Alone Together: American Intellectuals in the American-Soviet Friendship Movement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
American intellectuals who participated in American-Soviet friendship groups between the 1920s and 1980s are often classified as “fellow travelers” in the literature of the American Left. Scholars have deemed the American-Soviet friendship organizations – most prominently the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship (NCASF) – “Communist-fronts,” a phrase used to designate groups that pretended to be loyal to American institutions but in fact served Soviet purposes. In the tradition of Denning’s work on the Popular Front and Isserman’s on the American Communist Party, this dissertation complicates our understanding of the American-Soviet friendship movement and its leaders. By examining the influences and careers of four leaders of the movement – Corliss Lamont, Richard Morford, Rockwell Kent, and Harry Steinmetz – this dissertation proves that the intellectuals and reformers drawn to the American-Soviet friendship movement pursued ideas and ideals that were current at the time – pacifism, pragmatism, techno-utopianism, humanism, progressive education, artistic realism – but did so in a manner that gave the cause of American-Soviet friendship a unique flavor that distinguished it from the Popular Front and Communist Party. The friendship movement supplied an environment in which to explore alternative visions of social progress and human justice, and it was ultimately the leadership’s commitment to these alternative visions – rather than loyalty to the Soviet Union or communism in general – that shaped the careers of those who proposed to lead that movement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".