Margaret Larkin’s Gendered Journey of Resistance Part 2: Cold War Battles

If you haven’t already, read Part 1: From Cowboy Ballads to Cold War Battles: Margaret Larkin’s Gendered Journey of Resistance 

Margaret Larkin and “Women Fight Back”

The years 1942 to 1945 saw Albert Maltz’s rise to notoriety and prominence as both screenwriter and novelist. His scripts for the patriotic films Destination Tokyo and Pride of the Marines were nominated for Oscars, and his 1945 collaboration with Frank Sinatra on the short film “The House I Live In” won an Academy Award for its contribution to racial tolerance. Maltz’s acclaimed antifascist novel of 1944, The Cross and the Arrow, was reprinted in a pocket-sized armed forces edition of 140,000 and distributed to American GIs fighting Hitler in Europe. In these years, Larkin, aside from her maternal role, was politically active. She attended statewide Communist Party conventions, gave time and energy to socialist educational programs, and chaired her local CPUSA branch, often holding meetings in the Maltz home (while FBI agents sat outside in unmarked cars, copying down license plate numbers for J. Edgar Hoover).

With the end of World War II and the onset of reactionary, Cold War anti-communism, Maltz was summoned to Washington, D.C. to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In October 1947, he and nine other film industry figures were charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the investigation into alleged communist subversion.  At 3:11 P.M. on the day of Maltz’s famously defiant testimony, Larkin sent a telegram to her ten-year-old son in Los Angeles:

 “DEAR PETER: WE CAN ALL BE PROUD OF YOUR DADDY TODAY. HE SPOKE TO THE COMMITTEE OF MEN WE TOLD YOU ABOUT. IT IS A BAD COMMITTEE AND ALL GOOD AMERICANS SHOULD FIGHT IT. DADDY WASBRAVE AND FINE. HE FOUGHT WELL==JUST THE WAY YOU DID WHEN A BOY TRIED TO TWIST YOUR ARM. YOU KNOW THE WAY TO STOP A BULLY IS TO FIGHT BACK. THAT IS WHAT DADDY DID TODAY. WE LOVE YOU. KISS KATHIE FOR ME.   MOTHER.”

The case of the Hollywood Ten would dominate the next four years of Margaret Larkin’s life. Throughout the long fight, she showed that she was certainly her husband’s equal in courage and resilience. Her re-emergence as a cultural figure paralleled Maltz’s persecution and balanced his public battle with a more personal, family-centered struggle.

At a “Women Fight Back” rally at Manhattan Center in 1948, Larkin described what the blacklist era was like for her as “a contemptee’s wife” and addressed the challenges of managing her family during one of the hottest periods in the Cold War:

“When my husband and I came back from the Washington hearings a year ago, we looked for a way to help our children understand what had happened there. We were deeply concerned for our ten-year-old boy, especially. Had newspaper headlines or neighborhood talk frightened or confused him? . . . How to tell a ten-year-old boy and his little sister, that chance had selected their father to help a little in the long struggle for their liberties?”

While Maltz was away on a last-ditch tour to raise funds for his legal defense, Larkin gave a speech for California trade unionists that shared a poignant domestic scene:

“This morning my little daughter, longing for her father, asked me to put on a record which we have, of his testimony before the Thomas committee, two and a half years ago. When his deep voice began she ran to her room for his picture, and propped it up on the radio. “Now, it’s television,” she said.”

Margaret Larkin had a life-long interest in education. She was aghast when she read a National Education Association report that assumed the Cold War would long continue and would therefore require propaganda efforts to inculcate in children “national loyalties” against a “potential enemy country.” In a Mother’s Day speech for the Unitarian Fellowship in May 1950, she scolded the NEA for suggesting that “healthy young people” be trained in schools to wear uniforms and man machines: “If the schools are going to abandon the children to war, I am not.”

Twenty-eight days before Maltz’s incarceration, Larkin spoke before a large audience at the Civil Rights Congress in Los Angeles:

“When their father and the nine other fathers are in jail, I shall let my children know that writers in other times have taken part in the struggles of their people. . . . My children must, and I believe all children should, learn that progress in human affairs has been achieved only at a cost—a personal cost to men and women. Yes, and to the children, too.

The fight of the Hollywood Ten, and of their wives, and of their children, has been one skirmish in the fight for peace. It appears that this skirmish is about to be lost. [. . .] But these ten Hollywood men in jail may well become a sign to the rest of the world that there are defenders of peace here, that people here have a will to resist the war makers.”

While her husband was in prison from June 1950 to April 1951, Larkin became an acknowledged leader among the defenders of the Ten. In this role, she fought an exhausting legal-political battle—advocating for their parole and petitioning the Supreme Court to hear their case on appeal. Her frequent and eloquent public speeches about the challenges of parenthood in a time of terror should be read today. When some in Larkin’s audiences assumed those speeches were written by her husband, Larkin firmly but gracefully refuted that notion.

Her political skills caught the eye of organizers at the Independent Progressive Party of California, who proposed that she run for the U.S. House of Representatives in California’s Thirteenth Congressional District. She wrote Maltz at Mill Point Prison in West Virginia, that she was giving “serious thought” to declaring her candidacy and proposed that they “weigh it together” during her next visit. But Maltz, who had initially encouraged the idea, ultimately vetoed it. When Larkin visited Mill Point in late August 1950, his unspoken sexism surfaced. He cited concerns about Larkin’s health and convinced her to move east with the children so they could visit him more often.

Exile in Mexico

If Larkin’s maltreatment was the result of gender-based chauvinism, the long reach of the political blacklist was also devastating. Fear of a second subpoena and incarceration (a fear justified by the 1950 McCarran Act and, later, the Communist Control Act of 1954) sent the Maltz-Larkin family into exile in Mexico and kept them there for more than a decade. “Moving away and living in banishment was hard on them,” a family friend recalled, “they weren’t there out of choice. They were refugees who had to build a new community” (Kalmar). The years of cultural displacement led also to Maltz’s repeated infidelities and callous, almost sadistic divorce of Larkin in 1963.

In the final decade of her life, Margaret Larkin completed two well-received nonfiction books. Seven Shares in a Gold Mine, published in 1958, investigated the criminal conspiracy behind the planting of a time-bomb on a plane flight from Mexico City that nearly killed Larkin and her daughter Kathy:

“Through the brown smoke I saw bits of debris flying through the cabin, blown violently in upon us by the rush of air. I pulled the blanket close around my little daughter and sheltered her with my arms. “Oh my God!” I had cried out as the blow struck—a cry of protest, of furious disgust, that for this, for a four-day pleasure trip, life was to be lost, quickly, purposelessly. I waited in agony for the annihilating crash”(2).

The bomb had detonated in the plane’s forward baggage compartment, but the pilot was somehow able to safely land the aircraft. Larkin interviewed the persons involved in the crime and followed the case on its tortuous journey through the Mexican legal system.

A second nonfiction book, The Six Days of Yad Mordechai (1965), was an account of a Jewish kibbutz in southern Israel that fell to Egyptian forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (the Nakba to Palestinians) but was later recaptured and re-established. For the task of writing this “official history” of Yad Mordechai, the kibbutz leaders had originally sought to commission Albert Maltz. But while Maltz balked at the nonfiction project, Larkin took it up with passion. Some in the kibbutz were initially skeptical of  putting their story in the hands of a woman and non-Jewish outsider, but Larkin won the trust of the community and its leaders. She made two extended research excursions into the Ashkelon region, relying on the approach she had taken in her early labor journalism: immersion, close observation and attentive listening, leading to cultural understanding.

Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Jewish-American novelist Chaim Potok credited Larkin for the vivid detail of her historical account. More impressive today is Larkin’s rejection of xenophobia and call for ethnic tolerance in her role as spokesperson for the Yad Mordechai community:

“As Socialists, it was against their creed to despise any man because of his race. . .They knew that not every Arab was an enemy. They understood why the [Palestinian] nationalists felt betrayed by a plan to establish a Jewish homeland on Arab soil. . .Although some distrust remained, the two cultures, so foreign to each other, could and did exist side by side in peace” (30-31, 39).

Six months before her death, Larkin’s final piece of journalism, “Family Planning in Mexico,” appeared in The Nation. The well-researched article blends medical statistics with personal case histories from Larkin’s own interviews, to propose solutions to a massive women’s health crisis in a country long held back by religious prohibitions on reproductive rights. The last words Larkin ever published predicted a hopeful future: “Many thousands of Mexicans who wish to control the size of their families will now be given the means to do so” (511).

For Margaret Larkin’s admirers, the most interesting revelation in  her late-career non-fiction might be her 139-word autobiography, written in the third person and buried in the back matter of Seven Shares in a Gold Mine. After briefly mentioning her early poetry and the “cowboy songs” she published in 1931, she skips ahead a quarter century or more, to a nebulous present when she is still a wife and mother, but also “Miss” Larkin, the artist:

“Now Miss Larkin has stopped work in order to raise children, although she still tries to devote her mornings to writing. She prefers solitude for her work, but, as a wife and mother, she has long since learned not to expect it”(307).

Margaret Larkin died of heart failure in Mexico City on May 7, 1967. Her New York Times obituary of May 11 drew attention to her diverse talents and interests while noting the abiding spirit of inquiry and sociological research, along with compassion, that guided her many substantial cultural contributions. She remains an underappreciated figure—a nasty woman writer who deserves more scholarly attention.

Margaret Larkin is a Nasty Woman Activist and Writer.

© Patrick Chura 2026

Works Cited

Foner, Phillip S. History of the Labor Movement of the United States: Volume 10: The TUEL, 1925-1929. New York: International Publishers, 1994; pp. 143, 148.

Kalmar Odenheim, Lynne. Phone interview with the author, January 9, 2026.

Larkin, Margaret. “Poem to Another Lover”, The New Republic, October 8, 1924.

Larkin, Margaret. The Passaic Textile Strike . Directed by Samuel Russak., 1926.

Larkin, Margaret. “A Poet for the People—A Review”, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, March 1927, pp. 84-85.

Larkin, Margaret. “Ella May’s Songs”, The Nation, October 9, 1929, pp. 382-383.

Larkin, Margaret, “The Story of Ella May”, New Masses, November 1929, pp. 3-4.

Larkin, Margaret. The Singing Cowboy: A Book of Western Songs. 1931. A. A. Knopf, 1931, Da   Capo Press, 1979.

Larkin, Margaret. “Success Stories: Beale Street: Where the Blues Began,” by George W. Lee.  The Nation, September 5, 1934, 279.

Larkin, Margaret. “How One Type of Worker is Corrupted by Capitalism is Theme of Black Pit.” Daily Worker, March 19, 1935.

Larkin, Margaret. Seven Shares in a Goldmine. Simon & Schuster, 1959.

Larkin, Margaret. The Six Days of Yad Mordechai. Yad Mordechai Museum, 1966.   

Larkin, Margaret. “Family Planning in Mexico”, The Nation, November 14, 1966, pp. 508-511.   

Larkin, Katherine. Letter to Lynn Haessly, February 22, 1986.

Potok, Chaim. “This Piece of Earth”, New York Times, June 9, 1968.

Rabkin, Gerald. Drama and Commitment: Politics in the American Theatre of the Thirties. Indiana University Press, 1964.

Sandburg, Carl. “I Ride an Old Paint”, The American Song-bag, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1927.