It is a strange turn of life that the plays Lillian Hellman wrote in the 1930's and '40's center around the same moral issues as her recent factual memoir of the McCarthy period. The plays were for the most part written many years before McCarthy and the Red Scare were part of Hellman's life or of American life; yet the plays prefigure and parallel the memoir.

In her plays, and in Scoundrel Time, the memoir, Hellman formulates and explores the idea that regardless of political and social pressures, we must not eagerly, unthinkingly violate the unspoken rules of human decency….

In 1934, the twenty-nine year old Hellman dramatized precisely this moral issue in her first play, The Children's Hour. A young girl accuses her teachers of being lesbians in order to avoid punishment for having stolen a bracelet. Even more indecent than the girl's frightened act, however, is...