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PARTISAN REVIEW
His mind was already on St. Louis, for there he had agreed to deliver
a lecture at the Hotel Jefferson to the annual meeting of the American
College of Physicians. As we say these days, he compartmentalized, and
on the train he "forgot" all about the controversies of the Trotsky trial
and sketched out a lecture on "The Unity of Man," which he was to
deliver to an audience of one thousand doctors shortly after his arrival.
But he was still on the steps of his car, hauling his luggage and sev–
eral brightly colored Mexican baskets off the train, when a bevy of
reporters crowded around him. What was the outcome of the hearings?
they wanted to know. As usual, Dewey, standing on the steps, was
patient, smiling. As he answered questions, one reporter remembered
that "his sense of humor was constantly in evidence."
"A bad case has been made out against Russia, " he told the reporter
for the St. Louis
Star Times.
"If
the accused are innocent, we have an
example of arbitrary exercise of power by a dictatorship.
If
they are
guilty, we have former leaders betraying the cause for which they
fought- an evidence of some sort of rottenness in the system itself." He
said little about Trotsky-that person was already behind him, and he
never dwelt on the past. He wanted the reporters to know that he had
followed the news of the day from Mexico, and that he was more inter–
ested now in how the Supreme Court could be renovated; he doubted
that FDR's court-packing plan could succeed. But Dewey's experience in
the Trotsky trial had had an effect, after all . From this time forward, his
deep suspicion of the leadership of the Soviet Union was evident. He
himself was a socialist at the core of his politics, but after this trial he
rejected Marxism-Leninism and Stalinism utterly as the opposite of
socialism, whereas most other American liberals continued to regard
socialism and communism as closely related. On communism as applied
to America, he said definitively to the St. Louis reporter: "the surest way
to put this country into Fascist hands is to try to make it communist.
For me, however, I have great faith in the common sense of the average
American and in democracy and education. I look into the future with
hope.
If
recovery lasts,
I'll
feel easy; if it doesn't,
I'll
be afraid of Fascism
and war."
Dewey had hardly finished his commentary to reporters and lectur–
ing the physicians when he was on the wing again . He hurried to a rural
ranch in Missouri where his daughter Evelyn was living. But he didn't
pause long. Soon he was back in New York, mobbed by reporters, giv–
ing speeches, attending committee meetings and rallies, appearing on
the radio. His press releases were carried in all the major papers. The
onslaught against him by Party members and, more broadly, by those
