After the Miracle, page 26
Eventually, what was expected to be a nearly unanimous confirmation became a full-fledged battle as more senators—both Republican and Democrat—joined the effort to derail the nomination. At the height of the controversy, Helen publicly waded into the battle when she wrote a letter to the New York Times demanding Lilienthal’s confirmation. “As a free citizen and a thinking daughter of democracy,” she wrote, “I am moved to speak my mind in the present conflict between light and darkness symbolized by the conscienceless campaign of political goring and tossing against David E. Lilienthal… It is an issue vital to the nation and the world whether Mr. Lilienthal shall act as Chairman of the Commission of Atomic Energy or be repudiated, and its decision is the duty of the American people, not of a static group tied to vested interests and provincial bigotry.”2
Although Lilienthal would eventually be confirmed, it foreshadowed the ugly politics that would dominate the political landscape for decades to come. In July that year, a man named Walter Steele appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and set off a political firestorm. Steele, publisher of the fiercely anti-Communist publication National Republic, claimed to represent “twenty million patriots” in support of legislation outlawing the Communist Party. During his testimony, he leveled a number of sensational charges and claimed that the Communists were contemplating the creation of a dictatorship by violence if necessary.3 Among its leading forces, he singled out Jo Davidson and his Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICCASP)—an organization in which Helen had become increasingly active. Steele described the group as a “Red front” linked to the recently created political party headed by Henry Wallace.4 In states that had outlawed the Communist Party, he claimed, “the Reds lend their support to so-called ‘progressive’ candidates sponsored by Progressive Citizens of America. It is to be expected that this movement will assume the role of an iron curtain, behind which the Communists will parade in the political field in the states barring them from the ballot.”5
Many of the names cited by Steele at the hearing—including Hollywood figures such as Charlie Chaplin and Gene Kelly—had only peripheral links to the myriad front groups he cited. Even Ronald Reagan, who was once a New Deal Democrat, had served on the board of Davidson’s ICCASP for a time before he stepped down when accusations of Communist influence first began to circulate.6 Many liberals, in fact, would find their names tarnished for joining left-leaning groups, attending a meeting, or even signing a petition that was later revealed to be tied to a Communist organization or alleged front group. For those inadvertently caught up in the murky atmosphere of progressive politics, it was often difficult for observers to know where to draw the line when the witch hunts began.
As the FBI kept track of Helen’s political activities, however, there was little question which side of the line she stood on. If her open association with Communist institutions during WWII had been largely overlooked because the Soviet Union was an ally at the time, her continued sympathies a few months after the war ended once again caught the attention of the Bureau. They took note of a piece published in the Yiddish-language Communist newspaper, Morgen Freiheit, which reported that Helen had been one of the guests at the Soviet consulate in Manhattan on November 8, 1945, at a reception marking the twenty-eighth anniversary of the Soviet revolution. When she entered the consulate, she was heard to declare to her hosts, “Finally I am on Soviet Soil.”7
Three months later, the Bureau once again took note when Helen’s name appeared on a list of groups and individuals who sent messages of greeting to a conference of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—Americans who had fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War. In the seven years since Helen had first appeared with the brigade in the earliest days of her involvement with the Popular Front, the group had been officially listed by the United States attorney general as a “Communist organization.”8 At the end of 1946, she publicly extolled the USSR once again in the magazine Soviet Russia Today when she contributed an article headlined “We Are Judged by What We Do to Them,” calling for friendship between the United States and the Soviets. “There are solid grounds for faith to celebrate the 29th anniversary of the USSR,” she wrote. “May its founding ever be hailed as a new daystar of healing influences dawning upon man’s strife-blurred vision!”9
Initially, her explicit associations with Communist institutions and media outlets mostly escaped public scrutiny in the postwar period. But with the rapidly shifting American political climate, that was about to change. It was increasingly clear that she had become disillusioned with the direction the country was taking under Truman. “Here in America, we are living through a bitter period of retrograde,” she wrote her friend Eric Boulter in February 1947. “Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death, an uninspired, short-sighted administration has made havoc of the far-seeing, beneficent global policies for which he gave his life.” Racial discrimination, she complained, is “rampant” and every effort is being put forth to “stifle radicalism. Liberals are not allowed the use of any broadcasting stations, the manufacture of bombs continues, and it dismays me to see how little the people are doing individually to prevent atomic warfare.”10
Although Jo Davidson’s ties to the Communist Party—if any—are still uncertain, other figures around Helen during this period were undeniably party members, as Nella Henney observed with dismay in her journal in March 1947. Nella was especially concerned about Helen and Polly’s association with the future author of Spartacus. “Howard Fast, a close friend of theirs, a Jewish young man with a distressing background is an avowed Communist,” she wrote. “He has a dramatic sense and no small amount of literary ability, but he lacks integrity (see the way in which he manipulates American history to serve his thesis) and I am sorry to see Helen and Polly tangled up with him.”11 Her relationship with another prominent left-wing writer, Dorothy Parker, dated back to at least 1940 when Parker served on Helen’s ill-fated Spanish Rescue Ship mission to ferry anti-fascist refugees out of Vichy France.12 Parker had been named as a “Concealed Communist” by the former Soviet spy Louis Budenz, who served as a member of the CPUSA Central Committee before defecting in 1945. He provided no concrete evidence against Parker and, like McCarthy, Budenz was known for reckless accusations, although a confidential informant also told the FBI that Parker was a “concealed” member of the Party. Her file also revealed that she was a member of dozens of front groups and Communist “enterprises.”13 Helen’s involvement with other alleged party figures during this period underscores the fact that we can’t definitively pinpoint her close friendship with Jo Davidson as the linchpin of her continuing associations in the orbit of the Communist Party—especially since she was already a Fellow Traveler at least three years before she first met Jo in 1942. If a paper trail once existed pointing to her earlier party contacts, it almost certainly disappeared in the 1946 fire that destroyed Arcan Ridge and most of Helen’s cherished possessions while she and Polly toured Europe.
Meanwhile, the prospect of Wallace taking on Truman in the 1948 election was already causing trepidation among both the anti-Communist right and the leadership of the Democratic Party as they watched the Left champion a presidential run. Helen’s circle was undeniably excited at the prospect of a Wallace candidacy, as Nella observed after attending a party at Arcan Ridge in November 1947. She made particular note of the discussion after Jo Davidson arrived with his wife, Florence:
They both were on fire, for they had just had lunch with Henry Wallace and Wallace had agreed quietly to run for the presidency, if asked, knowing that he would fail… The Davidsons believe that Wallace is Christlike and that he is ready to be crucified for the people… They want it to be an upsurge of liberal-progressive thought and though they are all ready for failure, Jo says, ‘And by God we may win.’… Helen says that Wallace is her man.14
That same month, American Foundation for the Blind director Bob Irwin sent Helen an ominous note: “Enclosed is a clipping from the Daily Worker. There is a rumor going about that [the House Un-American Activities Committee] is going to investigate the Foundation very soon.”15 The clipping he attached is missing from the files, but the Communist Party paper had recently reported that Helen sent a statement of greeting to be included in a booklet commemorating the presence of Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor at a gathering of the Philadelphia Communist Party. Bloor was a former Socialist Party comrade, who had moved sharply to the left after the birth of the Soviet Union to become one of the cofounders of the Communist Party USA. A beloved figure in left-wing circles, she was widely known as the “Mother of the Communist Movement.” It would also soon emerge that Bloor’s son, Hal Ware, had headed one of the largest Soviet spy rings in American history, known as the Ware Group. Before his death in a car accident in 1935, he recruited dozens of spies to infiltrate the New Deal administration in underground cells scattered throughout the federal government.16
When Helen sent a greeting to Ella Bloor in the summer of 1947 that read simply, “Fraternally Yours, Helen Keller”—printed in the program of the Communist Party gathering—Ware had not yet been named publicly as a spy.17 Still, the attention of the witch hunters and the threat of an investigation made the AFB undeniably nervous and marked a dramatic turning point in Helen’s relationship with the Foundation to whom she had devoted so much of her life.
Only weeks after Irwin warned her that HUAC was threatening to turn its attention on the AFB, the most ominous threat to date presented itself in December 1947 when Westbrook Pegler devoted most of his popular syndicated column disparaging a piece that had recently appeared in rival Ed Sullivan’s “Talk of the Town” column.
Sullivan, the future TV variety show personality, reported that Helen Keller had recently visited the New York nightclub Café Society with Jo Davidson and that she had “followed the harmonic rhythms” of the headliner, Larry Adler, while he played harmonica. Pegler, a notoriously right-wing columnist, took note that the club was owned by brothers Leon and Bernard Josephson, both of whom had been associated with American Communism. Leon Josephson, he informed his readers, had told the State Department that he was a member of the “inner circle” of the US Communist Party and that he would “commit any act short of murder” to carry out the orders of the Communist Central Committee.18
Having convincingly established that the nightclub was a Communist front, Pegler blasted Ed Sullivan for providing “political publicity and propaganda” by reporting on Helen Keller’s outing under the guise of “innocent babble.”
He notes that by 1943, the headliner, harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, had appeared “three times in the reports of the Dies Committee”—a congressional committee chaired by Martin Dies that was formed before the war to investigate “disloyalty and subversive activities.” It was now better known as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Helen’s companion Jo Davidson, he adds, was also “cited” by the committee a number of times. Despite these references, it is clear from the tone of Pegler’s column that it was designed to out Helen as a Communist sympathizer—the first time the mainstream press had ever linked Helen directly to Communism.
“Helen Keller is cited 11 times down to 1943,” Pegler wrote, apparently referring to the number of times her name appeared in the committee’s internal investigations. “She knowingly chose her political company a long time ago. No news here.”19
Both the timing of Pegler’s column and the rumor that the Foundation would soon be investigated were precipitous. On November 24, 1947—only two weeks before Pegler singled out Helen and implicitly tied her to American Communism—the US Congress had cited ten Hollywood figures with contempt for refusing to cooperate at hearings called by HUAC to investigate alleged subversive activities within the film industry. The men, soon to become known as the Hollywood Ten, would be handed sentences of up to a year in jail—among the first victims of the blacklist that would destroy many lives over the next decade. Many, in fact, were members of Jo Davidson’s ICCASP. Their indictment would send a chill through the American Left that would last for years as countless progressive figures were hauled before the committee and given the chance to “name names” to save their careers. Others were forced to sign loyalty oaths. “Those who aren’t loyal should be put in concentration camps before it’s too late,” wrote the influential gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.20
Among the most worrying words in Pegler’s column was his assertion that Helen had been cited multiple times by the Dies Committee. It suggested that he had been leaked information by the FBI or the committee and appeared to confirm the rumor that Bob Irwin had recently heard about a potential investigation. The fact that the committee had never publicly named Helen or summoned her to testify suggests that the Pegler leak may have been designed as a shot across the bow—a warning for her to dial down her radical associations.
The pattern of the Red-baiters over the following decade indicates that her status as a beloved icon almost certainly shielded Helen herself from persecution. It is likely no coincidence that HUAC had chosen to turn its attentions first on a group of screenwriters and directors, rather than any number of stars who had been party members or Fellow Travelers during the 1930s and ’40s. Indeed, even when the committee eventually singled out actors, many of the names it targeted were relatively obscure, while both J. Edgar Hoover and the blacklisters often gave bigger names a pass during the witch hunts that followed. A few years later, the experience of one of those names would provide a telling example that suggests a figure of Helen’s stature was probably in no danger of public exposure.
When I Love Lucy debuted on CBS in 1951, it would transform a bubbly redhead named Lucille Ball into one of America’s first television superstars virtually overnight. Although she had already been a B-list movie actor for many years, her newfound fame brought unwanted attention to her political past. It didn’t take long for intelligence agencies to uncover the fact that Lucy had registered to vote for the Communist Party in 1936. That same year, according to her FBI dossier, there was a report that she had also been appointed to the State Central Committee of the California Communist Party. In addition, California Secretary of State records revealed that she sponsored a Communist Party candidate for the state assembly named Emil Freed.21 In 1938, Lucy registered to vote Communist once again, and on at least one occasion allowed her Beverly Hills home to be used to host a Communist Party gathering.22
Here was explosive evidence of a direct link between television’s biggest star and American Communism, far more concrete than the innuendo or secondhand rumors that had already destroyed more than one career. But America loved Lucy, and J. Edgar Hoover would later describe her and her husband, Desi, as among his “favorite stars.”23 Rather than expose her to a damaging public hearing, she was given the opportunity to meet privately with a member of the committee, William Wheeler. Here, Lucy offered a dubious excuse for her Communist past—telling Wheeler that she had never been a member of the party but had registered to vote as a “favor” to her ailing grandfather Fred Hunt, who had been a “Socialist all his life.”24 Despite this fairly flimsy and disingenuous explanation, the committee allowed the matter to rest there. She later signed an affidavit claiming that she had “no knowledge or recollection” of ever being appointed to the state committee.25 When Lucy’s Communist ties later became the subject of a “blind item” on Walter Winchell’s popular radio show in 1953, her husband, Desi Arnaz, deftly dismissed the rumor that the item pertained to his wife. “The only thing red about this girl is her hair and even that we’re not so sure about,” he quipped.26
As with Lucy, it’s very unlikely that Hoover or HUAC would have dared risk the approbation of the public and its mostly unwavering acceptance of the witch hunts by targeting a figure as beloved as Helen Keller. “I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment,” John Fox, the FBI’s in-house historian, confirmed.27
But even if she was safe from persecution, the same wasn’t necessarily true for the Foundation, which clearly feared the lasting repercussions from the Pegler column. We have no record about how the backlash was communicated to Helen, but an entry in Nella’s journal in December 1947 provides a revealing picture about what was going on behind the scenes, along with Helen’s colorful reaction to the accusations against her and Jo:
[Pegler] intimated that they were both communists without ever saying so (believe it is now libellous to call anyone a communist). The American Foundation for the Blind was somewhat disturbed. There are several reasons. One is that Helen is a national—rather an international—saint, and we demand austerity of our saints. The other (the main one so far as the Foundation is concerned) is that she is begging for money and the group that Pegler represents has more of it than any other. Helen called Pegler a dung-beetle and the rest of us called him worse names than that.28
The growing alarm within the Foundation only intensified after a financial contributor, Mrs. Walter Fosnot, enclosed a copy of Pegler’s column along with a note declaring that she would not see her money going to fund Helen’s “Communist activities.” Irwin immediately sent a memo to AFB president William Ziegler expressing alarm.
“I have heard a good deal of repercussion from this article of Westbrook Pegler but this is the first time I have had any direct evidence it is affecting our contributions,” he wrote. “I don’t know whether we should ignore this woman’s letter or write to her. Would you think something like the attached might be sent over your name? Helen Keller’s habit of playing around with Communists or near Communists has long been a source of embarrassment to her conservative friends. Please advise me.”29
