| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890–1928. By Bryan D. Palmer. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. xx, 542 pp. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03109-0.)
Bryan D. Palmer begins his biography of James P. Cannon with an assault on the historiography of American Communism, a field he claims has been excessively focused on the romance of espionage and "secret cables," due to the overpowering influence of the Cold War. Palmer seeks to situate radicalism back into the history of the United States, and Cannon serves as an excellent subject for such a corrective history. As Palmer shows, Cannon's radical roots lay not in Moscow, but rather in the populist-oriented politics of the Midwest during the late nineteenth century.	1
As a work of political and intellectual biography, this book is an important contribution to the study of American radicalism, particularly in the dark days of the 1920s. Most histories of the Communist party gloss over the period, anxious to move from the heady days of the Russian Revolution to the triumph of Joseph Stalin and the fracturing of American Communism. Palmer makes clear that this overlooked period is worth examining, both as a way to understand the origins of radicalism and to bring into sharper focus the factors contributing to the emergence of Trotskyism in the United States.	. . .

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