Lessons from the past we need for today - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Recently, looking for something to read, I pulled an old book off my office bookshelf, a lengthy (650 pages) biography of 1930s and 1940s Academy Award winner Frank Capra, the director of the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and I discovered that the current madness affecting the U.S. is a recurring theme.

 

I’m talking about the McCarthy era when Republicans sought to find Communists under every bed, and especially in Hollywood. Capra always felt insecure because he was actually born in Sicily and immigrated to the U.S. as  a child. During the First World War, he served in the army and in the Second World War he volunteered again, giving up his successful Hollywood career to make training movies.

 

Despite this record, when he volunteered to make films for the U.S. government during the Korean War, he was deemed a security threat. Senator Joseph McCarthy was leading a campaign against supposed Communists in various positions of influence in the early 1950s and because he had made films during World War II in support of the Soviet Union, an ally in that war, Capra was under suspicion of being a Communist. This from a man who had never even voted for President Franklin Roosevelt or his successor Harry Truman, but always voted Republican.

 

All this talk about McCarthyism prompted me to watch Trumbo, the movie about award-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo who was one of the first Hollywood professionals called before Congress to testify. He refused to answer their questions about his past affiliation. He was jailed for contempt of Congress, and spent more than a year in jail, during which he met one of the Senators who had questioned him who was later jailed for defrauding the government to pay family members.

 

Out of jail, Trumbo could not go back to writing scripts (for which he had been making $4,000 a week in the 1940s - when the average annual salary was $2,998).

 

He wrote scripts for which other authors were given credit, including Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn for which Ian McLellan Hunter won the Academy Award in 1953. In 2011, Trumbo was finally recognized for his work, 35 years after his death and nearly 60 years after the award was originally given.

 

To make a living, Trumbo began writing scripts for a producer of dozens of third-rate movies at a greatly reduced rate from what he had previously earned. But the producer needed lots of scripts, and so Trumbo recruited other blacklisted writers to contribute under assumed names. To keep up with demand, he often wrote in the bathtub. His wife and children were involved in delivering scripts.

 

His chief enemy, at least in the movie, was Hedda Hopper, a former failed movie actress who became a syndicated columnist, writing about Hollywood for her 35 million readers in various newspapers. She was vehemently anti-Communist and often suspicious of Trumbo.

 

In 1956, after moving to Mexico City, he was inspired to write about a small boy he had seen at a bull fight. His reputation was solid enough to convince his schlock producer to make this serious movie. The Brave One won the Academy Award in 1956.
The whispered rumours about his doings caused other producers, who needed good scripts, to reach out to him. Actor Kirk Douglas approached him to script Spartacus, chronicling the Third Servile War’s slave revolt against Rome from Howard Fast’s novella. 

 

About the same time, Otto Preminger asked Trumbo to write Exodus about the founding of the State of Israel. Trumbo convinced both that he should be credited for writing the scripts. When the movies appeared, his credit was on the screen, more than a dozen years after he was first jailed. Hedda Hopper did her best to drive audiences away, but the movies were just too interesting. Spartacus won four Academy Awards in 1960 and Exodus was nominated for three and won one. The blacklist was effectively over.

 

I was a young man when the next case of extremism happened when the Watergate Scandal  occurred. In 1972, President Richard  Nixon’s administration officials attempted to cover up their involvement in a nighttime raid on Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, leading to investigations. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post helped uncover the attempt by Nixon to rig the next election for the Republicans. 

 

But Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives were more honest back then as they prepared to impeach Nixon. Before they could, he resigned on Aug. 20, 1974.

 

Wouldn’t it be nice if Republicans were as honest today as they were in the days of Nixon, as Donald Trump seeks to create a dictatorship, leaving himself with ultimate power?