Rooster, as I have more leisure now to look at my life and assemble an overall picture, I was looking up an old professor from the 1960's University of Washington and my class on the poet John Milton...well HE was called to justify himself and testify against other professors...and he freely admitted he had been a member of the Communist Party, then got disillusioned and left. I remembered him because of his unusual name...Garland O. Ethel...we read PARADISE LOST, AREOPAGITICA, and several other great writings that quarter...and now I still have a permanent love of Milton!
But Dr. Ethel courageously refused to implicate anyone else; nevertheless, some of those fine instructors were fired and never again worked at anything other than manual labor...it was awful. I think my professor had full tenure for about 25 years by then, so that may have been the reason the U of W could not fire him.
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The point of all this? ...I really wonder if ANY at all of those persecuted were actively anti-democracy; maybe they did join Communism for a while, but then got disillusioned and left.
And now we have lost the legacy of artists like Dalton Trumbo...just that one Kirk Douglas film was enough to convince me of his talent!