Biography
Alexander Trachtenberg was the founder and longtime publisher of International Publishers, the principal U.S. publishing house of Marxist literature for most of the twentieth century. International Publishers issued the first English-language collected edition of Marx and Engels, the works of Lenin, the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois on Reconstruction, and a wide range of American radical and labor history.
Trachtenberg was indicted in the Foley Square Second String in June 1951 and convicted alongside Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the rest of the CPUSA national board in January 1953. He was sentenced to three years and served two years at the federal prison camp at Danbury, Connecticut, before being released on bond pending appeal. After the Supreme Courts 1957 Yates decision the government retried him; the second jury hung, and the prosecution was abandoned in 1958. He continued to run International Publishers until his death in 1966.
