Robert Minor

[3] Despite the notable family forefathers, Bob Minor was not brought up with a silver spoon in his mouth — rather he was the product of what one historian has called "the hard-up, run-down middle class," living in an "unpainted frontier cottage in San Antonio.

[4] Minor left home two years later, going to work at a variety of different jobs, including time spent as a sign painter, a carpenter, a farm worker, and a railroad laborer.

[5] In 1904, at the age of twenty, Robert Minor was hired as an assistant stereotypist and handyman at the San Antonio Gazette, where he developed his artistic talent in his spare time.

[8] Minor had saved several hundred dollars earned in St. Louis and decided that he wanted to go to Paris to attend art school to perfect his craft.

[9] Minor spent the rest of his time in Paris studying art on his own and taking part in the left wing labor movement through the Socialist Party of France.

The year 1914 saw Minor in the unusual position of being paid but unable to work, with an old contract he had signed with the New York World continuing to pay him a salary merely to keep him from drawing for other papers.

[10] However, with the outbreak of hostilities in August Minor began to make a series of aggressive and provocative cartoons attacking both sides of the European conflict for their imperialism.

While The World initially began to use these cartoons, it was not long before Minor came to the banks of the Rubicon, when his employer demanded that the artist begin to draw pro-war panels.

Minor's radical cartoons would later provide fodder for the United States government's prosecution of The Masses for alleged violation of the Espionage Act of 1917, a legal assault which would eventually lead to the demise of the magazine when Wilson's administration banned it from the U.S. Mail.

There he became deeply involved in the defense campaign of radical trade unionists Thomas Mooney and Warren Billings in their highly publicized legal case accusing them of bombing of the 1916 San Francisco "Preparedness Day" parade.

Minor authored several pamphlets in 1917 and 1918 and spoke to a wide range of audiences about the "frame-up" being perpetrated on the radical trade unionists through their convictions.

While there, he met Vladimir Lenin and wrote anti-war propaganda for distribution to English-speaking troops involved in the invasion of Soviet Russia.

While in Paris in 1919, Minor was arrested and charged with treason for advising French railway workers to strike against the shipment of munitions to interventionist forces in Soviet Russia.

[15] After the merger of the UCP with the old CPA in May 1921, Minor, using his underground pseudonym of "Ballister", was sent to Soviet Russia as the representative of the newly unified party to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI).

This convention was raided by local and Michigan state authorities, acting in concert with the Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Department of Justice, who had an undercover agent sitting as a delegate.

From 1923 to 1924, Minor sat on the Executive Committee of the Friends of Soviet Russia, the American affiliate of the Comintern's Workers International Relief organization.

"[17] On March 6, 1930, Minor was part of a great series of demonstrations of the unemployed conducted around the United States under the guidance of the Communist Party.

Minor was arrested at the demonstration held in Union Square in New York City, a rally which ended in a riot pitting marchers and police.

[13] In 1945, as a member of the CPUSA's governing National Committee, Minor dissociated himself from the discredited Browder, but he was nonetheless relegated to the role of Washington correspondent of The Daily Worker.

[13] Bob Minor suffered a heart attack in 1948 and was bedridden during the time of McCarthyism when his fellow leaders of the American Communist Party were arrested and imprisoned.