Biography
Sam Scarlett, a machinist and IWW lecturer from Chicago, Illinois, was convicted at the mass IWW trial in Chicago, sentenced to twenty years in prison and fined $20,000. He served in Leavenworth Penitentiary from September 7, 1918, to January 31, 1923. Scarlett's sentence was commuted when he agreed to be deported to England and swore never to return to the United States. In 1939, the FBI reopened its files on Scarlett when it was rumored that he had been arrested in Canada for helping to publish certain articles in The Clarion, a pro-communist newspaper in Toronto. Incredibly, the FBI continued its search for Scarlett from 1940, when he was rumored to have died, until 1959, simply to confirm his death. Scarlett's FBI record, released in 1990, was riddled with withheld and deleted pages.
From Kenyon Zimmer's Red Scare Deportees index (kenyonzimmer.com, compiled from INS deportation case files): Originally a member of the International Association of Machinists, he was radicalized and joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1911, becoming a prominent speaker and organizer reportedly arrested about 160 times. Among these arrests was his detention during the 1916 strike on the Mesabi Iron Range on murder charges that were later dropped. A defendant in the federal IWW trial of 1917–1918, he was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment and a $20,000 fine. His sentence was commuted in 1923 on condition of deportation, and he was deported to England in April of that year.
That August he emigrated to Canada and resumed organizing for the IWW in the Vancouver area, especially among miners. Canadian authorities attempted to deport him in 1924 using evidence supplied by US immigration officials, but the case was dropped. In 1931 he joined the Communist Party of Canada. He became an organizer for the party’s Mine Workers’ Union of Canada and was arrested in connection with the violent Estevan strike of October 1931, receiving a one-year sentence that damaged his health. Around 1938 he became chairman of the party in Toronto and of its newspaper The Clarion. When the party was outlawed in 1940, Scarlett lived underground and clandestinely entered the United States, where he remained illegally until his death in 1941.
