Bryan D. Palmer is Professor Emeritus and former Canada Research Chair, Canadian Studies, Trent University, Peterborough, Canada. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, former editor of Labour/Le Travail, and has published extensively on the history of labour and the revolutionary left, including the two-volume, Marxism and Historical Practice (Haymarket, 2016) and the co-authored, Toronto's Poor: A Rebellious History (Between the Lines, 2016).

Preface and Acknowledgments

List of Figures

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

References

Index