Biography
David Gordon was a Communist trade unionist, author, editor, and journalist. Born in Ukraine, he immigrated to the United States at the age of three. As a teenage worker-poet he was convicted of obscenity for his poem "America" — published in the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party USA — which compared the country to a whorehouse; sentenced to the New York reformatory, he was, after a broad free-speech campaign, paroled to the University of Wisconsin's Experimental College, where he held a Zona Gale literary scholarship and studied for two years. He became active in the labor movement as an organizer for the Paper, Pulp and Sulphite Workers Union and then as a Communist Party organizer in Toledo, Ohio, where he took part in the 1934 Auto-Lite strike. From 1936 to 1938 he served with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, and was afterward briefly held in an internment camp on the French border. In September 1942 he entered the U.S. Army, where he wrote hometown press releases about soldiers' families and drafted medal recommendations. Through the 1950s and 1960s he wrote feature articles for medical journals and taught Communist history and theory; he edited the Communist-initiated cultural periodical American Dialog and served on the Cultural Commission of the Communist Party USA. In 1970 he became cultural editor of the Party's newspaper, then titled the People's Daily World, and he made several trips to Cuba, writing extensively about them. He died on June 21, 1973.
