Congress For Cultural Freedom Research Articles

Cultural attachés: African literature, the CIA, and the hermeneutics of suspicion

Recent attempts to outline post-critical models of interpretation in literary studies have often fixated on suspicion, paranoia, or unmasking as their foils. But in the early decades of decolonization, it made sense to be paranoid: writers and artists were justified in suspecting that they were being covertly observed, funded, or promoted by para-state actors knee-deep in the Cold War battlefield of culture. Scholars have long debated whether and how covert state sponsorship for the arts matters. In postcolonial studies especially there has been a revival of interest in the CIA’s activities as a cultural patron through its proxy foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Recent research on the CCF has tended to concentrate on what its clandestine sponsorship means for aesthetic autonomy – the notion that the artist has or ought to have some relative autonomy from meddling outside forces, a cherished value of both modernism and mid-century humanism. Focusing on the CCF’s support for African modernism, this essay suggests that we need to look beyond autonomy as our default paradigm for assessing Cold War cultural patronage. Instead of joining the debate over what the CCF did or did not do to African literature, this essay asks: what did they even think they were doing? Drawing on research in the CCF archives, this essay argues that a better way to understand the CCF’s approach is as a practice of attachment. The aim here is to re-describe Cold War cultural patronage – and, along the way, to ask what scholars of decolonization and the Cold War might stand to learn by engaging with ongoing debates about methodology in the broader field of literary studies.

‘One of the last secret maestros’: Nicola Chiaromonte between Europe and America

ABSTRACT The article describes the transatlantic cultural mediation performed by Italian editor, critic and political activist Nicola Chiaromonte, focusing specifically on his relationships with figures from the mid-twentieth-century U.S. cultural formation known as the New York Intellectuals. Drawing heavily on unpublished correspondence and archival materials, it highlights how Chiaromonte – who in the 1930s belonged to influential Italian and French intellectual networks, as well as to the antifascist movement ‘Giustizia e Libertà’ – publicly and privately transmitted political ideas forged in the debates of the Italian antifascist diaspora and the intellectual matrix of interwar Paris to leftwing 1940s New York circles associated with literary and socio-political magazines such as Partisan Review (P.R.) and politics. After exploring Chiaromonte’s years as a refugee in Manhattan as a scene of formal and informal cultural mediation, it turns to his post-war role as co-editor of the Italian Congress for Cultural Freedom (C.C.F.) magazine Tempo Presente (T.P.), foregrounding this institutional role as a site of idea circulation and exchange that leveraged Chiaromonte’s transnational cultural knowledge and connections. The article emphasizes the significance of interpersonal relationships not only to Chiaromonte’s political vision but also as sites of transformational intellectual labour.

The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures by Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds.

<i>The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures</i> by Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds.

If Books Could Kill: Leo Tolstoy and the Cultural Cold War

Drawing on declassified Central Intelligence Agency files and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) archives held at the University of Chicago, this essay investigates how the CIA and its cover organizations sought to manipulate the legacy of Leo Tolstoy as part of the larger Cultural Cold War. In 1960, the CCF marked the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy's death by organizing a conference that attracted a wide range of writers and academics from around the world. Secretly sponsored by the CIA, the Tolstoy gathering, which took place in Venice in the summer of 1960, was intended to counter similar events planned by the Soviets, which the CIA feared would portray the Russian novelist as a prophet of Bolshevism. In response, the West hoped to claim Tolstoy as a thinker whose individualist philosophy was unassimilable to either Marxism or capitalism. Essentially, they sought to secularize his Christian anarchism as a form of radical liberty. However, this essay argues, the intelligence community's appropriation of the humanities ultimately conflicts with the pacifist writer's antipathy toward state sponsorship of the arts and the weaponization of culture in the service of nationalistic agendas.

We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan

We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes: Late Cold War Culture in the Age of Reagan

Liminal Liberalism? Ivan Kats, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the Obor Foundation in Cold War Indonesia

The story of the Obor Foundation is important for several reasons. Firstly, it covers the contribution of an up-till-now largely overlooked Western philanthropic enterprise to promote a cohesive national cultural identity for Indonesia in the wake of the fall of Sukarno. Secondly, Obor was an attempt to move beyond previous Cold War efforts to spread liberal ideas globally, most notably by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. To overcome critiques of top-down Westernization and neocolonialism, Obor sought to establish local control over the publishing process in a reciprocal arrangement of shared responsibility. Thirdly, it was symbolic of the move of the Ford Foundation, which had invested a great deal in the modernisation (i.e. Westernization) of Indonesian education, towards introducing a greater level of autonomy in their operations from the late 1960s onwards, expressing a general confidence in (and sufficient monitoring of) Western-trained and/or -oriented local leadership.

Moving Barriers to Investigative Journalism in Latin America in Times of Instability and Professional Innovation

ABSTRACT Latin American journalism has experienced recent transitions marked by digital affordances, including a growth of investigative journalism. The region has also experienced more political and economic instability, giving rise to a wave of threats and harassment against journalists. This repeated cross-sectional study analyzes the changing perceptions of threats and attacks as barriers to investigative journalism, through surveys of journalists from 20 Latin American countries conducted in 2013 and 2017. It performs intra-regional comparison utilizing the hierarchy of influences model. It found that women and those with fewer years of working experience (individual characteristics) were increasingly likely to perceive threats and attacks as a main barrier to investigative journalism. It also found that those working for digital platforms and working more independently (organizational characteristics) were also increasingly likely to perceive threats and attacks as major barriers.

Journalists’ Misjudgement of Audience Opinion

Prior studies have reported a right-leaning bias in the media’s reporting of how the public thinks of political issues, raising the question: Why, and to what extent, is this the case? One reason in particular has been discussed in this regard: Journalists judge public opinion to be more right leaning than it actually is (Beckers et al. 2021; Lewis et al. 2004). This paper therefore studies to what extent journalists misjudge audience opinion. The analyses are based on large-scale representative surveys of journalists (1993/2005) and the voting-age population (1994/2005) in Germany. Results show that German journalists (mis-)judge audience opinion to be more right-leaning than the audience sees itself. The results also show that journalists judge audience opinion to be to the right of their own stances, and that journalists in federal states with a right-leaning government and in West Germany judge audience opinion to be even further to the right. Audience feedback does not push journalists’ judgements of their audience towards the right, however. These results are discussed vis-à-vis research showing that there is a consistent bias in the depiction of opinions expressed by ordinary citizens, and research documenting that political elites overestimate public support for right-wing policies.

Trauma survivors and the media: A qualitative analysis

While much has been written about how the media covers traumatic events, little is known about the impact of the media on trauma survivors. This, despite the fact that crime coverage has been a staple of daily news cycles for several decades. Likewise, little has been written about the training and methods of the journalists who cover these events, or the impact of this coverage on the journalists. Based on 71 qualitative surveys and interviews with homicide and traffic fatality survivors, and 22 qualitative surveys of journalists, this article serves to describe five main themes regarding survivor experiences: 1) Prior experience with the media; 2) First encounters with the media; 3) Negative impacts of the media; 4) Positive impacts of the media; and 5) Advice for various stakeholders. Additionally, this article will describe three main themes highlighted by the journalists: 1) Trauma-informed training and guidelines; 2) Comfort in contacting survivors; and 3) Personal impact of reporting on trauma. These findings illustrate a clear gap in services available to survivors, in particular in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events when media attention is often at its highest, as well as a lack of support for journalists covering these events.

Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century, by Iain Stewart

During his long intellectual career, and perhaps more especially since his sudden death in 1983, Raymond Aron has become one of the foremost figures in the intellectual history of France, and more broadly of the West, in the second half of the twentieth century. Along with his contemporary and long-standing rival, Jean-Paul Sartre, he became the archetype of a male public intellectual: signing manifestos, travelling far and wide to conferences and public events, giving lectures, participating in media debates, and launching and editing periodicals. Above all, Aron had a remarkable talent for making himself visible in the intellectual and political battles of the era. He was a seemingly ever-present figure, from the Parisian intellectual warfare of the 1930s and the exile debates in London during the war years, to the front-line of anti-Communist mobilisation in organisations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s, and his journalistic tirades...

A penny for your words. Job insecurity as the chief problem affecting Spanish professional journalism

In view of the difficult period professional journalism is going through and the challenges facing journalists in their day-to-day work, this paper seeks to identify the main problems affecting professional Spanish journalists from the perspective of journalists, citizens and experts. To this end, the research presents results obtained through surveys of Spanish journalists, citizen focus groups and in-depth interviews with experts. The findings derived from the survey of journalists conducted in 2018 are compared with those from a survey of Spanish and European journalists conducted in 2012, both of which used the same parameters. The inclusion of findings from an additional survey carried out in 2008 by the researchers of this paper allow us to plot the evolution of the problems faced by the profession in Spain, highlighting those that have remained unchanged and become more deeply entrenched over a decade marked by the global economic crisis. The results show that Spanish journalists identified job insecurity as the main problem of their profession, while economic and political pressures came in second and third place respectively.

Raymond Aron, the United States, and the Early Cold War, 1945-1953

Almost simultaneously with the advent of the Cold War in 1947, Raymond Aron postponed a promising academic career to become a front-page columnist for the influential Parisian daily, Le Figaro. His regular editorials, along with the publication of a constant stream of essays and books, made him the most influential Atlanticist voice in France. Among the 'orthodox' historians of the early Cold War Aron enjoyed a reputation as a champion of US containment policy in Europe and, more generally, as a voice sympathetic to America in a French environment increasingly hostile to both US policies and American culture. By the 1970s, with the emergence of 'revisionist' histories of the Cold War, Aron's stock had fallen precipitously, especially after it was revealed that the Congress for Cultural Freedom–an organization with which he had been closely associated–had been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. However, a close examination of Aron's extensive writings during the early Cold War reveals that neither orthodox nor revisionist frameworks fully capture the nuances of his evolving positions regarding the early Cold War. His commentary on the emerging Cold War reveals a stubborn independence of mind that resists easy categorization.

Surveying journalists in the “New Normal”: Considerations and recommendations

As journalism undergoes widespread changes, it finds itself in a ‘new normal’. Research seeking to understand these changes by surveying journalists faces new methodological hurdles that span different stages of the survey process. This article identifies the key contemporary challenges when it comes to sampling, instrument design, and distribution. Best research practices in identifying a target population, sampling, selecting or developing measures, and maximizing the likelihood of participation are presented and discussed. Advice is also offered to help peer reviewers identify common shortcomings in surveys of journalists and encourage authors to engage with the limitations of their work.

The Chicago School goes East: Edward Shils and the dilemma of the Indian intellectuals,circa1956–67

AbstractThe sociologist Edward Shils (1910–95) is a neglected commentator on modern India. Best known in a South Asian context for his involvement in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Shils also produced an influential study on Indian intellectuals, published in 1961. He was one of the few non-Marxists to write about the role of intellectuals during the era of decolonization in Asia and Africa. His book appeared in the same year as Frantz Fanon'sLes Damnés de la Terre(1961) and a year before C. L. R. James'sMarxism and the Intellectuals(1962), just as Pan-Africanism was finding its ideological voice. This article recovers Shils’ work on the Indian intellectual. It describes his Indian interlocutors, his methodology, and his claims about the isolated and ineffectual character of the Indian academic elite. The article concludes with an examination of the longer-term influence and validity of Shils’ critique of the Indian intelligentsia.

“I Am Afraid Americans Cannot Understand”: The Congress for Cultural Freedom in France and Italy, 1950–1957

This article examines the nature and significance of the activities carried out in France and Italy by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an international organization that was secretly funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to support anti-Communist intellectuals, including those on the left end of the political spectrum. These two West European countries, with their large and politically influential Communist parties, were central to the CCF's work in Europe. The organization's task was complicated by domestic concerns and traditions that forced local intellectuals to stress their autonomy from the CCF International Secretariat and its U.S. patrons. The article uses the cultural Cold War and the competing interpretations of anti-Communism and cultural freedom within the CCF as a lens to explore the limits of U.S. influence and persuasion among the intellectual classes of Europe. By repeatedly asserting their independence and agency, the French and Italian members of the CCF helped redefine the character and limits of U.S. cultural diplomacy.

Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy. by Alessandro Brogi, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 533 pp. $55.00.

<i>Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy</i>. by Alessandro Brogi, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 533 pp. $55.00.

Shattering the ‘looking-glass world’: the Congress for Cultural Freedom in South Asia, 1951–55

ABSTRACT This paper assesses the thought and philosophy of South Asian intellectuals affiliated to the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The CCF’s founders – anti-communist European and American scholars – encouraged allies across several continents to establish magazines and organise conferences warning of the threats posed by ‘totalitarianism’ to free cultural expression. But South Asian members, more interested in postcolonial politics, used its resources to initiate transnational conversations about social change. Probing neglected local CCF magazines and seminar transcripts, the paper also constitutes an early intervention on intersections between the cultural Cold War and decolonisation among non-state actors in the region.

Towards a Semantic-oriented Model of Participatory Journalism Management

During the last two decades, citizens’ participation in news production process has raised great academic and entrepreneurial interest for participatory journalism. Traditional procedures and concepts such as gate keeping have been under discussion. News organizations redesign their websites in order to adopt tools and applications that make it possible for users to be active consumers or even co-producers of journalistic content, by liking, sharing, commenting and submitting material. At the same time, huge amounts of user-generated content are uploaded every minute on social media platforms. Subsequently, professionals have to deal with continually available information, which requires management, classification and evaluation in order to keep high journalistic standards and to avoid problems, varying from plain grammar mistakes to serious situations of fake news, hostility or hate speech. Thus, there is the obvious need for a new model of managing participatory journalism, based on semantic technologies, which will support organized collection and moderation of content in an effective way and in short time. The main objective of this paper is to define the requirements and describe the characteristics that the model should have. For this purpose, two online surveys of journalists and users were conducted in Greece, in order to gain some insights concerning the development of the model. The paper presents the key findings from the surveys and identifies the views, the preferences and the experiences as expressed by the respondents, which lead to the tendency towards a collaborative, semantic-oriented way of submitting and receiving user-generated content.

Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959. By Rosa Magnúsdóttir

It was an assumption of the Cold War that communist propagandists were better informed about liberal democracies than the other way around. The knowledge gap’s cause was not espionage but media. While Western reporters relied on governments for information about Soviet life, Soviet media could deride America in the U.S. press's own words. As Rosa Magnúsdóttir acknowledges in her study of Soviet media’s reckoning with the United States between 1947 and 1959, the historiography of the cultural Cold War reflects a similar imbalance between East and West to the one seen in the press. U.S. propaganda organs like the Voice of America, the United States Information Agency, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom have inspired at least one monograph apiece since the 1990s, while Soviet counterparts like Intourist or the World Peace Council figure prominently in occasional chapters in edited volumes. The USSR’s prewar campaigns to curry favor with foreign intellectuals are well documented. But the post-1945 debates discussed in Magnúsdóttir’s book, between Soviet “cultural bureaucrats” over how to handle “enemy number one,” are for the most part new ground. The disputes that figure most prominently in Enemy Number One concern propaganda for export, or how to mollify U.S. public opinion. But the book’s most intriguing insights pertain to the same question that drives Alan Ball’s provocative and illuminating anthology of Soviet magazine articles, Liberty’s Tears: how did Soviet propagandists package America for domestic consumption?

Propaganda ‘Worth an Army’: The Norwegian Labour Party, Haakon Lie and the transnational dissemination of Cold War propaganda, 1945–55

The working class was the most important target for British and American propaganda in Norway during the early Cold War. The propagandists found eager allies in certain Norwegian Labour Party partisans, who wanted support in their struggle against communist and Soviet influence. Party Secretary Haakon Lie became their key contact. Soon after the war, he started propaganda cooperation with the British Labour Party, as well as the British and US Embassies in Oslo, mostly on his own initiative. New opportunities arose with the onset of the Cold War and the establishment of secret Western campaigns to influence public opinion abroad. From 1948 onward, anti-communist propaganda poured into Norway, reaching a peak during the Korean War. In the early 1950s the British Foreign Office, the US State Department and the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom were all cooperating with the Norwegian Labour Party. This article gives an overview of the transnational dissemination of propaganda through Labour’s party and union apparatus, arguing that the Western propagandists’ remarkable reach towards the Norwegian labour movement and working class was a cultural ‘empire by invitation’.