ABSTRACT
The intellectuals who would form the Congress for Cultural Freedom came to oppose Communism through a quite different path. In the 1930s, while Josselson made deals for handbags and glass in Prague, many of them joined the Communist Party. For some, it was a passing enthusiasm; for others, Trotskyism sufficed. But they were all, in some sense, a “twice-born generation,” men who “were intense, horatory, naïve, simplistic, and passionate,” then “disenchanted and reflective,” wrote Daniel Bell.1 Their determination to build a postwar world outside the reach of Communism’s flawed ideals was born from their experiences, and the events of the thirties were the lens through which they viewed the early Cold War.2 Above all, they remembered five days at the end of a sweltering June in 1935, when many of them had made their way to Paris’s Left Bank for the Mutualité Congress, the event that came to symbolize the mood of the era.3 That spring, vague invitations had gone out to hundreds of writers, scientists, artists, and philosophers, announcing that “[i]n the face of the dangers which threaten culture in a number of countries, a group of writers are taking the initiative of bringing together a congress in order to examine and discuss the means for defending that culture.”4
