Breitman, George, 1916-1986

George Breitman (1916-1986) was born in a working-class neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey in 1916. After graduating from high school, Breitman found work in the Civilian Conservation Corps and later in the Works Progress Administration. By 1935, he had joined the Trotskyist movement as a member of the Spartacus Youth League and then as a member of the Workers Party. He also joined the New Jersey branch of the Workers Alliance of America, an organization that fought for relief during the Great Depression.

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) was founded in 1938 and Breitman was a founding member. In 1941, Breitman assumed editorship of the SWP's weekly newspaper, The Militant. Drafted and sent to France in 1943, he contacted a number of European Trotskyists and helped rebuild the war-battered Fourth International. After his return to the United States, he became editor of The Militant in the late 1940s and early 1950s. From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, Breitman worked as a proofreader and was a member of the International Typographical Union. In this period he was also the leader of the Detroit branch of the SWP. With his wife Dorothea, and Frank and Sarah Lovell, he initiated the Friday Night Socialist Forum (later called the Militant Forum), a weekly series that attracted a broad range of activists from the labor, left, student and African American movements. Through this period, Breitman used several pseudonyms, including Albert Parker, Philip Blake, Anthony Massini, John F. Petrone, and Chester Hofla. Returning to New York in the late 1960s, Breitman assumed responsibility for the SWP's Pathfinder Press. He edited the 14-volume Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1929-1940 (1969-1979), worked on various collections of the writings of James P. Cannon, and edited Malcolm X Speaks (1965). In the course of these activities Breitman corresponded with scholars and added to his collection of Trotskyist documentation.

In the late 1970s Breitman opposed the growing trend among the SWP leadership toward what he viewed as a politics focused on Castro's leadership of the Cuban Communist Party. Among the hundreds expelled from the SWP in the early 1980s, he played a leading role in establishing the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, which sought to unify U.S. supporters of the Fourth International. Breitman died of a heart attack in 1986.