Steve Nelson (activist)

Stjepan Mesaros, best known as Steve Nelson (1903–1993), was a Croatian-born American political activist. Nelson achieved public notoriety as the political commissar of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and a leading functionary of the Communist Party, USA. Nelson is best remembered for having been prosecuted and convicted under the Smith Act in 1953.

Stjepan Mesaros (sometimes as "Stephen Mesarosh") was born in Subocka, Croatia on January 1, 1903 of ethnic Hungarian extraction. The Communist Party of the United States would later claim he was born in Steelton, Pennsylvania.

Mesaros emigrated to the United States of America with his mother and three sisters 1919. He started working in a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant. A succession of blue-collar jobs followed.

In 1923, by now using the Americanized name "Steve Nelson," he joined the youth section of the American Communist Party, the Young Workers League. He went on to join the adult Workers (Communist) Party in 1925.

He met Margaret Yaeger, a typist in the Pittsburgh office of the Party. They married and went to Detroit in 1925, where he worked in the auto industry as an assembly line worker and union organizer. In 1928 the Nelsons moved to New York City. Nelson studied Marxism at the New York Workers School and afterwards, with the onset of the Great Depression, the Nelsons worked for the Communist Party full-time.

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