Harry Kelly

Harry May Kelly (1871–1953) was an American anarchist and lifelong activist in the Modern School movement.

Biography Early life and work Born in a thirteen-room house in Saint Charles, Missouri and christened in the local Episcopal church, Kelly spent his youth on the banks of the Mississippi. while his mother was a descendant of the Calvert family, founders of the city of Baltimore. Kelly left school after the fifth grade and worked as a pressman in printing companies in order to support his family. He was hired as a salesman of printing equipment by the American Machine and Foundry Company of Cleveland, Ohio. Kelly moved to England in 1898, partly to meet his father's relatives, but also to engage with London's renowned circle of anarchist revolutionaries, a prospect which he had looked forward to with impatience.

Return to America On his return from Europe, Kelly continued selling printing equipment for American Machine and Foundry until 1920, with the exception of several weeks in 1911 when he became a full-time professional organizer for the Francisco Ferrer Association of New York, an anarchist organization established to create Modern Schools in America based on the ideas of Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia. He was a co-founder and organizer of the Ferrer Modern School at Stelton Colony in Piscataway Township, New Jersey, which became the most successful and longest lasting anarchist colony in America. He left the colony in 1923, and went on to found the Mohegan Colony at Lake Mohegan, New York in 1925, and later the Mount Airy Colony at Harmon, New York.

In a speech celebrating Kelly's fiftieth birthday, Havel elaborated:

Kelly's attitude towards his life divided between wage labor and activism was one of ambivalence.

Death

Kelly died in New Rochelle, New York in 1953. He was buried near the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument at Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois.

Works online 1908: "Anarchism: A Plea for the Impersonal", in Mother Earth, Vol. II, No. 12 (February 1908). 555–562. 1912: "A Review of the Year", in Mother Earth, Vol. VI, No. 11 (January 1912). 331–334.