American Committee for Cultural Freedom
The American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF) was the U.S. affiliate of the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF).
Overview
[edit]The ACCF and CCF were organizations 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."[1] The CCF was funded by the CIA, as well as the ACCF (via the CIA officer James Burnham and front organizations like the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE).[2]
Within the American committee, ex-communist intellectuals affirmed most vehemently the need for resistance to communism: Franz Borkenau (member of the Communist Party of Austria until 1929), Sidney Hook (Communist fellow traveler in the 1920s); Arthur Koestler (member of the Communist Party of Germany from 1931 to 1938) and James Burnham (member of the Fourth International from 1934 to 1940). Koestler and Borkenau fully supported the idea of setting up a frontal opposition movement to international communism. Burnham even spoke out in favor of the manufacture of American atomic bombs.[3]
Members
[edit]The dominant figure in the organization was Sidney Hook. Its 600-strong membership encompassed leading figures on both the Right and the Left, some of whom included:
- Roger Baldwin
- Daniel Bell
- James Burnham
- Alexander Calder
- John Chamberlain
- Whittaker Chambers
- Elliot Cohen
- Robert Gorham Davis (chairman 1953–1954)[4]
- Moshe Decter
- John Dewey
- John Dos Passos
- Max Eastman
- James T. Farrell
- John Kenneth Galbraith
- Clement Greenberg
- Henry Hazlitt
- Sidney Hook
- Karl Jaspers
- Elia Kazan
- Irving Kristol
- Melvin J. Lasky
- Sol Levitas
- Dwight Macdonald
- Reinhold Niebuhr
- Mary McCarthy
- J. Robert Oppenheimer
- William Phillips
- Merlyn Pitzele
- Jackson Pollock
- David Riesman
- Elmer Rice
- James Rorty
- Richard Rovere
- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
- George Schuyler
- Sol Stein
- Norman Thomas
- Diana Trilling
- James Wechsler
- Leslie Fiedler
The committee's central or executive committee varied over time. James Burnham, who worked for the CIA, was a member until he left the group circa 1954.[5] Whittaker Chambers joined in late 1954 and was also a member of the executive committee.[6][7][8][9][10] Diana Trilling became chair person at some point.[11]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Cranky Integrity on the Left" in The New York Times (August 27, 1989)
- ^ Wilford, Hugh (2009). The Mighty Wurlitzer. ISBN 978-0674032569.
- ^ Grémion, Pierre (1995). Intelligence de l'anticommunisme : le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris (1950-1975). Fayard. OCLC 848618638.
- ^ "Robert G. Davis, 90, Author, Professor and Literary Critic". The New York Times. 17 July 1998. Retrieved 29 July 2017.
- ^ Smant, Kevin J. (1992). How Great the Triumph: James Burnham, Anti-Communism, and the Conservative Movement. University Press of America. p. 45.
- ^ Chambers, Whittaker (1987). Odyssey of a Friend (reprint ed.). Washington: Regnery. p. 229.
- ^ Navasky, Victor (2013). Naming Names. Open Road Media. ISBN 9781480436213.
- ^ Gollin, James (2001). Pied Piper: The Many Lives of Noah Greenberg. Pendragon Press. p. 143. ISBN 9781576470411.
- ^ Pells, Richard H. (1989). The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age. Wesleyan University Press. p. 340. ISBN 9780819562258.
- ^ Ceplair, Larry (2011). Anti-communism in Twentieth-Century America. ABC-CLIO. p. 134. ISBN 9781440800481.
- ^ Haslett, Tobi (29 May 2017). "The Feuds of Diana Trilling". New Yorker. Retrieved 22 October 2017.
Sources
[edit]- 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)