The Judgment of Helen Levitt

SPEAKER_17: Pushkin. SPEAKER_16: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about SPEAKER_19: humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on this show, you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back, and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Malcolm Gladwell here. SPEAKER_17: Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got you back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. SPEAKER_17: In the archives of UCLA's library, there is a remarkable seven-hour interview conducted in 1988 with a woman named Helen Sloat-Levitt. 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. SPEAKER_08: What I'd like you to start with is your biographical background. When and where you were born, your parents, your family, etc. SPEAKER_05: Fine. My roots are solidly middle-class, Jewish, Brooklyn, out of Poland. SPEAKER_17: The interviews were conducted by the historian Larry Ciplair over the course of many months. He remembers the Levitts well, particularly Helen, petite, intense, alive, but in some sense wounded. SPEAKER_07: 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 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. SPEAKER_17: The Levitts had their reasons for not trusting outsiders, as you will hear. SPEAKER_07: They are, you know, the other 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. SPEAKER_17: Larry Ciplair'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. SPEAKER_05: My paternal grandfather went to parochial high school and then to med school and became a doctor, as did my father. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_05: They gave in each day of 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. SPEAKER_17: Once she went to a birthday party for a wealthy friend of hers, held at the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum. SPEAKER_05: 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. SPEAKER_17: She was a child of the 1930s, when the grand experiment that was America suddenly turned bleak. SPEAKER_08: Did the Depression have much of an impact on your family? Oh yeah, my father was just devastated. SPEAKER_17: His medical practice suffered. Patients stopped paying. His investments were wiped out. SPEAKER_05: Until the prohibition was over, I know he was selling liquor prescriptions to the druggists across the street. SPEAKER_08: Was your father a political person at all? SPEAKER_05: 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. 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, 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. That was me. SPEAKER_17: Helen listened. As a teenager, she was a junior counselor at her summer camp. SPEAKER_05: 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. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_05: 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. SPEAKER_00: For the first time as I stepped on Soviet soil, I felt myself a full human being, a full human being. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_05: The people who were doing things, really out there fighting the good fight with the young communists. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_05: After I would get out of the kitchen, the rats would take over and I could see them. SPEAKER_17: Helen met Al Levitt 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. Paul wrote for the movies and television, social parables like the 1948 Technicolor film, The Boy with the Green Hair. SPEAKER_04: 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. My green hair is to remind you that war is very bad for children. You must tell all the people. SPEAKER_17: Helen Help found a nonprofit theater in Hollywood, volunteered, ran things. SPEAKER_05: 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. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_09: 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. SPEAKER_17: It was holding much of Eastern Europe hostage. Poland, now under martial law, is sealed off from the outside world. SPEAKER_01: Britain, America, and other Western nations are watching closely. The Soviet Union apparently wasn't involved, but from the background they approved. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_05: 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. SPEAKER_17: I asked you at the beginning to judge her. So next, let's judge her. SPEAKER_16: The one thing we can never get more of is time. Or can we? This is Watson X Orchestrate. AI designed to multiply productivity by automating tasks. When you Watson X your business, you can build digital skills to help human resources spend less time generating offer letters, writing job recs, and managing schedules, and spend more time on humans. Let's create more time for your business with Watson X Orchestrate. Learn more at ibm.com slash orchestrate. IBM, let's create. SPEAKER_17: Do you know that right now, as you listen to this, there's an astronaut named Frank Rubio in some tiny spacecraft way, way up there in space. He left for the International Space Station in September of last year, thought he was going for six months. And then once he was up there, NASA called him up and said, actually, Frank, we want you out there for a year, 371 days to be exact. My question is, if you're NASA, and you pull that bait and switch once, how do you recruit the next crop of astronauts? I mean, you say to your recruits, I need you to leave your family and friends and everything you know and love dearly. Eat food out of a tube, but only for six months. And they're like, wait, look at Frank. That's what you told him. And he's still up there. Recruiting for astronauts, if you're NASA, is hard. If only there was some sophisticated job recruiting site capable of finding those few Americans who are perfectly happy to float around in space for an undetermined length of time. Sadly, for NASA, there's no such tool. But for the rest of us, oh yes, there is. ZipRecruiter. New hires cost on average $4,700 for all of us non-spaceflight companies. And with that kind of money at stake, you have to get it right. So what's the most effective way to find the right people for your roles? ZipRecruiter. See for yourself. Right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Gladwell and experience the value ZipRecruiter brings to hiring. Once you post your job, ZipRecruiter's smart technology works quickly to identify people whose skills and experience line up with exactly what you want. It's simple. ZipRecruiter helps you get hiring right. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free before you commit. ZipRecruiter.com slash Gladwell. Again that's ZipRecruiter.com slash G-L-A-D-W-E-L-L. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Somewhere out there, believe it or not, there's someone who wants Frank Rubio's job. SPEAKER_19: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new podcast about the viruses that shape our lives. It's a show about how viruses attack us and how we fight back. I'm Jacob Goldstein and on Incubation, we'll hear how scientists have pioneered new techniques in the fight against viruses. SPEAKER_13: There was just something about the way the virus was shaped. SPEAKER_14: It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine. Until now. SPEAKER_19: Until now. We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth. SPEAKER_15: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists. SPEAKER_19: Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_11: The leader of the Soviet Union from the late 1920s to 1953 was Joseph Stalin. SPEAKER_17: 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. Seven hundred thousand people were murdered. In August of 1939, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. SPEAKER_12: We have reached the serious events of the week. John 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 peace... SPEAKER_17: The hero of the idealists back in Brooklyn had made a deal with a monster. The historian Larry Suppler interviewed many American communists from those years, and he told me their unwavering support for Stalin always bothered him. SPEAKER_07: 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. SPEAKER_17: When the Levites 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, SPEAKER_07: usually, filters from New York. How closely was the national party under the control of or in communication with the Soviet SPEAKER_17: Union in those years? SPEAKER_07: 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. SPEAKER_17: 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 Seppler asked Helen Levitt if she would have considered herself a Stalinist through this whole era. She said, of course. SPEAKER_05: 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. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_08: Why did you leave the Communist Party? I guess that should be... Oh, it just disappeared after the Khrushchev letter. SPEAKER_05: Whatever it is. The Khrushchev Report. SPEAKER_08: The so-called secret speech. Whatever. Yeah. SPEAKER_05: I mean, the party just disappeared in Hollywood. We didn't leave formally and say, you know, we're leaving because there was no party. It just, overnight it disappeared. Did you feel embarrassed? SPEAKER_08: No. Having supported the Soviet Union and now to have seen it? SPEAKER_05: No. SPEAKER_17: Keep in mind, Larry Suppler 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. SPEAKER_17: 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 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 Zeppler, 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. SPEAKER_05: 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 is 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. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_11: An iron curtain had descended across the continent. The hunt for communists within the United States became an obsession, starting with SPEAKER_17: Hollywood. SPEAKER_10: SPEAKER_17: In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_05: Things were really going along very nicely. I think it was a kind of jolly life. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_05: And then when they came to the door, the subpoena was kind of a cold chill because I knew it was all over. SPEAKER_08: Now was this a subpoena to appear publicly or was it a subpoena? A subpoena to appear publicly in Washington. SPEAKER_17: 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 Ciplier. SPEAKER_18: It's extraordinary. It's like the Committee of Congress and yet I was very calm, very composed. SPEAKER_05: 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 everybody is young before they get old, but I'm laughing. 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, then they did it. SPEAKER_08: Had you decided what you were going to do with the rest of your life now that Al's professional career was at an end? Or had that something you'd not been thinking about too much? SPEAKER_05: Well, the first thing we did was fire the servants. SPEAKER_08: Did you have a sense, sort of a perspective that this too shall pass and that you could not do it? No. Oh, forever. SPEAKER_05: Forever. Forever. The blacklist we thought was forever at that point. SPEAKER_17: Helen Levitt had her tax returns in those years in a little pile on the table. She took them out. SPEAKER_08: So 1952 was the first full blacklist year and your income that year was? SPEAKER_05: $3,956. SPEAKER_17: 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 Levitt 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 correspondent school. That job earned $256. SPEAKER_05: After the kids were asleep, we would set up two typewriters in the living room and correct papers from this correspondent school. 35 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. SPEAKER_17: They were broke. Their marriage was falling apart. Then Al's parents came to visit for two weeks. SPEAKER_05: 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, they wouldn't have been up. There wasn't a dime in the house because I had tried to, you know, make things seem better than they were. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_05: Our best friend called that night and the ones that we had seen every Saturday night previously in Grantwood, you know, went so regularly. SPEAKER_05: Said don't come to the party on Friday night. That was a terrible moment. SPEAKER_08: Did you lose a lot of friends? All our friends. SPEAKER_08: I know you're not a bitter, angry person, but weren't you just outrage? SPEAKER_05: I was lonely, lonely, lonely. We were 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. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_05: As I look back, that was the toughest thing. The loneliness was simply dreadful. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_16: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new podcast about SPEAKER_19: the viruses that shape our lives. It's a show about how viruses attack us and how we fight back. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on Incubation, we'll hear how scientists have pioneered new techniques in the fight against viruses. SPEAKER_13: There was just something about the way the virus was shaped. It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine. SPEAKER_14: Until now. Until now! SPEAKER_19: We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth. SPEAKER_15: And eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists. SPEAKER_19: Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_17: Let's talk about Pandora's box. According to Greek mythology, Pandora was given a box from the gods that contained special gifts, but they forbade her from opening it. In the end, Pandora's curiosity got the best of her. She opened the box, thereby unleashing curses upon mankind. Cut to 3,000 years later, and we could very well be talking about the story of those mattresses in a box. You know what I'm talking about. They promised something special inside, but in the end, many would say, it's a curse. After all, they're just glorified slabs of foam that are crushed, crammed into a box, and then left on your doorstep. If you want a mattress that feels like a true gift from the gods, consider a Saatva luxury mattress. Saatvas don't come in a box. That kind of quality simply can't be crammed into a cardboard container. What's more, Saatva will set up your new mattress for you, and take your old one at no extra charge. If history has taught us anything, it's do not open Pandora's box. And right now, you'll save $200 on $1,000 or more at saatva.com slash Gladwell. That's S-A-A-T-V-A dot com slash Gladwell. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_04: 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. SPEAKER_17: The Levitts did more than sitcoms. They became active in the Writers Guild, where Helen led a mentorship program for young black screenwriters. SPEAKER_05: 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. SPEAKER_08: Does the Guild pay you to do this? No. SPEAKER_05: I wouldn't dream of taking money for teaching black writers. SPEAKER_08: If you were teaching white writers, would you dream of taking money? I don't want to be a teacher for money. SPEAKER_05: I mean that's just not what I do. SPEAKER_17: One cause led 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. SPEAKER_05: Because if ever we found ourselves in such a circumstance, we would want to be the people who knew. SPEAKER_17: Helen was in her 60s by this point. SPEAKER_05: So it was very stressful, difficult for me because I had 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. SPEAKER_04: Here in this country, thousands of TV and movie script writers walked off their jobs today. SPEAKER_17: In 1981, the Writers Guild called a strike. The Levitts, old leftists that they were, had to support it. SPEAKER_04: The key stumbling block is the union's demand for a share of home video profits. SPEAKER_05: 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. SPEAKER_17: The two of them consulted with doctors, trained people to teach CPR, organized a group of first aid workers into teams. SPEAKER_05: And I remember realizing and saying at the time that the Writers Guild picket line 81 SPEAKER_05: 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, just pouring my forces at every picket. All my students from my Black Writers Workshop wanted to work for me, so I got a core of very loyal young people. I had planned to stay home and write a screenplay, but maybe this is better. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_07: There's another huge expression called Guten Ashuma, which kind of means good in themselves, you know, kind of just intrinsically good people who, as you say, 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. SPEAKER_17: 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 Alan Helen's son, Tom, on Zoom. I wanted to ask him about his parents. SPEAKER_03: 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. SPEAKER_17: 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. SPEAKER_17: Uh-huh. Yeah, that's almost nice. Uncanny. That's your father. Yeah. SPEAKER_03: And here's my mom. Now I see. SPEAKER_17: Helen Levitt, 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 Levitt? I know her now and what she went through. I can't. I can't. Happy Gaines and special thanks to the Pushkin crew. Heather Fain, Carly Migliori, Maya Koenig, Daniella Lacan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Marano, Jason Gambrell, and of course, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. SPEAKER_17: 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 $4.99 a month. Look for Pushnik exclusively on Apple Podcasts subscriptions. Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group benefits insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got your back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. An email address is a direct digital path to the mind, the machine, and the data of every person in your organization. That means your M365 accounts are at risk of cyber attacks, but you can put your mind at ease with Mimecast. They've developed an integrated frictionless solution that fortifies your existing email security and reduces risk, cost, and complexity, allowing your organization to work protected. Visit mimecast.com today to start your free 30-day trial. That's M-I-M-E-C-A-S-T dot com to learn how you can work protected with Mimecast. SPEAKER_02: With millions of books on Amazon, there's a reading feeling for everyone. For example, Raquel's Whoa! when she first entered the kingdom by dragon back is different to Ari's Whoa! when he found out there was more than one crime scene, which is also different to Ava's Whoa! the moment when the stable boy became a stable man. From Whoa! to Whoa! to Whoa! Amazon Books. That reading feeling awaits.