The Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters and directors who briefly went to prison in 1950 for contempt of Congress when they refused to answer questions about Communist party affiliations from the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), have, in the past few decades, become cultural heroes. The movie industry, consumed by guilt for its blacklisting of uncooperative Communists and ex-Communists, has produced a slew of apologias. Blacklistees have received honors and awards and been hailed for their courage and unflinching dedication to free speech, while cooperative witnesses, most notably the late director Elia Kazan, have been excoriated for their supposed moral lapses in truthfully testifying about communism in Hollywood.
The most interesting and controversial member of the Hollywood Ten was screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976). The highest-paid writer in Hollywood when he ran afoul of HUAC, Trumbo has been widely credited with breaking the blacklist in 1960, when he received screen credits for writing both Spartacus and Exo dus. With his acerbic wit, pugnacious personality, and withering insults, he managed to enrage, at different times, not only Hollywood conservatives but his own comrades as well.
This massive new biography, begun by Trumbo’s son and completed, after his death, by historian Larry Ceplair (coauthor of an earlier history of communism in Hollywood), is, at turns, fascinating, enlightening, and contradictory. While it succeeds in portraying a man who was hardly a Stalinist automaton, it does suggest, against the authors’ intentions, a talented screenwriter who was a political idiot.
Of Swiss and Scottish ancestry, Dalton Trumbo was born in 1905 and grew up in Grand Junction, Colorado, in a Christian Scientist household. He dropped out of college after one year, when his family’s financial situation deteriorated, and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked in a bakery on the night shift for eight years, supporting his mother and two younger sisters. Obsessed with making a career and money as a writer, he suffered rejection after rejection before latching onto a part-time job writing movie reviews. His breakthrough came in 1934, when he was hired as a reader at Warner Brothers, published a novel, and had several short stories in the Saturday Evening Post. Ambitious and self-promoting, he soon got a screenwriting contract and became active in the fledgling Screen Writers Guild. His ascent was rapid: In 1938, he received eight screen credits, wrote a play that was briefly staged in New York, wrote his only successful novel, Johnny Got His Gun, and got married.
Although hailed as a powerful antiwar statement, Johnny was morally simplistic and politically incoherent. Even Trumbo wound up repudiating its message before readopting it when it suited his politics. The main character, a horribly disfigured World War I soldier, delivers an affecting but unrealistic message: If little people refuse to fight, wars will not occur. Trumbo later denied that he was a pacifist, telling the FBI in 1944 that he only opposed “jingoistic wars” and that the current conflict was a “people’s war.” By the time he directed a film version of Johnny in 1970, it was intended as an attack on American involvement in Vietnam.
When Trumbo wrote the novel, he was not yet a Communist; at the time, the party opposed pacifism. But when it was published, just after the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in September 1939, it was serialized in the Daily Worker and hailed for its antiwar stance. Trumbo remained opposed to World War II, he later told the FBI, until June 22, 1941, the day Germany attacked the Soviet Union (although he also later insisted that he did not support American involvement until Pearl Harbor). Prior to the Nazi German invasion of Soviet Russia, he had argued that the conflict was not between “evil and righteousness” and that there was little to choose from between Churchill’s England and Hitler’s Germany. In fact, he argued, the blood of a German soldier was just as precious as that of an Englishman or a Pole.
Those disfigured in a people’s war were, presumably, part of the price to be paid for defeating tyranny, while those Jews turned over to Hitler in 1939 were a small price to pay for avoiding battlefield casualties. Trumbo’s moral compass was clearly revealed in a 1943 meeting with the FBI, when he offered to provide agents with information about pacifists and other war opponents who had written him admiringly about Johnny and discussed ways to spread its message more widely. When the interests of the Soviet Union were at stake, Trumbo believed that informing on political dissidents was a necessity.
Ceplair claims that Trumbo did not formally become a Communist until 1943, joining because several of his close friends—Hugo Butler, Michael Wilson, Ring Lardner Jr., and Ian Hunter—were members, not because of the party’s dogma. By Ceplair’s account, Trumbo was not a very dependable member, avoiding meetings and accepting party diktats but hardly being enthusiastic about them. Trumbo, Ceplair insists, was a Communist who did not believe “all the dogma and every pronouncement of the organization.” He was never “an apparatchik, an automaton, or a robotic follower of dogma,” nor was he even much interested in the Soviet Union.
But Ceplair provides numerous examples of a man faithfully toeing the party line. Trumbo went along with Earl Browder’s expulsion as president of the American Communist party in 1945 with not a murmur of protest. In fact, he opined that in a contest between Lenin and Browder, he preferred to believe that “Lenin was right.” When his friend (and later Hollywood Ten comrade) Albert Maltz faced party demands that he repudiate an article in which he had argued for more autonomy for artists in the face of the party’s ideological strictures, Trumbo avoided taking a public position but privately wrote critically about Maltz. After Maltz recanted, Trumbo gave a speech in which he insisted that screenwriters had to produce progressive works. He wrote proudly that Hollywood had not “produced anything so untrue and reactionary” as the publishing industry, which had brought out volumes by Arthur Koestler, Jan Valtin, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, and Leon Trotsky, most of whom had denounced the Soviet Union and not “free speech.” He regularly slandered his anti-Communist opponents in the Screen Writers Guild as “fascists”—and with far less justification than their claims that Trumbo was a Communist. For good measure, this heroic champion of free speech, while editor of the Screen Writers Guild magazine, kept anti-Communist articles from appearing.
In his opening statement to HUAC, Trumbo compared the political atmosphere in Washington to Berlin in 1933. Throughout the early Cold War, he blamed the United States for fostering repression around the world, for ignoring Eastern European purge trials, for Soviet anti-Semitism, and for military aggression, mindlessly repeating the mantra that America alone impeded the “free interchange of ideas.” Neither the rhetoric nor the tactics of the Hollywood Ten endeared them to liberals whom they expected to support their right to belong (secretly) to an organization that denounced liberals as fascists. Basing their refusal to testify on the First Amendment instead of the Fifth Amendment, they were rebuffed by the Supreme Court, went to jail for contempt of Congress, and were blacklisted by the studios.
Dalton Trumbo made a very comfortable living even when he was blacklisted. A fast and compulsive writer, he churned out scripts at a prodigious rate while formally barred from Hollywood between 1954 and 1960, either writing or consulting on 60 screenplays, using more than a dozen pseudonyms and “fronts.” Independent Hollywood producers willingly paid cut-rate prices to get his talents. Most of his work was formulaic, but he also wrote Roman Holiday (1953), The Sandpiper (1965), and The Brave One (1956), for which “Robert Rich” received a screenwriting Oscar in 1957. One unwitting producer tried to hire Rich and threatened to go to another screenwriter—yet another Trumbo front—if his price was too high! By the end of the decade the blacklist was crumbling, and Trumbo received credit under his own name for Spartacus and Exodus.
Well-paid as he was, particularly after the blacklist ended, Trumbo was in constant financial trouble, spending everything he earned and then complaining that he had to accept more hack jobs instead of devoting himself to novels. A 26-month sojourn in Mexico with several of his fellow blacklistees after his release from prison contributed to his financial woes. A financially disastrous production of Johnny Got His Gun—designed to show that “all wars [including World War II] are irrational”—ruined him: His house went into foreclosure, he had to pawn his wife’s jewelry, his retirement accounts were drained, and he was pursued by the IRS.
Despite his success as a screenwriter, Trumbo despised what he did and yearned to write novels instead. About screenplays, he wrote his wife: “[B]asically, I hate them.” Appealing to Nelson Algren to serve as a front while he was blacklisted, Trumbo told Algren that screenplays involved “a combination of prose and construction and sentimentality and vulgarity that appalls even me, who am used to it. . . . Hollywood is a vast whorehouse.”
Trumbo had quietly left the Communist party around 1947-48, but he remained committed to its worldview and was critical of those who publicized their defection. He rejoined the party in 1956, in solidarity with the California Communists convicted under the Smith Act, but resigned again after a few months. Most of his complaints about the party, even those uttered publicly, were procedural, not substantive: He criticized its secrecy, its tedious meetings, and its lack of loyalty to the Hollywood Ten. Even the experience of being accused of chauvinism for a politicized script being considered for production by a group of his blacklisted friends—it praised North Korea—could not convince him that the Communist Party USA and its intolerant, narrow-minded minions were poor pillars of support for freedom of speech. He did enrage his old comrade Maltz by proclaiming that he bore no animus for those in Hollywood who had informed; they, too, were victims of HUAC.
Despite resurrecting his screenwriting career after 1960, Trumbo’s politics remained just as nutty as before: He refused to denounce communism, continually attacked anti-communism, called the United States “fundamentally racist,” and dabbled in Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. Before he died in 1976, Trumbo summarized his talents and their limits in a handwritten note that Larry Ceplair found in Trumbo’s archive: “God put me in a position to make a fool of myself, but no one expected me to take such glorious advantage of it.”
Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory, is the author, most recently, of The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History .