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PARTISAN REVIEW
Program Committee! She made public announcement of this fact
when she withdrew as a sponsor of the conference, as did Dr. Dav is.
It was now clear to me what the conference was. To make doubly
sure I made extensive inquiries among friends and acquaintances in
radical circles in New York, and telephoned individuals in a half
dozen universities and colleges in the East. I discovered that not a
single person openly critical of Soviet foreign policy or of the Com–
munist Party line in any field of the arts and sciences had been in–
vited. The program of speakers, to the extent that it could be discov–
ered, indicated that the conference was to be a family affair among
Communists and "honest liberals," the quaint expression used by the
Communist Party to designate formally unaffiliated individuals who
were willing to echo the party line or go along with it in uncritical
complicity. My normal indignation with the deceptions practiced by
the Communists reached a pitch of anger at the crudity and gall with
which they were conducting this operation and the publicity it was
receiving. They were posing as champions of peace at a time when
the Soviet Union was threatening the peace of Europe with their
blockade of Berlin, and as advocates of a free culture at the height of
the Zhdanov purges and the imposition of Lysenkoism on Soviet
scientists.
Resolved to counter this ambitious grandiose fraud on the
American public with its pretensions to defend the cause of peace by
concentrated attacks against American policies at home and abroad,
I called a meeting consisting of as many local members I could reach
of the Committee for Cultural Freedom, organized in 1939, which
had become dormant during World War II, and some of its erstwhile
revolutionary critics who had been sobered by the postwar experi–
ence . The meeting was held at the home of Dwight Macdonald, who
made up in enthusiasm for the Spartan simplicity of his ·hospitality.
There were about thirty persons present- Counts, Childs and one
or two others from Teachers College, Kallen from The New School ,
Norman Thomas, James Farrell, Arnold Beichman , Bertram Wolfe ,
the editors of
The New Leader, Partisan Review,
and
Commentary,
and
others whom I do not now recall . I explained the situation to them,
cited the details of my own case as compelling evidence of the dis–
honesty of the proceedings, and proposed that we launch an educa–
tional countercampaign to expose the true auspices and purposes of
the conference . By this time the conference had become controver–
sial. The State Department had charged that it would become pri–
marily "a sounding board for Communist propaganda," and its re–
fusal to issue visas to some well-known European Communists who
