A Difficult Woman (42 page)

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