Cannon, James Patrick

CANNON, JAMES PATRICK (1890–1974). The foremost leader of US Trotskyism, James Patrick Cannon was born in Rosedale, Kansas, and grew up in an Irish immigrant working-class family in which his mother’s Catholic religious convictions coexisted with his father’s deep-rooted labor radicalism (from Irish nationalism, the Knights of Labor to the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs). Cannon quit high school to become an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, where he received training from William D. “Big Bill” Haywood and Vincent St. John in militant strikes, revolutionary agitation, free-speech fights, and patient working-class organizing.

A Midwestern leader of the Socialist Party’s left wing after Russia’s 1917 revolution, Cannon helped establish the early communist movement, serving as the first national chairman of the Workers Party in 1921. Cannon was an American delegate to the Communist International on five occasions, once spending eight months in Moscow on the Comintern’s executive committee. In the United States he headed the International Labor Defense from 1925 to 1928, organizing campaigns to defend such “class-war prisoners” as Sacco and Vanzetti, Tom Mooney, and others. With William Z. Foster he led a faction in the American Communist Party that saw itself as more grounded in US labor-radical experience.

While attending the 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Comintern, Cannon obtained a copy of Leon Trotsky’s critique of Stalin’s bureaucratic policies in the Soviet Union and the Communist movement. Agreeing with the exiled Trotsky’s defense of “Bolshevik-Leninist” principles, he quietly circulated the document among comrades back in the United States. This resulted in a rash of expulsions and the organization of the Communist League of America. Through a complex process of splits and fusions, in which Cannon played a leading role, the Trotskyists significantly increased their numbers and influence by the time they established the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. Cannon was its national secretary until his semi-retirement in 1953. Even afterward he played a substantial role in helping the Socialist Workers Party survive the intense pressures of the Cold War period. He was also active in the leadership of the Fourth International, a worldwide organization established by Trotskyists in 1938. In the early 1940s Cannon was one of the first victims of the Smith Act. As an orator and writer, Cannon distinguished himself as an accomplished popularizer of revolutionary Marxist ideas that were strongly flavored by a blending of the Bolshevik and US labor-radical traditions in such works as The Struggle for a Proletarian Party (1942), America’s Road to Socialism (1953), and Speeches for Socialism (1971).

Cannon, James P. The First Ten Years of American Communism. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1962.

Cannon, James P. The History of American Trotskyism. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972.

Evans, Les, ed. James P. Cannon as We Knew Him, by Thirty-Three Comrades, Friends, and Relatives. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976.

Palmer, Bryan. James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Palmer, Bryan. James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-1938. Leiden: Brill, 2021.

James P. Cannon Papers, 1919-1975. Finding Guide. Wisconsin Historical Society.