Talk:Dalton Trumbo

Personal life
Can anyone suggest works I might study Trumbo's homelife, with his wife Cleo and children? I remember seeing photos and films of the red trials, and Cleo made quite an impression on Congress. I think that would be worthy of further insight. Help? Thanks and happy new year. Chris 02:38, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
 * found http://www.mcpld.org/trumbo/WebPages/photogallery.htm Chris (talk) 07:49, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I removed "It is not widely known, but Trumbo liked to do most of his writing in the bathtub." b/c it had no citation. 158.130.14.165 15:16, 10 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Is this citation good enough?Nbauman 21:08, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

"was criticized"
"However, Trumbo always maintained that those who testified under pressure from HUAC and the studios were equally victims of the Red Scare, an opinion for which he was criticized.[citation needed]" I concur with the need for a citation. The later part of the sentence is passive. "Was criticized" begs the question by whom ?--David Tornheim (talk) 22:23, 11 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I thank you for your concurrence, but urge you to look up Begging the question (despite the common error, it don't mean what you seem to think it does) :-). LotLE × talk  00:13, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Hear hear. So tired of people saying ‘That begs the question…’ when they mean ‘That raises the question…’

‘Begging the question’ means exactly the reverse of raising it.59.102.126.169 (talk) 07:49, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

"Involvement with communism"
I removed a sentence citing Trumbo bragging that in the Daily Worker that he and other "communists" had squashed Darkness at Noon as well as other anti-communist projects. My objection is not the accuracy of the statement, but, in the context of citing his years of membership in the Communist Party, that it picks out one highly specific detail that distorts the overall picture. Trumbo, as well as many others involved with the CP in the mid-40's did a wide variety of things, many of which would be considered quite patriotic today, particularly with regard to freedom of speech. By picking this one claim by Trumbo - which may well be no more than braggadocio - makes it sound as though the House Un-American Activities Committee was acting in good faith in suspecting writers involved with the CP of undermining US democracy. This is, to say the least, a highly debatable claim, and therefore opens a major can of worms in an otherwise reasonably balanced article. - MacRutchik 17:51, 30 May 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by DrJonMack (talk • contribs)


 * Someone put it back. I tried to add context by noting that it was written about recently.Parkwells (talk) 15:48, 15 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I tried to dig up the original cite for the claim that Trumbo bragged about killing Darkness At Noon in the Worker (I believe it, but I wanted to see for myself). No luck, although it appears to be from an edition of the Worker from 1946, I think from sometime in April. The Worker isn't publicly archived for that period though. Dingsuntil (talk) 10:03, 21 February 2015 (UTC)


 * More and more issues of the Daily Worker are going online; if Trumbo wrote for it (under his own name), then eventually we should see his name surface online. --Aboudaqn (talk) 22:28, 13 August 2016 (UTC)


 * I've also tried to follow this citation chain. Some books reproduce a longer quotation from the Daily Worker piece, which mention's Koestler's The Yogi and the Commissar, but not Darkness at Noon: "We have produced a few fine films in Hollywood, a great many of which were vulgar and opportunistic and a few downright vicious. If you tell me Hollywood, in contrast with the novel and the theater, has produced nothing so provocative or so progressive as Freedom Road or Deep Are the Roots, I will grant you the point, but I may also add that  neither has Hollywood produced anything so untrue or so reactionary as The Yogi and the Commissar, Out of the Night, Report on the  Russians, There Shall Be No Night, or Adventures of a Young Man.  Nor does Hollywood's forthcoming schedule include such tempting items as James T. Farrell's Bernard Clare, Victor A. Kravchenko's  I Chose Freedom, or the so-called biography of Stalin by Leon Trotsky." Valkotukka (talk) 18:06, 9 August 2017 (UTC)

November 2015

 * Membership in the Communist Party was not illegal in the United States. In the 1930s, Communists were among the groups opposed to the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Europe. This was perhaps most notable in the Spanish Civil War which became a proxy war: fascist Germany and Italy supported the Nationalists against both communists aligned to Stalin as well as international socialist groups not affiliated with Moscow who backed the Republicans.


 * The enmity between fascism and communism came to a sudden stop when the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact established a non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. As Hitler invaded Poland to start World War II, Britain and France declared war on Germany, while Stalin split up Poland with Hitler. Moscow-backed communist parties told American communists to remain neutral, and not to urge the United States involvement in the widening war on the side of the United Kingdom.[17] This split American communists between those who held to the long-time antagonism against fascism who still desired to stop Hitler, and those who agreed with the isolationist stance. Trumbo was an isolationist; he wrote a novel The Remarkable Andrew, in which, in one scene, the ghost of Andrew Jackson appears in order to caution the United States not to get involved in the war. In a review of the book, Time Magazine wise-cracked "General Jackson's opinions need surprise no one who has observed George Washington and Abraham Lincoln zealously following the Communist Party Line in recent years."[18]

-- I removed the sentences about communism not being illegal, and communism combatting fascism. 1. Its not sourced, 2. its undue, 3. its potentially coatracking. Perhaps a simple solution would be a brief sentence in that first paragraph reading roughly along the lines of "Trumbo began his affiliation with communism in the 30's and joined the party in the 40's, which was never illegal." But pointing out that communism was opposed to fascism appears to alter the page into an apology for communism and U.S. communist sympathizers. DaltonCastle (talk) 18:24, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi, DaltonCastle. I reverted the bold edit per WP:BRD, but I've copied the article content (placed above) under consideration. You'll note that I've included the subsequent content about the 'communism vs fascism' that you let remain in the article. That content (reproduced above in green text) all appears to be about the same thing, so I am confused as to why some was removed while some was retained. I also note that there are indeed source citations in that content (but I haven't yet verified that everything above is accurately conveyed by the present sources - I'll get to that).
 * As for "an apology for communism", I'm not seeing it in the above text. Could you be clearer on that? Regards, Xenophrenic (talk) 18:50, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Hello! Thanks for responding here. I had not noticed the above green text before, but I would also question its inclusion. This article is not about the enmity between communism and fascism, it is about Trumbo. And while there should be some mention of this due to his party affiliations, it should not be nearly this much. That second paragraph works because it mentions how this directly influenced Trumbo's work. But in the first paragraph, there is no connection to Trumbo so its just a statement of unrelated history. DaltonCastle (talk) 19:41, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Oops, yes I had seen that text before, I just thought that was a section further down the page since it appeared to start a different way. My mistake. DaltonCastle (talk) 19:42, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I think that text, which is sourced only to a 1941 Time magazine book review and a book which doesn't even mention Trumbo, is a mess. I see there is already a tag on that section. I'm going to dig up some better sources and give that section a bit of a rewrite later this evening. Maybe the problems we've noted above can be cleared up at the same time. Xenophrenic (talk) 16:05, 17 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Ok great! Feel free to tag me to review or help at all if I dont already take notice. DaltonCastle (talk) 17:58, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

The thing about communists lumps too many things together, but it suited them at the time. There are

1.'communists' with humanitarian ideas like health care, education, and housing for all; then there are

2. 'communists' who are peaceniks, like avoid wars at all cost, then there are

3. 'communists' who want all business in government ownership; and then there are

4. 'communists' who want the whole country and the economy directed by a 5-year-plan as happened in the Soviet Union.

It becomes quite clear in the book "Lynn, Kenneth S. (1997). Charlie Chaplin and His Times. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80851-X.".Bold text Chaplin was, of course, long accused of being a communist but in his business dealings he had been as capitalist as they come. Then came his movie 'Monsieur Verdoux' and he had quite a brawl with the censorship office. He had submitted the script before shooting but his changes did not go far enough for them. They accused him that 'Monsieur Verdoux' is a veiled criticism of wars. Monsieur is a mass murderer and there are sentences in there that can be read as accusing warfare of the same mass murder as Verdoux has committed, i.e. the lack of rationale to make a song and dance about a mass murderer but not about the many more deaths from wars. I hope this will help to understand these times. Ally Hauptmann-Gurski 58.174.69.217 (talk) 04:21, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Deleted material on Steve Martin
The material about Martin's learning about politics and art because of his brief involvement with Dalton's daughter is more appropriate for his article rather than this one. His education has too much space here.Parkwells (talk) 15:48, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Early career
I have added some information from the obituaries, especially the Washington Post (ref name=well) on his early adult life. Regarding Vogue magazine:
 * (quote) Trumbo got his professional start working for Vogue magazine.

Well says that he worked at the bakery until after "Vanity Fair, The Forum and other magazines began publishing his stories and essays. In 1934 he became managing editor of the Hollywood Spectator and then joined Warner Brothers" (see the article). --P64 (talk) 23:47, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

Sympathizer?
The entire "Involvement" section has an apologetic tone to it. "Membership in the Communist Party was not illegal in the United States." Who said it was? Orthotox (talk) 17:54, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
 * This is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed. Sorry for not noticing this earlier. This is what we are discussing in the above section "November 2015". DaltonCastle (talk) 18:00, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

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Sculpture in Grand Junction
I learned in an email today that there is a sculpture of Dalton Trumbo in downtown Grand Junction, Colorado. Since I don't know how to document things to Wikipedia standards, I am requesting that someone find documentation about this and add it to the "Legacy" section. The email I received was from Colorado Public Radio (cpr.org). ---Dagme (talk) 01:10, 18 March 2020 (UTC)