Revisionist History - The Judgment of Helen Levitt

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

Helen Slote Levitt was on her way to the good life in 1950s Hollywood. Then one day, her name appeared on a list. The story of an ordinary woman whose world was upended by extraordinary times. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the archives of UCLA's library, there is a remarkable seven-hour interview conducted in 1988 with a woman named Helen Sloat Leavitt, along with a separate interview with Helen's husband, Al Levitt. Each conversation spanning an extraordinary period. The Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement. What I'd like you to start with is your biographical background, when and where you were born, your parents, your family, etc. Fine. My roots are solidly middle class, Jewish, Brooklyn, out of Poland. The interviews were conducted by the historian Larry Sapler over the course of many months. He remembers the Levitts well, particularly Helen.

Petite, intense, alive, but in some sense, wounded. It was an interesting interview because when I first approached them, they said no. They were justifiably, I think, wary of people coming to ask them questions, the answers to which they had refused to give to other people. So I made a deal with them. I said I'd send them five questions through the mail, and then they could look them over, and if they thought those were legitimate, we could talk on the phone, and they would answer them, which they did. And they came to trust me, you know, that I wasn't someone who was, you know, going to betray them in any way. The Levitts had their reasons for not trusting outsiders, as you will hear.

They are, you know, the Yiddish term starker, it means strong, you know, kind of tough. You don't let things bowl you over. They were starkers. Helen probably even a little bit more than Al, I think. Larry Siplair's conversation with Helen Levitt is a masterclass in interviewing technique. Careful, persistent, unflinching, always with the sense that there is something he's trying to uncover. I interview people for a living as well, but I could not have sat so patiently with Helen Levitt for that long. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

In this episode, I want to do something simple, play you selections from Helen Levitt's interview. I want you to listen to her story, in her words, and hear, as I did, about a crucial decision she and her husband made when they were young. At the end, I want you to judge her and decide whether she deserved her fate. Since we seem to be doing a fair amount of this these days, judging people for the things they say and believe, I thought it would be a useful exercise. Helen grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn,

in a house on the corner of Carroll Street and Kingston Avenue. My paternal grandfather went to parochial high school and then to med school and became a doctor, as did my father. Helen was a precocious child, alert, intelligent. She remembers as a kid reading a charity appeal in the New York Times, New York's 100 Neediest Cases. They gave in each day or each week actual cases of poor, suffering people. And I never missed reading every one of those cases. And I agonized as I read them. Once she went to a birthday party for a wealthy friend of hers,

held at the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum. So here all we little rich kids went to this terrible, dreary, Dickens-like place. And the show was put on, and all the little orphans were brought in. They could watch the show, and then all the little orphans were led away down these dark halls. There was a horror to it that never left me. She was a child of the 1930s, when the grand experiment that was America suddenly turned bleak. Did the Depression have much of an impact on your family? Oh yeah, my father was just devastated.

His medical practice suffered. Patients stopped paying. His investments were wiped out. Until the prohibition was over, I know he was selling liquor prescriptions to the druggist across the street. Was your father a political person at all? Yes he was what you'd call a parlor pink. He and his friend Harry Silver would fight the revolution in our living room. They would have these violent political

discussions and the women would sit there so disgusted because these two guys couldn't make a decent living. And here they were talking about changing the world. But I realized fairly recently in looking back that those two guys were doing that for my benefit because they knew that there was one person in that room who was listening, and that was me. Helen listened.

As a teenager, she was a junior counselor at her summer camp. And my new friend Ines came to camp. She was beautiful, and she got these incredible love letters from her radical boyfriend in New York that she would let me read that were just so romantic and political. She took me to meet him on a night that he was just making a speech from a soapbox in Manhattan. That was where I was exposed to the young communists.

The Young Communist League, the YCL, the youth branch of the American Communist Party. Nobody recruited Helen. She just walked up and volunteered. In the 30s, the Young Communist League of America had thousands of members. The YCL branch in New York was a world unto itself, filled with ideas and passion. There were people going hungry all over the United States, an ongoing moral catastrophe in the American South, a vicious war in Spain against fascism,

not to mention Hitler's rise in Germany. Americans were looking for answers, and many found them in the world's biggest communist empire, the Soviet Union. I found it unfair, unfairness of life unbearable, and assumed that, God, if it were fixable, how wonderful. And the fact that there was a country, the Soviet Union, which was really trying to fix it, seemed quite marvelous to me. For the first time, as I stepped on Soviet soil,

I felt myself a full human being. A full human being. The black American actor and singer Paul Robeson, then at the height of his fame, made a pilgrimage to the mecca of communism and said, for the first time in my life, I walk in full human dignity. The people who were doing slings, really out there fighting the good fight with the young communists. Helen was now attending Brooklyn College, volunteering in a rat-infested building for the YCL,

making sandwiches that the branch could sell to pay the rent. After I would get out of the kitchen, the rats would take over and I could see them. Helen met Al Leavitt at summer camp. He was from the Bronx. He wanted to be a writer. He followed her into the YCL. They got married and moved to Los Angeles, had two kids, lived up in the Hollywood Hills. Al wrote for the movies and television, social parables like the 1948 Technicolor film, The Boy with the Green Hair. Everywhere you go, people will say, they will say, there is the boy with the green hair. And then people will ask, why does he have green hair? So you will tell them, because I am a war orphan, and my green hair is to remind you that war is very bad for children. You must tell all the people. Helen helped found a non-profit theater in Hollywood, volunteered, ran things.

My whole life has been that way. It's always been somebody asked me to do something, you know, I did it. And I always did much more than was asked of me. That was the story of my life. While I was listening to Helen Levitt's story of how she came to join the Communist Party, I couldn't help but think of myself at 18, the age that she was when she entered the movement. I'd just started college. It was the early 80s. I had a poster of Ronald Reagan on my wall. If you asked me what I was back then, I would have said I was an anti-communist. That was my cause. The Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan. The Afghan defenders and the Russian attackers fought

bitterly for almost four hours, and according to the Afghan source, casualties on both sides were heavy. It was holding much of Eastern Europe hostage. Poland, now under martial law, is sealed off from the outside world. Britain, America, and other Western nations are watching closely. The Soviet Union apparently wasn't involved, but from the background they approved. The summer after my sophomore year, I did a journalism internship in Washington, D.C., where we were required to do a research project. Mine was on how many people had been killed by communism. I spent the summer in the Library of Congress,

trying to track down who was killed in what government-manufactured famine or who died in what internment camp. I was horrified. Helen Levitt got caught up in the communist movement at the same age I got caught up in the anti-communist movement, and for the same reason. Because 18 is the age that we look for a cause bigger than ourselves. It's funny, I haven't thought

about that time in my life for years, except when I listened to Helen Levitt, and it all came rushing back. The brightest and the most beautiful were leading the young radicals. I mean, they were the most dazzling figures on campus. They were the most brilliant professors, no question about it. The only courses that I remember were taught by Marxist professors. I asked you at the beginning to judge her. So next, let's judge her. Продолжение следует... The leader of the Soviet Union from the late 1920s to 1953 was Joseph Stalin. He embarked on an aggressive course of nationalization. He collectivized agriculture. Millions of peasants were forced off their land.

In the early 30s, agricultural areas like Ukraine were devastated by famine, caused in large part by Stalin's policies. Five to seven million people died. He established the Gulag, a network of prison camps through which 18 million people were held at one time or another. In the years that the young Communist League was serving sandwiches in New York City, Stalin launched something called the Great Purge. 700,000 people were murdered. In August of 1939, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. We have reached the serious events of the week. Von Ribbentrop, leaving Berlin for Moscow, ushers in a new incomprehensible chapter in German diplomacy. What has happened to the principles of Mein Kampf?

Equally, what can Russia have in common with Germany to throw over the... The hero of the idealists back in Brooklyn had made a deal with a monster. The historian Larry Sapler interviewed many American communists from those years, and he told me their unwavering support for Stalin always bothered him. Again and again, even from people who I thought were really incredibly intelligent people, their main answer was, we thought the party leaders knew better. We thought they had more information, that they were a little more sophisticated in their reasoning, and so we went along.

That always threw me. I mean, I'm still, to this day, don't really find it convincing. When the Levitts moved to Los Angeles, they joined the Hollywood branch of the Communist Party. The way Helen Levitt talks about it, she makes it sound like a glorified social club. It wasn't. They had various branches, and they would get their orders, as it were, from the county, usually, filtered from New York. How closely was the National Party under the control of or in communication with the Soviet Union in those years? Complete. Complete control. The party couldn't do anything that the people in Moscow would disapprove of. And when they did, they were rapidly brought into line. Meanwhile, Stalin's policies were not

exactly a secret. The purges, the famine, the pact with Hitler, the show trials, the concentration camps. There were plenty of people in the United States appalled by what was happening in the USSR, just not the members of the Hollywood branch of the Communist Party. At one point, Larry Sapler asked Helen Levitt if she would have considered herself a Stalinist through this whole era. She said, of course. The general attitude we took in terms of any attacks against the Soviet Union was that the establishment here had so much at stake to undermine any success in the Soviet Union that you couldn't believe anything.

We justified everything. The Nazi-Soviet pact did not bother us. We really trusted Stalin, that he knew what he was doing. Stalin died in 1953. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, famously denounced him in 1956. After that, it was impossible to maintain the fiction that Stalin was anything except one of the 20th century's bloodiest dictators. Only then did the Communist Party in Hollywood fade away. Why did you leave the Communist Party?

It just disappeared after the Khrushchev letter. Whatever, the Khrushchev report. The so-called secret speech. Whatever. I mean, the party just disappeared in Hollywood. We didn't leave formally or say, you know, we're leaving, because there was no party. It just, overnight, it disappeared.

Did you feel embarrassed? No. Having supported the Soviet Union now to have seen it? No. No. Keep in mind, Larry Sipler and Helen Levitt are talking in 1988, during the final chaotic years of the USSR, when many Russians felt embarrassed about having supported the Soviet Union.

Not Helen Levitt. There's a famous picture taken at the Yalta Conference in 1945, where the Allies met to plan the end of the war. Churchill, FDR, and Stalin sitting in a row. As a teenager in my anti-communist phase, I was fixated on that photograph. Churchill, the greatest of all British wartime leaders, looks grumpy and indomitable. Roosevelt, who created the modern American state, is thin and drawn.

He will be dead inside of a few months. Then there's Stalin on the end, in full Soviet Army dress, looking straight at the camera with a trace of a smile below his thick mustache. All I could think was, what's so funny? Why is he smiling? How could the others put up with him?

I thought of that photograph again when I listened to Helen Levitt rhapsodize about the glories of her communist past. She looked at those three men and she cast her lot with a paranoid, homicidal jackass on the end. And why? Because she mistakenly thought that the way to deal with the world's injustices was to line up behind a monster? In seven hours of talking with Larry Sapler, Helen Levitt never once comes to terms with the consequences of her beliefs. No remorse, no regrets, nothing about her heady days at Brooklyn College, except nostalgia. Young people who were on the campus, who did not get involved,

either with the young communists or the young socialists, either weren't bright enough, because it was heady stuff. I mean, Engels and even Lenin, I mean Marx was impossible to read, but Engels was comprehensible but very, well it was a challenge to read, but I was very impressed with Engels and Lenin. They both were extraordinary minds and incredible writers. Young people who didn't get involved either didn't have the intellectual capacity or the courage. As I listened to the interview, this is the moment that hit me, the sheer arrogance of it.

But then I kept listening to the rest of her story. In 1947, the Cold War between the USSR and US had just begun. A large chunk of Germany and Eastern Europe was under Soviet control. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sounded a warning that would instantly become famous. An iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. The hunt for communists within the United States became an obsession, starting with Hollywood. This committee, under its mandate from the House of Representatives, has the responsibility of exposing and spotlighting subversive elements

wherever they may exist. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings. It is only to be expected that communists would strive desperately to gain entry to the motion picture industry simply because the industry offers such a tremendous weapon

for education and propaganda. Screenwriters and movie stars who were suspected of once being members of the Communist Party were called to testify. Those who refused went to prison. Anyone suspected of communist ties were blacklisted. It was all but impossible for them to work in show business under their own names. The Levitts saw their friends get caught up in the witch hunt one by one. And then one day, the witch hunt came for them. You know, things were really going along very nicely. I think it was a kind of jolly life. It was 1951. Helen had just had a baby, their second, a daughter. They had a housekeeper and a nurse.

Her husband, Al, was a rising star in Hollywood. And then when they came to the door with the subpoena, it was kind of a cold chill because I knew it was all over. Now, was this a subpoena to appear publicly? A subpoena to appear publicly in Washington. it a subpoena? A subpoena to appear publicly in Washington. Both the Levitts were called to testify. They were asked about their communist affiliations. They were forced to take the Fifth.

Al Levitt had a statement prepared for his appearance that day. He read it decades later to Larry Supler. Every man has the right to be unpopular or even to be wrong without suffering the consequence of official censure, blacklist, or jail. Most peace-loving people will find themselves unpopular with this Committee. I do not, therefore, intend to enter my beliefs or my associations in a popularity contest in which the members of this committee are the judges. I shall offer no cooperation to the evil purpose of these hearings,

except that which the force of law compels." Extraordinary. The Committee of Congress, and yet I was very calm, very composed. I turned to my lawyers when I needed to. But I have footage of us in the hall of the federal building minutes after we came out of the hearing room. And I'm so pleased with it. Not only do we look so young,

which, well, everybody, you know, is young before they get old, but I'm laughing. You know, we're in such good spirits, and there's no sense of people who have been through an ordeal, but people who have done something difficult, and, you difficult, then they did it. Had you decided what you were going to do with the rest of your lives now that Al's professional career was at an end? Or had that something you'd not been thinking about too much?

Well, the first thing we did was fire the servants. Did you have a sense, sort of a perspective, that this too shall pass and that... No. Oh, forever. Forever. Forever. The blacklist we thought was forever at that point. Helen Levitt had her tax returns in those years in a little pile on the table. She took them out. So 1952 was the first full blacklist year and your income that year was? $3,956. Before landing on the blacklist, they had been making as much as $20,000 a year, very good money in the early 1950s. Now they had to support their two children on a fraction of that. Al Leavitt met a rich man who took pity on him

and gave him a job filing. He got $722 for the year. Al also used a front, which was common practice during the blacklist years. The front pretended to be the writer, got the credit, took half the money. The blacklisted writer did all the work. They were desperate. The next idea was correcting papers from a correspondence school. That job earned $256. After the kids were asleep, we would set up two typewriters in the living room

and correct papers from this correspondence school. Thirty-five cents for the first lesson and a dollar for the last lesson, which was a full short story. That was a terrible period in our lives. They were broke. Their marriage was falling apart. Then Al's parents came to visit for two weeks.

We tried to hide from them how terrible things were. When they left, they gave us $35 for their food, and I had to take it because if I hadn't, there wouldn't have been a... There wasn't a dime in the house because I had tried to, you know, make things seem better than they were. Helen Levitt remembered every detail of this time. Their daughter was four and developmentally disabled. She was still drinking from a bottle

and waking up two or three times a night. Helen and Al were exhausted and, most of all, alone. Their son Tom was expelled from his school. Everyone around them seemed to be turning their backs. From the moment they appeared before Congress, the Levitts became pariahs. Our best friend called that night, and the ones that we had seen every Saturday night previously in Brentwood, you know, went so regularly, said, don't come to the party on Friday night. That was a terrible moment. Did you lose a lot of friends?

Well, our friends. I know you're not a bitter or angry person, but weren't you outraged at all? I was lonely, lonely, lonely. It was so sad. We were so lonely. We were invited out maybe once or twice a year. It was blacklist night when we were invited. Another blacklisted couple would be there, period. We were never invited to integrated affairs.

We were never invited to integrated affairs. They were utterly excluded. When faced with someone whose actions and views we disapprove of, we have many options. Anger, concern, persuasion. We can chastise them or try to reform them. But what was done to the Levitts was something different. Exclusion. Exclusion is sanction without restraint. And while we're equipped to deal with anger and conflict, we're not equipped to be cast out of the community to which we belong. It's why solitary confinement is so excruciatingly painful, or why school suspensions have been shown again and again to be the most counterproductive of all educational interventions. And yet a third of all American children will be suspended over the

course of their schooling. We can't help ourselves. As I look back, that was the toughest thing. The loneliness was simply dreadful. My 18-year-old self would have welcomed Helen Levitt's punishment. But now, all I can think of is how carelessly and casually we impose this kind of brutal social sanction on others. Exclusion is not justice. It's cruelty. The Levitts clawed their way back into show business. Both of them wrote scripts under assumed names.

They called themselves the Augusts. But they never had the kind of career as screenwriters they once imagined for themselves, using the big screen to tackle serious issues. Al Levitt wrote for TV sitcoms. I'm sorry, Greg, but football is out. Like this Brady Bunch episode, where Greg, one of the many Brady kids, wants to play football, and his mom worries he'll get injured. Mom, a guy can get hurt right in his own home, like falling in a bathtub.

Oh, sure, but he doesn't have two other guys in the bathtub with him trying to knock him down. The Levitts did more than sitcoms. They became active in the Writers Guild, where Helen led a mentorship program for young black screenwriters. Because it's just grotesque that they simply are not hired to write on white shows. Almost all their employment is on shows about blacks. Does the Guild pay you to do this? No.

I wouldn't dream of taking money for teaching black writers. If you were teaching white writers, would you dream of taking money? I don't want to be a teacher for money. I mean, that's just not what I do. One cause led to another. A friend of the Levitts had a heart attack. The paramedics took 40 minutes to another. A friend of the Levitts had a heart attack. The paramedics took 40 minutes to arrive. After that, the Levitts decided that they needed to learn CPR. Because if ever we found ourselves in such a circumstance, we would want to be the people who knew. Helen was in her 60s by

this point. So it was very stressful, difficult for me because I never moved a muscle in my life. And I didn't even know then that I have had asthma all my life. And the breathing was very difficult. The compressions were... I really went into training because I was determined that I was going to pass. There were 18 of us who took the course and only 11 passed. And I squeaked through. Here in this country, thousands of TV and movie script writers walked off their jobs today.

In 1981, the Writers Guild called a strike. The Levitts, old leftists that they were, had to support it. The key stumbling block is the union's demand for a share of home video profits. I looked at each other and we've got all this CPR skill in the guild now. If anybody has a heart attack on the picket line, boy, we better really be prepared. The two of them consulted with doctors, trained people to teach CPR, organized the group of first aid workers into teams. And I remember realizing and saying at the time that the Writers Guild, pick a line 81,

was probably the safest place in the world to have a heart attack because at no point were you more than 60 seconds away from somebody who knew CPR. And so I'm kind of like a general, you know, deploying my forces at every picket. All my students from my Black Writers' Workshop wanted to work for me, so I've got a core of very loyal young people. I had planned to stay home and write a screenplay, but maybe this is better. Helen Levitt got there in the end,

not on the grand moral political stage that she had imagined for herself as a child. She wasn't very good at the grand and the political. She was better at smaller and more ordinary causes. Giving a voice to black screenwriters or, on the picket line, making sure no medical emergency was left unattended. Caring for the neediest cases. There's another Yiddish expression called guttunashuma, which kind of means good in themselves, you know, kind of just intrinsically good people who, as you say,

strive to know what the right thing to do is and then do it. And sometimes they have detours along the way. What my younger self did not understand is that there is no perfect and easy path to conscience. Sometimes it's circuitous and full of unfortunate detours. And maybe what we owe each other is faith and patience, because some of us will take longer than others to figure out where our conscience lies. Can you describe them? What do they look like? I recently called up Al and Helen's son, Tom, on Zoom. I wanted to ask him about his parents. My dad looked a little bit like me. He was slightly taller. My mother was short. She was about five foot. I have pictures of them I can show you. Would you like me to do that? Oh, yeah. Hang on just a moment. I'll have to go to the

other room. Tom Levitt came back with two black and white photographs in wooden frames. He held them up to the camera. Here's my dad. Oh, he does look like you. Uh-huh. Yeah, that's almost nice and canny. That's your father. Yeah. And here's my mom. Oh, I see. Helen Lovett, slender, short, wearing an elegant black dress,

smiling at the camera, eyes full of intelligence and compassion and life. Born in Brooklyn, 1916. Died in Los Angeles, 1993. Can I judge Helen Lovett? I know her now and what she went through. I can't. Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle, Lee Mangistu, and Jacob Smith, with Eloise Linton and Anu Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton, original scoring by Luis Guerra,

mastering by Flon Williams, Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Flan Williams. And engineering by Martine Gonzalez. Fact-checking by Amy Gaines. And special thanks to the Pushkin crew. Heather Fane, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Daniela Lacan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Jason Gambrell, and of course, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Thank you. that offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for $4.99 a month. Look for Pushnik exclusively on Apple Podcasts subscriptions.