I note Hollywood is preparing to release yet another movie offering a whitewashed history of its own love affair with Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.
This one is called “Trumbo” and focuses on the story of Dalton Trumbo, a terrific screenwriter, union boss and Communist Party thug who used his power and influence to blacklist those who actively opposed a Communist Party takeover of America’s entertainment industry.
It would be a worthwhile endeavor if Hollywood were going to tell the truth about Trumbo. But it never has, and it likely never will. It’s too embarrassing. It’s too politically incorrect. That’s because Trumbo would be totally at home in Hollywood today – an environment so politically correct, so progressive, so alien to the values that made America great that the truth is almost nowhere to be found in its prolific work.
This is a subject I know a thing or two about, having devoted several years to reporting and commenting on the political side of Hollywood, having interviewed surviving members of the Hollywood Ten, having spent countless hours with Hollywood insiders who stood up to Trumbo and the Hollywood Communists along with Ronald Reagan and a handful of other brave men and women in those days.
I never got around to writing a book on this subject, but a friend of mine did. His name is Allan Ryskind, who has written a great new and, for me, long-awaited book on the subject called “Hollywood Traitors.” He formerly served as an editor at Human Events. His father was the late Morrie Ryskind, a great comedic screenwriter whose credits include many Marx brothers classics. Allan, therefore, grew up in Hollywood. He heard all the stories – or almost all of them. I heard a few later in the 1980s when I worked in Los Angeles as a journalist.
But let me begin with Trumbo because of what will be renewed interest in this pseudo-heroic figure because of the 2015 movie.
Trumbo was one of the Hollywood Ten. The story America has been told over and over again about the Hollywood Ten is that they were denied work in Hollywood because of their progressive political views. They were grilled by inquisitors of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 and asked to answer the famous question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
It was a good question. Stalin was well on his way to executing tens of millions of his own people in the Soviet Union with the notion of spreading Communism worldwide. The Communist Party USA was 100 percent controlled by the Soviet Union as a third column apparatus inside America. And card-carrying American Communists, under party discipline, under the direction of the Soviet Communist Party and with its funding, were furthering Stalin’s cause in the U.S. by any means necessary.
Trumbo had joined the party in 1943, but he admitted later he might as well have been a member 10 years earlier. It was during that period that he actually began blacklisting those who opposed Communist infiltration and subversion of Hollywood. In fact, he actually boasted about this activity in The Worker Communist newspaper, explaining how he and other party members kept the following works from reaching the screen: Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” and “The Yogi and the Commissar”; Victor Kravchenko’s “I Chose Freedom”; and “Bernard Clare” by James T. Farrell.
Somehow, that kind of blacklisting was all right. It was invented by the Hollywood Communists – including Trumbo. Many anti-communists were prevented from working or faced opposition for roles and screenplay development by the Communist cartel.
Ronald Reagan, head of the Screen Actors Guild, was one of those who face immense opposition. He was once warned by Communist thugs he might get acid thrown in his face. He started packing a gun. But there were many others, some who never worked again. Among those was Allan Ryskind’s father, Morrie.
Hollywood was Reagan’s schoolroom on Communism. It would serve America well many years later when he became one of our greatest presidents and set the stage for winning the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Hollywood likes to conflate this historic period with “the McCarthy era.” It had nothing to do with it. Sen, Joseph McCarthy came later. His focus was on Communist infiltration of the U.S. government, something that is more or less a fait accompli today.
To explain how bad things were in Hollywood pre-World War II, the Hollywood Communists like Trumbo were apologists not just for Stalin, but for Hitler too.
Before being betrayed by Hitler, Stalin formed a mutual non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. This allowed Hitler to roll up Europe. During that period, Trumbo and his friends demonstrated against any involvement in the war and against any aid to Great Britain. That’s what Stalin told them to do. They explained how Hitler really wasn’t a threat to anyone.
Overnight, however, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the Hollywood Communists had an epiphany. Suddenly, they became war hawks, demanding immediate intervention.
So what happened in 1947 at the Hollywood Ten hearing when the screenwriters and directors were asked the simple question?
When the House committee began its work, it wasn’t a fishing expedition, or an attempt to get actors, directors and writers to sign loyalty oaths. The FBI had been investigating these people and had rock-solid proof that they were all card-carrying Communist apparatchiks of the Soviet Union.
That’s why the committee asked the question: If members of the Hollywood 10 lied under oath and denied they were members, their Communist registration documents would be provided and they could be jailed for contempt of Congress. If they pleaded the Fifth Amendment, they knew their careers were threatened because the American people had no desire to be entertained by villains in league with U.S. enemies and mass murderers. So they came up with the idea of pleading the First Amendment – attempting to portray themselves as civil libertarians and good American dissidents.
It didn’t work. The committee simply asked the FBI to produce their Communist registration documents, and that was the end of their careers – for a brief time.
But America has a very short memory – and a very forgiving one.
After a few years, most were back in the business, many of them still pushing their Communist Party line, once again doing their best to ensure their enemies – patriotic Hollywood talent – were punished through a resumption of the blacklisting the Communists started.
Here we are in the 21st century, and it’s happening all over again: Boycotts against sponsors of conservative celebrities, reckless and irresponsible demagoguing against those who stand up for American principles, high-pressure tactics of ridicule and intimidation against purveyors of inconvenient truths, every imaginable tactic to silence voices of opposition.
Once again, the original blacklisters – or their ideological descendants – are at it again.
They are rewriting the truth as effectively as they rewrote the truth about the Hollywood blacklist. But it’s not just the entertainment industry doing it any more. It’s the entire popular culture – the press, academia, union thugs under the watchful and approving eye of a government and political establishment gone wild.
It was never the right that sought to “blacklist” people for their political views. It was always the left. And it has always been successful – but never more so than today.
That’s where we are today, with voices being strangled, vilified, marginalized and censoring themselves as a matter of survival.
And into this environment comes a whitewash called “Trumbo.” Just what we needed for a generation brainwashed to believe the very worst about America and the very best about our mortal enemies of the past and future.
Media wishing to interview Joseph Farah, please contact [email protected].
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