Harold Ware
Template:TOCnestleft Harold Ware
Rural activism
The Russian Revolution was still fresh and in June 1929 Lem Harris sailed to the Soviet Union where he joined Harold Ware, a Communist Party USA member who had settled in the Verblud region of the USSR, to help in the drive to collectivize and mechanize the farms. Harris witnessed the tremendous surge of farm production under socialism and the rising living standards and cultural life of Soviet collective farmers. It convinced him of the advantages of socialism.
That conclusion was driven home when he and Ware returned to the U.S. in 1930 to find the nation locked in the worst economic depression in history with millions, including farmers, facing starvation brought on by “overproduction.”
Ware and Harris set out on a nationwide tour to conduct a “farm survey.” It included study of impoverished African-American and white tenant sharecroppers in Alabama and Texas, as well as wheat farmers on the Great Plains ruined by grain prices a fraction of the cost of production.
In his memoirs, My Tale of Two Worlds (International Publishers, 1986), Harris tells of the grassroots movement of farmers and workers that sprang up in those years with the slogan, “Fight or starve.” He dedicates the book to many of the heroes and heroines of that movement, including Mother Ella Reeve Bloor, many of whom were Communists. Harris himself joined the CPUSA in 1931. His father took him out of his will but Lem never expressed a word of regret. [1]
"Ware Group"
The famous Ware Group Communist apparatus was organized by Harold Ware, a son of prominent communist "Mother" Ella Bloor.
This group acted as an adjunct of the NKVD of the Soviets. The principal function of the group was to obtain information desired by the NKVD particularly with regard to individuals.
Chambers stated that frequently he turned over to Peters sizable sums which he had collected from the Ware group. Chambers has identified John Abt, formerly with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, later with the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, and with the LaFollette Senate Civil Liberties Committee as having been a member of this group. In 1952 Abt was representing the Communist Party USA as co-counsel with Vito Marcantonio before the Subversive Control Board.
Following the death of Harold Ware in an automobile accident, John Abt married Ware's widow, Jessica Smith, who at one time was a secretary in the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D. C. Later, when she became editor of Soviet Russia Today, she was one of the few persons ever to register as a Soviet agent.
Other members who comprised this group were Lee Pressman, formerly with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and later general counsel of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Henry Collins, at one time a member of the Forestry Service of the Department of Agriculture, Nathan Perlow, an economist, and when known to Chambers was connected with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D. C., Charles Kramer, who was also employed by the La Follette committee while Chambers was in contact with him and Alger Hiss, who worked with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the State Department, the United Nations Organization, and finally was president of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace.
References
- ↑ [http://www.peoplesworld.org/lem-harris-farm-labor-writer-dies-at-98/ PW, Lem Harris, farm labor writer, dies at 98 by: EVELINA ALARCON & JOHN PAPPADEMOS september 27 2002]