July 15, 2021 • 34 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. In the archives of UCLA's Library, there is a
remarkable seven hour interview conducted in nineteen eighty eight with
a woman named Helen Slote Leavitt, along with a separate
interview with Helen's husband, Al love It, each conversation spanning
(00:40):
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 went on
where you were born, your parents or family, etc. Fine,
my roots are solidly middle class Jewish Brooklyn, out of Poland.
(01:09):
The interviews were conducted by the historian Larry Seplaire over
the course of many months. He remembers the Levits 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, you know, they were justifiably, I think,
(01:30):
wary of people coming to ask them questions, the answers
to which they refused to give and 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 relegitimate,
we could talk on the phone. They would answer them,
which they did, and they came to trust me. You
know that I was wasn't someone who was, you know,
(01:52):
going to betray them in any way. The Levits had
their reasons for not trusting outsiders, as you will hear
they are. You know, you know that you just termed starker.
It means strong, you know, kind of tough, you don't
let things bowl you over. They were starkers, Helen, probably
(02:12):
even a bit more than all. I think Larry Sepplair'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
(02:33):
Lovett 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
(02:59):
listen to her story in her words and here 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.
(03:30):
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 a parochial high
school and then to med school and became a doctor,
as did my father. Helen was a precocious child, alert, intelligent.
(03:54):
She remembers as a kid reading a charity appeal in
the New York Times New York's hundred Neediest Cases they
gave in each day or each week, actual cases of poor,
suffer ring people. And I never missed reading every one
of those cases, and I agonized as I read them.
(04:19):
Once she went to a birthday party for a wealthy
friend of hers, held at the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum.
So here are we little rich kids went to this terrible, dreary,
Dickens like place, and the show was put on. All
THETT orphans were brought in they could watch the show,
and then all the little orphans were led away down
(04:40):
these dark wails. There was a horror to it that
never left me. She was a child of the nineteen thirties,
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 just devastated. His medical practice suffered,
(05:04):
patients stopped paying, his investments were wiped out, kill the
prohibition was ooh, 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 Silva would
fight the revolution in our living room. They would have
(05:28):
these vile and 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 benefits, because they
(05:50):
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 Inness came to camp. She was beautiful,
and she got these incredible love letters a radical boyfriend
(06:11):
in New York that she would let me read. They
were just so romantic and political. She took me to
meet him on a knight that he was just making
his speech from a soapbox in Manhattan. That was where
I was exposed to the Young Communists, the Young Communist League,
(06:32):
the YCL, the youth branch of the American Communist Party.
Nobody recruited Helen. She just walked up and volunteered. In
the thirties, 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. They were
(06:53):
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 on the unfairness of life, unbearable and assume that God,
(07:17):
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. But
the first time as I stepped on Soviet soil, I
felt myself a full human being, a full human bee.
(07:40):
The Black American actor and singer Paul Robson, 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 somethings really out there fighting the good
fight with the Uncommunists. Helen was now attending Brooklyn College,
(08:03):
volunteering in a rat infested building for the YCL, making
sandwiches that the branch it sell to pay the rent.
That I would get out of the kitchen. The rats
would take over and I could see them. Helen met
l 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,
(08:24):
had two kids, lived up in the Hollywood Hills. I'll
wrote for the movies and television social parables like the
nineteen forty eight Technicolor film The Boy with the Green Hair.
Everywhere you go people will say, they will say, there
is the boy with a green hair, and then people
will ask why does he have green hair? So you
(08:50):
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 nonprofit theater in Hollywood, volunteered rand
things my whole I've been that way. It's always been
(09:11):
somebody asked me to do something. You know, I did it,
And I always did much more than as asking me.
That was the story of my life. While I was
listening to Helen Lovett's story of how she came to
join the Communist Party, I couldn't help but think of
myself at eighteen, the age that she was when she
(09:32):
entered the movement. I just started college. It was the
early eighties. 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
(09:53):
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 Apparty wasn't involved,
but from the background they approved this summer after my
(10:15):
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 interment camp. I was horrified.
(10:40):
Helen Leavitt got caught up in a communist movement at
the same age I got caught up in the anti
communist movement, and for the same reason, because eighteen 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
(11:03):
most beautiful world leading the year young radicals. I mean
they were the most Muslin figures on campus. They were
the most brilliant professors, no question about it. The only
courses that I remember were to what by Marxist professors.
I asked you at the beginning to judge her, So next,
(11:24):
let's judge her. Do you think where will will be?
(11:54):
Where she let? The leader of the Soviet Union from
the late nineteen twenties to nineteen fifty three was Joseph Stalin.
He embarked on an aggressive course of national zation. He
collectivized agriculture. Millions of peasants were forced off their land.
(12:15):
In the early thirties, 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 eighteen million people were
held at one time or another. In the years that
the Young Communist League was serving sandwiches in New York City,
(12:38):
Stalin launched something called the Great Purge. Seven hundred thousand
people were murdered in August of nineteen thirty nine, Stalins
signed a non aggression pact with Hitler. We have reached
the serious events of the week Van Ribbon trump leaving
Berlin for Moscow rushers in a new incomprehensible chapter in
German diplomacy, what has happened to the principles of mine camp? Equally,
(13:00):
what can Russia have in common with Germany? The hero
of the idealists back in Brooklyn had made a deal
with a monster. The historian Larry Seplayer 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.
(13:24):
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
(13:45):
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 filters from New York.
How closely was the National Party under the control law
or in communication with the Silviet Union in those years,
(14:08):
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
(14:29):
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 Sepplair 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
(14:54):
against the Soviet Union was that the establishment here had
so much at stake to undermine any success in the
Soviet Union. But you couldn't believe anything. We justified everything.
The Nazi Soviet Pact did not bother us. We really
(15:17):
trusted Stalin, but he knew what he was doing. Stalin
died in nineteen fifty three. His successor, Nikita Krushchev, famously
denounced him in nineteen fifty six. After that, it was
impossible to maintain the fiction that Stalin was anything except
one of the twentieth century's bloodiest dictators. Only then did
(15:40):
the Communist Party in Hollywood fade away? Why did you
leave the Communist Party? It just disappeared after the krushe Whatever,
the Kushef report, the secret so called secret speech, whatever
I mean, the party just disappeared in Hollywood. We didn't
leave form williams as saying, you know, we're leaving because
(16:01):
there was no party. It just overnight it disappeared. Did
you feel embarrassed having supported the Serviet scene? Keep in
mind Larry Seplair and Helen Levitt are talking in nineteen
eighty eight, during the final chaotic years of the USSR,
(16:21):
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 nineteen forty five, where the Allies met
to plan the end of the War, Churchill, FDR, and
Stalin sitting in a row. As a teenager in my
(16:42):
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,
(17:04):
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 rhapsodized about the
glories of her communist past. She looked at those three men,
(17:26):
and she cast her lot with the 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 Seplair, Helen Levitt never once comes to terms
with the consequences of her beliefs. No remorse, no regrets,
(17:50):
nothing about her heavy days at Brooklyn College except nostalgia.
Young people who were on the campus who did not
get involved, either the young communists or the young Socialists,
weren't enough because it was heavy stuff. I mean Angles
(18:12):
and even Lenin. I mean Marx is impossible to read,
but Angles was comprehensible but very well. It was a
challenge to read. But I was very impressed with Angles
and Lenin. They both were extraordinary minds, and Dick incredible writers.
A young people who didn't get invoved either didn't have
the intellectual capacity or the courage. As I listened to
(18:40):
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 nineteen forty seven, 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
(19:04):
that would instantly become famous, and I am Jerdan had
descended across the continent behind that line by all the
capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern New York.
The hunt for communists within the United States became an obsession,
(19:25):
starting with Hollywood. This committee, under its mandate from the
House of Representatives, has the responsibility of exposing and spotlightings
subversive elements wherever they may exist. In nineteen forty seven,
the House Unamerican Activities Committee held hearings. It is only
to be expected that communists would strive desperately to gain
(19:48):
entry to the motion picture industry, simply because the industry
offers such a tremendous weapon or 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 eyes were blacklisted.
(20:11):
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 say,
it was a kind of jolly life. It was nineteen
fifty one. Helen had just had a baby, their second,
(20:33):
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. The subpoena was kind of
a cold chill, because I knew it was all over. Now.
This was a subpoena to appear publicly or was it
super publicly? In Washington, both the Levitts were called to testify.
(20:57):
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 Supplair. Every man has the right to be unpopular,
or even to be wrong, without suffering the consequence of
official center, blacklist, or jail. Most peace loving people will
(21:20):
find themselves unpopular with this committee. I do not therefore
intend to enter my beliefs on 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 a committee of Congress. And yet I
(21:51):
was very calm, very composed, 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.
(22:14):
I don't like, do we look so young, which everybody
you know, it's young before they get old. But I'm laughing.
You know, we're in such good spirits. I mean, there's
no sense of people who were been through winter or deal,
but but people who have done something difficult and you
(22:35):
know than 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
that's something you've not been thinking about too much, Well,
the first thing we did was far the servants. Did
you have a sense um sort of a perspective that
(22:57):
this trucial pass and oh forever forever the blacklist we
thought it was forever at that point. Hell never had
her tax returns those years, and a little pile on
the table stock them out. So nineteen fifty two is
the first full blacklist year and your income that year
(23:17):
three thousand, nine hundred and fifty six dollars. Before landing
on the blacklist, they had been making as much as
twenty thousand dollars a year, very good money in the
early nineteen fifties. Now they had to support their two
children on a fraction of that. A'l levitt met a
rich man who took pity on him and gave him
a job filing. He got seven hundred and twenty two
(23:38):
dollars 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 correspondent school.
That job earned two hundred and fifty six dollars. After
(24:01):
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
dolf for the last lesson, which was a full shoot story.
That was a terrible period. Now alive, they were broke,
Their marriage was falling apart. Then Al's parents came to
(24:24):
visit for two weeks, and we try to hide from
them how terrible things were. They left. They gave us
thirty five dollars for their food, and I had to
take it because if I hadn't, they wouldn't have been up.
There wasn't a dime in the house, because I had
tried to make things seemed better than they were. Helen
(24:44):
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
(25:07):
they appeared before Congress. The it's became parias. Our best
friend called that night and the ones that we had
seen every Saturday night previously in Brantwood, we went so
regularly and said don't come to the party on Friday night.
That was a terrible moment. Did you lose a lot
(25:29):
of friends? Well, our friends. I know you're not a bitter,
angry person, but weren't you I was originally lonely, lonely.
He was so sad, you were so lonely. We would
have invited out maybe once or twice a year. It
was blacklist night. When we were invited, another blacklisted couple
(25:50):
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
(26:13):
them or try to reform them. But what was done
to the Levitt's was something different. Exclusion. Exclusion is sanctioned
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
(26:37):
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 That was the toughest thing. The loneliness was simply dreadful.
(27:00):
My eighteen year old self would have welcomed Helen Levitt's punishment,
but now all I can think of is how carelessly
and casually impose this kind of brutal social sanction on others.
Exclusion is not justice, It's cruelty. The Levitts clawed their
(27:34):
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 a career as screenwriters they
once imagined for themselves. Using the big screen to tackle
serious issues. L Levitt wrote for TV sitcoms I'm sorry, Greg,
but football is out. Like this Brady Bunch episode where Greg,
(27:58):
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 a bathtub with him trying to knock
them down. The levitz did more than sitcoms. They became
active in the Writers Guild, where Helen led a mentorship
(28:19):
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. Just
to go pay you to do this, now, I wouldn't
dream of taking money for teaching black riders. If you're
(28:41):
teaching white writers, would you dream of taking I don't
want to be 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 Levitz
had a heart attack. The paramedics took forty minutes to arrive.
After that, the Levitz decided that they needed to learn
CPR because whatever we found myself such a circumstance, we
(29:04):
would want to be the people who knew. Helen was
in her sixties by this point, so it was very
stress 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. I really went into training
(29:26):
because I was determined that I was going to pass.
There were eighteen of us who took the course, and
on the eleven pass, and I squeaked through. Here in
this country, thousands of TV and movie script writers walked
off their jobs today. In nineteen eighty one, the writer's
Guild called a strike. The Levitt's old leftists that they
(29:47):
were had to support it. The other two strikes, the
key stumbling block as 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
(30:09):
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 ride is skilled.
Pick a Line eighty one was probably the safest place
in the world to have heart attack, because at no
point we more than sixty seconds away from somebody who
moved CPR. And so I'm kind of like a general,
(30:31):
you know, deploying my forces at every picket or my
students from my black riot's workshop wanted to work for me,
So I've got a core, 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,
(30:52):
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 medical emergency was
left unattended, caring for the neediest cases. There's another Year's
(31:18):
expression called good to a Schuma, which kind of means
good in themselves, you know, kind of just intrinsically good
people who, as you say, to strive to do, 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
(31:42):
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 Alan Helen's son, Tom
on Zoom. I wanted to ask him about his parents.
(32:05):
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 him I can show you. Would
you like me to do that? Oh yeah, hang on
just a moment. I'll 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
(32:28):
my dad. Oh he does look like you. Huh. Yeah,
it's almost night, so, Kenny, 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
(32:50):
full of intelligence and compassion and life. Born in Brooklyn
nineteen sixteen, Dodge in Los Angeles, nineteen ninety three. Can
I judge Helen love It? I know her now and
what she went through? I can't. Revisionist History is produced
(33:22):
by Mail LaBelle, Lee Mingistu and Jacob Smith, with Eloise
Linton and on a Name. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flawan Williams, and
engineering by Martin Gonzalez. Fact checking by Amy Gaines and
special thanks to the Pushkin crew. Had a fine Carli Megliori,
(33:44):
Maya Kanig, Daniello Lacan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano,
Jason Gambrel and of course Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
(34:21):
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Pushkin. In the archives of UCLA's Library, there is a
remarkable seven hour interview conducted in nineteen eighty eight with
a woman named Helen Slote Leavitt, along with a separate
interview with Helen's husband, Al love It, each conversation spanning
(00:40):
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 went on
where you were born, your parents or family, etc. Fine,
my roots are solidly middle class Jewish Brooklyn, out of Poland.
(01:09):
The interviews were conducted by the historian Larry Seplaire over
the course of many months. He remembers the Levits 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, you know, they were justifiably, I think,
(01:30):
wary of people coming to ask them questions, the answers
to which they refused to give and 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 relegitimate,
we could talk on the phone. They would answer them,
which they did, and they came to trust me. You
know that I was wasn't someone who was, you know,
(01:52):
going to betray them in any way. The Levits had
their reasons for not trusting outsiders, as you will hear
they are. You know, you know that you just termed starker.
It means strong, you know, kind of tough, you don't
let things bowl you over. They were starkers, Helen, probably
(02:12):
even a bit more than all. I think Larry Sepplair'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
(02:33):
Lovett 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
(02:59):
listen to her story in her words and here 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.
(03:30):
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 a parochial high
school and then to med school and became a doctor,
as did my father. Helen was a precocious child, alert, intelligent.
(03:54):
She remembers as a kid reading a charity appeal in
the New York Times New York's hundred Neediest Cases they
gave in each day or each week, actual cases of poor,
suffer ring people. And I never missed reading every one
of those cases, and I agonized as I read them.
(04:19):
Once she went to a birthday party for a wealthy
friend of hers, held at the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum.
So here are we little rich kids went to this terrible, dreary,
Dickens like place, and the show was put on. All
THETT orphans were brought in they could watch the show,
and then all the little orphans were led away down
(04:40):
these dark wails. There was a horror to it that
never left me. She was a child of the nineteen thirties,
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 just devastated. His medical practice suffered,
(05:04):
patients stopped paying, his investments were wiped out, kill the
prohibition was ooh, 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 Silva would
fight the revolution in our living room. They would have
(05:28):
these vile and 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 benefits, because they
(05:50):
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 Inness came to camp. She was beautiful,
and she got these incredible love letters a radical boyfriend
(06:11):
in New York that she would let me read. They
were just so romantic and political. She took me to
meet him on a knight that he was just making
his speech from a soapbox in Manhattan. That was where
I was exposed to the Young Communists, the Young Communist League,
(06:32):
the YCL, the youth branch of the American Communist Party.
Nobody recruited Helen. She just walked up and volunteered. In
the thirties, 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. They were
(06:53):
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 on the unfairness of life, unbearable and assume that God,
(07:17):
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. But
the first time as I stepped on Soviet soil, I
felt myself a full human being, a full human bee.
(07:40):
The Black American actor and singer Paul Robson, 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 somethings really out there fighting the good
fight with the Uncommunists. Helen was now attending Brooklyn College,
(08:03):
volunteering in a rat infested building for the YCL, making
sandwiches that the branch it sell to pay the rent.
That I would get out of the kitchen. The rats
would take over and I could see them. Helen met
l 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,
(08:24):
had two kids, lived up in the Hollywood Hills. I'll
wrote for the movies and television social parables like the
nineteen forty eight Technicolor film The Boy with the Green Hair.
Everywhere you go people will say, they will say, there
is the boy with a green hair, and then people
will ask why does he have green hair? So you
(08:50):
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 nonprofit theater in Hollywood, volunteered rand
things my whole I've been that way. It's always been
(09:11):
somebody asked me to do something. You know, I did it,
And I always did much more than as asking me.
That was the story of my life. While I was
listening to Helen Lovett's story of how she came to
join the Communist Party, I couldn't help but think of
myself at eighteen, the age that she was when she
(09:32):
entered the movement. I just started college. It was the
early eighties. 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
(09:53):
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 Apparty wasn't involved,
but from the background they approved this summer after my
(10:15):
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 interment camp. I was horrified.
(10:40):
Helen Leavitt got caught up in a communist movement at
the same age I got caught up in the anti
communist movement, and for the same reason, because eighteen 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
(11:03):
most beautiful world leading the year young radicals. I mean
they were the most Muslin figures on campus. They were
the most brilliant professors, no question about it. The only
courses that I remember were to what by Marxist professors.
I asked you at the beginning to judge her, So next,
(11:24):
let's judge her. Do you think where will will be?
(11:54):
Where she let? The leader of the Soviet Union from
the late nineteen twenties to nineteen fifty three was Joseph Stalin.
He embarked on an aggressive course of national zation. He
collectivized agriculture. Millions of peasants were forced off their land.
(12:15):
In the early thirties, 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 eighteen million people were
held at one time or another. In the years that
the Young Communist League was serving sandwiches in New York City,
(12:38):
Stalin launched something called the Great Purge. Seven hundred thousand
people were murdered in August of nineteen thirty nine, Stalins
signed a non aggression pact with Hitler. We have reached
the serious events of the week Van Ribbon trump leaving
Berlin for Moscow rushers in a new incomprehensible chapter in
German diplomacy, what has happened to the principles of mine camp? Equally,
(13:00):
what can Russia have in common with Germany? The hero
of the idealists back in Brooklyn had made a deal
with a monster. The historian Larry Seplayer 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.
(13:24):
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
(13:45):
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 filters from New York.
How closely was the National Party under the control law
or in communication with the Silviet Union in those years,
(14:08):
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
(14:29):
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 Sepplair 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
(14:54):
against the Soviet Union was that the establishment here had
so much at stake to undermine any success in the
Soviet Union. But you couldn't believe anything. We justified everything.
The Nazi Soviet Pact did not bother us. We really
(15:17):
trusted Stalin, but he knew what he was doing. Stalin
died in nineteen fifty three. His successor, Nikita Krushchev, famously
denounced him in nineteen fifty six. After that, it was
impossible to maintain the fiction that Stalin was anything except
one of the twentieth century's bloodiest dictators. Only then did
(15:40):
the Communist Party in Hollywood fade away? Why did you
leave the Communist Party? It just disappeared after the krushe Whatever,
the Kushef report, the secret so called secret speech, whatever
I mean, the party just disappeared in Hollywood. We didn't
leave form williams as saying, you know, we're leaving because
(16:01):
there was no party. It just overnight it disappeared. Did
you feel embarrassed having supported the Serviet scene? Keep in
mind Larry Seplair and Helen Levitt are talking in nineteen
eighty eight, during the final chaotic years of the USSR,
(16:21):
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 nineteen forty five, where the Allies met
to plan the end of the War, Churchill, FDR, and
Stalin sitting in a row. As a teenager in my
(16:42):
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,
(17:04):
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 rhapsodized about the
glories of her communist past. She looked at those three men,
(17:26):
and she cast her lot with the 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 Seplair, Helen Levitt never once comes to terms
with the consequences of her beliefs. No remorse, no regrets,
(17:50):
nothing about her heavy days at Brooklyn College except nostalgia.
Young people who were on the campus who did not
get involved, either the young communists or the young Socialists,
weren't enough because it was heavy stuff. I mean Angles
(18:12):
and even Lenin. I mean Marx is impossible to read,
but Angles was comprehensible but very well. It was a
challenge to read. But I was very impressed with Angles
and Lenin. They both were extraordinary minds, and Dick incredible writers.
A young people who didn't get invoved either didn't have
the intellectual capacity or the courage. As I listened to
(18:40):
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 nineteen forty seven, 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
(19:04):
that would instantly become famous, and I am Jerdan had
descended across the continent behind that line by all the
capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern New York.
The hunt for communists within the United States became an obsession,
(19:25):
starting with Hollywood. This committee, under its mandate from the
House of Representatives, has the responsibility of exposing and spotlightings
subversive elements wherever they may exist. In nineteen forty seven,
the House Unamerican Activities Committee held hearings. It is only
to be expected that communists would strive desperately to gain
(19:48):
entry to the motion picture industry, simply because the industry
offers such a tremendous weapon or 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 eyes were blacklisted.
(20:11):
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 say,
it was a kind of jolly life. It was nineteen
fifty one. Helen had just had a baby, their second,
(20:33):
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. The subpoena was kind of
a cold chill, because I knew it was all over. Now.
This was a subpoena to appear publicly or was it
super publicly? In Washington, both the Levitts were called to testify.
(20:57):
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 Supplair. Every man has the right to be unpopular,
or even to be wrong, without suffering the consequence of
official center, blacklist, or jail. Most peace loving people will
(21:20):
find themselves unpopular with this committee. I do not therefore
intend to enter my beliefs on 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 a committee of Congress. And yet I
(21:51):
was very calm, very composed, 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.
(22:14):
I don't like, do we look so young, which everybody
you know, it's young before they get old. But I'm laughing.
You know, we're in such good spirits. I mean, there's
no sense of people who were been through winter or deal,
but but people who have done something difficult and you
(22:35):
know than 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
that's something you've not been thinking about too much, Well,
the first thing we did was far the servants. Did
you have a sense um sort of a perspective that
(22:57):
this trucial pass and oh forever forever the blacklist we
thought it was forever at that point. Hell never had
her tax returns those years, and a little pile on
the table stock them out. So nineteen fifty two is
the first full blacklist year and your income that year
(23:17):
three thousand, nine hundred and fifty six dollars. Before landing
on the blacklist, they had been making as much as
twenty thousand dollars a year, very good money in the
early nineteen fifties. Now they had to support their two
children on a fraction of that. A'l levitt met a
rich man who took pity on him and gave him
a job filing. He got seven hundred and twenty two
(23:38):
dollars 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 correspondent school.
That job earned two hundred and fifty six dollars. After
(24:01):
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
dolf for the last lesson, which was a full shoot story.
That was a terrible period. Now alive, they were broke,
Their marriage was falling apart. Then Al's parents came to
(24:24):
visit for two weeks, and we try to hide from
them how terrible things were. They left. They gave us
thirty five dollars for their food, and I had to
take it because if I hadn't, they wouldn't have been up.
There wasn't a dime in the house, because I had
tried to make things seemed better than they were. Helen
(24:44):
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
(25:07):
they appeared before Congress. The it's became parias. Our best
friend called that night and the ones that we had
seen every Saturday night previously in Brantwood, we went so
regularly and said don't come to the party on Friday night.
That was a terrible moment. Did you lose a lot
(25:29):
of friends? Well, our friends. I know you're not a bitter,
angry person, but weren't you I was originally lonely, lonely.
He was so sad, you were so lonely. We would
have invited out maybe once or twice a year. It
was blacklist night. When we were invited, another blacklisted couple
(25:50):
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
(26:13):
them or try to reform them. But what was done
to the Levitt's was something different. Exclusion. Exclusion is sanctioned
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
(26:37):
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 That was the toughest thing. The loneliness was simply dreadful.
(27:00):
My eighteen year old self would have welcomed Helen Levitt's punishment,
but now all I can think of is how carelessly
and casually impose this kind of brutal social sanction on others.
Exclusion is not justice, It's cruelty. The Levitts clawed their
(27:34):
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 a career as screenwriters they
once imagined for themselves. Using the big screen to tackle
serious issues. L Levitt wrote for TV sitcoms I'm sorry, Greg,
but football is out. Like this Brady Bunch episode where Greg,
(27:58):
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 a bathtub with him trying to knock
them down. The levitz did more than sitcoms. They became
active in the Writers Guild, where Helen led a mentorship
(28:19):
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. Just
to go pay you to do this, now, I wouldn't
dream of taking money for teaching black riders. If you're
(28:41):
teaching white writers, would you dream of taking I don't
want to be 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 Levitz
had a heart attack. The paramedics took forty minutes to arrive.
After that, the Levitz decided that they needed to learn
CPR because whatever we found myself such a circumstance, we
(29:04):
would want to be the people who knew. Helen was
in her sixties by this point, so it was very
stress 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. I really went into training
(29:26):
because I was determined that I was going to pass.
There were eighteen of us who took the course, and
on the eleven pass, and I squeaked through. Here in
this country, thousands of TV and movie script writers walked
off their jobs today. In nineteen eighty one, the writer's
Guild called a strike. The Levitt's old leftists that they
(29:47):
were had to support it. The other two strikes, the
key stumbling block as 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
(30:09):
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 ride is skilled.
Pick a Line eighty one was probably the safest place
in the world to have heart attack, because at no
point we more than sixty seconds away from somebody who
moved CPR. And so I'm kind of like a general,
(30:31):
you know, deploying my forces at every picket or my
students from my black riot's workshop wanted to work for me,
So I've got a core, 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,
(30:52):
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 medical emergency was
left unattended, caring for the neediest cases. There's another Year's
(31:18):
expression called good to a Schuma, which kind of means
good in themselves, you know, kind of just intrinsically good
people who, as you say, to strive to do, 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
(31:42):
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 Alan Helen's son, Tom
on Zoom. I wanted to ask him about his parents.
(32:05):
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 him I can show you. Would
you like me to do that? Oh yeah, hang on
just a moment. I'll 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
(32:28):
my dad. Oh he does look like you. Huh. Yeah,
it's almost night, so, Kenny, 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
(32:50):
full of intelligence and compassion and life. Born in Brooklyn
nineteen sixteen, Dodge in Los Angeles, nineteen ninety three. Can
I judge Helen love It? I know her now and
what she went through? I can't. Revisionist History is produced
(33:22):
by Mail LaBelle, Lee Mingistu and Jacob Smith, with Eloise
Linton and on a Name. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flawan Williams, and
engineering by Martin Gonzalez. Fact checking by Amy Gaines and
special thanks to the Pushkin crew. Had a fine Carli Megliori,
(33:44):
Maya Kanig, Daniello Lacan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano,
Jason Gambrel and of course Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
(34:21):
If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries,
consider becoming a Pushnik. Pushnik is a podcast subscription that
offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for four dollars and
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Malcolm Gladwell
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