Lewis Corey was born on October 13, 1892 in Galdo, a village south of Naples, Italy. His father, Antonio Fraina, sailed for New York when the boy was two, hoping to escape poverty and persecution for his republican views. The following year his mother, Louise Fugacelli Fraina, an illiterate peasant, joined him there with their two sons. They lived in the Italian Lower East Side of New York City. From the age of six Lewis Corey worked.
After his father died in 1907 he never again attended school.
The New York Journal hired him as a cub reporter, and agnostic and socialist groups became his college. He soon became a writer for the Daily People, the organ of the Socialist Labor party, and was appointed the party's New York organizational secretary when he was only seventeen. He broke in 1914 with the "Jesuiticism" of the SLP and its leader, Daniel De Leon, and became editor of the New Review, then the theoretical voice of the left wing in the Socialist party. He wrote under the name Louis C. Fraina.
Early in 1917, Fraina met the Russian revolutionists Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and Aleksandra Kollontai, who planned to join him in launching the monthly Class Struggle until they suddenly left New York because of the prospect of imminent revolution in Russia. During this period Fraina also edited Modern Dance Magazine; throughout his life he wrote on plays, poetry, novels, art, and music. With the outbreak of revolution in Russia, the group of left socialists in America became more active.
Fraina founded and led the Bolshevik Bureau of Information.
In 1918 he published The Social Revolution in Germany and Proletarian Revolution in Russia, which contained his translations of the first postrevolution essays of Lenin and Trotsky, with extensive commentary, and his own Revolutionary Socialism, which, in its advocacy of "mass action" and general strike, was less Leninist than it was syndicalist.
In Boston from November 1918, Fraina edited the Revolutionary Age, the organ of both left-wing socialism in America and the Communist International.
In 1919 he called and chaired the National Left Wing Conference, from which two Communist parties emerged: the Communist Labor party, headed by John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow, and the Communist party of America, which Fraina served as national editor and international secretary. In the latter capacity he was a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1920.
Factional fighting in the Communist International no doubt contributed to Fraina's departure from the movement, and when he left, he retained some party funds, possession of which led to critical attacks by his political opponents.
Corey and his family returned to New York in 1923, and he worked as a proofreader until 1929. The first item he published under the name Lewis Corey was a New Republic article of May 2, 1926, which marked his reemergence as an independent socialist, writing now on economics rather than politics. A Brookings Institution grant in 1929 enabled him to complete The House of Morgan (1931), and from 1931 to 1934 his employment as associate editor of the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences provided funds to bring out The Decline of American Capitalism (1934), his major work and a best seller. Corey resumed cautious cooperation with Communists during this period, possibly hoping his scholarship and ideas might help to renovate the party. The Crisis of the Middle Class (1935) was relevant to the popular-front policy then current, and Corey was asked to edit the April 17, 1936, issue of the New Masses on the same theme. By 1937, however, the purges in the Soviet Union decisively alienated Corey from Soviet-centered socialism. He served on the short-lived independent Marxist Quarterly, worked for six months as an economist for the Works Progress Administration in Washington, and from 1937 to 1939 was educational director for International Ladies Garment Workers Local 22 in New York.
In 1942 Corey accepted a post at Antioch College, becoming perhaps the nation's only professor of economics who had not gone to high school. He helped edit the Antioch Review, and from 1944 he worked with the Michigan Commonwealth Federation, preparing for a postwar socialist initiative that would escape the old party lines.
In 1946 this became the National Educational Committee for a New Party, with John Dewey as honorary chairman and Corey as research director.
Corey wrote Meat and Man (1950) with assistance from the Amalgamated Butcher's Workmen Union.
By July 1951, when he became educational director for the union and left Antioch, politics in the United States had swung far to the right, and the FBI began to question Corey and to threaten him with deportation under the McCarran Act. Following the mood of the times, Corey had expressed his aversion to Stalinism in such articles as "Showdown With Russia: We Must Free All Korea". But on Christmas Eve 1952 his deportation order arrived. Before it could be enforced the meat-cutters' union leadership turned him out, and he suffered a heart attack, then a fatal cerebral hemorrhage.
Corey died in New York City.
He was the first in American left-socialist circles to develop the ideas associated with Lenin in Europe, which he spread by editing the New International. Corey helped found the Union for Democratic Action and served as its research director; it subsequently became the Americans for Democratic Action. He was a founding member of the American Communist Party.
World War I split socialist groups everywhere into pro-war and anti-war, revolutionary and nationalist factions; and in America, Corey became what Theodore Draper described as the "one man who led the way to a pro-Communist Left Wing, " boldly declaring against United States involvement in The Socialist Attitude on the War (1917), which cost him a month in jail.
In 1942 he published The Unfinished Task, in which he argued: "Democracy came into the world as a revolutionary liberating economic (and political) force; we must renew the force. "
His final position appears in notes for an uncompleted work, Toward an Understanding of America: "A proposal for a socialist mixed economy retains all the democratic procedures and values; it retains free enterprise where it is still functional; it is a synthesis of liberal democracy and liberal socialism. "
In Moscow, Fraina met--and three weeks later married--Esther Nyesvishskaya, who worked for the Comintern. In 1922, he was out of the Communist movement, living in Mexico with his wife and newborn daughter. Fraina never discussed these years in detail, but he later said his marriage and paternity allowed him to experience "a childhood I had never known. "
