by Alan M Wald
In addition to Dewey, the commissioners included Bejamin Stolberg, who was born in Munich in 1892 and immigrated to the United States in 1908.19 After graduating from Harvard University and pursuing further studies at the University of Chicago, Stolberg became a labor journalist and moved to New York in the mid-1920s. An enchanting conversationalist who lacked the drive to realize his talents in a substantial manner, Stolberg developed a friendship with David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and had considerable influence on intellectuals including Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson. In 1933 he read and reviewed Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution for the Nation. He developed an admiration for Trotsky but never became a political disciple. With him was Suzanne La Follette, the niece of U.S. Senator Robert La Follette, Sr., who had been a journalist and then art critic for the Nation. Under the influence of Alfred Jay Nock’s extreme individualism, she edited the New Free man for several years. She, too, was more taken with Trotsky’s personal brilliance than his political views.20 The fourth commissioner was Otto Ruehle, a prominent German Marxist and biographer of Marx, then in exile from Hitler.
The most controversial commissioner was Carleton Beals, author of many books on Latin America, who drove down to Mexico City from Los Angeles with his wife. By the end of the hearings, relations were not at all cordial between Beals and virtually everyone else. In the opinion of Dewey and the other commissioners, Beals took advantage of the hearings to ask some improper questions that had no bearing on the charges raised during the Moscow trials, questions that might have jeopardized Trotsky’s status as an exile in Mexico. Beals claimed, for example, to have special information that Trotsky had sent Michael Borodin as his emissary to foment revolution in Mexico seventeen years earlier. This was especially provocative in light of the fact that Trotsky had been permitted into Mexico on the promise that he would not attempt to intervene in Mexican affairs. In the midst of the hearings, Beals resigned from the commission, denouncing it as biased in favor of Trotsky.21
One of the additional tasks with which those not directly involved in the hearings assisted was the physical defense of the Rivera villa where the hearings were held. “There was the anxiety that the Stalinists might raid the hearings,” recalled McDonald. “Some of us were pressed into service as armed guards, among our duties, but Buster Keaton-like, I had so much trouble with my gun that I had to turn it in.”22 On another occasion Charles Walker armed himself to accompany Trotsky into town.23 Farrell helped for a while building barricades to buttress the wall behind Trotsky’s desk, until it began to affect his sinuses. Later, after the hearings were over and Trotsky had gone on a vacation to Cuernavaca, Farrell took over the guard of Trotsky’s papers from Bernard Wolfe, sitting on a table with pistols in holsters, bullets strung across his shoulders and chest, and a machine gun in his hand.24
Tensions ran high among the small group. At one point a fist fight broke out between John McDonald and Albert Goldman.25 In another incident, Solow, McDonald, and Wolfe were taking a break, sitting on a table smoking with their legs dangling. Trotsky, who was known to be obsessive about orderliness and intolerant of cigarette smoke, came into the room and asked for a translation that had been in preparation. When Wolfe said he would have it completed in just a few moments, Trotsky, irritated, slammed the glass door behind him, breaking a pane as he left.26
Tension existed between the Trotskyists and the non-Trotsky-ists as well. For example, Stolberg and La Follette had objected to George Novack’s going on the train from New York City to Mexico City, believing that the mere presence of a known Trotskyist on the scene could compromise the impartiality of the commission; Dewey, however, seemed unconcerned, and Novack usually took pains to be discreet and avoided acting as a spokesman for the Trotsky Defense Committee. After arriving in Mexico, Novack discussed the problem with Trotsky who concluded that a concession would have to be made. Novack thereafter stayed in a separate residence and remained somewhat apart from the central organization of the hearings. As a gesture of friendliness, Trotsky later invited Novack into his study to help him improve a draft of his eloquent summary speech. Novack recalled that Trotsky had some difficulty describing Dewey in precise terms. After scratching out several alternatives, Trotsky characterized him as “the personification of genuine American idealism . . . a man of unshakable moral authority . . . who by virtue of his age should have the right to remain outside the skirmishes in the political arena.”27
The train arrived in Mexico City on Tuesday morning, 6 April, and that evening Dewey reported his initial impressions to Robbie Lowitz, his future wife:
We have had a fairly busy day with consultations with one another and with the press and with Trotsky’s lawyer [Albert Goldman]. I’ll begin with him; he is a Chicago socialist, and makes a good impression on me of both quick intelligence and good practical judgment. He says that in Trotsky’s interest as well as in our own we must lean over backward whenever necessary in order to be fair. Trotsky has consented to be guided entirely by the ideas of the Commission as to the management of the hearings. Not that I think that he had much difficulty in convincing Trotsky but that Trotsky is used to the Continental method [in] which there is much more opportunity for speeches and less questions and answers to them.28
On Saturday, 10 April, the hearings officially began with a powerful statement by Dewey condemning the refusal of many countries to grant asylum to Trotsky so that he could have an opportunity to defend himself against the charges of the Stalinist regime: “This Commission, like many millions of workers of city and country, of hand and brain, believes that no man should be condemned without a chance to defend himself. It desires at the outset . . . to congratulate the Mexican government on its broad interpretation of the meaning of political democracy which makes our meeting possible.”29 Later that day Solow described to Margaret De Silver some of the events that had occurred in the charged setting, made even more electric by Frida Kahlo’s beauty and the presence of Diego Rivera surrounded by a delegation of Mexican trade unionists:
Dewey’s opener was a honey. Goldman spoke 30 minutes, outlined what LDT’s [Trotsky’s] side means to prove. . . . In the meantime millions of photographers, quite a few union delegates present, LDT brilliant as can be, shifting from one language to another . . . Finerty [legal counsel for the commission, who had also been the defender of Sacco and Vanzetti, and Tom Mooney] turning up late for the second session, me translating Ruehle’s questions and Trotsky working me out of a job translating his answers to them by giving them first in German and then English, Dewey like tart cider asking the best questions of all.
Solow went on to describe some of Trotsky’s comments and personal reactions:
Oh, I can’t tell the story tonight, but it went off O.K., although I imagine the unfriendly press will twist many a thing against us. Here are a few cracks:
Goldman: Were you a tailor in New York?
Trotsky: Unfortunately I never learned a productive trade. Dewey: Is Vishinsky [the Soviet prosecutor] quoting correctly when he says Lenin in 1904 called you a phrasemonger?
Trotsky: I think I recognize Lenin’s style.
The political stuff was old dope to me and we didn’t get to brass tacks (Romm, Hotel Bristol, etc. [referring to some of the blatantly falsified testimony against Trotsky]) today so the real high spot was at the start when Goldman was asking the usual formal opening questions. When he got to Trotsky’s family and children, and finally to the daughter who committed suicide, the old man couldn’t take it. His face twitched before he replied, and when he did his eyes were visibly wet and red. There is only one thing lacking, and that is a Stalinist attorney to do the cross examining. I’d give a foot to have Brodsky [a well-known Communist lawyer] here and an arm to have Vishinsky here. They’d end up giving both feet and both arms to get out alive.30
Glotzer, who had experience in the legal process, also believed it would have been preferable if Communist representatives had been presen
t and an adversarial proceeding ensued. Yet he insisted that the testimony showed that the commissioners asked sharp questions; they did not simply accept anything Trotsky said without corroboration from written documents.
Once the sensational hearings were under way, the excitement mounted each day. On Thursday, 15 April, Dewey reported: “Yesterday was the most interesting day yet. ‘Truth, justice, humanity’ and all the rest of the reasons for coming are receding into the background before the bare overpowering interest of the man and what he has to say.”31 On Friday Farrell wrote to Margaret Marshall, book-review editor for the Nation: “Trotsky has utterly demolished the macabre fables of the Moscow Trials for any human being who is susceptible to reason and who does not require that his opinions be manufactured for him by persons thousands of miles across the sea. He has presented documentary evidence which creates more than a reasonable doubt [about the charges against him]. He has built up a logical case, and despite the fact that he has gone on answering questions almost six hours a day since Saturday, his testimony holds together like a most amazing piece of logic.”32
Trotsky’s closing speech, in which he dealt with the historical context of the frame-up trials, the nature of Stalinism, and his whole life story, provided a fitting climax. Glotzer recalled that he spoke “with great passion and his voice and speech were alternately inflected with rising and lowering power, depending on matters treated. The voice was on the high side but clear and strong and captivating.” Trotsky sat throughout the summation, although he would have preferred to stand and pace and gesture. Under the table at which he sat, his hands and forearms were in constant motion. When he finished, the audience burst out in spontaneous applause.33
Following additional hearings in New York conducted by an affiliated body in Paris, the commission’s verdict that Trotsky was innocent of all charges was made public in December 1937. Both the verbatim transcript of Trotsky’s testimony and the commission’s deliberations were published as The Case of Leon Trotsky (1937) and Not Guilty (1938).
MARXIST CULTURAL RENAISSANCE
The most important cultural impact of the Moscow trials involved the evolution of the Partisan Review in the late 1930s. The connection between Partisan Review editors Phillips and Rahv with Trotsky, and to a lesser extent with his followers in the United States, was largely confined to the province of ideas. Their private correspondence with Trotsky indicates far more agreement with him than they publicly acknowledged, although they failed to establish a relationship with the Trotskyist movement, other than that of teaching a few classes for the Trotskyist organization and meeting with its leaders on occasion. However, one editor of the revamped publication, Dwight Macdonald, would make a stronger commitment and join the Trotskyists in the fall of 1939.
Born in New York City on 24 March 1906, Macdonald was descended from two generations of lawyers.34 After graduating from Phillips Exeter in 1924, he followed in his father’s footsteps by going to Yale University where he became a film enthusiast. This was not surprising since his father’s law firm had a number of motion picture companies as clients. With his friends F. W. Dupee and George L. K. Morris, Macdonald took over Yale Lit. After graduation in 1928 he worked for a while at Macy’s department store in New York, trying to save money in order to write, and then he attempted to establish an intellectual community on a farm in Ohio owned by his friend Dinsmore Wheeler. Soon he was back in New York where another Yale friend, Wilder Hobson, got him an interview that led to his becoming the first editorial employee of the newly founded Fortune. At the same time, he, Morris, and Dupee initiated the Miscellany, and he wrote on film for the Symposium.35
With the advent of the depression, many of the staff members at Fortune began to move left politically, coming into conflict with the publisher. In late 1934 Macdonald married Nancy Rodman, a left-wing mathematics major and Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar (1932), whose brother, Selden Rodman (Yale 1931), was editor of Common Sense. By the mid-1930s, Macdonald was reading Marx and had become a fellow traveler of the Communist Party, collaborating with the party in founding the Time-Life unit of the Newspaper Guild. In 1936, having accumulated some savings from his $10,000-a-year salary, which were added to Nancy’s income from a trust fund, he wrote a provocative series of articles on U.S. Steel and resigned from Fortune after his work was bowdlerized.
Soon after, his relationship with the Communist Party came into question as the Moscow trials began. In a long letter to the New Republic, only part of which was published, Macdonald aggressively challenged Malcolm Cowley’s defense of the trials. Subsequently, Dupee introduced Macdonald to Phillips and Rahv. Not only did they induce him to break with the party but they persuaded him to join the editorial board of the newly reorganized Partisan Review36
The fifth member of the new editorial board—along with Phillips, Rahv, Dupee, Macdonald, and Morris, the magazine’s financial mainstay—was Mary McCarthy. Born in Seattle on 21 June 1912, she devoted her Vassar years to literary activities with her friends Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and Eleanor Clark.37 Newly married in 1933, her actor-husband brought her into contact with Communist circles in New York. Soon she was marching in May Day parades and attending fund-raisers for the New Masses. She came close to joining the party when she separated from her husband in the summer of 1936. At the time she was writing reviews for the Nation and the New Republic, working part-time as Benjamin Stolberg’s typist and research assistant, and beginning a job as editor at Covici Friede, a left-wing publishing house. At a cocktail party in honor of the legendary cartoonist Art Young, she found herself agreeing with James T. Farrell that Trotsky deserved a hearing. Soon after, her name was listed on the letterhead of literature published by the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. Irritated at attempts by friends to force her off the committee, she began to take an interest in the case and concluded that the Moscow trials were fraudulent. Soon she was seeing Farrell and Hortense Alden, and through them she came to know Philip Rahv with whom she began to live in the summer of 1937. When Partisan Review was relaunched that December, McCarthy was listed as an editor in charge of theater reviews, a token assignment she would later insist was due to her once having been married to an actor.
Before the June 1937 American Writers’ Congress, the ever-cautious Phillips and Rahv had not publicly revealed any disaffection from the Communist Party, let alone sympathy for Trotsky. They attended the party’s literary criticism workshop together with Macdonald, McCarthy, Dupee, and Clark. Granville Hicks, the leading Communist Party critic who was chairing the session, stood helplessly by as Rahv delivered an eloquent discourse on the history of freedom and human thought. Macdonald discussed Trotsky’s prose style, emphasizing that its brilliance must be acknowledged even by those who did not agree with Trotsky’s politics.38 When the new Partisan Review was launched, Phillips and Rahv endeavored to develop a number of Trotsky’s literary and political ideas.
In March 1938, for example, Phillips turned to Trotsky for assistance in clarifying the historical record regarding the aesthetic views of Marx and Engels. After recapitulating their essential contributions—their description of the laws governing the cultural superstructure, their tributes to various writers, and their warnings against economic determinism—Phillips cited Trotsky as the only major Marxist leader who had written authentic literary criticism. Trotsky, Phillips contended, was outstanding in that he “not only saw in literature a mirror of society but was acutely conscious of those qualities which, taken together, make up the social vision of a work of art.” Phillips then summarized and praised Trotsky’s analysis of postrevolutionary Soviet culture and his explanation of how the shifting social forces were refracted through the texture of literary work. More important to Phillips, however, was Trotsky’s “polemic against those critics who were impatient with history and wanted to establish by decree a proletarian art.” Phillips concluded with tributes to Trotsky’s amplitude and his variety of insights. He also explained Trotsky’s appr
oach to the nature of the artistic element using Eliot as an example: “Is not the autumnal sensibility of Eliot a kind of comment on the state of society?”39
Rahv, too, considered Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution in the summer of 1939 when he surveyed the literary record of an eventful decade. But on the whole his commentary demonstrated how far Rahv had evolved from his once vivid confidence in a proletarian literary renaissance. He noted that while, during the early part of the decade, the immersion of young writers in political action had played a liberating role, now, on the eve of a new world war, with the Communist Party behaving more patriotically than even the Democrats, the political movement was rapidly retrogressing in the direction of a “new gentility.” The intellectual or artist who wished to remain faithful to truth must now stand alone guided only by his or her conscience:
If a sufficiently organized, active and broad revolutionary movement existed, it might assimilate the artist by opening to him its own avenue of experience; but in the absence of such a movement all he can do is utilize the possibilities of individual and group secession from, and protest against, the dominant values of our time. Needless to say this does not imply a return to a philosophy of individualism. It means that all we have left to go on now is individual integrity—the probing conscience, the will to repulse and assail the forces released by a corrupt reality.
Concerned with how best to maintain the integrity of the intellectual, Rahv was clearly moving away from the classical Marxist view of the central role of the international working class. The importance of Trotsky for Rahv was not the latter’s reaffirmation of authentic Marxism-Leninism with a corresponding mandate to organize the vanguard of the proletariat for the coming struggle for power. Trotsky seemed more important to Rahv for his other insights. Affirming that a study of the “special role and changing status of the intellectual” is crucial to any “social examination” of modern writing, Rahv concluded that “Trotsky is, I believe, the only Marxist critic who develops his analysis of writers and literary trends largely around this concept. . . . But Trotsky does not credit this factor with sufficient power.”40
