A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  She turned now from worrying about what others would leave her to how she would distribute her own substantial assets. True to form, she worried over every detail, changing the will almost yearly in large and small ways, trying as hard as she could to control what would happen to the money she had so carefully accumulated in her lifetime. The list of beneficiaries changed as her old friends died off, but with a few exceptions she sought to leave those who remained with meaningful personal items rather than gifts of cash. To her secretaries, the choice of a piece of jewelry as well as a small amount of cash; to Annabel Nichols, a diamond bracelet; to Barbara and John Hersey, a Queen Anne table, and to Barbara a piece of jewelry too. And so it went. She named her friends and the particular item or items she wanted them to have: an antique chest or dressing table to one, a pair of candlesticks or wall sconces to another, Russian icons to a third, and then choices of anything left over to others. As each year passed, she crossed out those who had died or offended her, or added a new friend. The specificity of the final versions suggests that Lillian wanted her heirs to know that she had thought about each of them individually, that she held for each of them a particular affection that she could express only with something that was irremediably hers.

  As the wills changed over the years, she left more and more of her property to Peter Feibleman, who had loved and cared for her since the mid-sixties. And yet there were strings attached that also changed over the years. She wanted to leave the cooperative apartment to him, but only if he lived in it. If he chose to sell it, then he could keep the largest part of the money it brought in—but, she wrote to her lawyers, “I would like to make the provision that he has no right to bequeath the apartment to his heirs and that if he owns it on his death the total sale reverts to my estate.”125 The Martha’s Vineyard house would go to Feibleman, but additional property on the Gay Head beach would be left to the town for the use of local children. Cantankerous to the end, she sought to assign separate fiduciaries for her literary properties, as executors for her estate, and for the two trusts she established—as well as for the trust she set up for the royalties that would go to Hammett’s daughters and for the Vineyard property. Her lawyers protested, finally, the “fragmented authority” that would result. Under that version of the will, they calculated, nine individuals would be involved in each decision as to any literary property. She wanted to tie her executors and literary fiduciaries to their jobs by paying them a flat fee, plus an executor’s or trustee’s commission on the services they rendered.

  In the early eighties, when her estate was probably worth more than $2 million and would soon, by one estimate, amount to $3.5 million, she was still dithering.126 She signed the last version of her will on May 24, 1984, just a month before she died. The will that she rewrote many times teaches us something about what history had done to her, for she wanted both to recognize those who had been kind to her and to ensure that her wealth would continue to support the work to which she had devoted her life. The final distribution of her estate suggests her need both to believe that she was loved and to use her resources to express what love she still could. For in the end money was not simply a way of sustaining herself, but a way of convincing the world that she mattered. And who could blame her, a woman alone, a woman without money or beauty, for extracting from her talent and her fame the emotional sustenance that no partner provided?

  Chapter 8

  A Known Communist

  He who has seen a war and plans another must either be a villain or a madman.

  —Lillian Hellman, “Judas Goats,” 1947

  It’s still not un-American to fight the enemies of one’s country.

  —“From America,” 1949

  We are or are being made into a fearful people, and fearful people will stand for very little deviation.

  —speech at Swarthmore College, 1950

  The Communist Party was not illegal in the years when Hellman and Hammett moved into its orbit in the late 1930s. Despised and feared by some, the CPUSA commanded the loyalty of many who believed that communism augured economic democracy and social egalitarianism. Like Hellman and Hammett, many in and around the Communist Party hoped that communism would bring a fuller and more complete political democracy than any yet achieved in the Western world. They would learn that they were wrong, but at the time many clung to the idea that, whatever the defects of the existing Soviet Union, the idea of communism remained the last, best hope for a socialist nirvana. For this reason, many idealists dismissed revelations and rumors about forced collectivization of farms, the removal and forced labor of millions of peasants, fake trials and executions of senior officials, and arbitrary imprisonment of critics of all sorts in a brutal system of gulags. Later they would wonder how they could have been so blind to Stalin’s malfeasances, but at the time the belief in the saving power of communism ran deep.

  The reputation of communism rebounded during World War II as the United States allied with the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler’s Germany. Stalin’s stature and the American public’s admiration for the courage of Russian soldiers increased as Americans watched its ally single-handedly—and with enormous loss of life—resist a massive assault of German troops at Stalingrad. At one with her country and its policies, Hellman could and did support the Soviet-American alliance with all the energy at her disposal. But the war’s aftermath quickly ruptured the brief friendship, spawning a polarizing struggle for influence between two very different economic and political systems and a bitter stalemate as both sides sought to draw allies around the world into their orbits. As it became clear that the Soviets sought to create for themselves a series of barrier states and spheres of influence, the West became increasingly suspicious. By March 1946, only eleven months after the end of the European war, Churchill delivered the Fulton, Missouri, speech that would mark the beginning of the Cold War.

  From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.1

  The ally had turned into an enemy, and those who had too enthusiastically supported that ally, Hellman among them, became objects of mistrust. Espousing communist ideas, once considered merely eccentric, now became subversive. Attributions of communism or excessive sympathy for communism (fellow traveling) signaled disloyalty rather than dissent. Just two months after Churchill’s ominous speech, a giant railroad strike broke out in the United States, fomented by workers whose wages had been constrained during the war and who now wished to garner some of their deferred benefits. President Truman, suspecting communist leadership, declared that this was a strike of “a handful of men against their own government and against every one of their fellow citizens.” On May 26, 1946, he asked Congress for authority for a government takeover of the railroads, their operation to be handled by the army.2 Hellman described the events to John Melby in China as “absolutely unbelievable.” She was in shock, she wrote, calling the day of the speech a “black, black day.” Truman’s speech, she thought, was “the most remarkable document ever issued by a president.”3

  The following November, Republicans, arguing that the Democrats were soft on communism, swept the U.S. midterm elections. Just two weeks after that, President Truman lashed back with a proposal to investigate the loyalty of every federal government employee. And four months later, on March 21, 1947, the president signed an executive order that gave the FBI the authority to examine the records of each of the two million employees of the U.S. government. With communist ideas now officially labeled subversive, government agencies felt free to pursue individuals. “Derogatory information” about any person could trigger a fu
ll-scale investigation even if that information came from anonymous sources. The accused lost the right to confront the accuser in open court; the FBI supplied the names of thousands of suspected subversives to 150 loyalty and security boards set up all over the nation. Accusation was tantamount to conviction, as the boards had powers of summary dismissal. The Smith Act, passed in 1940, buttressed these boards by making membership in the Communist Party illegal. Over the course of a decade, the FBI eventually investigated some four and a half million people, fostered upward of 27,000 full-scale investigations, and caused the firing of perhaps three hundred people.

  Hellman was appalled. The “Truman loyalty order,” she told a June 1948 audience at Carnegie Hall, “is legalizing spying on the American people.” For a decade, the loyalty-security program and its offshoots would chill the heart of every American who had ever uttered a word in dissent. Reinforced by the Taft-Hartley Act (passed over Truman’s veto on June 23, 1947), which required that union officers swear that they were not communists, the legislation assumed that holding communist ideas provided prima facie evidence of disloyalty. With that in mind, state and federal authorities launched a campaign of intimidation that trampled cherished rights. Gone was the notion of presumptive innocence and the promise of fair and speedy trials. Association with any group in which communists continued to work became evidence of one’s guilt. The climate of fear and intimidation—Hellman called it bullying—spelled the death of the Popular Front, as social democrats and socialists quickly distanced themselves from suspected communists. It encouraged some to resign their jobs before investigations began and discouraged others from applying for jobs that required loyalty oaths. Radio and television personality Studs Terkel remembered the period as one in which “one’s political beliefs served as a rationale for government monitoring.”4

  Because neither the FBI nor the loyalty boards ever had to disclose the sources of their information or the nature of their evidence, an unknown number of false accusations occurred. To facilitate their task, the FBI (prompted by the attorney general) produced a list of organizations “thought to be subversive” and those that had protected the rights of subversives. The initial list of forty-one groups indiscriminately included left-and right-wing suspects. The Ku Klux Klan, Nazi groups, and the American Civil Liberties Union found themselves among the organizations listed. Soon the list expanded to 159. Membership in any one of them implied guilt by association regardless of individual beliefs and could deny an individual a job, an education, a contract, and more. States, municipalities, hospitals, hotels all used these doubtful lists to vet teachers, nurses, janitors, and carpenters who might once have contributed money or exercised their right to dissent. Arguably, these activities gave license to Senator Joseph McCarthy, who honed the art of accusation without evidence to a science when he began his own personal campaign of intimidation in early 1950.

  By the late 1940s, those who had once sought alternatives to market capitalism or been sympathetic to communism faced difficult choices. Some decided to simply walk away. Disillusioned with the Soviet Union and unable to believe in a more just United States, they dropped out of politics and hoped to slide by unnoticed. Others denounced their youthful utopian dreams, recanted their critiques of capitalism, and developed liberal positions that sought to sustain the social agenda of the New Deal within a framework of market capitalism. These were the liberals. Many who had once been communists and partisans of the Soviet Union concluded that they had simply been duped by the Communist Party, resolutely abandoned their old positions, and concluded that the Soviets threatened American freedoms. As Soviet power in the world increased, this group formed the heart of an anticommunist movement—their anger turning into bitterness about having once been misled, their audience expanding with every unpopular Soviet gambit. Men like Sidney Hook and James Burnham quickly identified themselves as Hellman’s opponents.

  Some partisans of communism could not let go of their illusions. They remained loyal both to communism and to the Soviet Union, rationalizing its malfeasances as the actions of a nation under threat. This was the hard-line group, the Stalinists, many of them members of the CPUSA. Hellman was not one of these. She neither admired nor feared the Soviet Union: her trips there had resulted in equal measures of romanticism about the Soviet people and cynicism about its leadership. Rather she insisted, as she remarked in a 1949 speech, that “nowadays on the Right it is fashionable to pretend that only Russia is at fault. I am sorry to say that there are too many on the Left who pretend that only the United States is at fault.”5

  Between these extremes lay a range of sometimes overlapping and limited options. Many principled progressives, including former members of the party and die-hard opponents to it, declared their horror at the methods adopted by Stalin, rejected the Soviet Union as a model, and clung, nevertheless, to the hope that some more democratic form of socialism, some more socially just social order, might emerge from the carnage of war. The reviving social democracies of Western Europe provided some hope in this respect. In the United States, liberals, socialists, Trotskyists, and others vehemently disagreed over how a new society might emerge—whether through slow changes at the ballot box or through revolutionary activity—and what it would look like. After 1949, China, Albania, even social democratic Sweden had fans; differing groups concurred only in their opposition to a specifically Soviet communism. Their conflicts with each other ultimately drowned out all possibility of alliance in the interests of creating the better world for which they all longed. But their differences did not prevent them from individually and collectively condemning both the anticommunist right and the Stalinist left.

  Stalinism thus became the common enemy of left-wing factions, like the Trotskyists and former New Deal liberals, and conservatives, all of them united in their assessment of the potentially destructive power and negative ideological influence of the Soviet Union. They coalesced in support of Truman’s Loyalty and Security program to weed out subversives, and in agreement with the enemies of those who still claimed allegiance to even the most abstract forms of communism. Communism, they agreed, simply bred subservience to the Soviet Union. Stalinism was no better than fascism: both produced totalitarian dictatorships inimical to freedom and democracy. In a climate of fear, hysteria ruled. Liberals and conservatives alike joined in agreement that a belief in communism betrayed the broader, more humane values of the Enlightenment in blind obeisance to a monstrous regime. To whisper the word was to query loyalty to core American values of freedom and democracy. One would have had to have been willfully ignorant not to have known about the sins of Stalin in the past, the argument went. Failure to acknowledge them now implicated the mute in the sin. To Americans of all kinds, silence connoted sympathy with communism, which, as historian Richard Pells notes, “implied organizational commitments and ties which were inimical to the interest of a democracy.”6 To those on the left, silence meant a refusal to disassociate oneself from the failed Soviet model, a continuing commitment to state-controlled, bureaucratic, and coercive forms of governing.

  Efforts to identify the disloyal posed a particular conundrum to liberals. They shared the beliefs of other anticommunists in what Pells calls “the continuing danger of traitors and spies in high places, the necessity of security checks and legislative restraints to safeguard democracy, the tendency of Communists on trial to dissemble and deceive.”7 But in identifying as a foreign conspiracy those who aimed to undermine American freedoms, they found themselves supporting regulations and restrictions that threatened freedom itself. In 1947, a group of liberals including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., union leaders David Dubinsky and Walter Reuther, New Dealers Ben Cohen and Gardner Jackson, and a young lawyer named Joseph Rauh (who would later become Lillian’s attorney) created Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) to defend civil rights and civil liberties and to sever any public association of liberalism with a communist agenda. “We reject any association with Communists or sympathizers with communism in
the United States as completely as we reject any association with fascists or their sympathizers,” they announced.8 If communists were controlled by Moscow, part of a foreign conspiracy, and agents of a foreign power, ADA founders believed, then they would inevitably use democratic traditions to undermine them. In their view, protecting democracy required suspending democratic freedoms, including the freedom of expression, at least for a while. So they joined the anticommunist crusade and tried to distance themselves from some of its worst abuses. They challenged Joseph McCarthy’s techniques, rejecting the finger-pointing strategy of guilt by association and vague accusations leveled without evidence by nameless people. At the same time, they shared such fear of subversion that they supported loyalty oaths and neither defended nor spoke up for those imprisoned under the Smith Act or charged by government committees.

  Hellman interpreted their stance as sheer cowardice, adamantly insisting that in their refusal to support the civil liberties of all, liberals acted out of rank fear.9 The committees, she said later, “made liars out of rather simple-minded people … who were very, very frightened.”10 Their behavior, she thought, undermined their own tenets. If she was more outspoken than most, she was not alone. While many liberals and people on the left (including Leslie Fiedler, Daniel Bell, and Philip Rahv) took anticommunist positions, others found themselves in limbo. John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the ADA’s founding members and a good friend of Schlesinger’s, tried to persuade his friend to change his position on civil liberties. When he failed, Galbraith limited his relationship to the ADA to economic matters.11 A few on the left—Dwight MacDonald, Henry Steele Commager, Mary McCarthy, and Irving Howe, among them—shared Hellman’s strong sense that there was more to be lost by adopting the tactics of the enemy (loyalty oaths, secret hearings, security checks) than there was in allowing communists to speak their pieces.12 MacDonald, McCarthy, and Howe all personally rejected communism and later turned against Hellman for refusing to join their condemnation.