Standards for Intellectual Integrity

The most interesting exchanges in the Waldorf debate occurred after the meetings had ended and the delegates departed. Then the two ideological armies—the anti-Stalinists and those they considered fellow travelers—battled over the heart of the issue. Had there been diversity of opinion at the Waldorf Conference? Was the Freedom House conference any better in this regard? Why should one group try to prevent another from staging whatever kind of conference it pleased, with or without diversity? Had the AIF tried to silence the free speech of the Waldorf participants? Did the Soviet Union really want cultural exchange? Could the Waldorf Conference have been held in the Soviet Union? What did it mean to be an intellectual, a critic, or to hold a responsible conference?

The AIF was most upset at the lack of diversity at the Waldorf Conference. Macdonald upbraided it as "strictly a Stalinoid affair" that "excluded from the speakers' platform all known anti-Communists." He found it ironic that a peace conference could not spare "five minutes" for the pacifist voice of A. J. Muste and instead had only "reliable" speakers. Their one exception to excluding critics of Russia, in Macdonald's opinion, was Norman Cousins, "a pennyworth of bread in an intolerable deal of sack."^[108]

Margaret Marshall, editor of The Nation 's book section and one of the few outspoken anti-Stalinists at the magazine at the time, was held in

high regard by the New York intellectuals—whom she published when she could. Her attitude caused some friction among the staff, as Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation , was a favorite target of the anti-Stalinists. Soon after the conference ended, Marshall wrote that she did not regret that the issue of "freedom of expression" had "haunted the conference from its very inception," acting "like an invisible picket." Although the issue was not on the conference agenda, still, "Since it is my incorrigible belief that the free expression and exchange of ideas will do more in the end than a thousand peace conferences to bring about genuine peace, I cannot regret that the conference was thus pulled off its appointed course."^[109]

Not to be left out of a Waldorf argument, Hook joined Macdonald and Marshall in their criticism in the pages of The Nation . In a letter printed in the magazine, Hook complained that there were no anti-Stalinists at the Waldorf podium, no "well-known critic of Soviet totalitarianism" such as Edmund Wilson. "A few questions from the floor," Hook wrote impatiently, "do not constitute a discussion," but rather an "intellectual fraud." That dishonesty, Hook stressed to the magazine's readers, was the heart of the AIF's opposition to the Waldorf Conference—that their rigging of the speakers "made honest discussion impossible."^[110]

The defense offered by some conference associates on the question of diversity was beguiling. Howard Fast informed the public that, although the Waldorf Conference did not represent all the varied intellectual opinions in America, "it most certainly represented the aspirations of most American intellectuals." Even more disingenuous was leftist author Albert Kahn's statement in a letter to Shapley before the conference that, yes, "there are aspects of Soviet life which warrant criticism," but "the leaders and people of the Soviet Union are constantly indulging in all sorts of criticism about themselves." Kahn told Shapley that he opposed having the conference criticize the Soviet Union and was against "presenting a fully rounded picture," because of his respect for Soviet accomplishments, their "great contributions, particularly in the last war, to the Jewish people," and because he did not want others to think he was criticizing the Soviet Union merely to promote his reputation.^[111]

Kirchwey's defense of the conference, however, had an obvious integrity. In response to the AIF's accusations that the Waldorf leaders had invited only reliable leftists, Kirchwey named a list of the invited who would surely have rocked the boat if they had attended. Only Cousins had accepted the invitation.^[112]

Rather than be put on the defensive, Kirchwey had questions of her own. For all its sanctimonious evangelizing about intellectual freedom,

she asked, how much diversity was there at the AIF's Freedom House conference? Leafing through the record of the Freedom House program, Kirchwey decided that the AIF had omitted to make space "for even the limited ideological differences that emerged at the Waldorf." She found no "pro-Communist speakers" thundering behind AIF microphones and marveled that "Dr. Hook's refusal to permit T. O. Thackrey [editor and publisher of the New York Post ] to speak at the counter-rally was amazing in view of his own righteous indignation over Shapley's refusal to permit him to speak at the Waldorf."

After all their moral breast-beating, how did the AIF explain its own one-sidedness? "If the answer," she told Hook, "is that no one can claim to talk about peace who is bound by the dogmas of communism or the interests of Moscow, then the question arises: What is left, under that dictum, for any further negotiation between West and East?" How could Hook exclude one party to the debate and yet assert that interchange and dialogue were the path to truth? "If we do not want to fight communism," Kirchwey counseled, "the only alternative is to deal with it, try to work out ways of accommodation. Most anti-Communists of the Hook school insist that neither they nor this country desire war with Russia. If they are sincere, and I think they are, then they should be wary of rejecting as a frame-up every attempt to talk to Russians or other Communists."^[113]

Perhaps intellectual openness and responsibility, she implied, required a conception of freedom that included encouraging a dialogue with odious groups such as the Communists. If dialogue was encouraged to break down, were intellectuals being intellectuals? Was this not exactly the sort of dialogue, Kirchwey asked, that the Waldorf Conference had tried to promote?

The editor of The Nation was not alone in chiding the AIF for transgressing its own highest principle. Margaret Marshall, who stood much closer to the AIF than to the Waldorf position, had attended both the Waldorf's opening dinner on Friday night and the Freedom House program on Saturday afternoon. At Freedom House she reported finding some of the same narrowness of opinion as at the conference ten blocks uptown, but the AIF speeches, to their credit, were more "specific and informative," and benefited from exploring the issue of intellectual repression. "Here also there was unanimity," Marshall wrote of the anti-Stalinist program, "and it too would have been more interesting if the other side had been present." But worse, in her opinion, was the AIF's defensive claim that inviting the opposition only plays into the hands of the enemy. That logic, Marshall pointed out, supported rather than undermined the Soviet belief that repression has a future.^[114]

Hook was offended by Kirchwey's assault on the integrity of the AIF.

"We invited Dr. Shapley or anyone he delegated to speak at our meeting," Hook insisted. No, answered Kirchwey, that statement is "wholly disingenuous." Since Hook had already harshly attacked all those taking part in the Waldorf program, his invitation was not "a friendly offer of cooperation," and he could not have expected Shapley to accept. Hook manned the AIF defense without flinching. He sharply denied her allegation that the AIF rejected "as a frame-up every attempt to talk to Russians or other Communists." It was the AIF that wanted honest dialogue between the two sides, Hook argued, and the Waldorf leaders were the ones who had rigged it to make that impossible. How dare Kirchwey and The Nation presume to speak of intellectual freedom? "As anyone knows who listened to our speakers, especially the noted pacifist, A. J. Muste, more differences on foreign policy were expressed than have ever been voiced at the dinner forums of The Nation since the days of Oswald G. Villard."^[115]

Here Hook referred to the Reverend A. J. Muste, secretary of the pacifist group Peacemakers, which the New York Times described as "an organization advocating non-violent resistance to war and the draft," and which Muste himself described as an association of "non-violent revolutionaries." Muste sent requests to both Shapley and Hook asking for time to present his proposals for peace to both the Waldorf Conference and the Freedom House meeting. Only the AIF offered Muste a chance to speak, although, in all fairness, it is not clear that Muste asked for a spot on either program any earlier than two days before the Waldorf Conference opened. Hook later described Muste's speech at the AIF conference as one in which he "denounced the American government as equally responsible for the cold war as the Soviet Union."^[116]

Some observers felt that the AIF had stifled the freedom of speech of the Waldorf participants, whether intentionally or not. One of the more outspoken of this opinion was Hook's colleague Theodore Brameld, professor of educational philosophy at NYU. In a letter to the New York Times following the Waldorf events, Brameld warned of "the need to withstand the pressure of certain 'liberals' to scare and intimidate others of us from daring to identify ourselves with such a conference." Lest any reader mistake the subject of his letter as the AIF generally rather than Hook specifically, Brameld quickly clarified the portrait. Referring to Hook's role as a leading pragmatist, Brameld complained that "By the kind of philosophic test which they themselves usually employ to settle important problems—the test of practical consequences—it is entirely plausible to argue that the consequence of their own tactics may turn out to be vastly more injurious to the cause of democracy than any which could possibly follow from sponsorship."^[117]

Hook was not amused. He and George Counts fired a letter to the

Times in reply, complaining that Brameld had misrepresented their position toward the Waldorf program's freedom of expression. The AIF did not want to prevent the Waldorf meeting, but rather to assure a diversity of opinion there. When they could not do so, they concluded that Shapley's forum was "a propaganda weapon of the Soviet Foreign Office," and planned their own gathering. The AIF invited representatives from the Waldorf meeting to speak at Freedom House, but the invitations were not accepted. If the Waldorf leaders really intended "a fair give and take between different points of view," as they claimed, then sponsors such as Brameld should have insisted upon an honest program or else resigned. "Those who, like Dr. Brameld, remained as sponsors and did nothing whatsoever to prevent Communist domination of the program became accomplices in the perpetration of an intellectual fraud upon the public." But instead of criticizing the Communists who designed the fraudulent conference, Brameld and others "now direct their fire against those American liberals who have opposed repressions of freedom in every country in the world, including our own. This testifies to a bad conscience." Hook and Counts found it especially inconsistent that Brameld criticized the picketers for disrupting freedom of expression at the Waldorf, while "he failed to condemn the widespread booing of the few speakers at the conference who sought to criticize ever so slightly the drastic purge of intellectuals in the Soviet Union."^[118]

With a heavy heart, a somewhat discouraged and wounded Brameld answered their letter in the Times with another. Discovering unnecessary roughness, he first called foul play. Hook and Counts had shifted the discussion "from an impersonal level to that of one's own integrity" accusing him of a "bad conscience" and pronouncing him "guilty by association." Brameld instead described his concerns as the stifling of opinion under the guise of promoting greater diversity of opinion. He was worried about an anti-Communist offensive that would transgress liberal boundaries, the impulse that would later be known as McCarthyism. "I did issue the warning," Brameld admitted, "which I repeat, that their continuous, too all-inclusive, almost totally negative attack upon communism at home and abroad is one of the most dangerous boomerangs which could at the present moment be placed in the hands of those powerful reactionary forces for whom many of the picketers were merely a front." The late 1940s were not a safe time to encourage domestic attacks; they could too easily get out of hand. "For while the boomerang would perhaps miss my critics and their associates on its return trip," Brameld pointed out, "it could scarcely miss vast numbers of liberal, socially oriented trade unionists, Jews and others who are so often the indiscriminate victims of every attack from the extreme right."^[119]

Brameld's point was well taken, for Hook's rough rhetoric was not intended to promote a flourishing of opinion on the left. Hook would have been the first to admit that he had no tolerance for what he considered to be dangerous opinions, but the last to admit that his definition of dangerous opinions sometimes loomed stiflingly large. Nor did Hook seem to appreciate how his caustic polemical style was at odds with the AIF's professed concern with promoting intellectual dialogue and free expression. In his argument in The Nation with Freda Kirchwey, he fulminated against her "totalitarian liberalism" that was blind to "red totalitarianism." Of her writing during the previous decade, Hook maintained that it had been "a record of intellectual and moral double-dealing."^[120]

In her reply to the AIF's concerns about the lack of diversity at the Waldorf affair, Kirchwey entertained, for argument's sake, Hook's premise that he and other anti-Stalinists were omitted from participation in the Waldorf program because of their political views. "Is even this evidence of 'fraud' or of 'organized Communist duplicity'?" she asked. "I'll confess I don't think so. I think it only proves what hardly needed proof: that the Waldorf conference was a left-wing affair run by an organization which has never concealed its leftist complexion." She agreed that the NCASP was composed of "people of about the same range of opinion as the Wallace party—Communists, near-Communists, and assorted liberals who believe peace requires a policy of conciliation with Russia." She found nothing especially shocking, deceptive, or covert about this. "The sessions were 'free' within the range of opinion represented above. But it would be nonsense to pretend that the speakers or delegates comprised a cross-section of American opinion, or that a vigorous interchange of conflicting views was the order of the day. At a meeting like the Waldorf conference one hears variations on a theme rather than discords."

Given that the Waldorf leaders never pretended that theirs was anything but a leftist conference, how could Hook and the AIF try to deny the group its right to stage a sectarian meeting? "Why can't Dr. Hook admit the simple, not very shocking or fraudulent fact that when partisan organizations, left, right, or center, hold meetings, they act like partisan organizations, favoring people of their own general point of view and rejecting most of those who detest and oppose them?" Were Presbyterians invited to Baptist conferences, or were Catholics invited to Jewish policy meetings? And was it really so intellectually traitorous that it was so? Admit that there was nothing underhanded and dishonest about a leftist group holding a leftist conference, she advised, "and there is still plenty of room to denounce the opinions expressed at the Waldorf meetings as lop-sided, dangerous, seditious, or anything Dr. Hook pleases."

Indeed, Kirchwey disagreed with "a large part" of the pronouncements

of the Waldorf program, its "concentration of fire on American foreign policy and the whitewashing of Russia," but that did not convince her of the planning committee's sedition. "There was no attempt to analyze the balance of responsibility," she admitted, "and few sensible proposals for ending the cold war. But all this does not add up to 'fraud,' in my opinion."^[121]

Despite Kirchwey's intelligent response, the Waldorf Conference clearly had called down upon itself the wrath of the AIF and other opponents. The Waldorf leaders had foolishly billed the affair as a free forum for a discussion about world peace, a nonpolitical event. Further, as Margaret Marshall pointed out, in choosing the conference participants on the basis of their political beliefs, the Waldorf sponsors "threw down the gauntlet to other writers, scientists, and artists who stubbornly regard themselves, and surely with reason, as also representative. It was a challenge that could hardly be ignored, and the response of Sidney Hook and Americans for Intellectual Freedom was not only inevitable but necessary." By sending representatives such as Fadayev and Shostakovich, the Soviets "were surely inviting the attention of the curious on the one hand and the furious on the other."^[122]

The crime was not that the Waldorf sponsors had chosen leftist speakers, as Kirchwey knew they had a right to do. The error was that after the leaders had designed their program they insisted that it was not a leftist political gathering at all. The New York intellectuals, along with most of the rest of America, were not willing to let the conference sponsors have it both ways.

For their part, the anti-Stalinists delighted in pointing out that an anti-Soviet counterpart to the Waldorf Conference could never have been held in Russia. William Barrett imagined "what the analogue to this Conference must be: a conference held in Moscow in which the Russian delegates would vigorously attack the Soviet Union while the American delegates spoke in jingoist terms of the United States." Macdonald, in his wry style, rendered a more caustic scene. Let us hear no more from the Waldorf participants about American repression, Macdonald suggested. "That is, until they have prevailed on the Politburo to permit, in, say, Moscow's Hotel Lux, a similar gathering of 3,000 pro-USA Russian citizens (especially released from the labor camps to attend), which will be addressed by a seven-man American delegation chosen by Dean Acheson." Macdonald drew up the cast himself. "Clarence Buddington [sic ] Kelland would do very well, politically and esthetically, for Comrade Fadayev's opposite number . . . and Comrades Fadayev, Shostakovich and Pavlenko can have three minutes each, from the floor, to ask awkward questions of Mr. Kelland."^[123]

The skirmishes about the Waldorf Conference demonstrate several attributes of the New York group. First, the contentious manner in which they waged their opposition to the conference reflected the polemical style they brought with them into adulthood from their youthful Marxism, factional debates, and educational training. Second, it revealed the seriousness they attached to their fight against improper and irresponsible leftism. Third, the Waldorf antagonisms showed the group at work helping to form the acceptable boundaries to an official ideology of American liberal anti-Communism.

But most important, the Waldorf conflict demonstrated the tension within the intellectual community over the role and function of the intellectual. Intellectual responsibility was needed, all agreed, but there was little consensus about what defined responsible behavior. Between Hook and Shapley, or between Macdonald and Kirchwey, there were sharp disagreements about what constituted intellectual integrity and intellectual fraud. Although Kirchwey thought that the exclusion of some viewpoints from the conference was not fraudulent, Hook, Macdonald, and others in the New York group had no confidence that her approach would preserve the intellectual's role as independent critic. In that regard, the group felt that the Soviet Union and the Waldorf Conference represented the same threat to free society, and to allow the conference to proceed unchallenged could undermine American pluralism, individualism, and intellectual independence. So the AIF had a duty to unmask the conference's real nature and to provide at their Freedom House counter-rally alternatives to what they considered to be irresponsible leftism.

The New York group's opposition to the Waldorf Conference demonstrated that they placed a higher premium on their identities as independent intellectuals than on their images as political radicals. They were more driven by their intellectual responsibilities to rationalism, tolerance, and freedom of inquiry than to their political dedication to the concepts of socialism, equality, social justice, and planning. During the 1930s the group's primary commitment to the intellectual necessities of free debate and a diversity of opinion had already caused them to turn slowly away from a radical socialism and toward a greater concern for democracy and liberalism. From their beginning as a group in the 1930s, they were above all intellectuals. Only secondarily were they radicals.

The Waldorf struggle was merely the most recent event in the string of anti-Communist battles the independent leftists had waged, beginning with their furor over the Moscow Trials in 1936. Maybe it was inevitable that the great intellectual warriors of the time were drawn into the anti-Communist battles, for they felt as though they were defending the province of free intellect by protecting the sanctity of the West. "In the last

few decades," William Phillips wrote shortly before the Waldorf affair, "politics has made greater claims on intellectual life than ever before in modern history. The reason, of course, is that our intellectual fate is bound up with our political fate; and . . . our political fate has constantly been at stake. It has been a time of extreme situations."^[124] So much, according to the group, hung in the balance in the tensions between East and West: national destiny, political democracy, social pluralism, cultural freedom, and not least of all the intellectual function. This was the view of the New York group from outside the Waldorf at mid-century.

Yet the New York intellectuals were not unified in their response to the period of "extreme situations." Although the divisions were less evident in their response to the Waldorf Conference, from the late 1930s through the 1980s the group split over the proper amount of criticism intellectuals should direct toward their culture. Certainly those on the left who sponsored the Waldorf proceedings were too critical of America, but how much criticism should responsible intellectuals aim at their own country? Conversely, how much dissent could critics avoid before they ceased to perform a useful intellectual function? That disagreement framed most of the debates among the New York intellectuals in the postwar period. Since the group's inception in the 1930s there had been a division between those members who were "affirmers" and those who were "dissenters."