Biography
Harry M. Wicks (Herbert Moore Wicks, 1889–1956) was a founding leader of the Communist Party of America in 1919 — a delegate to its founding convention, a member of the committee that drafted the party program, a member of its Central Executive Committee representing Portland, Oregon, and associate editor of the party organ The Communist. In April 1919 he was arrested in Spokane, Washington, for "disloyalty" after a militant strike speech, and secondary sources report he was jailed again during the November 1919 federal anti-Communist crackdown, though no trial, conviction, or sentence is on record for either arrest. From 1919 onward he was repeatedly accused of being a police informant or agent provocateur — including a 1923 charge (of which a Workers Party commission cleared him) and a 1937 expulsion from the CPUSA as an alleged spy; historian Theodore Draper found no convincing evidence for the spy charges. He later served as a Communist International representative to the Communist Party of Australia (1930–31) and died in Chicago in 1956.
