McAlister Coleman

Coleman is today best remembered as an early biographer of Eugene V. Debs as well as the author of a 1943 work of social history, Men and Coal.

[1] His father, John Caldwell Coleman, was a successful attorney and prominent figure in liberal New York Republican Party political circles.

[2] In 1920, Coleman entered the public eye as a prominent critic of the Lusk Committee of the New York state legislature — an investigative agency established in March 1919 which conducted a series of raids on the Russian Soviet Government Bureau (the de facto Soviet embassy), the Rand School of Social Science, and other radical institutions in New York City.

Coleman was the editor of a March 1920 report entitled The Truth About the Lusk Committee, which charged that the Lusk Committee and its Assistant Counsel and leading light Archibald E. Stevenson had accomplished little more than aiding the arrest and conviction of Big Jim Larkin and Benjamin Gitlow and two hapless Finnish language newspaper editors and spur on the widely condemned expulsion of five elected Socialist legislators from the New York State Assembly, all the while illegally overspending its legislative appropriation.

[1] From the early 1920s onward, Coleman was active in the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Together with Thomas, Coleman sought move aside the so-called "Old Guard" of the party by working to develop an alternative Militant faction, youth-oriented and tending towards particularly radical political rhetoric.

[12] Coleman provided a sympathetic portrait of the miners and their daily struggle to earn a living in the mining industry, while providing a mixed review of the personality and performance of mine workers' labor leader John L. Lewis, both criticizing him for instability and opportunism while acknowledging his achievements in organizing miners for higher wages and better working conditions.