Kate Richards O’Hare Cunningham

Kate Richards O’Hare Cunningham (born March 26, 1877, near Ada, Ottawa county, Kansas, U.S.—died Jan. 10, 1948, Benicia, Calif.) was an American socialist and reformer whose vocal political activism led to a brief prison stint and a longer subsequent career as a prison-reform advocate.

After brief attendance at a normal (teachers) school in Nebraska, Kathleen Richards taught for a short time in a rural school. She then became an apprentice machinist in the Kansas City, Missouri, shop where her father worked and joined the International Order of Machinists union. On her own time she devoted herself to temperance work, the local Florence Crittenton mission, and religion.

Gradually, however, Richards began to doubt the value of social work and ameliorative reforms. Reading Henry George, Ignatius Donnelly, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and other radical authors and in particular hearing a speech by Mary Harris (“Mother”) Jones converted her to socialism. She joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1899 and two years later followed the majority faction that decamped to form the more moderate Socialist Party of America. In the latter year she attended the International School of Social Economy, conducted in Girard, Kansas, under the auspices of the weekly socialist paper Appeal to Reason. There she met Francis P. O’Hare, whom she married in 1902. Their honeymoon, a socialist organizing and lecture tour, inaugurated the career they shared for 15 years. Crisscrossing the Great Plains states and lecturing as far away as Great Britain, Canada, and Mexico, Kate O’Hare was one of the socialist cause’s most effective proselytizers.

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In 1904 O’Hare published a socialist novel, What Happened to Dan? (revised and enlarged in 1911 as The Sorrows of Cupid), which enjoyed wide circulation. About 1912 she and her husband became copublishers and coeditors of the weekly National Rip-Saw, published in St. Louis, Missouri (it was renamed the Social Revolution in 1917). In 1910 Kate O’Hare ran for a Kansas congressional seat on the Socialist ballot, and in 1913 she represented the party at the Second International in London. In 1917, as chair of the party’s Committee on War and Militarism, she spoke coast-to-coast against U.S. entry into World War I.

In July of that year, following an address in Bowman, North Dakota, O’Hare was indicted under the new federal Espionage Act. Convicted, she entered the Missouri State Penitentiary in April 1919; Emma Goldman was one of her fellow prisoners. From prison she published Kate O’Hare’s Prison Letters (1919) and In Prison (1920). In 1920, as the culmination of a nationwide campaign by socialists and civil libertarians, her sentence was commuted; she later received a full pardon from President Calvin Coolidge. She campaigned vigorously for presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1920. In 1922 she organized the Children’s Crusade, a march on Washington, D.C., by children of imprisoned antiwar agitators to demand immediate amnesty for all. In 1923 she and her husband joined the Llano Cooperative Colony, a settlement modeled on 19th-century utopian communities, near Leesville, Louisiana. There they resumed publication of their newspaper, retitled American Vanguard, and helped found Commonwealth College.

By 1924 Kate O’Hare had largely abandoned socialist agitation for prison reform, and in 1924–26 she conducted a national survey of the contract-labour practice of prisons. She continued to teach at Commonwealth College for two years after the dissolution of the Llano community and the college’s move to Mena, Arkansas, in 1926. In 1928, having divorced her first husband, she married Charles C. Cunningham, a San Francisco lawyer. In 1934 she was active in Upton Sinclair’s “End Poverty in California” campaign for the governorship, and in 1939–40 she was assistant director of the California Department of Penology.