The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  Cannon and Shachtman closely collaborated from the early 1920s through their expulsion from the Communist Party in 1928, and again throughout the 1930s, despite a near rupture in their relationship in 1932–33. In the fall of 1939, a dispute erupted in the Trotskyist organization, the Socialist Workers Party, which divided the party into factions led respectively by Cannon and Shachtman. The dispute involved questions relating to actions taken by the Soviet Union in eastern Europe and also touched on internal organizational policies and practices, questions about which almost always accompany a major factional struggle. The membership of the Trotskyists had risen to 1,520 in 1938, after the group had been purged from the Socialist Party, and then it dropped to 1,095 in 1940, on the eve of the break between Cannon and Shachtman. In 1942, Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party was at 645, and Shachtman’s Workers Party was a few hundred less.5

  In retrospect, it is clear that the real core of the 1939–40 controversy was the famous “Russian Question,” that is, the class nature of the Soviet Union. A year later Shachtman would embrace the position, initially advocated by his ally James Burnham, that a new class had come to power in the Soviet Union. Shachtman first considered the new “bureaucratic collectivist” system an improvement over capitalism, worthy of defense if assaulted from the outside, but he changed his mind after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, concluding that there was nothing worth defending in the new social order.6 Cannon held to Trotsky’s view that the Soviet Union had abolished capitalism but was blocked in its transition to socialism by the development of a bureaucratic “caste,” which had established a totalitarian system of political rule much like that of the Nazis.7 Since, unlike a class, a caste is not intrinsic to the social, structure, Trotsky made a distinction between the Soviet Union’s nationalized economy, which ought to be defended and democratized, and its political regime, which required total extirpation. In the spring of 1940, Shachtman’s faction split from the Socialist Workers Party to form the Workers Party, which changed its name to the Independent Socialist League in 1949 and dissolved into the Socialist Party in 1959.

  Trotsky supported Cannon during the dispute, but even earlier, when interparty feuding of 1931–33 had led Trotsky to condemn both Cannon and Shachtman for “sharpening the struggle by means of impermissible organizational methods and by poisoned polemics,” it was clear that he regarded Cannon as the representative of the stable proletarian base essential to the core of a Marxist party. Shachtman, for all his brilliance and personal charm, was regarded by Trotsky as a potentially unstable intellectual much like the German Trotskyist Kurt Landau and the French Trotskyist Pierre Naville, both of whom had created many problems for Trotsky.8 Trotsky complained in 1931, for example, that Shachtman tended to be “guided . . . more by personal and journalistic sympathies than by fundamental political considerations.”9 Although Trotsky also gave Cannon a few knocks, he generally respected Cannon’s tactical advice, and even deferred to his policies when it came to organizational matters, confining his disagreements to private conversations and letters.10

  Within certain limitations, Cannon and Shachtman’s personal capacities for leadership crucially affected the course their movements took, both during the time they functioned in a unified party and after their bitter separation in 1940. Therefore, information about their lives and salient personal characteristics may add a previously neglected dimension to an understanding of the numerous political disputes that filled the pages of documents, newspapers, and journals and that rang through party headquarters and halls during preconvention and convention debates of the political movement most central to the formation of the anti-Stalinist left. Although Cannon and Shachtman both had politically committed fathers and apolitical, religious mothers, and each in his youth developed a fondness for literature, they had little in common in appearance, temperament, and styles of leadership.

  PORTRAIT: JAMES P. CANNON

  When Cannon emerged as a midwestern leader of the pro-Bolshevik wing of the Socialist Party in 1917, he was still a gangling young man of medium height with light-brown hair, blue eyes, large ears and nose, and a heavy chin. As a leader of the Communist Party in the 1920s, he became known as a superb orator, an accomplished writer, a shrewd politician, and an American radical with vital links to earlier indigenous movements. Fifteen years later, as one of the two central leaders of the Trotskyist movement, he had grown stocky, with iron-gray hair that would become a thick, white, leonine mane by the 1950s. His body, still sturdy, had just begun to go soft, and his shoulders had acquired a slight stoop, although he retained a dignified and confident stance throughout his life. His right thumb was missing, presumably from a work-related accident in his youth.

  A complex, often misunderstood man, Cannon elicited undesired adulation from some and unwarranted suspicion from others. He began a novel in his youth, wrote skillful sonnets, sang beautifully in a mellow voice, and drew upon his extraordinary memory to recite lengthy poems by Kipling and Bryant in informal company. His vices included a tendency to self-indulgence and a predisposition to procrastination. His theoretical knowledge was essentially confined to the basics of Marxism. He was a haphazard administrator, and he was capable of raging factional diatribes in a movement notorious for vitriolic polemics. Yet his self-indulgent lassitude evaporated at the first sign of a genuine party crisis, as if he had been conserving his energy in order to see the important struggles through to the end. Most significantly, he had an enviable ability to inspire talented young men and women from diverse backgrounds to devote their lives to socialism rather than conventional careers, thereby creating a nucleus of party cadres that he was able to sustain over many decades.

  Some saw Cannon as the embodiment of the jovial Irish stereo type: round face, ruddy complexion, a twinkle in his eye, a gift for gab, a ready wit invariably armed with a few new jokes to tell when he got together with friends to drink and talk. Others perceived him as a stony, rude, and moody person whose physiognomy expressed inner bitterness, a man unable to manage more than a wintry smile, who projected, even in his greetings, a heavy preoccupation. To some extent Cannon’s psychology will always remain a mystery, not because he was given to masks or poses, but because, like so many other socialist workers of his generation, he never revealed his inner life, believing that it was irrelevant or harmful to dwell on one’s personal problems. There are several aspects of his life about which little is known. Among these are his relationship with his mother, who died in 1904 when he was fourteen and whose devout Catholicism may have influenced him to consider himself a “Christian Socialist” as late as 1911; his marriage at the age of seventeen to his thirty-year-old high school teacher, Lista Makimson; and the causes and nature of his addiction to alcohol, broken only later in life, that was so pronounced during the 1920s that some called his circle in the Communist Party (which included William F. Dunne, Clarence Hathaway, and Thomas J. O’Flaherty) “the drinking faction.”

  His leadership abilities were indisputable. His devotion both to his youthful vision of socialism and to the Trotskyist movement was complete. He stuck to his small outcast party by choice, for there is little doubt that his skills would have enabled him to find a comfortable position in the union bureaucracy if he had so desired. Cannon instilled in his followers a confidence in his ability to lead despite the many defeats that they suffered. Although possessed of a somewhat anarchistic personality and imbued with a plebeian anger against the injustices produced by the prevailing social order, Cannon disciplined himself in the mold of Lenin to create a team of party leaders, expertly balancing off their talents and defects.

  Speaking quietly in a lecture style, with a ringing tenor voice and a Kansas-Missouri border twang, Cannon had a distinctive habit of raising his tone a bit on the second or third word of a sentence. With straightforward but colorful language he could render a complex situation clear and simple. His commanding personal presence could not help but inspire imitators, and more than one young d
isciple would fold his thumb into his palm when giving a public talk, unconsciously replicating the gestures that Cannon made with his thumbless right hand. But for all of Cannon’s pride and self-esteem, flatterers only irked him; he preferred his authority to derive from his ideas, not his personal charisma.

  Born in Rosedale, Kansas, on 11 February 1890, Cannon was the son of Irish immigrants raised in England. One grandfather had been a cabinetmaker and the other a tailor. His father, John, was a spindlemaker until a machine process eliminated his skilled trade. In the 1880s, Cannon’s family immigrated first to Rhode Island and then moved to Rosedale after his father’s brother Jim landed a job in a rolling mill there. When the mill failed, it was converted into a foundry where John Cannon worked as a laborer.

  The Cannons were steeped in the Irish nationalist tradition of Robert Emmet; John Cannon successively identified with the Knights of Labor, the Populists, the Bryanites, and finally the socialists for whom he sold subscriptions to the Appeal to Reason as a member of the “Appeal Army.” His son Jim went to work in a Swift meat-packing house at the age of twelve. At sixteen, Jim was propelled into Socialist Party politics by the famed Haywood-Pettibone-Moyer labor defense case. Uplifted by radical ideals and desiring some knowledge of culture, he entered the local high school when it was built a year later, despite the derisive laughter of his pool-hall buddies. When he was given the part of Marc Antony in a school performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, his oratorical abilities caused a sensation in Rosedale. Local Democrats talked of his becoming a prominent lawyer or politician, but, before graduation, his predilection toward radical politics led him to become a traveling organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and a follower of Vincent St. John. At twenty-one, after hearing several lectures by Arthur M. Lewis on “social and organic evolution,” the former altar boy abandoned the last vestiges of his religion.

  Very active in the IWW from 1911 to 1913, Cannon left his role as a traveling organizer to become one of the “home guard” following his marriage. After the Russian Revolution he rejoined the Socialist Party and resumed his political activity, although he also took night courses at Kansas City Law School while holding down a full-time office job during the day. When his comrade, Earl Browder, was arrested for antiwar agitation and sent to prison, he left Cannon to assume the editorship of Workers World, a socialist newspaper published in Kansas City. Soon afterward Cannon himself was arrested for activities in support of a local miners strike. Quickly he rose to become a leading figure in the Socialist Party’s left-wing. Following the 1919 split in the Socialist Party, he joined the Communist Labor Party led by John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow, and, when the United Communist Party was formed in the spring of 1920, he was elected to its central committee and assigned as organizer of the party’s St. Louis-Southern Illinois district. Toward the end of 1920 he moved to Cleveland to edit the Toiler, a party organ, and in 1921 he transferred to New York City to participate in the party’s top leadership body. He lived for five or six months with Robert Minor, the Masses cartoonist who was married to Mary Heaton Vorse, until his wife Lista and their two children were able to join him. It was Vorse, a professional journalist, who taught him how to organize materials for speeches and articles, but for the most part his speaking, debating, and writing skills were self-taught from the time of his high school days.

  After participating in an internal struggle to create a legal party as a means of ending the underground existence of the Communist movement, Cannon was elected chairman of the national committee of the Workers Party, the new above-ground organization. In 1922–23 he served on the Presidium of the Communist International in Moscow, and between 1925 and 1928 he headed the International Labor Defense, in which capacity he raised money and publicized the cases of the Centralia prisoners, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, and the McNamara brothers. He also organized the International Labor Defense’s Sacco-Vanzetti defense campaign. During these years Cannon’s group of followers, including Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, formed a bloc with William Z. Foster’s group against the faction led by Charles Ruthenberg and Jay Lovestone. The two factions quarreled over such issues as the party’s attitude toward a labor party, trade union strategy and tactics, the location of the national office, and the nature and composition of the party leadership. During that time Cannon left Lista and began living with Rose Karsner (1890-1968), a Romanian-born party worker whose maiden name was Greenburg. A small, indefatigably energetic woman, Karsner brought stability to Cannon’s life and greatly promoted his welfare. She had served as a secretary for Max Eastman’s Masses magazine and had been married to David Karsner, a journalist and biographer of Eugene V. Debs. The Karsners were such good friends with Walt Whitman’s secretary, Horace Traubel, that they named their daughter “Walta” in honor of Whitman.

  During the summer of 1928 Cannon attended the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International where he received a translation of Trotsky’s “Criticism of the Draft Program of the Communist International.” Captivated by the program of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, Cannon and his followers were expelled from the American Communist Party in October for circulating Trotsky’s views. With Shachtman and Martin Abern he began publishing the Militant newspaper immediately and founded the Communist League of America (Left Opposition) (CLA) in mid-1929. The CLA had only a hundred members at first, but it doubled its size over the next several years and began publishing a theoretical magazine, the New International, in 1934.

  Shortly after he had been expelled from the Communist Party, Cannon entered one of the most difficult periods of his life. His wife, Lista, fell ill and died, leaving Cannon and Rose to care for two more children. Having no income or financial security, Cannon accepted David Karsner’s assistance in securing a job in the circulation department of the New York Tribune. His drinking increased. At the same time, unflattering stories began to circulate within the newly founded Trotskyist organization that Cannon desired to retire from politics and go into the hotel business with his brother in the Midwest, that he was hostile to the younger members and opposed political initiatives, that he was kept in power by a group of “handraisers” from the party’s Minneapolis branch who showed up at party plenums to vote with Cannon but never expressed their own opinions, that National Committee members who lived outside New York could not participate in shaping party policy because they never received important information and were always presented with faits accomplis, and that Cannon was contemptuous of intellectuals, antitheoretical, lazy, and opportunist. These accusations fueled a factional struggle between Cannon and his two chief lieutenants, Shachtman and Abern, which kept the party continuously at the point of a split until 1933. Then the fortunes of the Trotskyist movement began to improve. For the next six years, Cannon, Shachtman, and Abern constituted a leadership team, with Cannon continuing to hold positions as national secretary of the party and editor of the Militant. He later served as a delegate to the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938 and as a member of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International.

  Cannon’s admirers were adamantly pro-Cannon and his detractors equally anti-Cannon. Hence it is difficult to assess the real basis of the litany of charges against him, charges that would be frequently repeated for decades by his political opponents. At the least, the accusations seem to have been grossly exaggerated in the hothouse atmosphere of the tiny Trotskyist movement, comprised of a few hundred men and women who were hypersensitive to any signs of bureaucracy and highly conscious of the need for theoretical clarity. The claim, for example, that Cannon had contempt for intellectuals seems to be only partly true: he had a contempt for those he called “playboy intellectuals” or “dilettante intellectuals,” individuals he took to be dabblers slumming in the proletarian movement. But there is evidence that Cannon held in high esteem those he considered to be undivided in their allegiance, who had cut their ties with their middle- or upper-class background to reshape their liv
es in service to the working-class movement. It may be accurate, as some of his critics claimed, that a few of Cannon’s followers sought to conceal their own New York Jewish intellectual backgrounds by talking out of the sides of their mouths, as they imagined tough proletarians talked; but it is not clear that Cannon was responsible for that kind of behavior. It also seems likely that Cannon was noticeably uncomfortable around anyone whose dress, behavior, or speech might be associated with manners of the elite classes. This may be an excusable attitude for a worker-revolutionary, but it did mean that, if one were an intellectual, one might have felt the burden of convincing Cannon that he or she had not been brainwashed by the class enemy. Perhaps a different attitude might have enabled Cannon to maintain better relations with some of the writers attracted to the Trotskyist movement, but many of his fears and misgivings turned out to be justified. During the late 1930s and the 1940s, he witnessed a stampede to the right, a full retreat from revolutionary politics, by virtually an entire generation of intellectuals who had swung to the left in the years following 1929.