Audra Wolfe | The Fight for Science and Freedom: Recovering the Role of Science in Cold War-Era Cultural Diplomacy

• Free
• History
• Science & Health

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) is probably the best known of the CIA’s attempts at covert cultural diplomacy, but its scientific programming has been mostly forgotten. From its first appearance at the organization’s opening meeting in Berlin in 1950, the strand of the CCF’s agenda continued throughout the 1950s, with a major conference on Science and Freedom chaired by Michael Polanyi in Hamburg in 1953 and three smaller meetings in Paris, Milan, and Tunis. From 1954 to 1961, the CCF’s Committee on Science and Freedom published a bulletin called Science and Freedom. But despite pushes from the CCF’s Paris office, Science and Freedom never lived up to the CIA’s expectations, and the Agency finally cut off funding in 1961 in favor of a more mainstream journal, Minerva.

Science never took on the central role in the CCF’s operations that Michael Polanyi originally envisioned for it, but it did play a role, and there is evidence to suggest that U.S. policymakers wanted it to play a larger one. This talk uses the story of the CCF’s failed science programming to explore broader U.S. visions of science as a tool for cultural diplomacy—covert, overt, or something in between.