by Paul Kengor
And yet Dewey's service to the Soviet cause was not over. He went further on the recognition issue: in late January 1933 the professor signed a letter urging the American president-elect, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to recognize Russia. Some eight hundred professors and university presidents joined Dewey in signing the letter, including the usual suspects from Columbia—Carlos Israels, R. G. Tugwell, and George Counts, all of whom had traveled to the Soviet Union with Paul Douglas aboard the SS President Roosevelt in 1927.41 Naturally, too, Corliss Lamont heartily supported all these efforts (and then some), and Margaret Lamont organized a separate committee to recognize Russia, generating yet more petitions. Women were her chief target, and she managed to get such well-known figures as Jane Addams and Amelia Earhart to sign on.42 The Potemkin Progressives had launched an all-out effort for Stalin's top priority. They were truly doing Stalin's legwork.
Ironically, this influential letter from the American academy came right as news emerged that the Soviet central-planner-in-chief was collectivizing agriculture in the North Caucasus, an utterly disastrous project that would usher in one of the worst episodes of mass starvation in human history. The progressives, however, viewed Stalin's intentions with considerable optimism. Dewey—and those of similar mind—saw the coming collectivization as quite promising, possibly the future for economic development.43
In short, then, John Dewey's insights on Bolshevik Russia from roughly 1928 to 1933 were not merely naïve but appalling. What explains his credulity?
To the best of our knowledge, he was not a member of the Communist Party, nor was he even a small “c” communist.44 This seems true despite his repeated expressions of admiration and sympathy for Marxist ideas. Dewey was far Left but not a communist, not a member of CPUSA, and not under the control of the party.
He was, however, most definitely a dupe, and in that capacity he provided invaluable aid to the Soviets.
Yet there is more to John Dewey's story. Like many duped leftists, he moved in and out of the “dupe” category—sometimes suckered, other times not. He was fooled for a while, but, like certain other leftists, he found redemption in the truth—namely, the truth about Stalin. As with so many leftists, it would take some time. For all their brilliance, the enlightened professors were not exactly quick studies. For all their celebrated cynicism and erudition, they were extremely gullible—at least when it came to their “friends” on the left.
Dewey, nonetheless, would come around. He would eventually reject what a later, savvier intellectual, Vaclav Havel, would call “the communist culture of the lie.”
THE REDEMPTION OF PROFESSOR DEWEY
Although the swift rebuke of John Dewey's “impressions” of the Soviet Union did not immediately change the educator's views, the backlash may have prompted him to revisit his conclusions about the Great Experiment. In 1934, the first year of Stalin's Great Purge, Dr. Dewey delivered another written surprise, but this one far more grounded in reality.
In April of that year he published a short but sweet essay called “Why I Am Not a Communist” in Modern Monthly; soon thereafter it was reprinted in hardcover in a printed symposium edited by the leftist intellectual Sidney Hook.1 Dewey actually wrote the piece in 1933, and said it was the culmination of “reservations” that had begun to swirl in his mind back in 1931.2
It was clear from the essay that Dewey's problems were not so much with “communism” as a philosophy as with “Communism, official Communism, spelt with a capital letter,” as the professor put it. In other words, he objected to how Soviet Russia was putting the ideology put into practice.
The despiser of “dogma” also took umbrage at the dogmatism of a regime that had become “the dictatorship of the proletariat and over the proletariat.” This dictatorship and “the suppression of the civil liberties of all non-proletarian minorities” had become “integral parts of the standard Communist faith and dogma,” Dewey wrote. There was, in fact, an “excess of dogma and indoctrination” under Communism.
He was realizing what many anti-Communists (like Ronald Reagan) would later point out: atheistic Communism was, ironically, like a religion to the Marxist faithful.
Dewey finally recognized what Vladimir Lenin had preached from the outset: the inevitability of class war, the need for violent revolution, party infallibility, and the use of lying and deception to achieve the party's purposes. “One of the reasons I am not a Communist,” he explained, “is that the emotional tone and methods of discussion and dispute which seem to accompany Communism at present are extremely repugnant to me.” He said that Communists, and especially “Communist spokesmen,” harbored a “systematic, persistent and seemingly intentional disregard” for “fair play” and “elementary honesty in the representation of facts.” The Communists believed that “the end justifies the use of any means,” he concluded. Some fifty years later Ronald Reagan would say much the same thing in his first presidential press conference—to the guffaws of liberals who derided him for his supposedly crass anti-Communism. The Soviets, Reagan said, “reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain” their goal of “world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state.”3
The ends-justify-the-means approach, Dewey said, also applied to how the Communists treated their opponents and to how they used liberals—that is, their dupes. The Soviets engaged in “hysteria” in “their denunciations,” attempted “character assassination of their opponents,” and employed a “policy of ‘rule or ruin.’” Then, surely thinking of how he and his duped liberal friends had been treated, he condemned the Communists’ “misrepresentation of the views of the ‘liberals’ to whom they also appeal for aid in their defense campaigns.”
John Dewey, erstwhile sucker, had wised up.
The Dewey Commission
From there, the education of John Dewey continued its upward trajectory. Like many leftists of his generation, he came to see the sheer brutality of the Soviet system. In the mid-1930s millions were killed in Stalin's Great Purge, in the gulags, and in the Ukraine's forced famine. For Dewey, the most galling example of Soviet injustice came in the Moscow show trials.
While Stalin simply stacked kulaks in boxcars and shipped them off to the gulag, he used elaborate “show trials” to eliminate political and military rivals. The idea was to accord these higher-profile figures some semblance of apparent justice—though the trials were rigged, with the verdict predetermined. It was more farce—the Potemkin village taken into the courtroom.
One of the earliest victims of these show trials was Pavel P. Blonskii, with whom Dewey was quite familiar. Blonskii had been one of Dewey's advocates on Soviet education in the 1920s. Blonskii was purged in 1931, well before Stalin really ramped up the killing machine.4
But it was Stalin's actions toward Leon Trotsky that really set off Dewey. In December 1927 Stalin had exiled Trotsky—his chief competitor as Lenin's former second in command—to Alma Ata, Kazakhstan, in Soviet Central Asia. This move had the crucial effect of splitting the international Communist movement into two polarized factions, pro-Trotsky versus pro-Stalin. Trotsky eventually made his way to Mexico, where he made a lot of noise—to Stalin's chagrin. The Soviet supreme leader persecuted his rival in exile, putting Trotsky on “trial” in Moscow in absentia.
In 1937 Dewey organized a tribunal of American leftists to examine the Moscow trials, with special focus on Trotsky's case. The philosopher-educator became the chairman of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, which ran from 1937 to 1938.5 The Dewey Commission was a coalition of liberals/progressives, socialists, and even Trotskyites. The last category included many unwavering comrades motivated to expose Stalin's crimes by their love of Trotsky and what they perceived as Trotsky's “better” version of global Communism. This was hardly commendable, as Trotsky himself had advocated violence and world revolution, was a thug, and was as militantly atheistic as Stalin (if not more so), having
launched with Lenin the League of the Militant Godless. He was not a good man.
But while the Dewey Commission was encouraged by Trotskyites, it was not a Trotskyite body. In fact, many members of the commission disliked Trotsky because he had persecuted non-Communist leftists when he was Lenin's partner in crime. Dewey himself was neither a Trotskyite nor a Trotskyite sympathizer. The same could be said for his right-hand man on the commission, Sidney Hook, a liberal who was no dupe.6
The Dewey Commission became a battleground, reflecting the bitterly opposed factions and microfactions of the political Left. Nonetheless, with the good professor trying to keep the commission together, this gaggle of leftists started accumulating evidence against Stalin.
The Right Side of History
Transcripts of the rigged hearings in Moscow made their way to the West. As they did, many leftists were shocked at the transparent phoniness of the proceedings. Notably, they included Whittaker Chambers, who was in the process of leaving his life as a Communist and KGB spy. Shaken by the transcripts, Chambers sought out Dewey, through Sidney Hook—a sign that Chambers approved of where Dewey stood on Stalin. These two men—a former Columbia undergrad and a current Columbia professor—had changed dramatically over the previous decade. To borrow from Chambers's language, both were now on “the right side of history.”
Chambers's request for a meeting was rebuffed because Hook and Dewey knew of his recent checkered history—as did much of the New York Left—and were not certain he had rejected that past. They feared that leaked word of a meeting could compromise the impact of the Dewey Commission. Dewey (and Hook especially) understood that the judgment of the commission could really rankle the USSR. Stalin feared the verdict of their report, which could have lasting implications for the global Communist movement.7
As the commission took up the issue of the alleged guilt of Leon Trotsky, Dewey and other members traveled to Coyoacan, Mexico, where the exiled Communist had been living as a guest of Diego Rivera. The professor personally interviewed Trotsky there. Dewey also sent a telegram to Clarence Hathaway, editor of the Daily Worker, inviting the Communists to send an attorney to participate in a preliminary hearing in Mexico City on whether Trotsky was guilty of the charges that Stalin's cronies had made against him. Hathaway reported the telegram and invitation at a Communist Party Politburo meeting on April 2, 1937. Typical of CPUSA behavior, the Communists opted not to participate but instead to vilify Dewey in the Daily Worker— and to send at least one secret agent.8
The commission's hearing degenerated into political infighting, but Dewey's crew still managed to produce some solid findings in the form of two published reports: “The Case of Leon Trotsky” (1937) and “Not Guilty” (1938).9 The commission rightly determined that the trials were frame-ups, in which the outcomes had been predetermined. The “trials” had been a feeble attempt to paint a veneer of justice to convince gullible outsiders.
The findings were international news—exactly as Stalin had feared. They were covered in the New York Times for three straight days—December 12–14, 1937—and the coverage was favorable to the commission's conclusions. Stalinists worldwide reacted with palpable rage, vilifying Dewey as a “warmonger” and an “enemy of the working people.” The overheated reaction was testimony to the quality of the Dewey Commission's work.10
Stalin's American “Friends”
This is not to say that Joseph Stalin no longer had friends among American liberals. Predictably, dupes were there to defend Stalin when the Dewey Commission published its findings. One was former Dewey student Corliss Lamont, head of the odious front group Friends of the Soviet Union, which was full of closet Communists and duped liberals.
Lamont went on the radio immediately after Dewey had finished reading his broadcast statement on the commission's findings. He was also quoted as a counterpoint to the Dewey Commission in the widely read New York Times articles on the subject. Lamont eagerly attacked the findings of his mentor while simultaneously excusing the Georgian bandit spearheading (to that point) history's bloodiest regime.
As usual, Moscow appreciated Lamont's work, as is today evident in Comintern documents. Sidney Bloomfield, an American Communist stationed at the Comintern in Moscow, had been tasked with monitoring the American press reaction to the workings of the Dewey Commission and the Trotsky issue generally. In one memo for the Comintern, dated February 3, 1937, and headed “NOT TO BE PUBLISHED,” Bloomfield expressed his disappointment with the New York Times, especially the reporting of Joseph Shaplen, whom Bloomfield called a “Right-wing Socialist.” Bloomfield was let down even by the reporting of Walter Duranty, the notorious Soviet apologist at the Times, who seemed overly sympathetic to Trotsky.11 Of course, Bloomfield most reviled the coverage of the Hearst press, which, he said, was the “most vicious of all … the bourgeois papers.” “The Hearst press,” he reported, “out-did all the others in collecting the filth from all the fascist and reactionary press of the world.”12
But there was a ray of hope, Bloomfield reported in a second memo for the Comintern. Fortunately for the Communists, Corliss Lamont was on Stalin's side. Lamont, Bloomfield noted approvingly, had taken “issue with Dewey on the important questions,” cited the “poisonous campaign of Trotyskism” around the world, and called for “American sympathy to be continued ‘towards the heroic efforts of the Soviet Republic to construct a new world whose basic ethical principle is loyalty to the welfare and progress of all mankind.’”13
Those last glowing words for Stalin's Russia were Lamont's. The Communists in Moscow were not the only ones who took note of the remarks. Lamont's pals at the Daily Worker published his radio address in the December 14 issue.
John Dewey may have seen the light, but Corliss Lamont continued to wallow in darkness.
The Mother of All Epitaphs
Dewey would later say of the Trotsky commission episode, “It was the most interesting single experience of my life.”14 For his work with the commission, the professor earned the enmity of Joseph Stalin and the evil empire. So much so that by 1952, the year of Dewey's death—and one year before Stalin's—the “scholars” in the Soviet Ministry of Education published a “study” titled “The Pedagogy of J. Dewey in the Service of Contemporary American Reaction.”15 A far cry from the encomiums that had poured forth from Moscow in the 1920s, this Soviet “study” portrayed Dewey as a promoter of “obscurantism,” a spreader of “vile ideology,” a “thorough enemy of science,” a “henchman of the contemporary world of imperialist reaction,” and a defender of “imperialist barbarism.” In their typical flair for understatement, the Soviets judged Dewey the “wicked enemy” not merely “of the American people, but also of all the freedom-loving peoples of the entire earth.” Dewey stood in contrast to the “freedom-loving” men in the Kremlin, who by this point had annihilated anywhere from twenty million to sixty million people. He especially stood in contrast to “the great leader of the Soviet people and of all progressive mankind, J. V. Stalin.”16
In truth, this was the finest of tributes to Dewey—the mother of all epitaphs.
In the end, then, John Dewey is a prototype for the experience of so many of the duped “progressives” of his era: he had been a complete dupe, but had awakened to the real horrors of Soviet Communism, and then made reparation. To be sure, he could still be counted on to offer the occasional naïve reflection on communist ideology, but he had awoken to the vicious nature of the Stalin regime. Life affords plenty of second chances, and Dewey made the best of his.
And as we shall see in a later chapter, John Dewey's long, strange trip was not even finished. Another opportunity for political redemption was waiting around the bend.
SMEARING ANOTHER LIBERAL ICON: CPUSA’S ASSAULT ON“FASCIST” FDR AND THE NEW DEAL
In the 1930s, with the rise of Hitler in Germany, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its members adamantly opposed the Nazis—for a while, anyway. At the same time, they shamelessly tried to frame President Franklin D
elano Roosevelt and his New Deal as an American form of the same fascism. In addition to smearing that liberal icon—the next in line after Woodrow Wilson—they were also considerably unkind to a third liberal icon, Eleanor Roosevelt.
Those positions, unbelievable as they may seem to modern readers, will be demonstrated in this and subsequent chapters. Throughout, American Communists marched in lockstep with the Soviet line—and occasionally succeeded in enlisting gullible liberals. These machinations formed another insidious side of the American Communist movement. Liberal Americans should have been—and should remain—outraged by this.
But here is yet another ugly aspect of the history of American Communism that has been given short shrift by historians. The vast majority of Americans have no knowledge of the horrible treatment CPUSA doled out to liberal icons. Too often, historians have focused instead on the alleged evils and excesses of the anti-Communists; as usual, the enemy for the Left is always to the right.