In 1978 one of the SWP’s most respected veterans, George Novack, wrote a brief history in the November issue of International Socialist Review entitled “Fifty Years of American Trotskyism.” Novack hoped to explain “the capacity of this relatively small revolutionary socialist formation to influence the course of broad social struggles.”1 His clear, succinct article offered much information in a coherent chronological narrative.

At the same time, however, Novack’s effort had serious limitations. It restricted itself to noting some of U.S. Trotskyism’s primary accomplishments and some of its most salient internal conflicts—all in a somewhat self-congratulatory tone that was apparently designed to instruct and encourage younger comrades. It in no way prepared the reader for the fact that the SWP would soon explicitly abandon Trotskyism, proclaim itself to be a “sister party” of the Cuban Communist Party, and experience a demoralizing decline.

The fact remains that, in order to develop an in-depth historical materialist analysis, one must begin with at least the basic outline of the story. What follows is little more than an introduction that retraces what Novack offered in 1978, although drawing on additional sources. Another limitation: the present essay is an account of the first fifty years of American Trotskyism, so its focus is on the late 1920s to the late 1970s. In another essay reproduced in this volume, I attempt a more adequate analysis—more seriously connecting party history with broader social realities, and also dealing with developments of the 1980s, which help illuminate the earlier history.

Novack’s account of U.S. Trotskyism was limited to an exclusive focus on the majority currents within the CLA, the WPUS, the Trotskyist faction in the SP, and the SWP. In his opinion, those breaking from this majority broke from “real Trotskyism.” I have come to believe that reality is more complex, more interesting than this, but the focus of the present account is also on the “mainstream” of the U.S. Trotskyist movement, with which I identify.

In this account I mention the names of many people who were active in the revolutionary movement. I only regret that I have not been able to describe all these people and to offer names and descriptions of even more people—their personal backgrounds as well as political experiences, ideas, and passions. The history of the Trotskyist movement was not made by theoretical abstractions or impersonal forces or interchangeable beings. This history was made by actual people with names, with faces and bodies, with interesting and often complex lives. Mentioning so many names is my way of indicating this personal involvement in the making of history. It would be good if other historians sought to find the life stories connected with these names, and to trace the interconnections of these life stories with one another and with the larger social reality, in order to provide a more adequate account of the history that is sketched here. Readers should use their critical imaginations and powers of empathy to infuse this historical outline with the vibrant humanity that was essential to the actual Trotskyist movement.

By 1901, many of the remnants and continuations of this labor-socialist tradition combined with other elements (former Populists, Christian socialists, radicalized feminists, leftward-moving intellectuals, battle-scarred trade unionists, and so on) to form the Socialist Party of America. Christopher Lasch has summarized some of the significant facts:

More than this, approximately one-third of the unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) were led and strongly influenced by Socialists. Many Socialists played a central role in establishing the militant and vital Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). They also were a major force in the early National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in numerous feminist efforts, and in much of the radical and reform ferment that characterized the so-called Progressive era of 1900–18.

Indeed, many of the Progressive reforms were generated by fear among upper-class political figures, who were feeling the pressure of the rising socialist challenge. As Theodore Roosevelt put it in 1906: “I do not like the social conditions at present. The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men, their greed and arrogance . . . and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition of excitement and irritation in the popular mind, which shows itself in the great increase in the socialistic propaganda.” Politicians such as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson aggressively pushed for reforms that would force the so-called robber barons—the industrial capitalists who had transformed the U.S. economy in the decades following the Civil War—to “clean up their act,” in order to preserve capitalism. At the same time they attempted to work with conservative (or conservatized) labor figures such as AFL president Samuel Gompers, who symbolized a “reasonable” alternative to militant socialism. Future capitalist politicians—most successful of whom was Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s—were to utilize this gambit with great success.4

In the early 1900s a divergence opened in Socialist Party ranks between moderates led by Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit, who rejected revolutionary socialism in favor of a more gradualist reform orientation, and those inclined to hold firm to a more militant class-struggle perspective. Representing the left wing of the party were such figures as Eugene V. Debs and the even more intransigent IWW leader “Big Bill” Haywood. The SP has sometimes been idealized (in the words of Lasch, summarizing the account of historian James Weinstein) as “inclusive, nonsectarian, and given to searching and open debate,” and the party’s structure was quite open and loose. The fact remains, however, that—as with social democratic parties generally—the moderate elements dominated the party apparatus, often using their power undemocratically to undercut, or sometimes even repress or expel, left-wing influence.

In the face of the patriotic hysteria and fierce government repression unleashed by World War I, the bulk of the SP held to an antiwar position. Yet the party’s left wing increasingly came to feel that this position was being soft-pedaled by the moderates. When the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 created the world’s first workers’ state in Russia, the Socialist Party as a whole greeted it with enthusiasm, but the moderates were adamant that this should in no way affect “business as usual” for the party. The left wing, however, argued that there were important lessons to be learned from the Bolsheviks and that the Socialist Party must develop a consistently revolutionary approach to American and world realities. When it became clear in 1919 that the left wing was winning over a party majority, the moderates engineered massive expulsions, eliminating the bulk of the left wing and over half the membership.

Some of the most committed and capable activists from the SP went on to form the core of the new Communist movement in 1919, soon to be joined by other Socialist Party veterans in the early 1920s. There were also left-wing trade union activists from the IWW and AFL. Especially significant in this period was the adherence to communism by a cluster of Black socialists associated with an important radical group called the African Blood Brotherhood led by Cyril Briggs.

At first the new movement was fragmented, riddled with naively utopian hopes and organizational immaturity. Ultra-leftism and government repression reinforced each other, creating an atmosphere incapable of attracting or retaining even a majority of those pro-left forces driven out of the SP, not to mention new recruits from broader working-class layers. By the early 1920s, however, a unified Communist Party was forged that more effectively reflected U.S. radical traditions, blending with the principles of Russian Bolshevism and the experience of the international revolutionary workers’ movement.5

On the trade union front, the Communist Party created an influential network of leaders and activists in the AFL through the Trade Union Educational League, led by the famed leader of the 1919 steel strike William Z. Foster. It played a major role in the realm of defending civil liberties, largely through the International Labor Defense (ILD), headed by James P. Cannon, as well as through working relationships with such people as Roger Baldwin of the recently formed American Civil Liberties Union. This role was especially important in the face of the fierce government repression that devastated the radical movement in the wake of World War I. The ILD assisted “class-struggle prisoners” regardless of political affiliation—most famous being the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, as well as militant socialist trade unionists Tom Mooney and Warren K. Billings. The Communists coordinated an impressive array of immigrant fraternal and social organizations and sought to help protect the rights of immigrants through the National Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. (It is worth remembering that a majority of U.S. workers in many areas during this period were first- and second-generation immigrants.) Especially due to the insistence of the Communist International, the American Communist Party began to give more consistent and careful attention to the problem of racism and the plight of African Americans than had ever been the case among U.S. left-wing organizations. A small but important core of Black intellectuals and workers came to see, in the words of Harry Haywood, “the elimination of racism and the achievement of complete equality for Blacks as an inevitable byproduct of a socialist revolution in the United States.” Attention was also given to the need for a farmer-labor alliance, and to what was then called “the woman question.” Through the innumerable books and pamphlets published by International Publishers and Workers Library Publishers, through the Daily Worker and a variety of English- and foreign-language periodicals, through classes and lectures and special schools, through marches and rallies and Communist electoral campaigns, the Communist Party sought to spread Marxist ideas and deepen socialist consciousness. Although party membership figures fluctuated between 7,000 and 12,000, many thousands more were drawn to its activities and influenced by its efforts.6

Problems will inevitably develop in any movement composed of human beings, and the Communist Party of this period was no exception. But as James P. Cannon put it some years later: “It was composed of thousands of courageous and devoted revolutionists willing to make sacrifices and take risks for t...