Elinor Ferry

Elinor Ferry (1915–1993) was an American journalist, labor organizer, and socialist. She was member of the Independent-Socialist Party and lifelong supporter of Alger Hiss. She was married for about a decade to The Nation publisher George Kirstein.

Background

Ferry was born in 1913 in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. She 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.

In the 1950s, her name appears in print in various political capacities. In 1957, her name appears in a "Trotskyite" debate in the International Socialist Review.

In 2001, her name receives mention as an Independent-Socialist Party "campaigner."

Hiss case

During the 1950s, Ferry documented McCarthyism and First Amendment defendants.

She spent many years writing about the Alger Hiss. Her correspondence appears in the Hiss papers at Harvard. According to Allen Weinstein, Ferry was a "friend and defense researcher" of Hiss who "worked closely with Helen Buttenweiser on research for Hiss's retrial motion." He also noted that "Links between The Nation and the Hiss defense had been close from the beginning of the case," starting with publisher Frida Kirchwey and followed by succeeding publisher George Kirstein (Ferry's husband). According to G. Edgar White, she was "Helen Buttenweiser's research assistant." As early as 1952, other writers began to draw on her research to discredit Chambers. Author John Chabot Smith cited Ferry's interview with Max Bedacht (whom Chambers claimed had delivered his summons to the Soviet underground) 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". In his "psychobiography" on Chambers, author Meyer Zeligs cites copious usage of materials from Ferry. Author Julia M. Allen cited Ferry about Chambers' wife, "Recollections of Esther Shemitz reflect the gender rigidity of the time and help to explain why both Hutchins and Rocher felt especially protective of her. In interviews conducted by Elinor Ferry in the 1950s, Shemitz was characterized as being 'masculine'."

FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated Ferry from 1952 through 1968.

She had at least one child, James. ) and Matthew Mills Stevenson.