Wheeler, Truman

Laura Ross

A tireless advocate for peace and social justice and sixty-year member of the Communist Party USA, Laura Ross was born Laura Kaplowitz in the coal town of Blossburg, Pennsylvania, in 1913. One of seven children in an impoverished Lithuanian-immigrant family, Ross helped two sisters attend college, but saw her own formal education end with high school, continuing with occasional night classes after work.

By the age of 20, Ross left Pennsylvania to take a retail job in a Jewish section of Brooklyn, N.Y., and in 1932 she married a wine salesman named Harry Naddell, with whom she had a daughter and a son. Although not initially drawn to politics, Ross became active as an organizer for the Retail Clerks Union Local 65 and was drawn into radical circles during the Second World War through her work with Russian War Relief, raising funds for refugees from Nazi Germany. As she later wrote, her "real education, from a working-class viewpoint, took place in the Communist Party USA," and when she discovered that her husband lagged behind politically after she joined the Party, the two divorced.

The hostile political climate of the 1950s strengthened, rather than weakened, Ross's leftist commitments. Willing to stand up to opponents verbally, she was defiant when FBI agents questioned her at her home, and she led her local in a protest vigil outside the home of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on the night they were executed. After marrying Max Ross in 1963, an attorney for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, she moved from Brooklyn to Brighton, Mass., and carried on in her political work with a new circle of associates. Blunt and uncompromising, she was deeply concerned about the plight of working people in America as well as the impact of American militarism abroad, and became a recognized opponent of U.S. interventionism in Vietnam and elsewhere.

Always bustling, Ross's apartment in Brighton was a center for a variety of radical and left-oriented groups, ranging from the Communist Party to the Rainbow Coalition. By the early 1970s, she was widely known in the region as one of the key figures in establishing the Center for Marxist Education in Central Square, Cambridge, and for her entry into formal politics. Most famously, Ross announced in 1974 that she would oppose the popular twelve-term Congressman Tip O'Neill for his seat in the 8th District. Aware that the odds were long, Ross nevertheless garnered 6,400 votes that year (vs. 107,000 for O'Neill), leading her to run again in 1978 on a platform of reducing military spending in favor of funds for cities, youth employment, and services for the elderly: "We are paying through the nose for this military might. We are trading guns for butter." In her last run for office in 1984, Ross received 15,668 votes, nearly eight percent of the total cast.

Unflagging in her beliefs to the end, Ross died in Brighton, Mass., on August 5, 2007, aged 94.

From the guide to the Laura M. Ross Papers MS 515., 1876-2003, 1970-1990, (Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries)