ON THE COMMITTEE FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP73-00475R000100600001-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 18, 2013
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: September 1, 1967
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STATSENT, se,+ nhpy-Ontober. 1967
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release @ 50-Yr 2013/12/18: CIA-RDP73-00475R000100600001-0
NOTEBOOk
Michael Hari ington
? On the Committee for Cultural Freedom
The recent revelations about secret CIA subsidies has brooght to
public attention the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an interna-
tional grouping of intellectuals, and its affiliate in this country,
the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Notably miss-
ing in the discussions these last few months has been an effort
to analyze politically the role of these groups during tlio years
when the Cold War was at its height. Such an analysis did appear
In Ike pages of DISSENT Some twelve years ago; it was written by
Michael Harrington; and it seems just as cogent .now ai it was
then. We wish we had the space to reprint the entire to tide as
it appeared in our Spring .1955 issue, but here, completely un-
changed, is a significant portion of it.?Eo.
In practice the ACCF
has fallen behind Sidney Hook's views
on civil liberties. 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.
His Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No arti-
cles were widely circulated by the
Committee, which meant that in ef-
fect 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 develop-
ments. Under the guidance of Hook
and the leadership of Irving Kristol,
who supported Hook's general out-
look, 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.
At times this had an almost comic
aspect. When Irving Kristol Ural exe-
cutive 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 communiqu?on the out-
rages performed by people like Arthur
Miller or Bertrand Russell in exag-
gerating the danger to civil liberties
in the U.S.
Inevitably, this led to more serious
problems. In an article by Kristol,
which first appeared in Commentary
and was later circulated under the
ACCF imprimatur, one mail read
such astonishing and appalling state-
ments as "there is one thing the Ankeri.
can people know about Senaiur Mc-
Carthy: he, like them, is unequivocal-
ly anti-Communist. About the spokes-
men for American liberalism, they
feel they know no such thing. And
with s&ne justification." This, in the
name of defending cultural freedom!
As someone remarked, the Comm.ittee
might better have renamed itself the
American Committee for Cultural Ac-
commodation.
We are not, to be sure, dealing with
a black-and-white matter. In a number
of cases the ConnLittce has acted with-
in the United States in defense of
freedom. It protested to Attorney Gen-
eral Brownell on the treatment of
Chaplin and Arthur Miller; it was
active in the Muhlenberg College case
where some. Chaplin films were
banned; it criticized the procedure of
the McCarthy investigation of the
Voice of America. The Committee also
claims to have done good work in
ways precluding publicity, and there
is no reason to doubt this claim. Cur-
rently, 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
honorable discharge ' because of his
past (anti-StLinist) associations.
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 in-
discriminate anti-Stalinism to give it-
self to an active struggle against the
dominant trend of contemporary in-
tellectual life in America. What it
really cares about most is a struggle
against fellow-travelers and "neutral-
ists"?that is, against many European
intellectuals; 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 viola-
tions of freedom that have mounted
up in the U.S., instead of querulously
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release
minimizing their extent and gravity.
One of the crippling assumptions of
the Committee has been that it would
not intervene in cases where Stalinists
or accused Stalinists were involved. It
has rested this position on the acade-
mic argument, advanced most systema-
tically 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 in-
volved when they are deprived of
these privileges. But the actual prob-
lem is not the metaphysical one of
whether enemies of democracy (as the
Stalinists clearly are) have a "right"
to dethocratic privileges. What matters
is that the drive against cultural free-
dom and civil liberties takes on the
guise of anti-Stalinism. Thus, for ex-
ample, such an outrage ? as depriving
the veteran anti-Stalinist radical Max
Shachtman of a passport with which
to travel in Europe?a State Depart-
ment act one may assume the ACCF.
would not approve of?is made pos,
sible or at least much easier by the
precedents created in prosecutions and
persecutions of .the Stalinists. Given
such facts, it becomes?extremely. diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to defend civil
liberties without clearly defending the
civil rights of Stalinists (which has
nothing whatever to do with [defend-
ing] spies or sabotage). And this the
Committee has failed to do.
But it has gone even further. In
December 1952 it published a "Memo-
randum on the Visa Problem." This
document was concerned with the en-
try of foreign intellectuals, trade un-
ionists, etc., into the United States.
The cases which gave . rise to the
Memorandum were, of course, those of
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@ 50-Yr 2013/12/18: CIA-RDP73-00475R000100600001-0