Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  In fact, Merton suggested that Columbia's motto—In lumine tuo videbimus lumen— “might profitably be changed to: In lumine Randall videbimus Dewey” (here referring to John Dewey and to another influential Columbia philosophy professor, John Herman Randall).33

  Dewey's Politics

  Clearly, John Dewey's politics were on the left—but exactly how far to the left has long been a matter of dispute.

  One source of the confusion is that much of his written work was ambiguous. Oliver Wendell Holmes called Dewey's writing “inarticulate.” Jacques Maritain said the innumerable “ambiguities” in Dewey's work fostered “a disastrous confusion of ideas.” Lionel Trilling listened to a Dewey lecture at Columbia and “found him incomprehensible.”34 Political scientist Leo R. Ward noted that “it is difficult to say for sure in what Dewey believed.”35 All of this is true.

  Here Dewey had much in common with Karl Marx. As with Marx, a cottage industry arose in trying to ascertain what Dewey meant; when he was being practical or abstract; what kind of a blueprint, if any, he left for his form of utopia; and the degree to which the implementers of his vague concepts had successfully executed his ideas.

  Dewey and Marx also shared a connection to Hegel, notes William Brooks, a scholar at Canada's St. Lawrence Institute for the Advancement of Learning. Marx drew from the German philosopher his view of the dialectic. Dewey, too, was influenced by Hegel, and he created his own dialectic—educational where Marx's was economic. Dewey's educational dialectic owed a debt not just to Hegel but also to Marx himself, Brooks points out: “Dewey found Marxism useful, if not indispensable, in the formulation of his educational theories.”

  Like Marx, Dewey was convinced that economics was central to determining the course of society and history. He also indicated that he thought Marx had correctly applied Hegel's dialectic to the realm of economics. “We are in for some kind of socialism, call it whatever name we please,” averred Dewey. “And no matter what it will be called when it is realized”—some called it socialism, some called it communism—“economic determinism is now a fact, not a theory.”36

  Of course, Dewey and Marx were united in their hostility to religion, too. According to Brooks, Dewey believed that schools needed to be liberated from religious influences in order to demonstrate that it was not Providence but man's labor that was responsible for progress. His apostles would take up the charge of banning religion from public schools.

  Dewey, like so many other leftists of the era, closely considered Marxism and was influenced by it to a substantial degree. He had many Marxist sympathies and might have been a Marxist for a period. As for the Communist movement, he was an intimate of many of the chief figures involved and fell in with a number of front groups.

  True, for various reasons (as we shall see) this man of the Left ended up repudiating official Communism. But his sympathies placed him in a number of socialist groups—including, reportedly, the Socialist Party.37 And as a result he was in position to be suckered by the Communists into supporting their causes.38

  Whatever John Dewey's politics actually were, he was, indisputably, a dupe.

  Embracing Comrade Dewey

  For a time, at least, John Dewey and the Bolsheviks formed a mutual-admiration society. His ideas influenced the Bolsheviks from the very start of their revolution. In fact, the Soviets embraced Dewey's ideas for their schools before American liberals did. As William Brickman, a colleague at Columbia's Teachers College, wrote in a gushing but authoritative introduction to Dewey's book Impressions of Soviet Russia, “The number of translations of Dewey's works was quite impressive during the initial decade [of the Russian Revolution].”39

  No question about that. The Bolsheviks wasted no time getting John Dewey's works into Russian. In 1918, only three years after it was published in the United States, Dewey's Schools of Tomorrow was published in Moscow.40 Given what was happening in Russia at the time, this is staggering. The Bolshevik Revolution had begun only months earlier and the devastating Russian Civil War was in full swing. Millions of people were on the verge of poverty, starvation, and death by war and execution. What's more, the Bolsheviks were broke; they did not have the money to be translating American books into Russian. The fact that they managed to make Dewey's work such a high priority at that perilous moment is compelling testimony to how much they emphasized education as the way to build the Communist state, and to how utterly indispensable Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin considered Dewey's teachings.

  Only a year after Schools of Tomorrow was published came a Russian translation of Dewey's How We Think (1919) and then, in 1920, The School and Society.41 These, too, came during the misery of the Russian Civil War (1918–21), which, according to historian W. Bruce Lincoln, snuffed out the lives of seven million men, women, and children.42 Dewey's ideas were apparently judged as crucial to the revolution as any weapon in the arsenal of the Red Army.

  And so several more translations immediately followed, including a big one: in 1921, even before the civil war had ended, the Soviet government published a sixty-two-page pamphlet excerpted from Dewey's Democracy and Education.43

  Remember, Democracy and Education stands as John Dewey's most significant work. It remains the most common choice of schools of education as an introduction to Dewey's thought. It became the bible of Columbia Teachers College, and a guidepost for educational programs across the country. It was the book in which the philosopher himself said he attempted to summarize his “entire philosophical position.”44 Liberals and progressives adore the book; it is one of the classics in their movement.

  And it was a Bolshevik favorite.

  Dewey's impact on the Soviet Union was immediate and pervasive. A witness to this was Anna Louise Strong, who worked and lived in the USSR in the early 1920s and closely observed Soviet education.45 Strong was one of the eight contributing editors to the flagship publication of the front group Friends of the Soviet Union. She was close to Corliss Lamont. She was (in the words of the U.S. Congress) “for years one of the most active agents for the Communist International.”46 She was a splendid duper of Protestant clergymen in particular.47 Even Corliss and Margaret Lamont could not avoid calling Strong an “American supporter of the Communist cause.” She was author of the pamphlet “The Soviets Conquer Wheat” and coeditor of the English-language Moscow Daily News, along with “Michael Borodin,” whom the Lamonts identified in their book only as “of Chinese fame.”48 In fact, Mikhail Borodin was widely known in Communist circles as “Stalin's Man in China,” having helped forge the Chinese Marxist movement in the 1920s.49 (This was another of those crucial facts the Lamonts neglected to mention to their readers.)

  Note Strong's testimony on Dewey's impact on the Soviets: contemporary school reform in Stalin's state, she said, was “modeled more on the Dewey ideas of education than on anything else we have in America. Every new book by Dewey is seized and early translated into Russian for consultation. Then they make their own additions.”50

  The Soviets themselves said this quite candidly. In a 1929 book, Albert P. Pinkevich, rector of the Second State University of Moscow, stated that Dewey had a “tremendous influence” on Soviet education. Pinkevich compared Dewey's impact to that of leading educators in Germany, where Marxism was particularly prevalent; German was often the first Western language of translation for Soviet documents. Compared to even the Germans, “Dewey comes infinitely closer to Marx and the Russian communists,” asserted Pinkevich.51

  The Soviets were lavish in their praise of Dewey. Professor Stanislav T. Shatskii, a leading Soviet educational “reformer,” told Dewey's close Columbia colleague Thomas Woody that he “drew greatest assistance” from Dewey and was “deeply impressed by his ‘philosophy of pragmatism.’”52 It was Shatskii who translated Dewey's magnum opus, Democracy and Education, into Russian for the Soviet pamphlet.

  Was Dewey embarrassed to be heartily embraced by totalitarians? Not at all. As his admiring colleague William Brickman discerned, “This was fu
lsome praise indeed for Dewey.”53

  The Soviets reached out to Dewey directly to convey their praise. In 1928 Professor A. G. Kalashnikov of the pedagogical department of Moscow Technical University sent Dewey a two-volume set of the most recent Soviet Pedagogical Encyclopedia, which owed a great debt to Dewey's progressive work.54 Kalashnikov included a warm personal note to Dewey that read, “Your works, especially ‘School and Society’ and ‘The School and the Child,’ have very much influenced the development of the Russian pedagogy and in the first years of [the] revolution you were one of the most renowned writers.” The “concrete shapes of pedagogical practice” that Dewey had developed, wrote an appreciative Kalashnikov, “will be for a long time the aim of our tendencies.”55

  VIP

  In sum, the apparatchiks commandeering the Soviet educational bureaucracy were dazzled by John Dewey. Surely, too, they appreciated his evolving view of the menace of religion to young people.

  Soviet officials practically begged Dewey to come pay them a visit—a special visit. This was a man, after all, who merited VIP treatment. He had already helped the Bolsheviks tremendously with their education system. Now they sensed that the Columbia professor could be an even bigger help: here was a progressive who could communicate the Soviets’ worldview to America and who, more than that, could help them with some major political objectives in Washington, D.C.—well beyond the province of education.

  The Kremlin needed John Dewey to come to the USSR to be shown around. Precisely that would happen in the summer of 1928.

  JOHN DEWEY'S LONG, STRANGE TRIP

  By 1928 John Dewey could no longer resist the blandishments of the Soviet Union. That summer he embarked on a pilgrimage to the USSR. He set sail as part of an unofficial delegation of twenty-five American educators from various universities, including, naturally, Columbia Teachers College, where colleagues like Dr. J. McKeen Cattell joined the voyage. According to State Department records, Dewey and crew launched on June 23; they would return home on or around July 20.1

  Dewey should have known the obvious: the purpose of these invitations from the Soviet government was to try to dupe high-level American leftist intellectuals into favorable impressions of the Great Experiment, and then to enlist them in a campaign to get the U.S. government to officially recognize Stalin's dystopia. The progressives would be paraded from Potemkin village to Potemkin village in the hopes that they would share their exciting experiences with the masses back home.

  But Dewey downplayed the potential for political exploitation, even scoffing at the paranoia of those who suggested it. In his account of the trip, he paused to acknowledge that some “kindly friends” had tried to warn him “against being fooled by being taken to see show places.” This warning “appears humorous in retrospect,” he said.2 Although the Soviets were masters of propaganda and manipulation—as Dewey himself recorded in his notes—he explained that they “had enough to do on their own account without bothering to set up show establishments to impress a few hundred—or even thousand—tourists.”3

  This was disingenuous at best. Dewey knew he was no mere tourist, and neither were the nearly two dozen university presidents and experts of American higher education traveling with him on this guided tour. The Bolsheviks saw him as the world's preeminent educator, a fact conveyed to Dewey quite clearly.

  Perhaps to spare himself the charge of extreme gullibility, Dewey conceded in his next breath that indeed certain “places and institutions … were ‘shown’ us,” and that they may well have been “the best of their kind.” But he saw no manipulation there; these places and institutions were merely “representative of what the new regime is trying to do.”4

  When Dewey got back to America, he did not disappoint the Soviets. Between November and December the professor filed a six-part series of glowing reports in The New Republic. The next year these epistles to the faithful and seekers alike were eventually compiled into a book, Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World.5

  That book, more than any allegation that the philosopher-educator was a Marxist, was the most damning indictment of Dewey's views on the USSR. What it reported was nothing short of breathtaking.

  Love That Leningrad

  Dewey's dispatches on Russia were evocative and full of colorful detail, at times almost lyrical. He was occasionally ambivalent about his subject, uncertain whether to commend or criticize the Bolshevik experiment. But his hesitation typically gave way to the former—usually quite easily.

  Consider, for example, the very first lines of his first epistle. As with the Lamonts, Dewey's first staged stop was at Leningrad. The city had been renamed in 1924, after having been previously called Petrograd (1914) and, historically, St. Petersburg. “The alteration of Petrograd into Leningrad is without question a symbol,” began Dewey, “but the mind wavers in deciding of what.” On one hand, he mused, “it seems to mark a consummation, a kind of completed transmigration of souls. Upon other occasions, one can imagine it a species of mordant irony.”6

  The mordant irony, of course, was that the decaying city was a fitting tribute to the decaying corpse of Vladimir Lenin. But Dewey dismissed that idea as something in which an “enemy” of the Bolsheviks would find “malicious satisfaction.” He was much more charitable. Though the city was admittedly “unkempt,” he sensed an “impression of movement, vitality, energy. The people go about as if some mighty and oppressive load had been removed, as if they were newly awakened to the consciousness of released energies.”7

  In Dewey's mind, the Bolsheviks had thoroughly liberated the Russian people. He could see it himself. Then again, he was on a staged tour. He should have expected nothing else from a totalitarian country that would have shielded from him—or jailed—any poor soul (or dissident) who might have begged him for a minute of concealed conversation or a nugget of bread.

  Here again he expressed momentary hesitation. “I am willing to believe what I have read,” he said, “that there is a multitude of men and women in Russia who live in immured and depressed misery, just as there is a multitude in exile.” But he quickly countered that there was another “multitude,” those “of a new life,” a new multitude that “walks the streets, gathers in parks, clubs, theaters, frequents museums.” Those people, this “reality,” as he called it, invigorated Dewey. They constituted not only “the present and the future” but also “the essence of the Revolution in its release of courage, energy and confidence in life.”8

  Dewey almost swooned: “My mind was in a whirl of new impressions in those early days in Leningrad. Readjustment was difficult, and I lived somewhat dazed.”9

  Critics of the Soviets had it all wrong, he suggested. “I have heard altogether too much about Communism, about the Third International [the Comintern], and altogether too little about the Revolution,” he wrote. Never mind the millions of lives claimed in that Revolution; to Dewey, the Bolsheviks had ushered in not any sort of dangerous dictatorship, but rather a “revolution of heart and mind” and a “liberation of a people to consciousness of themselves as a determining power in the shaping of their ultimate fate.”10

  “Such a conclusion may seem absurd,” he added. True enough—the Bolsheviks’ brutal, unelected dictatorship was constructing history's vastest system of what Lenin and Trotsky termed “concentration camps.” Yet Dewey simply compounded the absurdity by invoking a Marxist refrain. The most important reality, he claimed, was that the “dialectic of history” was happening right under everyone's nose. Here, John Dewey, student of the Hegelian dialectic, seemed to endorse the basic Bolshevik worldview:

  My conviction is unshaken that this phase of affairs [in Russia] is secondary in importance to something else that can only be termed a revolution. That the existing state of affairs is not Communism but a transition to it; that in the dialectic of history the function of Bolshevism is to annul itself; that the dictatorship of the proletariat is but an aspect of class-war, the antithesis to the thesis of the dictatorship of bourgeoi
s capitalism existing in other countries; that it is destined to disappear in a new synthesis.11

  These, wrote Dewey, “are things the Communists themselves tell us. The present state … is necessarily a state of transition to the exact goal prescribed by the Marxian philosophy of history.”12

  The Columbia professor was absolutely right in his understanding of Marxist theory and philosophy of history. Yes, the current phase of a revolution did not matter as much as the direction and end goal; as Marx himself argued, it was merely a way-station, a transition to the eventual world revolution that would usher in a classless society. But Dewey was not simply describing Marxist theory; he seemed to be endorsing it—though, as usual, his language made him hard to pin down.

  Sometimes Dewey's reports contradicted themselves. For example, he said that the Russian people “are well nourished” and that “there are no marked signs of distress,” though he was forced to acknowledge that “fairly long lines are seen waiting at some shops, especially where food is sold,” and that items in store windows were “usually of the quality associated with cheap bazaars.”13