Beginnings
Shachtman was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. He emigrated with his family to New York City in 1905.
At an early age, he became interested in Marxism and was sympathetic to the radical wing of the Socialist Party. Having dropped out of City College, in 1921 he joined the Workers Council, a Communist organization led by J.B. Salutsky and Alexander Trachtenberg which was sharply critical of the underground form of organization of the Communist Party of America. At the end of December 1921 the Communist Party launched a "legal political party," the Workers Party of America, of which the Workers' Council was a constituent member. Shachtman thereby joined the official Communist movement by virtue of the Workers' Council's dissolution by merger.
Shachtman was persuaded by Martin Abern to move to Chicago to become an organizer for the Communist youth organization and edit the Young Worker. After joining the Communist Party, he rose to become an alternate member of its Central Committee. He edited Labor Defender, a journal of International Labor Defense, which he made the first photographic magazine on the US left. As editor of Labor Defender he fought to save anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti from execution, speaking at street-corner meetings that were broken up again and again by police.
Through most of his time in the Communist Party Shachtman, along with Abern, associated with a group led by James P. Cannon. Central in the party leadership from 1923 to 1925 but pushed aside due to the influence of the Communist International (Comintern), the Cannon group became in 1928 supporters of Leon Trotsky.
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Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)