McAlister Coleman

McAlister Coleman (July 3, 1888 – May 18, 1950) was an American journalist, author, and political activist on behalf of socialism and organized labor. Coleman gained public notice as a leading leftist critic of the Lusk Committee of the New York State Legislature in 1920. He was subsequently a frequent candidate for public office on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America. Coleman is today best remembered as an early biographer of Eugene V. Debs as well as the author of a 1943 work of social history, Men and Coal.

Biography

Early years

McAlister Coleman was born July 3, 1888, in New York City. His father, John Caldwell Coleman, was a successful attorney and prominent figure in liberal New York Republican Party political circles.

Coleman enrolled at Columbia University in New York City, from which he graduated in 1909. before remarrying Dr. Ruth Fox in 1931.

In 1920 Coleman was arrested in Meriden, Connecticut for conducting a series of socialist street meetings without a public permit. Convicted and levied a nominal $25 fine, Coleman appealed the case all the way to the Connecticut Supreme Court as a test of freedom of speech rights, ultimately seeing his conviction overturned with the finding that state and local ordinances giving public officials control over citizens' permission to speak were unconstitutional. He traveled to West Virginia in 1925 to cover the bitter union organizing campaign there, suffering incarceration along with 200 others after being arrested at one non-union mine.

New York Socialist Senatorial candidate McAlister Coleman shared the podium with novelist Upton Sinclair and civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois on behalf of Norman Thomas for president in 1928.

Coleman was frequently a candidate for public office. In the fall of 1928 Coleman stood as the nominee of the Socialist Party for United States Senate in New York state. Coleman also ran as the Socialist nominee in the New York State Senate in 1930, for United States Congress from New York in both 1937 and 1938, and once again running for US Senate, this time from New Jersey, in 1940.

Coleman was a close political associate of six-time Socialist candidate for President of the United States Norman Thomas. Together with Thomas, Coleman sought move aside the so-called "Old Guard" of the party by working to develop an alternative Militant faction, youth-oriented and tending towards particularly radical political rhetoric. To this end, Coleman is credited by historian Jack Ross as the author of the first explicit document of the Militant faction's ideas, a 1931 pamphlet called A Militant Program for the Socialist Party of America: Socialism in Our Time.

Later years

In the late 1930s, Coleman moved to Newark, New Jersey and took a position working for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as its publicity director.

Generally a publicist rather than a scholar or a historian, Coleman was the author of a broad array of pamphlets and magazine articles, but few longer works. One notable exception was his wartime magnum opus on coal miners and coal mining, Men and Coal, published by Farrar and Rinehart in the fall of 1943. Coleman provided a sympathetic portrait of the miners and their daily struggle to earn a living in the mining industry, while providing a mixed review of the personality and performance of mine workers' labor leader John L. Lewis, both criticizing him for instability and opportunism while acknowledging his achievements in organizing miners for higher wages and better working conditions.