American Committee For The Defense of Leon Trotsky

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.

Read more about American Committee For The Defense Of Leon Trotsky:  History, Conclusions of The Inquiry

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    Under all conditions well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.
    Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)

    The Englishman’s strong point is his vigorous insularity; that of the American his power of adaptation. Each of these attitudes has its perils. The Englishman stands firmly on his feet, but he who merely does this never advances. The American’s disposition is to step forward even at the risk of a fall.
    Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911)

    The cemetery isn’t really a place to make a statement.
    Mary Elizabeth Baker, U.S. cemetery committee head. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, p. 15 (June 13, 1988)

    If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.
    Malcolm X (1925–1965)

    England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.
    —Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)