The martyrdom of Dalton Trumbo by Michael Weiss

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Jul 13, 2008 04:38 PM

The martyrdom of Dalton Trumbo

by Michael Weiss

There is no better curator of the museum of American Communism than Ronald Radosh. Part of the pleasure to be derived from reading him lies in his intimate association with many of the antiquities and relics on display, and I mean no disrespect in phrasing it like that. A dispassionate scholar may unearth all the necessary evidence about 20th-century Reds and fellow travelers, but to have been one oneself lends a certain, shall we say, urgency to the subject. Once you've read Radosh's review of the new hagiographic documentary on Dalton Trumbo in the Weekly Standard, you know you can skip all the others.

Radosh is fair and expansive, giving credit where it's due to the most fascinating and perhaps most talented member of the Hollywood Ten, but not stinting on the dirt that was conveniently and expectedly left out of the celluloid:

There is a lengthy sequence in which Donald Sutherland reads from Trumbo's 1939 antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun. Nowhere do we learn that Johnny, touted by the Communists during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and serialized in their newspaper, was withdrawn from circulation by Trumbo when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Literally overnight, the Communist party's peace campaign ended and was replaced by calls for intervention against Hitler.

Accordingly, Trumbo censored his own book, took the plates from the publisher, and let it go out of print. But the novel, which had gotten good reviews, was still popular, and readers wrote to Trumbo to find out where it could be found. Not satisfied that his book was no longer available, Trumbo-fearing, undoubtedly correctly, that many of those letter-writers were isolationists, and some even pro-fascist-invited the FBI to visit him at home in 1944, and turned the letters over to the agents. He informed on Americans who only wanted to read his own novel! It was the right wing, he explained, that was trying to make censorship of Johnny Got His Gun into "a civil liberties issue," so he had no compunction about informing on these people. After all, he told the agents, some of them were "organizing politically" and others had called Franklin Roosevelt a "criminal incendiary."

Apart from being a delicious irony in itself, there is an added value of this anecdote. One of the more outrageous and enduring pieties of the American left is the notion that McCarthyism was our very own Great Terror, blacklisted screenwriters our Old Bolsheviks, and a thuggish and mediocre senator from Wisconsin the Midwestern Vyshinsky. Historically illiterate and morally cretinous though this bit of equivalence was, is and forever will be (notice that the radical left is only interested in Stalinist abortions of justice when they can be used as cudgels for U.S. failings), here we have a case in which one of the heroes of McCarthyism plays the part of paranoid inquisitor and snitch. (Someone wake up Elia Kazan.) And yet Radosh is generous and mature enough to refrain from making the obvious -- and far more justified -- comparison between denunciator and denounced.

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