The battle at the Waldorf marked a turning point in the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds. The failure of the conference signaled the final extinction of the Popular Front as a force in American cultural life (at just the same time communists were being driven out of their last labor stronghold in the CIO), and the AIF’s counterdemonstration was the opening U.S. salvo in a conflict that would come to be known as the “cultural Cold War”—the Soviet-American contest for the allegiance of the world’s intellectuals. The following year, in June 1950, Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination would fund an anticommunist rally in West Berlin directly inspired by the example of the AIF, out of which was to emerge the CIA’s principal front operation in the cultural field, the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom. Over the course of the next decade, the CCF would become one of the west’s main defenses against the ideological appeal of communism and a dominant institutional force in western intellectual life.
Before examining the impact of the CIA’s covert patronage, as administered through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, on American culture (the subject of the next chapter), it is first necessary to relate the history of the CCF’s New York–based affiliate, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), and its attempt to mobilize U.S. intellectuals in the cultural Cold War. As will soon become evident, this means telling a story very like that of the Lovestoneites’ Free Trade Union Committee in that it features a group of ex-communists helping to invent the weapons with which the CIA fought the Cominform, then their being sidelined as the spies attempted to professionalize their front operations. The main dif-
72
A D E E P S I C K N E SS I N N E W Y O R K
ference between the ACCF and the FTUC was that the intellectuals were, if anything, even more troublesome clients for the Agency than their counterparts in labor.
When Hook countered the Cominform’s peace offensive by appealing instead to the concept of intellectual freedom, he was speaking to a distinct ideological tradition on the American non-communist left that dated back to the early 1930s. There emerged then in New York a group of intellectuals who, although riven by internal conflicts of one sort or another, were united by certain strong ideological bonds.3 One of these was a shared sense of alienation from the dominant, liberal political culture of the 1930s, the product in most cases of a Lovestone-like upbringing in an environment of Jewish, immigrant, working-class socialism (although the group was also joined by several upper-class, gentile bohemians whose rejection of New Deal politics could be interpreted as a form of radical conservatism). Following from this, the New York intellectuals, as they would later be designated (sometimes with the “i” in “intellectuals” capitalized, reinforcing their sense of themselves as a definite—and important—community or movement), also shared a strong allegiance to highbrow culture, in particular the most complex forms of modernist literary experimentation, which they consistently defended against political attack from both the left and the right.
Most crucially, and again inextricably tied up with their other affinities, the group was bound together by its hatred of Stalinism. Like Lovestone, most of the New York intellectuals had passed through or close to the communist movement in the early 1930s, and they remained in its orbit until the end of the decade, an element of its Trotskyist “left opposition”
(the Lovestoneites were the “right opposition”). Afterward, although several of them tried hard to invent new forms of non-communist radicalism, most became preoccupied with fighting Stalinism, to the exclusion of other, positive political commitments—a condition that Irving Howe, one of the more enduring radicals in their number, diagnosed as
“Stalinophobia.”4 Later still, during and after the 1960s, their peculiar combination of fervent anti-Stalinism and cultural elitism would cause the New York intellectuals to become identified with the neoconservative movement in politics and the arts.5
I N T E L L E C T U A L S
73