Secret Subventions:
Troubling Legacies

Paul Buhle

Frances Stonor Saunders, a young British scholar and independent film producer, has dramatized the issues with her controversial volume, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New Press, 1999). Saunders' FOIA inquiries and interviews, along with new information turned up by other scholars, suggest that the quiet influence of the CIA on historians was more extensive and long-lasting than scholars have hitherto grasped. The New York Times and other media sources seem most concerned with flashy cultural issues (such as Agency manipulation of images in the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm) and the moral issue of "complicity." The real issue for our profession is how funding, whether secret or open, directs scholarship toward fixed agendas.

According to the better-known part of Saunders's tale, the onset of secret sponsorship began in 1950 with the formation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and a domestic counterpart, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. The lavish international conferences and accompanying perks should concern us far less, from the outset, than the adamant denials of CIA sponsorship by recipients and their eagerness to credit those denials. A score of prominent U.S. historians can be counted among the participants, along with a considerably larger number of cultural critics, sociologists and freelance intellectuals. Historically-minded scholars contributed most heavily to the theory of "American Exceptionalism" then very much in vogue.

The American Committee for Cultural Freedom closed its doors in 1957, following a series of internal disagreements and embarrassing revelations. The Congress for Cultural Freedom reorganized itself after 1967 into the International Association for Cultural Freedom and persisted another decade. President Johnson ruled out further intelligence funding for domestic programs (re-launched under Nixon's COINTELPRO) but as Saunders acutely notes, he did not end international ventures that include U.S. intellectual figures. After 1970, private foundations with similar political agendas picked up the slack.

All this may be rather less important than the secret CIA sponsorship of scholars. Saunders estimates that a thousand volumes were produced, under the imprint of a variety of commercial and university presses, with covert subventions. To take only my area of specialized scholarship, labor and radical history, the consequences are staggering. As Sigmund Diamond revealed in Compromised Campus (Oxford, 1992), the highly prestigious scholarly series, "Communism in American Life," was secretly planned by the board of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, with generous funding arranged for a handful of scholars. Some well-researched and enduring monographs appeared, along with shallow polemical forays. But not one forecasts the balanced account of American Communists' genuine contributions, especially in labor, culture and civil rights, established by subsequent generations of social historians.

Every scholar has a perfect right to political and personal views: rigidly anti-Communist, Communist or (for the great majority of us) "other." Saunders and Diamond raised, however, the troubling combination of secret funding and the appearance of scholarly independence. Some veterans of CCF/ACCF activity, editors or contributors to respected mainstream journals subsidized by foundation "pass-throughs," have insisted that participants would have acted no differently without such funding and the issue is therefore moot.

This argument seems to me to evade the real problem. Scholars (and especially reviewers) should take note of foundation sources acknowledged in any scholarly volume, just as the authors should list these carefully, and not merely for purposes of scholarly etiquette. Nearly every foundation has its leanings, some far more than others. The secrecy of the CIA operation was obviously intended to disguise an agenda, as much from the European (also Asian, Latin American and African) as from the American public. The surviving web of secrets prevents us from viewing more clearly a central episode in our national intellectual and scholarly history.

Saunders also notes that CIA staffers and intellectual allies "placed" Agency views involving current issues in many popular American magazines during the 1950s-60s, a strategy with disturbing implications for our image of the "public intellectual." No matter how scholars toiled to create a useable past, they were likely to be outgunned by others better connected. Similar concerns involve access to trade publishers, reviews, and reviewers beyond the framework of the scholarly journal. No one will pretend, I think, that "contacts" have no bearing on these issues, just as no one should pretend that professional status, the prestige of university (even family) background and affiliation have no effect upon fellowship-granting foundations, publishers, and reviewers.

The "prestige game" is highly undemocratic in almost every respect, but we seem to be stuck with it. At the very least, all the cards should be on the table. We need, then, to reconsider the scholarly and other connections of perhaps the most influential American intellectual group at midcentury, come to understand the submerged section of the iceberg as well as its tip, and grapple with the questions that fresh evidence raises for contemporary scholars. We can do so most effectively if more scholars will press FOIA claims related to this and other subjects, make their research available to other scholars, and seek to tap the memories of political survivors on all sides for what we do not yet know and must find out.