Tumult at the Waldorf

A hurricane of charges and countercharges whirled through Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria last week while pickets chanted, prayed and shouted on the sidewalks outside. At the storm's center, 2,800 delegates to the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace--Communists and both calculating and befuddled followers--wallowed in a sea of windy "peace" talk. In all the tumult, the delegates and their gusts of fog-laden dialectics could at first hardly be heard.

The State Department, which had already labeled the conference as a Communist sounding board, issued a 36-page white paper reciting the Soviet government's repeated refusal of U.S. offers to exchange scholars or information. As the seven-man Russian delegation arrived, Hearst's Daily Mirror roared: "Throw the bums out. We don't want them . . . We intend to insult them--if it is possible."

Cores & Muddles. Whether the uproar had suddenly caused the conferees to change their minds or whether they had hoped to sell their cause by moderation in the first place, the conference itself got under way on a deceptively mild note. At first, the show might easily have been mistaken for an election rally for Henry Wallace, where the party line was pushed, but not too obviously. In fact, the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, which sponsored the conference, had also espoused Wallace's candidacy. Dr. Harlow Shapley, Harvard astronomer and chairman of N.C.A.S.P., a veteran advocate of party-line causes, was the conference chairman. Quietly working around him was the same hard core of trained Communists, the same muddle of the earnest and the inexperienced. The list of sponsors included such familiar leftist names as Playwright Arthur (Death of a Salesman) Miller, Novelist Norman (The Naked and the Dead) Mailer, Composer Aaron Copland, Poet Louis Untermeyer, New York Times Critic Olin Downes.

But the center of the excitement was the delegation from Russia and the Iron Curtain countries of Europe. Their boss and director was ruddy, narrow-eyed Alexander Fadeev, political boss of Soviet writers, who is reputed to be an MVD official assigned to the part of an intellectual in search of peace. Their showpiece--and the only visitor of major stature--was Composer Dmitri Shostakovich. A shy, stiff-shouldered man with a pale, wide forehead, Shostakovich was painfully ill at ease. To the repeated ovations he received he ducked his head abruptly again & again, like a small boy after a commencement speech. He cringed visibly from the photographers' flashbulbs, mopped his brow, twiddled his spectacles. During speeches, his long fingers seemed to be tapping out some nameless composition on his forearm.

The Russians began with an air that was close to sweet reasonableness. Under the baiting of U.S. reporters, they ducked embarrassing questions ("That leads away from the question of peace"), or shrugged them off. In general, they seemed content to show themselves, prove that Russians were not monsters, declare their devotion to peace. Meanwhile they would let the Americans denounce the U.S. for them.

Only a Beginning. That the faithful Americans seemed eager to do. Cried Henry Wallace: "Any race or nation [like Germany and Japan] which feels that it was meant by destiny to rule the world will inevitably be destroyed . . . The Anglo-Saxons are in serious danger of taking just that step." Optimistically, Wallace added that he hoped "we may all soon meet in Moscow." At a $10-a-plate dinner, backed by a huge "antiwar" mural by Masses & Mainstream Cartoonist William Cropper, stout, bearded Charles Stewart, public-relations man for the Churchman, took up a collection. He raised close to $20,000 from the 1,900 diners, with the exhortation: "This meeting is only a beginning."

Outside the conference hall the pickets massed in angry clots and put on a show that caught the attention of many a delegate, unseemly though it became at times. Crippled veterans were paraded in wheelchairs; elderly women knelt in the street to recite the Lord's Prayer. Pickets yelled: "Why don't you go back to Russia, you stinking Commies?"

Inside, one dissenting voice was raised in protest. Armed with a telegram of encouragement from Assistant Secretary of State George V. Allen, Editor Norman Cousins, of the Saturday Review of Literature, spoke over boos and catcalls. To his fellow delegates he said: "I ask you to believe that the American people . . . are not speaking out against the idea of peace . . . They are speaking out against a small political group in this country which has failed to live up to the rules of the game in a democracy . . . Tell the folks at home that Americans are antiCommunist, not anti-humanitarian, and being anti-Communist does not automatically mean they are pro-war." Snapped Playwright Lillian Hellman: "I would recommend, Mr. Cousins, that when you talk about your hosts at dinner, wait until you have gone home to do it."

Into the Breach. The Russians did not have to listen to such words of protest often. Whenever unpleasantness threatened, an American leaped into the breach. When Dwight Macdonald, editor of the anti-Communist magazine Politics, asked Fadeev at a press conference what had happened to several Soviet writers who have disappeared, Daily Worker Columnist Howard Fast jumped up and cried: "I know what has happened to all the people who could not be here with us ... I wait myself to be arrested at any time." Fast seemed overly apprehensive. Even Leipzig-born Communist Gerhart Eisler, facing deportation, was at liberty and in attendance at the big meeting.

Shouted Playwright Clifford Odets, whose The Big Knife is doing a brisk business on Broadway: "I am proud to reach out and shake the hand of any man or woman who has the courage to appear here ... If I speak here Sunday, I may be without a job Monday. The country is a little in the state of unholy terror from coast to coast."

"I Agree Completely." By week's end, the visiting Communists made it clear that their air of aloof peace-seeking was a good pose only as long as things went as they wished. At the final session, Political Scientist Frederick Schuman of Williams College had the poor judgment to suggest, very tentatively, that "frightened, neurotic men" in both countries endangered peace. "Most Americans who are convinced disciples of democracy now believe, in all sincerity, and with some reason, that their cherished way of life is threatened primarily by the Soviet Union."

The crowd in the Waldorf's huge ballroom burst into angry boos. Boss Fadeev was on his feet. To resounding cheers he replied flatly: "Professor Schuman is mistaken. There are no elements in our country which desire war with the U.S. or any other country ... I think the important thing for us to understand ... is that those elements in the U.S. which would like to see another war against Russia are . . . also enemies of the American people."

Schuman saw his error and was ready with a fawning reply: "I agree with that completely." The crowd applauded politely. He tried to do better: "I also agree that there are elements in the U.S. which desire war with the U.S.S.R." The applause quickened. "No one," he added abjectly, "no one in the U.S.S.R. wants war with the U.S. . . . Since the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, America has not been making its necessary contribution to peace." Williams' Schuman was in good standing again.

All that remained was to adopt a series of vacuous resolutions in favor of "peace." There was a "monster rally," complete with spotlights and fixings, at Madison Square Garden, where the Churchman's Stewart again appealed for money to carry the act on tour, and Shostakovich played the second movement of his own Fifth Symphony. No one had really had anything to say about how peace was to be attained--beyond making a noise about it. But the conference seemed well pleased with the results. This week the show will move on, carrying the Russians first to Newark, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

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