1947 October 28

Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo Defies HUAC, Is Blacklisted

 

Dalton Trumbo, one of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters, defied the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on this day by refusing to discuss his political beliefs and association or to name names of Community Party members he knew.

Along with other members of the famous “Hollywood Ten,” Trumbo refused to answer the question “are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party.”

The HUAC hearings began on October 20, 1947, with a series of “friendly” witnesses. The committee then had a series of confrontations with a group of “unfriendly” witnesses who refused to answer the committee’s questions about their political beliefs and associations, which began on October 27, 1947. This group became known as the Hollywood Ten. All were cited for contempt of Congress, convicted, sentenced to prison, and blacklisted by the film industry. See the announcement of the blacklist on December 3, 1947, and the ACLU criticism of the blacklist on December 14, 1947.

As was the case with Trumbo, the appearance of each member of the Hollywood testimony was followed by testimony of a HUAC investigator who introduced evidence the witness’s political activity, including a photostat of Communist Party membership card.

The Hollywood Ten hearings are probably the most famous even in the entire history of HUAC, and one of the most famous events in the history of the Cold War.

Contempt of Congress indictments became a heavy weapon against alleged subversives during the Cold War. While it had rarely been used before World War II, HUAC issued 21 contempt citations in 1946, 14 in 1947, and 56 in 1950. All other House Committees in those years issued a total of only 6 contempt citations.

After leaving prison, Trumbo continued to work, using pseudonyms. He won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay on March 27, 1957, under the name of “Robert Rich” for the film The Brave One. He was eventually awarded the Oscar on May 2, 1975. Producer/actor Kirk Douglas finally broke the blacklist when he hired Trumbo (secretly until the last minute before the film’s release) to write the screenplay for Spartacus, which opened on October 6, 1960. Director Otto Preminger also challenged the blacklist when he publicly announced he had hired Trumbo to do the script for the film Exodus on January 20, 1960.

HUAC conducted a second set of investigations of Hollywood in 1951 and 1952, with over 30 days of hearings. The 1951-52 investigations were far more damaging than the Hollywood Ten hearings in 1947. Members of the Hollywood Ten lost the court appeals of the contempt citations and were sentenced to prison. No court decisions had established a First Amendment right to refuse to testify before an investigating committee. As a result, many witnesses in 1951 cooperated with HUAC and provided names of people they said were communists. Far more careers were destroyed than in 1947. A number of witnesses left the country to work in England or Europe.

Watch Trumbo’s HUAC testimony: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFR4RIyekis

Learn more about Trumbo’s life and career: Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo, Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical (2015)

Read about the Hollywood Ten and the blacklist: Thomas Doherty, Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist (2018)

Read producer/actor Kirk Douglas’ personal account of Trumbo’s role as screenwriter for Spartacus (1960): Kirk Douglas, I am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist (2012)

See the 2015 film: Trumbo (2015)

Learn more: Michael Freedland, with Barbara Paskin, Witch-Hunt in Hollywood: McCarthyism’s War on Tinseltown (2009)

Watch the film, “Trumbo”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Fb1bL67J8&feature=mv_sr

Learn more about the history of HUAC: http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/huac

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