American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky

The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky was a pseudo-judicial process set up by American Trotskyists as a front organization following the first of the Moscow Trials. It had no powers of subpeona, nor official imprimatur from any government. It was composed of historians, sociologists, journalists, authors, and other notable figures, including Edmund Wilson, Suzanne La Follette, Louis Hacker, Norman Thomas, John Dos Passos, Reinhold Niebuhr, George Novack, Franz Boas, John Chamberlain and Sidney Hook. John Dewey, then seventy-eight years old, agreed to head its Commission of Inquiry.

In March 1937, The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky initiated the so-called Dewey Commission (officially the "Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials"). The inquiry was named after its Chairman, John Dewey. Its other members were Carleton Beals, an authority on Latin-American affairs; Otto Ruehle, biographer of Karl Marx and former member of the Reichstag; American journalists Benjamin Stolberg and Suzanne LaFollette (Secretary); Alfred Rosmer, who in 1920-21 had been a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International; Wendelin Thomas, leader of the Wilhelmshaven sailors’ revolt in November 1918 and later a Communist member of the German Reichstag; Edward A. Ross, Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin; former literary critic of The New York Times John Chamberlain, Carlo Tresca, Italian-American anarchist leader; and Mexican journalist Francisco Zamora.

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