He was best remembered as the court reporter for the 1937 John Dewey Commission that examined the Stalinist charges against Trotsky in Mexico City and as a memoirist and activist in the social democratic movement in his later years.
Politically active since childhood, he was selling socialist literature on the street corners by age eight, and joined the Young Communist League at fifteen.
[2] In the fall of 1928 Glotzer and his Chicago co-thinker Arne Swabeck were expelled from the Workers (Communist) Party and its youth section for espousing Trotskyism.
[2] Glotzer was a delegate to the founding convention of the Communist League of America (Opposition) (CLA) in May 1929 and was elected as one of five members of the governing National Council of the fledgling organization.
In 1931, Glotzer traveled with his wife to visit Leon Trotsky at Prinkipo, Turkey, where he spent some weeks as a secretary and guard to the exiled Soviet leader.
[1] In April 1937 the skilled stenographer Glotzer was sent to Mexico City to serve as court reporter at the John Dewey Commission called to hear charges made by the Joseph Stalin regime against Leon Trotsky.
This commission heard evidence for a week before rendering a verdict clearing Trotsky of charges of espionage and sabotage levied against him in the ongoing Moscow Trials.
After the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the beginning of the Second World War, Shachtman, Abern, and others condemned the USSR's alliance with Nazi Germany and their cooperative invasion of Poland.