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American Communist movement since its inception. Pepper, a Hungarian, had arrived in the United States as a member of the three-man Comintern delegation that had supervised the 1922 convention. He had stayed on, using his Comintern status to insinuate himself into the leadership of the American party. Citing the Comintern's support for "united front" tactics, he urged American Communists to move aggressively into mainstream politics. Opposing Ruthenberg and Pepper was the largest faction, led by William Z. Foster, head of the party's labor arm (the Trade Union Educational League), and James Cannon, the party's chairman. Foster and Cannon thought that Communists should make their move into mainstream labor and liberal groups gradually, establishing a solid base of support before attempting to influence these organizations. They regarded Pepper's tactics as too aggressive and liable to provoke a backlash. Ludwig Lore, head of the German immigrants, led a small third faction. Lore took a more leftist position, disdaining the shift away from an explicitly revolutionary position.
Communists sought entry into the third-party movement through an arrangement with leaders of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party. This state party had displaced the Democratic Party in Minnesota as the chief rival to the Republicans in 1918; in 1922 the Farmer-Labor Party had supplied both U.S. senators and two members of the House of Representatives. In 1924 it sought to spread its call for a leftist "cooperative commonwealth" (to be achieved by nonrevolutionary means) beyond Minnesota. William Mahoney, head of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Federation, the organizing body of the Farmer-Labor Party, enthusiastically backed La Follette but tried to nudge the campaign to the left by making him the candidate of a national farmer-labor party rather than of the more centrist CPPA. With that in mind, Mahoney and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Federation called a founding convention for a national farmer-labor party. Mahoney felt that if sufficient trade union, farmer, and independent leftist groups supported the convention, it could shape La Follette's campaign.
Communists approached Mahoney and offered their support. Thanks to its Moscow subsidies (documented in chapter 2, below), the Communist party and its affiliated ethnic, labor, and single-issue front groups employed several hundred organizers. Communist support guaranteed that the Farmer-Labor convention would receive public endorsement from these groups, as well as hundreds of delegates. Mahoney accepted the aid, believing that
Both the Ruthenberg-Pepper and the Foster-Cannon factions agreed to enter the third-party movement via Mahoney's Farmer-Labor convention. Lore considered the idea ill-advised. The disagreement between the dominant factions was simply a matter of tactics. But as document 3 shows, even this minor, domestic-policy issue was referred to Moscow for resolution, on the initiative of the American Communist leadership.
Moscow, Comintern leaders listened to the Americans' arguments and rendered a decision. Their judgment was made not on the basis of American political realities but according to internal Soviet needs. Lenin, who had been gravely ill for more than a year, had died in January 1924, and the fight over who was to succeed him was well under way. Grigory Zinoviev was one of the leading contenders for the position. Leon Trotsky, who had been the early favorite but was
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