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Harold Ware

Harold or "Hal" Ware (August 19, 1889 – August 14, 1935) was an American Marxist, regarded as one of the Communist Party's top experts on agriculture.[1] He was employed by a federal New Deal agency in the 1930s. He is alleged to have been a Soviet spy and is understood to have founded the "Ware Group," a covert group of operatives within the United States government aiding Soviet intelligence agents.

Harold Ware
Harold Ware circa 1935
Born
Harold Maskell Ware

(1889-08-19)August 19, 1889
DiedAugust 14, 1935(1935-08-14) (aged 45)
Alma materPennsylvania State College
Occupation(s)agricultural engineer, Soviet GRU spy
Spouse(s)Margaret Stevens (1st), Clarissa "Cris" Smith (2nd), Jessica Smith (editor) (3rd)
Children4
Parent(s)Ella Reeve Bloor, Lucien Bonaparte Ware
Espionage activity
Allegiance Soviet Union
Codename"H.R. Harrow" (1921)
Codename"Harrow" (1928)
Codename"George Anstrom" (1932)

Background Edit

 
Ella Reeve Bloor (circa 1910)

Harold Maskell Ware, best known by his nickname "Hal," was born on August 19, 1889, in Woodstown, New Jersey, the fourth child of Ella Reeve Bloor and her husband, Lucien Bonaparte Ware. Two of Ware's three older siblings died in early childhood.[2]

His mother, Ella Bloor, converted to socialism during 1894-1895, when the family lived in Philadelphia.[2] She became a lifelong activist in the labor movement, an early member of the Social Democracy of America (organized by Victor L. Berger and Eugene V. Debs), and a founder of the Communist Party of America.[2] Ware was raised in a politically radical household, as a "Red Diaper Baby."

When he was 15, a case of measles left Ware with what doctors believed to be an early case of tuberculosis.[2] His divorced mother moved with him and two brothers to the country for a year, while the rest of the family lived with his father in Philadelphia and attended school there.[2] While his mother went weekly to Wilmington to speak and organize literature sales (as Delaware state organizer for the Socialist Party), Ware lived a rural life. Although he would return to school in the big city the following year, his orientation towards the countryside was firmly established.

Following his graduation from high school (circa 1907), Ware enrolled in a two-year course in agriculture at Pennsylvania State College, later Penn State University.[1][3]

Career Edit

Following graduation, with financial help from his father he bought a grain and dairy farm near Arden, a small town near Philadelphia, where he learned farming firsthand.[2] His brief experience as a working farmer made him almost a unique figure among pioneer members of the American Communist Party, a group almost exclusively composed of urban laborers, factory workers, or intellectuals (and mostly foreign-born).

Before WWI began, Ware had proven himself something of an agricultural innovator. Unable to afford equipment for his tractor, he welded together two harrows for horses. He adapted other horse-drawn gear for use in mechanized agriculture.[1]

After three years, Ware sold the farm and took a job in a shipyard as a draftsman, for which he had a natural faculty. This lasted until the end of the First World War, whose armistice in November 1918 ended the torrent of government funding directed toward the shipbuilding industry.[1]

Communist Party Edit

 
Communist Labor Party of America logo

Although not a delegate to its founding convention, Ware was a member of the Communist Labor Party of America (CLP) from the year of its origin, 1919, as were his mother and older sister, Helen.[4] Ware and his family stayed with the CLP throughout its permutations, merging into the United Communist Party in 1920, into the Communist Party of America in 1921, and into the "aboveground" Workers Party of America in 1922, and eventually the Communist Party of the USA in 1929.[5]

Almost immediately after the Party launched, federal and state authorities moved against the fledgling communist movement, forcing its adherents to make use of pseudonyms and to conduct their activities in secret. During the so-called "underground period" of the party, the agriculturally-oriented Ware used the pseudonym "H.R. Harrow," publishing under that by-line in the communist press.[6] (The pseudonym seems to have been a pun on his real given name, "Harold.")

 
First section of "H.R. Harrow's" agricultural recommendations to the underground Communist Party of America (November 1921)

In 1921, eager to study the plight of migrant farm workers firsthand with a view to organizing them for the Communist Party, Ware took a six-month trip around the United States, working harvests from the South to the Midwest, Northwest and then East again through the Upper Midwest.[2] This experience, combined with his previous agricultural experience, cemented Ware's place as the Communist Party's leading agricultural expert.

That fall, in addition to articles he wrote for the "underground" and "aboveground" Communist press, Ware compiled an exhaustive survey of American agriculture, including maps showing distribution of types of farms, farm incomes, and so forth in different sections of the country.[2] The research was transmitted to the Communist International in Moscow, where it was read and praised by Lenin himself.[citation needed]

In late 1921, Ware attended the founding convention in New York of the Workers Party of America. He was elected an alternate to the governing Central Executive Committee of that organization.[7] Ware was not typically a member of the Communist Party's top committees; he preferred to work in the agricultural sector rather than to engage in factional party politics.

Soviet collective farming Edit

 
Soviet Russia, official magazine of the Friends of Soviet Russia (cover by Lydia Gibson)

Ware helped come up with the idea of using funds raised by the Friends of Soviet Russia organization to construct a model collective farm in Soviet Russia. His farm would serve as a model to help to alleviate the great Russian famine through production of grain plus firsthand demonstration of modern agricultural technique. An appropriation of $75,000 was granted for the project, with Ware's half-brother, Carl Reeve, traveling around the U.S., showing a motion picture depicting horrific conditions in Russia to help raise funds. Funding in hand, Ware went to the J.I. Case Farm Implement Co. and brokered a deal for 24 tractors and related equipment.[1]

In May 1922, Hal and Cris Ware left his three children in America for Soviet Russia along with their tractors, implements, a complete medical unit, and several tons of food supplies. Also making the voyage was a doctor who spoke Russian and a group of American farmers to operate the machinery. The group had been assigned land in the village of Toikino in Perm guberniia, a substantial distance from any centers of population. They taught local peasants the basics of machine operation and plowed 4,000 acres (16 km2) of land. Shortages of fuel, hauled by peasant wagons some 40 miles (64 km) from the nearest train station, severely hampered their efforts. At season's end, the American crew left for Moscow, whence they went home to America with thanks.[1]

The next year, Soviet authorities were eager to expand the Toikino experiment of 1922. The Soviet People's Commissariat of Agriculture offered a large tract of fertile land in the Kuban region, just north of the Black Sea for a second model farm. Working again with the Friends of Soviet Russia organization, Ware organized a party of 40 to make the trip, including agricultural specialists, a doctor, and a nurse. He arrived in Soviet Russia to inspect the land designated for the project, only to be told by Soviet officials that the deal was off because local peasants had begun to allocate the land among themselves. A hasty search commenced for yet another site, in the North Caucasus, but the project was delayed.[1]

Ware spent most of 1925 raising funds for his Soviet farming venture. This farm was organized as a Russian-American joint venture, with Ware as its American Director and then director of the state farm for three years. The project took over four flour mills and profitably operated them; they began to electrify the countryside.[1]

During winter 1928-29, Ware returned to the United States, where he attempted to interest American agricultural equipment manufacturers in the Soviet market. He convinced some companies to send test tractors and implements along with mechanics to assemble them.[1] He stayed in the Soviet through the collectivization campaign of 1929-30.[1]

Return to America Edit

 
Unemployed men outside soup kitchen (opened by Al Capone) in Depression-era Chicago (1931)

In Spring 1931, Ware set out to organizing farmers and farm-workers in America. In the company of Lem Harris, another Communist Party agricultural expert, he made a year-long survey of American agriculture, echoing his research of 1921. The pair travelled by car around the United States, visiting nearly every state in the union, studying the sometimes desperate conditions which resulted from the collapse of agricultural prices associated with the Great Depression.[1][8]

Shortly after completion of this task, Ware established a research center in Washington, DC called Farm Research, Inc. and recruited personnel to run it.[1] The institute, funded by the Communist Party, published a newspaper called The Farmers National Weekly continuously throughout the Great Depression.[1] Fellow Communist Party member Herbert Joseph Putz (Erik Bert) (1904-1981) edited the newspaper (1934-1936)[9] ("Farm Research" received funding from the Robert Marshall Foundation, which also funded the Communist controlled news agency "Federated Press."[10][11]) In 1932, Ware was active in the Farmers Holiday Association on behalf of the Communist Party.[2]

Soviet espionage: Ware Group Edit

Allegations: Whittaker Chambers Edit

 
Whittaker Chambers around the time he first made his public allegations about the Ware Group (1948)

In his 1952 memoir, Witness, former Communist Whittaker Chambers wrote that from the time of Ware's death to his defection from the Communist Party in April 1938, he had been a member of the "Washington spy apparatus" headed by Colonel Boris Bykov, a Russian military intelligence officer.[12] Chambers wrote that in addition to the four members of the group (also identified by Lee Pressman under oath to Congress in 1950, though Pressman denied that the group engaged in espionage):

There must have been sixty or seventy others, though Pressman did not necessarily know them all; neither did I. All were dues-paying members of the Communist Party. Nearly all were employed in the United States Government, some in rather high positions, notably in the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, the National Labor Relations Board, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Railroad Retirement Board, the National Research Project — and others.[12]

Chambers further wrote that "by 1938, the Soviet espionage apparatus in Washington had penetrated the US State Department, the US Treasury Department, the Bureau of Standards and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.[12] These individuals "supplied the Soviet espionage apparatus with secret or confidential information, usually in the form of official United States Government documents for microfilming," Chambers stated.[12]

In the 1930s, Hal Ware was employed by the federal government, working for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), a New Deal agency which reported to the Secretary of Agriculture but was independent of the Department of Agriculture bureaucracy. According to Chambers, he also "organized that Washington underground" in which he was later to work.[12] Introduced to him in the spring of 1934,[12] Chambers described Ware at length:

He was as American as ham and eggs and as indistinguishable as everybody else. He stood about five feet nine, a trim, middle-aging man in 1934, with a plain face, masked by a quiet earnestness of expression wholly reassuring to people whom quickness of mind makes uncomfortable. Nevertheless, his mind was extremely quick. ...

He might have been a progressive country agent or a professor of ecology at an agricultural college. And yet there was something unprofessorially jaunty about the flip of his hat brim and his springy stride. ... It is true that he liked to drive his car at breakneck speed almost as well as to talk about soils, tenant farmers and underground organization ...

Harold Ware was a frustrated farmer. The soil was in his pores. Unlike most American Communists, who managed to pass from one big city to another without seeing anything in the intervening spaces, Ware was absorbed in the land and its problems. He held that, with the deepening of the agricultural crisis, and with the rapid mechanization of agriculture, the time had come for revolutionary organization among farmers.[12]

According to Chambers' testimony, when he came back from Soviet Russia in 1930, Ware carried with him $25,000 in US currency hidden in a money belt, funds from the Comintern for work among the farmers.[12] It was with these funds that he had established Farm Research Inc. in Washington, DC. But his real mission was espionage, Chambers wrote:

Once the New Deal was in full swing, Hal Ware was like a man who has bought a farm sight unseen only to discover that the crops are all in and ready to harvest. All that he had to do was to hustle them into the barn. The barn in this case was the Communist Party. In the AAA, Hal found a bumper crop of incipient or registered Communists. On its legal staff were Lee Pressman, Alger Hiss and John Abt (later named by Elizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts). There was Charles Krivitsky, a former physicist at New York University, then or shortly after to be known as Charles Kramer (also, later on, one of Elizabeth Bentley's contacts). Abraham George Silverman (another of Elizabeth Bentley's future contacts) was sitting with a little cluster of communists over at the Railroad Retirement Board.[12]

Others named by Chambers included Henry H. Collins, Jr., Laurence Duggan, Nathan Witt, Marion Bachrach, and Victor Perlo.[12] Others subsequently mentioned in these ranks included John Herrmann, Nathaniel Weyl, Donald Hiss, and Harry Dexter White.[citation needed] According to Chambers, Ware was in close contact with and directly reported to J. Peters, "the head of the underground section of the American Communist Party":[12]

... By 1934, the Ware Group had developed into a tightly organized underground, managed by a directory of seven men. In time it included a number of secret sub-cells whose total membership I can only estimate — probably about seventy-five Communists. Sometimes they were visited officially by J. Peters who lectured them on Communist organization and Leninist theory and advised them on general policy and specific problems. For several of them were so placed in the New Deal agencies (notably Alger Hiss, Nathan Witt, John Abt and Lee Pressman) that they were in a position to influence policy at several levels.[12]

Corroboration from Ware Group members Edit

 
Lee Pressman, shortly after leaving the Ware Group, working for the CIO (1938)
  • Lee Pressman: On August 28, 1950, Lee Pressman gave testimony against his former comrades, though denied that they engaged in espionage.[13][14] He stated he had met Ware and that:

In my desire to see the destruction of Hitlerism and an improvement in economic conditions here at home, I joined a Communist group in Washington, D. C, about 1934. My participation in such group extended for about a year, to the best of my recollection.[15]

Pressman also indicated that in at least one meeting of his group, perhaps two, he had met Soviet intelligence agent J. Peters.[16] Pressman's 1950 testimony provided the first corroboration of Chambers' allegation that a Washington, D.C., Communist group around Ware existed, with federal officials Nathan Witt, John Abt and Charles Kramer named by Pressman as members of this party cell.[12]

  • Nathaniel Weyl: In 1952, Nathaniel Weyl testified before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Committee that he had been a member of the Ware group, and that Alger Hiss had attended meetings as well – the only eyewitness corroboration of Whittaker Chambers's testimony that Alger Hiss was a Communist and Ware Group member.[12][17][18] Of his own Ware Group participation, Weyl said: "I was one of its less enthusiastic members."[19] Weyl described what could be interpreted as Ware's efforts to corral him into espionage and his own effort to extract himself from the group:

Ware wanted me to try to get into the Foreign Service and be attached to the staff of William Bullitt, our first Ambassador to the Soviet Union ... I didn't think there was anything illegal about membership in the Ware unit, but nevertheless it was duplicitous ... I told Hal Ware that the Moscow idea was out and that I wanted to leave Washington and resign from government. He said: absolutely not. I forced his hand by committing an appalling breach of security. I showed up at a cell meeting with the girl I was having an affair with, a young lady who was not a Communist Party member and who had known nothing about the group. Ware withdrew his objections and I resigned from AAA.[19]

  • John Abt: In his 1993 autobiography, * John Abt, later long-time attorney for the Communist Party, confirmed that the Ware Group had existed, that it was a secret Communist Party unit, and that Ware had recruited him and several of the others named by Chambers for the Party.[20]
  • Hope Hale Davis: In her 1994 memoir, Hope Hale Davis also admitted to membership in the Ware group: Davis confirmed that it was engaged in illegal activity.[21]

Personal life and death Edit

 
Jessica Smith (circa 1913-1918)

Ware married Margaret Stephens: in 1916, she died three weeks following birth of their second child, Nancy Stephens Ware.[3]

In August 1917, Ware married his second wife, Clarissa "Cris" Smith. (The couple had two children, Robin and Nancy, before divorcing in the early 1920s.)[1] Ware's second marriage seems to have ended upon their return to the States. Cris took a job in the National Office of the Workers Party as head of the Committee for Protection of Foreign-Born Workers. She was reported in the Communist Party press as having died of "acute pancreatitis, a rare disease of one of the digestive organs of the stomach," rumored to be a cover story for a botched illegal abortion, on September 27, 1923. Benjamin Gitlow luridly wrote of a love triangle between Cris, Party national secretary C. E. Ruthenberg, and future secretary Jay Lovestone. Her death was "a tragic end, for the last of Cris Ware's abortions proved fatal for her."[22]

While in Russia, Ware met Jessica Smith, working with the Quaker famine relief effort, the American Friends Service Committee. Back in New York City, the pair were married in January 1925 by Rev. Norman Thomas, soon to become a key political leader of the Socialist Party of America.[1]

On August 9, 1935, Ware was critically injured in an automobile accident in the mountains near York Springs in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania when his car collided with a coal truck. He died the next Tuesday at the hospital in Harrisburg, never regaining consciousness after the crash.[23][1][2]

Legacy Edit

Ware was memorialized with a chapter in the memoir written by his more famous mother, Ella Reeve Bloor, in 1940:

As a boy he loved the outdoors, was full of restless, eager vitality and bold curiosity. He had a startlingly vivid imagination, and an urge and talent for organizing that continued and marked his whole life. More than ordinarily shy, he forgot his shyness when engaged in one of his organizing ventures, and a flow of colorful, stirring talk would come from him so persuasive that those who heard him were completely carried away. He grew slim and tall, and when we moved to Arden was captain of the baseball team and a leader in tennis and other games. He missed a lot of school because of his siege of tuberculosis, but he read a lot and was always able to make up two or three years of ordinary schooling in a few months of intensive study. His interest in socialism began as early as I can remember.
Hal's interest in agriculture began early. He started raising truck in a small garden in Arden, and sold it around the countryside. His keen sense of beauty showed in the way he fixed up his boxes of vegetables to sell, arranging them artistically in green boxes.
He first planned to study forestry. He used to tell me his dreams of a life in the open, alone on a hillside, a sea of green tree tops below him. While taking the entrance exams for Pennsylvania State College he found that the forestry course would take four years, while there was a fine two-year agricultural course. Beginning to feel, too, that he did not want to live away from people, but among them, he chose agriculture. His interest in economics and politics developed intensely at this time, and while at college he wrote me constantly for the latest news of the socialist movement. We were always very close to one another, and no matter how many months or years we were apart, we could always pick up where we had left off."[2]

After his death, attorney John Abt married Jessica Smith, Ware's widow. Ware left behind four children: Judith, David, Nancy, and Robin.

Hal Ware's half-brother, Carl Reeve, was also a lifelong activist in the Communist Party.

Works Edit

  • "Our Agrarian Problem." Signed as "H.R. Harrow." The Communist [New York: Unified CPA], vol. 1, no. 5 (November 1921), pp. 20–21, 23
  • "American Agricultural Problems," The Toiler, vol. 4, whole no. 194 (November 12, 1921), pp. 8–10
  • "American Farmers in Russia," Soviet Russia Pictorial [New York], vol. 8, no. 4 (April 1923), pg. 77
  • "The Factory Farm — A Discussion Article on the Party and the Farm Problem." Signed as "Harrow." Part 1: The Communist, vol. 7, no. 12 (December 1928), pp. 761–769. Part 2: The Communist, vol. 8, no. 3 (March 1929), pp. 142–149
  • The American Farmer (as "George Anstrom") (1932)[24][25]
  • "Planning for Permanent Poverty: What Subsistence Farming Really Stands For." Harper's Magazine, April 1935

See also Edit

References Edit

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Harris, Lement (1978). Harold M. Ware (1890-1935): Agricultural Pioneer, U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. (Occasional Paper No. 30). American Institute for Marxist Studies. pp. 3 (Farm Research Inc), 4 (weekly), 5 (Margret Stevens), 8 (Clarissa Smith), 10 (draftsman), 16 (24 Case tractors), 18 (Toikino), 37 (Jessica Smith), 36–41 (fundraising), 43–45 (1929–1930, 45–58 (US tour), 59 (pamphlet), 59–68 (Farm Research Inc), 68 (death). Retrieved August 6, 2018.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Bloor, Ella Reeve (1940). We Are Many. International Publishers. pp. 35-36 (birth), 45 (birth), 51 (mother), 66-67 (Philadelphia), 71 (Arden), 267 (measles, 1921), 234 (Farmers Holiday Association), 262 (death), 268 (Arden), 270 (underground press). Retrieved November 22, 2020.
  3. ^ a b Margaret S. Ware Death Certificate, Wilmington, New Castle Co., Delaware; Date of death: October 16, 1916.
  4. ^ For a list of delegates to the founding convention of the CLP see http://www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/cpa-clp19delegates.html
  5. ^ For the complete saga of the early Communist Party's evolution, see Early American Marxism website, http://www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/communistparty.html
  6. ^ The best available list of pseudonyms of American communists appears in Jeffrey B. Perry, "Pseudonyms: A Reference Aid for Studying American Communist History," American Communist History, vol. 3, no. 1 (June 2004), pp. 55-126. The identification of Hal Ware as "H.R. Harrow" was made shortly after publication of the article, vetted to the H-net Historians of American Communism newsgroup, H-HOAC.
  7. ^ Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking, 1957. Page 450, footnote 28.
  8. ^ "Hearings Regarding Communist Activities Among Farm Groups". US Government Printing Office. December 28, 1951. p. 1913. Retrieved August 5, 2018.
  9. ^ "Guide to the Erik Bert Paper". 1983. Retrieved November 22, 2020.
  10. ^ Fourth Report - Un-American Activities in California - 1948: Communist Front Organizations. Senate of the California Legislature. 1948. pp. 98 (Lincoln Bridge), 113–114 (organization). Retrieved October 18, 2018.
  11. ^ Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications (And Appendixes) ... House Document No. 398. US GPO. 1962. p. 73. Retrieved October 18, 2018.
  12. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Chambers, Whittaker (May 1952). Witness. New York: Random House. pp. 26–31, 204, 332–336, 347fn. ISBN 9780895269157.
  13. ^ . Time. September 4, 1950. Archived from the original on January 14, 2009.
  14. ^ Klehr, Harvey; Haynes, John Earl; Vassiliev, Alexander (2009). Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. With John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. pp. 282 (Pressman dinner for Kramer), 425–428. ISBN 978-0300155723. Retrieved March 19, 2017.
  15. ^ "Hearings regarding Communist espionage in the United States Government". August 28, 1950. p. 2845 (Communist group) 2850 (met Ware), 2860 (started law practice). Retrieved May 26, 2015.
  16. ^ Hearings Regarding Communism in the United States Government — Part 2, pp. 2855-2856.
  17. ^ . TIME. March 3, 1952. Archived from the original on January 14, 2009. Retrieved June 29, 2008.
  18. ^ Hewitt, Alan (January 9, 1953). "I Was in a Communist Unit with Hiss". U.S. News & World Report. Retrieved June 29, 2008.
  19. ^ a b Weyl, Nathaniel (2003). "Encounters with Communism, 1932–1940". American Communist History. 2 (1): 81–94. doi:10.1080/1474389032000112618. S2CID 144718557.
  20. ^ Abt, John (1993). Advocate and Activist: Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-2520-2030-8.
  21. ^ Davis, Hope Hale (1994). Great Day Coming. Hanover NH: Steerforth Press. ISBN 978-1-8836-4217-4.
  22. ^ Gitlow, Benjamin (1940). I Confess: The Truth About American Communism. E.P. Dutton. pp. 153–154. Retrieved August 7, 2018.
  23. ^ The Gettysburg Times, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, August 12, 1935, Page 2, https://www.newspapers.com/clip/123385864/ware-improves/
  24. ^ Anstrom, George (1932). The American Farmer (PDF). International Pub1ishers. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
  25. ^ Anstrom, George (1932). The American Farmer. International Pub1ishers. Retrieved August 6, 2018.

Further reading Edit

  • Chambers, Whittaker (May 1952). Witness. New York: Random House. pp. 26–31, 204, 332–336, 347fn. ISBN 9780895269157.
  • Whittaker Chambers, , August 3, 1948,
  • John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
  • Joseph Lash, Dealers and Dreamers. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
  • Earl Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966
  • Harris, Lement (1978). Harold M. Ware (1890-1935): Agricultural Pioneer, U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. (Occasional Paper No. 30. American Institute for Marxist Studies. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
  • Nathaniel Weyl, The Battle Against Disloyalty. New York: Crowell, 1951.
  • Nathaniel Weyl, Treason: The Story of Disloyalty and Betrayal in American History. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1950

External links Edit

  • Overview of the Farmers' National Weekly newspaper issues

harold, ware, harold, ware, august, 1889, august, 1935, american, marxist, regarded, communist, party, experts, agriculture, employed, federal, deal, agency, 1930s, alleged, have, been, soviet, understood, have, founded, ware, group, covert, group, operatives,. Harold or Hal Ware August 19 1889 August 14 1935 was an American Marxist regarded as one of the Communist Party s top experts on agriculture 1 He was employed by a federal New Deal agency in the 1930s He is alleged to have been a Soviet spy and is understood to have founded the Ware Group a covert group of operatives within the United States government aiding Soviet intelligence agents Harold WareHarold Ware circa 1935BornHarold Maskell Ware 1889 08 19 August 19 1889Woodstown New Jersey USDiedAugust 14 1935 1935 08 14 aged 45 near Harrisburg Pennsylvania USAlma materPennsylvania State CollegeOccupation s agricultural engineer Soviet GRU spySpouse s Margaret Stevens 1st Clarissa Cris Smith 2nd Jessica Smith editor 3rd Children4Parent s Ella Reeve Bloor Lucien Bonaparte WareEspionage activityAllegiance Soviet UnionCodename H R Harrow 1921 Codename Harrow 1928 Codename George Anstrom 1932 Contents 1 Background 2 Career 2 1 Communist Party 2 2 Soviet collective farming 2 3 Return to America 3 Soviet espionage Ware Group 3 1 Allegations Whittaker Chambers 3 2 Corroboration from Ware Group members 4 Personal life and death 5 Legacy 6 Works 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External linksBackground Edit nbsp Ella Reeve Bloor circa 1910 Harold Maskell Ware best known by his nickname Hal was born on August 19 1889 in Woodstown New Jersey the fourth child of Ella Reeve Bloor and her husband Lucien Bonaparte Ware Two of Ware s three older siblings died in early childhood 2 His mother Ella Bloor converted to socialism during 1894 1895 when the family lived in Philadelphia 2 She became a lifelong activist in the labor movement an early member of the Social Democracy of America organized by Victor L Berger and Eugene V Debs and a founder of the Communist Party of America 2 Ware was raised in a politically radical household as a Red Diaper Baby When he was 15 a case of measles left Ware with what doctors believed to be an early case of tuberculosis 2 His divorced mother moved with him and two brothers to the country for a year while the rest of the family lived with his father in Philadelphia and attended school there 2 While his mother went weekly to Wilmington to speak and organize literature sales as Delaware state organizer for the Socialist Party Ware lived a rural life Although he would return to school in the big city the following year his orientation towards the countryside was firmly established Following his graduation from high school circa 1907 Ware enrolled in a two year course in agriculture at Pennsylvania State College later Penn State University 1 3 Career EditFollowing graduation with financial help from his father he bought a grain and dairy farm near Arden a small town near Philadelphia where he learned farming firsthand 2 His brief experience as a working farmer made him almost a unique figure among pioneer members of the American Communist Party a group almost exclusively composed of urban laborers factory workers or intellectuals and mostly foreign born Before WWI began Ware had proven himself something of an agricultural innovator Unable to afford equipment for his tractor he welded together two harrows for horses He adapted other horse drawn gear for use in mechanized agriculture 1 After three years Ware sold the farm and took a job in a shipyard as a draftsman for which he had a natural faculty This lasted until the end of the First World War whose armistice in November 1918 ended the torrent of government funding directed toward the shipbuilding industry 1 Communist Party Edit nbsp Communist Labor Party of America logoAlthough not a delegate to its founding convention Ware was a member of the Communist Labor Party of America CLP from the year of its origin 1919 as were his mother and older sister Helen 4 Ware and his family stayed with the CLP throughout its permutations merging into the United Communist Party in 1920 into the Communist Party of America in 1921 and into the aboveground Workers Party of America in 1922 and eventually the Communist Party of the USA in 1929 5 Almost immediately after the Party launched federal and state authorities moved against the fledgling communist movement forcing its adherents to make use of pseudonyms and to conduct their activities in secret During the so called underground period of the party the agriculturally oriented Ware used the pseudonym H R Harrow publishing under that by line in the communist press 6 The pseudonym seems to have been a pun on his real given name Harold nbsp First section of H R Harrow s agricultural recommendations to the underground Communist Party of America November 1921 In 1921 eager to study the plight of migrant farm workers firsthand with a view to organizing them for the Communist Party Ware took a six month trip around the United States working harvests from the South to the Midwest Northwest and then East again through the Upper Midwest 2 This experience combined with his previous agricultural experience cemented Ware s place as the Communist Party s leading agricultural expert That fall in addition to articles he wrote for the underground and aboveground Communist press Ware compiled an exhaustive survey of American agriculture including maps showing distribution of types of farms farm incomes and so forth in different sections of the country 2 The research was transmitted to the Communist International in Moscow where it was read and praised by Lenin himself citation needed In late 1921 Ware attended the founding convention in New York of the Workers Party of America He was elected an alternate to the governing Central Executive Committee of that organization 7 Ware was not typically a member of the Communist Party s top committees he preferred to work in the agricultural sector rather than to engage in factional party politics Soviet collective farming Edit nbsp Soviet Russia official magazine of the Friends of Soviet Russia cover by Lydia Gibson Ware helped come up with the idea of using funds raised by the Friends of Soviet Russia organization to construct a model collective farm in Soviet Russia His farm would serve as a model to help to alleviate the great Russian famine through production of grain plus firsthand demonstration of modern agricultural technique An appropriation of 75 000 was granted for the project with Ware s half brother Carl Reeve traveling around the U S showing a motion picture depicting horrific conditions in Russia to help raise funds Funding in hand Ware went to the J I Case Farm Implement Co and brokered a deal for 24 tractors and related equipment 1 In May 1922 Hal and Cris Ware left his three children in America for Soviet Russia along with their tractors implements a complete medical unit and several tons of food supplies Also making the voyage was a doctor who spoke Russian and a group of American farmers to operate the machinery The group had been assigned land in the village of Toikino in Perm guberniia a substantial distance from any centers of population They taught local peasants the basics of machine operation and plowed 4 000 acres 16 km2 of land Shortages of fuel hauled by peasant wagons some 40 miles 64 km from the nearest train station severely hampered their efforts At season s end the American crew left for Moscow whence they went home to America with thanks 1 The next year Soviet authorities were eager to expand the Toikino experiment of 1922 The Soviet People s Commissariat of Agriculture offered a large tract of fertile land in the Kuban region just north of the Black Sea for a second model farm Working again with the Friends of Soviet Russia organization Ware organized a party of 40 to make the trip including agricultural specialists a doctor and a nurse He arrived in Soviet Russia to inspect the land designated for the project only to be told by Soviet officials that the deal was off because local peasants had begun to allocate the land among themselves A hasty search commenced for yet another site in the North Caucasus but the project was delayed 1 Ware spent most of 1925 raising funds for his Soviet farming venture This farm was organized as a Russian American joint venture with Ware as its American Director and then director of the state farm for three years The project took over four flour mills and profitably operated them they began to electrify the countryside 1 During winter 1928 29 Ware returned to the United States where he attempted to interest American agricultural equipment manufacturers in the Soviet market He convinced some companies to send test tractors and implements along with mechanics to assemble them 1 He stayed in the Soviet through the collectivization campaign of 1929 30 1 Return to America Edit nbsp Unemployed men outside soup kitchen opened by Al Capone in Depression era Chicago 1931 In Spring 1931 Ware set out to organizing farmers and farm workers in America In the company of Lem Harris another Communist Party agricultural expert he made a year long survey of American agriculture echoing his research of 1921 The pair travelled by car around the United States visiting nearly every state in the union studying the sometimes desperate conditions which resulted from the collapse of agricultural prices associated with the Great Depression 1 8 Shortly after completion of this task Ware established a research center in Washington DC called Farm Research Inc and recruited personnel to run it 1 The institute funded by the Communist Party published a newspaper called The Farmers National Weekly continuously throughout the Great Depression 1 Fellow Communist Party member Herbert Joseph Putz Erik Bert 1904 1981 edited the newspaper 1934 1936 9 Farm Research received funding from the Robert Marshall Foundation which also funded the Communist controlled news agency Federated Press 10 11 In 1932 Ware was active in the Farmers Holiday Association on behalf of the Communist Party 2 Soviet espionage Ware Group EditAllegations Whittaker Chambers Edit nbsp Whittaker Chambers around the time he first made his public allegations about the Ware Group 1948 In his 1952 memoir Witness former Communist Whittaker Chambers wrote that from the time of Ware s death to his defection from the Communist Party in April 1938 he had been a member of the Washington spy apparatus headed by Colonel Boris Bykov a Russian military intelligence officer 12 Chambers wrote that in addition to the four members of the group also identified by Lee Pressman under oath to Congress in 1950 though Pressman denied that the group engaged in espionage There must have been sixty or seventy others though Pressman did not necessarily know them all neither did I All were dues paying members of the Communist Party Nearly all were employed in the United States Government some in rather high positions notably in the Department of Agriculture the Department of Justice the Department of the Interior the National Labor Relations Board the Agricultural Adjustment Administration the Railroad Retirement Board the National Research Project and others 12 Chambers further wrote that by 1938 the Soviet espionage apparatus in Washington had penetrated the US State Department the US Treasury Department the Bureau of Standards and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland 12 These individuals supplied the Soviet espionage apparatus with secret or confidential information usually in the form of official United States Government documents for microfilming Chambers stated 12 In the 1930s Hal Ware was employed by the federal government working for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration AAA a New Deal agency which reported to the Secretary of Agriculture but was independent of the Department of Agriculture bureaucracy According to Chambers he also organized that Washington underground in which he was later to work 12 Introduced to him in the spring of 1934 12 Chambers described Ware at length He was as American as ham and eggs and as indistinguishable as everybody else He stood about five feet nine a trim middle aging man in 1934 with a plain face masked by a quiet earnestness of expression wholly reassuring to people whom quickness of mind makes uncomfortable Nevertheless his mind was extremely quick He might have been a progressive country agent or a professor of ecology at an agricultural college And yet there was something unprofessorially jaunty about the flip of his hat brim and his springy stride It is true that he liked to drive his car at breakneck speed almost as well as to talk about soils tenant farmers and underground organization Harold Ware was a frustrated farmer The soil was in his pores Unlike most American Communists who managed to pass from one big city to another without seeing anything in the intervening spaces Ware was absorbed in the land and its problems He held that with the deepening of the agricultural crisis and with the rapid mechanization of agriculture the time had come for revolutionary organization among farmers 12 According to Chambers testimony when he came back from Soviet Russia in 1930 Ware carried with him 25 000 in US currency hidden in a money belt funds from the Comintern for work among the farmers 12 It was with these funds that he had established Farm Research Inc in Washington DC But his real mission was espionage Chambers wrote Once the New Deal was in full swing Hal Ware was like a man who has bought a farm sight unseen only to discover that the crops are all in and ready to harvest All that he had to do was to hustle them into the barn The barn in this case was the Communist Party In the AAA Hal found a bumper crop of incipient or registered Communists On its legal staff were Lee Pressman Alger Hiss and John Abt later named by Elizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts There was Charles Krivitsky a former physicist at New York University then or shortly after to be known as Charles Kramer also later on one of Elizabeth Bentley s contacts Abraham George Silverman another of Elizabeth Bentley s future contacts was sitting with a little cluster of communists over at the Railroad Retirement Board 12 Others named by Chambers included Henry H Collins Jr Laurence Duggan Nathan Witt Marion Bachrach and Victor Perlo 12 Others subsequently mentioned in these ranks included John Herrmann Nathaniel Weyl Donald Hiss and Harry Dexter White citation needed According to Chambers Ware was in close contact with and directly reported to J Peters the head of the underground section of the American Communist Party 12 By 1934 the Ware Group had developed into a tightly organized underground managed by a directory of seven men In time it included a number of secret sub cells whose total membership I can only estimate probably about seventy five Communists Sometimes they were visited officially by J Peters who lectured them on Communist organization and Leninist theory and advised them on general policy and specific problems For several of them were so placed in the New Deal agencies notably Alger Hiss Nathan Witt John Abt and Lee Pressman that they were in a position to influence policy at several levels 12 Corroboration from Ware Group members Edit nbsp Lee Pressman shortly after leaving the Ware Group working for the CIO 1938 Lee Pressman On August 28 1950 Lee Pressman gave testimony against his former comrades though denied that they engaged in espionage 13 14 He stated he had met Ware and that In my desire to see the destruction of Hitlerism and an improvement in economic conditions here at home I joined a Communist group in Washington D C about 1934 My participation in such group extended for about a year to the best of my recollection 15 Pressman also indicated that in at least one meeting of his group perhaps two he had met Soviet intelligence agent J Peters 16 Pressman s 1950 testimony provided the first corroboration of Chambers allegation that a Washington D C Communist group around Ware existed with federal officials Nathan Witt John Abt and Charles Kramer named by Pressman as members of this party cell 12 Nathaniel Weyl In 1952 Nathaniel Weyl testified before the U S Senate Internal Security Committee that he had been a member of the Ware group and that Alger Hiss had attended meetings as well the only eyewitness corroboration of Whittaker Chambers s testimony that Alger Hiss was a Communist and Ware Group member 12 17 18 Of his own Ware Group participation Weyl said I was one of its less enthusiastic members 19 Weyl described what could be interpreted as Ware s efforts to corral him into espionage and his own effort to extract himself from the group Ware wanted me to try to get into the Foreign Service and be attached to the staff of William Bullitt our first Ambassador to the Soviet Union I didn t think there was anything illegal about membership in the Ware unit but nevertheless it was duplicitous I told Hal Ware that the Moscow idea was out and that I wanted to leave Washington and resign from government He said absolutely not I forced his hand by committing an appalling breach of security I showed up at a cell meeting with the girl I was having an affair with a young lady who was not a Communist Party member and who had known nothing about the group Ware withdrew his objections and I resigned from AAA 19 John Abt In his 1993 autobiography John Abt later long time attorney for the Communist Party confirmed that the Ware Group had existed that it was a secret Communist Party unit and that Ware had recruited him and several of the others named by Chambers for the Party 20 Hope Hale Davis In her 1994 memoir Hope Hale Davis also admitted to membership in the Ware group Davis confirmed that it was engaged in illegal activity 21 Personal life and death Edit nbsp Jessica Smith circa 1913 1918 Ware married Margaret Stephens in 1916 she died three weeks following birth of their second child Nancy Stephens Ware 3 In August 1917 Ware married his second wife Clarissa Cris Smith The couple had two children Robin and Nancy before divorcing in the early 1920s 1 Ware s second marriage seems to have ended upon their return to the States Cris took a job in the National Office of the Workers Party as head of the Committee for Protection of Foreign Born Workers She was reported in the Communist Party press as having died of acute pancreatitis a rare disease of one of the digestive organs of the stomach rumored to be a cover story for a botched illegal abortion on September 27 1923 Benjamin Gitlow luridly wrote of a love triangle between Cris Party national secretary C E Ruthenberg and future secretary Jay Lovestone Her death was a tragic end for the last of Cris Ware s abortions proved fatal for her 22 While in Russia Ware met Jessica Smith working with the Quaker famine relief effort the American Friends Service Committee Back in New York City the pair were married in January 1925 by Rev Norman Thomas soon to become a key political leader of the Socialist Party of America 1 On August 9 1935 Ware was critically injured in an automobile accident in the mountains near York Springs in Harrisburg Pennsylvania when his car collided with a coal truck He died the next Tuesday at the hospital in Harrisburg never regaining consciousness after the crash 23 1 2 Legacy EditWare was memorialized with a chapter in the memoir written by his more famous mother Ella Reeve Bloor in 1940 As a boy he loved the outdoors was full of restless eager vitality and bold curiosity He had a startlingly vivid imagination and an urge and talent for organizing that continued and marked his whole life More than ordinarily shy he forgot his shyness when engaged in one of his organizing ventures and a flow of colorful stirring talk would come from him so persuasive that those who heard him were completely carried away He grew slim and tall and when we moved to Arden was captain of the baseball team and a leader in tennis and other games He missed a lot of school because of his siege of tuberculosis but he read a lot and was always able to make up two or three years of ordinary schooling in a few months of intensive study His interest in socialism began as early as I can remember Hal s interest in agriculture began early He started raising truck in a small garden in Arden and sold it around the countryside His keen sense of beauty showed in the way he fixed up his boxes of vegetables to sell arranging them artistically in green boxes He first planned to study forestry He used to tell me his dreams of a life in the open alone on a hillside a sea of green tree tops below him While taking the entrance exams for Pennsylvania State College he found that the forestry course would take four years while there was a fine two year agricultural course Beginning to feel too that he did not want to live away from people but among them he chose agriculture His interest in economics and politics developed intensely at this time and while at college he wrote me constantly for the latest news of the socialist movement We were always very close to one another and no matter how many months or years we were apart we could always pick up where we had left off 2 After his death attorney John Abt married Jessica Smith Ware s widow Ware left behind four children Judith David Nancy and Robin Hal Ware s half brother Carl Reeve was also a lifelong activist in the Communist Party Works Edit Our Agrarian Problem Signed as H R Harrow The Communist New York Unified CPA vol 1 no 5 November 1921 pp 20 21 23 American Agricultural Problems The Toiler vol 4 whole no 194 November 12 1921 pp 8 10 American Farmers in Russia Soviet Russia Pictorial New York vol 8 no 4 April 1923 pg 77 The Factory Farm A Discussion Article on the Party and the Farm Problem Signed as Harrow Part 1 The Communist vol 7 no 12 December 1928 pp 761 769 Part 2 The Communist vol 8 no 3 March 1929 pp 142 149 The American Farmer as George Anstrom 1932 24 25 Planning for Permanent Poverty What Subsistence Farming Really Stands For Harper s Magazine April 1935See also EditList of American spies Ware Group John Abt Whittaker Chambers Noel Field Harold Glasser John Herrmann Alger Hiss Donald Hiss Victor Perlo J Peters Ward Pigman Lee Pressman Vincent Reno Julian Wadleigh Harold Ware Nathaniel Weyl Harry Dexter White Nathan WittReferences Edit a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Harris Lement 1978 Harold M Ware 1890 1935 Agricultural Pioneer U S A and U S S R Occasional Paper No 30 American Institute for Marxist Studies pp 3 Farm Research Inc 4 weekly 5 Margret Stevens 8 Clarissa Smith 10 draftsman 16 24 Case tractors 18 Toikino 37 Jessica Smith 36 41 fundraising 43 45 1929 1930 45 58 US tour 59 pamphlet 59 68 Farm Research Inc 68 death Retrieved August 6 2018 a b c d e f g h i j k Bloor Ella Reeve 1940 We Are Many International Publishers pp 35 36 birth 45 birth 51 mother 66 67 Philadelphia 71 Arden 267 measles 1921 234 Farmers Holiday Association 262 death 268 Arden 270 underground press Retrieved November 22 2020 a b Margaret S Ware Death Certificate Wilmington New Castle Co Delaware Date of death October 16 1916 For a list of delegates to the founding convention of the CLP see http www marxisthistory org subject usa eam cpa clp19delegates html For the complete saga of the early Communist Party s evolution see Early American Marxism website http www marxisthistory org subject usa eam communistparty html The best available list of pseudonyms of American communists appears in Jeffrey B Perry Pseudonyms A Reference Aid for Studying American Communist History American Communist History vol 3 no 1 June 2004 pp 55 126 The identification of Hal Ware as H R Harrow was made shortly after publication of the article vetted to the H net Historians of American Communism newsgroup H HOAC Theodore Draper The Roots of American Communism New York Viking 1957 Page 450 footnote 28 Hearings Regarding Communist Activities Among Farm Groups US Government Printing Office December 28 1951 p 1913 Retrieved August 5 2018 Guide to the Erik Bert Paper 1983 Retrieved November 22 2020 Fourth Report Un American Activities in California 1948 Communist Front Organizations Senate of the California Legislature 1948 pp 98 Lincoln Bridge 113 114 organization Retrieved October 18 2018 Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications And Appendixes House Document No 398 US GPO 1962 p 73 Retrieved October 18 2018 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Chambers Whittaker May 1952 Witness New York Random House pp 26 31 204 332 336 347fn ISBN 9780895269157 The Road Back Time September 4 1950 Archived from the original on January 14 2009 Klehr Harvey Haynes John Earl Vassiliev Alexander 2009 Spies The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America With John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr New Haven CT Yale University Press pp 282 Pressman dinner for Kramer 425 428 ISBN 978 0300155723 Retrieved March 19 2017 Hearings regarding Communist espionage in the United States Government August 28 1950 p 2845 Communist group 2850 met Ware 2860 started law practice Retrieved May 26 2015 Hearings Regarding Communism in the United States Government Part 2 pp 2855 2856 Another Witness TIME March 3 1952 Archived from the original on January 14 2009 Retrieved June 29 2008 Hewitt Alan January 9 1953 I Was in a Communist Unit with Hiss U S News amp World Report Retrieved June 29 2008 a b Weyl Nathaniel 2003 Encounters with Communism 1932 1940 American Communist History 2 1 81 94 doi 10 1080 1474389032000112618 S2CID 144718557 Abt John 1993 Advocate and Activist Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer Champaign IL University of Illinois Press ISBN 978 0 2520 2030 8 Davis Hope Hale 1994 Great Day Coming Hanover NH Steerforth Press ISBN 978 1 8836 4217 4 Gitlow Benjamin 1940 I Confess The Truth About American Communism E P Dutton pp 153 154 Retrieved August 7 2018 The Gettysburg Times Gettysburg Pennsylvania August 12 1935 Page 2 https www newspapers com clip 123385864 ware improves Anstrom George 1932 The American Farmer PDF International Pub1ishers Retrieved August 6 2018 Anstrom George 1932 The American Farmer International Pub1ishers Retrieved August 6 2018 Further reading EditChambers Whittaker May 1952 Witness New York Random House pp 26 31 204 332 336 347fn ISBN 9780895269157 Whittaker Chambers Testimony before the House Un American Activities Committee House Committee on Un American Activities August 3 1948 John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr Venona Decoding Soviet Espionage in America New Haven Yale University Press 1999 Joseph Lash Dealers and Dreamers New York Doubleday 1988 Earl Latham The Communist Controversy in Washington From the New Deal to McCarthy Cambridge Harvard University Press 1966 Harris Lement 1978 Harold M Ware 1890 1935 Agricultural Pioneer U S A and U S S R Occasional Paper No 30 American Institute for Marxist Studies Retrieved August 6 2018 Nathaniel Weyl The Battle Against Disloyalty New York Crowell 1951 Nathaniel Weyl Treason The Story of Disloyalty and Betrayal in American History Washington D C Public Affairs Press 1950External links EditOverview of the Farmers National Weekly newspaper issues Cold War Intelligence Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Harold Ware amp oldid 1163881055, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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