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PARTISAN REVIEW
If
all these incentives to refuse did not work, one final one was also
bound to fail. Sidney Hook says that one night he was at Dewey's apart–
ment when a well-known radical, an opera singer, arrived. The man said
that he had come as an official representative of the Soviet artistic orga–
nization Vox. The Soviets, he said, remembered Dewey's earlier trip
with pleasure, and they would like him to return for a
visit-all
expenses paid.
He stressed that-"all expenses paid"-and he outlined
a luxury junket on the Black Sea. Dewey said, "Well, I don't know if this
would be an appropriate time for me to visit the Soviet Union because
I'm thinking of going to Mexico with the Trotsky Commission." At this
point the visitor interrupted-"Trotsky, Schmotsky! We aren't inter–
ested in him. We would only like for you to come, to see that wonder–
ful things have happened in the ten years since you were there. But you
have to come now... .All expenses will be paid by Vox. Yalta, the Black
Sea . A wonderful trip." Dewey thanked him, the man left, and Dewey
turned to Hook. "Well, that was pretty barefaced, wasn't it?" he asked .
But he decided to accept the chairmanship of the hearing, after all.
He was crystal clear about why he was going-it was for his beliefs .
Agnes Meyer writes about this time: "John told me he soon realized he
had to accept, despite the arduous journey. Wherever the truth might
lead, he said, the outcome of the investigation would afford an oppor–
tunity for American democracy to reorient itself toward the solution of
its own social problems." Nonetheless, Fred kept trying to persuade
Dewey not to go. He pursued his father all the way to the train plat–
form, still insisting that it was irrational for him to make the journey.
Dewey wrote to Roberta from the
Sunshine Special,
"I tried to answer
Fred's questions about why I was going and had to tell him that he was
too rational and there weren't any rational answers to his questions in
a world as irrational as this one."
Thinking of Gumberg and Cowley, he wrote to a friend: "I have spent
my whole life searching for truth.
It
is disheartening that in our own
country some liberals have come to believe that for rea ons of expedi–
ency our own people should be left in the dark as to the actual atroci–
ties in Russia . But truth is not a bourgeois delusion, it is the mainspring
of human progress."
When it was learned that in
1937
Dewey
would
go to Mexico,
Edward Ross wrote to Novak: "No one in the country could bring so
much prestige to the committee as he can." Dewey's pre ence on the
commission meant that the major papers and even the newsreels would
cover the hearing-an extremely important consideration.
