In Memory of Dorothea Breitman

One of a Generation of Worker Socialists Who Accomplished Much and Whose Legacy
Lives With Us
by George Saunders
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------On Labor Day this year we lost another beloved comrade, Dorothea Breitman (1914
2004), lifelong companion of George Breitmanone of the leading figures in the
American Trotskyist movement. A memorial meeting for Dorothea (whose friends
called her Dotty) is scheduled for December 12 in New York City. Memorial Meeting
for Dorothea Breitman
Sunday, December 12, 2004, 3 p.m.
In the Community Room at 280 Rector Place (The Soundings) at South End Ave.,
Battery Park City
Subway-#1, 9, R or W train to Rector St., walk across the West Side Highway
(pedestrian bridge)
Buses-M9 (from the East Side) or M20 (from the West Side) to South End Avenue
For information, call (917) 439-9054

Dottys passing is, for me, symbolic of a whole generation of working class socialists
who took part in the major class struggles of their time. Such people are far too rare in
todays United States, but before World War II and in the postwar labor upsurge radical,
socialist-minded workers were present by the thousands. The kind of milieu from which
Dotty emerged will be forged again, is being forged now as workers face increasing
deprivation by the capitalist system. From such a milieu come revolutionary socialist
cadres for all seasons, such as Dotty and her comrades were.
Growing up in a working class district of Newark, New Jersey, Dotty was radicalized
during the Great Depression, like so many others, from encounters with the irrational
contradictions of capitalism, which in the 1930s left millions jobless and impoverished
in the midst of plenty. Her father, who had a drug store in a working class
neighborhood of Newark, was driven into bankruptcy, and they moved from the
familys house into an apartment building. In 1935 she attended a meeting of the
Spartacus Youth League, youth group of the Workers Party, the organization of the
American Trotskyists at that time. She wrote that she was brought there by a fellow
who lived in the apartment underneath ours. (These quotes are from a 1993
autobiographical letter that Dotty wrote to Dave Riehle.)
George Breitman was the organizer of the Spartacus group that she joined (two years
older than her and almost as new to revolutionary politics as she was), and their lives
were linked from then on. She described the neighborhood where she and George lived
in their youth as a dead-end type of neighborhood where the poshest apartment house
in town was a half block from this poor, working class section.

From 1935 on, George and Dotty were part of the core cadre of American Trotskyism.
She wrote that after I joined Spartacus my interest in politics strengthened as the
realization grew that although I had great dexterity I did not have the talent or the
ambition necessary to be a concert pianist. [From the age of fourteen she had been
earning good money by giving piano lessons.] By the time we came out of the SP [the
Norman Thomas Socialist Party, which the Trotskyists joined in 1936, to link up with its
radicalizing left wing, and from which Thomas and his moderate, lets-reformcapitalism associates expelled them in 1938] I had determined to give up music and
become a factory worker. (I thought Lenin had convinced me of this, but GB [George
Breitman] thought it was the proletarian nature of the Trotskyist cadre in Newark.)
She also commented, with her own wry humor: Joining the movement made me into a
worker. But in the end I had to work to earn a living. Neither in my piano playing or as
a member of a revolutionary socialist party did I ever have a scintilla of ambition.
Working-class revolutionaries were the major component of the Socialist Workers Party,
which was founded in 1938. George Breitman described the SWPs strong and deep
involvement in the organized working class movement at that time:
Our chief union stronghold was Minneapolis, where our comrades in the Teamsters
union led by [Vincent Raymond] Dunne, [Carl] Skoglund, and Farrell Dobbs were
showing the whole country what a union led by revolutionaries could do. It was our
aspiration in Newark, and I am sure elsewhere, to meet the high standards they were
setting.
Another gain of that time was the organization of our fraction in the maritime industry,
starting on the West Coast. Although he was not at the founding convention, Tom Kerry
was elected to the National Committee at this convention, partly in recognition of his
work in this fraction, which also served as a model for the party. [Frank Lovell was also
a leader of that maritime fraction.]
Most of our other activity was centered in the new CIO unions that were being born at
the timesteel, auto, electrical, and so on. We helped to sign up workers to join the
unions, both in the plants and in their homes; we participated in strikes to win
recognition and bargaining rights; we joined forces with others to gain, extend, or
preserve democracy inside the unions.
The main difference was that the unions then were less bureaucratized and the workers
had a greater interest in their unions than they do today [1982]. That made it easier for
militants to get a hearing from the members in those days.
Dotty left a description of her life as a worker in New Jersey from the late 1930s into
the early 1950s.
Newark was a center for light industry. I earned a living by making radios, light bulbs,
telephone equipment, Flit-gun sprayers. Worked with the Steel Workers Organizing
Committee to organize the shop that made Flit-gun sprayers. (Flit was an anti-mosquito
pesticide.) We won the strike but the plant folded. The boss had another plant in

Pennsylvania (unorganized) and had told us that he would shut the New Jersey plant
down if we won the election.
Also worked at and helped in organizing Western Electric (AT&Ts Kearney plant,
where they manufactured equipment). The local Mafia sent people in and took over the
leadership of the union. It was a natural target for themthe 20,000 workers there fed
their lucrative numbers racket. Also worked at Crucible Steel where I kept track of the
furnace heat. They wanted to train me to be a crane operator, but I was afraid I might
drop a steel bar on someones head. I had many jobs in the electrical industry. One of
the best was working on large radio transmitters (they sent me to school for six months
to learn to read schematics). I was working at the local Westinghouse plant making light
bulbs when I left to go to Trotsky School in 1953.
Trotsky School was a facility at Mountain Spring Camp in New Jersey where a small
number of SWP cadres were selected each year to take six months out of their workday
lives to study history, economics, and philosophy and educate themselves in Marxist
dialectics and historical materialism.
In 1954 the Breitmans moved from New Jersey to Detroit to help rebuild the SWP
branch there. The branch had lost half or more of its membership with the defection of
many trade unionists who had gotten old and lost their revolutionary perspective amid
the postwar prosperity, combined with the rabid anti-Communist atmosphere of the
McCarthy era. This defection is usually referred to as the Cochran split of 1953. The
defecting layer of former trade union activists was led by the Detroit auto workers
leader Bert Cochran. For a thorough account of this experience see the book by James P.
Cannon, Speeches to the Party.
Together with Frank and Sarah Lovell, Al and Bea Hansen, Ed and Rita Shaw, Evelyn
Sell, and a number of others, George and Dotty Breitman built a model branch for
revolutionary socialism in Detroit. The regular Friday Night Socialist Forum and the
establishment of a socialist presence on campus at Wayne State University were
innovations that helped this layer of older working class cadre link up with a new
generation of radicalizing youth, serving as a model for the party nationwide. Young
people active around the issues of the day, especially the civil rights movement from
1955 on, the Cuban revolution from 1959 on, and the antiVietnam War movement that
arose in the 1960s, found in the Breitmans and other experienced SWP cadre wise and
patient teachers who helped orient youth toward the long-term struggle to abolish
capitalism.
Dotty wrote that she was not very happy in Detroit:
After I joined the movement I assumed that I would gladly go wherever the movement
needed me. I would be one of Cannons footloose rebels, like a Wobbly, ready to pack
and go wherever the party needed me. When I went to Baltimore in 1944 I was
lonesome and sad. But it was not New York that I missed. It was GB. [George was
drafted into the army in 1943 and served in France, where he also made contact with
European Trotskyists who in 194546 were seeking to rebuild the Fourth International
in the aftermath of World War II.]

Only after moving to Detrotit did she realize how attached she was to the New York
area. (For her, Newark, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, was like a suburb
of the metropolis.) Dotty described her working life in Detroit, and later in New York,
as follows:
When we moved to Detroit in 1954 I was hoping to get a job at the Square D plant, but
it folded before I arrived in town. Had to learn to be a typist to earn a living. Put in a
long stint at Wayne State University in the cashiers office. Then got into the ITU
(International Typographical Union) when they needed typists for the new processes.
Became a proofreader when we moved to New York in 1967. Retired at age 62 from a
book and job shop where my work consisted of proofreading meaningless brochures
which companies were required to issue by the stock exchange.
The editors of A Tribute to George Breitman (New York, 1987) state that Dorothea
Breitman was an alternate delegate to the founding convention of the Socialist Workers
Party and served on its National Committee, 195662. Expelled in 1984, she is now a
member of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency [FIT]. She was also one of the SWPs
candidates for public office in Michigan a number of times. In her 1993 letter to Dave
Riehle, Dotty wrote more modestly about her role in the SWP and after:
Member of Executive Committee Newark branch 193853. Member Detroit Exec. 54
57. Organizer Baltimore, 1945, and Newark 51 & 52. Alternate member of National
Committee 195459. After expulsion from SWP took care of literature and finances for
New York Local Organizing Committee of FIT. Since dissolution of FIT have taken
over national IV (International Viewpoint) correspondence and subs as well as
continuing to put BIDOM and IV in one bookstore.
In 1967 the party had asked the Breitmans to move to New York City, especially so that
George Breitman could help with the expansion of Pathfinder Press. His editing of
Malcolm Xs speeches, and his own writings about Malcolm, had already made a big
impact. From 1967 to 1984 Dotty was active in the New York branch, but the new
younger comrades of the 60s generation were doing most of the branch work. Now she
had time to pursue a renewed interest in piano playing, when she wasnt helping to care
for George, who was stricken more severely by the arthritis that plagued him much of
his life. Despite that crippling illness he was the editor or the main editorial influence in
bringing out two dozen or more books of Trotskys writings and several volumes of
James P. Cannons speeches and writings, as well as books on the history of the SWP
and the Fourth International.
I had the honor and rare privilege of working with George Breitman on the Trotsky
writings project for most of the 1970s. In connection with the Trotsky work I often
visited George and Dotty at their East Thirteenth St. apartment. Dotty was generally a
cheerful and encouraging presence. She was not prominent as a writer, editor, or
translator, but she had a keen understanding and appreciation of that work. She could be
a harsh and sometimes unfair critic, but she was also quick to express praise, and she
understood the complexities of political life and political pressures.
In more recent times, for example, she told me how much she liked Joe Auciellos style
of writing. It was clear and straightforward, she said, and reminded her of George
Breitmans style. She told me that in the last presidential election, in 2000, she thought

some comrades had wrongly taken Tony Mazzocchis friendly attitude toward Ralph
Nader as an indication that support for Nader was a good idea. She herself did not
support the Nader campaign, which she viewed as essentially a form of bourgeois
politics.
But in 2004, a year of increasingly disabling illness, sorting out such political issues
could no longer be part of her life.
Andy Pollack was right to recall that Dotty was active into the late 1990s with the New
York chapter of the Labor Party; he remembers her characteristically staffing a table of
Labor Party literature together with Frank Lovell. She also helped Frank with the
finances of Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, which he had founded in 1983 after being
expelled from the SWP by an ungrateful, and degenerating, leadership team from the
younger generation led by Jack Barnes. In the 1980s the Lovells and Breitmans again
formed a team, as they had in Detroit, but this time it was centered around the Bulletin,
the FIT, and the fight against the degeneration of the SWP and for the preservation of
Trotskyism. As long as Dotty was physically able she regularly brought a bundle of the
Bulletin to a local New York bookstore.
Dorothy Breitman was part of a group who went to Cuba in 1960 in the early days of
the revolution, as part of a Fair Play for Cuba Committee see for yourself expedition.
Many SWP activists of that timeincluding Sarah Lovell and Jean Tusseytook part
in that trip, which was organized in part (again, if I remember right) by Ed and Rita
Shaw, who were active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee as well as being key
players in the Detroit branch of the Socialist Workers Party, along with the Breitmans
and Lovells. All of the SWP, and us co-thinkers in the Young Socialist Alliance, were
active then in defending the first socialist revolution in the Americas.
For me Dorothys passing is like another sign of the times. Today nearly all of those
outstanding worker Bolsheviks of the then-healthy SWP of 1960, and the entire '60s
decade, have passed from the scene. But how they would have cheered, and been
cheered, by the new voice that has begun to speak out from CubaCelia Hart
defending permanent revolution and reraising the Flag of Coyoacn!
I remember one of the older comrades telling me about a visit by a small group of
American Trotskyists later in the 1960s, or maybe it was in the 70s. At any rate the
influence of the Soviet bureaucracy lay heavy on Cuba then because of its dependence
on Soviet aid in the face of economic blockade and military threat from the capitalist
rulers of the United States. The comrade told me that a Cuban revolutionary they met on
that visit, finding out who they were, insistently repeated: Dont abandon Trotskyism!
Celia Hart learned about the stultifying rule of the bureaucracy when she lived in East
Germany for some six years. When she asked her father, Armando Hart, one of the
leaders of the July 26 Movement and of the Cuban revolutionary government, why the
atmosphere in East Germany was so different from what it was in Cuba, her father took
her to a locked cabinet. There on a book shelf were the three volumes of Isaac
Deutschers biography of Trotsky and Trotskys own work, Revolution Betrayed. Celia
Hart, and Im sure many others in Cuba and around the world, are learning important
lessons from the rich legacy of the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian revolution.
Today Celia Hart is speaking out strong and clear in defense of permanent revolution.

Im sure it would have gladdened the hearts of older comrades like the Breitmans and
Lovells to know that the perspective of revolutionary socialism is not being abandoned.