Progressive Era Repression and persecution Anti-war and civil rights movements Contemporary James Patrick Cannon (February 11, 1890 – August 21, 1974) was an American Trotskyist and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.

The Bolshevik victory in Russia served to radicalize the Socialist Party of America and brought Cannon back to the organization.

In May 1920, the CLP merged with a section of the CPA headed by C. E. Ruthenberg and Cannon was elected as a member of the Central Executive Committee of the new organization by the founding convention.

Cannon was elected by the CEC of the unified CPA as delegate of that organization to the Enlarged Plenum of the executive committee of the Communist International (ECCI) and as formal party representative to the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU), leaving the USA in mid-May 1922 and arriving finally in Moscow on June 1.

He stayed on there as a delegate of the American party to the 4th World Congress of the Comintern, where he was elected to the ECCI Presidium, serving from August through November 1922.

On January 19, 1924, Cannon was named assistant executive secretary of the Workers Party of America, working under his faction rival, Ruthenberg.

He was the WPA's candidate for Governor of New York in 1924, and again returned to Moscow as a delegate of the party to the 5th Enlarged Plenum of ECCI, held in March and April 1925.

Cannon was an important factional leader in the American communist movement of the 1920s, sitting on the governing Central Executive Committee of the party in alliance with William Z.

While in Russia in 1928, Cannon read a critique of the direction of the Communist International written by Trotsky which the Comintern had mistakenly circulated.

Therefore, when the labor movement revived in the early 1930s the Communist League was well placed to put its ideas into action in the Twin Cities and through their influence in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters the union rapidly grew after an historic dispute in 1934.

Cannon played a major role in this dispute directing the work of the Communist League on a daily basis, along with Shachtman.

This decision came at a cost, however, with a left wing faction led by Hugo Oehler refusing to join the Socialists and exiting to form the Revolutionary Workers League.

Chicago attorney and devoted Trotskyist Albert Goldman, who entered the SP about a year earlier than his comrades, launched a factionally-oriented newspaper called The Socialist Appeal, while Cannon headed west to Tujunga, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, to launch a western paper oriented to the trade union movement called Labor Action.

(Those expelled had organized a "Federation of NY Left Wing Branches" of the SP and published a Trotskyist edited journal, Socialist Appeal.

Trotsky was killed by one of Stalin's NKVD agents and the CPUSA supported the US government's prosecution of Cannon and other American Trotskyists under the Smith Act.

Following the war, Cannon resumed leadership of the SWP, but this role declined after he handed the post of national secretary in 1953 to Farrell Dobbs.

A great deal of Cannon's writing has been collected, although volumes were issued non-sequentially by various publishers and are by no means exhaustive.

In approximate chronological order of content, providing the publisher and date of first edition, these selected works volumes are: Collected writings and speeches