Biography
Louis C. Fraina was an Italian-born American Marxist theorist, journalist, and editor who emigrated to the United States as a small child. A political opponent of conscription, he was arrested in 1917 for anti-draft activity, convicted, and served a 30-day jail sentence in 1919. In September 1919 he co-founded the Communist Party of America and became its first International Secretary; in January 1920 he was indicted with 84 other CPA leaders during the Palmer Red Scare on a charge of conspiracy to cause armed revolution, though he was abroad on a Communist International mission and was never tried on it. He later broke with Communism and reemerged in the 1930s as the prominent economist and writer Lewis Corey; the U.S. government moved to deport him under the McCarran Act in 1950–1952, but he died in 1953 before the order was carried out.
