SHERRY MANGAN
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
The Fourth International is in mourning. Sherry Mangan, former member of the international Secretariat and member of the International Executive Committee, died on the 24th June, 1961, at the age of 57.
Born of a bourgeois American family, he studied at Harvard University. He won a certain reputation in America literature and demonstrated a real journalistic talent, when, in the years of crisis between the two World Wars, he turned his attention to social problems and the workers' movement. His general temperament and combativity rapidly led him to the American Trotskyist organisation of the Fourth International. Unlike a certain number of intellectuals of his country, he remained loyal until his last breath to the program and organization of the World Socialist Revolution.
In 1940, being in Paris as the correspondent of an American newspaper, he helped the underground activity of the French section of the Fourth International and was therefore expelled from France by the Petain Government. He then used the opportunities offered by his work as a journalist to help the Fourth International ensure liason during the War, despite the controls and censorship. At the end of the war, he settled in Paris and was elected a member of the European Secretariat, and then of the International Secretariat. He was the main author of the Statutes of the Fourth International adopted at the Second World Congress in 1948.
As he was European correspondent for the American review, "Fortune", he was called before
3 Macarthy's Un-American Activities Committee. In front of this Committee, he courageously asserted his communist convictions and was therefore deprived of his job.
His health was already bad and he was obliged to interrupt his political activity, though always staying in the closest continual contact with the International.
During the crisis in 1953 in which the SWI International were opposed to each other, an despite the numerous links he had with the SWP, he stood fully by the side of the International, although always putting his utmost efforts into trying to find a way to end this crisis.
Around this period, he remained several years in Bolivia, living with the miners, and writing a remarkable novel on their life, which has not as yet been published.
Although weakened by his illness, he took up again his place and his work in the International Secretariat of the Fourth International at the Fifth World Congress in 1957. He did his share of the activity in defense of the Algerian Revolution and he greatly helped in the issuing of the English language edition of the theoretical organ of the Fourth International. He continued his work up to the last moment, for this issue of the "Fourth nternational".
The Fourth International will keep alive the memory of his unlimited devotion to the cause of the workers and humanity. When the time comes we will not fail to see that his memory is rightly honoured by the American proletariat.
ACTIVIST MILICIANO
As he felt the wall against his back and against the back of his head, he thought: The glint of sun I see on those rifles is the last glint of sun I shall see on rifles, or on anything else.
The thought seemed to him too personal for this moment, which - with three hundred others coming after
SHERRY MANGAN