Robert Minor was an American cartoonist and radical politician.
Background
Robert Berkeley "Bob" Minor was born on July 15, 1884, in San Antonio, Texas. He was the son of Robert Berkeley Minor, an improvident lawyer who later became a respected judge, and Routez Houston Minor, a relative of Sam Houston, president of the Republic of Texas.
Education
Minor's formal education was limited to four years of the grammar school. In 1912, Minor attended the Académie Julien.
Career
Minor had held jobs in a railroad office and as a Western Union delivery boy, sign-maker, and reporter-artist for the San Antonio Gazette before he was twenty. In 1904, he moved to St. Louis, where he worked for the Sanders Engraving Company and later as a cartoonist for Joseph Pulitzer's St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Under the influence of Leo Caplan, a physician and Socialist, Minor joined the Socialist party in 1907, but he soon showed a greater interest in the less structured, freewheeling anarchist wing of American radicalism. On a trip to New York in 1910, Minor met Mark Sullivan, later the editor of Collier's, who introduced him to Theodore Roosevelt, who was then building the Bull Moose party. He also met and liked the radical artists Henrik Glintenkamp, Art Young, and Boardman Robinson, the nucleus of the group that was to found the Masses. But when offered a post with Collier's, Minor preferred to return to St. Louis. When the New York World, another Pulitzer paper, tried to hire him, he insisted on studying in Paris first. In the Académie Julien, he met major French and expatriate artists and also became acquainted with the French anarcho-syndicalist movement. After ten months abroad, in 1913, Minor became the World's chief cartoonist. His work a broad-stroke, almost passionate use of crayon and brush was particularly effective during that paper's antiwar period, but when the World took a pro-Allies stand he was "put on the ice, " and then, on the basis of his having done a cartoon for the anarchist paper Mother Earth, fired. In 1915, he began drawing for a Socialist daily, the New York Call. The same year, Minor went back to Europe to cover the Eastern Front with John Reed and Boardman Robinson, working both for the Call and for the Newspaper Enterprise Association, which syndicated his drawings and articles. He also went to Mexico in 1916, to cover General John Pershing's expedition against Francisco "Pancho" Villa. In 1916, Minor visited Upton Sinclair in California and became immersed in the case of Tom Mooney, the leader of the streetcar workers who was charged with complicity in the bombing of the 1916 Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco. Minor tried unsuccessfully to interest Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, and his chief writer, Lincoln Steffens, in the Mooney case, a cause célèbre at home and abroad. In March 1918, Minor went to Europe again, this time with credentials from the Philadelphia Daily Ledger. He visited Moscow for the first time and had great difficulty reconciling his anarchist beliefs with Bolshevik behavior since Lenin had by then dissolved the Constituent Assembly and had made short shrift of his critics among Socialist revolutionaries and anarchists. Through Boris Reinstein (a one-time follower of Daniel De Leon's American Socialist Labor party) Minor was introduced to Lenin, who was apparently much taken with him and used Minor's offices to publicize the Bolsheviks' willingness to settle czarist war debts in return for American business concessions.
Returning from the Soviet Union Minor witnessed in Germany the suppression of the Spartakists the revolutionary followers of Karl Liebknecht in which Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were arrested and murdered by the followers of Gustav Noske, a Majority Socialist. He himself was arrested in Paris and almost executed by United States military in Coblenz on the charge of undermining the morale of American soldiers. Steffens successfully interceded on his behalf, through the offices of Colonel Edward Mandell House, adviser to President Woodrow Wilson. Minor went back to California and again took up the Mooney case; at the same time he spoke and wrote on the Russian Revolution. In 1920, he joined the newly formed American Communist movement. He was soon sufficiently high in the Communist hierarchy to be a defendant in the trials that resulted from the Federal Bureau of Investigation raids, in August 1922, of the meetings of underground American Communist leaders with Communist international representatives, which took place at Bridgman, Michigan. By this time, Minor had completely abandoned his art for politics. He was editor of the Daily Worker from 1928 to 1930.
After the famous March 6, 1930, demonstration in New York's Union Square, he was arrested for illegal assembly, together with William Z. Foster, Israel Amter, and two others, and was sentenced to a term of six months to three years. After serving six months and eight days, he was released following an operation for a nearly fatal attack of appendicitis. In 1932, he ran unsuccessfully as the Communist candidate for governor of New York, and the next year for mayor of New York City. In 1934, he was active in Maryland civil rights cases, and in April 1935, he was kidnapped and beaten in the desert outside Gallup, N. Mex. , where he had gone to publicize a miners' strike. In late 1936, after running for a New York seat in the United States Senate, he went to Spain, nominally as the Daily Worker's war correspondent but more importantly as his party's commissar in the International Brigades. Returning home, he spent the latter half of 1937 campaigning on behalf of the Spanish Republicans. When, in September 1939, American Communists had to redefine their foreign policy following the Soviet-German nonaggression pact, it was Minor who delivered the report to the national committee meeting in Chicago. When the party's general secretary, Earl Browder, went to jail in 1940, Minor became acting general secretary.
During the last three years of the war, Minor's columns in the Daily Worker devotedly publicized and praised the new and unorthodox policies of his mentor, Browder, often to the point of exaggeration. When, for example, Browder proposed postwar cooperation on behalf of Soviet-American comity, Minor stated this possibility as ideological doctrine. But when Moscow rebuked Browder in the spring of 1945, Minor turned strongly against everything he had previously zealously espoused and in the process lost credibility. Minor's decline in the party's hierarchy coincided, in the postwar years, with his physical deterioration. He tried, as the southern correspondent of the Daily Worker, based in Washington, D. C. , to refocus on the civil rights issues that had gained him such attention in the mid-1930's. In 1948, he was associated with the defense of the party's leadership, both in the trials of Communist leaders under the Smith Act of 1940 and in the Dennis case, which sustained their convictions. By 1951, as the party's leaders went to jail, Minor was virtually immobilized by illness and could no longer as he had a decade before fulfill supportive or emergency leadership roles. He died in Ossining, New York, the following year.
Achievements
Politics
Minor was a member of the party's delegation to the Communist International from 1922 to 1924, and during the early 1920's edited and contributed to the Liberator, successor to the Masses. One of his major preoccupations was "the Negro question, " which especially interested him since he was a southerner. In 1924, at the time of Marcus Garvey's "back to Africa" movement, Minor published several articles (in the Daily Worker) on the problems of American blacks. These were pioneer efforts for American Communists and were reprinted with respectful appreciation by the New York Amsterdam News, a leading Harlem publication. Minor did not, however, limit himself to journalism or to international Communist conclaves. As one of his party's more authentic figures, he was active in early efforts, in January and March 1930, to organize the unemployed.
Membership
a member of the CPUSA's governing National Committee
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Minor is a study in extremes. A truly gifted and powerful cartoonist, he renounced art for politics. He made this gesture of total subservience to politics after years as an anarchist despising and denouncing politics. But he could not transfer his genius from art to politics. The stirring drawings were replaced by boring and banal speeches. He had none of the gifts of the natural politician, his stock in trade was limited to platitudes and slogans. The wild man, tamed, became a political hack. If as an anarchist he had believed that politics was a filthy business, as a Communist he still seemed to believe it was — only now it was his business. " - The historian Theodore Draper
Connections
Minor had been married thrice: in 1915 to Pearl Bazarie, from whom he was divorced in 1919; and in 1920 to Mary Heaton Vorse, a writer, from whom he was divorced in 1922. In 1923, Minor married an artist, Lydia Gibson, who was not a Communist but who had been an active suffragette and had figured in the New York artistic-bohemian world.