Albert Goldman (politician)

Albert Goldman (1897–1960) was a Belorussian-born American political and civil rights lawyer, closely associated with the American communist movement. Goldman broke with the mainline Communist Party, USA in 1933, joining the Trotskyist opposition, in which he would be a leading participant for the better part of the next two decades. Goldman is best remembered as a defendant and lead defense attorney in the 1941 Smith Act prosecution of the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party.

Albert Goldman was born of ethnic Jewish parents in 1897 in the Minsk oblast of today's Belarus, then part of the Russian empire. The family emigrated to the United States in 1904, when Albert was 7, settling in the Midwestern metropolis of Chicago.

Goldman attended elementary and secondary school in Chicago before leaving for Cincinnati to study to become a rabbi at Hebrew Union College. Glotzer left before completing his rabbinical studies and transferred to the University of Cincinnati, where he not only studied but was a star athlete, captaining the collegiate basketball team and running track.

Following his graduation from college in 1919, Goldman worked as a tailor. He came into contact with the radical movement in this occupation, first joining the Industrial Workers of the World and shortly thereafter the newly formed Communist Party of America. Goldman made use of the pseudonym "Albert Verblin," under which name he wrote a polemic pamphlet answering a 1921 book by Socialist Party leader Morris Hillquit entitled From Marx to Lenin.

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