The Scoundrel in the Looking Glass
[In the following essay, originally published in Philosophy and Public Policy in 1980, Hook excoriates what he considers Hellman's total misrepresentation of history in her memoir Scoundrel Time, in particular her paradoxical vindication of Stalinism and vocal stand against McCarthyism.]
Lillian Hellman enjoys a wide reputation: students pay her homage, reviewers praise her books. A recent play on the McCarthy era presents her as a martyred heroine, radiant in the glow of the spotlight. She is also a brilliant polemicist, skilled in moralizing even at the expense of truth, honor, and common sense. And she has spun a myth about her past that has misled the reading public of at least two countries.
Let us imagine the following case.
A woman of some literary talent and reputation who, although not a cardholding member of the Nazi German-American Bund, which flourished in the 1930s, is the mistress of one of its leading figures, and hobnobs with its political leaders in the circles in which she moves. She signs denunciations of the victims of Hitler's purges and frame-up trials as “spies and wreckers” whose degenerate character has been established, and characterizes the Nazi holocaust as a purely internal affair of a progressive country whose “policies have resulted in a higher standard of living for the people.” She attacks a commission of inquiry, headed by a noted American philosopher, to discover the truth about juridical affairs in Nazi Germany. At every political turn as Hitler consolidates his power and screws tighter the pitch of his terror against his own people and those of other lands, she lauds his rule. She plays a leading role in organizing cultural front organizations as transmission belts for the Nazi party line. When Berlin launches a phony peace conference, she serves as a keynote speaker denying its true auspices and savagely assailing its critics. When artists and literary figures rally to provide relief for the victims of Nazi oppression, she sabotages their efforts by insisting that charity begins at home. She visits Nazi Germany four times and returns without uttering a single word of criticism of its gleichgeschaltet culture, and its concentration camps.
Disturbed by the growing influence of the German-American Bund and other political groups controlled by foreign governments, Congress authorizes one of its committees to investigate their activities and the sources of their plentiful funds. The legitimacy of the inquiry is upheld by the highest courts. It turns out that many members and sympathizers of the Bund are found in the entertainment industry. By this time because the true nature of the Nazi regime has been discovered by many, and because the United States is virtually at war with Hitler, some witnesses subpoenaed and under oath, and therefore subject to penalties of perjury, testify truly about their past involvements and experiences. Some refuse to testify about their membership, invoke the First Amendment, and risk being jailed for contempt. Others invoke the privilege of the Fifth Amendment on the ground that their truthful testimony would tend to incriminate them. Some like the woman in question invoke the Fifth Amendment not on the ground that their truthful testimony would tend to incriminate them but that it would tend to incriminate others—which really constitutes an abuse of the Fifth Amendment. Some who publicly claim to have been falsely identified as members of the Bund, when invited to confirm or deny the charge, nonetheless invoke the Fifth Amendment.
Much of the interrogation appears, and indeed is, irrelevant or foolish. Some of the committee members are interested in making headlines and (in the changed climate of hostile opinion to Germany) political capital out of the investigation. Nonetheless, considerable evidence is uncovered of penetration by members and sympathizers of the Bund into various areas of American cultural life, especially the entertainment industry. Partly out of conviction and partly out of a sense of guilt at the shabby way they earned their swollen salaries in Hollywood, members and fellow travelers paid large sums of money into the coffers of the Bund. Some of them were well enough organized to place obstacles in the way of outspoken critics of Nazi causes who sought employment.
The entertainment industry is run for profit. Its moguls are exceedingly sensitive to what affects public favor and box-office receipts. Not surprisingly, owners and producers became fearful of employing those identified under oath as members of the Nazi German-American Bund, or who invoked the Fifth Amendment, lest any film, play, or program with which they are associated become the target of a public boycott. An informal blacklist developed and some racketeers sought to exploit the situation. Some economic hardship resulted. Blacklisted writers peddled their scripts under pseudonyms. However, in a few short years, the wartime hostilities with Germany having been forgotten, those who suffered temporary economic hardship resumed their prosperous careers.
What would one think of the woman in this parable who, in 1976, strikes the pose of a heroine who defied the congressional inquisition and empties the vials of her wrath on anti-Fascists in the intellectual and literary community who allegedly stood idly by when she was questioned about her involvement with leading Nazi members and organizations? What would one think of this woman who now lamely asserts that her only fault was being a little late in recognizing “the sins” of Hitler—despite all the evidence that had accumulated over the forty years from the time she had endorsed the first of Hitler's mass purges?
For the Nazi German-American Bund in the above hypothetical account substitute the Communist party. For the woman in question—Lillian Hellman who in her book Scoundrel Time1 seems to have duped a generation of critics devoid of historical memory and critical common sense.
When Lillian Hellman was subpoenaed to appear before the House committee, the United States was in effect at war with two Communist powers—North Korea and China. The threat of involvement with the U.S.S.R. loomed large in popular consciousness. The leaders of the Communist party had declared that in case of conflict with the Soviet Union they would not support the United States. The record of Communist actions, at home and abroad, had generated fear in the American people—and not only among them—of forcible Communist expansion. It began with the violation of the treaties about free elections in Eastern Europe; followed by the revelations of Igor Gouzenko (the code clerk in the Russian embassy in Ottawa) of massive Soviet espionage in Canada and the United States by domestic Communists; the Communist take-over in Czechoslovakia; the arrest and conviction of Klaus Fuchs, Allen Nunn May, Harry Gold, the Rosenbergs, David Greenglass, and other atomic spies; testimony of Communist penetration into some of the most sensitive areas of government; the trials and conviction of Alger Hiss; the Communist blockade of Berlin; the hazardous and costly Berlin airlift; Communist support of rebels in Greece and Turkey; the invasion of South Korea (June 1950). Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of congressional investigations—and despite Lillian Hellman's contention to the contrary, their methods and areas of investigations were often criticized by liberals!—they did not create the climate of concern about Communist aggression abroad and Communist penetration within. That was a consequence of historical events. CIO trade-unionists and NAACP Negro leaders were barring Communist-controlled locals from their organizations; leading figures in Americans for Democratic Action and the Socialist party (notably Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Norman Thomas) as well as independent anti-Communist liberals, even when criticizing the excesses of the investigating committees, were exposing the unscrupulous behavior of Communist cells in every organization they joined. The concern on the part of the public with security was quite legitimate. One of the great spokesmen of the liberal tradition, Walter Lippmann, even advocated outlawing the Communist party; fortunately it was never done. Certainly the public had a right to know who was financing the Communist party—why nothing had been done to counteract the infiltration of members of its underground apparatus into sensitive government agencies—and what ostensibly neutral organizations, political and cultural, that party had established in order to penetrate the structure of American life.
That Lillian Hellman should have been called as a witness before a congressional committee investigating Communist organizations and activity in the entertainment industry (even if she had not been identified in sworn testimony as present at a meeting organized by Communist party functionaries to enlist prominent writers as members-at-large) was to be expected. The record of her activity as a participant and defender of Communist causes was notorious.
During the 1930s she defended all the Moscow trials, attacked the John Dewey Commission of Inquiry for trying to establish the truth about them, worked hand-in-glove with the party fraction in organizations like the League of American Writers and the Theatre Arts Committee. She went along with almost every twist and turn of the party line. During the Soviet-Finnish War when a theatrical relief committee for the victims of Soviet aggression was organized, it was attacked by Lillian Hellman (among others in the Theatre Arts Committee) on the grounds that “charity begins at home,” and that it was a disguised form of intervention abroad—this from the very persons who had been conspicuously active in organizing or supporting committees for Communist relief causes all over the world!
Throughout her self-serving book Lillian Hellman fails to distinguish between two types of witnesses charged with membership before the congressional committees—those who were truly identified as being members of the Communist party, and those who were falsely so identified. To her all investigation of Communist activity was a witch-hunt. One could argue (and many liberal anti-Communists did) that congressional inquiries into education and culture would have a chilling effect upon teachers and other professionals, and that whatever abuses and misconduct by Communists existed in those fields—and there were plenty!—could be dealt with by the practitioners in these fields themselves, without bringing in the state or government. Some took the same position with respect to Communist infiltration in the fields of labor and religion (see, for example, the editorial in the New Republic for 20 April 1953, “Communists in the Chruches”). But this is not at all Miss Hellman's view. She is opposed to any investigation of members of the Communist party under any auspices. She fiercely attacks any attempt by congressional committees to identify members of the Communist party, even in the most sensitive posts of government, who had slipped through defective and often nonexistent safeguards of the security system. She dismisses the evidence against Alger Hiss in passages that betray her ignorance, really indifference, to the evidence.
According to Miss Hellman the only evidence against Hiss was contained in the documents secreted by Whittaker Chambers in the famous pumpkin. And of these she says that “the only things that had been found in Chambers' pumpkin were five rolls of microfilm, two developed, three in metal containers, most of the frames were unreadable, none of them had anything to do with the charges against Alger Hiss.” She could not be more wrong. A great deal of the evidence against Hiss had nothing to do with the contents of the pumpkin (namely, all of the papers that were typed on the Hiss Woodstock typewriter). The two developed microfilm rolls of the five in the pumpkin consisted of photographs of memoranda from State Department office files to which Hiss had access and of mimeographed copies of cables from abroad that were initialled by Hiss. The other three microfilms—which were not introduced in evidence at the trials—contained unclassified material. (Espionage agents never know what the home office already has or might find useful.)
Miss Hellman's reference to the Hiss case is characteristic. On crucial matters, whenever her testimony can be checked by the record it turns out to be misleading or false. The two rolls of developed microfilm bore directly on the charge against Alger Hiss.
Roger Baldwin (the founder and long-time head of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a consistent critic of some of the techniques of congressional investigations) once observed, “A superior loyalty to a foreign government disqualifies a citizen for service to our own.” Miss Hellman would have us believe, despite the oaths and pledges that Communist party members took during those years to defend the Soviet Union, that they were no more of a security risk than any others. To be sure membership in the Communist party did not mean that given the opportunity, all members necessarily would be guilty of betrayal of their trust. One may ask, “Are there not some who would refuse to play this role?” The best answer to this question was made by Clement Attlee after the Pontecorvo affair in Britain, “There is no way of distinguishing such people from those who, if opportunity offered, would be prepared to endanger the security of the state in the interests of another power.”
Of course there can be no reasonable comparison between the capacities and opportunities for mischief of Communists in sensitive posts in government and Communists in the field of education and culture. Had Miss Hellman recognized this her position would be a little stronger. But her unqualified contention that the investigation of Communists any time and anywhere was a witch-hunt—a subversion of freedom of thought, a persecution of mere heresy rather than of conspiracy and underground secrecy wherever Communist cells functioned—testifies to the faithfulness with which she has followed the official Communist line. She does not regard it as conceivable that one could sincerely oppose both the Communists and Senator Joseph McCarthy—the Communists for what they truly represented, the existence and extension of the Gulag Archipelago—and McCarthy for making their work easier by his irresponsible accusations and exaggerations.
Individuals identified as members of the Communist party, and who did not deny it, fell into three main groups—1) those who told the truth, 2) those who refused to answer questions about their membership on grounds of the First Amendment, and 3) those who invoked the privilege against self-incrimination of the First Amendment. In all such cases the motivations for testifying, or not testifying, were mixed; but to Miss Hellman this needlessly complicates matters.
She refers to those who told the truth about their past as “friendly witnesses”: These are the “scoundrels.” She refuses to believe that anyone who told the truth could have been genuinely disillusioned with Communist behavior or, as the record of Communist penetration and deception unfolded, that they could be shamed by a sense of guilt at having abetted the Communist cause at home and Communist regimes of terror abroad. To her the only “honorable” persons were those who refused to testify if their truthful testimony required that others be implicated. The “betrayers” were only those who did testify regardless of the consequences to others and themselves. But these terms are narrowly defined to fit only the Communist cause.
When the director of the Ku Klux Klan of the state of Alabama was sentenced to jail for refusing to produce Klan records of membership before a grand jury, he pleaded that he was bound by a sacred oath of secrecy, and that to reveal the names of the members would be an act of betrayal. Miss Hellman never raised a murmur against his conviction, and it is not likely that she would characterize his actions as “honorable.” She scoffs at the notion that members of the Communist party—even their hardened functionaries—in defending the political and cultural terror of the Soviet regime and its satellites were actually “betraying” the ideals of human freedom and of their own country. Even those like Eric Russell Bentley, who disapproved of the congressional inquiries, wrote apropos of the Miller case: “I object … to the assumption that what is involved is the question of honor and betrayal with “honor” always meaning the protection of Communists and “betrayal” always meaning the revelation of Communist activity. For after all, there is also such a thing as betrayal of the United States and honorable refusal to betray the United States. Who has been betraying whom?” (New Republic, 10 September 1956).
Since writing this and other pieces in a similar vein, and at the time in personal letters to me, Eric Bentley has reversed himself. In his Thirty Years of Treason (New York, 1970) he praises both Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman for the stand they took, and out-McCarthys McCarthy by identifying the position of liberal critics of McCarthy—who attacked McCarthy when Bentley remained silent—with the position of “McCarthyism.”
Not only is Lillian Hellman altogether unreliable in describing the “friendly” witnesses before the congressional committees, she does not tell the truth about the liberal and socialist anti-Communists of the time. She gives the impression that with hardly any exceptions they were either sympathetic to the investigations or silent out of fear of losing the perquisites of the high positions they occupied. She states flatly, “No editor or contributor of Commentary ever protested against McCarthy.” The truth is that several editors and contributors protested at his vicious exaggerations not only in the relatively uninfluential pages of that publication but frequently in the New York Times.
The first call for the organization of a national movement to retire McCarthy from public life was published in the New York Times (3 May 1953) by a contributor to Commentary, Partisan Review, and the New Leader—at the height of Senator McCarthy's power. The best book on the subject during that period, McCarthy and Communism, was published by James Rorty and Moshe Decter in 1954 under the auspices of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, and received the encomiums of liberal figures like Reinhold Niebuhr and Elmer Davis.
The manner in which Lillian Hellman refers to these anti-Communist liberals shows that what she cannot forgive them for is not so much their alleged failure to criticize McCarthy but (despite her belated—in 1976!—acknowledgment of Stalin's “sins”) their criticism of the crimes of Stalin and his successors during the forty years in which she apologized for them. Her reference to these anti-Communist liberals also betrays the priggishness of the unconsciously would-be-assimilated 100 percent American whose ancestors had reached American shores a few boatloads ahead of other immigrants. Of these intellectuals she writes that “many of them found in the sins of Stalin Communism—and there were plenty of sins and plenty that for a long time I mistakenly denied—the excuse to join those who should have been their hereditary enemies. Perhaps that in part was the penalty of nineteenth-century immigration. The children of timid immigrants are often remarkable people: energetic, intelligent, hardworking, and often they make it so good that they are determined to keep it at all costs.”
What she conceals from the reader is that those she criticizes did not wait for the emergence of McCarthy to combat Stalinism at home and abroad. They began in 1933 when Stalin did his bit to help Hitler come to power. She also conceals the fact that McCarthy was elected with the support of the Communist party to the Senate in 1946, defeating the incumbent liberal anti-Communist Robert La Follette, Jr., who had opposed the treaties of Teheran and Yalta. It took McCarthy four years to become an “anti-Communist crusader” of the nationalist, isolationist variety. She conceals the facts that when McCarthy was riding high, like Congressman Martin Dies before him, he lumped together welfare-state socialists and liberals with Communists; that what contributed to McCarthy's influence (before he did himself in by attacking the army) was the spectacle of scores of Communist witnesses remaining silent, or invoking the Fifth Amendment, as the picture of Communist penetration in American life unfolded; that American reactionaries (who were criticized by those whom Lillian Hellman attacks) seem to have agreed with her that these children of immigrants were the “penalty” for America's past immigration policy; and that few, if any, of these anti-Communist liberals and socialists ever “made it so good” as Lillian Hellman. Indeed, had they been as much concerned with “making it” as she, they would not have taken an open anti-Communist position when Miss Hellman and her Communist associates were running rampant in Hollywood and elsewhere and trying to bar “Trotskyite-Fascists”—as all anti-Stalinists were then called—from getting work or getting published.
Lillian Hellman pictures herself as a heroine defending intellectual and cultural freedom against her inquisitors. But she actually had nothing to fear from them. She claims that she was never a cardholding member of the Communist party. If true she could not by her testimony identify on the basis of her own knowledge anyone else as a member. Anything else would merely be hearsay. She herself was never clearly identified as a member but only as “present” with leading Communists at a meeting fifteen years earlier—a meeting she cannot recall as having taken place. Since she has denied that she ever was a member of the Communist party, to any question about any other person's membership she could have truthfully responded that she did not know. The person who placed her at the meeting had admitted his own membership—she certainly could not have hurt him. Two days before her appearance she wrote the committee that she was prepared to answer all questions about herself; but, if questioned about others, she would invoke the Fifth Amendment because she did not want to bring “bad trouble” to anyone else. She claims that she was the first witness to brave the wrath of the committee with this defiant position.
The official records of her interrogation reveal that her entire present account is a compound of falsity and deliberate obfuscation. First of all, it is not true that she was the first of the witnesses to have taken the position that only if she were not questioned about others would she answer questions truthfully about herself—a condition that no court or committee of inquiry can grant. Communists who were identified as members of the party by the sworn testimony of former members had taken precisely the same approach, and Miss Hellman was merely following the pattern with minor variations. For example, on 19 May 1952 (the very day she wrote her letter and two days before her own appearance) a University of Buffalo teacher of philosophy refused on grounds of the Fifth Amendment to answer the question whether he had been a member of a Communist party cell at Harvard during the late 1930s. He, too, had offered (in a letter to the committee earlier in the month) to testify concerning his own “past associations and activities” but not about others.
The reason why members of the Communist party took this tack should be clear. If they refused to answer any question on the grounds of the First Amendment, they risked an action for contempt. If they denied membership (as some members of the Communist party had done in previous investigations in local areas like New York) they risked an action for perjury, if two witnesses who had been former members identified them. By invoking the Fifth Amendment as the ground for their refusal, they escaped answering any questions with impunity. In their case the admission of membership in the Communist party might be self-incriminating under the Smith Act—although no ordinary member of the party was ever prosecuted under it. The first victims of the Smith Act were Trotskyists whose conviction Miss Hellman's political allies gleefully applauded. In Miss Hellman's case, since she explicitly claims that she was not a member of the Communist party—and that her refusal to say so was motivated only by reluctance to incriminate others—her invocation of the Fifth Amendment was really illegitimate because her truthful testimony could never have incriminated her.
Even more surprising are the details of her testimony. Some questions about her membership in the Communist party she answers without invoking the Fifth Amendment. To the question, “Are you now a member of the Communist Party?” She answers, “No.” “Were you yesterday?” She still answers, “No.” “Were you last year at this time?” “No.” “Two years ago from this time?” “No.” But to the question, “Three years ago at this time?” she refuses to answer on the grounds of self-incrimination. She does not explain why a truthful answer would tend to be self-incriminating to the question about her membership in the Communist party in 1949 but not in 1950, 1951, and 1952.
The committee was satisfied with her response and, happily for her, took no legal action, for its apparent strategy was to convince the country that those who invoked the Fifth Amendment had something to hide. Technically, of course, under the law an innocent person could invoke the Fifth Amendment. A police officer, for example, earning $15,000 a year and questioned as to whether the $500,000 in his vault was “graft,” could invoke the Fifth Amendment, whether he was guilty or innocent, and stay out of jail. But, after a departmental hearing, he could very well lose his post, unless he could rebut the presumption of unfitness to hold a position of trust created by his refusal to answer a question germane to his professional responsibilities. As Jeremy Bentham pointed out long ago the refusal to answer on grounds of possible self-incrimination creates an inescapable presumption of guilt even if that presumption is rebuttable.
Whether or not one agrees with his politics—which were abominable since he, too, was a committed apologist for Stalin's terror and upheld its necessity as a teacher in the party school—Dashiell Hammett's course in refusing to testify was certainly more straightforward than Lillian Hellman's. The record of her own interrogation as well as of others gives the lie to the artful reconstruction of her behavior as a morally defiant witness. She relates an incident—unreported by anyone else present (newsmen were there in large numbers)—according to which after her letter had been read by the committee's counsel, a journalist loudly exclaimed, “Thank God somebody finally had the guts to do it!” This is implausible on its face. What she did had indeed been done before, and it required no guts at all to invoke the Fifth Amendment. It was a ticket to safety.
Oddly enough, although her reason for refusing to testify truthfully about herself was that she would cause “bad trouble” to others, on the occasions when she proceeded to invoke the Fifth Amendment she could not possibly have compromised or even embarrassed them. When asked if she was “acquainted” with Martin Berkeley she invoked the Fifth. But since Berkeley was a self-confirmed former member whose testimony had identified her as present at a meeting in his house, she could not have harmed him in the least. When asked if she was “acquainted” with V. J. Jerome (who was a member of the Political Committee of the Communist party and in charge of organizing Communist party cells in Hollywood), she also invoked the Fifth. The same for John Howard Lawson. She could not have possibly caused them trouble if, as she now assures us, she was not a member of the Communist party during that time. By denying that she was a member in 1952, 1951, and 1950, and invoking the privilege against self-incrimination for periods earlier, she creates the presumption that she told the truth neither then nor now.
Lillian Hellman is not only disingenuous, to put it mildly, about her defiance of the House committee but also about her “involvement” with the Communist movement even if she is given the benefit of every doubt about whether she was technically a dues-paying member. Throughout her book she gives the impression that she really knew little about the political doings going on around her; that the discussions she heard or overheard made no sense to her; that it sounded like gobbledygook; and that her relations with the Communist party were remote, the result of association with Dashiell Hammett on the one hand, and her opposition to fascism on the other. Yet the internal evidence of this book, and her explicit statement about her political education in a previous book, make it extremely difficult to swallow her artful picture of herself as a rebel and a Bohemian not seriously interested in politics.
By her own account in this book she was up to her neck in politics. She played an important role in both the official and unofficial front activities of the Communist party. She met with “high officials” of the party to discuss the behavior of the party fraction in former Vice-President Henry Wallace's Progressive party. She was privately opposed (she tells us) to the Communist domination of the Progressive party although its role in organizing it was patent even to outsiders. She presents a jeering caricature of Henry Wallace as a kind of eccentric hick and skinflint at a time when the worst thing about him was his invincible political innocence. Subsequently, when he turned against the Communists and denounced them (New York Herald Tribune, 14 February 1952) for their “force, deceit, and intrigues,” and their activities in the Progressive party, Miss Hellman taxes him with lying—that is, he knew it all along because she had told him that Communists were in the Progressive party when he had asked her about it.
But Lillian Hellman is no more just to Henry Wallace than to others. Wallace had publicly recognized the damage the Communist party was doing to the cause of genuine Progressives when he declared in a speech at Center Sandwich, N.H., in the Fall of 1948, “If the Communists would only run a ticket of their own, the Progressive Party would gain 3,000,000 votes.” What Wallace did not know is what Miss Hellman did not tell him—that the Communist party had infiltrated into the strategic organizational posts of the Progressive party, and that she had the evidence of it. What she did tell him when he questioned her was that indeed there were some Communists in the Progressive party and “that the hard, dirty work in the office is done by them. … I don't think they mean any harm: they're stubborn men.” This was not an accurate account of their role, and she knew it.
In her previous book,2 Miss Hellman has said enough to make incredible her claim in this book that all the strange talk about “dictatorship and revolution” she heard in Communist circles struck her as outlandish. She says she came late to radicalism. But toward the end of the 1930s she undertook a study of Communist doctrine and embarked on an intensive “kind of reading I had never seriously done before. In the next few years, I put aside most other books for Marx and Engels, Lenin, Saint-Simon, Hegel, Feuerbach. Certainly I did not study with the dedication of a scholar, but I did read with the attention of a good student, and Marx as a man, and Engels and his Mary became for a while, more real to me than my friends.”
If she could read Hegel we can be sure that she had no difficulty with the catechismic texts of Stalin although she curiously omits his name. Nor did she stop with reading. She checked her knowledge against the superior knowledge of Dashiell Hammett whose Communist political orthodoxy, despite any private doubts, was sufficiently reliable to qualify him for teaching at the party school. “I would test my reading on Dash, who had years before, in his usual thorough fashion, read all the books I was reading and more.”
Therefore, when she tells us in her most recent book that precisely during and after this period of intensive study “the over-heated arguments, spoken and printed about dictatorship and repression puzzled me”—as if she were a Marilyn Monroe who had fallen among Marxists—she is singularly unpersuasive. Miss Hellman may or may not have been a member of the Communist party but until Stalin died she was not only a convinced Communist but a Stalinist; and for all her posturing about not really knowing what “dictatorship” means she may still be a Communist. She is no longer a Stalinist but it is not clear when she ceased being one. Communists ceased defending Stalin only after Nikita Khrushchev's revelations at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union in 1956.
Lillian Hellman's most valuable contribution to the Communist cause was her activity on behalf of their front organizations. A few months after the Progressive party imbroglio she was called upon to serve as a keynote speaker at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria (New York, 25-26 March 1949). This conference was a follow-up of the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace at Wroclau-Breslau in Communist Poland (25-28 August 1948) and was preparatory to the World Peace Conference in Paris (20-23 April 1949). The Waldorf meeting was held at the height of the Zhdanov purge of Soviet intellectuals. It barred from its program anyone who was critical of Communist party dogma of the class nature of science (including this writer who had, at first, been accepted by a rather careless program committee). The foreign-policy line the conference took was identical with that of the Kremlin: to wit, the United States was the chief enemy of peace and the instigator of the Cold War against the peaceful and freedom-loving Soviet Union. It even refused to give the platform to the Reverend A. J. Muste who was prepared to blame both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. for the Cold War. Lillian Hellman valiantly defended the conference against its critics—whose chief point of protest was the refusal of the conference to speak up for the dissenting or nonconforming intellectuals who were being martyred in Communist countries (although the conference adopted resolutions condemning the court proceedings against Communist leaders under the Smith Act as “heresy trials of political philosophies and attempts to limit and destroy the right of association”). To serve as spokesman for a conference of this kind was a very strange role indeed for a self-denominated life-long “rebel” against organization—at a time when the location and character of the slave-labor camps in the Gulag Archipelago had become public knowledge.
Throughout her book Miss Hellman claims to be aware of “the sins of Stalin” acknowledging only that she was a little late in seeing them. It is only natural to wonder at what point, or when, she saw them; and what she did after she saw them.
It is reasonable to assume that whenever she became aware of them, even if she remained a critic of the sins of her own country, she would not have endorsed measures and organizations that extended the sway or influence of the sinful Stalin and his regime. For otherwise it would have betrayed a degree of hypocrisy and deviousness hard to reconcile with her celebrated forthright nature—so quick to anger when she is bamboozled or pushed around. Nor is it unreasonable to expect that after endorsing in her ignorance so many of “the sins of Stalin”—a curious phrase for “political crimes” since Miss Hellman does not really believe in sin—when she realized their true nature, she would in some way at some point make some public acknowledgment of her discovery. This has been the history of many idealistic Communists and Communist sympathizers who became alienated by some particularly vile outrage or betrayal of the cause with which they had been publicly identified. Certainly, if some former Nazi fellow-traveler were to write in 1976 that, although late, he had become aware of “the sins of Hitler,” we would be curious to know when he learned about them, and what he had said or done on making the discovery. (Even Albert Speer has given us thousands of pages of details.)
The record of what Lillian Hellman has written—and not written—makes it clear that she did not know about the political crimes of Stalin during the purges and Moscow frame-up trials of the thirties, the deportations of the peasants and the resulting famine in the Ukraine; the Nazi-Soviet Pact; the invasion of Poland and the destruction of the Baltic States; the Soviet attack on Finland; the surrender of German Jewish Communists who had fled in 1933 to the Soviet Union by Stalin to Hitler in 1940; the liquidation of the anti-Fascist Jewish leaders, Alter and Ehrlich, by Stalin as “spies for Hitler”; the Katyn massacre of the Polish officers; the mass executions and deportations of returning Russian prisoners-of-war after World War II; the overthrow of the democratic Czechoslovak government in 1948; the Zhdanov purges and executions; the Berlin blockade; the Communist invasion of South Korea; the suppression of the German workers' revolt in East Berlin and East Germany in 1953.
Until Stalin died there is not a particle of evidence that Lillian Hellman regarded any of his actions as sinful or politically criminal. Even after Khrushchev's revelations in which he more than confirmed the findings of the John Dewey Commission of Inquiry, denounced by Miss Hellman twenty years earlier, did she by so much as a word signal her awareness of the nature of Stalin's crimes. She remained mute.
Nor did she speak out when Khrushchev sent in Red Army tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Nor has her voice been heard in criticism of “the sins” or political crimes of Stalin's and Khrushchev's successors—the construction of (and the shootings at) the Berlin Wall, or the renewed persecutions of Soviet dissenters and their incarceration in insane asylums. After all, Miss Hellman visited the Soviet Union in 1937, 1944, 1966, and 1967. But not a single word of criticism of what she saw or heard or of disavowal of her past tributes to the Soviet Union appeared. Not even the brutal invasion of 1968 by Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia moved her to public protest. By this time even the American Communist party, the most supine of the Kremlin's pensioners, had shown enough independence to make a feeble protest against Soviet anti-Semitism.
Writing in 1976 she expects us to accept without question her assurance that she had long seen through the horrors and systematic oppression of the Communist regimes. It is hard to do this if only because, as this book reveals, she still regards those opposed to the extension of Communist influence as greater enemies of human freedom and the decencies of political life than the Communists ever were. Of the Communists she writes with sadness and pity: of the liberal anti-Communists she writes with virulent hatred. By her attack on them she seeks to distract attention from the many years she faithfully served as an acolyte in the “personality cult,” Khrushchev's euphemism for the total terror under Stalin. In this she is banking on the absence of historical memory on the part of most of her readers.
This absence of historical memory is illustrated in the introductions to both the American and English editions of [Scoundrel Time] by Garry Wills and James Cameron.
The introduction by Wills, reprinted as an appendix in the English edition, goes further than the most extreme of the revisionist positions on the Cold War. According to him, Truman (despite his opposition to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and to McCarthy) was the true architect of the Cold War. The Communists abroad were blameless, and the Communists at home were merely victims of a reaction to Roosevelt's enlightened policies. Indeed, the Cold War was inspired by domestic considerations. Wills flatly states that “Truman launched the Cold War in the Spring of 1947 with his plan to ‘rescue’ Greece and Turkey.” All unprovoked, of course. There was nothing, or no one, to rescue them from. “We had a world to save with just those plans,” he goes on to say, “from NATO to the Korean War.” It appears, then, that Truman's plan, with which all of America's Western allies readily agreed, as early as 1947 envisaged the invasion of Korea in the summer of 1950. Wills must believe that either Dean Acheson's declaration that Korea was beyond the sphere of American national interest was a deliberate provocation by the State Department to lure the North Koreans into invading South Korea or that South Korea at the instigation of the United States invaded North Korea. Presumably the United States intimidated the United Nations to support the defense of South Korea. Wills has unconsciously reconstructed the Kremlin's propaganda line. The only omission is the failure to charge the United States with the guilt of conducting germ warfare in North Korea. Wills's account of the domestic political scene in the United States during this period is no more accurate than his flyer in foreign-policy demonology.
It is not likely that Wills will find many credulous readers who are old enough to remember the past. But among them we must number James Cameron who has written the introduction to the English edition. He confesses that he does not know Lillian Hellman, and it is clear that he does not know the United States, its recent history, and the details of the period he writes about with such sublime indifference to the record. He even believes that “Scoundrel Time is come again” in America although he leaves unclear who the scoundrels are this time: The John Deans whose testimony, bartered for immunity from prosecution, helped convict the Watergate defendants? Or those convicted? He is also unclear about the British scene. He asks: “Why did our society never have the McCarthy trauma? Because we were too mature … ? Because our constitution, being unwritten, was too flexible? Because we produced no paranoiac like McCarthy? Perhaps—but also because we had too few Lillian Hellmans.”
But why should the presence of more Lillian Hellmans generate McCarthyism? Is Cameron saying that if there had been as many Communist fellow-travelers, guilty of the same hypocrisy and duplicity in British cultural and political life as in the United States, the reaction would have been the same? The British Communists, except for those recruited by the Soviets as espionage agents, were never as conspiratorial as the American Communists and were not instructed to penetrate government agencies.
Nor does the English constitution have anything to do with it. If anything its flexibility could lend itself to even greater abuse since there is no Supreme Court to nullify or overrule Parliamentary legislation. English courts have never made absolutes of any right, or tolerated abuses of the privilege against self-incrimination. Actually, in Britain from 1947 on, not only were members of the Communist party completely barred from secret work but also all persons associated with the party in such a way “as to raise reasonable doubts about their reliability.” After the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean the recommendations of a White Paper by Privy Councillors were accepted by the British government in 1956. It reaffirmed the basic principle on which earlier security measures were based that “the Communist faith overrides a man's normal loyalties to his country,” and extended them to embrace the much wider circle of “sympathizers” and “associates.” These are vague and ill-defined terms, and they required good sense and a genuine dedication to liberal values and individual liberties to apply them without miscarriages of justice. The procedures of American security boards were in some respects much fairer than their British counterparts. Civil servants in Britain who were under investigation were never told of the evidence against them; they were denied rights of legal counsel and even of representation at hearings. They had no right of appeal from the verdict of the tribunal to a higher administrative body or to a court.
Nonetheless, the American procedures worked more hardships and injustices because they were, as a rule, administered by Democratic and Republican party regulars who were politically ignorant of the wide spectrum of beliefs different from their own and who, as I once put it, “found the distinctions between member, sympathizer, front, dupe, innocent, and an honestly mistaken liberal as mysterious as the order of beings in the science of angelology.”
Even before Joe McCarthy appeared on the scene, public identification under sworn testimony had been made of individuals occupying the following posts in the American government: 1) an executive assistant to the president; 2) an assistant secretary of the Treasury; 3) the director of the Office of Special Political Affairs in the State Department; 4) the secretary of the International Monetary Fund; 5) the chief of the Latin American Division of the Office of Strategic Services; 6) a member of the National Labor Relations Board; 7) the chief counsel of the Senate Subcommittee on Civil Liberties; 8) the chief of the Statistical Analysis Branch of the War Production Board; 9) a United States Treasury attaché in China; 10) the Treasury Department representatives and adviser in the Financial Control Division of the North African Economic Board in UNRRA, and at the meeting of the Foreign Ministers Council in Moscow in 1947; 11) the director of the National Research Project of the Works Progress Administration.
What would the public reaction in Britain have been if individuals of similar government rank and influence had been identified as members of the Communist party after the Klaus Fuchs case? Probably not as virulent as the American reaction, but it is not altogether excluded that even James Cameron might have been more perturbed than he seems to be. He would have to recognize the difference between nonexistent witches and Communist subversives.
It was in this atmosphere that demagogues like McCarthy seized their opportunity. Ritualistic liberals played into their hands, not by deservedly criticizing their excesses and irresponsibility, but by denying that Communist party infiltration into government existed. The Communists and their sympathizers contributed to eliciting public support for the investigative committees by invoking the Fifth Amendment, even when it was unnecessary, thus generating the impression that the conspiratorial activity was on a vaster scale than it actually was.
The greatest damage done by Senator Joseph McCarthy—whom Miss Hellman never faced—was to the American Foreign Service. His irresponsible charges against a few who may have been guilty of political naïveté—the Chinese Communists were, after all, not mere “agrarian reformers”—tended to inhibit critical independent judgment of American policy among their colleagues. McCarthy headed the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations which should not be confused with the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the Committee on the Judiciary whose proceedings, in comparison with McCarthy's committee as well as those of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, were fairly meticulously conducted. There is no need to deny, as Miss Hellman does, that the disclosures before the House Committee about Alger Hiss and other key figures named by Whittaker Chambers were genuine. But they would not have been necessary had responsible security officers quietly acted on information which they had long before the hearings. The aura of the Hiss case kept the House committee going for a long time, but it hardly compensated for the vigilantism, cultural irrationalism, and national distrust generated by its successive chairmen and leading members who exploited their roles for cheap political publicity. Their excesses made intelligent criticism of the communism of that period—the heyday of Stalinism—more difficult.
For someone like Lillian Hellman, who loyally cooperated with members of the Communist party in all sorts of political and cultural enterprises for almost forty years, to impugn the integrity of liberal anti-Communists like Lionel Trilling and others of his circle is an act of political obscenity.
The criticisms made by anti-Communist socialists and liberals during these years have been vindicated by events. They insisted on the central distinction between “heresy” whose defense is integral to a free society and “conspiracy” whose secrecy is inimical to it.
This distinction was often ignored by the investigating committees and sometimes by their critics. A heretic is an honest defender of an unpopular idea. A conspirator is one who works stealthily and dishonestly outside the rules of the game. Our moral obligation is to the toleration of dissent, no matter how heretical, not to the toleration of conspiracy, no matter how disguised or secret. When that secrecy is combined with loyalty to a foreign power dedicated to the overthrow of free and open societies, a power that manipulates the activities of conspirators wherever they operate, the pitiless light of publicity must be brought to bear on the situation. Whatever may be the case in these polycentric days, during the years Miss Hellman writes about the evidence is overwhelming that Communists, even though their party was legal, were organized secretly in parallel underground organizations under assumed names working for political objectives framed by the party fraction. To be sure, they sometimes did other things as well, some of them worthy and all of them under deceptively high-sounding phrases, but only to increase their influence in furthering their underlying political purposes. Those who wittingly helped them, even if they paid no party dues, were morally as guilty in the deceptions they practiced. They were engaged in helping to destroy the open society whose benefits and freedoms they enjoyed.
POSTSCRIPT
Since the above was written, Lillian Hellman dramatically confirmed the double-dealing nature of her political judgment, its use of double standards and convenient invention.
In the course of a colloquy with Dan Rather of the Columbia Broadcasting Company, Lillian Hellman was asked about the charge that she could see what was wrong with McCarthy and that whole era but failed to see anything wrong with Stalinism. After all, if considered from the point of view of loss of human life, deprivation of freedom, torture, and suffering of innocent human beings, Stalinism was infinitely worse than McCarthyism.
To which she replied: “I happen never to have been a Communist for one thing, which is left out of this story. I didn't quite understand the argument, I mean I don't really know what has one thing to do with another. I was not a Russian, I was an American.” To which Rather responded: “You can't see that the basic argument here is that you applied a double standard? You applied one standard to McCarthy and the United States and another standard to Stalin and the Soviet Union.” “No,” replied Lillian Hellman, “I don't think I did. I was injured by McCarthy for one thing. I was not personally injured by Stalin, which is not a very high class reason but it's a very—it's a good practical reason.”3
Lillian Hellman is an eager but unaccomplished liar. She was not German. Nor was she personally injured by Hitler. But she protested vigorously his terror regime. She was not Italian. Nor was she personally injured by Mussolini but she joined liberals in denouncing him. She was not Spanish. Nor was she personally injured by Franco but she was very active in the defense of the Loyalist Spanish cause. Only when called upon to protest against the infamies of Stalin and Stalinism did she suddenly discover that she was not Russian and that as an American she had no business abroad. But then if the fact that she was not Russian and suffered no injury at Stalin's hands exonerates her from failure to criticize Stalin's crimes, why then did she defend them, especially the monstrous Moscow frame-up trials, and defame those who, like John Dewey, sought to establish the truth about them?
Lillian Hellman's shabby justification for her sustained role as minnesinger of Stalin's regime is so transparent that it is perhaps needless to point out that “personally” she was never injured by McCarthy (whom she never even confronted) or by the House committee before which she testified.
Notes
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(Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1976).
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An Unfinished Woman (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969).
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Excerpts from the transcript of the interview with Dan Rather as published in the New York Post, March 23, 1977.
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Lillian Hellman and the McCarthy Years
Autobiography and Memory: The Case of Lillian Hellman