Throughout her career, Lillian Hellman was as much known for her political activism as for her artistic work. Indeed, her plays were often celebrated for their subtly expressed political perspectives, and her obituary in the New York Times had a headline that described her as "Playwright, Author, and Rebel." Her leftist political leanings and her refusal to bend to the status quo made her a formidable political subject and a unique artist.
Indeed, Hellman's chief loyalty was to her own perspective. In 1952, when she was called to testify before the House Committe of Un-American Activities for her involvement with the Communist Party, Hellman wrote a letter to the committee saying, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions," and refused to name the names of other artists who were involved in the party, calling the McCarthy witch hunts "inhuman and dishonorable." As a result of this decision, she was blacklisted, was at risk of imprisonment, and lost much of her income.
While Hellman was sure in her politics, she was hesitant to associate with particular movements. Though she had been involved in the Communist Party for a time, she considered herself a rebel before she considered herself a member of a particular party. "Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries," she once said. This led her to be criticized by both members of the establishment as well as Communists of her time, but she did not waver in her commitment to forging her own ideological path.
Throughout her career, Hellman fought for causes she believed in. She was a fierce critic of conservatism and capitalistic greed. However, towards the end of her life, she expressed a rather curious disillusionment with liberalism, writing in a memoir, " ''My belief in liberalism was mostly gone. I think I have substituted for it something private called, for want of something that should be more accurate, decency. . . . but it is painful for a nature that can no longer accept liberalism not to be able to accept radicalism.''
