Dalton Trumbo

James Dalton Trumbo, more commonly known as Dalton Trumbo, was a successful novelist and Hollywood screenwriter. His name garnered further recognition during the late 1940s when Trumbo was blacklisted and became a member of the infamous “Hollywood Ten.”

Trumbo was born in 1905 in Colorado where he and his family resided until he entered college in 1924. While his family moved west to Los Angeles, Trumbo started his first year of college at University of Colorado. In the summer of 1925, Trumbo moved to Los Angeles to be with his family. After Trumbo’s father died the following year, he began to take up small jobs to help provide for his family. He worked at a bakery as a night bread wrapper for nine and a half years while writing short stories and novels, reviewing pictures for motion picture trade magazines, and attending classes at USC for two years. In that time Trumbo wrote eighty-eight short stories and six novels; in 1933 he decided to quit the bakery and pursue a career in writing. He was published by McCall’s, Liberty, The Saturday Evening Post, The Forum, Vanity Fair, and North American Review. He published his first novel, Eclipse in 1934, and just five years later, he published Johnny Got His Gun.

Johnny Got His Gun won one of the early National Book Awards: the Most Original Book of 1939. This anti-war novel is about an American World War I soldier, Joe Bonham, who wakes up in a hospital with locked-in syndrome. He loses his arms, legs, face, and all senses but touch. After unsuccessfully attempting suicide, he communicates with his doctors by moving his head in morse code and asks to be shown to the country. The doctors do not want the country to see the horrors of war. Instead, he is left with locked-in syndrome for the rest of his life. During the entire novel, Joe has flashbacks of his family, girlfriend, and friends back home to show what he had lost during the war. Johnny Got His Gun drew great acclaim and was one of Trumbo’s finest literary accomplishments. Complementing his tremendous success in literature was Trumbo’s equally remarkable success on the silver screen.

In 1934 Trumbo’s motion picture career began and within a few years he had become one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters; his movies received Academy Award nominations and boxoffice magazine awards. His film career came to a standstill in the fall of 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) “sought to establish the influence of communist subversives in the West Coast filmmaking community” (Palmer 57). Along with nine other unfriendly witnesses, Trumbo refused to testify as to whether he was a communist or not in front of the committee. As a result, they were cited for defiance when “a group of film studio executives and producers issued the infamous Waldorf Statement, which declared categorically that the Hollywood Ten - as Trumbo and his associates had come to be known - would no longer find employment in the film industry” (Palmer 57). For not complying with the investigations, Trumbo was jailed in June 1950 for nine months. When released, he found himself blacklisted and disenfranchised in Hollywood (Palmer 57).

In order to continue working during his blacklisted years, Trumbo had to use fronts and pseudonyms to pass his work through production. Although Trumbo was no longer recognized by name as an active player in Hollywood, his works during the years of the blacklist played a major role in its demise. Trumbo’s script for the movie The Brave One won an Academy Award under his pseudonym Richard Rich in 1956. Although Trumbo could not publically accept this award, his triumph helped the action of hiring blacklisted screenwriters under pseudonyms, and “by the mid-1960s, some of the blacklisted screenwriters were back in Hollywood” (Schrecker). Trumbo’s presence and work also played an important part in ending the blacklist when President Kennedy crossed an American Legion picket line to view Spartacus, “[a movie publically credited to have been written by Dalton Trumbo, by its star and executive director Kirk Douglas] thereby lending the credibility of the nation’s highest office to the effort to end the blacklist.” (Schwartz)

Trumbo’s success as both a screenwriter and novelist can be attributed to his dedication to use mostly first-person accounts as a basis for his writing. Just before World War II ended, he and seven other writers departed on June 1945 for an eight-week, 22,000-mile journey that took them to Kwajalein, Guam, Tinian, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Manila, Tawi Tawi, Balikapapan and Okinawa. While on his trip, Trumbo wrote letters about the horrors of war and destruction of cities in the Pacific. He described Manila after its destruction as a city “that has been reduced by gunfire to rubble” and where “babies and families [drank] from the sewers” (Ceplair 151). Because Trumbo was in a military fleet, he experienced not only the ghastly Pacific War, but also saw the lifestyles of the sailors he lived with. A historic document gathered from the UCLA Library Special Collections shows Trumbo subjected to the Line-Crossing Ceremony, a sailor’s rite performed when a vessel passes the equator. The night before the ship crosses its mark, new sailors receive fake subpoenas from a highly regarded crew member titled Neptunus Rex. The last page of the document obtained from UCLA Special Collections is Trumbo’s subpoena. Once the ship is at the equator, new sailors are required to go to Neptunus Rex’s court to answer for their crimes. During a “hearing”, the sailors suffer through many ordeals and public humiliations including: drinking hot sauce with aftershave and eating whole uncooked eggs. The pictures in the document show Trumbo subjected to many of these activities during his Line-Crossing Ceremony. Once the rite is over, the new sailors become part of the brotherhood of veteran sailors. The first page of the document is a proclamation stating Trumbo’s initiation as a seasoned sailor and welcoming him to the brotherhood on the ship. Experiences from both the war in the Pacific and eight weeks in the Navy gave Trumbo enough details to write a long article for Screen Writer describing the servicemen and women he had met, and their feelings about the war (Ceplair 155). Although the documents do not depict the effect of blacklisting on Trumbo’s life, they do show Trumbo’s willingness and dedication to his work, no matter the circumstance or condition.

Although Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted for the majority of his career and forced to use a pseudonym, he is remembered as a highly successful writer. Part of his success can be attributed to his determination to make stories as realistic as possible. Document found in UCLA Special Collections reveal his efforts fully to understand the horrors of war by living with the Navy for eight weeks and witnessing battles firsthand in the Pacific. Despite the blacklist stigma, Trumbo continued to succeed in pursuing realism in his writing. He should be remembered for his unwavering dedication to his craft in a situation that tried to silence him. For that reason, he will forever be remembered as an integral person that helped the film industry stay alive in Los Angeles.

Proclamation of Line-Crossing Ceremony. June 30, 1945. Image courtesy of UCLA Library Special Collections

Subpoena. June 29, 1945. Image courtesy of UCLA Library Special Collections

Photographs of Line-Crossing Ceremony. June 1945. Image courtesy of UCLA Library Special Collections

Works cited

1. Ceplair, Larry, and Christopher Trumbo. Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical. University Press of Kentucky, 2015.
2. Leppo, Danielle. "Crossing The Line Is As Eternal As The Sea." U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 129.7 (2003): 78.
3. Moore, David. "Pollywog or Shellback: The Navy’s Line Crossing Ceremony Revealed.” Veterans United Network Pollywog or Shellback The Navys Line Crossing Ceremony Revealed Comments.
4. Palmer, Tim. "Side Of The Angels: Dalton Trumbo, The Hollywood Trade Press, And The Blacklist. (Cover Story)." Cinema Journal 44.4 (2005): 57-74.
5. Schwartz, Richard A. "How the Film and Television Blacklists Worked." Florida International University. Film and History Annual For 1999, 1999. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.
6. Trumbo, D. (1939). Johnny Got His Gun. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott

Cite this article

Nephele A., Natalie D., Erika S., Derek L., Arnav K.. "Dalton Trumbo." Los Angeles: The City and the Library. Colleen Jauretche, Editor. Fall 2015. /article/2015-09-01-trumbo