Harvey and Jessie: A Couple of Radicals

This engaging memoir records the lives of two radical journalists who shared commitments to socialism, the labor movement, civil rights movement, peace movement, and to each other. The story of their long partnership chronicles twentieth-century American radicalism in a very personal and evocative way. Harvey O'Connor, a devoted socialist and Wobbly, was the Eastern Bureau manager of the Federated Press, a labor news service, when he met Jessie Lloyd in 1929. The granddaughter of Henry Demarest Lloyd, the nineteenth century social reformer, and "Chicago Tribune" heiress, she was, at 25, already a labor journalist of some repute, having been a reporter in Geneva and Russia after graduating from Smith College. Harvey hired her, and they were married in 1930. Their working relationship and their marriage lasted more than half a century.With the publication of his critically acclaimed book "Mellon's Millions", Harvey established his reputation for muckraking exposes. With their continued participation in leftist causes, their home became a meeting place for reformers, liberals, and radicals of various persuasions. Despite different backgrounds Harvey's proletarian radicalism and Jessie's left-pacifist bourgeois family they valued a variety of radical traditions. Their writing depicts the conflict, challenges, and quarrels that they faced but does not become mired in theoretical sectarian debates. This dual autobiography vividly describes major episodes in twentieth-century American and world history the Seattle General Strike, Russia in the 1930s and 40s, the Gastonia strike, steel organizing in the Pittsburgh area and in the early days of the C.I.O., McCarthyism in the words of people who, as writers and public personalities, figured prominently in these events. Author note: Susan M. Bowler is a freelance writer.