William Barrett here reports on the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace which took place at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on the weekend of March 25, and about which there has been so much controversy. 

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“Was the Conference really Communist-dominated?” a woman of my acquaintance asked. “I was not sure from the papers.” We were talking about the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, held at the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria in New York the weekend of March 25-27. My questioner was a very intelligent professional woman and a convinced liberal, not actively engaged in politics and therefore unfamiliar with the political history of the persons who sponsored or spoke at the Conference. She had read all the newspapers on the Conference, but her doubt remained. And this doubt is typical: it expresses the attitude of many people of good will who are opposed to Communism when they recognize it, but who are willing to lean over backwards in order not to be taken in by what they fear might be propaganda from the Right. They prefer to risk being wrong with Stalin for fear of being right with Hearst, though they never put the alternatives to themselves so starkly—that would be too decisive. And it was this large indecisive audience of liberals that a propaganda spectacle like the Conference aimed to reach.

Of course, the tabloids had been whooping it up all week that the Commies were coming to the Waldorf. The Daily News and the Mirror had been snarling at the meeting as if it were actually to be an armed invasion, and the evening papers had been treating it with all the excitement of a late afternoon sports event. (There was something ironic in the popular press’s paying this much attention to any group of intellectuals; obviously, it was not as intellectuals that they were suddenly so newsworthy.)

The State Department itself entered the scramble with a statement, printed on the first page of the New York Times on Thursday morning, denouncing the Conference as a “sounding board for Communist propaganda.” But for Americans at this historical juncture, their press is suspect, and their State Department is a strangely discredited organization: American liberals would seemingly rather die than believe anything the latter says—even though this time the State Department made a telling point against the Conference that the Conference itself never answered: namely, that Russian interest in this cultural conference was odd in view of the fact that Russia had turned down every proposal hitherto for steady and continuous cultural exchange with the United States.

But the newspapers (including the respectable), in reporting the sessions, somehow managed to convey to many people the impression that the Conference did really rep resent an outspoken exchange between different points of view. It did this by (inevitably as newspapers) emphasizing certain speeches and questions (unexpected and exceptional) which embarrassed but did not upset the routine tenor of the Conference, and chiefly by failing to present any intellectual analysis of the program, issues, selection of speakers, and organized technique of discussion. So, despite the newspapers and even because of the newspapers, there were still reasons for many liberals who had not been at the meetings to be hazy, like the professional lady with whom I talked afterward, about this Conference’s true nature.

One newspaper, to be sure, the New York Herald Tribune, did an excellent job on this occasion, and chiefly because it chose to follow the cues supplied by the rival organization to the Conference, Americans for Intellectual Freedom, directed by Dr. Sidney Hook. This group, with small personnel and scant resources, threw itself headlong into the batde, took rooms at the Waldorf from which it issued a steady stream of statements to the press, and topped off its activities for the week by staging a rival meeting on Saturday afternoon, at Freedom House on 40th Street, devoted largely to an indictment of the Russian suppression of all cultural liberties. Without the guidance of the AIF, the public opposition to the Conference would have descended to the level of the picketlines in the street.

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The pickets were there bright and early on Friday morning. The great picket scare (it had been estimated that there would be 100,000 of them) never materialized. On Friday morning there were actually more cops around the Waldorf than there were pickets. The latter were on the whole a pretty sad lot; mosdy from religious organizations, the American Legion, and local Ukrainian and Slovakian clubs, they occasionally sang hymns or knelt in prayer before the news cameras. Their behavior was hardly hysterical, as some of the delegates inside the Conference claimed, but they did give the impression of including some very unsavory types. As the Conference went on, the pickets became fewer, and the police, seeing that there was to be no violence, also became much less evident.

On Friday morning the Conference itself had not yet begun, but Dr. Harlow Shapley, its chairman and director of the Harvard College Observatories, had called a press meeting that morning, and it was the first opportunity to see both the foreign guests and Dr. Shapley himself in the flesh. In calling a press conference, Dr. Shapley got something he had not exacdy bargained for. For American newspapermen, a press conference is precisely an occasion where one asks as embarrassing questions as one can. Dr. Shapley had intended to stage something else: a meeting which simply hurried through a series of prepared statements. The newsmen (who managed anyway to break through with some sharp questions) were not any more pleased by the proceedings than was Dr. Shapley, though for different reasons. “What kind of a news conference is this!” one veteran reporter remarked to me, as we were filing out. “One guy after another just reads his statement.” This reporter had put his finger on the technique, decidedly not in the American pattern, that was to be used throughout the Conference to obviate any real debate.

It would be difficult from the brief glimpses on this public occasion to form any clear idea of so obviously complex a character as Dr. Shapley’s. His face reminded one somehow of Henry Wallace. Perhaps the resemblance was read into it from their common political associations; but it did seem the same American type as Wallace’s: more youthful than its years, very facile in showing emotion, with a kind of sincerity written all over it, but also capable at times of becoming quite harried and even sick-looking. At the keynote session at Carnegie Hall on Saturday morning, I stood directly in front of Dr. Shapley while the “Star-Spangled Banner” was being sung, and I have rarely seen a face express so much emotion: he looked very much on the verge of tears. When the anthem was finished, he stepped forward to tell the audience that they could not imagine how close to his heart were the feelings expressed in that song. Indeed, his warm and emotional voice seemed always to carry the tones of deep and convinced feeling. To complete the very American side of his character, Dr. Shapley is apt at folksy humor. His wit was not very brilliant, but it invariably drew laughter. This very great willingness of the audience to laugh at some poor jokes (including the very cheap one by Louis Untermeyer, that “Hook is a dirty four-letter word”—which the poet Robert Lowell, who was in the audience, sprang up to object to) was a sign of its complete identification with the speakers. From the opening gale of laughter at Dr. Shapley’s first sally at the banquet on Friday evening, one knew that one was very distinctly en famille.

But with all his tremolo of deep and convinced feeling, Dr. Shapley’s behavior over the weekend made clear how very complex a quality human sincerity can be—and we are reminded again of Henry Wallace. There is, for example, the business of his strange encounter with Sidney Hook, and the fact that he has not yet publicly retracted his statement that Dr. Hook lied in saying that he—Hook—had been invited by some members of the program committee to speak at one of the sessions, although Dr. Hook has documentary proof of the invitation.

But, for me, the most complicated and puzzling incident was Dr. Shapley’s remark to Norman Cousins, when Mr. Cousins showed him the anti-Communist speech he intended making at the opening banquet: “This will ruin us, but we’sre for free speech, so go ahead.” Certainly, if he really believed that the speech would “ruin us,” Dr. Shapley was very generous in allowing Mr. Cousins to speak. But why, one wonders, should the speech “ruin us” if the Conference really represented, as Dr. Shapley on the following Monday said it did, all points of view? Perhaps Dr. Shapley’s sincerity at this point may have been a little desperate, since, if he prevented the speech, Mr. Cousins, who is editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, might have gone on to print it—as he did anyway.

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Besides Dr. Shapley, the two personalities who commanded most attention were the Russian delegates Messrs. Fadeyev and Shostakovich. Shostakovich was undoubtedly the star of the show, inevitably greeted with the loudest applause at every session at which he appeared. Shostakovich has the face of a boy, sensitive, unformed, and immature; the face, not of a happy boy, but one sickly, nervous, drab. When he had to speak, he hunched up his shoulders nervously, thrust his face forward, and spoke at, rather than into, the microphone in a high thin voice. “How unhappy he looks!” a good many people said to me, evidendy seeing in his face the unhappy soul of a musical genius suffering under the heavy burden of Russian censorship. It may be some lack of pity in me, but I could see no signs in Shostakovich of a soul in torment; his record, after all, is that of an artist with a very pliant backbone. True, he did look unhappy, but who wouldn’st look unhappy sitting through session after dreary session, most of it in a language one didn’st understand? And there were moments when he seemed very relaxed and cheerful: at the news conference on Friday morning, while the attention of the conference was on other speakers, Shostakovich engaged in a very brisk and animated conversation with Fadeyev, smiling and gesturing. Of course, that was at the beginning of the Conference, when the trial of boredom had not yet set in.

If Shostakovich seemed sickly and introvert, the whip of the Soviet delegation, Fadeyev, on the other hand, looked the very picture of extrovert health. Vigorous, alert, and aggressive, he was obviously in his element in a big public show like this. Perhaps these public talents, rather than any literary ability, explain why Fadeyev is Secretary-General of the Union of Soviet Writers—in fact, the commissar of literature in the Soviet Union. I have not read any of Fadeyev’s books, but if they are of a high imaginative order, then this bureaucrat-type is certainly a person of remarkable variety. One had the impression that among all the foreign delegates (most of whom seemed on the verge of falling asleep from boredom the greater part of the time), Fadeyev’s eyes were intently following the ball at every moment: it was left to him to make the most aggressive speeches, and it was he who declared the ultimate and practical purpose of the Conference at the final rally on Sunday evening at Madison Square Garden, where he denounced the Adantic Pact as “infamous.”

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But to get at the truth of the Conference one has to proceed beyond these reporter’s observations to an intellectual dismemberment of the issues and procedures during this dull and windy weekend at the Waldorf.

The meeting was not a conference because no genuine intellectual debate took place, and there was no debate because matters were carefully arranged so that there should not be any. Speaker after speaker read his paper, with only a brief opportunity left for questions from the floor—and with time very carefully rationed to each questioner. Some of the questions, as mentioned, were embarrassing to the guests from the East, and the newspapers played them up, thereby creating the impression that full opportunity of expression had been given to dissenting opinions. It was on this mistaken impression that Dr. Harlow Shapley tried to cash in a day later by a public statement to the effect that the Conference had really represented different points of view. This was absolutely not the case. It is not hard to brush off any question, no matter how embarrassing, by a flat statement or a rhetorical flourish, provided the questioner has no opportunity to follow up his question. This opportunity was never given at any session I attended.

Various techniques of evasion were employed. One that was constantly used throughout the Conference was trotted out at the opening press conference on Friday morning. The Yugoslav delegate, Popovich, was asked what had happened to the Serbian writers Nikola Bartulovic and Sibe Milicic. (Both men had absolutely unblemished records of resistance to the Nazis, and both had been promptly shot when Tito came to power.) Popovich answered that the question was irrelevant to the purpose of the Conference, which was peace.

Sometimes the evasion was a simple rhetorical flourish, absolutely irrelevant to the question asked. In the panel session on literature, somebody asked from the floor what treatment was given to conscientious objectors to war in Soviet Russia. The Soviet writer P. A. Pavlenko volunteered a rather curious “answer”: as for himself, he said, he had always been willing to fight for his country, he had joined the Red Army in the last war when he was fifty, and he would be willing to fight again when he was a hundred.

Sometimes the lie direct was used; and it worked because the limitation of time prevented the questioner from exposing it. The master of this technique was Fadeyev. At this same literary panel, he was asked about his blistering wholesale attack upon American culture at the Wroclaw Conference in August 1948: Did he believe in his attack? (He had been wooing American culture during the present Conference.) Fadeyev answered that in the speech at Wroclaw he had not attacked American culture but only those forces in America that were working against peace. The questioner rose to protest and to press his question, but was ruled out of order. The lie would have ended there, but it had to be protected by the chair a few minutes later when another person arose, held up the issue of Pravda in which Fadeyev’s Wroclaw speech was printed, and asked to be permitted to translate it aloud to the audience. Permission was not granted: there was not enough time.

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If questions—systematically answered and systematically pursued—were to be asked of anyone, that man was Shostakovich. At the panel on fine arts and music, a speech was read for Shostakovich by an interpreter, which sought to cover up last year’s musical purge in Russia. Speaking of those works of his which had been condemned by edict of the Central Committee of the Communist party, Shostakovich said: “My works found response only among the narrow strata of sophisticated musicians, but failed to meet with approval among the broad masses of listeners.”

Here was the conflict between the tastes of the elite and the mass, the cultural minority and majority, which is a pretty permanent part of the history of culture and which we are very familiar with here in America. But what has happened in Russia? The conflict was resolved by an edict of the Central Committee of the Communist party deciding that a certain minority (the sophisticated musicians), with standards and tastes different from the mass, is not to be permitted to exist or function. Elsewhere in his speech, Shostakovich, attacking “bourgeois formalism” and “reactionary modernism,” declared the necessity of “social realism” in music. But what does “bourgeois formalism” mean as applied to music? What is the “social realism” of a Bach fugue or of Beethoven’s Opus 131? What does it mean culturally to give the politician the right (and to assume he has the ability) to pronounce when the musician has become too formalistic or modernistic and to forbid his work publication and performance? The Conference did not deign to discuss such matters. Going further, Shostakovich attacked, in particular, the music of Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Schoenberg as decadent and reactionary. It may be asked: why wasn’st Hindemith or Schoenberg or Stravinsky invited to the Conference to defend himself and debate these issues with Shostakovich?

Indeed, when we come to the question as to who was and who was not invited to the Conference, the whole facade of innocence crumbles. For the Conference, by carefully handpicking the participants, eschewed any possibility of a genuine intellectual exchange. Why, for example, was French literature represented—among those originally invited to the Conference—only by the poet Paul Eluard, a member of the French Communist party? Why were André Gide, André Malraux, or Jean-Paul Sartre not invited to represent another point of view besides that of Eluard? Why was English philosophy represented only by William Olaf Stapledon, a run-of-the-mill pedagogue of very little reputation, and not also by a man like Bertrand Russell? British literature was to have been represented by a fellow-traveling popular novelist, Louis Golding. No invitations were sent to British writers like T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, and others who would have been critical of the Soviet Union.

The representation of American literature was even more outrageously one-sided, in view of the fact that the meeting was held in the United States, where writers of other persuasions were easily available. In the panel session on writing and publishing, held Saturday afternoon in the Waldorf’s Starlight Roof, the chief spokesmen for American literature were distinguished mainly for their lack of unfriendliness to Stalinism: Howard Fast, F. O. Matthiessen, and Richard O. Boyer. No invitations were sent to writers like John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, James T. Farrell—to name only a few of the dozen the Conference might have chosen. Norman Mailer, the young novelist, was invited on the basis of his support of Henry Wallace in the last election; but he surprised everybody by getting up to announce that he now considered Russia an example of “state capitalism,” and doubted the effectiveness of any such meeting as the Conference in bringing about world peace. Up to this point Mailer had obviously been a great favorite of the audience, and there had been loud demands that he take the floor. His speech brought gasps of dismay, and a number of responses from the comrades, all trying to persuade him of his mistake and clearly not yet ready to give him up as lost from the fold. But Mailer’s discordant speech lasted only two or three minutes and the session droned on, taking its tone and color from chief spokesmen Fast, Matthiessen, and Boyer. With the session organized this way, it was inevitable that Howard Fast should emerge as the dominant opposite number to the Russian delegate, Fadeyev, both commissars of literature.

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Of course, criticism was made of Russia during the Conference. But when one examines this “criticism,” one finds that in its very nature and aim it had a subtle role of its own to play during this period of the Russian peace offensive. The keynote session on Saturday morning was opened by Dr. Harlow Shapley himself, whose speech was reported in the conservative New York Sun that afternoon under the streamer, “Shapley Arraigns Russia.” Apparently the Sun wanted to lose no opportunity for antiCommunist propaganda, but its headline defeated its own end. What, in fact, was Shapley’s arraignment of Russia? He said that in the East individual liberty was “sorely restricted,” and he did refer—or rather said he could refer—to the labor camps of the East—though he qualified, “without much direct evidence.” But the real point of his speech was to balance every criticism of Russia by an equal and opposite criticism of America, so that the total effect was precisely to equate the two systems. If both are equally sinners, then there are no grounds for preferring one system to the other, so that in the international conflict between them there is no reason to support any American attempt to check Russian aggression. This happens to be the prime argument of the ideal fellow-traveler in this period. Its goal: to return America to isolationism so that Russia can have a free hand in Europe and Asia.

The new soul-searching (Frederick Schuman did it even more emotionally than Dr. Shapley) takes the form of confessing sins on both sides, so that in the shuffle notice is lost of the fact that the West is democratic, however imperfect, while the East is a slave state. Suppose that in March 1939 the German-American Bund had commanded enough funds, enough propagandizing fellow-travelers, had captured Broadway and a good part of Hollywood, and that it had organized a Conference for Peace at the Waldorf, with the purpose of keeping the United States out of Europe while Hitler overran Poland and France. One can imagine fellow-traveling Nazis confessing sins on both sides, Germany and the United States—certainly democracy was no more perfect here in 1939—in order to fan isolationist spirit. But, given our historical hindsight, can we not say that all such neatly balanced criticism would have been a tremendous blind? Would one not have had to ask, more fundamentally, whether any kind of conference was possible or desirable with Hitler’s emissaries—whether any kind of conference was possible or desirable with a totalitarian state? On the present occasion Stalin’s emissaries gave absolutely no indication, from any speech or interview, that conference with them was really possible—except for people already on their side.

Yet this question, on which the whole possibility of the Conference turned, was never raised by any of the Americans who spoke officially at the various sessions. Indeed the behavior of the American speakers, in contrast with that of the Russians, was perhaps the salient fact about the whole affair. While speaker after speaker among the Americans assailed his government, the Russians never deviated a hair’s breadth from the straight line that had been laid down for them. This fact, open to anyone who had eyes to see and ears to listen, told the whole story of two social systems already at war in this Conference for peace.

Mr. Ira Wolfert, war correspondent and novelist, spoke for several minutes to the effect that he had read conflicting reports about the Soviet Union and that he did not know what the real truth about Russia was since he had never been there. (From all indications, Mr. Wolfert was never in Nazi Germany either, but he did not have the same trouble in making up his mind that Hitler’s was a totalitarian state.) Mr. Wolfert need not have been in Russia, he had only to use his reporter’s eyes and ears at the Conference, and he could have learned about the nature of the Russian state from the behavior of its delegates. While Mr. Wolfert’s Hollywood colleague, Clifford Odets, attacked American capitalism as a “mad beast,” the Soviet delegates had no word of criticism for the slave-labor camps in Siberia, the total suppression of civil, political, and artistic liberties—no word touching that whole list of indictments of the Soviet system compiled from the experiences of innumerable people who, unlike Mr. Wolfert, were in the Soviet Union and suffered directly from its brutalities. What would Mr. Wolfert (or anyone of liberal persuasion) think of an American who spoke about the United States as uncritically as the Russians did of the Soviet Union? Would he not immediately distrust the integrity of the speaker?

To bind together all these points (which are really one point) one has to imagine what the analogue to this Conference would be: a conference held in Moscow in which the Russian delegates would vigorously attack the Soviet Union while the American delegates spoke in jingoist terms of the United States. Obviously such a conference could never be held, the very idea of it is fantastic. On the other hand, the Conference at the Waldorf was held, and that fact is a sign of the measureless distance between the two systems.

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The audience was the last, but by no means the least, touch in this staged spectacle. The composition of this audience seemed to vary in certain ways from session to session, but in the mass it had the same color as its speakers, and knew just when to applaud, hiss, or be silent: silent when criticism of Russia was made and bursting out in applause at any unfriendly reference to the United States.

The most “distinguished” audience was undoubtedly that present at the opening banquet on Friday evening in the Grand Ballroom. Eighteen hundred people attended, but we were told that the banquet was oversubscribed by three times that number. I do not know on what basis the seating was arranged, but there were all the indications of a sliding social scale, if the clothes of the women were in this case as reliable an indication as they usually are. The tables directly in front of the speakers’s table were oc cupied by the more expensively gowned women, while in the rear balconies one heard the humbler accents of the Bronx and Brooklyn. Roaming these balconies and listening to some of the talk, I had the impression that the Communist party now recruits its members and sympathizers largely from the lower middle class rather than from workers: dentists, shoe-salesmen, furriers, and small businessmen. At the session on writing and publishing there was a different audience, on the whole much younger, a good part of it apparently of college age; but it did not bear (any more than the diners at the banquet) the marks of proletarian origin, and a lot of the girls had the look of Sarah Lawrence or Bennington.

Much could have been learned of the human element behind the Conference if one had had access to the rank and file, the hidden people who made the wheels turn, tending the typewriters, telephones, and mimeograph machines; but these people were carefully kept out of sight and hearing of the inquisitive press. One could, however, mix with the audience, and moving among them one caught snatches of private conversation that were more honest about the Conference than the public speeches from the various rostra. Milling out with the crowd from one panel, I overhead one young woman refer to three pacifists who had raised questions from the floor as “Trotskyites”—the standard Communist word to designate any anti-Stalinist radical—and she went on to say: “They are always nagging us with their questions. You can’st do it at one of their meetings. But they come around to OUT meetings and do it.” Of course, in theory the young lady had no right to say “our meeting,” since the Conference had been thrown open to anyone who paid three dollars and thus became a delegate. But this revealing use of pronouns tells more about the make-up of the Conference than all of Dr. Shapley’s protestations to the contrary.

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It was the audience, in fact, that seemed to me the most depressing phenomenon of all. I don’st know whether the Conference was, in its own terms, a success or failure. Some people, I think, were much too quick to call it a flop: the Luce publications, because Norman Cousins made a “ringing pro-American speech” on the opening night; and some leftist reporters, because a few embarrassing questions were asked that may not have been answered but were quickly smothered—as if the whole Conference had turned upon these fifteen minutes or so of questioning. One takes Stalinism lighdy at great risk. One cannot afford to be too cheerful about a Conference that listed so many fellow-traveling sponsors; that read telegrams of good will from Nehru, Shaw, and Mann; that has virtually captured Broadway, and has a pretty firm toe-hold on the whole of that commercialized culture which, after all, is the dominant propaganda agency in American life. But, most of all, one can’st be very cheerful about the fact that an audience like this is still, at this late date, capable of existing, with its stolid and enthusiastic capacity for boredom, deception, and self-deception.

The Conference leaves one with the melancholy impression that there is no American organization adequate in resources, energy, or direction to fighting Stalinist propaganda on a satisfactory intellectual level. The State Department hardly covered itself with glory in this situation: whatever reasons it may have had for denying visas to the delegates from Western Europe, the denial itself was not good propaganda for America, and the Conference made the most of it, Dr. Shapley himself firing the opening gun at the banquet by referring to the “State Department’s Iron Curtain.” For the few days that the Conference was front-page news, the press picked up the organization of Americans for Intellectual Freedom, but prompdy forgot all about it as soon as the occasion was over. Even in its mortal struggle with Stalinism, America does not have much use for its intellectuals. This may prove its great mistake. For the one overwhelming fact that emerges from this Conference is that, despite all the ink spilled and the voices raised in the last fifteen years, despite the incontrovertible evidence amassed from the internal laws, decrees, and press of Russia itself, the myth of the Soviet Union still persists and flourishes. Each year it harvests its new crop of innocents (they were to be seen at the Waldorf) who in their turn harden into hatchet-men and commissars, while drowsy liberals go on asking whether conferences like this are “really Communist dominated.”

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