Chapter 4

Politics Without Fear

I don’t understand personal salvation. It seems to me a vain idea. Conscience includes the fate of other people.

—Lillian Hellman, 1977

It was one thing to become a famous playwright; quite another to make one’s way in the bracing political scene of the 1930s. When Hellman returned to New York from Hollywood in March of 1931, she found a city deep in the throes of the Depression. In that year, the city’s unemployment rate doubled, reaching an astronomical 15 percent of the city’s work-force. That figure would increase every month of her first year in the city until by March of 1932, one of every four workers was unemployed. Hellman seems at first to have been uninvolved in the political scene. Broke and unemployed herself, she did not identify with the men and women on the breadlines; she did not join the ranks of those demanding unemployment insurance or participate in the unemployment councils sponsored by the Communist Party. Nor did she march with any of the hundreds of political factions waving banners on the streets of the broken city. We have no evidence that she participated in any of the anti-eviction activities that tried to protect increasing numbers of families struggling to pay their rent. And Hellman does not seem to have been involved in the formal political proceedings of those years, as Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt set up a run for the presidency and clinched the nomination in the summer of 1932, or good-government groups clamored for an investigation into the corruption of Mayor Jimmy Walker, who was forced out of office in September 1932. In the summer and fall of 1931 and in the winter of 1932, as the nation sank deeply into the Depression, the young Lillian Hellman took no visible political position.

And yet we know that Hellman was not without social compassion or sympathy for the working class. A resourceful and creative young woman surrounded by writers and artists, most of them on the left and some of them already beginning to choose sides, she must have been pulled in many directions. Though she had matured into a 1920s culture that placed a premium on individual expression and achievement and was personally ambitious, she harbored a streak of anger toward the rich and corrupt members of her own family that translated into visceral hatred of power and wealth. She had long valued class equality and racial justice, and she understood that achieving these goals would disturb cherished individual rights, including those of property ownership. To this extent she was a socialist.

Together these translated into what some later called naïve politics. She wanted desperately to believe, in the jargon of the day, that “a better world” was possible, wanted to believe in a world where democracy, individual liberty, and especially freedom of speech could thrive. No political program captured these desires. Rather she invoked a desire for decency, justice, and morality as though these were self-evident and easily definable goals. As her friend Peter Feibleman puts it, she had the “sense of justice of a very small child.”¹ Hellman’s commitment to an ethic of justice often presented itself as a stubborn certainty about the righteousness of particular political positions and a persistent loyalty to those who shared her beliefs. Hellman was not unusual in the 1930s, a decade riven by ideological arguments, each proposing the one right solution to the ills of the economy and the discontents of the poor. But moral ideals are like blank checks: real people confront real problems, full of paradoxes and contradictions. Like millions of others drawn into the complicated politics of the thirties, Hellman found herself caught up in the currents of the moment as she responded to the situation around her.

While she struggled to find her place within the maelstrom of ideas and juggled with her personal life, Hellman became involved with organizing a union of writers among the drama and film communities on the East and West coasts. This would be her first leap into the political maelstrom of the thirties, and it would lead her straight into the larger political conflicts of the day.

1938: She wanted desperately to believe that a better world was possible. (Photofest)

East-and West-coast communities of writers were closely connected. Dramatists who wrote for the stage lived a precarious economic existence until and unless they achieved renown. Those who worked in Hollywood, on the other hand, tended to live much better. Since the advent of talking pictures, screenwriters had been highly valued by the Hollywood studios and relatively well paid. In 1933, a time in which a family of four could live comfortably in most parts of the country on $25 a week, run-of-the-mill screenwriters routinely drew $50 weekly salaries. This was Hellman’s salary in her first years in Hollywood. The talented among them earned an exceedingly generous wage of between $200 and $1,000 a week. The best, including Hellman after the success of The Children’s Hour, earned much more: $2,500 weekly, in Hellman’s case. Such high wages attracted the nation’s most talented writers, who, governed by their need for income, participated in a commuting culture between the East and West coasts. In this community Hellman’s friends Laura and S. J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker, Arthur Kober, and Nathanael West joined the likes of John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The large studios each kept a stable of writers, none of them larger or more respected than those who worked for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios headed by Louis B. Mayer.²

Already by 1933 there had been rumblings of discontent across the ranks of theater and studio employees. On the East Coast, some of the craft workers had organized themselves into guilds under the umbrella of the International Association of Theater and Stage Employees (IATSE). The Authors’ League of America sponsored a special unit for dramatists, and some dramatists organized into a Dramatists Guild. These spread, along with the workers, to the West Coast studios. In self-defense, the producers created their own association, which they called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and which they described as intended to bring disputing parties together. A few writers, some of them members of the Writers Club of the Authors’ League of America and others inspired by the example of playwrights who had formed the East Coast–centered Dramatists Guild, called a meeting in February 1933 to discuss the possibility of unionizing. They wanted a share in the royalties earned by movies on which they worked, and, crucially, they wanted screen credits for their scripts.

Then in March, under cover of the Depression and as other studios struggled to pay their bills, Louis Mayer announced that he was cutting the wages of MGM’s employees by 50 percent. The moment seemed ripe: FDR had only just been sworn in as president; the unemployment and banking crises had reached catastrophic levels. Mayer and other producers saw an opportunity to cut costs, and they took it. But movies had flourished during the early years of the Depression, and the industry had prospered. Employees, among them the writers, were outraged, especially as it became clear that MGM could well afford to continue to pay its work-force. Albert Hackett, then writing for MGM, recalled that “when they found out what Mr. Mayer did, everybody started to organize. The screen-writers got together and they got into an organization.”³ To avoid the appearance of a union, still somewhat distasteful to professionals, they called their organization the Screen Writers Guild. The producers, in turn, felt betrayed by their relatively coddled writers. They had, they claimed disbelievingly, provided generous wages and extensive creative freedom. High wage scales led Irving Thalberg and other producers to believe that writers would never jeopardize their livelihoods by joining a union. As Thalberg put it, “These writers are living like kings. Why on earth would they want to join a union like coal miners or plumbers?”⁴

Hellman was then on the East Coast and only just beginning the challenging task of writing The Children’s Hour, so she was not involved in the initial West Coast unionization effort. But she was a member of the Authors’ League of America, under whose auspices the campaign initially emerged and which housed the stage playwrights’ Dramatists Guild, to which she also belonged. Among the organizers of the Screen Writers Guild were old friends of Hellman’s and especially of Hammett’s, some of them either members of or sympathetic with the Communist Party. They included John Howard Lawson, and Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, the team that had written the screenplay for Hammett’s Thin Man. Hellman’s friend Dorothy Parker, who worked with Hellman in the organizing campaign, was probably already active in the party. The writers argued that their creativity had been purchased: they had sold their artistic freedom to the producers. They wanted either greater control over the content of their scripts or a share in the profits.

Lillian cut her teeth in the ensuing conflict as she firmly supported writers in their claims against producers. The struggle was painful: striking workers lost their jobs, those sympathetic to the Guild discovered their contracts would not be renewed, and some workers settled for smaller pay reductions. The writers took their case to the newly created National Recovery Administration, claiming a right to organize under section 7a, which mandated recognition of organizations of workers. The producers contended that writers were not employees at all but independent contractors. The writers won this first round, but it was a short victory. Within the year, the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, leaving the producers free to try once again to control them.

By the summer of 1934, Lillian, like all her friends, was flirting with the Communist Party. That winter had witnessed a wave of strikes, some of the most successful led by communists of one stripe or another. To Kober she wrote that she had spent an evening arguing with Mani—Herman Shumlin. “Mani as you know is now an ardent Communist, and being more intelligent than most, sees things more clearly. However there are many things which he also gets confused and dogmatic about and we screamed at each other for several hours.”⁵ Midst the screaming, Hellman struggled to find a place within the turmoil on the left, moving at every step closer to the communism of the 1930s.

The 1935 decision of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) to embrace Popular Front tactics provided an opening. Since 1928, the CPUSA had followed a path dictated by Joseph Stalin’s conviction that the Soviet Union would lead the way to a new worldwide revolutionary moment. The Communist International (Comintern) then ordered the Communist parties of the countries within its orbit to avoid all compromise with socialist, social-democratic, and labor parties that did not strictly follow the communist line. The CPUSA responded by policing its own ranks, expelling those like Jay Lovestone who would not accept Comintern leadership, and turning venomously on those who followed Leon Trotsky’s faith in the possibilities of worldwide revolution. Instead of creating coalitions with former allies in the farmer-labor parties and the various socialist parties, the CPUSA declared all these groups to be enemies and labeled them “social fascists.”⁶ As the Depression deepened and the left grew in influence, factional struggles among left-wing groups grew sharp and deep. Leading American socialists like Norman Thomas and A. J. Muste strongly disagreed that a revolutionary path required adherence to a dogmatic line disseminated by an increasingly paranoid and Stalinist Soviet Union. Some New Deal liberals and reformers toyed with the ideals of communism without following the party line; others strongly believed that bigger government, stronger regulation of banking and industry, and a larger voice for labor would save capitalism. Decrying the sins of fascists and “social fascists” alike, the CPUSA demanded a defense of even the worst delusions of the Soviet Union.

In the summer of 1935, after nearly a decade of attacking anyone who did not fully and completely support Stalin’s Soviet style of communism, the Seventh World Congress of Communist Parties adopted a new Popular Front policy. Convinced that the worst enemy of the Soviet Union was fascism, it called on Communist parties the world over to lead an attack on fascism in all of its forms. To this end, the Comintern called for a change from revolutionary strategies to cooperation and alliance with existing left-wing groups. In the United States, the Communist Party, encouraged by Chairman Earl Browder, led a campaign to reconfigure the image and practice of the CPUSA, turning from virulent antagonism against potential allies on the left to efforts to join with them in antifascist coalitions. From early opposition to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the party lent its support to New Deal programs. Instead of organizing alternative trade union structures, Communists embedded themselves in existing trade unions, particularly those organized under the banner of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). At the same time, the CPUSA adopted the language of democracy, progressivism, and social justice—a language that Hellman had been employing for at least a decade. And it participated in a multifaceted array of coalitions of like-minded people, with or without membership in the party. The effort was captured in the party’s new slogan, “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.” The outcome was Popular Front politics, a term that aptly designates the millions of people then sympathetic to socialism.

The Communist Party’s new appeal immediately manifested itself in dramatic growth. From a pre–Popular Front strength of perhaps 30,000, the party’s membership climbed to close to 100,000 members by 1938. All kinds of people joined, including a large assortment of writers, public intellectuals, and theater figures. Their numbers were enhanced by the party’s growing willingness to countenance dissent in a wide variety of front organizations that supported a range of popular causes and that did not make an issue of the participation of party members. Hellman joined several of these, including the League of Women Shoppers, the League of American Writers, the Anti Fascist League, and the Motion Picture Artists’ Committee. What mattered now was not what party one belonged to or worked with, but how effectively one could join with others to pursue antiracist, antifascist, and trade union activities.⁷

Dashiell Hammett most likely found a home in communism before Hellman did. Flailing a bit after completing The Thin Man, which was to be his last novel, he became increasingly committed to left-wing positions. His letters to his daughter Mary, written in the early fall of 1936 in the midst of FDR’s campaign for a second term as president and in the aftermath of the CPUSA’s turn to Popular Front politics, have the ring of the insider. “There is no truth in the statement that the Communists are supporting Roosevelt,” he wrote to her disingenuously on September 11, “that’s just the old Hearst howl.”⁸

For Hellman, the catalyst might well have been the war in Spain. Both Hellman and Hammett were horrified by the brutal fascist bombardment of what Hellman called “Little Spain.” In 1936, the Spanish elected a Popular Front government that included communists and social democrats among its members. Hellman and her friends watched, paralyzed, as a group of generals led by Francisco Franco and supported by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy attacked a legally elected government. None of the Western democracies—not Britain, not France—would do anything about it. When Franco began his offensive on July 17, 1936, both refused the Spanish government’s request for aid, and, to make matters worse, they, along with the United States, embargoed arms to Spain. Popular Front movements all over Europe came to the government’s defense, as did the Soviet Union.

Both Hellman and Hammett strongly sympathized with Spain. To his daughter Mary, Hammett wrote that losing the war in Spain would be a

great set-back for the cause of working people everywhere. Don’t believe too much of what the papers say: they are largely on the side of the rebels, and so are such Fascist countries as Germany, Italy and Portugal. The truth is that the present Spanish government is far from perfect, but it at least tries to be on the side of the poor people … while its enemies are the sort of people that most of our ancestors came to this country to escape.⁹

Later that fall, he tried to enlist in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American soldiers who fought on the Loyalist side. If legend is to be believed, the Communist Party urged Hammett to remain in the States, where he could usefully serve as a fund-raiser and advocate.¹⁰ He was then perhaps already a member of the Communist Party.

Hellman took longer to decide. Her indecision illuminates the tensions of many thoughtful people in the mid-1930s, sparked perhaps by the dramatic growth of the party itself. Large numbers of liberals, socialists, and communists became vaguely aware in the 1930s of Stalin’s increasingly ruthless methods, of the thousands of people who had starved as a result of his economic policies, and of the thousands more subject to arrest and murder as a result of his growing paranoia. They objected to what seemed to be the growing subservience of the CPUSA to the Comintern in Moscow. In their eyes, the American wing of the party, financially supported by and consistently favorable to Soviet leadership, could not be trusted. These left-wing opponents accused party members of slavish adherence to an evil bureaucracy, of overlooking the anti-democratic methods of the dictatorial Stalinist regime.

Neither Hellman nor Hammett stood among these opponents. Their relationship to the left-wing activities of the thirties was as members of the entertainment community, rather than as intellectuals. Like many others, they believed themselves independent of Soviet influence and capable of thinking for themselves with regard to the direction of U.S. politics. Still, they held the Soviet effort as a model and accepted its leadership. Though they understood, vaguely perhaps, the imperfections of the Soviet Union, they strongly believed in its potential and trusted that communism with a small c could be harnessed to the purposes of democratic and progressive causes. If they heard rumors of purges and deaths, they remained skeptical. This was, after all, a period when rumors flew. In circles like Hellman’s, solidarity in the interests of class politics and international harmony seemed an achievable goal, not to be undermined by factionalism and in-fighting.

Hope and belief in the future guided Hellman’s vision of a nation that could solve problems of class injustice, racism, and poverty. In this she was not unusual. Betsy Blair, a blacklisted actress who was, perhaps ironically, denied membership in the Communist Party because she was married to the famous Gene Kelly, who did not wish to join up, recalled what her left-wing activity meant to her: “It’s like the light that comes from heaven in paintings of saints. We felt such joy believing in the better world that communism would bring, feeling part of the great brotherhood of man. I guess it was a kind of religious ecstasy that we thought would embrace the most deprived and persecuted.”¹¹ Many of Hollywood’s entertainment community and certainly huge numbers of writers and intellectuals shared this hope. For Blair, as for Hellman, the central issue in this period was the search for social justice that the ideal of communism seemed to represent. Only the Soviet Union provided a living example of this ideal, even if it did not fully live up to its promise. And in any event, most believed that the dangers of an aggressive fascism posed a greater threat to democratic practice than the Soviet Union. Blacklisted screenwriter Alvah Bessie, responding to a question about why he joined the party, replied, “Why? I was intellectually convinced that it was the right thing to do, and I thought—as any number of people thought—this was the only organization that was actually fighting Fascism in the world, that was actually fighting unemployment, racial discrimination, national chauvinism.”¹²

In February 1937, depressed by the failure of Days to Come, Hellman returned to Hollywood to work on a film script for Dead End. With one brilliant stage success and one flop behind her, she was not yet a name to be reckoned with, but she was certainly a known quantity. The film adaptation of Children’s Hour, for which she had written the script, had opened to critical acclaim. Her liaison with Dashiell Hammett assured her entrée into all the celebrity circles. And with a lucrative contract in her pocket from Samuel Goldwyn, head of MGM studios, she had enough money to live well without relying on Hammett’s erratic funds. Her timing could not have been better, for the Hollywood scene had taken on its own political furor.

In the aftermath of the unfavorable decisions around their efforts to organize, playwrights and screenwriters briefly called off their campaign. The producers created an alternative organization called the Screen Playwrights, which they insisted their writers join and whose members got preference for jobs. They went so far as to call all SWG leaders communists and to blacklist those who had been active in the SWG. Among those blacklisted was John Howard Lawson, the SWG’s first president. Lawson, who was to be blacklisted again for political reasons in the late forties, called this the first blacklist.¹³ The SWG struggled against the Screen Playwrights for a while, but it could not retain members who had no work. Reluctantly, it dissolved. To all appearances, the Screen Writers Guild had died.

Here was a cause after Hellman’s heart—one in which principle overruled pecuniary interest. By 1936, she ranked among the best paid of Holly-wood’s well-compensated screenwriters. In January she had signed a contract with Samuel Goldwyn, committing herself to adapt five stories (to be selected by Goldwyn) for the screen. Each assignment was expected to take ten weeks, and she would be paid $2,500 a week.¹⁴ Yet like her writer colleagues, she had little control, even over her own work. When it came to adapting the stage version of The Children’s Hour, she grudgingly altered the plot into a heterosexual triangle to satisfy the demands of the movie code and to meet the requirements of the movie moguls who feared that a lesbian theme would not be commercially viable. And she agreed to rename the film These Three to distance it even further from the controversial play.

Hellman readily identified with the demands of the writers for a voice in how credit was distributed and attributed on the screen. The producers believed that, having hired writers for particular tasks, they also owned and controlled the work produced. Hellman and others agreed to a point, but insisted that as artists they deserved credit for their work, distributed according to the proportion of work they had contributed to a picture. Because producers had the authority to move writers around at will or to insist that they work in teams, they could deny any writer ownership of his or her work or attribute it to replacements whose names they wished to promote. This amounted to a kind of censorship because it gave producers complete control not only over words but over who got the credit for them. Like her fellow writers, Hellman wanted to constrain the power of movie producers—to retain at least a modicum of control over how her words were used. To her, the producers’ acts resembled the bullying with which she already identified fascism and that she would soon deplore in the case of the Spanish Civil War. A member of the New York–based Dramatists Guild, the author of a failed play that empathetically depicted factory workers, she became a labor organizer.

Just a few months after the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, Congress passed the Wagner Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This board was charged with supervising union campaigns and monitoring fair elections, free from employer intervention. Now the Screen Writers Guild quietly regrouped.¹⁵ When Hellman returned to Hollywood in the winter of 1937, the SWG had already begun a new organizational campaign. Lillian’s friend Dorothy Parker (already a celebrity) and Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell, immediately became involved. Lillian, who had come west to work on the script for Dead End, joined the cause. She seems to have been quite serious about her trade union commitments, belying accusations that she never took politics seriously. She lectured on “The Stage and Social Problems” for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union on January 21, 1937; along with Dorothy Parker and Hammett, as well as such early activists as Donald Ogden Stewart and John Howard Lawson, she held meetings in her home.¹⁶ With them she handed out leaflets at studio gates, knocked on doors in Hollywood, and buttonholed writers at parties and events. And she was effective. According to Maurice Rapf, whom she recruited to membership in the guild and who had never previously met her, she “was working to sign everybody up for the Guild. She could have asked me to join the local fire-fighters; I would have joined. It didn’t make any difference to me.”¹⁷

Determinedly, this group began to gather the signatures necessary to conduct an NLRB-supervised election, finally coming out into the open in June 1937. Then it elected a new leadership that included communist and noncommunist left-wingers, staunch conservatives and writers who had grown wealthy working for the industry, and hacks who ground out B movies for a weekly wage.¹⁸ Hellman, along with Hammett, was elected to a new board. With the board, she participated in a March 1938 meeting with NLRB executive secretary Nathan Witt to discuss the guild’s capacity to represent the writers. A few months later—on June 7, 1938—the NLRB ruled that screenwriters were employees under the provisions of the Wagner Act and scheduled an election for just three weeks from that date. On June 28, 1938, the SWG roundly defeated the Screen Playwrights to become the screenwriters’ legal representative.

The struggle wasn’t over. Along with Philip Dunne, Charles Brackett, and Donald Ogden Stewart, Hellman became part of the negotiating team that first tried to bring in a contract. But though they had lost the election, the producers were not yet ready to settle. As Dunne recalled, “they pretended to negotiate with us” but they were “full of dirty tricks and evasions.”¹⁹ “The main thing we were interested in,” remembered Dunne, “was that we wanted to determine the screen credit … it was the most important issue for writers … We didn’t want control of the material, because we recognized ourselves as employees, but what we did want was control of credits, because credits meant hiring … so long as the producers could designate who got the credit they controlled the hiring hall.”²⁰ The producers held out for almost three years, settling only after the United States entered World War II. By then Hellman was no longer on the negotiating team, which had shed its communist members. The final contract was a victory of sorts. It called for a minimum wage of $125 per week for all writers as well as minimum periods of employment, and put the guild in control of screen credit.²¹ Hellman played only a bit part in this victory, her own political commitments less relevant to the successful establishment of a guild for screenwriters than her activities in the ensemble.

While the guild negotiated with producers over how to acknowledge the work of writers, it harbored a simmering internal dispute. The producers, eager to discredit the SWG, accused its leadership of communist sympathies. In the period of the Popular Front, when communists and noncommunists often worked together and when attachment to communism was often understood as a search for social justice rather than a commitment to Stalinism, the accusation did little more than roil the waters. To be sure, many who were involved in organizing the SWG were sympathetic to communist goals of racial equality and social justice and opposed to untrammeled capitalism. Some (including John Howard Lawson and Ring Lardner Jr.) were probably members of the CPUSA in 1936 and 1937. Hellman had not yet joined the party.

Increasingly the producers insisted that the issue was as much political as it was economic. Only the producers, they argued, could adequately police political content in order to diffuse the influence of communism that crept into the language of writers. This seemed farfetched to experienced writers like Albert Hackett (who early served on the SWG steering committee). “Mr. Mayer,” he concluded after reflecting on the emergence of the left in the movie industry, “really is the cause of all the communism in Hollywood.”²² In his view, the source of the problem was Mayer’s heavy-handed insistence on controlling both wages and credits for writers, denying them ownership of their work or any element of creativity. John Howard Lawson agreed. Himself a member of the Communist Party by the mid-1930s, he confirmed Hackett’s sense that “nobody was ever suspicious about our slipping anything into the pictures.”²³ Even later in the decade, most denizens of Hollywood still insisted on the distinction between party membership and Marxist convictions. When screenwriter Allen Boretz, a party member, glimpsed Dashiell Hammett at a meeting in 1937, he noted that he “stood in a corner and said very little … It was a Marxist study group,” he emphasized. “These were not yet Communists, if they ever did become Communists.”²⁴

To the outside world, however, this was a distinction without a difference. Association with communists, such as existed in many trade union groups in the Popular Front period, seemed to be evidence of subjection to communist dogma. Fearful that communism and membership in the CPUSA amounted to the same thing, insistent that loyalty to the CPUSA involved taking orders from Moscow, and conceiving those orders to be mandatory and therefore an abrogation of the free will and free thought essential to a democratic society, those suspicious of the left, including the producers, accused writers of acting as foils of the Communist Party. Producers pointed to the League of American Writers (a front organization founded in 1935) and its creation of the School for American Writers in 1940, where some of the leading left-wing screenwriters (including Lawson and Stewart, Paul Jarrico, and Michael Blankfort, but not Hellman) taught. By hurling accusations of communism, producers hoped to divide the writers, to discourage uncommitted writers from joining the union, and perhaps to discredit the union altogether. Inadvertently, they created a political whirlwind of sorts when state and federal legislatures took a hand in the situation—setting up committees to explore communist influence in the entertainment industry.

On the very same day—June 7, 1938—that the National Labor Relations Board ruled that screenwriters could organize, the U.S. House of Representatives resolved to form a new committee—the House Committee on Un-American Activities—under the leadership of Texas congressman Martin Dies. Modeled after an already existing California committee headed by Jack Tenney that had weighed in on the side of the producers, the committee took it upon itself to “inquire into the realm of political thought, affiliation, and association” of everyone in the industry.²⁵ Tenaciously, the committee, better known as HUAC, called upon members of the many front groups that now appeared in Hollywood to testify as to whether they were or were not party members. Hellman was not called.

The producers now had an ally, and the writers a larger concern. The Dies Committee called on members of the SWG and its parent organization, the League of American Writers, to defend themselves against charges of communist leadership.²⁶ Their efforts were buttressed a year later by the passage of the Smith Act, which prohibited the dissemination of ideas and the distribution of literature that sought to overthrow the U.S. government. This, thought Hellman, marked the moment when the United States officially declared war against communist ideas inside and outside the Communist Party. And yet bitterly as Hellman felt about the act’s prohibition against advocacy of communist ideas and its chilling effects on the ability of writers to speak their minds, she and other party members would cheer when, in 1943, the Smith Act was used to investigate Trotskyists.²⁷ Even when the Second World War came and the United States allied itself with the Soviet Union, both the SWG and the League of American Writers remained targets of suspicion. And when the two organizations joined forces to sponsor a fifth annual Writers Congress in 1943, the Dies Committee condemned the effort by the Congress to allow writers to say what they wanted as “a plot by communists to take over the industry.”²⁸ Fearing destruction, the Screen Writers Guild began to purge its leadership of known communists. Hellman remained a member and staunch supporter of the organization but did not again assume a leadership position.

While the campaign to unionize screenwriters unfolded, Hellman found herself increasingly involved in the debate over the Spanish Civil War. Under the auspices of left-wing groups including the Communist Party, sympathetic individuals everywhere volunteered to fight on the government’s side in an international brigade. By the fall of 1936, American volunteers, organized into what was called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, were already on their way to Spain. Additional numbers of young men and women joined the cause of the Republican Loyalists as ambulance drivers and reporters. The war took a complicated turn in early 1937 when the Republican Loyalists turned to the Soviet Union for help, which was quickly granted. As Soviet money and influence escalated, government defenders found themselves helpless to resist a disastrous and divisive Soviet effort to exert leadership over all the Spanish Republican forces. Anarchist and socialist members faced off against the Soviet-led communists, leaving Republican Loyalist fighters in disarray. American and non-Soviet partisans found themselves not only fighting Franco but torn apart by Soviet attacks on those who resisted their leadership. What was an American to do?

In the early fall of 1936, while confusion reigned, antifascists of all stripes tried to provoke some sort of intervention by the United States. Hellman, her heart clearly with the Spanish Republican Loyalists but her head deeply involved with the production of Days to Come, stayed on the sidelines. Hammett wrote long letters to his teenage daughter Mary to try to explain why he supported the Republican cause. The Spanish Civil War had started, he told her, when a triumvirate of wealthy landowners persuaded the army to overthrow the elected government (only two of whose twelve members were communists). “They decided to buy a revolution,” he wrote, and then followed this assertion with advice to “be in favor of what’s good for the workers and against what isn’t. Follow that and you may not be the most brilliant person in the world, but you’ll at least be able to hold your head up when you look at yourself in the mirror.”²⁹

Then film producer Joris Ivens approached Hellman for money to make a documentary film about the war. This was to be the beginning of Hellman’s lifetime commitment on behalf of the Republican Loyalists and wartime refugees. Hellman joined with Dorothy Parker, Herman Shumlin, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, and others to found a group called Contemporary Historians. Together they raised $3,000 to send Ivens to Spain, and they put together a script he could use to guide his filmmaking. But Ivens abandoned the script as soon as he arrived in Spain and followed his instincts and opportunities instead. The film that emerged that spring as The Spanish Earth had a narrative written by Ernest Hemingway (whom Ivens had met in Spain) with a little help from John Dos Passos. Marc Blitzstein (Hellman’s friend and the acclaimed composer of The Cradle Will Rock) and Virgil Thomson compiled a score made up of indigenous Spanish music.

The film was never intended to be dispassionate. Joris Ivens viewed it as a fund-raising vehicle for the Republican Loyalist side, and when Hellman first saw it, on July 10, 1937, she was in Hollywood at such a fund-raiser. Hellman was uncomfortable: she had wanted more “facts,” she said; she would have preferred a film more outspokenly condemnatory of fascism.³⁰ Other viewers responded more sympathetically. At its first showing, Hemingway made a pitch for money and raised $20,000 for ambulances in Spain. Legend has it that Hammett contributed the first $1,000. Later in the summer, President Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt invited Hemingway, his partner, Martha Gellhorn, Joris Ivens, and others to a special showing at the White House. Eleanor wrote favorably about the film and the war in her column. And in surprising concord, after the film’s release in August, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the New Masses, and the Daily Worker all reviewed it favorably.

On August 25, just six weeks after the viewing and only a day after the release of the successful film Dead End (on whose script she had worked during the spring), Hellman set off with Alan Campbell and Dottie Parker for an extended trip to Europe. Arriving first in Paris, she left after several weeks to travel through Berlin to attend a theater festival in Moscow. This was the trip on which she may or may not have encountered her old friend Julia (about which more later); it was also her first personal encounter with Soviet communism. She stayed in Moscow only a few days, then returned to Paris through Helsinki. Tired from several weeks of traveling, she was prepared to rest.

Otto Katz intervened. Katz (a man with twenty-one aliases, known to Hellman at the time as Rudolph Breda and later as Otto Simon) was a handsome and dashing Czech-born and German-educated journalist with a reputation for charming women. Some think that he and Hellman had a passionate affair when they met, first in Hollywood in early 1937 and again in Paris. A dedicated communist, loyal to the Comintern, Katz was then engaged in encouraging celebrities to speak out against fascism. He would later serve as a press attaché for the Spanish Republican government.³¹ At dinner in Paris, he talked Lillian into going to Spain. He probably didn’t have to try very hard. Jim Lardner also influenced her. He was the brother of her old Screen Writers Guild colleague Ring Lardner Jr., who would later be indicted for refusing to testify as to his communist connections. Dottie Parker and Alan Campbell, who had just returned from Spain, may have played a role as well. With so many people encouraging her, she could hardly refuse to go. “I had strong convictions about the Spanish war, about Fascism-Nazism, strong enough to push just below the surface my fear of the danger of war,” she later wrote.³²

The trip became an important turning point in her life. As was her style, she focused on the human side of the war, neglecting larger political meanings in deference to its poignant and destructive effects on ordinary people. In one trip across the country, she wrote, she encountered a kind farm family who fed her out of their meager stores. They had taken in a refugee from Madrid, a woman who recognized that Hellman’s bleached-blonde hair would soon need color. In the midst of her misery, she recommended that Hellman go and look up her cousin when she arrived in Madrid: “She works good on the hair. Tell her I send you, tell her I didn’t have the baby. Tell her to put soap in the bleach and do a good job.”³³ The gesture touched Hellman’s heart, as did the defenselessness of most ordinary people. She described a bombardment in Madrid that terrified the population the evening before she left. “In a kitchen back of my hotel, a blind woman was holding the bowl of soup that she came to get each night. She was killed eating the bowl of soup.”³⁴ The episode confirmed her sense of fascism as the fountain of brutality and the refuge of bullies. “Finding the range on a blind woman eating a bowl of soup,” she concluded sarcastically, “is a fine job for a man.”³⁵

Spanish Loyalists and their international-brigade allies, in contrast, were doing noble work. “I came to Spain because I was puzzled,” Hellman insisted. “I had been taught in school that it was the right of every man to decide the form of his own life, and the form of the government that was to rule that life. I believed that. I believed that hard.”³⁶ Hellman expressed similar feelings in a piece she wrote on her return. Intended for national distribution, it was turned down by an important newspaper syndicate and published in the liberal weekly the New Republic. In it, she recalled a day of bombing in Valencia and the feelings evoked by the wounded members of the international brigades that had defended it. “They had come,” she wrote after she returned home, “because they thought that if a man believed in democracy he ought to do something about it … I prayed, for the first time in many years, that they would get what they wanted.”³⁷

In a fury against the fascists, she neither saw nor registered the dangers of the divisive Soviet policy. Did this make her a dupe—an ideological fellow traveler with no mind of her own? Why didn’t she, unlike George Orwell or John Dos Passos, see the danger at hand? Did the wish to defeat the fascists blind her, as it did many noncommunists as well as communist partisans of the Spanish Republic? Neither Hemingway nor Dorothy Parker nor hundreds of survivors of the international brigades condemned a destructive Comintern policy that turned weapons against its own allies. Left-wing journalist Isadore Feinstein—also known as I. F. Stone—faced the same dilemma and remembered the confusion. Even as he knew that socialist, anarchist, and dissident communist soldiers were being attacked and killed by the pro-Soviet side, he remarked, “We knew there were anguished choices … we didn’t know what to do.”³⁸

Whatever her initial motives for going to Spain, Hellman invested herself in the morality of the Republican cause. She recalled the courage of the Spanish under bombardment with deference and respect. She remembered the wartime privation with horror. After she returned to Paris, she could no longer tolerate what seemed to her a meaningless social round. She escaped to London, where, she tells us, she spent weeks, hobbled by a broken ankle, reading Marx, Engels, and other left-wing literature for the first time. Afterward she reflected on her experience in the simple language of the newly committed. “The Spanish are a gentle people and patient,” she wrote a few months after her return.

It had taken them a long time to declare … that there was something wrong with a world which allowed a king to have more racing cars than he could use, more pheasant to shoot at than he could eat, when their own children walked without shoes and ate without bread. They wanted, as all people of dignity will always want, a chance to work and to live and to be happy. That was the future they wanted, and that was the future they thought they were making.³⁹

Within months after her return to the United States, Hellman and other single-minded antifascists found themselves embroiled in disputes with American communists deeply critical of Stalin’s ruthless efforts to take control of opposition to Franco. The split ran deep, but despite evidence of vicious Soviet intervention, Hellman insisted on continuing to support the Republican cause as though it were still unified. She lauded the elemental courage of Spanish citizens and castigated the American press for its refusal to weigh in against the forces of fascism. An angry diatribe she wrote in the summer of 1938, published in the New York Post, captured the strength of her feelings. There, she attacked a New York Times correspondent who reported that American prisoners (probably largely communists) were “simply chronic bellyachers.”⁴⁰ The New York Times, she suggested sardonically, chose to print dispatches of this “very naïve journalist” in preference to those of a “brilliant and daring” reporter already on the scene because it feared attention to its Jewish ownership. “Every Jew must be an anti-Fascist to be either a good Jew or a good American,” she concluded.

The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 in a victory for Franco. Hellman never forgot the international and American soldiers who had been maimed and wounded in Spain. She engaged in fund-raising for them and for the Spanish men, women, and children who fled after Franco proved triumphant. Already a supporter of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which had been started by her friend Dorothy Parker in 1936, she helped to found the Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain in the battle against fascism. In 1939, this group helped to launch the Hollywood section of the Joint Anti Fascist Refugee Committee, under whose auspices the Spanish Refugee Appeal was formed. Hellman was honored by this group early in 1945 for her tireless fund-raising efforts “in the name of the thousands of Spanish refugees throughout the world.”⁴¹ A few years later she agreed to publish a short piece in Alvah Bessie’s collection about the war, The Heart of Spain. When the book appeared without a contribution from Ernest Hemingway, she excoriated Bessie for the omission. “If I had known of your censorship of Hemingway,” she wrote, “I would not have allowed you to include me in the anthology.” She continued by condemning “the self-righteous conviction that censorship is fine if one side practices it, and evil if another side plays the same game.”⁴²

1938: She never forgot the members of the international brigade who had been maimed and wounded in Spain. (New York University Tamiment Library)

Decades later, long after the Soviets had abandoned all interest in Spain, when the war had receded from memory and her own credibility was under attack, Hellman remained a staunch contributor to Spanish refugees. For most of this time she supported a group that favored refugees who had fought with and for the communist side. But after 1969, she agreed to let her name appear on the letterhead as a “sponsor” of Spanish Refugee Aid. That organization was founded by members of the non-communist left to provide help to “the displaced, disabled, hungry, sick, weary Spanish refugees” who had been chased out by Franco’s government and abandoned even by the United Nations’ Refugee Relief Association because the UN had recognized Franco. It helped everyone exceptthose who had fought with the communists. In the spring of 1978, Hellman came under attack for her putative former and continuing Stalinism. In one of those illuminating footnotes to history, Mary McCarthy threatened to resign from the board if Hellman’s name was not removed. In the end the board held fast. Despite other disagreements with Hellman’s politics, most of its members never doubted Hellman’s commitment to all those who fought for a free and democratic Spain.⁴³

Whatever their political differences over the factional fights in Spain and the centrality of the Soviet Union in their politics, whatever their party affiliations, Hellman and her friends could unite over their hatred of fascism. We can watch that hatred build over the course of the 1930s, from Hellman’s political awakening during her 1929 stay in Bonn to her increasing use of the language of antifascism and democracy in the early 1930s. It emerges clearly in Days to Come as well as in the film script for Dead End. We note her disappointed response to the weak antifascist language of The Spanish Earth. Her extended European visit in the fall of 1937, and particularly the attacks on civilians in Spain, confirmed all her worst suspicions.⁴⁴ Fascism relied on the mindless exercise of power. Democracy, in contrast, counted on the individual’s capacity to express his or her own thoughts, to govern his or her own direction.

But it would be a mistake to see Hellman’s commitment to the left, and particularly her relationship to the Communist Party, as merely transitory exercises directed at defeating fascism. It would be equally misguided to imagine that she espoused antifascism to obscure her sympathy for communism: as a vehicle aimed at change without the language of revolution. Rather, in the context of the moment, these commitments converged. Antifascism was one of many reasons to join the Communist Party. In 1936 and 1937, the heyday of the Popular Front and the moment when the New Deal seemed to be veering leftward, Hellman found in a broadly defined socialism the value system she held dear. In the Communist Party, to which Hammett probably already belonged, she saw the opportunity to oppose fascism and construct a political path for socialism. Her friends Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, Marc Blitzstein, Herman Shumlin, and many of her acquaintances were already members. The question was not why did she join the party, but how could she not have joined?

Her writing in this period, particularly The Little Foxes, embodies the critique of capitalism that party membership implied. By some interpretations, that play, which opened in February 1939, spells out the power of greed to corrupt even the most intimate relationships in the family. Capitalism, The Little Foxes seems to be saying, can destroy even the most intimate relationships. The play’s success, the power of its message, and its resonance with American audiences speak to the mood of a country still enmeshed in economic depression. And yet like many of her plays, The Little Foxes was consistent with some of the favorite themes of American communists without following them mindlessly or even closely. The Daily Worker, the organ of the Communist Party, admired the play on the whole, but critic Milton Meltzer objected to the film version for placing the character of the family (“they’re terrible because it’s in their nature”) at the film’s center. If only, he lamented, “The Little Foxes had been able to show more directly the necessity under a competitive economic system for the dog-eat-dog of people out to make good by this same society’s standards. It would have reached even greater stature.”⁴⁵ Perhaps ironically, The Little Foxes made Hellman rich, providing her not only with enough money to buy her beloved Hardscrabble Farm in Pleasantville, New York, but with the celebrity to make her a valuable asset to what can only be called “front” causes.

By some accounts Hellman was already in the party by 1937. Louis Budenz—a notoriously unreliable FBI informant—told the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1950 that he had learned about her membership when he joined the party that year. He had, he wrote, been “officially advised” that she continued to be a member until 1945.⁴⁶ Martin Berkeley claims to have spotted her at a meeting in Hollywood in the summer of 1937. Perhaps so. She was, that summer, briefly in Hollywood for a screening and fund-raiser for The Spanish Earth, which had not yet been formally released. And her presence at a meeting suggests the kind of serious interest in the party that she often claimed. In November, after her trips to Moscow and to Spain, when she retreated to London to recover her stability she says she sat down to immerse herself in Marx and Engels. Perhaps the point is not worth debating. If she wasn’t already in the party in 1937, she was certainly drawn to it by multiple strands. But then so was everyone else she knew.

By her own account, Hellman joined the party in 1938 “with little thought as to the serious step I was taking.” In a statement she drew up in 1952, she tells us that she remained “a not very active” member until late in 1940 when she stopped attending meetings and “severed all connections with the party.”⁴⁷ Despite her later protests, Hellman seems to have been a pretty loyal trooper during her two years of party membership. Her name appears often, in a variety of front organizations and in some that would have been unusual for her. For example, it doesn’t surprise us to see it among the sponsors of the National Committee for People’s Rights, July 13, 1938. Nor do we blink when we see it among the sponsors of the Foster Parents’ Plan for Children in Spain, October 31, 1938, or the signators of the Coordinating Committee to Lift the Embargo. But what is she doing in the League of Women Shoppers (of which she became a vice president in 1938 and in which she seems to have remained active until at least July 1941)? Why, for the first time, did she contribute an essay to the New Masses, in October 1938? And why, though she was by now immersed in the Screen Writers Guild unionizing campaign, did she agree to chair the Sponsors’ Committee of the United Office and Professional Workers of America, Local 16, Fifth Annual Stenographers’ Ball? That she was drawing closer to the Communist Party constitutes the best explanation for all these activities.

Hellman’s increasing commitments to a variety of Popular Front groups suggest a significant incidence of involvement with the CPUSA during the heady late 1930s. They also tell us something about how, after-ward, people like Hellman came to camouflage both the memory of their membership and its nature. Some say that she continued to be a “concealed” member well after 1941. Her celebrity status might have made her more valuable in that role. And yet Hellman’s outspokenness in defense of Soviet causes during the war years suggests that concealment would have served little purpose. Hellman neither hid her support for the Soviet Union nor allowed herself to turn into a mindless follower.

If Hellman’s dates are accurate, then she joined the CPUSA after the worst of the Moscow purge trials and in full awareness of them. Not only had she been in Moscow while they were going on, but she had returned to a United States where the press fully covered them. Consistent with the party line, Hellman remained silent during the trials; she did not (as some factions on the left did) question their validity nor query Stalin’s motives for condemning hundreds of high-level officials and army officers to death. Instead, in April 1938, a few months after her return and around the time that she apparently joined the party, Hellman, along with 150 other artists, writers, and scientists, signed a letter declaring their faith in the guilt of the defendants and accepting the trials as necessary to preserve progressive democracy in the Soviet Union.⁴⁸ The act allied her with the Stalinist wing of the Communist Party and helps to explain why the label stuck to her until she died.

Did Hellman really believe that Stalin needed to summarily eliminate thousands of people whom he suddenly declared to be enemies of the state? Or—what is more likely—was her willingness to sign this letter, circulated in the first flush of her party membership, an effort to demonstrate that she could be loyal to a party line? Was not the CPUSA the most vociferous defender of racial equality and the most consistent supporter of her union, the Screen Writers Guild? Did she sign because she wanted to stop the spread of fascism at all costs? Did she, like many others, rationalize Stalin’s efforts to cover up his crimes out of despair over the continuing inroads of fascism? After all, she and many others saw the Soviet Union as the most consistent opponent of fascism in Germany and Italy. Or could it be that, as she confessed to her goddaughter, Catherine Kober Zeller, many years later, she simply had not seen the full spectrum of Stalin’s sins?⁴⁹ In the sharp glare of history, neither the act of signing that letter nor her failure to repudiate the document thereafter is defensible. But by the dim light of the 1930s, both acts are understandable.⁵⁰

The most plausible explanation for Hellman’s defense of the Moscow Trials at the time lies in her despair over the continuing inroads of fascism. The months before she signed that letter had been disastrous for the antifascist cause. In March, Germany had incorporated Austria into a province of the Nazi state. By April it had become clear that the Spanish Republican Loyalists (faced with the adamant refusal of European and American democracies to ship arms to them) would go down to defeat. Such pressures influenced many defenders of the Moscow Trials. Nathaniel Weyl, who had joined the CPUSA in 1930, commented on his own response: “My wife and I had read the official transcript of the trials, and concluded that the accused men had been judicially murdered. However, we thought that the communist movement was the most powerful world force against Nazism, and therefore, that we should not join the public critics of Stalin.”⁵¹

Even after the letter appeared, international events continued to go downhill. On September 29, Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, which turned over part of Czechoslovakia to Germany. And in November, the destruction of Jewish property during Kristallnacht signaled a newly vicious phase of the Reich’s attack against Jews. Faced with an isolationist spirit in the United States—Time magazine had just been accused by some members of its own staff of espousing fascist sympathies—it made sense for people like Hellman and Hammett to join with their friends to try to consolidate their forces against fascism. On November 17, 1938, a group of thirty-six prominent authors, including Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, called on President Roosevelt to stop trading with Germany. Not long after, well-known communist and noncommunist figures like Richard Wright, Harold Clurman, Lester Cole, Jerome Davis, and Malcolm Cowley joined together with many others to call for a cessation of attacks against the Soviet Union.⁵²

On the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and because it promised to stem the fascist tide, the CPUSA grew apace. Indeed, the antifascist cause often flowed into that of communism. Sam Jaffe, Hollywood agent and producer and a great admirer of Lillian Hellman’s, recalled attending a meeting of the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1930s. After he, his wife, and their friend Oscar Hammerstein left, they turned to each other and said, “‘My God, this was a Communist meeting.’ It was a cover-up. We were in a Communist meeting. But it was labeled Anti-Nazi League. Well, sure they were Anti-Nazi, but it was strictly a Communist meeting … It was Anti-Nazi, true, but it was Communist propaganda that they were propagating.”⁵³

The antifascist cause (like every good cause in this Popular Front period) attracted Jews, intellectuals, and champions of liberty of all kinds as well as Communists into its fold. But the coalitions often surprised even close friends, setting off bitter recriminations and factional fights. For all their hatred of Hitler, many on the left, including Trotskyists and other anti-Stalinist communists, rebelled against associating with members of the CPUSA who refused to acknowledge the horrors of the bloody purges of the 1930s. To these opponents of Stalin, whipping up a frenzy against fascism seemed merely a ploy to cover up the evils of Stalinist communism. Then and later they wanted Stalinism acknowledged for the evil it was. Still there were others to whom it made not a whit of difference who was energized in the fight against fascism as long as the fight was won. Hellman probably belongs in this group. The evidence suggests a trajectory that reflects the difficult moral choices that she and many other intellectuals and creative artists of her day faced. She had moved from a generic and unformed concern for democracy and liberty to a hatred of fascist bullies, and then to membership in the CPUSA. In the crucial years at the end of the thirties, she and many others believed that victory over fascism required loyalty to the party. Still, her decision to join and to remain in the party would haunt her for decades after.

The Soviet pact with Germany, signed in the summer of 1939, opened a chasm on the left. Two weeks after the pact was signed, Germany invaded Poland, setting off the Second World War. A wartime atmosphere enveloped the United States, posing for many the question of whether the United States should remain neutral or whether it should join the war to help its traditional allies—Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium—fend off the German assault. The war turned intellectuals and artists on the left, people who had been friends and allies, into instant enemies. Some argued that the Soviet Union signed the pact to buy time to build up its defenses. On these grounds, they abandoned their earlier support of action against Germany and advocated for peace. Others insisted that a neutral position meant giving up the fight against fascism. Particularly for Jews who were aware of the laws that isolated their coreligionists and deprived them of jobs, freedom, and food, choosing sides must have been torturous.

Hellman sided with the Soviets. Her long history of antifascist work notwithstanding, she did not withdraw from the Communist Party. In what perhaps constitutes the most persuasive evidence of her party loyalty, she did not condemn the Soviet Union’s ruthless betrayal of its own principles and its callous division of Polish territory with the Germans. For her, the argument that the Soviets needed to buy time to build up their strength proved persuasive. A few weeks after the start of the war, in October 1939, the Soviets invaded Finland, accusing its leaders of harboring fascist sympathies. In solidarity with the Finns, much of the Broadway theater community turned its productions into benefit performances to raise money for Finnish resistance. Such benefits were not uncommon; Hellman had previously supported them for Spanish War Relief. Now, however, when Tallulah Bankhead, the star of The Little Foxes, pressed Hellman to do the same for Finland, Hellman refused. The story has often been used to demonstrate Hellman’s adherence to the communist party line during this period. That interpretation is supported by a statement she made at the time. She feared, she told a reporter, that such a benefit “would give dangerous impetus to war spirit in this country.”⁵⁴

Later she told a different story, one that depicted the disagreement as based on personal animus. Bankhead had earlier refused to perform a benefit for Spanish Republican fighters who needed money to get out of a Spain then falling to Franco.⁵⁵ Hellman, who had passed through Helsinki in 1937 and noted the posters and rallies in support of Hitler, had little sympathy for the Finns. Along with her like-minded producer Herman Shumlin, she was not inclined to raise money for what she considered a country with fascist sympathies. Angry with Bankhead for denying her an opportunity to raise funds for Spain, she simply took her revenge. Hellman claimed that Bankhead turned “what had been no more than a theatre fight … into a political attack: it was made to seem that we agreed with the invasion of Finland, refused aid to true democrats, were, ourselves, dangerous Communists.” She claimed to be a victim: “It was my first experience of such goings-on.”⁵⁶

It is difficult to believe that Hellman did not invent the second story to justify her behavior after the fact, and yet she did not mindlessly support the party line. She would later write of the German alliance with Russia: “While I believed that the Soviet Union’s disillusionment with Munich in 1938 afforded some justification for the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, I wholly disagreed with the position of the Communist Party in its glorification of Nazism.”⁵⁷ Two projects in which she was then engaged illustrate this complicated position: PM magazine and her antifascist play Watch on the Rhine. Together, they reveal something of her unconventional intellectual stance.

Ralph Ingersoll, Lillian’s old friend and sometime lover, planned to develop a new daily newspaper intended to serve truth “whether the truth takes us to the right or to the left.” Ingersoll claimed to have been inspired to produce PM by Lillian herself and gave her credit for the name. As the story goes, Ingersoll, the distinguished editor of Fortune magazine and soon to become general manager of Time, Inc., fell into a passionate romance with Hellman that lasted through the summer and fall of 1935. When Lillian, in the presence of Dashiell Hammett, mocked him once too often for being under the thumb of the corporation’s owner, Henry Luce, Ingersoll vowed to prove his manhood by creating a publication of his own.⁵⁸

By the fall of 1939, Ingersoll was ready to start the newspaper, whose credo he succinctly described in one of many drafts of his “Proposition to Create a New Newspaper” as “against people who push other people around.” Talented writers of all kinds would write for it, he believed, because “only here can they write honestly what they know and see.”⁵⁹ This would be possible because PM would not be dependent on advertising. Rather it would be supported, at five cents a copy, by the “subway rider.” He proved to be partially right. Launched with the help of funding from a large advisory board and particularly from the department store heir Marshall Field (whose wife, Ruth, was a good friend of Lillian’s), Ingersoll produced an afternoon newspaper whose circulation reached nearly two hundred thousand daily.

To get PM going and to hire its staff, Ingersoll placed on its planning committee a range of intellectuals who included Hellman and Hammett, both of them by now understood to be members of the Communist Party. Together they hired a young staff, some of them communists. Others, like Ingersoll himself and the journalist I. F. Stone, were committed to noncommunist antifascist politics. The staff also included liberals who despised the Soviet Union. Among these, the news reporter James Wechsler stood out. Ingersoll deployed his talent effectively, insisting that everyone had to work together and that the paper would publish only independent thought. Communists were fine; single-minded followers of the party line would be rejected. Not everyone believed him.

For a while the paper worked beautifully. PM was apparently read in the White House. Avidly antifascist, President Roosevelt and Eleanor used the paper to create support for interventionist policies and to construct sympathy for the refugees of fascism. Both Hammett and Hellman devoted time and attention to it in 1940 and 1941. FDR invited Ingersoll to the White House to consult with him about policy and politics. Despite widespread accusations of sympathy with communism, Ingersoll successfully laughed off any taint of Communist Party influence.

Yet the several pieces that Hellman wrote for PM during its short eight-year life span reveal how awkwardly even the most talented writers responded to the injunction to independent thought. Hellman, still drawn to communism in the years of the Nazi-Soviet pact, would not defend either the Soviet Union or the Germans, and yet she demonstrated an unrelenting cynicism with regard to American democracy. Sent to Philadelphia to cover the Republican national convention of 1940, she soon left the convention hall, frustrated by the apparent deal-making that undergirded the process of selecting a president. On the street, she buttonholed “three white men and two black men” to ask them “whether they thought Mr. Roosevelt might run again, or who did they think the Republicans would pick for a candidate.” Unconvincingly she reported that one after the other refused to speak to her. A taxi driver told her “he had been instructed not to talk about politics, the war, or the state of the nation.” Another replied to her questions by telling her, “We don’t think around here much. It’s too hot to think.” Yet a third replied that he “didn’t have any ideas, sometimes it wasn’t smart to have ideas.” She concluded, in what can only be interpreted as an obvious projection, that they were “too suspicious and too tired and too frightened to exercise their primary right of free and easy speech.”⁶⁰

About this time, Lillian Hellman came to the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Their files on her, numbering close to a thousand pages, start in 1941 and, with sporadic breaks, follow her into the 1970s.⁶¹ Hellman seems not to have been aware of the surveillance—and yet this too is part of the American twentieth century. The bureau searched its inventory and newspaper databases back to 1936 to compile evidence of her association with left-wing groups.

Hellman was growing impatient. The Nazi-Soviet pact had effectively, if only momentarily, curtailed the Communist Party’s criticism of fascism. But Hellman was not to be silenced. She had always defended the right to speak freely, and, whatever the Soviet line, she would speak up now. Swiftly, she sat down to pen Watch on the Rhine, the only play she ever wrote, she tells us, that flowed from her pen in a single draft. The play eloquently celebrated “men willing to die for what they believed in.”⁶² In so doing, it implicitly condemned Soviet efforts to convince Americans to remain out of the war then spreading across Europe, and it appealed for engagement with a fascist enemy. Inaction, Watch on the Rhine seemed to warn, would stifle freedom everywhere. Hellman had no need to name Germans as the enemy in the play; a German villain who drew on the German embassy for support made its targets clear. She preferred, she would later say, to speak to the issue of sticking by one’s convictions.

The communist press predictably attacked the play. As it had taken issue with The Little Foxes for being too easy on capitalists, now it condemned Watch on the Rhine for its “fabric of omissions.” Why, wondered communist critics, did the play fail to illuminate the economic ills that provoked the rise of fascism? Alvah Bessie, writing in the New Masses, deplored the play’s lack of sensitivity. Instead of “trying to whip or cajole us into imperialist war against the fascists,” Bessie commented, “Hellman might have used her skills to promote the world-wide organization by the working people against their separate home-grown brands of fascism.”⁶³

Nine weeks after the play opened in April 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. The alliance of fascism and communism was over. The west joined with the communists to defeat fascism. Dashiell Hammett settled in at Hardscrabble Farm to write the screen version of Watch on the Rhine. Hellman became a darling of the communist press. Simultaneously, she earned a treasured invitation to both supper at the White House and a command performance of her play on January 25, 1942. There, as she remembers it, President Roosevelt inquired about the provenance of the play and, when she told him she had started it in the summer of 1940, asked her how she reconciled the play with rumors that she had supported communist pickets then opposed to U.S. entry into the war. Hellman denied that she had ever supported the pickets.⁶⁴

By the time she dined at the White House in January 1942, Hellman had probably already withdrawn from the CPUSA. But before and after she withdrew, she joined an astonishing array of antifascist organizations. She remained active in the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign and in the Hollywood Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. If the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade sponsored a fund drive to aid wounded volunteers, Hellman’s name appeared on the invitation. If the American Friends of Spanish Democracy held a dinner, Hellman gave a talk. She joined the American League for Peace and Democracy—an organization of mixed provenance formed in August 1939 to sponsor refugee scholarships and to campaign for peace.⁶⁵ She helped to found the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, whose first act (on January 17, 1940) was to circulate a petition to discontinue the Dies Committee. To the FBI, Hellman’s name on a group’s membership list affirmed the presence of communists and earned the group the label of a “front” organization.

But Hellman seemed to care little about whether a particular group bore the communist imprimatur at any given time. After the United States entered the war, she raised money for Russian war relief; she lent her name to the Artists’ Front to Win the War (sponsor, October 1942); she signed petitions circulated by the League of American Writers to open a second front (in September 1942); she sponsored a call for the Congress of American-Soviet Friendship, November 6 to 8, 1943. She cheered when the Dies Committee suspended its investigations and cooperated happily when the federal government asked Hollywood producers to make films that encouraged sympathy for a Soviet Union under fire. At a moment when the United States and the Soviet Union fought on the same side, Hellman’s American patriotism and continuing admiration for the Soviet Union blended smoothly. Throughout the war years, she retained a warm sympathy for those who struggled for democratic rights, a high regard for the people of the Soviet Union, and a growing commitment to issues of world peace. If she became instrumental in Popular Front activities, she was never a party liner, never an ideologue.

While the United States and the Soviet Union were friends, Hellman could do what she could not bring herself to do when the party was under attack. She could comfortably withdraw from the party, though not from her deep antifascist and antiracist commitments, without feeling that she had somehow betrayed her friends. Perverse as this behavior may seem, it speaks to the code of loyalty that Hellman maintained consistently thereafter, and especially in the years of the Cold War. She could not hit a person, nor attack a friend, when he was down. True to form, as the war drew to a close and suspicions against the Soviet Union’s postwar intentions mounted, she joined the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship and later served on its women’s committee. But she did not care for the party, did not like being under its discipline, did not follow a line. She refused always to betray friends who remained within the Communist Party orbit, and she never wavered in her admiration for the Soviet people. Most of all she resisted the efforts of government “bullies” to deny her right to think about communism in any way that suited her. In what is perhaps the most backhanded of compliments, one of the FBI reports on her commented that its sources indicated that “Lillian Hellman is one of the few Communists or Communist sympathizers who will discuss Communism openly and honestly.”⁶⁶

At the same time she became deeply committed to exorcising racism within the United States in this time of war. When Paul Robeson, who was probably a member of the Communist Party at this point, persuaded a Council on African Affairs meeting on April 8, 1942, to adopt a resolution advocating the end of discrimination in the armed forces and government services, Hellman joined him on the podium. This turned out to be only one of many fund-raising affairs in which Robeson and Hellman were associated. And it turned out to be one of several issues championed by Eleanor Roosevelt as well as by the Communist Party.⁶⁷ At the end of that month, she and Hammett traveled to Hollywood, where Hellman wrote a short script for an armed-forces documentary called The Negro Soldier. Hellman aimed for a film that debated what were then called Negro rights. The forty-minute short that ultimately emerged in 1944 was not the ringing plea for white and black unity against discrimination that Hellman imagined. Rather, director Stuart Heister produced an upbeat documentary showing the contributions of African-Americans to the armed services over time. It had no relationship to the film Hellman wanted, and neither her name or Robeson’s was later associated with it. September 25, 1943, found Hellman at Hunter College, leading a group discussion of Jim Crow in the armed forces sponsored by the Citizens Emergency Conference for Inter-Racial Unity. Robeson, her ally and friend in these endeavors, in turn joined Hellman on the platform when she raised money for Spanish Loyalists.⁶⁸

In July 1944, Hellman received a cablegram from the Russian Embassy in Washington with an invitation to visit the Soviet Union. Two of her plays, The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine, were to be performed there, and Hellman was invited to observe the rehearsals, expenses paid by the Soviets. She accepted the invitation with alacrity. There followed months of delay during which the FBI recommended refusing her a passport because, as one of their records puts it, “she is considered to be a Key Figure in Communist activities by the New York Field Division.”⁶⁹ The FBI report on Hellman, sent to assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle, tarred Hellman with the brush of guilt by association, naming her as “a member of many organizations allegedly Communist dominated and that have followed the Communist Party line.” The report also noted that she had been “closely associated with a number of individuals who have been identified as members of the Communist Political Association.” The bureau report took particular umbrage at Hellman’s efforts to protest the activities of the FBI, noting that an unnamed informant had reported in 1940 that “Lillian Hellman had been assigned by the Communist Party to ‘smear the FBI’ in the newspaper, PM.”⁷⁰ If so, Hellman fell down on the job.

After Harry Hopkins intervened on Hellman’s behalf, it took a while to arrange transportation, but at last in early October she set off. All the while, the FBI tracked her.⁷¹ Arriving first in Los Angeles, she stayed for several days with her ex-husband, Arthur Kober, and his wife, Maggie. The FBI carefully noted that she was staying with her mother-in law, though agents must have known she was unmarried. It also noted that she spent most of her time conferring with Hal Wallis. She was then working with him on a film production of The Searching Wind. She took a train to Seattle, stopping overnight in San Francisco. In Seattle, the FBI held her luggage overnight while she flew on to Anchorage, Alaska. Agents duly reported that their search of her baggage “indicates Hellman has contract with Collier Magazine for short stories. No derogatory information developed.”⁷² Hellman stayed in Anchorage for two days while the Soviets cleared her visa, and finally, on October 19, embarked on an arduous two-week journey via Murmansk to Moscow, where she arrived in early November.

1944, In L.A. on the way to Moscow, she spent most of her time conferring with Hal Wallis. (Photofest)

For all the fuss that the passport office made about her trip, and for all that the FBI followed her travels with keen interest, Hellman herself seems to have treated the trip as an opportunity to get to know the Russian people, and even then her contacts were limited. If her diaries are to be trusted, Hellman judged the Soviet Union in terms of how well it observed her comfort and how tenderly she was cared for. At every stop we learn whether the room is clean or dirty, warm or cold, large or small; we find out about the inadequacy of toilets and read a litany of comments about the freezing outhouses; we know whether and if she had a “fine” dinner. Central in these diaries are comments about the people she met along the way. She writes about those who greeted her, escorted her, and entertained her; she offers generous judgments about the character of the men—most of them in uniform—she encountered. Day after day she comments that “Russian men are nice to women, very kind and tender,” or writes, “They have all been so kind and so nice and so warm,” and concludes, “These people have a real kind of Christianity.”⁷³ These judgments mingle with her sense of herself, for, as always, she cares about what people think of her. “I do alright with these people,” she comments after a few days of traveling. And then again, “I am a little pleased with myself because they like me and yesterday said so.”⁷⁴

Because she was ill and tired when she finally arrived in Moscow, Ambassador Averell Harriman invited her to stay in the American compound for the duration of her visit. There, comfortably housed and well fed, she wandered about Moscow with her interpreter, Raisa Orlova. Her diary records where she went and her impressions, almost all favorable, of those she met. Over and over again she repeats phrases such as “these are warm, strong men … They are men who know they are men and like all such act with simplicity and tenderness … I think maybe Russians have the best natural manners in the world … All Russians have a sense of humor.”⁷⁵ She writes that “the Russian soldiers treated Poles courteously” and comments that she witnessed “the deep reverence and respect that even intellectuals have for Stalin.”⁷⁶ Such remarks evoke the reader’s skepticism about Hellman’s judgment. And yet Orlova remembers a Lillian Hellman who had little admiration for the Soviet system as a whole. When she tried to convince Hellman of the virtues of living under socialism, she writes, Hellman replied acerbically that she would “start listening to the victories of socialism after you’ve built the kind of toilets that don’t make you want to retch at all the airports from Vladivostok to Moscow.”⁷⁷

1944: Moscow. “I do alright with these people.” (Ransom Center)

A rare invitation to visit the front lines as the Russians moved west affirmed Hellman’s positive impressions of Russian men and perhaps convinced her to characterize them favorably while ignoring issues of power and leadership. Forbidden to ask questions, Hellman absorbed the experience of war with her soul, noticing the devastating destruction, first in Leningrad and then in the villages and towns she encountered as she moved toward Warsaw. After she returned home, she wrote about the bravery and nobility of Russian soldiers in the line of fire, continuing the positive assessments her diary records. Her first article for Collier’s magazine hardly mentions Stalin’s name. Instead it romanticizes the soldiers she met on the way. They are, she writes, open and informed about “political issues at home and abroad.”⁷⁸ They speak “without self consciousness and without fake toughness; they speak simply, like healthy people who have never, fortunately, learned to be ashamed of emotion.” They engage with her in rituals of mutual admiration. Hellman does not forget to tell us that on leaving the front, she received a tribute from the veterans of Leningrad—an inscribed cigarette case given to her by the “men, officers and generals of the First White Russian Army on the Warsaw front.”⁷⁹

The story of Hellman’s wartime visit to the Soviet Union ends with a flummoxed FBI. On January 2, 1945, while she was still at the front, the ever-watchful FBI noted that she was likely to return to the United States soon and asked its agents to make arrangements to have her baggage searched. Hellman didn’t leave Russia until early February, and then she flew to London via an arduous route that took her through Iran, Egypt, and France. She stayed in London for several weeks and then flew to Baltimore on February 27, 1945. She seems not to have been aware of the Keystone Cops ritual that accompanied her return to the States. On February 9, the director of the St. Paul office sent a memo to “Director, FBI” indicating they did not know where she was.

Inasmuch as an Agent of this office recently read in a Washington D.C. newspaper that Lillian Hellman had returned to this country, the Bureau is being requested to check its files in order to ascertain whether Lillian Hellman has in fact recently reentered the United States. The Bureau may wish to advise the St. Paul Office and other offices … of the whereabouts of Lillian Hellman.

On March 27, after Hellman had been back in the States for a month, J. Edgar Hoover’s office sent out another memo inquiring whether anyone knew if Hellman had returned to the United States and asking whether her baggage had been examined. Not until mid-May did agent Fred Hallford inform his boss that “the subject had arrived at Baltimore 11 weeks earlier.” “She was not interviewed at great length,” he wrote. “She stated that during this trip she was a guest of the Soviet and British Governments. She described her tour as a cultural tour.” Hallford noted that “no baggage or body search of the subject was conducted upon her entry at the Port of Baltimore.” And then he added: “For your confidential information, Miss Hellman displayed at the time of the interview some indignation that a person of her prominence should be subjected to any questioning upon entrance into the United States.”⁸⁰

Perhaps Hellman was right to be indignant. On March 21, 1947, the New York Field Division of the FBI told Hoover’s office that they were about to delete Hellman’s name from their “key figure” list. Her name was in fact removed two years later. “No further investigation of this subject is contemplated at this time,” the New York Bureau director wrote, “and the case is being placed in a closed status.”⁸¹ Little did he then suspect that Hellman’s code of loyalty and her moral compass would soon face its severest test.