Biography
Claude Merritt was imprisoned at San Quentin State Prison during the era of California's criminal-syndicalism prosecutions, which sent more than a hundred IWW members and labor radicals to San Quentin and Folsom on one-to-fourteen-year terms. He appears on the International Labor Defense's rosters of American class-war prisoners in Labor Defender (1926-27) with inmate number 37336; like most of the rank-and-file labor prisoners of the period, little else about his case entered the historical record.
In an open letter to Warren Billings printed March 10, 1931, Tom Mooney explicitly names John Cornelison and Claude Merritt as victims of the 1922 railroad shopmen’s strike who were suffering in California penitentiaries. The letter associates Merritt specifically with the railroad strike without establishing his precise statutory charge, sentence or custody endpoints; a different offense is not inferred from Cornelison’s case. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1931/v08-n060-NY-mar-10-1931-DW-LOC.pdf#page=4
The September 8, 1930 Laisve, page 5, reproduces an International Labor Defense political-prisoner directory. Its row prints Claude Merritt, a term of life, the year 1922 in the sentencing-year column, and confinement or correspondence location San Quentin, California. This is an attributed historical directory entry; printed years and nominal terms are not exact intake dates or measured time served, and mailing boxes do not independently identify a prison. The directory contains stale or conflicting chronology, so this row does not override independently established conviction, death or release facts. Source: https://www.spauda2.org/laisve/archive/1930/1930-09-08-LAISVE.pdf#page=5
In a letter from San Quentin published in Labor Defender, October 1928, printed page 215 (PDF page 20), Claude Merritt described himself as a member of Oakland Local 735 of the Brotherhood Railway Carmen of America. He said he had been a charter member of its San Francisco local and transferred to Oakland when that local disbanded. He also reported that prisoners could write only one letter a day. These are attributed autobiographical details, not new custody endpoints.
The Behind the Bars directory on printed page 4 lists this prisoner under San Quentin State Prison, California, with life, 1922. This is an attributed historical directory entry: the year and nominal term do not establish an intake day, uninterrupted imprisonment, completed service or physical release.
