Markin comment:
In the introduction to a recent posting that started a series entitled From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.) I noted the following that applies to this series on the roots of the American Communist Party as well:
“In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive…..”
I am continuing today in that vane in what I also anticipate will be an on-going series on the early days of the American Communist party from which we who are students of Leon Trotsky trace our roots. Those roots extend from the 1919 until 1929 when those who would go on after being expelled, led by James P. Cannon, to form the Socialist Workers Party which also is part of our heritage. That is not the end of the matter though as the American Communist Party also represented a trend in the 1930s, the Popular front strategic policy, that has bedeviled revolutionaries ever since in one form or another. Those 1930s issues need to be addressed as well.
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Additional comment on this article-Markin
A certain amount of caution is needed in dealing with the Stalinized American Communist Party, as with the Communist International, because the Stalinists, then and now, were more than happy to slander political opponents on their left, and to rewrite history for their own purposes. Hardly a new idea among those who “win” whatever battle they are fighting. But a little bit tough on those of us who are trying to draw the lessons of the past for today’s left-wing militants. This series starts with the reflections of that early Communist leader mentioned above, James P. Cannon, who had his own axes to grind politically, no question. However, as Theodore Draper who wrote the definitive study on the history of the early American Communist Party in two volumes noted, of all the people whom he interviewed for the his books James Cannon was the one that stood out as wanting to remember as truthfully as he could that early history. I will use that statement as the touchstone for using Cannon’s work first. William Z. Foster, Earl Browder and the others will get their chance later.
********
James P. Cannon
Letters to a Historian
(1954 – 1956)
* * *
These articles from the magazines Fourth International and International Socialist Review are based on letters Cannon wrote to Theodore Draper who was then researching his two-volume series on the history of the US Communist Party
Written: March 1954 to February 1956.
Published: Fourth International, Summer 1954–Spring 1956, & International Socialist Review, Summer 1956–Spring 1957. Source: Original bound volumes of Fourth International and International Socialist Review and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive
*****
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
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The Pre-War Left Wing
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.4, Fall 1955, pp.126-127.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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July 22, 1954
Dear Sir:
RE: Bittelman’s History of the Communist Party of America
(Reprinted in Special Committee on Communist Activities [Fish Committee] 1930, House of Representatives Hearings.)
I have studied this document, to which you called my attention, at the Los Angeles Public Library and found it very interesting indeed. It is obviously the synopsis of a series of lectures prepared by Bittelman for some classes either in New York or Chicago. I judge from internal evidence that it was written in the latter part of 1923 or early in 1924.
This History shows Bittelman at his best as a student and critic, and it explains why, at that time, he was appreciated by those of us who came to the party from syndicalism. Bittelman, as a student, knew a great deal more about the party-political side of the movement, its tradition and the theoretical differences within it, than we did.
* * *
The old pre-war division of the left-wing movement into a narrowly “political” party wing and an “anti-political” syndicalist wing was a very bad thing all the way around. I have never seen this side of left-wing history adequately treated anywhere. Bittelman’s exposition, despite its telescoped conciseness, is probably the best you will find.
I think there is no doubt that in the period before the Russian Revolution, the syndicalist wing of the American movement was the more revolutionary, had the best and most self-sacrificing militants and was most concerned with mass work and real action in the class struggle. But the syndicalist reaction against the futility of parliamentary socialism was a bad over-correction, which produced its own evil. By rejecting “politics” altogether, and the idea of a political party along with it, the syndicalists prepared the destruction of their own movement. The syndicalists made a cult of action, had little or no theoretical schooling or tradition and were rather disdainful of “theory” in general.
The difference between the two wings, as I recall it from that time, was often crudely formulated as “action versus theory.” Being young then, and very fond of action, I was an ardent disciple of the Vincent St. John school of “direct action” – and to hell with the “philosophers” and “theorizers.” I still believe in action, but the sad fate of the IWW in later years ought to convince anybody that action without the necessary theoretical direction is not enough to build an enduring revolutionary movement.
* * *
Bittelman’s History is an instructive, succinct explanation of the defects of the pre-war left-wing movement in the SP, and a good factual account of its progressive evolution under the influence of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. His description and criticism of the left-wing conception of the party as “an auxiliary to the revolutionary union and a propaganda instrument of socialism” (Part IV, Section C) is quite pertinent. He might have added that the right-wing socialists had the same basic theory with a different twist. They simply interpreted the restricted role of the SP to mean in practice that it should not interfere with the affairs of the labor fakers within the unions) criticizing them only for their politics at election time.
* * *
Especially interesting is Bittelman’s report about the role of Trotsky – during his sojourn in New York in 1917 – in making Novy Mir, the Russian socialist daily, “a new ideological center of the left wing”; and his activity in promoting the publication of The Class Struggle as the first ideological spokesman “for the English speaking elements” of the left wing. This corroborates Trotsky’s own references to his work in America in his autobiography, My Life. Trotsky had a lot to do with the development of the communist movement in America from its beginning out of the left wing of the SP in 1917, through its big crisis over legalization in 1922, through the later period which culminated in our expulsion in 1928, and in the activity of our party ever since. Bittelman’s truthful reference to the role of Trotsky in reorienting the left wing in 1917, even before the Bolshevik Revolution, shows me conclusively that his document was not written later than early 1924. After Trotsky was put in the minority in the first stages of the fight in the Russian party, Bittelman, who read the Russian press and took his lead from it automatically, could never have mentioned Trotsky favorably under any circumstances.
* * *
Bittelman’s one-paragraph description of the “Michigan group” (later the Proletarian Party) is correct, to the point and complete. (Section XII.) One paragraph in the history of American communism is just about what those pompous wiseacres, who, as Bittelman says, “completely missed the everyday fighting nature of Leninism and communism,” are worth.
* * *
Bittelman’s account of the National Conference of the Left Wing in June, 1919 (Section XII), is well worth studying as the report of a strictly New York “political,” alongside my own impressions as a provincial stranger in New York for the first time. Especially interesting is this quotation: “There was a third group at the conference, most of them English speaking delegates from the western states, that favored going to the Socialist Party convention because they were totally unprepared for a break with the social reformists.”
As I previously wrote you, we non-New Yorkers knew that the SP was not ready for a split in 1919. But Bittelman’s statement is the first place I have seen it clearly written that the New Yorkers really understood the attitude of the “English speaking delegates from the western states” – the “western states” being the whole country west of Manhattan Island. I may be a little out of focus, in view of everything that happened since June, 1919, but I still get burned up when I think about the ignorant arrogance of the New Yorkers who dragged the left wing into that premature and costly split.
* * *
Bitte1man’s account of the caucus of the Russian Federation at the first convention of the CP, and of how this caucus dominated the convention (Section XII, Subsection B), is the only inside report of this grisly business that I have ever seen. And despite its brevity; I believe it is completely accurate. Bittelman, himself a Russian, was obviously a member of the Hourwich (Russian) caucus and speaks with authority about its proceedings.
Bittelman’s revelation is truly a priceless historical document. Just consider his report of the way the Russian bosses toyed with and chose between those leaders of the “English speaking group” who broke the solidarity of the native movement to play the Russians’ game:
“Leadership of federation caucus knew that it must have the services and support of an English speaking group in order to form and lead the party. Two English speaking groups to choose from. The Michigan group or the group of the Revolutionary Age. Each of the two groups presents its program to the federation caucus.”
And this:
“After long struggle, federation caucus adopts program of the group of Revolutionary Age.”
And finally the conclusion of Bittelman’s summary:
“First meeting of central executive committee shows rift between federation group and English speaking group.”
Just to be reminded today by Bittelman’s document of how this wrecking crew played with the native left-wing movement, at that critical turning point in its development, and the heavy costs of their mad adventure, makes me almost mad enough to want to go back and fight that battle all over again.
* * *
Bittelman’s section on the Role of Foster Group in the Labor Movement of the US (Section XII, Subsection B), is grossly inflated and exaggerated. It shows Bittelman in his more accustomed role as factionalist, making a “case” for his own faction – the new Foster-Cannon-Bittelman combination – and forcing or inventing evidence to make it look good.
The facts are that the Foster group did not amount to a tinker’s dam as a revolutionary factor in the AFL. They actually followed a policy of ingratiating adaptation to the Gompers bureaucracy, not of principled struggle against it. It is quite true that Foster himself, with a few assistants, did a truly great work of organization in the stockyards and later in the steel strike of 1919. But that was done by and with the consent of the Gompers bureaucracy, and at the cost of renouncing all principled criticism, including the principle of principles, the First World War.
(See the testimony of Gompers, Fitzpatrick and Foster himself in the US Senate Committee report entitled: Investigation of Strike in Steel Industries, (1919), Hearings Before the Committee on Education and Labor, United States Senate – Sixty-sixth Congress, first session – quoted in The Militant, August 15, 1929.) [Reprinted on page 129 of this issue of Fourth International. – Ed.]
I do not think it is historically correct to speak of the Foster group in the AFL as a serious current in the revolutionary left wing which was later to become the CP. It was pretty strictly a progressive trade-union group, and I never knew a half dozen of them who ever became communists.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
****
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
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Foster and Browder
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.4, Fall 1955, pp.127-131.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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August 4, 1954
Dear Sir:
My statement about the limited number of Foster’s AFL group who became communists corresponds to the facts, and even probably gives this group a little the best of it. Only two of them, besides Foster – Joe Manley and Jack Johnstone – ever played a noticeable role in the party. I knew Jay Fox by reputation as an anarchist editor of pre-World War I days, but never encountered him anywhere in the CP. That meant pretty nearly for sure that he wasn’t there, because I knew everybody who was in any way active or prominent from one end of the country to the other. The same applies to David Coutts whom Foster mentions (in his History of the Communist Party of the United States).
It is quite possible that these people and a few, but not “many,” others of the Foster AFL group, formally joined the party and then dropped out without attracting anyone’s attention. Sam Hammersmark played a minor role in the Chicago local organization during the time I was there in 1923-1927. But like most of those whose ideas and methods of work had been shaped in the narrow school of trade unionism, he was lost in the complexities of party politics.
Foster himself, in a big way, and Johnstone and Manley to a far lesser extent, made personal contributions to the CP. But it would be historically false to represent the Foster AFL group as a contributing current in the new movement. Even Browder, who had been a pre-war Fosterite syndicalist, did not come to the communist movement by way of Foster. He jumped over the head of the Foster group – if it is proper even to speak of such a formation as a definite ideological tendency – and came in as an individual three years ahead of Foster. It was Browder who was commissioned by the party to invite Foster to attend the Congress of the Profintern in 1921 and thus started him on the road to the party. By one of those historical quirks, for which I ask neither praise nor blame, I was directly responsible for Browder’s coming into the left wing of the SP in the first place in 1918; for his introduction to the national leadership of the CP and his coming to New York in 1921; and for his delegation to the Profintern in the same year. It was in Moscow at the Profintern Congress that Browder got together with Foster again and then became his first assistant, and a very efficient one, in the office of the TUEL.
Browder’s background and my own were almost identical, as were the successive stages of our political evolution. We were both about the same age, both originated in Kansas, were both socialists from early youth, and both made the switch from the SP to syndicalism along about the same time. Thereafter, for a number of years our paths diverged a bit. Browder became a convert to the Fosterite version of syndicalism and I remained an IWW. However, partings of the ways organizationally never brought such a sharp break in cooperation and in personal relations as has been the case in later years after the War and the Russian Revolution.
In those days people in the various groups and tendencies used to maintain personal contact and cooperate with each other in causes of mutual concern, particularly in labor defense matters. Browder and I became well acquainted and worked together, along with radicals of other stripes in Kansas City, in defense committees for Tom Mooney, in the Schmidt-Kaplan case which grew out of the McNamara affair, and in similar activities of a “united front” character before we ever heard of that term.
We were drawn together more closely by America’s entry into the First World War and our common opposition to it. Browder and his brothers were influenced by the anarchist propaganda of Berkman and Goldman and attempted to organize an open fight against conscription, refusing on principle to register for the draft. I took a somewhat different tactical line – favored by most of the IWW’s and left socialists – of registering for the draft as a “conscientious objector.”
Shortly before his first imprisonment for a year in 1917, for refusing to register for the draft, Browder had made a trip to New York. There he contacted the people connected with the Cooperative League of America and began to lean very strongly in the direction of work in the cooperative movement, both as an occupation and as a means of political expression. While he was in jail I was completely revising my syndicalist views under the influence of the Russian Revolution and the popularization of its leading ideas in The Liberator and The Revolutionary Age.
To put my newly acquired political conceptions into practice I decided to rejoin the Socialist Party and connect myself with the national left wing, then being promoted by The Revolutionary Age; I got together with A.A. (“Shorty”) Beuhler and a number of other militants in Kansas City, who were favorable to the idea of a new political alignment, and we decided to start a weekly paper in Kansas City to express our views. At an early stage in the promotion of this project Browder and his brothers were released from jail and I immediately took up the new program with them.
I am quite sure that such a drastic reorientation had not occurred to Browder before this meeting. But he, like myself, was a pronounced anti-capitalist revolutionist to start with, and I found him receptive and sympathetic to the new idea. We soon came to agreement and then went to work in earnest to launch our paper, the Workers World. We joined the Socialist Party Local at the same time, along with a number of other live-wire militants in Kansas City-former IWW’s, AFL syndicalists, socialists, and quite a few independent radicals who had previously dropped out of the SP, finding it an inadequate expression of their radical views.
Browder was the first editor of the paper, but a short time later he had to go to Leavenworth to begin serving a second two-year term for conspiracy to obstruct the draft, and I took over the editorship. We ran the paper for about six months, until I was arrested in December, 1919, and indicted under the war-time Lever Act, because of my agitation in the Kansas coal fields against the anti-strike injunction of the federal government.
When Browder finished his second prison term, along about January, 1921, I was already in New York, a member of the Central Committee and in the thick of party politics. Browder was unknown to the other party leaders, but on my motion was brought to New York and placed in charge of organizing the delegation to the Profintern Congress. It was in that function that he resumed his contact with Foster and arranged for Foster also to attend.
This is a rather long and involved explanation of the original point – that the Foster AFL group was not the medium through which Browder came into the CP, although he had been previously connected with Foster.
* * *
In his History of the Communist Party of the United States Foster makes an elaborate attempt to back-write history by blowing up the minuscule Foster group of practical trade unionists in the AFL, and representing it as a serious ideological tendency and a contributing current to the movement of American communism. Here Foster really outwits himself. He actually does himself an injustice, although I would not accuse him of such an intention. If no more were involved than that, one could well afford to let the matter rest. But since history is no good, and is even worse than useless, if it is not true, I feel obliged to defend him against himself in order to set the record straight.
Foster’s astounding success in organizing the packinghouse workers (l9l7-l9l8) in an AFL set-up almost designed and guaranteed to make such a thing impossible, and his repeat performance in the steel strike (1919) under still more difficult conditions, were extraordinary personal accomplishments.
In the late Thirties the unionization of the steel industry was a pushover; the official leaders simply rode the tide of a universal labor upsurge generated by the long depression, and Lewis got US Steel’s signature to a contract without a strike. But in the year 19l9 – before the depression and before the rise of the CIO – no one but Foster, with his executive and organizing skill, his craftiness, his patience and his driving energy, could have organized the steel workers on such a scale and led them in a great strike, through the road-blocks and booby-traps of craft unionism, under the official sponsorship of the Gompers AFL.
Foster’s steel campaign was unique. It was all the more remarkable precisely because he did it all by himself against all kinds of official sabotage, and with the assistance of only a small handful of people of secondary talents who were personally attached to him and worked under his direction. His ex post facto attempt to represent himself in this grandiose action as the instrument of an ideological tendency tributary to the communist movement, not only falsifies the historical facts, but by indirection, detracts from the magnitude of his personal achievement.
The Foster group in the AFL began with a revolutionary program outlined in a pamphlet based on French syndicalism (1913). But this first programmatic declaration was soon withdrawn, rewritten and watered down to nothing but a tongue-in-cheek affirmation that mere trade-union organization would automatically solve all problems of workers’ emancipation. Thereafter, Fosterism was simply a method of working in the AFL by adaptation to the official leadership.
By adaptation individuals can get a chance to work. Foster demonstrated that to the hilt in practice. But adaptation is not a movement and cannot create a movement, for the question of who is serving whom always arises. Gompers, who knew Foster’s past and was no fool, thought that Foster’s work and adaptation could serve Gompers’ aims. He permitted Foster to work under AFL auspices for that reason, as he testified with brutal frankness before the Senate Committee Hearings on the Steel Trust Strike. Fitzpatrick was evidently of the same opinion. Both he and Gompers proved to be correct. Foster’s later adaptation to the Communist Party worked out the same way.
Foster’s work and achievements in the early days of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) under the Communist Party, were no less remarkable than his stockyard and steel campaigns. His rapid-fire organization of a network of effective left-progressive groups in a dozen or more different unions demonstrated most convincingly that his previous successes in the AFL were no fluke. It proved, for the second time, under different auspices, that given the forces and the machinery to work with, Foster was a trade-union organizer without a peer. In each case, however, his work was permitted and controlled by other forces which Foster had to serve. For that reason there never was and never could be such a thing as a Foster “movement” or, strictly speaking, even a Foster group. Foster has been condemned throughout his career, ever since he left the IWW, to serve the aims of others whom he sought to outwit by adaptation.
Foster was the leader of his own faction in the CP only within this framework. In the very first showdown in the original Foster group in 1925, when political issues of party interest were posed point-blank, he found himself in the minority and discovered that the policy of the Foster group was not his to determine at will. In the second showdown of the group, by then reduced to a smaller composition of ostensibly pure Fosterites – in 1928, at the Sixth Congress caucus meeting of the opposition delegates in Moscow – the leader found himself completely isolated. Bittelman, seconded by Browder and Johnstone, attacked him most brutally and disdainfully on that occasion and took complete charge of the “Foster group.” He was left without a single friend or support in the caucus. (The rest of us, members of the opposition bloc but not Fosterites, simply stood aside and let the Fosterites fight it out.)
All Foster had left at the time of the Sixth Congress in 1928, was his name and the manifest intention of Stalin to use it for his own purposes. His name represented not a political tendency, however small, which had to be recognized. It was the symbol, rather, of his personal achievements as an organizer, of his public renown which was not yet seriously tarnished by his internal party defeats. But, ironically, even his name and fame, which had been well earned by real performance, and which gave him a scrap of a special position in the party, was an obstacle to the realization of his ambition to be the official leader of the party, be it only by the grace of Stalin. For his own purposes Stalin needed in the US, as elsewhere, leaders without independent strength, leaders made by him and completely dependent on his favor. Browder filled the bill. He was the perfect example of the candidate distinguished not by the defect of his qualities, but by the quality of his defects.
* * *
Browder was an intelligent, industrious and dependable chief clerk by nature, but in no case an executive leader of independent capacity and resource. He was capable of filling the office of formal leader of the party by the permission of Stalin for 15 years without having, in his wildest imagination, previously entertained such an ambition and without having the slightest idea of how it came about or how his regime was brought to an end so precipitately and so easily. I don’t doubt that Browder began to think he was ten feet tall in the long period where he walked on stilts above the party multitude. But I doubt very much whether he could explain to himself or others how he got up so high in the first place, or why the stilts so suddenly gave way under him.
* * *
The original relationship between Foster and Browder, and the proper one, considering the personal qualities of each, had been the relation between executive and first assistant. The appointment of Browder to the first position in the party, with Foster subordinated to the role of honorary public figure without authority, really rubbed Foster’s nose in the dirt. It was not pleasant to see how he accepted the gross humiliation and pretended to submit to it.
When Browder was finally deposed 15 years later, Foster was permitted to officiate at the ceremonies. It was pitiful to see how he gratified his long-standing grudge and gloated over the victim in celebration of his hollow victory. In reality the great organizer, who accepted the office of formal leadership without the power, was celebrating his own utter defeat as an independent political figure.
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
***
Fourth International, Fall 1955
Foster in World War I
(Stenographic Report)
From Fourth International, Vol.16 No.4, Fall 1955, p.21.
Transcription & mark-up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
(The material printed below, indicating the attitude of William Z. Foster toward American imperialism in World War I, consists of extracts from the public stenographic record of the Senate investigaltion of the steel strike in 1919. The published volume is entitled: Investigation of Strike in Steel Industries. Hearings before the Committee on Education and Labor, United States Senate – Sixty-sixth Congress, first session. Pursuant to S. Res. 202 on the Resolution of the Senate to investigate the Strike in the Steel Industries. Foster today is National Chairman of the American Communist Party – Ed.)
* * *
FOSTER AND GOMPERS
FITZPATRICK: He (Foster) is not preaching and is absolutely confining himself to the activities and scope of the American Federation of Labor, and has done so for the years that I have known him. This is not a new thing for me. I have known Foster for probably six or seven years. (Page 75.)
THE CHAIRMAN: Have you ever discussed this book (Syndicalism) with him at all?
FITZPATRICK: Oh, he joked about the views he had in his younger diays, when he associated with men who were actuated with radical thoughts, and he was imbued by it, but when he got both his feet on the ground and knew how to weigh matters with better discretion and more conscience, he had forgot all of those things that he learned when he was a boy, and is now doing a man’s thinking in the situation. (Page 76.)
GOMPERS: About a year after that meeting at Zurich – no, about two years after the Zurich meeting (where Foster had appeared as an International delegate of the IWW – Ed.), and about a year after that pamphlet (Syndicalism) had been printed, I was at a meettsng of the Chicago Federation of Labor, conducted under the presidency of Mr. John Fitzpaltrick. I was called upon to make and did make an address. One of the delegates arose after I had concluded and expressed himself that it would be wise for the men in the labor movement of Chicago and of the entire counltory to follow the thought and philosophy and so forth which President Gompers had enunciated in his address. I did not know who was the delegate. He was a new personality to me. I might say that I was rather flattered and pleased at the fact that there was general comment of approval of not only my utterances but of the delegate who had first spoken after I had concluded.
Much to my amazement, after the meeting was over I was informed that the delegate was W.Z. Foster, the man who had appeared in Zurich and the man who had written that pamphlet. I think I addressed a letter to him expressing my appreciation of his change of attitude, his change of mind, and pointing out to him that pursuing a constructive policy he could be of real service to the cause of labor. He was a man of ability, a man of good presence, gentle in expression, a commander of good English, and I encouraged him. I was willing to help build a golden bridge for mine enemy to pass over. I was willing to welcome an erring brother into the ranks of constructive labor. (Pages 111-112.)
FOSTER: I am one who changes his mind once in a while. I might say that other people do. I shook hands with Gustave Hervé in La Santé Prison. At that time he was in there for anti-militarism and for preaching sabotage, and today I think Gustave Hervé (Hervé had turned Socialist Patriot. – Ed.) is one of the biggest men in France. (Page 396.)
THE CHAIRMAN (to Foster): But all that time, when you were advocating the doctrines of the IWW through the country and abroad, you were running counter to the policies of the American Federation of Labor?
FOSTER: Yes, sir.
CHAIRMAN: Mr. Gompers, however, has not changed his views concerning the IWW, but your views have changed?
FOSTER: I don’t think Mr. Gompers views have changed – only to become more pronounced possibly.
CHAIRMAN: And you say now to the Committee that your views have so changed that you are in harmony with the views of Mr. Gompers?
FOSTER: Yes, sir, I don’t know that it is 100 percent, but in the main they are. (Page 423.)
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FOSTER AND THE WAR
SENATOR WALSH: What was his attitude toward this country during the war, if you know?
MR. FITZPATRICK: Absolutely loyal, and he did everything in his power to assist in every way. I worked with him. I worked with him during the whole of the war, and I know the service that he rendered to the country. I think that he rendered as great a service, not only to the United States Government, but to the Allies, as any man. (Page 76-76.)
SENATOR WALSH (to Foster): What was your attitude toward this country during the war?
FOSTER: My attitude toward the war was that it must be won at all costs.
SENATOR WALSH: Some reference was made by Mr. Fitapatrick about your purchasing bonds or your subscribing to some campaign fund. Do you mind telling the committee what you did personally in that direction?
FOSTER: I bought my share, what I figured I was able to afford, and in our union we did our best to help make the loans a success.
WALSH: Did you make speeches?
FOSTER: Yes, sir.
WALSH: How many?
FOSTER: Oh, dozens of them.
WALSH: I would like to have you, for the sake of the record, tell us how many speeches you made, what time you devoted, and what money you expended for bonds, for the Red Cross or for any other purposes.
FOSTER: Wel1, I think I bought either $450 or $500 worth of bonds during the war. I cannot say exactly.
WALSH: You made speeches for the sale of bonds?
FOSTER: We carried on a regular campaign in our organization in the stockyards.
WALSH: And your attitude was the same as the attitude of all the other members of your organization?
FOSTER: Absolutely. (Pages 398-399.)
******
James P. Cannon
Early Years of the American Communist Movement
Letters to a Historian
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Origins of The Foster-Cannon Group
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Source: Fourth International, Vol.16 No.4, Fall 1955, pp.131-133, 143.
Original bound volumes of Fourth International and microfilm provided by the NYU Tamiment Labor Libraries.
Transcription & Mark-up: Andrew Pollack/Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
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March 17, 1955
Dear Sir:
The Foster-Cannon group, as a definite faction in the party, originated as a direct result of the labor party convention in Chicago, on July 3, 1923, which culminated in the split with the Fitzpatrick group and the formation of the still-born “Federated Farmer-Labor Party” under CP leadership and control. It would be a big mistake, however, to isolate this single “political issue” from its context and to judge the ensuing struggle purely in terms of differences on the labor party question. The sources of conflict were far deeper and more complicated than that. The launching of the ill-fated “Federated Farmer-Labor Party” simply triggered the explosion, which had been building up out of the general situation in the party.
Behind the unfortunate action at Chicago stood Pepper, and “Pepperism” was the real issue in the first stages of the long fight. The author of the policy which produced the Chicago fiasco was Pepper, and the fire of the new opposition was at first directed against his adventuristic policy, and his dictatorial domination of the party. The new opposition came into conflict with Ruthenberg only after he definitely aligned himself with Pepper, and after efforts, repeatedly made by Foster, to come to an agreement with him had failed. There were profound reasons for Ruthenberg’s alignment, as well as for ours, and these reasons transcended the political dispute of the moment.
The labor party question-more specifically, the question of the “Federated Farmer-Labor Party” – was the immediate and central question of policy at issue in the first stages of the faction fight. But at the bottom of the conflict there were other causes. Each of the contending factions had deep roots in different past experiences and traditions, and the alignments on each side in the “power struggle” took place very quickly, and all the more “naturally,” because of that.
It should be recalled that prior to the Russian Revolution the revolutionary movement in this country, as in some other countries, notably France, had been split into a party-political wing, conceiving “political action” in the narrow sense of electoral and parliamentary action, and a syndicalist wing, rejecting “politics” altogether. For the greater part, the two tendencies had been separated from each other organizationally. Therewith there had been a rather sharp division in their activities and fields of work. The “politicals” devoted themselves primarily to socialist propaganda and election campaigns, while the syndicalists concentrated on “direct action” in the economic struggle-union organization campaigns and strikes.
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The attempt of the Comintern to fuse these two tendencies together in the new communist parties had more success in the United States than elsewhere. Prominent activists from both sides of the old movement came into the CP, and they brought a part of their old baggage with them. The “politicals” had come to recognize the importance of trade-union work, but – at that time – it was still a strange field for them; they had no real understanding of it, no “feel” for it. The ex-syndicalists and practicing trade unionists had come to recognize the necessity of a party and the importance of “political action,” but – again at that time – their first interest was trade-union work.
There were exceptions, of course, but by and large, the old predilections determined the tendency of the party activists to align themselves with one faction or another; they felt more at home with people of their own kind. These differences of background and temperament, which were also reflected in different social habits and associations and different ways of working, made for an uneasiness in personal relations among the leaders. This was evident even in the period prior to the blow-up in July 1923, when they were collaborating most effectively on the main projects of the time – to legalize the party and to expand its public activities, and to swing the party support behind the Trade Union Educational League.
We were all beginning – learners in the field of Marxist theory and politics; and, in the best case, further study, time and experience in working together would have been required to fuse the two tendencies together into a harmonious working combination. I believe there was a general will to effect such a fusion, and things might have worked out this way in a normal course of development. But the high-powered intervention of Pepper, with policies, methods and designs of his own, cut the process short, disrupted the collaboration and deepened the division.
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I was quite well aware of Pepper’s general operations and machinations in the party – far more perceptively, I venture to say, than Foster and the other Chicagoans – and I didn’t like the way things were going. I thought at first that my objections were restricted to internal party affairs. It took the shock of the July 3 Convention to convince me that Pepper’s politics was all of one piece; that the fantastic unrealism of his internal party policy had its counterpart in external adventurism.
For that reason, perhaps, when the conflict over the catastrophic policy at the July 3 Convention broke into the open, I was not content to rest on that single issue. From the beginning of the fight I conceived of it as a general struggle to overthrow the Pepper regime. It didn’t take Foster long to come to the same conclusion, and that’s the way the issue was posed. The alignments, on both sides, in the ensuing struggle took place on that basis. Pepper’s labor policy was only one item in the catalogue.
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Within this context, it would be completely correct to say that the formation of the Foster-Cannon faction took place as a reaction to the July 3 Convention at Chicago. The unavowed faction of Pepper, however, existed long before that. The presentation of the Ruthenberg-Pepper “thesis,” attempting to justify the “Federated Farmer-Labor Party,” and the vote of Foster, Bittelman and Cannon against it, at the Political Committee meeting of August 24, 1923, could perhaps be taken as the formal starting point of the internal struggle.
Prior to that, and leading up to it, were my conversation with Foster at Duluth, related in my letter of May 28, 1954, and my articles in the Worker in the summer of 1923, which indirectly criticized the official party policy. Other background material, and my account of the struggle up to and at the December 1923 Convention of the party, are contained in my letters of May 19, 27 and 28, 1954. I have checked these letters again and find nothing to change. That’s the way it was; at least that’s the way it looked to me.
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You ask how I look at my own role in the formation of the Foster-Cannon group. I think that is indicated in the account I have written in those letters. I had the highest regard for Foster’s ability in general, and for his feel and skill as a mass worker in particular – a most essential quality which the leaders of the other faction seemed to lack – but I never belonged to Foster’s staff of personal assistants and was never in any sense a personal follower. Relations between me and Foster, from start to finish, always had the same basis. Cooperation in internal party affairs depended on agreement on policy, arrived at beforehand. That was no trouble in 1923; our thinking (ran along the same lines.
Foster was the party’s outstanding mass leader and most popular figure, and he carried himself well in that role. But he was not a political infant as he has often been represented; he knew what he was driving at. He symbolized the proletarian-American orientation, which the party needed and wanted, and I thought he was justly entitled to first place as party leader and public spokesman.
He was rather new to the party at that time, however, and was still feeling his way carefully. As one of the original communists, I knew the party better. I had closer connections with many of the decisive cadres and probably had more influence with some of them. Our combination – while it lasted – was an effective division of labor, without rivalry, at least as far as I was concerned. Each made independent contributions to the combination and each carried his own weight.
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Browder’s belated claim that it was he, not Foster, who conducted the labor party negotiations with the Fitzpatrick leadership in Chicago could be true only in a technical sense. Behind Browder stood Foster; Browder was the agent and, as always, an intelligent and capable agent, but in no case the “principal.” Foster’s influence in the Chicago Federation of Labor, and his authority, solidly established by his great work in the campaigns to organize the packinghouse workers and steel workers, in which he had secured the effective collaboration of Fitzpatrick and won his confidence, determined and governed Fitzpatrick’s relations with the Workers Party forces, from the first liaison to the break at the July 3 Convention.
Further, Browder’s report of his activities in the internal party situation of that time may be factually correct, but they certainly did not have the significance which he attributes to them. His attempt to depict himself as playing an independent role in the internal struggle of 1923-1924 strikes me as historical “back-writing” – as an adjustment of the facts of that period to fit the role he later came to play in the party, by grace of Stalin, after Foster had lost his original influence, and after such inconvenient obstacles as Pepper, Ruthenberg, Lovestone and Cannon were out of the way. If Browder played any independent part whatever in 1923 I didn’t know anything about it; and I surely should have known it because I was in the center of things where the decisions were made and was in a position to know how and by whom they were made. There is no doubt that he, like many others, was bitterly dissatisfied with the Pepper policy and its results. This widespread sentiment, which could probably be classified under the head of disgruntlement, provided the material, ready-made, for an effective, and eventually victorious, opposition. But this opposition first had to be organized by people with the necessary influence and authority to carry the party; and they had to know where to begin and whom to begin with.
As I have previously related, the opposition of 1923, as a definite movement in the party aiming at party control, began with the agreement between Foster and me. That was decisive step number one. The next was the agreement with Bittelman. The leading people of the Chicago District-Browder, Johnstone, Swabeck and Krumbein-and the better half of the leadership of the youth organization-Abern, Shachtman and Williamson-along with numerous other influential party militants such as William F. Dunne, were important supporters of the new opposition from the start. But the initiative came from the three people mentioned above, and the main influence in the leadership, from the beginning until the break-up of the faction in 1925, was exerted by them. This was so well established, and so widely recognized, that Browder’s present report is the first I have heard to give a different interpretation.
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I don’t know what went on in Browder’s head at the time, or what he imagined he was doing, but I do know that his latter-day recollections of furious activity as an independent force have very little relation to reality. Browder’s report and interpretation of his conversation and agreement with Ruthenberg in August 1923 impress me as an unwitting revelation of his own naivete. He may very well have had such a conversation with Ruthenberg, but his impression that Ruthenberg agreed to a combination with him, regardless of Pepper and Foster, not to speak of Lovestone and Cannon, was most certainly a misunderstanding on Browder’s part. Ruthenberg knew the relation of forces in the party too well for that. Ruthenberg was pretty cagey, he knew What he wanted, he had a high opinion of himself and was concerned with problems of self, and I don’t think he rated Browder very highly as a party leader. Moreover, Ruthenberg had shown no disposition to oppose Pepper’s policy. Just the contrary – witness the Ruthenberg-Pepper “thesis,” presented at the very time Browder imagined he had secured Ruthenberg’s agreement to separate himself from Pepper – August 24, 1923!
What probably happened Was that Browder talked and Ruthenberg simply listened, and Browder came away with the impression of an “understanding” that did not exist. I do remember Browder telling me, along about that time, that Ruthenberg had expressed antagonism to Lovestone on the ground that he exacerbated the factional situation and poisoned the atmosphere generally. This was quite true about Lovestone, and the objection to his ugly quarrelsomeness would have been in character for Ruthenberg, who was himself invariably polite, courteous and “correct“-I used to think he was too “correct“-in all discussions and relations with colleagues in the Committee. Browder may have taken Ruthenberg’s remark about Lovestone for an “understanding” in the internal party situation.
However, as is usually the case, as the internal struggle unfolded, the deep-going political differences cut across and cancelled out minor irritations in both camps. Ruthenberg, as events had shown and were to continue to show, was in essential agreement with Pepper’s political line, and it was foolish to think he could be influenced by Browder to determine his course in the party on secondary issues. I don’t think Ruthenberg “broke faith” with Browder. More likely, Browder’s “understanding” with him was a misunderstanding on Browder’s part.
Ruthenberg was a proud man, with a high-and-mighty haughtiness. Unlike Foster, he appeared to stand above the dirty little vices, such as outright lying, double-dealing, betrayal of confidence. He would have considered such things, if he thought about them at all, as not simply wrong but, more important, beneath his dignity.
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Foster’s knowledge and feel of the trade-union movement surpassed that of all the other party leaders in the early days, but his experience in that field was not all profit. He had learned too much in the school of the labor fakers, who got what they wanted one way or another, without regard to any governing theory or principle, and he mistakenly thought such methods could be efficacious in the communist political movement. Crude American pragmatism, which “gets things done” in simple situations, is a poor tool in the complexities of revolutionary politics.
Foster was somewhat mechanical and eclectic in his thinking, and this frequently led him to summary judgments in complex questions which called for qualified answers. His one-sided, almost fetishistic concentration on “boring from within” the AFL, as the sole means of radicalizing and expanding the labor movement – a concept which had to be thrown overboard in 1928, and which was brutally refuted – in life by the rise of the CIO-is an outstanding example of his limitations as a thinker.
But in the frame of comparison with the other leading figures of the pioneer communist movement in this country, which in my opinion is the proper way to judge him historically, Foster was outstanding in many ways. Attempts to represent him as some kind of babe in the woods, led astray by craftier men, which have been recurrently made throughout the history of the party, beginning with his alliance with me in the formation of the Foster-Cannon group, never had any foundation in fact.
Foster was a shrewd and competent man, far more conscious and deliberate in all his actions than he appeared and pretended to be. Everything that Foster did, from first to last, was done deliberately. In fact, he was too shrewd, too deliberate in his decisions, and too free from the restraint of scruple; and by that he wrought his own catastrophe. The actions which, in a tragic progression, made such a disgraceful shambles of his career, derived not from faulty intelligence or weakness of will but from defects of character.
Foster was a slave to ambition, to his career. That was his infirmity. But this judgment, which in my book is definitive, must be qualified by the recognition that he sought to serve his ambition and to advance his career in the labor movement and not elsewhere. Within that field he worshipped the “Bitch-Goddess of Success” as much as any businessman, careerist on the make, or politician in the bourgeois world.
Foster was a man of such outstanding talent, energy and driving will that – in the conditions of the country in his time – he could easily have made his way in any number of other occupations. But the labor movement was his own milieu, deliberately chosen in his youth and doggedly maintained to the exclusion of virtually all other interests. Within that limit – that he had no life outside the labor movement – Foster subordinated everything to his mad ambition and his almost pathological love of fame, of his career. To that, with a consistency that was truly appalling, he sacrificed his pride and self-respect, and all considerations of loyalty to persons and to principles and, eventually, to the interests of the movement which he had originally set out to serve.
Shakespeare’s Gratiano said they lose the world “that do buy it with much care.” Foster’s too-great consistency in his single-minded pursuit of fame and career at any price became a self-defeating game. His willingness to humiliate himself and surrender his opinions to gain favor with the Stalinist “power” only disarmed him before repeated exactions in this respect, until he was stripped of the last shred of independence. His disloyalty to people robbed him of any claim on the loyalty of others and left him without support at the most critical turning points. His readiness to profess opinions he didn’t hold, for the sake of expediency, to lie and cheat to gain a point, lost him the respect of his colleagues and eventually destroyed his moral authority in the party cadres. He ended up friendless and alone as early as 1928, incapable of contending for leadership in his own name, and fit only for the role of figurehead leader.
But even for that shabby substitute for fame and career Foster has had to grovel in the dust, and to contribute his bit systematically, year after year for more than a quarter of a century, to the gross betrayal of the workers’ cause which he had proclaimed as his own. “Success” in the world of Stalinism is dearly bought indeed – if by some horrible misunderstanding one should call Foster’s pursuit of fame and career successful!
Yours truly,
James P. Cannon
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