by Alan M Wald
PORTRAIT: MAX SHACHTMAN
If Cannon’s personality evoked varied reactions, Shachtman seems to have been much more widely regarded as a pleasant person. Few failed to admire his crackling wit, polemical style, sense of irony, robust humor, and exceptional political acumen. Five feet nine inches tall and stocky, Shachtman had jet-black hair, a thin mustache, full lips, and dark brown eyes whose penetrating gaze was perhaps his most distinctive facial feature. His tendency to paunchiness increased with age but halted in the 1950s when he suffered a coronary thrombosis. By then his hair had thinned to the point of baldness. Occasionally, like Trotsky, he sported a goatee.
A facile writer, his breezy style and razor-sharp wit animated his polemical sallies, which were grounded in an exceptional knowledge of the history of the Marxist movement. On the platform he was a devastating speaker and debater, over the years demolishing opponents ranging from Earl Browder to Alexander Kerensky. His voice was rather high-pitched, sometimes rising to a screech, but ordinarily of resonant timbre. Many remembered his passionate, resounding orations, which often lasted for hours. For some, Shachtman’s extraordinary speaking style recalled a Beethoven symphony: he began slowly, building in soft whispers, and then burst forth, with powerful resonance, filling the room with a spine-tingling crescendo. For others, his sarcasm, humor, ad hominem attacks, forceful logic, and deep emotional sincerity provided high entertainment.
Shachtman’s humor was notorious. He could tell stories that lasted fifteen minutes yet were still funny. Energetic and gregarious, always ready with an off-color anecdote, Shachtman sometimes prolonged a one-liner to the breaking point while savoring the dramatic moments made possible by his Yiddish accent. One exchange illustrating the vulgar side of his humor occurred amidst a 1934 debate with CLA member Tom Stamm over the proper way to relate to the new forces from Muste’s American Worker’s Party, with whom the CLA was fusing. Shachtman, urging moderation, pointed out that the new organization about to be born was “like a baby that has to be nursed.” “Yes,” Stamm replied, “but nursed at the left breast of revolutionary Marxism and not at the right breast of conciliationism and centrism.” To this Shachtman retorted that he certainly favored nursing at the proper breast, “but at a breast and not at an organ of the body that’s designed for other functions.”11
There were some, however, who felt that Shachtman had cold, odd, or even light-minded sides as well. Other than his longtime associate, Albert Glotzer, few knew him intimately. Cannon welcomed Shachtman to his home many times, but Shachtman never reciprocated. Notorious for not returning borrowed books, he could be maddeningly irresponsible—not keeping appointments or completing articles by deadlines. He tended to rush to the office and dash off an article for the party’s newspaper or fulfill some other assignment at the very last minute. In the mid-1930s he first broached the idea of writing a full-scale history of the Third International. Although he researched the subject throughout the 1960s, and even signed a contract with a publisher, nothing came of the project but unpublishable notes found after his death.
Shachtman’s biography resembles those of many other New York Jewish radicals of his generation. He was born in Russia on 10 September 1904. To escape military servitude, his father had immigrated to the United States shortly after Max’s birth. His wife and son joined him eight months later. They first lived on the Lower East Side, then on the Upper East Side, and finally in East Harlem on iooth Street between First and Second avenues. Shachtman’s father was a men’s tailor and an activist in the Journeymen’s Tailor’s Union for many years. Before World War I he supported the Socialist Party and read the Jewish Daily Forward; afterward, he became pro-Communist and read the Freiheit.
Formed by his family and environment, as a teenager Max considered himself a socialist, but he was not especially interested in politics. While attending De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, he had some contact with the Young Peoples Socialist League, the youth group of the Socialist Party. He did well in mathematics, but his favorite subject was history. He came under the influence of Dr. Abraham Lefkowitz, a notorious dissenter suspected of pacifism during 1917–18, and later a leader of the teacher’s union. Shachtman got a subtle infusion of socialism from Lefkowitz’s classes and began to check out books from the library of the Socialist Party’s Rand School of Social Science. In 1920, at sixteen, he entered the City College of New York. By that time his parents had acquired a bit of money and wanted him to become a professional; instead, he soon dropped out of college to become a full-time participant in the radical movement.
Attending public meetings at “Trotsky Square,” at the north end of Central Park at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, he tried to make contact with the underground Communist Party. When that failed, he allowed himself to be recruited by Alexander Trachtenberg, who worked at the Rand School library, into the Workers Council, a communist group that was trying to induce the Socialist Party to affiliate with the Third International. Shortly thereafter the Workers Council gave up the project and fused with the Communist Party. Shachtman joined the party, but not the youth group. However, he soon became fast friends with the youth leader Martin Abern.
Born Martin Abramowitz in 1898 in Romania, Abern had grown up in Minneapolis. He joined the IWW and the Young Peoples Socialist League at fifteen and then became a star football player at the University of Minnesota. Refusing to serve in the military during World War I on political grounds, Abern was expelled from college and imprisoned for six months. In 1920 he was elected as the youngest member of the Central Committee of the underground convention held to unite the Communist Labor Party and the Communist Party, and he was soon sent to Chicago as the national secretary of the Young Workers League.12 A few years later, Shachtman, then nineteen and assisting Louis Engdahl on the Daily Worker, readily accepted Abern’s invitation to join him in Chicago to help put out the Young Worker. Shachtman spent a year in Chicago, living in the back room of the youth group’s national office.
In 1923 he attended the Fifth Plenum of the Communist International in Moscow, secretly bringing back money to assist the youth organization. His own wages, when he received them, were $10 a week. In 1927 he attended the Seventh Plenum of the Comintern. But during the mid-1920s, after returning to New York City, he worked mainly with the International Labor Defense. With Cannon, whom he regarded as a model, Shachtman addressed scores of meetings in support of Sacco and Vanzetti and wrote a pamphlet on the case as well. As its editor, he turned the International Labor Defense publication Labor Defender into the first left-wing pictorial magazine in the United States. He also occasionally put out the Daily Worker when the other staff members were away.
Shachtman was well read in literature, writing in the Liberator on James Joyce and other literary matters with extreme confidence.13 Although he continued to admire such Russian writers as Tolstoy and Chekhov, he became so absorbed in social theory that he virtually stopped reading fiction. During the mid-1920s he became something of a bibliophile and a collector of the classics of socialism. He also began doing translations. He was fluent in French and German, knew Yiddish well, and had a passing knowledge of Spanish. In the Trotskyist movement, Shachtman served as the principal editor of New International from its founding in 1934. His book Behind the Moscow Trial: The Greatest Frameup in History (1936) was among the first to present the facts about the purge of the Bolshevik leaders. In January 1937 Shachtman and George Novack drove to Mexico to greet Trotsky and his wife upon his arrival in Tampico, and in 1938 Shachtman presided over the founding conference of the Fourth International in Paris.
JAMES BURNHAM: FROM NEO-THOMISM TO TROTSKYISM
The intellectuals among the anti-Stalinist left during the 1930s were largely comprised of writers, scholars, and artists who either belonged to or were otherwise connected to the movement led by James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman. Some, including James T. Farrell and Meyer Schapiro, never joined but may have been closer in thought and outlook than Dwight Macdonal
d, who was briefly a member. Those who held membership came from diverse backgrounds and performed different roles. Those from New York City were mainly middle class or working class in origin. Many were either at the outset of careers or had been temporarily blocked in their chosen professions by the depression.
A notable exception was James Burnham, the son of a British-born executive of the Burlington Railroad, who held a B.A. from Princeton and an M.A. from Oxford. He was a member of the faculty at New York University, where he taught in the Philosophy Department. He had earned a national reputation as coeditor of the Symposium and coauthor of a much admired textbook, Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1932).14 Born in 1905 in Chicago, his parents were devout Roman Catholics. His brother, Philip, later became editor of the Catholic magazine Commonweal, and Burnham was an ardent believer until the middle of his Princeton years. He then became a literary neo-Thomist, studying with Father Martin C. D’Arcy at Oxford where he developed special interests in medieval and Thomistic philosophy. At the onset of the Great Depression, he was torn by incongruous sentiments. Propelled leftward by the economic crisis, he started reading Marx while living in the south of France during the summer of 1930; yet that same autumn he and Philip Wheelwright initiated the Symposium modeled after T. S. Eliot’s Criterion.
The magazine became a forum through which Burnham tried to resolve the conflicts that plagued his intellect and emotions. The result was often confusing because, despite a calm, cool, personal presence, he asserted opinions in writing with great certainty, suggesting a maturity, wisdom, and experience far beyond his twenty-five years. At the same time, he was desperately in need of a system on which he could anchor his authoritative judgments. While his old system was crumbling, he floundered as he tried to construct a firm position that could reconcile his contradictory impulses.
Burnham’s initial contributions to the Symposium reveal a burgeoning modernist literary sensibility that would flicker brightly several more times during the 1930s and then fade out. At the beginning of 1931, for example, he published a subtle and prophetic defense of Faulkner, followed by a favorable review of Denis Saurat’s Literature and the Occult Tradition (1930), which endorsed poetry as the highest mode of self-knowledge.15 Ten months later Burnham’s attention was riveted on Max Eastman’s translation of the first volume of Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (1932): “Reading this remarkable book was an exciting experience; and it left me with the impression of understanding very clearly those events of which it claims to be an accurate record and a valid explanation.” In a tone suggestive of a conversion experience, Burnham enthusiastically devoted his lengthy review to explicating Trotsky’s cogent and enchanting method. Beginning with a thoughtful exposition of Trotsky’s prose, the review flowed inexorably to the conclusion that “Trotsky’s style cannot be separated from his view of history.” Finally Burnham asserted that Trotsky’s method should be called “dialectical materialism” in distinction to “historical materialism.” Trotsky’s Marxism, he noted, rather than analogizing history to the physical processes, paid greater attention to the role of the individual and the “inner necessity” of the historical process.16 Burnham’s last words constituted a cautious prediction of an American revolution during his lifetime, a revolution that would parallel October 1917 in form but not in content.
Just six months later, Burnham wrote a strange polemic called “Marxism and Aesthetics.” Although he credited Marxism with some general insights into the social basis of art, he ascribed to Marxist literary criticism the very excesses and mechanistic approach that he had praised Trotsky for surpassing. Then he veered back toward religious idealism, concluding that “because I believe that Marxism is, in the last analysis, false, false in this sense— inhuman in offering an order of values not acceptable to man nor in keeping with man’s nature—I do not rest my hopes for art in any esthetics it can give birth to.”17 Six more months passed and Burnham and his coeditor Wheelwright were considering politics again, this time more seriously than before, having issued their “Thirteen Propositions” on the crisis of American capitalism. Although its first several pages were taken up with caveats about how the world is far more complex than Marxists recognize, their conclusion was anticapitalist, revolutionary (in a very literal sense: they called for a “seizure of political power”), and collectivist. Moreover, they argued that the Communist Party should be written off for political and spiritual failings; a much greater sensitivity to the social reality of the United States was required, as well as an inculcation of moral values “in the tradition of western civilization.”18 Responding to criticisms of the “Thirteen Propositions” in a subsequent issue, including a charge by the New Masses that they were “fascist,” Burnham offered some considerable modifications of his views. Not only did he wish to clarify that his admonitions against the Communists were directed only at the American Party and in no way were aimed at the Soviet Union, but he wanted to make it clear that he had really only meant to denounce certain tactics of the American Party. Moreover, his views had further evolved: “Now I should no longer ‘denounce’ at all. I still believe that most of the charges are substantially correct, but I believe also that they should be offered in such a way that the Party will be supported, not hindered; and I now understand better the objective difficulties against which the leaders strive.”19 This spurt forward in his radicalization seems to have been partly inspired by his observation of a miners’ strike in southern Illinois.20
It seems rather remarkable that, having just announced his fidelity to the Communist Party, Burnham would be engaged only a month or two later in organizing the American Workers Party, a clear rival to the Communists. But at this point he seems to have fallen substantially under the influence of his colleague Sidney Hook. He read Hook’s Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx and appeared to replicate the stages of Hook’s relationship with the Communists, albeit in telescoped form. Indeed, his review of Ralph Fox’s biography of Lenin submitted to the New Masses in late 1933 appeared in January 1934. All doubts and caveats now gone, Burnham declared Lenin “the chief political leader of all time” and embraced the dialectical materialist method as the only theory capable of explaining the “relation of the . . . leader to history.”21
Burnham threw himself into the American Workers Party with great energy. Abandoning the Symposium, he assumed the post of the American Workers Party’s national secretary and contributed a regular column to its paper, Labor Action. When Hook began to urge that the AWP fuse with the Trotskyists, Burnham, too, became an ardent advocate of fusion, and, when the Workers Party of the United States was formed, he took on the position of coeditor (with Shachtman) of the new organization’s theoretical magazine, the New International. To the Trotskyist movement he brought some special qualities: a breadth of cultural knowledge, a writing style free of Marxist clichés, an aura of objectivity and impartiality, and a fresh perspective on indigenous political issues. Tall, thin, bespectacled, conservatively dressed, and a good speaker, Burnham however, displayed little warmth in personal relations. He was liked by the young party members and admired by Shachtman, but he kept aloof from the rank and file. An excellent teacher, he was asked one summer to give classes on socialism to the Trotskyists in Minneapolis but refused to give up his vacation in Connecticut. He lived at Sutton Place in New York City and would occasionally attend political committee meetings in a tuxedo because he had just come from or was en route to cocktails at the Rockefellers or at the home of some other wealthy family with whom he was friends.
Burnham wrote prolifically for the Trotskyist press, sometimes under the party name “John West” (he was also known as “Kelvin”), and played a leadership role in the organization from the start, although he resisted all proposals to leave his teaching position at New York University to become a full-time party functionary. When the Trotskyists entered the Socialist Party and Cannon moved to San Francisco for a year, Burnham and Shachtman led the Trotskyist faction from N
ew York. After the Socialist Workers Party was founded at the end of 1937, Burnham, Shachtman, and Cannon formed its three-person secretariat, in charge of the party’s day-to-day affairs. Burnham’s polemical specialty was attacking reformism, whether it be the social democrats’ policies regarding war, the construction of a nonrevolutionary labor party, or the Communists’ new “People’s Front” orientation which he lambasted in a particularly lucid pamphlet.22 Occasionally he turned to literary criticism, reflected in his balanced assessment of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1938).
Two of Burnham’s most impressive contributions were his rebuttals to Max Eastman, written in 1935 and 1938. Eastman had polemicized first against Marxist philosophy and then against Trotsky’s interpretation of the results of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. It was thus ironic that Burnham himself had serious doubts about dialectical materialism and was on the verge of launching a full-scale repudiation of Trotsky’s analysis of the social nature of the Soviet Union.23 Possessed of a classical kind of religious temperament, Burnham was in private tormented by uncertainty, but in public he could marshal a powerful, utterly logical case, as long as the basic tenets of his system retained some plausibility. Between late 1937 and 1940, however, Burnham’s new system began to unravel, just as his old one had disintegrated between 1930 and 1933. Once more he was caught up in a sequence of embarrassing contradictions and rapid turnabouts until, in the mid-1940s, he settled upon a vulgar anticommunist ideology that would sustain his increasingly banal writings for the next forty years.
The central theoretical issue that prompted Burnham to forge a halting yet relentless move to the right was Trotsky’s theory of the class nature of the Soviet Union. In the wake of the Moscow trials, a primary concern for the entire anti-Stalinist left intelligentsia was whether or not the Soviet Union remained a transitional society, however impeded in its progress—that is, a postcapitalist society that was originally en route to socialism under Lenin, but retrogressing under Stalin’s totalitarian rule (in Trotsky’s awkward terminology, “a degenerated workers’ state”). If so, the Soviet Union still warranted a dual approach on the part of revolutionaries, one of support for certain features of its economic system against an assault by capitalist or fascist states, combined with an unremitting opposition to its political regime. If this approach did not obtain, then how should the Soviet Union be characterized, and what would be the political implications of that characterization if the Soviet Union were attacked—and for the prospects for socialism in general if the Soviet Union were to be something other than an impeded transitional society?
