Frances Stoner Saunders died on August 31, 2026. She was not very well known or acclaimed on the left. In fact, she was not really a person of the left-- neither deeply dedicated to a party or cause, nor an activist.
Yet she wrote one of the most important books for the left over the last three decades.
All the more reason to honor her belatedly.
Saunders’ book, Who Paid the Piper? CIA and the Cultural Cold War (The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, in the US, 1999), was a landmark, exposing the intimate involvement of the CIA (and its fronts, affiliates, and secret allies) in influencing intellectual and cultural currents.
As her US editors tell it, “In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stoner Saunders presents for the first time the shocking evidence that the CIA infiltrated every niche of the cultural sphere during the postwar years.” While the publishers exaggerated-- important bits and pieces had appeared before (see, for example, the 1967 Ramparts exposures, George Morris’s 1967 CIA and America Labor)-- no one had constructed such a broad and comprehensive picture of the shaping of post-war culture and intellectual life by “outside” forces. No one had shown how both the form and content of the arts and humanities were overwhelmingly turned into weapons in the Cold War against Communism.
Apologists for the CIA and its revealed bought-or-captured intellectuals were stymied precisely because Saunders had no leftist axes to grind. If anything, Saunders’ reaction was motivated more by the loss of innocence, the soiling of her chosen fields of interest, rather than by a political agenda. It was difficult dismissing this copiously researched book as conspiracy theory.
The book broke many assumptions. In the first place, it was a refutation of the near-universal myth that only ruthless Communists would attempt to secretly influence the thinking of the unwary, unprotected masses. According to that myth, propaganda, as it was pejoratively called, was strictly the province of Marxists; Western democracies were dedicated to an open, unrestricted free market of ideas.
Saunders shattered that myth.
Millions-- billions, in today’s money-- were poured into influencing everything from the French and Italian elections to student organizations in the US, as well as trends in contemporary art. At the same time that unreconstructed, racist US politicians were attacking modern music as decadent and brain-rotting, the CIA was showcasing the same music to foreigners to show how free musicians were to experiment in the US. When it came to winning the Cold War, hypocrisy knew no bounds.
Saunders outlined the networks that generated and passed on the money to support artists, musicians, writers, journals, and organizations enlisted and created in service of defeating Communism. Wealthy individuals offered their foundations as sources and conduits; NGOs cooperated and were influenced by the CIA and its fronts; publishers and media figures willingly cooperated in promoting CIA-planted books and articles.
CIA manipulation and influence was never limited by scruples or political oversight-- it ranged from mass culture to high culture, from mass organizations to elite cliques.
By cracking open the once-secret world of behind-the-scenes influence on culture and letters, Saunders opened up to scrutiny the broader world of ideology. Marx famously wrote in The German Ideology: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” Through her study, Saunders demonstrated that in the world of cultural ideas, the ruling class was not going to give up that privilege.
Others have followed up with even broader studies. John McCumber wrote Time in the Ditch in 2001, recounting the effects of McCarthyite fears on the discipline of academic philosophy. His was not a hand-in-the-cookie-jar exposé, but an explanation of how timidity, complacency, and navel-gazing can relegate professional philosophy to irrelevancy.
Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA played America (2008) takes an even broader look at CIA moves to shape how US citizens look at the world, how they think about religion, race, sex, labor, and media.
Joel Whitney’s 2016 Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers adds to the lengthy file of the CIA’s attempts to determine or undermine the thinking and writing of elite “influencers.”
In truth, we can view the more recent work of Gabriel Rockhill and his collaborators as direct descendants of Saunders’ landmark study. His projection of a “compatible left” -- intellectual currents supported and promoted to distract people from radical change-- has challenged the left credentials of the Frankfort School, delegitimized much of French Theory, and dismissed the antics of Slavoj Žižek. His book, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? pays unstated homage to Saunders’ similarly named book.
Similarly, Jeff Schuhrke takes on the ignoble history of US labor and the consequential influence of the CIA and the US government in his book, Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anti-Communist Crusade. Just as culture became a tool of US policy in the Cold War, the US labor movement was covertly enlisted in the same effort to tilt the scales against Communism here and abroad.
Unfortunately, the work of Saunders and those who came after have failed to see their messages escape the filter of the corporate media. The idea that a great wizard might be orchestrating the drama of the land of Oz has yet to be widely exposed to the masses. While people are skeptical of politicians, the media, business leaders, and advertisers, few know the extent that ideas have been deliberately molded to enforce a consensus, a hostility toward alternatives to the rule of capital.
When people learn how they have been shepherded toward a rigid conformity beyond their own interests, we will move closer to socialism. We can thank Frances Stoner Saunders for advancing that education.
Greg Godels
