It is a strange turn of life that the plays Lillian Hellman wrote in the 1930's and '40's center around the same moral issues as her recent factual memoir of the McCarthy period. The plays were for the most part written many years before McCarthy and the Red Scare were part of Hellman's life or of American life; yet the plays prefigure and parallel the memoir.

In her plays, and in Scoundrel Time, the memoir, Hellman formulates and explores the idea that regardless of political and social pressures, we must not eagerly, unthinkingly violate the unspoken rules of human decency….

In 1934, the twenty-nine year old Hellman dramatized precisely this moral issue in her first play, The Children's Hour. A young girl accuses her teachers of being lesbians in order to avoid punishment for having stolen a bracelet. Even more indecent than the girl's frightened act, however, is the whole community's eagerness to accept the children's stories, though they are shown to be improbable. This eagerness for scandal is one of the immoral pressures out of which the lies have grown. The same kind of pressures caused people to make exaggerated and false accusations before the [House Committee on Un-American Activities]…. (p. 1)

Scoundrel Time portrays Hellman thinking hard about her own fears—of jail, and rats, and no money—and deciding exactly which principles are or are not important enough for her to defend in spite of these fears. Hellman believes that this kind of hard thinking is what moral battles are made of…. Scoundrel Time explores the very personal foundations of political commitment and of political acts. Hellman strives to understand clearly which issues are worth enough to her for her to pay the price of commitment … and which issues no one at all who believes in fundamental human rights can ignore without shaming and disgracing themselves. (p. 2)

[In Scoundrel Time Hellman] is angry at people who are dishonest with themselves, and who refuse to face either their fears or their principles, but simply allow themselves to slide unthinkingly into the easiest course of action. (pp. 2-3)

Stronger than any political message in Scoundrel Time and most of the plays is this conviction that it is shocking and disgraceful when people refuse to face up to their personal responsibility of defending their own moral and political beliefs and not allowing them to be trampled in a time of scoundrels….

[In] The Little Foxes (1939), whose plot turns around the villainy of a family scheming against each other, the most evil act is merely Regina's passive participation in her husband's death, when she refuses to help him. And the great moment in this early play is like Hellman's great moment of non-participation in the HUAC's persecutions: Alexandra decides to break away from her acquiescence to her family's corruption….

Even a more sinister villain than Regina—the dangerous Teck in Watch on the Rhine (1941)—is not quite an active evil figure. His corruption grows directly out of the passivity and cowardice of his half-commitment to fascist activities…. [Teck] exploits others to gain acceptance by the Nazis. His position bears comparison with that of the intellectuals half in, half hoping to come onto the McCarthy bandwagon…. (p. 3)

The choice between sliding through life joining and leaving the most convenient bandwagons, or actively and constructively shaping one's life, is dramatized by Hellman in her later plays as a choice relating to personal philosophy and individual fulfillment as much as it is a moral and political issue. Ned Crossman and Ben Griggs, in The Autumn Garden (1951), dissipate their creative human potential by following the path of least resistence—a course which for them is in the long run self-destructive, and unfulfilling. Crossman wastes himself in the easy haze of alcohol…. Ben Griggs allows himself to fall into domestic fetters in his destructive, stagnating relationship with his wife. And both Crossman and Griggs come to recognize with anguish and disappointment that they can never break away to shape their lives in a constructive, fulfilling way. Frustration and self-imprisonment have become an easy habit, and they have lost the will and desire to break it….

[For Hellman] the moral issue is seen finally as a personal issue of pride and dignity. But the pride and dignity Hellman values in other people is usually pride which is based on loyalty to a long-thought-about private code of integrity and morality—whatever that code may be. (p. 4)

Scoundrel Time is about a struggle to retain dignity and honor by a woman who [admits she fears her fears]…. Julia [in Pentimento] reminds Hellman of her fears in warning her not to attempt to help the anti-Nazi resistance unless she can recognize and accept her fears and is willing to struggle with them for the sake of this particular cause. (pp. 4-5)

Scoundrel Time is a book about Hellman's deliberate decision [not to risk jail by denouncing HUAC when she appeared before it] and the moments of fear and choice and punishment that came before and afterward; but it is also a book about anger with most of us for being so undeliberate in our moral decisions. Hellman is as rebellious as Solzhenitsyn, in his different way, against the thoughtless, careless complacency of people's participation in their culture. She is furious with intellectuals like [Clifford] Odets who claimed to be radically committed to American political freedoms, but who carelessly, in a moment of pressure, turned roundabout on all these beliefs, and yet went on as though nothing substantial had been yielded….

Scoundrel Time is about that hour when a person must actively resist, or be deprived of the liberties that should be a part of a fundamental code of human decency and personal honor. The book is about the decision to stand fast and refuse to participate in the attack on those liberties. There is a quiet heroism in that hour; but it is always brought into earthly perspective by Hellman's frustrated realization that her hour came within a society which acquiesced and continues to acquiesce to the erosion of these liberties at the same time as it professes to believe in them.

The book implies that our quiet cooperation with McCarthy led to more recent political abuses…. Scoundrel Time, then, is about some of the substantial issues of this time in America; they are the issues Hellman dramatized from 1936 to 1960 in her plays, the issues she faced along with her fears and principles during the 1950's time of scoundrels, and the problems we now face in reacting to Watergate. (p. 5)