The French turn in the United States: James P. Cannon and the Trotskyist entry into the Socialist Party, 1934–1937

Abstract

To expand dissident communism’s influence in 1934 Trotsky urged his supporters to join the French Socialist Party. A fusion of the Trotskyist Communist League of America (Opposition) led by James P. Cannon, and a radicalizing American Workers Party headed by A. J. Muste, formed the Workers Party (WP) in 1934–1935. The WP soon followed this entryist orientation in 1936. This article challenges a previous historiography, addressing the ways in which Cannon charted a controversial course inside the Socialist Party. Cannon stressed the importance of mass work in the unions and in various political campaigns, such as support for republican insurgents in the Spanish Civil War and defense of Trotsky against the slanders of the Moscow Trials of 1937. This Trotskyist political work built the SP, but it also exposed acute differences separating the fractured leadership of the Party from the revolutionary policies and practices animating a growing left wing. After little more than one year of this kind of agitation, the Trotskyist entryists were expelled. They had won over almost 1000 supporters, many of whom contributed mightily to the Socialist Workers Party, founded in 1938.