American Committee for Cultural Freedom

The American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF) was the U.S. affiliate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization that, during the Cold War, sought to encourage intellectuals to be critical of the Soviet Union and Communism, and to combat, according to a writer for the New York Times, "the continuing strength of the Soviet myth among the Western cultural elite. Despite all that had happened - the Moscow show trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the Russian attack on Finland, the takeovers in Eastern Europe, the mounting evidence of the gulag - Joseph Stalin still retained the loyalty of many writers, artists and scientists who viewed the Soviet Union as a progressive alternative to the 'reactionary,' 'war-mongering' United States." The CCF was in part funded by the CIA.

The dominant figure in the organization was Sidney Hook. Its 600-strong membership encompassed leading figures on both the Right and the Left, including: James Burnham, Alexander Calder, Whittaker Chambers, Max Eastman, Henry Hazlitt, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Sol Stein and Jackson Pollock.

See also

• Anti-Communism

Sources

• Sidney Hook, Out of Step, Harper & Row, 1987.
• A Short History of the New York Intellectuals on PBS's Arguing the World
• American Institute of Physics
• Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
• "Radical History" in The New Criterion (June 2002)
• "Revising the History of Cold War Liberals" in New Politics (Winter 2000)
• "The Mood of Three Generations" in The End of Ideology (2000)

• "Cranky Integrity on the Left" in The New York Times (August 27, 1989)