Bryan D. Palmer is the Canada Research Chair at Trent University. He edits Labour/Le Travail and is the author of ten other books, the most recent being Canada's 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era.

"Palmer's biography is destined to become a classic in the historiography of US Communism. It is the most serious treatment of the Communist movement's history in the 1920s since Draper's two volumes appeared approximately 50 years ago. . . . Palmer is currently preparing the second volume of his Cannon biography, chronicling the subject's Trotskyist years. I can hardly wait to read it."--Left History"Palmer's faithful, moving account of the choices Cannon faced has important lessons for us. One of those lessons is that, even as we weigh the decisions the choices and hopes of previous radical generations, we need to attend to out own imperatives and dreams."--Canadian Dimension"An important contribution to the study of American radicalism."--Journal of American History

• Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Communist Can(n)on Questioning American Radicalism Stalinism: What¿s in a Name American Communism: Histories of Ambivalence and Accomplishment At the Point of Embattled Historiographic Production: The Meanings of Theodore Draper The Three Drapers Communist Biography and Stalinism: James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left 1. Rosedale Roots: Facts and Fictions An American Birth Fin-de-Siècle Context: Kansas in a World of Change In the Shadow of the Irish Diaspora: England and America The Industrial Frontier Family Fortunes A Boy¿s Life Meanings 2. Youth¿s Discoveries Mothers and Fathers and Adolescent Work Early Encounters with Socialism Education and the Discovery of Desire The Limitations of Rosedale Socialism 3. Hobo Rebel/Homeguard A Soapbox Apprenticeship Traveling Man: A Vincent St. John Seasoning Anarchy in Akron: Rubber Workers and the Mass Strike, 1913 Fast-Train Hoboing and Hell Popping in Peoria A Solidarity of the Jail Cell: Marriage Duluth and the Testing of Class-War Leadership: Gunmen, Kidnappings, and Beatings The Home Front: Cannon Back in Kansas World War I and Revolutionary Doubt The Personal Is Political: Radical Manhood The IWW: The Great Anticipation 4. Red Dawn 1917: Revolution in the East; Repression in the West Socialist Revival A Revived Class Struggle Browder and Cannon A Revolutionary Press A Fractious Left Wing Foreign-Language Federations and the Dialectic of Revolutionary Mobilization Cannon and the Communist Labor Party The Agitator¿s Return: Kansas Coal Fields, 1919 Caught in the Anti-Red Dragnet 5. Underground A Suit of Clothes The Divided Communist Underground Bridgman Brokering: The Emergence of Cannon as a Potential Communist Leader A Cleveland Sojourn: Challenging Ultraleftism New York: Bohemians and Clandestine Communists Cannon, Consolidation, and an Above-Ground Party: Kansas Charm and the Politics of Revolutionary Regroupment 6. Geese in Flight Founding the Workers¿ Party Undergroundism Unreconstructed Cannon and the Struggle for an Activist Communist Party, 1922 The Birth of the Goose Caucus and the Turn to Moscow 7. Pepper Spray The Americanizer¿s Return to America Cannon on the Road Again: The Push and Pull of Party Assignment Pogany/Pepper Communists Outmaneuver Themselves: Farmer-Labor Party Illusions and Intrigues, 1923 Cannon, Foster, and Trade Union Combination, 1923 Pepperism Rampant The Romance of Politics The Third National Convention of the Workers¿ Party, 1923¿1924 8. Stalinist Suspensions Of Factions and Foreign Domination Labor Organization, Communist Education, and Sustaining Collective Leadership Blind Spot: ¿Women¿s Work¿ Race and Revolution Pepper, Bureaucratism, and Permanent Factionalism Farmer-Laborism, Again Factionalism¿s Enigmatic Fulcrum: Ludwig Lore Comintern Changes Bolshevization and Electoral Campaigns Lore, Escalating Anti-Trotskyism, and Factional Stalemate, 1924 Return to Moscow and Comintern Degeneration, 1925 ¿Tearing Each Other to Pieces¿: Factional Gang War Of Cables and Comintern Men: American Communism¿s Decisive Subordination 9. Labor Defender Bolshevization and Leninist Mass Work Labor Defense and the Shifting Nature of Communist Trade Union Work, 1923¿1926 ¿Professionalizing¿ Nonsectarian Labor Defense Press and Propaganda Class-War Prisoners Sacco and Vanzetti Factionalism¿s Toll, 1927¿1928 10. Living with Lovestone A Cannon Faction to End Factionalism, 1926 Ongoing Stalinization Regrouping a Collective Leadership Ruthenberg¿s Death and the Lovestone Coup Stalinism and Lovestone Becoming Lovestone, 1927 The Lovestone Regime: A Right Lurch, 1927¿1928 11. Expulsion Cannon and the Corridor Congress, 1928 The Temporary Eclipse of Foster Cannon and a Canadian: Maurice Spector Trotsky¿s Draft Program Surfaces The Cannon-Dunne Split A Clandestine Cannon American Trotskyism Underground Antoinette Konikow: Boston¿s Red Birth-Control Advocate and Pioneer Left Oppositionist Piecing Together Possibilities of an American Left Opposition Flushing the Trotskyists Out Before the Court of Lovestone ¿Three Generals without an Army¿: Under Attack How Communist Party Repression Organized Early American Trotskyism Chicago and Minneapolis: Centers of a New Movement Trotskyism and the Communist Party: An Uncertain Future, 1928 Conclusion: James P. Cannon, the United States Revolutionary Movement, and the End of an Age of Innocence Revolution and Reaction Communism¿s First Decade: The End of an Age of Revolutionary Innocence Stalinism at Work Cannon and the Struggle for a Left Oppositionist Practice Cannon¿s Legacy: The Theory and Practice of Building a Revolutionary Party Communist Continuity: The Significance of Revolutionary Subjectivity Notes Index

Bryan D. Palmer is the Canada Research Chair at Trent University. He edits Labour/Le Travail and is the author of ten other books, the most recent being Canada's 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era.

"Palmer's biography is destined to become a classic in the historiography of US Communism. It is the most serious treatment of the Communist movement's history in the 1920s since Draper's two volumes appeared approximately 50 years ago. . . . Palmer is currently preparing the second volume of his Cannon biography, chronicling the subject's Trotskyist years. I can hardly wait to read it."--Left History"Palmer's faithful, moving account of the choices Cannon faced has important lessons for us. One of those lessons is that, even as we weigh the decisions the choices and hopes of previous radical generations, we need to attend to out own imperatives and dreams."--Canadian Dimension"An important contribution to the study of American radicalism."--Journal of American History

• Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Communist Can(n)on Questioning American Radicalism Stalinism: What¿s in a Name American Communism: Histories of Ambivalence and Accomplishment At the Point of Embattled Historiographic Production: The Meanings of Theodore Draper The Three Drapers Communist Biography and Stalinism: James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left 1. Rosedale Roots: Facts and Fictions An American Birth Fin-de-Siècle Context: Kansas in a World of Change In the Shadow of the Irish Diaspora: England and America The Industrial Frontier Family Fortunes A Boy¿s Life Meanings 2. Youth¿s Discoveries Mothers and Fathers and Adolescent Work Early Encounters with Socialism Education and the Discovery of Desire The Limitations of Rosedale Socialism 3. Hobo Rebel/Homeguard A Soapbox Apprenticeship Traveling Man: A Vincent St. John Seasoning Anarchy in Akron: Rubber Workers and the Mass Strike, 1913 Fast-Train Hoboing and Hell Popping in Peoria A Solidarity of the Jail Cell: Marriage Duluth and the Testing of Class-War Leadership: Gunmen, Kidnappings, and Beatings The Home Front: Cannon Back in Kansas World War I and Revolutionary Doubt The Personal Is Political: Radical Manhood The IWW: The Great Anticipation 4. Red Dawn 1917: Revolution in the East; Repression in the West Socialist Revival A Revived Class Struggle Browder and Cannon A Revolutionary Press A Fractious Left Wing Foreign-Language Federations and the Dialectic of Revolutionary Mobilization Cannon and the Communist Labor Party The Agitator¿s Return: Kansas Coal Fields, 1919 Caught in the Anti-Red Dragnet 5. Underground A Suit of Clothes The Divided Communist Underground Bridgman Brokering: The Emergence of Cannon as a Potential Communist Leader A Cleveland Sojourn: Challenging Ultraleftism New York: Bohemians and Clandestine Communists Cannon, Consolidation, and an Above-Ground Party: Kansas Charm and the Politics of Revolutionary Regroupment 6. Geese in Flight Founding the Workers¿ Party Undergroundism Unreconstructed Cannon and the Struggle for an Activist Communist Party, 1922 The Birth of the Goose Caucus and the Turn to Moscow 7. Pepper Spray The Americanizer¿s Return to America Cannon on the Road Again: The Push and Pull of Party Assignment Pogany/Pepper Communists Outmaneuver Themselves: Farmer-Labor Party Illusions and Intrigues, 1923 Cannon, Foster, and Trade Union Combination, 1923 Pepperism Rampant The Romance of Politics The Third National Convention of the Workers¿ Party, 1923¿1924 8. Stalinist Suspensions Of Factions and Foreign Domination Labor Organization, Communist Education, and Sustaining Collective Leadership Blind Spot: ¿Women¿s Work¿ Race and Revolution Pepper, Bureaucratism, and Permanent Factionalism Farmer-Laborism, Again Factionalism¿s Enigmatic Fulcrum: Ludwig Lore Comintern Changes Bolshevization and Electoral Campaigns Lore, Escalating Anti-Trotskyism, and Factional Stalemate, 1924 Return to Moscow and Comintern Degeneration, 1925 ¿Tearing Each Other to Pieces¿: Factional Gang War Of Cables and Comintern Men: American Communism¿s Decisive Subordination 9. Labor Defender Bolshevization and Leninist Mass Work Labor Defense and the Shifting Nature of Communist Trade Union Work, 1923¿1926 ¿Professionalizing¿ Nonsectarian Labor Defense Press and Propaganda Class-War Prisoners Sacco and Vanzetti Factionalism¿s Toll, 1927¿1928 10. Living with Lovestone A Cannon Faction to End Factionalism, 1926 Ongoing Stalinization Regrouping a Collective Leadership Ruthenberg¿s Death and the Lovestone Coup Stalinism and Lovestone Becoming Lovestone, 1927 The Lovestone Regime: A Right Lurch, 1927¿1928 11. Expulsion Cannon and the Corridor Congress, 1928 The Temporary Eclipse of Foster Cannon and a Canadian: Maurice Spector Trotsky¿s Draft Program Surfaces The Cannon-Dunne Split A Clandestine Cannon American Trotskyism Underground Antoinette Konikow: Boston¿s Red Birth-Control Advocate and Pioneer Left Oppositionist Piecing Together Possibilities of an American Left Opposition Flushing the Trotskyists Out Before the Court of Lovestone ¿Three Generals without an Army¿: Under Attack How Communist Party Repression Organized Early American Trotskyism Chicago and Minneapolis: Centers of a New Movement Trotskyism and the Communist Party: An Uncertain Future, 1928 Conclusion: James P. Cannon, the United States Revolutionary Movement, and the End of an Age of Innocence Revolution and Reaction Communism¿s First Decade: The End of an Age of Revolutionary Innocence Stalinism at Work Cannon and the Struggle for a Left Oppositionist Practice Cannon¿s Legacy: The Theory and Practice of Building a Revolutionary Party Communist Continuity: The Significance of Revolutionary Subjectivity Notes Index

Bryan D. Palmer is the Canada Research Chair at Trent University. He edits Labour/Le Travail and is the author of ten other books, the most recent being Canada's 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era.

"Palmer's biography is destined to become a classic in the historiography of US Communism. It is the most serious treatment of the Communist movement's history in the 1920s since Draper's two volumes appeared approximately 50 years ago. . . . Palmer is currently preparing the second volume of his Cannon biography, chronicling the subject's Trotskyist years. I can hardly wait to read it."--Left History"Palmer's faithful, moving account of the choices Cannon faced has important lessons for us. One of those lessons is that, even as we weigh the decisions the choices and hopes of previous radical generations, we need to attend to out own imperatives and dreams."--Canadian Dimension"An important contribution to the study of American radicalism."--Journal of American History

• Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Communist Can(n)on Questioning American Radicalism Stalinism: What¿s in a Name American Communism: Histories of Ambivalence and Accomplishment At the Point of Embattled Historiographic Production: The Meanings of Theodore Draper The Three Drapers Communist Biography and Stalinism: James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left 1. Rosedale Roots: Facts and Fictions An American Birth Fin-de-Siècle Context: Kansas in a World of Change In the Shadow of the Irish Diaspora: England and America The Industrial Frontier Family Fortunes A Boy¿s Life Meanings 2. Youth¿s Discoveries Mothers and Fathers and Adolescent Work Early Encounters with Socialism Education and the Discovery of Desire The Limitations of Rosedale Socialism 3. Hobo Rebel/Homeguard A Soapbox Apprenticeship Traveling Man: A Vincent St. John Seasoning Anarchy in Akron: Rubber Workers and the Mass Strike, 1913 Fast-Train Hoboing and Hell Popping in Peoria A Solidarity of the Jail Cell: Marriage Duluth and the Testing of Class-War Leadership: Gunmen, Kidnappings, and Beatings The Home Front: Cannon Back in Kansas World War I and Revolutionary Doubt The Personal Is Political: Radical Manhood The IWW: The Great Anticipation 4. Red Dawn 1917: Revolution in the East; Repression in the West Socialist Revival A Revived Class Struggle Browder and Cannon A Revolutionary Press A Fractious Left Wing Foreign-Language Federations and the Dialectic of Revolutionary Mobilization Cannon and the Communist Labor Party The Agitator¿s Return: Kansas Coal Fields, 1919 Caught in the Anti-Red Dragnet 5. Underground A Suit of Clothes The Divided Communist Underground Bridgman Brokering: The Emergence of Cannon as a Potential Communist Leader A Cleveland Sojourn: Challenging Ultraleftism New York: Bohemians and Clandestine Communists Cannon, Consolidation, and an Above-Ground Party: Kansas Charm and the Politics of Revolutionary Regroupment 6. Geese in Flight Founding the Workers¿ Party Undergroundism Unreconstructed Cannon and the Struggle for an Activist Communist Party, 1922 The Birth of the Goose Caucus and the Turn to Moscow 7. Pepper Spray The Americanizer¿s Return to America Cannon on the Road Again: The Push and Pull of Party Assignment Pogany/Pepper Communists Outmaneuver Themselves: Farmer-Labor Party Illusions and Intrigues, 1923 Cannon, Foster, and Trade Union Combination, 1923 Pepperism Rampant The Romance of Politics The Third National Convention of the Workers¿ Party, 1923¿1924 8. Stalinist Suspensions Of Factions and Foreign Domination Labor Organization, Communist Education, and Sustaining Collective Leadership Blind Spot: ¿Women¿s Work¿ Race and Revolution Pepper, Bureaucratism, and Permanent Factionalism Farmer-Laborism, Again Factionalism¿s Enigmatic Fulcrum: Ludwig Lore Comintern Changes Bolshevization and Electoral Campaigns Lore, Escalating Anti-Trotskyism, and Factional Stalemate, 1924 Return to Moscow and Comintern Degeneration, 1925 ¿Tearing Each Other to Pieces¿: Factional Gang War Of Cables and Comintern Men: American Communism¿s Decisive Subordination 9. Labor Defender Bolshevization and Leninist Mass Work Labor Defense and the Shifting Nature of Communist Trade Union Work, 1923¿1926 ¿Professionalizing¿ Nonsectarian Labor Defense Press and Propaganda Class-War Prisoners Sacco and Vanzetti Factionalism¿s Toll, 1927¿1928 10. Living with Lovestone A Cannon Faction to End Factionalism, 1926 Ongoing Stalinization Regrouping a Collective Leadership Ruthenberg¿s Death and the Lovestone Coup Stalinism and Lovestone Becoming Lovestone, 1927 The Lovestone Regime: A Right Lurch, 1927¿1928 11. Expulsion Cannon and the Corridor Congress, 1928 The Temporary Eclipse of Foster Cannon and a Canadian: Maurice Spector Trotsky¿s Draft Program Surfaces The Cannon-Dunne Split A Clandestine Cannon American Trotskyism Underground Antoinette Konikow: Boston¿s Red Birth-Control Advocate and Pioneer Left Oppositionist Piecing Together Possibilities of an American Left Opposition Flushing the Trotskyists Out Before the Court of Lovestone ¿Three Generals without an Army¿: Under Attack How Communist Party Repression Organized Early American Trotskyism Chicago and Minneapolis: Centers of a New Movement Trotskyism and the Communist Party: An Uncertain Future, 1928 Conclusion: James P. Cannon, the United States Revolutionary Movement, and the End of an Age of Innocence Revolution and Reaction Communism¿s First Decade: The End of an Age of Revolutionary Innocence Stalinism at Work Cannon and the Struggle for a Left Oppositionist Practice Cannon¿s Legacy: The Theory and Practice of Building a Revolutionary Party Communist Continuity: The Significance of Revolutionary Subjectivity Notes Index