The Communists among us

Looking for one thing, finding another.

Before mentioning Progressive/Liberal tries at eliminating the unpretty from history, I wanted to use Darkness at Noon as a reference point. To make sure I remembered right, I searched the title and discovered the book, although influential and successful, was never made into a movie partly because of Dalton Trumbo. A screenwriter, Trumbo is often mentioned as a Hollywood blacklist victim. But: “In The Worker, Dalton Trumbo openly bragged that the following works had not reached the screen: Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar; Victor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom; and Bernard Clare by James T. Farrell, also author of Studs Lonigan and vilified by party enforcer Mike Gold as ‘a vicious, voluble Trotskyite.’"

http://reason.com/archives/2000/06/01/hollywoods-missing-movies

Trumbo’s anti- or pro-Communism is not the point here; rather, the first HUAC investigations. “The first head of what eventually became the House Committee on Un-American Activities was New York Democrat Samuel Dickstein. As the recently declassified ‘Venona’ documents (decrypts of Soviet cables) reveal, Dickstein moonlighted for Soviet intelligence--not out of ideology but for money. Initially concerned with pro-fascist groups in the late 1930s, the committee after the war was dominated by right-wing Republicans, though its most loathsome figure was Mississippi Democrat John Rankin, a sulfuric anti-Semite.” (Same link.)

But Dickstein might suffer the indignity of revised history.

“Still, only within the last 18 months has an effort begun to remove Dickstein’s name from the handful of street signs that bear it—a laborious bureaucratic process led by a community organization that has pledged ‘to right an historic wrong.’”

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/samuel-dickstein-congressman-russian-spy-111641.html#ixzz3ihjmRPMI

History is not pretty; never was, never will be. But eventually, it might be found truthful.