Evolution or Revolution

Sixteen solemn U.S. citizens filed into the jury box in a big walnut-paneled and marble courtroom in Manhattan last week, rose in their three-tiered box as Federal Judge Harold Medina made his entrance. The black-robed Court seated himself in his high-backed chair, looked out over the top of his desk and nodded to U.S. Attorney John F. X. McGohey. The trial of eleven Communist leaders, charged with conniving as Communists to overthrow the Government by violence, had finally got down to business.

A hundred-odd spectators watched. Six lawyers for the defense hunched over their tables, facing the bench. Judge Medina began to rock, holding his hand to his face. McGohey rose to outline the Government's case to the jury of twelve and its four alternate members.

The district attorney, a tall, grim-faced man, spoke for 60 minutes. He promised to prove that in 1945 the eleven Reds had laid their plans for violence. They had started classes in revolutionary technique, and the classes were still being run. Charged McGohey: "The Russian Revolution is studied in detail as a blueprint," and according to that blueprint it took only 50,000 trained revolutionaries to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia. "At the proper time," he said, the U.S. students of revolt are taught that "the party will lead the proletariat in revolution [in the U.S.]."

Scientific Socialism. At the defense table sat hulking, curly-haired Eugene Dennis, one of the eleven defendants. He had dismissed his lawyer, announcing he would plead his own case. His purpose was obvious; as his own attorney he could make speeches in court and get in a form of testimony without being under oath. Dennis made his side's first address.

He spoke in a surprisingly small, thin voice. Occasionally the judge had to stop him as he went soaring off into ideological space. He had to be stopped once again when he began to argue that the Reds had supported the U.S. war effort. It was beside the point, said the Court, "to show what good boys you were in other respects." Roughly within the framework of legal propriety Dennis made these points:

The Communist Party had been around the U.S. for 30 years, yet the Federal Government had never before tried to prosecute it for conspiracy. It was nonsense to say that communism's "scientific socialism" ("Much easier to understand than relativity," he declared) taught the violent overthrow of the U.S. The party, which numbered 70,000 members, merely practiced "the real principles of Marxism-Leninism."

As Dennis ticked them off, those principles sounded no more radical than Harry Truman's Fair Deal, no more revolutionary than the teachings of Abraham Lincoln. It wasn't Marx and Lenin who advocated force, he said. No, indeed. If violence came as a result of what the party proposed to do, said Dennis, it would be the fault of "reactionary groups [who] try to stop the march of social progress."

The other lawyers followed him, making much the same points. The jury listened with obvious interest.

Word from Moscow. McGohey presented his first witness. He was ex-Communist Louis Budenz, a reformed Red. In most of his previous public appearances, Witness Budenz had destroyed much of his value as an expert on communism by going off half-cocked every time the word was mentioned. But this time Witness Budenz, directed by the prosecution, testified icily and directly.

Doggedly the defense lawyers worried him with objections. His testimony was frazzled with interruptions, but what he managed to get out ran like this:

He was editor of the Daily Worker in 1945 when the party shifted from its wartime policy of getting along with capitalism to a postwar policy of trying to overthrow the U.S. The shift was dictated by Dmitry Z. Manuilsky, Ukraine delegate to the U.N., who at the time was in San

Francisco helping to write the U.N. charter for world peace.

In a letter from a Daily Worker correspondent, said Budenz, he was told that "Manuilsky was indignant at the American party for not criticizing American officials more severely." The result was French Red Jacques Duclos' now famous Paris article castigating Earl Browder, then chief of the U.S. Communist party. Browder, who still stands ready to testify for the defense, was the fall guy of the Communist policy shift dictated by Moscow.

Head-Scratching. As the trial lumbered on, the ideological gobbledygook of communism poured in full flood into the ears of Court and jury. Browder, among other things, was accused of the Communist sin of "tailism." "It sounds like some kind of special jargon," the judge said plaintively, and pleaded for an explanation of terms.

Budenz obliged. In committing tailism, Browder was riding the ideological coattails of such "bourgeois" thinkers as Franklin Roosevelt. Opportunistic error, said Budenz, was failing to follow the Marxist-Leninist line. Revisionism was erroneously believing in peaceful progress towards socialism. And just plain Browder-ism: being guilty of all the other errors in one big lump.

Defense attorneys also had some definitions of their own for what they considered errors committed in Judge Medina's courtroom. As Attorney Richard Gladstein saw it, certain of the judge's remarks did not fit the Court's own definition of fairness, were prejudicial to the case. Gladstein wanted him to declare a mistrial. "I won't do it," said the judge. "If you expect me to sit here like a bump on a log you're making a big mistake."

Attorney Harry Sacher said the judge tried to "negate" defense statements by his gestures. The way Sacher described them: "You scratched your head and pulled your ear." "When I scratch my head I'm just plain scratching my head," laughed Medina. "I have a habit of doing that and I'm not going to change it just because you don't like it."

Defense counsel had its own habit, too. Its members missed no pettifogging chance for objection, argument, delay. By such tactics they had held off the actual start of the trial for ten weeks. Now that it had been begun, delay for confusion's sake was still one of their favorite legal weapons.

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