A Difficult Woman (22 page)

But it would be a mistake to see Hellman's commitment to the left, and particularly her relationship to the Communist Party, as merely transitory exercises directed at defeating fascism. It would be equally misguided to imagine that she espoused antifascism to obscure her sympathy for communism: as a vehicle aimed at change without the language of revolution. Rather, in the context of the moment, these commitments converged. Antifascism was one of many reasons to join the Communist Party. In 1936 and 1937, the heyday of the Popular Front and the moment when the New Deal seemed to be veering leftward, Hellman found in a broadly defined socialism the value system she held dear. In the Communist Party, to which Hammett probably already belonged, she saw the opportunity to oppose fascism and construct a political path for socialism. Her friends Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, Marc Blitzstein, Herman Shumlin, and many of her acquaintances were already members. The question was not why did she join the party, but how could she not have joined?

Her writing in this period, particularly
The Little Foxes
, embodies the critique of capitalism that party membership implied. By some interpretations, that play, which opened in February 1939, spells out the power of greed to corrupt even the most intimate relationships in the family. Capitalism,
The Little Foxes
seems to be saying, can destroy even the most intimate relationships. The play's success, the power of its message, and its
resonance with American audiences speak to the mood of a country still enmeshed in economic depression. And yet like many of her plays,
The Little Foxes
was consistent with some of the favorite themes of American communists without following them mindlessly or even closely. The
Daily Worker
, the organ of the Communist Party, admired the play on the whole, but critic Milton Meltzer objected to the film version for placing the character of the family (“they're terrible because it's in their nature”) at the film's center. If only, he lamented, “
The Little Foxes
had been able to show more directly the necessity under a competitive economic system for the dog-eat-dog of people out to make good by this same society's standards. It would have reached even greater stature.”
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Perhaps ironically,
The Little Foxes
made Hellman rich, providing her not only with enough money to buy her beloved Hardscrabble Farm in Pleasantville, New York, but with the celebrity to make her a valuable asset to what can only be called “front” causes.

By some accounts Hellman was already in the party by 1937. Louis Budenz—a notoriously unreliable FBI informant—told the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1950 that he had learned about her membership when he joined the party that year. He had, he wrote, been “officially advised” that she continued to be a member until 1945.
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Martin Berkeley claims to have spotted her at a meeting in Hollywood in the summer of 1937. Perhaps so. She was, that summer, briefly in Hollywood for a screening and fund-raiser for
The Spanish Earth
, which had not yet been formally released. And her presence at a meeting suggests the kind of serious interest in the party that she often claimed. In November, after her trips to Moscow and to Spain, when she retreated to London to recover her stability she says she sat down to immerse herself in Marx and Engels. Perhaps the point is not worth debating. If she wasn't already in the party in 1937, she was certainly drawn to it by multiple strands. But then so was everyone else she knew.

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

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

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

Did Hellman really believe that Stalin needed to summarily eliminate thousands of people whom he suddenly declared to be enemies of the state? Or—what is more likely—was her willingness to sign this letter,
circulated in the first flush of her party membership, an effort to demonstrate that she could be loyal to a party line? Was not the CPUSA the most vociferous defender of racial equality and the most consistent supporter of her union, the Screen Writers Guild? Did she sign because she wanted to stop the spread of fascism at all costs? Did she, like many others, rationalize Stalin's efforts to cover up his crimes out of despair over the continuing inroads of fascism? After all, she and many others saw the Soviet Union as the most consistent opponent of fascism in Germany and Italy. Or could it be that, as she confessed to her goddaughter, Catherine Kober Zeller, many years later, she simply had not seen the full spectrum of Stalin's sins?
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In the sharp glare of history, neither the act of signing that letter nor her failure to repudiate the document thereafter is defensible. But by the dim light of the 1930s, both acts are understandable.
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The most plausible explanation for Hellman's defense of the Moscow Trials at the time lies in her despair over the continuing inroads of fascism. The months before she signed that letter had been disastrous for the antifascist cause. In March, Germany had incorporated Austria into a province of the Nazi state. By April it had become clear that the Spanish Republican Loyalists (faced with the adamant refusal of European and American democracies to ship arms to them) would go down to defeat. Such pressures influenced many defenders of the Moscow Trials. Nathaniel Weyl, who had joined the CPUSA in 1930, commented on his own response: “My wife and I had read the official transcript of the trials, and concluded that the accused men had been judicially murdered. However, we thought that the communist movement was the most powerful world force against Nazism, and therefore, that we should not join the public critics of Stalin.”
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Even after the letter appeared, international events continued to go downhill. On September 29, Britain's prime minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, which turned over part of Czechoslovakia to Germany. And in November, the destruction of Jewish property during Kristallnacht signaled a newly vicious phase of the Reich's attack against Jews. Faced with an isolationist spirit in the United States—
Time
magazine had just been accused by some members of its own staff of espousing fascist sympathies—it made sense for people like Hellman and Hammett to join with their friends to try to consolidate their forces against fascism. On November 17, 1938, a group of thirty-six prominent authors, including Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell,
called on President Roosevelt to stop trading with Germany. Not long after, well-known communist and noncommunist figures like Richard Wright, Harold Clurman, Lester Cole, Jerome Davis, and Malcolm Cowley joined together with many others to call for a cessation of attacks against the Soviet Union.
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On the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and because it promised to stem the fascist tide, the CPUSA grew apace. Indeed, the antifascist cause often flowed into that of communism. Sam Jaffe, Hollywood agent and producer and a great admirer of Lillian Hellman's, recalled attending a meeting of the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1930s. After he, his wife, and their friend Oscar Hammerstein left, they turned to each other and said, “‘My God, this was a Communist meeting.' It was a cover-up. We were in a Communist meeting. But it was labeled Anti-Nazi League. Well, sure they were Anti-Nazi, but it was strictly a Communist meeting … It was Anti-Nazi, true, but it was Communist propaganda that they were propagating.”
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The antifascist cause (like every good cause in this Popular Front period) attracted Jews, intellectuals, and champions of liberty of all kinds as well as Communists into its fold. But the coalitions often surprised even close friends, setting off bitter recriminations and factional fights. For all their hatred of Hitler, many on the left, including Trotskyists and other anti-Stalinist communists, rebelled against associating with members of the CPUSA who refused to acknowledge the horrors of the bloody purges of the 1930s. To these opponents of Stalin, whipping up a frenzy against fascism seemed merely a ploy to cover up the evils of Stalinist communism. Then and later they wanted Stalinism acknowledged for the evil it was. Still there were others to whom it made not a whit of difference who was energized in the fight against fascism as long as the fight was won. Hellman probably belongs in this group. The evidence suggests a trajectory that reflects the difficult moral choices that she and many other intellectuals and creative artists of her day faced. She had moved from a generic and unformed concern for democracy and liberty to a hatred of fascist bullies, and then to membership in the CPUSA. In the crucial years at the end of the thirties, she and many others believed that victory over fascism required loyalty to the party. Still, her decision to join and to remain in the party would haunt her for decades after.

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

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