October 11 - Born into Privilege, But...

On this day in Labor History the year was 1874.  That was the day that Mary Heaton Vorse was born in New York City. 

She grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts in a well-off family.  She traveled across Europe with her parents, receiving her education and learning to speak multiple languages fluently. 

She then worked as a book reviewer for the Criterion magazine.  In 1912 Mary and the man who would be her husband witnessed the Massachusetts’s textile strike.  The experience was a turning point in her life. She later wrote: “Both Joe O’Brien and I had come a long road to get to Lawrence…Together we experienced the realization of the human cost of our industrial life.  Something transforming happened to both of us.  We knew now where we belonged—on the side of the workers and not with the comfortable people among whom we were born…Some synthesis had taken place between my life and that of the workers, some peculiar change that would never again permit me to look with indifference on the fact that riches for the few were made by misery of the many.  It was in Lawrence that we realized what we must do, that we could make one contribution—that of writing the workers’ story—as long as we lived.”  

For more than fifty years after Lawrence, Mary travelled the United States, reporting and participating in strikes and the labor movement.  She wrote about the 1919 steel strike, and the lumber workers in the Pacific Northwest.  She wrote about the struggles of auto workers and textile workers and child labor.  In 1962 the United Auto Workers honored Mary with the Social Justice Award.