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'''Archibald MacLeish''' was an [[American]] poet, Librarian of [[Congress]], and a noted [[fellow traveller]].<ref>David Caute, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=zZ6YqBm3O2wC The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism]'' [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988] ISBN 0300041950, p. 185</ref>
MacLeish was born in 1892, the son of a prosperous [[Chicago]] department store executive, and spent his childhood on a seventeen-acre estate on Lake Michigan.<ref>David Barber, “Archibald MacLeish's Life and Career,” Modern American Poetry</ref> He attended [[Yale University]], where he was a member of Skull & Bones and a classmate of [[Dean Acheson]], with whom he moved on in 1915 to [[Harvard Law School]], where he became a protegé of [[Felix Frankfurter]].
After graduation, MacLeish lectured at Harvard, became an editor at ''The New Republic'' with [[Walter Lippmann]], then joined the Boston law firm of Choate, Hall and Stewart, which would later employ [[Alger Hiss]]. In 1932, MacLeish won the Pulitzer Prize for his epic poem ''Conquistadors.'' That year, he wrote an article questioning the [[legitimacy]] of the existing “[[capitalist]] order,”<ref>Archibald MacLeish, “To the Young Men of Wall Street,” ''Saturday Review'', January 16, 1932</ref> which caught Hiss' eye.<ref>Tony Hiss, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=14B3AAAAMAAJ&pgis=1 The View From Alger's Window]'' (New York: Vintage Books, 2000) ISBN 0375701281, pp. 140-141</ref>
In 1936, MacLeish submitted two articles the [[Communist Party]] organ ''New Masses,'' whose editor was [[Whittaker Chambers]].<ref>MacLeish “would not have written for that party publication at all unless he shared some of the goals of American communism.” Hilton Kramer, ''[http://books.google.com/books?ei=IuThSpqVFIq6yQSZ89j3Cw&id=yPZ3AAAAMAAJ The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War]'' (Chicago: I.R. Dee, 2000) ISBN 1566632226, p. 262</ref> The next year, he chaired the first open meeting of the Second Congress of the [[Communist front]] [[League of American Writers]],<ref>”[http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,758006,00.html Books: Creators' Congress], ''Time'', June 21, 1937</ref> where he introduced Communist Party General Secretary [[Earl Browder]].<ref>Ellen McClay, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=SwD5_1nAcbcC In the Presence of Our Enemies]'' (Bloomington, In.: AuthorHouse, 2006) ISBN 1420894226, p. 251</ref> The following year, President [[Franklin Roosevelt]] appointed him Librarian of Congress. During [[World War II]], MacLeish served as director of the War Department's Office of Facts and Figures and assistant director of the [[Office of War Information]]<ref>[http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/47 Archibald MacLeish], Academy of American Poets</ref>(where his subordinates included [[Owen Lattimore]], director of Pacific Operations, and [[Joseph Barnes]], in charge of international broadcasting),<ref>Erik Barnouw, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=UzVDHPsJ6AoC The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 1933 to 1953] (Oxford University Press, 1968) ISBN 0195004752, p. 159</ref> then (in 1944) assistant secretary of state for Cultural Affairs.
After the war, MacLeish served with Hiss on U.S. delegation drafting the [[United Nations]] [http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/preamble.shtml Charter]. The official assigned by the [[Office of Strategic Services]] (predecessor of the CIA) to record the drafting of that document would later say MacLeish "kicked me out" of the session.<ref>[http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/unationsday/docs/lindquist19april90.pdf Oliver Lundquist Interview], United Nations Oral History Project, Yale University, 1990</ref> [[Secretary of State]] [[Dean Acheson]] appointed MacLeish chairman of the U.S. delegation to the organizational meeting of [[UNESCO]].
In 1948, following the death<ref>"[http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,799590,00.html Investigations: The Man in the Window]," ''Time'', January 3, 1949</ref> of [[USSR|Soviet]] agent<ref>[http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/venona/1944/18nov_lawrence_duggan.pdf 1613 KGB New York to Moscow, 19 November 1944]</ref> [[Laurence Duggan]] (ten days after Duggan implicated [[Henry Collins]] and [[Frederick Vanderbilt Field]] in espionage, and five days after Hiss' indictment<ref>Christopher D. O'Sullivan, "[http://www.gutenberg-e.org/osc01/frames/fosc08.html 8. Resignation]," ''Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937-1943'' (Columbia University Press, 2007) ISBN 0231142587</ref> by a grand jury) MacLeish dedicated a poem—included in his ''Collected Poems'' (1952), for which he won a second Pulitzer Prize, as well as the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize—to Duggan, denouncing "informers" (apparently [[Hede Massing]] and [[Whittaker Chambers]], each of whom had identified Duggan)<ref>[http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page100.html Adolf Berle’s Notes on his Meeting with Whittaker Chambers] (John Earl Haynes, Historical Writings); John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=dIsmm_ZLHcIC Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America]'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), ISBN 0300077718, pp. 202-203</ref>for their "slanders" and "lies."<ref>Archibald MacLeish, "The Black Day," ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=KI0ESFOvi5QC Collected Poems, 1917-1982]'' [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1985] ISBN 0395395690, p. 403</ref> The following year, he returned to Harvard as a professor.
In 1958, MacLeish won a third Pulitzer for ''J.B.'', a verse play based on the book of Job. The following year, he wrote a preface for [http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/11/14/07 ex-Communist] Barney Rosset's<ref>In 1934, Rosset was among the New York City students bused to Vassar College—along with James A. Wechsler (a member of the [[Young Communist League]] and a leader of the [http://hnn.us/articles/2869.html essentially pro-Communist] American Students Union [ASU]) and Joseph Lash (who would become [http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/23/obituaries/joseph-p-lash-is-dead-reporter-and-biographer.html executive secretary of the ASU] two years later)—[http://www.nyc-plus.com/nycp9/youcantprintthat.html for an ASU conference]. [http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/1187 After the war] he joined the [[Communist Party]] as a student [http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/10/express/a-life-in-underground-letters at the University of Chicago]. After a 1948 trip to Communist Czechoslovakia, he [http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/1187 “got the hell out.”]</ref> unexpurgated edition of D.H. Laurence's 1928 novel, ''Lady Chatterley's Lover''. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield promptly banned this edition from the U.S. mail on the grounds that it was “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy, vile,” adding that any “literary merit the book may have is far outweighed by the pornographic and smutty passages and words.” In his landmark ruling overturning the U.S. Post Office's ban on obscene materials, Judge [http://www.fjc.gov/servlet/tGetInfo?jid=297 Frederick van Pelt Bryan] of the Southern District of New York admitted that the book included “four-letter Anglo-Saxon words used with some frequency,” but added that “even if it be assumed that these passages and this language taken in isolation tend to arouse shameful, morbid, and lustful sexual desires in the average reader,” he would not uphold the ban, in part because this edition had “a preface by Archibald MacLeish, a former Librarian of Congress, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and one of this country's most distinguished poets and literary figures.”<ref>Thomas M. Disch, ''The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World'' (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000) ISBN 0684859785, p. 117</ref> The novel's protagonist, gamekeeper Oliver Parkin, is a Communist who becomes “secretary of the Communist League.”<ref>“[res.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/XLI/162/285.pdf Reviews],” ''The Review of English Studies'' 1990 XLI(162):285-288; doi:10.1093/res/XLI.162.285</ref>
In 1963, MacLeish left Harvard, becoming a lecturer at Amherst College. In 1965 he won the Academy Award for best screenplay for ''The Eleanor Roosevelt Story''. He retired in 1967, and died in 1982 in Boston, Massachusetts.
==Notes==
{{reflist}}
MacLeish was born in 1892, the son of a prosperous [[Chicago]] department store executive, and spent his childhood on a seventeen-acre estate on Lake Michigan.<ref>David Barber, “Archibald MacLeish's Life and Career,” Modern American Poetry</ref> He attended [[Yale University]], where he was a member of Skull & Bones and a classmate of [[Dean Acheson]], with whom he moved on in 1915 to [[Harvard Law School]], where he became a protegé of [[Felix Frankfurter]].
After graduation, MacLeish lectured at Harvard, became an editor at ''The New Republic'' with [[Walter Lippmann]], then joined the Boston law firm of Choate, Hall and Stewart, which would later employ [[Alger Hiss]]. In 1932, MacLeish won the Pulitzer Prize for his epic poem ''Conquistadors.'' That year, he wrote an article questioning the [[legitimacy]] of the existing “[[capitalist]] order,”<ref>Archibald MacLeish, “To the Young Men of Wall Street,” ''Saturday Review'', January 16, 1932</ref> which caught Hiss' eye.<ref>Tony Hiss, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=14B3AAAAMAAJ&pgis=1 The View From Alger's Window]'' (New York: Vintage Books, 2000) ISBN 0375701281, pp. 140-141</ref>
In 1936, MacLeish submitted two articles the [[Communist Party]] organ ''New Masses,'' whose editor was [[Whittaker Chambers]].<ref>MacLeish “would not have written for that party publication at all unless he shared some of the goals of American communism.” Hilton Kramer, ''[http://books.google.com/books?ei=IuThSpqVFIq6yQSZ89j3Cw&id=yPZ3AAAAMAAJ The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War]'' (Chicago: I.R. Dee, 2000) ISBN 1566632226, p. 262</ref> The next year, he chaired the first open meeting of the Second Congress of the [[Communist front]] [[League of American Writers]],<ref>”[http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,758006,00.html Books: Creators' Congress], ''Time'', June 21, 1937</ref> where he introduced Communist Party General Secretary [[Earl Browder]].<ref>Ellen McClay, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=SwD5_1nAcbcC In the Presence of Our Enemies]'' (Bloomington, In.: AuthorHouse, 2006) ISBN 1420894226, p. 251</ref> The following year, President [[Franklin Roosevelt]] appointed him Librarian of Congress. During [[World War II]], MacLeish served as director of the War Department's Office of Facts and Figures and assistant director of the [[Office of War Information]]<ref>[http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/47 Archibald MacLeish], Academy of American Poets</ref>(where his subordinates included [[Owen Lattimore]], director of Pacific Operations, and [[Joseph Barnes]], in charge of international broadcasting),<ref>Erik Barnouw, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=UzVDHPsJ6AoC The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 1933 to 1953] (Oxford University Press, 1968) ISBN 0195004752, p. 159</ref> then (in 1944) assistant secretary of state for Cultural Affairs.
After the war, MacLeish served with Hiss on U.S. delegation drafting the [[United Nations]] [http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/preamble.shtml Charter]. The official assigned by the [[Office of Strategic Services]] (predecessor of the CIA) to record the drafting of that document would later say MacLeish "kicked me out" of the session.<ref>[http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/unationsday/docs/lindquist19april90.pdf Oliver Lundquist Interview], United Nations Oral History Project, Yale University, 1990</ref> [[Secretary of State]] [[Dean Acheson]] appointed MacLeish chairman of the U.S. delegation to the organizational meeting of [[UNESCO]].
In 1948, following the death<ref>"[http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,799590,00.html Investigations: The Man in the Window]," ''Time'', January 3, 1949</ref> of [[USSR|Soviet]] agent<ref>[http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/venona/1944/18nov_lawrence_duggan.pdf 1613 KGB New York to Moscow, 19 November 1944]</ref> [[Laurence Duggan]] (ten days after Duggan implicated [[Henry Collins]] and [[Frederick Vanderbilt Field]] in espionage, and five days after Hiss' indictment<ref>Christopher D. O'Sullivan, "[http://www.gutenberg-e.org/osc01/frames/fosc08.html 8. Resignation]," ''Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937-1943'' (Columbia University Press, 2007) ISBN 0231142587</ref> by a grand jury) MacLeish dedicated a poem—included in his ''Collected Poems'' (1952), for which he won a second Pulitzer Prize, as well as the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize—to Duggan, denouncing "informers" (apparently [[Hede Massing]] and [[Whittaker Chambers]], each of whom had identified Duggan)<ref>[http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page100.html Adolf Berle’s Notes on his Meeting with Whittaker Chambers] (John Earl Haynes, Historical Writings); John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=dIsmm_ZLHcIC Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America]'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), ISBN 0300077718, pp. 202-203</ref>for their "slanders" and "lies."<ref>Archibald MacLeish, "The Black Day," ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=KI0ESFOvi5QC Collected Poems, 1917-1982]'' [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1985] ISBN 0395395690, p. 403</ref> The following year, he returned to Harvard as a professor.
In 1958, MacLeish won a third Pulitzer for ''J.B.'', a verse play based on the book of Job. The following year, he wrote a preface for [http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/11/14/07 ex-Communist] Barney Rosset's<ref>In 1934, Rosset was among the New York City students bused to Vassar College—along with James A. Wechsler (a member of the [[Young Communist League]] and a leader of the [http://hnn.us/articles/2869.html essentially pro-Communist] American Students Union [ASU]) and Joseph Lash (who would become [http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/23/obituaries/joseph-p-lash-is-dead-reporter-and-biographer.html executive secretary of the ASU] two years later)—[http://www.nyc-plus.com/nycp9/youcantprintthat.html for an ASU conference]. [http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/1187 After the war] he joined the [[Communist Party]] as a student [http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/10/express/a-life-in-underground-letters at the University of Chicago]. After a 1948 trip to Communist Czechoslovakia, he [http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/1187 “got the hell out.”]</ref> unexpurgated edition of D.H. Laurence's 1928 novel, ''Lady Chatterley's Lover''. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield promptly banned this edition from the U.S. mail on the grounds that it was “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy, vile,” adding that any “literary merit the book may have is far outweighed by the pornographic and smutty passages and words.” In his landmark ruling overturning the U.S. Post Office's ban on obscene materials, Judge [http://www.fjc.gov/servlet/tGetInfo?jid=297 Frederick van Pelt Bryan] of the Southern District of New York admitted that the book included “four-letter Anglo-Saxon words used with some frequency,” but added that “even if it be assumed that these passages and this language taken in isolation tend to arouse shameful, morbid, and lustful sexual desires in the average reader,” he would not uphold the ban, in part because this edition had “a preface by Archibald MacLeish, a former Librarian of Congress, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and one of this country's most distinguished poets and literary figures.”<ref>Thomas M. Disch, ''The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World'' (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000) ISBN 0684859785, p. 117</ref> The novel's protagonist, gamekeeper Oliver Parkin, is a Communist who becomes “secretary of the Communist League.”<ref>“[res.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/XLI/162/285.pdf Reviews],” ''The Review of English Studies'' 1990 XLI(162):285-288; doi:10.1093/res/XLI.162.285</ref>
In 1963, MacLeish left Harvard, becoming a lecturer at Amherst College. In 1965 he won the Academy Award for best screenplay for ''The Eleanor Roosevelt Story''. He retired in 1967, and died in 1982 in Boston, Massachusetts.
==Notes==
{{reflist}}