Biography
Charles Ashleigh English-born IWW poet, journalist, and orator who delivered the eulogy at the 1916 funeral of the Everett Massacre martyrs and authored the poem "Everett, November Fifth." Convicted in the 1918 Chicago IWW trial; sentenced to 10 years at Leavenworth. Released in the December 1921 amnesty; deported to Britain in April 1922. Attended the Fourth Comintern Congress; remained a lifelong activist with the Communist Party of Great Britain.
From Kenyon Zimmer's Red Scare Deportees index (kenyonzimmer.com, compiled from INS deportation case files): Raised in a middle-class environment, Ashleigh joined the Independent Labour Party at age fifteen, later affiliating with the Fabian Society and the Social Democratic Federation. He served as a secretary of the Fabian Society from 1908 and was active in the socialist Clarion Scouts. At the behest of the ILP, he organized among South Wales coal miners in 1908–9. In 1909 he moved to Buenos Aires to work as a clerk with the Central Argentine Railroad, founded a Socialist Club there, and wrote for the Buenos Aires Herald. After traveling on foot through Argentina, Chile, and Peru, he worked his way as a crew member to Portland in 1912, then regularized his legal status by crossing between Canada and the United States. He became a paid speaker for the Socialist Party of America, but soon aligned himself with the IWW and became a paid organizer. He traveled extensively as a journalist, wrote poetry, and participated in the Rangel-Cline and Everett defense campaigns. Openly gay, he maintained a romantic relationship with African American radical poet Claude McKay. Arrested in 1917, he was a defendant in the federal IWW trial and received a ten-year sentence and a $30,000 fine. He joined the Communist Party while incarcerated, and his sentence was commuted in 1921 on the condition of his voluntary departure on February 7, 1922.
In London, Ashleigh transferred to the Communist Party of Great Britain and worked for the Sunday Worker, Daily Worker, and TASS. In 1922 he was dispatched to India to deliver invitations to the Fourth Comintern Congress but was detained and expelled by British authorities, yet was able to complete his mission. Later that year, he worked as a translator at the Fourth Comintern Congress in Moscow and was asked to establish an American information section for the Red International of Labor Unions, and moved to Berlin in 1923 to work for the RILU. He was arrested and expelled from Germany shortly thereafter. Published his semi-autobiographical IWW novel The Rambling Kid in 1930. Sent to Moscow in 1931 to write for The Moscow News/Moscow Daily News, he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1934 after being denounced as homosexual by a roommate. He remained a member of the CPGB until his death in 1974, though largely marginalized within it.
