by Alan M Wald
In the rest of the world Trotskyist movement, sentiment leaned toward the second alternative and concluded that Communist parties of China and Yugoslavia were not “Stalinist” in the same sense as was the Soviet party. Such parties were capable of leading social transformations, even if they were incapable of constructing postcapitalist societies without bureaucratic deformations. This meant a less epicentric conception of the role of Trotskyism in world politics but an important role, nevertheless.
Because of these different perspectives and because of divergent tactical proposals flowing from them—such as the recommendation of the majority of European Fourth International leaders that Trotskyists enter Socialist and Communist parties in certain countries—there ensued a fierce debate in the Fourth International that climaxed in late 1953. In the SWP, a tendency led by two founding members and important party leaders, Bert Cochran and George Clarke, agreed with the new positions of the Fourth International, although it gave these positions its own interpretation. Cochran had also differentiated himself several years earlier by opposing the SWP majority’s support of the Walter Reuther faction in the United Auto Workers.
Cochran was born into a Jewish family in New York City in 1917. Trained as a pianist, he attended the University of Wisconsin before joining the Communist League of America in 1934.69 From 1934 until 1939 he was an effective organizer in the United Auto Workers union, and beginning in 1939 he spent thirteen years as a full-time party functionary, writing (under the name “E. R. Frank”), editing, and serving in various administrative capacities. A dark, grinning man who balded early and who had a sly manner, Cochran was recognized as brilliant but self-centered. Clarke, born in 1913, was a founding member of the Communist League of America and had been a party functionary for many years.70 The other main theoretical leader of the tendency was Harry Braverman (who used the party name “Harry Frankel”), born in 1920 in New York.71 He had joined the Trotskyists in 1937 when they held the leadership of the Young Peoples Socialist League. Dropping out of Brooklyn College, Braverman became a coppersmith at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, then a steelworker in Youngstown, Ohio.
To the extent that the Cochran-Clarke tendency actually adhered to the political orientation then being developed by the leading European theoreticians of the Fourth International, they represented a necessary corrective to an orthodoxy that had proven incapable of assimilating major global changes. However, the extent of their adherence was always in doubt.72 In any event, the SWP proved incapable of integrating both points of view, which at least in theory might have produced a balanced perspective. In the spring of 1953 James P. Cannon became convinced, on rather flimsy evidence, that the leaders of the Fourth International were using the Cochran-Clarke faction to engineer a split in the SWP. At the November 1953 plenum of the SWP, the party’s National Committee indefinitely suspended members of the Cochran-Clarke faction because they had admittedly participated in a boycott of a meeting held in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the SWP newspaper, the Militant. After this, all members of the SWP were required to denounce the faction members for boycotting the meeting; those who balked were expelled on the spot. No trials were held for either the leaders or members of the faction; the SWP majority claimed that by admitting participation in a boycott the faction members had eliminated the need for a trial.
The Militant articles announcing the expulsion constituted a nadir in sectarian bombast. A 16 November 1953 article blasted the boycott, which the Cochran-Clarke group had organized as a protest against their alleged exclusion from party life: “This treacherous, strikebreaking action constituted, in effect, an organized demonstration against the 2 5-year struggle of American Trotskyism, and, at the same time, an act of objective aid to the Stalinists who expelled the initiating nucleus in 1928.”73 Two weeks later an article by Joseph Hansen repeated this theme employing a curious mix of metaphors rather embarrassing for a labor-oriented newspaper: “Our anniversary meeting was in effect an SWP picket line. . . . By the boycott, the Cochranites crossed the picket line.”74 Isaac Deutscher, the Polish former Trotskyist then living in England who was believed by some to have inspired the new line of the Fourth International, was characterized in an editorial several weeks later as “the slick, sophisticated, ‘non-Stalinist’ apologist, capable of meeting strong skepticism with a well-polished but carefully loaded ‘both sides of the question approach.’”75 Unlike the Communists, the SWP had never had a policy of preventing its members from fraternizing with expelled members; but the use of the term “strikebreaker” was bound to effect similar results. Clearly the apostate intellectuals were not alone in succumbing both to paranoia and narrow ideological perceptions during the difficult 1950s.
At the same November plenum that purged the Cochran-Clarke group, the SWP also announced the formation of what was in effect a rival Fourth International, thus splitting the international Trotskyist movement for the next decade. However, some of Cannon’s charges about the mixed political character of the expelled minority were soon confirmed. The Cochran-Clarke group walked out of the Fourth International six months later, at first because they felt pressure from the European leaders to initiate a reconciliation with the SWP, and later because they concluded that such an association was no longer relevant. Next, Clarke broke with Cochran and moved to Europe where he died a few years later in a car accident. For five years Cochran and Braverman published the American Socialist, a well-edited radical journal free of jargon and open to many fresh ideas. But the magazine and the organization that sponsored it, the Socialist Union, dissolved on the eve of the new radicalization of the 1960s. Cochran, who drifted in a political direction that was nonrevolutionary but hard to label, went on to write a half-dozen lively and thoughtful books such as Adlai Stevenson: Patrician among Politicians (1969), Harry Truman and the Crisis Presidency (1973), and Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (1977), and eventually became a senior associate of the Research Institute on International Change at Columbia University before his death in 1984. Braverman grew sympathetic to Maoism in the 1960s, became a leading editor at Grove Press, and then became the head of Monthly Review Books. His award-winning book, Labor and Monopoly Capital, was published in 1974.
Those intellectuals who remained members of the SWP made only a minor mark on American culture during the 1950s and later. The organization itself, of course, was in steady decline throughout the decade. The effects of postwar disorientation combined with the loss of many trade union cadre—not only through the expulsion of the Cochran group but also because the Trotskyist Teamsters in Minneapolis had been driven out of their jobs—were nearly devastating. In the 1940s, Socialist Workers Party membership had gone from 840 in 1944 to 1,470 in 1946. Then it dropped to 1,277 in 1948, 825 in 1950, 758 in 1952, and 480 after the break with the Cochran-Clarke group in 1954. The decline continued down to 434 in 1957 and 399 in 1959, then began to rise in the 1960s to four to five hundred and in the 1970s to well over a thousand.76 Still, within the boundaries of such limited resources and an orthodox framework, a few intellectuals managed some achievements, and, as the radicalization of the 1960s began, the framework loosened considerably.
Unfortunately, the most learned of the orthodox Marxist intellectuals, Joseph Vanzler (better known by his party name, John G. Wright) died at the age of fifty-four in 1956, leaving behind a relatively small and scattered body of original material.77 Born about 1902 in Samarkand, the burial place of Genghis Kahn in central Asia, Vanzler was the brilliant son of an aging rabbi and a fourteen-year-old girl. One of six Jews permitted to attend a Czarist school, Usick, as he was always called by his family and friends, had learned Latin, French, Greek, vernacular Russian, and Court Russian by the time he was eight.
In 1915, his mother fled with Usick to Boston, where another relative had previously moved, and married Max Cohen, who later became the successful owner of the Paramount Coat Company. In 1919 Usick entered Harvard to study chemistry. He left school in 1923, return
ed in 1925–26, and left again without receiving a degree. Subsequently Usick married Edith Konikow, daughter of the pioneer Boston Trotskyist Dr. Antoinette Konikow, and began a career in colloidal chemistry. Eventually he established his own successful business, manufacturing contraceptive jelly. Usick was learned in mathematics and science as well as in philosophy and literature. In the late 1920s he contributed a study of Greek culture to V. F. Calverton’s Modern Quarterly.78 In the early 1930s he helped to finance Americana, an irreverent, anarchistic magazine that was the brainchild of his friend Alexander King, the noted book illustrator and humorist.79 During these years he lived in New York, associating with a bohemian circle that included the novelist Maxwell Bodenheim and the painter DeHirsh Margules. In 1933 the eccentric businessman decided to follow his wife and mother-in-law into the Trotskyist movement.
Usick was six feet tall, stocky, with long black hair, bushy eyebrows, a thick mustache, and a wide expressive mouth that often seemed twisted, as if he were thinking an ironic thought. When angered, he would tend to go overboard, using harsh and vituperative polemical language that contradicted his rather gentle nature. At first he made a bad impression on the party leaders. Although the articles he wrote for the New International were quite sophisticated, he had previously struck up an association with B. J. Field, and, in fact, had joined the Communist League of America in a frenzy in order to reform it. He was active with Field in the 1934 New York hotel strike, but the factional struggle between Field and the Cannon leadership that ensued had a strong impact on him. He began to feel incompetent as a political leader and decided that his skills and talents lay elsewhere. Transforming himself from an individualistic intellectual into a party worker, he devoted himself to giving classes on Marxist philosophy, serving on the editorial boards of the party’s newspaper and magazines, translating writings by Trotsky, and drafting many of the party’s political resolutions.
Although he had an odd and volatile personality, he differed markedly from most radical intellectuals in that he was not interested in eliciting personal recognition or being in the spotlight. Most of his efforts were devoted to improving the work of others, although he produced quite a few meticulous articles on contemporary Soviet politics and the American economy as well as several on such diverse subjects as atomic energy and Feuerbach’s philosophy. Utterly devoted to socialist revolution, he nonetheless abhorred violence and was motivated by a desire for an ordered world. His work habits were a bit bizarre. For extended periods he would sit in utter silence; then, usually at an odd hour such as midnight or 6:00 A.M., typing very rapidly with one finger, he would produce the final version of an article that he had been contemplating. The rewrites had all been done in his head.
Usick’s last years were unexpectedly difficult. When his marriage broke up in the 1940s he turned his business over to his former wife. Remarried in the early 1950s, with a new baby and financially strapped, he fell ill with pneumonia and suffered a heart attack, which forced him to spend nearly two years convalescing before another heart attack killed him in the spring of 1956.
In addition to Vanzler, there were several others who did substantial and noteworthy intellectual work on behalf of the party. One was Joseph Hansen, born in 1910 in a small Mormon community in Utah. Hansen was drawn to Trotskyism by Earle Birney, the Canadian poet who was teaching at the University of Utah in the early 1930s, and for some years aspired to be a novelist.80 From 1937 to 1940 he served as Trotsky’s secretary in Mexico and thereafter primarily engaged in literary work for the Socialist Workers Party in New York. The author of long, meticulous polemics, Hansen had a tendency toward overconfidence and arrogance, but during the early 1960s he distinguished himself by producing a competent series of studies of the Cuban Revolution. To a considerable extent this work redeemed the orthodox Trotskyist position from its unconvincing interpretations of the Chinese and Yugoslavian revolutions.
Other party members produced literary work primarily on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party. George Breitman, born in 1916 in Newark and active in the Unemployed Leagues during the 1930s, wrote creatively on the political strategy of black liberation and undertook extensive and sustained research into the history of Trotskyism.81 Evelyn Reed, born Evelyn Horwit in 1905 in New Jersey and trained as an artist in New York, published several books on the origins of women’s oppression.82 Laura Gray, born Laura Slobe in Chicago in 1910, had a brief career as an avant-garde painter influenced by Paul Klee, then devoted the last ten years of her short life to drawing naturalistic cartoons in the Boardman Robinson tradition for the Militant.83
Several others also contributed to party intellectual endeavors but had distinct careers before or after their association with the Socialist Workers Party. Duncan Ferguson, born in 1905 in China, was a successful sculptor and former chair of the art department at Louisiana State University who left his job in 1940 to become a party activist for the duration of his life.84 George Perle, born in 1910 in Chicago, was a musician and composer influenced by Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. A tall, wiry man with dark, unruly hair, he organized a chorus of Socialist Workers Party members and wrote on dialectics and music for the party journal under the name “George Saunders.”85 Paul N. Siegel, born in 1916 in New Jersey, received a doctorate from Harvard and contributed articles on literary themes under the name “Paul Shapiro” to various party publications in the late 1940s and 1950s.86 After he was expelled with the Cochran-Clarke faction in 1953 he became a distinguished Shakespearean scholar. He rejoined the SWP in the 1970s but was expelled again in 1983. Yet another layer of Trotskyist intellectuals were in the environs of the party but never joined. Trent Hutter was the pseudonym of Peter Bloch, who was born in Germany of Sephardic Jewish parents. After studying in several European countries, he was a clandestine journalist for the anti-Nazi resistance in Belgium before arriving in the United States in 1949. For several years he contributed frequently to the Trotskyist press on popular culture, but in the early 1960s he abandoned Trotskyism to become an authority on Puerto Rican culture.87 Richard Schank, a brilliant but highly eccentric psychologist, functioned as a free-lance Trotskyist for a time until he was arrested and imprisoned in Ohio in the 1940s for allegedly stealing ballot boxes during a union election.88 Among the younger intellectuals in the SWP or its youth group in the 1950s and 1960s were several who would later, after leaving or being expelled, become distinguished during the rise of the New Left, including Staughton Lynd, James Petras, and Barbara Garson.
A good number of rising young scholars and artists passed through the ranks of the Workers Party during the 1940s (see chapter 10), but few became integrated into the organization or remained for any length of time. One of those who did was Noah Greenberg, who carried out devoted party work in the seamen’s union for a number of years before becoming a world-famous specialist in medieval music. Others were Spencer Brown, a poet who was active in the teacher’s union, and Jesse Cohen, an extraordinarily talented cartoonist, who was known in the Trotskyist movement as Joe Cohen and who signed his work “Carlo.” In the late 1940s the novelist Calder Willingham had a brief flirtation with the Shachtman group, encouraged by James T. Farrell whose review of End as a Man (1946) had given Willingham a national reputation. At one point Willingham paid Max Shachtman’s plane fare down to Mexico, so that the two of them could visit Natalia Trotsky, but they quarreled en route and parted ways in Mexico City. In the 1970s, Hal Draper proved himself one of the foremost Marxist scholars in the world through the publication of his multivolume series Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution.89
In addition, a number of disciples of C. L. R. James made scholarly and theoretical contributions during and after the 1950s. This grouping, known as the “state capitalist tendency” because of its theory of the Soviet economy, first coalesced after James’s arrival in the United States in 1938. In 1940 the state capitalists sided with Shachtman and became an organized tendency in the Workers Party until 1946; the tendency then returned to the Socialist
Workers Party for five years before striking out on its own, with seventy members initiating the publication of Correspondence in 1951. The leading theoretician was Raya Dunayevskaya, a Russian immigrant who, under the name Rae Spiegel, had served as Trotsky’s Russian-language secretary in the United States in 1937 and 1938. Using the party name Freddie Forrest, she wrote many articles on economic theory; later, as Dunayevskaya, she published Marxism and Freedom (1958) and Philosophy and Revolution (1973).
