A Difficult Woman (77 page)

The spirit of American communists and the divided attitudes toward Joseph Stalin make painful reading. A contemporary view of the communist threat in the 1930s can be found in Eugene Lyons,
The Red Decade
(New York: Arlington House, 1941). William O'Neill,
A Better World: The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) provides a more measured sense of the meaning of Stalinism to communist partisans, and Joseph Starobin,
American Communism in Crisis, 1943–1957
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) suggests some of the internal struggles of the CPUSA. Maurice Isserman,
If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left
(New York: Basic Books, 1987) explores the transition from the old left to the new. European perspectives on the political struggle can be found in Michael Scammell,
Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
(New York: Random House, 2009) and Jonathan Miles,
The Dangerous Otto Katz: The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). Katz's life overlapped with Hellman's in intriguing ways.

The McCarthyism of the late forties and early fifties is well captured by three books: David Caute,
The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); Stanley Kutler,
The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); and David Oshinsky,
A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy
(New York: Free Press, 1983). For the evolution of HUAC, see Walter Goodman,
The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968). Stefan Kanfer,
A Journal of the Plague Years
(New York: Atheneum, 1973) provides a sense of the tangled web in which Hellman was caught and Victor Navasky,
Naming Names
(New York: Viking Books, 1980) suggests the price of conscience. Some of the most remarkable accounts of those years come from memoirs. See especially Ring Lardner,
I'd Hate Myself in the Morning: A Memoir
(New York: Nation Books, 2000); Dalton Trumbo,
The Time of the Toad: A Study of Inquisition in America by One of the Hollywood Ten
(New York: Harper and Row, 1972); and the revelatory discussion by Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz,
It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

For the impact of the Cold War on families during the McCarthy period, Elaine Tyler May,
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
(New York: Basic Books, 1988) provides a great introduction. Carl Bernstein,
Loyalties: A Son's Memoir
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), is a moving account of the long-lasting effects of the Cold War mentality. Lary May, ed.,
Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) suggests some of the permanent change that resulted from McCarthyism.

Culture and politics in the sixties fuse with one another as they did in Hellman's experience. Edmund Wilson,
The Sixties
, ed. Lewis M. Dabney (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990) provides some sense of the tension implicit in this experience. Morris Dickstein,
Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties
(New York: Basic Books, 1977) suggests the changes in popular and highbrow culture that resulted. Norman Podhoretz,
Making It
(New York: Random House, 1967) characterizes some of the opportunities the decade provided. The relationship between cultural tensions and politics is well captured in Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin,
America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s
, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). There is a huge and exciting literature on race relations in the 1960s, but for a glimpse of how the Cold War impacted on activists like Hellman, see Martin Bauml Duberman,
Paul Robeson
(New York: Knopf, 1988). Thomas Borstelman,
The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) provides a broad overview. For the student movement in the same period, James Miller,
Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) is a good start.

By the 1970s, politics had begun to take a new form. David Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) is perhaps the best summary of the ideas that began to take shape and David Greenberg's
Nixon's Shadow
(New York: Norton, 2003) an intriguing look at the political consequences that haunted Hellman in the 1970s. The impact of de-industrialization is evident in Judith Stein,
Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies
(New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2010) as it is in Jefferson Cowie,
Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
(New York: New Press, 2010). Natasha Zaretsky,
No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007) offers an incisive interpretation of the spirit of the times as it affected personal life.

Lillian Hellman, caught up in accusations of lying and Stalinism during her last years, faced the venom of opponents. It would be remiss to avoid mentioning some of the literature in which she was attacked implicitly and explicitly, and yet such a list would be lengthy. Good beginnings can be made by perusing Sidney Hook,
Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century
(New York: Harper and Row, 1987); Alfred Kazin,
New York Jew
(New York: Knopf, 1978); Diana Trilling,
We Must March, My Darlings: A Critical Decade
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978); Norman Podhoretz,
Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer
(New York, NY: Free Press, 1999); and Muriel Gardiner,
Code Name “Mary”: Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983).

Alice Kessler-Harris
is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University. She is one of America's most renowned scholars, known for her work on labor and gender history. She is the author of the classic history of working women
Out to Work
. Her
In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America
won the Joan Kelly, Philip Taft, Herbert Hoover, and Bancroft prizes. In 2011–2012, she served as president of the Organization of American Historians.

Gendering Labor History

In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences

Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States

Women Have Always Worked: An Historical Overview

Copyright © 2012 by Alice Kessler-Harris

Electronic edition published in April 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address
Bloomsbury Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury Press, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Kessler-Harris, Alice.
A difficult woman : the challenging life and times of
Lillian Hellman / Alice Kessler-Harris.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ebook: 978-1-60819-379-0
1. Hellman, Lillian, 1905–1984. 2. Dramatists, American—20th century—
Biography. 3. Hellman, Lillian, 1905–1984—Political and social views. I. Title.
PS3515.E343Z74 2012
812'.52—dc22
[B]
2011028065

First U.S. edition 2012

www.bloomsburypress.com