James P. Cannon As We Knew Him

These reminiscences provide a unique personal account of a lifelong American rebel, and of fifty years of labor and radical history. James P. Cannon joined the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs in 1908, and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1911. He worked with “Big Bill” Haywood, Vincent St. John, and Frank Little as an IWW strike organizer. He was a central leader of the Communist Party in the 1920s and a founder of the American Trotskyist movement in 1928. At the founding convention of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938, Cannon was elected national secretary of the party. He was the principal defendant in the famous wartime Minneapolis labor trial and served a year in prison for his antiwar views. Cannon was the SWP’s national chairman emeritus at the time of his death, at the age of eighty-four, in 1974.