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  • Leonard Bernstein's The Age of Anxiety:A Great American Symphony during McCarthyism
  • Philip Gentry (bio)

In 1949, shortly after Harry Truman was sworn into his first full term as president, a group of American writers, artists, scientists, and other public intellectuals organized a "Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace," to be held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. They were joined by a number of their counterparts in the Soviet Union, or at least as many as could procure a visa from the US State Department. Most prominent among the visitors was composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who through an interpreter delivered a lecture on the dangers of fascist influence in music handcrafted for the occasion by the Soviet government. The front-page headline in the New York Times the next morning read, "Shostakovich Bids All Artists Lead War on New 'Fascists.'"1

The Waldorf-Astoria conference was at once the last gasp of the Popular Front and the beginning of the anticommunist movement soon to be known as McCarthyism. Henry Wallace's communist-backed third-party bid for the presidency the previous fall had garnered 2.4 percent of the popular vote, but the geopolitical tensions undermining the Popular Front coalition since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 were out in plain view a decade later. Once-communist intellectuals like Irving Kristol and Dwight MacDonald vigorously protested Stalinist influence on the conference, and in an ominous preview of the populist attraction of anticommunism, thousands of New Yorkers protested on the streets outside. Some of these activists were receiving secret assistance from the CIA, and the conservative New York press played a substantial role in [End Page 308] manipulating public sentiment, but there was also no denying that an anticommunist movement was gaining steam.2

One of the most prominent speakers at the conference was the composer Aaron Copland, the most famous ambassador of American classical music. Copland had a long association with communism and other left-wing causes.3 Although never a member of the party, he was the epitome of a "fellow traveler" who lent his name and money to many communist-associated causes and organizations. In the wake of the Waldorf conference, Life magazine published a photo of Copland in their list of communist "dupes and fellow travelers," and more direct repercussions soon followed.4 Most famously, a patriotic work that had been scheduled to be performed at the presidential inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower, the Lincoln Portrait, was pulled from the program after conservative congressman Fred Busbey objected. In 1953 Copland was subpoenaed to testify before Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The questioning was hostile, and although no further official action was taken, he had difficulty obtaining a passport for several years, and never again entered political life so directly.5

Before all of this, however, there was Copland's speech at the Waldorf conference. In it, he ruminated on how the onset of the Cold War was beginning to affect artistic activity in the United States:

Artists, by definition, hate all wars—hot or cold. But lately I've been thinking that the cold war is almost worse for art than the real thing—for it permeates the atmosphere with fear and anxiety. An artist can function at his best only in a vital and healthy environment for the simple reason that the very act of creation is an affirmative gesture. An artist fighting in a war for a cause he holds just has something affirmative he can believe in. That artist, if he can stay alive, can create art. But throw him into a mood of suspicion, ill-will, and dread that typifies the cold war attitude and he'll create nothing.6

In this oft-quoted passage, Copland describes a scenario of the artist rendered mute by the surrounding age of anxiety. Copland's career after his experience during the red scare of the 1950s has often been read as a kind of self-silencing along these lines. Howard Pollack argues that, at the very least, Copland was politically silenced, no longer associating himself with contemporary political debates and denying his activist past.7 Jennifer DeLapp has linked...

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