LEON TROTSKY’S ADVENTURE IN AMERICAN RADICAL POLITICS. 1935-7

VENKATARAMANI, M. S. “LEON TROTSKY’S ADVENTURE IN AMERICAN RADICAL POLITICS. 1935-7.” International Review of Social History, vol. 9, no. 1, Cambridge University Press, 1964, pp. 1–46, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44581517.

Trotsky left France for Norway, where he had lost the right to have visitors or leave his home or receive correspondence. He could not find refuge anywhere in Europe and finally found a place in Mexico.

Norman Thomas and a few other Americans sent a cable to Lazaro Carderas, leader of Mexico, requesting asylum for Trotsky. Trotsky’s followers had joined the Socialist Party of American led by Norman Thomas in May 1936. In August of 1936, Stalin tried and executed Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others on false charges of terrorist attacks on the Kremlin. Later in the same month, he sent a cable to the Norwegian government, where Trotsky was staying since France signed the Franco-Soviet Pact in 1935.

A special convention at the end of March 1937 of the Socialist Party threatened to eject the Trotskyists, after they made a campaign of criticizing Stalinism, interpreted as an attack on the Soviet Union, and the Spanish Popular Front government, contrary to Socialist Party of America policy. The Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Dewey, also known as the Dewey Commission, went to Mexico in early April, 1937.

The Clarity group used the convention to shut down Socialist Appeal, the Trotskyist faction’s paper and to exclude Trotskyists from the SPA national committee.

P. 21, March 1937 Convention puts the Clarity group in charge of the National Executive Committee and the National Action Committee, the leading bodies of the Socialist Party of America. The Clarity group used an alliance with the Trotskyists to gain the power, and sought to keep the Trotskyists in the party so they could eliminate the Norman Thomas/Jack Altman faction, the social democratic faction. Norman Thomas and Jack Altman controlled the Wisconson and New York branches, which were the only factions with a mass following.

P. 42 National Executive Committee emergency meeting: Create subcommittee to report on activities of the Appeal Association.