Lewis, Austin M.

LEWIS, AUSTIN M. (1865–1944). California-based lecturer, writer, and activist attorney, Austin M. Lewis devoted his life to the socialist cause. A major theoretician for the direct action, industrial unionist left-wing within the Debsian-era socialist movement, he also took on a number of notable Left- and labor-related West Coast legal battles.

Born in England in 1865, the son of a Lancashire schoolmaster, Lewis later attended the University of London where he acquired both bachelor’s and law degrees. While in London in the 1880s, he became interested in the socialist cause and the writings of William Morris. He immigrated to California in 1890 where he taught school at San Rafael. He also worked briefly as a journalist, contributing to the San Francisco Examiner and other papers. Admitted to the California bar in 1898, he soon established a reputation as a voice for socialism and as a movement attorney. He campaigned for governor of California on the Socialist Party ticket in 1906.

Lewis published several significant works under the auspices of Charles H. Kerr Company. His The Militant Proletariat (1911) was initially hailed as one of “the most important contribution to Socialist theory that has yet been produced by any American writer,” and “the most important work on American economic development and the tactics of the American Socialism that has yet appeared.” He also penned The Rise of the American Proletariat (1907), The Art of Lecturing (1908), and Proletarian and Petit-Bourgeois, and also found time to do various translations for Kerr including Friedrich Engels’s Anti-Dühring, published as Landmarks of Scientific Socialism (1907).

As a left-wing strategist and theoretician, Lewis strove to produce a sound, rigorous Marxian analysis of contemporary conditions in order to bolster the argument for industrial unionism. The Militant Proletariat went further than any other book of the period to elucidate the reasons for the rise and the national necessity of a “new unionism” capable of transcending the narrow confines of conservative, outmoded craft unions. Lewis’s work, a clear contribution to the Marxian discussion on the nature and composition of the American working class, helped to clarify a solid and unassailable Left position. It received a favorable reception within Left circles, drew the expected criticism from the foes it assailed, and passed through several editions.

As an attorney, Lewis devoted his career to such causes as the defense of Robert “Blackie” Ford and Herman Suhr, two organizers for the Industrial Workers of the World who had been charged with murder in the aftermath of California’s Wheatland Riot of 1913. He played a key role in the lengthy campaign to pardon Tom Mooney and Warren Billings and battled for repeal of California’s criminal syndicalism law in the 1920s. He helped organize the Northern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and served as its counsel. He also took on numerous pro bono cases in defense of itinerant and impoverished migrant workers.

Buchanan, Agnes Foster. “The Story of a Famous Fraternity of Writers and Artists.” Pacific Monthly (Portland, Ore.) 17, no. 1 (January 1907).

Byington, Lewis Francis. The History of San Francisco. 3 vols. Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1931.

De Leon, Solon. American Labor Who’s Who. New York: Hanford, 1925.

Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the I.W.W. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969.

Ruff, Allen. “We Called Each Other Comrade”: Charles H. Kerr and Company, Radical Publishers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

San Francisco Chronicle, 28 January 1940.