Waiting Game: Historical amnesia

Saturday’s edition of this newspaper had a small but puzzling news report on page 12. It was headlined: “John Wayne Day scrapped in California over race row”. May 26 is the birth anniversary of John Wayne, the legendary actor, famous for playing the tough hero in just so many Westerns. Legislators in California have voted against commemorating the anniversary. Among the reasons cited is that Wayne’s films showed scenes of “a lot of slaughtering of Native Americans”. The actor’s support of “white occupation of Native American land” — a process that amounts to vast chunks of modern American history — and a magazine interview from 1971 where he apparently slighted blacks were also cited.

In Orange County, not far from Los Angeles, there is an airport named after John Wayne. It is a nondescript airport, one of just so many, famous only because of its name. Perhaps there will be a call to rename it next. While a successful actor, Wayne’s political conservatism was not a secret. At the height of the Communist paranoia in the United States, in the early years of the Cold War, Wayne was prominent among those in Hollywood who spoke up for “American ideals”. This was a code for sharing, to whatever degree, the views of Congressman Joseph McCarthy.

In an extreme reaction, McCarthyism led to the “blacklisting” of prominent Hollywood personalities for supposed Communist sympathies. Wayne never named names or complained against colleagues. Even so, he was part of a substantial group of film actors and makers who saw the “American way of life” as being threatened by the Soviet Union and internally by “radical liberals” and fellow travellers who were writing scripts and injecting themes that Wayne and his friends considered subversive and “un-American”.

This argument was political but it was also cinematic. One of those unfairly blacklisted was Carl Foreman, a gifted screenwriter who wrote High Noon, an iconic film about an ageing sheriff who is forsaken by a cowardly town, takes on and kills four villains and then rejects his sheriff’s badge and leaves with his wife. It was a brilliant film that to Foreman was an allegorical protest against McCarthyism, and stood for the individual’s ability to rise above the craven mob and answer to his conscience.

High Noon won Gary Cooper the Oscar for best actor in 1953. John Wayne hated the film and saw Foreman’s script as antithetical to the “spirit of the West” and the brotherhood and camaraderie that he felt had built America. In response, he helped make and acted in Rio Bravo, nicknamed the “right-wing response to High Noon”. Here Wayne plays the sheriff, but is not wracked by self-doubt or any inner dilemma — Cooper in High Noon was torn between his duty and his pacifist Quaker wife — and receives offers of help from ordinary people who want
to stand with good against evil.

As it happens, Cooper and Wayne were good friends and part of the same Hollywood fraternity that supported “American ideals” and “patriotism” and had some sympathy for McCarthy’s desire to identify Communists and the proverbial “reds under the bed”. In later years, the two became symbols of the Republican camp; their friend from that politically volatile period in the 1950s, Ronald Reagan, went further and became a President both Wayne and Cooper voted for.
To complete the irony, it was Wayne who accepted the Oscar on Cooper’s behalf at the ceremony in 1953. Cooper was travelling and had told Wayne to accept the award for him in case he (Cooper) won. This for a film John Wayne didn’t like, scripted by a writer whose political leanings and one time membership of the Communist Party neither Cooper nor Wayne approved of. To crown the paradox, High Noon is today cited as a film that is redolent of American exceptionalism, and the willingness to go it alone and empower the individual. In that, it has been embraced by the right much more than the left.

What is the purpose of this story? It is to point to the limitations and sheer puerility of viewing history through the prism of contemporary political positions and political correctness. The posthumous blacklisting of John Wayne (which is what a legislative decision not to celebrate his birthday amounts to) ignores both context as well as achievements of an individual (in this case a cinematic artiste) that are above dispute. It follows a trend in recent months, one that has seen a campaign against Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University. There is a demand that buildings and institutions named after Wilson be renamed on the grounds that he — like many others a century ago — had regrettable and dodgy views on blacks and peoples of colour. Yet, the fact is Wilson was also an erudite man, perhaps the most academically proficient American President — at any rate the only one with a PhD — and a first-rate wartime leader and peacemaker. Are we to efface all this?

It is no different with the move to get Thomas Jefferson’s name off college campuses in the United States on the grounds that he owned slaves (as did so many in the late 18th century); or tear down a statue of Cecil Rhodes, imperialist, colonialist, explorer, philanthropist, businessman, founder of De Beers, from Oxford University on the grounds that he was racist. True, there are elements of Rhodes’ life or of Wilson’s policies or of John Wayne’s conservativeness for that matter that could be considered disagreeable by today’s standards (but would have been seen as more “normal” by the individuals themselves, in their time).
Having said that, will removing statues and refusing to commemorate birthdays achieve anything? Does this revision of history not resemble the same mindset that had Stalin carefully removing images of his opponents from archival photographs?

In the end, history is what it is; it cannot be cherry-picked. The sentiment that wants to un-celebrate John Wayne’s birthday and un-make Rhodes’ statue is no different from the Islamic State’s belief that the heritage of Palmyra must be smashed to dust, or the perception that a medieval temple forcibly converted to a mosque must be destroyed and reconstructed as it may have been 500 years ago. History, surely, cannot be reduced to a polarising debate between two equal and opposite forces of denialism.