Biography
Morris Becker was an anarchist and a vegetarian from New York, New York. Morris Becker was sentenced to a year and eight months in prison. He served in Atlanta Penitentiary from June 19, 1917, to July 25, 1917, and from September 12, 1917, to December 27, 1918. Becker was deported after being rearrested in December 1918 for failing to register for the draft.
From Kenyon Zimmer's Red Scare Deportees index (kenyonzimmer.com, compiled from INS deportation case files): Supporter of Alexander Berkman’s The Blast and participated in the No-Conscription League. One of the first individuals arrested under the Selective Service Act of 1917, he received a sentence of one year and eight months in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for interfering with the draft. He described himself as “a man without a country,” an anarchist, and “an advocate of peace and not of force.” Deported on the Buford on December 21, 1919.
In Petrograd he secured factory employment but complained of poor conditions, prompting accusations that he was a “pampered bourgeois” nostalgic for “capitalist America.” After a decade of silence, he sent a coded letter to Alexander Berkman in 1931.
The congressional digest records Morris Becker’s immigration-arrest entry at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary on October 27, 1917, and includes him among the Buford deportees who left the United States on December 21, 1919. This immigration record is distinct from the underlying draft prosecution and does not establish a new prison admission or complete custody timeline.
Congressional hearings, Appendix B, printed p. 148; printed p. 155.
