Cannon traveled there to provide political guidance. This success helped pave the way for a fusion of the Communist League of America with A. J. Muste's American Workers Party at the end of 1934. The new organization was called the Workers Party of the United States and its newspaper was called the New Militant.
In the spring of 1936 Cannon lead the Trotskyists into the Socialist Party and then moved to California where he edited the Socialist Party paper Labour Action. When the Trotskyists were expelled from the Socialist Party in mid-1937, Cannon returned to New York. The Trotskyists founded the Socialist Workers Party in January 1938 with Cannon as national
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secretary. The following autumn he participated in the founding of the Fourth International in Paris and was elected to the International Executive Committee. The Trotskyist movement had by now grown to over a thousand and had considerable authority in certain sections of the labor movement as well as among New York intellectuals grouped around the literary magazine Partisan Review.
In the fall of 1939 a dispute erupted between factions led by Shachtman and Cannon over questions relating to actions
In addition to having the unique capacity to hold a small party together for several decades under difficult circumstances, Cannon was a talented populizer of socialist ideas in his lectures and writings. This can be seen in a collection of his public talks, speeches for socialism (New York: Merit, 1971), and of his journalism, Notebook of an Agitator
(New York: Pioneer, 1958). Additional information about Cannon can be found in the following books: Les Evans, editor, James P. Cannon as We Knew Him (New York: Pathfinder, 1976); and Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking 1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Viking, 1960).