A remarkable life lived in just 25 too-short years. Stephen Graham (Grahovac) was born to Croatian peasants, emigrated as a child to Ohio, became homeless, went to jail, radicalized by Sacco and Vanzetti, joined the Communist Party, went South and was arrested for “inciting the Negroes to insurrection against the white population,” killed while at work.

‘Stephen Graham Buried With Communist Honors’ by Edward Newhouse from the Daily Worker. Vol. 10 No. 197. August 17, 1933.

Comrades Pay Respects to Organizer Who Was Electrocuted in Sweat Shop

NEW YORK. Aug. 16. Flanked by the honor guard of the Red Front, the body of Stephen Graham lay in state today at the Jugoslav Workers Hall, which was slowly filling up with the hushed comrades and relatives of the fighting Communist organizer, electrocuted on the job by a faulty base-plug.

He had been well on the way toward lining up his fellow-workers at the Vita-Bran corporation, 841 Tiffany Avenue, for a struggle against that factory’s killing pace and $7 a week wages when the end came.

Exhausted at the end of a cruel day’s work, his hand wandered over the plug and it was all over the moment he fell. After efforts to revive him were abandoned, the body was shipped to the morgue where qualified people agreed that Graham’s death was hastened by his system’s weakening under the torrid heat of the basement room.

Graham was young, only 25. His father, the Croatian peasant John Grahovac, brought him to Dayton, Ohio, in 1920. His mother had died back in the old country and Grahovac, who worked at laborers’ jobs, as longshoreman and steel mill hand, couldn’t afford to feed another mouth. He sent the boy out to shift for himself.

Stephen got in with a gang of young toughs who roamed the Dayton suburbs. They stole planks from a lumber yard, scraps from the steel yards, selling them or swapping them for sandwiches. The gang was caught and Stephen didn’t know the answers. He was sent to the reformatory for six months and when he buddied up with another inmate to attempt a break, his sentence was stretched to a year and a half.

Some of these experiences Graham later incorporated into letters which ran in the Daily Worker’s correspondence columns.

In 1926 he moved to Cleveland where he worked in the forges and mills, alternately as heater, shear helper and drill press operator. He finally secured what was a comparatively soft berth at Thompson Steel Products where he made $1.10 an hour.

The Sacco-Vanzetti case flashed across the nation’s headlines and took hold of the thoughtful young machinist. He had been an easy-going youngster, a crack harmonica player, one of the boys who could hold his own at cards or in a crap game. But the way he had of looking into things, brought home the full significance of the tragedy.

August 7, 1927, Stephen Graham laid down his tools in response to the call for a general strike by the Defense Committee. He was the only man in his factory to do so and was accordingly fired–the first in a long series of discharges for radical activity.

His mind was made up. He wanted to join something and he had an idea New York was the center of things. He came here and signed up with the International Labor Defense and the Young Communist League.

Stephen organized a Communist Party nucleus in a Brooklyn factory. He got subs for the Daily Worker and Labor Defender. He was active in Gastonia Relief and Defense work. When the Party sent him into the South, he got colonized in the Southern Spring Factory in Norfolk, Va. Here he worked four months before they caught on and fired him.

Graham didn’t stop there. He issued a leaflet calling a meeting of the factory workers to discuss conditions and organize. The men were Negroes. 150 of them came in a body.

Two dicks came too and waited until after the meeting, when they cornered the speaker.

“You got no right calling n***rs to meetings,” said one.

“You ain’t fit to associate even with n***rs,” said the other.

Stephen was brought up on the specific charge of “inciting the Negroes to insurrection against the white population”, later converted to “being a member of an organization that advocates the forcible overthrow of the U.S. government.”

The I.L.D. fought and defeated both charges.

He came North again and pitched into Party work within several hospitals which employed him in the food department. This brought him into the work of the Food Workers Industrial Union. He got the job on the candy-cutting machine in the factory which was to be the scene of his death. Only a few days before the accident he issued the leaflet which was to initiate the actual organization of the miserably exploited men and young girls. Our comrade’s record speaks for him.

Stephen Graham will be missed. Others must carry on!

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1933/v10-n197-aug-17-1933-DW-LOC.pdf