Culture - Page 4

One of the oldest sayings is that there are “no atheists in foxholes.” But for those soldiers either wounded or hit with the body parts of their exploding friends, the more apt expressions were caught by Paul Fussell, forty-percent disabled World War II vet and the most articulate historian of war. Before combat, Fussell catches

Robert Benchley, humorist and member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, once said of writing for the New Yorker in the 1920s, “you could write anything you liked, as long as you did it in evening clothes.” Benchley, no radical, was likely referring to the magazine’s toleration of him skewering everything and anything with his

Asked before his death about his proudest achievement, liberal actor Paul Newman stated, “making Nixon’s enemies’ list.” And that is a view shared by many 70s-era liberals (their counterparts today are probably hoping that Trump keeps such a list and that they will soon be on it). But to my mind, the more dangerous list,

When I was a graduate student, my mentor of sorts, John Patrick Diggins, told me of an incident he had with blacklisted screenwriter Lester Cole, who along with nine others, testified before Congress 70 years ago, in 1947. Both were watching the Watergate hearings, when Cole exploded to Diggins, “See, it has to be done

Liberals today smirk at American Cold War culture of the late 40s to early 60s with their typical moral vanity. Unable to avoid the failures and horrors of communism, they nevertheless try to salvage 1960s’ era views of American culture as hysterically misinformed about a superpower that had missiles pointing at the U.S. But upon

“I fear I am writing pornography.” So said former Communist and blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo about his on-again off-again attempt to address the Holocaust through the first-person narration of a concentration camp officer. When Auschwitz was liberated (ironically by the Red Army, which would soon institute a pogrom against Jews), a variety of writers tried

Asked once toward the end of his life about what he was proudest of, liberal activist and actor Paul Newman cited his appearance on Nixon’s “enemies list.” The flip side to this occurred with conservative actor John Wayne making it onto Stalin’s enemies list, with much more lethal consequences than anything Nixon had at his

One of the charges lodged at Hollywood communists who voluntarily revealed their politics to Congress during the blacklist period was that said volunteers did it to avoid jail or get back on the studio payroll, or both. Director Edward Dymytrk has always been hard for them to spin. Originally one of the Hollywood Ten, the

Toward the end of his life, liberal actor Orson Welles reported being told by Nikita Khrushchev on a Hollywood visit by the Soviet premiere that Stalin had once targeted conservative actor John Wayne for liquidation. Although not reaching this height and honor on Stalin’s “enemies’ list,” conservative matinee idol Robert Taylor was able to have

Upon receiving the manuscript of what would be George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, publisher Frederic Warburg considered the novel the most “depressing” and “pessimistic” thing he ever read. Many Orwell scholars, sharing this view, attributed the novel’s bleakness to Orwell dying by inches during the composition of the novel. But despite the novel’s depiction of a

When Hollywood Communists Adrian Scott, a producer, and Edward Dmytryk sought material that was both entertaining and capable of making their anti-capitalist points, they searched no further than noir writer Raymond Chandler. Chandler’s hyper-cynical portrayal of a murdering, drug-taking upper class, corrupt brutal cops and all of the above’s business relationship with LA’s criminal element

Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell were clearly polar opposites. Hemingway had much more plush circumstances owing to a rich wife; Orwell by turns was subsisting with his wife on an almost all-potato diet. But ideologically Hemingway claimed Orwell on the basis of the latter’s attack on Stalinist duplicity in Spain. But the history of both

To anti-communists, he was the leader and epitome of the well-fed Hollywood communists. Among his comrades behind closed doors, he was regarded as a “sectarian son of a bitch,” who was, outside of Stalin, the cause of defections. For the California Democratic Party during World War II, and much to their later embarrassment, he was

During the height of the violent protests by the anti-war movement in the late 60s, a cartoon circulated that reflected the shock parents experienced at their long-haired, profanity-spewing communist-flag waving children. In an attempt to soothe said parents the cartoon had one wife telling her husband, “Don’t worry about it, honey. Why, even Max Eastman

When mentioned by female journalists today, Martha Gellhorn is cited as a pioneer by breaking the bounds of females reporting in combat conditions. But Gellhorn is also a pioneer in another area; that of the mainstream media. As with today’s leftist-dominated news media, Gellhorn threw objectivity to the wind (although, to her credit, she was

In his lifetime, journalist Dwight MacDonald was regarded by his fellow New York intellectual crowd as an ambulance-chasing ideologue. From Macy’s employee to Trotskyite to liberal anti-communist to anarchist to born-again New Leftist, MacDonald gave the appearance of being intellectually promiscuous. The reality, though, is that MacDonald was the best kind of journalist: intellectually rigorous,

In 1947, actor Humphrey Bogart, who had just signed with Warner Brothers the most lucrative contract in the history of motion pictures, awoke to see his picture on the front page of the Daily Worker praising him as a fighter for the Communist Party. An FDR liberal, Bogart had as little sympathy for communism, he

When African-American writer and communist Richard Wright was physically expelled by his comrades during a May Day parade in 1937, he concluded that he “would always be for them, but they would not be for him.” He quietly left the Party but would not go public with his departure until 1944. What earned Wright the

Because of his role in outing Soviet spy Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers’ other career, not that of paid witness he would become, has been overshadowed. For Chambers was a journalist par excellence. He had the distinction of having written for the New Masses, Time, and National Review. At the time of his testimony, he was