-Caveat Lector-
http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/49thparallel/backissues/issue4/
trumbo.htm
Americanism with a Vengeance: Civil Liberties and Dalton
Trumbo
by Ron Capshaw. City University of New York.
. The recent controversy over the lifetime
academy award to Elia Kazan brought back into political use
the name of once-blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.
For anti-Kazan partisans, Trumbo�s name was cited to rebuke
Kazan for his informer role during the blacklist period.
"Trumbo was the brave one," actor Nick Nolte stated, "for
refusing to comply with the House Un-American Activities
Committee."
"Trumbo should be given the lifetime achievement award, not
Kazan," wrote one editor of a Colorado newspaper. The
Nation magazine, never one to let the blacklist era go
unremembered, reprinted Trumbo�s condemnation of Kazan
as "one deserving of utter contempt." What is striking about
this episode is not so much the power the blacklist period still
has to divide pundits, but that the majority of those who
attack the period were too young to have personally
experienced it. This use of Trumbo as a standard by which
to measure those of anti-Communists is a relatively young
phenomenon, one that shows the peculiar historical attitudes
of baby boomers. Once blacklisted and denounced as a
Stalinist, Trumbo, within the last thirty years, has undergone
a cultural rehabilitation that at times has verged on
celebration. The political winds shifting from right to left, from
the anti-communist 50s to the countercultural 60s, recast the
Trumbo image in a more favorable light. The New Left had
always needed heroes (Fidel Castro, Mao Tse Tung, Ho Chi
Minh) and martyrs (Huey Newton, Angela Davis); Trumbo
provided both. He was both a figure who stood up to HUAC
and a figure denied work for over a decade for his political
beliefs. But more than this was involved in the Trumbo
image. New Left pundits transformed him from Stalinist
"hack" (Murray Kempton�s phrase) to a figure worthy to stand
beside Clarence Darrow in his advocation of freedom for all.
He was now, in a biographical blurb for the 1972 edition of
Johnny Got His Gun, " a fighter against censorship." Literary
critic Robert Kirsch called him "a principled actor against
repression and thought control." A Colorado newspaper
editor called him the true symbol of freedom in the 1950s. A
Hollywood Organization, The Fund for the First Amendment,
recently gave testament to Trumbo�s heroic image at a film
retrospective recalling the blacklist period. When Trumbo
came on screen (during his 1947 testimony before Congress)
the audience cheered; when a HUAC congressmen next
appeared the audience booed. The purpose of this paper is
to examine the validity of the New Left�s portrayal of Trumbo
as a civil libertarian.
Fortunately, we do not have to rely on Trumbo�s film scripts
as a means to measure against the image (scripts are a
dubious source at best since a film usually is the result of
collaborative contributions and hence its political statements
cannot be traced to one single person). Instead we have a
number of pamphlets Trumbo wrote throughout his life on a
variety of political topics. This journey through the land of
Trumbo pamphlets reveals that the Trumbo image did not
originate with the New Left, but began with Trumbo himself.
As a pamphleteer, Trumbo used concepts of Anglo-Saxon
justice, fifth amendments, rights of free speech, and the
tradition of parliamentary democracy to defend communist
causes. His guise in these writings was that of a civil
libertarian defending democracy against the encroachments
of the state. Hence, designations by writers such as Studs
Terkel for Trumbo as a "defender of freedom" were merely
echoes of Trumbo�s self-definition begun decades before the
New Left.
The free-thinking communist
Most of these rehabilitators have had to contend with
Trumbo�s 1943-1948 membership in the American
Communist Party. Most have done so by portraying Trumbo
as a free-thinker, whose membership in an organization
known for its demands of orthodoxy and loyalty from its
members did not compromise his individuality. Robert Kirsch,
admitting Trumbo�s membership in the Communist Party,
qualified this admission by stating that its "dogma and
discipline went against his nature." But an examination of
Trumbo�s stances even before his membership shows a
disciple adhering to Moscow�s various ideological shifts at
every step. In 1940, during the period of the Hitler-Stalin
Pact, he was in sync with the Party Line, arguing against
American involvement in the European conflict. That same
year he supported the Soviet Invasion of Finland, even
parroting Stalin�s justifications for it when he argued that
Finland was fascist and therefore a threat to Russia. During
the Grand Alliance period, with Russia attacked by Germany,
Trumbo became violently pro-war; now attacking those he
once supported, such as America First, as pro-fascist. Thus,
his ideological gestures and rationalizations parallel those of
the most hard-line Party member in the period: Earl Browder,
Michael Gold.
"An upholder of a free screen"
But the rehabilitation still holds to some extent. Although the
free thinker label has been compromised, all this proves is
that Trumbo supported the stances of another country.
Trumbo�s defenders could argue that he was more worried
about reforming his own country; he was not concerned with
foreign policy, but making democracy a reality at home. And
he did this by his scrupulous attention to civil liberties and
domestic freedom. Was Trumbo a defender of a free screen
as some many of his latter-day celebrators such as Alec
Baldwin have proclaimed? During his investigation by the
House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, Trumbo
wrote a polemic arguing that HUAC were that it was trying to
subvert the freedom of the screen, to create, in effect, a
"slave screen." But Trumbo�s own earlier actions contradicted
this stance. He did not subscribe to a free screen anymore
than HUAC did. In a wartime letter to a Party newspaper, he
bragged that he was able to keep from making it to the
screen such "untrue" and "reactionary" works as Trotsky�s
"so-called biography" of Stalin and Arthur Koestler�s Yogi and
the Commissar. Thus, Trumbo�s "free screen" was a qualified
one�with anti-Stalinist works not eligible.
"A Voltarian figure"
What of his image as a fighter for free expression? Let us for
a moment fast-forward to 1960. Trumbo, once blacklisted,
now has his byline appearing on screen. He is no longer a
party member. Before an audience, he sounds like Voltaire in
his defense of civil liberties. He articulates his philosophy as
The Right to express ideas, good ideas, bad ideas, wicked
ideas, crazy ideas, impossible ideas�this is the most
precious right the individual can have. And the interesting
thing is that in the course of securing for himself these rights
he must also guarantee it to his enemy. Otherwise there can
be no freedom for anyone." In 1945, Trumbo must have
believed that wicked and crazy ideas were not eligible for
free expression. As editor of a journal, he rejected an anti-
Communist writer�s submission on the following grounds: It is
difficult to support your belief in "the inalienable right of man�s
mind to be exposed to any thought whatever, however
intolerable that thought might be to anyone else. Frequently
such a right encroaches upon the right of others to their lives.
It was this "inalienable right in Fascist countries which directly
resulted in the slaughter of five million Jews." The message is
clear: the toleration of free speech leads to the gas chamber.
Never mind that its practice might have prevented the
Holocaust, but that is not really the point. The point is that
Trumbo practiced in one era what he denounced in another.
Crazy and wicked ideas were not permissible in 1945, but
they were so in 1960 when Trumbo�s were numbered among
them. An argument could still be offered that although
Trumbo�s qualified stance on civil liberties while a Party
members certainly calls into question part of his image as a
civil libertarian, it only does so for the period when he was a
communist. One could argue that once having left the Party,
once having experienced government repression firsthand,
Trumbo had a conversion experience and became an
unqualified supporter of civil liberties for all. But such an
argument would be false. Blacklisted in 1947, unable to find
work, forced to relocate to another country, Trumbo still did
not exhibit any new appreciation of civil liberties for all. He
still made the same qualifications as an ideological pariah as
he did when he was a force to be reckoned with in
Hollywood. In 1956, he saw the Smith Act, which gave the
government the power to prosecute political dissent deemed
harmful to national security, as necessary in 1940 and
bemoaned that it had not been applied to the right. In short, it
would have been acceptable for the government to crack
down on fascists (which could have included a wide political
spectrum in the Trumbo dictionary). And as late as 1959, he
argued that it would have been permissible for the
government during the World War Two period to have
banned his anti-war novel, Johnny Got his Gun, in the
interests of the "public good." Which brings us to an
important question: why after experiencing government
repression, did he still qualify civil liberties? The answer is
that Trumbo was continuing to operate in the mental universe
of Stalinism. Even though he had left the Party in 1948, all of
the ideological baggage of Stalinism stayed with him. One
year later, the standard enemy of the Stalinist was still his:
the Trotskyites, who in one letter he accused of picket-line
violence and illegal activities. That same year, he listed Stalin
as one of the leaders of "the democratic forces of the world"
and proclaimed that anti-semitism did not exist in the Soviet
Union. The passage of seven years did little to damage his
view of Stalin; in 1956, he was still citing him as an authority
on democratic socialism. It is only in 1965, do we find any
criticism of Stalin and even then it is to score propaganda
points against the blacklist�"Taking from Russia a tip that
drowned an entire generation in blood, we have made politics
a religion." But more than just choosing fellow traveling over
formal party membership is at stake here. For when Trumbo
joined the party, 1943, is important for ascertaining the type
of mental universe he was still operating in as late as 1960.
Consider what it meant to be a Stalinist in wartime. Film-critic
Pauline Kael offers the best assessment of the atmosphere
of that period for Hollywood Communists when she charges
them with excessive patriotism. Tess Schlesinger, a
Hollywood Party member, has written, without apologies, that
to be a communist member in this period was the ultimate
expression of patriotism. But Stalinists� support of the war
effort made them take reactionary stances. Party members
were in the forefront of endorsing the government�s no strike
demand from labor, and demanding that blacks suspend their
civil rights quest until after the war. Their support of the war
effort led them into stances that would have resulted in
expulsion a decade earlier. Earl Browder, the CPUSA head,
in 1944 urged members to avoid talk of class conflict, to
cease criticizing free enterprise as an economic system and
instead work effectively to ensure peaceful co-existence
between it and socialism in the postwar period. With blatant
patriotism came righteous war fervor. A perusal of Hollywood
Stalinists� phrases in this period makes them sound like
Patton in their martial passion. Indeed, the homicidal phrases
of leftists in that period against the Axis leaves them little
ground to stand upon when they denounced Cold Warriors
for equally homicidal rhetoric in later years. Claudia Jones,
the editor of the Young Communist Weekly, advised readers
in 1943 that "to hate the enemy is to love one�s country."
Marc Blitzein, a Party member and composer, expressed his
enthusiasm for strategic bombing and the Grand Alliance all
in one stanza: "Open up that second front! Open up that
Second front! We will bomb a tyrant�s smile, and from his
throat his insane Heil�We will bomb him, bomb him from the
earth." Woody Guthrie had written on his guitar, "this
machine kills fascists." In a screenplay, Dashiell Hammett
had an antifascist take a Nazi sympathizer into a garage and
kill him gangland style, all to the tune of stirring, patriotic
music. This atmosphere of ideologically incorrect stances, of
excusable hate, of combat, of government crackdowns is
clearly the one Trumbo was influenced by and participated in.
Trumbo even joined the Party in this period for reasons of
combat: to aid his friends in the "coming battle with American
fascism in the postwar period." All of the things Trumbo
complained about during the Cold War�the smears, the
hateful investigations by the FBI, the government-sponsored
bills outlawing repression�were activities he himself tried to
participate in or supported during the war. In 1941, he
supported the government�s Smith Act prosecution of
American Trotskyites�a government crackdown on dissent.
As befitting the atmosphere of combat associated with
wartime Stalinism, Trumbo attempted to use the government
to suppress his political enemies, all in the name of the
Grand Alliance. In 1943, he urged the government to ban the
Hollywood conservative group, the Motion Picture Alliance for
the Preservation of American Ideals. In 1944, he urged the
FBI to investigate and interrogate correspondents critical of
the U.S war effort (even supplying the agency with a list of
questions to ask them)--quite a contradiction from his later
view of the FBI during the Cold War as "a hateful shadow
preying upon the citizenry."
He has dragged this atmosphere of World War II Stalinism
into the post-war years. In a written statement to HUAC, he
accused the committee of launching " direct attack upon the
constitutional rights of property and of management and of
that system which we call private enterprise." Trumbo is
advocating a Party Line that has since been denounced as
that of a "class enemy." Browder was expelled from the Party
for such statements in 1945 ("progressive free enterprise")
and replaced by William Z. Foster, who advocated a class
war with American imperialism. By the Party standards of
1947, Trumbo�s statement before HUAC makes him a
Browderist, an ideological leper.
But what is most revealing is that Trumbo is still using the
tactics of the wartime period rather than the current party line.
In 1956, he continued to operate from a World War Two
mindset when he defended the Smith Act as "a necessary
war measure"�the same language used by the New Masses
in 1944 to justify the Smith Act. In this period, his enemies
are liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr who have
abandoned the wartime alliance with Russia. This more than
anything else is indicative of his continuing affection for the
either/or, enemy/ally universe of World War Two Stalinism.
Schlesinger�s vital center is anti-Communist; therefore, in
Trumbo�s estimation, he is not anti-fascist. To be anti-
Communist is to be "right of center."
Clearly Trumbo is operating from a World War Two script:
there are just two categories: fascist (anti-Communist) and
anti-fascist (pro-Communist), enemies and allies. Schlesinger
is the former since he is no longer supporting the Grand
Alliance�an alliance clearly dissolved by 1949, the time of
his attack on Schlesinger.
But the Alliance still exists in Trumbo's mind, as evidenced by
his equation of anti-fascism with pro-Stalinism and fascism
with anti-Stalinism. He is reverting to 1944 rather than
observing the realities of 1949, to a period when Party Head
Earl Browder separated true Americans from the Un-
americans based on whether they were "for or against
Tehran." Consider also the time frame that Trumbo still
defends. In postwar writings, he constructs a historical
dividing line for when freedom existed and when it became a
perishable commodity: the World War Two era�the era of
the Troskyite repression, Japanese-American relocation, the
banning of Johnny Got his Gun. But it was not an era of
repression for the political faction Trumbo represented. His
Hollywood Comrade John Howard Lawson was on the board
of the Democratic Party committee. Trumbo himself wrote
speeches for Henry Wallace and United Nations
Representative Edward Stettiunius. But by Trumbo�s
timetable this period of domestic freedom ends oddly enough
when communist influence wanes: after 1945. Clearly
Trumbo has a different definition of freedom and repression
than those who see freedom as a commodity for all or none.
But after all was not everyone in the World War II period
forgetful of civil liberties? Had not political pundits, non-
communist as well as communist, put civil liberties on the
backburner in the interests of prosecuting the war? Hardly.
Dwight MacDonald denounced the relocation of the
Japanese, the government crackdown on Troskyites, the
martial passion of George Patton, the atmosphere of
righteous violence, Hiroshima�all matters Trumbo was silent
about during World War II as was the American Communist
Party. George Orwell�s hostility toward communists did not
conflict with his commitment to civil liberties during wartime.
In 1943, he denounced the government�s banning of the
Daily Worker, the newspaper of a party quite critical of him.
At the same time, he avoided patriotic blinders when he
refused the Duchess of Atholl�s offer to join an anti-
totalitarian organization because it said nothing about British
imperialism. Why did these men keep their commitment to
civil liberties intact? How were they able to withstand the
atmosphere of the period and Trumbo was not? The answer
lies in all three men�s ideological resume. MacDonald and
Orwell did not belong to a political faction that demanded
ideological correctness rather than commitment to freedom;
Trumbo did.
Orwell and MacDonald�s refusal to support any party line
gave them a mental freedom to criticize any country,
including their own. Both men criticized Stalin and Hitler, but
also Roosevelt and Churchill. But Trumbo trained his sights
on one enemy, the "fascists," which was anyone who
opposed Stalin. His prism was the Grand Alliance and
remained so even in the postwar period. In a postwar novel
about Nazi Germany, Trumbo constructed a possibly self-
revealing perspective on German history. For once, his
subconscious might have slipped past his ideological
defense mechanisms.
He argued that Germany�s celebration of maleness acted as
a shield to the penetrating civil libertarian ideas of the
Enlightenment. Based on our awareness of Trumbo, he may
have been describing himself and his Stalinist mindset. In a
sense, he was this "Germany." His mental allegiance to
wartime Stalinism acted as a shield through which no blanket
support of civil liberties could pass and remained impervious
even after he left the Party. He simply could not justify civil
liberties for his political enemies because he still saw them
through a Stalinist lens. Pauline Kael has written that
screenwriting has never recovered from hyper-patriotic
Stalinism. This comment should be extended to Trumbo�s
view of civil liberties. He never recovered from his hyper-
patriotic Stalinism, never embraced freedom for all even
when he himself experienced government repression. Civil
liberties were for him and his political compatriots alone since
his "enemies" were fascists and hence not worthy of these
protections ("We Defend the Bill of Rights for those people
who use the Bill of Rights," Party member Robert Minor,
1942). That is why he could write about fifth amendments,
Anglo-Saxon concepts, and parliamentary democracy and
yet not see that they were for everyone because he wrote
about these matters from a Stalinist cocoon. This cocoon
limited his capacity for ideological growth, for rethinking
previous positions. Trumbo exhibited (in print anyway) none
of the guilt feelings that other Party members such as Paul
Jarrico did about the war period: "yes, we were patriotic. We
were so fucking patriotic we said nothing about the
Trotskyites being tried under the Smith Act, the Japanese
being relocated." Alvah Bessie, one of the Hollywood Ten
and considered by many in the Party to be one of the most
hardline of Stalinists, now regrets the behavior of the Party
during wartime. Another wartime Party member, Steve
Nelson, faults the Party for supporting wartime actions and
fervor that would later be turned against them in the Cold
War. Even the most vociferous defender of the Hollywood
Ten, Victor Navasky, finds their behavior during the Smith Act
prosecution of Trotskyites hypocritical. But Trumbo did not
become one of the second thoughters. Although highly
critical of the U.S actions during the 1930s and the Cold War
period, Trumbo�s criticism halts before the 1941-45 period.
There is nothing in his writings criticizing the 1941 Smith Act
prosecution of Trotskyites, the relocation of the Japanese, or
use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For a
culture so weaned on cinematic images as Hollywood, it is
fitting that film should provide the best lesson for Hollywood
pundits regarding the Trumbo image. In the 1943 film
"Keeper of the Flame," a character played by Spencer Tracy
discovers that the deceased idol of American schoolboys
everywhere was, in reality, a fascist sympathizer. In short, the
image did not jibe with the reality. Rather than let the image
remain, Tracy�s character exposed the idol for what he was,
arguing that "truth is more important than propaganda." The
same standard should be applied to Trumbo. If we are to get
beyond Cold War propaganda, we have to move beyond
images that rely on either/or hero/villain simplicities and
examine the possibility that neither Trumbo nor HUAC were
civil libertarians. Both used their own version of Americanism
as a weapon to deny civil liberties to their political
enemies.
.
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