Elizabeth “Bessie” Beatty Sauter

Activist journalist inspired by Nevada labor, social issues

Bessie Beatty was a globally recognized journalist and activist who can credit the beginning of her career to the years-long union wars in the mines of Goldfield, Nev., at the beginning of the 20th century.

Born in 1886 in Los Angeles, Calif., to Irish immigrants Thomas and Jane Boxwell Beatty, young Bessie showed an early tendency toward activism. As a child, she decided to raise money for the Red Cross, and did so by staging a show, mostly made up of friends and siblings, and charged admission, which she sent to the Red Cross.

At 18, she enrolled at Occidental College, but stayed only a few years (1903-1906), writing for the Los Angeles Herald while still a student. The newspaper asked her to travel to the gold rush town of Goldfield, Nev., to cover the increasing tensions between miners and mine owners there. She was quite taken by the nature of the one-industry town, saying

“People have no time to be amused, and if they had time, they would not care for it. The game they are playing is more fascinating than any man has ever devised.”

Beatty was referring to the ongoing struggle between two powerful unions, the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World, and between them and the many mines that sprinkled the desert around Goldfield. The miners’ unions, after joining forces, succeeded in gaining higher wages and a voice for miners in disputes about gold theft from the mines. But shortly thereafter, with the intervention of the state governor and the federal government, those concessions were lost, and federal troops were sent in, despite the lack of noticeable violence (with one notable exception, the murder of a business owner.) Beatty saw the fights as the promise of labor’s power, a theme she wrote about and advocated for the rest of her life.

While in Nevada, she wrote a tragic story for the San Francisco Bulletin, which was later reprinted in the Tonopah Daily Bonanza, about a miner whose wife had died, leaving him to care for their three small children. By all accounts, he was a doting and caring father, and his death left the children in dire poverty in the mining camp of Sodaville, Nev. The Tonopah paper editorialized that readers should not worry that the children were no doubt in the care of town’s capable mayor.

At the end of her Nevada stay, she wrote a book called “Who’s Who in Nevada,” describing about 75 men of importance to the state. In 1907, she returned to Los Angeles, where she took part in activities supporting women’s right to vote and other social causes. She rode in an automobile know as “The Blue Liner” on a tour to Vallejo and other California towns to support women’s suffrage. She spoke to women’s clubs about getting active, often with a speech she called, “What Women Should Know about Politics.” She also spoke out against capital punishment at a 24-hour rally in San Francisco. In 1912, she published a collection of her articles and called it “A Political Primer for the New Voter,” a primer aimed at California women who had just won the right to vote.

Because George Wingfield owned the Reno Evening Gazette and other papers in Nevada, and was opposed to woman suffrage, the Nevada campaign needed help with press. In 1914, Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, gave to state suffrage headquarters the valuable services and paid the expenses of Miss Bessie Beatty, a member of its staff, to direct the state-wide press campaign of news and advertisements planned for September and October.

She was widely recognized for her column for the San Francisco Bulletin called “On the Margin,” which covered a variety of progressive issues. She had a fondness for the tenets of socialism, linking them in her mind to women’s suffrage. In the primer she wrote,

“To protect human life costs money. It cuts down on profits. The question for humanitarians to consider is not how to make it possible for women to work more than eight hours, but how they may secure sufficient wages for eight hours’ work to enable them to live.”

She had learned from a few of the more radical mine union organizers in Nevada and wanted to learn more about it from the socialists in Russia. She convinced her editors to send her to cover the start of World War I, with an eye toward the revolution in Russia. She went to Hawaii, Japan and China, reporting on mostly cultural issues. But she finally landed in Russia in 1917, just two months after the Bolsheviks overthrew Russia’s provisional government. She arrived in Petrograd, later St. Petersburg, on the Trans-Siberian Express, at a time when she said,

“Freedom was young…like the spring, like the leaves on the tree.” She called the “revolution that overthrew the Tsar and absolutism” … a …”simple thing, beautifully logical, gloriously unanimous.”

She interviewed political prisoners and wrote about the socialism they, and increasingly she, advocated.

Despite connecting socialism and women’s suffrage, she recognized that in Russia,

“there was no feminist movement. Instead of becoming feminists, women became Cadets, Social Revolutionists, Mensheviks, Maximalists, Bolsheviks, Internationalists, or attached themselves to one or another of the parties and shadows of parties.”

Upon returning to the United States, she collected her reporting into a book called “The Red Heart of Russia.” Three years later, she returned to Russia to interview Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Georgy Chicherin and Mikhail Kalinin.

She was later called to testify in Washington, D.C. during the first Red Scare, and refused to condemn the Bolsheviks, saying “I think that we should try and understand what they are attempting to do … to take the earning power out of money.”

She continued her advocacy in New York City and took a job as editor of McCall’s Magazine in 1919. After the passage of the 19th amendment, she asked readers to take more responsibility now for economic and social ills, saying “The fault will soon be ours if the world is not a happier place for the human race. How shall we go about it?”

Between world wars, Beatty became a staunch part of the artistic and intellectual left, writing for MGM and even co-writing a Broadway play. She married an actor, William Sauter, in 1926. She took her place on the National Label Council, which promoted union-made goods. In her later years, she hosted a radio program on New York’s WOR, where she interviewed figures like Eleanor Roosevelt and conducted war bond drives to the tune of $300,000, the equivalent of $5 million in today’s dollars. Her articles on politics, women’s rights, tourism, and other topics appeared in Good Housekeeping, The New Republic, Women’s Home Journal and Century magazines.

From her start in the gold mines of Nevada, Bessie Beatty took part in some of the most important feminist and socialist discussions of the time period. Her work was quoted by Nevada’s first lady Mabelle J. Kirman in 1935, when she was fighting for safe conditions in the garment industry. Beatty was honored by the Women’s International Exposition of Arts and Industries for her work in radio. She has an entry in the Soviet Encyclopedia. Time magazine called her a “Short, voluble bit of human voltage.”

That voltage was dimmed when she died of a heart attack at the age of 61 in 1947 at a friend’s home. The radio station where she worked aired a tribute program to her the next day. Her remains are in the Fresh Pond Crematory and Columbarium in Middle Village, Queens County, New York.

Bessie Beatty books

Researched by Patti Bernard and written by Kitty Falcone, 2025. Posted December 11, 2025.