Chapter 8

A Known Communist

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

—Lillian Hellman, “Judas Goats,” 1947

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

—“From America,” 1949

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

—speech at Swarthmore College, 1950

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hellman found herself at sea in this world of contest and conflict, comfortable in none of the competing groups. The essence of anticommunism lay in the conviction that the Soviet Union posed a large enough threat to American freedom to justify curtailing the civil liberties of Americans. She neither believed in the Soviet Union nor accepted that communists constituted an internal threat. She did believe in social justice and in the New Deal programs that fostered labor organization, enhanced economic security, and regulated corporate power. She had dealt with issues of war and peace, of greed and corruption, of fascism and antifascism in her plays and her movie scripts. Her daily life embodied all the moral certainty and outraged anger of a rebel generation. If she had briefly joined the Communist Party, she had never followed a party line. But she had friends both inside and outside the party and could not bring herself to repudiate people who, like herself, had been well intentioned. Among her friends she numbered respected New Dealers who had now become tainted. These included Archibald MacLeish, Harry Hopkins, and Henry Wallace. The accusations and name-calling made her head whirl. So she kept her silence about the Soviets and leveled her barbs at the investigatory committees. Trying to hew a path among enemies, she earned a reputation as a hard-liner. Liberals and conservatives alike dubbed her a Soviet sympathizer, a fellow traveler, a known communist. Had she not been a celebrity, perhaps none of this would have mattered. But celebrity made her vulnerable.

Hellman returned from the Soviet Union in March 1945 convinced that the destruction there had been so intense that the Soviets would never want war again. As she had been moved by the suffering of the Spanish in the Spanish Civil War, so she was touched by that of the Russian people, who had lost as many as twenty million lives and whose destroyed cities she had seen with her own eyes. She had stopped in London on the way back to help with a film and, she wrote to Muriel Rukeyser, found herself in V-2 bomb barrage. “I heard the bomb land; and then nothing happened until the screams … by the time I got to the bomb hole … A man was sitting in the hole, one of his arms lying across from him. Two children were lying across the street, a rubber ball between them. An old man was being carried into a house and a woman was holding her skirt against his face.”¹³ Had she seen these things? Did she imagine them? It did not matter. Lillian had had enough of war.

In the early postwar days, she lent her name to several groups that focused on how to construct an enduring peace. “There is a great deal of war talk now,” she wrote to John Melby, “and while I still don’t believe it historically possible, I would not be surprised at anything.”¹⁴ Such was the desire for peace at the time that for a while the idea drew the support of all kinds of individuals. In March 1946, for example, she chaired a tea for the Women’s Committee of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. Held at the Soviet consulate in New York, the tea meant to encourage notable American women to extend a hand of friendship to Soviet women. Participants crafted a message that included the sentiment that “We dedicate ourselves anew to the furtherance of friendship and peace among the women of all countries.” It expressed the hope that the “new world” would “bring peace, security and happiness for our children and for us.” At the time, such activities appeared relatively benign. A year later, the group appeared on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations, and the report of this tea and the warm response to it, which came from the Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee, found its way into Hellman’s FBI file. Yet the other signatories on the message included such notables as Mrs. Dwight Eisenhower, Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune among hundreds of others.¹⁵

Even as the Soviets spread their territioral umbrella over much of Central and Eastern Europe, Hellman remained a staunch believer in peaceful coexistence. “Quarrels start and quarrels end,” she told one audience. “It is not right to weigh large things on small scales. It no longer matters whose fault it is. It matters that this game be stopped, and that our arms and legs and heads and faces not be used to find out who was right and who was wrong, who said what on what day.”¹⁶ To “stop the game” required talking to the enemy. Though she knew that communists “played a substantial, and often dominant, role” in many of the organizations she joined, “I did not really care; I felt as they did that the Russians really did not want war and that this was what counted most.” “I was guided by a feeling that Russia would never again seek war as a means of settling international controversies,” she wrote later.¹⁷

In light of the Cold War and evidence at the time that the Soviets had launched what Sidney Hook called a “communist peace offensive,” Hellman’s position seems naïve. Some of her contemporaries thought her either duplicitous or a dupe, someone used by the Communist Party to serve its nefarious ends.¹⁸ Some have suggested that she remained a member, albeit a concealed member, of the Communist Party. Yet in the immediate postwar years, Hellman’s perspective was shared by many influential people, foreign and domestic. In Western Europe, British and French intellectuals openly disputed the question of whether communism constituted a threat to the rest of the world. Almost universally, they held the opinion that if Russians wanted communism within their own borders that was their business. Nor did it surprise them that Russia, so recently the victim of a devastating attack by Germany, should want to surround itself with a barrier of sympathetic states. At the time, high-level policy makers in the American State Department, men like Dean Acheson, were still arguing that, had he lived, FDR would have accepted some of Russia’s territorial aspirations.

President Harry Truman was of another mind altogether. He shared the conviction that no continuing peace could be achieved without a trustworthy partner, which the Soviet Union most definitely was not. Like Churchill, Truman was convinced that the Soviets had to be isolated, contained, confronted, and threatened by arms if their ambitions were to be stilled. Most Americans agreed. Propelled by fear, they identified the totalitarian behavior of the Soviet Union as the greatest threat to world peace. The idea of “peaceful coexistence” became a code for collaboration with the enemy, adherence to groups that supported it, an invitation to the FBI to investigate. That placed proponents of peace in an awkward position. If “peace” were construed as a communist goal, then advocates of peace became, by virtue of their beliefs, unpatriotic dupes guilty of demonstrating a foolish trust in a brutal enemy. They were disloyal Americans willing to place their country’s interests second to a totalitarian Soviet Union.

Hellman worked her way through this minefield with characteristic grit and legendary stubbornness. She joined Henry Wallace’s 1948 campaign for the presidency without a second thought. Wallace had been Roosevelt’s third-term vice president, and, when he was eased out of the vice presidency in 1944, accepted a position as secretary of commerce. But as he came to favor political and economic cooperation with the Soviets, Truman removed him from the cabinet. Wallace’s position endeared him to many advocates of peace, communists and liberals alike. In the spring of 1947, he decided to claim the issue as his own, and with the support of a new third party called the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) began a campaign for the presidency. Hellman was a founding member of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions—one of the groups that had lent its support to the formation of the PCA. Both groups, according to the FBI, would later be cited as communist front organizations by the California Committee on Un-American Activities.¹⁹ Lillian, Wallace’s neighbor and friend, was one of seven hundred individuals who, in March 1948, helped to launch the campaign. When Wallace asked her to head up a “Women for Wallace” committee, she agreed, following up by giving several talks to women’s groups—all of them emphasizing the vital role of women in any campaign to ensure world peace. Hammett stayed out of the campaign altogether.

It surprised nobody that there were communists in the campaign. Both the major-party candidates had adopted a hard line against cooperation with the Soviets, so the communists welcomed a viable candidate with a more open position regarding Soviet power.²⁰But as the campaign picked up steam in early 1948, a spate of Soviet aggression raised increasing doubts about Wallace’s nonconfrontational stance. In early 1948, just before Wallace announced his candidacy, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, installing their own regime, loyal to Moscow. Wallace defended the new government. In June, the communists blocked rail and road connections to Berlin, forcing the allied governments to supply the city by air. Wallace continued to argue that the United States alone was responsible for isolating the Soviet Union. In August, Whittaker Chambers named Alger Hiss, a former employee of the State Department and the United Nations, as a communist. Wallace increased the tension by adding Lee Pressman, an old-line communist and former CIO official, to his campaign staff as general counsel. And he alienated some liberals when he announced that he favored the nationalization of basic industries.

Challenged to explain the apparent leftward turn of his campaign, Wallace stumbled. Instead of asserting the rights of communists—the party was not illegal—to participate in an electoral campaign, he denied that he knew about their presence among his supporters. But Hellman, along with Paul Robeson and many others, had already been identified by the FBI as in, or close to, the party. In their eyes she was a “known communist.” Fearful of the taint of communism, the campaign tried to marginalize party members, fellow travelers, dupes, anyone it felt could color it pink. Too late. Wallace supporters passed this pink or red tinge on to whatever they did afterward.

The presence of “known communists” like Lillian Hellman served only to confirm suspicions that communists had taken over. Lillian, forthright as usual, despaired at the accusations and caught the blame for the guilt they evoked. Years later Michael Straight, then a columnist for the New Republic, which had supported Wallace early—and one of those who pulled out of the campaign because he didn’t like Wallace’s left position—remembered his retreat. “I know that some hate-filled individuals like Lillian Hellman, and some foolish fellow travelers like Virginia Durr maintained, and still maintain that I acted as I did out of cowardice,” he recalled.²¹ But Lillian herself was having difficulty defending Wallace by the end of the campaign. In October, as the election approached, she arranged an extended trip to Yugoslavia and left the country.

Hellman came back to the United States in time to help organize the 1949 Waldorf conference. Officially called the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, the Waldorf-Astoria conference was organized by the National Council of Artists, Scientists, and Professionals (NCASP). This group was originally a division of the Progressive Citizens of America—the third party that supported Wallace’s presidential party. It separated from the PCA in 1948—though it continued to boast an overlapping and sympathetic membership with the parent group. Opinions differ as to how the conference originated. Some observers insist that the NCASP was from the beginning a communist front organization and that the conference, conceived in Moscow, followed on the design of several other such meetings held in the United States and abroad in Poland and Paris. Certainly the call published in the Daily Worker lends itself to this interpretation. “The Cold War,” it declared as it announced the conference, “is incompatible with the program of economic and social advance. The military control of science is restricting the development of science for peaceful purposes. Free exchange of information is endangered.”²² But at least some of those who supported the conference thought of it in a different way. Thomas Emerson, a distinguished First Amendment scholar and a part of the original group, hoped the conference would deal with “current issues of the day and particularly with the problem of freedom of expression and civil liberties.”²³

The best evidence we have suggests that Harlow Shapley, a distinguished astronomy professor at Harvard and a long-standing advocate of peace whom Lillian had first met about a year earlier, put together the group that initiated the call for papers. That group proposed a conference to deal “with the obstacles that block the path to peace as well as the effects of the world situation on the cultural life of the country.”²⁴ Shapley, who was probably not a communist, may well have been a fellow traveler in the sense that he believed, in the words of historian John Rossi, that “the cause of world peace would be furthered by promoting contacts between Russia and the West.”²⁵

The original signatories (among them Hellman, Paul Robeson, poet Louis Untermeyer, scientist Linus Pauling, cultural critic Howard Mumford Jones, and a dozen others) included communists and fellow travelers as well as many who simply believed that, as Lillian put it, “there is no record in human civilization where wars destroyed ideologies.”²⁶ Hellman was in good company, joined by a range of people who insisted on talking about peace and challenging the Cold War.

Eventually some six hundred individuals would agree to sponsor the meeting that took place at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on March 27–29, 1949. At the time, newspapers ascribed the large number to an “intellectual reign of terror.” Influential communists and fellow travelers, the New York Herald Tribune claimed, had persuaded others to support the conference or face retaliation in the form of negative publicity.²⁷ Hellman had a different interpretation. “Only four years ago millions upon millions of people died,” she told the assembled participants at the opening session. “Yet today men talk of death and war as they talk of going to dinner.”²⁸

1949: Harlow Shapley put together the group that called for papers. (© Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Undoubtedly this was not a good time for a conference on world peace. Tensions with the Soviet Union had continued to escalate—particularly as questions of espionage floated to the surface. Judith Coplon, a twenty-seven-year-old Barnard College graduate and Justice Department political analyst, was on trial for spying for the KGB. Eleven leaders of the American Communist Party were charged under the Smith Act with advocating the destruction of the United States. Rumors spread that the Soviets would soon explode an atomic bomb. When it became clear that the meeting would include participants from behind the iron curtain, including a delegation from the Soviet Union selected by Soviet officials, opposition rose to astronomical dimensions. These official delegates, argued critics, would be merely mouthpieces for the Soviet Union. Why should the United States offer them a platform? The State Department warned that the conference was likely to be dominated by communists and agreed to let in only those communist delegates who represented their countries. Eventually twenty-three delegates from behind the iron curtain were among the three thousand who attended the conference. Additionally, the State Department discovered two unauthorized Canadian communists who had evaded its scrutiny. They were immediately deported.

The American Legion and the Catholic War Veterans rounded up hundreds of members to protest outside the Waldorf-Astoria. Among them were a line of nuns through which delegates had to pass. But the most effective critique, and the one with long-lasting effects, would come from a range of intellectuals on the left who fundamentally disagreed with fellow travelers over the causes of the Cold War. To their mind, Russia bore responsibility for the escalation in tensions. The most effective guarantee of peace, they argued, was a strong military defense. Peace merely allowed the Soviets room for aggression. A conference, with delegates selected by a state that allowed no freedom of expression, could expect only to serve the cause of propaganda. Devastatingly, opponents accused conference organizers, wittingly or not, of playing into the hands of the Soviets. A handful of the six hundred sponsors encouraged Shapley to make space for critics of the Soviet Union. But Shapley and others were committed to a conference that would not castigate either side. Its intent, as Thomas Emerson put it, was “to bring together people who would discuss the possibilities of peaceful co-existence that had a clear international flavor to it.”²⁹

The State Department thought that under those circumstances, the conference would simply provide a platform for communist propaganda. In this it was joined by a coalition of liberal anticommunists led by Sidney Hook and George Counts and glued together by virulent mistrust of the Soviet Union. When, two weeks before the conference, some of them asked Harlow Shapley for places on the various panels, Shapley refused. They were welcome to attend the conference and to speak from the floor, he wrote to them, but the panels were already filled. Sidney Hook, incensed at the refusal, invaded Shapley’s room to demand an invitation. After Shapley deftly maneuvered him out of the room, Hook and George Counts set up a counterconference at which Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Max Eastman, and others spoke. The counterconference drew as many as eight hundred people to an open-air meeting at Bryant Park, next to the New York Public Library. There, Eastman focused on the destruction of artistic freedom under Stalin and singled Hellman out for special condemnation. Dwight MacDonald and Mary McCarthy, both opponents, registered at the Waldorf along with three thousand others. Each managed to speak from the floor for five minutes.³⁰

Hellman’s participation in the Waldorf conference was clearly a product of long-standing and deeply felt commitments. She was, after all, a fellow traveler, a phrase that was not yet a term of opprobrium. Yet she was a bit player in every sense, a celebrity attraction rather than an architect of the discussions in which it engaged. Her most quoted remark from the affair came after Norman Cousins unexpectedly delivered a postbanquet talk critical of the organizers. She commented then, Virginia Durr remembered, that she thought he should wait until he got home before criticizing his dinner hosts.³¹ Daily newspaper accounts of controversy over the conference in the weeks before its opening hardly mention her except in the occasional lists of sponsors. At the conference itself, she sat on the dais of the opening session, chaired the banquet, and played a largely symbolic role. Afterward her name appears everywhere: among the lists formulated by the State Department and others to demonstrate the conference’s subversive nature, as one of only five women among the fifty people named by Life magazine as communist dupes, all of whose photographs occupied a dramatic double-paged spread.³² Newsweek’s highly critical account of the conference appeared alongside a photograph of her captioned “Lillian Hellman: Mastermind.”

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.”³⁷Robert 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 time 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

The passport came through a week later. It was too late. Her European counterparts backed off and refused to sign the contract she had so carefully negotiated. She set off for London anyway, eager to leave a United States where Hammett was heading to jail for refusing to reveal names to an investigatory committee. The two had agreed that she should get out of the way if possible. And she was still hoping for work. She departed despite warnings from her lawyers that the trip might be futile and that she had no grounds to press for a completed deal, preceded and followed by an angry flurry of telegrams, including one from her agent, Kay Brown, that insisted that “the responsibility for going to Europe was entirely yours.” It tells us something about her state of mind that Hellman not only went, but that she felt unfairly treated by those who had warned her off. She wrote to Henry Beeson, Gregory Zilboorg’s secretary, to report testily that she was at loose ends. “My original plan was to make a movie in France but I’m afraid that offer has been withdrawn.”⁶¹ When he suggested that she meet with Zilboorg in Switzerland, she wrote to say that she could not, and though she would not admit it, her restricted passport would not have allowed it. She consulted her lawyers about legal action only to be told that she had “no grounds for action. Because of the delay in connection with the passport, these people in the meantime changed their minds.”⁶² Kay Brown wrote to express sympathy that the expected contract had not materialized and to hope that “an assignment which you might like comes up for you in London.”⁶³ But if Lillian had no legal ground to stand on, she continued to press her case until the Ventura production company agreed to pay her travel costs and expenses.

Hellman returned to the United States in the fall of 1951, Hammett in jail, to find the dragnet was moving ever closer. In the 1947 Hollywood hearings, her closest colleagues, including John Howard Lawson and Ring Lardner Jr., were among those who went to jail. But in 1951, when investigations of the entertainment industry resumed, she saw her friends turn tail and confess. In turn Larry Parks, Clifford Odets, Budd Schulberg, and Elia Kazan cooperated with investigating committees and implicated others. Kazan argued that he needed to protect his livelihood. “I’d hated the Communists for many years and didn’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them,” he wrote in his autobiography.⁶⁴ Others simply saw no reason to protect a Communist Party they had come to despise. They not only publicly renounced communism but agreed to reveal everything they knew, including the names of those with whom they had worked. After all, to refuse to identify oneself as a former communist implied that one had something to cover up. And once one revealed one’s past, cooperating with investigatory committees provided the best evidence of sincere contrition. Offering the names of other once and future party members not only provided the government with a huge list of potential subversive suspects that HUAC and the FBI could question, but it meant that those named, in turn, could name still others. The list could expand indefinitely.

The trouble, as Hellman and others quickly understood, was that the process rewarded the informer and encouraged people to exaggerate their knowledge. “The good American,” noted Ted Thackrey in the left-wing New York Compass, “is the informer and the conformist who is willing to confess that associations once regarded as innocent must have been evil … and that those associates must be denounced by name no matter how tenuous the association, how vague the memory.”⁶⁵ The behavior, Hellman perceived, produced “confessions of sin that never happened.” She thought this “one of the comic marks of the years between 1948 and 1958,” when many men “marched themselves before committees to confess what they never knew, beg pardon for what they had never done.”⁶⁶

Hellman did not and could not believe that Americans would remain silent in the face of such injustice. Her sense of bewilderment is palpable. All around her, friends and acquaintances positioned themselves with respect to the assault on the left. As they did so, the lines between and among them with respect to the sanctity of civil liberties sharpened. She was, she wrote just a decade later, “a very frightened woman,” and she felt “the sadness of watching people be punished for so little—because the truth is that the radical or liberal movement in America was always very small and almost always very foolish. But then fools also have a right to justice and to freedom.” At first she laughed “at anybody’s right to deny that.”⁶⁷ But her laughter was short-lived. Hellman was not among those who frighten easily, she had written “Judas Goats,” and yet she was afraid. Her hero in this period was Anton Chekhov, in whom she had become interested in early 1950 and whose collected letters she would soon edit and publish. From Chekhov she copied into her notebook an early statement that reflected her disillusionment with her colleagues. “I do not believe in our educated class, which is hypocritical, false, poorly educated and indolent; I don’t believe in it even when it suffers and complains for its persecutors emerge from its own bosom,” Chekhov had written.⁶⁸ Hellman shared the belief and wished she could emulate his courage.

Hellman’s Armageddon came when she was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the spring of 1952. For several years she had preached defiance of the investigatory committees, suffered from the movie industry’s blacklist, and watched her friends weigh the impossible choice of cooperating with the committees, going to jail, or losing their livelihoods. Now it was her turn. She was part of an entertainment industry that had been targeted for several years; she had made no secret of her sympathy for world peace or racial equality, both key programs of the CPUSA. And she knew that her name had come up before HUAC and other committees on several occasions. In a list of names he turned over to HUAC in July 1950, FBI informant Louis Budenz had identified Hellman as a party member from 1937 to 1945.⁶⁹ Her name surfaced again during an April 1951 investigation of her friend Dorothy Parker, and a third time when former party member Martin Berkeley identified her, the following September, as having attended a meeting at his California home in the late thirties. Still, the call came at a particularly difficult time. Hammett had just been released from a four-month jail term; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sat in jail, each under sentence of death. Joe McCarthy was at the peak of his career.

When the subpoena arrived, Hellman lost her cool. By her own account, she tasked the African-American man who delivered it with serving an inglorious master. Finally she succumbed to the numb calm that comes, as she put it later, from knowing that “there is nothing to do but to face trouble with a roped control.”⁷⁰ She consulted one lawyer and then another before she came to the man who would finally counsel her through the episode. He was Joseph Rauh, a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action and a liberal anticommunist who had not previously represented admitted communists. This was not, he later told Hellman, entirely his choice. Rather he sensed that potential clients who remained within the Communist Party chose to follow the advice of party lawyers, even when they sought him out. He could not, he thought, represent them, because they could not be fully open with him.⁷¹ But Hellman was different. She had, he wrote to her as they tried to frame her defense, “made it quite clear in our talks that you genuinely disagree with the activities of the Communist Party … and recognize that you were wrong in joining the Party.” Rauh believed that Hellman refused to distance herself from the party or to acknowledge her error in joining up because of “your feeling that somebody might think you were saying so because you were afraid of public opinion rather than because that was your true view.”⁷² He counseled her to set aside her fear of public opinion and to admit that she had been wrong in joining the party. She refused. Only later did he begin to understand why. She believed, he wrote shortly after Scoundrel Time began to attract attention, that “it only added to the witch hunt to criticize Communists and Communism—even rationally and thoughtfully.”⁷³ Rauh disagreed with that position. He did not believe, as Hellman did, that attacking communists would simply play into the hands of the committee. “It seems to me that the struggle for freedom is a two-front war against both communists and their right wing opposition,” he would confess later. But he admired her stand, and “the courage with which she held it.”⁷⁴

With Rauh, Hellman confronted the Hobson’s choice she now faced. She was, Rauh’s assistant Daniel Pollitt recalled, terrified. When she came into the office, “she was very polite and she didn’t interrupt. I thought she was extremely frightened.”⁷⁵ Still, she was adamant that she would not name names. Rauh thought she “would even have accepted jail before naming names. What she really wanted to do was tell the committee off without violating the law and that is what she ended up doing.”⁷⁶ But how would she behave? She could choose to answer no questions about her relationship to the Communist Party and simply take the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, as others had done. But that course suggested that she had something to hide. Though those who had taken it had avoided jail, they had not shed the taint of communism. School boards routinely fired teachers who pleaded the Fifth Amendment; employers would not hire them; Hollywood refused them jobs. She could admit her earlier association with communism, repent the mistake, and apologize. That option curdled her blood. She had done nothing of which she was ashamed. As she later told Rauh, if she had briefly joined the Communist Party, she had never taken it seriously. To confess to a wrong she did not feel would be tantamount to groveling before the bullies of the committee. Besides, if she confessed she would be asked for the names of those she had encountered in the party. Rauh tried to persuade committee counsel Frank S. Tavenner Jr. and member Richard Nixon to allow her to testify in executive session. But the approach came to nothing.

In the end Rauh and Daniel Pollitt devised a halfway strategy, to which she agreed. She could, as she wished, tell the committee “under oath everything about yourself but nothing about anyone else.”⁷⁷ Rauh cautioned her about the risk involved: if the strategy failed, it would invite a citation for contempt and the jail sentence she hoped to avoid. But Rauh and Pollitt thought they might pave the way by appealing to public opinion. They would hedge her refusal to testify about others with a letter to the committee in which she would offer to answer anything they wanted to know about her if they agreed to ask her about no one else. That letter would explain the dilemma in which the committee put her and others like her, and appeal to their sense of decency. Rauh was almost sure that committee chair John Wood would refuse this overture, and he advised Hellman to prepare a public statement that she could release to the press after the committee hearing, explaining her position.

This second, public statement was never released, but in some ways the various drafts that Hellman composed provide what is possibly the most accurate assessment of her association with the Communist Party. She joined in 1938, “attended very few Communist party meetings in Hollywood in 1938–39 and an equally small number in New York in 1939–40. I stopped attending meetings or taking part in Communist Party activities in the latter part of 1940 and severed all connection with the Party.” Under Rauh’s prodding, she added a sentence admitting that she was “wrong about the Communist Party”; she had joined out of a misplaced idealism, and she had no bitterness with those with whom she associated in the party. She would not, she wrote, “become the instrument for damaging these lives and those of their families.”⁷⁸ Together she and Rauh completed this statement as she drafted the initial version of the letter she would send to committee chair John Wood. She did not wish to claim the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, she wrote to Wood: “I am ready and willing to testify before the representatives of our Government as to my own opinions and my own actions, regardless of any risks or consequences to myself.” She could not and would not answer questions about other people. The letter, duly rejected, left her and Rauh fearful of what would happen next.

On the morning of the hearing, May 21, 1952, Dan Pollitt and Joseph Rauh picked Hellman up, a bundle of nervous energy. She had tried to calm her nerves the day before by shopping and was wearing the fruits of her expedition. Newspapers described the “blonde, forty-six and trim figured” Hellman wearing “a close-fitting black hat and a tailored brown-and-black checked silk dress.”⁷⁹ As she took the stand, she “clenched a handkerchief in clasped hands.” The hearing started slowly, and then twenty minutes in, counsel Frank Tavenner asked her whether it was in fact true that she had been present at a June 1937 meeting in the home of Martin Berkeley. Hellman ducked the question. “Most seriously I would like to ask you once again to reconsider what I have said in the letter,” she replied. “In other words,” said Tavenner, “you are asking the committee not to ask you any questions regarding the participation of other persons in the Communist Party activities.” Hellman’s back rose: “I don’t think I said that, Mr. Tavenner.”⁸⁰

Then Chairman Wood, in a mistake he must have long regretted, suggested the letter be entered into the record. Rauh had brought with him copies he intended to distribute to the press after the hearing. Now he seized the opportunity. Dan Pollitt jumped up and passed copies of the letter to waiting hands.⁸¹ Briefly, it looked as if Rauh would be disciplined for causing the letter to be distributed, but it had been entered into the record, which forced the committee to read it out loud. Ten more minutes of fruitless questioning later, the committee closed the hearing. It had been exactly thirty-seven minutes long, and it would situate Hellman as a heroine.

As Pollitt whisked her out of the hearing room, a dazed Lillian Hellman did not fully realize what had happened. She had won, a triumphant Rauh told her when he joined them later in a local coffee shop. She had defeated the committee; she had given no names and would serve no jail time. Rauh attributed the victory to her letter. In it, Hellman eloquently asked the committee to respect “simple rules of human decency and Christian honor” by not forcing her to betray people who had never done any harm. “I was raised in an old-fashioned American tradition, and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country,” she had written. “To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman, and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.”⁸² The letter was now public, its plea for decency part of the public record. She had stood up to the committee by articulating a defiant moral position that quickly caught the American imagination.

Public and private praise poured in. LILLIAN HELLMAN BALKS HOUSE UNIT, headlined the New York Times.⁸³ Journalist Murray Kempton contrasted her behavior with that of others who debased themselves by confessing to sins they had not committed. This was a “courageous act of conscience,” he concluded, “worthy of a lady.”⁸⁴ One precious tribute came from Brooks Atkinson, the New York Times drama critic who had previously taken her to task for writing melodrama. He wrote to compliment her: “If we are to have a society that is not totalitarian and in which people do not denounce each other, as they do in Communist Russia and did in Nazi Germany, your attitude has a basic moral force that every lover of the American system must adhere to. It is the code of honor among civilized people of all national origins.”⁸⁵

Hellman reveled in this position. “It was like a wedding here yesterday, with strange people getting happy,” she wrote to her friend Bill Alfred two days later, enclosing some of the newspaper clippings. “I must say the New York papers treated me fine … The Mirror, maybe, best of all.”⁸⁶She had been surprised to learn that when her name was mentioned at a luncheon at the American Jewish Congress, “the ladies applauded loud and long.” The euphoria continued for a while. “I am a local heroine,” she wrote to Melby a week after the event.⁸⁷ To Rauh she gushed, “The reaction here has been just too good to believe. There has been the largest amount of mail I have ever received about anything, and an equally large number of telephone calls.” She sent her “deepest thanks and absolute conviction that we did everything as well as we could do it, and that the legal decisions you make were sound and thoughtful, and no matter what comes from them I will be fully satisfied and happy.”⁸⁸

Privately, she was not as confident. To Melby she complained about part of the strategy he had developed, regretting that she had agreed to deny Communist Party membership for the two years before the hearing and to take the Fifth Amendment for questions before that point: “I am sorry that I didn’t take the legal risk and go back 13 years. I think it was the only unwise decision that Rauh made and stupid of me to have followed it.”⁸⁹ For all her courage at the HUAC hearing, she could not hide a sense of vulnerability. To Melby she confessed to being “foolishly restless and frightened to be alone. That is new for me, and I don’t like it.”⁹⁰ She had difficulty working—difficulty that persisted through the summer, forcing her to set aside work on her new play and to focus instead on the Chekhov introduction. “One of the penalties of this year,” she told Melby, “has been a restless refusal to sit down and work, or even to read or think.” In the same letter, she elaborated: “I have got myself into kind of a bad, aimless state of depression and discomfort … I am doing foolish things, and feeling foolish things.”⁹¹

The things she was doing were not only foolish, they were sometimes narcissistic and unprincipled as well. The Pleasantville farm sold, Dash rented the cottage in Katonah from their old friends Helen and Sam Rosen; Lillian often joined them there for a Saturday-night dinner. The Rosens were close friends and loyal supporters of Paul Robeson, with whom Hellman had fought for an end to racial segregation in the army during the war. Robeson, then still either in or close to the Communist Party and himself hounded by various government investigating agencies, was at dinner one night shortly after Hellman’s HUAC hearing. Helen Rosen recalled watching Hellman, who “evidently did very well in public but was shivering inside of herself.” That night “when she came into the kitchen to get her drink, leaving Paul and Dash and Sam in the other room, she gave me hell for having Paul there when she was there. I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. She was in a fury, and she said, ‘I’ve had a terrible time. I’ve been followed, my phone is probably tapped, and of all people to walk into—I don’t need to be in the same room with Robeson!’” Helen tried to calm her down. “I said, ‘Lillian, take it easy. He’s your friend, he’s my friend, he’s our friend. You’ve been through the worst, what is this all about?’” The response from a still enraged Lillian was simply, “‘Well it’s too much, everything’s too much.’”⁹²

And indeed, Hellman was still suffering. Her victory over HUAC enraged political enemies on the right who remained convinced that she was a communist and that her clever strategy had enabled her to escape punishment. How could a woman who refused to cooperate with a government committee claim to be acting in the American tradition? Was it possible for political dissenters, for rebels and radicals, to love their country? Was it fair to allow those who refused to divulge their past commitments to hide behind claims of truth telling? Advocates of security turned on her old lover and continuing friend, John Melby. Melby was by then a well-regarded senior State Department officer stationed in the Philippines who visited Hellman on his not infrequent visits to the United States. The most recent visit, in Philadelphia, occurred just a month before her HUAC hearing. And he had briefly seen her just after the hearing itself. His association with Hellman drew the attention of the Department’s Loyalty-Security board, which targeted him for investigation even before her HUAC hearing and picked it up with intensity afterward. To accuse Melby of disloyalty, his biographer Robert Newman tells us, was absurd. Since 1947, Melby had become a valued China hand with an unblemished record and a lengthy list of supervisors all attesting to his loyalty. “With his rock-ribbed reputation for anti-communism,” Newman tells us, Melby and his lawyer “were sure that no puny guilt by association with a playwright who was also a friend of eminent officials, could do him in.”⁹³

But drifting away from Hellman did not protect Melby from the investigations of government committees. In late June 1952, the Loyalty-Security Board repeatedly grilled him about his relationship with Lillian Hellman. Convinced that she was a dangerous communist and that his admitted association with her convicted him of duplicity, the board continued to ask him about her communist associations. Two days later, Melby and Hellman met in Joseph Rauh’s office. Lillian wanted to clear his name by appearing as a witness for Melby. Rauh, worried about her future as well as Melby’s, counseled against it. Melby, increasingly worried about Lillian’s political past, wavered but, according to Newman, finally gave in to the board and admitted that Hellman might well have had a past about which he did not know. For months the Loyalty-Security Board dueled with Melby, with Lillian on the sidelines, begging to appear as a witness on his behalf. If she could convince the board that she was not a communist and had herself never been disloyal, then the board would have no evidence of his disloyalty, no grounds to dismiss him. But when she finally testified in February 1953, the committee asked her nothing about her politics—they were already convinced on that score—and fastened instead on the repeated evidence of a devoted and committed relationship. John was fired the same spring of 1953 that Hammett was called before McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Government Investigations to explain why so many of his detective stories could be found in government libraries overseas.

Hellman, a fresh new passport in hand, once again granted to her by Mrs. Shipley (who could not have issued it had she believed Lillian to be a communist), left for an extended visit to Europe, where she again hoped to find work. Though she could leave the country, Hellman never outran her public image as a communist. She had defeated the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to be sure, satisfying those who railed against its violations of elemental civil liberties. But she had not squelched the increasingly certain, though surely mistaken, public perception that she was a communist. Repeatedly the label came back to haunt her—a powerful weapon in the accusatory arsenal leveled against her. She might evade the “known communist” label to emerge as a “fellow traveler” in the late fifties and sixties, only to descend to the level of “unrepentant Stalinist” in her later years. The labels suggest less about Hellman’s beliefs and practices than about the public mind-set from which they emerged. They tell us something about the long-lasting fear generated by Soviet communism and the McCarthy period, and the search for suspects during an interminable Cold War. And they lead us to wonder how Hellman—whose major sins were a continuing if misguided hope, an outspoken and voluble rebellion, and an angry and stubborn refusal to bow to bullies—managed to become the public face of Stalinism for as long as she did.