SOURCE: "John Dewey, the 'Trial' of Leon Trotsky, and the Search for Historical Truth," in Historical Truth and Lies about the Past, The University of North Carolina Press, 1996, pp. 13-34.

In the following essay, Spitzer examines Dewey's role as commissioner of the committee to defend Leon Trotsky, its eventual finding that Trotsky was not guilty of the Moscow purges or of corroborating with Nazi Germany, Dewey's rejection of historical objectivity, and Dewey's conclusion that Trotsky was right although Dewey abhorred his political views.

For truth, instead of being a bourgeois virtue, is the mainspring of all human progress.—John Dewey

Consider the following historical text:

In 1937, new facts came to light regarding the fiendish crimes of the Bukharin-Trotsky gang. The trial of Pyatakov, Radek and others, the trial of Tukhachevsky, Yakir and others, and, lastly, the trial of Bukharin, Rykov, Rosengoltz and others, all showed that the Bukharinites...