American Committee for Cultural Freedom


The American Committee for Cultural Freedom '' was the U.S. affiliate of the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom.

Overview

The ACCF and CCF were organizations that, during the Cold War, sought to encourage intellectuals to be critical of the Soviet Union and Communism, and to combat, according to a writer for The New York Times, "the continuing strength of the Soviet myth among the Western cultural elite. Despite all that had happened - the Moscow show trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the Russian attack on Finland, the takeovers in Eastern Europe, the mounting evidence of the gulag - Joseph Stalin still retained the loyalty of many writers, artists and scientists who viewed the Soviet Union as a progressive alternative to the 'reactionary,' 'war-mongering' United States." The CCF was funded by the CIA, as well as the ACCF.
Within the American committee, ex-communist intellectuals affirmed most vehemently the need for resistance to communism: Franz Borkenau, Sidney Hook ; Arthur Koestler and James Burnham. Koestler and Borkenau fully supported the idea of setting up a frontal opposition movement to international communism. Burnham even spoke out in favor of the manufacture of American atomic bombs.

Members

The dominant figure in the organization was Sidney Hook. Its 600-strong membership encompassed leading figures on both the Right and the Left, some of whom included:
  1. Roger Baldwin
  2. Daniel Bell
  3. James Burnham
  4. Alexander Calder
  5. John Chamberlain
  6. Whittaker Chambers
  7. Elliot Cohen
  8. Robert Gorham Davis
  9. Moshe Decter
  10. John Dewey
  11. John Dos Passos
  12. Max Eastman
  13. James T. Farrell
  14. John Kenneth Galbraith
  15. Clement Greenberg
  16. Henry Hazlitt
  17. Sidney Hook
  18. Karl Jaspers
  19. Elia Kazan
  20. Irving Kristol
  21. Melvin J. Lasky
  22. Sol Levitas
  23. Dwight Macdonald
  24. Reinhold Niebuhr
  25. Mary McCarthy
  26. J. Robert Oppenheimer
  27. William Phillips
  28. Merlyn Pitzele
  29. Jackson Pollock
  30. David Riesman
  31. Elmer Rice
  32. James Rorty
  33. Richard Rovere
  34. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
  35. George Schuyler
  36. Sol Stein
  37. Norman Thomas
  38. Diana Trilling
  39. James Wechsler
  40. Leslie Fiedler
The committee's central or executive committee varied over time. James Burnham, who worked for the CIA, was a member until he left the group circa 1954. Whittaker Chambers joined in late 1954 and was also a member of the executive committee. Diana Trilling became chair person at some point.