Biography
Saul Wellman was a Spanish Civil War veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a wounded U.S. Army veteran of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, and the postwar chairman of the Michigan district of the Communist Party USA. The combination of Lincoln Brigade and Bronze Star paratrooper made him one of the most decorated American veterans the Smith Act prosecutions would target.
Indicted in 1952 with five other Michigan-area Communists in the Detroit case, he was convicted at trial in 1954 and sentenced to five years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine. He served at Lewisburg and at the Federal Correctional Institution at Milan, Michigan, before being released on bond pending appeal. The conviction was vacated in 1957 in light of Yates v. United States and the indictment was dismissed in 1958 when the government declined to retry. After his release Wellman remained a left organizer in Detroit and worked as a printer; in 1979 he won a federal lawsuit against the Veterans Administration for the medical care it had refused him during his prison years on the grounds that he was a Communist.
