The American gulf is widening

The truth under assault

“Truth made you a traitor,” wrote Lillian Hellman, “as it often does in a time of scoundrels. But there were very few who stood up to say so…”

The playwright told the story of her encounter with the federal government’s spell of anti-Communist paranoia in the late 1940s and early ‘50s in a brief memoir (her third) entitled Scoundrel Time.

Her quote about the truth specifically referred to the experts who were fired from the State Department and falsely accused of engaging in a pro-Communist conspiracy by politicians like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy for doing no more than “to recognize that Chiang Kai-shek was losing” to the Communist forces in China.

The hysteria of what became known as the “McCarthy era” eventually passed, but not before greatly harming the careers of hundreds of actors, directors and authors including Hellman herself.

The history of the “blacklist” makes for particularly uncomfortable reading right now when the Trump administration is purging federal employees and…