Bryan D. Palmer's award-winning study of James P. Cannon's early years (1890-1928) details how the life of a Wobbly hobo agitator gave way to leadership in the emerging communist underground of the 1919 era. This historical drama unfolds alongside the life experiences of a native son of United States radicalism, the narrative moving from Rosedale, Kansas to Chicago, New York, and Moscow. Written with panache, Palmer's richly detailed book situates American communism's formative decade of the 1920s in the dynamics of a specific political and economic context. Our understanding of the indigenous currents of the American revolutionary left is widened, just as appreciation of the complex nature of its interaction with international forces is deepened.| Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Communist Can(n)on Questioning American Radicalism Stalinism: What¿s in a Name American Communism: Histories of Ambivalence and Accomplishment At the Point of Embattled Historiographic Production: The Meanings of Theodore Draper The Three Drapers Communist Biography and Stalinism: James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left 1. Rosedale Roots: Facts and Fictions An American Birth Fin-de-Siècle Context: Kansas in a World of Change In the Shadow of the Irish Diaspora: England and America The Industrial Frontier Family Fortunes A Boy¿s Life Meanings 2. Youth¿s Discoveries Mothers and Fathers and Adolescent Work Early Encounters with Socialism Education and the Discovery of Desire The Limitations of Rosedale Socialism 3. Hobo Rebel/Homeguard A Soapbox Apprenticeship Traveling Man: A Vincent St. John Seasoning Anarchy in Akron: Rubber Workers and the Mass Strike, 1913 Fast-Train Hoboing and Hell Popping in Peoria A Solidarity of the Jail Cell: Marriage Duluth and the Testing of Class-War Leadership: Gunmen, Kidnappings, and Beatings The Home Front: Cannon Back in Kansas World War I and Revolutionary Doubt The Personal Is Political: Radical Manhood The IWW: The Great Anticipation 4. Red Dawn 1917: Revolution in the East; Repression in the West Socialist Revival A Revived Class Struggle Browder and Cannon A Revolutionary Press A Fractious Left Wing Foreign-Language Federations and the Dialectic of Revolutionary Mobilization Cannon and the Communist Labor Party The Agitator¿s Return: Kansas Coal Fields, 1919 Caught in the Anti-Red Dragnet 5. Underground A Suit of Clothes The Divided Communist Underground Bridgman Brokering: The Emergence of Cannon as a Potential Communist Leader A Cleveland Sojourn: Challenging Ultraleftism New York: Bohemians and Clandestine Communists Cannon, Consolidation, and an Above-Ground Party: Kansas Charm and the Politics of Revolutionary Regroupment 6. Geese in Flight Founding the Workers¿ Party Undergroundism Unreconstructed Cannon and the Struggle for an Activist Communist Party, 1922 The Birth of the Goose Caucus and the Turn to Moscow 7. Pepper Spray The Americanizer¿s Return to America Cannon on the Road Again: The Push and Pull of Party Assignment Pogany/Pepper Communists Outmaneuver Themselves: Farmer-Labor Party Illusions and Intrigues, 1923 Cannon, Foster, and Trade Union Combination, 1923 Pepperism Rampant The Romance of Politics The Third National Convention of the Workers¿ Party, 1923¿1924 8. Stalinist Suspensions Of Factions and Foreign Domination Labor Organization, Communist Education, and Sustaining Collective Leadership Blind Spot: ¿Women¿s Work¿ Race and Revolution Pepper, Bureaucratism, and Permanent Factionalism Farmer-Laborism, Again Factionalism¿s Enigmatic Fulcrum: Ludwig Lore Comintern Changes Bolshevization and Electoral Campaigns Lore, Escalating...