ABSTRACT
The League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford produced a widely read manifesto, Culture and the Crisis, but began to splinter apart soon after the election. The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) tried, after a fashion, to entice Hook, whose writings on the Hegelian foundations of Marxism and efforts to reconcile Marxism with pragmatism had already established him as a talented Marxist thinker. In January 1933, the CPUSA's intellectual commissar, J. Jerome, launched an attack on Sidney Hook titled "Unmasking an American Revisionist of Marxism." Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Sidney Hook's relationship with communism was his position on the employment of communists in American universities. To defend Trotsky's right to a hearing was to declare oneself an enemy of the Soviet Union and, in the view of many American intellectuals, most of whom were not communists, to ally oneself with fascism.
