Wellman, Saul

Saul Wellman was a long time Communist Party member, Spanish Civil War veteran and political commissar in the International Brigades.

Wellman was born to Yiddish-speaking socialist émigrés in Brooklyn. Under-educated, he fought in the army, worked in a car factory for Ford and was employed at a printing company; Wellman fought against the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and against the Axis in World War II. Wellman returned home at the start of the Cold War, to help organize and lead the Communist Party in America. Then when the 60s came along, Wellman latched onto the civil rights movement. The documentary deals with wheelchair-using Wellman, during the last years of his life, at an Iraq war protest. Throughout his life, Wellman was an organizer and passionate speaker.

Wellman's militant defiance and controversial ideologies began at a young age. “I sucked socialism at my mother's breast,” he jokes. His mother, a Russian immigrant, believed in socialism and took Wellman to hear Eugene Debs, the leading socialist at the time, deliver a speech. But Wellman's defining moment came in high school when he decided to cut school in order to attend a protest. He got expelled as a result. His parents were devastated, but Wellman felt liberated. His last day of formal education was his first day as a revolutionary.

Wellman was arrested under the Smith Act in the McCarthy era, one of the many repercussions he faced for tirelessly organizing for the Communist Party in Michigan’s auto industry.

When war erupted in Spain, he and his friends, still young, had a naïve understanding of world politics and social progress, but signed up to fight in the international brigades anyway. “We didn't know our asses from our elbows,” he admits. Later, Wellman became a leader among American Communists, but when the Soviet Union's corruption was exposed, he abandoned the movement to promote Civil Rights and protest the war in Vietnam.

But Wellman's pursuit of his political passions came with negatives for those close to him. While he was busy with social activism, his wife was left at home to work full-time and raise their children alone. Wellman acknowledged the fact that his career disadvantaged his family, but he felt that his work was necessary to change society.