Louis C. Fraina
Louis C. Fraina was an Italian-American writer, educator and theoretician who was a founding member of the Communist Party of America in 1919. After running afoul of the Communist International in 1921 over the alleged misappropriation of funds, Fraina left the organized radical movement, emerging in 1926 as a left wing public intellectual by the name of Lewis Corey. During the McCarthy era, deportation proceedings were initiated against Fraina-Corey. After a protracted legal battle, Corey died of a cerebral hemorrhage before the action against him was formally abandoned.
Biography
Early years
Louis C. Fraina was born as Luigi Carlo Fraina on October 7, 1892, in the Galdo frazione of the town of Campagna, in the Province of Salerno of southern Italy. His father was a radical Republican and left Italy for America in 1897, to be joined by his wife and son a year later. Luigi's name was Americanized to "Louis" upon his arrival.Fraina grew up in the slums of New York City in the Bowery and working part-time as a newsboy from the age of 6. He later helped his mother in the making of cigars and plied his trade on the streets as a shoe shine boy.
Fraina graduated from primary school in 1905, but his father died just five weeks later, forcing Louis to abandon school in order to get a full-time job. He was never able to attend high school or college despite a lifetime career path that saw Fraina working as the education director of major unions, assuming a place as an author and public intellectual, and teaching economics at the university level for a decade.
Fraina pursued the path of self-education, reading broadly. From an early age, Fraina was engrossed with the ideas of political radicalism and freethought, publishing his first essay, "Shelley, the Atheist Poet," in the agnostic journal The Truth Seeker in 1909. Other articles in The Truth Seeker followed, causing newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane to show interest in him, which caused him to offer Fraina a job as a cub reporter at the New York Evening Journal, the flagship newspaper of the newspaper chain owned by William Randolph Hearst.
Left wing socialist (1909-1916)
Fraina came to socialism as a youth, later stating that he had joined the Socialist Party of America in 1909. Fraina seems to have been greatly influenced by the writings of Daniel DeLeon, editor of the newspaper of the rival Socialist Labor Party of America, a party which Fraina joined shortly after his departure from the SPA. Fraina was an enthusiastic convert to the SLP, making public speeches on revolutionary socialism and the SLP's ideas about revolutionary industrial unionism. He made streetcorner speeches in New York City every weekend in good weather, learning the art of public oratory in the trenches and mastering the loud and dramatic form of presentation needed to captivate strangers when speaking from a soapbox.By 1910, Fraina was writing voluminously for the daily newspaper published by the SLP. According to Fraina's biographer, historian Paul Buhle, "No one, not even DeLeon by this time, wrote more regularly for The Daily People. Fraina's most important journalistic task while on the staff of The Daily People was covering the 1913 Lawrence Textile Strike, one of the pivotal events of the American labor movement of that decade. This strike, in which members of some two dozen nationalities stayed out for weeks to resist a wage reduction, facing violence and arrest, was deeply influential upon Fraina. It was there that the Industrial Workers of the World had a moment of national spotlight which made many revolutionary possibilities for the IWW.
Early in 1914, Fraina resigned from the Socialist Labor Party. He remained politically active, however, and in the fall of 1914 he became the editor of The New Review, an urbane theoretical magazine launched by New York socialists in January the year prior. Fraina remained at the head of the editorial board of that publication until its termination early in 1916 due to lack of funds. A few months later, Fraina landed another position as a magazine editor, this time as the chief of Isadora Duncan's Modern Dance.
Pioneer communist theoretician (1917–1919)
The United States entered World War I in April 1917. This decision was bitterly opposed by the Socialist Party of America, which at its 1917 Emergency National Convention passed a militant document pledging continued opposition and resistance to the effort. Fraina rejoined the Socialist Party at this time and soon emerged as one of the leaders of the organization's left wing.In 1917, Fraina joined with Marxist theoretician Louis Boudin as a co-editor of Ludwig Lore's magazine, The Class Struggle. The publication, which first saw print in May 1917, soon became a leading voice of the radical wing of the Socialist Party, individuals who congealed into an organized political faction called the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party in 1919.
In 1918, Fraina was responsible for the first post-revolutionary collection of the writings of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky to be published in the United States. The book, entitled The Proletarian Revolution in Russia, gave English-speaking readers their first glimpse at the ideas of the Russian Communist Party and spurred the desire for emulation on the part of many American radicals.
Early in 1918, five radical Russian groups united with the English-speaking Socialist Propaganda League with which Fraina was associated to form the American Bolshevik Bureau of Information. The body was joined by Soviet Russian official representative Ludwig Martens, ostensibly as the delegate of the "New York Section of Russian Bolsheviki." The Bureau served as a forerunner of the official Russian Soviet Government Bureau, distributing official communications on behalf of the Soviet government, which was isolated by the European war and the object of sometimes imaginative vilification in the pages of the American press.
Fraina was also the editor of two of the earliest proto-communist newspapers in the United States, The New International and The Revolutionary Age. Combined with his other speaking, writing, and organizational activities, this position as editor of the leading radical publications of the day helped make Fraina arguably the leading theoretical and political figure of the founding days of the American communist movement.
Fraina was the author of the Left Wing Manifesto that served as the fundamental theoretical document of the organized Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party that emerged early in 1919. Fraina was a delegate to the June 1919 National Council of the Left Wing held in New York City and was prominent in the effort of members of the party's suspended foreign language federations and others seeking to establish a new Communist Party of America independent of the outcome of the 1919 Emergency National Convention of the Socialist Party. As arguably the top English-speaking leader of the new organization, Fraina was elected temporary chairman at the opening of the Founding Convention of the Communist Party of America on September 1, 1919, and delivered the keynote address to that body. He was also elected International Secretary by that body — the group's de facto first delegate to the Communist International in Moscow.
1919–1920 espionage controversy
The first international conclave attended by Fraina as representative of the CPA was a secret conference conducted by the short-lived Western European Bureau of the Communist International, slated to begin on February 10, 1920, in Amsterdam. As he was not a citizen of the United States, Fraina was forced to make this trip without a passport and legal visas. The services of Jacob Nosovitsky were employed by the CPA to aid with Fraina's travel arrangements and to accompany him abroad. Nosivitsky, believed to be an active and trustworthy member of the communist movement and an individual who had been used as a secret international courier, was actually a police spy working undercover in the radical movement and reporting on the activities of its principals to the US Department of Justice as its special employee N-100.Although apparently not tipped off by Nosovitsky himself, Amsterdam police authorities were aware of the Comintern's secret gathering in the city, and bugged the conference room with a dictaphone machine. The device was discovered by delegate Michael Borodin on the second day of the proceedings. A raid by the authorities soon followed, during which many delegates were arrested before being ordered to leave the country or physically deported. Fraina and Nosovitsky were not detained, but rather made their way to the home of Dutch radical S. J. Rutgers in Amersfoort, where several other delegates had assembled. They remained there a week before returning home to America.
Upon returning to America, a scandal arose. Ferdinand Peterson, a Finnish-American former socialist newspaper editor with extensive linguistic abilities, was induced to join the Justice Department as an undercover informant after being discharged from the American Army in 1919. Peterson confided in his former party comrade Santeri Nuorteva, now a leading member of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau in New York—the de facto consulate of Soviet Russia—of this assignment. Nuorteva helped Peterson provide a stream of uncontroversial and non-revelatory content for his daily reports throughout the summer and early fall of 1919.
Finally allowed to depart for Moscow, Fraina arrived only to find that rumors of the espionage charge had not been dispelled. Two more hearings were held under the auspices of the Comintern itself — one before the convening of the 2nd World Congress and the second one immediately after. The findings of all committees were unanimous and the charges of espionage against Fraina were dismissed, albeit never fully dispelled.