‘The Maltz Affair’ revisited: How the American Communist Party relinquished its cultural influence at the dawn of the Cold War: John Sbardellati

At the cultural level, this schism is best exemplified by the so-called Maltz affair. Arthur Schlesinger’s classic work of Cold War liberalism, The Vital Center, derided the cultural treachery of the American Communist Party, and pointed to the Maltz controversy as evidence that the Party ‘has sought systematically to enforce the doctrine that writing must conform, not to the facts, not to the personal vision of the author, but to a political line’.1 Subsequently, most commentators have echoed Schlesinger’s interpretation of the Maltz affair as an example of Communist Party discipline of its cultural workers.2