The American Committee for Cultural Freedom

...Or for the membership of that distinguished thinker and defender of freedom, Victor Riesel...

...III In practice the ACCF has fallen behind Sidney Hook's views on civil liberties...

...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 the part of Congressmen or State Department officials...

...This document, which contains an endorsement of the McCarran Committee, was given the approval of the executive of the ACCF...

...One of the crippling assumptions of the Committee has been that it would not intervene in cases where Stalinists or accused Stalinists were involved...

...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...

...H.) But by far the best and most impressive letter came from David Riesman...

...In the United States the ACCF assumed that the positive task of defending cultural freedom could be achieved primarily through uniting almost every variety of anti-Stalinist...

...A series of letters from ACCF leaders appeared in the February 28, 1955 issue of The New Republic, and these are worthy of close scrutiny...

...The Committee objects, on the ground of vagueness, to a definition for exclusion based on adherence to "economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world Communism or...

...Thus, for example, such an outrage as depriving 116 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...

...once "the task of uniting each free nation" is raised, the inevitable divisions of politics must come into play or be unhealthily suppressed...

...Gilbert's belief in due process and his insistence on procedural safeguards...

...We do not think it an exaggeration to say that the issue involves far more than the attitude of intellectuals toward Lattimore: it involves nothing less than the future of cultural freedom...

...Finally, certain speculations are possible with regard to the reasoning of some ACCF leaders...

...A good part of Thomas' long letter consisted of a blustering attack on the author of the original New Republic article for using a pseudonym—as if Thomas had not associated during his life-time with numerous socialists who, for good and sufficient reasons, also used pseudonyms...

...What matters is that the drive against cultural freedom and civil, liberties takes on the guise of anti-Stalinism...

...where it does have influence) . Neither point of view adds stature to American intellectuals...

...What, restrictions could legitimately be placed upon individual freedom in the interests of national security...

...In December 1952 it published a "Memorandum on the Visa Problem...

...it was active in the Muhlen berg College case where some Chaplin films were banned...

...This hodge-podge was to prove characteristic of the inner tension and confusion in the American Committee...

...Another description of the same process (although with a totally different—in 120 deed sympathetic—judgment of the result) was made by Lionel Trilling in the Partisan Review: "Intellect has associated itself with power as perhaps never before in history, and is now conceded to be itself a kind of power...

...Almost always it has served a useful purpose 113 only when it led to various groups or individuals acting in common for delimited ends while not pretending to dissolve their larger differences...

...For example, it sent James Burnham on a tour in India, with the intention, no doubt, of having that noted libertarian explain the meaning of cultural freedom to the benighted Indian intellectuals...

...It finds "adequate," however, criterion for exclusion of those who "advocate or teach or who are members or affiliated with any organization" that advocates or teaches the "violent overthrow" of the government...

...Stein's letter—a task that can be left to individuals (and Congressional committees...

...Norman Thomas, the leader of the Socialist Party and also active in the ACCF...

...Emphasis mine—M...

...Certainly this process of the loss of independence and the rationalization of the intellectual life plays a part in the creation of a phenomenon like the American Committee...

...IV Perhaps the most important—certainly the most scandalous— incident revealing the inner bent and bias of the Committee has occurred 117 quite recently...

...My decision to do so was taken long before the letter on the Gilbert article, though letters such as this, which appeared to me to demand the entire Committee's attention for the vindictive pursuit of the shrinking minority of "liberals who haven't learned," was one of the reasons for my resignation...

...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...

...of any other form of totalitarianism...

...We reprint his letter in full, and particularly invite attention to his final sentence: SIRS: I recently resigned from the Executive Committee of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom...

...And the problem becomes all the more exacerbated when the announced objective of an organization is not merely opposition to Stalinism (that comes pretty cheap these days...

...so that often it has been less an organization devoted to the defense of cultural freedom than an agency propagandizing the American party line...

...In the same issue of The New Republic there is an extremely effective answer to Thomas by the magazine's editor, Michael Straight, in which it is demonstrated at length that the McCarran Committee did not follow the rules for fair investigation set up by Thomas himself in his book The Test of Freedom, and that it did not aid public understanding of anything...

...118 V It is to the credit of several ACCF members that they have not kept silent about the Stein scandal...

...But Mr...

...Nor is there any reason why a "united front" in defense of cultural freedom should not be possible and useful—provided, however, that there is a clear understanding as to how cultural freedom can be defended...

...Stein's first point verges on the incredible...

...I Though it had a previous embryonic existence, the American Committee established itself after an International Congress for Cultural Freedom held in Berlin in June 1950...

...Stein's concern for the sanctity of juridical processes does not seem to have kept the ACCF-sponsored book, McCarthy and the Communists, by Rorty and Decter, from several times characterizing Lattimore as a "skillful, effective and influential partylining propagandist...

...Herbert J. Muller, in a blunt attack on Stein, wrote...

...In the 1950's there has been 121 a certain reversal of terms, a drive for absolute freedom in Russia (where the ACCF does not yet have any influence) and an ambiguity with regard to freedom in the U.S...

...This statement is, of course, substantially in agreement with one of the counts of the perjury indictment against Lattimore...

...Riesman's views on American society have been subjected to a good deal of criticism in DISSENT, it is only just that his position receive here the praise it deserves...

...Who were invited, incidentally, with far greater frequency and cordiality thanthe intellectuals of the anti-Stalinist left...

...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...

...My own judgment about the chain which runs from Tydings to McCarran to the perjury persecu119 tion is mixed, and really beside the point, since I share (as I am sure do most members of the Committee) Mr...

...In a way, the ACCF is organized along lines rather similar to the select social club or, if one wishes to be more kindly, a self-appointed and self-perpetuating "academy...

...Yet, in defense of Cultural Freedom, Mr...

...The immediate occasion for this crisis we shall describe later...

...The basis of the international organization was a manifesto signed by a wide spectrum of intellectuals, from Ignazio Silone to Sidney Hook, from David Rousset to Jacques Maritain...

...The kind of antiStalinism which follows from supporting the Smith Act, or even from supporting it with numerous qualifications as Sidney Hook does, is fundamentally different from that which follows from condemning the Smith Act...

...As a piece of apologetics this statement is fantastic...

...The cases which gave rise to the Memorandum were, of course, those of anti-Stalinists...

...by James T. Farrell—and Robert Montgomery...

...115 At times this had an almost comic aspect...

...Still, what appeared to me as a disproportionate amount of the Commit...

...one must be chosen...

...Was the fact that a teacher was a Communist to be regarded as professional disqualification or not...

...The statement of the International Committee, one quickly notices, does not provide such understanding...

...With increasing velocity, the ACCF has moved toward the position of embracing "pure and simple" (which is to say, not at all pure) anti-Stalinism, while maintaining a great deal of silence on the state of cultural freedom in the United States...

...VI It would be easy to adopt a, simple tone of anger against the ACCF...

...many activities of the latter sort have, in the interests of the individuals involved, not been publicized...

...The Committee lists the following as points open to legitimate disagreement among its members: Was Communism an opinion or a conspiracy...

...Behind this immediate crisis, however, lurk the larger problems that beset those American intellectuals who are sincerely devoted to cultural freedom yet are simultaneously involved with a politics that prods them to qualify, weaken and sometimes even negate this devotion...

...In effect, thereby, 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 political discrimination...

...What was the nature of totalitarianism, of democracy, of liberty...

...The feeling of betrayal which developed out of the increase of knowledge with regard to Stalinism was reinforced by the tremendous polarizing effect of the cold war...

...Rovere cast further light upon the ACCF when he remarked that the majority of its Executive agreed with Stein's views "and looks upon mine as eccentric...

...Yet the point in analyzing it cannot be a mere denunciation, if only because its membership includes good and honest people...

...it seems unfortunate to me that (liberals) should dissipate what little influence they have by...

...wrote to say he thought the ACCF "ought to find better things to do than to harry Lattimore...

...In an article by Kristol, which first appeared in Commentary and was later circulated under the ACCF imprimatur, one could read such astonishing and appalling statements as "there is one thing the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Com munist...

...The remainder of his communication, a crass and vindictive justification of the prolonged harassment to which Lattimore has been subjected, is entirely in keeping with the totally anti-libertarian—and indeed, in this case, downright inhumane—spirit of his ideas about cultural freedom in America...

...Meanwhile, the exchange in The New Republic has served to bring implicit disagreements into the open...

...Inevitably, this led to more serious problems...

...it criticized the procedure of the McCarthy investigation of the Voice of America...

...Anti-Stalinism—crude, promiscuous and often without positive content—became the magic talisman of intellectual respectability, and the result was a curiously ambiguous definition of cultural freedom...

...And when this is combined with the more basic social process of bureaucratization of the intellectual life, the result is the kind of ambiguity embodied in the American Committee...

...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...

...the very mood of American intellectual life in recent years has become increasingly that of "critical support" (with the inevitable emphasis on the second term gaining the ascendancy) of American foreign policy...

...Is there a right to a government job, which even Communists and other totalitarians could claim...

...David Riesman's letter poses a challenge that neither the ACCF leadership nor its members can ignore...

...Stein, speaking for the cause of Cultural Freedom, goes further and suggests a competence to deal with "apologists" (not, mind you, spies or saboteurs: simply apologists...

...A committee that could retain such figures (not to mention Max Eastman, John Chamberlain and John dos Passos) could hardly be expected to bristle with alertness before the dangers to liberty in the United States, no 114 matter how sensitive it was to the threat from several thousand miles away...

...Stein about the draft letter, I once more emphasized my feeling that there were more important issues demanding the Executive Committee's consideration, and that in any event (irrespective of the factual accuracy of the letter, which I did not question) to put the whole weight of the Committee for Cultural Freedom behind the pursuit of an already beleaguered man, living in limbo and not permitted to teach classes, was an act of inhumanity...

...That Norman Thomas, identified in American eyes with the cause of socialism, should have let himself be put in the position of defending Sol Stein's outrage—this tells us a great deal not merely about the ACCF but about the debacle of American radical and liberal politics in general...

...But such a disagreement can hardly be the basis for common action, even for the limited aim of opposition to Stalinism...

...Stein asking to be dissociated from the letter on the Lattimore case, and suggesting that whoever wrote it sign it and speak for himself...

...Given the presence of McCarthyite supporters in the Committee,* it was almost inevitable that the boast—"we have not allowed this overriding menace [of Stalinism] to blind us to the injustices on our doorsteps"— would be understood in extremely broad fashion...

...Part of the answer is supplied by the general development of American society...

...And again: "One can stand up for Owen Lattimore's rights when he is threatened with criminal proceedings and yet believe intelligent opinion in and out of Congress was the gainer of the inquiry conducted by Judge Morris" (i.e., the McCarran committee...

...It is humiliating that a nation confronted by literally life or death issues should still be distracted and embittered by an hysterical search for scapegoats...

...Obviously, these are questions concerning which honest men can disagree...

...He then proceeds to discuss them...

...The Committee, it goes without saying, has accomplished many good and valuable things, in clarifying the nature of Communist totalitarianism and in exposing the apologetics of its fellow-travelers, and in defending, as an aspect of cultural freedom, civil liberties in the academic and intellectual community...

...Together, the two events hastened an either/or kind of philosophy...

...About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing...

...His Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No articles were widely circulated by the Committee, which meant that in effect it endorsed his systematic, explicit efforts to minimize the threat to civil liberties and to attack those European intellectuals who, whatever their own political or intellectual deficiencies, took a dim view of American developments...

...And this the Committee has failed to do...

...but rather a positive defense of cultural freedom...

...Why then has it drifted into such an anomalous position...

...Thomas then went on to say that "Lawyers, devoted to civil liberty," have praised the McCarran inquiry into Lattimore as "something of a model in Congressional investigation...

...The European Committees have been more concerned with a living day-to-day defense of intellectual freedom and have retained a greater degree of political independence vis a vis their own governments...

...We are not, to be sure, dealing with a black-and-white matter...

...This general point gains in concreteness when it is related to the cold war...

...This feeling is rather similar, though it is not quite the same, as that which has been described by Hannah Arendt as the "exCommunist" syndrome—only they can know the cunning and power of the enemy...

...In the December 27, 1954 issue of The New Republic there appeared, under the pseudonym of Brian Gilbert, a discussion of the Lattimore case...

...Stein writes: Congressional committees, however, when they function responsibly, perform a valuable service in furnishing the public with evaluated information concerning the work of apologists and agents of the Soviet Union who have not—or cannot be proven to have—broken existing laws...

...II The Berlin manifesto was signed by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.— and James Burnham...

...The Committee also claims to have done good work in ways precluding publicity, and there is no reason to doubt this claim...

...This document was concerned with the entry of foreign intellectuals, trade unionists, etc., into the United States...

...In White Collar, C. Wright Mills assigns considerable importance to the rise of the intellectual technician and the parallel bureaucratization of society—with a consequent loss of independence on the part of the intellectual who is absorbed in this process...

...Nonetheless, this organization has recently suffered—and so far as one can determine, continues to suffer—a severe political crisis on the very issue of cultural freedom which is its presumable reason for existence...

...The statement—we do not propose to worry this one sentence too much, except for its symptomatic bearing—skirts the obvious fact that within the "limitation" it proposes there remains unanswered every question of how to oppose Stalinism...

...for the moment we need only say that it concerns statements by its leading officials so compromising to any libertarian spirit that a number of prominent ACCF members have publicly protested...

...A good number of its active leaders are people who have had bitter and scarring experiences with Stalinism, whether through party membership, front association, denunciation as Trotskyists real or assumed, etc...

...It is not a feeling likely to make for either a supple politics or a firm defense of cultural freedom...

...What it really cares about most is a struggle against fellowtravelers and "neutralists"—that is, against many European intellectuals...

...These elements of social and personal motivation may put certain ACCF leaders in an understandable light, but they do not, and cannot, excuse the political basis and actual practice of the Committee...

...My emphasis— M. H.) Perhaps the most extreme of the current interpretations of powers of Congressional committees claims the right of exposing general "situations...

...What has happened in practice is that the American Committee has taken on a political coloration: it has steadily drifted to the right, toward the position of conforming to and apologizing for the intellectual atmosphere in the United States...

...Stein's notions about what is proper to discuss, the Rorty-Decter book could thus be read as an attempt to exert "pressures upon judge and jurors...

...Without implying any "conspiracy" theory of history (or even of intellectual intrigue) , one may safely say that it is Hook who has molded the decisive ACCF policies...

...It protested to Attorney General Brownell on the treatment of Chaplin and Arthur Miller...

...The International Committee was conceived as a kind of "united front...

...That is, it involves the question faced by all the accredited institutions of American liberalism: will they, in a situation where every social pressure makes for accommodation and retreat, be able to remain liberal...

...it marks an abdication of critical function...

...Consisting primarily of rhetorical affirmations of freedom, the politics of this statement were as unexceptionable as they were vague, save perhaps for a sideswipe against "neutralism...

...In a number of cases the Committee has acted within the United States in defense of freedom...

...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...

...When one undercuts its formal pronouncements and examines its actual preoccupations, it becomes clear that anti-Stalinism of the most indiscriminate kind was the only essential requirement for membership...

...In writing Mr...

...Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...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 spies or sabotage...

...He writes: If Mr...

...For a discussion group they would provide an excellent agenda...

...and this, in turn, must obviously mute its defense of cultural freedom...

...122...

...Mr...

...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 with some justification...

...It counts among its members, most notably on its masthead, the names of many intellectuals with a long history of devotion to cultural freedom...

...Stein's "satisfied-customer view of the McCarran Committee"—an indictment which not even a hostile critic could improve upon...

...By contrast, the American Committee has enthusiastically laid itself open to the pressures and shaping influences of State Department policies and rationales...

...I had delayed resigning at the urging of friends who hoped that the Executive Committee could be reconstituted, so as to become more representative of the concerns of the membership at large, but I eventually became convinced that this was not the case and that, at any rate, I did not have the time, energy, and capacity for the effort...

...As someone remarked, the Committee might better have renamed itself the American Committee for Cultural Accommodation...

...Had there not been public discussion of the case, it is very possible that the vast "pressures" from the right that were quietly exerted might well have succeeded...

...And indeed, in going over the roster of the American Committee one does find intellect associated with power, the successful journalists, editors, union functionaries and the like...

...Just before resigning, I had written a letter to Mr...

...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 honor able discharge because of his past (anti-Stalinist) associations...

...This statement, let it be remembered, appears in a context of a long juridical and extra-juridical harassment of Lattimore—and to deplore this harassment in no way depends upon any sympathy with Lattimore's opinions...

...who "have not—or cannot be proven to have—broken existing laws...

...Richard Rovere caustically referred to Mr...

...Under the guidance of Hook and the leadership of Irving Kristol, who supported Hook's general outlook, the American Committee cast its weight not so much in defense of those civil liberties which were steadily being nibbled away, but rather against those few remaining fellow-travelers who tried to exploit the civil liberties issue...

...In another section of his communication, Mr...

...What about "guilt by association...

...In the 1930's many a Stalinist front group was for freedom here and not in Russia...

...This, in turn, has led to exercises in what might be called intellectual colonialism...

...DAVID RIESMAN It is sad—indeed, humiliating—to report, however, that the official ACCF position found its only supporter in...

...and one that does not require a Committee for Cultural Freedom...

...Members are co-opted after sponsorship...

...Now the concept of the "united front" has an honorable as well as a dishonorable past...

...This, in the name of defending cultural freedom...

...It indicates an almost complete reversal of the traditional estimate of the intellectual as a focus of opposition toward the status quo...

...it acts as it does not out of malice or because it is manipulated by a secret caucus, but from what is evidently free choice...

...Or for the fact that until quite recently such McCarthyite or near McCarthyite intellectuals as James Burnham and George Schuyler found it possible to work side by side with Sidney Hook...

...In passing: Mr...

...feeling obliged to prove their 100 percent liberality of spirit by springing to the defense of a McCarran...

...Gilbert's article expressed his displeasure with the perjury case now pending against Owen Lattimore, readers may question the propriety of such interference with judicial process and the appropriateness of such pressures upon a judge and jurors who will have to maintain objectivity in weighing the answers...

...This meeting was attended by intellectuals from 21 countries and was followed by the formation of national groups...

...Stein begins with the suggestion that such cases are not a proper subject of discussion...

...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 the February 14, 1955 issue, Sol Stein, Executive Director of the ACCF, came to the defense of Cultural Freedom in a long communication that is certain to become a classic document for the history of the collapse of American liberalism...

...But it has gone even further...

...tee's limited energies have gone into the drafting and discussion of such things as Mr...

...Here, the loss of independence is intensified by the polarities of the international situation...

...If one accepted Mr...

...Was the Smith Act a violation of civil liberties...

...It is but one reflection, and not by far the largest, of the stresses and strains which this free country is suffering as a result of its determination to resist Communist totalitarianism...

...Its well-publicized statements are often taken as the quasi-official opinion of intellectual liberalism...

...Some of them are people with a feeling that only they appreciate the urgency of combating Stalinism, a feeling of vast and even violent impatience with those "ritualistic liberals" who cling to the traditional pieties of civil libertarianism...

...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...

...That the point I am making is urgent can immediately be seen by comparing the American Committee and its European counterparts...

...Since Mr...

...When Irving Kristol was Executive Secretary of the ACCF, one learned to expect from him silence on those issues that were agitating the whole intellectual and academic world, and enraged communiques on the outrages per formed by people like Arthur Miller or Bertrand Russell in exaggerat ing the danger to civil liberties in the U.S...

...Answering the question "whether a real collaboration between Socialists and right-wing parties is possible or desirable," it declared: "This collaboration is desirable if its objectives are limited to the task of uniting each free nation against threats to its freedom from within and without and thus acting as a deterrent against aggression...

...Else how account for the recent election to its Executive Committee of Whittaker Chambers...