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

The Working Class in American History

by Bryan D. Palmer

Bryan D. Palmer's award-winning study of James P. Cannon's early years (1890-1928) details how the life of a Wobbly hobo agitator gave way to leadership in the emerging communist underground of the 1919 era. This historical drama unfolds alongside the life experiences of a native son of United States radicalism, the narrative moving from Rosedale, Kansas to Chicago, New York, and Moscow. Written with panache, Palmer's richly detailed book situates American communism's formative decade of the 1920s in the dynamics of a specific political and economic context. Our understanding of the indigenous currents of the American revolutionary left is widened, just as appreciation of the complex nature of its interaction with international forces is deepened.

Genres: History, Labor, United States, Politics, Biography

576 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

Reviews

[Shaun Richman · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, this was a nice companion to the recent scholarly treatments of William Z. Foster, the *other* real worker organizer in the early CP. Unlike Foster, who remained a loyal and orthodox Stalinist, Cannon read the first Trotskyite leaks out of the Commintern and immediately jumped ship.

This book leads up to that decision point, at the end of the 1920's. One assumes that author Bryan Palmer intends (or intended?) to write a second volume, about Cannon's efforts to forge an American left-opposition Communism, and on the Trotskyites' small but vital role in the sit-down militancy of the 1930's.

I hope Palmer sees that project through. It would be a welcome addition to the - wait for it - canon of American scholarship of the Old Left.

[Marc Lichtman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was glad to see that someone was finally going to write a biography of James P. Cannon, with an ambitious idea of doing it in several volumes. The biggest problem is that Palmer writes for academics, and his books are unlikely to be read by many people outside that milieu. There aren’t at the present time huge numbers of workers and youth reading Cannon, but there are a lot more reading him than reading Palmer. For anyone not an academic, I recommend skipping the acknowledgements and the introduction and starting the book with chapter 1. You can read the other materials later.

This volume covers Cannon's early life, a bit on his career as an organizer for the IWW but focusing mostly on the years when he was a founding leader of the Communist Party, with just a little on the initial founding of the Communist League of America (Left Opposition) after being expelled for remaining true to the program of Lenin, as advocated by Leon Trotsky. It has surprising little on Cannon's work as leader of the International Labor Defense, which was one of his biggest contributions to the Communist Party. I learned more recently by rereading Cannon's speech "The Trial of the Stalinist Leaders" in Speeches for Socialism. There is still more in Cannon’s First Ten Years of American Communism: Report of a Participant and many of his best essays for the 'Labor Defender' are in Notebook of an Agitator: From the Wobblies to the Fight against the Korean War and McCarthyism.

Cannon’s ‘First Ten Years of American Communism: Report of a Participant has his take on the two books by Theodore Draper on the early Communist Party (most of the book is the letters he sent to Draper). I find Cannon’s take on Draper more worth reading than that by Palmer in the introduction to this book. But go ahead, read both. Another book worth reading on Cannon's career in the Communist Party is James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: Selected Writings and Speeches 1920-1928' and the first three chapters of The History of American Trotskyism, 1928—1938: Report of a Participant.

The acknowledgements that start the book give a clue to what part of the problem is--Palmer came to see Cannon through the eyes of a miserable sect called the Spartacist League whose last one-page online paper was published in October 2020. They seem to have gone underground during the Covid pandemic and have just recently reemerged as I revise this review in April 2023.

The problem with the outlook of this group is that while they claim Cannon was a great leader, how great could he have been, if you actually believe that Cannon and all the most outstanding leaders of the Socialist Workers Party "sold out" (by embracing Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro!)? And then that the real revolutionary continuity ran through some youth leaders of the Shachtmanite social democrats who briefly joined the Socialist Workers Party before splitting! This outlook colors all of Palmer's writing in this book and in Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934 which is supposed to be a sequel where he continually slanders Farrell Dobbs, not for anything he actually did, but for what he surmises he might have done given the Spartacist view. Palmer starts with a wrong theory and sets out to prove it.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent history of the American socialist movement. This is history that is not taught in American schools, and it should be. Ever since McCarthy and the witch hunts of HUAC in the late 1940s and 1950s, it has been taught that socialism was some kind of "foreign" ideology. This is false, as this book reveals. Highly recommended.

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, well-researched book. Definitely worth reading.