Communists were running rampant in Hollywood during the Soviet rule of Joseph Stalin. They sympathized with the Nazis until Hitler turned on Stalin and the effort is still underway to mislead the American people about the depth and goals of the movement.
Later this year, Trumbo will hit theaters. It stars Bryan Cranston, Helen Mirren, John Goodman and Diane Lane. The film tells the story of Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and how his great success in the movies came to a crashing halt after he was identified as a communist. Trumbo is one of the infamous Hollywood Ten, who were outed in testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947. The movie will portray Trumbo as a champion of the first amendment.
Trumbo and his fellow communists in Hollywood’s golden era are the subject of “Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters, Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler” by longtime Human Events editor Allan Ryskind. Ryskind’s father, Morrie, was a longtime Hollywood screenwriter, with more than 50 titles to his credit.. Morrie Ryskind was among those who named Hollywood communists in congressional testimony.
Nearly 70 years later, the conventional wisdom suggests that the communist infiltration of Hollywood in and around World War II was either overblown or insignificant. However, the facts on Trumbo and others found to be communists are quite clear.
“The Screenwriter’s Guild, which my dad had belonged to, the flagship publication, was being edited by Dalton Trumbo, who was a famous communist, no question about it. He later acknowledged his was a communist. He turned the major publication into a communist publication,” said Ryskind.
Even after being exposed, Trumbo was unabashed in his support for communist figures and ideas. Ryskind says Trumbo even told a biographer that he joined the Communist Party in 1943 and should have done it a decade sooner.
“He said he never regretted, never regretted it,” said Ryskind, who says the association was just as obvious with the rest of the Hollywood Ten.
“The Hollywood Ten that Hollywood weeps over, but each and every member of the Hollywood Ten were members of the Communist Party and were loyal to Stalin,” said Ryskind.
And the list didn’t stop there.
“There were lots of communists in Hollywood and I’m talking about hard core communists, people whose allegiance was to the Soviet Union and Joe Stalin. There isn’t any question about it,” he said.
According to Ryskind’s research, even the most left-leaning estimates admit there were over 200 communists in Hollywood during that time.
But one area of great disagreement is over whether communists in Hollywood ever found solidarity with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Defenders of the Hollywood Ten and other communists strongly deny any affinity for Hitler. Ryskind says the attitude toward Hitler was directly related to their appreciation of Stalin.
“They switched sides. They had been anti-Hitler. Suddenly, with the pact, they became pro-Hitler. These communists in Hollywood always like to portray themselves, and Hollywood likes to portray them as anti-fascist. They were on the side of Hitler when he invaded Poland, in the next year when he conquered western Europe and when he was bombing England,” said Ryskind.
“The only reason they changed, they only reason they became anti-Hitler was because Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941,” he said.
These communists were not mere sympathizers. Ryskind says they saw them as actively involved in bringing down the American government and economy.
“When the League of American Writers was formed, their purpose was to use their art as a weapon,” said Ryskind. “The purpose was to destroy the American government as it existed, get rid of the capitalist system and impose a communist system. I’m not making this up. I got this from communist documents.”
Did the communist ideology of Trumbo and other screenwriters influence the content on the silver screen? Ryskind says it absolutely did.
“All these films were being made that were saying how wonderful Joe Stalin was,” he said. “There were all these various films, Song of Russia, Mission to Moscow. You had Action in the North Atlantic. You had Blockade.”
One of the most famous screenwriters of the era was Howard Koch, who wrote the screenplay for Casablanca. But he also wrote Mission to Moscow.
“The fact is Koch was a fellow traveler. You’d call him a communist without a party card. He was married to a communist,” said Ryskind, who says a man who may well have been a Soviet agent was a technical adviser for the film.
“It’s probably the most pro-Moscow, pro-Soviet film ever made. It made Stalin into the wisest statesman on the planet and that everything Stalin did was wonderful. It was so bad that even The Nation magazine, which was pro-Soviet, sid it was a whitewash,” said Ryskind.
As the communists grew in number and influence, patriotic Americans in Hollywood fought back.
“In 1944, my dad and Walt Disney and Sam Wood, who was a famous director, formed the Motion Picture Alliance. The reason they did that was because the commies looked at that time like they had taken over Hollywood. They were embedded in the guilds and the unions,” said Ryskind.
Why were so many Hollywood figures enamored with communism?
“What makes people join ISIS? There was an ideology there that people believed in. They believed that capitalism was terrible, It had to be overthrown and they wanted to actually see it overthrown,” said Ryskind.
It’s not just Trumbo who Hollywood liberals lionize from that era.
“You have John Howard Lawson. He was being memorialized in some fashion in The Majestic. Jim Carrey is in there. They name a wonderful town after John Howard Lawson, who was head of the Communist Party in Hollywood and was the enforcer of the Stalinist line and died a Stalinist,” said Ryskind.
Despite the deep leftist sympathies remaining in Hollywood today, Ryskind does not see as great a threat now as during the Stalin era.
“in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s, these people were agents of a foreign government designed to destroy us. There’s a little bit of difference between that and popping off and saying, ‘I’m a left-winger,'” he said.
