I can see why this is mildly embarrassing for Encounter and for Spender personally. But honestly, did anyone in this story do anything wrong? Nothing written in the magazine bore the imprint of CIA propaganda, because the CIA wasn't directing the content. Spender et al. can't be blamed for accepting money they didn't even know about. The CIA obviously had an interest in boosting pro-American discourse, but funneling money to people who were going to be pro-American anyway seems a very gentle - one might say even liberal - way of going about it.
The subsequent criticisms of the CIA program in the US quoted in the piece were (a) that it wasn't pro-American enough to be a good use of the money (which, from a liberal/free speech perspective, seems more praiseworthy than anything); and (b) that it is paradoxical to support capitalism with a government-funded magazine, which seems a rather extreme point given the far greater funding given to things like the BBC or NPR - one can be for or against those, but I don't really see why the fact that Encounter was funded covertly and they were/are funded openly makes a difference. One can accept that capitalism is better than communism while still seeing a place for a limited measure of government spending on media.
These are good points, and maybe I didn't make the reason people were upset with this, Spender most of all, clear enough: he was a poetic personality and a true believer who wanted his success to be his own, and despised anything that resembled an arcane Soviet bureaucracy in which everything was planned. Meanwhile, the Church Report condemned the magazine for what it regarded as promoting anti-American leftism. There is also the aspect that Stonor Saunders talks about in her astonishing last paragraph of "Who Paid the Piper?", namely the unwitting proximity of all such idealists to the dirty core of the Agency, establishing dictatorships in Iran and Guatemala during the same period it launched Encounter. Spender couldn't stand being associated with this cold beast.
"Behind the ‘unexamined nostalgia for the “Golden Days” of American intelligence’ lay a much more devastating truth: the same people who read Dante and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew governments, supported dictatorships, plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster. ‘In the name of what?’ asked one critic. ‘Not civic virtue, but empire.’"
That's kind of what I meant when I said that it was mildly embarrassing to Spender - that he had unwittingly associated with the CIA, which had, as you (or Saunders) note, a patchy (let's euphemistically say) record. And indeed, Spender might be understandably upset that this could lead people to attribute his success to them.
But the fact that the CIA did OTHER bad things doesn't make their funding Spender bad. You refer to the "astonishing last paragraph" of Saunders's book - but (admittedly without having read the book!) the point she's making seems boringly commonplace to me. That people who are invested in the study of the humanities sometimes do bad things - or even interpret their study as giving them license for bad things - is hardly special to the CIA: it has been happening at least since Alexander went on a rampage through Asia with the Iliad by his bedside and Aristotle as his tutor.
So how is this worse than any other artist with a patron of dubious morality? At least Spender didn't know he was being patronized by them, and didn't prostitute his art or change his opinions to suit the whims of his patron, unlike innumerable others. People rarely get indignant about Virgil and Horace being supported by Augustus, even though their poetry is far more compromised by that support than Spender's was. I really don't see this as a scandal of any sort, or indeed anything surprising or unusual, when seen from a broader historical perspective.
I have to agree. The CFF also funded abstract expressionist artists on the basis that allowing the avant-garde to flourish in the USA showed up Soviet socialist realism as an instrument of state repression of artistic freedom, and that that reflected a wider social freedom. A faulty piece of reasoning if ever there was one. Anyway, should we then condemn Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko?
A full analysis of Encounter’s contents might be a better way of examining the journal’s political slant.
Also, the Nabokov who wrote “No Cantatas for Stalin” wasn’t Vladimir, as might be assumed, but the less well-known Nicolas - the CFF’s “music expert”, showing that Encounter actually did publish stuff directly from the organisation.
Interesting piece, and not a subject that I know anything about. Just a query on the “coining” of Kronstadt regarding the moment of rejection of the communist party/ideology. Presumably this is a reference back to the Kronstadt rebellion of left wing sailors and soldiers against the very state controlling Bolsheviks in the early days of the Russian revolution. So the meaning of “crown state” is pretty irrelevant, no? And is this then really “coining a phrase” ? Having typed this it feels very nitpicking, but ho hum…
Where is the evidence that Spender was an "anti-anti-Communist" ? In 1956 Spender went to Venice to attack Sartre, an actual "anti-anti-Communist." Spender wrote about their encounter in various news outlets and created a fictional version that ran in Encounter the following year. Plus there is the whole "God that Failed" - a book that was ahead of its time with an "anti-anti-anti-Communist" stance.
Also the idea that Spender can be called "unwitting" is a testament to the power and influence of the Information Research Department - a propaganda and disinformation agency that only gets a Wikipedia link here.
I can see why this is mildly embarrassing for Encounter and for Spender personally. But honestly, did anyone in this story do anything wrong? Nothing written in the magazine bore the imprint of CIA propaganda, because the CIA wasn't directing the content. Spender et al. can't be blamed for accepting money they didn't even know about. The CIA obviously had an interest in boosting pro-American discourse, but funneling money to people who were going to be pro-American anyway seems a very gentle - one might say even liberal - way of going about it.
The subsequent criticisms of the CIA program in the US quoted in the piece were (a) that it wasn't pro-American enough to be a good use of the money (which, from a liberal/free speech perspective, seems more praiseworthy than anything); and (b) that it is paradoxical to support capitalism with a government-funded magazine, which seems a rather extreme point given the far greater funding given to things like the BBC or NPR - one can be for or against those, but I don't really see why the fact that Encounter was funded covertly and they were/are funded openly makes a difference. One can accept that capitalism is better than communism while still seeing a place for a limited measure of government spending on media.
Or is there something I'm missing here?
These are good points, and maybe I didn't make the reason people were upset with this, Spender most of all, clear enough: he was a poetic personality and a true believer who wanted his success to be his own, and despised anything that resembled an arcane Soviet bureaucracy in which everything was planned. Meanwhile, the Church Report condemned the magazine for what it regarded as promoting anti-American leftism. There is also the aspect that Stonor Saunders talks about in her astonishing last paragraph of "Who Paid the Piper?", namely the unwitting proximity of all such idealists to the dirty core of the Agency, establishing dictatorships in Iran and Guatemala during the same period it launched Encounter. Spender couldn't stand being associated with this cold beast.
"Behind the ‘unexamined nostalgia for the “Golden Days” of American intelligence’ lay a much more devastating truth: the same people who read Dante and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew governments, supported dictatorships, plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster. ‘In the name of what?’ asked one critic. ‘Not civic virtue, but empire.’"
That's kind of what I meant when I said that it was mildly embarrassing to Spender - that he had unwittingly associated with the CIA, which had, as you (or Saunders) note, a patchy (let's euphemistically say) record. And indeed, Spender might be understandably upset that this could lead people to attribute his success to them.
But the fact that the CIA did OTHER bad things doesn't make their funding Spender bad. You refer to the "astonishing last paragraph" of Saunders's book - but (admittedly without having read the book!) the point she's making seems boringly commonplace to me. That people who are invested in the study of the humanities sometimes do bad things - or even interpret their study as giving them license for bad things - is hardly special to the CIA: it has been happening at least since Alexander went on a rampage through Asia with the Iliad by his bedside and Aristotle as his tutor.
So how is this worse than any other artist with a patron of dubious morality? At least Spender didn't know he was being patronized by them, and didn't prostitute his art or change his opinions to suit the whims of his patron, unlike innumerable others. People rarely get indignant about Virgil and Horace being supported by Augustus, even though their poetry is far more compromised by that support than Spender's was. I really don't see this as a scandal of any sort, or indeed anything surprising or unusual, when seen from a broader historical perspective.
I have to agree. The CFF also funded abstract expressionist artists on the basis that allowing the avant-garde to flourish in the USA showed up Soviet socialist realism as an instrument of state repression of artistic freedom, and that that reflected a wider social freedom. A faulty piece of reasoning if ever there was one. Anyway, should we then condemn Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko?
A full analysis of Encounter’s contents might be a better way of examining the journal’s political slant.
Also, the Nabokov who wrote “No Cantatas for Stalin” wasn’t Vladimir, as might be assumed, but the less well-known Nicolas - the CFF’s “music expert”, showing that Encounter actually did publish stuff directly from the organisation.
Evan Kindley’s work may be relevant here:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674980075
Thanks!
Interesting piece, and not a subject that I know anything about. Just a query on the “coining” of Kronstadt regarding the moment of rejection of the communist party/ideology. Presumably this is a reference back to the Kronstadt rebellion of left wing sailors and soldiers against the very state controlling Bolsheviks in the early days of the Russian revolution. So the meaning of “crown state” is pretty irrelevant, no? And is this then really “coining a phrase” ? Having typed this it feels very nitpicking, but ho hum…
Where is the evidence that Spender was an "anti-anti-Communist" ? In 1956 Spender went to Venice to attack Sartre, an actual "anti-anti-Communist." Spender wrote about their encounter in various news outlets and created a fictional version that ran in Encounter the following year. Plus there is the whole "God that Failed" - a book that was ahead of its time with an "anti-anti-anti-Communist" stance.
Also the idea that Spender can be called "unwitting" is a testament to the power and influence of the Information Research Department - a propaganda and disinformation agency that only gets a Wikipedia link here.
Spender directly refers to himself in letters to Irving Kristol as an "anti-anti- Communist".
Meanwhile, your interpretation of Sartre's politics is so wrong I have no idea where you got it.