[2] His divorced mother moved with him and two brothers to the country for a year, while the rest of the family lived with his father in Philadelphia and attended school there.

[2] His brief experience as a working farmer made him almost a unique figure among pioneer members of the American Communist Party, a group almost exclusively composed of urban laborers, factory workers, or intellectuals (and mostly foreign-born).

[1] Although not a delegate to its founding convention, Ware was a member of the Communist Labor Party of America (CLP) from the year of its origin, 1919, as were his mother and older sister, Helen.

[5] Almost immediately after the Party launched, federal and state authorities moved against the fledgling communist movement, forcing its adherents to make use of pseudonyms and to conduct their activities in secret.

[citation needed] In late 1921, Ware attended the founding convention in New York of the Workers Party of America.

His farm would serve as a model to help to alleviate the great Russian famine through production of grain plus firsthand demonstration of modern agricultural technique.

An appropriation of $75,000 was granted for the project, with Ware's half-brother, Carl Reeve, traveling around the U.S., showing a motion picture depicting horrific conditions in Russia to help raise funds.

[1] In May 1922, Hal and Cris Ware left his three children in America for Soviet Russia along with their tractors, implements, a complete medical unit, and several tons of food supplies.

Shortages of fuel, hauled by peasant wagons some 40 miles (64 km) from the nearest train station, severely hampered their efforts.

The Soviet People's Commissariat of Agriculture offered a large tract of fertile land in the Kuban region, just north of the Black Sea for a second model farm.

[1] During winter 1928-29, Ware returned to the United States, where he attempted to interest American agricultural equipment manufacturers in the Soviet market.

[1] The institute, funded by the Communist Party, published a newspaper called The Farmers National Weekly continuously throughout the Great Depression.

He stood about five feet nine, a trim, middle-aging man in 1934, with a plain face, masked by a quiet earnestness of expression wholly reassuring to people whom quickness of mind makes uncomfortable.

Unlike most American Communists, who managed to pass from one big city to another without seeing anything in the intervening spaces, Ware was absorbed in the land and its problems.

[12]According to Chambers' testimony, when he came back from Soviet Russia in 1930, Ware carried with him $25,000 in US currency hidden in a money belt, funds from the Comintern for work among the farmers.

But his real mission was espionage, Chambers wrote: Once the New Deal was in full swing, Hal Ware was like a man who has bought a farm sight unseen only to discover that the crops are all in and ready to harvest.

On its legal staff were Lee Pressman, Alger Hiss and John Abt (later named by Elizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts).

Abraham George Silverman (another of Elizabeth Bentley's future contacts) was sitting with a little cluster of communists over at the Railroad Retirement Board.

[12]Others named by Chambers included Henry H. Collins, Jr., Laurence Duggan, Nathan Witt, Marion Bachrach, and Victor Perlo.

[12] Others subsequently mentioned in these ranks included John Herrmann, Nathaniel Weyl, Donald Hiss, and Harry Dexter White.

Sometimes they were visited officially by J. Peters who lectured them on Communist organization and Leninist theory and advised them on general policy and specific problems.

I showed up at a cell meeting with the girl I was having an affair with, a young lady who was not a Communist Party member and who had known nothing about the group.

She was reported in the Communist Party press as having died of "acute pancreatitis, a rare disease of one of the digestive organs of the stomach," rumored to be a cover story for a botched illegal abortion, on September 27, 1923.

"[22] While in Russia, Ware met Jessica Smith, working with the Quaker famine relief effort, the American Friends Service Committee.

[1] On August 9, 1935, Ware was critically injured in an automobile accident in the mountains near York Springs in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania when his car collided with a coal truck.

Ware was memorialized with a chapter in the memoir written by his more famous mother, Ella Reeve Bloor, in 1940: As a boy he loved the outdoors, was full of restless, eager vitality and bold curiosity.

More than ordinarily shy, he forgot his shyness when engaged in one of his organizing ventures, and a flow of colorful, stirring talk would come from him so persuasive that those who heard him were completely carried away.

His interest in economics and politics developed intensely at this time, and while at college he wrote me constantly for the latest news of the socialist movement.