Guide to the Max Shachtman Papers, 1917-1969

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Guide to the Max Shachtman Papers, 1917-1969

1917-1969

http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_103/tam_103.html

Max Shachtman was an author, editor, and a leader (successively) in the communist, Trotskyist, and socialist movements whose views helped shape the outlook of many progressive and liberal anti-communist intellectuals and labor leaders. Shachtman was a Polish-Jewish immigrant interested in socialist reform and the communist movement, but in 1928, was expelled from the Communist Party after adopting Trotsky's views. In 1929 he became a leader of the Communist League of America and lead a splinter group, the Workers Party (later the Independent Socialist League) who had differences with the party establishment's uncritical view of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. During the 1950s, Shachtman developed the political strategy known as 'realignment,' which held that U.S. socialists should ally themselves with the leadership of the labor movement and together work to make the Democratic Party into a social democratic party. During the 1960s, Shachtman began a history of the Communist International, which remained unfinished at his death in 1972. The papers include international organizational bulletins, correspondence, notes, clippings, cartoons, lithographs and manuscripts, documenting both his political and literary activities. Also included are research notes for his history of the Communist International, personal correspondence, an unpublished manuscript of Alfred Rosmer's memoirs of John Reed and a collection of German leaflets tracing the debate between the Nazis, the Communist Party, the Social Democrats and the German Trotskyists. Prominent correspondents include Norman Thomas, Natalia Sedova Trotsky, Erich Fromm, A.J. Muste and Max Eastman.

31.5 Linear Feet (60 boxes)

eng, Latn

Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives

Information

SNAC Resource ID: 6331353

Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives

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