On Ceplair and Trumbo's Dalton Trumbo and Doherty's Show Trial

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, two political ideologies, once thought extinct in the United States, have proven themselves to have just been dormant. On one hand, as reported in the Washington Post, recent Pew and Harvard University polls have found young Americans (between eighteen and twenty-nine years old) to be more receptive to the political ideal of socialism than older generations, the latter of whom were certainly discouraged by what scholars call the "containment ideology" of the Cold War.¹ On the other hand, neofascist ideology and its constituent planks of antisemitism, racism, and sexism, have recently asserted themselves in U.S. public life in a manner unfamiliar since the darkest days of Jim Crow or the anti-immigrant 1920s. In other words, since the postcommunist thaw, at least in the United States, liberal capitalist ideology has not been as triumphant as postmodernists predicted in the early 1990s.

In this context, the arrival of two recent books on the Cold War atmosphere of dissent and reaction are timely. The first is a lengthy biography of blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, titled Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical, which was written by Trumbo's son Christopher and film historian Larry Ceplair. (Ceplair has written extensively on the blacklist and Hollywood Marxism elsewhere.) The other is a shorter and in many ways brisker account of the congressional hearings that led to the founding of the blacklist, Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist, by Thomas Doherty. Despite their many differences, these books remind readers of the extraordinary measures taken by US politicians in the Cold War to render "socialism" (democratic and otherwise) a dirty word, and they elucidate the important role that Hollywood (as metonymy for US culture industry in general) played in this ideological process, a process that is probably misunderstood or overlooked by the third of young Americans who now say they are supportive of socialist values, not to mention their neofascist peers.

Ceplair and Trumbo's biography of Dalton Trumbo, part of the University Press of Kentucky's Screen Classics series, is as exhaustive an account of the great screenwriter's life as one might imagine reading. Over 700 pages, it is the longest book in the Screen Classics series, twice the length of many other entries, including texts on subjects whose work film fans would probably consider more significant, such as Jack Nicholson or Alfred Hitchcock. Nevertheless, the book is compelling reading and makes a strong case, implicitly, for more academic attention on screenwriters as part of cinematic history and analysis. Indeed, the contributions of a figure like Trumbo and many other screenwriters were largely written out of history, in part because of their very political persecution, a result of Hollywood's complicity with right-wing reactionaries in Washington and elsewhere to stifle dissent during the Cold War era, not to mention the latter's antisemitism, a recurring theme in both texts discussed here.

Trumbo's co-written biography narrates all phases of the subject's life, from his birth in Colorado in 1905 and sometimes tempestuous childhood and young adulthood in Colorado Springs and Los Angeles, to his career as a novelist and screenwriter, to his death from a heart attack, after a bout with cancer, in 1976. Unsurprisingly, the book focuses most on Trumbo's political activism, which began in the 1930s and infamously resulted in his being held in contempt of the Congress in 1947, after his refusal—with ten other Hollywood figures, mostly writers and mostly Jewish—to testify before a pre–Joseph McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee about their membership in the Communist Party. As is the case in the...