James P. Cannon
James Patrick Cannon was an American Trotskyist and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.
Born on February 11, 1890, in Rosedale, Kansas, Cannon was the son of Irish immigrants with strong socialist convictions. He joined the Socialist Party of America in 1908 and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1911. He was trained by "Big Bill" Haywood, a top IWW leader, and was an IWW organizer throughout the Midwest from 1912 to 1914.
Following his expulsion in 1928 from the pro-Stalinist Communist Party USA, Cannon helped establish the American Trotskyist movement. He co-founded and led the Communist League of America, which then merged into the Workers Party of the United States. In 1938, he was elected National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. During World War II, he was imprisoned for opposing America's involvement in the conflict. In 1953, Cannon stepped down as National Secretary and moved to California. At the time of his death in Los Angeles in August 1974, he held the position of national chairman emeritus of the SWP.
Political biography
Cannon in the early Communist movement
Cannon opposed World War I from an internationalist position and rallied to the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bolshevik victory in Russia served to radicalize the Socialist Party of America and brought Cannon back to the organization. He was an active participant in the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party, an organized faction that sought to transform the SPA into a revolutionary socialist organization. In 1919, he was a founding member of the Communist Labor Party, forerunner of the Communist Party of America, although he did not attend the Chicago convention of the CLP due to insufficient party tenure in the SPA. But he was a part of the CLP's leadership from its earliest days, serving as District Secretary of the CLP for the states of Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska from the time of founding. He was also the editor of the left-wing Kansas City weekly, Worker's World, from 1919 to 1920, assuming the position after fellow Kansas syndicalist Earl Browder was sent to prison for his previous antiwar activities.In May 1920, the CLP merged with a section of the CPA headed by C. E. Ruthenberg, and Cannon was elected to the new organization's Central Executive Committee by the founding convention. He worked variously as the St. Louis District Organizer of the UCP in the summer of 1920 and as editor of the organization's labor newspaper, The Toiler, in October of that year. This brought Cannon to New York City, where he was able to regularly sit on the meetings of the Central Executive Committee. After the UCP merged with the remaining CPA organization, headed by Charles Dirba, Cannon was named the first Subdistrict Organizer of the unified organization for Duluth, Minnesota.
Cannon was on the executive board of the American Labor Alliance, one of the underground CPA's most important legal organizations, intended to bring mainstream trade unionists into common cause with the persecuted underground communist movement. In December 1921, Cannon delivered the keynote speech to the founding convention of the "legal political party" formed in parallel to the underground CPA, the Workers Party of America, and was elected national chairman by that convention.
Cannon was elected by the CEC of the unified CPA as delegate of that organization to the Enlarged Plenum of the executive committee of the Communist International and as formal party representative to the Red International of Labor Unions, leaving the U.S. in mid-May 1922 and arriving in Moscow on June 1. He stayed on there as a delegate of the American party to the 4th World Congress of the Comintern, where he was elected to the ECCI Presidium, serving from August to November 1922. Back in the U.S., Cannon was a member of the executive committee of the Friends of Soviet Russia from 1922. He was also a candidate of the WPA for the United States Congress from the New York 10th District in 1922. Cannon remained on the CEC of the WPA throughout this period.
On January 19, 1924, Cannon was named assistant executive secretary of the Workers Party of America, working under his faction rival, Ruthenberg. He was the WPA's candidate for Governor of New York in 1924, and again returned to Moscow as a delegate of the party to the 5th Enlarged Plenum of ECCI, held in March and April 1925.
Cannon was an important factional leader in the American communist movement of the 1920s, sitting on the governing Central Executive Committee of the party in alliance with William Z. Foster, a Chicago-based group that looked to native-born American workers in the unions. Later in the decade, Cannon broke to an extent with Foster, heading up instead the party's legal defense arm, International Labor Defense. This organization served as a power base for Cannon and his associates. Cannon was the Workers Party's candidate for Congress in the New York 20th District in 1928.
Cannon's turn to Trotskyism
While in Russia in 1928, Cannon read a critique of the direction of the Communist International written by Trotsky which the Comintern had mistakenly circulated. He was convinced of the arguments, and attempted to form a Left Opposition within the Workers Party. This resulted in his expulsion on October 27, 1928, together with his co-thinkers Max Shachtman and Martin Abern.Outside of the Communist Party, Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern founded a new political party, the Communist League of America and began publishing The Militant. They came to see Hitler's crushing of the communist movement in Germany as evidence that the Comintern was no longer able to play a revolutionary role internationally and, with the remainder of the Third International under Stalin's control, unable to be internally reformed such that a new International and new parties were required.
Concretely this meant that they no longer considered the Communist League to be a faction of the Communist Party but rather considered it the nucleus of a future revolutionary party. It also meant that they were far more inclined to look at working with other sections of the reviving socialist and workers movements from this point forth. Although the Communist League had been a small organization — opponents dubbing Cannon, Abern and Shachtman "Three generals without an army" — it had won a majority of the Communist Party branch in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Therefore, when the labor movement revived in the early 1930s the Communist League was well placed to put its ideas into action in the Twin Cities and through their influence in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters the union rapidly grew after an historic dispute in 1934. Cannon played a major role in this dispute directing the work of the Communist League on a daily basis, along with Shachtman. In December 1934 the Communist League of America merged with pacifist A. J. Muste's American Workers Party to form the Workers Party of the United States.
Throughout 1935 and into 1936, the Workers Party was deeply divided over the so-called "French Turn." The Trotskyist organization in France had entered the country's social democratic party — the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière — and, while maintaining themselves as an organized faction in the broader organization, had made what were felt to be significant gains in advancing their programmatic goals and winning adherents to their cause among young party members. This tactic was subsequently endorsed by Trotsky himself, but the American party was split over the advisability of the maneuver. Cannon was a forceful advocate of the tactic and became embroiled in an inner-party fight to dissolve the Workers Party in favor of entry into the Socialist Party of America. In early 1936, a convention of the Workers Party finally decided that the organization should enter the SP. This decision came at a cost, however, with a left wing faction led by Hugo Oehler refusing to join the Socialists and exiting to form the Revolutionary Workers League. A. J. Muste became disgusted as well and left the radical political movement to return to his roots in the church.
The Trotskyists' stay inside the Socialist Party lasted only from mid-1936 until mid-1937. Admissions were made on an individual basis, rather than en masse. Chicago attorney and devoted Trotskyist Albert Goldman, who entered the SP about a year earlier than his comrades, launched a factionally-oriented newspaper called Socialist Appeal. Meanwhile, Cannon headed west to the Los Angeles suburb of Tujunga to launch a western paper, entitled Labor Action, focused on the trade union movement. Day-to-day operations of the SP's Trotskyist faction during 1936-37 were handled by Shachtman and James Burnham in New York, while Cannon made what he later described as "futile attempts to participate in correspondence in the work of the New York center."
As the factional situation in the Socialist Party intensified at the start of 1937, the decision was made by the hostile New York party organization to expel the Trotskyists, which took place in late spring. A large percentage of the SPA's youth organization, the Young People's Socialist League, likewise dropped out with the Trotskyists. Cannon reportedly said that when the SP expelled the Trotskyists, "they had expelled the heart of their party; Trotsky had won over all the serious young activists, leaving only a dead husk".
In the summer of 1937, Cannon returned to New York from California, where he conducted organizational activities which led to the formation of the Socialist Workers Party at a convention held from December 31, 1937, to January 3, 1938. Cannon was elected as the group's first National Secretary. James Cannon later wrote that "Our 'round trip' through the Socialist Party had resulted in gains all along the line. We formed the Socialist Workers Party...and began once again an independent struggle with good prospects and good hopes".