CANNON -- SIXTY YEARS OF SERVICE TO SOCIALISM
By George Novack
One of the most beloved and respected veterans of American Marxism passed from the arena of struggle when Rose Karsner Cannon, wife of James P. Cannon, national chairman of the Socialist Workers party, died March 7 of cancer in Los Angeles at the age of seventy-— eight. She had given sixty years of unflagging service to the cause of socialism with four decades of these as a leading figure of the American Trotskyist movement.
Rose was born in Rumania in 1890. She came as a child with her family to the United States in the flood of immigration from Eastern Europe at the turn of the century. She entered political life at eighteen, when she joined the New York Local of the Socialist party after listening to a street corner rally during the election year of 1908.
The party's presidential candidate that year was Eugene V. Debs. The Socialist leader made as profound an impression upon the young woman worker living on New York's East Side as he did on that entire generation of labor militants in the United States. She participated in all his campaign appearances in the New York area aS a salesman for The Masses. Rose became a personal friend of Debs following her marriage to Dave Karsner, a journalist who was Debs' first biographer.
A year after joining the Socialist party, Rose became secretary of The Masses, a semiofficial party publication which was later transformed into the most celebrated radical-literary periodical in American history.
The mighty events of the first world war and the Russian revolution produced the same upheaval in her political outlook as they did among her contemporaries. She was uplifted by the revolutionary fervor generated by the victory of October 1917 and convinced by the program of Bolshevism. From then until her death she considered herself a follower of Lenin as well as Marx.
In the ensuing split within American socialism, Rose unhesitatingly aligned herself with the revolutionary left wing in forming the new Communist movement. She first met James P. Cannon in 1921 at the convention which unified the rival communist groups named the Communist party and the United Communist party. Cannon was part of the central leadership of the latter organization, while Rose had been assigned to take notes of the convention proceedings.
Rose subsequently took charge of
the relief work of the newly established
Friends of Soviet Russia and was elected
its national secretary. The FSR collect-
ed half a million dollars worth of aid
for the starving Soviet population and
raised funds to buy the first American
tractors for the Soviet Union under the
slogan of "Tractors, Not Armaments."
In her next major assignment, she
collaborated with James P. Cannon in
launching the International Labor Defense
which defended many class-—war victims at
home and abroad. One of its outstanding
achievements was the immense national and
international campaign organized under
their direction on behalf of Sacco and
Vanzetti. As a guest of the International
Red Aid, Rose visited the Soviet Union
from December 1924 to April 1925.
Although increasingly disquieted
by certain inexplicable events within
the American Communist party, she did
not clearly perceive the drift of devel-
opments within the Soviet Union until
1928. She was the first person to whom
James P. Cannon showed the copy of Trot-
sky's Criticism of the Draft Program of
the Communist International, which he
had smuggled out of the Soviet Union.
This important document had accidentally
come into his hands as a delegate-member
of the Program Commission of the Eighth
Comintern Congress.
"After I finished reading it," she
later recalled, "although I did not grasp
its full implications, I did get the es-
sence of it. My reaction was: now at
last, light has been thrown on the trou-
bles we, the American section, had been
having with the Comintern."
Together with Cannon, Max Shacht-
man and Martin Abern, she was a founding
member of the Left Opposition which be-
came the Communist League of America
after their expulsion from the American
CP in 1928. She spent her next forty
years in constant activity to reorient
and reconstruct the revolutionary van-
guard in the U.S. :
During the first pioneering decade
she discharged many responsibilities in
the party center. She acted as business
manager of The Militant and headed
Pioneer Publishers.
She met the second world war, as
she had the first, with the attitude of
a revolutionary Marxist. She took in
stride the challenge posed by the con-
victions and subsequent imprisonment
of James P. Cannon and seventeen other
ff
Rose Karsner Cannon: 1890-1968
Rose Karsner Cannon: 1890-1968
a) 0
SWP and Minneapolis teamster leaders for their socialist opposition to the imperialist slaughter.
She set an example for the party members and especially its women with the tenor of her speech at the farewell banquet in New York shortly before the eighteen went off to prison on January 1, 1944: "We will not mope. We will be more active in the movement than ever before and we will continue in this work until you return."
After the war ended, Rose served as secretary of the American Committee for European Workers Relief which provided aid for antifascists and revolutionaries on that war-stricken continent.
In 1952, at the age of sixty-two, the Cannons moved from New York to Los Angeles where they made their home. She continued to participate in party life to the full measure of her capacities until the time of her death. In recent years she noted with intense interest and satisfaction the reunification of the Fourth International, the inspiring achievements of the Cuban Revolution, and the reinvigoration of American Trotskyism through the expansion of its young forces.
Next to Natalia Trotsky, Rose was more continuously and closely identified with the Trotskyist movement than any other woman comrade. She was loved for her warm and sympathetic character as much as she was admired for her fortitude in sustaining the revolutionary Marxist vanguard in the stronghold of imperialism over most of the turbulent twentieth century.
"The rose has faded and died; the fragrance of her personality endures."