Dorothy Markey | |
|---|---|
| Born | Dorothy Page Gary (1897-10-01)October 1, 1897 Newport News, Virginia, US |
| Died | October 1993 (aged 95–96) |
| Education |
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| Occupations |
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| Spouse | John Fordyce Markey |
| Espionage activity | |
| Allegiance |  Soviet Union |
| Service branch | probablyComintern's "OMS" |
| Service years | 1933–1940s? |
| Rank | Unknown |
| Codename | M. Burton (when writing for theAFT |
| Operations | Couriers (money) |
| Writing career | |
| Pen name | Myra Page |
| Language | English |
| Period | 1918–1964 |
| Genre | Proletkult |
| Literary movement | Communist |
| Notable works |
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| Website | |
| finding-aids | |
Dorothy Markey (born Dorothy Page Gary, 1897–1993), known by the pen nameMyra Page, was a 20th-century Americancommunist writer, journalist,union activist, and teacher.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
Page was born Dorothy Page Gary on October 1, 1897, inNewport News, Virginia. Her father's ancestors, the Garys, came from Wales to theTidewater region in the 1720. Her mother's ancestors, the Barhams, came toJamestown, Virginia. Her father Benjamin Roscoe Gary was a doctor, her mother Willie Alberta Barham an artist, and her home "affluent," "middle-class and progressive."Colgate Darden was a friend of her brother Barham Gary: in her memoir, Page refers to him as "Clukey Darden."[1][2][3][6]
In 1918, she received a bachelor's degree in English and history from Westhampton College (now theUniversity of Richmond).[1]
Later in 1918, she taught school inRichmond, Virginia. In 1919, she started graduate studies atColumbia University. She studied anthropology underFranz Boas,Melvin Herskovitz, andFranklin Giddings (the last Marxian but not a communist). Both Boas and Herskovitz "challenged the prevailing theories about racial hierarchies." She also took a class underJohn Dewey at Columbia'sTeacher's College and attended courses given by theologiansHarry Emerson Fosdick andHenry F. Ward atUnion Theological Seminary. In 1920, she obtained a masters with a thesis that analyzed the effect of New York newspaper coverage on theSpanish–American War. She also studied writing underHelen Hunter in the English department.[1][2]
While a graduate student, she became active in theYoung Women's Christian Association (YWCA), which at that time championed reform in race relations. Influenced bySocial Gospel, she "developed an antiracist consciousness and chafed against the restrictions imposed upon her as a southern white woman."[1][7]
Upon completing her master's degree in 1920, Page became a YWCA "industrial secretary" at a silk factory inNorfolk, Virginia, near her home town of Newport News and organized education for women workers.[2][3][8][9]
Giddings had introduced Page to theRand School of Social Science, where she had metAnna Louise Strong,Mary Heaton Vorse, andScott Nearing. In 1921, she returned to New York from Norfolk and studied further under Nearing at Rand; at that time, she first read theManifesto of the Communist Party byKarl Marx andFriedrich Engels.[2]
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Against her family's wishes, she took a factory job in Philadelphia and became aunion organizer for the (then pro-communist)Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (ACW). She chose amalgamated for its emphasis onProgressivism and education. Her first job was at aWanamaker's department store. Then the ACW helped her get work in a clothingsweatshop; she attended an ACW-led strike. Page became a pants seamstress–good enough that the ACW sent her to New York City for training in making button holes. The ACW sent her with others toSt. Louis, Missouri, to help to unionize its biggest garment sweatshop, Curlee's. During a slump in 1923, she took a secretarial job and then returned home to Newport News for a few months. In the spring of 1924, she returned to the New York area and got a job as a schoolteacher of American History inTeaneck, New Jersey. There, "I joined the New York City Local of theAmerican Federation of Teachers and quickly became one of its leaders.[2][3][8] (By "Local," Page is clearly referring to Local 5 AFT, AKA the New York CityTeachers Union.)
In fall 1924, she got a teaching fellowship in the History Department of theUniversity of Minnesota, chaired byF. Stuart Chapin.Pitirim Sorokin, former secretary toAlexander Kerensky andMenshevik leader, was a professor there. She married fellow teacher and fellowJohn Markey, and together they joined theAmerican Federation of Teachers union there. They both encouraged garment workers to unionize in theTwin Cities area (Minneapolis andSt. Paul).[2]
In June 1926, as a member of the American Federal of Teachers union, she attended a convention of theTrade Union Education League. Participants includedWilliam Z. Foster and John Jonstone. Also in June 1926, she took a class (Page and Nearing called it the Labor Research Study Group) under Nearing that sought a "law of social revolution" (though, according toWhittaker Chambers, "an infiltration of Communists... really ran the class, steered the discussions," and tried to "make the law of social revolution aMarxian law.") Nearing focused on the Soviet Union; Page wrote about India and the English Revolution of 1642.[2] According toWhittaker Chambers (but not Page), their classmates included: Page, Chambers,Sam Krieger, Eve Dorf and her husbandBen Davidson,[10][11] as well asAlfred J. Brooks,Dale Zysman,Benjamin Mandel, and Rachel Ragozin.[12] In July–September, 1926, she attended first an International Teachers' Union conference in Vienna, Austria, several related teachers' union conferences in Paris, France, and then, with Nearing, a Britishtrade union Conference in theUK. After passing through New York City, in part to publish her book with Nearing,The Law of Social Revolution, via theFederated Press, she returned to Minneapolis by late September to reunite with her husband. They immediately set about a "central trade union committee" of the MinnesotaAFL and commenced "workers' education" inDuluth.[2]
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In June 1928, Page earned her PhD in sociology with double minor in Economics and Psychology from theUniversity of Minnesota. In the fall of 1928, she accepted a teaching position atWheaton College (Massachusetts), while her husband had started another a year earlier atConnecticut College. In 1926, the YWCA had helped fund her research on working conditions among garment workers inGreenville andGastonia, North Carolina, and in 1929 again funded her to rewrite her doctoral thesis asSouthern Cotton Mills and Labor (1929): "Many lines and quotes... appear later in my Gastonia novel,Gathering Storm.[1][2][3][6]
On March 30, 1929, theLoray Mill strike (also known as the "Gastonia Strike") broke out and lasted into August; Sophie Melvin (future wife of Simon Gerson) traveled there to joinFred Beal in organizing strikers on behalf of the Communist Party controlled National Textile Workers Union. In fall 1929, her husband joined Wheaton College as head of her Sociology Department. In October 1929, Page was one of scores of founding members of theJohn Reed Clubs. Her "group" included:Grace Lumpkin,Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Dorothy Douglas, Ben Appel, Sophie Appel (and probablyAgnes Smedley who also knew most of these people). During theWall Street Crash of 1929 that started October 28–29, 1929, Page had just started working as a journalist forLabor Age, theILD'sLabor Defender, andSouthern Woman magazines. Some time in 1929, Page (along withGrace Lumpkin and Olive Dargin and three others) began novels about the Gastonia Strike: Page's novel wasGathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt, published in 1932.[1][2][3]
At the end of the 1929–1930 academic year, Page and her husband left Wheaton College. During the 1930s, Page was a political journalist and writer.[1][2] She wrote forSouthern Workman,Working Woman, and the CPUSA newspaperTheDaily Worker. In 1931, she became editor for theNew Pioneer monthly magazine for Communist children (1931–1938), published byYoung Communist League USA. She recruited her brother Barham and sister Bert to contribute stories. In May 1931, she traveled with William Z. Foster to hear him advocate that theUnited Mine Workers union split off from theAFL. Page quarreled with Foster over his position but did cover the strike in the July 1931 issue.[2]
Page's husband John Markey joined theLabor Research Association (LRA), for which he contributed writings under the pseudonym "John Barnett" for "several years." LRA's directors included:Anna Rochester,Bill Dunne,Grace Hutchins,Carl Haessler, and Charlotte Todes Stern.Edward Dahlberg was another contributor. Markey also helped "organize automotive and transportation workers. It was good experience... but organizing was not his forté. He was already best at academic teaching and research.")[2] As "John Barnett," John Markey also contributed articles toThe Communist, 1933–1935.[13]
Page spent two years in Moscow, whence she wrote for American socialist journals as well as the Soviet communist publicationMoscow News. She also wrote her novelMoscow Yankee (1935) there.[5][6]
Upon their return to the States around November 1933, when the US recognized the USSR diplomatically, Page and her husband lived in Brooklyn, NY. Page joined the editorial board ofSoviet Russia Today, a Soviet-backed magazine edited byJessica Smith, wife ofHarold Ware.
On May 1, 1935, Page joined theLeague of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members includedAlexander Trachtenberg ofInternational Publishers,Frank Folsom,Louis Untermeyer, Bromfelds[who?],I. F. Stone,Millen Brand,Arthur Miller,Lillian Hellman, andDashiell Hammett. Members were largely either Communist Party members orfellow travelers.Aline Bernstein (mistress ofThomas Wolfe) often hosted them at her home.[2]
Starting in August 1935, Page's husband spent a year (again as "John Barnett") as dean ofCommonwealth College, a workers' school inMena, Arkansas, while Page taught English writing and literature. Page metFLOTUSEleanor Roosevelt when she came to visit the college.[2]
In March 1937, she interviewedAndre Malraux for his views on theSpanish Civil War andHallie Flanagan about theFederal Theatre Project.[2]
During the 1930s, Page also taught school at the Writer's School, underwritten by theLeague of American Writers (itself established by the Party) and based inNew York City. In 1937, husband John Markey got a job as educational director of theTransportation Workers Union (TWU), aCIO member headed byMike Quill. In the summers of 1938 and 1939, Page taught at theHighlander Folk School inGrundy County, Tennessee.[2][6]
In the 1940s, she continued to teach at the Writer's School.[1]
In the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote biographies for juveniles under her married name "Dorothy Markey."[1]
In her memoirIn a Generous Spirit, Page states that both she and her husband were members of the nascentCommunist Party of the USA. She does not state when, but from her description it seems they joined in 1928 during the height of factionalism within the Party between followers ofJay Lovestone,James P. Cannon, andWilliam Z. Foster (described at some length in the memoir of Whittaker Chambers). Page states that she and her husband supported Foster because "he was a union man."[1][2]
By the fall of 1930, after they had let their contracts to teach expire at Wheaton College, her husband "John and I began to work full-time for the movement," i.e., for the Party. In 1931, she became editor for theNew Pioneer monthly magazine for Communist children (1931–1938), published byYoung Communist League USA.[2]
Page and her husband first traveled to Moscow in the summer of 1928 (crossing Europe on foot), where they joined a group of visitors led byJohn Dewey. They went again in September 1931 by ship in the company of Gastonia strike leaderFred Beal of the National Textile Workers Union returning to Soviet exile after an undercover visit to the United States where, in 1929, he had been convicted in Gastonia for conspiracy in the strike related death of a policeman. Beal was later to write disaparagingly of those westerners who, like Page, were made comfortable in Moscow by the party-state bureaucracy he identified as a "new exploiting class".[14][15]
Page stayed through mid-year 1933,[2] by which time Beal in Kharkov, but not she in Moscow, witnessed the famine produced by Stalin's collectivisation policies.[16]
In the same memoir, she states that they both worked in the Soviet underground, starting from their days in Russia (1932). She states that husband John Markey worked in agriculture and so came to meet and knowHarold Ware (founder of theWare Group which Whittaker Chambers took over upon Ware's death in 1935).[2] Page is clear about joining the Soviet underground:
While we were in the Soviet Union, John and I worked with the worldwide underground movement against the fascists. We worked for whoever made contact with us that we trusted, in Moscow or outside the Soviet Union. Contacts in Moscow usually asked me to do a job, and if I wanted to do it I did it.[2]
Page emphasized this last point by stating further, "I was never forced to do anything." She recounts a request while in Moscow for her to take money to China when traveling home, but she declined. The Soviets also asked her to stay in Moscow to help make a movie about America, but "the idea seemed crazy and I refused."[2] During the summer of 1933, the Soviets also had her husband deliver money to Hamburg "for the underground" on his way home to America. (Apparently, the Soviets intended to have them make separate journeys home.) "When I said goodbye to John, I didn't know whether I would ever see him again... We did what we felt we had to do, and that included risking our lives."[2] (The immediate risk Page is referring to was probably the 1933 Nazi takeover of Germany and immediate liquidation of the German Communist Party and its members, specifically theReichstag Fire and resultingReichstag Fire Decree of February 28, 1933.)
Most foreigners joined the Soviet underground via theComintern's "International Liaison Department" or "OMS" (Russian-language acronym).
During their second visit 1931–1933, Page claims to have not realized how privileged a life they led, living at the Lux Hotel and buying scarce good easily withvaludas ("American-style paper money") instead ofSoviet roubles.Louis Fischer discussed thecurrent famine inUkraine, but they dismissed him as a salaried newspaperman. "We didn't know about the horrors of collectivization because we chose not to know. Fischer was right, but we didn't believe him."[2] She had not known about "the matter of the purges because the Soviets were covering up the facts.[1][2][8][4][6]
During the early 1950s McCarthy Era, she notes "my work as a writer was interrupted."Viking Press canceled publication of her novelDaughter of Man, despite the support of editorPascal Covici and book agents Mavis Macintosh and Elizabeth Otis (who also representedJohn Steinbeck among others). Eventually,Citadel Press published it under a new title,With Sun in Our Blood.[2]
Page documents her departure from the Party:
I left the Party in 1953, having lost faith that it could do the job it was supposed to do. My disillusionment was gradual... Gradually, we just plain lost confidence in the party. Ever since the Amalgamated convention in Chicago in the early twenties... the Party seemed too quarrelsome and sectarian for me.[2]
She also added nuance to her decision:
I'm resentful that people think we listened only to Moscow and that when Stalin was exposed by Khruschev we lost our idol and therefore quit the Path. Stalin was not the reason we left. He was part of our disillusionment, but he wan't the reason we got out. Party members were not so attached to the Soviet Union that the Khruschev revelations made them change their whole lives. That wasn't the way we saw the world; we saw the world mainly from the U.S. point of view because that was our experience.[2]
(Note that Page dates her departure not to the 1956 "Secret Speech" byNikita Khrushchev but to 1953, the height of theMcCarthy Era.)
Page never testified before any congressional or other committees during theMcCarthy Era, though theFBI did interview her; they failed to connect "John Barnett" with John Markey, however. Friends of theirs who were subpoenaed to testify include:[to be determined]}. Friends who refused to testify includeW. E. B. DuBois (who "died a member of the Communist party")[2]
In her 1996 memoir (by which time most of her generation had died), she names scores of people she had known.[2]
Page recounts only mild bitterness over fallings-out with some friends and does little scandal-mongering (e.g., the affairs of Party leaderEarl Browder withKitty Harris and eventual wife Raissa.)[2]
In 1924 she met and later married fellow teacher/fellowJohn Fordyce Markey (July 27, 1898 – May 14, 1991) fromWest Virginia coal country. She had two children, daughter Dorothy May Markey Kanfer ("May," born April 21, 1935, wife ofStefan Kanfer) and adopted son John Ross Markey.[1][2][6][17][18][19]
By the "late 1920s," she chose the pen name "Myra Page" (after a cousin with the same name) because:
I could be freer in what I wrote without a name that would be immediately identified with my parents... Another reason for the pen name was that I couldn't very well teach sociology in a university and write radical journalism and fiction at the same time... I could teach as Dorothy Gary and write as Myra Page. Only later during the McCarthy period did I begin to write again under my real name.[2]
"Myra Page" may first appear in print in 1926.[20] The transformation continued in the first issue ofGathering Storm, where her name appears as "Dorothy Myra Page." (By the 1930, husband John Markey also adopted a pen name as "John Barnett": "the Party advised him to use a pseudonym so he could resume a regular teaching career.")[2]
Page died in 1993.[1]
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has archived Page's papers.
University of Maine English professorChristina Looper Baker (August 18, 1939 – January 13, 2013) wrote a 210-page memoir from interviews and papers calledIn a Generous Spirit: A First-Person Biography of Myra Page (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
In her posthumously published 1996 memoir, Page describes her anger at racial discrimination in her childhood, manifested by the treatment she witnessed of her Black friends and expressed in her first published piece, "Colorblind" inThe Crisis magazine, published while she was studying at Columbia (c. 1920) byW. E. B. DuBois, who became her friend.[2]
By the late 1920s, as a radical, pro-worker, communist writer, Page became one of scores of American writers who embraced "Proletkult" (which, after Stalin came to full power, emerged as "Socialist Realism"), advocated in the US byNew Masses editor-in-chiefMike Gold.[2]
Of her works,Gathering Storm (1932) is significant as both proletariat novel and focal point on the "black-belt thesis," whileMoscow Yankee chronicles an unemployed American autoworker who emigrates to the Soviet Union for work.[6] "I did not see the novel aspropaganda," she said of it. Instead, she included it among a group of works on Gastonia, particularly by women. She callsMary Heaton Vorse's accountGastonia (1929) as more reportage than novel. She considers the account ofOlive Tilford Dargan (writing under pen name "Fielding Burke"),Call Home the Heart well written though romanticized. She considersGrace Lumpkin's bookTo Make My Bread equal to her own because they both "wrote from the same orientation" as Southern women who had seen poverty.[2]
During the 1940s, Page published no more fiction books; her last novel,With the Sun in Our Blood (1950) was in fact drafted during the 1930s after transcribing an oral history byDolly Hawkins, whom Page had known while they both were organizers in Arkansas.[4]
Novels:
Short stories, chapters, articles:
Juvenile Biographies:
Articles, Chapters:
Autobiography:
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