From Ron Radosh (11/2/2013): Will the New Trumbo Movie Rehash Old Myths?
...he had almost faced trial and expulsion from the Communist party on the grounds that he was guilty of “white chauvinism.”
That little-known episode showed how even a devout Red like Trumbo was not safe from the party’s political correctness. Members were regularly expelled for using terms such as “whitewash” or “black sheep.” Party leaders used the charge to settle scores, to climb up the ladder of leadership, and to get potential opponents out of the way. Trumbo’s problem was that he wrote a script in 1952 about the case of a woman named Jean Field, a white woman who was a devout believer in Kim Il Sung and North Korea’s Communist state, and who was in danger of losing custody of her children to her ex-husband. One of the charges that her ex levied against her was that she let her own children play with black youngsters their own age.
Field read Trumbo’s script and hit the ceiling. Accusing him of “RANK [white] CHAUVINISM,” she singled out a sentence in which he described a black youngster as “clean and dressed in his Sunday best.” Field charged, and the party comrades agreed, that the implication was that the black child was “clean on only special occasions,” and hence the description was racist to the core. In fact, Trumbo replied, he had written “her son is in his best clothes,” and she had made up words he had not used. “Would it have pleased you,” he wrote to her, “if I had written ‘dirty and dressed in everyday clothes?’” To the party, he added that black children “get quite as dirty as your children,” and on special occasions, their parents “have just as much pride in their children as you do in yours.”
Traumatized by this episode, Trumbo suddenly understood what had caused so many party members to defect and even to inform and testify before HUAC. The CP, he told one screenwriter comrade, threw “a bucket of filth over me.”
Soon he acknowledged that he and his fellow members of the Hollywood Ten did not “perform historic deeds,” that in fact they took part in a circus orchestrated by Communist-party lawyers, all “to save [ourselves] from punishment.” Moreover, he even felt that his fellow Red screenwriters failed to get work not because they were Reds, but because they were “mediocrities,” all of whom failed to show “competence, ability [and] craftsmanship.”
