In the mid-1930s, while working for the
New York City Housing Authority, Lyman became disillusioned with the utility of his work designing housing projects to produce social improvement, and he became active in
Marxist politics. In 1934, shortly after finishing a
Museum of Modern Art exhibit on the state of New York City slums, he met Frances "Freddy" Drake (3/21/1912–5/3/1999), whom he married in 1939. Then in 1947, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Harvard College Class of 1922, Lyman wrote in their publication, the
25th Annual Report of the Harvard Class of 1922: 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. George Lyman Paine Jr died on July 1, 1978, while living in the County of Los Angeles, California, at the age of 76. His second wife, Frances 'Freddy' Drake Paine, died on May 3, 1999, also while living in California. Both, however, are buried on
Sutton Island,
Maine, where they had summered for many years. == Writings ==