James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928

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face of state-orchestrated Red Scares, as well as Stalinism’s repudiation of the original program and politics of revolutionary communism. Factionalism came to stalemate the renamed Workers (Communist) Party by the mid-to-late 1920s; revolutionary aspiration too often succumbed to promotions of personal authority; communist policy oscillated wildly. In 1928, while attending the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, Cannon read a scathing indictment of Stalin’s policies authored by Leon Trotsky. It opened his political eyes, convincing him that what he had been battling inside the American communist movement was but a particular variant of a wider political problem. Trotsky’s Left Opposition ideas, however, had been declared heretical in the Stalin-controlled Comintern. Returning to the United States, Cannon’s views soon earned him expulsion from the Party he had helped to create. Along with a handful of supporters, he began the difficult task of reorienting United States leftists to the politics of revolutionary communism. For the next three decades Cannon would be the leading voice of Trotskyism in the United States. James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 is meticulously and creatively researched. Written with panache, its rich detail rests on a wide array of sources. Palmer’s book situates American communism’s formative decade in the dynamics of a specific political and economic context, never losing sight of the mobilizations and militant strikes of the period. This study also locates this historical drama—to an unprecedented degree—alongside the personal life and particular experience of a native son of working-class radicalism. BRYAN D. PALMER is the Canada Research Chair at Trent University. He edits Labour/Le Travail, a journal of Canadian labor studies, and is the author of ten previous books, including Descent into Discourse and Cultures of Darkness. “In this magnificent biography of Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, Bryan Palmer recovers the lost history of the Left in the 1920s and completely reframes the debate about the origins and nature of the CPUSA. Beyond Cold War calumny or Popular Front fairy tale, here is the true story of ‘Reds,’ told by a master historian.” —MIKE DAVIS, author of City of Quartz, Planet of Slums, and Buda’s Wagon “Destined to become a path-breaking classic on American Communism, Bryan Palmer’s study of Jim Cannon offers a coherent and richly detailed account of that movement’s formative decade. Communism in the United States of the 1920s emerges from this volume not as a mere hotbed of sterile sectarianism, but as a promising outgrowth of U.S. radical traditions boldly intersecting with the contradictory realities of Russian Communism.” —PAUL LE BLANC, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, La Roche College, and author of A Short History of the U.S. Working Class and Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience Marx, Lenin and BIOGRAPHY/AMERICAN HISTORY B RYA N D. PA L M E R James P. Cannon AND THE ORIGINS OF THE American Revolutionary Left  Jacket photograph: International Labor Defense rally. Labor Defender. I L L I N O I S P A L M E R A volume in the series THE WORKING CLASS IN AMERICAN HISTORY edited by James R. Barrett, Alice Kessler-Harris, Nelson Lichtenstein, and David Montgomery UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS Urbana and Chicago www.press.uillinois.edu James P. Cannon A N D T H E O R I G I N S O F T H E American Revolutionary Left  ISBN: 978-0-252-03109-0 ,!7IA2F2-adbaja!:t;K;k;K;k Bryan D. Palmer’s magisterial study of James P. Cannon (1890-1974) concentrates on the emergence of the American revolutionary left in the 1910-28 years. The book explores how a labor militant was made in the small-town, working-class milieu of Rosedale, Kansas. It then chronicles the rise of that radical in the ranks of United States revolutionaries, charting Cannon’s movement from Kansas to centers of left-wing agitation , such as Chicago and New York. Cannon joined the Socialist Party of America (SP) at age eighteen. It was in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), however, where he apprenticed in the class struggle, leading strikes and rubbing shoulders with larger-than-life Wobbly figures, such as “Big Bill” Haywood and Frank Little. Influenced by the Russian Revolution of 1917, Cannon was soon an advocate of the Socialist Party’s Left-Wing. In...