Hellman Discussed at Women in Law Lecture

Professor Alice Kessler-Harris prioritized playwright Lillian Hellman’s role as a liberal advocate over her allegedly mysterious persona as part of a lecture series on women and law Thursday night.

Nearly a quarter-century after her death, Hellman, the famed author of The Children’s Hour, stirs the passions of literary critics and historians who continue to debate whether she was a heroine of American letters or a liar regarding her communist sympathies. In her speech, entitled “Lillian Hellman’s Crusade: Civil Liberties in an Age of Lies,” Kessler-Harris, the R. Gordon Hoxie professor of history, spoke of the polarizing figure whose character was rooted in playwriting and controversy.
“Everyone has an opinion about Lillian Hellman,” Kessler-Harris said.

The lecture attracted a mostly older crowd—“old lefties,” as Professor Carol Sanger put it, as she remembered admiring Hellman when she was young.

The award-winning playwright’s leftist leanings and associations with members of the Communist Party led to a well-known appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 where she refused to disclose the names of “communist sympathizers.” Two decades later, Hellman became a driving force behind the founding of the Committee for Public Justice, a group of lawyers, writers, scientists, and educators dedicated to the investigations of civil rights violations in governmental agencies. Hellman was blasted for her memoir Scoundrel Time, regarding which she was accused of lying about her appearance in front of HUAC and her own communist and Stalinist associations.

While acknowledging that Hellman had a lying streak, Kessler-Harris argued that a number of the accusations leveled against her were false, and that she was in part a political pawn in a larger neoconservative plot to discredit liberalism in the 1970s.
Kessler-Harris argued that understanding the nature of lying and corruption in both individuals and the larger government is as relevant today as it was in Hellman’s day.
While acknowledging that Hellman may have lied, Kessler-Harris said she personally “won’t believe she [Hellman] told anything but the truth” because Hellman’s advocacy work with the Committee for Public Justice stood for larger truths.

One audience member questioned whether Kessler-Harris was allowing Hellman to “have it both ways” in admitting that Hellman was, in her nature, a liar, but could still be seen as a crusader for civil rights.

Bert Lewen, Law ’58, said he believed that Hellman was fighting a battle for civil rights that still hasn’t been won. “I was living through the Nixon administration,” he said, but he believes that since then,“things have really gotten worse.”

“She’s such an iconic figure for so many people,” said Rhonda Zangwell, who also attended the lecture. Local resident Sharon Finn said that “I feel like we really do need her today.”
Alix Pianin can be reached at news@columbiaspectator.com.