National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions
Popular Front–aligned U.S. cultural organization active in the late 1940s, best known today as the sponsor of the 25–27 March 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace (the Waldorf Conference). Mailer twice spoke under its auspices — the 11 October 1948 academic-freedom rally (48.10) and the Waldorf Conference (49.1, 49.2a–c, 49.5) — and the NCASP published his Waldorf remarks.
The NCASP was one of the principal postwar successor bodies to the broader Popular Front cultural apparatus of the 1930s and early 1940s. Its October 1948 NYC rally brought Mailer to a platform with Wallace supporters W.E.B. DuBois, Harlow Shapley, F.O. Matthiessen, Shirley Graham, Louis Untermeyer, Howard Fast, and Philip Van Doren Stern (see 48.10).
Its March 1949 Waldorf Conference, formally titled the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, was the principal left-cultural event of the early postwar period to call for U.S.–Soviet cultural exchange and against rearmament. It was attacked as a Communist front by Life (4 April 1949, 39–43) and others; Mailer’s floor remarks there declared independence from both the Soviet and U.S. lines and from the conference itself — “I have come here as a Trojan horse” (see 49.5 for the full transcript).
The NCASP published Speaking of Peace (49.5) as the conference’s edited record; Mailer’s remarks are on pages 82–83.
Stub; to be expanded as further Mailer–NCASP material surfaces (the organization’s decline through 1950–1951 under HUAC pressure is documented elsewhere).
Related pages
- 1948 | 1949
- Political Freedom for Teachers Urged | The Waldorf Conference | Speaking of Peace: An Edited Report of the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace
- Henry A. Wallace