Dangerous Melodies
Page 34
But such declarations would have little impact on US-Soviet relations, which deteriorated swiftly. No amount of positive preaching from the Koussevitzkys of the world would alter the downward trajectory of what had been a formidable if fragile wartime partnership. Indeed, within months of the war’s end, the relationship began to fray and the United States and the Soviet Union would descend into a decades-long conflict that neither side seemed able or willing to resolve.14
After the war, many Americans came to believe that the Soviet Union, under Stalin’s leadership, began to pursue brutal, antidemocratic policies in Eastern and Central Europe, which threatened the security of the rest of the continent, the autonomy of which the United States was determined to defend.15 Americans were convinced, moreover, that the Communist threat was not limited to Europe or Asia; thus the idea developed that this pernicious ideology imperiled the safety of the United States, a view that disfigured the nation’s political culture and left few corners of domestic life untouched by what came to be known as McCarthyism.16
As the decade unfolded, the American public, whether reading a newspaper or a music journal, encountered stories suggesting that the world of classical music was not immune from the emerging tension. In the fall of 1946, Americans learned that two Soviet singers from the Kirov State Opera, members of a delegation to the all-Slav Congress in New York, had been ordered by the Department of Justice to register as foreign agents. This unexpected decision led a group of distinguished American musicians to express outrage in a public letter to Attorney General Tom Clark, which suggests the East-West struggle was seeping into the nation’s musical life.17
Two years later, Americans read that Soviet leaders were putting pressure on several eminent composers, a group that included Shostakovich and Prokofiev. They had fallen into disfavor with Stalin’s regime and were charged with engaging in “formalism.”18 It was said that they had forgotten how to compose for “the people” and substituted “neuropathic combinations,” rather than the finest “traditions of Russian and Western classical music.”19 As musicologist Richard Taruskin explains, the accusation of formalism emanated mainly from Leningrad party leader and politburo member Andrey Zhdanov, who was tasked with “taming the arts,” a responsibility he embraced first in literature, then in film, and finally in music. Formalism, Taruskin writes, was a “vague term with a checkered history,” which was “code for elite modernism.”20 Zhdanov put it rather differently, as Americans learned in 1948, declaring that Soviet music, which sounded “something like a dentist’s drill,” was “simply unbearable.”21
The saga was reported widely in the American press, which explored the story in news accounts and opinion pieces. Readers learned that three of the composers whose music was under attack, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian, were especially popular in the United States.22 Indeed, just days after the Soviet decision became known, New York’s WQXR radio presented a special broadcast of their music,23 while the Metropolitan Opera announced that it would perform Prokofiev’s War and Peace the following season.24
Americans read that figures like Shostakovich and Khachaturian had been ousted from key academic and administrative positions because of their creative transgressions.25 According to the Los Angeles Times, several Soviet composers had confessed to “writing antidemocratic music” and Shostakovich had bowed before his accusers.26 Several weeks later, Americans again heard from Shostakovich, who admitted his failings as an artist.27 Beyond such oppression, the absurdity of Soviet policies would have been clear to American readers who learned that Khachaturian had been bitterly attacked for his “bourgeois” work, while at the very same moment the “Information Bulletin” published by the Soviet Embassy in Washington was praising his music. As one newspaper opined, an attentive American would have recognized that even in a totalitarian state, sometimes the right hand did not know what the left was doing.28
While this was not the first time Shostakovich had fallen out of favor with the regime, he was a far more consequential figure in 1948 than he was in 1936, when his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was excoriated for its stylistic failings.29 From an American perspective, such repression was intolerable. Music critics, especially, were outraged. In the pages of the New York Herald Tribune, composer and critic Virgil Thomson observed that Soviet composers were expected to “edify . . . and instruct.” Whether they accomplished this, he explained, was a decision made by the Communist Party. Such states reminded one of “the great slave-owning empires of antiquity.”30
But critics were not the only ones commenting on Soviet artistic life. Writing to the Christian Science Monitor, Klaus Roy of Cambridge, Massachusetts, compared Soviet musical policies to those of the Nazis. It was a “sad commentary” that for the second time in the twentieth century, a regime aimed to halt “musical progress.”31 In the New York Times, novelist James T. Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy, contended that Stalin’s regime sought to control “writers, thinkers, [and] musicians.” Claiming that Soviet propaganda was more destructive than that of the Nazis, Farrell lamented that many Americans had fallen for the “Soviet myth.”32
For months after the story broke in early 1948, the repression of Soviet composers garnered attention. Late in the year, Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times asked why the composers had been “chastised like a group of unruly children.” Clearly, the party aimed to “inoculate” the “Soviet intelligentsia against Western” influence.33
In February 1949, it was announced that Shostakovich would visit America as part of the delegation of Soviet cultural and scientific figures Moscow had authorized to travel to the United States.34 News reports about the peace gathering, which, it was hoped, would include delegates from some thirty countries, along with hundreds of Americans, noted that the Russian composer had faced severe difficulties the previous year when Soviet authorities had denounced his work.35
The ostensible purpose of the Waldorf conference was to advance the cause of world peace. It was organized by astronomer Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard observatory and chairman of the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. Despite this apparently worthy goal, as one historian has written, the international peace movement was linked in this period to the Soviet Union, which sought to “stigmatize nuclear weapons” and undermine America’s nuclear advantage. Moreover, Moscow used the movement to portray “the Soviet Union as a peace-loving nation,” to strengthen the Communist Party worldwide, and to represent the United States as a threat to peace.36
Not surprisingly, many Americans who followed the three-day affair saw it as an attempt on the part of those in league with the Soviet Union to advance Moscow’s global aims. They believed the participants were either zealous supporters of Moscow or at least sympathetic to the Communist cause. With the intensification of the Cold War and the country descending into the second Red Scare, the meeting would inevitably release vitriol, whether one embraced or rejected the Soviet model.37
In the weeks before the conference, newspaper readers across the country encountered competing pronouncements and determined maneuvering by participants and US-government officials. A Chicago paper offered the following headline: “ ‘Intellectual’ Pinks Map Fight on U.S. Policy.” Digging deeper, Chicagoans learned that the delegates, including “five from Red Russia,” would meet in the “capitalistic surroundings of New York’s largest luxury hotel to stage a ‘peace offensive’ against American foreign policy.” While Shostakovich would head the Soviet delegation, the paper reported, its real chief was A. A. Fadeyev, the Secretary General of the Union of Soviet Writers. Fadeyev had appeared in Wroclaw, Poland, a year earlier at another peace conference where he had attacked American culture as “disgusting filth.”38
As concerns grew about the nature of the meeting, some Americans began to have second thoughts about attending, lending weight to the idea that it was intended to undermine the country’s international position. Announcing his withdrawal, Irwin Edma
n, a philosophy professor at Columbia University, said he had not realized it had been designed to advance the Communist perspective, while Bryn Hovde, president of the New School, refused an invitation, claiming the gathering represented “too limited a group of American intellectuals.”39
The New York musicians’ union declared it would not participate. In a blunt letter to the organizers, union president Richard McCann insisted that the meeting’s organizing body confront the fact that there was no creative freedom in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and claimed the conference needed to emphasize this. Concerning Shostakovich, McCann suggested the composer might wish to settle in the United States, where “his genius would flower” as it never had.40
But some were excited about the gathering. Conference organizer Harlow Shapley spoke in support of the meeting, though his critique of America is striking. In announcing the conference, Shapley rebuked the United States for its Cold War foreign policy, his rhetoric highlighting American responsibility for the unsettled state of world politics. By bringing together leading figures in culture and science, Shapley argued, the conference could enhance the prospect for global cooperation.41
Others contended the conference would help reestablish cultural relations between the two adversaries,42 and Shostakovich, the meeting’s most notable figure, would surely play a key role in accomplishing that. This possibility inspired distinguished members of America’s classical-music community to cable the composer to convey their excitement at his impending visit. Articulating the conviction that had been invoked so often in the past, the group proclaimed, “Music is an international language and your visit will serve to symbolize the bond which music can create among all peoples.” Their message concluded with the hope that cultural exchange might strengthen the ties between both peoples and enhance the prospect for lasting peace.43
With the conference set to begin, the US government had to decide who it would permit to enter the country to participate. Before reaching a decision, Washington received protest letters opposing admission of the Soviet delegation. Writing to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Perry Brown, the national commander of the fiercely anti-Communist American Legion, expressed strong reservations about admitting the Soviets. According to Brown, Harlow Shapley had numerous links to Communist-front organizations and his council, which was responsible for arranging the meeting, had consistently advanced the “Communist Party line.” It would be acceptable, Brown claimed, were the visiting Russians to engage in activities linked to their professions, but that was not the case, especially when one saw that Alexander Fadeyev was heading their delegation.44
The animus against Fadeyev dated to the 1948 meeting at Wroclaw, Poland, where he offered a brutal critique of the United States at the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace.45 In Poland, Fadeyev had likened German fascists to American monopolists, who were seeking “world domination.” Still worse, he had asserted that America was planning an atomic attack on the Soviet Union.46 That Fadeyev would soon alight on American soil was more than many could tolerate.47
But tolerate the Russians was what Americans would have to do, for the US State Department had granted visas to twenty-two foreign visitors, who would arrive in late March, joining hundreds of American participants at the Waldorf. Aside from Russia, the overseas contingent would come from several Western European countries, along with an Eastern European group.48
Even as the US government proclaimed a policy of freedom and tolerance, it was apparent that neither was unlimited, for the conference delegates would be under the watchful eye of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had been created in 1938 to ferret out alleged Communist influence, first in New Deal agencies and labor unions, and later in countless organizations throughout the country.49 Moreover, before the conference began, the delegates from England, France, and Italy would have their visas rescinded by the State Department and would be barred from entering the United States because of their political views.50
As the conference neared, opposing voices intensified, making clear this would be no soporific convention of chatterers. Claiming he had received hundreds of letters demanding that he stop the gathering, New York governor Thomas Dewey noted that those who had written believed the meeting was a ruse to mask a “Communist propaganda effort” to undermine the United States. While the governor would not suppress the meeting, he claimed its Communist origins had been exposed.51
The most arresting voice to emerge among conference opponents was that of Professor Sidney Hook, who would organize a counter-rally called Americans for Intellectual Freedom. Hook, the chair of New York University’s philosophy department, was described by one scholar as “a cerebral brawler.”52 Born in Brooklyn, he had been a follower of the Communists in his younger days, though he had foresworn the party early in the Second World War. “Short, stocky, and angry” was the description of Hook by a man who knew him well, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who observed that he possessed a “lucid . . . mind,” which he applied to a variety of diverse problems, including Marxism. Nevertheless, in Schlesinger’s estimation, the NYU professor had allowed his anticommunism to become an obsession.53 For a few days, Hook and his supporters would present an ideological counterweight to Shapley’s Waldorf gathering.
Claiming his request to speak at the Waldorf’s plenary session had been denied, Hook organized a rally at Freedom House, not far from where Shapley’s conference would be held. He charged that those sponsoring the Waldorf meeting were perpetrating a “fraud” by permitting only a “sounding board for Communist propaganda,” and said he expected great support from “democratic Americans opposed to totalitarianism.” Shapley fired back, claiming he had received Hook’s request to speak only after the program had been organized, but allowed that Hook could air his views from the floor—an offer Hook rejected.54
Hook’s initiative amassed considerable backing from more than two hundred writers, scientists, academics, activists, and editors who denounced Shapley’s crowd.55 Issuing a statement on behalf of the group’s ideals, philosopher John Dewey asserted that intellectuals who backed Communist organizations were supporting the same suppression of “intellectual freedom” that had been accomplished in Stalin’s Russia. Another Hook supporter, novelist John Dos Passos, suggested removing the “mask of peace” from the conference, and observed that one could be proud of America’s “tolerance” for allowing its mortal enemy to establish a forum for propaganda on American soil.56
As the conference neared, New York was bursting with plans to counter the meeting with a barrage of anti-Communist rhetoric. The most powerful statement came from Hook and his cochair, educational theorist George Counts of Columbia University, who demanded that Shapley ask the Soviet delegates what their government had done to the “artists, writers, and critics,” who, since 1921, had been “imprisoned, exiled, or executed.”57
The conference opened on March 25 with an opulent dinner at the Waldorf, which was ringed throughout the day by protesters. By the time the dinner began, two thousand people were demonstrating outside the hotel, singing patriotic songs and chanting anti-Communist slogans. Some knelt in the street and recited the Lord’s Prayer.58 As the largely peaceful protests unfolded, the conference began in the grand ballroom, with Shapley welcoming the delegates and their own two thousand supportive attendees. In a press conference earlier that day, Shapley asserted that the meeting was an independent enterprise not linked to any political group, declaring that “writers, scientists, educators, and professional[s]” had come together in order to help establish a “spirit of peace.” The gathering had been “falsely—and knowingly falsely—described as Communist,” he said.59
The opening night gave the public its first opportunity to hear Shostakovich, though his brief observations were not noteworthy. While not politically neutral, his remarks provided no foretaste of the fiery rhetoric to come. On this night, at least, the composer spoke in benign fashion, offering greetings from the Soviet delegation to th
e “progressive representatives” of American culture. “We are united with them in the noble task of defending the peace.”60
If the prospects for peace were uncertain, many would have agreed that the most memorable event that evening involved a young editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, Norman Cousins, who addressed the gathering in unexpected—and unfashionable—terms. Cousins, associated with various liberal causes and a leading advocate of world government, had been invited by the organizers to offer an “opposing” perspective. After initially rejecting Shapley’s request, he decided to participate, and directed his remarks at the foreign delegates, urging them to inform those at home that “it is a lie to say that any group controls the United States—not excluding Wall Street or the American Communist Party.”61
During Cousins’ presentation, a cry rang out: “You’re in the wrong conference.”62 Despite boos, hisses, and derisive laughter, Cousins told the throng it was untrue that the American government wanted war. While Americans were anti-Communist, he said, they were not antihumanitarian. And merely because one was anti-Communist did not mean one was either pro-war or “anti-the-Russian people.” Let your countrymen know that democracy must “protect the individual against the right of the state to draw the blueprints for its painters and writers and composers.”63
When he was finished, Cousins received a tepid response, and Shapley, who joined those applauding, said the dinner was intended to be a “free forum” where people could say whatever they wished. Playwright Lillian Hellman chided the attendees for their poor behavior toward Cousins, while rebuking him for his message: “I would recommend, Mr. Cousins, that when you talk about your hosts at dinner, wait until you have gone home to do it.” The audience cheered lustily.64