I have only recently encountered Pete Turner’s letter to Cosmonaut, “Bryan Palmer, Trotskyism, and James Cannon,” which appeared January 4, 2023. Offering a response gives me the opportunity to thank your magazine and Brendan Campisi for the thoughtful and fair-minded review of my James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-1938 (2021), which appeared in Cosmonaut July 1, 2022. Campisi provides a serious, politically substantive, at times critical, reading of my book.
Pete Turner’s letter is rather different. It commences with the declaration: “I am not going to spend the money on a thousand page book by Palmer.” It is of course his prerogative to spend his dollars as he sees fit, and I can understand why Turner, and others, might choose not to part with the price publishers ask for a large book such as I have written. But Turner suggests his decision has less to do with cash than with credibility. I am not to be trusted because “he caught me falsifying a reference in another book,” wrote me about this, and my “reply didn’t add up.” The bibliographic error that he identified was supposedly concocted to cover up for a tainted source.
The error Turner noticed relates, I believe, to a mistaken citation in the bibliography of my 2013 book, Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934. In that study I inadvertently listed Lulu Schwartz’s Brotherhood of the Sea: A History of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, 1885-1985 as a 1986 publication by Rutgers University Press. In fact, this book, an official, commemorative history that the union commissioned Schwartz to write, was published and distributed by Transaction Books of Rutgers – The State University, New Brunswick. Mr. Turner may be relieved to learn that I corrected the mistake in my 2021 study of Cannon and Trotskyism’s emergence in the United States.
I have no record of any written communication from Turner, which does not mean that he did not contact me almost a decade ago. He could have. I do vaguely recall that after I delivered a talk on Revolutionary Teamsters in the Bay Area, someone approached me alerting me to the mistaken attribution.
Transaction Books, a publisher of social science texts, was founded by Alvin W. Gouldner, Lee Rainwater, and Irving Louis Horowitz and, like many academic publishers, had connections to granting agencies like the Ford Foundation. With Horowitz as its dominant figure, Transaction Books certainly published anti-communist works, especially with a liberal/social democratic tilt, although this did not characterize all of their titles. In 2016 Transaction Books was sold to the Taylor and Francis Group and its publications merged with that organization’s Routledge imprint.
Brotherhood of the Sea is often cited as published by the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, a legitimate referencing in as much as the title page lists both the SUP and Transaction Books. Schwartz, however, has listed the book as appearing with Transaction Books. That Transaction Books published Brotherhood of the Sea is easily confirmed in correspondence between Schwartz and Transaction staff, searchable online in the Horowitz Transaction Publishers Archives, Penn State University Libraries, https://libraries.psu.edu>collections. That archive also contains correspondence relating to the Institute for Contemporary Studies, and Schwartz’s connection to it as editor of the Journal of Contemporary Studies. As a publisher and distributor, facilitating a consortium of journals, Transaction established a relationship with the Institute of Contemporary Studies and its publications. To the best of my knowledge, Brotherhood of the Sea was never published by the Institute of Contemporary Studies (ICS), as Turner asserts.
Turner is right to have a jaundiced view of the ICS, and of Schwartz, whose political degeneration from a leftist to neoconservative working for, publishing with, and funded by the John M. Olin Foundation’s (benefactor of the ICS) Reaganite agenda was evident in a mid-to-late 1980s association with the Institute for Contemporary Studies. Written as Schwartz was clearly in rapid political motion to the right, Brotherhood of the Sea strikes me as exhibiting less of the ideological imprint of the ICS, and more the influence of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific trade union officials who paid Schwartz to research and write the text and were presumably happy to gloss over unpleasant aspects of the union’s history, especially its racism. When the book was published Schwartz identified herself as a member of Social Democrats, USA.
As an official history of the union that was playing an important role in the class struggle politics of the Pacific coast at the time Cannon arrived in California, Schwartz’s book was not an account I could ignore. Schwartz had access to union records and other material it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for me to otherwise locate, including some useful factual background on the Trotskyists’ relations with the Marine Federation, SUP President Harry Lundeberg, etc., in 1936-1937. I attempted to historically contextualize the complex situation confronting Cannon as he supported a major SUP strike while editing a paper, Labor Action, covering developments on the waterfront. Everyone who reads my second volume on Cannon and Trotskyism in the US can draw their own conclusions. Consulting a wide range of sources, I did my best to accurately recount what happened at the time, on the basis of the facts I could ascertain, as I intend to do in the third volume of the trilogy, addressing Cannon and Trotskyism from the late 1930s into the 1970s.
My hope, of course, is that in all future writing I will manage to avoid error, bibliographic or otherwise, but it is difficult when producing a thoroughly researched and densely footnoted text, covering a complicated history, to guarantee absolute perfection.
Bryan D. Palmer
