Beginning at 8 p.m. tonight readers can see Turner Classic movies host Robert Osborne glorify the Hollywood Ten—assuming he is consistent with his statements during his four previous programs devoted to this subject.
The main point to remember is that most of the Ten were not only members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), but Stalinists. See the details in this article by University of Maryland historian Art Eckstein and in Ronald Radosh’s recent New York Sun article.
An example of the lamentable state of American journalism and universities is the glorification of the Stalinist Dalton Trumbo (also a hero of Robert Osborne’s) by the University of Colorado Journalism School, as explained by Eckstein.
The Dalton Trumbo Fountain, we learn from the official description of the University of Colorado School of Journalism, “is named in honor of Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten … screenwriters and directors who were blacklisted and driven from their livelihoods for refusing to testify before the House of Un-American Activities Committee” (HUAC).
This is the official University of Colorado description of Trumbo—and no doubt the only things that most undergraduates, or even graduate students, at Colorado know about him. As such, the description is a lie, especially given Trumbo’s real attitude towards freedom of speech during the most famous period of his life.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, he was a secret member of the CPUSA, which was a secret revolutionary organization loyal to the Soviet Union Communists (who, unlike witches, really did exist). Trumbo was a Stalinist, faithfully following every twist and turn in the Party line. And he was a person who participated in the Party’s traditional suppression of free expression.
For instance, Trumbo was part of the Party’s inquisition against the screenwriter Albert Maltz in 1946. Maltz had published a statement that artists should be free to say what they feel, and that literature should be judged by its human and humane quality, not the politics of its author. Trumbo and his fellow Communists browbeat Maltz for publishing this heresy, until Maltz finally issued a humiliating public recantation. Maltz, who also later was brought before HUAC (and went to jail for refusing to testify), told Gerda Lerner that his appearance before HUAC in 1947 was nothing compared to the psychologically destructive trauma of his criticism/self-criticism sessions before the Communist Party in 1946.
Trumbo was also part of the Communist Party investigation of the director Robert Rossen in 1949 over Rossen’s film, “All the King’s Men.” Party Headquarters in New York thought that the film was too much an attack on one-man rule—i.e., on Stalin. The confrontation with his Hollywood inquisitors over the nature of his art drove Rossen right out of the CPUSA (“Take the Party and shove it!”). The inquisitors consisted mostly of the Hollywood Ten themselves—the very men who are now officially depicted at the University of Colorado and on Turner Classic Movies as sainted martyrs and defenders of freedom of speech.
If readers wish to make known their views to Time Warner’s falsification of history, details are provided at the end of my previous article. Readers also can contact the general manager of TCM in Atlanta.