James Patrick Cannon, the leading American Trotskyist of his generation and a founder and national chairman of the Socialist Workers Party, was born in Rosedale, Kansas, on February 11, 1890. Cannon adopted the socialist views of his Irish, working-class father and joined the Socialist Party in 1908. In 1911 he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, working as a strike organizer and journalist. After the Russian Revolution Cannon joined the Communist Party and was elected to its Central Commission in 1920 and during the party's first decade Cannon served in other leadership positions. From 1925 to 1928 he headed the International Labor Defense in behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti, Bill Haywood, Tom Mooney, and others.
At the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in 1928 Cannon was won over to the Stalinist opposition of Leon Trotsky and, as a result, was expelled from the Communist Party. In 1929 Cannon was a founding leader of the Communist League of America (CLA), the first American Trotskyist organization, and editor of its newspaper, The Militant.
Because of his pragmatism, experience within the American labor movement, and willingness to join with other segments of the non-Communist Party left, Cannon successfully built the American Trotskyist movement during the early 1930s. Leadership during the Minneapolis Teamsters' strike brought Cannon and the CLA a recognition and respect within the radical movement that no other group experienced. In 1938 Cannon was a founder of the Socialist Workers Party and, with Trotsky, a founder of the Fourth International. During 1944-1945 Cannon was among the SWP and Minneapolis Teamster leaders jailed for violation of the Smith Act.
Cannon served as national secretary of the party from 1938 until his semi-retirement in 1953. Thereafter he continued to be a force within the party (while also serving as national chairman from 1953 to 1963), although during this period he largely devoted himself to his writings such as America's Road to Socialism (1953). Cannon died on August 21, 1974.
Cannon's wife Rose Greenberg Karsner Cannon was born in Rumania in 1890 and emigrated to the United States as a child. At the age of 18, she joined the Socialist Party in New York where she met, among others, George R. Kirkpatrick, Eugene V. Debs, and David Karsner, a journalist and biographer whom she married in 1911.
Following the Russian Revolution of 1917 Karsner's political ideology became more radical and, in 1920, she joined the Communist Party. At the Unity Convention of 1921, she met James P. Cannon, then a member of the central party leadership. During that same year, her marriage to David Karsner ended in divorce, and she began a professional and personal relationship with Cannon. In 1925 she and Cannon helped organize the International Labor Defense, an organization that provided legal defense for various political cases of the 1920s, the most notable being Sacco and Vanzetti. After the death of Lenin and the emergence of Stalin in 1923, Karsner, like Cannon, became increasingly dissatisfied with the direction of the Communist Party in the United States, and she assisted in the formation of the Communist League of America in 1928. Karsner was also involved in the formation of the Socialist Workers Party and served as business manager for The Militant. After World War II she was secretary of the American Committee for European Workers Relief. In 1953 Karsner and Cannon moved to Los Angeles. Karsner died of cancer in 1969 following a series of illnesses.
