Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins

Chapter Ten: Twentieth-Century Americanism

185 Chapter Ten Twentieth-Century Americanism Life comes to us but once and it should be possible to live one’s life in such a way that looking back one would feel no regret for years lived pointlessly; no shame for a petty worthless past—so that as one died one could say “All my life and all my strength has been given to the most beautiful thing in the world—the struggle for the freedom of mankind.” —Nicholas Ostrovski in The Making of Hero (quotation copied by Grace Hutchins into her personal notebook, ca. 1936–1937) Rochester’s affections had shifted irrevocably away from Vida Scudder and her efforts to create theological and political synthesis. Without abandoning Scudder entirely, Rochester, along with Hutchins, had become a devotee of labor activist and CPUSA organizer Mother Bloor, signing on as a sponsor for her forty-fifth anniversary banquet.1 With Bloor, they honored the achievements of women labor activists and recommitted themselves to the fight against fascism. And as part of their response to the increasing fascist threat, they modified their rhetorical mode again, tempering their debunking with efforts to create a broad antifascist front. Indeed, the banquet can be seen as an attempt to draw in a wide range of celebrants. Chaired by Heywood Broun and Roger Baldwin, the event celebrated Ella Reeve Bloor’s forty-five years as a labor activist and organizer. Will Geer, Mother Bloor’s son-inlaw , performed alongside the International Workers Order Band, and a theater company offered a scene from Clifford Odets’s “Waiting for Lefty.” Hutchins, always more involved in social organizing than Rochester, was a member of the Celebration Committee and delivered a testimonial to Mother Bloor. Describing a visit Mother Bloor had paid to silk workers in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Hutchins withheld the identity of a special worker until the end: “Fired that night by Mother Bloor’s enthusiasm, the girl threw herself into the labor movement and became a leader in organizing the textile workers. Her name is Ann Burlak.”2 Hutchins knew the audience would recognize the name. If the rest of the program featured men, Hutchins would ensure that her testimonial placed women at the revolutionary center. What’s more, by invoking the name of Ann Burlak, Hutchins chronicled a cross-generational tradition of women activists, a tradition usually taken for granted and unacknowledged in the larger movement but one with which Hutchins and Rochester were familiar because of their own experiences struggling to establish women’s presence in the Episcopal Church and the FOR. 186 PASSIONATE COMMITMENTS Despite having shifted their affiliations, Hutchins and Rochester continued to correspond with old friends and acquaintances. Sarah Cleghorn had just published her own memoirs, Threescore, writing in detail about Community House, about the job that Hutchins and Rochester had made for her, and about Hutchins and Rochester themselves, celebrating their partnership. Seeing the review of Threescore in the New York Times, Hutchins had gone out immediately to buy it. “It just happened along at the time I am trying to recover from the grippe with that completely down-and-out limp, discouraged feeling which is, I suppose, characteristic of the trouble,” Hutchins wrote to Cleghorn. “Feeling as if nothing could lift me out of the slough, I read what you wrote of Anna and me at 352. And presto, I felt better! If anybody could ever honestly think I had even one of those good qualities you describe, there must be some good in me. . . . Thank you for such a very generous and forgiving statement about me! It was certainly good for an inferiority complex,” she added. “Rulers of America has not had such good luck in reviews as your book, but it is going well. It was the Book Union choice for February.”3 Figure 10.1. Ella Reeve Bloor (Mother Bloor) 187 TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICANISM Rochester wrote a few days later, insisting that Cleghorn had been “too kind to some of your friends.” Then, unable to resist the pull of the old argument, she lamented: “Some things I wish you had done differently—but that would be only if you saw some things differently! . . . But how could you fall for Mr. Roosevelt!” she exclaimed. “His whole administration is set to buttress a decaying capitalism. He is more suave than Hoover but his function is the same.”4 Other old sparring partners reappeared around this time. In a...