book review

University of Georgia Press

Chapter Title: Freda Hogan (1892–1988) A Socialist Woman in Huntington, Arkansas Chapter Author(s): MICHAEL PIERCE

Book Title: Arkansas Women Book Subtitle: Their Lives and Times Book Editor(s): Cherisse Jones-Branch, Gary T. Edwards Published by: University of Georgia Press. (2018) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1vhtrh3.10

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Freda Hogan (1892-1988)

A Socialist Woman in Huntington, Arkansas

M I C H A E L PIERCE

Huntington, Arkansas, a small coal-mining town in the Ouachita Mountains near the Oklahoma border in southern Sebastian County, produced four of the nations most prominent Socialist women in the first decades of the twentieth century. There was Mabel Hudson, who left Huntington to work at the Social- ist Party of America (SPA) headquarters in Chicago, where she held a variety of posts, including the party's top position—executive secretary—for a brief time in the late ipios.1 Ida Hayman Gallery moved from Huntington to study the law, and she became an attorney for the Socialist-led United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) District 14 in southeast Kansas before her untimely death in 191/.2 Bertha Hale Brown White, the former wife of a Huntington coal miner, in 1924 was the first woman to head a national political party's presidential campaign when she served as the executive secretary of the SPA.3 Later, White— then married to public power advocate Judson King—became an instrumental behind-the-scenes figure in the movement that brought electricity to rural resi- dents all over the nation, including much of Arkansas, in the 19308 and 1940S.4

Freda Hogan cut her journalistic teeth at her father's Socialist newspaper in Huntington before moving to Oklahoma City, where she kept that state's Social- ists together, helped put out the influential American Guardian, worked with UMWA Socialists as they battled the leadership of John L. Lewis, and even re- ceived serious consideration for the SPA'S presidential nomination in 1928.5

In this chapter, I use the biography of Freda Hogan, the only one of these women to leave an extensive written record of her Socialist roots in Arkan- sas, to argue that it was not mere coincidence or happenstance that these four women came from an Arkansas coal-mining town with a population that never

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9 4 M I C H A E L P I E R C E

exceeded 1,700.6 Mining towns have traditionally provided expanded opportu- nities for women to demand economic and civil rights and to engage in radical political activity. The nature of mining (teams of men working underground in a dangerous environment with few prospects for social mobility) and the geog- raphy of mining towns (relatively isolated, compact communities with popu- lations overwhelmingly working class) made these communities places with well-defined class dynamics and worker solidarity. Distinctions between one's family and those of other workers often blurred, and women, who made up a large percentage of the people above ground on workdays, expanded their traditional roles as defenders of home and family to include the entire class. Freda Hogan explained the activism of women in mining towns by noting, "No woman has ever felt the keenness of the class struggle more, or knows better that there is a class struggle, than does the miner's wife."7

Huntington was home to the state's Socialist Party headquarters and its long- time leader, Dan Hogan, who also practiced law and published the Huntington Herald. Hogan served as something of a mentor to each of these women. As Hogan's daughter, Freda Hogan Ameringer, later recalled, "Our home and office were modest but their influence extended far beyond that little mining town.... It was there Ida Hayman Gallery was encouraged to read law. Mabel Hudson began her work and interest in the Socialist Party in Papa's office, going from there to work in the National Socialist Party office as secretary to J. Mahlon Barnes.... Bertha [Hale] Brown, a sister, also began work in Papa's office." Dan Hogan's support was crucial for the careers of these women. He provided an avocation, initiated them into Socialist culture, and connected them to the So- cialist world outside of Huntington.8

But the accomplishments of these women cannot be understood simply by their relationships to Huntington and Hogan. The women themselves partici- pated in a larger network of Socialist women that connected them to activists across the nation and the globe. This community provided role models, nur- tured friendships, opened opportunities beyond the borders of Arkansas, and encouraged women's participation in the public sphere. Perhaps most impor- tant, this network formed the core of a distinctively female Socialist culture that sustained the women in their political work, providing a cohesive community, a set of values, a worldview, and a mission that ultimately promoted greater activ- ism. These women were so devoted to the work of the party that Freda Hogan Ameringer later characterized their commitment to the movement as "more like a religion than a political faith."9

The zeal with which women took to the Socialist cause was crucial to the success the SPA had in Arkansas and the nation. As evidenced by Bertha Hale

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Freda Hogan 95

Brown White and Mable Hudson Barnes's service as the party's executive sec- retary and the consideration that Freda Hogan received in 1928 for the party's presidential nomination, women exercised more power, commanded more re- spect, and found greater opportunity in the SPA than they did in either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party Though the SPA never truly lived up to its egalitarian ideas, it offered unprecedented opportunities for Arkansas women to participate in partisan politics in the first decades of the twentieth century Women rallied the faithful on the lecture circuit, mobilized in the wake of women's suffrage, and performed the unheralded behind-the-scenes tasks that were necessary for the functioning of the party

Freda Hogan came into the world on November 17,1892, probably in Mans- field, a mining town a few miles from Huntington. Her mother, the former Charlotte "Lottie" Yowell, had met Dan Hogan in the Scott County town of Wai - dron, where he was reading law and she was living with a sister while attend- ing school. In many ways, it was an odd match—a daughter of one of western Arkansas's most prominent families and the son of Irish immigrants—but the marriage lasted until his death in 1935. The couple moved to Mansfield, where at the time of Freda's birth Dan Hogan was practicing law and publishing the Alli- ance Patriot, a small paper affiliated with the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party For much of Freda Hogan's early life, Lottie Hogan's health problems lim- ited her ability to perform many of the domestic functions, and Dan and Freda conspired to relieve her of many burdens, especially after she gave birth to three more children—Hazel in 1900, Alice in 1904, and Daniel Jr. in 1908. Although Lottie's health improved in the years before World War I, Freda continued to take up much of the slack by helping her father with his law practice, publishing efforts, and work for the Socialist Party10 This closeness led Freda to idolize her father, and she devoted herself to becoming an activist and community leader like him. Recalling her father's influence on her life, she declared: "His faith, his hopes, his problems, and his friends—as well as his enemies—became m i n e . . . . I wanted to be as Papa wanted me to be, to be worthy of him, to measure up to his fine ideals."11

It is unclear when the family moved the few miles from Mansfield to Hunting- ton, but in the first years of the twentieth century Dan Hogan dedicated himself to building the Socialist Party of Arkansas, which was formally established in 1903. He worked closely with several other men, including Thomas Hagerty, a Van Buren, Arkansas, priest who played a central role in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, and Wells LeFevre, who went on to establish the Working Class Union. Arkansas Socialists, like those in nearby Oklahoma and Kansas, were never orthodox party members. Instead they blended populist

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p<5 M I C H A E L P I E R C E

ideas about the dangers of concentrated wealth and religious revivalism with the teachings of Karl Marx to produce what one historian called "grass-roots Socialism." The Socialist Party's founding platform included calls for the collec- tive ownership of the means of production; reduction of work hours; an old-age pension; free, compulsory, and nonsectarian public education; direct legisla- tion; public health insurance; and "equal political, civil, and religious rights [for] all men and women." But Freda Hogan Ameringer later explained the Arkan- sas Socialist Party's appeal more simply: the members, who were mostly trade unionists and middling farmers, were "people who were moved by the great ideal that they would have a cooperative commonwealth."12

The Hogans always lived on the edge of poverty. Income from party activism, a radical small-town newspaper, and legal work for unions was never enough to meet the family's needs and was always subject to the vagaries of the political environment. When Freda Hogan was six years old, her father helped in the UMWA'S unsuccessful attempt to organize the local mines and lost his news- paper and small printing plant as a result. It wasn't until 1907—after the UMWA'S successful organizing of the area's mines had brought in steady legal work and Dan Hogan had secured another printing plant—that the family was able to purchase its first home, a rather simple four-room frame house with two bed- rooms added on later. The mortgage was just $10 a month, later increasing with the additional bedrooms, but the family could still barely afford the payments. To make ends meet, Lottie Hogan (like most wives in Arkansas towns) kept a large garden, chickens, pigs, and a milk cow to provide the bulk of the family's sustenance.13

While he was building the party, Dan Hogan traveled throughout the state and region and often took Freda with him, introducing her to the world beyond Huntington and to activists with whom she would work throughout her career. After a meeting with Dan Hogan in Fort Smith, Eugene Debs wrote, "It was a great joy to me to see you and your fresh, sweet daughter and I shall always see you hand in hand, a beautiful picture, fine to look upon and full of inspiration." The pair became so inseparable that party activists began referring to them as "old Dan and little Freda."14

Traveling with her father exposed Freda Hogan to Socialist luminaries like Eugene Debs, and prominent Socialists—including the party's most articulate and inspiring women—came to Huntington, where they gave public speeches, met with miners, interacted with townspeople, and stayed at the Hogan home. Freda Hogan Ameringer remembered Mary "Mother" Jones coming to visit. Although Jones "shocked certain elements in the town with her profanity," the people of Huntington "seemed to glory in the spirit of the frail-looking woman."

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Freda Hogan 97

May Wood Simons, widely considered the party's foremost female intellectual, made a quite different impression in Huntington: "Her appearance, smartly tailored suit, in perfect taste, beautifully correct English, scholarly bearing, a speech showing perfect knowledge of her subject and well organized in every detail were all but stunning." Freda Hogan first met Kate Richards O'Hare, whom she considered to be "at the very top among Socialist women—able, well-informed speaker, fearless crusader and aggressive for standing up for her opinions in Socialist party organizations," when she visited Huntington.15 These women—and other visitors like Lena Morrow Lewis, Anna Maley, and Caroline Lowe—modeled the type of life that Freda Hogan aspired to, provided her with a network of contacts, and introduced her to a wider female Socialist culture.16

Although traveling the country preaching the gospel of Socialism did not conform to early twentieth-century female ideals, women on the Socialist lec- ture circuit did not directly challenge traditional gender roles when speaking in Arkansas. Quite the contrary, they often reinforced the idea that women's primary responsibilities were domestic, and they usually conformed to con- ventional notions of femininity.17 Emma Langdon, an organizer for the radical International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, told a Sebastian County audience, "If the government of the country were turned over to me to manage, my first act would be to send the women and the children home, where they should be—out of the stores and factories and away from the grind of industry." Likewise, Kate Richards O'Hare, who traveled the nation and left the care of her children to others, convinced one Arkansas newspaper that she was "an ardent lover of the home life." Even activists like Mary Jones, whose language and rough manner departed from the feminine ideal, took nicknames like "Mother," which underscored their role as protectors of the family. These women tended to see gender discrimination as arising from class exploitation and focused their attention on economic issues. To do otherwise would be akin to treating a disease's symptoms rather than its underlying cause.18

Like these others, Freda Hogan drew on the traditional idea of the woman as protector of home and family to claim a right to speak in the public sphere. She insisted that the capitalist system exploited all workers but especially women and children in its never-ending search for cheaper and cheaper labor. This exploitation threatened the very fabric of the nation's families because it forced "an unthinkable number" of women "to enter the scarlet ranks" and compelled children to leave the protection of home and school for mills, mines, shops, and factories. The only way to protect the home and family, Freda concluded, was to eliminate the capitalist system and replace it with the collective ownership of the means of production.19

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98 M I C H A E L P I E R C E

Although she attended the public school in Huntington, which like most small-town Arkansas schools of the era only went through the eighth grade, Freda Hogan Ameringer never mentioned her formal education in her remi- niscences. But she described a home environment in which learning was an integral part of life. The family dining table was the site of much of her educa- tion. Not only did the family members take turns reading aloud in the evenings, but frequent guests transformed the dining room into something of a debating hall, where discussions of political events, history, poetry, and literature could last for hours. The family's collection of books—usually housed at Dan Hogan s law office—was an asset not only to Freda but to the entire community. Freda Hogan Ameringer remembered: "Many a young miner boy or girl owes his first taste for good reading to that little frame office. For there was no public library in Huntington and most folks considered books and magazines as luxuries. How I remember our battered volumes of Shakespeare, Dickens, and other clas- sics which made the rounds."20

Freda Hogan s life as an activist began in 1907, when she was just fourteen. That year, a member of the Arkansas General Assembly representing Monroe County, far from the coalfields, proposed a bill to repeal the state's mine-run law, which required that mine operators pay miners for all of the marketable coal that they dug. Freda heard about the bill and began going door to door asking residents to sign a petition demanding that the legislature leave the law alone. Local UMWA officials heard about her efforts and invited her to travel to Little Rock to lobby on the miners' behalf. She later recalled, "I got a pretty good hearing, and I remember telling them that counting idle days, when mines did not work, miners made only $1.25 a day." Legislators must have been impressed with the arguments of Hogan and others, because the bill failed to make it out of committee.21

As Freda became a teenager, her father began devoting more time to the So- cialist Party, running for office on the state slate and serving on several national committees. His first run for governor was in 1906, when he received just 2,165 votes. But as the party grew, so did the number of votes he received. Dan Ho- gan garnered 9,196 votes (6.1 percent) in 1910 and 10,798 (8 percent) four years later. In 1908, he began representing Arkansas on the party's national council, and four years later he joined the SPA'S executive committee. The high point of Hogan's prominence in the SPA came in 1912, when the party's left wing sup- ported him for the vice presidential nomination that ultimately went to former Milwaukee mayor Emil Seidel.22

By her sixteenth birthday, Freda Hogan had ceased accompanying her father as he was spending more time campaigning and traveling to party functions. In-

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Freda Hogan 99

stead, Freda became the family's main breadwinner, writing for the Huntington Herald, editing the paper, and running the printing business during her father's long absences. In fact, while Dan Hogan was conducting his 1910 gubernatorial campaign, seventeen-year-old Freda formally took charge of the Herald. The younger Hogan's stewardship of the paper so impressed editors throughout the region that one of them exclaimed, "That girl is a genius, a printer, a writer, and takes after her father, even to being Irish."23

Around this time, Freda Hogan also began taking advantage of her contacts with Socialist women to launch her journalist career outside of Huntington. Most of her early writing concerned traditional women's issues—family life, marriage, child labor, and the experiences of young women on their own—and was in the didactic style common to the era. Some of the work was fiction- alized, like "Mary and John—Up to Date," an account of an overworked and beleaguered young married couple who are transformed into a contented and happy pair through work for the party. In other pieces, Hogan wrote about people in Huntington. "One Boy I Know—and His Ma" tells of a local young boy who was forced by poverty to leave school to join his father in the mines. Freda Hogan transformed his life by giving him some SPA literature. Not only was he converted to Socialism, but he also converted his mother, whose natural concerns about children and the home allowed her to see the benefits of a co- operative commonwealth. The son and mother, though, had no luck converting the father, whom Hogan presented as too stuck in the old ways of doing things to see the benefits of the collective ownership of the mines. Freda Hogan's point was that Socialism's hopes were tied to women and young men rather than to older men.24

The 1911 arrival of Ida Gallery in Huntington transformed Freda Hogan's life. Unlike Mabel Hudson and Bertha Hale Brown, who became Socialists while living in Huntington, Gallery arrived a devoted Socialist. Dan Hogan had con- vinced her to move to Huntington from nearby Bonanza, another Sebastian County mining town where she taught school, to serve as the secretary of the state's Socialist Party. She was married to Phillip Gallery, who lived in Sche- nectady, New York, where he served as secretary to the Socialist mayor. Freda Hogan Ameringer later recalled, "For me a large gap in my life was filled by Ida. I had become so engrossed with my work and the Socialist cause, I no longer had ties to my former school friends and other Socialist women with whom I had contacts were much older. Ida and I became the best of friends, sharing our dreams and problems." Gallery even helped Hogan get to the 1912 Socialist convention in Indianapolis, where she watched her father battle for the vice presidential nomination and where she first met her future husband,

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100 M I C H A E L P I E R C E

Oscar Ameringer, a nationally prominent journalist who had earned a reputa- tion as the "Mark Twain of the Socialists." For Freda Hogan and most female Socialists, distinctions between one's personal life and one's life as an activist were nonexistent.25

Ida Gallery filled a void in Freda Hogan's life, and Arkansas Socialists cred- ited Gallery with the enormous growth of the party experienced in the years before World War I. An Arkansan described Gallery's efforts in the New York Call: "She is small and wiry and can pound the typewriter all day and into the night with nervous prostration. She has literally reached out into the moun- tains and valleys and led the people in to organizing and maintaining locals. As a result there are now locals in the state reaching into nearly every county."26

When Ida Gallery left Huntington in 1914 to study law, Freda Hogan took over her duties as party secretary, determined to be every bit as successful. Gallery had set a high standard, and Hogan thought that failing to meet that standard would not only let down the party but also betray her friendship with Gallery. Under Hogan's stewardship, the party continued to flourish, at least until the crackdown on Socialists that came with World War I.27

By 1912, one publication had identified Freda Hogan as "among [the] most active women in Arkansas in furthering [suffragist] propaganda." In addition to working on suffrage issues in Socialist circles, Hogan served as the secretary of the women's suffrage organization in southern Sebastian County. But unlike some middle-class suffragists, who talked in a language of individual rights, Hogan and Arkansas's Socialist women saw the vote as a means to an end— elimination of the economic exploitation of industrial and agrarian workers. Ar- kansas's Socialist suffragists insisted: "Women, being slaves to men, men slaves to their employers and employers slaves to the system, thereby makes the female half of the race slaves three times over." Hogan explained that women were "ex- ploited [by their employers] more ruthlessly than men. Always they work for lower wages and under poorer conditions." The expansion of the franchise to women, Hogan insisted, promised to end these three types of slavery. The vote would help make women equal to men. But more important, women—whose maternal instincts make them the natural enemy of economic exploitation— would use the franchise to challenge the economic system from which all forms of exploitation sprang. For Freda Hogan, the fight for women's suffrage became the main front in the larger battle for a more just economic system.28

Freda Hogan's work on suffrage and women's issues extended beyond Arkan- sas. In 1914, she joined the SPA'S Woman's National Committee (WNC). Formed in the middle of the twentieth century's first decade, the WNC initially existed, in the words of historian Mari Jo Buhle, as an "educational service." It pro-

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Freda Hogan 101

duced literature designed to attract sympathizers and to educate the converted in "the materialist conception of history as related to women's status." The WNC flourished under the leadership of Anna Maley and Caroline Lowe, two women whom Freda Hogan had come to know and respect from their frequent trips to Huntington and meetings on the Socialist lecture circuit in Arkansas.29 Both Maley and Lowe served as mentors to Hogan, who was a generation younger, and they probably helped her secure a place on the committee.30

During Hogan s tenure, the WNC provoked a messy debate within the party over approaches to women's issues. Hogan and three other committee mem- bers advocated that the WNC move beyond its educational work and launch an aggressive campaign to organize women in anticipation of the extension of the vote. The WNC called for special organizers and the publication of a news- paper dedicated to women's issues. If the party failed to act, the committee warned, the two major parties would organize women and use their votes to strengthen capitalists' grip over the nation's political system. But many in the party—including some of its most prominent women—objected to the pro- gram and called for the elimination of the WNC altogether. For them, discrimi- nation against women arose out of class exploitation, and the campaign for women's suffrage and the mobilization of women were so integral to the party's existence that they should not be segregated as women's work. The debate was not resolved to anyone's liking; the WNC was not eliminated, but it also did not launch its proposed campaign.31

Most of Freda Hogan's early activism and journalism focused on what had traditionally been seen as women's issues, but that changed in 1914 when she found herself at the center of a dispute between local members of the United Mine Workers and the Bache-Denman Coal Company. In April of that year, Bache-Denman's principal owner, Franklin Bache, abrogated the company's contract with the union and announced that its area mines would operate on a nonunion basis. The company recruited scab miners from Tennessee, expelled some union miners from company housing, and brought in heavily armed guards from the notorious Burns Detective Agency. When the citizens of southern Sebastian County held a rally to protest these moves, Freda Hogan was the featured speaker. She told the crowd of two thousand that they should not allow the company's actions to stand. After her speech, Hartford's Socialist town constable and a brass band led the crowd to one of the company's mines in an attempt to convince the nonunion miners and the guards to leave the area. But after one of the guards struck a boy with the butt of a gun, a huge melee ensued with the crowd forcing nonunion members to take flight and guards to surrender their weapons. The crowd then flooded the mine and hung from the

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102 M I C H A E L P I E R C E

tipple an American flag and a banner declaring, "This Is Union Man s Country." For the next three months, an armed struggle raged with the miners, citizens, local law enforcement officials, and the UMWA on one side and, on the other, Bache-Denmaris hired thugs and U.S. marshals trying to enforce a federal labor injunction.32

Freda Hogan chronicled each twist and turn of the confrontation in Socialist and labor periodicals like the International Socialist Review, Railway Carmen s Journal, New England Socialist, and Woodrow's Monthly. The story she told was of a greedy and unscrupulous out-of-state mine owner disrupting life in the coal- fields of Sebastian County and a community united in defense of UMWA mem- bers. Not only did Franklin Bache import armed guards who "insulted the wives and daughters of miners, [and] shot into their homes," but he also manipulated federal bankruptcy laws to have himself appointed as the receiver of his own indebted property. He then used his authority as receiver to secure a federal injunction against any interference with company property and U.S. marshals to enforce the injunction. After miners and local law enforcement officers routed Bache's private army in a series of gunfights, Bache convinced President Wood- row Wilson to send federal troops to protect his mines and federal prosecutors to arrest ten UMWA officials, who had sent miners weapons to defend their homes. More than anyone else Freda Hogan made the arrest and subsequent imprison- ment of the UMWA officials a cause celebre in Socialist and labor circles.33

As the Bache-Denman conflict receded from the headlines in 1915, when the UMWA officials were released from their imprisonment, Hogan tried to stop the United States from entering the world war that had begun in Europe in the late summer of 1914. Like other SPA members, she blamed those "reaping a harvest of dollars from the wholesale murder in Europe" for the increasing pressure on the United States to enter alongside England and France. She ex- plained that "capitalists in the manufacture and shipment of munitions to the belligerents" had made a mockery of U.S. claims of neutrality and had ended up costing American lives on the high seas. Munitions makers—anxious to see more orders—had then used this loss of life to justify U.S. entry. These capital- ists, Freda Hogan concluded, "desire that we make a breastwork of our bodies that this manufacturing may go on; that others of our class stand ready to go to war that still larger orders and profits may be theirs."34

Dan Hogan agreed with his daughter's assessment of the causes of U.S. in- volvement in the war. After U.S. entry in April 1917, he served on the SPA'S Com- mittee on War and Militarism and signed the committee's July 1917 resolution condemning the war as "a crime against the people of the United States." During the committee's debates, Dan Hogan proposed that the SPA demand that the

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Freda Hogan 103

federal government "conscript" income over $5,000 to pay for the war effort, de- claring, "The capitalists involve us in war and they ought to be compelled to pay for it." The real purpose of such a tax, though, was not to increase government revenue but to remove what the Socialists saw as the real cause of the war: profits. Without the prospects of profit, Dan Hogan thought, those who clamored loud- est for the United States to enter would lose interest in sustaining the conflict.35

The onset of the war disrupted the lives of the Hogans and like-minded Social- ists. The SPA'S opposition to the war and the government's implementation of the draft provoked a harsh response from the Wilson administration and Congress. Passage of the Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918) essentially made it a crime to speak out against the war or the draft, and Freda Hogan feared that her father would be sent to prison. Although Dan Hogan avoided prosecution, some of the Hogans' friends were not so lucky. For example, a federal court sent Kate Richards O'Hare to prison for violating the Espionage Act. The court deter- mined that she had willingly obstructed military enlistment, citing a speech in which she denounced the war, warned that soldiers would become fertilizer on the fields of France, and called mothers who proudly sent their sons off to war "brood sows." In Oklahoma's Canadian River valley, federal authorities arrested some four hundred members of the Working Class Union—founded by the Hogans' friend and former Huntington resident Wells LeFevre—for resisting the draft. Not even the nation's most prominent Socialist was spared. A federal judge sentenced Eugene Debs to twenty years in a federal penitentiary for de- claring that in all wars the working class fights to benefit the elite.36

Soon after U.S. entry into the war, the family's financial straits and health problems forced Freda Hogan to leave Huntington. Oscar Ameringer, whom she married in 1930, later explained: "What with hard work, close confinement in a stuffy print shop, and worry about paper and ink bills, Freda got herself down to 96 pounds. The doctors pronounced her condition as incipient T.B. [tuberculosis], and urged her to seek health and livelihood in God's fresh air." Ameringer offered Freda a job raising capital for the Oklahoma Leader, a Social- ist daily newspaper he was planning that would be modeled after and subsidized by Victor Berger's highly successful Milwaukee Leader. Not only did the job allow Freda Hogan to enjoy "God's fresh air," but the commissions she made on the sale of shares helped her family through some rough times back in Hunting- ton. Ameringer saw his enlistment of Freda as the first step toward convincing the entire Hogan family to "leave the God-forsaken state of Arkansas and come to Oklahoma" to run the paper. Moving to a bigger city and a paper with greater resources promised the family not only a larger stage for its political work but also the type of economic security that it could never have in Huntington.37

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104 M I C H A E L P I E R C E

Traveling around Oklahoma in a beat-up Model T, Freda Hogan and Oscar Ameringer had little trouble raising the necessary funds, but the federal govern- ment's harassment of Milwaukee Socialists interrupted the start of the paper. Federal authorities charged Victor Berger, who had been the first Socialist to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, with violating the Espionage Act, citing antiwar editorials in the Milwaukee Leader. The authorities also revoked the paper's second-class postage permit and prevented the paper and Berger's local Socialist organization from receiving mail. Oscar Ameringer rushed to Wisconsin to mobilize support for Berger's fight, and Freda Hogan soon fol- lowed. Although she remembered being "lonely and a bit homesick" while in Milwaukee, Hogan kept busy collecting funds for the Leader, campaigning for women's suffrage, and, most important, helping the Socialists get around the postal service's sanctions. Ameringer later explained with his usual sarcasm: "No one would suspect that slip of an Arkansas girl—with the non-German name of Hogan—of trying to stop the World War. We installed her near one of the main branches of the Milwaukee post office, where she carried on her subversive activity as our underground depository of whatever mail our friends among the post employees could snitch and deliver after working hours." Al- though Ameringer, Hogan, and Milwaukee's Socialists could not stop the prose- cution of Berger, they won in the court of public opinion. Milwaukee voters sent Berger back to Congress as he was appealing his conviction.38

Even though the war had brought women's suffrage, Freda Hogan could see little good coming from the conflict—just a "world of heartbreaking pain and sorrow." Not only had it been fought to advance the interests of munition mak- ers and bankers, but also authorities had prosecuted those whom she held in the highest esteem. Kate Richards O'Hare sat in a Missouri prison, Eugene Debs was in the Atlanta penitentiary, and Victor Berger was appealing his conviction and twenty-year prison sentence. The movement that she and her father had worked so hard to build was in shambles. She confessed that the "war was too much [even] without the incarceration of our comrades. When I think about it all, it would be easy to lose my socialist faith."39 Of course, Freda Hogan did not lose her socialist faith.

But Hogan did do something that Bertha Hale Brown, Mabel Hudson, Ida Gallery, and countless other ambitious, politically active women had already done: she left Arkansas in hope of a brighter future. Freda and the whole Hogan family moved to Oklahoma City in late 1919 or early 1920 to start the Okla- homa Leader. While living in Oklahoma, Freda Hogan finally moved out of her father's shadow. She teamed up with Oscar Ameringer and UMWA Socialists to fight against John L. Lewis's corrupt leadership, was considered for the SPA'S

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Freda Hogan 105

presidential nomination in 1928, helped produce the influential American Guardian and other political newspapers, and remained a vital part of Okla- homa City's left into the 19808. Hogan s activities in Oklahoma prompted the great jurist Alfred P. Murrah to call her "the finest person I ever knew"40

The departure of Freda Hogan and her family for Oklahoma City coincided with the end of the Socialist Party's heyday in Arkansas. The reasons for the party's decline are many but the Wilson administration's wartime persecution of Socialists and the postwar "red scare," which labeled party members as subversive, rank among the most important. The party limped through the 19208, led by a cadre of activists at Commonwealth College in Polk County, some thirty miles south of Huntington, and members of the UMWA, but it never again attracted the followers in Arkansas and much of the rest of the region that it had before the war.

The Socialist Party's collapse in 19208 Arkansas did not mean the end of its ideas. Many of the items that the Socialist Party placed on the political agenda in the state—direct legislation, wage and hour regulation for women, and women's suffrage—were enacted during the party's heyday. Other party planks—old-age pensions, public power, abolition of child labor, regulation of employee hours, and government health insurance—were taken up by New Dealers in the 19308 or became part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program in the 19608. Though the nation never became the cooperative commonwealth that young Freda Hogan hoped for, important pieces of the Socialist platform have eased the lives of many Arkansans, making the state a better place to live and work.

The collapse of the Socialist Party did, however, curtail the partisan political activities of Arkansas women. The party had offered women unprecedented op- portunities in the political and public sphere—not as clubwomen or auxiliary members or tokens or widows of elected officials but as full-fledged members and leaders—and its distinct female culture had nurtured and sustained the women as they entered the political sphere. Bertha Hale Brown White and Mabel Hud- son Barnes availed themselves of these opportunities, and each of them ascended from Huntington to the SPA'S top post. Likewise, the Socialist Party contemplated nominating Freda Hogan for president in 1928. The passing of the party and its female culture closed doors for politically active women that would not be opened again until the 19708 or 19808. Freda Hogan died on October 4,1988.

NOTES

i. David A. Shannon, Socialist Party of America: A History (1955; repr., Chicago, 111.: Quadrangle, 1967), 202; fragment of unidentified newspaper clipping, April 14,1912, box 3, folder i, Oscar and Freda Ameringer Papers, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City (hereafter Ameringer Papers).

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1 0 6 M I C H A E L P I E R C E

2. Biographical sketch, Phil and Ida Hayman Gallery Collection, Pittsburg (Kans.) State Univer- sity, http://library.pittstate.edu/spcoll/ndxcallerys.html (accessed August 9, 2010); Eugene V. Debs, "Sad Death of Ida Gallery," Social Revolution (May 1917).

3. "Bertha Hale White," in American Labor Who's Who, ed. Solon DeLeon with Irma C. Hays- sen and Grace Poole (New York: Hanford, 1925), 248; manuscript Census returns, U.S. Census, 1910, Population Schedules, Diamond Township, Sebastian County, Ark.; Freda Hogan Ameringer's Reminiscences, box 3, folder 13, Ameringer Papers, reprinted in Michael Pierce, "Great Women All, Serving a Glorious Cause: Freda Hogan Ameringer's Reminiscences of Socialism in Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 69 (Winter 2010): 294-324; Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 338.

4. Bertha Hale Brown White King's activism on behalf of public power can be traced through the Clyde Ellis diary, box i, folder 8, Clyde Taylor Ellis Papers, Special Collections, University of Ar- kansas Libraries, Fayetteville; and the Judson King Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

5. "Freda Hogan," in American Labor Who's Who, 107; Oscar Ameringer, If You Don't Weaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer (New York: Holt, 1940); Pierce, "Great Women All," 294-324; John Thompson, "She Never Weakened: The Heroism of Freda Ameringer," in An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before: Alternative Views of Oklahoma History, ed. Davis Joyce (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1994), 17; Vaughn Davis Bornet, Labor Politics in a Democratic Republic: Moderation, Division, and Disruption in the Presidential Election 0/1928 (Washington, D.C.: Spartan Books, 1964), 85.

6. Huntington's population waxed and waned with the health of the state's coal industry. It rose quickly with the coal boom that began at the end of the nineteenth century, reaching 913 in 1890 and 1,298 ten years later. The population peaked in 1910 with 1,700 inhabitants before declining after World War I, falling to fewer than 900 by 1930. Thirteenth Census of the United States, vol. 2: Popula- tion (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913), 106; Sixteenth Census of the United States, vol. i: Number of Inhabitants (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1942), 108.

7. United Mine Workers' Journal, February 8,1912, cited in John Hinde, When Coal Was King: Lady- smith and the Coal-Mining Industry on Vancouver Island (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011), 254 (quotation); Freda Hogan, "One Boy I Know—and His Ma," Progressive Woman (June- July 1913): 6; Bertha Hale Brown, "All's Right with the World," Progressive Woman (October 1912): 8.

8. Pierce, "Great Women All," 313-14. It is unclear if Freda Hogan Ameringer meant that Mabel Hudson and Bertha Hale Brown were biological sisters. I have been unable to locate either of them in the manuscript Census before 1910 because Hudson and Brown were the names of their first husbands.

9. Pierce, "Great Women All," 320. 10. Ibid., 310-11; Fred W Allsopp, History of the Arkansas Press for a Hundred Years and More

(Little Rock, Ark.: Parke-Harper, 1922), 440. The domestic arrangements of the Hogan family, in- cluding Lottie's infirmities, can be traced through the letters of Freda Hogan's grandmother: Alice I. Hogan to Fannie Carnall, January 27, 1895, February 21 and November 18, 1896, January 6 and April 30,1897, all in box i, folder 4, Emma Stevenson Black Collection, Special Collections, Univer- sity of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.

11. Pierce, "Great Women All," 310-11; Freda Hogan Ameringer, "Tribute to Dan Hogan by Daughter," American Guardian (Oklahoma City), January 25,1935.

12. James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), xi-xxi; G. Gregory Kiser, "The Socialist Party of Arkansas, 1900-1912," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 40 (Summer 1981): 119-53 (platform quotation, 130; cooperative commonwealth quotation, 152).

13. Pierce, "Great Women All," 312. The success of the UMWA not only brought a little economic stability to the Hogan family, it also transformed the lives of the local miners and their families.

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Freda Hogan 107

Freda Hogan Ameringer recalled: "Before they had the Union, the miners all had these company houses which were very depressing to look at, just about as plain and unattractive as you could make them. Then as the Union was organized, these miners were able to build their own little cot- tages with vegetable gardens in the back yard and flowers in the front yard" (Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 197*124).

14. E. V. Debs to Dan Hogan, July 10,1908, box 3, folder 11, Ameringer Papers (first quotation); Fred W. Holt to Eugene V. Debs, February 23,1915, in Letters of Eugene V. Debs, ed. Robert Constan- tine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 2:131-33 (second quotation); Brownie [probably Bertha Hale Brown] to Freda Hogan, March 31,1915, box 3, folder 2, Ameringer Papers.

15. Pierce, "Great Women All," 315-19. 16. The contributions of these women to the SPA can be traced through Mari Jo Buhle, Women

and American Socialism, 1870-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), esp. 152-66. 17. When communicating with other Socialist women through the SPA'S Progressive Woman, Ar-

kansas women sometimes challenged the notion of separate spheres. See, for example, Jessamine S. Fishback, "The Legal and Actual Status of Women," Progressive Woman (October 1913): 8; Bertha Hale Brown, "Love and the Woman," Progressive Woman (November 1912): 7.

18. Southwest American (Fort Smith, Ark.), September 2, 1917; Peter H. Buckingham, Rebel against Injustice: The Life of Frank P. O'Hare (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 52.

19. Freda Hogan, "Women Socialists of Arkansas," unidentified newspaper clipping, April 14, 1912, box 3, folder i, Ameringer Papers.

20. Pierce, "Great Women All," 312-13; Ameringer, "Tribute to Dan Hogan by Daughter." 21. Pierce, "Great Women All," 313; Journal of the Senate of Arkansas, 1907 (Hot Springs, Ark.:

Sentinel-Record, 1907), 129-30,185; Arkansas Gazette, March 3,1907. On the mine-run law in Ar- kansas, see A. A. Steel, Coal Mining in Arkansas (Little Rock, Ark.: Democrat Printing and Litho- graphing, 1910-1912), 243-96.

22. Melvyn Dubofsky We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, rev. ed. (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Books, 1973), 83; Kiser, "Socialist Party of Arkansas," 119-53; Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (1952; repr., Chicago: Haymarket, 2004), 406.

23. Fort Gibson Post (Okla.), March 3,1910; Pierce, "Great Women All," 311; Allsopp, History of the Arkansas Press, 439.

24. Mary E. Marcy to Freda Hogan, May 7,1913, box 3, folder 2, Ameringer Papers; Freda Hogan, "Mary and John—Up to Date," Detroit Emancipator, March 23,1912, clipping in box 3, folder i, Am- eringer Papers; Hogan, "One Boy I Know," 6. Also see Hogan, "The Baby," and Hogan, "Inspiration in Lowly Places," both clippings in box 3, folder i, Ameringer Papers; Hogan, "To the Girl," Railway Carmens Journal 19 (June 1914): 354-55.

25. Pierce, "Great Women All," 322-23. Bertha Hale Brown and Mabel Hudson also married men who had devoted their lives to the party. Brown married Dan White, a Socialist leader in Massa- chusetts, and Hudson married J. Mahlon Barnes, who served as the SPA'S executive secretary from 1905 until 1911 (ibid., 313-16).

26. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 233. 27. Pierce, "Great Women All," 322-23. 28. Ibid., 310; Freda Hogan to Mamey, February 9, 1917, box 3, folder 11, Ameringer Papers;

unidentified clipping, April 14, 1912, box 3, folder i, ibid, (first and second quotations); Hogan, "Women Socialists of Arkansas" (third quotation). Also see Hogan, "One Boy I Know," 6.

29. Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 152-60. 30. In her reminiscences, Freda Hogan Ameringer fondly recalled Maley's and Lowe's visits to

Arkansas: "Anna had grown up and worked in the great Minnesota Socialist movement, which had

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1 0 8 M I C H A E L P I E R C E

elected [Thomas] Van Lear mayor of Minneapolis. Her speaker's appeal, a fund of information, and

delightful sense of humor, were irresistible. She attacked the subject with body blows and had our

crowds laughing and cheering to the end. Caroline, on the other hand, was a gentle soul, one of the

dearest most considerate women who ever lived. She appealed to the heart and the conscience of

her hearers, showing them a Socialist world of love and beauty, with happiness and plenty for all.

Crowds instantly loved and trusted her" (Pierce, "Great Women All," 318-19). For more on Maley's

and Lowe's visits to Arkansas, see Anna Maley to Freda Hogan, February 12,1917, box 3, folder 2,

Ameringer Papers; advertisement in Harrison Times (Ark.), August 5,1916.

31. Report of the Woman's National Committee, May 1915, box 3, folder i; circular letter from

Woman's National Committee to Socialist Editors, n.d., box 3, folder i; Brownie to Freda Hogan,

March 31,1915, box 3, folder 2, all Ameringer Papers.

32. United Mine Workers' Journal, April 16, 1914; Arkansas Gazette, April 6, 1914; Southwest

American (Fort Smith, Ark.), April 8,1914; Samuel Sizer, "'This Is Union Man's Country': Sebastian

County, 1914," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 27 (Winter 1968): 306-29; Stephen H. Norwood, Strike-

breaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 154-63.

33. Freda Hogan, "Arkansas to Repeat Colorado Mine War? Trouble Is Brewing," New England So-

cialist (Fitchburg, Mass., and Boston), November 27,1914, clipping in box 3, folder i, Ameringer Papers;

Hogan, "Fine and Jail Sentences for Revolting Coal Miners," Woodrow's Monthly i (March 1915): 24-26,

ibid.; Hogan, "The Struggle in Arkansas," Railway Carmen's Journal 19 (December 1914): 766-68; Ho-

gan, "The Miners of Arkansas," International Socialist Review 13 (January 1915): 438-40 (quotation).

34. Freda Hogan, "Only for Ourselves," clipping, n.d., box 3, folder i, Ameringer Papers. The

article was reprinted from the Appeal to Reason (Girard, Kans.).

35. J. Louis Engdahl, "Party Demands Capitalists Pay Expense of the Conflict," Milwaukee Leader,

April 14,1917, i, 12.

36. Freda Hogan to Seigfried Ameringer, March 21,1918, box 3, folder 9, Ameringer Papers; Ber-

tha Hale White, "The Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma," New Day (Milwaukee), March 4,1922,

68; Sally Miller, From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O'Hare (Columbia:

University of Missouri Press, 1993), 190-91; Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 357-68; Ameringer, If

You Don't Weaken, 347-56. The Socialists were not the only ones to oppose U.S. entry into the war.

Antiwar sentiment was widespread throughout the rural South and Plains. Jeannette Keith, Rich

Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during World War I (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); James F. Willis, "The Cleburne County Draft War,"

Arkansas Historical Quarterly 26 (Spring 1967): 24-39.

37. Ameringer, If You Don't Weaken, 313 (first quotation); Seigfried Ameringer to Freda Hogan,

September 5,1917; Oscar Ameringer to Dan Hogan, November 13,1917 (second quotation); Seigfried

Ameringer to Dan Hogan, October 19,1917, all box 3, folder 8, Ameringer Papers.

38. Pierce, "Great Women All," 319-20 (first quotation); Ameringer, If You Don't Weaken, 325

(second quotation); Sally Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism (Westport,

Conn.: Greenwood, 1973), 191-219; Oscar Ameringer to Freda Hogan, June 13 and December 20,

1919, box 3, folder 3, Ameringer Papers.

39. Freda Hogan to Theodore Debs, December 26,1919, box 3, folder i, Ameringer Papers.

40. Ibid.; Thompson, "She Never Weakened"; Alfred P. Murrah to Freda Hogan, December 13,

1954, box i, folder 7, Ameringer Papers.

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