Wellman, Saul

WELLMAN, SAUL (1913-2003). A youthful labor organizer, volunteer with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and later head of the Michigan Communist Party CP, Saul Laurence Wellman immersed himself in major Left movements and events of the twentieth century. As a mentor to many in the New Left and Democratic Socialists of America, his influence endured.

Raised in Brooklyn by Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants, Wellman absorbed radicalism at an early age. Herself organizing workers in the needle trades, his mother took him to hear Eugene V. Debs speak when Saul was fourteen. At sixteen, he joined the Young Communist League, swiftly becoming a soapbox orator. On 6 March 1930, he joined the unemployed march of 110,000 in New York's Union Square. Shortly, he found himself expelled from Brooklyn Boys High School. Rather than returning to school, Wellman began work as a truck driver. Soon, he became a full-time organizer for the Confection and Tobacco Jobbers Employees Union. He married Peggy Hobson, a Young Communist League comrade and skilled sewing operator, union organizer and secretary of the Boot and Shoe Workers Union.

At age twenty-three, Wellman volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He became political commissar of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigades, fighting in five battles before being wounded during the Ebro offensive in 1938. Wellman continued to fight against Fascism by enlisting as a paratrooper in World War II, at twenty-nine older than most volunteers. Jumping into Holland with the 101st Airborne Division in mid-September 1944, he was seriously wounded and captured at the Battle of the Bulge.

After his recovery and the war's end, Wellman moved to Detroit to lead the Communist Party's auto union organizing effort. As a Detroit CP leader amidst McCarthy Era repression, he went underground for several years. Arrested under the Smith Act in 1952, he became lead defendant in the infamous Detroit Smith Act trial, resulting in his imprisonment for six months. A Supreme Court ruling later set aside his conviction. In the aftermath of the Khrushchev revelations about Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Wellman left the Communist Party and became an apprentice in a printing firm, later elected as an officer of the lithographers’ union.

Wellman came to be embraced by the new generation of radical activists during the 1960s, seen as a hero of the older generation, a mentor open and undogmatic, supportive and profoundly committed to new forms of social activism. His connection with the New Left helped lead to the formation of the Detroit chapter of the New American Movement (NAM) and, in 1982, the merger of NAM with the Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee (DSOC) to form the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Calling himself an “ecumenical Marxist,” and discovering Eurocommunism for himself, he traveled widely as a mentor of the New Left, receiving awards from the city of Detroit and State of Michigan and serving as a scholar in residence. Active in the national and local Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Wellman was also the guiding spirit of the Wayne State University Abraham Lincoln Brigade Scholarship Fund.

Brooks, Chris and Liana Katz, “The Commissar and the Good Fight—by Saul Wellman,” The Volunteer, Dec.16, 2015.

Montell, Judith and Ronald Aronson, “Professional Revolutionary: The Life of Saul Wellman,” documentary film.

Saul Wellman Collection. Michigan State Universities. Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collection. Radical Collection. https://lib.msu.edu/MurrayHongSPC/collections/wellman/