The radical life of Mother Bloor

0:00You know what? It sucks to be bored. But when I get on my phone and play real casino games on SpinQuest.com, the time flies by. That two-hour wait at the DMV seems like 10 minutes. Play your favorite spots. Live Black Check, live preps, with a live dealer. New players, $30 coin packs are on sale for $10. Play SpinQuest.com and you'll never be bored again. SpinQuest is a free to play social casino. Boydware prohibited. Visit SpinQuest.com for more details. We've got a really massive stack of historical documents in front of us today, and I've been waiting all week to get into this one. Oh yeah, this is a big one. It really is. We are launching right into a brand new deep dive for you, looking at the incredibly complex, completely fascinating life of Ella Reeve Bloor. Right. Or, as a lot of people in history knew her, simply Mother Bloor. It's a sweeping story to take on, honestly. I mean, her lifespan from 1862 all the way to 1951.

1:00Which is just a massive chunk of time. Exactly. It covers some of the absolute most volatile transformative decades in modern history. Yeah. So our mission today, we are pulling from excerpts of her Wikipedia biography. And we really want to extract the most important nuggets of knowledge from those sources. We want to figure out how this one woman navigated, shaped, and just relentlessly challenged the American labor and radical political landscapes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's a massive undertaking, but a vital one, if you want to understand the mechanics of that era. Definitely. Now, before we jump into the history, there's something very important we need to establish right in front with you. Yes. The disclaimer. Right. This deep dive covers some highly politically charged topics. We are going to be talking about the history of socialist and communist movements, both here in the United States and abroad. And we need to be very clear here. Absolutely clear to you, our listener, that we are not taking any sides here, either left wing nor right wing.

2:03That is a crucial point. We are not endorsing any of the viewpoints, the platforms, or the ideologies that are going to come up in this conversation. Not all. All today is strictly to be your impartial guides. We are just conveying the factual history and the ideas exactly as they are contained within our original source material. We're just here for the history and the human story. Exactly. So, with that established, why should we be paying attention to Ella Reeveblore? Out of all the figures from that era, why dedicate a whole deep dive to her? You should care because Mother Blower's life is really a masterclass and how grassroots movements evolve over time. If you want to understand the historical roots of tying political rights specifically, the right to vote directly to workplace safety and labor rights, her story is the blueprint. She really loved it. She did. She didn't just theorize from a desk somewhere. She was on the front lines, often at great personal cost. Okay, let's unpack this. We have to start at the very beginning, which is actually a million miles away from those radical front lines.

3:08It really is. She was born Ella Reeve on Staten Island in July 1862, so this is right in the middle of the American Civil War. And she ends up growing up in Bridgeton, New Jersey. A very, very different world than the one she would eventually help shape. I mean, the societal expectations for a woman in the 1870s and 80s were incredibly rigid. Completely different. And her early personal life reflects that intensity, I think. In 1882, when she was just 19 years old, she married a man named Lucien Bonaparte, where? Who was quite a bit older. Yeah, he was 27 at the time. And over the next 10 years, they had seven children. Seven kids and 10 years. But the heartbreak here is immense. She lost three of those children by the time they were three years old. Oh, wow. Yeah, Pauline Charles and one of her twins, Lucien Jr. It's a profound amount of tragedy for a young mother to experience in such a shortwinder of time. I can't even imagine. The infant mortality rates of the era were higher, of course, but that doesn't lessen the personal devastation at all.

4:08No, not at all. And the four children who did survive went on to live these incredibly diverse, vibrant lives. They really did. Her daughter, Helen, became a concert violinist. Her son, Harold, became an agriculture expert. And later on, an activist in the Communist Party of America, just like his mother. Following in her footsteps. Exactly. And another son, Hamilton, who went by buzz, became an artist and a really prominent leader in the village of Arden, Delaware. Which is actually where Ella lived for many years later on. It paints a picture of a household that was clearly very dynamic. You have this fostering of both intense creativity and a strong sense of civic or political duty. But her own civic duty didn't start out radical at all. I was actually surprised by this in the sources. Oh, her early activism. Yeah. She was initially involved in reform movements like the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the WCTO and Women's Suffrage. Right. Plus, she was a published children's book author. She wrote a book in 1895 called Three Little Elevers of Nature.

5:09And another in 1899 called Talks About Authors and Their Work. What's fascinating here is the sheer distance she travels ideologically. You have a temperance advocate and children's author who eventually becomes converted to socialism. It's quite the pivot. According to her later FBI files, the catalyst for this conversion was a man named Dr. M.V. Ball of Philadelphia. Right. And he was actually a student of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Wait, pause for a second. Going from writing children's books about nature and campaigning against alcohol to reading Marx and Engels, how does that leap even happen? If we connect this to the bigger picture, it actually starts to make a lot of sense. Okay. How so? Put yourself in her shoes. You have a grieving mother who has suffered a men's personal loss. She is already advocating for women's suffrage and temperance. Right. The WCTO. And at that time, temperance wasn't just about banning alcohol for moral reasons. It was seen by many women as a way to protect families from the ravages of poverty, domestic violence, and addiction.

6:10Which were huge issues. Huge issues, which they felt were exacerbated by the industrial working conditions of the time. So she's already looking at social problems and trying to fix them. Precisely. She's treating the symptoms. But when someone like Dr. Ball introduces her to a systemic critique of society, like the economic frameworks offered by Marx and Engels, it provides a broader vocabulary for the injustices she's already fighting against. It gives her a framework. Yes. She evolved from a reformer into a fierce political radical because she started looking for the root causes of that poverty and suffering. That reframing helps a lot. She was looking for a system to explain the suffering she saw on the ground. And she really threw herself into finding the right vehicle for those new beliefs. She definitely didn't do things halfway. No kidding. In 1897, she divorced Lucian, married her second husband, Louis Cohen, who was also a socialist, and became a founding member of the social democracy of America. Which was a very big deal.

7:11Yeah, this was a group set up by Eugene V. Debs and Victor Berger. Eugene V. Debs being one of the most famous influential labor organizers in American history, working alongside him was massive. But her memoir reveals a really telling anecdote about her time there, which shows she wasn't just a blind follower. Not at all. Debs had this grand plan to form a utopian colony out west. The idea was to build an ideal community to show everyone by example that this economic model could work. Right, a proof of concept. Exactly. And Ella was writing a children's column for their paper, the social democrat, and kids were actually mailing her pennies to fund this utopian colony. You can see the ethical dilemma forming right there. It sparked a massive crisis of conscience for her. She felt it was completely unfair to collect money from children for something that didn't even exist yet. It bothered her deeply. She looked at this whole colonization scheme and called it unscientific and unsound. She essentially told her local group it wasn't real socialism at all.

8:12She wasn't afraid to speak her mind. Clearly, because when the party held a convention in Chicago in 1898 and officially voted to continue with the colony plan, she abruptly resigned. That is a crucial moment for understanding her character. Eugene Debs was basically a rock star in this movement. Yeah. Walking away from him was a huge risk. But she possessed a very sharp critical thinking ability. She needed something grounded in reality, not a fantasy colony out west. And she thought she found that reality shortly after when she attended meeting of the socialist labor party in New York. The SLP? Right. The speaker was Daniel Delion, the editor of the party's newspaper. She described him as small, slight, prematurely gray, but speaking very deliberately and convincingly. He was a powerful intellectual force. He was analyzing capitalism and tearing down the idea of isolated utopian colonies, and Ella was sold. She thought, finally, scientific socialism, and she joined the SLP. She was looking for a rigorous theoretical approach, and Delion certainly provided that strict framework.

9:16He did, but here's where it gets really interesting. Oh, this store is so good. Ellen Delion became friends, and she started working with the New York Labor News Company, which was managing the translation of revolutionary books and pamphlets into English. She worked with the manager, Julian Pierce, to proofread the pamphlets that Delion himself had translated. But apparently, Delion's English translations were incredibly rough, unreadable even. It's completely clunky. So Ellen Julian would secretly reconstruct and fix Delion's English behind his bag before they went to print, and they never let him know they were doing it. It's a brilliant detail. It shows a real grounded pragmatism. Yeah. She wasn't interested in bruising the leader's ego, or having a theoretical debate about language. She just wanted the material to be readable and effective for the workers on the street. She just wanted it to work. Exactly. But her time with Delion wasn't destined to last either, and this raises an important question about her overall philosophy,

10:16the constant tension between ideological purity and practical results. Let's dig into that, because she ended up walking away from the SLP too. She did? She had been elected to the General Executive Board of the SLP's Union Affiliate, which was called the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. The ST&LA. Yes. And she was out there organizing street car workers in Philadelphia and Essex County, New Jersey. But she started to see a massive strategic flaw. By trying to build a separate, ideologically pure radical union, they were engaging in what's called sectarianism. Let me make sure I'm following. Can you break down why that was such a problem for her on the ground? Think of it like a massive company where the workers want better conditions. You have a main union, in this case, the American Federation of Labor, the AFFL. Okay, the big mainstream union. Right. The SLP decides the AFFL isn't radical enough, so they start their own splinter union. To be more pure. Yes. But by pulling all the most passionate, radical vocal workers out of the mainstream union to form their own pure club,

11:19they accidentally handed all the power in the main union over to the conservative leaders. Oh, wow. They were isolating themselves from the vast majority of everyday workers. So they were basically preaching to the choir in an empty room, exactly, while the actual power remained untouched. That makes total sense. She realized this sectarianism was a dead end. She believed organizers needed to be working within the massive AFFL to create a united trade union movement, not sitting in isolated purity. And she confronted Deleon about this. She told Deleon this directly. He didn't get angry, but he flat out refused to change his methods. So, true to form, she walked away. She just kept moving through whatever was most practical. She even rejected another splinter group in Pennsylvania called the Logical Center, led by Lucian Sanio. Because it was more of the same. Exactly. Instead, in 1901, she swallowed her pride and went back to her old friend Eugene Debs to join the newly formed Socialist Party of America. The SPA. But theory only gets you so far.

12:21Eventually, she had to test these ideas in the real world, which brings us to her field work. And this brings us to 1905, which is a legendary piece of her story. This is the year she gets her famous nickname. Yes. Ella teamed up with a fellow Socialist Party member, Upton Sinclair. Sinclair was writing a book about the horrific conditions in the Chicago Stockyards. A book that would become the massive bestseller, the jungle. A book that literally changed American food safety laws. But gathering that information was incredibly dangerous work. It was. Ella went undercover right into the visceral, dangerous reality of the Stockyards to help them gather the information. She was right in the thick of it. To pull this off, she pardoned up with a colleague named Richard Bloor. They pretended to be a married couple to avoid suspicion from the factory bosses. And it worked. It did. And the wildest part. They never actually married, but she kept his last name, Bloor, for the rest of her life. Yeah. She became Mother Bloor. It's a fantastic origin story for a legendary organizer.

13:23And her organizing was relentless from that point on. Relentless almost feels like an understatement when you look at the record. Our sources list her organizing strikes across Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Ohio, and New York. All over the country. We were talking about miners, hadders, steel workers, and needle workers. She was constantly in the trenches. And the physical toll must have been staggering because our source notes are crazy statistic. She was arrested 36 times over the course of her career. 36 times. Think about the physical and emotional endurance that required. It's unbelievable. Jail time for radical organizers in the 1910s and 20s wasn't just a slap on the wrist. It meant facing awful conditions, intimidation, and real danger. But it's crucial to understand that for organizers like her, an arrest wasn't just a consequence to be avoided. It was often a strategic tool to draw public attention to the strikes and the working conditions. Which is wild when you think about it from the perspective of a mother with surviving children at home.

14:24Very true. But that fieldwork deeply shaped her ideology, particularly her legacy as the prominent socialist feminist. Yes, she made what she called a direct connection between the ballot and our work. Okay. She was out there seeing the conditions marginalized working women were facing in these factories. She argued that because these women had absolutely no political voice, their only weapon was protest. And as her own 36 arrests proved, relying solely on protest was dangerous. Dangerous and often ineffective at creating lasting systemic change. She believed that until these working women had the ballot, until they could vote on the actual lives that governed their working conditions, they would always be at the mercy of their employers. So it wasn't just an abstract democratic ideal. Not at all. Suffrage wasn't just a philosophical debate for her. It was a matter of workplace survival. It was about having a legally binding contract versus just begging a boss for a safer machine. So the vote was literally a tool for safety.

15:25And she didn't just advocate for the vote. She ran for office herself repeatedly to force these issues into the public eye. She was a trailblazer there too. She was the very first woman to run for state office in Connecticut when she ran for secretariat state. Later, she ran for a lieutenant governor of New York in 1918, and even for governor of Pennsylvania in 1938. And again, keeping our neutrality disclaimer in mind. We're detailing these political campaigns not to endorse the specific party platforms, but to illustrate her tactics. Exactly. She knew she wasn't going to win those races. She was using the electoral system as a megaphone for the marginalized workers she was organizing. A megaphone she kept using as she moved into the next phase of her life, the communist era, where she stepped on to the global stage. Things really shift gear here. She was one of the founders of the Communist Labor Party of America, which emerged from the left wing of the Socialist Party. And by the early 1920s, she started traveling internationally. In 1921 and 1922, she went to Moscow for the Common Turn Conventions.

16:28The Common Turn being the Communist International, a global gathering of these political parties. And there's this incredible cloak and dagger detail from the 1921 Red International of Labor Union's Convention. I love this part. She attended using the pseudonym Emmons, and she voted using credentials that were issued to her by three locals of the International Association of Machinists. She was a known radical who had been arrested dozens of times. Alisa's were simply a practical necessity for her to cross borders and operate at that point. But she certainly didn't stay hidden when she came back home. This is honestly one of my favorite details in the source material. It's so good. Upon returning from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, when she would have been around 60 years old, by the way, this grandmother hitchhiked all the way across the United States. Incredible. She was writing articles about her travels for the daily worker newspaper. Just this sheer stamina of hitchhiking across the country in the 1920s is mind-boggling. It speaks to her absolute refusal to stop moving. Her later years are just as packed as her early years.

17:30They really are. From 1932 to 1948, she served on the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA. She was touring the Midwest, giving speeches and leading strikes for farmers during the Great Depression. Still on the ground. She even returned to Russia for a few months at the end of 1937. And what's interesting is how her political stance is kept adapting to the global situation, especially during World War II. This is a critical pivot. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, her geopolitical calculus completely shifted. She became a highly vocal advocate for the United States and into the war, right? Yes. She pushed hard for an early invasion of Europe to create a second front against the Axis powers. This is pragmatism on a global scale. You have a lifelong labor organizer who spent decades fighting against the American industrial machine, suddenly advocating for that same machine to gear up for a massive global war. It seems like a contradiction at first. It does. But she was looking at the geopolitical chessboard, figuring out what action was necessary right at that moment to defeat fascism,

18:36which she saw as the ultimate existential threat to workers everywhere. She adapted to the reality in front of her. And she stayed active, practically until the end. We wrap up her timeline in the summer of 1951. Eliree Bloor died on August 10, 1951 in Richlandtown, Pennsylvania. She was 89 years old. Yes. She had married for the final time in 1930 to a man named Andrew Almholt. Today, she's buried in Harley's cemetery in Camden, New Jersey. It's a quiet resting place for someone who caused so much noise in her lifetime. And the cultural footprint she left behind is massive. In 1940, she published her autobiography called We Are Many. That book actually inspired the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie to write his famous song, 1913 Massacre. That's a huge cultural touchstone. And when she died, her public funeral reception in Harlem was a huge event. It was photographed by Life magazine. Right. And the famous American painter, Alice Neal, actually painted a piece called The Death of Mother Bloor, showing her beer and the line of mourners.

19:37Which is a brilliant paint. It is. That painting was even featured in a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City recently in 2021. Oh, and one more fun fact from the culture side. Her granddaughter, her to wear, became a well-known actress. She permeated so many different layers of American history and culture from the factory floors to the art world. So what does this all mean? That's the big question. When we look at all these pieces, the utopian colonies she walked away from, because they were unrealistic, the union she abandoned, because they were too isolated. The 36 arrests, the undercover work in the stockyards, the hitchhiking, the global conventions. We see a woman who was a deeply restless, fiercely pragmatic organizer. Yes. She completely refused to settle for beautiful utopian dreams if they didn't practically tangibly help the workers standing right in front of her on the ground. That pragmatism is her defining trait. And it actually brings up something really fascinating to think about in our modern context.

20:39Okay. What's that? Well, if you're looking at your own modern workplace, you might take basic safety regulations or HR departments for granted. But Mother Blower had to fight tooth and nail for those concepts to even be discussed. True. She deeply believed that marginalized workers had absolutely no power to change their conditions without the ballot. She saw the right to vote as the ultimate weapon for workplace safety. Because protests were too dangerous and easily dismissed without legal backing. Exactly. So I'll leave you, our listener, with this final concept to mull over on your own. Now that Universal suffrage is a legal reality in our society, how do you think a pragmatist like Mother Blower would view the effectiveness of the ballot today? That's a great question. If she were looking at the modern gig worker or the modern marginalized laborer who still struggles with safety, unpredictable hours and fair pay, would she say the vote achieved the workplace protections she always believed it would? Or would she argue that the battlefield has simply shifted and completely new forms of organizing are required?

21:41Wow. That is a fantastic question to chew on. Is the ballot the shield she hoped it would be or just a different kind of trench? Thank you for walking through this incredible history with us today and helping break down these massive historical shits. It was a pleasure to explore it. Thank you for listening. Keep questioning the systems around you and keep learning. Keep that curiosity alive. And we will catch you next time for another deep dive. What's up, baby? It's Bretsky. And I'm here to tell you that SpinQuest.com is giving out free sweet coins. All you got to do is purchase a $10 coin pack and guess what? They're going to give you the coins from a $30 coin pack. That lets you play all your favorite games like Blackjack, Wanted Dead or Wild, and we're talking real cash prizes, baby. SpinQuest.com. SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino. Boydware prohibited. Visit SpinQuest.com for more details. Warning. The following Zippercruder radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F-words.

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