From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors

Constructing American Boyhood in Postwar Hollywood Films

Peter W.Y. Lee

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781978813489
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

After World War II, studies examining youth culture on the silver screen start with James Dean. But the angst that Dean symbolized—anxieties over parents, the "Establishment," and the expectations of future citizen-soldiers—long predated Rebels without a Cause. Historians have largely overlooked how the Great Depression and World War II impacted and shaped the Cold War, and youth contributed to the national ideologies of family and freedom. From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors explores this gap by connecting facets of boyhood as represented in American film from the 1930s to the postwar years. From the Andy Hardy series to pictures such as The Search, Intruder in the Dust, and The Gunfighter, boy characters addressed larger concerns over the dysfunctional family unit, militarism, the "race question," and the international scene as the Korean War began. Navigating the political, social, and economic milieus inside and outside of Hollywood, Peter W.Y. Lee demonstrates that continuities from the 1930s influenced the unique postwar moment, coalescing into anticommunism and the Cold War.

1

The Family in Trouble, 1920–1945

For its ten-year anniversary issue in 1946, Life magazine visualized upcoming trends in American middle-class lifestyles. Titled “Dreams of 1946,” the issue detailed the hopes of servicemen and women. “During the war years G.I.s and war workers dreamed of a brave new postwar world that would be full of air-conditioned peace and electronically controlled plenty,” the article proclaimed.¹ “The war, which kept a great many American dreams from coming true, also made the dreams more roseate and wondrous.”² Now, the downfall of Hitler brought those fantasies within reach. Large photo spreads showcased a “Family Utopia”: moving vans delivering televisions, new wardrobes, washing machines, baby carriages, and private helicopters to new homes.³ These images supposedly proved how prosperity lay right around the corner.

Life’s description of Americans and their “dreams” of material goods underscored the legacy of the Great Depression and World War II. The economic austerity and the social plights of the Depression and global war left psychological scars on the public.⁴ Having known economic, political, and social hard times during the past fifteen years, Americans envisioned a stable postwar world, lest the Depression return. In popular myth, signs of success included family solidarity, social mobility, suburbia, and conformity. However, then-recent history remained burned into the public consciousness, including a “depression mentality”: making do with less, building nest eggs in preparation for future hardships, and finding security in the family.⁵

Building Carvel

This dream of security reflects the cultural and social impacts of the Great Depression and World War II. This instability stemmed from the “boom” years of the 1920s. The Roaring Twenties elided presidential candidate Warren Harding’s “return to normalcy” campaign slogan that had evoked pre–Great War ideals of late Victorian gentility and propriety. In their landmark 1920s study of typical midsized American towns dubbed “Middletown” (represented by Muncie, Indiana), sociologists Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd observed and documented the generation gap. Here, young people dreamed of “petting parties in the purple dawn” filled with flivvers and flappers, all of which violated traditional, respectable middle-class sensibilities.⁶ Movies about “flaming youth” with titles like The Plastic Age (1925) and The Godless Girl (1929) connoted the artificiality and spiritual dearth among young people infatuated with consumption and new sensations. The slang that characterized “bohemians” and “sheiks” spoke to how the Lost Generation shied away from the traditional social mores of genteel America.

While the Jazz Age placed strains on family ties, the Depression shattered family solidarity and security. By 1935, the median family annual income dropped to $1,600—far below the $2,500 necessary for a comfortable standard of living, and many families made do with a shoestring $500.⁷ Those who could not make do found themselves adrift, either on the road for greener pastures or lost in an identity crisis. Studies presented anecdotes about fathers abandoning their wives and children as the emasculating crisis challenged their roles as breadwinner and provider.⁸ Nor were the fathers the only ones who left their families behind. The U.S. Children’s Bureau confirmed “hundreds of thousands” of “roving boys,” not wanting to burden their families, ran away in search of work and to fend for themselves.⁹

Director William Wellman’s Wild Boys of the Road (1933) effectively presented restless youths during the Depression. The picture features middle-class boys hitting the road to relieve the burden on their families when their dads lose their jobs. Hollywood’s self-censorship body, the Production Code Administration, fretted over these teenagers encountering dangers outside the comforts of home; chief censor James Wingate asked Warner Bros. to tone down the roving boys’ encounters with streetwalkers, who, employed in the oldest profession, had some sort of job security. Wingate also objected to a railroad brakeman raping a girl hobo; he preferred the assault “be rather an attack in which Lola has been rather badly beaten.” Even worse, Lola’s lost virtue was shared by all; a younger lad asks what happened, and an older, knowing boy responds, “Aw, don’t be so dumb.”¹⁰ In retaliation, the kids attack the rapist, beat him, and kill him when they force him from a moving train (figure 3). The censors understood Warner Bros. wanted “to retain as much punch as possible” for box office purposes, but they warned the studio against obtaining “such dramatic quality at the cost of too much horror.”¹¹ The “horror” was Depression-afflicted kids who lost middle-class security.

The Production Code could not sanitize the “horror” completely. Warner Bros. placated Wingate with a sympathetic judge who rises to the occasion to protect America’s youth under the Blue Eagle of the New Deal, and he sends them home with assurances that their families have recovered. Wingate conceded “it would be hard” to gauge public reaction, but he predicted “the picture will meet with a minimum of difficulty,” thanks to the turnaround of kindly, sympathetic political officials.¹² But he was wrong. Local censors snipped objectionable shots, including boys peppering police with produce and eggs. In Canada, censors inserted a disclaimer noting the film portrayed “conditions in the United States,” but they admitted that “in our own country the patience of our economically disinherited youth is sadly tried in common with all nations of the earth.”¹³ What happened south of their border could happen in British Columbia. Quebec censors simply banned the picture for one reason: “Featuring vagabond boys on the road—soliciting, etc.”¹⁴

FIG. 3 Teenage wasteland. Wild Boys of the Road (1933) exploits the “roving boy” crisis of the early Depression with sex, violence, and the “agony of today’s forgotten youth!” The hero (Frankie Darro, right) leads the boys in revenge on a railroad brakeman (Ward Bond, center) after he rapes one of the group. (Author’s collection.)

These rowdy youths—from the Roaring Twenties and their younger, lawless, “wild” brothers—needed a strong parental hand. Wild Boys of the Road’s judge sitting under the Blue Eagle shield stood in for President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt projected a grandfatherly image whose “fireside chats” and speeches evoked a folksy, down-to-earth assurance.¹⁵ The First Lady, Eleanor, wrote a “My Day” column where she described meeting people and listening to their problems.¹⁶ The Roosevelts inspired desperate Americans of all ages to seek advice, relief, or a sympathetic ear.¹⁷ Many tales centered on family life, with stories of emasculated men in identity crises, overtaxed women struggling to find food, and children wanting to help, but not knowing how. One father’s letter represented the national plight, begging Roosevelt to help him “save my home for my family.” He detailed how he and his wife taught their four children to “live to be proper Americans who love their country, and if needs [sic] be give their lives for it.”¹⁸ The key to national salvation, he asserted, lay in familial well-being.

Young children symbolized this yearning for family stability, and Hollywood complied. Public pressure against unsavory, hard-hitting pictures that glamorized spice and vice led to the Production Code’s strengthening in 1934. Fittingly, the renewed code was embodied not by troubled teenagers but by a six-year-old Shirley Temple. Temple, with her precocious charms, ringlet curls, and adorable baby face and voice, projected innocence mixed with wisdom. Her screen characters resolved plotlines dealing with families breaking up and economic distress that stumped the adults around her.¹⁹ Her pictures ended happily, with Shirley winning the hearts of a collective nation that stood up and cheered her on. As Temple aged, her screen persona matured unevenly, her box office waned, and another youngster, Mickey Rooney, succeeded her.

Mickey Rooney projected a teenage enthusiasm and lust for life rooted in a close-knit home life. His famed “Andy Hardy” persona, presented in fifteen MGM films from 1937 to 1946 (plus shorts, radio broadcasts, public service announcements, and a revived attempt in 1958), celebrated wholesome family togetherness in a midwestern small town, Carvel, created on MGM’s carefully manicured backlot. The films focused on Andy’s troubles with girls, his money to treat girls, and the material pains of growing up and wooing/impressing girls. Stories ended with young Hardy seeking “man to man” advice from his father-judge, and together they promoted piety, patriotism, and generosity (figure 4). The series, cheap to produce and enormously successful, presented an idealized image of American stability that elided large segments of the public outside theaters.

Andy’s success lay in consistency and formulaic storytelling. Anticipating what Hollywood now calls a “cinematic universe,” studio writers intimately knew Carvel’s continuity. In 1941, series screenwriter Katharine Brush explained, “The trouble is that the movie public knows its Hardys like its next-door neighbors and if you make the smallest mistake in characterization, or in dialogue, or in material detail—if you let the slightest off-note creep in anywhere at all—the public protests violently, and swamps the studio with outraged letters.”²⁰ Brush listed specifics: the Hardy family’s income and mortgage remained unknown (so Depression audiences could not make comparisons), kept addresses and phone numbers consistent, and built a family tree going back five generations. Such attention to detail strengthened the series’ characters and tone, while inviting audiences to partake in a growing family saga. Moviegoers could know the Hardys as closely as they knew their neighbors.

FIG. 4 Man to man in the New Deal in Judge Hardy’s Children (1938). As the title implies, Andy Hardy (Mickey Rooney, second from left) gets advice from his father (Lewis Stone, left), who presides over the teen’s socialization into manhood. Andy’s sister (Cecilia Parker, right) watches the maturation process. (Author’s collection.)

MGM recognized the public regarded the Hardys as role models, especially to thwart potential “wild boys.” Brush pointed out how the studio took “infinite pains” to keep the Hardys “precisely average,” lest the “public cries out bitterly—most recent complaint being from parents who say the Hardys travel too much, interrupting school year and thus setting bad example to Young America.”²¹ These complaints reinforced how moviegoers saw the movie family as their ideal stand-in. Brush continued, “All examples must be good, of course, and the studio has abundant proof in letter-files that not only do parents send their children to see these pictures—‘Why can’t you be as nice as that?’—but the children send their parents for the same reason.” Through their pictures, the Hardys socialized youths and their elders through these supposedly timeless tales of middle-class Americana. But for audiences in the Depression, MGM warily stayed away from one topic: money. Brush noted, “Any and all financial troubles suffered by Hardy’s must be of some unusual kind—here it seems we depart from the average, and the family is never shown harassed with ordinary little everyday debts, of the sort that people go to movies to escape from.”²² Lest the Hardys’ predicaments seem too much like the lives of their fans, Andy’s problems remained outlandish, outrageous, and ultimately inconsequential.

Carvel existed outside the Great Depression, but, as Brush noted, the Hardys left their small town to venture out west, to New York, and later met world troubles when Andy shipped out to the front lines during World War II. Fans complained when the family left Carvel not just because Andy missed school but because reality threatened to taint his small-town sensibilities. In early production stages, MGM writers, on the lookout for story material and hoping to top each installment, turned to “real life” for inspiration, and facets of the Great Depression and World War II seeped in. For Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble (1944), scriptwriter Agnes Christine Johnson interviewed college students and observed their obsessions with social prestige, money, and sex, and even thought about combining all three with a pregnancy scare, with the potential parents worried about another mouth to feed. Johnson noted previous installments dealt with death and rhetorically asked, “How can you top it by anything stronger, unless you are e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Claude Jarman Jr.
• List of Abbreviations
• Chronology
• Introduction: Are the Kids All Right?
• 1. The Family in Trouble, 1920–1945
• 2. Gable Is Able: Re-creating the Postwar Family
• 3. Curbing Delinquency: Hot Rodding and Hot Rods
• 4. Whitewashing the Race Cycle in 1949
• 5. The International Picture
• Conclusion: Revising the “Deanlinquent”
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author