In preparation for these events, we are launching this column. As the first installment, we are reprinting below an excerpt from the article “A Short History of the Militant,” by Joseph Hansen. It was first published in 1968 on the occasion of the paper’s 40th anniversary. Hansen was a longtime leader of the Socialist Workers Party and the Militant’s editor at different times.

BY JOSEPH HANSEN  
Since its first issue of November 15, 1928, The Militant has expressed the political position of the Trotskyist movement in the United States. It was launched in opposition to the Stalinist faction that had been placed in command of the Communist Party under a Kremlin ukase. From the beginning, The Militant stood to the left of The Daily Worker. It still remains there.

The aim of The Militant for the first five years was limited in the main to bringing the views of the International Left Opposition, and particularly its leader, Leon Trotsky, to the attention of members of the Communist Party in hope of breaking the grip of the Stalinist faction and returning the party to observance of the revolutionary-socialist program on which it had been founded. This meant defending the Soviet Union as a workers’ state, but opposing Stalinist decay. In the United States it meant faithful adherence to the program of class struggle.

The first editorial board of The Militant consisted of James P. Cannon, Martin Abern and Max Shachtman. Maurice Spector was added to this board a little later, his name appearing on the masthead of the December 15, 1928, issue. Arne Swabeck became the fifth member of the board on January 1, 1931. This board remained unaltered until The Militant changed its name to New Militant on December 15, 1934, as one of the results of the fusion of the original Trotskyist group, the Communist League of America, with the American Workers Party led by A. J. Muste.

The five members of the original editorial board of The Militant were all well-known Communist Party leaders who had participated in founding the party. When they learned the truth about differences in the Russian Communist Party through documents that came into Cannon’s possession at the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, they decided to break the censorship set up by Stalin. The editors decided to make the suppressed documents written by Trotsky and other leaders of the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union available to the entire international Communist movement. And they decided to do battle inside the Communist Party for the program that the Left Opposition stood for—the program of Leninism to which they had been won upon the victory of the Russian Revolution in October, 1917.

The members of the editorial board knew that the struggle would be difficult, although they did not appreciate how difficult it was to be in the face of the concerted attacks that descended on them from all sides, ranging from the liberals to the Fascists. The attacks were not confined to ideology. Our world movement suffered assassinations at the hands of Stalin’s agents, long prison terms, and death in concentration camps and before the firing squads of the Nazis.

The editors of The Militant were not without influence when they came out in defense of the cause Trotsky stood for. In the American Communist Party, James P. Cannon was a member of the Political Committee and the Central Executive Committee; Martin Abern and Arne Swabeck were members of the Central Executive Committee; Max Shachtman was an alternate. Maurice Spector was a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, chairman of the Canadian Communist Party, and editor of The Canadian Worker and The Canadian Labour Monthly. All of them were public figures—Martin Abern and Max Shachtman as leaders of the Communist youth movement, James P. Cannon and Arne Swabeck as organizers and leaders in workers’ struggles going back before World War I. Maurice Spector was an outstanding figure in the Canadian radical movement.  
 
Trotsky: ‘It is necessary to prepare’
Their efforts met with a warm response from co-thinkers abroad. Trotsky, for instance, sent a message which was published in the June 1, 1929 issue. It may be worth quoting here, since the staff of The Militant shared his views on the points he made then, and the current staff, although completely renewed, has not changed in this respect.

“The work to be achieved by the American Opposition has international-historic significance, for in the last historic analysis all the problems of our planet will be decided upon American soil. There is much in favor of the idea that from the standpoint of revolutionary order, Europe and the East stand ahead of the United States. But a course of events is possible in which this order might be broken in favor of the proletariat of the United States. Moreover, even if you assume that America, which now shakes the whole world will be shaken last of all, the danger remains that a revolutionary situation in the United States may catch the vanguard of the American proletariat unprepared, as was the case in Germany in 1923, in England in 1926, and in China in 1925 to 1927. We must not for a minute lose sight of the fact that the might of American capitalism rests more and more upon a foundation of world economy with its contradictions and crises, military and revolutionary. This means that a social crisis in the United States may arrive a good deal sooner than many think, and have a feverish development from the beginning. Hence the conclusion: it is necessary to prepare.”  
 
Building party in tradition of Leninism
If those words of 1929 sound highly contemporary, the same can be said of much that appeared in The Militant in the early years. The concern of the editors was to do what they could to advance the task of solving the truly great problems facing humanity in our era. Those central problems still remain to be solved—in fact they have become exacerbated, now presenting the world with the alternative either of a planned economy on a global scale or civilization reduced to radioactive ruins. Consequently, a surprising amount of material in The Militant remains timely and well worth considering despite the obvious corrections and adjustments that have to be made owing to the fact that the course of the class struggle on an international scale proved to be more complex, tortuous and drawn out than any of the original board expected.

The editors of The Militant—and a long succession of able revolutionary journalists have participated in getting it out—have sought to report these developments honestly and accurately and to influence their outcomes insofar as it was possible to influence them.

The policy from the beginning was to maintain The Militant as a fighting newspaper, not a mere muckraking or sensationalistic journal, but a fighting paper integrated with the supreme task of our times—to build a combat party of the working class in the tradition of Leninism.  
 
 
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