A Difficult Woman (43 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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But 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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