On the Intellectual Barricades

...Wallace would do anything to get Truman...

...This struck me as hilarious, on a par with Sir Robert Peel's 1832 support for the National Gallery on the ground that it would ease class friction...

...In his extremely well-researched book, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and theStruggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (Free Press?, 333 pp., $22.95), Peter Coleman vividly portrays the growth of the enterprise, the internal feuds and divergent tendencies that racked it, and its ultimate meltdown when the arrival of a generation that knew not Hitler or Stalin coincided with the revelation that the CCF had been covertly supported by the Central Intelligence Agency...

...In any event, Coleman has given me a new perspective on conferencing...

...Gerhard Eisler, the Rosenbergs, Greek Freedom, the Madagascar Seven, The Trenton Six, the Florentine Five, etc...

...The-Partisan Review crowd, the original core of the American Congress for Cultural Freedom, thought that when confronted with a crisis, one wrote an article...

...The fact that the failure of totalitarianism to produce "singing tomorrows" has today become a truism is in part a testament to the success of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in bracing the anti-Communist forces for the long-distance run that has led from Stalin and Lavrenti P. Beria to institutional chaos in the Soviet Union...

...Thus, when the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its American branch came on the scene I was immersed both in my teaching career at Haverford College and in the effort to clean up the Democratic Party, first in Philadelphia and then in all of Pennsylvania...

...Intellectuals are big talkers, and I heard some odd things in the late '50s, things that led me to suspect Cord Meyer was running quite an extensive and varied cultural offensive spearheaded by liberal anti-Communists...

...Perhaps because I was never attracted by Marxism in any of its manifestations, I was incapable of comprehending their world...

...That meeting marked the formation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), dedicated to seizing the commanding cultural heights in the West from the carefully disciplined Stalinists and their network of transmission belts...

...It was hard, often seemingly fruitless labor, but one of the things that made it interesting was the cast of characters: I realize, for instance, that I missed something in life by never knowing the Australian poet and CCF leader James McAuley...

...Indeed, before the United States entered World War II Sidney, John Dewey and other anti-Stalinist intellectuals had founded a Committee for Cultural Freedom to counter the Communist fronts mushrooming under the aegis of Willi Muenzenberg with their Popular Front message that So viet Russia was thebulwarkof human liberty against fascism...

...The seminar may have been fun...

...This brings us to the awkward point where the role of the U.S...

...He could write a pamphlet for every occasion, but he never considered it a substitute for organized action...

...He was organizing a CCF seminar in Montevideo on how to foster democratic development in Latin America and invited me to contribute...

...The 1950 Berlin Congress had been adjudged too confrontational by some European and English participants...

...There was no animosity between the American CCF and ADA...

...or I could mooch a lunch off Irving Brown or Harry Goldberg at the American Federation of Labor's Free Trade Union Committee...

...So the antique Stalinists, with some new recruits (mostly "red diaper-babies" such as Paul Robeson, Jr...

...I am deeply indebted to him intellectually—speaking of the years before he wandered off into Indian mysticism—but I wouldn't have wanted him in my World War II outfit...

...Marx to me was a superb political journalist (I now recognize Engels' major role in his articles), but I knew an eschatology when I saw one, and thought it absurd to desert the main (Christian) tent for a sideshow...

...While a fair number of us were teachers, ADA was not an intellectual outfit...

...In April 1966 the New York Times blew the whistle, and a year later its reportage was sensationalized in the organ of the lobotomized Left, Ramparts...

...Iwentmy way, eventually being elected national chairman of ADA in 1962, serving until 1965 when it became apparent that those of us who maintained ADA'S traditional "hard line" toward Communist imperialism were losing control to the anti-Vietnam forces...

...Besides holding conferences to save freedom, the CCF launched a series of Cultural Events...

...In Europe, including Britain, anti-Americanism was the order of the day, at least among the leading intellectuals...

...Curiously, since the great schism in American liberalism has left those of us who still hold the old flag in a small minority, I appreciate this need for fellowship far more at age 66 than I could at 36...

...What Coleman has brought home to me is that, unlike a number of lonesome antitotalitarians elsewhere in the world, I was already "networked"—to use an abominable term...

...In fact, I never could understand how Sidney Hook put up with this syndrome...

...We were in the trenches against Yahoo anti-Communism, Stalinist residues, racial segregation, and a host of other problems, domestic and foreign...

...Wallace admitted in his memoirs that he was taken for a ride, but at the time his fury at Truman-the-Usurper overcame what little political sense he had...

...Writers & Writing ON THE INTELLECTUAL BARRICADES BY JOHN ? ROCHE I doubt if in the history of the 20th century you could discover a more bizarre assemblage of intellectuals than the one that soon rallied around the standard raised at the 1950 Berlin Kongress für Kulturelle Freiheit...

...The Liberal Conspiracy elegantly chronicles from a distance (and documents) the inherently fissiparous nature of the Congress for Cultural Freedom...

...Americans for Democratic Action, which I joined upon its founding, was the liberal antitotalitarian matrix...

...Here, as he points out, the CCF did a splendid job of keeping its constituents aware that they were part of an authentic, strong democratic cultural tradition, not moribund dinosaurs doomed by inexorable climatic shifts...

...It has taken 40 years for the intellectual world to accept the now admitted bankruptcy of Marxism-Leninism: Mikhail S. Gorbachev has confirmed in spades the prediction many of us made in the late '40s that if the West could hold the line, Communist society would eventually disintegrate...

...I remember an evening in the early '50s when Sidney and I took on a couple of apologists for Alger Hiss at some hall in Greenwich Village...

...I might even go further than the author to argue that the magazines alone justified the organization's existence...

...I was particularly annoyed by the moral snottiness of Koestler's observation that the fight for the future would be between Communists and ex-Communists...

...In January 1947, two new organizations entered the fray: the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), and Americans for Democratic Action (ADA...

...I confessed I simply didn't have the patience to deal with all those prima donnas and added "If you asked X (a New York deep-thinker) to explain what happened to Jan Masaryk in February, 1948, he' d begin with a 30-minute discourse on the law of gravity...

...If the author is somewhat more generous than I, perhaps that is because you really had to know some of these characters to realize what conceited, egotistical fakirs they were...

...My reaction to the artsy-craftsy destabilization of Communism made me even more suspect among the professional intellectuals, one of whom labeled me an'Overeducated peasant...

...I avoided involvement—for example, in a 1959 raid on a World Youth Festival in Vienna—not to preserve my soul, but because I thought that as a teacher it would be vocationally dishonest to fly a false flag: I would gladly have gone to Vienna to challenge the young Communists, but not as the representative of an American youth organization I had never heard of...

...I said the hell with it and stuck to running for the Haverford Township School Committee on an anti-loyalty oath platform...

...Or did the CIA connection contaminate the whole undertaking...

...I never met the CIA's agent in the operation, Michael Josselson, but from a number of mutual friends I gained the distinct impression that he was a fighter in the cause of freedom who happened to be in the CIA, rather than a CIA operative who set out to bag a bunch of intellectuals and employ them like organ-grinders' monkeys...

...Wallace, far from being an outstanding liberal, had the ideological sensitivity of a fire plug, but he hated Harry S. Truman with quite understandable ferocity...

...The cadres learned early that Wallace needed minding: He stepped off a plane in 1947 and said nice things about the Marshall Plan before his keepers got to him...

...Was the game worth the candle...

...Coleman also emphasizes that probably the journals the Congress sponsored—Encounter, Preuves, Tempo Presente, Minerva, Quadrant, to name only a handful—made more of an impact than much of the talking...

...The American people, however, patently suffering from false consciousness engendered by the cunning of our imperialist elite, got quite distressed by the Czech coup, the Berlin blockade, the Eastern European annexations and purge-trials, and Stalin's other gestures of friendship toward the West...

...Raymond Aron once told me that he felt like a medieval knight surrounded in his keep by screaming peasants—except, as he noted with typical irony, the peasants were his Sorbonne colleagues...

...Moreover, although I kept my thoughts to myself, I was certain the CCF's cover would be blown to the discredit of a lot of fine people who had no notion of Agency sponsorship...

...we had worked together to defeat the Stalinist takeover of the American Veterans Committee from 1946-48...

...And it stumbled upon an ideal frontman in former Vice President Henry A. Wallace...

...These were not cynical men, and their behavior over the years in coping with the CCF's eccentricities demonstrated their commitment to intellectual freedom...

...We were proud to be "Cold War liberals" (it is now forgotten that a "Cold" war was the alternative to active hostilities...

...For antitotalitarians without such ideological safety nets, life must have been pretty dismal...

...For starters, I had—and still have—a certain contempt forthe "New York Intellectuals...

...Coleman, in fact, has written a model case study of intellectuals trying to cope with a messy and nasty world in which a large number of human lives were at risk...

...Central Intelligence Agency in putting up the money for the CCF has to be explored...

...I remember an exchange I had with Seymour Martin Lipset, a world-class CCF conferencer, in 1965...

...Then Michael Straight made him editor of the New Republic, the Communists provided him with a platform, and the PCA supplied ostensibly non-Communist organizational sinews...

...Having been second to a sick President for four years, and dumped in 1944, the Iowan bitterly watched Truman's accession following Franklin D. Roosevelt's funeral within three months of his fourth inauguration...

...The papers—and I have read a couple of collections—were pretty deadly, but there was an opportunity to meet informally and develop personal relations with others like yourself...

...its impact on democracy in Latin America was invisible...

...As an adolescent I had seen James Burnham, James T. Farrell, Dwight Macdonald, Sidney Hook, Reinhold Niebuhr, and a host of other radical nabobs wandering around from meeting to meeting, often from one excommunication to the next, and I was jaded...

...Aron was by nature a loner, but he gave strong support to the CCF and spiritual aid and comfort to those who attended its conferences...

...ultimate salvation for hemi-demi-semi-ex-Communists required a journal of their own...

...We even cooperated on many occasions, particularly those in which the American CCF members reacted strongly against some eminent European Congress figures like Bertrand Russell who equated the Soviet Union and the United States...

...We were interested in the only real game in town: electing liberals to office and passing liberal legislation at the state and Federal level...

...ADA was the engine for liberal DemocraticvictoryinPhiladelphiain 1951, and played a significant role in the 1954 gubernatorial win...

...So I stuck to working precincts in ADA and let the professional conferencers fly around the world holding uplifting seminars...

...A man who had been a leader of the Stalinist caucus in the American Veterans Committee (a liberal group I helped set up in 1946) was put on duty as a full-time ideological handler...

...While some of the CIA's cultural endeavors were almost juvenile, the CCF both fostered the development of a group of fine political / cultural journals and provided an international common room where beleaguered anti-Communists could find spiritual sustenance, a sense of solidarity, and reassurance (something we all need at times) that they had not been consigned by History to the dustbin...

...My experience starting at age 15, when I joined the Norman Thomas Socialist youth movement in New York, combined with my taste for action and distaste for rhetoric, doubtless made me prematurely skeptical of permanent, floating talk-shops...

...I could wander into the "Levitas Salon," the editorial offices of The New Leader at 7 East 15th Street, and find kindred spirits...

...I lost, yet at least I led the Democratic ticket in a safe GOP area...

...The PCA became the umbrella Stalinist outfit, begetting an almost infinite number of Committees to Save...

...A decade or so later, the CCF invited me to come listen to the same bunch of characters...

...Their behavior in the 1960s, alas, demonstrated the accuracy of this hunch...

...Most of these "innocents' clubs" (as Muenzenberg styled them) self-destructed with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but after June 1941 their cadres started work again, now arguing that the American people must prevent their leaders from reverting to anti-Bolshevik atavism once the War was over...

...We were operating on different axes, though, and my gut feeling was that the New York Intellectuals would abandon any principle if sticking to it could spot their highly burnished personae...

...I never did, and Peter Coleman's painstaking recreation of the CCF ambience has helped me figure out why...

...It was an interesting mix of New Dealers-in-exile, trade unionists from the American Federation of Labor (the Congress of Industrial Organizations still had a strong Stalinist contingent), and young liberals and Social Democrats...

...Cord Meyer Jr., the top man in Washington, was a dedicated liberal anti-Communist...

...As we mapped out our strategy at supper, he asked me again why I boycotted the CCF...

...In retrospect, the surprising thing is that it took so long for the CIA's role in the CCF to dribble out...

...Hugh Trevor-Roper savaged it in the Manchester Guardian: His assault was basically perverse, yet he was on target in saying that ex-Stalinist apparatchiks like Arthur Koestler and Franz Borkenau retained the Leninist modus operandi while abandoning the dogma...

...I thanked him and declined, but not before suggesting a simpleanswer: "disarm the military...

...To violate the maxim de mortuis nihil nisi bunkum, I can say on the basis of almost half a century's experience that Arthur Koestler ranks either second or third in the stiff competition for the most unpleasant man I have ever met—the would-be Ayatollah of anti-Communism...

...Nicolas Nabokov, one of the CCF's guiding spirits, shortly suggested that the Congress organize cultural fetes to convince the European masses that Western culture was superior to Stalinist and thereby wean them away from the then huge French and Italian Communist parties...

...went to work among the intellectuals and the trade-union movement to expose the villainy of the American Centurions...

...I was an active young Social Democratic-liberal when the Congress was born, and one of my mentors, the late Sidney Hook, was the deus ex machina of its American branch...

...I finally resigned in February 1968, after ADA endorsed that charming Irish wacko Eugene McCarthy for President...

...A couple of my New York friends—I recall Sidney Hook and Daniel Bell—urged me to get involved in the CCF...

...In my judgment, which has been much strengthened by Coleman's study, the answer is Yes, in overall terms it was a worthy cause...