I’ve read excerpts of this, and always wanted to read the whole thing. I got it on tape and listened to it while driving. I was incredibly interested by the introduction, which lay out the time line and some historic background for the McCarthy era.<\/p>\n
Lilian Hellman was famous for standing up to the House Unamerican Activities Committee. What they did was pull people in and get them to tell on all their friends as proof of their own innocence. “Innocence” in this case meant their ideological agreement with the government.<\/p>\n
I find this idea reprehensible. So did many people at the time. It was wrong for the government to insist on one set of ideas.<\/p>\n
So Lillian Hellman was subpaenaed to testify before the HUAC, and she said that she would not plead the 5th if they didn’t ask her any questions about other people. The remarkable thing was that she didn’t go to jail for contempt, which others had done.<\/p>\n
She talked about what it was like to live at that time. One thing I learned was that, even when Daschell Hammet, her longtime friend and one of the first to be blacklisted for his political ideas, was not only blacklisted and jailed, but when he did manage to find some money, the IRS found some loopholes to take all his earnings for the rest of his life. I hadn’t realized that the IRS was in on it too.<\/p>\n
The introduction tells us that Hammet based Nora from “The Thin Man” on Lillian. Once I knew that, I could catch the tone of the stories she told. It was a story, about a certain time. Lots of things happened, and there were huge ripple effects of this repressive ideology.<\/p>\n
This was well worth checking out. I can’t help but think there are cautionary lessons for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve read excerpts of this, and always wanted to read the whole thing. I got it on tape and listened to it while driving. I was incredibly interested by the introduction, which lay out the time line and some historic … Continue reading