two women who had accused the Scottsboro Boys of rape, only to later recant her original testimony during the Patterson trial. Rushmore graduated to The Daily Worker as "a $25-a-week writer." After a series of girlfriends, he began dating Ruth Garvin, who wrote the women's column for the Sunday Worker Progressive Weekly. They married on October 12, 1936, when Rushmore was aged 23. Rushmore rose to become the paper's official film critic by 1939, but in December he was fired for giving an ambivalent review of Gone with the Wind; despite describing the film as a "magnificent bore" and holding to the standard CPUSA line that the film was "racist," his review was regarded as insufficiently negative by the editorial board because he admired the film's technical aspects. The chief editor of the Worker, Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., who personally fired Rushmore, was particularly incensed at Rushmore's refusal to rewrite the review. However, the sacking backfired as it made the front page of all the major New York newspapers, including the New York Journal-American, New York Post and The New York Times, as well as mainstream papers across the country, which were supportive of Rushmore. The resulting publicity made the 26-year-old an instant celebrity in anti-communist circles. One of the most prominent columnists of the era, Westbrook Pegler, gave Rushmore rousing support in his December 29, 1939, column. Hearst years After his firing from The Daily Worker, Rushmore joined the anti-communist Hearst-owned Journal-American. On December 22, 1939, the day most papers published news of Rushmore's firing, the Worker published an official notice of his termination and gave the reasons. The next day, the Journal-American published "Red Paper's Lies Bared by Ex-Critic", in which Rushmore defended his film review. In early 1940, Rushmore applied for a job at Time magazine via fellow ex-communist Whittaker Chambers. Not knowing Rushmore and fearful as to how he realized he was a fellow ex-communist, Chambers turned him away. At the Journal-American, Rushmore reinvented himself from a communist sympathizer to an anti-communist investigator of the very industry that produced the films he once reviewed. In 1943, his wife Ruth gave birth to one daughter named Barbara. In 1940 he began to write anti-communist articles for the American Mercury, continuing up to the mid-1950s with his "Heard on the Party Line" column. As his celebrity increased, Rushmore hired a Broadway press agent to manage his career. Columnist