Fraina, Louis C.

FRAINA, LOUIS C. (1892–1953). The first major ideologue of American communism, Louis C. Fraina combined in himself various contradictions of 1910s proletarian enthusiasm, cultural avant-gardism, and political overreach. Later known as Lewis Corey, more democratic socialist than hardcore Marxist, he similarly epitomized the course of the intellectual first drawn to and then repelled by the 1920s–1930s Left. A virulent anti-communist at the end of his life, he continued to search for a new party or organization to fulfill the American dream of prosperity and equality, as he saw it. At each turn he maintained an interest in the arts and arts criticism, perhaps as respite from his sometimes beleaguered circumstances.

Louis Fraina was born in Galdo (Salerno), Italy, probably in 1892 (he sometimes gave the year as 1894), son of a radical republican who emigrated to New York in 1897, but never sought citizenship. Young Fraina, newspaper seller, factory worker and sometime street corner speaker, grew close to the Socialist Labor Party, in which he rapidly rose to become an ace reporter and a protégé of Daniel De Leon. Breaking with the Socialist Labor Party, he became an editor and within a few years the primary editor of the political and cultural avant-gardist New Review.

Enraged by the outbreak of WWI, the capitulation of European Socialist parties and the subsequent US entry into the war, yet excited by widespread mass strikes, he became active in the US Socialist Party in opposition to the war and in support of the Russian Revolution. His activism resulted in arrest at least once, which made him vulnerable for deportation as an undocumented alien, a status which would come back to bite him decades later.

Fraina championed “mass action” as a strategy, in contrast to the SP’s electoral work, and believed that new social relations would grow out of industrial unionism and worker cooperatives. He laid out these early communist perspectives in Revolutionary Socialism (1918), in his annotated edition of Russian writings, The Proletarian Revolution in Russia (1918), and as one of three editors of the proto-Communist Class Struggle. Concurrently, he associated with the avant-garde arts scene in Greenwich Village and edited a few issues of Modern Dance magazine.

Between 1917 and. 1919, Fraina spoke frequently at political meetings across the US, resonating especially with the Foreign Language Federations that formed one of several shifting factions that exited the SP to eventually form the Communist Party. As a well-known figure, Fraina made his way to the second international meeting of the Comintern. There, he vied with John Reed and others to represent the views and commitments of the American Left.

Before his journey, he had been accused by some Communist leaders of collaboration with the Bureau of Investigation. Cleared in an internal party trial, he never quite escaped the suspicions among the founding generations of American Communists, even decades later. Retried in Moscow, he was again found innocent, only to run afoul of early Communist factionalism and a charge of embezzling Comintern funds after a tour of Comintern duty in Mexico.

Disillusioned by his unsuccessful organizing efforts in Mexico, he recrossed the border with his Moscow-born wife and Mexican-born baby daughter and assumed the name Lewis Corey.

Corey worked as a proofreader at the New York Times before reemerging in the1920s–1930s as an economist, editorial worker at The Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, and author of three influential books. The House of Morgan (1930), was followed by The Decline of American Capitalism (1934), and The Crisis of the Middle Class (1935), in which he described an emerging American class structure with ownership separated from management and a large portion of office work proletarianized. The Decline was widely credited with close statistical study of the inner decay of the economy, offset until the Crash by the lure of speculation. C. Wright Mills would later cite Crisis as an influence on his own work. Toward the end of the 1930s, Corey accepted a position in the educational department of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, its leadership loosely allied with the Lovestone faction of the American Left, and wrote essays for its newspaper, Workers’ Age.

Self-educated, with no formal degrees, Corey nevertheless joined the economics faculty at Antioch College in 1943, serving until 1951. During that time, he continued his interest in the arts as an editor of the eclectic Antioch Review and was happy hosting literary figures who visited the Yellow Springs campus, as his daughter later recalled. A dormitory was later named for him.

Stung by repeatedly unsatisfying experiences with the Communist Party, Corey became a spokesperson of Left-leaning liberalism in the 1940s–1950s. Owing to past left-wing ties, or perhaps the rivalry of younger rising intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. , he received little credit for his leadership of the Union for Democratic Action, a short-lived, wartime group later reborn after the War as Americans for Democratic Action.

Encouraged by the reformist success of the postwar British Labour Party, Corey worked with union leaders in the later 1940s to organize a “New Party” in the United States. The party’s program of liberal political and economic democracy, first proposed by the Michigan Commonwealth Federation, featured nationalization of monopolies within a market economy. Like others seeking a vehicle for sweeping social change outside of the two-party system, he was thwarted. Abandoning the notion of the working class as the central agent of change, he likewise found no other.

Corey’s Unfinished Task: Economic Reconstruction for Democracy (1942), is notably the first socialist text to elaborate the “mixed economy,” its ideas borrowed freely but without acknowledgment by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Daniel Bell, and others. His final book, Meat and Man (1950), a history of the meat-cutters’ union, revealed a further rightward drift toward hopes for business-labor cooperation and “scientific” replacement of world forests with intensive agriculture. Near the end of his life, he left a position with the meat cutters’ union in frustration.

A precocious writer on cultural issues from dance to poetry during his “Fraina” years, an occasional commentator on novels during the 1930s, Corey sought to sustain or return to his interest in the arts and culture. He left notes for a comparison of the work of Wagner and Verdi and began writing a biography of famed antebellum utopian reformer and proto-feminist, Frances Wright.

Corey had been accused of subversive activities by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) early in his tenure at Antioch, but the college administration defended him. In 1950, when he was pointedly, sometimes rabidly, criticizing the totalitarianism of the USSR, he received a deportation order based not just on his illegal entry to the US, but also on being a Communist, an identity he repudiated decades earlier. He died at his desk on September 15, 1953 while working on the Wright biography and fighting the deportation order. His application for a Certificate of Legal Entry, previously denied, was approved in a mailing received at his home two days later.

Buhle, Paul. A Dreamer’s Paradise Lost: Louis C. Fraina/Lewis Corey, 1892–1953. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995.

Corey, Esther. “Lewis Corey (Louis C. Fraina), 1892–1953: A Bibliography with Autobiographical Notes.” Labor History 4 (spring 1963).

Corey, Lewis. Crisis of the Middle Class, “Foreword” by Paul Buhle. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 edition.

Lewis Corey Papers, 1910-1953. Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4079676/