• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 909 0

meeting in Moscow in 1938. An American, James P. Cannon, attended this congress and was converted to Trotskyism.31 The SWP was formed in December 1937–January 1938, in part to protest the SP’s expulsion in June 1937 of many left-wingers. One of its major founders was Cannon, born in Rosedale, Kansas, in 1890. His father was a Socialist and a partisan of The Appeal to Reason, a popular Socialist journal. Cannon joined the SP at eighteen and three years later became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Later he was hailed as the “founder of American Trotskyism,” the leader and teacher “of three if not four generations of revolutionists.” He strongly believed in “practical politics,” opposing the “nationalist theory of Stalin and his gang of ‘Socialism in One Country’ argument. Internationalism was the most important consideration in the world because, “in reality, we live on one planet, and all the countries and parts of it are joined together in mutual independence.”32 The SWP sought to “mobilize the American masses” and lead them in the overthrow of the capitalist economic system. It proposed to recruit “among the middle classes, Negroes . . . unemployed youth, trade unionists, and ‘colonial people.’”33 From its inception in the late 1930s, the SWP “recruited women comrades on a scale never seen before in the radical movement”—40 percent “of our staff members are women.”34 In 1938, 4 percent of the convention’s delegates were women, the next year it was 8 percent, and the trend grew in the years ahead.35 Cannon was “angry at injustice, inequalities, special privileges, and exploitation. He was angry at poverty. He seethed over the crimes of Capitalism . . . its wars, its reactionary ideologies . . . its police, its courts, its prisons, its fascism, its tendency to drop back to barbarism.”36

These philosophies and outlooks were exactly what Genora wanted to accept in 1938. A chapter of the SWP was formed in Flint (the main party headquarters was in New York City), and Genora, after her expulsion from the SP, became a member (by the early 1950s, Genora rose to the post of state secretary). The SWP in New York had been trying to recruit the Johnsons for some time; that the couple did not repel such advances was another reason the Flint Socialists removed them from their party. Its official newspaper, Socialist Call, had printed numerous articles about the Flint EB, almost always highlighting Genora’s Socialist roles in Flint. These articles did not sit well with the Flint Socialists, either. An immediate SWP goal was to instill members’ responsibilities to the party and the need for regular contributions for its maintenance. It wanted to involve “comrades” not in the auto industry, although GM and other car manufacturers appeared the most fruitful field for recruitment. What role SWP militants, who called themselves the vanguard of the working classes, should play with the UAW was a subject of intense debate. Of special interest to the Flint SWP were the newly arrived black workers—the SWP went house to house in the black neighborhoods, preaching the virtues of a Socialist America. Discussion groups met regularly in members’ homes and held symposia and sponsored lectures on not only GM’s treatment of the working person but also on the need of the federal government to set up training centers for laid-off workers to “retool.” In the meantime, in 1939, Genora and Kermit attended the annual meeting of the SWP, held at Irving Place in New York City. Unknown to Genora at the time, as she walked down the center aisle with Kermit right behind her, a young man in the audience admired her: “Genora came smartly down the aisle dressed in a jacket, blouse and slacks. . . . Many people can make an entrance and never be noticed, but with Genora every head was turned in her direction.” The young member of the SWP felt certain that now, with the Johnsons, the party could go in a new proletarian direction. But watching Genora come down that aisle made it difficult to stick to politics. “At that moment I had to confess, if