A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  By her own account, Hellman joined the party in 1938 “with little thought as to the serious step I was taking.” In a statement she drew up in 1952, she tells us that she remained “a not very active” member until late in 1940 when she stopped attending meetings and “severed all connections with the party.”47 Despite her later protests, Hellman seems to have been a pretty loyal trooper during her two years of party membership. Her name appears often, in a variety of front organizations and in some that would have been unusual for her. For example, it doesn’t surprise us to see it among the sponsors of the National Committee for People’s Rights, July 13, 1938. Nor do we blink when we see it among the sponsors of the Foster Parents’ Plan for Children in Spain, October 31, 1938, or the signators of the Coordinating Committee to Lift the Embargo. But what is she doing in the League of Women Shoppers (of which she became a vice president in 1938 and in which she seems to have remained active until at least July 1941)? Why, for the first time, did she contribute an essay to the New Masses, in October 1938? And why, though she was by now immersed in the Screen Writers Guild unionizing campaign, did she agree to chair the Sponsors’ Committee of the United Office and Professional Workers of America, Local 16, Fifth Annual Stenographers’ Ball? That she was drawing closer to the Communist Party constitutes the best explanation for all these activities.

  Hellman’s increasing commitments to a variety of Popular Front groups suggest a significant incidence of involvement with the CPUSA during the heady late 1930s. They also tell us something about how, after-ward, people like Hellman came to camouflage both the memory of their membership and its nature. Some say that she continued to be a “concealed” member well after 1941. Her celebrity status might have made her more valuable in that role. And yet Hellman’s outspokenness in defense of Soviet causes during the war years suggests that concealment would have served little purpose. Hellman neither hid her support for the Soviet Union nor allowed herself to turn into a mindless follower.

  If Hellman’s dates are accurate, then she joined the CPUSA after the worst of the Moscow purge trials and in full awareness of them. Not only had she been in Moscow while they were going on, but she had returned to a United States where the press fully covered them. Consistent with the party line, Hellman remained silent during the trials; she did not (as some factions on the left did) question their validity nor query Stalin’s motives for condemning hundreds of high-level officials and army officers to death. Instead, in April 1938, a few months after her return and around the time that she apparently joined the party, Hellman, along with 150 other artists, writers, and scientists, signed a letter declaring their faith in the guilt of the defendants and accepting the trials as necessary to preserve progressive democracy in the Soviet Union.48 The act allied her with the Stalinist wing of the Communist Party and helps to explain why the label stuck to her until she died.

  Did Hellman really believe that Stalin needed to summarily eliminate thousands of people whom he suddenly declared to be enemies of the state? Or—what is more likely—was her willingness to sign this letter, circulated in the first flush of her party membership, an effort to demonstrate that she could be loyal to a party line? Was not the CPUSA the most vociferous defender of racial equality and the most consistent supporter of her union, the Screen Writers Guild? Did she sign because she wanted to stop the spread of fascism at all costs? Did she, like many others, rationalize Stalin’s efforts to cover up his crimes out of despair over the continuing inroads of fascism? After all, she and many others saw the Soviet Union as the most consistent opponent of fascism in Germany and Italy. Or could it be that, as she confessed to her goddaughter, Catherine Kober Zeller, many years later, she simply had not seen the full spectrum of Stalin’s sins?49 In the sharp glare of history, neither the act of signing that letter nor her failure to repudiate the document thereafter is defensible. But by the dim light of the 1930s, both acts are understandable.50

  The most plausible explanation for Hellman’s defense of the Moscow Trials at the time lies in her despair over the continuing inroads of fascism. The months before she signed that letter had been disastrous for the antifascist cause. In March, Germany had incorporated Austria into a province of the Nazi state. By April it had become clear that the Spanish Republican Loyalists (faced with the adamant refusal of European and American democracies to ship arms to them) would go down to defeat. Such pressures influenced many defenders of the Moscow Trials. Nathaniel Weyl, who had joined the CPUSA in 1930, commented on his own response: “My wife and I had read the official transcript of the trials, and concluded that the accused men had been judicially murdered. However, we thought that the communist movement was the most powerful world force against Nazism, and therefore, that we should not join the public critics of Stalin.”51

  Even after the letter appeared, international events continued to go downhill. On September 29, Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, which turned over part of Czechoslovakia to Germany. And in November, the destruction of Jewish property during Kristallnacht signaled a newly vicious phase of the Reich’s attack against Jews. Faced with an isolationist spirit in the United States—Time magazine had just been accused by some members of its own staff of espousing fascist sympathies—it made sense for people like Hellman and Hammett to join with their friends to try to consolidate their forces against fascism. On November 17, 1938, a group of thirty-six prominent authors, including Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, called on President Roosevelt to stop trading with Germany. Not long after, well-known communist and noncommunist figures like Richard Wright, Harold Clurman, Lester Cole, Jerome Davis, and Malcolm Cowley joined together with many others to call for a cessation of attacks against the Soviet Union.52

  On the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and because it promised to stem the fascist tide, the CPUSA grew apace. Indeed, the antifascist cause often flowed into that of communism. Sam Jaffe, Hollywood agent and producer and a great admirer of Lillian Hellman’s, recalled attending a meeting of the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1930s. After he, his wife, and their friend Oscar Hammerstein left, they turned to each other and said, “‘My God, this was a Communist meeting.’ It was a cover-up. We were in a Communist meeting. But it was labeled Anti-Nazi League. Well, sure they were Anti-Nazi, but it was strictly a Communist meeting … It was Anti-Nazi, true, but it was Communist propaganda that they were propagating.”53

  The antifascist cause (like every good cause in this Popular Front period) attracted Jews, intellectuals, and champions of liberty of all kinds as well as Communists into its fold. But the coalitions often surprised even close friends, setting off bitter recriminations and factional fights. For all their hatred of Hitler, many on the left, including Trotskyists and other anti-Stalinist communists, rebelled against associating with members of the CPUSA who refused to acknowledge the horrors of the bloody purges of the 1930s. To these opponents of Stalin, whipping up a frenzy against fascism seemed merely a ploy to cover up the evils of Stalinist communism. Then and later they wanted Stalinism acknowledged for the evil it was. Still there were others to whom it made not a whit of difference who was energized in the fight against fascism as long as the fight was won. Hellman probably belongs in this group. The evidence suggests a trajectory that reflects the difficult moral choices that she and many other intellectuals and creative artists of her day faced. She had moved from a generic and unformed concern for democracy and liberty to a hatred of fascist bullies, and then to membership in the CPUSA. In the crucial years at the end of the thirties, she and many others believed that victory over fascism required loyalty to the party. Still, her decision to join and to remain in the party would haunt her for decades after.

  The Soviet pact with Germany, signed in the summer of 1939, opened a chasm on the left. Two weeks after the pact was signed, Germany invaded Poland, setting off the Second World War. A wartime atmosphere enveloped the United States, posing for many the question of whether the Unit
ed States should remain neutral or whether it should join the war to help its traditional allies—Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium—fend off the German assault. The war turned intellectuals and artists on the left, people who had been friends and allies, into instant enemies. Some argued that the Soviet Union signed the pact to buy time to build up its defenses. On these grounds, they abandoned their earlier support of action against Germany and advocated for peace. Others insisted that a neutral position meant giving up the fight against fascism. Particularly for Jews who were aware of the laws that isolated their coreligionists and deprived them of jobs, freedom, and food, choosing sides must have been torturous.

  Hellman sided with the Soviets. Her long history of antifascist work notwithstanding, she did not withdraw from the Communist Party. In what perhaps constitutes the most persuasive evidence of her party loyalty, she did not condemn the Soviet Union’s ruthless betrayal of its own principles and its callous division of Polish territory with the Germans. For her, the argument that the Soviets needed to buy time to build up their strength proved persuasive. A few weeks after the start of the war, in October 1939, the Soviets invaded Finland, accusing its leaders of harboring fascist sympathies. In solidarity with the Finns, much of the Broadway theater community turned its productions into benefit performances to raise money for Finnish resistance. Such benefits were not uncommon; Hellman had previously supported them for Spanish War Relief. Now, however, when Tallulah Bankhead, the star of The Little Foxes, pressed Hellman to do the same for Finland, Hellman refused. The story has often been used to demonstrate Hellman’s adherence to the communist party line during this period. That interpretation is supported by a statement she made at the time. She feared, she told a reporter, that such a benefit “would give dangerous impetus to war spirit in this country.”54

  Later she told a different story, one that depicted the disagreement as based on personal animus. Bankhead had earlier refused to perform a benefit for Spanish Republican fighters who needed money to get out of a Spain then falling to Franco.55 Hellman, who had passed through Helsinki in 1937 and noted the posters and rallies in support of Hitler, had little sympathy for the Finns. Along with her like-minded producer Herman Shumlin, she was not inclined to raise money for what she considered a country with fascist sympathies. Angry with Bankhead for denying her an opportunity to raise funds for Spain, she simply took her revenge. Hellman claimed that Bankhead turned “what had been no more than a theatre fight … into a political attack: it was made to seem that we agreed with the invasion of Finland, refused aid to true democrats, were, ourselves, dangerous Communists.” She claimed to be a victim: “It was my first experience of such goings-on.”56

  It is difficult to believe that Hellman did not invent the second story to justify her behavior after the fact, and yet she did not mindlessly support the party line. She would later write of the German alliance with Russia: “While I believed that the Soviet Union’s disillusionment with Munich in 1938 afforded some justification for the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, I wholly disagreed with the position of the Communist Party in its glorification of Nazism.”57 Two projects in which she was then engaged illustrate this complicated position: PM magazine and her antifascist play Watch on the Rhine. Together, they reveal something of her unconventional intellectual stance.

  Ralph Ingersoll, Lillian’s old friend and sometime lover, planned to develop a new daily newspaper intended to serve truth “whether the truth takes us to the right or to the left.” Ingersoll claimed to have been inspired to produce PM by Lillian herself and gave her credit for the name. As the story goes, Ingersoll, the distinguished editor of Fortune magazine and soon to become general manager of Time, Inc., fell into a passionate romance with Hellman that lasted through the summer and fall of 1935. When Lillian, in the presence of Dashiell Hammett, mocked him once too often for being under the thumb of the corporation’s owner, Henry Luce, Ingersoll vowed to prove his manhood by creating a publication of his own.58

  By the fall of 1939, Ingersoll was ready to start the newspaper, whose credo he succinctly described in one of many drafts of his “Proposition to Create a New Newspaper” as “against people who push other people around.” Talented writers of all kinds would write for it, he believed, because “only here can they write honestly what they know and see.”59 This would be possible because PM would not be dependent on advertising. Rather it would be supported, at five cents a copy, by the “subway rider.” He proved to be partially right. Launched with the help of funding from a large advisory board and particularly from the department store heir Marshall Field (whose wife, Ruth, was a good friend of Lillian’s), Ingersoll produced an afternoon newspaper whose circulation reached nearly two hundred thousand daily.

  To get PM going and to hire its staff, Ingersoll placed on its planning committee a range of intellectuals who included Hellman and Hammett, both of them by now understood to be members of the Communist Party. Together they hired a young staff, some of them communists. Others, like Ingersoll himself and the journalist I. F. Stone, were committed to noncommunist antifascist politics. The staff also included liberals who despised the Soviet Union. Among these, the news reporter James Wechsler stood out. Ingersoll deployed his talent effectively, insisting that everyone had to work together and that the paper would publish only independent thought. Communists were fine; single-minded followers of the party line would be rejected. Not everyone believed him.

  For a while the paper worked beautifully. PM was apparently read in the White House. Avidly antifascist, President Roosevelt and Eleanor used the paper to create support for interventionist policies and to construct sympathy for the refugees of fascism. Both Hammett and Hellman devoted time and attention to it in 1940 and 1941. FDR invited Ingersoll to the White House to consult with him about policy and politics. Despite widespread accusations of sympathy with communism, Ingersoll successfully laughed off any taint of Communist Party influence.

  Yet the several pieces that Hellman wrote for PM during its short eight-year life span reveal how awkwardly even the most talented writers responded to the injunction to independent thought. Hellman, still drawn to communism in the years of the Nazi-Soviet pact, would not defend either the Soviet Union or the Germans, and yet she demonstrated an unrelenting cynicism with regard to American democracy. Sent to Philadelphia to cover the Republican national convention of 1940, she soon left the convention hall, frustrated by the apparent deal-making that undergirded the process of selecting a president. On the street, she buttonholed “three white men and two black men” to ask them “whether they thought Mr. Roosevelt might run again, or who did they think the Republicans would pick for a candidate.” Unconvincingly she reported that one after the other refused to speak to her. A taxi driver told her “he had been instructed not to talk about politics, the war, or the state of the nation.” Another replied to her questions by telling her, “We don’t think around here much. It’s too hot to think.” Yet a third replied that he “didn’t have any ideas, sometimes it wasn’t smart to have ideas.” She concluded, in what can only be interpreted as an obvious projection, that they were “too suspicious and too tired and too frightened to exercise their primary right of free and easy speech.”60

  About this time, Lillian Hellman came to the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Their files on her, numbering close to a thousand pages, start in 1941 and, with sporadic breaks, follow her into the 1970s.61 Hellman seems not to have been aware of the surveillance—and yet this too is part of the American twentieth century. The bureau searched its inventory and newspaper databases back to 1936 to compile evidence of her association with left-wing groups.

  Hellman was growing impatient. The Nazi-Soviet pact had effectively, if only momentarily, curtailed the Communist Party’s criticism of fascism. But Hellman was not to be silenced. She had always defended the right to speak freely, and, whatever the Soviet line, she would speak up now. Swiftly, she sat down to pen Watch on the Rhine, the only play she ever
wrote, she tells us, that flowed from her pen in a single draft. The play eloquently celebrated “men willing to die for what they believed in.”62 In so doing, it implicitly condemned Soviet efforts to convince Americans to remain out of the war then spreading across Europe, and it appealed for engagement with a fascist enemy. Inaction, Watch on the Rhine seemed to warn, would stifle freedom everywhere. Hellman had no need to name Germans as the enemy in the play; a German villain who drew on the German embassy for support made its targets clear. She preferred, she would later say, to speak to the issue of sticking by one’s convictions.

  The communist press predictably attacked the play. As it had taken issue with The Little Foxes for being too easy on capitalists, now it condemned Watch on the Rhine for its “fabric of omissions.” Why, wondered communist critics, did the play fail to illuminate the economic ills that provoked the rise of fascism? Alvah Bessie, writing in the New Masses, deplored the play’s lack of sensitivity. Instead of “trying to whip or cajole us into imperialist war against the fascists,” Bessie commented, “Hellman might have used her skills to promote the world-wide organization by the working people against their separate home-grown brands of fascism.”63

  Nine weeks after the play opened in April 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. The alliance of fascism and communism was over. The west joined with the communists to defeat fascism. Dashiell Hammett settled in at Hardscrabble Farm to write the screen version of Watch on the Rhine. Hellman became a darling of the communist press. Simultaneously, she earned a treasured invitation to both supper at the White House and a command performance of her play on January 25, 1942. There, as she remembers it, President Roosevelt inquired about the provenance of the play and, when she told him she had started it in the summer of 1940, asked her how she reconciled the play with rumors that she had supported communist pickets then opposed to U.S. entry into the war. Hellman denied that she had ever supported the pickets.64