Dupes
Page 63
56. Muggeridge wrote about this experience many times, including in a personal, detailed March 1983 letter to President Ronald Reagan. This letter is quoted and cited in my God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (New York: ReganBooks, 2004), 253.
Chapter 4: John Dewey: The Kremlin's Favorite Educator
1. “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” Human Events, November 19, 2007, 10. This was a republication of the list, which actually first appeared in the May 30, 2005, issue.
2. Henry T. Edmondson III, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), xiv.
3. This quote is taken from Carey's endorsement on the back cover of Edmondson's book.
4. Pragmatism, developed by Charles Pierce and William James, is the theory that the meaning of a course of action or proposition lies in its observable consequences; it is the sum of those consequences that constitute the meaning of the action or proposition. This is considered a practical way of addressing problems. It can be applied—as it was by Dewey—to the classroom in the form of a desire to experiment in search of the best methods of learning.
5. To cite merely some recent buzzwords that spring from this mindset, there are “whole language,” “outcomes-based education,” “self-esteem,” and “values clarification.”
6. Michael L. Peterson sheds light on these various shades of Dewey's thinking: “Experimentalism rejects any concept of a transcendent, ultimate, fixed reality (such as the idealist's realm of ideas and supreme mind, the Aristotelian's pure form, and the Thomist's absolute being). According to experimentalism, all traditional, otherworldly views rest on the unfounded metaphysical presumption. Experience—common human experience—is the only basis for philosophy. Since experience is constantly changing, experimentalists think about how we can adapt to as well as control changes in our environment. This approach has far-reaching implications for education, whether conceived narrowly as curriculum reform and teacher training or broadly as the basis for the adjustment process of the individual in the social and physical environment.” Michael L. Peterson, With All Your Mind: A Christian Philosophy of Education (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 51–52.
7. Edmondson, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, 13, 25–27, 40, 97–114.
8. Peterson, With All Your Mind, 53.
9. Edmondson, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, 6.
10. Ibid., 6–7.
11. Sources vary on whether she was staunchly Congregationalist, a strict five-point Calvinist, or, as one biographer put it, possessive of “a comparatively cool, urbane Universalism.” Neil Coughlan, Young John Dewey (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1975), 3–4.
12. Generally speaking, Mrs. Dewey, as a young woman, became a devout person, which she brought into her marriage and her parenting. John Dewey never forgot how his mother often asked him and his brothers if they were “right with Jesus.” She ordered her sons not to drink, smoke, dance, gamble, play cards, shoot billiards, and so on. A number of leading leftist intellectuals of the day, some of them prominent converts who left the “clutches of the God that failed”—as Communism had been famously referred to in those days—wrote about this aspect of Dewey, from Sidney Hook to Max Eastman, both of whom knew Dewey very well.
13. Too few scholars have delved into spiritual biography of Dewey. An article by Jared Stallones provides valuable historical detail. Jared Stallones, “Struggle for the Soul of John Dewey,” American Educational History Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, 2006.
14. Stallones, “Struggle for the Soul of John Dewey,” 21–23.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 23.
17. Ibid., 24.
18. When Dewey moved to Chicago in 1894, he withdrew as a member of the First Congregational Church in Ann Arbor without requesting a transfer to another church. Ibid., 25.
19. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 186.
20. Specifically, Dewey said that it was the “belief in immortality more than of any other element of historic religions” that made him believe that “religion is the opium of peoples.” Dewey's review of Lamont's book The Illusion of Immortality, ran in the April 24, 1935, issue of The New Republic. See Lamont, The Illusion of Immortality, vii–xiii. This is the fifth edition of the work, originally published in 1935.
21. Edmondson, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, 19.
22. Ibid., 19–20.
23. Ibid.
24. The alleged Dewey quote states, “There is no god and there is no soul.” This is cited, for instance, at the sites for Accuracy in Media (AIM.org) and AllAboutPhilosophy.org.
25. Dewey was one of thirty-four signers. The manifesto, which lists fifteen principles for which humanists stand, is available at the website of the American Humanist Association: http://www.ameri-canhumanist.org/who_we_are/about_humanism/Humanist_Manifesto_I.
26. Lamont, The Illusion of Immortality, 254.
27. Dewey judged Lamont's work “an extraordinarily complete and well-informed discussion.”
28. Lamont, The Illusion of Immortality, vii–xiii.
29. Merton downplayed his own short-term infatuation with Communism as youthful silliness, which, for him, seemed the case. Still, his chronology of this period reveals him to have been duped repeatedly by Communists. He and others mouthed the party line, whatever it was, including the convenient preaching for peace—proffered only when it served Moscow's interests. Merton came to his senses much quicker than many other dupes—with the aid of a firm intellectual grounding in Roman Catholicism, which was intensely anti-Communist—and developed a mature understanding of the “virulence” of Soviet Communism.
30. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948), 153–57.
31. Ibid., 153–56. Merton was an admirer of Mark Van Doren, another New Republic writer who was on the left and suspected (by some) of being on the Marxist left. Merton credits Van Doren's presence at Columbia for saving him from Communism: “It was a very good thing for me that I ran into someone like Mark Van Doren at that particular time, because in my new reverence for Communism, I was in danger of docilely accepting any kind of stupidity.”
32. Ibid., 194.
33. Columbia philosophy professor John Herman Randall was a prominent member of the American Philosophical Association. He was a Columbia man through and through, receiving his own education there (undergraduate and graduate school) as well as being an educator at the university. Ibid.
34. Kimmage, The Conservative Turn, 26.
35. Edmondson, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, 10–11.
36. William Brooks, “Was Dewey a Marxist?” Discourse: The Journal of the St. Lawrence Institute, vol. 13, Winter 1994, available at the website for St. Lawrence Institute for the Advancement of Learning, http://stlawrenceinstitute.org/vol13brk.html.
37. For a discussion of Dewey's reported membership in the Socialist Party, see, among others, an insightful analysis by Tiffany Jones Miller, “John Dewey and the Philosophical Refounding of America,” National Review, December 31, 2009, 37–40.
38. Sometimes, after a number of lessons learned, Dewey and other socialists parted ways with the Communists—in some cases angrily expelling their comrades. This was the case, for instance, with the League for Industrial Democracy, the socialist group of which Dewey was a member in the 1930s. At the same time, even with such repudiations, Dewey worked arm-in-arm with the Trotskyites, the anti-Stalin wing of the international Communist movement. This raised suspicions that Dewey was anti-Stalin (which he was, adamantly) but not anti-Trotsky, and, hence, not really anti-Communist. As was so often the case with Dewey, ambiguity prevailed when trying to get a handle on what the philosopher-educator truly believed.
39. William W. Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World, Mexico-China-Turkey 1929 (New York: Bureau o
f Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1964), 17.
40. Ibid., 17–18.
41. Ibid., 18.
42. W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 11–12.
43. Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 18.
44. Edmondson, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, 10–11.
45. Strong's trip took place in either 1922 or 1923.
46. “Investigation of Communist Activities in the New York City Area—Part 5,” Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, 83rd Congress, 1st Session, July 6, 1953 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1953), 2250.
47. For example, Strong wrote a letter to the editor published in the October–November 1941 issue of The Protestant (pages 105–6) in which she claimed that the Vatican was pushing for religious freedom in the USSR not because religious freedom was lacking there—she suggested such freedom was flourishing—but because the Catholic Church was seeking political and religious control, and especially over the Russian Orthodox Church. This was just what liberal Protestants wanted to hear, and many swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. The letter is republished in “Investigation of Communist Activities in the New York City Area—Part 5,” Committee on Un-American Activities, 2250–51.
48. Corliss and Margaret Lamont, Russia Day by Day, 82, 118.
49. Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 83.
50. Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 19.
51. Albert P. Pinkevich, The New Education in the Soviet Republic (New York: John Day, 1929), vi.
52. Thomas Woody, New Minds, New Men? (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 47–48.
53. Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 19.
54. During his trip to the USSR in the summer of 1928, Dewey attended an educational conference organized by Professor Kalashnikov. They apparently hit it off quite well. It was ten days after the conference that Kalashnikov sent Dewey the two-volume encyclopedia.
55. Quoted in Jay Martin, The Education of John Dewey: A Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 354.
Chapter 5: John Dewey's Long, Strange Trip
1. Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 19–20, 58n.
2. Ibid., 55.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 55–56.
5. The collection of essays was published in 1929 by The New Republic, Inc., as well as in subsequent Dewey writings and a later (1964) volume edited by William W. Brickman, produced and published by the Teachers College at Columbia University. The quotes cited herein are taken from the Brickman edition.
6. Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 44.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 44–45.
9. Ibid., 45.
10. Ibid., 46.
11. Ibid., 47.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 48.
14. Ibid., 50.
15. Ibid., 54–55.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 63.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 65.
20. Ibid., 65n.
21. For one striking source on this, see Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956 (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 29, 37–38, 325–27, 345–51.
22. Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 65n.
23. Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 65.
24. “A Restored Look for the Long-Ignored Churches of Russia,” Associated Press, July 23, 1976, B3.
25. Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 65.
26. In a blessed moment for Russia's beleaguered believers, neither seen or appreciated in the West, First Lady Nancy Reagan, during the June 1988 Moscow summit, threw a fit over what had happened to these cherished items of Russian religious and cultural history—specifically the holy classics in the reserve collection of the Tretyakov Gallery. The Communists had removed these lovely, sacred works from public view. The Russian authorities, very sensitive to PR, acceded to the request of their high-profile guest and momentarily displayed the images. It was maybe Nancy Reagan's finest hour. I write about this in God and Ronald Reagan, 308. Also, Nancy Reagan's trip was briefly but cautiously reported by Pravda. See “Nancy Reagan Visits Moscow Art Gallery,” Pravda, June 2, 1988, 5, translated text from Soviet media printed in Foreign Broadcast Information Service (hereafter FBIS), June 6, 1988, 24.
27. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 328.
28. Mikhail Gorbachev, On My Country and the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 20–21.
29. Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 72.
30. Ibid., 74, 89.
31. Ibid., 47, 74–75, 99.
32. Ibid., 74–75.
33. Ibid., 75–76.
34. Ibid., 75n.
35. Ibid., 78–80.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 79.
38. Ibid., 29.
39. Ibid., 110–11.
40. See Ibid., 29; and Jane M. Dewey, “Biography of John Dewey,” in Paul A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of John Dewey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1939), 43.
41. Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, 47–48, 50, 144.
42. Ibid., 144–45.
43. Many of those of similar mind saw the collectivization as enormously promising. Dewey saw it as potentially promising, and (predictably) was more in favor of (and impressed by) the Soviet willingness to “experiment” in the realm of economic “collectivism.” See ibid., 144–45; and Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 102–3.
44. I will address this in more detail later in the book. “He [Dewey] was very left,” notes Herb Romerstein, “but not under the control of the Communist Party.” Interview with Herb Romerstein, August 9, 2007.
Chapter 6: The Redemption of Professor Dewey
1. The article was John Dewey, “Why I Am Not a Communist,” Modern Monthly, vol. 8, April 1934, 135–37. It was reprinted in Sidney Hook, ed., The Meaning of Marx: A Symposium by Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Morris Cohen, Sidney Hook, and Sherwood Eddy (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934).
2. Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 439. See also John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 399; and Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 468–69.
3. Ronald Reagan, News Conference, January 29, 1981, available at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=44101.
4. Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 19–20.
5. This committee has also been called the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, as well as numerous other names. It is sometimes said that there was a Committee of Inquiry, of which the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky was an offshoot. It is impossible to find a single common name used by historians. The one I've chosen to use is taken from the early edited book by William W. Brickman (John Dewey's Impressions, p. 7), who seemed meticulous in trying to get these names exactly right. See also Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 140–41.
6. Herb Romerstein offers this insight: “Dewey was not a Trotskyite sympathizer. In fact, most of the people on the Dewey Commission were opposed to Trotsky because they quite properly blamed him for a lot of the persecution of non-Communist leftists when Trotsky was Lenin's partner in ruling Russia. The Trotskyites, of course, supported the commission and had a front organization—the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. Even that group had a lot of other leftists in it. While they disliked Trotsky, they were even more opposed to Stalin.” Interview with Herb Romerstein, August 9, 2007.
7. Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 118, 140–44.
8. For details on this, see Romerstein and Breindel, The Venona Secrets, 329–31.
9. Historians will alternately refer to these as both “reports” and “books,” sometimes in quotation marks, sometimes italicized. In fact, both were published by Harp
er & Row, and are basically reports published as books.
10. See Romerstein and Breindel, The Venona Secrets, 331; Brickman, ed., John Dewey's Impressions, 20; and Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism, 301.
11. Bloomfield regretted that Duranty “cannot conceal more or less sympathy for the concerned,” which included a number of his persecuted Communist “friends,” such as Karl Radek, Grigori Sokolnikov, and Trotsky.