Christian Toto, who appeared yesterday on PJM Political, reviews Trumbo for Pajamas Media, “the new crockumentary”, as the Drunkablog accurately dubs it, on blacklisted “Hollywood Ten” writer Dalton Trumbo, while quoting from Ronald Radosh:
There is a lengthy sequence in which Donald Sutherland reads from Trumbo’s 1939 antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun. Nowhere do we learn that Johnny, touted by the Communists during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and serialized in their newspaper, was withdrawn from circulation by Trumbo when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Literally overnight, the Communist party’s peace campaign ended and was replaced by calls for intervention against Hitler.
Accordingly, Trumbo censored his own book, took the plates from the publisher, and let it go out of print. But the novel, which had gotten good reviews, was still popular, and readers wrote to Trumbo to find out where it could be found. Not satisfied that his book was no longer available, Trumbo–fearing, undoubtedly correctly, that many of those letter-writers were isolationists, and some even pro-fascist–invited the FBI to visit him at home in 1944, and turned the letters over to the agents. He informed on Americans who only wanted to read his own novel! . . .
That’s a topic I also mention in my recent Silicon Graffiti video:
Meanwhile, on his blog, Christian writes that Glenn Beck has come up with a rather novel way to begin to break the new Hollywood blacklist.
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