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fpbAmong my favourites in my movie collection is a John Ford-Henry Fonda item called My Darling Clementine. It is one of the finest movies ever made, both on a technical and an artistic level. To watch it is a long, slow-burning pleasure for refined palates, like a very slow drink of a very fine wine; nevertheless, it is one of those rare masterpieces that manage both superlative, polished artistry and a simplicity that a child can approach. Yet I wonder how many of you have even heard of it, let alone seen it. It is practically never broadcast, and I doubt whether it is even occasionally seen in arthouse theatres and movie clubs. The reason? That parts of it are virtually unwatchable today, unless you, like me, make up your mind at the beginning to put with offensive material. It is thoughtlessly, reflexively racist and sexist. It is also, if you have any interest in history, false to history in a big way. It tells a version of the famous Earp-Clanton clash at the OK Corral, Tombstone, that nobody today would take seriously. And with all that, it sets out to be, in an understated but muscular way, a legend of the building of America, with a powerful core of morality. And there is the problem: because, as I said, this handsomely designed and magnificently made moral legend of the rise of a great nation incorporates, carelessly and as if taking them for granted, racism with genocidal characteristics, profound sexism, and historical falsehood.
Genocidal racism: Near the beginning of the story, Wyatt Earp, whose fame goes before him, is approached by some of the respectable men of Tombstone to become the town’s US Marshall and clean it up. He refuses, but is nearly made to change his mind when he is forced to take down a violent drunk who was shooting up a saloon. The name of the drunk? “Injun Joe.” And Earp’s reaction to this? “What kinda town is this, sellin’ likker to Injuns?”
This scene might about pass muster as described, but to watch it is a different matter altogether. The beating Earp (Henry Fonda) inflicts on Injun Joe has clear features of public humiliation, ending up with a kick in the backside – the classic sign of public contempt – and an order to get outta town (although Earp is not, at the time, an US Marshall or anything, and has no more authority than his fists give him). And the connotation of his protest is not that whiskey was destroying the Indian race at the time, as everyone knows now, but just that a saloon was no place for an Injun, and that a drunk Injun was a danger to whites (always and everywhere, by principle). At a time and place where the horrors of saloon drinking were about to create, as a reaction, the remarkable phenomenon of Carrie Nation, this is quite spectacularly hypocritical; except that at the time this movie was made – the forties, long after 1933 and the final repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment – Carrie Nation and all the abominations she had fought had been pretty much airbrushed from the nation’s collective memory.
As a result, there occurs the film’s one narrative weakness. We are supposed to understand that, when the brothers Earp rode into town, Tombstone was a kind of lawless pioneer hellhole like the legendary Abilene or Deadwood. Yet almost as soon as soon as Earp is made Marshall, order suddenly reigns. Control over the town’s saloons is apparently established by little more than an exchange of scowls with Doc Holliday, who, we have to understand, is the toughest of the local tough guys. Once he accepts the new Marshall, there are no more problems with drunks or rowdies. Why? Obviously, because in 1940s America good guys drank liquor – in moderation, of course – and visited bars. (“Saloons” had long gone out of fashion, due to the activities of Temperance Leagues decades earlier. But it was and remains a distinction without a difference.) This is not in keeping with the reality of the late-nineteenth-century American West, and it even robs the tragic figure of Doc Holliday of some extra resonance: if it became clear to what an extent a Boston man with a medical degree and the corresponding social status degraded himself by haunting fleapit saloons in rough Western towns, John Ford would perhaps not have had to bring in the other offensive feature of this great movie.
For part of the greatness of Ford’s movie is that it does have its own kind of moral complexity, and it focuses on the figure of Doc Holliday. It is made clear to us that he is a thug, a drunk, and a profoundly self-degraded person. He is also a dying man, devoured by the great nineteenth-century nightmare, “consumption” or tuberculosis – a terrible disease whose devastation the movie leaves implied, with that constant understatement that is its strength. As a doctor – at least, a medical graduate, whether or not he ever practiced – he must know what it is doing to him. He has probably gone to the Southwest because its dry climate might do him less harm than the wet and winter-cold weather of Massachusetts; but he is a dead man walking, and all the movie is woven through with our progressive discovery of this and of what it means for him.
Now, if Ford will not emphasize the degradation of saloon drinking – because it would make half his audience feel guilty, and, as Charles M.Schulz said in another context, why alienate half your potential audience in advance? – then he must use another pointer. And the pointer he uses is Doc’s highly emphasized relationship with “Chihihuahua”, one of the local whores. There is nothing good to be said for Chihihuahua: she is promiscuous (at the same time as she places herself under Doc’s protection, she is carrying on with Luke Clanton, and Doc knows it), lives on her lovers’ money, she is vulgar, a cheat at cards, greedy, a regular and compulsive liar, and probably a drunk (this side of her charming personality is not emphasized). The degradation of Doc’s attachment to her is underlined by the arrival of Clementine Carter, his Boston sweetheart, and a 100% true lady. Clementine is not a wholly incredible figure, but her politeness, courage, devotion and charm – not to mention her blonde beauty – do strike us as somewhat artificial. If it wasn’t that we perceive a strong will under that ladylike exterior – she does not allow Holliday to silence or scare her, and at the decisive moment she coolly acts as his nurse as he is operating to save Chihihuahua’s life – she would be in danger of coming across as a Mary Sue.
However, this feminine perfection is an artistic necessity for the story: it is required to set off the sheer sluttishness and, above all, the undesirability of Chihihuahua. There must be no delusion about the nature of this woman: no suggestion of “golden-hearted whore” or any of the other cliches whereby whoredom is made acceptable or even charming. These things may have their value elsewhere, but not in a story part of whose core is the degradation of Doc Holliday.
Nevertheless, Chihihuahua herself must be shown as redeemable or at least somehow justified and excusable in her behaviour; or else her murder at the hands of the monstrous Luke Clanton would not be a tragedy, and Doc’s decision to avenge her by taking the Earps’ side against the Clantons would be merely the reaction of an angry chief thug to the loss of his girlfriend. Ford does not allow us that. To the contrary, the scene where Doc uses what is left of his medical skill to try and save the dying girl is one of the greatest things I have ever seen in a movie. And the reason why it works is that, from the beginning, Ford has shown that beneath all Chihihuahua’s vices lies a strong streak of childishness. (“You just wait till Doc gets here!”) She is basically immature, and we are made to feel that Doc tolerates her faults, to some extent, as a grown man tolerates a squalling child. Soon, the same toleration also becomes visible in Wyatt Earp’s behaviour to her. And this immaturity is clearly linked to the fact that she is half-Apache. (Wyatt Earp: “If you don’t behave, I’ll pack you off to the reservation where you belong!”) The permanently infantile, permanently under ward status of lower and subject races, is a nearly universal feature of racism, expressed in such thing as a young white calling an elderly black “boy”. And at the decisive point, when she is about to go under the knife, Chihihuahua is shown to hand herself over to Doc’s care with a visibly childlike expression of trust and affection, and we are meant to be touched. And we are – and this is perhaps the most artistically successful display of a racist idea that I have ever seen.
Why do I speak of genocidal overtones? There is no genocide in the movie. But by accepting and incorporating the worst racist stereotypes, and incarnating them in a mixed-race Apache and Mexican woman, John Ford pretty much assents to what was done to the Apaches; which is one of the nastiest chapters (though the Apaches were no angels themselves, that’s for sure) of a long and nasty history. There is no notion, throughout the movie, that Indians might have any reason for being angry; no, Injun Joe is a vicious drunk, and Chihihuahua a calculating whore, because that is the way they are, and that’s it. I dare say that if and when Ford were ever brought up against historical reality, he would at least disavow the more genocidal events; the thing is that, at this point, and in spite of his intense interest in Western history, he has done no such thing. The racism which, in this movie, he accepts as normal, has been, in the hands of other men, an instrument of genocide; and while he is not guilty of it personally, he has the same status of fellow traveller as someone who votes for the Communist or Fascist parties. I hardly need add that not a single black face ever turns up, even in crowd shots.
(It must be added that, in later movies, Ford did try to make amends to the ghosts of murdered and deceived Indians – not always with artistic success, but the attempt does him honour.)
One of the climactic scenes of the movie is the founding of the first local church, bringing out all the town’s decent people – a pleasant surprise for the Earps, who, as law enforcers, had not had so much contact with them before. It is another magnificent scene, expressing the delight of a community coming together under the symbols of faith and patriotism – the bell of the projected church, already ringing, and two great Union flags – through a long and delightful dance scene parts of which consciously evoke, in my view, the great Flemish painters. This scene has little to do with the unfolding of the story – except for the fact that Wyatt Earp dances with Clementine Carter, foreshadowing their eventual interest in each other – but the movie could never in a million years do without it. It represents everything that the Earps are fighting for in their clash with the Clantons – who, in this version of the story, are unmitigated bandits: community, order, decency, morality, hard work (the church is still to be built, and the platform and wood piles indicate that it will take a considerable amount of muscle power to put it up), and, underlying it all, the laws of America and the Christian religion. It is all done with such ease and brilliance that we are swept along, imaginatively made part of the community; and that gives to the final death-grapple with the Clantons its power and intensity. The Earps and even the dying and degraded Doc Holliday are fighting for something better and higher than themselves. It is not just a matter of avenging the deaths of the Earps’ brothers and of Chihihuahua: they stand between the good folk of Tombstone, whom we have got to know and love in the church-inauguration-and-dance scene, and the lawless violence of the Clantons.
It is worth thinking of where America was in the forties. A good deal of the country was under the threat of armed violence from the Mob, and, less frequently mentioned but not less bloodthirsty, from the KKK. At the same time, tyrannies of every colour threatened it from outside. Contemporary spirits, not only in America, had seen a parallel between the violence of Al Capone in Chicago and that of Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin; even C.S.Lewis, in his 1933 classic The Pilgrim’s Regress, identified the dwarves created by the monstrous Mr.Savage as “Marxomanni, Mussolimini, Swastici and Gangomanni”. Resisting armed and lawless violence by force of arms was something that meant something to every decent American in 1940. The threatening, lowering Clantons, beginning with an insinuating offer to buy the Earps’ cattle, but progressively developing into an armed danger that threatens the whole town, could well stand for more recent dangers.
And here is the problem. The America for which the Earps and Doc Halliday fight, and for which some of them die, has features which would be quite intolerable to the America of today. People think with pride, and rightly, of the way their grandfathers stood up against Fascism, and then resisted Communism, in the name of human freedom. But it becomes somewhat problematic when one remembers that the society that resisted Fascism incorporated racism as a regular and legal feature, and all but smiled upon genocide in its own past. Goering was not slow in pointing that out from the dock at Nueremberg. Southern trees bore strange fruit with a regularity that would appal us today, if we thought about it. I, as an Italian, have to live with the fact that my fathers invented Fascism and thought it a sound, even valuable, political innovation; as well as with the fact that our copyright and trademark brands are beyond a doubt on the very notion of organized crime – the whole world (with the possible exception of China with its Triads) has learned how to turn crime into a business and a political power from us. That is to show that every country has features of its quite recent history of which to be ashamed. My point, however, is that my conservative American friends gravely underrate this element in their own past. They complain about Liberals painting the past of their country as one unending nightmare of racism and exploitation; but they do not deal with the fact that racism and exploitation were facts. Certainly, America stood for liberty throughout its existence; but its application of the principle to its own affairs was – shall we say – patchy? And as the discourse of American conservatives really is conservative – that is, it really relies on a constant exaltation of the country as it was in the past, especially the forties and fifties – they should not be surprised when they are charged with being blind to racism, even genocidal racism, and sexism. One just has to look at this masterpiece of the movie art to see how ingrained they were in the man-in-the-street’s mind – the mind Hollywood appealed to – and in the moviemakers’. We are not talking about mere survivals, thoughtless prejudices, but about active principles, which organize John Ford’s materials and account for some of his mightiest scenes. The ingrained racism which has Chihihuahua surrendering her life into Doc’s hands like a child, and Doc taking charge of her because, whatever her failures, she is “his” Injun, produces a shatteringly moving and tragic scene; nothing could bear stronger evidence of the fact that, to Ford, it was a living value. He seriously believed that whites should hold other races under protective and benevolent tutelage, and this is the relationship he touchingly presents as Chihihuahua is going under the knife. Unless you understand this, you will not understand one of the fundamental points of the movie – which even affects the reason why the founding of a new American community with its flags and its church is presented in such an unmitigatedly positive light. It brings, not only the decency and order they expect to the settlers themselves, but also the light of benevolent and protective tutelage to the benighted natives.
The truth is that, whatever conservatives may want to charge the sixties with, they produced a revolution without whose fruits we would not want to live. Who would want, today, not to be free to have a black friend (I am speaking from a white viewpoint, of course), to have or marry a black girlfriend, to live under the dozens of constrictions that were taken as natural in the early fifties? Who would not be ashamed of accepting the “boss”-“boy” roles that then seemed natural when whites and blacks met? And that does not extend only to blacks – I am thinking, for instance, of all the Chinese people in or near my f-list. And we should not forget that the whole set of values on which this was built began with a deep prejudice against the Catholic Church. Today’s conservatives have made a near-conquest of American Catholics, and do not despair of reaching blacks and Jews – the same groups that their predecessors wanted at least de-powered, and if possible thrown out of America altogether. And this was in a time that old men can still remember.
As Martin Gardner once said, the modern fundamentalist preachers are kittens compared with the likes of Gerald Lyman Smith and Father Coughlin, the great big-tent and radio preachers of the thirties. And these were not secondary figures. Smith supplied much of the electoral muscle to the strange semi-tyranny of Huey Long in Louisiana. Father Coughlin’s radio programs had an average of two million listeners, and, when Roosevelt had to neutralize his Fascist propaganda, he had to mobilize the Pope himself. If you want to know why the more ignorant liberals cherish to this day a stereotype of the fundamentalist preacher as raising strange flags and forming cadres of stormtroopers, it is because these people really did. People like Smith and Coughlin really intended to bring a vaguely Christianized version of Fascism to America. It is enough to define Smith, that even the notoriously racist Senator Theodore Bilbo was too far left for him; and it is enough to define his methods, that he accused Bilbo of complicity in Huey Long’s murder. (It is hard, too, to improve on Bilbo’s reaction to that bit of preaching: “a contemptible, dirty, vicious, pusillanimous, with-malice-aforethought, damnable, self-made liar”. Those who complain about the verbal violence of today’s politics ought to remember such things.)
That it is ridiculously inappropriate to apply that kind of picture to Falwell and Oral Roberts, let alone to the more recent and thoughtful conservative leaders, should be obvious, but it does not exist altogether without reason. The truth is that the American right has undergone a mutation since then. The very names of these people, except for a few historians, are forgotten. Modern conservatives are people who want, unconsciously, to have their cake and eat it – to keep everything about the sixties revolution that they appreciate, even to appropriate it, and to pretend that what they reject is the whole. They do not really follow on from the real fifties and forties and thirties; at best, they follow on from men like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, who started out as Roosevelt supporters and grew dissatisfied with Democratic politics and worried about Communism. They carry into the field of conservative Christianity the heritage of the New Deal and of even more recent forms of left-wing activism. Most of them have nothing to do with what was the real right-wing activism of those days. A modern conservative who found himself in one of Gerald Smith’s big-tent events would probably start to heckle, and eventually find himself bodily thrown out.
My point is that it does no good to pretend that these things were not there. To idealize the fifties only gives opponents arguments. It is not just that the world has moved on; where it has moved on in unacceptable directions, we are right in refusing to move with the times. But we cannot pretend that there is no problem. It is wrong to imagine that those of us who see the past as one unbroken waste of sexism, racism, and oppression, have no point. Their mistake is in idealizing the present, not the past – to imagine that we have solved those problems, and that those were the only problems worth solving. But these things really were there, and woven through the whole warp and woof of society. And most people supported or passively accepted them. The minority numbers and extremist status of rebels against abortion today echoes the minority numbers and extremist status of abolitionists in the past. In the history of major evils, the majority of the population has always tended to accept or support the status quo, and to condemn or even demonize the activist minority that opposed them. The worst possible mistake is to give them arguments.
Genocidal racism: Near the beginning of the story, Wyatt Earp, whose fame goes before him, is approached by some of the respectable men of Tombstone to become the town’s US Marshall and clean it up. He refuses, but is nearly made to change his mind when he is forced to take down a violent drunk who was shooting up a saloon. The name of the drunk? “Injun Joe.” And Earp’s reaction to this? “What kinda town is this, sellin’ likker to Injuns?”
This scene might about pass muster as described, but to watch it is a different matter altogether. The beating Earp (Henry Fonda) inflicts on Injun Joe has clear features of public humiliation, ending up with a kick in the backside – the classic sign of public contempt – and an order to get outta town (although Earp is not, at the time, an US Marshall or anything, and has no more authority than his fists give him). And the connotation of his protest is not that whiskey was destroying the Indian race at the time, as everyone knows now, but just that a saloon was no place for an Injun, and that a drunk Injun was a danger to whites (always and everywhere, by principle). At a time and place where the horrors of saloon drinking were about to create, as a reaction, the remarkable phenomenon of Carrie Nation, this is quite spectacularly hypocritical; except that at the time this movie was made – the forties, long after 1933 and the final repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment – Carrie Nation and all the abominations she had fought had been pretty much airbrushed from the nation’s collective memory.
As a result, there occurs the film’s one narrative weakness. We are supposed to understand that, when the brothers Earp rode into town, Tombstone was a kind of lawless pioneer hellhole like the legendary Abilene or Deadwood. Yet almost as soon as soon as Earp is made Marshall, order suddenly reigns. Control over the town’s saloons is apparently established by little more than an exchange of scowls with Doc Holliday, who, we have to understand, is the toughest of the local tough guys. Once he accepts the new Marshall, there are no more problems with drunks or rowdies. Why? Obviously, because in 1940s America good guys drank liquor – in moderation, of course – and visited bars. (“Saloons” had long gone out of fashion, due to the activities of Temperance Leagues decades earlier. But it was and remains a distinction without a difference.) This is not in keeping with the reality of the late-nineteenth-century American West, and it even robs the tragic figure of Doc Holliday of some extra resonance: if it became clear to what an extent a Boston man with a medical degree and the corresponding social status degraded himself by haunting fleapit saloons in rough Western towns, John Ford would perhaps not have had to bring in the other offensive feature of this great movie.
For part of the greatness of Ford’s movie is that it does have its own kind of moral complexity, and it focuses on the figure of Doc Holliday. It is made clear to us that he is a thug, a drunk, and a profoundly self-degraded person. He is also a dying man, devoured by the great nineteenth-century nightmare, “consumption” or tuberculosis – a terrible disease whose devastation the movie leaves implied, with that constant understatement that is its strength. As a doctor – at least, a medical graduate, whether or not he ever practiced – he must know what it is doing to him. He has probably gone to the Southwest because its dry climate might do him less harm than the wet and winter-cold weather of Massachusetts; but he is a dead man walking, and all the movie is woven through with our progressive discovery of this and of what it means for him.
Now, if Ford will not emphasize the degradation of saloon drinking – because it would make half his audience feel guilty, and, as Charles M.Schulz said in another context, why alienate half your potential audience in advance? – then he must use another pointer. And the pointer he uses is Doc’s highly emphasized relationship with “Chihihuahua”, one of the local whores. There is nothing good to be said for Chihihuahua: she is promiscuous (at the same time as she places herself under Doc’s protection, she is carrying on with Luke Clanton, and Doc knows it), lives on her lovers’ money, she is vulgar, a cheat at cards, greedy, a regular and compulsive liar, and probably a drunk (this side of her charming personality is not emphasized). The degradation of Doc’s attachment to her is underlined by the arrival of Clementine Carter, his Boston sweetheart, and a 100% true lady. Clementine is not a wholly incredible figure, but her politeness, courage, devotion and charm – not to mention her blonde beauty – do strike us as somewhat artificial. If it wasn’t that we perceive a strong will under that ladylike exterior – she does not allow Holliday to silence or scare her, and at the decisive moment she coolly acts as his nurse as he is operating to save Chihihuahua’s life – she would be in danger of coming across as a Mary Sue.
However, this feminine perfection is an artistic necessity for the story: it is required to set off the sheer sluttishness and, above all, the undesirability of Chihihuahua. There must be no delusion about the nature of this woman: no suggestion of “golden-hearted whore” or any of the other cliches whereby whoredom is made acceptable or even charming. These things may have their value elsewhere, but not in a story part of whose core is the degradation of Doc Holliday.
Nevertheless, Chihihuahua herself must be shown as redeemable or at least somehow justified and excusable in her behaviour; or else her murder at the hands of the monstrous Luke Clanton would not be a tragedy, and Doc’s decision to avenge her by taking the Earps’ side against the Clantons would be merely the reaction of an angry chief thug to the loss of his girlfriend. Ford does not allow us that. To the contrary, the scene where Doc uses what is left of his medical skill to try and save the dying girl is one of the greatest things I have ever seen in a movie. And the reason why it works is that, from the beginning, Ford has shown that beneath all Chihihuahua’s vices lies a strong streak of childishness. (“You just wait till Doc gets here!”) She is basically immature, and we are made to feel that Doc tolerates her faults, to some extent, as a grown man tolerates a squalling child. Soon, the same toleration also becomes visible in Wyatt Earp’s behaviour to her. And this immaturity is clearly linked to the fact that she is half-Apache. (Wyatt Earp: “If you don’t behave, I’ll pack you off to the reservation where you belong!”) The permanently infantile, permanently under ward status of lower and subject races, is a nearly universal feature of racism, expressed in such thing as a young white calling an elderly black “boy”. And at the decisive point, when she is about to go under the knife, Chihihuahua is shown to hand herself over to Doc’s care with a visibly childlike expression of trust and affection, and we are meant to be touched. And we are – and this is perhaps the most artistically successful display of a racist idea that I have ever seen.
Why do I speak of genocidal overtones? There is no genocide in the movie. But by accepting and incorporating the worst racist stereotypes, and incarnating them in a mixed-race Apache and Mexican woman, John Ford pretty much assents to what was done to the Apaches; which is one of the nastiest chapters (though the Apaches were no angels themselves, that’s for sure) of a long and nasty history. There is no notion, throughout the movie, that Indians might have any reason for being angry; no, Injun Joe is a vicious drunk, and Chihihuahua a calculating whore, because that is the way they are, and that’s it. I dare say that if and when Ford were ever brought up against historical reality, he would at least disavow the more genocidal events; the thing is that, at this point, and in spite of his intense interest in Western history, he has done no such thing. The racism which, in this movie, he accepts as normal, has been, in the hands of other men, an instrument of genocide; and while he is not guilty of it personally, he has the same status of fellow traveller as someone who votes for the Communist or Fascist parties. I hardly need add that not a single black face ever turns up, even in crowd shots.
(It must be added that, in later movies, Ford did try to make amends to the ghosts of murdered and deceived Indians – not always with artistic success, but the attempt does him honour.)
One of the climactic scenes of the movie is the founding of the first local church, bringing out all the town’s decent people – a pleasant surprise for the Earps, who, as law enforcers, had not had so much contact with them before. It is another magnificent scene, expressing the delight of a community coming together under the symbols of faith and patriotism – the bell of the projected church, already ringing, and two great Union flags – through a long and delightful dance scene parts of which consciously evoke, in my view, the great Flemish painters. This scene has little to do with the unfolding of the story – except for the fact that Wyatt Earp dances with Clementine Carter, foreshadowing their eventual interest in each other – but the movie could never in a million years do without it. It represents everything that the Earps are fighting for in their clash with the Clantons – who, in this version of the story, are unmitigated bandits: community, order, decency, morality, hard work (the church is still to be built, and the platform and wood piles indicate that it will take a considerable amount of muscle power to put it up), and, underlying it all, the laws of America and the Christian religion. It is all done with such ease and brilliance that we are swept along, imaginatively made part of the community; and that gives to the final death-grapple with the Clantons its power and intensity. The Earps and even the dying and degraded Doc Holliday are fighting for something better and higher than themselves. It is not just a matter of avenging the deaths of the Earps’ brothers and of Chihihuahua: they stand between the good folk of Tombstone, whom we have got to know and love in the church-inauguration-and-dance scene, and the lawless violence of the Clantons.
It is worth thinking of where America was in the forties. A good deal of the country was under the threat of armed violence from the Mob, and, less frequently mentioned but not less bloodthirsty, from the KKK. At the same time, tyrannies of every colour threatened it from outside. Contemporary spirits, not only in America, had seen a parallel between the violence of Al Capone in Chicago and that of Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin; even C.S.Lewis, in his 1933 classic The Pilgrim’s Regress, identified the dwarves created by the monstrous Mr.Savage as “Marxomanni, Mussolimini, Swastici and Gangomanni”. Resisting armed and lawless violence by force of arms was something that meant something to every decent American in 1940. The threatening, lowering Clantons, beginning with an insinuating offer to buy the Earps’ cattle, but progressively developing into an armed danger that threatens the whole town, could well stand for more recent dangers.
And here is the problem. The America for which the Earps and Doc Halliday fight, and for which some of them die, has features which would be quite intolerable to the America of today. People think with pride, and rightly, of the way their grandfathers stood up against Fascism, and then resisted Communism, in the name of human freedom. But it becomes somewhat problematic when one remembers that the society that resisted Fascism incorporated racism as a regular and legal feature, and all but smiled upon genocide in its own past. Goering was not slow in pointing that out from the dock at Nueremberg. Southern trees bore strange fruit with a regularity that would appal us today, if we thought about it. I, as an Italian, have to live with the fact that my fathers invented Fascism and thought it a sound, even valuable, political innovation; as well as with the fact that our copyright and trademark brands are beyond a doubt on the very notion of organized crime – the whole world (with the possible exception of China with its Triads) has learned how to turn crime into a business and a political power from us. That is to show that every country has features of its quite recent history of which to be ashamed. My point, however, is that my conservative American friends gravely underrate this element in their own past. They complain about Liberals painting the past of their country as one unending nightmare of racism and exploitation; but they do not deal with the fact that racism and exploitation were facts. Certainly, America stood for liberty throughout its existence; but its application of the principle to its own affairs was – shall we say – patchy? And as the discourse of American conservatives really is conservative – that is, it really relies on a constant exaltation of the country as it was in the past, especially the forties and fifties – they should not be surprised when they are charged with being blind to racism, even genocidal racism, and sexism. One just has to look at this masterpiece of the movie art to see how ingrained they were in the man-in-the-street’s mind – the mind Hollywood appealed to – and in the moviemakers’. We are not talking about mere survivals, thoughtless prejudices, but about active principles, which organize John Ford’s materials and account for some of his mightiest scenes. The ingrained racism which has Chihihuahua surrendering her life into Doc’s hands like a child, and Doc taking charge of her because, whatever her failures, she is “his” Injun, produces a shatteringly moving and tragic scene; nothing could bear stronger evidence of the fact that, to Ford, it was a living value. He seriously believed that whites should hold other races under protective and benevolent tutelage, and this is the relationship he touchingly presents as Chihihuahua is going under the knife. Unless you understand this, you will not understand one of the fundamental points of the movie – which even affects the reason why the founding of a new American community with its flags and its church is presented in such an unmitigatedly positive light. It brings, not only the decency and order they expect to the settlers themselves, but also the light of benevolent and protective tutelage to the benighted natives.
The truth is that, whatever conservatives may want to charge the sixties with, they produced a revolution without whose fruits we would not want to live. Who would want, today, not to be free to have a black friend (I am speaking from a white viewpoint, of course), to have or marry a black girlfriend, to live under the dozens of constrictions that were taken as natural in the early fifties? Who would not be ashamed of accepting the “boss”-“boy” roles that then seemed natural when whites and blacks met? And that does not extend only to blacks – I am thinking, for instance, of all the Chinese people in or near my f-list. And we should not forget that the whole set of values on which this was built began with a deep prejudice against the Catholic Church. Today’s conservatives have made a near-conquest of American Catholics, and do not despair of reaching blacks and Jews – the same groups that their predecessors wanted at least de-powered, and if possible thrown out of America altogether. And this was in a time that old men can still remember.
As Martin Gardner once said, the modern fundamentalist preachers are kittens compared with the likes of Gerald Lyman Smith and Father Coughlin, the great big-tent and radio preachers of the thirties. And these were not secondary figures. Smith supplied much of the electoral muscle to the strange semi-tyranny of Huey Long in Louisiana. Father Coughlin’s radio programs had an average of two million listeners, and, when Roosevelt had to neutralize his Fascist propaganda, he had to mobilize the Pope himself. If you want to know why the more ignorant liberals cherish to this day a stereotype of the fundamentalist preacher as raising strange flags and forming cadres of stormtroopers, it is because these people really did. People like Smith and Coughlin really intended to bring a vaguely Christianized version of Fascism to America. It is enough to define Smith, that even the notoriously racist Senator Theodore Bilbo was too far left for him; and it is enough to define his methods, that he accused Bilbo of complicity in Huey Long’s murder. (It is hard, too, to improve on Bilbo’s reaction to that bit of preaching: “a contemptible, dirty, vicious, pusillanimous, with-malice-aforethought, damnable, self-made liar”. Those who complain about the verbal violence of today’s politics ought to remember such things.)
That it is ridiculously inappropriate to apply that kind of picture to Falwell and Oral Roberts, let alone to the more recent and thoughtful conservative leaders, should be obvious, but it does not exist altogether without reason. The truth is that the American right has undergone a mutation since then. The very names of these people, except for a few historians, are forgotten. Modern conservatives are people who want, unconsciously, to have their cake and eat it – to keep everything about the sixties revolution that they appreciate, even to appropriate it, and to pretend that what they reject is the whole. They do not really follow on from the real fifties and forties and thirties; at best, they follow on from men like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, who started out as Roosevelt supporters and grew dissatisfied with Democratic politics and worried about Communism. They carry into the field of conservative Christianity the heritage of the New Deal and of even more recent forms of left-wing activism. Most of them have nothing to do with what was the real right-wing activism of those days. A modern conservative who found himself in one of Gerald Smith’s big-tent events would probably start to heckle, and eventually find himself bodily thrown out.
My point is that it does no good to pretend that these things were not there. To idealize the fifties only gives opponents arguments. It is not just that the world has moved on; where it has moved on in unacceptable directions, we are right in refusing to move with the times. But we cannot pretend that there is no problem. It is wrong to imagine that those of us who see the past as one unbroken waste of sexism, racism, and oppression, have no point. Their mistake is in idealizing the present, not the past – to imagine that we have solved those problems, and that those were the only problems worth solving. But these things really were there, and woven through the whole warp and woof of society. And most people supported or passively accepted them. The minority numbers and extremist status of rebels against abortion today echoes the minority numbers and extremist status of abolitionists in the past. In the history of major evils, the majority of the population has always tended to accept or support the status quo, and to condemn or even demonize the activist minority that opposed them. The worst possible mistake is to give them arguments.
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Date: 2007-10-27 05:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-27 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-27 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-27 05:59 pm (UTC)Did you manage to read the essay? Did you like it?
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Date: 2007-10-27 06:06 pm (UTC)I've not managed to have a second read at it yet, but there should be time for that tomorrow. The first read-through was pretty much breathtaking, at any rate!
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Date: 2007-10-27 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-27 10:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-29 08:31 pm (UTC)