[1] He was never able to attend high school or college — despite a lifetime career path that saw Fraina working as the education director of major unions, assuming a place as an author and public intellectual, and teaching economics at the university level for a decade.

From an early age, Fraina was engrossed with the ideas of political radicalism and freethought, publishing his first essay, "Shelley, the Atheist Poet," in the agnostic journal The Truth Seeker in 1909.

He made streetcorner speeches in New York City every weekend in good weather, learning the art of public oratory in the trenches and mastering the loud and dramatic form of presentation needed to captivate strangers when speaking from a soapbox.

[7] Fraina's most important journalistic task while on the staff of The Daily People was covering the 1913 Lawrence Textile Strike, one of the pivotal events of the American labor movement of that decade.

[8] This strike, in which members of some two dozen nationalities stayed out for weeks to resist a wage reduction, facing violence and arrest, was deeply influential upon Fraina.

This decision was bitterly opposed by the Socialist Party of America, which at its 1917 Emergency National Convention passed a militant document pledging continued opposition and resistance to the effort.

[11] The book, entitled The Proletarian Revolution in Russia, gave English-speaking readers their first glimpse at the ideas of the Russian Communist Party and spurred the desire for emulation on the part of many American radicals.

[11] Early in 1918, five radical Russian groups united with the English-speaking Socialist Propaganda League with which Fraina was associated to form the American Bolshevik Bureau of Information.

As arguably the top English-speaking leader of the new organization, Fraina was elected temporary chairman at the opening of the Founding Convention of the Communist Party of America on September 1, 1919, and delivered the keynote address to that body.

[14] Although apparently not tipped off by Nosovitsky himself, Amsterdam police authorities were well aware of the Comintern's secret gathering in the city, and bugged the conference room with a dictaphone machine—a device discovered by delegate Michael Borodin on the second day of the proceedings.

This information was conveyed to Nuorteva, a factional opponent of Fraina and the CPA, who levied these suspicions publicly in the pages of the Socialist Party daily, the New York Call.

[18] Fraina made the case that Mexico (as well as the rest of Latin America) represented a colonial base of American capitalism, and that in the fight to overthrow the latter, communist revolutionary movements should be sponsored in the former.

[21] Even when Reed succumbed to typhus on October 17, 1920, Fraina was not selected to join the Comintern's directive body, perhaps owing to a residual aura of suspicion related to discredited espionage charges against him.

[1] Before making the trip to Mexico, Fraina, Katayama, and "Scott" made a stop in New York City, where they attempted without success to broker a unity agreement between the two feuding American communist Parties.

[23] The Comintern representatives established an office as the Latin American headquarters of the Profintern and founded two newspapers, El Trabajador (The Worker) and Boletín Comunista (Communist Bulletin).

[29] Fraina reported to the Comintern approvingly of the "sobriety and steadiness" of the delegates, who avoided the "flamboyant, hysterical" behavior characteristic of some Mexican political gatherings.

[30] Fraina came to feel overwhelmed by the pressing demand of the few activists in the tiny CPM for immediate revolution, however — a vision that for a long time he had realistically dismissed — and he appealed to the Comintern for the dispatch of a veteran Russian militant to Mexico to guide the organization.

Disillusioned with the incessant factionalism that seemed to render the fledgling communist movement impotent, Fraina and his wife and baby daughter returned to the United States from Mexico in 1923.

[31] The family settled in New York City where Fraina — temporarily adopting the pseudonym "Charles Joseph Skala" — took a job as a clerk in a dry good store for $12 a week, while his wife went to work in a sweatshop.

"[37] Corey seems to have had no qualms about the political role of the Communist Party, eagerly signing the manifesto of the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford, thereby endorsing the CPUSA's 1932 Presidential ticket.

[42] This ideological proximity was emphasized when Corey was chosen to edit a special issue of the CPUSA literary monthly The New Masses thematically focused upon the middle class.

[42] Corey's political path took another detour in the latter part of 1936, when he moved again away from the CPUSA's orbit and began an association with the dissident Communist movement around expelled party leader Jay Lovestone.

With secret police terror beginning to rage in the Soviet Union from 1936 onward, the Lovestone political organization's criticism of the USSR became increasingly harsh and its appreciation of American institutions more pronounced — a perspective which Corey himself shared.

[45] He left that post to assume the position of education director of Local 22 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), located in New York City.

[45] Coming on the heels of the 1937–1939 secret police terror, the apparent duplicity of Joseph Stalin in negotiating a peace pact with Adolf Hitler moved Corey away from the communist movement for a second time — permanently.

[46] Lewis Corey formally broke with circles that were supportive of the Russian way to communism in 1940, disillusioned with the atrocities committed by the regime headed by Joseph Stalin, by the CPUSA's sugarcoating and endorsing unpalatable Soviet realities, and by the organizational impotence and factionalism of the non-Communist left.

[47] Corey's public declaration of his alienation from Marxism came in a three part series published in the liberal news weekly The Nation, in which he declared: The bitter admission must be made that all variants of Marxism, "revolutionary" and "reformist," meeting the pragmatic test of history, have revealed fatal shortcomings.... All [Marx's] creative originality was congealed into a system which had a "Marxist" explanation for everything..., which was unjust to Marx himself because the system denied his emphasis on the historical relativity of ideas....

[49] In 1942, Corey spoke at Antioch College, a private liberal arts school located at Yellow Springs, Ohio at a conference held on the topic of post-war reconstruction.

[47] Both the anti-communist right and Communist Party members and fellow travelers took aim at Corey, with leaflets circulated and a story run in the Chicago Tribune entitled "Red Teaching at Antioch.

His father had come to the United States without obtaining naturalization papers and young Louis had decided against filing later due to his 1917 conviction as a conscientious objector.