Biography
Samuel Lipman was 21 at the time of his arrest; the lone Marxist socialist (rather than anarchist) among the Abrams defendants and a worker in the fur trade. Authored the English-language leaflet — the milder of the two leaflets at issue. Convicted Oct 23, 1918 under the Sedition Act; sentenced to 20 years and $1,000 fine. Deported to Soviet Russia Nov 24, 1921. There became a Communist Party member and economist; arrested in Stalin's Great Purge and reportedly executed in 1937.
From Kenyon Zimmer's Red Scare Deportees index (kenyonzimmer.com, compiled from INS deportation case files): Lipman belonged to the Socialist Party of America as well as New York’s anarchist Frayhayt Group, and identified as a leftwing socialist and Marxist rather than an anarchist. A pacifist and vegetarian strongly influenced by Leo Tolstoy, he lived with anarchist Ethel Bernstein, his common-law wife. In 1918 he was arrested with others for distributing leaflets opposing US intervention in the Russian Civil War and sentenced to twenty years under the Espionage Act. While imprisoned he became disillusioned with Tolstoy and falsely claimed anarchist beliefs in hopes of deportation. After losing the landmark Supreme Court free-speech case Abrams v. United States, he was deported November 23, 1921.
In Russia he married Bernstein, studied agronomy, and became chairman of the Department of Economic Geography at the University of the Toilers of the East. In 1928 he applied to join the Communist Party. During Stalin’s purges in the 1930s he was executed.
Richard Polenberg’s 1994 study identifies Francis Gordon Caffey as the prosecutor in the Abrams defendants’ sedition trial. Journal of Supreme Court History, 1994, printed page 26.
