Clarence Miller

Clarence Miller (born 1906) was a 20th-century American labor activist who, as a member of the Young Communist League USA, participated in the 1926 Passaic textile strike (January 25, 1926 – March 1, 1927) and the 1929 Loray Mill strike (AKA Gastonia Strike) (March 30, 1929 – June 7, 1929), in which he and six other labor leaders were found guilty of murder.

Background

Clarence Miller was born in 1906 to "middle-class parents." He joined the Young People's Socialist League "while still in school."

1926 Passaic Strike

In 1926, Clarence Miller was a strike leader during the Passaic strike, along with Kate Gitlow (mother of Benjamin Gitlow), Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. On February 2, 1926, Miller met with Albert Weisbord, William Weinstone, Joseph Zack, and others named Kovetz, Blumkin, Baylin, and Dyaik. International Labor Defense mentioned Miller ("another of the young militants") faced probably prison term. Jack Rubinstein and Miller was held on $10,000 bail. On May 17, 1926, the case against Rubinstein and Miller was dismissed. On June 18, 1926, Miller spoke to a YCL Youth Conference in New York City.

1929 Gastonia Strike

On March 30, 1929, Fred Erwin Beal of the National Textile Workers Union led the Loray Mill strike, better known as the 1929 Gastonia Strike. In late April 1929, Miller and his wife arrived in Gastonia with CPUSA representative Jack Johnstone. On June 7, 1929, Miller was one of 16 workers arrested during the strike. Other "communists among the prisoners" included: Fred Beal, Vera Bush, Amy Schechter, and "19-year old Sophie Melvin of the Young Communist League." All 16 faced threat of the electric chair. On October 6, 1929, Miller testified about dynamiting of strike headquarters. Edith Saunders Miller, Miller's wife, testified that "she had taught the children in the strikers' tent colony to strive for a Soviet-style government of workers and farmers." She "avowed almost all of the Communist principles that Beal had carefully avoided." (In 1949, Beal wrote, "Comrade Edith Miller was addressing the Court, but she was anticipating the commendation of Stalin's lackeys in New York and Moscow." ) On October 21, 1929, seven of the Gastonia strike leaders and union members were found guilty of the murder of O.F. Aderholt, chief of police: Fred Beal, Clarence Miller, George Carter, Joseph Harrison, W.M. McGinnis, and Louis McLaughlin. Beal later noted, "It was characteristic of Southern justice that the four Yankee 'foreigners'–George Carter, Joseph Harrison, Clarence Miller, and I–were given the more severe sentences... from seventeen to twenty years of hard labor in the State prison at Raleigh." )

In a 1937 article, Beal wrote, "I could not, like Clarence Miller and so many other complaisant dream-walkers, convince myself that the suffering and futility which I saw everywhere in Stalin-land were but figments of the Capitalist imagination."In September 1931, In his 1949 memoir, he wrote: Only Clarence Miller, who was never a worker and whose connection with the Gastonia strike was accidental, blossomed out in Soviet Russia as a "Red professor" and occupied a comfortable apartment, enjoying the prosperity of Soviet bureaucracy.

On August 9, 1949, Joseph Zack Kornfeder testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) regarding Communist infiltration of American labor unions: In response to the question "Did many Americans attend the Academy of Red Professors?" he said: There were two that I know of... Sam Don, D-O-N, who later became editor of the Daily Worker, and another one was Miller, I believe Clarence Miller. After his graduation he was utilized in the apparatus of the Communist International. I don't know to what extent he became active in the American Communist Party, however. I haven't seen his name in any public activity.

Miller appeared in the documentary The Passaic Film Strike (1926).