Last night I caught the second half of the PBS American Master's series episode about Dalton Trumbo. I'm a big fan of Trumbo, but didn't really know it until last night. He was blacklisted in Hollywood in 1947, but wrote under "fronts" or pseudonyms winning one Academy Award for the "Brave One" in 1957 under the front "Robert Rich" and later being posthumously awarded the Academy Award for "Roman Holiday". In 1960, 13 years after being blacklisted, he finally received on screen credit for both "Exodus" and "Spartacus" bringing an end to the blacklist.
The thing that amazed me the most was not his perseverance throughout the dark times of being blacklisted, but what seemed to be his unshaken belief in what he considered the true face of America, which was not the artificial hysteria of McCarthy. He blamed government for overreaching its bounds with the "Red Scare" and wrote many an essay against the abuse. In an age where everything is partisan and a person's views could easily be drowned out by the tyranny of the majority, whomever that majority may be, I found the last piece in the documentary to be very inspiring. I made me affirm my notion that America is filled with Americans, and each and every on has the right to pursue happiness (not be happy), write and speak their minds free of the abuse of government and their peers. They may be politicians and lawyers, or the underbelly of society, but no one person has the right to tell another, whomever they may be, that they have to be silent.