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CHAPTER 6 “Pepperism” in America He [Pepper] shoved me here… he shoved me there. He stepped all over me. I went black and blue, I was sore as hell. But I waited, waited, waited, And did not have the guts to lead a fight Till Foster took the cudgel up, Till Foster led the row. “MEDITATION, A MONOLOGUE,“ BY JAMES CANNON Of the hundreds of delegates who were to attend the “monster convention ” scheduled to begin on July 3, 1923, in Chicago, only ten were officially allocated to the Workers’ Party. But Pepper, who as an organizer in Hungary and Germany, had learned certain innovative methods for artificially enhancing the influence of the Communist movement, was confident that with proper planning the Workers’ Party would be able to play the leading role in the transformation of the FLP into a mass Labor Party dominated by the CP. What the Communists lacked in numbers would be compensated for by discipline, ingenuity, and a bit of chicanery. In studying the Farmer-Labor Party leaflet announcing the calling of the convention , Pepper identified a loophole that the Communists could take advantage of. In order that the “rank-and-file” would be fully represented, local labor and farm organizations, even small ones, had been encouraged to send accredited delegates. To take advantage of this opportunity, the CEC, at Pepper’s urging, encouraged members throughout the country to volunteer to serve as delegates to the convention on behalf of their union or fraternal organization.1 These volunteers would receive generous travel funding , which was made possible by substantial subsidies that the Comintern was providing. Since in many cases there were no other members of such organizations who were interested in taking on this responsibility, Communists arrived at the convention in numbers greatly disproportionate to 1 Minutes of the CEC meeting of June 21, 1923, RCPUSA, 515/1/190/16–18, reel 12. their actual influence at the local level. Furthermore, WP members were creative in locating, and even in some cases inventing, organizations that they could claim to represent. In this way such fictitious or newly created groups as the Romanian Progressive Club, the Philadelphia United Workingmen Singers, the Lithuanian Workers’ Literature Society, and two obscure organizations from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, supposedly authorized Communists to act on their behalf. As a result, of the approximately 550 delegates who arrived in Chicago, about 190 were Communists and a significant portion of the rest were not particularly hostile to the ideology of the Workers’ Party.2 Fearful that they were about to lose control of their own convention, Fitzpatrick and his colleagues made futile attempts to stop the momentum of the Communists. They discovered, however, that the majority of those who had made their way to Chicago, although not necessarily ready to ally completely with the Communists, were determined to create a new Labor Party and were unsympathetic to Fitzpatrick’s belated call for caution and further planning. On the second day of the convention, the caucus system Pepper had helped set up, with runners facilitating communication between ten-man groups headed by captains, was highly effective in maintaining WP discipline and winning over delegates. The enthusiasm and determination of the WP contingent proved to be contagious, and when Ruthenberg put forward a proposal for the immediate organization of the new party, the FFLP, it was approved despite strenuous opposition from the FLP leadership. Though euphoric in victory, Pepper and Ruthenberg tried in various ways to appease Fitzpatrick, for example, by ensuring that neither in the party platform nor in the convention speeches was their any revolutionary rhetoric that would cause alarm on the non-Communist Left.3 However, no one familiar with the contemporary American labor scene, least of all Fitzpatrick, was taken in by these attempts to disguise what had happened. Communists formed a solid majority of the executive committee of the FFLP, and the key position of national secretary was given to Joseph Manley, a Pepper loyalist (and also Foster’s son-in-law). The journal of the FLP was taken over and renamed. Fitzpatrick was deeply embittered by what he regarded as the perfidious and ruthless conduct of the WP leader2 Draper, American Communism, 44; 450, fn. 38. 3 Ibid., Draper, 47–48. Pepper offered his own tendentious account of the convention, including the many concessions that the WP allegedly made to the FLP, in his long report to the ECCI of October 2, 1923...

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