Cultural Freedom versus Cultural Spin

Abstract

In his September 1949 presidential address to the American Historical Society, Social Responsibilities of the Historian, Conyers Read spoke of the current struggle of democracy against tyranny and insisted that professional historians contribute their skills: Total war enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part. The historian is no freer from this obligation than the physicist. Historians, he insisted, must help in asserting the nation's objectives, defining its ideals, establishing its standards and organizing all the forces of society in support of them. Samuel Eliot Morrison, during the same year was attacking Beard and a generation of historians for not measuring up as patriots and insisting that the younger generation write history fire in the eye, a history that would make a young man want to fight for his country in war or live to make it a better country in peace. Soon Allan Nevins demanded that American historians be intent [than they have been ] on proving our way of life, called decadent by our enemies has proved historically to be freer than any other in history.1 All of this more or less coincided with the establishment of the Congress for Cultural Freedom at a conference in Berlin in June 1950. Francis Stonor Saunders, a British documentary filmmaker, informs us that the Congress was part of a consortium established to innoculate the world against the contagion of Communism and to ease the passage of American foreign policy interests abroad (p. 2). A vast network of cultural institutions, journals, books, conferences, seminars, art exhibits, and awards was created to counteract what was seen as a worldwide Soviet propaganda campaign. Saunders's weighty volume is about this cultural cold war. She begins roughly with the notorious fellow-traveling Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in April 1949, and the protests against the proceedings by well-organized anti-communists funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. The volume's main narrative ends with the exposure of the CIA's covert penetration, influence, and funding of allegedly independent