SOURCE: Howe, Irving. “Lillian Hellman and the McCarthy Years.” In Irving Howe: Selected Writings, 1950-1990, pp. 340-46. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

[In the following essay, originally published in Dissent in 1976, Howe argues that Hellman's depiction of 1950s America in her memoirs is more mythology than fact.]

There are writers with so enticing a style that, in their own behalf, they must stop themselves and ask: “Is what I am saying true? Charming yes, persuasive also; but true?” This has, or should, become a problem for Lillian Hellman. Her three recent memoirs recalling her life with Dashiell Hammett and, in Scoundrel Time, her 1952 clash with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), all make attractive reading. By the same token, however, Miss Hellman has reached a point where she risks mythologizing her own life, transfiguring the story of a taciturn Dash and the peppery Lillian into a popular literary romance.

But let that pass, and let us turn to the claim of Miss Hellman and her admirers that in her latest book she provides an accurate and balanced record of the McCarthy years. My contention is that she does not. What she provides is half the story, a vivid and useful half, but no more.

Nothing, to be sure, in her book is as false and certainly nothing as vulgar as the Introduction Garry Wills has written for it. Yet, nuance and sensibility apart, Miss Hellman and Wills hold pretty much the same view of the early 1950s. Quickly summarized, it is this: The U.S. was seized in those years by an ideological fever, whipped up by Cold War reactionaries. America, says Wills, had fallen “in love with total war”; American intellectuals, says Miss Hellman, grew fearful that the spread of Communism might bring to an end “their pleasant way of life.” Now that the Nazis were smashed, a new scapegoat was needed and for this the Communists were ready at hand. The dirty work was done by congressional inquisitors, the intellectual support given by anti-Communist liberals and radicals. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), sneers Wills, did “the Committee's [HUAC's] kind of work in a more sophisticated way.”

This view of the McCarthy years is simple, self-serving, and untrue. It starts from a premise always dear to those who would deny the reality of Communism as problem or threat: the premise that there is a single, undifferentiated, and necessarily reactionary “anti-Communism.” Thus, writes Miss Hellman, the anti-Stalinist intellectuals have not yet found it “a part of conscience to admit that their Cold War anti-Communism was perverted, possibly against their wishes, into the Vietnam War and then into the reign of Nixon, their unwanted but inevitable leader.” It is an astonishing sentence, with gaps in the argument through which battalions of historical complications could march.

• • It assumes the existence of a unified body of intellectuals, all holding the same views about Communism, McCarthyism, and so on. But even within the ranks of the New York intellectuals, whom Miss Hellman seems mostly to have in mind, this was untrue.
• • It is preposterous as history. Complicated chains of events, as well as unforeseeable accidents, intervened between the McCarthy years and the Vietnam War; events and accidents that could more plausibly be assigned as causes of that war than could the McCarthyite inquisition. Equally preposterous is the claim that Nixon as leader was “inevitable.” What about the many intellectuals who did not follow Nixon, either evitably or inevitably? What about the possibility that the events of the late 1960s created a backlash from which Nixon profited? Suppose that in a few crucial states, like California, voters inclined toward the New Left had voted for Humphrey—might not Nixon have been defeated and not become our “inevitable” leader? Miss Hellman has wandered into a swamp of determinism/freedom that more experienced historians know it is wise to avoid.
• • The shoddiness, in any case, of Miss Hellman's argument can be revealed by proposing an equivalent: “The uncritical support given Stalinist Russia by people like Dashiell Hammett and other literary people led, possibly against their wishes, to a whitewash of Gulag Archipelago and the murder of millions, and for this the fellow-traveling intellectuals must inevitably be held responsible.” I imagine Miss Hellman would be outraged by such an argument, insisting we must make discriminations as to kinds of support, degrees of involvement, and the nature of motives. Well, let her try to imagine as much for others.

Except as a rhetorical device for dull-witted reactionaries, on the one hand, and bashful fellow-travelers on the other, there was no such thing as a monolithic “anti-Communism.” Opposition to Communism by demagogues like McCarthy rested on reactionary opinions and a fear that privileges might be lost; opposition to Communism by liberals and radicals rested on libertarian opinions and a fear that freedoms might be lost. In political methods and outlook, Joe McCarthy was a lot closer to the Communist Khrushchev than to the anti-Communist Norman Thomas.

That “anti-Communism” was exploited by the McCarthy hooligans does not mean there was no reason for serious people to worry about Communism as a threat to freedom. The Soviet Union had just gobbled up Eastern Europe—but Garry Wills sees only the “aggressive” foreign policy of Harry Truman. If Miss Hellman and Wills want to provide a balanced picture of this historical period, they must point not only to the failures of American policy, real and grave as these were, but also to the reasons that led many of us to fear that the Communist movement in Europe had gathered a dynamic of expansion threatening political freedom.

At the least, a few simple facts! Though Wills carries on at length about foolishness spewed by Ayn Rand before HUAC in order to ridicule the very idea that there was any ground for concern about Communism, he says nothing, nor does Miss Hellman, about the discussions then being carried on throughout the world on this matter by such people as Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, Nicola Chiaromonte, Willy Brandt, Norman Thomas, and many others. Really, to think you can dispose of any point of view by invoking Ayn Rand!

Still more—and here we come to a feat—both Wills and Miss Hellman talk about the early fifties without so much as mentioning the event that sent shivers through the hearts of intellectuals, and not theirs alone. Imagine writing about this period, imagine discussing the response of intellectuals to Communism, McCarthyism, and all the rest, without even mentioning the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. It would be like writing a study of the upheavals in the late 1960s without mentioning the Vietnam War! For it was the coup in Czechoslovakia that persuaded many people that there could be no lasting truce with the Communist world. I don't know whether Garry Wills is old enough to remember that event, or has troubled to read anything about it, but Lillian Hellman must remember it.

There were, to be sure, intellectuals who buckled under the McCarthyite assault (it was not, by the way, a “terror”: people could speak, write, agitate against it without fearing a knock on their doors at 4:00 in the morning). Other intellectuals allowed their hatred of Communism to deflect them from an adequate resistance to McCarthy. As instances of the latter, Miss Hellman cites Partisan Review and Commentary. She is largely unfair about the first, largely right about the second. Partisan Review, as she notes, printed in 1954 a violently anti-McCarthy and free-swinging attack by me on conformist intellectuals; the piece was written at the suggestion of Philip Rahv, then its leading editor; and it could hardly have gotten into the pages of PR behind the backs of the editors. What seems to me true is that the magazine didn't take a sufficiently bold lead in rallying intellectuals against McCarthyism; but that is something very different from what Miss Hellman says. As for Commentary, it was then controlled by intellectuals hurrying rightward (a fate that seems to befall that journal periodically) and its record on McCarthyism was, let us say, shabby. Two of its leading editors, Elliot Cohen and Irving Kristol, while not giving their approval to McCarthy, went to some lengths to dismiss the idea that the Wisconsin demagogue constituted a serious threat to American liberties.

Surely Miss Hellman must remember, as Wills might have troubled to find out, that there were old-fashioned liberals like Henry Steele Commager and Roger Baldwin and old-fashioned Socialists like Norman Thomas who combined a principle opposition to Communism with an utter rejection of McCarthyism. Thomas fought for the liberties of the very Stalinists who had supported the prosecution of Trotskyists in Minneapolis under the notorious Smith Act. In the early issues of Dissent there were attacks on McCarthy and all he stood for, as well as criticism of the Commentary people for their waffling.

The same holds for the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. Perhaps some people in that group had bad records in the early 1950s. There were cowards everywhere in scoundrel time. But as it happens, a hero of Miss Hellman's book is Joe Rauh, the lawyer who represented her before HUAC. Everyone who knows ADA also knows that Rauh has been one of its two or three central figures from the moment of its birth. If Garry Wills is so intent upon pillorying ADA, shouldn't he at least ask how he can reconcile the charge that ADA did “the work” of HUAC with the fact that this leading ADA figure emerges in the Hellman book as a staunch defender of liberties? Didn't Wills read Hellman or Hellman Wills?

Wills is equally feckless in writing about the once-famous Waldorf Conference in 1949, of which Miss Hellman was a prominent sponsor. In the name of peace, this gathering was organized by “the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace,” a group Wills neglects, somehow, to characterize politically. In fact, it was dominated by Communists and their friends, and represented the last hurrah of the fellow-traveling intellectuals in the United States. Its overwhelming stress was to blame the developing Cold War on the United States.

Wills tells us that U.S. footpads and intellectual auxiliaries joined at this conference to harass lovers of peace. “Guardians of liberalism” like Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald went to the sessions “in order to disrupt them.” The composer Shostakovich, who was one of the Russian delegates, “was, in the name of freedom, publicly insulted for not being free.”

False, every word. In 1949 Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald were anti-Stalinist, independent radicals—to speak of them as “guardians of liberalism” is gratuitously patronizing. Nor did they disrupt the conference. McCarthy, Macdonald, and Robert Lowell asked questions of Shostakovich (who looked as if he wanted to be anywhere but where he was) and of the Russian culture commissar, Alexander Fedayev (who looked as if he'd like to get these American wiseguys back home; he'd teach them to ask questions!). The questions concerned the fate of Russian writers persecuted by the regime and, in the case of Lowell, the sufferings of conscientious objectors in the Soviet Union.

Now to someone trained in a GPU school all this might have seemed “disruptive.” But to Garry Wills, so severe in his judgments about standing up for freedom?

In her own essay Miss Hellman is more charming and certainly writes better than Wills. She has earned the right to be proud of her record in defying the HUAC bums, though her explanation of why some of her friends, like Clifford Odets, lost their nerve and gave names to the committee is very disturbing. “The children of timid immigrants [Jewish immigrants?] are often remarkable people: energetic, intelligent, hard-working; and often they make it so good that they are determined to keep it at any cost.” Are we to infer that the children of bourgeois German Jews or starchy Protestant Americans have proven themselves to be rocks of fortitude in resisting tyrannical authority? And as for that remark about “timid immigrants,” Miss Hellman ought to look at a recent book called World of Our Fathers, where she can learn just how “timid” many of those immigrants were.

Miss Hellman's main target is finally the intellectuals, those—mostly unnamed—who failed to stand up or stand up strongly enough to McCarthy. “Up to the late 1940s,” she had believed that “the educated, the intellectual lived by what they claimed to believe: freedom of thought and speech, the right of each man to his own convictions.” Well, as I've indicated, a number of American intellectuals did just that. Yet before Miss Hellman grows so furious with the others, those who caved in and those who wobbled, oughtn't she to be asking the same kind of questions about the people with whom she collaborated politically over the years, signing statements, organizing the Waldorf Conference, sponsoring the Progressive party? How can it be that someone who believed in such splendid things didn't trouble to ask friends and collaborators whether they lived by “freedom of thought and speech, the right of each man to his own convictions”?

Miss Hellman doesn't ask such questions; she isn't inclined to make things hard for herself. She is riding high these days—and no one, really, should begrudge Lillian Hellman her success, for she is a gifted writer. Still, I find myself disturbed by the way she clings to fragments of old dogmas that, at other and more lucid moments, she knows she should have given up long ago. “Most of the Communists I had met,” she writes, “seemed to me people who wanted to make a better world; many of them were silly people and a few of them were genuine nuts, but that doesn't make for denunciations. …”

No individual should be harassed or persecuted, or denounced to the cops, for holding even the most obnoxious opinions. But what about judgments of the opinions themselves and of the public consequences of holding them?

Most of the Communists Miss Hellman met may have wanted a better world, but the better world they wanted came down to a soul-destroying and body-tormenting prison: the Moscow trials, the Stalin dictatorship, the destruction of millions during the forced collectivization, and a systematic denial of the slave camps in Siberia. (Do you really think we didn't know about Gulag Archipelago until Solzhenitsyn published his remarkable book? He offered new material, but the essential facts were known as far back as the late 1930s—and were violently denied by many of the people with whom Miss Hellman worked at the Waldorf Conference and in the Progressive party.)

A final point and we are done. On her next-to-last page Miss Hellman writes that the intellectuals whom she has attacked have a right to criticize her for “taking too long to see what was going on in the Soviet Union. But whatever our mistakes, I do not believe we did our country any harm.”

Lillian Hellman could not be more mistaken! Those who supported Stalinism and its political enterprises, either here or abroad, helped befoul the cultural atmosphere, helped bring totalitarian methods into trade unions, helped perpetuate one of the great lies of our century, helped destroy whatever possibilities there might have been for a resurgence of serious radicalism in America. Isn't that harm enough?

Scoundrels there were in the 1950s, as in all other times, and Lillian Hellman has pointed to some of them accurately. But she would have done both her readers and herself a greater service if she had been more precise—and more comprehensive—in her pointing.