Historical/Biographical Note

Myra Tanner Weiss was born May 17, 1916. She joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1935 while attending the University of Utah. She moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s, at which time she organized agricultural and cannery workers. She also helped establish the SWP in Los Angeles where she met another party organizer, Murry Weiss [born Morris, in Chicago, September 9, 1915, son of Joseph and Freida; died December 26, 1981] whom she later married. Tanner Weiss ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 1945 and 1949. The Weisses moved to New York City in 1953 where Murry Weiss edited the Socialist Workers Party's newspaper The Militant. Running with Presidential candidate Farrell Dobbs, Myra Tanner Weiss was the Socialist Workers Party's Vice Presidential candidate in 1952, 1956, and 1960. Together with her husband she organized the School for Marxist Education in New York. Tanner Weiss left the SWP in the early 1960's because she thought the party had undergone a 'gross bureaucratization'. According to records of the New York local branch of the SWP Myra Tanner Weiss would no longer be considered a member of the Party as of October 1966. She did however remain politically active and became involved with the New York Socialist Feminists and the Committee for a Revolutionary Socialist Party (CRSP). Tanner Weiss received a masters degree in political science from New York University in 1972. She subsequently worked as a proof reader. She died on September 13, 1997.