Harold Ware | |
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 Ware's passport photo, 1927 | |
| Born | Harold Maskell Ware (1889-08-19)August 19, 1889 Woodstown, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Died | August 14, 1935(1935-08-14) (aged 45) NearHarrisburg, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Pennsylvania State College |
| Occupation(s) | Agricultural engineer, SovietGRU spy |
| Spouse(s) | Margaret Stevens (1st) Clarissa "Cris" Smith (2nd) (3rd) |
| Children | 4 |
| Parents |
|
| Espionage activity | |
| Allegiance |  Soviet Union |
| Codename | "H.R. Harrow" (1921) |
| Codename | "Harrow" (1928) |
| Codename | "George Anstrom" (1932) |
Harold or "Hal" Ware (August 19, 1889 – August 14, 1935) was an AmericanMarxist, regarded as one of theCommunist Party's top experts on agriculture.[1] He was employed by a federalNew Deal agency in the 1930s. He is alleged to have been a Soviet spy and is understood to have founded the "Ware Group," a covert group of operatives within the United States government aiding Sovietintelligence agents.
Harold Maskell Ware, best known by his nickname "Hal," was born on August 19, 1889, inWoodstown, New Jersey, the fourth child ofElla Reeve Bloor and her husband, Lucien Bonaparte Ware. Two of Ware's three older siblings died in early childhood.[2]
His mother, Ella Bloor, converted tosocialism during 1894-1895, when the family lived inPhiladelphia.[2] She became a lifelong activist in thelabor movement, an early member of theSocial Democracy of America (organized byVictor L. Berger andEugene V. Debs), and a founder of theCommunist Party of America.[2] Ware was raised in a politicallyradical household, as a "Red Diaper Baby."
When he was 15, a case ofmeasles left Ware with what doctors believed to be an early case oftuberculosis.[2] His divorced mother moved with him and two brothers to the country for a year, while the rest of the family lived with his father in Philadelphia and attended school there.[2] While his mother went weekly toWilmington to speak and organize literature sales (as Delaware state organizer for theSocialist Party), Ware lived a rural life. Although he would return to school in the big city the following year, his orientation towards the countryside was firmly established.
Following his graduation from high school (circa 1907), Ware enrolled in a two-year course in agriculture atPennsylvania State College, later Penn State University.[1][3]
Following graduation, with financial help from his father he bought a grain and dairy farm nearArden, a small town nearPhiladelphia, where he learned farming firsthand.[2] His brief experience as a working farmer made him almost a unique figure among pioneer members of the American Communist Party, a group almost exclusively composed of urban laborers, factory workers, or intellectuals (and mostly foreign-born).
Before WWI began, Ware had proven himself something of an agricultural innovator. Unable to afford equipment for histractor, he welded together two harrows for horses. He adapted other horse-drawn gear for use in mechanized agriculture.[1]
After three years, Ware sold the farm and took a job in ashipyard as adraftsman, for which he had a natural faculty. This lasted until the end of theFirst World War, whose armistice in November 1918 ended the torrent of government funding directed toward the shipbuilding industry.[1]
Although not a delegate to its founding convention, Ware was a member of theCommunist Labor Party of America (CLP) from the year of its origin, 1919, as were his mother and older sister,Helen.[4] Ware and his family stayed with the CLP throughout its permutations, merging into theUnited Communist Party in 1920, into theCommunist Party of America in 1921, and into the "aboveground"Workers Party of America in 1922, and eventually theCommunist Party of the USA in 1929.[5]
Almost immediately after the Party launched, federal and state authorities moved against the fledgling communist movement, forcing its adherents to make use of pseudonyms and to conduct their activities in secret. During the so-called "underground period" of the party, the agriculturally-oriented Ware used the pseudonym "H.R. Harrow," publishing under thatby-line in the communist press.[6] (The pseudonym seems to have been apun on his real given name, "Harold.")
In 1921, eager to study the plight of migrant farm workers firsthand with a view to organizing them for the Communist Party, Ware took a six-month trip around the United States, working harvests from the South to the Midwest, Northwest and then East again through the Upper Midwest.[2] This experience, combined with his previous agricultural experience, cemented Ware's place as the Communist Party's leading agricultural expert.
That fall, in addition to articles he wrote for the "underground" and "aboveground" Communist press, Ware compiled an exhaustive survey of American agriculture, including maps showing distribution of types of farms, farm incomes, and so forth in different sections of the country.[2] The research was transmitted to theCommunist International in Moscow, where it was read and praised byLenin himself.[citation needed]
In late 1921, Ware attended the founding convention in New York of theWorkers Party of America. He was elected an alternate to the governing Central Executive Committee of that organization.[7] Ware was not typically a member of the Communist Party's top committees; he preferred to work in the agricultural sector rather than to engage infactional party politics.
Ware helped come up with the idea of using funds raised by theFriends of Soviet Russia organization to construct a model collective farm inSoviet Russia. His farm would serve as a model to help to alleviate thegreat Russian famine through production of grain plus firsthand demonstration of modern agricultural technique. An appropriation of $75,000 was granted for the project, with Ware's half-brother,Carl Reeve, traveling around the U.S., showing a motion picture depicting horrific conditions in Russia to help raise funds. Funding in hand, Ware went to theJ.I. Case Farm Implement Co. and brokered a deal for 24 tractors and related equipment.[1]
In May 1922, Hal and Cris Ware left his three children in America for Soviet Russia along with their tractors, implements, a complete medical unit, and several tons of food supplies. Also making the voyage was a doctor who spoke Russian and a group of American farmers to operate the machinery. The group had been assigned land in the village ofToikino inPerm guberniia, a substantial distance from any centers of population. They taught local peasants the basics of machine operation and plowed 4,000 acres (16 km2) of land. Shortages of fuel, hauled by peasant wagons some 40 miles (64 km) from the nearest train station, severely hampered their efforts. At season's end, the American crew left for Moscow, whence they went home to America with thanks.[1]
The next year, Soviet authorities were eager to expand the Toikino experiment of 1922. The SovietPeople's Commissariat of Agriculture offered a large tract of fertile land in theKuban region, just north of theBlack Sea for a second model farm. Working again with theFriends of Soviet Russia organization, Ware organized a party of 40 to make the trip, including agricultural specialists, a doctor, and a nurse. He arrived in Soviet Russia to inspect the land designated for the project, only to be told by Soviet officials that the deal was off because local peasants had begun to allocate the land among themselves. A hasty search commenced for yet another site, in theNorth Caucasus, but the project was delayed.[1]
Ware spent most of 1925 raising funds for his Soviet farming venture. This farm was organized as a Russian-American joint venture, with Ware as its American Director and then director of thestate farm for three years. The project took over four flour mills and profitably operated them; they began to electrify the countryside.[1]
During winter 1928-29, Ware returned to the United States, where he attempted to interest American agricultural equipment manufacturers in the Soviet market. He convinced some companies to send test tractors and implements along with mechanics to assemble them.[1] He stayed in the Soviet through thecollectivization campaign of 1929-30.[1]
In Spring 1931, Ware set out to organizing farmers and farm-workers in America. In the company ofLem Harris, another Communist Party agricultural expert, he made a year-long survey of American agriculture, echoing his research of 1921. The pair travelled by car around the United States, visiting nearly every state in the union, studying the sometimes desperate conditions which resulted from the collapse of agricultural prices associated with theGreat Depression.[1][8]
Shortly after completion of this task, Ware established a research center in Washington, DC calledFarm Research, Inc. and recruited personnel to run it.[1] The institute, funded by the Communist Party, published a newspaper calledThe Farmers National Weekly continuously throughout the Great Depression.[1] Fellow Communist Party member Herbert Joseph Putz (Erik Bert) (1904-1981) edited the newspaper (1934-1936)[9] ("Farm Research" received funding from theRobert Marshall Foundation, which also funded the Communist controlled news agency "Federated Press."[10][11])In 1932, Ware was active in theFarmers Holiday Association on behalf of the Communist Party.[2]
In his 1952 memoir,Witness, former CommunistWhittaker Chambers wrote that from the time of Ware's death to his defection from the Communist Party in April 1938, he had been a member of the "Washington spy apparatus" headed by ColonelBoris Bykov, a Russianmilitary intelligence officer.[12] Chambers wrote that in addition to the four members of the group (also identified byLee Pressman under oath toCongress in 1950, though Pressman denied that the group engaged in espionage):
There must have been sixty or seventy others, though Pressman did not necessarily know them all; neither did I. All were dues-paying members of the Communist Party. Nearly all were employed in the United States Government, some in rather high positions, notably in theDepartment of Agriculture, theDepartment of Justice, theDepartment of the Interior, theNational Labor Relations Board, theAgricultural Adjustment Administration, theRailroad Retirement Board, theNational Research Project — and others.[12]
Chambers further wrote that "by 1938, the Soviet espionage apparatus in Washington had penetrated theUS State Department, theUS Treasury Department, theBureau of Standards and theAberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.[12] These individuals "supplied the Soviet espionage apparatus with secret or confidential information, usually in the form of official United States Government documents for microfilming," Chambers stated.[12]
In the 1930s, Hal Ware was employed by the federal government, working for theAgricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), aNew Deal agency which reported to theSecretary of Agriculture but was independent of the Department of Agriculture bureaucracy. According to Chambers, he also "organized that Washington underground" in which he was later to work.[12] Introduced to him in the spring of 1934,[12] Chambers described Ware at length:
He was as American as ham and eggs and as indistinguishable as everybody else. He stood about five feet nine, a trim, middle-aging man in 1934, with a plain face, masked by a quiet earnestness of expression wholly reassuring to people whom quickness of mind makes uncomfortable. Nevertheless, his mind was extremely quick. ...
He might have been a progressive country agent or a professor of ecology at an agricultural college. And yet there was something unprofessorially jaunty about the flip of his hat brim and his springy stride. ... It is true that he liked to drive his car at breakneck speed almost as well as to talk about soils, tenant farmers and underground organization ...
Harold Ware was a frustrated farmer. The soil was in his pores. Unlike most American Communists, who managed to pass from one big city to another without seeing anything in the intervening spaces, Ware was absorbed in the land and its problems. He held that, with the deepening of the agricultural crisis, and with the rapid mechanization of agriculture, the time had come for revolutionary organization among farmers.[12]
According to Chambers' testimony, when he came back from Soviet Russia in 1930, Ware carried with him $25,000 in US currency hidden in a money belt, funds from the Comintern for work among the farmers.[12] It was with these funds that he had established Farm Research Inc. in Washington, DC. But his real mission was espionage, Chambers wrote:
Once theNew Deal was in full swing, Hal Ware was like a man who has bought a farm sight unseen only to discover that the crops are all in and ready to harvest. All that he had to do was to hustle them into the barn. The barn in this case was the Communist Party. In the AAA, Hal found a bumper crop of incipient or registered Communists. On its legal staff were Lee Pressman,Alger Hiss andJohn Abt (later named byElizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts). There was Charles Krivitsky, a formerphysicist atNew York University, then or shortly after to be known asCharles Kramer (also, later on, one of Elizabeth Bentley's contacts).Abraham George Silverman (another of Elizabeth Bentley's future contacts) was sitting with a little cluster of communists over at the Railroad Retirement Board.[12]
Others named by Chambers includedHenry H. Collins, Jr.,Laurence Duggan,Nathan Witt,Marion Bachrach, andVictor Perlo.[12] Others subsequently mentioned in these ranks includedJohn Herrmann,Nathaniel Weyl,Donald Hiss, andHarry Dexter White.[citation needed] According to Chambers, Ware was in close contact with and directly reported toJ. Peters, "the head of the underground section of the American Communist Party":[12]
... By 1934, the Ware Group had developed into a tightly organized underground, managed by a directory of seven men. In time it included a number of secret sub-cells whose total membership I can only estimate — probably about seventy-five Communists. Sometimes they were visited officially by J. Peters who lectured them on Communist organization and Leninist theory and advised them on general policy and specific problems. For several of them were so placed in the New Deal agencies (notably Alger Hiss, Nathan Witt, John Abt and Lee Pressman) that they were in a position to influence policy at several levels.[12]
In my desire to see the destruction of Hitlerism and an improvement in economic conditions here at home, I joined a Communist group in Washington, D. C, about 1934. My participation in such group extended for about a year, to the best of my recollection.[15]
Pressman also indicated that in at least one meeting of his group, perhaps two, he had met Soviet intelligence agentJ. Peters.[16] Pressman's 1950 testimony provided the first corroboration of Chambers' allegation that a Washington, D.C., Communist group around Ware existed, with federal officialsNathan Witt,John Abt andCharles Kramer named by Pressman as members of this party cell.[12]
Ware wanted me to try to get into the Foreign Service and be attached to the staff ofWilliam Bullitt, our first Ambassador to the Soviet Union ... I didn't think there was anything illegal about membership in the Ware unit, but nevertheless it was duplicitous ... I told Hal Ware that the Moscow idea was out and that I wanted to leave Washington and resign from government. He said: absolutely not. I forced his hand by committing an appalling breach of security. I showed up at a cell meeting with the girl I was having an affair with, a young lady who was not a Communist Party member and who had known nothing about the group. Ware withdrew his objections and I resigned fromAAA.[19]
Ware married Margaret Stephens: in 1916, she died three weeks after birth of their second child, Nancy Stephens Ware.[3]
In August 1917, Ware married his second wife, Clarissa "Cris" Smith. The couple had two children, Robin and Nancy, before divorcing in the early 1920s.[1] Ware's second marriage seems to have ended upon their return to the States. Cris took a job in the National Office of the Workers Party as head of theCommittee for Protection of Foreign-Born Workers. She was reported in the Communist Party press as having died of "acutepancreatitis, a rare disease of one of the digestive organs of the stomach," rumored to be a cover story for a botched illegal abortion, on September 27, 1923.[citation needed]Benjamin Gitlow luridly wrote of a love triangle between Cris, Party national secretaryC. E. Ruthenberg, and future secretaryJay Lovestone. Her death was "a tragic end, for the last of Cris Ware's abortions proved fatal for her."[22]
While in Russia, Ware metJessica Smith, working with theQuaker famine relief effort, theAmerican Friends Service Committee. Back in New York City, the pair were married in January 1925 byRev. Norman Thomas, soon to become a key political leader of theSocialist Party of America.[1]
On August 9, 1935, Ware was critically injured in an automobile accident in the mountains near York Springs inHarrisburg, Pennsylvania when his car collided with a coal truck. He died the next Tuesday at the hospital in Harrisburg, never regaining consciousness after the crash.[23][1][2]
Ware was memorialized with a chapter in the memoir written by his more famous mother, Ella Reeve Bloor, in 1940:
As a boy he loved the outdoors, was full of restless, eager vitality and bold curiosity. He had a startlingly vivid imagination, and an urge and talent for organizing that continued and marked his whole life. More than ordinarily shy, he forgot his shyness when engaged in one of his organizing ventures, and a flow of colorful, stirring talk would come from him so persuasive that those who heard him were completely carried away. He grew slim and tall, and when we moved to Arden was captain of thebaseball team and a leader intennis and other games. He missed a lot of school because of his siege oftuberculosis, but he read a lot and was always able to make up two or three years of ordinary schooling in a few months of intensive study. His interest in socialism began as early as I can remember.
Hal's interest in agriculture began early. He started raising truck in a small garden in Arden, and sold it around the countryside. His keen sense of beauty showed in the way he fixed up his boxes of vegetables to sell, arranging them artistically in green boxes.
He first planned to study forestry. He used to tell me his dreams of a life in the open, alone on a hillside, a sea of green tree tops below him. While taking the entrance exams for Pennsylvania State College he found that the forestry course would take four years, while there was a fine two-year agricultural course. Beginning to feel, too, that he did not want to live away from people, but among them, he chose agriculture. His interest in economics and politics developed intensely at this time, and while at college he wrote me constantly for the latest news of the socialist movement. We were always very close to one another, and no matter how many months or years we were apart, we could always pick up where we had left off."[2]
After his death, Jessica Smith, Ware's widow married attorneyJohn Abt. Ware left behind four children: Judith, David, Nancy, and Robin.
Hal Ware's half-brother, Carl Reeve, was also a lifelong activist in the Communist Party.
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