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Article Excerpt
Bryan D. Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press 2007)
IN HIS WIDE-RANGING PORTRAIT of American life published in 1938, the left-liberal writer Louis Adamic recounted the tale of his research trip to the small Pennsylvania mining town of Shamokin while on assignment for The Nation magazine. In 1932, he learned, the Communist Party had dispatched its cadre to the state's anthracite region to organize the unemployed. The leftist missionaries from New York and Philadelphia insisted that revolution in the United States was "imminent." As good communists, they supported the "immediate and complete overthrow of capitalism," championed "the proletariat and the dictatorship thereof," viewed Soviet Russia as the "sole immediate ... [source] of all hope for humankind," and "recognized 'revolution' in every strike threat and in every grumble against a wage cut." If "one could judge by their talk and publications," Adamic learned from locals, "they hated nearly everything in the United States." (1)
The communists, many of them recent converts, were initially impressed with what they saw. Local coal bootleggers--men who illegally mined and sold coal from "company-owned lands, for the most part in open daylight, by the most primitive methods imaginable, in complete disregard of private property rights and successful defiance of company police," (2) had organized an Independent Coal Producers union. To communists' eyes, a bootlegger of socialist leanings informed Adamic, the union had "all the earmarks of being revolutionary soviets" and the very act of bootlegging "impressed them right off as a form of revolutionary activity." (3) All the unemployed miners needed was leadership, which the communists were happy to provide.
On a one-on-one basis, the miner admitted, "most of them were pretty nice people ... idealists," at least when they talked about "something else besides the revolution." But when the conversation turned political, "something happened and you wondered if they were crazy or you." It was definitely them, the miner concluded, for they "saw things cockeyed and talked and acted accordingly, trying to press everything they saw into their 'line.'" (4)
The tale, Adamic observed, "easily turns into farce without much effort on the teller's part." Treating Shamokin and other anthracite communities as if they were Union Square, the out-of-town communists sponsored demonstrations and parades, demanding more relief for the unemployed and carrying banners that read "Protect Soviet Russia! .... Free Tom Mooney!" and "Fight Fascism! Save the First Workers' Republic!" Adamic's informant admitted that when it came to the Soviets and the like, locals didn't know "their elbow from a knothole in a fence-post." The informant--who occasionally read the Nation and even the New Masses--did, but his neighbours exhibited little interest in the radicals' issues. The "people from Union Square didn't even know this attitude existed, or didn't care if it existed or not," he complained. (5)
Locals tolerated the outsiders--for a time. Eventually, the radicals attacked the mayor of nearby Mount Carmel as a "company tool, a stool-pigeon, a crook." A big mistake--for the mayor was himself "one of the people," a former miner who was unpopular with the mine operators and whose son-in-law was himself a bootlegger. "Who are these crazy people?" they asked. When the priests denounced the outsiders as communists, the communists denounced the priests as "stooges of capitalism." It appeared that the communists liked "the outcry against them; it proved to them they were right." (6)
Some locals came to believe that the agitators "were not really Communists but company agents and spies who came in to destroy the bootleggers' unions." They weren't, but they accomplished that end nonetheless. If they "had been company agents," the informant reported, "they could not have done a better job for the companies." After seven or eight months, there was "nothing left." Bootleggers were fighting one another and their union was in shambles. "Everything was wrecked." The communists packed their bags and left town, taking with them the ideas that "made them see things crazy and cockeyed." (7)
The Communist Party whose antics Adamic mocked was a party that James P. Cannon would have recognized and likewise condemned. Cannon, a Party founder and leader who was expelled from its ranks in 1928 for his nascent Trotskyism, had come to oppose what he saw as growing bureaucratization, the wrong-headed notion of "socialism in one country," and the "degenerating leadership" (313) of Joseph Stalin over not just the Soviet Union but the world communist movement. Now persona non grata, Cannon found himself the object of vilification and physical attack, his speeches broken up by knife- and brass knuckle-wielding bands Of party workers. They didn't succeed, for Cannon, in the words of historian Bryan Palmer, was "impossible to silence." (3) The man who was becoming America's leading Trotskyist would develop his critique of the party's so-called "Third Period," adopted following his ouster and lasting until the arrival of the Popular Front of the 1935-1939 years. Third Period communists maintained that capitalism was on the verge of collapse and that "only a steeled revolutionary vanguard could ensure that it toppled into communism." (319) He would have recognized well--and deplored--the communists' excesses and revolutionary fantasies in Adamic's account.
How Cannon arrived at his critique of the Party is one of the subjects of Bryan Palmer's new study, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928, an ambitious attempt to recover the life and legacy of a key founder of American communism. The book won the Canadian Historical Association's Wallace Ferguson Prize for 2008 as the best historical work on a non-Canadian subject. A prolific and versatile historian equally comfortable in the realms of fine-grained social history and rough-and-tumble theoretical debate, Palmer (who is also the editor of Labour/Le Travail) is always the engaged scholar. And that engagement is on prominent display in this book. Make no mistake: This is a passionate, partisan biography that makes no bones about its author's affection for his subject and his approval of Cannon's emerging critique of the party's ideological drift. For Palmer, what happened inside the Communist Party ideologically and programmatically matters deeply. "The chief victim of Stalinism in this country was the magnificent left-wing movement," Palmer begins. "The story of what happened to these young militants; what was done to them; how their faith was abused and their confidence betrayed by the cynical American agents of the Kremlin gang--that is just about the most tragic story in the long history of the American labor movement." (3)
Palmer's purpose here is not merely to restore a figure written out of the party's past by his Stalinist successors or ignored by New Left historians sympathetic to the party. As in earlier articles, he advances a nuanced yet forceful critique of the larger thrust of revisionist historiography of American communism. Although revisionists--with some prominent exceptions--have averted their eyes from the party's hyper-sectarian Third Period in favor of its subsequent, considerably less shrill Popular Frontism, their general sympathy for party members and the reforms they pursued has made them reluctant to interrogate the party's...
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