“I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the communist party.” We watched the movie Trumbo this week and the phrase is fresh on my mind.
I was born in the McCarthy era, in 1954. The Korean War had just ended and the Cold War was beginning to heat up. I recall my conservative father commenting at dinner that if Richard Nixon won the American presidency we could end up in another world war (John F. Kennedy won by a narrow margin), and I have vague memories of the Cuban missile crisis. In the 1960s my interest in politics was tweaked, as much by American news than by Canadian issues. In high school the name Dalton Trumbo became familiar because we studied Johnny Got His Gun in English class.
Our studies did not refer to, as best as I can recall, Trumbo’s success as a writer of screenplays or his status as one of the Hollywood Ten, or Billy’s Blacklist. Or that he spent nearly a year in jail for being found in contempt of Congress for his unwillingness to kowtow to HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, which made Senator Joe McCarthy a household name and Trumbo an anathema in the film business.
Trumbo, the movie, is more than just a terrific film featuring the remarkable actor Bryan Cranston (of Breaking Bad fame). It should serve as a cautionary tale in a time that looks more like the 1950s politically than we care to acknowledge. With Donald Trump’s bombastic presidential run focusing on a distrust of foreigners, primarily Mexicans and Muslims, and a promise to build walls along U.S. borders, it would do us well to wonder if history is once again repeating itself.
The Iron Curtain seems like a distant memory, the Berlin Wall having been toppled in the 1980s and Ronald Reagan having been declared winner — game, set and match — over the dreaded communists. But Trump and other Republican candidates are seeming to find traction in the idea of creating American walls, figurative and literal, without instilling a whole lot of fear among a people who should be as tired of living their privileged lives in fear as Canadians showed themselves to be in last year’s federal election.
Dalton Trumbo’s story is fascinating. After having some success with Johnny Got His Gun, a brilliant and disturbing anti-war tale, he went on to become one of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters. He joined the communist party in 1943, believing that isolationism was the answer for the U.S. In 1946, in an article he wrote titled “The Red Menace”, he said that Russians were justified in fearing the expansion of American power.
“If I were a Russian… I would be alarmed, and I would petition my government to take measures at once against what would seem an almost certain blow aimed at my existence. This is how it must appear in Russia today,” he wrote.
Once the blacklist took hold and Trumbo appeared to be out of business, he began writing under pseudonyms, finding producers who were more interested in making money than in Cold War politics. He wrote 30 scripts from his home in Mexico City, where he moved his family after serving his jail sentence. Two of his scripts, for The Brave One and Roman Holiday, would go on to win Academy Awards for writing. He received screen credit for neither at the time.
“There are many angry, greedy people in the world and they seem to be breeding in record numbers,” Trumbo says in his namesake movie.
The angry people who comprised HUAC slowly began to lose their power, if not legitimacy (the committee still existed until 1975, but the angry people now hold the majority in Congress) and Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas refused to hide Trumbo’s name in the 1960 movies Exodus and Spartacus. (I am sure there must be a master’s thesis somewhere that explores the fact that both those movies end in the letters US. If there isn’t, there should be.)
As the Republican lunatics race down a path that could lead to a new cold war (if we’re lucky) or world war (if we aren’t), Trumbo serves an entertaining and informative warning. If only sufficient numbers are listening, we might have some cause for hope.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.
