"Trumbo" Topic

Here is a link to an article published on Natioal Review when the movie based on the book was announced -

link

As it notes the book was an uncritical hagiography of Trumbo.

From the article -

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."

So much for the 1st Amendment champion myth.

Interesting. The article claims Trumbo pleaded the 5th Amendment before Congress, while the biography definitely states otherwise.

The article also indicates Trumbo was more Communist than the biography admits to.

And I've recently learned that he was my 10th cousin. Small world.