of defense robert gates or national security adviser james jones continue to call so unselfconscious flee for putting an iraqi or afghan face on whichever war was being discussed that is to follow the image to its logical conclusion including an iraqi or afghan mask over a face they recognize however inconveniently or embarrassing we as america. >> we can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> alice kessler-harris recounts the life of william homan -- lillian hellman, author of several social the infuse plays including "the children's hour" and "littlefoxes". this is about an hour. >> thank you for coming. very nice of you to be here this

evening. i want to start by talking about why bother with lillian hellman and then read something of the book so that you can get a sense of who she was. and there have been several biographies of lillian hellman. she was the most famous -- the 20th century female fly right for many years. and the 1970s when playwrights' began would work. and as such, it was the figure to be reckoned with. in addition to being a playwright, she was responsible for films like dead end kids of

the 1930s. and most famous for those plays of little -- "littlefoxes" and "the children's hour" which are repeatedly played as films, and late night television. and another of them. so the question is -- why do another one? this wasn't really a biography at all and i approach lillian hellman not as a biographer or someone interested in exploring the inferiority of her life but somebody interested in thinking about what she tells us about

20th century america. how can you look through lillian hellman and learn something about 20th century life? that is an important thing to do for several reasons. an important thing to do with lillian hellman because she is as i say in the book i described her as a very juicy character. she touches so many aspects of 20th century history. those aspects got me interested in working on her. so for example, she is a woman who manages to make it in the theater world at a moment in time when women aren't playwrights at all or if they are they are playwrights of what

are called domestic dramas in which women reenact the roles of women. hellman is not interested in that at all. she is interested in being a serious play right. she is a serious dramatists. she wants to engage the big subjects of the main one she deals with and deals with offenses is money and the corruption that money brings but she is interested -- she calls herself a moral playwright, not a political play right those some people think of her as a political playwright but as a moral playwright. she is interested in things like truth and honesty and the beating of the big lie and exploring the corruption of human life and the way in which people get corrupted by family

sometimes, but by the life that they live around them. because she is a serious play right, people don't take her very seriously until she produces at the age of 29 her first great play "the children's hour" and suddenly "the children's hour" which runs on broadway for about a year and a half, "the children's hour" makes her reputation. makes her reputation and places her immediately in the ranks of top american playwrights and for many years when you see those lists of the top ten playwrights in america she is in there. then suddenly she stops being in there. by the 1950s per day is pretty much done. she writes one more great play

at the end of the 1950s and then pretty much stops writing plays. here she is. a woman who makes it. she is what i call a self-made woman, that is a woman who manages against all the odds to become rich on her own out of her own pen, out of her own talent if you like. she doesn't marry well for. shea mary's ones but then divorces and doesn't marry again. she comes from her mother's family. had a good deal of money but for a variety of reasons it took lillian until she was 70 years old to inherit a share of that

money. her father's family is not for but very middling kind of family. so lillian has to make it on her own and she does. that is a very unusual circumstance for a woman who was born as she was in 1905. she comes to majority in the 1920s an 1930s. it is a moment in time when most women if they managed to make it at all make it by inherited money or marrying into money. she is a political woman following her own heart in the 1930s organizing the screen writers guild, dramatists guild.

she is the labor organizer joining the communist party along with multiple members of the entertainment industry and her friends, quitting the communist party after a couple of years and following her own political path. some call her a naive political person. but still to find a woman who can both manage to make it and who is political, that is already two bulls she is juggling in the air. finally she is -- what can we call her but a celebrity? she becomes partly through her talent as a playwright and screenwriter but partly just from the force of her persona she becomes a celebrity. she hangs out in the 1960s with

jackie kennedy and arthur schlesinger jr. and liberace, william styron, norman mailer, part of a community of celebrity people. she is famous for her dinner parties. she entertains. edmund wilson called her the queen of the cocktail belt in the 1960s. she has a kind of presence in and of herself. she is a woman who touches a variety of strains of american history and yet she is a woman who goes down if you like in the late 1970s. she is labeled a liar and a

stalinist and is dismissed as a minor dramatist. her plays are dismissed and after that rapid rise and success, she end her life notorious rather than famous. one of the questions i interested in as a historian is how do we understand this? how do we understand what happened to her? not as a product of her personality which if you know anything about her, you know was not very pleasant to say the least. she had a reputation for being nasty and mean spirited, she swore, she smoked, she was often a angry, she was in-your-face,

aggressive and self aggrandizing person. it wasn't personality that made her famous although it was part of what brought her down to the end but in this end the way to understand lillian hellman is not by understanding her persona so much as i understand it in the context of shifting politics and reality of the 20th century and that is what this book tries to do. when i am going to do is read you some paragraph from here and there to see if i can give you a sense of who she was and what i have done is pick some of the pieces that illustrate both -- and give you both a sense of her as an individual and at the same

time try to provide a sense how she fits into these various worlds and i can stop. there are a few of us so if you want to ask questions in between we can do that or whatever works is fine. so lillian hellman is up playwright. she worked hard at her plays. she imagined herself and to the end of her life if you asked her who she was she was a writer. she identified as a writer. she identified although she was -- she was born in new orleans so she identified all her life all the she lived most of it in new york and hollywood but she always identified herself as a southerner. she was a southerner and a jew

and a political person but if you asked her who she was she understood herself as a writer. that is how she managed to make it. and yet she sometimes wrote plays. it was not unusual for her to tell us she had written nine for example of the "littlefoxes" before it came into production and each draft was red and criticized by her friend and companion-0 hammond --daschel for hammond. you might want to ask questions. not only did she write carefully but she understood every word that she wrote as belonging to her. she didn't want anybody ever to change her words or her language so she was as the title of the book indicates a rather difficult person to work with because if you know anything

about theater you know that directors and actors often speak winds that they want to move or shift a little bit. lillian would have none of it. she with involved not only in the riding but in the casting of her plays. she would often have the final word. she was in on the selection of directors and actors in her plays and she very often would sit during rehearsals often making noises that were not welcome to the actors. [siren] here is a piece i am going to read for you. as it came closer to opening night she became increasingly

nervous pacing through rehearsals, drinking and unable to sit still. i have never felt anything but fear and resentment that what was private is to become public. what was mine is no longer mine alone. she told a harvard audience. more than anything else the commitment takes place on that day and final commitment of final having to stand up, stand beside the leaders will take responsibility for, open yourself to is for me an act of such proportions that i have never on all the many first days that came cease to be my kind. .. pendleton, a director who directed the 981 production -- 1981 production of "the little foxes" that starred elizabeth taylor as regina provides a vivid picture of her behavior on such occasions. there wasn't one scene, says

austin pendleton, that could make it to opening night without her saying she hated it, he affirmed. towards the end of the new york previews, hellman, still unhappy with how things were going, stormed out of the theater in the second intermission, and in full view of the audience pounded her cane on the ground to emphasize how much she hated the performance. pendleton says of himself, i just lost it. be and i started yelling. the lobby's jammed, people are ordering drinks in line, and i started yelling. this is the worst fucking night of my life. sorry about the expletive, but it's a literal quote. to which hellman yelled back, every night i see this fucking production is the worst fucking night of my life. [laughter] this incident so upset pendleton that he left the theater unable to watch act iii of the opening

night of his own play. he walked around the block several times, threatening to quit the show until the curtain came down, and then he retreated with some close friends to an obscure bar where he thought nobody could find him. just a few minutes into their first drinks, hellman -- who had tracked him down -- called on the telephone. you still angry? he said to him -- she said to him. and he then replied, and he describes himself as finding her question enchanting. we laughed for a few minutes about our blowup, he remembers, and i had a wonderful hour or so of drinking with my friends. the relationship mended, the revival turned out to be a critical success. so that gives you a sense not only of what she was like as a

playwrighter and someone involved in her plays, but it also gives you a sense of lillian hellman as a person, that is as a person who could lose it, who could scream and yell in public at the director of her own play which was a about to open, and yet ten minutes later or a half hour later she was smiling and charming, she'd forgotten it. she was someone who could explode and then make friends again. she would become angry and violent, sometimes violently, swearingly angry, and sometimes that anger would last a lifetime. but often it would be an anger that could be calmed as soon as she was brought to her senses as it were. that's lillian the playwright. and then there's lillian the

political person, and here's another kind of lillian that we need to take a look at, a lillian who has quite a different sense of what the world is about and where she fits into be it. she is, by all accounts, a bit player, if you like. if the communism -- in the communism and in the political conflict of the late 1930s and '40s. and if you know something about these conflicts, you know that they are roiled with factions and sectarianism on the left as well as between the left and the center, if you like. so there's the cpusa, the communist party which is antagonistic to the trot skyists, which is antagonistic

to the socialists, and you could go on down the line. hellman from about 1937 on identified with -- although she was not yet a member of the communist party. it's likely that her partner, daschle, was. but like many people in the entertainment world of that period, people who had been stung by the great depression and who really wanted to bring some sense of economic security to the country to curb the appetites of rampant, the interests of money, hellman fell into almost naturally a group of people who felt like that. so her best friend, dorothy parker, for example, was a member of the party. numbers of screenwriters whose

names you'll know, john howard lawson is the one i'll mention and who we're later going to be blacklisted as hellman herself would be were party members. as for a while was her, the director of the first four of her plays, herman shumlan. so it shouldn't surprise us that hellman sort of rotated into that politics, and she joined the party in 1939, she quit the party in 1941 by all, everything that we can learn. and, but she remained what we sometimes call a fellow traveler. that is, she did not repudiate either the soviet union, but more important for her, she would not repudiate her commitment to what she saw as social justice.

she was no longer a party member, she just liked and would not even when she was in the party be disciplined by the party or follow party dictates in any sense either ideologically or in terms of what she did. but still she believed in the idealism, the utopianism that the left wing represented. the result of that was that all that was fine as long as the u.s. was allied with the soviet union this world war ii. when world war ii ended, we know the beginning of the troubles gap. began. the beginning of the attack on the left. and hellman, who didn't want to repudiate her former associations, got caught in

this. hellman then returns -- sorry, hellman at the end of the war makes a trip to the soviet union. she's invited, they're doing a production of "the little foxes," and she's invited as a cultural figure to come to the soviet union. she makes the trip in the winter of 1944 and 1945 and comes back from the soviet union, and this short section describes what happens then. hellman returned from the soviet union in march of 1945 convinced that the destruction there had been so intense that the soviets would never want war again. as she'd been moved by the suffering of the spanish in the spanish civil war, so she was touched by that of the russian people who had lost as many as 20 million lives and whose destroyed cities she had seen with her own eyes. she had stopped in london on the way back to help with a film,

and she wrote to muriel rookheiser, found herself in a bomb barrage. i heard the bomb land and then nothing happened until the screams. by the time i got to the bomb hole, a man was sitting in the hole, one of his arms lying across from him. two children were lying across the street, a rubber ball between them. an old man was being carried into a house, and a woman was holding her skirt against his face. had he seen these -- she seen these things? did she imagine them? it didn't matter. lillian had had enough of war. in the early postwar days she lent her name to several groups that focused on how to construct an enduring peace. there's a great deal of war talk now, she wrote to heri

. friendship. held at the soviet could believe in new york, the tea meant to encourage notable american women to extend the hand of friendship to soviet women. participates crafted a message that included the sentiment that we dedicate ourselves to the further rains of friendship and peace among women of all countries. it expressed the hope that the new world would peace and security and happiness for our children and us. at the time, such activities appeared relatively benign. a year later, the group appeared on the attorney general's list of organizations, and the report of this tea and the worn

response to it which came from the soviet union antifashion. ct found the way into the fbi time. the other cig stories on the message included such notables as mrs. dwight isabel isabel celis -- eisenhower andcclo mrs. marry mccloud among murderses of others.ethune -- hundreds of others.ds o even as the soviet spread their umbrella he'll man remained a staunch believer in peaceful coexister. quarrel thes start and end she told one audience. i it is not right to weigh large l thins on small scales.it no it no longer matters who's fauld its but that it the game be stopped and our body parts not

be used to find out who was rite and who was wrong and who said a what on what day. to start the game, requiredhe talking to the enemy. though she knew the communist played a substantial and dominate role, in many -- excusn me. thew she knew the communism play a substantial and often dominant role in many of the organizations she joined, i didd not really care, she writes, i felt as they did. that the russians really did not want war and this was what counted most. i was guided by a feeling thatee russia would never again seek wa war as a means of settling international controvertses she

wrote later. right or wrong, that's the wro hellman who is a fellow traveler as s and she was committed to peace -- and to peaceful coexistence. one of the p results of that wat in 1949, she organized her conference at the waldorf history hotel. a conference officially calledal thele cultural scientific con p februaries fence -- chefs a member and which itself had communist members. there were many groups that have period that had both communistms and noncommunist members andunis that was one of them.- she was committed to workingorki with anybody who was interestedi innt peace. on amonothe orangal cig stories to

that a call for the conference n communist on the one hand, louie -- [inaudible] linus pauling, scientists and others who had no such connections. eventually about 600 people signed the invitation. and that invitation led to the construction of a conference which included eventually 3,000 people meeting at the waldorf-astoria along with a counterconference organized by anti-communists who believed that hellman was the mastermind of the conference. now, hellman, to be sure, had participated in organizing the conference, but she was by no means its mastermind and was only one of 600 members of the

organizing committee. but hellman, nevertheless, gets the blame for the conference. the conference then, when it took place, was picketed and here in a short paragraph let me give you a sense of what that was like. the american legion, the catholic war veterans rounded up hundreds of members to protest outside the waldorf-astoria. among them were a line of nuns through which delegates had to pass. but the most effective critique of the conference and the one with the most long-lasting effect, excuse me, the one with the most long-lasting effects would come from a range of individuals on the left who fundamentally disagreed with fellow travelers over the causes of the cold war. to their mind, russia bore responsibility be for the

escalation and tensions. the most effect bive guarantee of -- effective guarantee of peace, they argued, was a strong military defense. peace merely allowed the soviets more room for aggression. the conference with delegates selected by the soviet union, and there were a handful of such delegates, could expect only to serve the cause of propaganda. devastateing the the opponents accused conference organizers wittingly or not playing into the hands of the soviets. a handful of the 600 sponsors encouraged the organizers to make space for critics of the soviet union, but the organizers were committed to a conference that would knost -- not castigate either side. its intent was to bring together people who would discuss the possibilities of peaceful coexistence that had a clear international flavor to fit.

that's the line that hellman took and the line that thereafter condemned her as a stalinist. it was out of that conference that anti-intellectual, anti-communism large ri grew. largely grew. so i'm going to read you just one more short piece, although there could be many more. and this comes towards the end of her life, an incident that some of you may know about. hellman after she stops writing plays starts to write memoirs, publishes one in '69, publishes one in 1973, and then in 1976 she publishes a small memoir called sound rell time which is her memoir of her own appearance at the house committee on un-american activities. that memoir creates a, let me

just say a negative reaction, a vociferous negative reaction because hellman in that book takes for granted that joseph mccarthy and his minions, she calls them, would have been evil people. but, she says, the real blame should be laid at the feet of these liberals, the intellectuals who didn't stand up for those who were called before the committees. she argues that freedom of speech, the right to dissent was integral to american democracy and that in that period it was the liberals who became anti-communist and who, therefore, tacitly allowed mccarthy to do what he was doing. that they were the real criminals, if you like, of this period. that produces a resurgence of

all the conflicts of the 950s -- 1950, and hellman is caught right in the middle of it. she's accused by people on the left as well as by people who have now moved to the right of being a hypocrite for failing ever to denounce the soviet union, of being a hidden communist all of her life. the word stalinist is thrown at her repeatedly and endlessly. among the by-products of that is for a variety of political reasons the author, mary mccarthy, who was in a different political faction than hellman was, she'd been a trotskyist in her younger days

and anti, an anti-stalinist certainly, had a long history of enmity with lillian hellman. becomes -- well, let me read you the piece, and you'll see. hellman has just published or is about to publish, she's just sent to press a fourth memoir which is much less well known than the others. as it should be. but here's the incident as it occurs. maybe the fourth volume was already in press when early in 1980 novelist and literary critic mary mccarthy let a match to the firestorm that would serve as a metaphor for the 20th century. the moment provided a ready supply of fuel. everywhere one looked, small conflagrations were already

erupting. there was confusion and concern about the changing roles of women, debate over the legitimacy of sexual preferences and the value of the traditional nuclear namely, de-- family, declining opposition to left-wing ideologies including communist and a resulting escalation in the politics and language of anti-communism. this, you'll remember, is the beginning of the reagan period. the rise of identity politics is a factor in domestic and world politics, the vanishing influence of the intellectual and is the simultaneous rise of a popular, seemingly mindless celebrity culture. all these created a timider box of -- tinderbox of politics and emotion, and the aging lillian hellman seemed to have provided a spark to each of them. in the conflagration lay questions petty and mean,

twinges of common jealousy and sparks of rage. when the fire died down, lillian hellman's reputation was reduced to ashes. on october 18, 1979, mary mccarthy arrived at the studios at the educational broadcasting corporation to tape an interview with talk show host dick cabot. she had a new novel to publicize, her first in eight years. she hoped for the kind of success that would bring her back into the limelight. cabot looked forward to the interview. she was lively, witty, opinionated and striking on camera, he recalled later. the interview was going smoothly when in response to a question about overrated writers, she mentioned among ores lillian hellman -- others, lillian hellman who, i think finish this is a quote from mary mccarthy, is tremendously overrated, a bad writer and a dishonest writer.

but she really, and then she dismissed her, she really belongs to the past. cabot followed up. what was dishonest about lillian hellman, he asked? cabot knew hellman reasonably well. he had occasionally had dinner with her, he had previously interviewed her on his show and claimed to like her a lot. mccarthy answered, everything. i said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie including "and" and "the." the audience laughed, the moment passed, and cabot went on to other arenas. the network lawyer complemented him afterwards on a nice show, and the tape was stashed away in preparation for be its scheduled air time on january 24th, 980.

1980. two months later, alone in her bedroom, lillian watched the show on a cold saturday night. ill with emphysema and almost blind, she listened to mary mccarthy accuse her of being a liar. worn down by the axises of stalin -- the ax sayings of stalinism, tired of the never ending negativity about her personal life andsensitive about her rumored greed and self-aggrandizing nature, she was unprepared for this new assault. the following morning she picked up the phone and called her old friend and lawyer, ephraim london, one of the two people she had dedicated "maybe", her

new memoir. she wanted to know if there were grounds for a lawsuit. london agreed there might be. still in a fury, she called dick cabot demanding to know why he hadn't defended her. she would be suing the whole damn bunch of you, cabot recalled her telling him. mary mccarthy, at home in her paris lawsuit, heard rumors of a pending lawsuit and at first laughed them off. on february 18th a process server knocked on her door and handed her the formal notice. she claimed disbelief. cabot's question had caught her unaware, she protested, and lillian's name came to the forefront accidentally. surely her opinion was not actionable. notes from cabot's assistant that today suggest that mary mccarthy was lying. several days before the interview the assistant noted she had offered mccarthy a

range of questions including the one about overrated writers. when i asked if she'd like to discuss which writers are overrated and which underrated and suggested that it could be like a game, she was delighted, the assistant alerted cabot. after ward mccarthy continued to deny that lillian had been on her mind, but that seems highly unlikely. for more than 40 years, the two had shared a climate of hostility, their trajectories running along parallel paths, their opinions conflicting and confronting as they avoided personal encounters. seven years younger than lillian and an acknowledged beauty with a winning smile, mary mccarthy had a quick wit, a bad temper, strong political opinions and famous for her malice.

both women had married young and divorced fairly quickly. both had lived sexually adventurous lives, abused alcohol and achieved success in worlds generally reserved for men. each had a passion for good food and drink and generous hospitality. but there the similarities ended. mccarthy, graduating from vassar in 1933 as a self-declared socialist, had soon chosen trotskyism rather than the communist party as her ideological home. there the beginning -- from the beginning she despised what she called the brutality of stalinism and vigorously opposed the soviet union. she became the only female to participate in reviving the partisan review, a champion of the nonstalinnist left. in the late 1930s, she served as a drama critic and served

this that role for many years after. i'm going to have to stop because our time is running out. i could read you more of the incidents of lying. there are several wonderful examples of how mccarthy, because she's being sued by lillian hellman for claiming that hellman is a liar, the only way that she can defend herself is by proving that lillian hellman is a liar. and so she sends her friends, writes to everybody she knows to try to ascertain stories of hellman having lied. and she puts these stories together in a huge variety of ways around hellman's sexual exploits, around what she did on which trip where, around whether bombs fell at a particular kind of place or didn't fall.

the result is that by the end of the process lillian hellman is labeled in public as the quintessential liar. it's that reputation that has haunted hellman for all of her life. it's a reputation that comes partly, indeed, out of hellman's pen adapt as a dramatist -- penchant as a dramatist to exaggerate, partly out of the 20th century penchant to emphasize the individual over the collective, but more than anything else out of the long history of conflict, of political conflict that roiled the american left in the 20th century. i'm going to stop there. thank you. [applause]

now, if anybody would like to ask questions? >> i'm wondering if you found in your research anything about hellman around 1934? a at that time daschle hammet writes to her in st. louis and in albuquerque, and hammet's wife had been a nurse in new mexico, and there was work on rubber production possibly leading toward new materials development, possibly leading towards some of the wartime technologies. do you know whether hellman was in any of those kind of scientific works earlier on that the post-war scientific conflict? >> the question is what do we

know about hellman in 1934, particularly in terms of her relationship to new mexico and to, and and hahmet's wife's relationship to new mexico and particularly to new mexico rubber production in that period. and i think the answer there is hellman certainly had no relationship, at least as far as i know. in 1934 she was busy first finishing up "the children's hour" and then producing "the children's hour" which hit the stage late that year. she and hammet had lived together that summer on an island off the coast of connecticut. hahmet, when hellman met him, was married and remained married for another decade to the mother of his two children. that, the wife who hammet did

not live with in that period, lived sometimes in california and sometimes in new mexico. so she may well have been there, but as far as i know, hellman never had any connection with her, never met her, certainly never had any connection with the rubber industry. she was beginning then to organize for the drama, the drama was then called the drama writers' guild, later to be known as the dramatists' guild. but i think that's the best i can do with that. question. alex? >> it's fascinating, and there's so many questions to ask. but i think you must have left in the '30s, there are two things i'm particularly interested. one is what is the relationship with the kind of playwrighting left and that crew? there must be one, but she doesn't quite fit that mold.

she's doing something slightly different, although there's one woman who wrote this great play called "morning star" about immigrant labor. but a more specific question. she joins the -- she's in the party in rather a peculiar moment, right? is because, obviously, going to spain draws her to the party, and that makes someceps. but to join this -- in '39 right as the -- [inaudible] and then to quit in '41 right as the u.s. and soviet union were becoming allies and the anti-fascist moment is reborn, given that spain fired her political imagination, she joins the party and stays in at a very odd moment. so how do you deal -- what are the reasons she joins the party, what are the reasons she quits in terms of the timing? because it's odd timing. >> it is odd timing. the question has two parts. the first is what's her

relationship to other left-wing playwrighters in this period including mark leftsteven, and the second, why does she join the party this 1939 and quit in '41? both the joining and quitting, timing. she knowed clifford and likes him, and she knows mark and likes him much better, and later after the war she allies with mark blitz steven who turned "the little foxes" into an operetta which is sometimes still performed. i actually saw a performance a couple of years ago at bard college. but she does not want to be like them. she sees them as political playwrights, and she sees them as encompassing a rather narrow audience. and she wants a big audience. she thinks she has important

things to say, and she wants the large broadway audience. so she is always writing with that audience in mind. so though she is friendly with, let me put it that way, the playwrights we call the playwrights of the left, she is never part of that group or of either -- >> [inaudible] >> she's not part of the group theater, although she made allies with some people who were originally part of that theater. and she's not part of the province town players or any of the other left-wing groups. the second question, why does she join the party in 1939 is, i find, completely fascinating. she describes herself as having been, as having made the decision, basically, having

become attached to communism as opposed to various otherrisms. after she comes back from spain, she visits spain for several weeks while it's in the midst of civil war. she is, she writes about it, she is quite moved by the suffering there. and rather angry that america, that the u.s. won't pitch in to save the duly-elected government from fascists or from the generals who, led by franco, who are trying to take it over. she is so angry with them that she -- and she's been an anti-fascist for a while. that the anti-fascism shifts into i want to support the only country that is going to support

the legally-elected government of spain, and that country the soviet union which is already bringing weapons and so on. now, anybody who knows the history of that civil war knows that the soviet union probably did more bad than good because it brought weapons, but it also brought an ideological rigidity that eliminated, literally eliminated many others on the left who weren't sympathetic anarchists, for example, socialists who weren't sympathetic to the soviet union. but hellman was blind at that point. she did not want to see that. what she wanted to see was how anti-fascism could be played out. and my own guess is that, um, just as she in this period, she signs off on the moscow trials, you know, signs a letter saying, you know, she's part of a

hundred or so other people, stars and celebrities and writers all saying that the moscow trials are probably, you know, legitimate, and it's necessary for the soviet union to, you know, make sure that its boundaries and borders are secure. she is in this moment in 1937, 1938,1939 so, i think, embedded in this anti-fascist vision that she forgives the soviet union everything because of it anti-far stance. now, the curious thing is that in june of 1939 when the soviets sign the peace pact with nazi germany, hitler's germany, and many other people quit the party at that point, hellman doesn't quit.

hellman stays in. and hellman stays in, my own guess is daschle hammet probably was an influence here. hammet is much more committed to the party than she is. but the other piece of me thinks that one of the reasons she stays in is because she doesn't quit, um, you know, when, when a country is down or when a friend is down. she argues the argument that many made, that the soviet union signs this pact as a tactical maneuver, a tactical ha mover in order -- maneuver in order to enable the soviet union to build up strength before it goes to war with hitler. and she's willing to allow the soviet union that leeway. while she is staying in the party, she is writing "watch on

the rind." so at the same time that the soviet union has adopted this line of let's make peace with the fascists, she is not obeying the party line, right? she is writing a play which is the major american play that condemned the fascists. so, you know, she's got both balls juggling in the air. and she pulls out of the party before hitler attacks the soviet union. so she doesn't wait until hitler attacks. she's out of there as soon as she thinks that it's, it won't draw any attention in some way to pull out. so, you know, the soviet union has already risen, her commitment is clearly not to the soviet group onthen, it's to the anti-fascist cause once the u.s.

is geared towards going to war even before the russians are attacked. she's ready to pull out of there. so what can i say, but it's a mystery. there are explanations, we don't know what the explanations are, we can only guess at them, and that's what seems to make sense. okay. >> you suggest that she was pals with arthur schlesinger in the '60s. >> yes, yes. >> in the celebrity world of celebrity intellectuals. >> yes. >> but presumably in '49 he was one of the people specifically denouncing the waldorf-astoria meeting. >> yes. >> americans for democratic action. >> yes. >> so how did they mend fences 15 years later? >> well, american -- ada comes

out after this, or is developed in this period. so he's not one of the chief denunciators, people who denounce. but he certainly is one of them. and that's one of the curious things about hellman in the '60s. so she's gone smooth this tremendous, tremendous anti-communist period in the 1950s, by the 960s -- 1960s she's willing to let bygones be bygones. that politics is over as far as she's concerned. it's not in any sense the sort of moving piece of her life. so she makes friends not only with arthur schlesinger, but by the '60s she's a buddy of norman -- she's a good friend of marty parrot's. in other words, there are lots of political liberals tending to

the right, if i can put it that way, who she becomes close to in this period, and close enough to so that when sound rell times come -- scoundrel times comes out, you know, 14 or 15 years later, she breaks off her relationship with arthur schlesinger again. so, and she does that because he has personally attacked her. you know, he basically supports people who are attacking her, and she says, no, no, you don't have dinner with a friend one night and then, you know, put a knife in his back the next night. and i want nothing more to do with you. and schlesinger, you know, writes a letter to their common lawyer, joe rowe, who had defended her and whose buddy she remains and says, okay, now i'm back on the enemy list.

so, you know, i think in this period of the '60s the best way to look at it is she gets a kind of new lease on life. she's a support beer of the new left -- supporter of the new left which is, you know, as you know for an old lefty to support the new left was a rather unusual position to take. but she gives money to, you know, she support it is eugene mccarthy campaign. she is one of the original funders of the g.i. coffee house movement, the anti-war movement. she's working backwards through the '60s here, but she's one of the advocates of, um, of the march on, for jobs and freedom, the 1963 martin luther king march on washington. writes a very nice, big piece in the "ladies home journal" on this march for which she then is

later sued because she attacks the southern sheriffs who are brutalizing the young people who are involved in the civil rights movement. so, you know, in the '60s she's got a different politics. sheath got really -- she's got really a new left politics in the '60s, and that's revivifying for her politically. it's one of the reasons that makes it so surprising that by the '70s she can, once again, be accused of a stalinism which there's no evidence of anywhere, you know? if she'd once been a member of the party, there's a long history thereafter of a kind of independent politic. ..

book tv. next, from book tv recent visit to wichita, kansas, we hear from robert weems. business in black and white takes a look at what initiatives were supported by u.s. presidents to promote african-american business development. >> started working on the project the player wisdom was that president and the u.s. government really didn't have an interest in black entrepreneurship until the '60s. part of that was motivated by the war on poverty. some thought business ownership as means to help alleviate african-american poverty. another urban rebellions of the

mid to late 1960s. they believed if you had more african-american-owned enterprises in black neighborhoods it would decrees the likelihood of people destroying property in the neighbors. all that being said, and doing some preliminary reading, i came that across a fleeting reference in a 1949 book on black business two-way decision of negro affairs in the commence department. it was in the cool a.j. administration. it grow out of the commerce department when herbert hoover headed the commerce department. and it grew out of a meeting between a prominent african-american entrepreneur by the name of bar ned, who had a meeting with hoover, contending that it would be in the commerce

best interest to develop a special program a special programming aimed at african-american entrepreneurship. and part of the motivation for this was essentially during the 1920s, he an historian referred to it as a sort of golden age of african-american, you know, business activity in the united states. and barnett made the point that the commerce department could help stimulate think by forming a special agency to deal with issues or in fact to promote african-american entrepreneurship. interestingly enough, we talk about interest and support of division of negro affairs. it was filed during a republican administration cool age continued through hoover. when hoover lours in 19 32 it was continued in the fdr administration and continued to a truman.

this division literally had bipartisan support. again, when eisenhower came in, the division was discontinued. in fact, it really wasn't, you know, you don't have a clearly defined governmental agency aimed at african-american entrepreneurship until nixon established the office of minority business enterprise in 1969. during the 1960s whiling there was not receive sense specific government agency to assist african-american entrepreneurship, there were initiatives in the small business administration there were other initiatives in the commerce department to promote african-american entrepreneurship. as i e leaded to earlier based upon the war on poverty impulse. or based upon an attempt to help coil urban black rebellions during the '60s.

there was a real push to increasing the number of african-american banks, there was a push to increase the number of african-american franchise owners, there was a push increase in number of african-american auto dictatorships. and when we -- dealerrership. especially when we look at african-american franchise oich ownership which is today a significant segment of african-american business oip. ownership we can go back to the nixon administration and that is directly tied to some of what we see today. based upon my research, besides nixon who gets a lot of visibility and credit, i would say that the carter administration are in terms of deeds as well as words probably was the most supportive administration in terms of promoting african-american entrepreneurship. one of the things that the

carter administration did, there was a public work fact that was passed in 1977, and there was a ziplation in that act that said that 10% of government projects, you know, government work-related projects had to go to minority crarnghters. -- contractors. it contributed to an explosion of, you know, opportunity for minority contractors. another area that the carter administration helped to promote african-american entrepreneurship was in the realm of media and especially cable television. during the late '70's, there was little, if any, african-american ownership in the cable realm and literally through initiative associated with the carter administration, that held bob johnson to be in fact be in a

position to start black entertainment television. >> when we look at the reggen administration, we know that some administration in deed fought to cut back programs that historically assisted african-americans and other poor segments of american society. interesting enough during the reggen administration, the programs to assist black business were maintained and in fact, some instances actually enhanced. the evidence suggested one of the motivation for that was the influence of a list of -- [inaudible] who was the head of the white house office of public liaison during the period, and some behalf i have seen suggested that, you know, doll approach president reagan out there saying you're antiafrican-american and by continuing to support, you know,

african-american entrepreneurship that might help dispel the notion that you're totally against, you know, the aspirations the african-american community. and it appeared on reakingen on a personal leave believed in the free enterprise system. it wasn't a problem to promote programs to support african-american entrepreneurship. when we look at the reagan and the reagan presidency. he had more than a list. he had more conservative advisers as well. and this appeared to manifest itself. and supreme court nominations that reagan made and ultimately while the reagan administration continued to support, you know, business support support for african-american entrepreneurship, his supreme court nominee ended up ultimately helping the undermine the programs.

and a landmark case in this with regard was the case that filed a initiative in the city of richmond that allocated a certain proportion of public works projects to minority contractors. the supreme court with the new reagan edition declared that the city of richmond's policy was unconstitutionallal. six years later, with the addition of a clearance thomas, was nom named during the -- nominated during the first bush administration. the supreme court declared that a transportation department initiative that sought to allocate work to minority contractors that would declare unconstitutionallal as well. in the reagan administration you had the interesting i did cot my where the to assist

african-american entrepreneurship. subsequent supreme court nomination also helped to dismantle some of the programs. >> to bring it fairly close to the present, last summer there was a initiative cosponsored by the obama white house, and the business school at rutgers. rutgers has a center for urban black urban black development entrepreneur sheep. they coresponsed an urban imeerp summit. among other things similar to what previous administrations and others have said that by promoting more positive economic activity in urban black that only has a ben official effect on the neighborhoods but also on, you know, municipal, state, and international economies. again, there's this continuing thrust and movement and interest

in promoting urban entrepreneurship, which urban become because of the code work for black. again, we know the bott line is. we talk about business whether it's black, white, or what have you. if you can expand in certain areas. that's not going have a, you know, positive impact on the specific communities but on the broader economic sector. over the past thirty years, and again, linked with a lot of the governmental programs that were put in place during the '60s '70s 'and 80s we've seen a significant diversification of african-american enterprises in a variety of sectors. historically for a variety reasons. we saw african-american enterprise confined to, you know, personal care products. insurance companies that caters

exclusive to african-americans. again, over the past twenty, thirty years there's been significant i diversification. it generated some positive developments for instance, the leading african-american enterprise in america today worldwide technologies based outside the same lou of missouri had over $3 billion in 2011 and there in, you know, the i.t. area and -- but not withstanding the success stories. there's a cause for concern while there's been a dramatic increase in the number of african-american comprises over the past decade, the vast majority of the enterprises and the numbers 94% are single proprietorships. and the average, you know, income of these single

proprietorships is about $21,000. in today's world $21,000 is just barely above the poverty level. while one level has been a significant increase in the number of african-american enterprises, the vast majority of the still-remained marginal single proprietorship. we talk about single proprietorships part of the american dream is to, you know, own a business for yourself. i think a lot of african-americans become single propry tears based upon the fact that ongoing discrimination our limitation in the employment sector and the employment situation being as it is today. possibly going into business for yourself is an attractive alternative. again, when we look at the numbers and just a reality that upwards of 95% of small

businesses regardless of the ethic or gender makeup is another whole another reality that, you know, we have to deal it. i'm not sure that there a real solution to that because unfortunately most small businesses are destine to fail. but again, if short term, you know, some african-americans have a within able to -- have been able to expand upon singer proips to move into a larger enterprise to employ individuals. the numbers are very clear that the more african-americans or entrepreneur can move into the realm of actually employing people and expanding your enterprise the higher the likelihood of success. for more infoio