SIDNEY HOOK
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had been invited to attend disturbed the civil rights community. My
proposal was unanimously approved. We took up a collection which
amounted, if memory serves me correctly, to $280.00. With that and
with a force of volunteers whose sacrificial labors reached heroic pro–
portions, we launched the Ad Hoc Committee for Intellectual Free–
dom. I myself initially held out for calling our group the Committee
for Cultural Freedom in order to stress our continuity with the earlier
embodiment of our position, but in view of the fact that there were
so many fresh accessions to our ranks I yielded on that point.
Meanwhile the organizers of the Waldorf Conference had not
been idle. With vast resources at their disposal, they issued a stream
of releases of the names of distinguished Communists and left-wingers
from foreign countries scheduled to attend. The contingent from the
Soviet Union, which included Dmitri Shostakovitch, was particu–
larly impressive. (In a recent book purporting to be Shostakovitch's
Memoirs
it is alleged that Shostakovitch attended the Waldorf Con–
ference at Stalin's personal behest .) An intensive campaign was un–
dertaken to solicit sponsorship for the conference's program among
leading figures in American cultural life.
The strategy we adopted in our countercampaign was a princi–
pled one. We proclaimed that we had no objection to the Commu–
nists or anyone else holding their meeting. We defended their right
to do so. We made no demands that we be given a place on their pro–
gram, although we were prepared to accept invitations if they were
offered. We announced we would hold our own meeting and invited
Dr. Shapley to speak or send a representative. We protested these–
lective policy of the State Department in refusing to issue visas to
some of the Communist delegates from foreign countries like Bernal
and Crowther. We also issued statements condemning the noisy
picketing of the Waldorf Conference by militant pickets of the Amer–
ican Legion and other right-wing groups, on the ground that their
antics prevented reasonable discussion. What we objected to were
the false pretenses under which the conference was soliciting sup–
port, its declared objectives, in advance of the meeting, to hold the
United States solely responsible for the cold war and to condemn its
alleged domestic, political, and cultural repressions, while remain–
ing silent about, and in effect condoning, the Kremlin's aggressions
in Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia, and West Berlin, and the merci–
less Zhdanov purges in the Soviet Union and satellite countries that
were destroying thousands of innocent men and women by exile, im–
prisonment in concentration camps, and execution, for heresies in
thought and style.
