The Legend of Scoundrel Time

...Andrew Roth [a devoted young communist who had been appointed--over opposition--to Naval Intelligence] has been' furnishing confidential and secret documents to a man named Jaffe...who has had intimate relationship with the Russian Consul in New York...

...The most significant characteristic of the American Communist Party--what made it different from any other "radical" party-was its total allegiance to the Soviet Union...

...she will not talk about friends...

...On one side are Communists, fellow travellers, and anti-anti-Communists: good people all, who did not "mean any harm," and who, above all, were intent on blaming the United States for the Cold War...

...As the Committee slogged on into the fifties, investigating Communism in the schools and in the ministry, it becomes more difficult to justify its existence...

...the location of U.S...

...For historical reality we must look elsewhere...

...if he acts in consequence of it, the law takes place, and he is hanged...

...Hellman is especially contemptuous of liberal anti-Communists who, she claims, were inconsistent on the question of civil liberties as well as wrong in their view of the world...

...In his section of the Special Senate Committee report on the case in 1952, Henry Cabot Lodge detailed some of the documents as containing (for 1945) the latest and most sensitive U.S...

...John Fox The Reasons for the Red Scare Why, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, were so many liberals and conservatives afraid of domestic Communists ? In February 1945, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) accidentally discovered that its most confidential documents were , being leaked to a small magazine of Far Eastern affairs, Amerasia...

...Having escaped from such a horrendous past, Hellman feels obliged to tell the story of what it was like then--the trials and tribulations one endured for having "advanced" views...

...American workers, the Party began to realize, lacked an aggrieved-class consciousness...

...Such people probably did not like to think very much at all, for by the late forties the essential facts about Stalin's regime were known to all...

...In a letter she submitted to HUAC in which she explains her "position," she says that she will only testify about herself...

...U.S...

...Some examples: U.S...

...The question does not lend itself to such easy answers as Lillian Hellman provides...

...We often make sense of the past by singling out those figures who point towards the present, especially those luminaries who were out of key with their times--misunderstood by their contemporaries...

...Talk of internal Communist conspiracies became commonplace again--especially about conspiracies in the State Department--and a shrewd and sinister politician, looking for an issue to ride to fame and power, saw his chance...

...After all, most of the estimated half-million persons who had passed through the Communist movement by the late forties did not conspire to do anything, much less overthrow a government...

...There was no mass hysteria about the matter, however...

...national...

...Toleration was a much debated question in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because both Dissenting Protestants and Roman Catholics were, at one time or another, suspected of potential treason--of harboring less than total loyalty towards the reigning monarchy...

...An all-purpose smear word, subversive has often been used in the past to question the "American-ness" of those who advocated particular policies...

...Such people, it seems, were willfully innocent...

...In 1947, however, the Committee achieved instant notoriety by beginning an investigation into the alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood...

...A disturbing time yes, but a scoundrel time no...

...Of course it is uncharitable to say such things, but in doing so one is only paying Hellman back in kind, for she is a veritable virtuoso of uncharity...

...A demagogic genius of sorts, Senator Joe McCarthy came on the scene as a tracker of Communists in 1950...

...This scoundrel swaggered and blustered his way through Washington for about four years, virtually paralyzing the work of some arms of the government and ruining some distinguished careers...

...In 1950, though, the Korean War had begun, and it gave the Committee a renewed license to hunt for Communists...

...their hero for the past ten years had now become an un-person...

...Other writers, including Hilton Kramer, William Phillips, and Joseph Shattan, have criticized Hellman's account of the period in such publications as the New York Times, the Partisan Review, and Midstream...

...there was no depression and the United States did not become a fascist state...

...J. Edgar Hoover and his like have cried wolf so often that we no longer believe there ever were real wolves...

...But it is less important, finally, to assign praise or blame in these matters than to accept the notion that tolerance is an endlessly difficult question and that any sensible account of this period must hold in tension both the danger to freedom from the Communist Party itself and the danger to freedom posed by an excessive response to alleged internal subversion...

...The slavish obedience of the Party to the Soviet Union had its comic--or, if you like, pathetic--aspects: one week after the party organ, the Daily Worker, called Earl Browder (then head of the Party) "one of the great leaders of the people," the Moscow leadership signalled, by way of a leading French Communist, that Browder had to go...

...the organization of the Chinese Air Force...

...Since it is not easy to know when such activities have in fact become dangerous, Plamenatz urges caution, suggesting that " i t is incumbent upon us to make sure that there is no other likely way of averting the danger...

...What were the motives of policy advisers such as John Stewart Service and influential organizations such as the Institute of Pacific Relations ? What links were there between the Amerasia staff and the Soviet underground...

...These investigations were, in the main, unedifying affairs, with many witnesses shouting Communist slogans at the Committee, and some committee members claiming that Communists were injecting propaganda into the pictures they worked o n . To be sure, Hollywood was infested with Communists, and Part)' members did control the Screen Writers Guild, preventing those whose politics the)' disliked from getting lucrative assignments...

...Such an historical game has recently been played by Lillian Hellman, the well-known dramatist and the author of several highly-acclaimed autobiographies...

...During the Eisenhower years, according to Latham, they were used indiscriminately--often to get rid of employees who "were found unsuitable because of personal traits that did not involve loyalty...

...Hellman may be right, but we cannot be sure...

...Must one, in replying to this and similarly hysterical responses to the period, belabor the obvious and say that during this era people were not arrested in the middle of the night, were not sent to labor camps, were not killed...

...No, we cannot grant Hellman unpolitical status, nor can we grant her radical status, unless we define radical as being a Stalinist...

...And so she says, in the very same letter, that her friends "were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive," 8 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 a remark that we can only call a lie since Hellman admits in this very memoir that her friend Dashiell Hammett argued that "nothing less than a revolution could wipe out the corruption" in this country...

...The case was prosecuted prematurely, amid great internal government feuding...

...But let us be generous and say that Hellman is merely inconsistent, has a bad memory, or really believes that Communists "meant no harm...

...Peering through the dense fog of these incantatory phrases, one can barely discern a point, which is that the workers may be more interested in increasing their standard of living than in waging an all-out fight against their capitalist oppressors...

...John Plamenatz, a contemporary political philosopher, makes much the same point when he argues that we have no right to suppress ideas of which we disapprove, even if those ideas are themselves intolerant, but we do have the right to suppress those advocating such ideas "when their activities are in fact dangerous to freedom...

...The 1945 prosecution, by Assistant Attorney General James McInerney, demonstrated a certain lack of government eagerness to find Reds under beds...

...What we cannot grant her is her claim to be an unpolitical person, for the memoir is riddled with political remarks--the most simplistic being her claim that liberal anti-Communists were responsible for the Vietnam War...

...she did not rat on her friends...

...Most people went to meetings, signed petitions, joined front organizations, and marched in demonstrations...

...The question does not lend itself to easy answers...

...Many intellectuals decided to break with the Party after the latter event, yet the Party gained in strength and respectability during the war years, when the Soviet Union and the United States were allies...

...to us such stuff is old hat and means very little...

...But this is the kind of gambit the FBI specialized in--throwing all radicals, whether Communists or not, into the same pot...

...Some historians who grant that Communists and fellow travellers were subversive nevertheless argue that these people were never a threat to the nation's security...

...Hellman, of course, ignores such questions and distinctions...

...We must do whatJ...

...paranoid hysteria that resulted in a tragic tally of wrecked careers and ruined lives...

...Yet Hellman's cachet is such that the thousands if not millions of persons who will read this book in hardcover or in the subsequent paperback edition will probably swallow her carefully-prepared concoction whole...

...But the blacklist, we must remember, was not a law...

...Hellman obviously had no trouble putting her selfserving version of the past on paper--no trouble in fathoming the motives of all those who disagreed with her, who acted differently...

...His career, which effectively ended with the Senate's condemnation of his conduct in December of 1954, caused profound unease among many Americans though some were thrilled by him...

...The stridency and unreality of Communist polemics may make it seem that the Party could not have been worth taking seriously--that it must have been a small group of cranks, all stupefied by their own sodden rhetoric...

...First, it comes with an introduction that is pure paean: Hellman and her consort, Dashiell Hammett, were, according to Garry Wills, radicals trying "to uphold a private kind of honor in a rotten world...

...But were they--to use a disagreeable word--subversive...

...The Communists were also strong in France, Italy, and Greece...

...Many people also lost their jobs--or could not get jobs--as a result of the blacklist, which was a list of supposedly subversive organizations that the Attorney General's- off/ce had compiled for use by government agencies...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 7 Most of these citations, though, were thrown out by the courts, so that very few people actually went to jail for contempt of Congress: maximum sentence one thousand dollar fine, one year in jail...

...though originating in a dozen places in government service, they all bore the stamp of the Department of State, showing the documents had been received there...

...The Party soon began to realize, however, that the inevitable was not going to happen right away...

...Recalling that time some ten years later, Richard Rovere said that " i t was unquestionably the government's business to break up the apparatus and to combat the movement...

...Needless to say, the Party's rhetoric was increasingly out of touch with American realities...

...In any case, espionage is a rather clear-cut offense, and if the government did have "hard" evidence, it no doubt would have tried to prosecute many more government officials than it did...

...information on the Far East...

...How much valuable intelligence might have been provided to the Chinese Communists at a key juncture in Mao's struggle...

...No wonder, then, that the American government made a somewhat botched job of it during the tumultuous events of the late forties and early fifties...

...For one thing, legislation with regard to the "toleration" of Communists had already been passed: the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, which required "Communist-action" and "Communist.front" organizations to register with the Attorney General...

...Incredible as it may seem to some, few people went to jail: several Congressional witnesses for contempt, and several officials of the Party for violation of the Smith Act...

...And the memoir, moreover, refers to her many political activities, one of them being her serving as a sponsor for the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in 1949, a conference that was dominated by Communists and fellow travellers...

...It was, as Earl Latham put it in The Communist Controversy in Washington, "a dealer agency through which propaganda products, centrally manufactured, were distributed...

...In a recent, full-page advertisement in The New Yorker, she appears wrapped in a fur, staring confidently at the reader, under the phrase, "What Becomes a Legend Most...

...The trouble is, according to Freund, we don't know which half...

...What was needed, then, was more propaganda aimed at the workers, so as to increase their present discontents...

...Doing history in this way may at times be appropriate but it smacks of condescension, as if the age were too dim-witted for the likes of us, only worthwhile insofar as it tossed up such suffering prophets...

...And surely one must include among the scoundrels the Communists and their fellow travellers, who supported a regime in which the question of tolerance could not even be debated--in which even to raise the question meant risking prison or death...

...It was known to the FBI in 1945, for example, that The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 9...

...presumably everyone knows who she is and what she stands for...

...It is also difficult to escape the conclusion that the Committee, in effect, punished by negative publicity those activities that it could not constitutionally declare criminal, for the Committee was, by all accounts, often careless in the way it allowed cooperative witnesses, during public hearings, to spew forth an endless number of names...

...These security investigations continued without abatement, however, through the McCarthy era, when they no longer were necessary...

...Though Hellman's reading of the period has been vigorously disputed by several writers, including Nathan Glazer, a "neoconservative," as well as Irving Howe, a socialist, her view of the period has quickly become the view for many people, so that in a review of The Front, a recent movie about the blacklist, the critic speaks of the "insane excesses" of that era, and of "the wave of Stephen Miller works in Washington and has written for Commentary, Encounter, and Dissent: He was born in 1941...

...Nothing is further from the truth...

...Hellman very much wants to sell herself to the reader as an unpolitical person, someone who is loyal to friends rather than causes...

...It is all well and good to condemn demagogic politicians, but it does not follow that we must accept Hellman's notion of a benign Communist Party...

...During his reign of intimidation, he succeeded in getting several opponents voted out of office, having several thousand federal employees fired, and creating a climate of intellectual timidity, so that the area of discourse on foreign policy was severely constricted...

...This response often led to their being cited for contempt of Congress, since the Committee was reluctant to accept the witne~ss' decision as to just what would be discussed...

...Moreover, it is hard to work up much sympathy for many of thDse who appeared before HUAC, for as Robert Gorham Davis has said, a reading of the transcripts "almost always results in a rather dramatic decrease in sympathy for the non-cooperative witnesses.'" Nevertheless, it is hard to see why such investigations were especially important or necessary, since the Hollywood Communists could hardly have posed a threat to the nation's security...

...According to Hellman, those decent persons, "who wanted to make a better world," were victims of one of those "fierce, sweeping, violent nonsense-tragedies that break out in America from time to time...

...In 1947 Truman was responsible for a sweeping loyalty order that enabled the government to dismiss federal employees if there were "reasonable grounds" for suspecting their loyalty...

...the disposition of Chinese Nationalist troops...

...It is easy, no doubt, to think the worst of that period, for the two names most closely associated with the persecution of Communists are Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy, both of whom--in obviously different ways--turned out to be scoundrels...

...The legend offered up in her book is one that the historically unsophisticated will find hard to resist...

...Without removing any of the elements of basic importance that are responsible for the maturing of the economic crisis, let alone "abolishing" the causes of the crisis as projected by some bourgeois economists (Keynes) and in part by Browder revisionism, the struggle of the masses against the reactionary offensive and for the maintenance of living standards may stow down the tempo of the maturing economic crisis, may equip the masses economically to withstand with less suffering the impact of the crisis and also narrow the scope of the crisis...

...nor was there a general consensus as to how to deal with the Communists...

...Henceforth anything that smacked of the Popular Front, in which the Communist Party closely identified itself with causes dear to liberals and socialists, was labelled Browderism, and all the Party members dutifully repudiated their former beliefs...

...Last summer, he worked for Allen Weinstein, helping him prepare his upcoming book on the Hiss-Chambers case...

...What is more, the broader implications of the case are still unresolved...

...The issue itself impinged only intermittently upon the American consciousness during those years-subject to sudden flarings as well as to sudden changes in the principal actors involved...

...According to an article published in Fortune (February 1957), 108 leaders of the Party were convicted, but most of these either did not serve their sentences at all or served very brief ones...

...Therefore the information the Committee continued to amass was, in a sense, superfluous...

...Though the Popular Front, which was orchestrated by Moscow in 1935, was more successful than the previous party line in attracting fellow travellers and Party members, it sagged under the burden of first the Moscow Trials and then the Hitler-Stalin Pact...

...Others cooperated fully with the Committee, while still others were willing to talk only about their own activities...

...According to Latham, "there was substantial Communist activity in the federal government, [and] it consisted in part in the procurement of classified information for the use of the Soviet government...

...In 1948 the Soviet Union imposed the Berlin blockade, in 1949 it exploded its first atomic bomb, and in 1949 men who called themselves Communists took over in China...

...Thus the Party kept on telling American workers how dissatisfied they should be, fomenting strikes, and demonstrating for world peace--all the while hoping that the capitalist crisis was not too far off in the future...

...And, finally, we cannot even say that she was particularly courageous in her dealings with the Committee, for she too ended up in taking the Fifth Amendment although there was only the slightest chance that the Committee would have sent her to prison for contempt of Congress...

...The figure Latham gives for the total number of employees dismissed from 1947 to 1956--a figure he admits is highly speculative--is 3,900...

...Those people who did go to jail for contempt of Congress, like the Hollywood Ten, were for the most part truly contemptuous of Congress, their behavior before the Committee revealing a total lack of respect for the procedures of constitutional democracy...

...as authentic American radicals they should be conjoined with Martin Luther King, Jr...

...According to Howe and Coser, directly after the war approximately one-fourth of the total membership of the CIO was enrolled in unions controlled by Communists...

...they" are all guilty of dishonorable or cowardly behavior whereas she has always--she hastens to assure us--acted with decency...

...if he preaches erroneous doctrine, society may expel him...

...the Department of Justice has evidence to the effect that Lt...

...At first those who were subpoenaed took refuge in the First Amendment, but this was not accepted by the courts, which argued that the only recourse a witness had was the Fifth Amendmentmthat is, since he might, by virtue of the Smith Act of 1940, be prosecuted for simply being a member of the Party, he had a right not to incriminate himself...

...The following paragraph, written in 1946 by the Party's "eminent theoretician," Alexander Bittelman, tries to explain why this collapse might be delayed...

...submarines in the Pacific...

...It must be granted that most of these people, whatever their intentions, did not actually engage in subversion...

...The FBI had surveilled several visits by Jaffe to Earl Browder, chief of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), and at least one each to CP headquarters and the Soviet consulate during a brief span in spring 1945, which information McInerney did have at the time...

...Thus one can see why HeUman has become a prophet who is finally being recognized and honored--recognized as an early advocate of detente and honored as a tough, "liberated" woman who refused to be cowed by the threats of an investigative committee...

...The only fullblooded scoundrel during those years, Senator McCarthy, came on rather late in the game, in 1950, so it is not right to see those years as totally darkened by his presence...

...And Navy Secretary James Forrestal made this entry in his diary for May 28, 1945...

...All of which is easier said than done: a government cannot suspend the flow of events and conduct an experiment to find the most benign way of averting the danger to freedom...

...According to Wills, they opposed "the general degradation, not with a programmatic 'solution,' but with a personal code that makes pride possible in a shameful social order...

...Hellman's point is legitimate only if she, like E.M...

...Her name is not even mentioned in the ad...

...He specialized, as Richard Rovere has said, in multiple untruths, yet he managed to enlist a body of faithful supporters who believed every word he said...

...Since most people knew that domestic Communists were the flunkies of a foreign enemy, the debate about American Communism centered less on whether or not to control the Party than on how it should be controlled...

...The word may make some shiver, but what other word is appropriate as a description of those officials wh6se first concern, when considering policy matters, was the interest of the Soviet Union...

...OSS agents had observed people carrying envelopes and briefcases in and out of the magazine's offices at all hours, and in the office was found one suitcase containing over 400 documents...

...The issue, in any case, is an old one in political philosophy-one that was traditionally subsumed under the notion of toleration...

...During the war years the Party benefited from the fact that its central aim was in accord with the aim of the American government--to defeat the Axis powers...

...On the other side are all the unscrupulous and power-hungry politicians who were responsible for the numerous Congressional investigations that hounded and persecuted supposed "subversives" like herself...

...For the most part, then, the "law" either left the Communists alone or upheld their civil rights...

...plans for the postwar control: of Japan...

...One sentence in that letter has become rather famous: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group...

...Many witnesses, for a variety of reasons, took the Fifth Amendment, which led to their being branded as Fifth-Amendment Communists...

...In her book, Scoundrel Time, she speaks of the dark ages of the late forties and early fifties, when a small band of worthies, including herself, were punished for their enlightened views of the Cold War...

...In 1692 William and Mary promulgated the Act of Toleration, by which freedom of religious worship was granted, on certain conditions, to Dissenting Protestants...

...Toleration in its original force signifies the extent to which a polity allows the ideas and activities of those whom it disapproves to flourish...

...bombing targets in Japan...

...For her all Communists and fellow travellers should be honored as martyrs to the cause of world peace and American civil liberties...

...mastery and breakdown of Japanese codes...

...For approximately four years, from 1945 to 1949, the Communist Party was a powerful and influential force-in Hollywood, in certain unions, and in certain departments of the federal government...

...Senators who, for the most part, despised him, were for a time afraid of challenging him for fear of losing their seats...

...The Act was batted around by the courts and finally declared unconstitutional in 1967...

...The issue suffered from the strains and contradictions inherent in the multifaceted nature of American politics, with Congressional committees saying one thing, the courts another, the President still another--and nearly everyone changing his mind from time to time...

...The overthrow of Browder in 1945 was only one of the many twists and turns the Party took in order to faithfully toe the Stalinist line...

...Nurtured on detente, we dismiss such Marxist-Leninist prophecies as part of the verbal battle of the Cold War...

...As to the hazier area of influencing policy, Latham argues that "in the great questions of policy, the Corn6 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 munist position either accorded with an already prevailing conception of desirable American policy, or it was defeated...

...But whatever one's reservations about the manner in which the hearings were conducted, the Committee did, after all, as an arm of Congress, have the right to subpoena witnesses in order to gather information that mEght be relevant to the drafting of legislation...

...HUAC had been in existence since the early thirties, but during the war years it was rarely in the news...

...Moreover the age also favors Hellman's views, for in the mid-seventies we are by now rather blas~ and bored about Communism--quick to point out that it is not a monolithic force and that it does, in fact, come in different flavors, from the humane Italian to the oppressive Russian...

...It was slowly consolidating its hold on Eastern Europe, and in 1948 a Communist coup took place in Czechoslovakia, complete with mass arrests and show trials...

...she is a legend...

...In the late forties the Communist Party was at the height of its influence and power in the United States--a party whose chief tenet was" unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union and its immediate national interests," a party that was "a force to be reckoned with and to be respected," particularly in liberal and labor circles...

...Hellman, after all, is no longer simply--or merely--a writer...

...The above quotations are not gleanings from the radical Right...

...Unlike many people, she refused to cooperate with the Committee...

...Though one might object that the government cast its net too wide, the order was based on the sensible premise that Communists who held important positions in government could be dangerous to the nation's security...

...They come from Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics, which is the work of a contemporary socialist of the New Left variety, James Weinstein...

...One should not minimize McCarthyism, yet to say, as Hellman does, that those who suffered during this "scoundrel time" were victims of a violent nonsense-tragedy is to be guilty of an untruth worthy of McCarthy himself...

...During these years, then, the Communists and their fellow travellers could not be dismissed as unimportant hacks...

...The wisdom of most historians, then, supports Hellman's implied contention that domestic Communism was never a threat to the United States, and therefore it did not justify the measures taken to control it...

...History is not a laboratory experiment...

...But Hellman, unlike Forster, offers her friendship as proof that her friends meant no harm to the State...

...Edgar Hoover, it appears, could not do: distinguish between a Martin Luther King, who wanted to extend civil rights to those who had been denied them, and a Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman's close friend and companion, who as a member of the Communist Party supported a regime that had ruthlessly been suppressing civil liberties for thirty-odd years...

...What was the nature of important advice on the Far East being received by the State Department...

...Given this atmosphere," as Irving Howe and Lewis Coser point out in their history of the American Communist Party, "the Communists and their friends naturally found it possible to penetrate government offices, publishers' offices, the union movement, and the press...

...Howe's remarks are taken from a strong rebuke to Hellman published recently in Dissent...

...The legal development of the Amerasia affair is to this day shrouded in mystery...

...Like the United States, the Soviet Union had emerged from the wreckage of World War II as a superpower...

...the organization of Japanese naval forces...

...Naturally, the American Communist Party had to change its line, expunging all Popular Front rhetoric...

...messages from Roosevelt to Chiang Kai-shek...

...The purple prose works well with the purple photographs--warm, evocative shots of these two honest souls plus sinister pictures of the heavies in Congress who persecuted them...

...In Boswell's Life of Johnson, the author dangles the subject of toleration before Johnson, who pronounces upon the matter in his characteristically decisive way: " I f a man thinks erroneously, he may keep his thoughts to himself, and nobody will trouble him...

...The Party now argued that the United States was quickly becoming a fascist state, and that it was preparing for war in the hope of temporarily postponing the inevitable: the collapse of capitalism...

...Subsequent investigations turned up one of the biggest hauls of secret information in history: some 1,700 documents, from every government department except the FBI...

...McInerney later testified that the stolen information had been "only a little above the level of teacup gossip in the Far East," but he also said: I think now that Jaffe may have been an espionage agent, which information we did not have at the time...

...Making The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 5 sense of the late forties and early fifties--the time of the Congressional invesdgations, the Hiss trial, the blacklist, the Truman Loyalty Orders, and the McCarthy chargesmmeans fast of all acknowledging that the Communist Party was a powerful force in American life for several years after World War II...

...When Forster acknowledges that"love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State," he is careful not to deny that the State does have very real claims which the loyal friend abjures...

...As Irving Howe has said: "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...

...But in the late forties there was every reason to believe that such threats would be acted upon...

...And it is also easy to think the best of Lillian Hellman, whose frank autobiographies, in which she presents herself as a woman of courage, personal loyalty, and old-fashioned decency, have all become best-sellers, making her into a hero of the women's movement...

...We are a people," she says, "who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads...

...So, temporarily at least, capitalism would remain on its feet...

...On this side were also those cowardly and dishonorable persons who either cooperated with the committees, telling all, or refused to come to the aid of those being persecuted...

...Communists everywhere preached global revolution and the imminent demise of capitalism...

...Even Hellman herself admits that the Communist Party well-nigh controlled Henry Wallace's campaign for President on the Progressive ticket in 1948...

...One suspects that Hammett and others did not like to dwell on the harsh aspects of the government they were supporting...

...Though not official, the list was used by many private institutions as well, with the result that some people who had only the most tenuous connections with the Communists were fired from jobs...

...Who, she indignantly asks, were the true subversives--those well-meaning souls who demonstrated for world peace or those demagogic politicians who ranted about an internal Communist conspiracy...

...Many people did lose their jobs, especially those in the employ of the federal government...

...People of various political persuasions were worried about domestic Communism precisely because the Party was linked to what had recently become an external enemy...

...Though some people, as we have seen, did pass along classified information to the Soviet Union, their efforts, according to Latham and others, probably did not amount to much...

...According to Irving Howe, Hellman collaborated closely with the Party over the years, signing numerous statements and supporting well-known, Communist-front organizations...

...Half our fears of disorder will be mocked by history," Paul Freund, the noted legal historian, has said...

...The passage is also a good example of what passed for profound Marxist-Leninist thinking...

...It is these people, she says, who ultimately were responsible for "the Vietnam War and the days of Nixon...

...Now, after most of the historical evidence is in, historians may know that the Communists were harmless enough to be left alone, but in the late forties liberals, conservatives, and socialists believed that the Communist Party was a threat to freedom...

...lacking a control group, we cannot say what would have happened had the country let the Communists flourish...

...Society" was less benign...

...For Hellman that dark age is easy to fathom...

...Of the various ways in which the country dealt with the Communist "problem," the one that has received the most attention is the action of the House Un-American Activities Committee...

...Though as history Wills' introduction has the complexity of a cartoon, it does sound the appropriate thematic note, for he makes much of Hellman's personal loyalty, and this is what Hellman herself stresses when indulging in her sweeping moral judgments...

...a report entitled "Changes to Order of Battle of Chinese Army...

...Forster in his famous essay, "What I Believe," is willing to argue that her sole criterion in these matters is the bond of personal relationships...

...Though few people would claim, as a somewhat emotional historian recently did in the New York Times, that in those days the United States succeeded in "replicating Stalinism to protect us from Stalin," many people--especially young people --would say that in those days the United States was well on its way to becoming a fascist nation...

...After the war, as everyone knows, relations with Russia soon took a dramatic turn for the worse...

...In the Amerasia offices was found extensive photocopying equipment, and editor Philip Jaffe's desk was covered with dozens of originals and freshly made copies of the secret material...

...And according to Earl Latham, members of the Party and their supporters occupied numerous positions in the federal service, and they helped and aided each other in getting jobs and holding onto them...

...Among other pieces of information, the FBI found that an Amerasia assistant editor, who was listed in the New York Social Register, had visited Moscow in the 1930s to establish a working relationship with the Far East division of the Communist InterJohn Fox is a senior at Princeton majoring in English...

...Making sense of this period also means rejecting the attempt by some conservatives to put assorted liberals, New Dealers, socialists, and freefloating radicals in the same boat with the Communists and their fellow travellers...

...There were some people, however, who did more than think about the Soviet Union...

...Jaffe and a co-worker received only minor fines, and were charged not with espionage but with being" in illegal possession of Government documents...

...a timid Hollywood slavishly adhered to this list because it was unduly afraid of public opinion...

...It also benefited from the Russophile fever that was sweeping the country, with Life extolling the virtues of Stalinism and the Reader's Digest publishing a condensation of Misson to Moscow, a former ambassador's outright apologia for the Soviet "experiment...

...The "toleration" accorded Communists was a mixed and confusing bag indeed, but one pervasive misconception should be cleared up: it was, following Johnson's distinction, most often the case that "society" expelled Communists, it was rarely the case that the law had anything to do with Communists...

...Doing history' in this way also means ransacking the past for notions that support our current moral, intellectual, or artistic assumptions--using the past to give credit to our supposedly enlightened present...

...Her moral authority is such that for many people she must obviously be right when she denies that the Communists and fellow travellers posed any threat to American freedom...

...For her and many others the answer to that question is obvious: only scoundrels could have made such a fuss about Communists in America...

...One hopes that this disingenuous and mean-spirited memoir does not become the version of the era for many, since the "legend" who wrote this book has only given us a legend...