Jessica Smith (2) (1895–1983)

Jessica Smith, née Granville-Smith, was born in Madison, New Jersey, the daughter of Jessie May and Walter Granville-Smith. Her father was an award-winning painter. Jessica graduated from Swarthmore College and traveled in 1922 to the Soviet Union on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker famine relief effort. In Moscow, she met Harold "Hal" Ware, an American Communist and agricultural expert. Together they tried to establish a model collective farm in the Ural Mountains, using American tractors. They returned to the USA and were married in New York City in January 1925; they later had a son. Smith became the editor of Soviet Russia Today, a publication of Friends of the Soviet Union, a position she held for more than 20 years, and later served as editor of the New World Review, its successor. In 1943, she became a co-founder of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, which she also served as vice president and member of its Board of Directors.

Her husband founded the Ware Group, a Communist Party unit, in the early 1930s. In 1935, he died from injuries he sustained in an auto accident and Whittaker Chambers took over running the group. Smith remarried to lawyer John Abt, another member of the Ware Group, in 1937. She wrote and edited numerous books during her long life, most famously Woman in Soviet Russia (1928). Other works included
Over the North Pole, with Georgiĭ Baĭdukov (1938);
People Come First (1948);
The American People Want Peace (1955);
Hungary in Travail (1956);
Soviet Democracy, and How It Works (1969);

The USSR and World Peace, editor (1949).