A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  The publicity, as much as the role she played, accounts for the long-lasting association of the conference with Hellman’s name. A half century later, neither the meaning of the conference nor Hellman’s putative role in it had diminished. Arthur Miller, who chaired a session on the arts, credited the conference with “setting a new and higher level of hostility in the Cold War.”33 Conservative historian John Patrick Diggins conferred on the conference the honor of starting the intellectual Cold War and attributed to Lillian Hellman the feat of bringing “communist cultural celebrities together to defend the U.S.S.R.”34

  For the rest of her life and long after, Hellman’s name conjured up an image of rigid, ideological commitment to Stalinism.35 Blamed for legitimizing a delegation of “approved” Soviet writers and artists and a motley assortment of American and foreign communists to talk peace together, she was accused of being blind to Soviet repression and lacking in respect for American freedoms. She came to symbolize those who perniciously enhanced the credibility of an evil Soviet Union. The label stuck long after Stalin’s death, when many liberals had begun to envision possibilities for reducing tensions with the Soviet Union. But in the late forties and early fifties, the idea that one could make peace by exchanging ideas with the enemy smacked of disloyalty. The Waldorf conference turned into an important part of the indictment of Lillian Hellman.

  There is little evidence that Hellman was still a member of the Communist Party in these early postwar years, though she remained a fellow traveler. The FBI kept sporadic track of her from the mid-1940s on; its reports, which carefully noted her participation in communist front organizations and those on the attorney general’s lists, agree on this question. After opening a file on her in 1941, the bureau closed it on March 15, 1951.36 A comment from the FBI’s New York office indicated simply that its confidential informants “had no knowledge of the subject.”37 Robert Newman, John Melby’s biographer, concluded after a careful study of all the evidence that “Lillian Hellman was not a Communist in any significant sense, certainly not in the 1950s.” Newman continues, “It is simple nonsense to call her this; sheer polemics to call her a Stalinist; and plain insanity to believe, as J. Edgar Hoover did at one time, that she was in any way disloyal to the United States of America.”38 But party membership was no longer the issue. The Waldorf conference brought into suspicion any who did not conflate democratic values with anticommunist convictions. It revealed how extensively what the historian Christopher Lasch would later call “a conspiratorial view of communism” had taken hold, how widespread the agreement among liberals as well as reactionaries “that the communist conspiracy had spread through practically every level of American society.”39 Sadly, it also suggests how easy it was in those years to target someone like Lillian—angry, outspoken, “hateful” as some thought her—and to turn her into a negative symbol.

  Unsurprisingly, the conference helped to produce a series of powerful reactions. Along with the several international peace conferences that preceded and followed it, the conference stimulated Sidney Hook, George Counts, James Burnham, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and others to create the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, a leading anticommunist cultural organization. It encouraged the CIA to get involved in a counter-initiative that involved funding the International Congress for Cultural Freedom along with Encounter magazine. Each of these organizations dedicated itself to spreading American ideas and ideals in an effort to combat the spread of communism. Each assumed that advocating “peace” contributed to Soviet strength, and that participation in such peace organizations demonstrated communist sympathies.

  In the early fifties, Hellman believed that focusing on issues of communism and anticommunism was simply a red herring. “In all the organizations in which I have participated over the past 15 years,” she wrote in an unreleased statement, she had never “heard one word concerning espionage, sabotage, force, or violence, or the overthrow of our government.”40 She would not, could not, accept a world view that situated a good United States against an evil Soviet Union. That, she thought, along with such critics of McCarthyism as Nation editor Freda Kirchwey, was “too easy an out … for it excuses policies and behavior which bear no true relationship to the danger.”41 She did not accept a definition of communism as conspiratorial. She would not play ball with those who did. The real issue, she thought, had become the repression fostered by the anticommunist campaign, and particularly the campaign’s successful efforts to silence dissent in any form. From Hellman’s perspective, when liberals joined the attack on communism they not only reinforced a false conception of a forceful and pervasive conspiracy to overthrow America, they inhibited the capacity of ordinary people to dissent. By empowering those who sought to suppress legitimate disagreement, they undermined democracy. In this sense, she believed, nothing less than the future of democracy was at stake. Her position earned her the enduring label of the fellow traveler. But if the term were pinned on her and many others as a derogatory label, she did not receive it as such. Rather, her consistent defense of the right to dissent conveyed her refusal to falsify a worthy American radical past.

  Hellman’s convictions would be put to the test, slowly and painfully, in the days after the Cold War descended. Attorney Leonard Boudin, who defended many of those attacked, would call the years between 1947 and 1954 “worse than any time” in his professional life.42 The dragnet of loyalty and security captured Hellman’s Hollywood friends first. During the war, Congress had suspended investigations into the political activities of the entertainment industry, though not before it passed the 1940 Smith Act, which proscribed written and spoken ideas intended to overthrow the government of the United States, as well as the people and organizations thought to advocate them. The provisions of the Smith Act, and the continuing investigations of California’s state senator Jack Tenney, kept the issue of “un-American” activities in the public’s consciousness. As the war came to an end, the House of Representatives reenergized and renamed the former Dies Committee, calling it the Committee on Un-American Activities and providing it with subpoena power. HUAC, as it now became known, once again set its sights on the entertainment industry, focusing particularly on screenwriters who were thought to be able to exercise enormous influence on the opinions of audiences by putting subversive ideas in the mouths of unsuspecting actors. In the fall of 1947, the committee called nineteen actors and writers to testify. Some of these, most notably Adolph Menjou, Gary Cooper, and Robert Taylor, affirmed the committee’s sense that communist ideas had pervaded Hollywood. Others, like Ronald Reagan, who was then president of the Screen Actors Guild, provided the names of writers thought to be subversive. Ten of the nineteen, all of them screenwriters, challenged the right of the committee to ask questions about their beliefs. To wide public support, they appealed to First Amendment protections of their rights to think and speak freely. All of the ten—including John Howard Lawson and Ring Lardner Jr., Lillian’s friends and colleagues in the Screen Writers Guild since the thirties—eventually served brief jail terms for contempt of Congress.

  Several days after the hearings ended at the end of November 1947, the major Hollywood producers met in New York and, in an act designed to call off the committee’s investigations, fired the ten writers and agreed not to rehire them. Two days after that, the Screen Writers Guild, the organization that Hellman had worked so hard to bring to life, decided to police its own ranks. It announced that “No communists or other subversives will be employed by Hollywood.”43 The Hollywood blacklist, never formally acknowledged, had begun.

  Hellman responded to these events with outspoken rage. Writing in the Screen Writer, the vehicle of the Screen Writers Guild, she called the hearings “sickening, immoral and degraded” and characterized the capitulation of the producers as the culmination of “a week of shame.” “There has never been a single line or word of Communism in any American Picture at any time,” she wrote with evident hyperbole. How could there be, she continued: “There
have never or seldom been ideas of any kind.” Hollywood, she thought, harbored more than its share of fearful men, “men scared to make pictures about the American Negro, men who have only in the last year allowed the word Jew to be spoken in a picture, men who took more than ten years to make an anti-Fascist picture, those are frightened men and you pick frightened men to frighten first. Judas goats.” She dismissed them contemptuously as “craven men … trying to wreck the lives of … men with whom they have worked and eaten and played, and made millions.”44

  “Judas Goats” put Hellman on the record in a moment, and with a position that required a good deal of courage. It also signaled the stance she would thereafter adopt with respect to attacks on the left. She believed in freedom of thought, belief, and speech for herself and for others; she not only defended the rights of others to speak without fear or dread of consequences, but she valued those who spoke up in defense of freedom of thought and speech. She did not believe that communism endangered the United States internally, nor that the Soviet Union threatened it from outside. She despised those who knuckled under the fists of bullies, and she decried investigators who “pandered to ignorance by telling people that ignorance is good and lies even better.” She had nothing but contempt for the Hollywood producers who had helped to enforce blacklists. “These great millionaires,” she called them, “men powerful enough to have made and ruined the world’s darlings, arrogant enough, many of them, to have led their own lives on terms outside the rest of us, would now, in solemn fear, declare that fear without shame.”45

  Still, she herself was frightened and bewildered by some of the repercussions around her own prospects. In the spring of 1948, Hellman’s friend William Wyler, who had directed film versions of These Three, Dead End, and The Little Foxes, proposed that she adapt Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie for the screen. Hellman and Wyler talked about the plan during a European trip, and Hellman returned home to await a contract from Paramount Pictures. The contract never came. Almost three decades later, Hellman tried to reconstruct the incident in a letter to Wyler. He had confronted Barney Balaban, president of Paramount, only to be told that Hellman was unacceptable. Wyler flew to New York to talk to Hellman. As Hellman remembered the incident, he appeared at her door

  furious and angry at what had happened in Balaban’s office. Balaban had told you that they could not employ me. That I was on a kind of forbidden list. You protested strongly that there was no such list and you said that Balaban took from his drawer a file which he told you was the F.B.I file on me. You were horrified that there was such a thing and you were very angry with Balaban, threatening to quit. You, Dash, and I talked about it on 82nd Street for two nights. I think …46

  That was only the beginning. Lillian recalled a second story in which Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, sent her a contract “for any job I wanted, writer, producer, director, and that the contract sent to my house carried a clause of such mysterious words that I hastened around to ask what it meant.” She discovered, she says, that it meant “I could not visit, or have visit, a prescribed list of people who were thought to be too liberal, too radical, or too talkative.” Hellman remembers “laughing at the sheer gall of it, sure that they couldn’t be serious.”47 But they were to have the last laugh. In 1950, the right-wing newsletter Counterattack, whose sponsors included former FBI agents, published a list of 150 entertainment-industry individuals believed to be communists. Counterattack editors made a point of going after people who were well known and had reputations to hurt. The detailed information they collected about Hellman’s activities could only have come from the FBI.48 Hellman, her name on the latest list, now knew she was excluded from the American movie industry.

  Hellman and Wyler talked about the plan during a European trip. Here with William Wyler in 1960 on the way to Europe. (Photofest)

  She watched now, her world in chaos, as her friends and acquaintances allied themselves with those who championed curtailing civil liberties. Some of the most liberal organizations refused to protect the rights of communists. Americans for Democratic Action, founded in 1947 to preserve the New Deal, took a strong anticommunist position in order to preserve its own legitimacy. Traditional defenders of the First Amendment like the American Civil Liberties Union refused to defend the rights of those suspected of communism to speak.49 Both organizations willingly purged their memberships in order to defend their anticommunist credibility. Trade unions fell into line, policing themselves, though often only after fierce fighting and internal political tensions. Hellman’s own Screen Writers Guild agreed to eliminate communists from leadership positions. Universities followed suit. Though at first the American Association of University Professors issued a statement insisting that faculty members could be dismissed only for acts of disloyalty, not for Communist Party membership, it never so much as publicized the names of dozens of institutions that fired suspected party members.50 The Board of Regents of the University of California dismissed thirty-two faculty members who refused to sign loyalty oaths in 1950. Three years later, thirty-seven institutions (including Yale, Stanford, and Brown) agreed that since “loyalty, integrity and independence are incompatible with membership in the Communist party … party membership extinguishes the right to a university position.”51 Their stance effectively curtailed the “full academic freedom … guaranteed to professors and scholars,” for it was assumed that not cooperating with government investigatory bodies was tantamount to admission of Communist Party affiliation.

  Hellman responded, naïvely perhaps, but nevertheless with stubborn refusal to concede to fear. On numbers of occasions she had demonstrated her own willingness to stand by her convictions. By the late 1940s she was a celebrity who had lent her name to causes that she believed would further her visions of equality—against racism, for world peace, and on behalf of social justice. Many of the organizations she had joined—she counted thirty-nine of them in a list she prepared in 1952—appeared on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations. Some of the petitions she had signed explicitly attacked HUAC, calling on Congress to abolish it and the Supreme Court to declare that it imposed censorship.52 The FBI duly reported these attacks as indications of Hellman’s continuing attachment to communism.53 She also lent her name to an endless number of dinners and appeals on behalf of a variety of an eclectic series of groups that included the United Jewish Appeal, the American Jewish Congress, Ethical Culture, FDR’s Four Freedoms Award, and, after the president’s death, the National Committee for Roosevelt Day. Some of these were front organizations in the sense that the Communist Party led them into paths consistent with Soviet policies at the time. Others were formed by non–party members, though they welcomed communists and everyone else who shared their goals. Hellman did not distinguish among these groups, participating in one after another, seemingly paying little attention to their leadership: “I joined a great number of organizations which I believed were dedicated to peace and to other humanitarian aims,” she would write later.54

  She must have felt something akin to panic as she tried to sort out what was happening to her world. “I had never, during my grown life, lived in a period of reaction and I did not identify it quickly,” she wrote a decade later.55 Repeatedly she faced moments when decisions about how to act tormented her. As a member of the board of the Authors’ League of America, she was asked in 1950 to sign an affidavit testifying that she was not a member of the Communist Party. She agonized over the decision, deciding at last to sign it: “If it must be done now then it must be done and that is all there is to it.” But she asked to speak to the issue at the next meeting, and she accompanied her affidavit with a statement of protest condemning “the requirements of affidavits of this sort as violating my constitutional freedom of opinion and association.”56 “We are—or we are being unnaturally made into—a fearful people,” she warned an audience of Swarthmore College students around the same time.57

  She and Hammett, who was then living part of the tim
e in his 10th Street apartment in New York, and part of the time with her, remained under sporadic surveillance. In July 1951, as Hammett was preparing to go to jail for refusing to reveal the names of contributors to a bail fund for Communist Party leaders, the FBI came to call. They were both at home when a team of agents knocked on the door of her Pleasantville farm to search for eight Communist Party leaders whom they believed were in hiding there. Hellman denied knowing anything about the fugitives, and a search of the farm produced no trace of them.58

  Hoping to find work in Europe, Hellman decided to travel there. This was a familiar scenario. Ring Lardner Jr. recalled that during this period he was reduced to working incognito for Hellman’s friend Hannah Weinstein, who had taken her family off to England, where she set up the television production company that produced the first Robin Hood series using blacklisted Hollywood writers.59 But Hellman was not desperate enough to write under an assumed name. She had traveled to Europe in 1948 with some success, and in early 1951 she applied for a new passport. But now she ran into trouble. In 1950, Congress passed the Subversive Activities Control Act, also known as the McCarran Act, which contained a provision denying passports to communists. The decision to grant a passport rested in Ruth B. Shipley’s State Department Passport Division. Mrs. Shipley needed to be convinced that Lillian was not a communist. Hellman, with a potential job waiting for her in Paris—an adaptation of Ibsen’s The Doll House—pleaded her case and then waited. Desperate, in July she told Shipley that she would lose the job if she delayed her departure. “I am not a Communist. I am not a member of the Communist Party,” she wrote. “In the past I have been a member of many left wing organizations but, while I have made many foolish decisions in my life, I have never done anything which could be called by any honest person, ugly or disloyal or unpatriotic.”60