Copyright by Patricia Mary Burns 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Patricia Mary Burns certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Testing the Seams of the American Dream: Minority Literature and Film in the Early Cold War Committee: ____________________________________ Brian Bremen, Supervisor ____________________________________ Jennifer Wilks ____________________________________ Julia Lee ____________________________________ Karl Miller ____________________________________ Michael Kackman Testing the Seams of the American Dream: Minority Literature and Film in the Early Cold War by Patricia Mary Burns, B.A.; M.A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2011 Testing the Seams of the American Dream: Minority Literature and Film in the Early Cold War Patricia Mary Burns, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011 Supervisor: Brian Bremen Testing the Seams of the American Dream: Minority Literature and Film in the Early Cold War delineates the concept of the liberal tolerance agenda in early Cold War. The liberal tolerance message of the U.S. government, the Democratic Party, and others endorsed racial tolerance and envisioned the possibility of a future free from racism and inequality. Filmmakers in often disseminated a liberal message similar to that of the politicians in the form of “race problem” films. My shows how these films and the liberal tolerance agenda as a whole promises racial equality to the racial minority in exchange for hard work, patriotism, education, and a belief in the majority culture. My first chapter, “Washing White the Racial Subject: Hollywood’s First Black Problem Film,” performs a close reading of Arthur Laurents 1946 play Home of the Brave, which features a Jewish American protagonist, in conjunction with a reading of the 1949 film version, which has an African American protagonist. The differences between the two texts reveal the slippages in the liberal tolerance agenda and signal the inability of filmmakers to envision racial equality on the big screen. “The American Institution and the Racial Subject,” my second chapter, discusses the 1949 film Pinky as well as Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter. All of these iv works suggests that the attainment of education promises entry into the mainstream by racial minorities, yet Paredes and Sone question this process by interpreting it as resulting in the dual segregation of their protagonists. My third chapter, “Earning and Cultural Capital: The Work that Determines Place,” looks at the promise that with hard work anyone can attain the American Dream. I show how the 1951 film Go for Broke!, Ann Petry’s The Street, and José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho work to dispel this American myth. My final chapter, “The Regrets of Dissent: Blacklists and the Race Question,” examines the 1954 film Salt of the Earth alongside Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go and John Okada’s No-No Boy to reveal the dangerous mixture of race and dissent in this era. v Table of Contents Introduction: The Unity Ideal..………………………………………………………………………………….……1 Chapter 1: Washing White the Racial Subject: Hollywood’s First Black Problem Film…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..….28 Chapter 2: The American Institution and the Racial Subject……………………………………….101 Chapter 3: Earning and Cultural Capital: The Work that Determines Place…………………181 Chapter 4: The Regrets of Dissent: Blacklists and the Race Question………………………….266 Conclusion: Film, Literature, and Politics of the Early Cold War………………………………….359 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..372 vi Introduction: The Unity Ideal In Frank Capra’s 1945 Why We Fight: War Comes to America, the narrator announces that men of all walks of life and backgrounds are responsible for making and keeping America what it is. The film flips through close up shots of the types of men fighting in the war – “Bookkeepers, soda jerks, mechanics, college students, rich man, poor man, mega man, thief, doctors, lawyers, merchants”1 – and where they come from – “Men from the green hills of New England, the sun baked plains of the middle west, the cotton fields of the south, the close-packed streets of Manhattan, Chicago, the teaming factories of Detroit, Los Angeles, the endless stretching distances of the Southwest, men from the hills, and from the plains, from the villages and from the cities.” The film, moving quickly through the story of American history (envisioned as industrial progress), then tells its audience about the racial and ethnic make-up of those who have contributed to America’s success through the sweat of their labor: the English, the Scottish, the Dutch, the Italians, the Frenchmen, the Swiss, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Poles, the Welshmen – some of these images are tied to a location or an occupation, and others are just listed, but all are accompanied by an image of men at labor. The narrator next lists “the Negro harvesting cotton in the hot sun.” The film here, instead of using a close up of a black man’s face, offers an extended visual of black cotton pickers, mostly women, and of a black child being gently pulled along atop a sack of cotton. The narrator continues, “*the sweat+ of the Spaniard, the 1 All quotes from the film are from my own transcription. 1 first to roam the great Southwest, of the Mexican, in the oil fields of Texas and on the ranches of New Mexico,” the Greek, and the Portuguese. Then he adds, “the German, with his technical skills,” and the Hungarian and the Russian. And, finally, the narrator concludes, “*the sweat+ of the Irishman, the Slav, and the Chinese working side by side.” Most of the men pictured are wearing traditional ethnic dress in order to more easily distinguish their backgrounds. The labor performed – homesteading, felling trees, planting seeds, etc. – is predominately labor associated with establishing a new country, including factory and foundry work. With this extensive list, the film displays a sense of awareness of the heterogeneous elements that make up America and promotes a celebration of America as made by and made up of polyglot and polyethnic pioneers. From 1942 to 1945, Hollywood director Frank Capra made a series seven films for the War Department entitled Why We Fight.2 Each about an hour long, the films detail the Axis rise to power and military aggression as well as show Americans and their allies valiantly defending themselves from the atrocities of the enemy. The series also argues that isolationism must come to an end, and that the Axis pose a direct threat to American values. In the first of the series, Prelude to War, Peter Rollins writes, “As the narrator explains, ‘We lose the war and we lose everything: our honor, the jobs we work at, the books we read, the very food we eat, the hopes we have for our kids, the kids themselves” (“Frank” 83). The films were propaganda meant for those serving in the 2 The subtitles of the seven films are: Prelude to War (1942), The Nazi Strike (1943), Divide and Conquer (1943), The Battle of Britain (1943), The Battle of Russia (1943), The Battle of China (1943), and War Comes to America (1944). These are sometimes referred to as P-1 through P-7. 2 American armed forces as well as for some limited foreign audiences. As Rollins tells us, however, After seeing Prelude to War in 1942, President Roosevelt told subordinates that ‘every American should see these films.’ When his Office of War Information opposed distribution to theaters across America because the films violated guidelines for treatment of enemy populations—for example, calling the Japanese ‘buck-toothed friends’ of the Germans—Roosevelt simply countermanded the restraint order. Roosevelt wanted Americans to see/hear forceful arguments against isolationism; in addition, he was not averse to their experiencing an in-your-face statement of Germany’s global designs. (“Frank” 84) Thus, the films were widely distributed in America during the war and, “By the end of the war, some 54 million Americans had seen the series” (“Frank” 84). The films and its director serve as an example of the collaboration between Hollywood’s moviemakers and the United States War Department and Office of War Information (OWI) during World War II, a unity that served to produce government films with a Hollywood sheen, and Hollywood films with a government bent.3 At the same time, much of the focus on American unity and on the promotion of American values that are represented in these 3 For more on these linkages, see Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor’s Why We Fought: America’s War in Film and History, Thomas W. Bohn’s An Historical and Descriptive Analysis of the ‘Why We Fight’ Series, David Culbert’s “‘Why We Fight’: Social Engineering for a Democratic Society at War,” and Thomas Cripps’s Making Movies Black. 3 films seep into the postwar period with the advent of a new war against the global spread of Communism. The final film of Capra’s series, War Comes to America (1945), focuses on the American homefront and offers a domestic an answer to “why we fight” – the film delineates the values and beliefs worth protecting. Indeed, the film opens with a close up on three children saying the Pledge of Allegiance and then pans out to show a whole schoolyard of children saying it in unison. The film pans out again to focus on the American flag, and then fades into shots of American soldiers, of different backgrounds, fighting in combat overseas. Suggestive of just who the audience must rally to protect, the children also signify patriotism and dedication to a set of ideals – represented in the Pledge of Allegiance – that the film works to promote.