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. His father was Cornish, while his mother was a descendant of the Calvert family, founders of the city of Baltimore. Once a partner of railroad magnate Thomas Alexander Scott, Kelly's father had lost his stake and took a job as a mine inspector, dying in poverty before Kelly's fifth birthday. Kelly left school after the fifth grade and worked as a pressman in printing companies in order to support his family. At twenty years old, he was wandering from city to city. He was hired as a salesman of printing equipment by the American Machine and Foundry Company of Cleveland, Ohio. It was during this time he became actively engaged in the trade union movement and was first exposed to anarchist ideas. He became a collaborator of Charles Mowbray on Boston's The Rebel, and when that ceased publication, published a paper called The Match, the first of three anarchist periodicals he founded in America. Kelly's contemporary Hippolyte Havel would later comment that "The Match went out all too suddenly, but while it burned it gave Kelly great pleasure and satisfaction." Years in England