The American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF) was the U.S. affiliate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization that, during the Cold War, sought to encourage intellectuals to be critical of the Soviet Union and Communism, and to combat, according to a writer for the New York Times, "the continuing strength of the Soviet myth among the Western cultural elite. Despite all that had happened - the Moscow show trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the Russian attack on Finland, the takeovers in Eastern Europe, the mounting evidence of the gulag - Joseph Stalin still retained the loyalty of many writers, artists and scientists who viewed the Soviet Union as a progressive alternative to the 'reactionary,' 'war-mongering' United States." The CCF was in part funded by the CIA.
The dominant figure in the organization was Sidney Hook. Its 600-strong membership encompassed leading figures on both the Right and the Left, including: James Burnham, Alexander Calder, Whittaker Chambers, Max Eastman, Henry Hazlitt, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Sol Stein and Jackson Pollock.
Famous quotes containing the words american, committee, cultural and/or freedom:
“We are now in the Me Decade—seeing the upward roll of ... the third great religious wave in American history.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
“The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a year less than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1953)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“Only very slowly and late have men come to realize that unless freedom is universal it is only extended privilege.”
—Christopher Hill (b. 1912)