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James Cannon and Felix Morrow, with a bust of Trotsky.

Felix Morrow (1906 - 1988) US politician, Communist.

Morrow was born Felix Mayrowitz to an Orthodox Jewish family on June, 1906 in New York City. In a letter to Wald, Morrow talks about his father's Hassidic upbringing and his disillusionment with the movement:

"I came from a Hassidic family, but my father at the age of 15 had feld in disillusionment from the house of the Chortkow Rebbe where his father was a gabbai. But my mother remained religious and I had a traditional Jewish education"[1].

Felix Morrow was for many years a leading figure in American Trotskyism, best known for his book Revolution and Counter-Revolution In Spain. He joined the Communist League of America in 1933 and after Max Shachtman's minority split in 1940, served as editor of the Socialist Workers Party's paper, the Militant.

Morrow was one of 18 SWP leaders, including James P. Cannon, imprisoned under the Smith Act during the Second World War.

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 politics to the right.

In the 1960s Morrow headed the Causeway Books publishing house, which specialized in books on the Western occult tradition. He contributed an introduction to The Romance of Sorcery by Sax Rohmer published by Causeway, the only non-fiction work by Rohmer, who is best known as the creator of the Fu Manchu novels.

[1]Menorah group moves left in JEWISH SOCIAL STUDIES, summer-fall, 1976. p.292

• Felix Morrow Archive
• The Militant, weekly paper of the Socialist Workers Party
• Pathfinder Books, the bookstore of the Socialist Workers Party