Robert J. Alexander

Robert Jackson "Bob" Alexander (November 26, 1918 – April 27, 2010) was an American political activist, writer, and academic who spent most of his professional career at Rutgers University. He is best remembered for his pioneering studies on the trade union movement in Latin America and dissident communist political parties, including ground-breaking monographs on the International Communist Right Opposition, Maoism, and the international Trotskyist movement.

Robert J. Alexander was born in Canton, Ohio on November 26, 1918. His family moved to Leonia, New Jersey in 1922, when his father, Ralph S. Alexander accepted a teaching position at Columbia University. Alexander graduated from the public high school in 1936 and matriculated at Columbia, receiving a B.A. in 1940 and a Master of Arts degree the following year. In 1936 Alexander took a senior trip to Spain, which sparked a lifelong interest in Hispanic cultures.

Alexander was drafted in April 1942 into the United States Army Air Corps. He spent 25 months stationed in Great Britain, during which time he spent his off hours speaking to a number of British trade unionists, taking extensive notes of his conversations. These discussions helped Alexander to refine an interview style of research which would later become a hallmark of his academic work.

After demobilization he began work for the State Department. While there, he received a grant from the Office of International Exchange of Persons of the State Department to work on his Ph.D. dissertation on labor relations in Chile, where he conducted hundreds of interviews in virtually all the major factories of the country. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1950.

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