Ella Reeve Bloor 1862-1951 Ella Reeve Bloor was born July 8, 1862, in Staten Island, NY.  During her childhood in Camden, she became acquainted with Walt Whitman.  A founder of the American Communist Party, she was also a women's rights activist and worked to organize farmers in the Midwest.  Woody Guthrie's "1913 Massacre" was inspired by a chapter in "Mother" Bloor's autobiography.  She died on August 10, 1951 and is buried at Harleigh Cemetery, Camden, NJ.

Bloor, Ella Reeve (Women in American History)
http://search.eb.com/women/articles/Bloor_Ella_Reeve.html

Ella Reeve Bloor (Spartacus Educational)
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAbloor.htm

The Loup City Riot, 1934
http://www.nde.state.ne.us/SS/markers/393.html

Mother Bloor lauds Howard Fast's "Clarkton" (Daily Worker, October 29, 1947)
http://www.trussel.com/hf/bloor.htm

Howard Fast, Mother Bloor Head Whitman Peace Festival (Daily Worker, May 26, 1950)
http://www.trussel.com/hf/plots/t634.htm

Mother Bloor remembers Walt Whitman in Camden (from We Are Many by Ella Reeve ("Mother") Bloor)
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/whitman-per-bloor.html

The "Savagely Fathered and Un-Mothered World" of the Communist Party, U.S.A.: Feminism, Maternalism, and "Mother Bloor". Feminist Studies, Fall, 1999
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0300/3_25/59226321/p1/article.jhtml

Read more about Mother Bloor in ...

Bloor, Ella Reeve. We Are Many: An Autobiography. New York: International Publishers, 1940. 

Brown, Kathleen A. Ella Reeve Bloor, Suffragist, Trade-Unionist, Socialist, and Revolutionary in the Making,
1862-1919. MA thesis, San Francisco State University, 1987.

Scholten, P.L.C. Militant Women for Economic Justice: The Persuasion of Mary Harris Jones, Ella Reeve Bloor, Rose Pastor Stokes, Rose Schneiderman, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Ph.D. Thesis, Indiana university, 1979.

Tombstone photograph copyright © 1999-2004 by BJ Swartz. Permission is granted to use the photo as long as it is not for profit and not for reproduction in a publication or web page without credit. If you do use a photo, I'd just like to know and would appreciate it if you would send a donation to St. Paul's Food Basket. Thanks! 

BJ Swartz
kelta@keltaskavern.com
Created 1999, updated June 6, 2007