May Day and Frank Collier

Tomorrow is May Day, honored by Socialists and Communists worldwide, a fitting time to remember the persecution and tragic fate of Franklin P. Collier, Jr.

Collier was raised in Melrose at 211 Porter Street. His father was a popular cartoonist for the Boston Traveler newspaper. Like many East Side families since, their social life revolved around the links of Bellevue Golf Club. In 1923, Collier graduated from Melrose High School and matriculated at Dartmouth, where he majored in journalism.

Darkness lay beneath this idyllic, privileged upbringing. In the early 1930s, Collier published two erotic, violent novels. They failed to sell. His father died, and he moved with his mother to 47 Ferdinand Street. He worked as a writer for the WPA, holding leadership roles in the writer’s union.

At some point during these years, he became a devoted Marxist. He was the leader of the Melrose area cell of the Communist Party USA, holding meetings at his house on Ferdinand Street. By 1945, he was manager of the Progressive Bookshop on Beach Street in Boston, the chief source of Communist literature in New England.

During these years he also made the ill-starred acquaintance of Herbert Philbrick, a fellow Melrosian and secret FBI informant. Acting on Philbrick’s accusations, in 1954 the FBI arrested seven Massachusetts Communist leaders, including Collier. Collier had to post a high bail, lost his job, and found himself unemployable.

The state charged Collier and his allies with plotting the violent overthrow of the government. Both the US Supreme Court and the Massachusetts SJC ruled against the legal basis for the prosecution; moreover, no evidence ever surfaced that Collier or the others had ever planned such an attack. Eventually, all charges were dropped.

Collier’s mother died in 1957. In 1958, in despair over her death and his own persecution, he took his own life.

Melrose school children have for decades read “The Crucible” to understand the baseless witch hunts of the McCarthy era. They might do better to study Franklin Collier, the only person in Melrose history arrested, persecuted, and driven to an early death for holding unpopular opinions and reading unpopular books.