According the the testimony given to the FBI by Louis Francis Budenz, the Independent Citizens Committee was a Communist front controlled by the Communist Party without the knowledge of most of its members. At least, he stated, it had started that way. Many Marxist historians dispute the extent of influence of the Communist Party on the Popular Front organizations contending that the fellow travelers and non-Communist social democrats who made up much of the membership were actually in control. But the whole point of a front was to create an organization that appeared democratic and broad-based while secretly being controlled by a small inner core of Party members and supporters. It is hard to say where the ICCASP fell within this spectrum. Some of its nominal leaders were Communists and fellow travelers and others were not.
Budenz was the former managing editor of The Daily Worker and member of the National Committee of the Communist Party as well as a self-admitted former Soviet agent. In 1945 he came back to the Catholic church, in which he had been raised, under the influence of the charismatic John Fulton Sheen, an ardent proselytizer, anti-Communist and anti-Freudian who was responsible for a number of high profile mid-century conversions. As part of his penance, Budenz provided extensive testimony to the FBI on the inner workings of the party, particularly on how front organizations operated and the role that the Soviet Politburo played. He became as doggedly committed to anti-Communism as he had been to the Party and wrote a number of exposes on the subject.
Budenz's testimony was damning, but Communist apologists discredited or dismissed most evidence or testimony provided by former Party members, contending that they were lying rats seeking revenge over a spurned sexual advances or because they had been overlooked for promotion, were in it for the money, or were trying to cover up their own perfidy. Budenz provided these apologists with an opportunity to attack his testimony later in the 1950s by becoming a paid expert witness in government trials and investigations, often providing testimony against individuals based on hearsay, citing "official reports" as the source of his information rather than his personal knowledge. In particular his critics slammed him for his troublesome contradictory testimony in two different trials of state department official Owen Lattimore, widely considered to have been accused falsely of being a Soviet agent. But it was the high degree of credibility of his earlier revelations, which were based on first-hand experience, that made him a credible "witness" to the McCarthy group in these later trials.
In his earlier testimony Budenz said that the Independent Citizens of the Arts operated initially from his offices at The Daily Worker. It had been formed by the cultural commission of the newspaper. The Soviet Politburo entrusted Lionel Berman, the cultural section organizer of the Party in New York, to put together the initial committee. Berman called in some of the most reliable big names among the well-connected Stalinist cadre such as screenwriters John Howard Lawson and Ring Lardner Jr., songwriter E. Y. Harburg and playwright Lillian Hellman to form the core committee whose directive was to recruit a broad constituency of culturally influential people as they had in the 1930s Popular Front anti-Fascist days before the Hitler-Stalin pact had muddied the waters.
The group launched itself initially as a committee to support Franklin Delano Roosevelt's controversial run for a fourth term in 1944. That year the Party supported Roosevelt, whom they had denounced as a "social fascist" in 1932, embraced as a friend of the common man in 1936 during the Popular Front days and denounced as a warmonger in 1940 after the Hitler-Stalin Pact. They were still denouncing him until Hitler's invasion of the USSR in 1941. In 1944 the defeat of Hitler was a paramount consideration to the Party and FDR was again a hero. But many on the Left were furious that Vice President Henry Wallace had been booted from the ticket and replaced by Harry Truman. It was important to the Party, as well as to New Dealers, that the Leftists not sit out the election and allow anti-Communist Thomas Dewey to snatch the victory putting him in charge of running the show after the War was won.
According to Budenz, support of Roosevelt was largely honey to draw the flies. The long term goal was to form a competing political group within the Democratic Party to the CIO's National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC), an organization of professionals and notables formed by Sidney Hillman to provide support from non-union professionals for union goals, serving in essence as the left wing to the Democratic Party. Although Communists were welcome into NCPAC --their ardor, commitment, organizational abilities and social networks were a valuable commodity--Hillman kept them from controlling the organization. According to Budenz, the Communist Party wanted its own dog in the hunt. At the same time the anti-Communist Left and AFL unions had formed the Union For Democratic Action, which would later become Americans for Democratic Action, to counter Communist influence in the liberal movement. At the 1945 Communist Party convention, Budenz testified, Berman and the cultural commission took bows for having created the Independent Citizens as a potent political weapon.
The new organization was very successful in drawing in New Dealers among the glitterati. Most of its membership were not Communists and may not have been aware of Party involvement. They thought they were supporting the principals of the New Deal and world peace. In time some of the non-Communist members of the Committee began to have suspicions. In the summer of 1946 open dissension broke out in the Hollywood unit. As Olivia de Havilland recounted in a 2006 Wall Street Journal interview, some non-Communist members of the executive committee were disturbed that while American foreign policy was frequently denounced by the organization, Soviet foreign policy was never criticized or questioned. American foreign policy under Truman was repeatedly characterized as controlled by war-mongering Wall Street interests, in line with the postwar Party line while the policies of the Soviet Union were equated with world peace. Pro-Soviet and anti-American resolutions often were passed by the committee when more moderate members were absent.
A group of New Dealers on the executive board of the Hollywood committee, including De Havilland and Ronald Reagan, began questioning what some of their fellow committee members meant by "promoting democracy" here and abroad. That summer they introduced a resolution at an executive committee meeting declaring that the organization did not support a Communist government in the US. According to Reagan, this set off a firestorm of invectives-- fascists, warmongers, imperialists, red baiters, witch hunters- hurled by other committee members against the resolution's sponsors. Bandleader Artie Shaw was especially enraged and stood to deliver an impassioned speech defending the Soviet Constitution as the perfect embodiment of democratic principals, demanding that De Havilland study that holy writ. The anti-Communist resolution was defeated. This does not necessarily mean that all of the opponents were in favor of a Communist US. Some may have felt that it was too deliberately divisive. After being voted down, De Havilland, Reagan, producer and studio head Dore Schary and the Committee's national political director, James Roosevelt, resigned from the executive committee. Reagan credited this experience as one of the factors that drove him out of the liberal camp. Schary remained a committed civil libertarian who opposed the subsequent witch hunts. Roosevelt became head of the California State Democratic Party around this same time and later became a congressman.
The Independent Citizens Committee increasingly worked on initiatives with the rival NCPAC, which also was enduring an internal power struggle between its Communist and non-Communist members. Earlier the CIO-sponsored political party in New York, the American Labor Party, had undergone a schism when its most anti-Communist contingent withdrew to form the Liberal Party, leaving the ALP increasingly in the hands of the Communists and fellow travelers. Hillman, who had attempted to keep the Communists within NCPAC and the ALP in a subordinate position, died in the summer of 1946 after a prolonged illness. Many of the candidates that NCPAC had supported in the 1946 elections were defeated and the organizations' endorsements in some cases proved to be a liability because of the Communist taint. By year's end the Independent Citizens and NCPAC merged to form the Progressive Citizens of America which rallied around Henry Wallace and moved toward the formation of a third party uniting leftists and liberals under the leadership of the Communist Party. This effort was a dismal failure that contributed heavily to the fatal weakening of the United Front movement, leaving its members and supporters, Communists and non-Communists alike, open to retaliation by the Right.