page_title: Mauritz A. Hallgren
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Mauritz A. Hallgren / Biography / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of the 1-cent propaganda pamphet by Mauritz A. Hallgren, Why I Resigned from the Trotsky Defense Committee.
context_page_description: Mauritz Alfred Hallgren was an American journalist, editor, and author. Hallgren is remembered as a leading liberal public intellectual of the 1930s, writing extensively on current affairs for The Nation magazine.
context_section_description: During the first half of the 1930s Hallgren was a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine, contributing articles on domestic and international affairs and reviewing non-fiction books. In 1934, Hallgren left The Nation to take a post on the staff of the Baltimore Sun.
  As an active opponent of fascism and supporter of loyalists to the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War, Hallgren was a member of the Communist Party USA-sponsored League of American Writers and a signer of the organization's 1939 convention call.
  In January 1937, Hallgren made headlines by publicly resigning as a member of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, an organization of leading intellectuals which took testimony to test the veracity of political charges made against Leon Trotsky as part of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union. Hallgren charged that the committee had "become an instrument of the Trotskyists for political intervention against the Soviet Union." Hallgren's resignation letter to the Committee's secretary, Felix Morrow, was later published as a 1 cent pamphlet by the Communist Party's International Publishers in 1937.
  In his January 27 letter to Morrow, Hallgren explained that he had joined the Trotsky Defense Committee as an expression of his belief in" the right of asylum for persons exiled because of their political or other beliefs." With the granting of asylum to Trotsky by Mexico, this aspect of the committee's work had come to a close, however, Hallgren noted. However, with the completion of the second out of what was to become the three Moscow Trials, Hallgren came to a belief that
  
  "the very unanimity of the defendants, far from proving that this trial is also a 'frame-up,' appears to me to prive directly the contrary. For if these men are innocent, then certainly at least one of the three dozen, knowing that he faced death in any case, would have blurted out the truth. It is inconceivable that out of this great number of defendants, all should lie when lies would not do one of them any good."
  Hallgren asserted that while he readily agreed that "Stalin has his faults," nevertheless "every fair-minded person must concede that under its present leadership the Soviet Union has made remarkable progress toward establishing socialism." It was only among the Nazis, fascists, and reactionaries, as well as a handful of socialist adherents of the Second International and the Trotskyists who contended that the USSR was not progressing towards socialism, Hallgren wrote to Morrow.
  "The outcry against the Moscow trials first came from the Trotskyites," Hallgren charged. Given the weight of the public evidence, Hallgren concluded:
  
  "...I shall remain convinced that the present liberal movement to win justice for him is nothing more than a Trotskyite maneuver against the Soviet Union and against socialism.  I am equally convinced, as I must be under the circumstances, that the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky has, perhaps unwittingly, become an instrument of the Trotskyites for political intervention against the Soviet Union. ... I do not intend under any circumstances to allow myself to become a party to any arrangement that has for its objective purpose (whatever may be its subjective justification) the impairment or destruction of the socialist system now being built in Soviet Russia."
  Others joining Hallgren in resigning from the Trotsky Defense Committee included journalists Carleton Beals and Lewis Gannett, as well as Nation magazine editor Freda Kirchwey. These resignations were touted by the Communist Party as evidence that the committee was nothing more than a publicity bureau for Leon Trotsky and the political movement which he headed.
  Later in 1937, Hallgren published a book entitled A Tragic Fallacy, a work later hailed by historian Harry Elmer Barnes as "the definitive indictment of American interventionist diplomacy from Wilson to Roosevelt."
caption: Cover of Hallgren's pamphlet Why I Resigned from the Trotsky Defense Committee.
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