Introduction to

James P. Cannon and the
Early Years of American Communism

By the Prometheus Research Library
August 1992

Source: James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism. Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928 © Spartacist Publishing Company, 1992. ISBN 0-9633828-1-0; Published by Spartacist Publishing Company, Box 1377 G.P.O. New York, NY 10116. Introductory material and notes by the Prometheus Research Library.
Transcription\HTML Markup: Prometheus Research Library
Copyright: Permission for on-line publication provided by Spartacist Publishing Company for use by the James P. Cannon Internet Archive in 2005.

Cannon in the IWW
The Birth of American Communism
Cannon in the Underground
The United States in the 1920s
Cannon’s Seven Months in Moscow, 1922
The Degeneration of the Comintern
John Pepper Comes to America
The Farmer-Labor Party
The Split with Fitzpatrick
The Fight Against "Pepperism"
Factional Gang War
Trotsky Fights the "Third Party Alliance"
The 1924-25 Faction Fight
The Fight Against Lore’s "Two and a Half Internationalism"
The 1925 Decision on the Labor Party Slogan
The Cannon-Foster Split
The International Labor Defense
The American Negro Labor Congress
The TUEL and the Sixth Plenum of the ECCI
Anti-Trotskyism in the Mid-1920s
Ruthenberg’s Sudden Death
Lovestone Becomes Lovestone
Cannon Becomes a Trotskyist

On 27 October 1928 James P. Cannon, a member of the Political Committee of the American Communist Party—called at that time the Workers (Communist) Party—was expelled for attempting to organize within the party in support of Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition. The Trotskyist opposition was fighting to return the Soviet regime and the Communist International to the revolutionary internationalism of Lenin’s day, insisting that the fate of the Soviet regime depended on the international extension of the October Revolution and that the forging of Leninist vanguard parties was key to that extension.

By the time of Cannon’s expulsion Trotsky and other leading members of the Left Opposition had already been expelled from the Soviet party and the Communist International. Many had been sent into internal exile in the Soviet Union; Trotsky himself was in Alma Ata in Soviet Central Asia. Most of those fighting against the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution learned only much later that their fight had found support in the adherence to their cause of a senior American party leader.

More importantly, they learned that Cannon did not stand alone. Expelled along with Cannon were fellow Central Committee member Martin Abern and alternate member of the Central Committee Max Shachtman, both of them close associates of Cannon since the early days of American Communism, leading members of the longstanding “Cannon group” (or faction) within the party, and leaders, along with Cannon, of the International Labor Defense. Over the next few months more than 100 members of the Workers Party were expelled, some for making forthright statements in support of Cannon, Abern and Shachtman, most for simply questioning the propriety of the expulsions. The newly expelled had almost all been supporters of the Cannon faction, and they included Arne Swabeck, another full member of the Central Committee, as well as Vincent R. Dunne, most of the Twin Cities leadership, and Cannon’s companion Rose Karsner, a founding member of the party and a central administrator of the ILD. Expelled from the Canadian Communist Party was Maurice Spector, party chairman and member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, along with a small band of supporters.

Not all of the Cannon faction opposed the expulsions. In particular Cannon’s closest friend and associate, William F. Dunne—a full Central Committee member and candidate member of the Political Committee who was on foreign assignment for the Communist International at the time of the expulsions—stayed in the party and denounced Cannon. Manuel Gomez, alternate member of the CC and head of the party’s Anti-Imperialist League, testified against Cannon in the Political Committee. In all, probably only about half the members of the faction—which was composed almost entirely of party cadre and was thus the smallest of the three major factional groupings in the party—were expelled, and not all of these became members of the Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA) when it was founded in May 1929. But a solid majority of those who founded the American section of the Left Opposition were Cannon faction supporters of long standing.

The genesis of the CLA from an established grouping within the Communist Party, with years of political collaboration and agreement behind it, gave it an organizational stability and political cohesion lacking in other International Left Opposition sections outside of the Soviet Union itself. Most other leaders who came over to the Left Opposition from parties of the Communist International did so only after they had been discredited and stripped of all supporters. Cannon stands out as the only one expelled while he was still a credible party leader, able to win others to his political course.

The material presented in this book is designed to shed new light on the unique origins of American Trotskyism by providing a documentary record of the political evolution of Cannon and his faction within the Workers Party. Though we have been able to include some of the popular agitational pieces, our selection of Cannon’s writings and speeches is heavily weighted toward internal factional material. We include here many documents coauthored by Cannon, and others which he cosigned but probably had no part in writing. In most cases it was impossible to determine the actual authorship of the jointly signed material, and the political profile of the Cannon faction would have been severely skewed if we had not included the major coauthored statements. Where necessary we have also supplemented this material with excerpts from the party’s Executive Council (Political Committee) minutes.

Yet it would be a mistake to look at this material simply as a prelude to Cannon’s later emergence as the authoritative American Trotskyist leader. For Cannon was also one of the most able Communist leaders in the 1920s, a period when the party was not yet homogenized into a rigid Stalinist orthodoxy. This was a time of real, necessary and inevitable debate about the tasks facing Communists in the United States. From 1924 these debates were increasingly dominated, and increasingly deformed, by a Communist International which was losing its revolutionary perspective. The American party, feeling the pressure of an expanding and stable American imperialism, readily followed in the International’s wake. Thus the experience of building a Leninist party in the United States in the 1920s was largely negative. But if Cannon, feeling at a dead end in the internal factional wars, was able to make the leap in 1928 to Trotsky’s programmatic and international understanding of Stalinism, it was in large part because he had tried, in the preceding period, to chart a path for the party based on revolutionary communism.

This book does not stand alone but supplements the excellent two-volume history of the American Communist Party (through 1929) written by Theodore Draper, one of only two “reasonably adequate histories” of Comintern sections, according to the historian E.H. Carr (the other being J. Rothschild’s history of the Bulgarian party). (1) An ex-Communist if anti-Communist, Draper had a sympathy and feel for the subject usually lacking in professional historians. Moreover, he was able to interview many former party leaders in preparing The Roots of American Communism and American Communism and Soviet Russia. (2) Cannon, in semi-retirement, was able to devote considerable time to answering Draper’s questions about the Communist movement. His letters were a major independent contribution to Draper’s researches, and they were later published as The First Ten Years of American Communism. Draper wrote a preface for Cannon’s book, and in it he paid tribute to Cannon’s excellent memory of the period:

For a long time, I wondered why Jim Cannon’s memory of events in the Nineteen-Twenties was so superior to that of all the others. Was it simply some inherent trait of mind? Rereading some of these letters, I came to the conclusion that it was something more. Unlike other communist leaders of his generation, Jim Cannon wanted to remember. This portion of his life still lives for him because he has not killed it within himself. (3)

Draper contrasted Cannon’s letters with other autobiographical efforts: “Official American communists have published so-called autobiographies, but they have been largely spurious. Cannon’s letters are the real thing.” (4) It hardly needs to be noted that the documentary record presented here, culled from the published press of the Communist International and the Workers Party as well as from unpublished archival sources, fully validates Cannon’s First Ten Years, even as it amplifies and augments it. Such a documentary record—even a highly selective one—cannot be said to exist for the accounts of many leading ex-Communists, to say nothing of the official histories penned by Stalinist hacks. William Z. Foster’s tendentious History of the Communist Party of the United States writes Cannon, among others, almost entirely out of the party’s early years, while Earl Browder and Benjamin Gitlow portray Cannon—in their own image—as simply an unprincipled and power-hungry intriguer. (5) Bertram D. Wolfe, on the other hand, disingenuously disappears his own role as Jay Lovestone’s chief factional hatchet man and anti-Trotsky expert. (6) These accounts—written by those who contributed greatly to the Stalinization of the Workers Party and its destruction as a revolutionary organization—often make unintentionally hilarious reading. We could supplement Draper’s observation: if Cannon had reason to remember, he also had nothing to cover up. Cannon went on to become the finest communist political leader the United States has yet produced.

 Cannon in the IWW

Cannon was one of those who came to Lenin’s communism by way of the syndicalist movement. But Cannon’s syndicalism was not the “boring from within the American Federation of Labor” variety espoused by William Z. Foster, who also joined the Communist movement. Cannon had been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a “Wobbly.” He had quit the Socialist Party (SP) at the age of 21 to champion the “one big union” envisioned by the IWW, which eschewed the electoral political activity of the SP in favor of what it called “direct action.” Cannon was part of a great exodus of left-wingers from the Socialist Party at that time—many quit after the SP adopted a constitutional clause against the advocacy of “sabotage” in 1912 and many more left when the SP removed IWW leader “Big Bill” Haywood from its Executive Board in 1913.

In many ways Cannon was typical of the revolutionary-minded proletarian youth who flocked to the early IWW, disgusted with the middle-class reformism of the dominant SP leadership. The IWW believed in dual unionism—the strategy of building new revolutionary unions from the great mass of non-unionized, largely unskilled workers, rather than “boring from within” the existing conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft unions. The dual-unionist ideology heavily influenced the nascent American left wing, and it was to plague the early Communist movement.

Cannon had made a special study of public speaking in high school (he had dropped out of school at the age of 12 to help support his family by working in a meatpacking plant, but he returned to high school in 1907 and attended for three years). It was his ambition to become a soapbox agitator for the IWW, and he did indeed become a popular speaker at 6th and Main in downtown Kansas City. He was a delegate to the seventh national convention of the IWW in Chicago in 1912. He served as secretary of the convention and took an active part in its proceedings. He caught the eye of IWW leader Vincent St. John and after the convention he became a protégé of St. John.

Cannon cut his teeth in the labor movement as a Midwest organizer and speaker for the IWW from 1912 to 1914. After the convention St. John sent Cannon to Jackson, Michigan, where an auto strike was on. But the strike fizzled and Cannon ended up in New Castle, Pennsylvania, working on the IWW journal Solidarity. The winter of 1913 saw Cannon make a speaking tour of the Midwest in support of the Akron rubber strike; he spent two weeks in jail in Peoria, Illinois toward the end of that year for his activity in support of the Avery manufacturing strike. Cannon learned as he went along during this period of itinerant organizing. His experience was characteristic of the IWW at the time, as he later noted in a tribute to Vincent St. John, who was widely known as “the Saint”:

“The Saint,” of affectionate memory, was a wonderful man to learn from. He was short on palaver and had some gaps in his theory, but he was long on action and he was firmly convinced that the water is the only place where a man can learn to swim. His way of testing, and also of developing, the young militants who grew up under his tutelage was to give them responsibility and shove them into action and see what happened. Those who acquired self-confidence and the capacity to make decisions under fire on the spot, which are about 90 percent of the distinctive quality of leaders and organizers, eventually received credentials as voluntary organizers and thereafter enjoyed a semi-official status in the strikes and other actions which marked the career of the IWW in its glorious hey-day. The shock troops of the movement were the foot-loose militants who moved around the country as the scene of action shifted. (7)

After Cannon was released from the Peoria jail, St. John sent him to Omaha, then to Duluth, where he worked with Frank Little in an ore dockers strike. Later on in 1914 Cannon was a delegate to the IWW’s eighth convention. Afterward he returned to Kansas City, joining his first wife, Lista Makimson, who was a schoolteacher there. Lista had come to visit Cannon when it looked like he might face a long jail term for his activity in the Avery strike; they were married in Pekin, Illinois. Cannon remained active in the Kansas City IWW; during World War I he registered for the draft as a conscientious objector and was known as a vocal opponent of the war. (8) It was the Russian Revolution which galvanized Cannon back into political action on the national field. He was far from the only one so affected. A pro-Bolshevik left wing was developing inside the Socialist Party; Cannon, disillusioned by the IWW’s failure to grasp the significance of the workers revolution in Russia, rejoined the SP in order to hook up with this left wing. In 1919 Cannon and Earl Browder, who had been a local supporter of William Z. Foster’s syndicalist organization, launched a pro-Bolshevik journal in Kansas City, Workers' World.

The Birth of American Communism

The traditional sectarianism of the Americans was expressed most glaringly in their attempt to construct revolutionary unions outside the existing labor movement; their refusal to fight for “immediate demands” in the course of the class struggle for the socialist goal; and their strongly entrenched anti-parliamentarism, which was only slightly modified in the first program of the Communist Party. (9)

Both the CLP and CPA went underground in reaction to the Palmer Raids. Both decided, on principle, to remain there, eschewing public political activity as the postwar revolutionary tide swirled above them.

Cannon in the Underground

All that hodgepodge of ultra-radicalism was practically wiped out of the American movement in 1920-21 by Lenin. He did it, not by administrative order backed up by police powers, but by the simple device of publishing a pamphlet called Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder....The “Theses and Resolutions” of the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 also cleared up the thinking of the American communists over a wide range of theoretical and political problems, and virtually eliminated the previously dominating influence exerted by the sectarian conceptions of De Leon and the Dutch leaders. (10)

Cannon was one of the first to grasp Lenin’s message. He first entered the national arena in the Communist movement when he gave a powerful speech against dual unionism to the founding convention of the United Communist Party (UCP) in May 1920. This convention was the first small step on the road to uniting all the forces in the U.S. that stood for the Third International: it united the Communist Labor Party with a C.E. Ruthenberg-led split from the Communist Party of America. The UCP was not yet ready to shed its ultraleftism and adopt the Bolshevik position of working within the reactionary American Federation of Labor where necessary. But Cannon’s status as an ex-Wobbly and therefore a “reformed” dual unionist so impressed the delegates that he was elected to the Central Committee and appointed organizer for the St. Louis/Southern Illinois Coal District. (11)

Though they were few, the syndicalists who came over to the Communists were crucially important. For they made the American party rich in its acquired inheritance. Not only SP party men like Ruthenberg and foreign-language federation sectarians, but also trade unionists who knew the score in the American labor movement—all these currents endeavored to assimilate Lenin’s communism. The cross-fertilization that resulted gave a vitality to the early American party, a vitality totally lacking in, for example, the early British Communist Party, which failed to win over the syndicalists and Celts of the Socialist Labour Party and was left with only former members of H.M. Hyndman’s sterile British Socialist Party. (12) The IWW withered to a shell of its former self after 1919, but Cannon remained concerned with winning its remnants to Leninism. It was Cannon’s ties to the pre-WWI radical movement that impressed the young Max Shachtman, among others:

He made an enormous impression upon me, which never really died....He was known as an excellent orator, a very smooth writer, an exceedingly intelligent and shrewd politician; and he had what comparatively few of the then leaders of the Communist party had: namely, he had a living, personal connection with the pre-Bolshevik revolutionary radical movement in this country. (13)

In the fall of 1920 Cannon was named editor of The Toiler, the UCP’s weekly newspaper published in Cleveland. It was around this time that he started spending most of his time in New York instead. Many of the prominent party leaders, including Ruthenberg, were in jail as a result of the Palmer Raids. Cannon himself was under indictment. In April 1920 he and Charles Baker, the National Organizational Secretary of the CLP, were charged under the Lever Act for obstructing the production of coal during the 1919 miners strike—Cannon had spent two months in jail for his support activities—but the 1920 indictment never came to trial (charges were dropped in February 1922). So Cannon was one of the few available communist leaders who had the English-language ability and office skills necessary for party administration. Cannon later described how, as much as he preferred to leave the major decisions to others, he soon recognized that they were politically unqualified: “I knew then that I had to fight for the leadership.” (14)

And fight he did. The two Communist parties were finally united, upon the Communist International’s insistence, in May of 1921. Cannon and the young Jay Lovestone became the main axis of the leadership which steered the newly united, but still underground, party into legal political activity. They were aided by the development of a new pro-Communist group within the Socialist Party, organized around the journal Workers' Council. In December 1921 the Communists merged with the Workers' Council forces and founded the Workers Party as a legal party (a parallel “illegal” Communist Party apparatus remained until April 1923). James P. Cannon was the Workers Party’s first chairman and its major public spokesman.

Not surprisingly, there exists today very little record of the internal deliberations of the American Communist movement from the underground period. We have found a few articles on the IWW signed by Cannon in late 1920, when the Communists were trying to intersect an intense discussion among the Wobblies on relations with the Communist International. We also found an extensive article, published in The Liberator, on Kansas miners leader Alexander Howat. All these articles reflect Cannon’s origins in the IWW and Midwestern labor movement, and they are included in this book. However, the record of Cannon’s activities as an adept and skillful Communist politician begins with his address to the founding convention of the Workers Party, also included here.

The United States in the 1920s

The decade was one of decline and demoralization of the trade-union movement. Membership in the AFL peaked at slightly more than 5 million workers in 1920. By 1929 it was less than 3.5 million. Almost 20 percent of the non-agricultural workforce was unionized in 1920; the figure had fallen to just over 10 percent by 1930. Many unions virtually disappeared. Especially hard hit were the miners and the textile unions; it is no accident that the Workers Party maintained a substantial base of support in these two industries for most of the decade. The craft unions came more and more to dominate the AFL. Blacks had no choice but to work in open shops, if they worked: 24 of the major AFL unions discriminated against blacks by statute; most of the others did so informally. And the union leaders made no bones about their enlistment in the war against godless communism. Photo-Engravers leader Matthew Woll, a member of the AFL Executive Council, declared, “It is no secret that the American Federation of Labor is the first object of attack by the Communist movement. Consequently the American Federation of Labor is the first line of defense.” (15)

Cannon’s Seven Months in Moscow, 1922

Even after the founding of the Workers Party in December 1921, the ultraleftist disease lingered in the American Communist movement. Diehard undergrounders insisted on maintaining the parallel illegal apparatus of the Communist Party, even after it became clear that the Workers Party could function openly. Soon a fight was raging between the undergrounders-on-principle (known as the “Goose Caucus”) and those who wanted to abolish the underground party (who were known as the “Liquidators”). Cannon was one of the principal “Liquidators.” Freed of major administrative responsibility for the party by C.E. Ruthenberg, who became secretary of the Workers Party after his release from prison in the spring of 1922, Cannon was designated to represent the “Liquidators” before the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) in Moscow. He left New York in May and spent the rest of the year in Moscow. (16)

Cannon had to fight hard to convince the Comintern leadership of the necessity for abolishing the underground party. The black poet Claude McKay, who also attended the Comintern’s Fourth Congress and participated in the discussion around the American question though he was not formally a member of the Workers Party, described Cannon’s demeanor:

I listened to James Cannon’s fighting speeches for a legal Communist party in America. Cannon’s manner was different from Bill Haywood’s or Foster’s. He had all the magnetism, the shrewdness, the punch, the bag of tricks of the typical American politician, but here he used them in a radical way. I wondered about him. If he had entered Democratic or Republican politics, there was no barrier I could see that could stop him from punching his way straight through to the front ranks. (17)

But Cannon’s Midwestern American “bag of tricks” was hardly going to sway the leadership of the Communist International. In a letter to Draper, Cannon described how the tide was finally turned in favor of the “Liquidators” after Cannon, Max Bedacht and Arne Swabeck were able to present their position directly to Leon Trotsky. (18) We publish here the famous document on “one sheet of paper—no more” where Cannon and his cothinkers summarized their position for the Russian leaders. Unfortunately, we have been unable to locate any other record of Cannon’s 1922 interventions in the ECCI, American Commission or other bodies. We do publish here “In the Fifth Year of the Russian Revolution,” the speech Cannon gave on his tour of the United States upon his return.

In Moscow Cannon served as American party representative on the Presidium of the ECCI, a post which put him in intimate touch with the day-to-day workings of the Communist International and its leaders. He also worked on the executive body of the Red International of Labor Unions. This experience was crucial, for in 1922 the International was still infused with the revolutionary will and spirit that had animated its founding. The experience instilled in Cannon a deep and abiding internationalism, and a respect for Zinoviev, in particular, which was later to prove crucial in Cannon’s evolution to Trotskyism. (19) The “Liquidators” succeeded in carrying the day and the International’s salutary intervention prevented another pointless split in the American party. The trust Cannon developed toward the Comintern made him slow to realize later in the decade that things had fundamentally changed with the ascendancy of Zinoviev, Stalin and Bukharin in the Russian party.

The Degeneration of the Comintern

“Moscow domination” did indeed play an evil role in this unhappy time, but it did not operate in a vacuum. All the conditions of American life in the late Twenties, pressing in on the unprepared infant party, sapped the fighting faith of the party cadres, including the central leaders, and set them up for the Russian blows. The party became receptive to the ideas of Stalinism, which were saturated with conservatism, because the party cadres themselves were unconsciously yielding to their own conservative environment. (20)

John Pepper Comes to America

In purging the SP left wing, Hillquit was merely following in the shadow of Samuel Gompers. The November 1911 confession to the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building by the structural iron workers' unfortunate McNamara brothers had severely embarrassed Gompers, who had publicly and repeatedly insisted on the brothers' innocence. The case had galvanized pro-labor sentiment in the country, resulting in the near election of a Socialist mayor in Los Angeles. In the aftermath Gompers took great pains to dissociate the AFL from anything approaching labor militancy and independent working-class political action. As a result, the step which Frederick Engels in 1886 had called “the first great step of importance...the constitution of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers' party,” had not been taken on a national level. (21)

The newly founded Workers Party began agitation for a labor party in late 1922, attempting to form a united front with the pre-existing “Farmer-Labor” movement. The major advocate of the new labor party orientation was one József Pogány, known as John Pepper, who had become a figure of the party leadership during Cannon’s Moscow sojourn. Pepper, one of the leaders of the 1919 Hungarian Workers Republic disaster, was part of a Comintern delegation sent to unite the various Communist forces in the U.S. in the summer of 1922. The delegation was led by the Pole Henryk Walecki (known in the U.S. as Valetski), a post-WWI convert to Bolshevism whose later career in the Comintern caused Trotsky to remark: “People of Walecki’s calibre will never conquer anything. But they are perfectly capable of losing what has been conquered.” (22) Walecki hesitated to take a strong side in the fight between the Goose Caucus and the “Liquidators.” He did, however, manage to get all the forces claiming allegiance to the Comintern to finally unite in one party.

Pepper had evidently been assigned to the U.S. simply to work with the party’s Hungarian-language Federation, but he passed himself off as some kind of permanent official Comintern “representative” and was elected to the party’s Central Committee at the 1922 Bridgman convention. An unprincipled adventurer who was a frequent target of Trotsky in internal Comintern disputes, Pepper became a major destabilizing factor within the American party: “He was a phony, but by far the most brilliant phony I ever knew. He sparkled like an Arkansas diamond,” wrote Cannon in later years. (23) Having arrived in the country knowing nothing of the language, Pepper wrote in English the party’s first pamphlet for a labor party in October 1922, only three months later. (24)

The Workers Party was a small party by Comintern standards—it claimed only slightly more than 12,000 members by late 1922. Nonetheless, the growing predominance of American imperialism in the world made the U.S. party of strategic concern, and the party was given a representative on the International’s Executive Committee. But while many Russian leaders had spent years in exile in Europe and felt they knew something about France, Germany, or even Britain, none of the major Comintern leaders had spent more than a few months in the United States. They did not presume to dictate where they did not know the situation; there was no one to give the American party the attention that, say, Trotsky gave the French Communist Party in the early years. People of the calibre of John Pepper were able to storm into the breach and they were the sort who also adapted well as the Comintern degenerated. Pepper plunged the party onto a political course that was both organizationally sectarian and politically opportunist.

The Farmer-Labor Party

Farmer-Labor Party candidate Christensen polled a quarter of a million votes in the 1920 elections. He did particularly well in Non-Partisan League states like the Dakotas and Montana, as well as Washington where the memory of the Seattle general strike remained strong. The agrarian Western states remained the electoral bastions of the “Farmer-Labor” movement through the 1924 elections. (25)

Fitzpatrick’s Farmer-Labor Party joined the Conference of Progressive Political Action (CPPA), an organization founded by the railroad union tops in February 1922, hoping to pressure it into founding a party modeled on the reformist British Labour Party. The CPPA was explicitly not a party, but an agency to support “Progressive” candidates of any party in state and local elections. When the CPPA voted to keep this “non-partisan” orientation at its conference in December 1922, Fitzpatrick split in disgust. The Workers Party, whose delegates the CPPA conference had refused to seat, went with him.

Fitzpatrick then agreed to call a conference to found a new party and to work with the Workers Party in building the conference, which was called for 3 July 1923. The Workers Party eagerly and enthusiastically entered into the bloc with Fitzpatrick. The fact that Fitzpatrick’s Farmer-Labor Party had already taken a giant step backward from its original stand for independent working-class political action did not concern the Workers Party leadership, which accepted the “Farmer-Labor” orientation and designation. In this they may have been adversely influenced by Zinoviev’s confused formulations on possible “workers and peasants governments” at the Fourth Comintern Congress.

But the Workers Party leadership was also exhibiting a woeful and willful ignorance of recent American political history. In 1912 Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs had run against Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, pulling almost a million votes in the presidential elections. The Progressive current had sought, since that time, to co-opt working-class and petty-bourgeois socialist currents into the movement for a third bourgeois party. The Communist leadership was blind to this danger. The party did not attempt to draw a clear class line in its propaganda by insisting that the new party be unambiguously working-class in character. Nor did they insist that the new party make a complete break with bourgeois political currents, including La Follette’s.

The Split with Fitzpatrick

The Workers Party did not combat Fitzpatrick politically but it flouted his organizational concerns at every turn. The story of the precipitous and ill-conceived break with the Fitzpatrick forces at the July 3 conference is well told by Theodore Draper. (26) Given the growing conservative mood in the country, a split was probably inevitable sooner rather than later. Fitzpatrick was under intense and immediate pressure from the AFL to split with his Communist allies. Most of the AFL unions refused to send delegates to the July 3 conference. At the first meeting of the united-front conference preparations committee, Fitzpatrick’s line to the Workers Party was: “Let’s get the record straight—we are willing to go along, but we think you communists should occupy a back seat in this affair.” (27)

What was not inevitable was the weight of the forces on each side of the split. If the Workers Party had tried to polarize Fitzpatrick’s party on a programmatic class basis, they might have come out of the venture with augmented forces. Instead, under the leadership of Pepper, they viewed the conference as a get-rich-quick scheme. They accepted the two-class “Farmer-Labor” designation, muddying the political waters, while organizing to take control of the conference completely away from Fitzpatrick. In the end the independent trade-union forces in attendance went with Fitzpatrick, leaving only the Workers Party and a few petty-bourgeois Non-Partisan League populists in the newly founded Federated Farmer-Labor Party (FFLP).

Fitzpatrick was furious; he became a bitter, vengeful enemy of the Workers Party, which now lost the protection the alliance had provided them in the national AFL. The effect was immediate on William Z. Foster’s Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), which had become the party’s trade-union arm. In August 1923 Morris Sigman, newly elected head of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), declared TUEL membership incompatible with membership in his union. By the end of 1925 most major unions had done likewise. John L. Lewis revoked the charter of the Nova Scotia United Mine Workers (UMW), which had applied for membership in the Comintern’s Red International of Labor Unions. (28) In November 1923 William F. Dunne, prominent party member and delegate from Butte, Montana, was refused his seat at the annual AFL convention in Portland. The UMW motivated Dunne’s expulsion; only six delegates voted against it.

Cannon had almost no part in the deliberations of the Workers Party leadership leading up to the July 3 convention. Immediately after his return from Moscow in January 1923 he had been sent on national tour to speak about the situation in Soviet Russia, probably a conscious maneuver on the part of Pepper to get him out of the way. But in May he passed through Chicago and got wind of how things were going when Arne Swabeck and other Chicago leaders complained to him. Cannon fired off a letter to Ruthenberg, which we publish here, complaining about the stupidity of attempts to pack the conference. Needless to say, his advice was ignored.

The Fight Against “Pepperism”

Cannon described how, in the aftermath of July 3, he made a pact with William Z. Foster to fight against Pepper’s leadership of the party. (29) The Foster-Cannon faction won control of the Workers Party at its Third Convention in December 1923, moving the party headquarters from New York to the proletarian center of Chicago. They retained control of the Central Executive Committee (CEC or Central Committee) up until the party’s Fourth Convention in August 1925. The Cannon faction was born as an integral part of the Foster-Cannon faction of this period. We publish here Cannon’s opening shot in the campaign against Pepper, “The Workers Party Today—and Tomorrow,” as well as the theses on the labor party submitted by Foster and Cannon to a CEC plenum in November 1923.

John Pepper did not stand alone against the Foster-Cannon forces. He had carefully built up a base of support in the party, based largely on the ex-ultraleftists of the Goose Caucus, and had found a willing pupil for his unique brand of opportunism/adventurism in Jay Lovestone. Moreover, party secretary C.E. Ruthenberg lent his significant credibility to the Pepper faction, as did Max Bedacht.

While the two factions may have initially differed on their evaluation of the split with Fitzpatrick, in the aftermath there were few differences on the orientation of the party. Both the Pepper-Ruthenberg and the Cannon-Foster factions compounded the party’s initial error in failing to polarize the Fitzpatrick Farmer-Labor Party around a class axis. They proposed that the Workers Party enter into an ongoing political alliance with the “Progressive” forces.

What remained of the petty-bourgeois agrarian populists and trade-union “Progressives” in the Federated Farmer-Labor Party were already lining up behind the proposed candidacy of Robert M. La Follette for the 1924 presidential elections. It was clear that the AFL, the Socialist Party and the pathetic remnants of the Non-Partisan League were all going to participate in the attempt to found a new “Progressive” party. In his inimitable fashion, Pepper saw in this a “La Follette revolution” which “will contain elements of the great French Revolution, and the Russian Kerensky Revolution. In its ideology it will have elements of Jeffersonianism, Danish cooperatives, Ku Klux Klan and Bolshevism. The Proletariat as a class will not play an independent role in this revolution.” (30) So, Pepper argued, the Workers Party had to go along with La Follette and separate itself out at some unspecified later date. This strategy of ongoing political blocs with bourgeois forces would ultimately be perfected by the Communist International under Stalin as the “Popular Front” or “People’s Front.”

Foster and Cannon held no brief for Pepper’s anti-Marxist theoretical schemes. But they feared the party’s further isolation in the trade-union movement if they attempted to swim against the political tide for La Follette. Even before the December 1923 Workers Party convention, Foster and Cannon had come to essential political agreement with the Ruthenberg faction on this question. In November Foster and Cannon had withdrawn their theses, which condemned the formation of the FFLP, and voted instead for a new, conciliatory set of theses by Ruthenberg-Pepper. The new “November Theses” stressed the necessity of a continued bloc with the “Progressives” even as it hailed the formation of the FFLP.

Both major factions were thus in agreement as the Workers Party embarked on an opportunist course which led it close to open support for La Follette. Their policy of building a party with La Follette’s supporters, without openly advocating—or strongly opposing—La Follette’s candidacy, was known as the “third party alliance.” Cannon’s writings from the fall of 1923 through May 1924 fully support the “third party alliance,” wrongly painting the La Follette “Progressives” as working-class centrists rather than as a bourgeois political current with supporters in the workers movement. In later years, Cannon noted the essential unity that existed at the top of the Workers Party on the La Follette question:

The cold fact is that the party which had proclaimed itself at its inception as a revolutionary party of the working class, and had adopted a corresponding program, became, for a period in 1924, the advocate of a “third party” of capitalism, and offered to support, under certain conditions, the presidential candidacy of the petty-bourgeois demagogue La Follette....

The bewildered party disgraced itself in this affair, and all the prominent leaders without exception, myself included, were in it up to our necks, with no excuse save that of ignorance and no reason except perhaps the foolhardy ambition to outwit ourselves. If I can force myself to return to this leap into political irrationality, even now—30 years later—it is only because a bad experience, honestly evaluated and accounted for, may serve a useful purpose in immunizing the movement against similar abnormalities in the future.

Foster’s role in this sorry business was the same as mine and that of all the other American leaders at the time. Pepper—interpreting what he took to be the Comintern line—formulated the policy; the rest of us went along. Considering the fact that Pepper had been defeated and put in the minority at the party convention, at the end of 1923, this says a lot for his resilience and continuing influence, but it doesn't say much for the rest of us. (31)

The only Workers Party leaders to oppose the “third party alliance” were Ludwig Lore and Moissaye Olgin, whose bases were, respectively, in the German Federation cadre and the Jewish workers in the garment unions. Both Olgin and Lore were well enough schooled in pre-Leninist Social Democratic Marxism to recognize that an ongoing alliance with the Republican La Follette was not the road to the “distinct workers party” that Engels had written of. Lore’s New York group held the balance of power between the Foster-Cannon and Pepper-Ruthenberg factions at the December 1923 convention. The Cannon-Foster faction won the day only by getting the Lore group’s support. This they managed to do without abandoning their faction’s support for the “third party alliance.” By common agreement, the question was referred to the Comintern.

The support of the Finnish Federation was also key to the Cannon-Foster victory. The Finnish Federation had come over to the Workers Party from the Socialist Party only in 1921; it was a clannish group, based on agricultural and cultural cooperatives. The Finnish membership gave their allegiance to Soviet Russia but wanted little part in American politics. They were a pivotal group within the Workers Party because they comprised about 50 percent of the membership: 6,509 out of a total party membership of 12,394, according to figures prepared for the Workers Party’s 1922 convention. In contrast, total membership of the English-speaking branches at the time was only 1,276. (32)

It was Cannon who carefully built up support for the Foster-Cannon faction, masterminding the coup against Pepper-Ruthenberg at the party’s December 1923 convention. In winning Lore’s and Olgin’s support, Cannon was also able to finally bring about unity between the warring factions of Alexander Bittelman and Moissaye Olgin in the Jewish Federation. Cannon’s immense skills as a factional politician were later described by Bittelman:

As I became better acquainted with Jim, I began to notice and appreciate his skills in internal party politics....He seemed fully aware, not alone of the political differences between the two groups, but also of the individual and personal frictions and incompatibilities between, say, Salutsky and myself, or between Olgin and Shachno Epstein, by way of example.

These skills in intra-party politics, the playing of which he obviously enjoyed very much, were unquestionably a source of strength to Jim himself as well as to our party, or parties—the Communist Party and the Workers Party. I remember a certain image of him that I acquired after a while. It was the image of a caretaker of a large experimental institution or laboratory, moving about the various machines, tools, gadgets, testing tubes, etc., making sure they operate properly, oiling, fixing, changing, improving and adjusting. That was Jim Cannon’s main contribution in our party; and, for the particular phase in its development a very important contribution. His humor and wit played no small part in all of that. (33)

Cannon’s skills as a politician were not universally appreciated. In a letter to the ECCI defending John Pepper, who had been recalled to Moscow, Jay Lovestone complained in early 1924: “The seeds of the present factional struggle were sown when Comrade Cannon returned from the Fourth Congress of the Comintern.” (34) But the aim of Foster-Cannon had been to put an end to “Pepperism,” not to push aside Pepper’s American backers. Ruthenberg remained secretary of the party even after the Foster-Cannon victory. Cannon became assistant secretary, while Foster was party chairman. In the period after the convention Cannon was at great pains to build a collective at the top of the party, as is evident from a letter he wrote in the spring of 1924 to a Lore supporter and leader of the Jewish Federation in New York:

2. Jewish Affairs The unification effected in the leading strata will gradually spread to the ranks if the leading comrades will work to that end consciously and patiently. The most important thing to strive for, of course, is ideological unity on a broad basis....

What you do not see clearly yet is that the party is in the midst of a profound crisis of growth. It is going through a transition period. The old party, which was a loose collection of warring groups without a single authoritative, leading group, is working its way, with much travail, into a homogeneous body led by a support and confidence of the great majority of the party members. [emphasis in original] (35)

Factional Gang War

Nonetheless the factional lineups hardened, leading to the factional gang warfare which plagued the party for most of the rest of the decade. Personal antipathies and social factors certainly played a role in the developing factional war, as Alexander Bittelman, himself a member of the Cannon-Foster inner circle, explained:

Most of the Cannon-Foster circle were a rather rough-and-ready group of individuals. There was among them much camaraderie, plain spoken talk and few niceties in mutual relations. In group discussions they would use what they chose to call “trade union language,” in which variations on “damn it” were of the more innocent expressions. And candor compels me also to say this: in our own circle four-letter exclamations were a dime a dozen and sometimes cheaper. Whereas Ruthenberg, in circumstances which tempt one to resort to some such exclamation, would merely say: “Goodness gracious.” I can never forget the expression on the faces of some of my comrades in the Cannon-Foster circle on such occasions. (36)

Ruthenberg saw in the Foster-Cannon bloc a bunch of upstart trade-union opportunists who threatened communist orthodoxy. Max Bedacht, who was, like Ruthenberg, a proper and straight-laced German (he never got over the antipathy he felt because Cannon was chewing tobacco when they first met), thought likewise. (37) Though “C.E.” Ruthenberg (no one ever called him by his first name) had an honorable history as an SP left-winger and was the faction leader with mass appeal among the Workers Party rank and file, he was an aloof individual who by all accounts left to others the details of the internal factional struggle. Pepper was Ruthenberg’s factional operative until Pepper was recalled to Moscow in May 1924; after that Jay Lovestone played the role. Lovestone became the dominant force within the Ruthenberg faction, even before Ruthenberg’s untimely death in March 1927.

Pepper was “the consummate type of the man who knows how to adapt himself, a political parasite.” (38) Lovestone was a man molded in Pepper’s image. If the search for a get-rich-quick road to mass influence through the Farmer-Labor movement was the political basis of the early Ruthenberg faction, Lovestone’s corrupt and cynical organizational methods were the internal counterpart. His factional cohort, Benjamin Gitlow, wrote accurately (if bitterly), at least on this question:

He was unmarried, as far as anyone knew, but beyond that not a man in the Party knew anything more about him. But Lovestone knew everything about everybody in the Party. He was a walking Walter Winchell of the lives and scandals of the important Party members. To him many Party comrades would confide their innermost secrets, yet he confided nothing. The leaders of the Party feared and hated him more than any other man because he knew too much. His personal file was the talk of the Party. Whenever he could get a leader of the Party down in black on white, it went into his file, and when one least expected it, the letter, foolishly written, the remark, damaging to one’s character, was publicly used if the occasion demanded it. (39)

Antipathy to Lovestone characterizes all those who were on the other side of the factional divide in the Workers Party. Bittelman later wrote that “Lovestone’s way was ruthless, unscrupulous and iron-fisted.” (40) “In intimate circles,” according to Cannon, “Foster remarked more than once that if Lovestone were not a Jew, he would be the most likely candidate for leadership of a fascist movement. That was a fairly common opinion.” (41)

There was nothing that Lovestone wouldn't do in the fight to put his faction in control of the Workers Party. Cannon explained why Lovestone was the predominant figure in the Ruthenberg faction:

Wolfe was a more serious student, he was better educated and more effective both as a speaker and a writer than Lovestone himself. And Bedacht, a product of the old pre-war German school, knew far more about formal Marxist doctrine and took it more seriously. But both of them lacked Lovestone’s will, his ruthless and driving ambition, to say nothing of his truly diabolical passion for intrigue and his indefatigable energy in setting men against each other and fouling things up generally. (42)

“I don't know whether you can get a comprehension of what it meant to fight with a son-of-a-bitch like Lovestone,” Cannon later told Draper. (43) But if Lovestone kept the factional pot boiling in the American party, it was the increasingly Stalinized Comintern that provided the heat.

Trotsky Fights the “Third Party Alliance”

For a young and weak Communist Party, lacking in revolutionary temper, to play the role of solicitor and gatherer of “progressive voters” for the Republican Senator La Follette is to head toward the political dissolution of the party in the petty bourgeoisie. After all, opportunism expresses itself not only in moods of gradualism but also in political impatience: it frequently seeks to reap where it has not sown, to realize successes which do not correspond to its influence. Underestimation of the basic task—the development and strengthening of the proletarian character of the party—here is the basic trait of opportunism!...The inspirers of this monstrous opportunism, who are thoroughly imbued with skepticism concerning the American proletariat, are impatiently seeking to transfer the party’s center of gravity into a farmer milieu—a milieu that is being shaken by the agrarian crisis. By underwriting, even if with reservations, the worst illusions of the petty bourgeoisie, it is not at all difficult to create for oneself the illusion of wielding influence over the petty bourgeoisie. To think that Bolshevism consists of this is to understand nothing about Bolshevism. (44)

Trotsky’s preface was dated May 20. The same day, the Comintern issued its decision on the question. Zinoviev had finally conceded the main point to Trotsky: “An alliance with the La Follette movement would not serve the liberation of the petty-bourgeois masses from domination by capital.” But Zinoviev could not adopt Trotsky’s hard line against a two-class party without undercutting the triumvirate’s campaign against Trotsky for “underestimating” the peasantry. The decision accepted the need for a farmer-labor party in America:

These two independent tasks—the task of building around the Communist Party a broad class labor party and of establishing a bond between the labor party and the poorest elements of farmers—have developed in the United States, thanks to the peculiarities of historical evolution, as one problem, namely, the building of a common party of workers and exploited farmers....The American Communists must establish within the Farmer-Labor Party a strong consolidated labor wing including the agricultural wage workers. (45)

Subsequent Comintern decisions on the labor party question in the United States only compounded and amplified the confusion on the question of the “two-class party” exhibited in this declaration.

The Comintern decision accepted the Cannon-Foster contention that the split with Fitzpatrick’s forces had been a disaster. (Even Israel Amter, a hard Ruthenberg-Pepper supporter, had been forced to admit in the Comintern’s journal that “experience demonstrates that the conception of comrades Foster-Cannon was correct.”) (46) But the ECCI was careful not to endorse either faction, and it criticized Cannon by name:

If the group represented by comrades Ruthenberg and Pepper has made the mistake of not realizing sufficiently the dangers besetting the party on the long path leading to securing the co-operation of the petty-bourgeois masses, the comrades gathered around the other group, such as comrades Hathaway and Cannon, have made a number of declarations which show that in their efforts to secure influence on the petty bourgeoisie they failed to maintain the Communist position. (47)

In his capacity as secretary of the Farmer-Labor Federation of Minnesota, Hathaway had signed a statement against the imposition of communist “utopias,” an act attacked by both Trotsky and the ECCI decision as a particularly egregious example of opportunism. No specific declaration of Cannon’s was mentioned, but the singling out of Cannon was no doubt due to Pepper’s Comintern influence. In effect, the attack on Cannon served to deflect attention from the fact that both factions had “failed to maintain the Communist position.” The public criticism had to have affected Cannon’s standing in the party. Readers will note a marked shift toward Communist orthodoxy in Cannon’s writings in the summer of 1924. While other party leaders viewed the Comintern’s decision as only a temporary setback, Cannon sought to assimilate its full significance for communist strategy.

The 1924-25 Faction Fight

The Fight Against Lore’s “Two and a Half Internationalism”

Lore’s real crime, as far as Zinoviev was concerned, was his support to Trotsky. But there was truth to the charge that Lore remained a social democrat who, like Kautsky with his short-lived “Two and a Half International,” was trying to straddle the fence between reformism and communism. Lore’s group of party supporters were definitely a rightist bunch, centered on a layer of trade-union officials like needle trades leader Charles Zimmerman. In June 1924 Cannon had labeled Zimmerman “a dangerous opportunist who has to be watched”; Zimmerman’s later trajectory would indicate that this was not an exaggeration on Cannon’s part. (48) The needle trades leaders soon broke with Lore, and they retained membership in the Workers Party even after Lore was expelled in 1925. Their opportunism remained a frequent target of Cannon.

As is apparent from the material we publish here, Cannon energetically took up the ideological struggle against Lore’s “Two and a Half Internationalism.” He also pushed Zinoviev’s “Bolshevization” campaign. But even as he promoted these campaigns, which were code words for anti-Trotskyism in the Comintern as a whole, he remained essentially a passive supporter of the broader anti-Trotsky campaign. He was able to take this position in part because Loreism was a real right-wing tendency within the American party.

Though they turned against their erstwhile supporters in the Lore faction, the Cannon-Foster faction hardly had the profile of a left wing. They correctly insisted on the necessity of a proletarian majority in any farmer-labor movement, but they did not criticize the party’s failure to insist on the working-class character of the party formed at the July 3 Chicago convention. Their documents reveal a tendency to adapt to the backward prejudices common in the AFL unions. There is little emphasis, for example, on the need for the party to aggressively wage a fight against the racist Jim Crow restrictions in most union constitutions. And they said little about American imperialism’s increasingly restrictive and racist immigration policies.

The decision against support to La Follette had been part of a general left turn by the Comintern in 1924-25. Afraid that Trotsky might pick up support, Zinoviev maneuvered to outflank him on the left. The years 1924-25 were later described by Trotsky as “the years of Left mistakes and putschist experiments.” (49) Under the general rubric of “Bolshevization,” most of the established sectional leaderships were replaced by figures loyal to Zinoviev and hence more willing to spout the leftist rhetoric he demanded. The ascendancy of Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow in Germany was symptomatic of this trend. Pepper knew how to couch the Ruthenberg faction’s orientation in terms of the pseudo-leftism that was the political currency of the Comintern under Zinoviev. It was this, combined with Pepper’s skillful playing of the Trotsky card, that ensured the defeat of the Foster-Cannon faction at the Comintern’s Fifth Plenum in March-April 1925.

The 1925 Decision on the Labor Party Slogan

The plenum declared, “it must be recognized that in the elections La Follette gained an important victory,” and decreed the urgent necessity of continued agitation around the labor party issue. The ECCI did not correct the party’s former position in favor of a two-class farmer-labor party even though it reversed it: “Our slogan itself should now be revised insofar that we no longer agitate for a 'farmer-labor party' but only for a 'labor party,' since in the changed conditions the premises for the formation of a joint party of workers and small farmers are lacking.” (50) Political clarity was beside the point to the ECCI.

As a propaganda slogan, the demand for a labor party could have had a place in the communist arsenal at this time. But to insist on the need for an agitational campaign around the slogan was tantamount to insisting on a continued orientation to the bourgeois “Progressive” forces. An unsigned article in the March English-language Communist International had argued this explicitly: “The La Follette movement is an inevitable stage in the process of the revolutionization of the American proletariat....The chief political task of the American Communists now consists in breaking the proletarian and poor farmer elements, away from the La Follette movement....” (51) The La Follette third party movement was dead, however, so the opportunist orientation demanded by the Comintern remained a dead letter in the next period, except in a few states like Minnesota, where small “Farmer-Labor” remnants survived.

The Comintern leadership clearly favored the Ruthenberg-Lovestone faction. But the Cannon-Foster faction still had the votes in the American party: they won a majority of delegates in the elections to the party’s Fourth Convention, held in August 1925. Both Cannon and Draper describe how a cable from Moscow intervened to change the verdict of the American party. (52) The Comintern cable declared that the “Ruthenberg Group is more loyal to decisions of the Communist International and stands closer to its views,” demanded that the hated Lovestone remain a member of the Central Executive Committee and insisted that the Ruthenberg faction get at least 40 percent of the seats on the incoming CEC.

The Cannon-Foster Split

Cannon and Foster split over how to respond to the cable. Cannon wanted to comply with the sense of the cable and give each faction 50 percent of the incoming CEC. Foster wanted to flout the Comintern and wash his hands of the new CEC by giving the Ruthenberg group an absolute majority. Cannon carried a bare majority of the Foster-Cannon caucus and the faction followed his proposal. But the Comintern representative to the new CEC, S.I. Gusev—a Russian who had followed Stalin’s line in the Russian party since the Civil War days—declared his intention to vote with the Ruthenberg faction, giving them the majority in any case. In the aftermath, the following joke reportedly became popular among the more cynical party members: “Why is the Communist Party of the United States like the Brooklyn Bridge? Because it is suspended on cables.” (53)

But Cannon was not at all cynical where the Communist International was concerned. He was a loyal “Cominternist” and, as he later told Draper, he had “been convinced in our discussions with the Russians, that we had made a political error in our estimate of the prospects of a labor party in the United States, and I was most concerned that we make a real correction. With inadequate theoretical schooling I was already groping my way to the conception, which later became a governing principle, that a correct political line is more important than any organizational question, including the question of party control.” (54)

For Foster, however, the question of party control remained paramount. The split in the Cannon-Foster faction hardened and became permanent because Foster and Bittelman insisted on appealing the Comintern cable after the convention and sought to mobilize the base of the Cannon-Foster faction against the Comintern. Such an opposition was necessarily based on the rightism of the Finns and of Lore’s supporters (who remained in the party even though Lore himself was expelled by the convention). Cannon had already written a polemic against the anti-internationalism of the leader of the Finnish Federation, Henry Askeli. In later years Shachtman described the thinking of Cannon and his supporters when they broke with Foster:

The kind of support we would necessarily rally, the kind of support that would come to us whether we rallied it deliberately or not, would be of a kind that first would mobilize all of the right-wing elements of the party against the Comintern, and in mobilizing them behind the appeal, we would be placed increasingly at the mercy of these right-wing elements. They would constitute more and more of our troops. And, willy-nilly...a split would ensue. Why willy-nilly? Because nobody really felt the Comintern would reverse its decision. (55)

The break between Cannon and Foster became final when Cannon spoke out against the Foster-Bittelman appeal in a speech, which we publish here, to the Young Workers League conference in October. Foster retained the support of the Finns and the core of the TUEL apparatus—his group had the bigger rank-and-file base. But the Cannon-Foster cadre had split down the middle. Cannon won the youth, including Shachtman, the party leaderships in Detroit and Minnesota, as well as Abern, Swabeck, Gomez and Cannon’s best friend and collaborator, William F. Dunne.

Cannon and his supporters blocked with the Ruthenberg faction in the period after his split with Foster, trying to forge a collective pro-Comintern leadership. Their joint resolution “Unify the Party!” is included here. But even as Cannon broke with Foster, he and Dunne were compelled to register a protest in the Political Committee against Ruthenberg’s attempts to undercut Foster’s Trade Union Department. Their bloc with Ruthenberg-Lovestone did not last very long.

The International Labor Defense

The International Labor Defense (ILD) was the center of Cannon’s public political work from August 1925 until his expulsion in 1928. In a letter to Draper, Cannon told the story of how the ILD was conceived in Moscow in 1925 with ex-Wobbly “Big Bill” Haywood. Rose Karsner, at the time head of the International Red Aid campaign in the United States, was also in Moscow and participated in the discussions. Cannon detailed the proud history of the ILD’s non-sectarian defense of class-war prisoners. (56) Such defense had been a theme of Workers Party propaganda since the party’s inception, but the ILD gave it flesh and blood.

It appears that only the timing of the ILD’s founding allowed it to survive the vicissitudes of the internal party struggle. Just before the Fourth Convention Cannon was able to force his plans for the establishment of the ILD through the Executive Council (Political Committee) over Ruthenberg’s objections, as indicated in the 26 June 1925 minutes, excerpts of which we publish here. If Ruthenberg had prevailed and Max Bedacht had been appointed ILD secretary, the entire project would probably have been scuttled since Cannon’s personal ties with the IWW and ex-Wobbly milieu were key: the Wobblies demanded that Cannon be secretary of the organization as a condition for cooperation. (57)

By late August Ruthenberg-Lovestone had a majority on the Executive Council, but the ILD was protected (as Foster’s TUEL was not) by Cannon’s initial alliance with Ruthenberg. Cannon had time to build it into the party’s largest and most successful united-front organization. Its monthly magazine, the Labor Defender—edited by Max Shachtman and managed by Martin Abern—had a circulation of 22,000 by July 1928. Cannon wrote frequently on ILD matters in both Labor Defender and the party’s Daily Worker.

In 1958 Cannon published a selection of his popular, agitational writings over the years, Notebook of an Agitator. (58) He included most of his ILD material and all of his major articles on the campaign against the execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927. Notebook of an Agitator also includes some other popular pieces Cannon wrote while in the Workers Party, including his tribute to C.E. Ruthenberg. This book is still readily available; we therefore publish none of these articles here. We include here only one ILD article which was not in Cannon’s selection: “The Red Month of November” (November 1927).

The American Negro Labor Congress

The syndicalists were significantly better than the SP on this question; they actively fought Jim Crow in the labor movement. In its first decade the IWW made significant headway in organizing an integrated timber workers union in the South. Cannon’s account of the 1912 IWW convention takes special note of the fact that two black delegates attended the convention, including one from the Brotherhood of Timber Workers, calling the integrated meeting “proof that we have surmounted all barriers of race and color.” (59) The Chicago Stockyards Labor Council, organized by Foster and Johnstone in 1919, made some headway in organizing black workers as well as white. On the eve of the July 1919 Chicago race riot the Stockyards Labor Council tried to organize an integrated packinghouse workers' march through the black neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side. When the packing bosses succeeded in having the march banned (on the pretext that it might foment racial tension!), Foster and Johnstone organized two separate marches—one black and one white—both of which marched the planned route, to the cheers of the black community which lined the parade route. (60)

But even the best of the syndicalists did not hark back to Marx and Engels' writings on the revolutionary nature of the American Civil War. No one in the American left wing saw the fight against the oppression of black people as a motor force for the American socialist revolution.

The Workers Party in the 1920s broke with this tradition of lack of attention to the unique racist structure of American capitalism. The Russian Bolsheviks had developed their party in intense opposition to the Great Russian chauvinism of the tsar’s empire, and they understood that the demands of oppressed minorities could be a powerful revolutionary force. Cannon recalled in his 1961 essay, “The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement,” how important the Russian influence was in reorienting the American Communist movement:

The best of the earlier socialists were represented by Debs, who was friendly to all races and purely free from prejudice. But the limitedness of the great agitator’s view on this far from simple problem was expressed in his statement: “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world” (Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross). That was considered a very advanced position at the time, but it made no provision for active support of the Negro’s special claim for a little equality here and now, or in the foreseeable future, on the road to socialism.

And even Debs, with his general formula that missed the main point—the burning issue of ever-present discrimination against the Negroes every way they turned—was far superior in this regard, as in all others, to Victor Berger, who was an outspoken white supremacist....

The difference—and it was a profound difference—between the Communist Party of the Twenties and its socialist and radical ancestors, was signified by its break with this tradition. The American communists in the early days, under the influence and pressure of the Russians in the Comintern, were slowly and painfully learning to change their attitude; to assimilate the new theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the over-all program—and to start doing something about it.

The true importance of this profound change, in all its dimensions, cannot be adequately measured by the results in the Twenties. The first ten years have to be considered chiefly as the preliminary period of reconsideration and discussion, and change of attitude and policy on the Negro question—in preparation for future activity in this field.

The effects of this change and preparation in the Twenties, brought about by the Russian intervention, were to manifest themselves explosively in the next decade. The ripely favorable conditions for racial agitation and organization among the Negroes, produced by the great depression, found the Communist Party ready to move in this field as no other radical organization in this country had ever done before. (61)

Many of the initial black cadre of the American Communist movement came from the milieu around A. Philip Randolph’s journal, the Messenger, and his Harlem Socialist political club. Randolph sided with the reformist SP majority in the 1919 split; those blacks who saw the Russian Revolution as the way forward gravitated to the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), founded late in 1919 by Cyril Briggs. The ABB’s initial aim of “African liberation and redemption” was later expanded to that of the “immediate protection and ultimate liberation of Negroes everywhere” and it became a recruiting ground for the Communist movement by the summer of 1921. Claude McKay, who had worked with the British Communists in London from 1919 to 1921, played a role bringing the Harlem ABBers into the orbit of the American Communists.

The Brotherhood sent a fraternal delegation to the founding convention of the Workers Party in December 1921 and many ABB members joined the new legal party. While the ABB retained a separate existence and identity through 1924, it was closely associated with the Workers Party; its remaining local organizations were advised to join the Workers Party in 1925. In New York the ABB was based mostly among political activists of West Indian extraction, while in Chicago it had a significant base among the Southern-born skilled building tradesmen organized in the American Consolidated Trades Council (ACTC). Edward Doty, a plumber by trade, was the Chicago ABB post commander and also the founder of the ACTC. (62)

In discussions on the question of the oppression of the American black population in the early congresses of the Communist International (such discussions took place at the Second, Fourth and Fifth World Congresses in 1920, 1922 and 1925 respectively), the question was viewed primarily as an extension of the colonial question. The early Comintern laid great emphasis on the leadership role American blacks were destined to play in the liberation of the African colonies. Concomitantly the American party tried to influence and recruit from Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa Universal Negro Improvement Association; in the mid-1920s the party supported the anti-Garvey opposition as the UNIA fell apart following Garvey’s 1922 arrest. (63) Both the party and the ABB participated in an ill-fated “All-Race Negro Congress” in Chicago in February 1924, but the majority of black middle-class delegates were resolutely opposed to a pro-labor, communist perspective. (64)

With the formation of the American Negro Labor Congress in 1925, the party’s orientation shifted to organizing American blacks as part of the working class, taking into account the beginning of the mass migration which was to transform the predominantly Southern agrarian black population of sharecroppers and tenant farmers into a key component of the urban American proletariat. But the ANLC still reported to the Comintern’s Eastern Department, and the black Americans who went to Moscow to study in the 1920s were sent to the University of the Toilers of the East, an institution established expressly for educating Communists from the colonial world. (65)

Perhaps because the fight for black liberation was not seen as strategic for the American socialist revolution, the party’s line on the fight against racial discrimination, and the work of the ANLC after 1925, were not issues in the factional struggles that racked the Workers Party in the 1920s. There is little on the question in the Cannon factional writings we publish in this book.

It is notable, however, that at least according to Harry Haywood, most of the party’s black members supported the Ruthenberg-Lovestone faction. This factional lineup was not to change until the Comintern’s Sixth Congress in 1928 when Haywood, then a student at the Lenin School in Moscow, joined the Foster-Cannon factional bloc. Haywood was then the only black member of the American party supporting Stalin’s position that blacks in the Southern United States “black belt” formed a nation whose right to self-determination the party should champion. The Foster-Cannon opposition, with Foster and Dunne in the lead, jumped on the self-determination bandwagon early, in order to use this as a club against the Lovestone faction. Most of the black American party members initially resisted the self-determination slogan, arguing that the party should continue to champion full social and political equality for blacks—Haywood’s brother, Otto Hall, who was also a student in Moscow, accused Haywood of seeking to provide grist for Foster’s factional mill. (66)

While support for the post-1925 CEC majority does not appear to have netted the ANLC leaders access to greater party resources or attention—the minutes of the Political Committee meeting of 7 December 1927 reveal that Lovestone simply dismissed an ANLC request that the party fund two full-time ANLC organizers—this was nonetheless a real element in the internal dynamics of the party. Haywood reports that Robert Minor’s attention to the black members, as well as his writings on the question of black oppression, played a role in winning the black members to the Ruthenberg-Lovestone group. Haywood also remembers that the Ruthenberg-Lovestone faction was seen as pro-Comintern, while the Foster-Cannon supporters were seen as “opportunist, narrow-minded trade unionists lacking in Marxist theory.” (67)

It was the Foster-Cannon faction which was most closely identified with the party’s exclusive emphasis on “boring from within” the reactionary AFL unions. Most of these unions actively refused to admit the blacks who had streamed into the Northern factory cities during WWI. The AFL orientation of the Workers Party in the 1920s meant, in practice, that the party could not organize black workers. While Cannon was never personally committed to the exclusively AFL trade-union policy, Cannon’s lieutenant Bill Dunne leaned more in Foster’s direction. And Dunne was the Cannon-Foster faction “expert” on what was then called the “Negro question.” (68)

Dunne was the Workers Party’s representative to the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in 1924, and to the Third Congress of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern) which followed. When the head of the Profintern, A. Lozovsky, suggested at the congress that the American party should organize separate unions of black workers where the AFL unions refused to organize blacks, Dunne adamantly opposed this perspective. Pointing to the racial integration in the UMW, where the party actually had a significant base, Dunne basically alibied the racist policies of the AFL bureaucracy. His words speak volumes about the limitations of the American party at the time:

The fact that black workers are unorganized is not due to racial antagonism, but is because the American workers are unorganized in general. In those industries where Negroes work, they are admitted into the unions as members with equal rights; this is the case in the miners union, the largest organization in the American Federation of Labor; this is the case in the building trades. There are unions which encompass only skilled workers and they, of course, do not admit Negroes. But when Negroes appear in these industries in significant number, and compete with the members of the unions, then they will be accepted as members with equal rights. If we are opposed to dual unions in general, then we cannot be in favor of parallel Negro unions. Certainly racial antagonism exists, but the best way to fight it will be by accepting white and black workers into one organization, not by mobilizing the Negroes on one side of the barrier and whites on the other. (69)

Dunne’s speech contrasts sharply with the urgency Trotsky conveyed on the question of fighting race prejudice in the American labor movement, in a letter to Claude McKay published the year before Dunne spoke:

In North America the matter is further complicated by the abominable obtuseness and caste presumption of the privileged upper strata of the working class itself, who refuse to recognize fellow workers and fighting comrades in the Negroes. Gompers' policy is founded on the exploitation of such despicable prejudices, and is at the present time the most effective guarantee for the successful subjugation of white and colored workers alike. The fight against this policy must be taken up from different sides, and conducted on various lines. One of the most important branches of this conflict consists in enlightening the proletarian consciousness by awakening the feeling of human dignity, and of revolutionary protest, among the Negro slaves of American capitalism. (70)

The Communist International eventually prevailed over the leadership of the American party, and the resolution adopted by the Workers Party’s Fourth Convention in August 1925 included the proviso: “Where Negroes are not permitted to join the existing 'white' trade unions, it is the duty of the Communists to take the initiative in the formation of organizations of Negro workers, declaring in principle against dual unionism and against racial separation, and declaring as a primary purpose the struggle for admission into the existing unions, but functioning as full-fledged Negro unions during the struggle.” (71)