Biography
Poet and Masses contributor. Indicted in November 1917 along with editor Max Eastman, John Reed, and the staff of The Masses — the radical New York socialist literary magazine — under the Espionage Act of 1917 for conspiracy to obstruct military recruitment. The Post Office had already revoked the magazine's second-class mailing privileges, effectively shutting it down. The first trial (April 1918) and second trial (October 1918) both ended in hung juries; the government declined a third prosecution and the charges were dismissed. The Masses re-emerged as The Liberator under Eastman's editorship. Bell was indicted specifically over her poem "A Tribute" — a sympathetic verse about jailed anarchist anti-conscription organizers Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman published in The Masses; the indictment quoted her poem as proof of conspiracy to obstruct the draft. Charges dismissed against her with the rest of the defendants.
