The Left had a substantial presence in the New York theater world of 1946. Many prominent actors, directors and writers participated in political and cultural activities of left-leaning and Communist Party organizations and several plays on Broadway reflected the political ideology of the Left. However the days of heavy-handed agit prop in the commercial theater had ended.
Political activism had picked up since the war on college campuses but at a considerably lower volume than before the war. A period of relative complacency was beginning to set in. Many of the students were returning vets with more immediate concerns than world revolution on their mind. City College still was the center of the student left, although the well-documented, vigorous student debates of the late Thirties were a thing of the past. Increasingly the student body at City College was a generation further away from the sons of immigrants who had attended in the Thirties and not as ardent in its radicalism. The Rapp-Coudert Committee investigations of 1940 and 1941 had purged much of the Communist Party members from the faculty, some of whom went over to the Jefferson School of Social Sciences. Columbia and NYU and other colleges in the city also had left-leaning student groups on campus.
The Left produced a wealth of publications including the Stalinist Daily Worker and New Masses, the fellow-traveling PM and The Nation, the dissident Partisan Review and the liberal Democratic tabloid Post. The movement had its own nightclubs, Cafe Society and Cafe Society Uptown where you could see politically informed entertainers perform socially relevant material in a glamorous atmosphere. It had its own book clubs, most notably the Book Find Club. The ACA Galleries and the Downtown Gallery specialized in artists of the Left. They also showed up for screenings of Soviet movies at the Stanley and elsewhere.