Nelson, Steve

NELSON, STEVE (1903-1993). Steve Nelson, an important labor organizer and Communist Party leader, is best known for his work as political commissar of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and as a defendant in the Smith Act trials of 1953. His autobiography, written in collaboration with James R. Barrett and Rob Ruck, remains an essential document for examining the intersection of the labor movement and the Left, and also the tensions created by Party leaders’ blind faith in Moscow.

Born Stjepan Mesaos in Croatia on January 1, 1903, Nelson emigrated to the US with his mother and three sisters in 1919. By 1923, he was working as a carpenter and other blue collar jobs in Pittsburgh and had also adopted a new name. Nelson soon joined the Young Workers League and then the Party itself, in 1925. He met his future wife Margaret at a Party office and they moved to Detroit where he worked in auto plants and as a full time labor and party organizer. He was also being prepared for a major Party shift, from ethnic organizing to a workplace and industry-wide focus.

The couple moved to New York in 1928, where Nelson attended the New York Marxist School, both of them soon to become full time party functionaries. A key organizer of International Unemployment Day on March 6, 1930, Nelson was badly beaten by the police and arrested, almost certainly under constant FBI surveillance from this point onward. In 1931, the couple traveled to Moscow so spend two years attending the International Lenin School. At the conclusion of the school, Margaret stayed in Moscow and Nelson traveled throughout Europe and the far east for the Comintern.

Returning to the US, they settled in the anthracite coal region of Northeast Pennsylvania where he agitated among miners. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Nelson tried to join what would become the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, but was told initially to remain in the coal fields. After military advances by the Franco forces, Nelson and a small cadre of Party members traveled to Spain via France. He was soon named political commissar of the brigade, with duties including the enforcement of discipline and inspiring troops in an increasingly difficult military situation. He was wounded and returned to the US where he toured, mobilizing support and donations for the Spanish Loyalists and the International Brigades.

In the 1940’s, Nelson was elected to the Party's national leadership, and settled in San Francisco, where he headed an especially influential branch. The Hitler-Stalin pact had cost many members, but the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, bringing the US into the War, Party membership and influence surged to new heights, Nelson himself met privately with atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer, but later denied any espionage connections, a recollection later disputed by some scholars of the Manhattan Project.

In 1944, General Secretary Earl Browder, convinced that conditions in the nation would preclude violent revolution and that postwar cooperation between the US and the Soviet Union was possible, readily convinced a party convention that the CPUSA should be dissolved and reconstituted as a Communist Political Association. A move met with enthusiasm in many circles, and an increased Party membership, it was reversed at the behest of Moscow in 1946. Browder was soon expelled along with others, some of them his bitter opponents. In the following years, as the Cold War intensified, Party leaders took steps to form an underground organization, widely believed to be another blunder.

Leaders of the party including Nelson were captured and charged with sedition under the Smith Act, found guilty and released only after the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional. Meanwhile, Russian misdeeds and their revelation in 1956 accelerated the departure of many members and led to a split in the Party. Nelson, a leader among those seeking to reform and democratize the movement, was on the losing side of the bitter inter-party conflict, and with many others, left the Party in 1957.

The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade became for Nelson, as many, an alternative source of activity. He became its National Commander in 1963 and until his death was admired as a major figure in the doomed anti-Franco crusade. Looking back, in his memoir, on a lifetime of activity, Nelson regretted the blind faith in Moscow and the absence of true Party democracy.

Nelson and Margaret built a cottage on Cape Cod, where he remained a major personality for many summer residents of Old and New Left generations alike.

Caute, David. The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and and Eisenhower. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.

Nelson, Steve, James R. Barrett, Rob Ruck. Steve Nelson, American Radical. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.

Nelson, Steve, The Volunteers. New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1953.

Rosenstone, Robert A. Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln in the Spanish Civil War. Robert A New York: Pegasus, 1969.

Steven Nelson Papers. Finding Aids. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives. New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/alba_008/bioghist.html