Biography
Marcus Graham (the pen name of Shmuel Marcus) was an anarchist editor — of the Anarchist Soviet Bulletin (1919), later Free Society and The Road to Freedom, and, in the 1930s, the Los Angeles paper MAN! A Journal of the Anarchist Ideal and Movement. A Romanian-Jewish immigrant born in Dorohoi in 1893, he refused on principle to disclose his birthplace or cooperate with immigration authorities, and the government spent two decades trying to deport him. Arrested during the 1919 Red Scare for distributing the Anarchist Soviet Bulletin, he was held about six months on Ellis Island while officials tried to establish his country of origin; a deportation order was issued, but he was released rather than deported when Russia, Mexico, and Canada all refused to accept him. That dormant 1919 edict was revived in 1936; immigration officers raided the MAN! office on October 6, 1937, and Judge Leon R. Yankovich finally dismissed the seventeen-year-old order on January 14, 1938. In June 1940 Graham lost a contempt appeal and was sentenced to six months (or until he agreed to answer immigration inspectors' questions about his age and birthplace). He was never deported. He died in Manchester, New Hampshire in December 1985.
