A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  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

  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.”16 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.17

  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.18 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.19 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 can
didate with a more open position regarding Soviet power.20 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.21 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.”22 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.”23

  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.”24 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.”25

  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.”26 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.27 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.”28

  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.”29

  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.”