Duncan Ferguson (political Activist) - Political Radicalization

Political Radicalization

In 1939, he underwent some fundamental transformations in political thinking, social behaviour and personal habits. He became radicalized and labelled himself a Trotskyist. Ferguson would go on to translate, among other writings, Trotsky's Nationalized Industry and Workers' Management (written in 1938)

He left New Orleans, where he had married his third wife, Demila Sanders, and moved to Gambier, Ohio. At the end of 1941 Demila went to New York, shortly thereafter Ferguson arrived there, and they took a loft on West 21st Street in Manhattan, New York. Demila and Duncan Ferguson met with such Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leaders as J. Cannon, A. Goldman and F. Morrow. After having rejected the offer to become chairman of the Arts Department of Queens College, he found employment at the Crucible Steel plant where he worked as a lathe operator. He became a union shop steward and a delegate to the SWP's national conventions.

In January 1944 the Fergusons went to Mexico on behalf of the SWP in order to take care for Leon Trotsky's widow, Natalia Sedova, who continued to live in the house Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, where Trotsky had been assassinated in August 1940. Demila complained about the conditions in Mexico and left at the end of 1944; Ferguson followed her to New York. For many years he was an active SWP member, writing articles under pseudonyms and doing translations from French language material. In the 1940s he was a member of the National Committee of the Civil Rights Committee, for several years he ran Pioneer Publishers (the SWP publishing house) and from 1956 to 1958 he was managing editor of the International Socialist Review, the theoretical journal of the SWP. Later he was a member of the National Control Commission of the SWP.

Among the few pieces of sculpture, which Ferguson completed after becoming chiefly a party worker, were busts of Trotsky and James P. Cannon. Demila ultimately left her husband and, after a period of depression, Ferguson began an affair with Laura Slobe, an artist and member of the SWP. Their affair ended after a few years and she died in 1958. By the mid-1950s Ferguson's health worsened, so that he had to abandon his job and live off dividends from stock left to him by his father, who had died in 1945.