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Ranking Communist Party (CPUSA) figure,
American Trotskyist movement founder, and
longtime Socialist Workers Party leader, James
Cannon was born in Rosedale, Kansas, on February
11, 1890. Poverty radicalized his immigrant
father, John, a laborer in a foundry. John
introduced the young James to Irish nationalism,
the Knights of Labor, populism, and finally
the Socialist Party. James displayed a deep
and lifelong anger at capitalism and the injustices
it spawned. He left high school to organize
for the Industrial Workers of the World.
Soon he joined the Socialist Party and rose
rapidly among its left wing. Cannon had taken
a path that would make him an acquaintance
of nearly all the era's celebrated radicals.
After Earl Browder's imprisonment during World War I, Cannon edited
Cannon's life took a dramatic turn in 1928 while he was in the Soviet Union. In Moscow, Leon Trotsky offered compelling criticism of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union's direction. Cannon returned to the United States carrying Trotsky's writings. That October, Cannon and 100 followers were driven from the cpusa. They called themselves the Communist League of America (Left Opposition), began publishing a newspaper,
Success brought schism during the early months of World War II. Socialist Workers Party figures Max Shachtman and James Burnham argued that the Stalinists constituted a new bureaucratic class in the Soviet Union. Cannon, like Trotsky, considered the Soviet Union's nationalized economy worth defending, despite Stalin's dictatorship. In early 1940 Shachtman's faction became the Workers Party. In 1941 federal authorities used the Smith Act to imprison Cannon and seventeen other Socialist Workers Party figures and Minneapolis Teamsters. Supposedly their organizations had advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government; actually they opposed American foreign policy. Cannon served thirteen months at Sandstone Penitentiary. During the McCarthy era, a public that drew few distinctions among radicals persecuted the Socialist Workers Party and Communist Party alike.
Cannon retired in 1953 but lived to see the "New Left" of the 1960s and 1970s. He died on August 21, 1974, believing that Vietnam War resisters, African Americans, Hispanics, women, youth, and gays were taking a permanent step toward socialism in the United States.