Lyman Paine

Who was Lyman Paine?

George Lyman Paine, Jr., known as Lyman Paine, was an American architect and radical left activist. He is known for his work with the Correspondence Publishing Committee with his wife Freddy Paine, and was closely associated with Grace Lee Boggs.

Paine was born in New York City in 1901. His father George Lyman Paine, Sr. was an Episcopal priest and a Christian Socialist, the son of philanthropist Robert Treat Paine. After graduating from Harvard University in 1922, G. Lyman Jr. became an architect. He married Ruth Forbes of the distinguished Forbes family in 1926. They were divorced in 1934.

In the mid-1930s, Lyman became active in Marxist politics. While working for the New York City Housing Authority, Lyman met Frances "Freddy" Drake, whom he married in 1939. Lyman and Freddy Paine were early members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a group within the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party which included Grace Lee Boggs and her husband James Boggs. The Johnson-Forest group split from the main current of the Trotskyist left at the beginning of the 1950s, setting up the Correspondence Publishing Committee which produced the newspaper Correspondence. When Johnson-Forest founder C. L. R. James left the group in 1962, the Paines remained with the Committee and the Boggses.