Louis C. Fraina (1892–1953) was a founding member of the American Communist Party 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 1930 as a left wing public intellectual by the name of Lewis Corey. During the McCarthy period, 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.
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Louis C. Fraina was born as Luigi Carlo Fraina on October 7, 1892, in Salerno Province, Campagna, 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.[1] Fraina grew up in the slums of New York City and worked as a newsboy from the age of 6, later being employed in a cigar factory and as a bootblack.
Fraina attended school until the death of his father in 1908, at which time the 16-year old left high school to work for the Edison Company.[2] The precocious and brilliant Fraina henceforth continued on a path of self-education, emerging as a writer and an intellectual. From an early age, Fraina was engrossed with the ideas of political radicalism and free thought, publishing his first essay, "Shelley, the Atheist Poet," in the agnostic journal The Truth Seeker in 1909.[2]
Fraina came to socialism as a youth, later stating that he had joined (and quickly departed) the Socialist Party of America in 1909.[3] 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.[4]
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.[5] Fraina's most important journalistic task while on the staff of The Daily People was covering the 1912 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 their day in the sun — and the revolutionary possibilities seemed endless.
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 V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky to be published in the United States.[6] 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.[6]
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.[6] The body was joined by Soviet Russian official representative Ludwig Martens, ostensibly as the delegate of the "New York Section of Russian Bolsheviki."[6] 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 (1918) and The Revolutionary Age (1918-1919).[7] 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.[7]
Lewis Corey broke with Marxism in 1940, disillusioned with the atrocities committed by Joseph Stalin, by the cheerleading of the Communist Party USA for unpalatable Soviet realities, and by the organizational impotence and factionalism of the non-Communist left. By the end of World War II, Fraina had emerged as a vocal anti-communist, reevaluating his past views in a critical light:
"I once believed, as a Marxist, that dictatorship of the proletariat would relax and pass away; but the dictatorship grew tighter and tighter until it became a totalitarian state. Some years ago I concluded that dictatorship was to blame. But was it?[8]
By 1945, Corey was calling his former comrades "political totalitarians" and accusing them of using "power politics and conspiratorial infiltration" to gain their unsavory ends.[8]
Ironically, as Corey's politics turned against his Stalinist beliefs, he ran afoul of the Federal prosecutors. In December 1950, Corey was served with a deportation warrant from the US Department of Justice charging that he had been in the country illegally almost his entire life and for being a Communist. His father had come to the United States without obtaining naturalization papers and young Louis had decided against filing later due to his 1917 conviction as a conscientious objector.[9] The case was tied up for years, and his application for a Certificate of Lawful Entry was denied under the McCarren Act.[10]
On Christmas Day, 1952, Corey received an announcement of an impending deportation order. The next month he was terminated from employment by the Butcher's Union, for whom he worked. Corey spent his last months traveling between New York City and Washington, working with lawyers in his effort to stave off deportation to his native Italy.[10]
Corey suffered a traumatic cerebral hemorrhage at his desk on September 15, 1953, lapsed into a coma, and died the next day. Two days later, a Certificate of Lawful Entry posthumously arrived in the mail, along with a contract from a publisher for a projected book, Toward an Understanding of America.[10]
Corey's papers are housed in the Rare Book & Manuscript section of Butler Library at Columbia University in New York City. The collection includes 10 linear feet of material housed in 24 archival boxes.[11]
In Warren Beatty's film Reds, Louis Fraina was portrayed onscreen by actor Paul Sorvino.