Quin, Mike

QUIN, MIKE (1906–1947). In his fourteen-year career as a labor journalist, magazine writer, novelist, radio commentator, and pamphleteer, Mike Quin endeared himself to Communist Party members and sympathizers through his witty commentary and incisive analysis. Averaging more than a million words a year, Quin’s numerous poems, short stories, and reportage appeared in the Partisan, New Masses, Western Worker, People’s World, and Daily Worker.

Born Paul William Ryan, Quin was the son of an Irish American salesman and a seamstress. Quitting school at age fifteen, he worked a series of odd jobs in San Francisco until going to sea at age nineteen. As a merchant seaman, Quin was apparently introduced to Marxism. He left the merchant marine in 1929 and affiliated with the Hollywood John Reed Club. He joined the Communist Party in 1933 and became a member of the editorial board of the Partisan, using the pseudonym Michael Quin. His first Party publication was And We Are Millions. Quin returned to San Francisco in the early 1930s and joined the staff of the Western Worker. There he aligned himself with the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, writing for its newspaper, the Dispatcher.

In 1938, Quin became public relations director for the California Congress of Industrial Organizations and in 1941 became its wartime “Reporter on the Air,” writing the radio program Facts to Fight Fascism. In this same year, he gained national attention for his pamphlet The Yanks Are Not Coming, for which influential gossip columnist Walter Winchell marked him “the most dangerous man in America.”

In the last years of his life, Quin wrote three detective novels under the name Robert Finnegan. In 1947 he was diagnosed as having cancer and died on 14 August. A memorial service, presided over by Harry Bridges, attracted more than five hundred mourners for San Francisco’s “beloved rebel.”

Quin, Mike. On the Drumhead: A Selection from the Writing of Mike Quin; A Memorial Volume. Edited with an introduction by Harry Carlisle. San Francisco: Pacific Publishing Foundation, 1948. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/ondrumheadselec00quin/mode/2up

Watson, Morris. “Beloved Rebel.” Dispatcher, 22 August 1947.