advocates for abandonment of "underground" isolation and adoption of the strategy of constructing a mass Labor Party in America. Pepper aligned with Jay Lovestone's pro-Bukharin faction, as Whittaker Chambers recalled in his memoirs: For the first and only time, I attended a Lovestone caucus meeting... I remember the short, arrogant figure of John Pepper, who, as Joseph Pogany, had been the commissar for war in the Hungarian Soviet Government, and who was now the official representative of the Communist International to the American Communist Party, and Lovestone's "gray eminence." A factional foe, James P. Cannon, later recalled the decisive role which Pepper played in the American Communist movement of the 1920s: He first came to this country in the summer of 1922 and soon began to regulate party affairs with the arbitrary authority of a receiver appointed by the court to take over a bankrupt concern. His only trouble was that this particular concern was by no means bankrupt, and the receiver's operations met with challenge and opposition which limited his tenure to a rather short term. But while it lasted it was a real merry-go-round which left everybody dizzy. * * * We were [later] told in Moscow that he had been shipped to America in one of the moves to break up the raging faction fight in the émigré leadership of the defeated Hungarian Communist Party, and that his assignment was to work with the Bureau of the Hungarian Federation of the party in the U.S. As far as I know, that's all the official authorization he ever had. But Pepper, a manipulator deluxe, was never one to be stopped by the formal rules and regulations which act as restraints on ordinary mortals. The man worked fast. Pepper was made a member of the governing Central Executive Committee of the CPA's "above-ground" arm, the Workers Party of America, a position to which he was re-elected by the 3rd Convention in January 1924. Pepper allied himself closely with the Executive Secretary of the CPA's "legal" wing, C.E. Ruthenberg, and together the two headed one of the two primary factions in the American Communist Party throughout the second half of the 1920s. Not surprisingly, Pepper was loathed by the opposition faction headed by William Z. Foster and James P. Cannon, who managed to have Pepper recalled to Moscow by the Comintern in 1925. Soviet Union Once back in Moscow, Pepper