Obituary Harold Isaacs (1910-1986) HAROLD ISAACS, a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party and author of a classic Trotskyist study of the aborted Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, died at age seventy-five in Boston on July 9, 1986 from complications resulting from heart surgery. In 1976 he retired from his position of Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Isaacs was born in New York City on September 13, 1910, and graduated from Columbia University in 1930. Seeking a career in journalism, he accepted a job as a reporter for the China Press in Shanghai and Peking. There he befriended a South African journalist, later known under the names of Li Fu-jen and Frank Graves, who was sympathetic to Trotskyism but had been collaborating with the Chinese Communists through his association with the author Agnes Smedley. A fluent writer with a sharp mind, Isaacs soon established further secret connections with Trotskyists during an investigation of a rebellion in the Kuomintang.
After being introduced to Smedley, he was able to obtain funds from the Communist Party to establish an English-language paper called China Forum, which he edited for two years. He then issued a public statement, break with the Chinese Stalinists" (published in New International 5, no. 4 [September-October 1934]: 76-78), and returned to the United States. He immediately joined the Workers Party of the United States (WPUS), which had been formed at the end of 1934 from a fusion of the Communist League of America and AJ Muste's American Workers Party.
When the proposal was first made by James P Cannon and Max Shachtman for the WPUS to consider the possibility of carrying out the "French Turn" in the United States, which might involve dissolving and entering the Socialist Party, Isaacs was vehemently opposed. But his personal correspondence with Trotsky from early February to early an anarchist group; from the Liga socialista rivolutzionaria, an organization which defines itself as Trotskyist; and from Medicina democratica (Democratic Medicine). • March 1934 demonstrates a complete turn-about, and he remained a supporter of the CannonShachtman leadership for the rest of the decade.
Under the pseudonym Roberts, Isaacs played an important role in the Trotskyist movement of the late 1930s. When the Trotskyist newspaper Socialist Appeal was launched in late 1937, Isaacs was for several years its real editor - organizing the staff, assigning articles, and editing most of the contributions - despite Max Shachtman's name on the masthead.
In 1938 he published his classic The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, with an introduction by Trotsky. As early as 1935 Isaacs had begun his collaboration on the book with Trotsky, travelling to Norway for a series of discussions in the summer of that year. Both Trotsky's introduction and Isaacs' diary notes from the interviews are available in Leon Trotsky on China (New York: Monad, 1976, pp. 578-91 and 541-46).
Although Isaacs supported Cannon and Trotsky during the 1939-40 split with Shachtman, he was discouraged by the assassination of Trotsky and left the SWP soon afterwards. In 1943 he began a new career as a Newsweek editor and correspondent. In 1951 The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution was reissued with Trotsky's introduction deleted and the revolutionary Marxist conclusions expunged. That same year Isaacs inaugurated his academic career, teaching at Harvard University, the New School for Social Research, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The most famous among Isaacs' subsequent books is Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change (1975). In 1980, Isaacs and his wife Viola returned to China and re-established relations with people they had known in the 1930s. An account of this visit was published as ReEncounters in China (1985).
Alan Wald 27