January 18, 2007
Etymology and History II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:20 AM EST In his post on etymology and history, John Steele Gordon wrote, “It wasn’t until after the Second World War that this ‘fashionable’ anti-Semitism [in the United States] began to wane. The novel by Laura Hobson, Gentleman’s Agreement, made into a movie directed by Elia Kazan that won the Oscar for best picture in 1947, marks, perhaps, the beginning of the end of this form of anti-Semitism.”
In many ways, Gentleman’s Agreement was of a piece with other staples of the new culture of pluralism that emerged from World War II. Throughout the 1940s, the American government’s Office of War Information actively worked with Hollywood studios to churn out “platoon films,” each of which featured an ethnically (and, much more rarely, racially) diverse group of soldiers or marines. Movies like Air Force (1943), Bataan (1943), Guadalcanal Diary (1943), The Purple Heart (1944), Objective Burma (1945), and A Walk in the Sun (1945) encouraged ordinary servicemen and civilians to think of the nation’s diversity as a source of strength, while paradoxically blunting the real differences between people of different races, religions, and national backgrounds. In Pride of the Marines, a wounded Jewish serviceman named Lee Diamond tells his comrades (over the background score of America the Beautiful), “One happy afternoon when God was feeling good, he sat down and thought up a beautiful country and named it the U.S.A. . . . Don’t tell me we can’t make it work in peace like we do in war. Don’t tell me we can’t pull together. . . . Maybe some guys won’t hire me because I celebrate Passover instead of Easter. . . . We need a country to live in where no one gets booted around for any reason.”
This was a radically inclusive message—certainly a break with the 1920s and 1930s, when raw prejudice was still very much a staple of the public culture. Though African-Americans fared less well by the new ethic of diversity (they were usually, though not always, excluded from platoon films, an omission that was at least an accurate reflection of military policy), they weren’t entirely absent from the litany of artistic and political endorsements of an open society. In the Oscar-winning 1945 short film The House I Live In, Frank Sinatra teaches a group of white ethnic street kids that religion and national origins are completely inconsequential. Importantly, though the group does not include a black kid, Sinatra sings, “. . . all races and religions, that’s America to me.” It’s unimaginable that he could have voiced a comparable sentiment five years earlier.
On the other hand, the new culture of diversity tended to emphasize what Americans shared in common in such a way as to blunt the very real (and usually benign) differences between Catholics and Jews, Irish and Italians, African-Americans and whites. In Gentleman’s Agreement, Gregory Peck, whose non-Jewish character poses as a Jew for several weeks in order to better understand the workings of anti-Semitism, explains to his son that Jews are just like all other Americans, except that they go to “church” on Saturday. Fair enough. But not exactly right.
Clearly there was a tension between celebrating diversity and emphasizing the importance of national unity. Most movie artists and politicians erred toward the latter in the 1940s.
There’s a great story, perhaps apocryphal, about Gentleman’s Agreement. After the film won its Best Picture Oscar, a reporter asked one of the members of the crew what lessons he had learned. He replied that it’s important not to treat someone badly because he’s Jewish, because he might actually turn out to be a Christian.
Progress is progress.
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