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125 Chapter Seven Worker Journalists Now listen to me, workers, listen to what I tell. Remember the textile workers, in their dirty cell. Now we must stand together, and to the boss reply, “We will never, no, we’ll never, let our leaders die.” —Ella May Wiggins (textile worker and singer, murdered by vigilantes outside Gastonia in 1929) “Purtiest singin’ I ever heard,” said one woman, who stood throughout a meeting at which Ella May sang. —Jessie Lloyd O’Connor, Harvey O’Connor, and Susan M. Bowler (Harvey and Jessie: A Couple of Radicals) We will devote all of our energy and all our work efforts so that American workers will walk hand in hand with the other proletariat of the world in the class struggle. —Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins (The Hammer, Rostov-on-Don, May 22, 1927) Hutchins and Rochester set sail for the United States from Southampton on the Cunard line R.M.S. Carmania on July 9, 1927, “restless for home.” “It’s high time we were back at work,” Rochester wrote to Sally Cleghorn.1 Although they had never stopped working , sending back articles and dispatches from many points of the globe, what Rochester and Hutchins longed for now was a new organizational home, a new community. But not just any community: they had moved beyond the Companions, the FOR, and the LID, dissatisfied with what they felt were half measures in every organization, although they could not dismiss friends in these groups as easily. They were seeking a community whose members not only addressed the economic roots of inequality without compromise but whose practices would allow Rochester to challenge the gendered division of labor, researching, writing, and speaking alongside the men and whose policies would allow Hutchins to work to enlarge the discursive space for other women. They sought a community , in short, in which they would be welcomed as they were and could advocate greater liberties for others as well. Within two months, they would apply for membership in the Workers (Communist) Party. During the ensuing two months, Rochester and Hutchins brought their new vision to old relationships, sparking new conflicts and reigniting old ones, a portent of the direction 126 PASSIONATE COMMITMENTS their lives were taking. Harry F. Ward had said, “Whatever form the new order may take, its vital breath is the sacrificial spirit.”2 Although they were not sacrificing their identities or their partnership, they were pioneering into a space that few people from their past understood, and that meant that they sustained losses. When Hutchins made arrangements to visit her family at their summer home in Castine, Maine, she told her mother that she had begun the “change of life” more than a year earlier and that it was making her more “nervous” than usual. Anna, she said, had been “the most perfectly understanding comrade,” a sly joke to herself. But given her “nervousness,” she said, she did not want to discuss or be reproached for having cut her hair or for her opinions about Russia.3 With that conveniently acceptable explanation in place, Hutchins took off for the north, writing to Rochester on her departure: “My Dearest, I . . . have read three Boston papers to see what they are doing about Sacco and Vanzetti. All three report amiably a meeting of protest held here yesterday by the Workers’ Party, with Earl Browder speaking. But the Herald states that the S. V. Defense Committee disclaimed all connection with the W. P. meeting.” Hutchins and Rochester knew then, if they hadn’t known already, that they would be signing on with the party of least approbation but, they hoped, with the most promise. In a manner that would become typical, Hutchins followed this political commentary with a counterweight, a tender expression of affection: “I have pulled up my slip in the back and am looking tolerably respectable, but I miss my partner to brush my shoulders! Dear, dear Partner, how lucky we are to have our pleasant apartment and to be getting it settled so well. . . . I love you more and more and more.”4 Apparently Hutchins’s parents agreed to the conditions she had outlined for her visit, because Hutchins later reported to Rochester that the stay had gone well: “Beloved,” she wrote, “all is well! Father pronounces my hair ‘not so bad.’ . . . Mother says nothing but seems to survive.”5 There was evidently no discussion of Russia. Nonetheless, Hutchins cut the visit short, staying only two nights, because what...

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