O'Hare, Kate Richards (1877–1948)

Biographical Details

Kate Richards was born in Ada, Kansas, on March 26, 1877. She attended school in Nebraska for a short period of time before becoming an apprentice machinist working alongside her father in a Kansas City, Missouri, shop. Richards joined the International Order of Machinists union and, on her own time, devoted herself to temperance work through the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

Political Influences

During her tenure as a machinist, Richards became interested in the writings of many radical authors, including Henry George, Ignatius Donnelly, and Henry Demarest Lloyd. However, it was a speech made by Mary Harris “Mother” Jones and a meeting with Julius Wayland, the editor of Appeal to Reason, that ultimately converted Richards to socialism.

Richards joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1899, and two years later moved to the more moderate Socialist Party of America. She then enrolled in the first class of the International School of Socialist Economy in Girard, Kansas. This school was founded by the influential journalist Julius Wayland and was designed to train socialist organizers. Richards met and married Francis O'Hare while attending school in 1902. They spent their honeymoon lecturing on socialism and continued their efforts for 15 years. Their journeys on their lecture tours reached from the Great Plains states to places as far away as Britain, Canada, and Mexico.

In 1904, Kate O'Hare successfully published a socialist novel titled, What Happened to Dan?, later revised and reprinted as The Sorrows of Cupid in 1911. The O'Hares then became copublishers and coeditors of the radical weekly publication National Rip-Saw, published in St. Louis, which they subsequently renamed the Socialist Revolution in 1917. In 1910, Kate O'Hare unsuccessfully ran for the Kansas Congress on the Socialist ballot. In 1917, she became chair of the Committee on War and Militarism and toured the country to speak against the United States' entry into World War I. Shortly after her coast-to-coast travels, the Federal Espionage Act was passed that made it a federal offense to make speeches undermining the war effort.

Imprisonment and Penal Reform

In July 1917, Kate O'Hare was indicted under the new Federal Espionage Act for making an antiwar speech in North Dakota, and was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. The trial judge acknowledged that the United States was a nation of free speech, but reminded all that war was also a time of sacrifice when people should not weaken the spirit or destroy faith or confidence of the people. Two years later, in April 1919, after her appeals failed, Richards became a federal prisoner, joining anarchist Emma Goldman in the women's section in the Missouri State Penitentiary, at the time the largest prison in the country.

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