by Mike Gray

According to the Media Research Center, Howard Fast (1914-2003), doyen of leftist screenwriters who is most famous for Spartacus, did a hatchet job on a Founding Father ten years ago in A&E’s production of The Crossing. In Fast’s view, the struggling Americans were morally equivalent to the mercenary Hessians across yonder river. (That’s a common conceit among leftists, that whenever the United States resists evildoers by using violence against them, we’re no better than they are. The few exceptions to that rule seem to be Nazis and Sith Lords.)

A&E itself supplied this biographical information about Fast:

In the ’50s, Fast was blacklisted, and in May 1952 The New York Times reported intimidation of librarians across the nation by Legionnaires, Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, and Minutemen in Texas and California. Fast’s books were purged from school libraries. Citizen Tom Paine, formerly used as a school text, was banned from use in New York City schools. His 1990 memoir Being Red goes more deeply into the issue. You can read Fast’s angry response to the injustices of the McCarthy era in his own Crisis Papers (1951). He also wrote a poetic eulogy, ‘Never to Forget: The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto,’ as well as pamphlets, journal articles, and columns for the Daily Worker, Masses & Mainstream, and other radical publications.

Does it come as a surprise, then, that George Washington—and Nathaniel Greene as well—come across as Wall Street fatcats? And just how much was Fast cribbing from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980)?