Biography
Maurice Becker was a radical artist for The Masses who, as a World War I conscientious objector, was court-martialed and sentenced to twenty-five years' hard labor at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He took part in a prisoners' strike there before his release. His imprisonment was recalled in a first-person letter published in New Masses in 1934.
Roger Baldwin's introduction to Becker's prison lithographs confirms that the drawings grew from Becker's own Leavenworth imprisonment and depicts the clash between military authority and conscientious objectors. Baldwin describes objectors leading a prison strike and enduring isolation, shackling and bread-and-water punishment; the general treatment is not assigned to Becker as a separately proven individual event. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/wm/highres/v4n08-jun-1925-6-gra-WM.pdf#page=14
Self-portrait by Maurice Becker. The original reproduction bears the mark “KATO.H”. Borders cropped from the original scan.
The dictionary identifies the artist and World War I conscientious objector Maurice Becker as born in Nizhni-Novgorod on January 4, 1889. This supplies the missing day and month previously represented by a year-only placeholder. Its broad 1975 death year does not replace the existing exact death date.
Jacob Rader Marcus, editor, and Judith M. Daniels, associate editor, The Concise Dictionary of American Jewish Biography, printed page 38 (PDF page 44); SHA256 bd387e6e61df8c078e5bb346575f565127c3519959ef5fcee3ad44d57b2ef146.
