The truth was that Dalton Trumbo,
undoubtedly a top-notch screenwriter, was no friend of free speech and the
First Amendment, which he purported to defend when the House Committee on
Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigated Communism in Hollywood in 1947.
Along with the nine other writers, directors, and actors who were subpoenaed,
Trumbo took the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer the committee’s
questions, presenting himself as a defender of basic civil liberties.
The blacklisted writers are
remembered as a group of innocent victims persecuted by reactionary,
attention-grabbing congressmen. They had to fight the studio chiefs, the right
wing, and the committee’s “friendly” witnesses — whom they branded “informers”
who sold their own souls for the right to continue working by naming their old
comrades as party members.
The real truth is that Trumbo and
his fellow members of the Hollywood Ten were dedicated, hard-line Stalinists
who regularly followed the twists and turns of the Communist-party line, as
dictated from Moscow.
Back in 1939, Trumbo had written
a major anti-war novel that received favorable reviews, Johnny Got His Gun. The
book came out during the infamous Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and was
serialized in The Daily Worker, the Communist party’s newspaper.
When Germany broke the pact and
invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941, Trumbo withdrew the book from circulation,
and copies that had been sent to bookstores were ordered returned.
Disappointed readers wrote to
Trumbo asking where they could obtain the novel to read. Trumbo invited the FBI
to come to his home and gave them the names of those who had written to him
requesting a copy of his book. The right wing, he told them, wanted to make his
own censorship of the novel “a civil liberties issue.” So he informed on them,
telling the agents that he feared they might be “acting politically” and might
even oppose FDR. Some civil libertarian!
In later years he bragged how he
had used his position to stop anti-Communist films from being made. Stalin, he
said, was “one of the democratic leaders of the world,” so he used his position
to stop Trotsky’s biography of the dictator from being filmed and did the same
with anti-Communist books by James T. Farrell, Victor Kravchenko, and Arthur
Koestler, all of which he called “untrue” and “reactionary.” As he explained in
1954 to a fellow blacklisted writer, the Communist party had a “fine tradition
. . . that whenever a book or play or film is produced which is harmful to the
best interests of the working class, that work, and its author should and must
be attacked in the sharpest possible terms.”
Two years later, when many
Communists learned some of the truth about Stalin from the Khrushchev speech,
Trumbo wrote a comrade that he was not surprised. He explained that he had read
the books by Koestler, George Orwell, James Burnham, Eugene Lyons, and Isaac
Don Levine, who all had exposed the truth about the Soviet Union. These, of
course, were the very books he had made sure would never be turned into movies.
Trumbo supported Stalin, all the while knowing that he was a monster.
Years later Trumbo had second
thoughts, which he largely kept private. In public he presented himself as a
noble fighter against the unjust blacklist, and he gave a much-quoted 1970
speech about how no one came out of the time unsoiled; there were “only
victims.”
The public did not learn,
however, that he had almost faced trial and expulsion from the Communist party
on the grounds that he was guilty of “white chauvinism.”
That little-known episode showed
how even a devout Red like Trumbo was not safe from the party’s political
correctness. Members were regularly expelled for using terms such as
“whitewash” or “black sheep.”
Party leaders used the charge to
settle scores, to climb up the ladder of leadership, and to get potential
opponents out of the way. Trumbo’s problem was that he wrote a script in 1952
about the case of a woman named Jean Field, a white woman who was a devout
believer in Kim Il Sung and North Korea’s Communist state, and who was in
danger of losing custody of her children to her ex-husband. One of the charges
that her ex levied against her was that she let her own children play with
black youngsters their own age.
Field read Trumbo’s script and
hit the ceiling. Accusing him of “RANK CHAUVINISM,” she singled out a sentence
in which he described a black youngster as “clean and dressed in his Sunday
best.” Field charged, and the party comrades agreed, that the implication was
that the black child was “clean on only special occasions,” and hence the
description was racist to the core.
In fact, Trumbo replied, he had
written “her son is in his best clothes,” and she had made up words he had not
used. “Would it have pleased you,” he wrote to her, “if I had written ‘dirty
and dressed in everyday clothes?’”
To the party, he added that black
children “get quite as dirty as your children,” and on special occasions, their
parents “have just as much pride in their children as you do in yours.”
Traumatized by this episode,
Trumbo suddenly understood what had caused so many party members to defect and
even to inform and testify before HUAC. The CP, he told one screenwriter
comrade, threw “a bucket of filth over me.”
Soon he acknowledged that he and
his fellow members of the Hollywood Ten did not “perform historic deeds,” that
in fact they took part in a circus orchestrated by Communist-party lawyers, all
“to save [ourselves] from punishment.” Moreover, he even felt that his fellow
Red screenwriters failed to get work not because they were Reds, but because they
were “mediocrities,” all of whom failed to show “competence, ability [and]
craftsmanship.”
Most of all, he said, one of the
causes of the blacklist was not HUAC, but the very Leninist group they all
pledged adherence to. In an unpublished 1958 article, Trumbo wrote that “the
question of a secret Communist Party lies at the very heart of the Hollywood
blacklist,” and that is why Americans believed the Communists had something to
hide. They lived in the United States, not Stalin’s Russia, he wrote, and should
have worked openly and put their ideas in the marketplace to be judged
accordingly, rather than work in a Leninist cell. They should, he said, have
been open Communists, or “not have been members at all.” The Communist party,
he said, had exploited him and the others “for every left-wing cause that came
down the pike,” and they all were nothing but “noble losers.”
He even admitted that the
informers he had once hated had broken from the ranks “to avoid constant
attempts to meddle with the ideological content” of their work and had good
reasons to turn against their own comrades. Clearly, that conclusion stemmed
from his own experience with the totalitarian group to which he belonged.
Judging from the publicity for
the forthcoming movie, and from the book on which the Trumbo story will be
based, none of the complex reality that informed Trumbo’s life will be depicted
on the silver screen. Once more, Hollywood will honor John Ford’s famous axiom
that if a legend has become the real story, go with the legend.