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Mary Donovan Hapgood and Powers Hapgood (home) southeast corner of Southport				Submit your comments about this site!
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		Mary Donovan Hapgood became nationally known during the 1920s as corresponding secretary for the Sacco-Vanzetti defense team. She delivered a eulogy after their execution in 1927. In 1932, she was offered and declined, the Socialist Party's nomination for Vice-President of the United States. She was the first woman to run for governor of Indiana, running on the Socialist ticket in 1940. Mary worked during the founding years of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). She also helped to found the Indiana Civil Liberties Union. She remained politically active into her 80s, working in the 1960s peace movement and on the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy (1968) and George McGovern (1972). She lived on a farm near Southport with her husband, Powers Hapgood. Powers Hapgood was born to a leading Progressive Era family and educated at Shortridge High School and Harvard University. Powers gained national prominence for choosing to turn his back on his privileged - though progressive - upbringing and devoting his life to the working class. After college graduation, he traveled extensively and worked in coalmines in several countries. He reported his experiences in national publications such as The Nation. He played a key role in organizing the United Mine Workers of America until an internal political battle with John L. Lewis led to Powers being ousted from the union. Hapgood then became active in the Socialist Party, for which he ran for governor in 1932. After reconciling with Lewis in 1935, Powers served as the CIO's regional director for Indiana until just before his death in 1949. The following quote is from Kurt Vonnegut:"I made it my business to meet Powers Hapgood, an official of the CIO, in 1945, because he was a member of an upper-middle-class family, with a happy childhood and eastern prep school and Harvard educations in his past -- and yet he had worked in coal mines after earning his Harvard degree. As luck would have it, he had testified some weeks earlier in a case involving a disturbance on a CIO picket line. The judge, knowing of his reputable family and elegant education, was at one point moved to ask him why he had chosen to become so passionately associated with persons, one would think, who were not his sort. I put Hapgood's reply in Jailbird, a novel of mine, to wit: 'The Sermon on the Mount, sir.'"
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Resources
Gerold Baumann, "Powers Hapgood: Profile of a Hoosier Radical." Master’s thesis, Butler University, 1964. Robert Bussel, "A Love of Unionism and Democracy: Rose Pesotta, Powers Hapgood, and the Industrial Union Movement, 1933-1949." Labor History 38, nos. 2-3 (spring/summer 1997): 203-229. Robert Bussel, From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class, (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1999). Robert Bussel, Hard Traveling: Powers Hapgood, Harvey Swados, Bayard Rustin and the fate of independent radicalism in twentieth century America, Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1993. Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, page 658-59. Mary Donovan Hapgood papers. Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Powers and Mary Donovan Hapgood Farm Diaries. Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana. Powers Hapgood and Many Donovan. "Murdered Miners." The Nation 126, no. 3271 (March 14, 1928): 293-294. Powers Hapgood, "In Non-Union Mines: The Diary of a Coal Digger." New York: Bureau of Industrial Research, 1922. Powers Hapgood, "On Being a Manual Worker (An Appeal to Young Progressives)." New Student 12, no. 17 (May 19, 1923): 5. Powers Hapgood, "Paternalism vs. Unionism in the Mining Camps." The Nation 112, no. 2913 (May 4, 1921): 661-662. Kurt Vonnegut. Jailbird. New York: Dell, 1979.