Myra Page
Dorothy Markey | |
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Born | Dorothy Page Gary 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 | OMS" |
Service years | 1933–1940s? |
Rank | Unknown |
Codename | M. Burton (when writing for the AFT |
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 name Myra Page, was a 20th-century American
Background
Page was born Dorothy Page Gary on October 1, 1897, in
In 1918, she received a bachelor's degree in English and history from Westhampton College (now the University of Richmond).[1]
Career
Later in 1918, she taught school in
1920s
While a graduate student, she became active in the
Upon completing her master's degree in 1920, Page became a YWCA "industrial secretary" at a silk factory in Norfolk, Virginia, near her home town of Newport News and organized education for women workers.[2][3][8][9]
Giddings had introduced Page to the
Against her family's wishes, she took a factory job in Philadelphia and became a
In fall 1924, she got a teaching fellowship in the History Department of the
In June 1926, as a member of the American Federal of Teachers union, she attended a convention of the
In June 1928, Page earned her PhD in sociology with double minor in Economics and Psychology from the University of Minnesota. In the fall of 1928, she accepted a teaching position at Wheaton College (Massachusetts), while her husband had started another a year earlier at Connecticut College. In 1926, the YWCA had helped fund her research on working conditions among garment workers in Greenville and Gastonia, North Carolina, and in 1929 again funded her to rewrite her doctoral thesis as Southern 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, the Loray Mill strike (also known as the "Gastonia Strike") broke out and lasted into August; Sophie Melvin (future wife of Simon Gerson) traveled there to join Fred 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 the John Reed Clubs. Her "group" included: Grace Lumpkin, Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Dorothy Douglas, Ben Appel, Sophie Appel (and probably Agnes Smedley who also knew most of these people). During the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that started October 28–29, 1929, Page had just started working as a journalist for Labor Age, the ILD's Labor Defender, and Southern Woman magazines. Some time in 1929, Page (along with Grace Lumpkin and Olive Dargin and three others) began novels about the Gastonia Strike: Page's novel was Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt, published in 1932.[1][2][3]
1930s
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.
Page's husband John Markey joined the Labor 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 to The Communist, 1933–1935.[13]
Page spent two years in Moscow, whence she wrote for American socialist journals as well as the Soviet communist publication
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 of Soviet Russia Today, a Soviet-backed magazine edited by Jessica Smith, wife of Harold Ware.
On May 1, 1935, Page joined the
Starting in August 1935, Page's husband spent a year (again as "John Barnett") as dean of
In March 1937, she interviewed
During the 1930s, Page also taught school at the Writer's School, underwritten by the League of American Writers (itself established by the Party) and based in New York City. In 1937, husband John Markey got a job as educational director of the Transportation Workers Union (TWU), a CIO member headed by Mike Quill. In the summers of 1938 and 1939, Page taught at the Highlander Folk School in Grundy County, Tennessee.[2][6]
Later life
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]
Communism
Party membership
In her memoir In a Generous Spirit, Page states that both she and her husband were members of the nascent Communist 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 of Jay Lovestone, James P. Cannon, and William 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 the New Pioneer monthly magazine for Communist children (1931–1938), published by Young Communist League USA.[2]
Moscow
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 by John Dewey. They went again in September 1931 by ship in the company of Gastonia strike leader Fred 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]
Soviet espionage
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 know
Most foreigners joined the Soviet underground via the
"Disillusionment"
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 with valudas ("American-style paper money") instead of
During the early 1950s McCarthy Era, she notes "my work as a writer was interrupted."
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.
McCarthy Era.)Naming names
Page never testified before any congressional or other committees during the
W. 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 leader Earl Browder with Kitty Harris and eventual wife Raissa.)[2]
Personal life and death
In 1924 she met and later married fellow teacher/fellow John Fordyce Markey (July 27, 1898 – May 14, 1991) from West Virginia coal country. She had two children, daughter Dorothy May Markey Kanfer ("May," born April 21, 1935, wife of Stefan 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 of Gathering 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]
Legacy
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has archived Page's papers.
University of Maine English professor Christina Looper Baker (August 18, 1939 – January 13, 2013) wrote a 210-page memoir from interviews and papers called In a Generous Spirit: A First-Person Biography of Myra Page (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
Works
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" in
W. 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 "
Of her works, Gathering Storm (1932) is significant as both proletariat novel and focal point on the "black-belt thesis," while Moscow Yankee chronicles an unemployed American autoworker who emigrates to the Soviet Union for work.[6] "I did not see the novel as propaganda," she said of it. Instead, she included it among a group of works on Gastonia, particularly by women. She calls Mary Heaton Vorse's account Gastonia (1929) as more reportage than novel. She considers the account of Olive Tilford Dargan (writing under pen name "Fielding Burke"), Call Home the Heart well written though romanticized. She considers Grace Lumpkin's book To 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 by Dolly Hawkins, whom Page had known while they both were organizers in Arkansas.[4]
Novels:
- Southern Cotton Mills and Labor, introduced by Bill Dunne (1929)[21]
- Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (as "Dorothy Myra Page") (1932)[22]
- Soviet Main Street with photography by Abram Pogovsky (Soyuzphoto) (1933)[23]
- Moscow Yankee (1935, 1995)[24][25]
- With Sun in Our Blood (1950)[26]
- Reissue: Daughter of the Hills: A Woman's Part in the Coal Miners' Struggle, introduced by Alice Kessler-Harris and Paul Lauter, afterword by Deborah S. Rosenfelt (1950, 1986)[4][27]
Short stories, chapters, articles:
- "American Working Women," Workers' News (Fall 1934)
- "Leave Them Meters Be," Workers' News (Fall 1934)
- "Water," Workers' News (Fall 1934)
- "The Girl Who Was Afraid," Southern Worker (1934)
- "Men in Chains," The Nation (as "Myra Page") (1935)
- "Pickets and Slippery Sticks", chapter in New Pioneer Story Book (1935)[28]
Juvenile Biographies:
- The Little Giant of Schenectady:
Charles Steinmetz(1956) (as Dorothy Markey)- Explorer of Sound:
Michael Pupin(1964) (as Dorothy Markey)Articles, Chapters:
- "Colorblind", The Crisis magazine (c. 1920) (as "Dorothy Gary")
- "The Developing Study of Culture" (as "Dorothy P. Gary"), Trends in American Sociology (1929)[29]
- "Bourgeois Apologists and the South" (reviews), The Communist (September 1930)
- "Grey-Wash" (review), The Communist (May 1931)
- "The Cropper Prepares", The New Masses (February 11, 1936)
- "Malraux on Spain", Daily Worker (March 7, 1937)
- "Hallie Flanagan," (publication unknown) (c. 1937)
- "Cardenas Speaks for Mexico", The New Masses (August 30, 1938)
- "Cornish Miners (review), The New Masses (November 18, 1941)
- "Farm Saga" (review) Myra Page, The New Masses (March 3, 1942)
Autobiography:
- In a Generous Spirit: A First-Person Biography of Myra Page with Christina Looper Baker (1996)[2]
See also
- Stefan Kanfer
- Grace Lumpkin
- Esther Shemitz
- Whittaker Chambers
Wanda Gag- Marguerite Young (journalist)
- Proletkult
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n "Myra Page Papers, 1910-1990". University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 2004. Retrieved 2017-11-19.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an Page, Myra;
ISBN 9780252065439. Retrieved 4 August 2018.- ^ a b c d e f Mantooth, Wes (25 July 2006). You Factory Folks Who Sing This Song Will Surely Understand: Culture, Ideology, and Action in the Gastonia Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargin. Routledge. pp. 19 (novels), 20–36 (bio).
ISBN 9781135515393. Retrieved 4 August 2018.- ^ a b c d
ISBN 9780807837344. Retrieved 4 August 2018.- ^ a b Choi Chatterjee; Beth Holmgren, eds. (2013). Americans Experience Russia: Encountering the Enigma, 1917 to the Present. Routledge. p. 97.
ISBN 9780415893411. Retrieved 4 August 2018.- ^ a b c d e f g h M. Keith Booker, ed. (2005). Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 543–544.
ISBN 9780313329401. Retrieved 4 August 2018. ISBN 978-0-313-32940-1.- ^ a b c Mickenberg, Julia L.; Nel, Philip (2008). Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature. NYU Press.
ISBN 978-0-8147-5720-8. Retrieved 4 August 2018.- ^ Lee, Elisabeth Grace (2017). Pilgrims' Progress: Southern Social Activists' Journey from Christianity to Communism during the 1920s and 1930s (PDF) (MA). North Carolina State University. pp. 1-2 (Social Gospel), 31 (Page @ YYCA).
- ^
LCCN 52005149.- ^ Lambert, Bruce (22 December 1991). "Ben Davidson, 90, a Co-Founder Of the Liberal Party in New York". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 April 2013.
- ^ Iversen, Robert W. (1959). The Communists & the Schools. p. 21. Retrieved 7 April 2013.
{{cite book}}
:|newspaper=
ignored (help)- ^ "The Communist: Contents by Issue (1927 – 1944)". Marxist Internet Archive. Retrieved 17 January 2019.
- ^ Beal, Fred Erwin (1937). Proletarian journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow. New York: Hillman-Curl. pp. xiii–xiv.
- ^ Disler, Mathew (2018). "This Crusading Socialist Taught America's Workers to Fight—in 1929". Narratively. Retrieved 2022-01-02.
- ^ Beal (1937) pp. 283-305
- ^ "Christina Looper Baker". Bangor Daily News. 18 January 2013. Retrieved 3 August 2018.
- ^ Janet Galligani Casey, ed. (2004). The Novel and the American Left: Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction. University of Iowa Press. p. 58 (fn8).
ISBN 9781587294754. Retrieved 3 August 2018.- ^ "Book Review Digist". H.W. Wilson Company. 1997: 96. Retrieved 3 August 2018.
{{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires|journal=
(help)- ^ The Law of Social Revolution. Library of Congress. 1926. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- ^ Page, Myra (1929). Southern Cotton Mills and Labor. Workers Library Publishers. Retrieved 3 August 2018.
- ^ Page, Myra (1932). Gathering storm: a story of the black belt. International Publishers.
LCCN 32033994.- ^ Page, Myra (1933). Soviet Main street. Co-operative publishing society of foreign workers in the U.S.S.R.
LCCN 34013943.- ^ Page, Myra (1935). Moscow Yankee. G.P. Putnam's sons.
LCCN 35004723.- ^ Page, Myra (1995). Moscow Yankee. University of Illinois Press.
LCCN 95002992.- ^ Page, Myra (1950). With sun in our blood. Citadel Press.
LCCN 50010931.- ^ Page, Myra (1950). With sun in our blood. Feminist Press at the City University of New York.
LCCN 50010931.- ^ Martha Campion, ed. (1935). New Pioneer Story Book. New Pioneer Publishing Company. pp. 90–95. Retrieved 4 August 2018.
- ^ Trends in American Sociology. Harper. 1929. pp. 172–220. Retrieved 5 August 2018.
External sources
- Wisconsin Historical Society: undated photo of Myra Page
- Marxists.org, Women Authors, Myra Page (includes photo)
- Those Good Gertrudes A Social History of Women Teachers in America - Author's Annotated Introduction to Manuscript Collections
- Myra Page Papers, 1910-1990 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill