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
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 in part funded by the CIA.
Members
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
- Moshe Decter
- John Dewey
- John Dos Passos
- Max Eastman
- James T. Farrell
- John Kenneth Galbraith
- 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
The committee's central or executive committee varied over time. James Burnham was a member until he left the group circa 1954.[2] Whittaker Chambers was also a member of the executive committee.[3]
See also
- Congress for Cultural Freedom
- Anti-Communism
References
- ↑ Cranky Integrity on the Left" in The New York Times (August 27, 1989)
- ↑ 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.
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)