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John was born on October 31, 1906 Itzak Rijock in Brailov, Ukraine, and immigrated to the United States in 1923 with his father, Zalik, and other members of his family.
As an adult he rarely used his family name, preferring Steuben, and occasionally adopting other pseudonyms such as Harold Schulsberg, John Stevenson, John Stevens, and David Brown, when engaged in covert organizing efforts. Little is known of Steuben's early life.
He went to a general high school but he had little more than a sixth-grade education.
Steuben is variously reported to have worked as a house-wrecker, metal polisher, sheet metal worker, and machinist in his early days in New York City. In the early 1930's he became a full-time organizer for the Steel and Metal Workers Industrial Union, an affiliate of the Trade Union Unity League, the Communist-led union federation established in 1929.
In accord with his primary commitment to union-building, when the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) set up the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in 1936, Steuben almost immediately resigned his party post (but not his membership) and became a full-time SWOC organizer.
Given responsibility for the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Plant, he spent months quietly building the union, largely through house-to-house visits. The steel workers' organizing drive of 1936-1937 culminated in the hard-fought but unsuccessful "Little Steel" Strike against Bethlehem, Republic, Inland, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube in May 1937.
Steuben played a leading role, particularly in the dramatic events of June 19, when two strikers were killed and forty-two injured in a riot at the entrance to the Republic mill in Youngstown.
In April 1938, however, he was purged from the SWOC's staff as part of the union's effort to cut cost - and Communist influence. After his dismissal, Steuben returned to New York City. His study of the American labor movement in World War I was published as Labor in Wartime (1940).
Most of his writings, including Strike Strategy (1950), dealt perceptively with concrete problems facing labor organizers but lacked theoretical sophistication. Meanwhile, he continued to participate in unionizing drives, devoting much of his energy to the fledgling New York hotel unions. This work was interrupted in 1943, when Steuben was naturalized and entered the army for a two-year stint that included a tour with the infantry in New Guinea.
After a medical discharge, he resumed his hotel-organizing work and was elected secretary-treasurer of the Hotel Front Service Employees Union.
In 1949, however, he lost his bid for leadership and left hotel union politics. Having been divorced earlier, Steuben married another hotel organizer, Lee Candea, in 1950. That year he became editor of March of Labor, a new monthly aimed at left-wing trade unionists.
His usual exuberance and dedication attracted talented volunteers who helped produce an "unusually slick and lively" labor publication. But the success of March of Labor was short-lived because of inadequate funds, Steuben's poor health, and the cold war climate.
In June 1935 Steuben suffered the first of a series of crippling heart attacks, and by the spring of 1954 he was forced to retire from active work on the magazine. His physical decline, along with the demise of March of Labor, was accelerated by government harassment, ranging from denaturalization proceedings (1952), to surveillance by the FBI, and hearings before the House.
When the Soviet-installed Hungarian regime threatened to order the execution of strikers in January 1957, he felt compelled to speak out against this attack on "the inalienable right of free men to organize and strike. "
In a front-page interview in the New York Times, he told of his disillusionment with the Soviet government, and urged American Communists to "repudiate everything that smacks of Stalinism and chart a course on the basis of the true interests of American workers and the American people. "
Steuben died on May 9, 1957 in Flemington, New York.
John Steuben was active in the American labor movement in the 1930s. He was an organizer for the Communist-run Steel and Metal Workers Industrial Union (1930s) and played a major role in the "Little Steel" Strike (1936–37). After serving in World War II, he edited March of Labor (1950–54) and published Strike Strategy (1950).
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Having been a Communist party activist since the mid-1920's, Steuben in 1934 was chosen party section organizer for the steel-making region centered in Youngstown, Ohio. But he was never content with merely holding a party position; he preferred direct union organizing, disdaining party bureaucrats without practical field experience as mere "functionaries. "
Although he had little more than a sixth-grade education, he was widely respected for his erudition and gained a reputation as an expert on the American labor movement through his articles in the Communist press and his lectures at Communist party and workers' schools.
A staunch supporter of the Soviet Union, Steuben found his faith shaken by Khrushchev's revelations in February 1956 of excesses of Stalinism. He privately resolved to "live out my few remaining years in agony and silence. "
His friends, however, called him "Shorty" because of his five foot, one inch height.
Quotes from others about the person
Steuben, recalled Harold Ruttenberg, "had taken control. He was the boss man, and he negotiated the settlements and the police withdrawal. "
Despite his lifelong dedication to militant trade unionism, Steuben, wrote Len De Caux, a former coworker, "got little tribute when he died - too soon after a side-switching statement to be shriven by his old side, or hailed by the other side. "
His marriage to Frances Nagy, a Youngstown native, assured him of local credibility, and his engaging personality helped him to win converts. Having been divorced earlier, Steuben married another hotel organizer, Lee Candea, in 1950.
