Biography
Steve Nelson was one of the most prominent American Communists of the twentieth century. Born Stjepan Mesaroš in Croatia in 1903, he emigrated to the United States as a teenager and became a CPUSA organizer in the steel and coal towns of western Pennsylvania. In 1937 he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, was wounded twice, and rose to become commissar of the brigade — making him one of the most senior surviving American veterans of the Spanish Civil War. After Spain he organized for the CPUSA in California, where the FBI later alleged he had been part of the Soviet effort to obtain information from the Manhattan Project.
Nelson was prosecuted in three parallel cases in the early 1950s. In 1952 he was convicted in Pennsylvania state court of sedition and sentenced to 20 years; that conviction was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1956 in Pennsylvania v. Nelson, the landmark ruling that federal sedition law preempted state prosecutions. In 1953 he was convicted in federal court in Pittsburgh under the Smith Act and sentenced to five years in federal prison; he served until that conviction was reversed in light of Yates v. United States in 1957. After his release he wrote one of the canonical American Communist memoirs, Steve Nelson, American Radical (1981, with James R. Barrett and Rob Ruck).
