Biography
Harvey O'Connor (March 29, 1897 – August 29, 1987) was a labor journalist and author, born in Minneapolis and raised in the Pacific Northwest, who worked in Seattle journalism and the radical press from about 1918 to 1924 and later wrote extensively on labor history, corporate power and the petroleum industry. His papers are held by the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University.
During or immediately after the February 1919 Seattle General Strike, O'Connor was arrested in a police roundup of labor radicals. Authorities accused him and other radical publishers of producing material tending to cause a breach of the peace, and he was indicted or threatened with prosecution under Washington's criminal-anarchy law, which carried up to ten years. He was never tried: prosecutors abandoned the case after the state failed in a test prosecution meant to establish the legality of its broader criminal-anarchy campaign.
Decades later he was indicted for contempt of Congress in October 1953 for refusing, on First Amendment grounds, to answer Senator McCarthy's questions. His case became part of the broader First Amendment resistance to congressional investigations of the McCarthy era.
