Hester R. McCullough; Heroine of Right on Entertainment Issue

The woman who sparked a national furor in the late 1940s, becoming a heroine of the political right for her stand against entertainers associated with communist causes, is dead at 71.

Hester R. McCullough died at home Sunday.

In 1948, Mrs. McCullough, then living in Greenwich, Conn., returned a $6 subscription ticket to a performance by dancer Paul Draper and harmonica player Larry Adler, whom she accused of being members of communist-front organizations.

In a letter to the Greenwich Community Concert Assn. that was published in a local newspaper, Mrs. McCullough wrote that the entertainers, “while fine artists, have been openly denounced in the press as being pro-communist and, as such, I do not believe should appear in any community project in Greenwich.”

Draper and Adler--who admitted to supporting organizations with communist sympathies but denied being sympathizers--filed a $200,000 libel suit but decided not to pursue the case when it ended in a hung jury in 1950. By then it had become a cause celebre , taken up by such conservative columnists as Westbrook Pegler.

In later years, Mrs. McCullough said she had no regrets.

“What I thought then, I still do,” she told the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine in a 1987 interview. “The Communists themselves wanted to destroy this country and its government.”