Within this group, two individuals stand out for the important part they played in the cultural Cold War. Sidney Hook was the archetypal Jewish New York intellectual: brilliant, pugnacious, a fearsome polemicist; poet Delmore Schwartz nicknamed him “Sidney Chop” for his implacable performances of logical argumentation.6 Born and raised in one of the worst immigrant slums in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, Hook worked his way through CCNY (like Lovestone, he was a member of Morris Cohen’s famous philosophy class) to graduate school at Columbia, where he became a disciple of the illustrious Pragmatist John Dewey. Although strongly influenced by Marxism—indeed generally acknowledged as America’s leading Marxist thinker thanks to his magnum opus, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx—Hook was an ardent anti-Stalinist who loudly protested the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s, in which Stalin used the courts to purge his political enemies. Hook went so far as to organize a commission of inquiry, chaired by his mentor Dewey, which traveled to Mexico to question the exiled Leon Trotsky. In 1939, after much of the American left had rejected the Dewey commission’s finding that Trotsky was innocent of the charges leveled against him by Stalin, Hook formed another group, the Committee for Cultural Freedom, to act as a focus of opposition to the Popular Front. (As several historians have noted, some New York intellectuals, such as diehard radical Dwight Macdonald, thought the committee’s brief too “negative” and joined instead the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism, which put equal emphasis on anti-Stalinism and democratic socialism.)7 The late 1940s found Hook increasingly alarmed by the threat of Soviet expansion into western Europe and casting around for other organizational weapons with which to fight the anti-Stalinist cause. An attempt to hijack Macdonald’s anarcho-pacifist Europe-America Groups (EAG) for this purpose failed, as did an effort to replace EAG with the more straightforwardly anti-Soviet Friends of Russian Freedom (whose statement of aims was eerily like that of the CIA émigré front AMCOMLIB). Hook’s 1949 counterrally at the Waldorf was the culmination of this two-decades-old organizational history.
Less visible than Hook, but arguably more influential behind the scenes, was another NYU philosophy professor, James Burnham. If Hook epitomized the plebeian, immigrant New York intellectual, Burnham—taller in stature, gentler in expression, more elegant in appearance—belonged to the small minority of native-stock, patrician rebels who also were mem-
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bers of the group. Born into a wealthy Chicago family, Burnham received his education at a Catholic boarding school in Connecticut, then Princeton and Balliol College, Oxford.8 After taking up his appointment at NYU in 1929, he was gradually drawn into the world of New York sectar-ian radicalism, emerging as a leading theoretical light of the new Trotskyist faction, Max Shachtman’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP), before losing his faith in socialism after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and being driven from the SWP the following year. The 1940s saw Burnham move from a position of bleak political detachment, as expressed in his widely read 1941 treatise The Managerial Revolution (whose “nightmare vision of a world divided among three perpetually warring totalitarian superstates” strongly influenced George Orwell’s 1984), to fierce partisan-ship in the Cold War.9 The Struggle for the World, published in 1947 but based on a paper Burnham had written for the OSS in 1944, depicted international communism as a conspiratorial movement bent on global domination. The book urged American leaders to use all the means at their disposal, including political and psychological warfare, to resist Soviet expansion. “The summons is for nothing less than the leadership of the world,” proclaimed Burnham, in language verging on the apocalyptic.
“If it is reasonable to expect failure, that is only a measure of how great the triumph could be.”10
