ABSTRACT

In 1949, Soviet front groups targeting intellectuals, lawyers, labor unions, students, and women sprang up across Western Europe and arrived in America. The beginning sounded innocuous enough: the National Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions announced a “Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace” at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in March 1949. The National Council, however, had been invented for the occasion as a new offshoot of the Cominform’s peace campaign, and the American press was not fooled. The New York Times predicted a spectacle of Soviet delegates parroting the party line while fellow travelers watched for applause cues.1 “There is simply no excuse for anyone not to know that the National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions is a fellow traveler outfit, run by fellow travelers . . . [who] follow the party line,” declared the Chicago Tribune.2 On the eve of the Waldorf Conference, the American Jewish League and the American Legion urged the State Department to deny visas to delegates and other “subversive elements.”3 Senators denounced the conference.4 The State Department defended its decision to let Soviet delegates enter by noting that America had no Iron Curtain.5 The press intercepted them at the airport. The ubiquitous Fadeyev was first off the plane, and then Dmitri Shostakovich, the most gifted composer of his generation, stepped into public view. Photographers swarmed, blinding him with their flashbulbs; reporters shouted out “Hey, Shosty, look this way! Wave your hat!”6 There, too, was Josselson. From a hotel on East 42nd Street the night before the Waldorf Conference, he wrote Lasky that he was “traveling a great deal between Washington and New York, trying to get the job done for which I was sent over” and, as usual, “working under terrific pressure.”7 The trip was fortuitously timed: There was “[p]lenty of excitement here because of the cultural peace congress – screaming headlines, 100,000 pickets and what have you. Boris [Shub] and I are going to attend all of it, peace congress, counter rally, Russian counter rally.” And Josselson was already in touch with the key figure behind the counter rally: “[Sidney] Hook, whom I expect to talk to this afternoon, is playing the part that you played at the [German Writers’ Congress]. Wish you

On March 25, the conference’s opening night, 2,800 delegates congregated in the Waldorf ’s ballroom for a black-tie dinner. Howard Fast, literary critic F.O. Matthiesen, twenty-six-year-old Norman Mailer, composers Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, playwright Lillian Hellman, and writer Dashiell Hammett comprised the American delegation.9 Shostakovich chain-smoked, watching others deliver speeches in his name.10 “[T]he first speaker, a retired bishop from Utah . . . nearly broke up the whole affair by talking forever,” reported one account. But the speeches were beside the point: what mattered were the delegates’ prominent names, the symbolism of New York, the denunciations of American aggression, and the clamor for a peaceful settlement.11 Outside, in pouring rain, 500 police officers circled New York’s largest picketing ring, while 1,000 protesters thronged the sidewalks. The Catholic War Veterans prayed. American Legion members waved placards. Eastern European émigrés waved the old flags of their home countries as the water bled their colors together. A woman held an “Exterminate the Red Rats” sign with one hand, using the other to spray anyone entering the Waldorf with a water gun.12 Meanwhile, at the Ritz, 300 Communists chanted “Send that bundle back to Britain” in a picket line protesting about Churchill, the guest of honor at a dinner hosted by Time-Life publisher Henry Luce.13 In the Waldorf ’s bridal suite, Sidney Hook presided over a motley assembly of friends and acquaintances whom he tentatively named “Americans for Intellectual Freedom.” His message to the group was clear: the Soviet Union was again using front groups to win the sympathy of the world’s intellectuals; the conference had to be disrupted, its true sponsors revealed, and its myth of freely expressed views exposed.14 (Members of Hook’s group, Lasky later noted, had been “busy doing much the same anti-Stalinist clarification when the [State] Department’s diplomats were busy selling the good character of Uncle Joe Stalin!”15) Hook’s group was also miniscule. Its full membership, enlisted a few weeks prior, could fit in a small living room; only a dozen made it to the Waldorf. Journalist Arnold Beichman handled logistics and publicity.16 Mary McCarthy had recently published her second novel, The Oasis, about a thinly veiled Dwight Macdonald (“Macdougal Macdermott”), who had accompanied her.17 Robert Lowell had just served as Poet Laureate and won his first Pulitzer.18 William Phillips and Philip Rahv, the editors of Partisan Review, had seen their publication become an institution among New York intellectuals.19 James Farrell was an acclaimed novelist whose best works – the Studs Lonigen trilogy, published at twenty-five – were long behind him. Nicolas Nabokov, the composer who had been one of Josselson’s closest friends in Berlin, was now back in America and formed part of this circle.20 Nabokov had visited David Dubinsky, the head of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, “and obtained from him a modest subsidy plus secretarial and public relations expenses.”21 Dubinsky also helpfully “negotiated” the suite at a steep discount by threatening a hotel staff strike.22 Many were ex-Communists; most had been deeply sympathetic to the Soviet Union. They agreed on little except that the Waldorf Conference could

At first there was no plan, only half-baked pranks. Conference mail was poached. Absurd press releases were issued in the organizers’ names. Hook, anticipating resistance if the group went downstairs, insisted they arm themselves with umbrellas and prepare to tap the floor for attention if they were ejected. McCarthy and Macdonald thought this a bit much.24 Far better were the messages of support the group obtained from luminaries like the poet T.S. Eliot, the writer Ignazio Silone, and the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, all of whom sent telegrams denouncing the conference as an affront to intellectual freedom. In 1949, these men were considered celebrities, and their telegrams qualified as news.25