Trumbo-tron

Ron Radosh in the Weekly Standard on Trumbo: The Movie, the new crockumentary about blacklisted "Hollywood Ten" writer Dalton Trumbo:

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that Johnny, touted by the Communists during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and serialized in their newspaper, was withdrawn from circulation by Trumbo when Germany invaded the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! . . .

Sublime. Ed Driscoll's latest Silicon Graffitti is on the same subject:



Devoted Chutchitarians will recall that Trumbo attended the University of Colorado; the big fountain on campus (BFOC) is named for him.

(via Brothers Judd, who also link to Andrew Breitbart's piece yesterday on Republicans in Hollywood, "Mr Spielberg, tear down this wall.")