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13 Facts About Elinor Ferry

1.

Elinor Ferry was an American journalist, labor organizer, and socialist.

2.

Elinor Ferry was member of the Independent-Socialist Party and lifelong supporter of Alger Hiss.

3.

Elinor Ferry was married for about a decade to The Nation publisher George Kirstein.

4.

Elinor Ferry helped organize the American Newspaper Guild, founded in 1933 by sportswriter Heywood Broun and journalists Joseph Cookman and Allen Raymond.

5.

Elinor Ferry became an assistant to Mike Quill of the Transport Workers Union, founded in 1934 by Quill for subway workers in New York City and which had leadership dominated by the CPUSA during its early years up through 1948 during the presidential campaign of Henry A Wallace.

6.

Elinor Ferry worked for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, founded in 1936 by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, disbanded in 1942 to become the United Steel Workers of America, now the United Steelworkers union.

7.

Elinor Ferry served as secretary of Emergency Civil Liberties Union, founded in 1951 under the direction of Clark Foreman, formed as a breakaway from the American Civil Liberties Union, known after 1968 as the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, and merged in 1998 with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

8.

Elinor Ferry spent many years writing about the Alger Hiss.

9.

Elinor Ferry's correspondence appears in the Hiss papers at Harvard.

10.

Elinor Ferry's work was to result in a negative "political history" of Whittaker Chambers and a defense for Hiss.

11.

Author John Chabot Smith cited Ferry's interview with Max Bedacht and wrote that "Bedacht denied the whole story; he told journalist Elinor Ferry it was a flat lie, and that he had never had any connections with an underground of any sort, Russian or American".

12.

Elinor Ferry married at least twice, the second time to George Kirstein for ten years.

13.

Elinor Ferry resided mostly in Mamaroneck, New York, and died in 1993.