The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 67/No. 40           November 17, 2003  
 
 
75th Anniversary of the ‘MILITANT’

Cannon: how the ‘Militant’ got its name
 
November 15 marks the 75th anniversary of the first issue of the Militant, which has been published uninterruptedly since 1928. Militant distributors around the world are planning public events around that date to celebrate this occasion.

The Militant launched this column two weeks ago as part of preparing for these 75th anniversary celebrations. The first two installments consisted of major excerpts from “A Short History of the Militant” by Joseph Hansen, a long-time Socialist Workers Party leader and Militant editor at various times. This week, we feature an interview with James P. Cannon published in the Nov. 10, 1978, Militant to mark the paper’s 50th year.

Accompanying the two-page spread of the interview was a list of 50th anniversary rallies planned for 30 cities. Featured speakers included Militant editor Mary-Alice Waters; staff writers Harry Ring—the author of the article below—Omari Musa, and Andy Rose; and other SWP leaders at the time such as Jack Barnes, John Hawkins, Linda Jenness, Andrew Pulley, and Olga Rodríguez.

Twenty-five years later, similar events are being organized. Speakers’ panels will include workers, farmers, and youth who have joined Militant distributors in various social struggles over the years and who have read and appreciate the newspaper. They will also feature a speaker who can explain the history of the Militant and its place in building an international communist movement, yesterday and today.

The Militant urges all its distributors to send us information on these meetings by Monday, November 10, so they can be listed on this page in the next issue.
 

*****

BY HARRY RING  
James P. Cannon, the founding leader of the American Trotskyist movement, was also the founding editor of the Militant.

In the fall of 1973, less than a year before he died, I interviewed Cannon about the early years of the Militant. We were both living in Los Angeles at the time, and I did a series of oral history interviews with him so that added information about him would be available for future reference.

As Cannon filled in details and added recollections about the initial years of the Militant, one thing became clear. The founders of American Trotskyism had fully absorbed Lenin’s concept of the role of a newspaper in building a revolutionary party.

Lenin saw the development of an effective newspaper as key to the building of a party. The press, he emphasized, is the collective organizer of the party.

When the Trotskyists were expelled from the Communist Party fifty years ago, the first thing they did was publish a paper.

The story has been told many times. “Three generals without an army.” Cannon, Max Shachtman, and Martin Abern were expelled by the Communist Party’s central committee for their adherence to Leon Trotsky’s “Russian Opposition.”

The three found themselves outside the party with literally a handful of supporters. Yet within a week of their expulsion, they were on the street with a paper, the Militant.

It wasn’t easy.

“We didn’t have any money to start with,” Cannon explained. “We didn’t even have a mimeograph machine.”

Moreover, the new paper and movement were being launched not on the basis of an advance for the movement but a setback.

The original Communist Party press, Cannon recalled, had been founded under the inspiration of the victory of the Russian revolution of 1917.

But in 1928, “we didn’t start with a victory,” Cannon explained. “We started with a terrible defeat—with the exile of Trotsky, first to Alma-Ata then to Turkey, and our own expulsion and isolation.”

It wasn’t a passively accepted isolation. The small band of Trotskyists were determined to reach the ranks of the Communist Party with their ideas. The bureaucratic hacks who controlled the CP were equally determined that this should not happen. They regularly dispatched goon squads against the Trotskyists, and their paper.

For the Trotskyists, the semimonthly Militant was a crucial weapon.

“The whole movement centered around the Militant,” Cannon said. “We didn’t have enough people to make a demonstration.

“When we decided to challenge the Stalinist hooligans and to sell our paper right in front of the cafeteria, which they operated in Union Square, Abern, Shachtman and I had to go do it, take the papers and try to sell there.”

He emphasized the point a half dozen times.  
 
‘Our weapon’
“It was our weapon.

“Everything we had was concentrated around the Militant. Just the physical process of getting out the Militant and finding the money somewhere to pay for it—that was the biweekly achievement.

“The paper is the voice of the movement. Without a paper, how are you going to build a movement?”

How did the Militant get its name?

It was Cannon’s proposal and the idea stemmed from his relationship with Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Cannon had been the national secretary of International Labor Defense, a nonpartisan committee initiated by the Communist Party in the mid-1920s to defend political prisoners.

Defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, the victimized anarchists, was a major activity of the ILD. Cannon visited Sacco and Vanzetti in prison several times.

He recalled a visit with Vanzetti that stayed particularly in his memory.

“We had a long talk,” he said. “Vanzetti was talking about a third member of their group who had jumped, or was pushed, out of a ten-story building when the government agents had him prisoner and were examining him.

“I remember Vanzetti saying, ‘He wouldn’t have jumped. He was a good militant.’

“In the old radical movement,” Cannon explained, “that was an ordinary expression. That’s what you say about a person who’s active and giving all they’ve got to the movement.

“I proposed this name to designate what we were, and it was accepted.”

Cannon took particular pride in the fact that the Militant was internationalist from the outset and that it played an important role in building the world Trotskyist movement.

Moreover, the Militant was the exiled Trotsky’s principal voice. With its few meager pages, it managed to publish an entire series of major articles by Trotsky analyzing key Soviet and world developments.

And despite the difficulties and pressures members of the movement persisted in their stubborn efforts to get the paper out. They sold it to each individual they could reach and, whenever they obtained names, mailed copies abroad.

It was an extraordinarily difficult process, but it brought results.

Cannon told a story illustrating what a single copy of the paper can accomplish.  
 
A single copy …
A copy of the first issue was received in South Africa by a radical journalist, Frank Graves. Graves was convinced by that first Militant and became a Trotskyist.

Shortly after, Graves went to China as a reporter. There he played an important role in helping establish the Chinese Trotskyist organization.

During this same period, Graves also won another journalist to Trotskyism. This was Harold Isaacs, then China correspondent for Havas, predecessor of Agence France Presse.

Isaacs remained with the movement less than decade, but made two important contributions.

He authored a major book, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, which detailed how Stalin’s false policies led to the bloody defeat of the 1925-27 Chinese revolution.

And he played an important role in relation to the Militant. After several years in China, Isaacs was reassigned to New York. There, Cannon said, he contributed his journalistic skill to help train a Militant staff.

At the outset, Cannon and Shachtman were the only experienced writers in the new movement. But with the aid of Isaacs, they were able to train newer recruits to Trotskyism and, as Cannon put it “professionalize” the paper.  
 
First fund drive
An early but not easily attained goal was to establish the Militant as a weekly.

At the founding convention of the new organization, held in Chicago in May 1929, a special fund was launched for this purpose. The tiny organization set out to raise $1,000.

They acquired a battered old linotype machine and an even older press. In November 1929—a few weeks after the stock market crash—they began weekly publication.

As Cannon recalled that experience, you could see him relive it.

“We started out with high hopes with this thousand-dollar fund,” he said. “But we never made it. It was just too much money for the comrades. We overreached ourselves.”

In July of 1930, they retreated back to a semi-monthly. But they persisted and finally, in 1931, established the weekly Militant.

“The paper became quite professional,” Cannon said. “Gradually—and sometimes by leaps—it became a recognized journal in the radical movement.

“It was never regarded as a throwaway sheet of a sect. It was known as a paper with a point of view and a method of approaching things.”

I think Cannon would be pleased that on the Militant’s fiftieth anniversary, it’s still known that way.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home