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and we shared it, but it was not a sufficient ground to permit their
names to be used as a cover-up of the purposes of the conference.
Somewhat to my surprise, some of the sponsors maintained that not
Communism but Catholicism, not the Kremlin but the Vatican,
threatened peace and freedom in the world, a bizarre judgment that
had no relevance to the issues and anti-American orientation of the
conference. But the chief rejoinder to our protests was the assertion
we had heard in the thirties, and which was repeated many years
later, that the concern of American liberals was primarily with "the
sins of our own country. We live here and not abroad. Whatever the
actions of Stalin we cannot affect them." This came from men and
women who had on dozens of occasions protested the actions of Brit–
ish and French imperialism, of Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini, of
dictators in Southern and Central America, of Chiang Kai-shek in
distant China.
It
seems only yesterday that Lillian Hellman, in re–
plying to Dan Rather's question, on a CBS interview, of why she re–
mained silent about Stalin's Gulag Archipelago and other infamous
crimes while passionately denouncing the excesses of the McCarthy
investigation, replied, "I don't really know what one thing has to do
with another. I was not a Russian, I was an American." (She was not
a German yet she blasted Hitler, not a Spaniard but attacked Franco.)
Finally, there were the impressive German exiles, Einstein, Thomas
Mann, Irwin Panofsky, whose hatred of the Germans was so pro–
found that they felt greater gratitude towards than fear of the Rus–
sians, despite what was occurring in Eastern and Central Europe
and within the Soviet Union itself. (The case of Einstein I shall dis–
cuss in a separate chapter.)
It was undoubtedly Harlow Shapley who played the leading
role in involving the non-Communist sponsors. He was especially ef–
fective with scientists who lacked sophistication. It was he who had
approached A.
J.
Carlson, the brilliant and temperamental physiol–
ogist at the University of Chicago. I had known Carlson in the mid–
thirties. I was then a member of the Council of the American Asso–
ciation of University Professors when Carlson was president and
Ralph Himstead executive secretary. At one of the Council meet–
ings a communication had been received from the College Teachers
Union, Local Five, then under the control of the Communist Party,
proposing a program ofjoint action with the AAUP. The words were
honeyed and inoffensive. In the discussion I read from an internal
bulletin of the Union, revealing that its strategy was first to collabo–
rate with the AAUP and then bore from within, ultimately to take it
over or destroy it. After convincing itself of the authenticity of the
