Cultural Freedom versus Cultural Spin

Francis Stonor Saunders. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: The New Press, 2000. vii + 509 pp. Notes and index. $29.95

In his September 1949 presidential address to the American Historical Society, "The Social Responsibilities of the Historian," Conyers Read spoke of the current struggle of democracy against tyranny and insisted that professional historians contribute their skills: "Total war enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part. The historian is no freer from this obligation than the physicist." Historians, he insisted, must help in asserting the nation's objectives, defining its ideals, establishing its standards and organizing all the forces of society in support of them. Samuel Eliot Morrison, during the same year was attacking Beard and a generation of historians for not measuring up as patriots and insisting that the younger generation write history "with fire in the eye," a history that "would make a young man want to fight for his country in war or live to make it a better country in peace." Soon Allan Nevins demanded that American historians be "more intent [than they have been ] on proving our way of life, called decadent by our enemies has proved historically to be freer than any other in history." ¹

All of this more or less coincided with the establishment of the Congress for Cultural Freedom at a conference in Berlin in June 1950. Francis Stonor Saunders, a British documentary filmmaker, informs us that the Congress was part of a consortium established to "innoculate the world against the contagion of Communism and to ease the passage of American foreign policy interests abroad" (p. 2). A vast network of cultural institutions, journals, books, conferences, seminars, art exhibits, and awards was created to counteract what was seen as a worldwide Soviet propaganda campaign. Saunders's weighty volume is about this cultural cold war. She begins roughly with the notorious "fellow-traveling" Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in April 1949, and the protests against the proceedings by well-organized anti-communists funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. The volume's main narrative ends with the exposure of the CIA's covert penetration, influence, and funding of allegedly independent intellectual and cultural institutions in the late 60s. It covers the CIA's role in the creation and manipulation of magazines, conferences, musical festivals, movies, books, jazz concerts, international seminars, literally every aspect of cultural activity, in order to promote a positive picture of American democracy and American culture. It amounted to an enormous honey pot of funds to be dispensed with generous liberality and with very little accountability. The CIA and its allies in this cultural cold war wanted a consistent celebration of American life and were indeed willing to pay for it.

It may be of interest to the readers of this journal that in this detailed account, which identifies the organizing apparatchiks and the "witting" and "unwitting" participants, there is an almost total absence of historians and their organizations. There are writers, literary and cultural critics, poets, painters, musicians, social scientists, opera singers, movie producers, actors and journalists, but practically no historians. Only Arthur Schlesinger Jr. plays an important role but not as an historian, more as an organizer of the "non communist left" (NCL) in America and as a custodian of the culture. Schlesinger was apparently eminently qualified to check on the credentials of intellectuals to determine the purity of their anti-Stalinism and whether it was in the interest of the committees for cultural freedom in America and Europe to award the "candy" dispensed by the fake foundational fronts. Graduate students of history during the 1950s and 60s may well recall the established position demanded by the profession's leaders. Few could forget Oscar Handlin's ferocious attack on William Appleman Williams in the William and Mary Quarterly for Williams's challenge to the agreed upon consensus. Readers of John Higham, Jesse Lemisch...