Bryan Palmer. James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: James P. Cannon and the ‘Prince’s Favors’

1 – Hope and the Dog Days

2 – Historiography’s House of Mirrors

3 – Mirror Image Refusals

4 – Analytic Alternative

5 – Cannon and the History of American Trotskyism

1 – An American Left Opposition

1 – Exile off Main Street

2 – Stalinism Consolidating

3 – Stalinist Slow Dancing: Guile

4 – Picking up the Pace: Gangsterism

5 – Recruiting the American Left Opposition: Three Phases

6 – Cannon: Caretaker of the Original Left Opposition Cadre

7 – Recruitment’s Second Phase: Stalinism’s Heavy Hand

8 – ‘An Army of a Million People’: Hungarians, Italians, Finns, and Immigrant Birth Controllers

9 – A Publication Program

10 – The Founding of the Communist League of America (Opposition)

2 – Dog Days

1 – Downturn: Economic Depression

2 – ‘Left Turn’: Revolutionary Politics and the Third Period

3 – Dimensions of Cannon’s Crisis: Material Being

4 – Dimensions of Cannon’s Crisis: Reconstituted Families and Domestic Complications

5 – Dimensions of Cannon’s Crisis: Rose Karsner’s Break-Down

6 – Cannon’s Collapsing World: The Personal Becomes Political

7 – The Weisbord Whirlwind

8 – Branch Bickerings: New York Cliquism and Youth Recruits

9 – Factional Waystation: June 1932, National Committee Plenum

10 – Factionalism Internationalized: The Turn to Europe

11 – International Intervention

12 – Dog Days Denouement: New Turns

13 – Internal Ironies

3 – Daylight: Analysis and Action

1 – 1933–34: Past, Present, and Future

2 – Context: Revival/Reorientation

3 – The Long and Trying March Back to a Labor Party Perspective

4 – Black Oppression in America: National Self-Determination vs. The Revolutionary Struggle for Equality

5 – The Momentum of Mobilizations: Unemployed and Labor Defense Work

6 – Miner Militants: Cannon’s ‘Bona Fide Proletarians’

7 – B.J. Field: A Napoleon among New York’s French Chefs

8 – Dawn of a New Left Opposition Day

4 – Minneapolis Militants

1 – General Strike

2 – Class Relations in Minneapolis

3 – Trotskyists among the Teamsters: Propagandistic Old Moles

4 – January Thaw; February Cold Snap: The Coal Yards on Strike

5 – Lessons of the Coal Yards Strike

6 – Strike Preparations: Unemployed Agitations and Industrial Unionism

7 – Overcoming ‘Bureaucratic Obstacles’

8 – The Ladies’/Women’s Auxiliary

9 – Rebel Outpost: 1900 Chicago Avenue

10 – The Tribune Alley Plot and the Battle of Deputies Run

11 – May 1934: Settlement Secured; Victory Postponed

12 – Stalinist Slurs

13 – Farmer-Labor Two Class Hybrid vs. Class Struggle Perspective

14 – Interlude

15 – Toward the July Days

16 – A Strike Declared; A Plot Exposed

17 – Bloody Friday

18 – Labor’s Martyr: Henry B. Ness

19 – Martial Law/Red Scare

20 – Olson: The Defective ‘Merits’ of a Progressive Pragmatism

21 – Standing Fast: Satire and Solidarity

22 – Mediation’s Meanderings

23 – Sudden and Unexpected Victory

5 – Entryism

1 – 1934: Militancy and Marginalization’s Movement

2 – The French Turn

3 – Cannon, Trotsky, and the Preparatory Ground of Entryism: Transcending the ‘Organic Unity’ Imbroglio

4 – Fusion with the Musteites

5 – Building the Party amid Fusion’s Fallouts

6 – Anticipating the French Turn

7 – Americanizing the French Turn: Factions and Combinations

8 – The Intensification of Oehlerite Sectarianism

9 – Ousting the Oehlerites

10 – Socialist Party Schisms and Workers Party Entry

11 – Prelude to Entry: Cannon in Harness and Muste’s Conversions

12 – Entryism & Subordination

13 – A Farmer-Labor Detour and the Return of the Oehlerite Repressed

14 – Entry Proclaimed

15 – Cannon in California: The ‘Foot Loose Rebel’ and the Agitational Road

16 – Entryist Estrangement

17 – The Return of the Prodigal Agitator

18 – Reaction from Above

19 – The End of Entry

20 – Assessing the French Turn in America

6 – Trials, Tragedies, and Trade Unions

1 – 1937’s Imperative: Assimilating Revolution’s Recruits

2 – The Origins of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky

3 – The Non-partisan Origins of Trotsky’s Defense

4 – Dancing with Dewey

5 – Trotsky’s Testimony

6 – Carleton Beals and Stalinism at Work in the Preliminary Sub-commission

7 – Delimitation by Default

8 – Social-Democratic Delimitation

9 – Brand Barcelona on Centrist Foreheads: Trotskyism and the Spanish Civil War

10 – Trotskyism Finds its ‘Sea Legs’: Cannon and the Maritime Federation of the Pacific

11 – Frame-Up in Minneapolis: Who Killed Patrick J. Corcoran?

12 – Trotskyism on the Line: Footholds in Mass Production and the CIO

Conclusion: Party/International

Selected References