RONALD RADOSH: The Hollywood Blacklist Gets Whitewashed. A Review of ‘Blacklisted: An American Story’ at the Capital Jewish Museum.
That claim, moreover, ignores that when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in Moscow, overnight the Brigade veterans became anti antifascist, arguing publicly that Hitler’s Germany was a benign power, and that the real threat to peace came from the United States and Britain, which wanted to drive the United States into war. The last commander of the Brigades, Milton Wolff, speaking to the veterans at their annual convention that took place in May 1941, denounced as equally evil “Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, and Mussolini.” He attacked FDR for wanting America to participate in the “imperialist slaughter in which the youth of our country, will, if he has his way,” seek U.S. “involvement … in an imperialist war from which the great majority of the American people can derive only misery, suffering and death.” He stated that the Brigade veterans’ organization “opposes every move of Roosevelt and the warmongers in this direction.”
Members who opposed the Nazi-Soviet Pact were immediately expelled from the organization by Wolff. So much for their prescient antifascism! Why is this not in the exhibition?
Then one must pay attention to the most famous of all the blacklisted Hollywood writers, the talented and brilliant screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. During the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Trumbo had published his novel Johnny Got His Gun, a searing antiwar novel (made into a Hollywood film during the Vietnam war) about a World War I vet who lost his sight and all his limbs. It was meant to increase antiwar sentiment when the FDR administration was beginning to provide aid to Great Britain. It won the National Book Award for Best Original Novel in 1939.
When Nazi Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Trumbo and his publisher suspended printing of Johnny Got His Gun, and Trumbo appealed to readers who had bought it to return or destroy the book. He also did one other little-known action: In 1944, he asked the FBI to come to his house to look at letters he had received from people who wanted to know how they could get a copy of Johnny Got His Gun. Charging that the writers were clearly still antiwar, still isolationist, and some were as well pro-Hitler and opposed fiercely to the president, he gave their names to the bureau. His view, he wrote the FBI, was that his book “shouldn’t be reprinted until the war was at an end.” He was afraid, however, that the letter-writers “could adversely affect the war effort” if the book was made available. In 1970, he acknowledged that “I foolishly reported their activities to the FBI.” Yet he still thought he was right to oppose getting into the war in 1939 because it would be a “disastrous course” to move away from isolationism, which is also why he spoke up against Lend-Lease aid to Britain, arguing that would be like handing a gun to a “hot-headed man.”
Years later, Trumbo bragged that due to his influence in the film colony, he was able to stop a Hollywood movie that was to be made about Leon Trotsky. Yet, Trumbo himself came to see the truth about the totalitarian Soviet Union. He had read, he admitted, all the major anticommunist books, and hence, “I was not surprised.” As for the CP, he knew the blacklisted writers were used for the party’s own agenda. He was furious that they were “exploited for every left-wing cause that came down the pike.”
As Mark Steyn wrote of screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo in 2003, when the off-Broadway play that was a likely inspiration for the 2015 biopic starring Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston as Trumbo, “Though the play won’t tell you the answer to that famous question – ‘Are you now or have you ever…?’ – the answer is: yes, he was. The more interesting question is: How do you feel about getting one of the great moral questions of the century wrong?”
