I wouldn't exactly call Zumoff prominent in the real world, but having a featured title at Haymarket is a real accomplishment over here, especially if you never spent time in the ISO. Sorta like a step below getting published by Verso but a step up from getting published by AK Press. So definitely the sparts most prominent author. It will likely be the only long book he ever writes because he literally worked on it for twenty years. When I knew him in the late 90s he was working on it and obsessed with the topic, and it didn't get published until like 2015 or something like that. Its worth a read if you're interested at all in the Comintern or the US left. Zumoff wasn't a very effective disrupter of meetings though; he came across as someone you'd never want to talk to afterwards. Arrogant, rude, shouty, annoying, etc. Was actually fun to argue with one-on-one tho.
I'm an ex-pat who now lives in the States. I can't remember the exact year (I'd have to look it up) but I remember when the Sparts turned up
cough en masse to a Bryan Palmer meeting at the Tamiment Library to heckle him about one of his books about James Cannon. I should have brought popcorn. It was funny.
I probably already mentioned it on this thread but I remember being shocked when I stumbled across a couple of Sparts outside Brooklyn College selling their wares. It must have been about 12 or 13 years. It was funny 'cos they were both German. (Funny 'cos when you stumbled across Sparts in London more often than not, they'd be American.)
Edit:
Apologies to the Sparts. I'd totally misremembered that Bryan Palmer meeting. The acrimony from them to him was after the meeting out of his earshot (I heard it though). They were as good as gold during the meeting itself.
And it turns out the meeting was in 2007. Fuck, where have all the bastard years gone? (Two pain in the arse kids, that's where they've gone). I only knew the year 'cos it turned out I blogged about it at the time. Blogs, now I'm really showing my age.
Cut and pasted below is said blog post. Apologies in advance for the shit jokes and the sawdust prose. I'm not a writer:
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
New York Stories
Bryan Palmer speaks at NYU Louis Proyect carries a report of a meeting that I attended at the Tamiment library a few weeks back. I did take some notes at the meeting but being the lazy bastard that I am, I never got round to writing them up. In truth, the notes were more for my personal use, as it's not a period or political tradition I pretend to know a lot about.
Bryan Palmer, a Canadian Labor Historian, has recently published the first volume in what will be a major biography of James P. Cannon, the father of American Trotskyism. Speaking with ease before an audience of about 160/170 people, Palmer's central point for Trotskyist activists today was that Cannon was at his best when he engaged in broad work and the Leninist left in America that is covered in this volume [the book finishes in 1928 when Cannon was expelled from the American CP and the CI for his siding with Trotsky] was at its most productive when undertaking labor defence work in the mid to late twenties that allowed itself to break out of the self-imposed ghetto that the American Comminust movement had placed itself because of the warring factions disagreeing on the question of an open versus an underground party in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the Palmer raids.
As I say there was an impressive turnout of about 160/170 people at the meeting on what was a cold Friday night. The majority of the audience could be loosely termed as being part of the '68 generation and, believe it or not, I was one of the younger ones in attendance.
Naturally being a meeting on Cannon in the labor history library at NYU it was anything but a dry academic lecture. The meeting had been sponsored by - I think - five different Leninist organizations, ranging from the Sparts to the Freedom Socialist Party to the International Bolshevik Tendency through to Socialist Action (I will have missed someone out), and after Palmer's talk part of the meeting was made up of prepared statements from those groups sponsoring the meeting on why they alone were the true Trotskyist organization in the room
cough, I'm saying nothing, and why all the other groups were attending under false pretences. These contributions were quickly followed by prepared speeches from the floor delivered in an equally acerbic fashion from those groups and individuals who hadn't got around to co-sponsoring the event.
It actually didn't get as bitter or as acrimonious as I was expecting [they were pussycats in comparison to the current political punch up between Galloway and the SWP], but that's perhaps because the Sparts were actually the most heavily represented in the audience and were therefore on their best behaviour during the course of the meeting, and because - as Louis mentions - the audience fell in love with the contribution from 91 year old Lillian Pollak.
Pollak joined the Trotskyist movement in the early thirties and worked alongside Cannon, Bert Cochran and other 'names' from the early movement. You just knew that if she had wanted to she could have taken the meeting over with her stories of the movement from that period.
This half-baked Menshevik enjoyed the meeting for all its denunciations and vanguardist verbiage, and it was nice that it ended on the warm fuzzy feeling of the IBT, the Sparts and Jan Norden's Internationalist Group briefly reuniting around the warm glow of the political memories of someone from the thirties, talking of a period untainted by Third Campism and Pabloism.
One final thought, though: what was with the six busts of Eugene Debs in the library? Did the library not get the memo with that quote* from Debs?