Notebook: On the Committee for Cultural Freedom
Harrington, Michael
The recent revelations about secret CIA subsidies has brought to public attention the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international grouping of intellectuals, and its affiliate in this...
...The Committee objects, on the ground of vagueness, to a definition based on adherence to "economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world Communism or .. . of any other form of totalitarianism...
...Thus, for example, such an outrage as depriving the veteran anti-Stalinist radical Max Shachtman of a passport with which to travel in Europe—a State Department act one may assume the ACCF would not approve of—is made possible or at least much easier by the precedents created in prosecutions and persecutions of the Stalinists...
...those issues that were agitating the His Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No arti-whole intellectual and academic world, cles were widely circulated by the and enraged communiques on the outCommittee, which meant that in ef-rages performed by people like Arthur fect it endorsed his systematic, explicit Miller or Bertrand Russell in exagefforts to minimize the threat to civil gerating the danger to civil liberties liberties and to attack those European in the U.S...
...Currently, it is intervening in the case of Barry Miller, a former member of the Politics Club of the University of Chicago to whom the army refuses an honorable discharge because of his past (anti-Stalinist) associations...
...When Irving Kristol was exeeven of intellectual intrigue), one may cutive secretary of the ACCF, one safely say that it is Hook who has learned to expect from him silence on molded the decisive ACCF policies...
...As a piece of apologetics this statement is fantastic...
...About the spokesthose few remaining fellow-travelers men for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing...
...It is but one reflection, and not by far the largest, of thestresses and strains which this free country is suffering as a result of itsdetermination to resist Communist totalitarianism...
...In the course of the analysis, Section 212 (a) (28) of the McCarran Act, which bars visas strictly on the basis of political criteria, is discussed...
...Under the guidance of Hook and was later circulated under the and the leadership of Irving Kristol, ACCF imprimatur, one could read who supported Hook's general out-such astonishing and appalling statelook, the American Committee cast its ments as "there is one thing the Ameriweight not so much in defense of can people know about Senator Mcthose civil liberties which were steadily Carthy: he, like them, is unequivocalbeing nibbled away, but rather against ly anti-Communist...
...In this discussion the Committee assumes as a matter of course that it is perfectly legitimate to bar Stalinists (or members of the Communist party) from visas...
...it was active in the Muhlenberg College case where some Chaplin films were banned...
...In December 1952 it published a "Memorandum on the Visa Problem...
...This curious defense of cultural freedom is capped with an even more curious statement: We know that the visa problem was not created by arbitrary malice on thepart of Congressmen or State Department officials...
...but it fails to see that even in terms of such an objective, it could be effective only if it fought with vigor and passion against the violations of freedom that have mounted up in the U.S., instead of querulously minimizing their extent and gravity...
...And this the Committee has failed to do...
...In an article by Kristol, took a dim view of American develop-which first appeared in Commentary ments...
...on civil liberties...
...We wish we had the space to reprint the entire article as it appeared in our Spring 1955 issue, but here, completely unchanged, is a significant portion of it...
...This document was concerned with the entry of foreign intellectuals, trade unionists, etc., into the United States...
...We are not, to be sure, dealing with a black-and-white matter...
...One of the crippling assumptions of the Committee has been that it would not intervene in cases where Stalinists or accused Stalinists were involved...
...Thereby, in effect, the Committee proposes its own version of the Smith Act, and abandons the long-standing and honorable position of American liberalism that such phrases as "violent overthrow," besides being vague and misleading, are insufficient grounds for poIitical discrimination...
...But it has gone even further...
...What matters is that the drive against cultural freedom and civil liberties takes on the guise of anti-Stalinism...
...it criticized the procedure of the McCarthy investigation of the Voice of America...
...What it really cares about most is a struggle against fellow-travelers and "neutralists"— that is, against many European intellectuals...
...and it seems just as cogent now as it was then...
...Such an analysis did appear in the pages of DISSENT some twelve years ago...
...It finds "adequate" criteria for exclusion of those who "advocate or teach or who are members or affiliated with any organization" that advocates or teaches the "violent over throw" of the government...
...it was written by Michael Harrington...
...intellectuals who, whatever their own Inevitably, this led to more serious political or intellectual deficiencies, problems...
...It protested to Attorney General Brownell on the treatment of Chaplin and Arthur Miller...
...Notably missing in the discussions these last few months has been an effort to analyze politically the role of these groups during the years when the Cold War was at its height...
...Without implying At times this had an almost comic any "conspiracy" theory of history (or aspect...
...The recent revelations about secret CIA subsidies has brought to public attention the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international grouping of intellectuals, and its affiliate in this country, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom...
...And with some justification...
...The cases which gave rise to the Memorandum were, of course, those of anti-Stalinists...
...It has rested this position on the academic argument, advanced most systematically by Sidney Hook, that Stalinists, being enemies of democracy, have no "right" to democratic privileges and that, consequently, no threat to civil liberties or cultural freedom is involved when they are deprived of these privileges...
...Given such facts, it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to defend civil liberties without clearly defending the civil rights of Stalinists (which has nothing whatever to do with [defending] spies or sabotage...
...But the actual problem is not the metaphysical one of whether enemies of democracy (as the Stalinists clearly are) have a "right" to democratic privileges...
...This, in the name of defending cultural freedom( As someone remarked, the Committee might better have renamed itself the American Committee for Cultural Accommodation...
...As a description of reality it is far more accurate with regard to the stresses and strains within the Committee itself than within the United States...
...In practice the ACCF who tried to exploit the civil liberties has fallen behind Sidney Hook's views issue...
...The Committee also claims to have done good work in ways precluding publicity, and there is no reason to doubt this claim...
...There are recommendations for exceptions, for a sophisticated use of criteria, in the case of Stalinist front members, but the assumption is always that the mere holding of Stalinist opinions is automatically a sufficient ground for refusing a visa...
...But these activities do not absorb the main attention or interest of the Committee: its leadership is too jaded, too imbued with the sourness of indiscriminate anti-Stalinism to give itself to an active struggle against the dominant trend of contemporary intellectual life in America...
...In a number of cases the Committee has acted within the United States in defense of freedom...
Vol. 14 • September 1967 • No. 5
