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.