She added, “Nobody did at that period—that interpretation is the result of a significant change in our political culture. I never liked the secrecy but was willing to live with it because I thought we were doing useful work.”70
Like the Lovestoneites of the FTUC, witting members of the ACCF
seem not to have been troubled ethically by the organization’s secret funding. What concerns they felt were either tactical (another Executive Committee member, labor official Arnold Beichman, objected “not so much for moral reasons as because I felt certain that someday the whole tawdry business would be exposed”) or (again as with the FTUC) related to the question of the organization’s independence.71 In October 1951, Hook told Burnham that several members had become so upset about the arrangements for the Paris festival that they were on the verge of resigning. As Burnham reported to the CIA, there was “a general feeling of uneasiness about the relations of the Committee with ‘the government,’ and a half-conscious feeling by the Committee members that they are being exploited for purposes over which they have no real control.” An effort should be made “to counteract this uneasiness, and to forestall any public disruption of the Committee.”72
Whatever it was that the New York intellectuals in the ACCF knew or did not know about the CIA’s hand in their affairs, it did not prevent them from treating the organization as if it were a genuine, privately run committee, indeed, as if it were their own. The most obvious indication of this lack of regard for the ACCF’s intended tactical function as cover and backstop for the international CCF was the Executive Committee’s support for the two strategic options advocated by Koestler and Burnham in 1950 yet rejected by the CCF’s leadership: the adoption of an overtly political position and the inclusion of conservative elements in a united front against communism. The first of these policies, which reflected the
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New York intellectuals’ intense anti-Stalinism and conviction that they knew best how to wage the cultural Cold War, even led the ACCF to question the tactics of its parent body. Sometimes this criticism was implicit, as when the ACCF took steps to protest Soviet violations of human rights or rebut communist anti-American propaganda to which the CCF
had not responded.73 At other times, it explicitly disputed the relevance to the Cold War of the CCF’s cultural activities: Nabokov’s festival was a particular target for denunciation by the New York intellectuals, who clearly thought that the neutralist atmosphere of the French capital was rubbing off on the CCF’s officers.74 The CCF was understandably annoyed by these attacks from within its own camp and took an increasingly stern line with its American affiliate during the early 1950s. Hook found himself having to mediate between the two organizations, trying to explain the CCF’s cultural strategy to his comrades in New York while at the same time defending the ACCF’s hard-line political pronouncements to members of the CCF’s Executive Committee in Paris.
The other main tendency of the ACCF, toward a broad, inclusive membership policy (a late victory for Burnham, who had advised Hook to advertise the new organization “outside of the old radical and avant-garde circles” among “more conventional ‘American’ types”), resulted in a body that resembled, in the apt phrase of historian William L. O’Neill,
“a Popular Front of anti-Stalinists, something like the League of American Writers in reverse.”75 At first, the ACCF’s right and left wings—the former composed mainly of such ex-communists as Burnham and AMCOMLIB’s Eugene Lyons, the latter of socialists, liberals, and a few mavericks like Dwight Macdonald—managed to coexist, perhaps partly because potentially disruptive individuals in the New York intellectual community were either not invited or refused to join.76 (The launch of the journal
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