A Difficult Woman (44 page)

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.”
³⁷
Robert Newman, John Melby's biographer, concluded after a careful study of all the evidence that “Lillian Hellman was not a Communist in any significant sense, certainly not in the 1950s.” Newman continues, “It is simple nonsense to call her this; sheer polemics to call her a Stalinist; and plain insanity to believe, as J. Edgar Hoover did at one time, that she was in any way disloyal to the United States of America.”
³⁸
But party membership was no longer the issue. The Waldorf conference brought into suspicion any who did not conflate democratic values with anticommunist convictions. It revealed how extensively what the historian Christopher Lasch would later call “a conspiratorial view of communism” had taken hold, how widespread the agreement among liberals as well as reactionaries “that the communist conspiracy had spread through practically every level of American society.”
³⁹
Sadly, it also suggests how easy it was in those years to target someone like Lillian—angry, outspoken, “hateful” as some thought her—and to turn her into a negative symbol.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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