Morris Lewit at the World Congress of the Fourth International in 1991.
Photo by Carol McAllister. When Morris Lewit died September 28, 1998, we lost a strong yet gentle person who was loved and valued by many of us. He was born January 3, 1903 — the same year as the birth of Bolshevism — and many of his younger comrades saw in him one of the finest incarnations of this revolutionary working-class political current.
He had been known to many in the revolutionary socialist movement headed by Leon Trotsky by his party name: Morris Stein. He was known more affectionately by some veteran comrades as “Moishe” — though others of us simply called him Morris. One younger comrade who remembered him from the late 1950s has offered this description: “Moishe, who looked so frail, small, and old, still worked each day as a plumber…He was bright, political, particularly interested in the international movement, and given to independent thinking.” This normally soft-spoken, thoughtful, tough yet warm human being was a central figure in the Trotskyist movement.
Morris and his companion of sixty-eight years, Sylvia Bleeker (1901–1988), had both been teen-age participants in the Russian Revolution. Both had been members of the early Communist movement in the United States, and early participants in the opposition to the Stalinist degeneration of that movement, openly identified with Trotskyism by 1930. Morris played a leadership role in the U.S. Trotskyist movement from the 1930s through the 1950s in its various organizational forms (Communist League of America, Workers Party of the United States, Socialist Appeal caucus of the Socialist Party, and finally the Socialist Workers Party) — serving on the National Committee, on the Political Committee, and also for a time after World War II on the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. It was during a trip to Europe in this capacity that he first met a youthful Ernest Mandel, who many years later often spoke of him with respect and facilitated his attendance at the 1991 World Congress of the Fourth International. (Mandel once commented that “if I would want to single out the persons from whom I learned most during the years following the war, I would name two SWP leaders: Morris Stein and George Breitman.”)
Some of the qualities of Morris Lewit come through in the way that he spoke to his comrades when he became acting National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party during World War II. He commented: “History has imposed upon us a great mission, the mission of liberating humanity from the rotten putrid capitalist system.” In his opinion, “this fight is the only fight worth the sacrifice of one’s freedom and even of one’s life,” and all of the comrades — he felt — were “mindful of our responsibility to our party and to the world Trotskyist movement, a responsibility that demanded that differences be resolved in the democratic way by majority vote rather than by the method of factional struggle, personal recriminations, etc. In a word, we have functioned in the true spirit of a collective leadership where the collectivity gives greater strength and greater wisdom to each individual.”
The fusion of spirit and mind was essential: “The membership as well as the leadership must be trained as revolutionary Marxists who know how to fight in the class struggle, to fight not only with physical courage and power, but also with the sharpest ideological weapons.” His vision of the revolutionary organization that had to be developed in the United States was clearly grounded in the Bolshevik tradition of the revolutionary workers’ movement that had made the Russian Revolution of 1917:
“Our revolutionary program and policy is best served by a party of democratic centralism. Centralism in action; fullest democracy in the internal life of the organization whenever questions of policy are before the membership for discussion. As our movements grows and develops, every last rank-and-filer will be called upon to assume places of responsibility and leadership in the mass movement. Our membership must be imbued with a sense of responsibility. Our movement must be imbued with the comradeship of people who are in the life-and-death struggle for a common cause. We must have the necessary ability to work together.”
Such ideas had animated him since he was a teen-age radical, and he held them to the end of his life.
From the Russian Revolution to the Early Days of U.S. Communism
His oldest brother Nathan had arrived first in New York City and was able to send back money for the trip. Morris and other family members got the last Polish train out traveling to the Baltic port of Danzig (now Gdansk). From there they went first to Denmark and then sailed to New York on the rickety King Oscar II. Just before the ship sailed, another young refugee named Sylvia Bleeker went off to get her feather quilt and just missed being left behind. She was, for many years afterward, a person noted for her vivaciousness and wit, with clear blue eyes and flaming red hair, whose beauty was matched by an incredible self-assurance.
Morris later recalled that he and Sylvia were “reluctant to leave the Soviet Union, the land of socialism, to go to capitalist America.” Like many young working people they had been swept up in the struggle to create a very different kind of “new world,” one free from oppression, exploitation, and war. This drew them together during the journey, and they were to become comrades and lifelong companions. Morris had been powerfully influenced by the socialist vision and Marxist ideas that animated the Bolshevik revolution, although his involvement was as an unaffiliated youngster influenced by the Jewish Socialist Bund (he recalled frequenting a tearoom that the Bund operated).
He respectfully noted that Sylvia — just a little older — had functioned as a teacher and also as a courier between different areas held and not held by the Bolsheviks. (The Militant of August 15, 1930, recounted: “She joined the underground Communist Party in the United States in 1920 to which she had been transferred by the Russian Party, for which she had been carrying on responsible work in Poland during the most critical days of the Russian revolution.”) The hoped-for goal of a socialist world — whose political and economic and cultural life would be controlled by the great working-class majority, making possible the full and free development of each person — contrasted sharply with the cramped quarters and miserable conditions of their sea voyage.
Members of Morris’s family recall that all were seasick in the hold for much of the four-month Atlantic crossing. Sylvia was the only one to keep her health and her stomach, and she nursed the rest of the party until the ship slipped into upper New York harbor on Labor Day, 1920. Since this was a holiday, the ship’s owner would have had to pay the longshoremen time and a half to unload the King Oscar II, so the owner decided to let the ship languish at anchor in the harbor for yet another day — which must have seemed like forever for the sick and weary travelers. Nonetheless, recalled Morris’s niece Zelda Kessler, “we were happy to be in America.”
Her sister Eleanor Smiley explained what happened to the family name Tankelevitch at the hands of officials at Ellis Island. “First they lopped off the front, then they cut off the back and added a loop on the ‘v.’ That’s how Morris went from being Tankelevitch to Lewit.”
Sylvia Bleeker and Morris Lewit in 1922.
An unidentified friend is at left.
Eleanor remembered that “Morris and Sylvia were a couple when they came over. They probably never legally got married. Sylvia was always known as Sylvia Bleeker. There were two names on their bell. She was a feminist before her time.” Zelda noted the irony of the ship’s manifest listing Sylvia’s occupation as a “domestic” and “servant,” since “there was nothing like that in her. Such a ball of fire. So wonderful.”
In the same year that Morris arrived in New York, George Meany had begun his career in the bureaucracy, as a business agent of the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry. It was in this union that Morris became active after securing a plumbing apprenticeship, and he was involved in a left-wing caucus that confronted the conservative Meany but hardly deterred the rising young bureaucrat. Sylvia was to be a prominent figure in her own right within New York’s labor movement. Finding work in the garment industry, trimming women’s hats, she would soon be elected secretary of the 3,000-member Local 43 of the Millinery Workers, the second-largest local of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and the largest concentration of unionized women workers in the country. Yet it was hardly the case that the young couple’s attention was restricted to the class struggle. Hungry for intellectual sustenance, both Morris and Sylvia attended courses at City College. “They knew all about the heavens,” Eleanor remembered about her evening walks with them. “They pointed out all the constellations across the horizon.”
Shortly after their arrival, the two of them became immersed in the early Communist movement. “Sylvia and I organized a club of young workers, a Jewish club, the Sunrise Club, and we had about a hundred members,” Morris explained. “We had lectures and would get speakers from the Communist Party. When the Young Workers League was organized [in 1922], we had the club join the Young Workers League.” This was the Communist Party youth organization, two of whose key leaders were Max Shachtman and Martin Abern (who several years later would, with James P. Cannon, establish the Trotskyist movement). Soon Morris and Sylvia formally left the Jewish federation of the Communist Party in order to help lead the Yiddish-speaking workers into the “Americanized mainstream” of the working class. It was important to go into the broader movement, said Zelda, because “you couldn’t help the Jewish workers unless you helped all workers.”
Morris and Sylvia and the large Lewit family first moved into Morris’s older sister Sadie’s three-room flat and soon occupied a similar flat in the same building on 96th Street in Manhattan. The places had gas-jet lighting, bathrooms in the hallway, and big black stoves in the kitchen and bathtubs in the kitchen as well. But they needed a bigger apartment and in a few years were able to move the family up to 118th Street in Harlem, then a major Jewish neighborhood. When they got even more prosperous in the mid-twenties they moved yet again, this time to the Bronx, a fancy place in those days.
In the meantime, Morris’s parents bought a farm in the Catskills near a town called Dairyland, nine miles north of Ellenville, some ninety miles north of New York City. They are remembered by relatives as a “terrific couple.” The name Ida was the Anglicized version of the Hebrew “chay,” which means life. She was extraordinarily zestful, energetic, and kind. Morris and Sylvia visited quite a lot. The family members enjoyed each other immensely, and the children especially loved their Uncle Morris and their Aunt Sylvia, who, though never having children of their own, were — it is still remembered — “wonderful with the kids.”
In the mid-1920s there were three major factional currents within the Communist Party of the United States. One was led by Jay Lovestone, another by William Z. Foster, yet another by James P. Cannon. Foster and Cannon had joined together for a class-struggle orientation that they considered more in tune with American workers. Cannon had deep roots in the working-class socialism of the IWW and Debs tradition. For many, Foster seemed to have even stronger credentials as the famous leader of the 1919 steel strike before becoming a Communist, and he headed up the party’s trade union work.
About Lovestone, Morris said: “I never had any use for him. He was an opportunist fraud. You can see that by his whole evolution. He looked at the CP as a stepping-stone to prominence.” While initially triumphing over Foster and Cannon (in part thanks to the covert backing of Stalin in the Communist International), Lovestone soon ran afoul of the Stalinist machine, after which he became increasingly tied to the bureaucracy of the American Federation of Labor and the U.S. State Department.
“I was a Fosterite,” Morris commented. “Sylvia too. We had Foster caucus meetings at my parents’ house.” Looking back on the often brutal and debilitating factionalism of that time, Morris later summed up the character of the rival leaders with the assertion about Cannon that “in that jungle he was the only principled man.”
While others in Morris’s family did not share his political affiliations, they were very protective of him. When two policemen showed up at the farmhouse door, Morris’s mother spoke to them only in Yiddish, pretending not to be able to understand them. When they left his father laughed, speculating that they were merely trying to sell tickets to a local Democratic Party fund-raiser. Another time the FBI came to the farm inquiring after Morris, asking Ida Sarah when last she saw her son. “Never hear from him, don’t know where he is,” she replied in perfect English.
From Brookwood Labor College to Trotskyism
A combination of anti-Communist repression by the union bureaucracy and ultraleft policy induced by the Stalin leadership of the Communist International had resulted in Communist-led union bodies breaking away to form the Trade Union Unity League. Sylvia’s local became part of the short-lived Needle Trades Workers Industrial Union. She was elected a vice-president and member of the General Executive Board of the new body, and was the organizer of the union’s Headwear Department.
The time spent at Brookwood was obviously important for both of them. The other students included some of the most alert and militant industrial workers throughout the country, and the school itself attempted to accommodate diverse labor traditions connected to such figures as Samuel Gompers, Eugene V. Debs, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Morris was elected to the Board of Directors by the students. Other Board members included Fania Cohen, Education Director of the ILGWU, James Maurer, the socialist head of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, and the school’s director, Rev. A.J. Muste.
Morris’s opinion of Muste was quite positive — he “taught history, was a very good teacher, had a firm grasp of his subject, [was] very articulate.” He was one of the more left-wing members of the Brookwood faculty, as was Arthur W. Calhoun, “a very nice person, good teacher, came from a religious socialist background [as did Muste], taught economics.” Calhoun was close to the Communist Party and offered — as an “extra” — a special course on Marx’s Capital. Another labor educator with a left-wing reputation was David J. Saposs, though in Morris’s opinion he was not as radical as Calhoun or Muste and was “not much of a teacher.” (Later he became a Cold War anti-Communist.)
While at Brookwood, Morris and Sylvia became aware of the struggle of the Left Opposition against Stalinism within the Soviet Union and the Communist International. The Brookwood library had a subscription to the Comintern journal Inprecor (International Press Correspondence), which carried part of the record of Russian Communist Party debates in 1927. Included in a special issue — for the last time — were speeches by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, which Morris read. “At that time I concluded that Trotsky was right,” he recounted. “And I became a Trotskyist actually before there was a Trotskyist movement in this country.”
Being at Brookwood, however, shielded him somewhat from the anti-Trotsky campaign inside the Communist movement, and the fact that he was aligned with Foster rather than Cannon (who was expelled with many of his followers for Trotskyism in 1928) also helped. But the Lovestone leadership — having destroyed one rival caucus inside the party — moved to destroy the Fosterites as well. Lovestone wrote a special 36-page pamphlet as part of this effort, entitled Pages From Party History, whose many viciously factional passages included this one: “Only a few weeks ago two prominent supporters of the Opposition in the New York District, Comrades Lewitt and Seligman, were co-signers of a statement issued by Brookwood, denouncing the communist movement and kowtowing to the American Federation of Labor.”
After returning from Brookwood, Morris remained in the Communist Party but was much less active. One top CP leader, William W. Weinstone, aware of Sylvia’s sympathies for Trotsky, had a special meeting with her after the expulsion of Trotsky and his followers from the Communist movement. “Would you take the word of one man against the word of the Communist International?” he asked. Her response: “Yes. If he happens to be right.”
As Morris put it, “we were with them” when Jim Cannon and other Trotsky supporters were expelled from the U.S. Communist Party, “but we didn’t leave right away.” As late as 1930, Sylvia — still immensely popular among garment workers — was nominated as Communist Party candidate for U.S. Congress. Morris was in touch with Max Shachtman, who with Cannon was the foremost leader of the newly-formed Communist League of America (CLA). He received and read that group’s paper, the Militant, and even wrote for it an anonymous report on a major CP meeting. Finally, however, the end came. “I went to the branch meeting and I gave them a Trotskyist speech. They were all quiet. Nobody said a word. A couple of days later one of them came to ask me for my party [membership] book.”
When Sylvia was brought up on charges of Trotskyism, the Militant took note of the event in a front-page article, stating that “in response to a number of heresy-hunting questions, she replied that she was sympathetic towards the views of the Left Opposition…Comrade Bleeker is not only one of the most prominent militants in the needle trades, but an old devoted Party member…Is Comrade Bleeker to be expelled from the Party by the Browders…because she, like so many others, dares to hold views, entirely Communist, that run counter to the momentarily official views of the Stalinist clique?”
When her expulsion came, the Militant published Sylvia’s eloquent statement that noted: “My record of work activities and devotion to the Needle Trades Workers Industrial Union and the Party needs no apology. It has been known to the workers for almost 10 years. Any work assigned to me was carried out faithfully and flawlessly.” But she insisted that no good Communist must be afraid “to think, question, or disagree,” and because “the Party is the political weapon of the workers against the capitalist system,” when “the policies of the Party fail to live up to its historical role…every Communist must point it out, criticize and if compelled, organize a faction to correct these policies.”
Noting that this is what Trotsky was doing, she argued that she and others were “adherents to the course of Leninism as against the policies of Stalin’s regime, which is leading the Party into the abyss.” She concluded: “The bureaucrats cannot and will not tear us away from the ranks of Communism and the working class!”
Communist Party resources and membership (about 20,000), were far more imposing than those of the 200-member Communist League of America. But Lewit and Sylvia jumped right in. Morris played a major role in helping Shachtman translate Trotsky’s writings. In the recent past Max Eastman had done some important translation work, and in the future John G. Wright would play a key role in that regard. But for the stream of Trotsky’s writings that appeared in the Militant and in early CLA pamphlets, much of the work was done through a collaboration of Morris Lewit reading Trotsky’s Russian text aloud while Max Shachtman sat pecking away at the typewriter.
Cannon was nowhere to be seen in the CLA’s small national office. “I kept asking, ‘Where’s Cannon?’ But everybody sort of clammed up.” Lewit added that “Cannon had a very tough time making a living,” and there are indications he was battling his way through a personal crisis.
Morris also began to assume other practical responsibilities. Shachtman was not good at organizational routine (Morris complained that often the office was locked up while Shachtman went to the movies), and Morris shouldered much of this as he functioned as the CLA district organizer for New York and New Jersey. Sylvia became involved in fraction work, among garment workers, among Yiddish-speaking workers (she and Morris were centrally involved in the production of the Yiddish-language periodical Unser Kampf [Our Struggle]), and among Greek comrades. When Shachtman was sent to Prinkipo for discussions with Trotsky about the CLA (including factional tensions between comrades around him and other comrades identifying with Cannon), the trip was financed by Morris’s savings.
The close working relationship with Shachtman resulted in the nomination of Morris for a National Committee position at the CLA’s 1931 convention becoming a point of factional tension. But Morris would later argue that he did not view his own loyalties in such a factional manner (and even more he scoffed at one rumor that he was part of the “Abern Clique”). After this initial conflict passed, Morris’s evolution — as he worked with both Cannon and Shachtman on the National Committee, on the Political Committee, and in the national office — caused him to be considered (by the time of the 1939–1940 factional struggle) among “the leading members of the Cannon faction,” according to a central document produced by the faction that was then led by Shachtman.
In 1934 Morris played an important role in the fusion process between the CLA and the American Workers Party (AWP), formed not long before and led by his old Brookwood teacher A.J. Muste. This fusion led to a new group, the Workers Party of the United States. The “reunion” with Muste — with whom Morris had good relations — didn’t last long, since the former AWP leader left the Trotskyist movement after little more than a year. (He went on to become an important radical pacifist influence in the civil rights and antiwar movements.) Most of the AWP members stayed, however, and some were to make important contributions to the movement. There were two who proved to be problematical.
One was James Burnham, an intellectual with great prestige and a sharp mind — once lionized on the left, but after playing a key role in the 1939–1940 factional fight, he abandoned socialist politics and rapidly evolved into an influential right-wing ideologist. “He was involved with abstractions,” Morris recalled. “He idealized the working class and couldn’t face the reality of it…He was a naïve intellectual who could write articles but never had any experience with life — no wonder he wound up all the way on the right now.” With the other problematical AWPer, Morris noted, “Trotsky paid with his life.” He was referring to a relatively well-to-do young woman named Sylvia Ageloff. A friend of hers — a former AWP member who had joined the CP — introduced her to a romantic young man named Ramón Mercader during a trip to Europe (but unknown to her, he was a Stalinist agent under orders to assassinate Trotsky). She brought her murderous lover to meet her political hero in Mexico and introduced him into the Trotsky household.
Morris and Sylvia got to know Cannon in the early 1930s when “he would stop by our apartment from time to time to chew the fat” on his way to or from a job that he had finally secured. “Both Sylvia and I were never interested in the coffee klatches they used to have in Cannon’s home,” he once said. “They used to get together and have a few drinks and get talking. There was [George] Clarke and Sam Gordon and a few others, I suppose. We never participated in these kinds of socials. We’d have dinner with them sometimes, or lunch…. But we valued our private life too much to give it up.”
Yet there were qualities in Cannon that they came to value as time passed, although as Morris stressed, “he was a contradictory figure, like everybody else. He had his good points and his limitations.”
While Cannon “worked well under pressure,” sometimes the pressures could have a negative impact. Morris especially remembered when he, Cannon, and Shachtman were supposed to have a meeting in 1936 with a leader of the Socialist Party’s Militant Caucus. The Trotskyists were seeking to enter the Socialist Party, so the meeting was not unimportant — but Cannon disliked the Militant Caucus leader and resented having to take him seriously. Morris and Shachtman found their leader incapacitated, the “victim” of a drinking episode, and had to spend time pouring coffee into him in order to keep the unity negotiations on track.
Cannon’s limitations included the fact that “he was a lazy man. He didn’t have much patience for routine, so he always needed somebody to do the routine work. He would really shine with the internal polemics. But in the everyday work he didn’t have much patience…He would come in late to the office. I would have the mail prepared for him to look at, and we would talk about what needed to be done. But he wasn’t very good for detail. He needed a stage.” And yet Morris had profound respect for him.
“Cannon was a political leader,” he emphasized. “Shachtman was an impressionist — look at the political evolution he went through.” Contrary to some allegations, Cannon was “not anti-intellectual, the opposite — he welcomed them.” He himself “had a fine mind and was a capable speaker,” and before he would comment on any question he would study it.” More than this, “he certainly had a very good sense of justice…was a very capable strategist,” sought to be principled. “The best thing about Cannon was that as a political leader he never looked at someone who opposed him…as an enemy you’ve got to get rid of…He always looked upon it as an opportunity to educate the party. He welcomed disagreements. That’s where he really shone.”
In the conflict of Shachtman and Burnham against Cannon and Trotsky in 1939–1940, Morris and Sylvia lined up with the latter.
Summary of U.S. Trotskyism’s History
“A bird’s-eye view of the sixteen year history of Trotskyism in this country, will reveal three clearly discernible stages in the development of our movement. When the small group of pioneer Trotskyists was expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 and formed the CLA (Opposition) its primary preoccupation was the recruitment and training of Trotskyist cadres out of the CP. Until 1933 we considered ourselves a faction of the Communist Party, directing our primary attention to developments in the Communist Party, subjecting every one of the twists and turns of the Stalinists to merciless Marxist criticism.
“Hitler’s rise to power marked a new stage — the second in the development of our movement. It was then that Comrade Trotsky issued the call for a new International and for new parties. The incapacity of the Communist Party to struggle against fascism, its capitulation before Hitler, brought the bankruptcy of the Comintern into bold relief and posed sharply the task of building a new International and new parties.
“In this task of building a new revolutionary party in this country, the American Trotskyist movement demonstrated its viability. The leadership proved that it was free of organizational fetishism and that it was capable of the necessary tactical flexibility which the tasks of building the new party demanded. In a determined and aggressive manner we proceeded to seek out those elements on the political scene who would join us in building the party. We fused [with] the American Workers Party, and before long we even took the drastic step of entering the SP in order to fuse with the left wing inside that organization. All these steps are fully covered in Comrade Cannon’s latest book, The History of American Trotskyism.
“The launching of the SWP at the beginning of 1938 marked the third stage in the development of our movement. By this time we had gathered around us the revolutionary elements of the CP, of the AWP, as well as the SP. The AWP was eliminated from the scene as a possible competitor and the SP remained a hollow shell after our expulsion and the split. We, on the other hand, had gathered and steeled our cadres in this process. At the same time we took advantage of the opportunities that opened before us in the mass movement. We participated in the unemployed struggles, our Minneapolis comrades led the great strikes of the teamsters in that city in 1934, etc.
“But by and large the SWP was from its beginning a small cadre party. The next stage, the third stage in the development of our movement, required first and foremost that we break out of isolation and find a road to the masses. Our possibilities for recruitment at the expense of the CP had largely been exhausted. The period of fusions and unifications had come to an end. There was only one direction in which we could steer our course: towards the militants in the plants, the mines and on the ships. We had to steer our course towards the militants in the mass production industries especially. They were beginning to realize the limitations of isolated economic struggles. They were beginning to awaken to the need of political action.
“It was then that we advanced the slogan of an independent labor party; we advanced the program of transitional demands elaborated by Comrade Trotsky. The labor party slogan and the program of transitional demands were to serve as the bridge between our small revolutionary party and the great mass of American workers. The American workers who built the powerful unions of the CIO in so short a time, who fought great battles against the giant corporations, were beginning to stir politically and our party had every reason to hope for rapid growth.”
The outbreak of World War II, however, threw the SWP into an internal crisis that culminated in the splitting away of about 40 percent of the organization under the Shachtman-Burnham-Abern faction. In the wake of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, there was an intensification of hostility toward the Soviet Union in the political and intellectual life of the United States. There was a sharp questioning by the minority of the traditional Trotskyist view that the economic changes brought about by the 1917 revolution in Russia were still worth defending. There were also differences around questions ranging from Marxist philosophy to Leninist organization. “Under the impact of bourgeois public opinion and its hue and cry against the Soviet Union, Professor Burnham, the playboy Shachtman, and the incorrigible cliquist Abern, banded together in a struggle to overthrow our program,” Morris commented bitterly several years later. Only after a nine-month faction struggle, which ended in 1940, “could we return to the main job of building the party.”
In order to return to the interrupted task, the SWP majority outlined “the campaign methods by which we were to build the party.” Morris elaborated on this orientation:
“This campaign method of building the party — the method of well thought-out, well organized campaigns growing out of the needs of the objective situation and limited to realizable goals, and the mobilization of all the energies of the party for the achievement of the goal — this method has guided us in the work of the party and it remains our guide today. With our tested revolutionary program and policies, with correct slogans and with bold campaign methods, our small revolutionary party will before long gear itself with the movements of the masses. Then and only then will we be unconquerable.”
Acting National Secretary
Looking around the room at the National Committee meeting where this transition was being decided, and noting that out of thirteen people present eight were going to jail (including the national secretary of the party, the labor secretary, the editors of the party press, the organizer of the New York local, etc.), he felt a great weight of responsibility but generated laughter when he asked: “Who am I remaining with?”
Not long afterward, he explained the perspective that guided much of what he and his comrades did next:
“The imprisonment of our party leaders was in the interests of the warmakers in Washington, of [bureaucratic-conservative Teamsters union President] Dan Tobin as well as Joseph Stalin. We naturally asked ourselves: What is to follow? Are they going to take other repressive measures against the party? Will the substitute leadership be harassed? The truth is, we had no answer. All we knew was that the more successful the struggle in behalf of the 18, the less chance there would be of further persecution. We knew that the more we hollered the greater would be our chances to operate freely. We did indeed raise quite a holler, especially for our small movement.”
But the defense of the imprisoned Trotskyists involved far more than publicizing and building support for their case in unions, community groups, etc. They were defended by an aggressive campaign to get out their ideas through pamphlets and books (including Cannon’s History of American Trotskyism) — and also by expanding the Militant from four pages to six pages, and deciding to more than triple its subscriber base from 900 to 3,000 — except that the goal was exceeded as comrades secured 7,614 new subscriptions.
There was also a decision to defend the 18 by increasing the number of SWP members, and between the dates of conviction and imprisonment (25 months) 245 new members were recruited. Afterward, it was decided to recruit ten new members for every convicted Trotskyist — but again the goal was exceeded as 218 were recruited. A rough tabulation indicates that about 45% were from the auto and aircraft industries, the shipyards, and maritime, 34% were women, 66% were men, 12% were Black, and the average age was just over 27 years. SWP membership increased from about 600 to 1,500 between 1941 and 1945.
Many shared Morris’s optimism: “In the next stage of disillusionment with the imperialist war, when the slogans of our party will become the slogans of the mass to an increasing degree, when the revolutionary struggles in Europe and in the colonies will reverberate in this continent, we are confident that hundreds and thousands of workers will flock to our party and its program.”
Gains were also registered in party finances. In 1941 27% of party income was “regular” as opposed to 73% that had to be secured through special fund-raising efforts. By 1944 — through the implementation of a system of branch sustainers — 66% of SWP income was now regular, with only 34% secured through special campaigns. One of these special campaigns was the 15th Anniversary Fund, which had a $15,000 goal but actually brought in $18,554.95. Education, branch building, hiring more full-time organizers, moving forward trade union work — all this and more was being accomplished under Morris’s leadership.
And yet the quality of Morris’s leadership caused him to emphasize the fact that this was the work of a new and diverse substitute leadership. “Very few of us had had the opportunity to work together for any period of time,” he observed. “But we were united in the determination to demonstrate to the whole world the vitality of our party. We were united by the common training we had received in the same school of Bolshevism. This is why we could work so harmoniously, not only when there was unanimity on questions, but also whenever differences arose on questions of policy or tactics.”
Morris also gave special emphasis to the central role played by women in the new situation, concluding: “When the history of Trotskyism during the difficult and trying period of this war is written, one of the brightest chapters in this book will be devoted to the portraying of the magnificent role of our Bolshevik women.” He is remembered by Dorothea Breitman and Jean Tussey, branch organizers at the time, as being an exemplary party leader, calm, kind, and possessed of acute reason and sound judgment.
Postwar Difficulties
The earliest split involved a small group around two SWP leaders who were among the imprisoned 18 — party lawyer Albert Goldman and Militant editor Felix Morrow, who began raising a more negative assessment of what the postwar world would look like even before going to prison. While much of what they argued turned out to be realistic, their overall pessimism brought them into collision with party-building perspectives, made them more urgent proponents of reunification with those around Max Shachtman (who had established the Workers Party), and finally drew them away from socialist politics altogether. Morris himself, along with Cannon and other SWP leaders, came to favor a serious exploration of unity possibilities with the Shachtman group in 1947, only to pull away from that when the two groups displayed fundamental differences in approach toward the issue of Cold War anti-Communism — the SWP rejecting it, the WP adapting to it.
Morris took the lead in polemicizing against the Morrow-Goldman perspectives — which gave special emphasis to allegations that the Cannon regime was bureaucratic and contained “germs of Stalin ist degeneration.” Morris responded that the incidents utilized to support this charge were not substantial, and more that the charge “is refuted by an examination of the social base of Sta linism and the history of our whole movement, which was born and which developed in merciless struggle against Stalinism.”
Looking back on this 1945–46 dispute, he reflected: “As soon as the Old Man [Trotsky] died, they had felt there was no Trotsky ist movement anymore. After the split they disappeared.”
There was also the Johnson-Forest tendency, led by C.L.R. James (Johnson) and Raya Dunayevskaya (Forest), which had switched from the WP to the SWP in 1947, then leaving the SWP in 1951. “They had serious differences,” Morris commented. “Johnson considered himself a Leninist, so to speak, as against Trotsky. He found support in Lenin for his conception of state capitalism in Russia, so he felt Trotsky didn’t understand the problem.”
James’s followers “were active people,” and James himself “was a very fine speaker — he spoke at public meetings on various issues where we didn’t have differences. He was very discreet about holding his differences to himself.” He and his supporters concluded that they should be on their own. “That wasn’t much of a fight. They just walked out.”
The 1952–1953 opposition led by George Clarke and Bert Cochran led to the most substantial rupture. “Oh, that was a stupid amalgam!” Morris was still muttering decades after the fact. He once offered this explanation to a younger listener:
“Clarke came back from Europe [where he had been assigned to help the Fourth International]. He had been working with [Michel] Pablo [a central leader of the Fourth International] to prepare documents. They concluded that everything is heading toward a showdown between the Soviet Union and the imperialist world and everything has to be subordinated to this struggle. I think Clarke was responsible for influencing Pablo on this. You reduce the world to these two camps, and then there is to be an imminent showdown between the Soviet Union and the capitalist world, and we have to be prepared to join the Soviet bloc against the capitalist world. A simplistic concept! Then there’s only one conclusion: there’s nothing to do but to get close to the Stalinist world in the coming showdown…I had a talk with Clarke when he got back. Afterward I said to Cannon: “You better get hold of your boy and talk to him about his politics.” Clarke was seen as a Cannonite from way back. So Cannon had one meeting with him and then gave up. Couldn’t do anything with him. So Clarke got hold of [Bert] Cochran. He didn’t have Clarke’s views — he was kind of trying to ease out…he had his own line, but he joined with Clarke in the split…Cochran was a talented fellow but quite intolerant of other people’s views. He was a capable man, but he became…you see, when you exist in a party like ours for a long time, you sometimes think you can do better on your own. Cochran thought he could produce a better magazine. He didn’t have Clarke’s line. It was just a marriage of convenience.”
In February of 1953, Morris, on behalf of the SWP leadership, wrote a reassuring letter to Pablo indicating that “some people are trying to read into this line [of the Fourth International] something that isn’t there — conciliation to Stalinism. This is what we propose to combat and I am confident we’ll do it in agreement with you.” By the autumn of that year, however, it was clear to the SWP leadership that the lines of Clarke and Pablo were essentially the same, and Morris was writing the first polemical response to a resolution advanced by Ernest Mandel, an ally of Pablo.
The polemic emphasizes points made by Trotskyists for many years, that “only a mass uprising of the oppressed masses can guarantee the Soviet Union’s further development toward socialism,” and that “only a Trotskyist party can lead such an uprising.” In contrast to this, Mandel’s resolution argued that with the postwar extension of revolution and revolutionary struggles, “engulfing waves of revolution” — as the resolution put it — were eliminating the conditions that had originally brought the bureaucracy into existence, paving the way for a socialist regeneration within the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Stalinism as a force in world politics.
This would seem to justify the Pablo-Clarke orientation, but it also “stands on its head the Trotskyist concept that the key to the extension of the world revolution is in the hands of the subjective factor, i.e., the revolutionary party. Instead of the subjective factor being the necessary element in the revolution, the ‘engulfing’ revolution by its own inherent power resolves the subjective factor.” With this perspective, the traditional workers’ parties led by reformists or Stalinists would be compelled to be a revolutionary force (and revolutionary socialists should therefore merge into them).
But Morris concluded that “the inflated optimism about the revolutionary wave which is spreading from country to country and continent to continent, is a cover for deep pessimism about the capabilities of the working class and the revolutionary vanguard.” Opposing this, he asserted: “We must once again Trotskyize the Trotskyist movement.”
Regardless of how perceptive Morris and his closest comrades may have been, however, by the time the Cannon-led majority was able to declare victory in the SWP, the Trotskyist movement in the United States and in the world had suffered a serious rupture. More than this, the growth of the movement was blocked by a combination of factors, including the unprecedented economic prosperity in the advanced capitalist countries, the consolidation of Stalinist power in the newly-expanded “Communist bloc” countries, and the ability to maintain control over the working-class movements of various countries by the traditional Social Democratic and Sta linist leaderships.
Decline
Dobbs, a veteran of the Teamsters struggles in Minneapolis and the Midwest, had been pushed into the position of national secretary. “He wasn’t prepared for this kind of job,” according to Morris. “He was really green…I was sorry for him….He was a trade union man who never had a chance to participate in a political discussion in a branch, which for us was novel.” Morris contrasted the two party branches: “In New York there was always political discussion. There were always disagreements, you always had to polemicize, and you sharpened your wits that way…In Minneapolis they didn’t have much [disagreement]; they were all of one mind. So that was his weakness, you see, he was not prepared for political leadership.”
Tom Kerry was far more politically oriented than Dobbs, in Morris’s opinion, but he also had a problematical side. “Tom was a fighter, a factionalist,” in Morris’s opinion. “He had to be restrained all the time.”
Morris, with Dobbs, Kerry, and Murry Weiss, served on a four-person Secretariat that functioned between meetings of the Political Committee. Unlike the others, he wasn’t on staff, and his job prevented him from reading all of the materials to be discussed and from engaging in certain preliminary discussions. Yet he made his own distinctive contributions: “I’d have to knock down some of their ideas, you know, that were not very mature.”
Weiss played a central role in the SWP’s “regroupment” efforts of the late 1950s, though he gained a reputation as being increasingly problematical as time went on. Dobbs saw him as a “nuisance” who needed to be “fought” — a course that Morris counseled against. He saw some of Weiss’s problems as being psychological, requiring medical rather than factional attention. (Weiss went on to bene fit from therapy, drawing away from his intense involvement in the SWP leadership, and became a therapist himself.)
In 1960, Morris’s own health took a dramatic turn for the worse. A misdiagnosis resulted in a potassium deficiency which was not understood or corrected until years later. Fainting spells, hospitalization, and debilitating weakness were the result. Increasingly, it became impossible for him to function in a leadership capacity in the SWP, or to remain politically active in any way. Sylvia’s attention also became more focused on tending to Morris — but frustrations and disturbing developments in the SWP were also causing her to draw back.
Morris and Sylvia, like many in the party, had looked upon the triumph and radicalization of the Cuban Revolution as an immensely hopeful development. But some of the youth — led by James Robertson and Tim Wohlforth (who would soon, respectively, become leaders of the Spartacist League and Workers League) — initiated a factional struggle in part around that issue, and also opposing efforts by the SWP leadership to work with people such as Ernest Mandel to reunify the Fourth International. While critical of the views of the oppositionists, Morris and Sylvia were deeply disturbed by the harsh factionalism unleashed by party leaders.
One day Sylvia came home from a branch meeting telling Morris: “I can’t go back to the branch.” In the debates, Kerry had been lacing into an oppositionist, thundering: “Why don’t you leave the party!” It seemed absolutely wrong behavior for a leading party comrade and was more than she could stand. But for Sylvia Bleeker to openly challenge Tom Kerry on the branch floor, pitting her prestige against his prestige, would throw the branch into turmoil. “So she kept quiet. But she couldn’t take the factionalism.”
In the same period, a new current of young people were flowing into the SWP and its new youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance. Some of these were a group from Carleton College, whom Morris saw as being especially promoted by Dobbs. “They came because of the work in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and they were radicalized by the Cuban Revolution,” Morris recalled. “I didn’t know them — that’s when I was sick.” Central among these was Jack Barnes, who was groomed to become the new SWP national secretary in the 1970s.
In recounting what he considered to be immature attitudes regarding discipline and expulsions, which he associated with the Dobbs-Kerry leadership (contrasting this with what he viewed as Cannon’s more “political” approach), Morris concluded: “That’s what happened with the Barnes clique: super-disciplinarians. I blame the party leader ship for going along with them. And then it came to them, and they were kicked out.” By 1979, Tom Kerry — realizing the betrayal of traditional political and organizational perspectives being orchestrated by the new leadership — courageously and angrily challenged the early beginnings of this development, but it was too late.
Final Decades
Such things had an impact in the larger society, and the consequent radicalization had an impact among members of their own family. In the climate of Cold War anti-Communism that had dominated U.S. culture in the 1950s, the younger children in the Lewit family tended to be “shielded” from the elderly couple. This, according to their grand-nephew Aaron, “limited, even suppressed, my capacity to appreciate the importance of Morris and Sylvia’s thinking, commitment, and political activism,” but in the 1960s, “politically charged by the Vietnam war, I began to realize what Morris and Sylvia represented, and I began to respect and admire what had been an inadvertent secret during my growing-up years.”
Other radicalized youth, especially those drawn to the Trotskyist movement, sometimes had a sense of awe when meeting Morris and Sylvia at a social event at the spacious Manhattan home of George and Connie Weissman or at some special SWP event.
But as the 1960s radicalization faded, and the U.S. working-class radicalization developed at its own very different pace, a crisis developed in the Trotskyist movement that had been revitalized by younger but less experienced activists. In the early 1980s the SWP’s new leadership sharply turned away from the party’s historic Trotskyist program in favor of an orientation toward the Cuban Communist Party led by Fidel Castro, and as part of this change, hundreds of members were either expelled or forced out of the party.
Never one to mince words, Sylvia challenged one older comrade who was going along with it all: “How could you!” Their sympathies were with the oppositionists, and they felt especially close to the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism and the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, which contained such close friends as George and Dorothea Breitman, George Weissman, and Frank and Sarah Lovell.
“Sylvia was a realistic and courageous woman,” her friend Sarah Lovell wrote in 1988, “and she faced her death with the same realism and courage with which she faced all the momentous events of her life.” Morris was left without this beloved companion for the final decade of his life. Things changed for him in more than one way. “My fondest memories,” according to Aaron Lewit, “include the excitement and interest in me that Sylvia would give when I called or visited during my twenties. If Morris answered the phone, he’d quickly turn it over to Sylvia. That all changed when Sylvia died, and Morris had to become more social. As a result, Morris and I became quick and good friends. He respected my work for nonprofit organizations, and we enjoyed lively, substantive talks during my visits and on the phone. When my son [Nathanael] was born in 1992, Morris was our first visitor at the hospital. From that day on, Morris was very close to Nathanael and always expressed remarkable joy in seeing him.”
Over the next several years after Sylvia’s death, Morris attended events of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, with special encouragement and help from Frank and Sarah Lovell. He was present at its national educational conference held in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1991. He also went to Italy later that year to attend the World Congress of the Fourth International as an honored guest. Morris was generous — when asked — in sharing his considerable insight and experience, and he continued to be valued highly among his comrades. Until he was compelled to have a knee replacement and then lost his eyesight, in the mid-1990s, he had remained relatively energetic and independent, intellectually lucid and alert. The final public meeting that he attended was a memorial for Ernest Mandel in 1995, not long after his surgery and as his sight was fading, to pay tribute to one comrade while joining ranks with others attempting to carry on the work to which he had devoted his life.
But his short-term memory was beginning to deteriorate. “If I asked Morris what he had for lunch,” grand-nephew Aaron recalls, “he would answer with Morris’s typically wonderful humor that asking him what he ate was no longer a fair question.”
In his final years, he was helped by a part-time attendant, an immigrant worker from Guyana named Marlin. “She and her husband were beautifully respectful to Morris and always sensitive and kind,” according to Aaron. They made it possible for him to continue to live in the comfortable little apartment in Queens, where he and Sylvia had made their final home. “When Marlin was having difficulty with her agency (which paid her $6.00 an hour, no benefits), Morris stepped in as her personal organizer. She said that Morris gave her the courage to stand up for herself, and have the confidence to leave the agency, and just work for him.”
Getting paid a genuinely fair wage by helping Morris, she and her husband were finally able to purchase their own home. While she became a friend and confidant, he tended to keep to himself whatever pain he was in during his final days. “He would tell Marlin that it was pointless to involve other people in his complaints because his pain was his.”
Aaron recounts Morris’s last day, and afterward: “When we arrived, Morris was not conscious; this time he was really in bad shape. Nathanael gave Morris a hug, and I could see a mild smile come over his face. He then attempted to raise his arms, but he was unable to. This was Morris. Even in his final moments he was able to receive and give pleasure…I miss my daily morning phone call with Morris. It was a moment of calm, an opportunity to share the day’s thoughts, current events, and good cheer…Morris’s goodness is often remembered in my family. There are often Morris references and stories. Maybe we do that to strengthen our thoughts by giving them an ethical and rational association.”
[The authors wish to express their thanks to Morris Lewit’s nieces Zelda Kessler, Eleanor Smiley, and Rose Weinberg, and his grand-nephew Aaron Lewit, who generously provided reminiscences for this article. Dave Riehle also shared useful information. Other sources include a taped interview with Morris Lewit by Paul Le Blanc, December 19, 1993; Robert J. Alexander, International Trotskyism, 1929–1985 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Tim Wohlforth, The Prophet’s Children, Travels on the American Left (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994); George Breitman, Paul Le Blanc, and Alan Wald, Trotskyism in the United States, Historical Essays and Reconsiderations (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996); back issues of the Militant from the 1930s and 1940s; published writings of James P. Cannon; Frank Lovell’s article “Sylvia Bleeker,” Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, January 1989; and internal documents from the SWP generously provided by Tamiment Library and Prometheus Research Library.]