The Heart of the Matter

In spite of the endless bickering of defense counsel in Manhattan's federal courthouse, the trial of the nation's eleven top Communists began to take shape. Last week, an exchange between Judge Harold Medina and Party Boss Eugene Dennis, who is defending himself, threw the fundamental issue of the case into sharp, clear focus.

As they had time & time again, defense lawyers angrily objected to the introduction of Communist books as evidence of criminal intent. Books and ideas were not on trial, they said. Such methods, said Dennis, were a violation of the constitutional right of free speech.

Medina sent the jury out, then explained: if the books taught methods of carrying out a violent revolution and if they were actually used to instruct revolutionists, then it was not the books that were on trial but the men who put them to use.

"But the important thing," Dennis argued, "is what interpretation we defendants have placed upon the books."

Judge Medina agreed wholeheartedly: "There is the issue in the case. You and the other defendants here say: 'This was all a perfectly innocent thing. We never advocated or taught . . . overthrow of the Government by force or violence at all. All we wanted to do was to bring about certain salutary social reforms, and to do it by a perfectly legitimate party . . . ' That, as I see it, goes right to the heart of the matter."

Perfectly Innocent Thing? That the activities of the Communists since 1945 were not perfectly innocent was what the Government had been trying to prove for the past 16 weeks. They had called a total of eleven witnesses--ex-Communists and undercover agents for the FBI--most of them once trusted and responsible members of the U.S. Communist Party. Their testimony touched on Red activities in Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Maryland, Wisconsin, New York, Missouri and Ohio.

As the ex-Communists told it, such books as the party's official History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Stalin's Foundations of Leninism were taught and studied by the faithful, not only as dogma, but "as guides to action." Only by violent action, the curriculum taught, could bourgeois governments be overthrown.

Who Were the Culprits? Putting their book-learning to practical use, said the witnesses, the party faithful were ordered to infiltrate U.S. war plants, e.g., General Electric at Lynn, Mass., manufacturers of jet engines. They were taught that when another "heavy depression" hit the U.S., the time would have arrived to destroy its Government; that if the U.S. adopted an "imperialist" policy, i.e., one opposed to the policy of the Soviet Union, the party must wage "civil war."

Such revolutionary tactics, the witnesses testified, were the subject of secret meetings, secret schools, gatherings at private apartments, were even discussed at such more or less open establishments as Manhattan's Jefferson School of Social Science.

Who did the teaching and the advocating? The Government had put the finger on a number of small fry as the actual instructors. On the basis of the evidence so far, only a few of the eleven big fish on trial had actually labored in this vineyard. What the Government was trying to prove, however, was that all of the eleven, who comprised the U.S. Politburo, set the line, gave the orders, and made very sure that a far from innocent thing was being carried out.

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