Steve Nelson, American Radical

by Steve Nelson, James R. Barrett, Rob Ruck

As the immigrant teenage son of a Croatian miller, Steve Nelson arrived in the United States after World War I and entered a world of chronic unemployment, low wages, dangerous work, and discrimination. Following the path taken by many fellow immigrant workers, he joined the Communist Party. He became a full-time organizer and ultimately a major leader, only to resign in 1957 after unsuccessful attempts to democratize the American party.

This remarkable oral biography, recounted in collaboration with two historians, describes day-to-day life in the party and traces Nelson's career from his beginnings in the Pennsylvania coalfields to his secret work as party courier in the Far East; form the battlefields of Civil War Spain to the jails of Cold War Pittsburgh; and from a small group of Communist autoworkers in Detroit to the upper reaches of a party leadership in New York. It is the frank and analytical account of a leading American working-class activist.

475 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Autobiography of Steve Nelson, a leading member of the Communist Party USA in the early-to-mid 20th Century, co-written with two historians who knew Nelson and clearly admired his legacy. Born in Croatia, Nelson moved to the United States at a young age, worked several blue collar jobs and gradually became attracted to Marxism. By the late '20s he was active in the Party; by the mid-'30s he was one of its leading lights, organizing miners in Illinois, longshoremen in California and steelworkers in Pennsylvania, fighting with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain, running Comintern missions in China and Nazi Germany and serving as a courier for the Soviet government in the United States. Nelson, understandably, places less stress on the latter; he doesn't view himself as particularly heroic or noble, just a man committed to a cause that he later came. Obviously, he denies the credible accusations that he recruited and maintained Soviet spy rings within the United States. Nelson paints interesting portraits of his fellow Communists (Australian-born leader Harry Bridges, ideologue Earl Browder, and his own, remarkable wife Margaret), his labor activism and his prosecutions and imprisonment during the McCarthy era; his belated disaffection towards the Party removed him from the public eye, but didn't stop his activism. Naturally, the book isn't completely honest about its subject's life, yet Nelson's tale is engagingly told, with humor, insight and vivid detail. A remarkable document of a man who, for good or ill, shaped radical politics in America for decades.