Hollywood took treason route in World War II

Actor Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo in "Trumbo" (2015)

Communists were running rampant in Hollywood during the Soviet rule of Joseph Stalin. They sympathized with the Nazis until Hitler turned on Stalin, and the effort is still underway to mislead the American people about the depth and goals of the movement.

Later this year, "Trumbo" will hit theaters. It stars Bryan Cranston, Helen Mirren, John Goodman and Diane Lane. The film tells the story of Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and how his great success in the movies came to a crashing halt after he was identified as a communist. Trumbo is one of the infamous Hollywood Ten, who were outed in testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, in 1947. The movie will portray Trumbo as a champion of the First Amendment.

Trumbo and his fellow communists in Hollywood's golden era are the subject of "Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters, Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler" by longtime Human Events Editor Allan Ryskind. Ryskind's father, Morrie, was a longtime Hollywood screenwriter, with more than 50 titles to his credit. Morrie Ryskind was among those who named Hollywood communists in congressional testimony.

Nearly 70 years later, the conventional wisdom suggests that the communist infiltration of Hollywood in and around World War II was either overblown or insignificant. However, the facts on Trumbo and others found to be communists are quite clear.

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"The Screenwriter's Guild, which my dad had belonged to, the flagship publication, was being edited by Dalton Trumbo, who was a famous communist, no question about it," Ryskind said. "He later acknowledged his was a communist. He turned the major publication into a communist publication."

Even after being exposed, Trumbo was unabashed in his support for communist figures and ideas. Ryskind said Trumbo even told a biographer that he joined the Communist Party in 1943 and should have done it a decade sooner.

"He said he never regretted, never regretted it," said Ryskind, who argued the association was just as obvious with the rest of the Hollywood Ten.

"The Hollywood Ten that Hollywood weeps over, but each and every member of the Hollywood Ten were members of the Communist Party and were loyal to Stalin," he said.

And the list didn't stop there.

"There were lots of communists in Hollywood, and I'm talking about hard-core communists, people whose allegiance was to the Soviet Union and Joe Stalin," he said. "There isn't any question about it."

In "Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters, Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler," Allan Ryskind reveals how the alleged "victims" of the Hollywood blacklist were actually ideological thugs: enthusiastic Stalinists committed to bringing about a socialist utopia in America – by violent revolution, if necessary.

According to Ryskind's research, even the most left-leaning estimates admit there were more than 200 communists in Hollywood during that time.

But one area of great disagreement is over whether communists in Hollywood ever found solidarity with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Defenders of the Hollywood Ten and other communists strongly deny any affinity for Hitler. Ryskind said the attitude toward Hitler was directly related to their appreciation of Stalin.

"They switched sides," he said. "They had been anti-Hitler. Suddenly, with the pact, they became pro-Hitler. These communists in Hollywood always like to portray themselves, and Hollywood likes to portray them as anti-fascist. They were on the side of Hitler when he invaded Poland, in the next year when he conquered western Europe and when he was bombing England."

Ryskind added, "The only reason they changed, they only reason they became anti-Hitler was because Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941."

Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Allan Ryskind:

These communists were not mere sympathizers. Ryskind said they saw them as actively involved in bringing down the American government and economy.

"When the League of American Writers was formed, their purpose was to use their art as a weapon," Ryskind said. "The purpose was to destroy the American government as it existed, get rid of the capitalist system and impose a communist system. I'm not making this up. I got this from communist documents."

Did the communist ideology of Trumbo and other screenwriters influence the content on the silver screen? Ryskind said it absolutely did.

"All these films were being made that were saying how wonderful Joe Stalin was," he said. "There were all these various films, 'Song of Russia,' 'Mission to Moscow.' You had 'Action in the North Atlantic.' You had 'Blockade.'"

One of the most famous screenwriters of the era was Howard Koch, who wrote the screenplay for 'Casablanca.' But he also wrote 'Mission to Moscow.'

"The fact is, Koch was a fellow traveler. You'd call him a communist without a party card. He was married to a communist," said Ryskind, who noted that a man who may well have been a Soviet agent was a technical adviser for the film.

"It's probably the most pro-Moscow, pro-Soviet film ever made," Ryskind said. "It made Stalin into the wisest statesman on the planet and that everything Stalin did was wonderful. It was so bad that even the Nation magazine, which was pro-Soviet, said it was a whitewash."

As the communists grew in number and influence, patriotic Americans in Hollywood fought back.

"In 1944, my dad and Walt Disney and Sam Wood, who was a famous director, formed the Motion Picture Alliance," Ryskind said. "The reason they did that was because the commies looked at that time like they had taken over Hollywood. They were embedded in the guilds and the unions."

Why were so many Hollywood figures enamored with communism?

"What makes people join ISIS? There was an ideology there that people believed in," he said. "They believed that capitalism was terrible. It had to be overthrown, and they wanted to actually see it overthrown."

It's not just Trumbo who Hollywood liberals lionize from that era.

"You have John Howard Lawson," Ryskind said. "He was being memorialized in some fashion in 'The Majestic.' Jim Carrey is in there. They name a wonderful town after John Howard Lawson, who was head of the Communist Party in Hollywood and was the enforcer of the Stalinist line and died a Stalinist."

Despite the deep leftist sympathies remaining in Hollywood today, Ryskind does not see as great a threat now as during the Stalin era.

"In the '30s and the '40s and the '50s, these people were agents of a foreign government designed to destroy us," he said. "There's a little bit of difference between that and popping off and saying, 'I'm a left-winger.'"