Felix Morrow

Felix Morrow was born Felix Mayrowitz to an Orthodox Jewish family in 1906 in New York City. His parents, emigrants from Eastern Europe, ran a small grocery store in the city. Morrow later recalled his upbringing in a letter to historian Alan Wald: I came from a Hassidic family, but my father at the age of 15 had fled in disillusionment from the house of the Chortkow Rebbe where his father was a gabbai (rabbai's assistant). But my mother remained religious and I had a traditional Jewish education. In the U.S., both of Felix Mayrowitz's parents had become socialists and Felix had been a participant in the youth section of the Socialist Party of America from an early age, beginning with the Junior division of the Young People's Socialist League. At age 16, Felix was employed as a reporter by the Brooklyn Daily Times. He later went to work for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, using his paychecks there to help finance his education at New York University (NYU). ==Career==

Communism CPUSA In 1931, the young graduate student applied for membership in the Communist Party USA in the wake of his friend Solow. SWP, WP The American Trotskyist movement underwent a complicated series of debates and splits in the 1930s: The CLA merged with the Workers Party of the United States in 1934, which then party dissolved into the Socialist Party of America in 1936. Shortly after, the Trostkyist faction of SPA (including Morrow) split to form the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). From 1940, Morrow served as editor of the SWP's paper The Militant, and its theoretical journal "Fourth International." In 1945 he was displaced by E R Frank (Bert Cochran) on the maneuvers of James P. Cannon and the SWP majority who opposed his views on perspectives for European Trotskyists at the mid-war point. Morrow was one of 18 SWP leaders, including the party's National Secretary, James P. Cannon, imprisoned under the Smith Act during the Second World War, receiving a 16-month sentence. (see ). In 1943 he formed a faction, with Albert Goldman which challenged the SWP's "orthodox" catastrophic perspective. Morrow and Goldman projected the likelihood of a prolonged period of bourgeois democracy in western Europe and emphasised the need for democratic and transitional demands against the maximalism advocated by the majority. Although he was expelled from the SWP in 1946 for "unauthorised collaboration" with Shachtman's Workers Party, he did not join Shachtman, and drifted out of left-wing politics. Publishing In the early 1950s, with the help of friends Meyer Schapiro and Elliot Cohen, Morrow was hired by Schocken Books, working first as salesman and soon as a vice president there. In the 1970s University Books was sold to the publisher Lyle Stuart, who continued to publish books under the imprint along with his own. Death Morrow died on May 28, 1988. He was survived by two daughters, a son, and two grandchildren. He lost another son to a car accident in 1969. ==Writings==

Morrow's most important work was Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain on the Spanish Civil War. • The Bonus March (New York, International Publishers, 1932) • • • • ==References==