Charles Orr (socialist)

Charles Andrew Orr (born 1906) was an American economist and socialist. He and his wife, Lois Orr, lived in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, where they supported the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM).^[1][2] They survived the Stalinist attack on the POUM in June 1937, after the fighting of the Barcelona May Days. They were arrested on 17 June, the day after Andrés Nin and the POUM executive were arrested, but were released on 1 July and placed by the US consul, Mahlon Perkins, on a ship bound for Marseilles on 3 July.^[3] They were in Mexico in 1940 when Leon Trotsky was murdered.

Collections of his papers are held at the Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University and Stanford University.

References

1. ^ Lois Orr, Letters from Barcelona: An American Woman in Revolution and Civil War, edited by Gerd-Rainer Horn, ISBN 9780230527393, 2009
2. ^ Jeremy Harding, Paralysed by the Absence of Danger, London Review of Books, 31(18), 2009
3. ^ Víctor Alba and Stephen Schwartz, Spanish Marxism versus Soviet communism: a history of the P.O.U.M., ISBN 0887381987, 1988