Screenwriter Dalton
Trumbo died in 1976, but Hollywood still hasn’t gotten over its high regard for
him. He is the subject of a new movie, Trumbo, that lionizes him as a
passionate supporter of the First Amendment and free speech, a true patriot.
But that defines Trumbo only in terms congenial to the political culture of the
Hollywood left.
Trumbo was, in fact,
a member of the Communist party during the years when it was under the tight
control of the Soviet Union. He followed the party line faithfully. He was
pro-Stalin, even during the 22 months of the Hitler-Stalin pact. He looked
favorably on North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung, notably after Kim’s invasion of
South Korea.
But you won’t pick up
any of this from the movie. Instead, Trumbo is presented as a brave and
principled member of the Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters who refused to
say if they were members of the Communist party when asked at a hearing of the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947. They went to jail for
contempt of Congress—Trumbo for 10 months—and were blacklisted from writing
screenplays for Hollywood studios.
This made Trumbo a
hero to the leftists who dominate the movie industry. And when he broke the
blacklist in 1960 with his name in the credits for the screenplay in Spartacus,
he became a deity. He’d earlier written screenplays under pen names, even
winning an Oscar as “Robert Rich.”
We now know the
Hollywood Ten were all Communists—capital “C”—and disciplined ones at that. When
the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed in 1939, Trumbo instantly switched from
attacking the Nazis to demonizing Hitler’s enemies, chiefly Franklin Roosevelt
and the British. When Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, the Soviet line changed,
and Trumbo changed with it, overnight.
Anyone who doubts
Trumbo’s allegiance to the Soviet Union should tap into Hollywood Traitors:
Blacklisted Screenwriters, Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler. Its author,
Allan Ryskind, devoted more than a decade to investigating the Hollywood Ten
and the battle in Hollywood in the 1940s between Communists and
anti-Communists, which the Reds came close to winning. Morrie Ryskind, the
screenwriter and father of Allan, was a leading anti-Communist. The book is
impressively researched. Every assertion is documented.
Ryskind (the son)
refers to the Hollywood Ten as the “Stalinist Ten.” But could these now-sainted
dissenters really have been Stalin groupies? Ryskind isn’t alone on this point.
In their book The Inquisition in Hollywood, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund
agree. “Communist screenwriters defended the Stalinist regime . . . with an infuriating self-righteousness, superiority, and
selective memory which eventually alienated all but the staunchest fellow
travelers,” Ceplair and Englund write. And they did so “unflinchingly,
uncritically, inflexibly—leaving themselves open to the justifiable suspicion
that they not only approved of everything they were defending but would
themselves act in the same way if they were in the same position.”
Only one of the
Hollywood Ten has recanted. It wasn’t Trumbo. It was Edward Dmytryk, a
respected director, who repudiated the Communist party. He was “shocked” by the
HUAC testimony of John Howard Lawson, the Communist boss in Hollywood, and
Trumbo. “It was clear to those who listened that the unfriendly witnesses were
behaving as Communists could be expected to behave,” Dmytryk wrote in a memoir.
Trumbo also behaved
that way as editor of the Screen Writer, the publication of the Screen Writers
Guild, from 1945 to 1947. It “championed Moscow’s war aims, hailed Red
screenwriters and their movies celebrating Stalin, lavished praise on
Hollywood’s Red guilds and unions and launched scathing attacks against the
anti-Communist community,” Ryskind says. The Screen Writer also notified
readers of lectures from “a Marxist or Soviet point of view.”
Part of Ryskind’s
research involved a trip to Madison, Wisconsin, where the Wisconsin Historical
Society houses the papers of screenwriters. He found fresh evidence of Trumbo’s
total commitment to the Soviet Union and its allies. “Nothing so underscores
his love for Leninism, Stalinism, and Communism in general as an unpublished
movie script discovered in his papers,” Ryskind writes in Hollywood Traitors.
The script was titled
An American Story. The heroine is a mother about to lose her children in a
custody case because of her political views. She wants to take them to North
Korea, which she believes is in “a fight for independence, just as we had to
fight for our own independence in 1776.” The script was “Soviet Communist
ideology in its rawest form,” Ryskind writes. The movie was never made.
Among Trumbo’s
papers, Ryskind found a poem entitled “Korean Christmas” that blames America
and Christianity for killing Korean children:
Have we hurt you,
little boy? Ah … we have We’ve hurt you terribly We’ve killed you Hear, then,
little corpse … it had to be Poor consolation, yet it had to be The Christian
ethic was at stake And western culture and the American way And so, in the
midst of pure and holy strife We had to take your little eastern life.
All that Ryskind reveals in his groundbreaking
book about Trumbo and the Hollywood Ten is lost on most of Hollywood today. The
blacklist is reviled as if it still existed, though it vanished more than a
half-century ago. It blinds many in the film industry to what motivated Trumbo
and his fellow screenwriters. It was their adherence to communism and loyalty
to the Soviet Union. Jack Valenti, when he was Hollywood’s lobbyist in
Washington, said a few flirted with communism. But real Communists in Hollywood?
No.
In 1997, a gala
called “Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist” was held at the Samuel Goldwyn
Theatre in Beverly Hills. Its sponsors were listed as the American Federation
of Television and Radio Artists, the Directors Guild of America, the Screen
Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild of America, West. About 1,000 people
attended, including Carl Reiner, Kevin Spacey, Billy Crystal, and John Lithgow.
Trumbo’s son Christopher, who produced a documentary in 2007 and a play about
his father, was a speaker.
Having been
blacklisted, Trumbo is treated as a hero, a liberal in a hurry. In Trumbo, he’s
courageous and witty. His anti-Communist enemies are villains. Bryan Cranston,
the actor who plays him, says Trumbo was jailed for being a “socialist.” Only
in Hollywood could someone believe that.
Fred Barnes is an
executive editor at The Weekly Standard .