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Caution children crossing: home, integration narratives, and the gentle warrior, 1950-1965

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Caution children crossing: home, integration narratives, and the gentle warrior, 1950-1965

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Content CAUTION CHILDREN CROSSING: HOME, INTEGRATION NARRATIVES, AND THE GENTLE WARRIOR, 1950-1965 by Deborah Elizabeth Ramsey A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CRITICAL STUDIES) May 2010 Copyright 2010 Deborah Elizabeth Ramsey ii Acknowledgements I am in the very fortunate position of wanting to thank the many people in my life, who provided tremendous support throughout the long, and many times arduous, process of this dissertation. First, a tremendous “thank you” to my chair Tara McPherson; this project could not have been done without her continuous support, belief, and advice. My sincere gratitude to my committee members--Sarah Banet-Weiser and Steve Anderson— who provided generous, insightful, and constructive feedback and direction. I am in much gratitude for the support that the Institute for Multimedia Literacy has provided me over the many years. Thank you to Holly Willis, Steve Anderson, Janein Chavez, Shelley Cooke, Adam Habib, Evan Hughes, DJ Johnson, Doney Joseph, Gabe Lazaro-Peters, Dave Lopez, Bjorn Palmer, Willy Paredes, Stacy Patterson, Susana Ruiz, Tara Waugh, Matthew Williams, Chris Wittenberg, and Ashley York. A huge thanks to my family and friends: my parents, Clayton and Deborah Ramsey; my brother, Clayton Ramsey; Jane, Alex & the Wernberg clan; Jo Ann Thrailkill; Jonathan Weil; Karolina Hübner; Marc, Elvia & the Petersen family; Nick Lewicki; Robin Ward; Robert Wilson-Smith; Tanya Greve. A gigantic and grateful shout out to Karen Beavers, Mary Jeanne Wilson, Vanessa Lee, and Veronica Paredes; and a very special thank you to Stephanie DeBoer. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii List of Figures iv Abstract vii Introduction 1 There’s No Place Like Home Chapter One 65 Domestic Threshold: Home of the Brave, Innocent and Marginalized Chapter Two 125 Intruder in the House?: The Gentle Warriors, Foreign Children & Adoption in Post-World War II United States Chapter Three 191 Unrest in the Home: The Civil Rights Era Epilogue 278 After the Storm, a Return Home Bibliography 284 iv List of Figures Figure 1: Katrina baby, September 19, 2005 cover of Newsweek 9 Figure 2: Geraldo Rivera on Fox News in the aftermath of Katrina 31 at the New Orleans Convention Center Figure 3: Geraldo Rivera on Fox News in the aftermath of Katrina 31 at the New Orleans Convention Center Figure 4: Jack-in-the-Box, Harper’s Weekly, December 7, 1870 68 Figure 5: Alligator and Child in Palmetto Grove, Florida 72 Figure 6: Jackie Robinson as a boy in the opening of The Jackie Robinson Story 84 Figure 7: Jackie Robinson as a the cute boy to be embraced 85 in The Jackie Robinson Story Figure 8: Jackie Robinson as a the cute boy to be embraced 85 in The Jackie Robinson Story Figure 9: The Statue of Liberty superimposed on Jackie Robinson 89 testifying before HUAC in The Jackie Robinson Story Figure 10: The Statue of Liberty superimposed on Jackie Robinson 89 as a child in The Jackie Robinson Story Figure 11: Kathy Fiscus 96 Figure 12: Carolyn Crawford, the girl in the well, in The Well 104 Figure 13: Carolyn Crawford, the girl in the well, in The Well 104 Figure 14: Rescue scene in The Well 113 Figure 15: Rescue scene in The Well 113 Figure 16: Embodiment of the racialized “Knowing” child 136 Figure 17: Death Slump at Mississippi Lynching 137 Figure 18: “Tensions Turned to Dread and Hate” 141 v Figure 19: “Tensions Turned to Dread and Hate” 141 Figure 20 “Tensions Turned to Dread and Hate” 141 Figure 21: “Tensions Turned to Dread and Hate” 141 Figure 22: Three Stripes in the Sun 150 Figure 23: The Gentle Warrior 166 Figure 24: The Gentle Warrior 166 Figure 25: The Gentle Warrior 166 Figure 26: The Gentle Warrior 166 Figure 27: The Gentle Warrior 166 Figure 28: Freedom’s Shame 204 Figure 29: Mamie Till-Bradley, the grieving mother 210 Figure 30: Carolyn and Roy Bryant with their two sons in court 212 Figure 31: Juanita and J.W. Milam with their two sons in court 212 Figure 32: Ruby Bridges 217 Figure 33: The Problem We All Live With by Norman Rockwell 217 Figure 34: Protesting mothers outside William Frantz Elementary School 224 in New Orleans Figure 35: Protesting mothers outside William Frantz Elementary School 224 in New Orleans Figure 36: Mahalia Jackson in Imitation of Life 245 Figure 37: The black crowd in Imitation of Life 245 Figure 38: Scout with Atticus, the domestic “Gentle Warrior,” 253 in To Kill a Mockingbird vi Figure 39: Scout with Boo Radley, specter of whiteness, 253 in To Kill a Mockingbird Figure 40: Selena and Rose-Ann, the monstrous maternal figure, 262 in A Patch of Blue Figure 41: The crowd rejecting Rose-Ann in A Patch of Blue 262 Figure 42: Gordon, the “Gentle Warrior,” helping Selena in A Patch of Blue 264 Figure 43: Intolerant mothers in A Patch of Blue 264 vii Abstract “Caution Children Crossing: Home, Integration Narratives, and the Gentle Warrior, 1950-1965” revolves around the image of the racialized child in post-World War II Cold War America. This child figure, along with themes of home, citizenship and compassion, in this historical period disclose what film and cultural scholar Steven Cohan claims is a crisis in masculinity. My project will support and expand upon Cohan’s work, yet reveal that it is a crisis in white masculinity and examine how the figure of the racialized child plays into the re-stabilization and reformation of white middle-class masculinity, as well as a remapping and remaking of racism in adult hegemonic culture. The project focuses on media narratives in post-World War II America, and inquires how the image of the child is exploited to maintain boundaries, a “structured blindness and opacity,” and to ultimately uphold a “possessive investment in whiteness,” particularly in a historical period in which the United States, and world, was experiencing a “shift” in the worldwide racial system. While examining an earlier period in American history, this project always keeps in mind that investigating the cultural strategies of the past can unearth how these residual cultural constructions and narratives are deployed in current political and cultural contexts to preserve the status quo; and hopefully this retrospective inquiry inspires new ways of envisioning the future without binaries and unjust logics. 1 Introduction There’s No Place Like Home …Hurricane Katrina’s violent winds and killing waters swept into the mainstream a stark realization: the poor had been abandoned by society and its institutions, and sometimes by their well-off brothers and sisters, long before the storm. We are immediately confronted with another unsavory truth: it is the exposure of the extremes, not their existence, that stumps our national sense of decency...As long as poverty is a latent reality, a solemn social fact suppressed from prominence on our moral compass, we can find our bearings without fretting too much about its awkward persistence. (Michael Eric Dyson) 1 The Myth of New Orleans “Land of Dreams,” “City of Sin,” “The City That Care Forgot,” “The Big Easy”—New Orleans as an American southern city holds a unique place in our culture; it has always been a center of myth and legend…(Violet Harrington Bryan) 2 When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, and the horrific spectacle of the aftermath was aired on television across the nation and world, my mother declared, “Well, New Orleans’ dirty little secret is out.” My family “evacuated” New Orleans fifteen years prior to Katrina, in 1990, to the grey overcast comfort of the Northwest city, Seattle. My parents, transplants to New Orleans but natives to the South, had attended undergraduate at Tulane/Newcomb, where they met, fell in love and decided to set up home in New Orleans for thirty-one years. My mother’s comment was a reaction to the barrage of images of black and poor citizens stranded at the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center. I wish I could say that I was astonished to see what was broadcast in the days after Katrina. But the shock I felt in witnessing images of people in deplorable conditions in that particular city felt all too familiar, and I could relate to my mother’s comment. Before Katrina, when people asked me the standard make-conversation 2 question of “where are you from?”, I would reply “New Orleans,” and immediately knew what question would come. Without fail, most people’s faces would light up with curiosity, and follow with “What was it like to grow up there?” After years of answering this question, I know exactly what they want to hear—that is was a party all the time, and stories of what I would do for Mardi Gras beads. But I, always the solemn serious person I am, answered, “It was difficult. There are a lot of social, racial and class issues. I felt like I grew up in an invisible bubble.” That seemed to stop all questioning. To give the city and its citizens credit, New Orleans certainly is, or was (it is still unclear what the social landscape will be of post-Katrina New Orleans), a multicultural city with a rich culture and opportunities for artistic expression and voices, however it was/is a city with deep divides, corruption and racial inequalities. My experience of navigating New Orleans was fraught with tensions between “truth” and urban myth. On the way to elementary school, we would pass Jo Ellen Smith Memorial Hospital, which was dedicated and aptly named after a young white nursing school female student who, on a required home care visit for nursing school, was robbed, raped, and “brutally” killed by two black men in a local public housing project. The hospital, although a memorial to a young woman who cared about the community, stood as a mythic reminder of the “brutality and danger” of black poor men. Later, when I switched schools in junior high, I now drove by the local housing project, and I looked in voyeuristic curiosity at this space and the people who occupied it. In New Orleans, every time we drove by a housing project, my mother would tell me to lock the car doors (this 3 was before automatic locks), reinforcing the “danger” that lurked in mysterious public housing. To my developing adolescent mind, this and many of the survival skills I acquired as a white upper-middle class Southern female were confusing and contradicting. And although my parents warned me of the “dangers,” they also taught me compassion and fostered an inquiry into the seemingly inequitable systems that we dwelled in. So in 1990, my family escaped the depressing streets of New Orleans. My parents took on new identities once they left the confining roles of the Southern upper-middle class. My mother was no longer the Southern socialite and volunteer. She did not dress up in costume slave garb, along with the other high-society New Orleans ladies, to volunteer and cook at the Hermann-Grima house. 3 When I moved to the Northwest with my family and then later to Southern California, I was struck immediately by the different racial and class politics. While intrigued by a new culture and feeling free from the oppressive culture of the South, I felt disoriented and a lack of grounding and familiarity. In Seattle and Los Angeles, it is not that the issues of poverty and race do not exist, but they seemed more quarantined than my experience in the city of New Orleans. My vision was adapted to seeing through a particular historical, social and racial lens, and I was removed from the cohesive narrative my parents could provide, of the local, personal and historical background of New Orleans and the South. One of the tasks I have taken as an adult and cultural scholar is to deconstruct the narratives that were developed during those years in New Orleans and to “make sense” of the racial, gender and class inequities and cultural 4 politics that I witnessed as a child, and to translate this into my current context, with continued questioning of my own identity, to construct and form alternative visions and optical logics. Many will recognize the title of this chapter, “There’s No Place Like Home,” as the infamous and overly-used line from the film The Wizard of Oz (1939). The phrase in the film refers to Dorothy’s longing and the magical words she repeats in order to return home. My use of the phrase can be read with a more ironic twist; my return home and the recollection of my experience in New Orleans as a child is not simply a nostalgic tale or intended to be seeped with white guilt, but a deliberate reflection with hopes to unveil. Although New Orleans is a place that I can call home, and a city with its own particular historical social relations, it is also a place that reflects national social relations and power structures in the United States around race, class and gender. This project returns home, to New Orleans, as a narrative strategy for entry points into the major themes, nodes, of the pursuing chapters: home; race and citizenship; the politics of compassion; and representation of children and innocence. Although this Introduction is positioned in a contemporary moment, the following chapters will examine these themes in post-World War II Cold War United States time period. Home during the 1950s in the United States relies on the maintenance of boundaries and the dual logic of inclusion/exclusion of Others. In this historical period of “white flight” to newly developed suburbs, the domestic containment of the suburban home was a 5 bounded place, both geographical and representational, of security for the 1950’s (white) family. The discussion of the Cold War family, as cultural historian Elaine Tyler May argues, cannot be isolated from the political culture beyond the physical borders of the suburbs. Home is this project is also metaphor for nation. The United States in the Cold War period moved into a position of global leadership, resulting in increased political and international pressure to address domestic racial policies of discrimination and segregation in order to build alliances with foreign nations against the threat of Communism; and to justify the liberal, democratic, capitalist world order of the United States as a more open and humane society than that of Communist states. The socio- economic foreign policy of the Cold War was containment and integration: containment of the Soviet Union and communism around the world; integration of democracy and free trade around the world, creating an integrated global economy. Part of the reason this project focuses specifically on this particular time period is the United States, and world, was experiencing a “shift,” a “break,” in the worldwide racial system. According to sociologist Howard Winant, a multitude of factors--anti-colonialism, antiapartheid, worldwide revulsion at fascism, US civil rights movement, and US-USSR competition-- contributed to this “break” and “linked antiracism to democratic political development.” 4 With this particular moment of social and political rupture, I am interested in examining race, home, and representation of children in the cultural discourse of this volatile time and how these cultural motifs were ideologically deployed to reframe (white) power structures, that also mold the structures I am embedded within. 6 My project revolves around the image of the racialized child in post-World War II Cold War America. This child figure, along with themes of home, citizenship and compassion, in this historical period disclose what film and cultural scholar Steven Cohan claims is a crisis in masculinity. However, my project will support and expand upon Cohan’s work and reveal that it is a crisis in white masculinity and how the figure of the racialized child plays into the re-stabilization and reformation of white middle-class masculinity, as well as a remapping and remaking of racism in adult hegemonic culture. The chapters following will focus on the culture and media in post-World War II America, and inquire how each of the main themes are exploited to maintain boundaries, a “structured blindness and opacity,” 5 and to uphold a “possessive investment in whiteness.” 6 Investigating the cultural strategies of the past can unearth how these residual cultural constructions are deployed in current political and cultural contexts to preserve the status quo, and hopefully inspire new ways of envisioning the future without binaries and unjust logics. The Disruptive Presence of Katrina The media coverage on the aftermath of Katrina offered a potential moment of “presence of mind” for U.S. citizens, and commanded the nation to witness the extreme poverty and racism that existed under not just the romanticized myth of New Orleans, but also within the U.S. democratic system. 7 In the media discourse of the aftermath, disorientation and the question of “How could this happen?” domineered discussions as reporters and citizens tried to comprehend and make sense of the despair on their screens. 7 In these national questionings, much of the blame of the aftermath was placed on the Bush administration and fumbling state and federal bureaucratic systems. Howard Winant claims that the victories from the racial shift of the modern Civil Rights period have been incorporated into the hegemonic racial state, resulting in the acquisition of “a new racial language” and a continuation of a “racially oppressive policy” culminating in today’s claim that we are now beyond race. 8 Although overt racism and the meaning of race have metamorphosed over time, Winant believes “race-conscious democracy has never been realized.” 9 To understand and clarify the racial dynamics in the U.S., Winant finds W.E.B. DuBois’ concept of the “veil,” a complex dialectical metaphor for the dynamics of race and power, still useful and relevant. The veil is both a barrier and a connection; and operates on two social levels—“we can understand the veil operating simultaneously at the ‘micro’ level of identity, experience, the divisions and struggles within the racialized self, and at the ‘macro’ level of the social whole, the collectivity, the state, history, the nation.” 10 As Winant indicates, racism exists on multiple planes and ignoring one level simply displaces the complexity of the problem, particularly in a period that wants to declare itself as “post-race.” By solely accusing the government and institutions, the average American citizen is allowed to maintain distance from the difficulties and complexities of racism and classism within the “democratic” structure, and to, perhaps, express a temporary moment of compassionate sympathy, but to ultimately continue on with everyday life, shirking acknowledgments of the complex interconnectedness of the social system and individual subject. 8 The media’s framing tactics of the aftermath of Katrina narrative did have their own controversy. Many citizens noted the stereotypical portrayal of white and black “looters,” and questioned the validity of the urban legends of lone black shooters wreaking terror in the flooded streets. Conversely, another common convention of disaster narratives is provoking compassion with the strategic use of innocence and representation of children. For instance, on the September 19, 2005 cover of Newsweek is an extreme close-up of a black baby, tears streaming down one side of its face. 11 In this particular illustration, the child symbolizes the innocent victim of a natural disaster and government mishandling. In this simple yet powerful image, the complexity of race, class and citizenship in the United States infrastructure is dissolved, and the critique of the aftermath becomes narrowly focused. As Henry Jenkins points out, the figure of the innocent child is used as a “’human shield’ against criticism” in the political battles of adults and hegemonic systems. 12 And as this study will expose, the representation of innocence and childhood is not equivocally bestowed and is intricately wrapped up in the preservation of the status quo. 9 On the above-mentioned Newsweek cover, the title at the top of the page, highlighted in yellow, is the headline “Why Bush Failed • Children of the Storm.” While the headline is actually titles of two stories, the design fails to clearly distinguish between Bush’s mishandling and the children. The arrangement encourages the reader to stream the words together, linking Bush’s failure to the children as the reader stares into the eyes of the child on the cover. The actual identity and condition of the baby on the cover is not important to the magazine compared to the emotive reaction (and ultimately sales) the design provokes. 13 Clearly, the magazine uses the trope of the innocent child to critique the Bush administration (perhaps even make a jab at Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy). But a “competent citizen” has to ask who does this baby represent? 14 And while the sentimental image of a crying black baby may evoke compassion would images of the “forgotten” citizens the baby stands in for create the same reaction? Figure 1: Katrina baby, September 19, 2005 cover of Newsweek 10 What is Home? Houses are assumed to become homes because they provide and become the environment within which family relationships--close, private, and intimate—are located. While it is true that non-family households also have homes, a crucial element of the everyday understanding of home is the notion of a place within which children are or will be reared and, therefore, a place of origin, a place of belonging, a place to which to return. 15 (Sophie Bowlby, Susan Gregory, and Linda McKie) Perhaps one of the more unsettling aspects of the aftermath of Katrina and the numerous people trapped at the Convention Center and the Superdome was that they were homeless. The mass of, mostly black, bodies were no longer safely contained in their homes, apartments, or housing projects. Not only had these citizens lost their physical dwellings, but most would depart on an exodus from the city they called home. Barbara Bush’s infamous and controversial “personal” observation of the Katrina survivors at the Astrodome exhibits white privileged culture’s “blindness” and fear to the complicated social and historical issues. 16 The media primarily focused on the homelessness of the innocent (the elderly and the children) and New Orleans homeowners; in other words those perceived to be good or potentially good and harmless citizens. The disaster narrative in the U.S. news is not just the devastation to human life, but of property, and the great lengths and dangers property owners will subject themselves to in order save their stake in the American Dream. 17 The house in American mythology is the symbol of success, a sign of ownership and active participation in the democratic capitalist system. In the quote opening this section, Bowlby, Gregory and McKie call attention to the common assumption of the physical house becoming a “home” of nuclear heterosexual family relationships. Historically the public acquisition of a house has traditionally been 11 a masculine role, while the private action of making the house into a home has customarily been the duty of the female, wife and mother. The home in the everyday understanding, as Bowlby, Gregory and McKie argue, is a secure and safe place for children to associate as a site of belonging, “a place to which to return.” Home, the space of the feminine and the childish, does not denote procurement of property, and therefore active participation. Many feminist cultural critics have taken issue with this gendering of private and public space, the implications of duty and power dynamics within the home, and those citizens who do not own homes. Many could also question whether presumptions about ownership of houses and cars on the U.S. government’s part, rather than analyzing the gross inequality of class and property ownership, contributed to the mismanagement and failure of the aftermath of Katrina. This discussion brings us to the first node of this project: the concept of home in American culture. In post-World War II, white flight moved Caucasian families out of urban spaces to the outer-lying suburbs, solidifying the perceived notions of the neutral (white) home, and further gendering public and private space. These suburban landscapes represented a safe haven to raise children and contain the ideals of childhood. The succeeding chapters will examine popular constructions of home as the privileged secure space of the child; but it is also worth considering alternatives conceptions of the “American” home. I have found feminist writings concerned with disrupting the conception of the protected neutral home fruitful when questioning what is at stake in maintaining “home.” Not only do these writings rupture common assumed dynamics 12 existing in the home, they provide alternative voices and a deeper, more sophisticated, foundation. “Home,” Bowlby, Gregory and McKie argue, is a site of exclusive political boundaries: The notion of the home as a physical location and a psychological concept is often a positive one of warmth, security, and a haven from the pressures of paid employment and public life. Media images and political discourse take it for granted that “a home” is something we all desire. However, the home is also a site for the creation and operation of inequitable relations….A concept of home is often employed by governments as a bounded and clearly demarcated space for safeguarding “family life” and the promotion of national identity and nationalism. In this context, the haven of “home” and “homeland” are spaces from which undesirables—those who do not conform—are excluded. 18 The four feminist writers that I single out in this Introduction as content for my project emerge from varying standpoints and positions, in terms of both identity and scholarship. These feminist writers connect their concept of home to a larger political project, which is not based on the binary of inclusion/exclusion and instead offer a richer theory of home that grants room for multiple identities and viewpoints. While the ensuing chapters will point to representations of home that do little to disturb boundaries and exclusion, these feminist writings will inform how popular constructions reinforce dominant, constricting, adult ideologies of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Home-place, borders, and privilege In Space Place and Gender, Doreen Massey discusses space, home and gender in the theoretical terms of fluid identities and how it is social relations that compose space, not geographical boundaries. Massey’s notion of space and the identity of place, such as home, “is always formed by the juxtaposition and co-presence [sic] of particular sets of 13 social interrelations, and by the effects which that juxtaposition and co-presence produce.” 19 This understanding is unfixed and not confined by concrete perimeters and goes “beyond the area being referred to in any particular context as a place,” and “by their very nature dynamic and changing.” 20 For Massey, home is then in part constructed out of the “interrelations with elsewhere,” which is: in contrast to many readings of place as home, where this is imagined to be the security of a (false, as we have seen) stability and an apparently reassuring boundedness. Such understandings of the identity of places require them to be enclosures, to have boundaries and–therefore and most importantly--to establish their identity through negative counterposition with the Other beyond the boundaries…The identity of a place does not derive from some internalized history. It derives, in large part, precisely from the specificity of its interactions with ‘the outside.’ 21 Massey recognizes fear and anxiety are common reactions to the destabilization of place and home, which indicates that the idea of place has been construed in a particular defined fashion. 22 Massey’s discussion of place as a fluid identity and the anxious response of distress felt by those who invest in the bounded, static construction of home are useful concepts in thinking through the cultural and social conflicts around home and space in post World War II United States. This project will consider multiple ways home was represented and adapted to accommodate fluctuating political and cultural agendas. Massey’s acknowledgment of fear and anxiety aroused by shifting established boundaries can also appertain to understanding the masculinity and national identity crisis of the 1950s. Post World War II culture normalized white-collar labor ideology resulting in “the working class’s identification with middle-class hegemony and masculinity.” 23 As Steven Cohan argues this “ended up relocating masculinity in what had previously been 14 considered a ‘feminine’ sphere, primarily valuing a man’s domesticity (and consumption) over his work (and production) as a means through which he fulfilled societal expectations.” 24 In addition, the Cold War politics of containment and integration required a “hard masculinity” to defend the nation’s boundaries, but also a “soft masculinity” for the home. This contradictory delineation of masculinity both celebrated “home” and nation. 25 As fixed notions of normative masculinity fluctuated in the fifties, my project will argue, the figure of the racialized child becomes a cipher for consequential anxieties and an Other for masculinity to redefine itself against. Less abstract in her discussion of the home, bell hooks provides insight into the political significance of “homeplace” for African Americans. For hooks, the homeplace is a site of black resistance in a society of racist domination and oppression. She states, Throughout our history, African-Americans have recognized the subversive value of homeplace, of having access to private space where we do not directly encounter white racist aggression. Whatever the shape and direction of black liberation struggle (civil rights reform or black power movement), domestic space has been a crucial site for organizing, for forming political solidarity. Homeplace has been a site of resistance. 26 The homeplace, affirms hooks, is a site that historically has been a place of psychic strength and energy for the marginalized African-American community. It also is a space for black women to exert their creative and political power of constructing a homeplace for critical consciousness. However, she locates a danger as black homes begin to replicate the norms of mainstream (white) middle class society: In the contemporary situation, as the paradigms for domesticity in black life mirrored white bourgeois norms…black people began to overlook and devalue the importance of black female labor in teaching critical consciousness in domestic 15 space. Many black women, irrespective of class status, have responded to this crisis of meaning by imitating leisure-class sexist notions of women’s role, focusing their lives on meaningless compulsive consumerism. 27 Her essay intends to honor the black women of the past who have created a homeplace as popular memory disregards them and their efforts. She also wants contemporary black women to revisit and recognize the “homeplace as a site of resistance.” 28 In other works, hooks focuses on a more intimate, personal, and internal concept of home. In Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, a memoir, she narrates the memories of a young black girl, assumed to be hooks. The memories include her family, interactions with her parent’s expectations, living in an unjust white world of the fifties and ultimately the process of discovering her self and creativity. At night when everyone is silent and everything is still, I lie in the darkness of my windowless room, the place where they exile me from the community of their heart, and search the unmoving blackness to see if I can find my way home. I tell myself stories, write poems, record my dreams. In my journal I write—I belong in this place of words. This is my home. This dark, bone black inner cave where I am making a world for myself. 29 In this instance, home is located inside of herself and she struggles to discover it through her writing and creativity. Homeplace, for hooks, is a place that can house a political community and provide renewal and recovery from a divisive world and culture. It is also a psychological and creative space that can provide comfort, safety, and a sense of belonging, but one has to work for it in the creative act. hooks’ notion of home is not a neutral passive place; it is a site of hope, growth, action and possibility. And as Doreen Massey points out, hooks’ memories are not simply nostalgic reminiscences, “she is talking of ‘a politicization of memory that distinguishes nostalgia, that longing for 16 something to be as once it was, a kind of useless act, from that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present.” 30 While home is certainly a place where the family and seeds of the community dwell, hooks’ essay points to the home as the birthplace for political consciousness, specifically for the marginalized African American community. hooks’ writings ascribe the home with an alternative use than the traditional “all-American” white consumer home. When looking at the symbol and value of the home in post-World War II United States, hooks provides a disparate model and infuses home and its inhabitants, such as women and children, with political activity. And while hooks regards the homeplace as a safe harbor from the dominant world, she also sees the homeplace, like Massey, as a site based on social relations. hooks’ description of the homeplace existing within a system that denies African- Americans their humanity and safety resembles an island amidst a sea of white. Cultural critic and poet Gloria Anzaldua speaks of a different demarcated experience of home and homeland in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Identifying herself as Latina and lesbian, Anzaldua writes about the struggle of the marginalized who occupy (and are occupied by) the border spaces, physically, culturally, and psychologically, between Mexico and the United States. Discussing the space between the United States, she states, The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them them… The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. 31 17 Anzaldua’s description of the borderlands, emphasizes the erection of borders to create identity, to establish those who are included and those who are excluded. Inclusion is a site of power, a component of the accepted and dominant culture; “the only legitimate inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with the whites.” 32 Those excluded are interpreted as deviants of the dominant ideology; “Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal…” 33 Resembling hooks, Anzaldua recognizes the position of the minority as an “outsider” in the oppressive white supremacist culture of the U.S. However Anzaldua’s emphasis is on her own exclusion from her traditional culture, her “home,” due to her identification as a lesbian. As hooks speaks of the self-actualizing physical space of home, Anzaldua explains the necessary, painful divorce from “home” in order to break away from internal oppression and attempt to create a new “home,” a new culture: To separate from my culture (as from my family) I had to feel competent enough on the outside and secure enough inside to live life on my own. Yet in leaving home I did not lose touch with my origins because el mexicano is in my system. I am turtle, wherever I go I carry “home” on my back… And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture— una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminine architecture. 34 For Anzuldua, home is ultimately located within the self. Due to the homophobic and sexist elements within dominant Latino culture, she must conceive her own space, her own culture that is built with a new consciousness out of traditional cultural elements. 18 Home is not a static concept—it is an active process of transformation, both in the self and culture. The process for una cultura mestiza is not a straightforward or easy one; it is an arduous psychological journey in formulating a new consciousness. La mestiza has discovered that she cannot hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries. The borders and walls that supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and towards a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes… In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness—and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm…The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war. 35 Anzuldua’s political goal is to not only alter the individual’s, la mestiza’s, consciousness, but the collective culture that is embedded in the dominant dualistic and convergent thinking of borders. The transformation occurs with the individual who can “show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended.” It is not just a process of consciousness-raising; once la mestiza has a strong foundation she is to embody the new consciousness and produce work that will influence and transform others. Anzaldua’s notion of home revamps the duality of inclusion/exclusion that dominant, patriarchal, and heterosexual homes are founded on. Redefining home, and 19 obtaining a mestiza consciousness, is a political project with the potential to liberate the culture of the destructive bounded mindset. Both hooks and Anzuldua describe home as a physical place and a psychological space, in which those who are marginalized can find strength, creativity, and healing through new political consciousness. Both speak from a place of the marginalized, the excluded, whether due to their racial and/or sexual identity. hooks’ and Anzuldua’s work attempt to imagine an alternative space for “Other.” Both of these feminists are demonstrating and encouraging political work in acts of remembrance and creativity. Their efforts crack the prevailing veneer of “home” and illuminate differing options, counternarratives and understandings. My project focuses on a time period in which the white middle-class concept of home domineers American culture. What hooks, Anzuldua, and Massey offer are theories and visions in opposition of white middle-class values. The concluding feminist writer speaks of “home” as she considers her place of privilege as a white woman and the struggle to transgress and redefine “home” within the bounded dominant space. Minnie Bruce Pratt’s essay Identity: Skin Blood Heart tackles the mirage of the secure white “home.” Pratt’s essay, like hooks and Anzaldua, delves into the personal memory of home and culture to expose deeper historical and political forces at play. For Pratt, home is an uneasy place. Biddy Martina and Chandra Talpade Mohanty describe Pratt’s narrative as, 20 tension between two modalities: being home and not being home. “Being home” refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; “not being home” is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself. Illusions of home are always undercut by the discovery of the hidden demographics of particular places, as demography also carries the weight of histories of struggle. 36 Pratt’s narrative reflects on the privileges of growing up white in a southern household and describes her process of political and self-consciousness. Pratt differs from hooks and Anzaldua in the sense that she recognizes her position of historical and cultural privilege. hooks and Anzaldua discuss the importance of home for the marginalized in American society, whether home is a physical location or an internal psychological space. Pratt, however, sees the need for a complete transformation of her normalized concept of home, which has her partaking in injustices against the excluded. It is also Pratt’s own marginalization in coming out as a lesbian that facilitates her understanding of privilege linked to dominant culture. Pratt’s process of consciousness is not just her comprehension of her own individual oppression as (white) woman and lesbian: But I did not feel that my new understanding simply moved me into a place where I joined others to struggle with them against common injustices. Because I was implicated in the doing of some of these injustices, and I held myself, and my people, responsible, what my expanded understanding meant was that I felt in a struggle with myself, against myself. This breaking through did not feel like a liberation but like destruction. 37 What Martin and Mohanty find so compelling about Pratt’s narrative is her struggle to work through her complex cultural narratives and re-imagine how she should be in the world. 38 21 In Pratt’s narrative, there is “no final realm of freedom;” “there is no new place, no new home,” for construction of home is formation of boundaries and change comes with transgression of boundaries. 39 Pratt’s narrative is “an irreconcilable tension between the search for a secure place from which to speak, within which to act, and the awareness of the price at which secure places are bought, the awareness of the exclusions, the denials, the blindnesses on which they are predicated.” 40 In challenging the notion of a secure place, Pratt’s narrative also brings to question the solidarity of a political community as political priorities must constantly be questioned and in flux in order for the community not to ossify into habitual privileged practices. 41 Transgressing boundaries is a process that is hard work and frightening. Pratt’s narrative differs from Anzaldua’s and hook’s as it told from an outlook of white privilege. While Anzaldua’s process is building a new home, a new culture, because she is on the outside, Pratt’s process is a constant questioning and chiseling at the privileged place of stability. Similar to Massey, Pratt’s narrative suggests that the feeling of security is always purchased at a price and involved in systems of power. hooks, Anzaldua and Pratt perceive home--whether it is building a homeplace, una cultura mestiza, or destabilizing notions of white middle-class home--as a struggle against the hegemonic oppressive culture. Pratt’s story also reminds one of the real and material dangers of opposition. Due to identifying herself as lesbian, she is perceived as unfit as a mother and her children are removed from her legal custody. Transgressing has very real dangers and consequences. 22 As these feminist scholars have argued, home, in its traditional sense, is the site of boundaries and creation of an identity based on inclusion/exclusion. “Home” requires inquiry. This project aligns itself with the struggle to destabilize assumptions of “home” and to question what is at stake in maintaining the secure notion of home? Home is also the space that the child is assumed to occupy. If “childhood is the difference against which adults define themselves,” 42 as Lynn Spigel argues, then what is threatened when beliefs of home and the perceived safety of the child is challenged? In particular, what fears are provoked in postwar debates around integration of schools and neighborhoods? And how is the figure of the child a key component to expanding the boundaries of inclusion? What becomes apparent in exploring these questions are the challenges and attempts to uphold (white) hegemonic patriarchy within and outside the national borders. Representations of home (and masculinity) are collapsed into nationhood during this time period; and in the chapters that follow, this project will demonstrate a historical and cultural attempt to stabilize “home,” while also attempting to integrate difference to expand U.S. political and cultural power. Citizenship and the Racial Contract Returning to New Orleans and the aftermath of Katrina, what became blatantly clear was the mistreatment of American denizens, who happened to be majority poor and black. This begins discussion of the second node of this project: citizenship and race. In Michael Eric Dyson’s analysis of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he comments on America’s amnesia towards the poor and the basic concept of American citizenship. In 23 the ideal world of democracy all citizens should expect to be treated equally, regardless of class, race, gender, or any category that an individual may be grouped. However, a very different practice is performed. Dyson relies on the idea of the democratic social contract and to expound his argument on the inequality of citizenship as determined in Michael Ignatieff’s New York Times article The Broken Contract. Ignatieff, Professor and Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, applies the concept of the (failed) social contract in political theory to the Katrina aftermath. He explains the basics of the contract of citizenship as, the duties of care that public officials owe to the people of a democratic society. The Constitution defines some parts of this contract [sic], and statutes define other parts, but much of it is a tacit understanding that citizens have about what to expect from their government. Its basic term is protection: helping citizens to protect their families and possessions from forces beyond their control. Let’s not suppose this contract is uncontroversial...But there is enough agreement, most of the time, about what the contract contains for America to hold together as a political community. When disasters strike, they test whether the contract is respected in a citizen’s hour of need. When the levees broke, the contract of American citizenship failed. 43 Ignatieff continues, "We are American": that single sentence was a lesson in political obligation. Black or white, rich or poor, Americans are not supposed to be strangers to one another. Having been abandoned, the people in the convention center were reduced to reminding their fellow citizens, through the medium of television, that they were not refugees in a foreign country...They are not ties of charity. In America, a citizen has a claim of right on the resources of her government when she cannot - simply cannot - help herself. It may be astonishing that American citizens should have had to remind their fellow Americans of this, but let us not pretend we do not know the reason. They were black, and…they were treated not as citizens but as garbage. 44 24 Ignatieff and Dyson reprimand the government’s failures to treat the victims of Katrina as citizens, which is their basic right and expectation as U.S. citizens. Ignatieff reminds readers, democratic citizenship is not based on philanthropy, but is a social contract each citizen has with the government. Ignatieff’s article is brief--as it is confined to the pages of the New York Times--and although he acknowledges that society is “unjust and unfair” to the poor and black in American society, the article neglects to extrapolate on the complex histories of race and class in relationship to citizenship. Ignatieff’s reference to the televised image as the reminder of citizenship is also worth noting. Only through the mediated image, can citizens recognize fellow citizens. While Americans were willing to give assistance, to a certain degree, serious debates around the “natural” rights of citizenship remained quiet. 45 In cultural and political scholar Lauren Berlant’s discussion of American citizenship and the national knowledge industry, she argues that “the vulnerability of personal existence to the instability of capitalism and the concretely unequal forms and norms of national life must be suppressed, minimized, or made to seem exceptional, not general to the population.” 46 She identifies the United States composed of the “infantile citizen,” which is a “citizen form that transcends the fractures and hierarchies of national life” by lacking a critical knowledge and political agency. 47 According to Berlant “citizen adults have learned to ‘forget,’” and/or have associated their utopian identification as “impractical, naïve, or childish…in order to be politically happy and economically functional.” 48 Ensuing, the infantile citizen believes that the nation and state have in mind the best interest and well being of the ordinary 25 citizen. In contrast, the “competent” adult citizen fosters a critical consciousness that distinguishes the “hypocrisy of nationalist rhetoric, and learns how to read conveniently and flexibly between the lines, thus preserving both utopian national identification and cynical practical citizenship.” 49 Dyson, Ignatieff, and Berlant reference a “forgetfulness” on the part of American citizens. It could be argued that all three writers call for the responsible American citizen to obtain a necessary critical vision to see the embedded position of denizens in the biased network of hegemonic power. In regards to race, philosopher Charles Mills continues with the call for vision, and makes the argument that the American social contract is a “Racial Contract” that promotes “a structured blindness” to white privilege in American social and political systems. Mills writes, “white supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today…It is just taken for granted, it is the background against which other systems, which we are to see as political, are highlighted.” 50 Using contractarian theory, history and political philosophy, Mills identifies the Racial Contract as the defining contract within Western democratic societies: “the social contract…is not a contract between everybody (‘we the people’), but between just the people who count, the people who really are people (‘we the white people’).” 51 His work is an attempt to reveal how race is an essential element to the democratic sociopolitical society and to retrain vision; “to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along.” 52 Mills wants to discuss racism, or global white supremacy, as “itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal and informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the 26 differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties.” 53 The history of the Western world is a history of white settlement, and, as Mills argues, it has been a transformation of human populations into “white” and “nonwhite” men,” and begot a system that perpetuates and reproduces this racial order. 54 To conserve a political and moral Racial Contract, Mills argues, the system possesses its own intrinsic “moral and empirical epistemology.” 55 He explains, But for the Racial Contract things are necessarily more complicated. The requirements of “objective” cognition, factual and moral, in a racial polity are in a sense more demanding in that officially sanctioned reality is divergent from actual reality. So here, it could be said, one has an agreement to misinterpret the world. One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular. 56 This argument of the social contract as an agreement to misinterpret the world in regards to race and privilege profoundly calls into question the nation’s knowledge industry and the moral and cognitive systems American citizens operate under. Mills continues to assert, Thus in effect, on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made [sic]…To a significant extent, then, white signatories will live in an invented delusional world, a racial fantasyland, a “consensual hallucination,” to quote William Gibson’s famous characterization of cyberspace, though this particular hallucination is located in real space...One could say then, as a general rule, that white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race [sic] are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement. And these phenomena are in no way accidental, but prescribed [sic] by the terms of the Racial Contract, which requires 27 a certain schedule of structured blindness and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity. 57 Similar to Berlant’s project to expose and reframe the national culture industry, Mill’s argument of “structured blindness” helps in reflecting on questions of how white supremacy boundaries are maintained and racism is remapped. These discussions of race, citizenship, forgetfulness and structured blindness provide a schema to understand how white systems of power and culture incorporate race to reinforce and secure privilege, while maintaining citizen consent. Mills, Berlant, hooks, Anzaldua and Pratt, all acknowledge a lack of persistent critical vision on most citizen’s part and an obfuscation by dominant power systems. The racial shift of the post World War II period did not result in racism’s dissolve, but racism’s adaptation. In examining the culture of the fifties with a focus on race and children, this project will parse the nuanced, yet powerful, modes of racism’s transformation. Before continuing to the next node, how race is conceived in this project requires comment. In regards to the concept of race, my project aligns itself with those theorists who perceive it as a sociopolitical and historical concept, not biological. For Mills, “Race is sociopolitical rather than biological, but it is nonetheless real. [sic]” 58 Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant state race is defined as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies. [sic]” 59 Omi and Winant define this “sociohistoric process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” as “racial formation;” and from this perspective, “race is a matter of both social structure and cultural representation.” 60 The 28 concept of race fluctuates and is socially and historically formulated. An entire branch of Critical Race Theory (CRT) has developed since the mid-1970’s that is interested in the relationship between “race, racism and power.” 61 Critical Race theorists would also agree that the socio-economic system of “white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.” 62 Cultural scholar George Lipsitz would term this the “possessive investment in whiteness,” while Charles Mills would call this the Racial Contract. Those who invest in this system of power have little incentive to change or perceive it as an unjust system, as Mills, Lipsitz, and Berlant argue. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic also recognize a relatively recent concept about race in the notion of “different racialization”—“the idea that each race has its own origins and ever evolving history” and society “racializes different minority groups at different times” for specific societal needs, such as labor. 63 These thoughts help translate the various constructions and emphasis of particular racial stereotypes at different points in time and place; and how these varying racial narratives allow certain groups to be included or excluded, seen or unseen, to be considered good citizens or not, at various historical moments. When the racial construct of “white” is mentioned in this project, it refers to the dominant hegemonic culture and all those who invest in and identify with it. White also appears in parenthesis throughout my project to draw attention to the privilege of whiteness. As Richard Dyer points out at the level of representation white is “just the human race.” 64 When common understandings—such as masculinity, femininity, child, common sense— are referenced, whiteness and the Racial Contract are always inferred but rarely 29 acknowledged; “the claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity.” 65 And while this project will primarily focus on the struggles of African Americans in post-World War II (white) culture in the United States, it will also reference, as in Chapter Two, how other races within the global context of the Cold War provided an intimate counterposition to American blackness and white patriarchy. Look at these Babies Once again returning to the case of New Orleans and the Katrina aftermath, this section brings us to the third node of my project, which is the representation of children, innocence and the politics of compassion. These three themes are tightly bound to one another, and are ultimately tied to race and class in American culture. While the myth of the American Dream and the Racial Contract support a structured blindness to the needs and existence of the marginalized, the media covering the Katrina aftermath deployed tactics that would heighten viewers’ compassion for the chaos and devastation that were occurring to the people at the Convention Center and Superdome. As stated earlier, reporters singled out the “innocent” victims of the aftermath, primarily the elderly and the young, to highlight the victimization of citizens who might otherwise in different circumstances be blamed for their own conditions. On a Fox News broadcast at 6pm (ET) six days after Katrina, a segment aired on which Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera express their bafflement at the conditions they find in New Orleans and lack of support from the government. 66 In Rivera’s segment, he is at the 30 Convention Center amongst the victims, expressing his astonishment, which escalates into an emotional outcry, bordering on the hysterical, to remove the people from the horrible conditions. Rivera is confounded as to how these people can still be in the city and questions, “where are the buses?” The camera pans across the crowd as he is talking, stops and focuses on a baby and mother. The camera tightly zooms in on the face of the baby. Rivera pauses his commentary and tells the audience to “Look at this little baby. There are so many little babies.” He asks the mother the age of the baby and takes it in his arms. Fervently, he expresses, “I got a baby. You know I have a baby. There are so many babies here.” He then becomes so emotional and tearful that he is unable to clearly speak. He returns the baby to the mother, collects himself and expresses “I don’t know, man. Let them walk the hell out of here…All you got here is thousands and thousands of people who have desperate, desperate needs six days later. These people are in the same clothes. Where do you think they go to the bathroom? They don’t wash their hands. They don’t wash their face. These babies. What the hell?” 67 Rivera’s breakdown occurs around the shock of the baby existing in dismal and filthy conditions. The baby disrupts his professional journalistic persona, and as his words “These babies. What the hell?” demonstrate, disturb his narrative logic of reporting. 31 The segment switches to news anchor Sean Hannity in the Fox News studio and to Shepard Smith, who like Rivera is in New Orleans, although not among the Katrina victims. The segment goes back to Rivera, who now holds another baby, just in a diaper, and expresses, “Sean, take a look, take a look. (The camera zooms in on a tight shot of the baby’s face) I want everyone in the world to see, six days after Katrina swept through this city, 5 days after the levees collapsed (camera zooms back out to a medium shot of Rivera with baby), this baby, this baby, how old is this baby?” He questions the grandmother of the baby, who replies she has been separated from her other grandchildren, which Rivera sees as a blessing that they are not experiencing the “hell on earth” at the convention center. Rivera then returns to face the camera and expresses, “Look in the face of the baby. This is it. This is it. No sugar coating. No political spin. No republicans or democrats. People suffering. Let them go. Let them out of here.” 68 Rivera’s plea for action, regardless if it was out of conscious decision or emotional impulse, is using the face of babies to represent the human lives that need help. The image of children, particularly the helpless baby, rouses a deep sense of “sympathy” in Figure 2 (left) and 3 (right): Geraldo Rivera on Fox News in the aftermath of Katrina at the New Orleans Convention Center. 32 the average adult human spectator. The innocence that is projected onto children, by commentator, camera, and audience member is a motivating factor to incite momentary support from the individual, community and government. But what does the figure of the innocent baby reveal? Certainly nothing about the actual child. The figure of the innocent baby, in this case, contains the potential “presence of mind” to expose social constructs and systems of power (in crisis), however more often than not the figure of the child embodies and masks adult social anxieties. The coverage of children and adults created a great sense of empathy and urgency to the situation in New Orleans, but what exactly are the politics of compassion at play? Politics of Compassion There is nothing clear about compassion except that it implies a social relation between spectators and sufferers, with the emphasis on the spectator’s experience of feeling compassion and its subsequent relations to material practices. (Lauren Berlant) 69 This Introduction opened with a discussion of two titles on the September 19, 2005 cover of Newsweek employing the image of a black baby’s face to create sympathy and buyers. In addition, halfway down the page, the title “Poverty, Race (capitalized, in white, to stand out and a noticeable font size larger) & Katrina: Lessons of A National Shame” appears placed on the cheek, under the left eye, of the child, where a tear would be streaming. The actual title for the article by reporter Jonathan Alter that appears in the magazine is “The Other America: An Enduring Shame,” 70 which opens with, It takes a hurricane. It takes a catastrophe like Katrina to strip away the old evasions, hypocrisies and not-so-benign neglect. It takes the sight of the United States with a big black eye—visible around the world—to help the rest of us 33 begin to see again. For the moment, at least, Americans are ready to fix their restless gaze on enduring problems of poverty, race and class that have escaped their attention. Does this mean a new war on poverty? No, especially with Katrina’s gargantuan price tag. But this disaster may offer a chance to start a skirmish, or at least make Washington think harder about why part of the richest country on earth looks like the Third World. 71 Alter uses shame, the metaphor of sight and the Third World to reproach Americans and the government over the plight of the poor. The failure to confront the deeper contributing socio-historical factors of the Katrina disaster manifested in diverse fashions. A common description of post-Katrina New Orleans by astonished citizens was “to see the U.S. looking so “Third World.” 72 In a editorial in the Los Angeles Times, Rosa Brooks, professor at University of Virginia School of Law, remarks on the flippant use of “Third World” among reporters to describe the scene in New Orleans after Katrina. She writes, The Third World didn’t sneak in along with Hurricane Katrina. It’s been here all the time…but just as it takes a mass famine or a tsunami to generate media attention for the Third World beyond our borders, it took the destruction of a major American city for the media to notice the Third World here at home. 73 Brooks critiques the media for their limited scope in recognizing poverty in the United States. But as anthropologist Virginia Dominguez points out, all citizens and the U.S. government are complicit in this inability to “see,” and stuck in a “deeper habit of neglect (and)… habit of thought.” 74 Brooks and Dominguez echo the blindness of the aforementioned authors. Dominguez perceives a danger in using the category of “Third World” to describe the Katrina disaster victims on the news coverage, which psychically distances spectators from social problems within American borders: 34 Mentally equating poor people with non-white people and both with ‘the Third World’ quietly allows viewers to slip easily into a familiar form of perception of the U.S., even when thy appear new and surprising. One of its greatest dangers is that it mentally allows people to think that poverty and non-whiteness are non- American things, even when they are present in the U.S. in significant numbers…what I do not know is how many of us have stopped to think about what it all means—both why we see ‘those people’ as ‘Third World’ and why it’s those people and not others we see on TV in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. 75 Dominguez closes her observations with, In the end the real surprise should be that people are surprised. New Orleans is really no more and no less “Third World” than the country as a whole. I know it is hard to accept that because we have grown accustomed to thinking that we live in a prosperous, middle class, powerful country. But who are we thinking of when we say we? And how many millions of Americans are we not thinking of? Clearly both the inequality that exists and the habits of thought of so many about ‘America’ need serious fixing. 76 Brooks and Dominguez’s commentaries highlight America’s inability to confront social realities such as poverty--which is inexplicably entangled with race--that conflict with the prevailing myth and superiority of the American dream and individualism. In this post- Civil Rights period, race continues to evoke confusion and anxiety, resulting in avoidance and masking. United States democracy operates on a precarious uneven tension between government, community and individual. Alter’s Newsweek article continues with questioning whether public witnessing of poverty in the aftermath of Katrina can alter society. He consults sociologist Andrew Cherlin, who asserts, The question now is whether the floodwaters can create a sea of change in public perceptions. “Americans tend to think of poor people as being responsible for their own economic woes,” says sociologist Andrew Cherlin of John Hopkins University. “But this was a case where the poor were clearly not at fault. It was a 35 reminder that we have a moral obligation to provide every American with a decent life.” 77 With a natural disaster, blame is diverted from the Katrina victims. Cherlin’s comment, echoing the social contract, that Katrina’s victims are an ethical and national reminder that every American deserves a decent life, blurs moral obligation with responsibility of the nation to its citizens. This is exactly at odds with a capitalistic free market society and the myth of American individualism. Cherlin’s semantical use of “we” can either refer to nation or to community. His use of moral obligation points to notions of right and wrong, to ethics, rather than legalities and contractual obligations. Traditionally, the task of morals and ethics is attributed to non-governmental institutions, such as the Church and family. Despite the American government’s participation in welfare and human rights programs, welfare and compassion, both within our country and outreach to other nations, have often been left to mission of the churches and non-profit institutions. A case in point is former George W. Bush administration and the conservative theory of compassionate conservatism, which was the political climate of Katrina. In the Wall Street Journal article “What is Compassionate Conservatism?” Myron Magnet describes the Republican approach of then Governor George W. Bush—“it utterly rejects the liberal conventional wisdom about uplifting the poor.” Instead, compassionate conservatives know that telling the poor that they are mere passive victims, whether of racism or of vast economic forces, is not only false but also destructive, paralyzing the poor with thoughts of their own helplessness and inadequacy. The poor need the larger society’s moral support; they need to hear the message of personal responsibility and self-reliance, the optimistic assurance that if they try—as they must—they 36 will make it. They need to know, too, that they can’t blame “the system” for their own wrongdoing. 78 Compassionate conservatives perceive the liberal “War on Poverty” welfare policies as fostering a sense of victimization and dependency on the state. From this perspective, capitalism inherently does not create inequality or an underclass. 79 With a policy of compassionate conservatism, the Bush administration, as a way to shift responsibility from state and nation, eased restrictions on faith-based organizations and provided government funds to support these organizations’ community and outreach programs. This policy relocates compassionate action to the local level rather than the nation, and promotes the conservative utopian hope of building human relations, while disregarding any social and historical complications. 80 In contrast to the previous Bush administration, empathy occupies a different place in current President Barack Obama’s liberal ideology. Recently. empathy and race have become hot topics with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. Commenting on the discourse around Sotomayor and racial empathy, political and linguistic scholar George Lakoff writes, Empathy is at the heart of progressive thought. It is the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of others -- not just individuals, but whole categories of people: one's countrymen, those in other countries, other living beings, especially those who are in some way oppressed, threatened, or harmed…Empathy is at the heart of real rationality, because it goes to the heart of our values, which are the basis of our sense of justice. Progressives…have a moral obligation to act on their empathy -- a social responsibility in addition to personal responsibility, a responsibility to make the world better by making themselves better. This leads to a view of a government that cares about its citizens and has a moral obligation to protect and empower them. Protection includes worker, consumer, and environmental protection as well as safety nets and health care…No one can earn anything at all 37 in this country without protection and empowerment by the government. All progressive legislation is made on this basis. 81 In opposition, Lackoff argues, empathy for conservatives is a personal feeling, emotion to liberal ideology, and a danger to “democratic” justice. In conservatives’ view, emotions in the political and legal system must be disciplined to correspond with political and social order; it is not a tool for transformation. In contrast, Obama writes about empathy in The Audacity of Hope, stating empathy “is at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the Golden Rule—not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes.” 82 In regards to race relations in the United States, Obama comments on the need for both transracial empathy and legal action: Sometimes only the law can fully vindicate our values, particularly when the rights and opportunities of the powerless in our society are at stake. Certainly this has been true in our efforts to end racial discrimination as important as moral exhortation was in changing hearts and minds of white Americans during the civil rights era, what ultimately broke the back of Jim Crow and ushered in a new era of race relations were the Supreme Court cases…Sometimes we need both cultural transformation and government action—a change in values and a change in policy—to promote the kind of society we want. 83 Obama’s rhetoric reflects the outcome of the racial “break” of the sixties and U.S. liberal politics and ideology. Unlike the compassionate conservative approach, he distinguishes the limits of relying solely on legal policy or social morality. 38 Empathy for progressives is perceived as a useful tool for social justice, in particular when it comes to racial relations. Sociologist Joe Feagin perceives sympathy and empathy as promising practices in reformation of racist social structures that privilege “whiteness.” For Feagin, empathy is an essential component to breaking down individual racism: thinking and practicing racism requires a breakdown in empathy across the color line. Racism is about the destruction of natural human empathy; it means lack of recognition of the humanity of the racialized other. Identification across the color line is hard for most whites to make. It involves understandings and emotions. 84 As noted already, Feagin, Winant and others recognize American racism as a historical “white” structural and institutional power system that excludes non-whites from full participation in the socio-economical and political system. 85 Individual racism exists for “whites” and “nonwhites,” but it is the system of “white” power and structural racism that is most troubling and difficult to deconstruct. For Feagin, not only do white citizens need to see, as previous authors contend, but also feel across the color line. To counteract ingrained “white” racist ways of thought and habit, Feagin argues for a new cognitive framework, which will “doubtless require a process of education or reeducation in which whites, as individuals and as groups, move toward understanding how the system of racial privilege was created and how they maintained it in everyday life.” 86 It is important not to just experience empathy, but also possess an understanding of historical positioning and oppression of the racial Other in society. An example of how empathy and popular (mis)perception play into sociopolitical decisions is the challenging issue of welfare. Empathy plays a significant role in the 39 American public’s opposition or support of welfare. Despite the deep belief in American individualism, most citizens believe “the government can and should play a central role in providing both the means for the individuals to better themselves and a cushion for times when individuals’ own efforts are not enough,” argues Martin Gilens in Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy. 87 However, welfare is judged “on issues of merit and deservedness;” and American complaints with welfare, according to Gilens, is, the perception that most people currently receiving welfare are undeserving. While no one factor can fully account for the public’s opposition to welfare, the most single component is this widespread belief that most welfare recipients would rather sit home and collect benefits than work hard to support themselves. 88 Gilens argues American understanding of welfare recipients is directly related to the viewpoint of race and old stereotypes that continue to populate mainstream media. American citizens’ reading of welfare recipients is often with lack of empathy and social complexity. While this project will not get into the lengthy sticky political debates around morality and compassion, I am interested in how media and dominant culture portray what society’s moral obligation is and what provokes sympathetic agency, particularly when children, race and class are involved. As Gilens implicates the persistent residual reliance on established stereotypes, cultural discourses have either the potential to upset or reinforce multiple ideologies and emotions. As Raymond Williams reminds us that feelings exist in a hegemonic cultural and social system of power, one crucial and 40 difficult question to ask in relation to feeling across the color line is how do these feelings develop into political agency in service of human and racial rights? 89 Cultural historian Lynn Hunt argues a dilemma with human rights is “their very existence depends on emotions as much as reason.” 90 Hunt examines the historical relation of the ideas and cultural practices of empathy and autonomy in relation to the evolution of human rights, in which the latter is co-dependent of the former. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson, Hunt terms “imagined empathy” as a foundation of human rights and argues new kinds of experiences--such as reading-- propagated practices of autonomy and empathy, resulting in re-imagined civil rights; “new kinds of reading (and viewing and listening) created new individual experiences (empathy), which in turn made possible new social and political concepts (human rights) [sic].” 91 By pointing to the correlation of human rights to emotion, which is in constant flux and process, the human rights revolution is never a complete formation and by definition is ongoing. 92 Hunt’s argument of imagined empathy in relation to cultural practices is valuable in questioning how transracial empathy operates in cultural discourses in the post World War II Cold War period. This project--surveying the themes of home, race, the child and compassion-- explores how American culture and emotions was shifting in a period of racial crisis and adjusting to new feelings and visions. 41 Children: a different standard This work, like so many others, is interested not in the actual living, breathing child, but the representations of children; and how these representations encapsulate adult projections and cultural fantasies in a specific historical and crucial sociopolitical moment. Modern day children’s images and their symbolic meaning are one way of “selling” concern and inciting spectators to “feel right.” However, are all children perceived as innocent, and does race and class distinguish certain children as burdens? As the following chapters focus on post-World War II American culture, probing questions are: how did American cultural practices foster racial empathy during the Civil Rights era in the 1950s? How is a culture of compassion that emphasizes the care for “other” American citizens’ rights created and promoted in a culture of dominance, power and “white” settlement? How did the racialized child in post-Word War II Cold War America act as a central cultural figure in a culture of integration, while managing “dominant” adult anxieties around shifting racial and gender paradigms and ultimately reframing white hegemonic power structures? Childhood is not just a biological stage in human life; it is a cultural and social construction embedded in systems of power that evolve over time. 93 Innocence, the belief associated to childhood, is also a social construction. Henry Giroux, in his essay, Stealing Innocence: The Politics of Child Beauty Pageants, discusses the myth of innocence proscribed to children. He writes, Innocence in this scenario not only erases the complexities of childhood and the range of experiences different children encounter but also offers an excuse for 42 adults to ignore responsibility for how children are firmly connected to and shaped by social and cultural institutions run largely by adults. Innocence makes children invisible except as projections of adult fantasies… 94 James Kincaid argues that the myth of innocence and the child as a social construction are “empty”—“a ‘child’ is, in other words, changes to fit different situations and different needs.” 95 In addition, as Jacqueline Rose argues, childhood innocence inculcates a “universal social reference” that hides all historical and social divisions. 96 With a political and socioeconomic structure founded on a legacy of white supremacy and capitalism, we must question how the myth of innocence appertains to children who are considered non-white and in need of assistance? Giroux continues, As the rhetoric of child welfare enters the public consciousness, innocence is increasingly being redeployed to rearticulate which specific children are deserving of entitlements and adult protection. Shot through with political and ideological values, innocence is not merely selective about which children are endangered and need to be protected, it also is used to signal who and what constitutes a threat to children. 97 The concept of childhood innocence is rife with contradiction. An interesting example of the contradiction race poses to childhood innocence is Sarah Banet-Weiser’s discussion of the 1999 case of Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban child found floating in the Gulf of Mexico after the boat he was on with his mother, and several other Cuban illegal refugees, sank on the way to the United States. Elian Gonzalez’s story, as Banet-Weiser argues, became a story of paradoxical elements of citizenship, innocence, nationality, and family. Banet-Weiser writes, The figure of the “innocent” child has enormous symbolic value in America’s cultural, political, and economic history, and is often used to invoke and fuel political battles over the “fate of America’s future.” …Elian was treated quite 43 differently from the way in which child refugees have been treated in the media historically, in part because of the issues of immigration already circulating at the time of his rescue…immigration procedures and border ideologies often collapse child immigrants as simply part of an adult immigrant pathology, and rarely does the American media take up the mantle of childhood innocence in illegal immigration cases with the same cultural forces and valence that this discursive frame has in other spheres. 98 At the particular historical moment the image of the child was used to represent various competing political interests. The case of Elian also demonstrates the political capital some ethnic and cultural groups have gained in the United States. Comedian Dave Chappelle, known for his outrageous and controversial style of humor on race relations, in Killin’ Them Softly (2000), makes light of the Elian Gonzalez controversy and the discrepancy of US immigration policy when it comes to race, innocence and African-American politics. 99 Chappelle jokes about the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton scandal, which segues into him envisioning being President of the United States. He comments that being the first black president would be “too hot” for him. He states, “there could be a black president some day but you don’t want to be the first one.” He jokes about people wanting to assassinate the first black president, but he affirms no one would touch him if he, referring to himself, were president, “because my vice-president will be Mexican for a little insurance.” Implying if he is assassinated, his vice president will open up the U.S.-Mexico border. This leads Chappelle into impersonating his Mexican vice-president--he remarks, “Si. Elian can stay.” Chapelle then reassures, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. I don’t got no Elian jokes. All I’ll say about Elian is thank god he’s cute. ‘cause if he was Haitian, you would’ve never heard about his 44 ass. If Elian Gonzalez was Elian Mamumbo from Haiti, they’d pushed that little rubber tube right back on. Sorry little fella’, all full. Good Luck.” 100 Chapelle’s sketch points to the incongruity between children who can be perceived as black (Haitian) and those who are perceived as non-black (Cuban). Not all children are worth saving, embracing or merit coverage by the media. Chappelle’s humorous logic also alludes to the politics of cute. Tracing the development of the “cute” child in American culture, Gary Cross not only connects the image of the innocent child to adult fantasies and projections, but to the development of cute to consumerism. Cross writes, “cute children invited adults to spend. They evoked in adults a longing to care for, protect, and possess, as well as to sacrifice.” 101 By endowing the innocent child cute, consumer spending is justified. In the case of Chappelle’s Elian comment, the Cuban child is constructed as cute, while if he was Elian Mamumbo from Haiti, a black child, would not be deemed cute, therefore not worth saving or spending government or public money. Instead, the black (Haitian) child would be a burden to American society and pocketbooks. Childhood Innocence As the Elian story demonstrates, innocence may be deployed in a variety of political and cultural strategies. This project, in discussing the innocence of children, draws from Anne Higonnet’s work in art history. Examining the visual history of child depiction, Higonnet argues that the modern construction of childhood--that children are naturally innocent--is a cultural ideal of the Enlightenment and relies heavily on representation of children and children's bodies. She writes, 45 visual fictions played a special role in consolidating the modern definition of childhood…to a great extent, childhood innocence was considered an attribute of the child's body, both because the child's body was supposed to be naturally innocent of adult sexuality, and because the child's mind was supposed to begin blank. 102 This visual emphasis on the child and the child's body becomes of point a reference to innate political and cultural ideology. This Western idealized concept of childhood is termed "the Romantic Child," by Higonnet, with two main characteristics: 1) the child is naturally innocent of sexuality, and 2) the child is a tableau rasa, waiting to absorb what the culture inscribes on her/his mind. However what is not questioned in great detail in Higonnet’s work is whether every child is perceived as possessing these characteristics in the mainstream culture. This project will argue that race, especially in an American context, complicates this notion and offers an-"other" understanding. Higonnet, as well as many other critics, argues that a crisis is occurring in the depiction of children in modern day society. In historically analyzing the child's image in art history, she locates photography as a moment that hastens a turning point. Although photography carried on and still perpetuates the tradition of the "Romantic Child," 103 it "at the same time has precipitated the current crisis in childhood's image," which inscribes child images with an adult sexuality and knowledge. This critical shift is a departure from images of tableau rasa ideology to images of a "Knowing Child"—a child closer to the adult world and knowledge. The "Knowing Child" is endowed with psychological and physical individuality at the same time exuding child-like qualities. 104 Higonnet's argument suggests that not only do these representations imagine a new 46 picture of childhood, but simultaneously a transformation in the author’s and viewer's perceptions of childhood. However, Higonnet only notes the emergence of the “Knowing Child” with photography. In relation to race and class, the "Knowing Child" is not an unfamiliar concept and existed long before the introduction of photography. The racialized body in Western hegemonic culture does not belong to the understanding of Higonnet’s "Romantic Child." In Higonnet’s work, there are two types or genres in photography that incorporate race and class: the ethnographic photography and social protest photography. The ethnographic photograph depicts a child that is naturally innocent, however, this child is portrayed as flawed and in need of being civilized, industrialized and rescued. Higonnet points to the paradox of this flawed innocence: Ethnographic photographs of naked children purport to show a curious "civilized" audience how picturesque primitive people "really" live. The condescension implicit in such an attitude allows a double standard of innocence. In an ethnographic context, a child's nudity or near-nudity can reinforce stereotypes of primitive and cultural hierarchy. Not all innocences are alike, or equal. 105 This innocence ascribed to foreign, Third World, children is very different than the innocence placed upon the white middle-class "Romantic Child." For example it is not uncommon for media, political and environmental organizations, such as the UN, to depict Third World children as threats to environmental and national security. The 1992 UN Conference claimed that the uncontrolled population and poverty of Third World countries is the fundamental cause for global environmental problems. 106 The solution proposed was to control the excess population. This overabundant population is 47 represented as hungry children, consuming resources but unable to be participants and producers in the global economy. 107 Despite the negative implications, these children and communities are also perceived as victims of political causes, such as war, or of environmental disasters. These communities lack the knowledge and technologies of the industrialized world that would significantly improve their lives and involvement in the global world. In contrast, the perceptions of American urban communities and families who are stricken with poverty are often viewed as products of their own self-demise. Compared with the “Romantic Child” and ethnographic portrayals, children of the urban space conflict with the dominant conception of innocence. Higonnet locates this contradiction of innocence in American social protest photography. Social protest photography, also understood as documentary photography, refers to the photographic work interested in exposing the underpinnings and inequality of social systems. Children in social protest photography, such as images of children in the Great Depression and civil rights movements, are perceived as "the deformation of the standard, and moreover they tend to be poor or not white, or both, in other words socially subordinate to their audience." 108 More importantly, social protest photography of children "is supposed to lead beyond bodies toward social conditions, and whose conscious intention, at least, is hardly to abuse real children, but, on the contrary, to use photographs of their bodies to achieve reforms in children's favor," 109 by reminding the mainstream of a "veiled" reality that exists. Similarly, Sharon Stephen, in Children and the Politics of Culture, notes the existence of “street children”-- referring to children, often racialized who occupy public 48 spaces, threaten perceived social order and public space. They are "outside the regulatory spheres of family and community." 110 The racialized child, existing outside of middle and upper class norms and boundaries, pollutes the understanding of innocence. Unlike the images of the white "Romantic Child," images of the racial child's body, in both Higonnet and Stephens discussions, who occupy the street, in the space of the Western world, fractures the constructed sentimental concept of innocence and displays to the viewer the injustices, the poverty, the hardships, and lack of innocence in many children's lives. This child exemplifies the “Knowing Child.” Returning to Dave Chappelle’s Killing Them Softly, his sketch “The Baby” calls attention to how race, space and class forge this different interpretation of childhood innocence. 111 While not to be taken literally, his ironic portrayal of a “baby” selling weed on the corner and who has kids to feed, comments on, albeit in a humorous way, the despairing poverty and situations that exist in the poor, and majority black, public housing neighborhoods in American cities. The “baby” in the poor black neighborhood does not have the luxury of being innocent or protected from the life on the streets. The “Baby” is Knowing Child, a street-smart “baby,” working in the illegal markets. Chappelle’s comedic strategy is to turn popular notions, in this case innocence and the child, upside down to reveal the cultural contradictions. Innocence is for the privileged child in the safe contained space of home. As Chappelle, Stephens, and Higonnet indicate, innocence is a conflicted ideal and a “value” that is contrived and exploited to preserve circumscribed boundaries. 49 These cultural complexities and contradictions around children, innocence, home, compassion and race shape the central lens in examining the image of the racialized child in post-World War II Cold War America. Concealed behind the image of the child are cultural and adult anxieties. In her book Feminism Without Women, Tania Modleski is interested in how male subjectivity in “crisis” appropriates “femininity” while continuing to preserve power over female subjectivity. She calls for criticism that will consider “the extent to which male power is actually consolidated through cycles of crisis and resolution, whereby men ultimately deal with the threat of female power by incorporating it.” 112 In congruous fashion, masculinity in this particular historical and political period of “crisis” develops an intimate relationship with the child, a position occupied by the mother, in order to transform and restabilize itself. The image of the child becomes a cipher for white masculine anxieties, and, as my project argues, ultimately a vehicle for white hegemonic patriarchy to sustain itself. No Place Like Home Out of the emergence of children’s culture and childhood studies, the origins of this project began with “simple” questions of how were racialized children represented in American culture at a time of changing racial paradigms? What were cultural strategies to incorporate the Cold War policies of integration and containment and its implications to race and class? How was the figure of the child instrumental is activating transracial empathy for political and cultural purposes? And did the myth of childhood innocence support the fantasy of transcending racism? Of course these questions expose the cultural 50 underworkings of something much more complicated and elusive. In trying to locate the image of the racialized child in this historical time, this project uses a variety of popular media texts (cultural discourses)—magazines, newspapers, Hollywood film, and photography—from the period of the fifties to the early sixties, and is informed by the vast amount of academic work in cultural studies with a particular focus on media, race and history. Many of the film texts examined in this work blend fact and fiction. This was not a deliberate methodological choice, but one that emerged in the process of research. The quest for representations of racialized children, differing from the common comedic images, say of The Little Rascals/OurGang, led me to films that combined real- life stories and fantasy. There are perhaps various reasons (T.V., globalism, social movements, liberalism, etc.) for this quasi-documentary style in film. This project, at this time, does not delve deeply into the multiple reasons, but it can be presumed it is connected to a culture that was struggling with fluctuating social dynamics and needed a type of realism to reverberate the shifting ideologies and paradigms. Toni Morrison’s interest in “the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them” captures an explanation of how race commonly functions as a narrative strategy in Western (white) culture. In the same manner this project reveals how the images of the child, particularly the racialized child, are employed to transfigure white masculinity and preserve hegemonic power structures. In his work Masked Men, Steven Cohan examines the multiple representations of (white) masculinity in fifties Hollywood film in relation to the perceived crisis in masculinity. In 51 understanding masculinity as a “masquerade,” Cohan is able to articulate why a hegemonic representation of masculinity could dominate the culture’s standards yet also change; why “a normative standard of masculinity is never stable or coherent or authentic;” and why “it has to exist alongside a range of alternative forms in representation.” 113 Cohan identifies the “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” as the dominant masculine “personae” of American fifties culture. 114 In congruent manner, my project identifies the appearance of the “Gentle Warrior” personae at this juncture in time, which culminates in the arrival of John F. Kennedy as President of the United States, the event that Cohan marks as the end point to his project. Cohan’s work also does not account for the interrelation of race to (white) masculinity. My project is more concerned with how race and gender are constituted near side this “Gentle Warrior,” and what is the cost of reforming (white) masculinity. The focus of the first chapter Domestic Threshold: Home of the Brave, Innocent and Marginalized, is the figure of the black child in early 1950’s cultural discourses within the political and social context of containment, integration and white flight; and argues that the black child represents a potential symbol for national unity and expansion of domestic boundaries, while also ushering in the remaking of white masculinity. The chapter begins with briefly examining the historical portrayal of African American children, often used in mainstream culture as a trope of horror to enforce boundaries of whiteness. With a slew of negative stereotypes behind it, the representation of the black 52 child begins to shift as American social and political policies are forced to embrace integration. Looking at the films, The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) and The Well (1951), the black child encourages racial empathy through narrative structure. The Jackie Robinson Story uses the “true” story of baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s entry as the first African American man into American baseball’s major leagues to champion racial tolerance and democratic values. The child in this narrative becomes a central figure onto which this story is mapped. Correspondingly, The Well adopts the true story of Kathy Fiscus for inspiration, which incites emotional identification with a black child and family. Again, the black child becomes a symbol of national and communal unity and promotes a rebirth and transformation of American society and white masculinity. The Well positions a new white patriarch as leader of the new united imagined American society. This (white) masculine figure will reappear and establish authority in the following chapters as the “Gentle Warrior.” The Well also exhibits young white uncontained femininity as socially problematic, and in much need of guidance, which will return in Chapter Three as it is linked to white patriarchy’s displacement of racism. Chapter Two, Intruder in the House?: The Gentle Warrior, Foreign Children & Adoption, concentrates on transformative narratives and demonstrates how the figure of the foreign child, particularly the Asian orphan, resolves and reconstructs racist and discriminating domestic ideologies through the development of the Gentle Warrior 53 personae, a model of (white) American masculinity, who will rule and guide the new global, interracial, and democratic “family.” However, while this model seemingly deals and resolves problematic race relations at “home,” it manifests the culture’s transition to a post-Civil Rights covert mode of racism. This chapter examines transracial adoption in the fifties and two Hollywood films Three Stripes in the Sun (1955) and Battle Hymn (1957) to explore how white masculinity is remade in relation to the shifting times of both global and domestic power and policies Unrest in the Home: The Modern Civil Rights Era, the third chapter, returns to the United States cultural landscape of the late fifties and early sixties and examines the solidification of the Gentle Warrior model. As the previous two chapters demonstrate, cultural narratives of the time provide white masculinity with the possibility of transformation, adaptation and maintenance of privilege. As a repercussion, this gentler mode of masculinity displaces the overt problem of racism onto other subjectivities, notably white working class men and women. While children and their innocence provided masculinity a new way of being, women and the maternal posed a particular problem. In examining the actual cases and the narratives spun around African American children-- Emmett Till and Ruby Bridges--white working class maternal femininity embodies a specific complication and source of American racism in the racial restructuring. Emmett Till and Ruby Bridges become symbols of both the ugliness of racism and the hope for 54 integration and opportunity. The national uproar around Emmett Till’s death and the not- guilty verdict of his murderers, Bryant and Milam, expose the shifting role of the black child at a particular moment in American history. Recalling the legacy of black children’s representation in American culture and their relation to innocence, the narrative of Emmett Till and the mothers involved in the case illustrate the change in racial logics. Till’s death also reveal the class differences in the segregation culture of the South and the nation, as well as outdated forms of gender and race. The story of Ruby Bridges centers on the monstrous maternal white working class femininity of the protestors. In comparison to these historical accounts, three films of the late fifties and early sixties--Imitation of Life (1959), To Kill a Mockingbird (1963), and A Patch of Blue (1965)—are examined and sustain the cultural critique of motherhood, working class femininity as the source of racism, and liberal masculinity as the solution to transform and save the American “home” and children. While the aim of this project is an attempt to understand the workings of racial politics in a particular moment in American history and culture, it also is an undertaking to recognize the slippery elusive interconnection of the construction of identities and hegemonic power. Although racial justices have been gained since the social movements of the post World War, racial democracy has not been fully recognized. This Introduction has deployed the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans, my home, to access and outline the various themes that provide the contours of my project. The majority of authors discussed in these pages have called for a new vision, a new awareness, in 55 relation to marginalized citizens of the United States. This project does not pretend to provide a new vision, but rather hopes to contribute to the process of transforming and developing alternative optics and racial understandings, with awareness of how historical and cultural discourses shape present day. 56 Introduction Endnotes 1 Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (New York: Basic Civitas, 2006) 2-3. 2 Violet Harrington Bryan, The Myth of New Orleans in Literature: Dialogues of Race and Gender, 1st ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993) 1. 3 “The Hermann-Grima House was built in 1831 and is one of the most significant residences in New Orleans. This handsome Federal mansion with its courtyard garden boasts the only horse stable and functional 1830s outdoor kitchen in the French Quarter. Painstakingly restored to its original splendor through archaeological studies and careful review of the building contract and inventories, the museum complex accurately depicts the gracious lifestyle of a prosperous Creole family in the years from 1830 to 1860.” (From the Herma Grima website: http://www.hgghh.org/) Today’s cooking demonstrations no longer have the volunteers dressing like slaves, and instead wear an apron to demonstrate the old cooking techniques of the pre-Civil war days. 4 Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) xiii. 5 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 6 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). 7 George Lipsitz refers to Walter Benjamin’s use of “presence of mind” to describe a precise awareness of the present moment, which one must have in order to understand the racial politics at play and the possessive investment of whiteness. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998) 2. 8 Winant, 33. 9 Ibid., 37-38. 10 Ibid., 31. 11 Newsweek, September 19, 2005. Under the image in fine print, the baby is identified as a 1-year-old girl rescued from the Ninth Ward, and nowhere in the magazine is there more information on the child. 12 Henry Jenkins, “Introduction,” in The Children's Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1998) 2. 57 13 See Note 11. 14 The term “competent citizen” is borrowed from Lauren Berlant. See Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 15 Sophie Bowlby, Susan Gregory, and Linda McKie, “"Doing home": Patriarchy, Caring, and Space,” Women's Studies International Forum 20, no. 3 (1997): 344. 16 Barbara Bush is quoted as saying, “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” Newsweek, September 19, 2005. 17 Of interesting note is the deployment of Blackwater and other private security contractors, normally used to support military operations, to New Orleans to help secure private property. Accounts from personal friends. Also see, Griff Witte, “Private Security Contractors Head to Gulf,” The Washington Post, September 8, 2005. And “StumbleUpon Demo - t r u t h o u t - Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans,” http://www.stumbleupon.com/demo/?review=1#url=http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/ 091005A.shtml. Also, there was little mention of the culture of hurricane prone areas, which fosters a culture of weathering out the storm attitude. This may also be related to class and who can afford the privilege of not worrying about property damage or evacuating. 18 Bowlby, Gregory, and McKie, 343. 19 Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) 168-169. 20 Ibid., 169. 21 Ibid.,169. 22 Ibid., 170-171. Massey states, “It also reverberates, I would argue, through our currently dominant notions of place and of home, and very specifically through notions of place as a source of belonging, identity and security. Moreover, it reverberates—and most importantly—in the fear which is apparently felt by some, including many writers on the subject, when the boundaries dissolve (or are felt to do so) when the geography of social relations forces us to recognize our interconnectedness.” 23 Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xiv. 24 Ibid., xii. 58 25 Ibid., xii. 26 bell hooks, “Homeplace: a site of resistance,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990) 47. 27 Ibid., 47. 28 Ibid., 48. 29 bell hooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996) 183. 30 Massey, 171. 31 Gloria Anzaldua. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987) 3. 32 Ibid., 3. 33 Ibid., 3-4. 34 Ibid., 22. 35 Ibid., 79-80. 36 Martin, Biddy and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) 196. 37 Pratt, Minnie Bruce. “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” in Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, eds. Elly Burkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith (Brooklyn, NY: Long Haul Press, 1984) 35-36. 38 Ibid., 198. They write: “Pratt’s self-reflection, brought on by a consciousness of difference, is nourished and expanded by thinking contextually of other histories and of her responsibility and implication in them. What we find extraordinary about Pratt as narrator (and person) is her refusal to allow guilt to trap her within the boundaries of a coherent ‘white’ identity. It is this very refusal that makes it possible for her to make the effort to educate herself about the histories of her own and other peoples—an education that indicates to her own implication in those histories.” 39 Ibid., 201-203. 40 Ibid., 206. 59 41 Ibid., 210. Pratt writes, “community, then, is the product of work, of struggle; it is inherently unstable, contextual; it has to be constantly reevaluated in relation to critical political priorities… they are a constant recontextualizing of the relationship between personal/group history and political priorities.” 42 Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001) 185. 43 Michael Ignatieff, “The Broken Contract.” The New York Times, September 25, 2005 (Late Edition), Section 6; Column 3, Magazine: The Way We Live Now, 15. <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/magazine/25wwln.html?_r=1&scp=10&sq=ignati eff%2C+michael&st=nyt&oref=slogin> 44 Ibid. 45 This invokes the question, what is it about the mediated image that promotes charity, at an extreme distance, and avoids the messiness of the actual situation and need? 46 Berlant, TQAGWC, 4. 47 Ibid., 27-29. 48 Ibid., 28. 49 Ibid., 48. 50 Mills, 1-2. 51 Ibid., 3. 52 Ibid., 2. 53 Ibid., 2-3. 54 Ibid.,13-14. 55 Ibid., 17. 56 Ibid., 17-18. 57 Ibid., 18-19. 58 Ibid.,126. 59 Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Racial Formations in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2 nd ed (New York: Routledge, 1994) 55. They write, “although the 60 concept of race invokes biologically based human characteristics (so-called ‘phenotypes’), selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process. In contrast to the other major distinction of this type, that of gender, there is no biological basis for distinguishing among human groups along the lines of race.” 60 Omi &Winant, 55-56. 61 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2001) 2-3. 62 Ibid., 7. 63 Ibid., 8. 64 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997) 2-3. 65 Ibid., 2. 66 See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrhvkuzPMio> Thanks to Steve Anderson for pointing my attention to this footage. 67 Ibid. Rivera also makes a passing remark that “it is like Willowbrook in there,” referring to the Convention Center. This obscure reference is Willowbrook School, a New York State institution on Staten Island, which closed in 1987, and was for children who were mentally and developmentally disabled. The School was the center of several abuse and neglect scandals. Geraldo Rivera, a local reporter for WABC New York, did an investigative expose in 1972 that revealed to American audiences the substandard conditions and abuses the state inhabitants were living and experiencing. The expose resulted in a lawsuit against the State of New York and the case is credited to helping with the passing of the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980 and a major victory for the rights of disabled citizens in the United States. Rivera’s comparison of the New Orleans Conference Center to Willowbrook, indirectly calls into question the treatment of the Katrina survivors and rights of American citizens. While trying to comment on the disparaging and unsanitary conditions at the Convention Center, this comment also makes a strange comparison of the Katrina survivors, who are mainly black and the elderly, to mentally and developmentally disabled children. While the comment should not be taken literally, it does emphasize the citizens who are forgotten, the citizens who are not seen as valuable contributing members of society. 68 Ibid. 69 Lauren Berlant, “Introduction: Compassion (& Withholding),” in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 61 70 Jonathan Alter, “The Other America.” Newsweek, September 19, 2005, 42. 71 Ibid., 42. 72 Virginia R. Dominguez, “Seeing and Not Seeing: Complicity in Surprise,” http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Dominguez/. 73 Rose Brooks, “Our Homegrown Third World; the media focus on Hurricane Katrina’s victims has washed away the wall that hid the nation’s impoverished from the rest of us,” Los Angeles Times (September 7, 2005) B13. 74 Dominguez,1-2. 75 Ibid., 4. 76 Ibid., 7. 77 Ibid., 42. 78 Myron Magnet, “What Is Compassionate Conservatism?,” http://www.manhattan- institute.org/html/_wsj-what_is_compassionate_con.htm. 79 Ibid. 80 Lauren Berlant attests; “By insisting that society’s poorest members can achieve the good life through work, family, community participation, and faith, compassionate conservatives rephrase the embodied indignities of structural inequality as opportunities for individuals to reach out to each other, to build concrete human relations.” Berlant is not sympathetic to compassionate conservatism, and instead is interested in compassion as “an emotion in operation” that denotes privilege and exclusion. See Berlant, Compassion, 4. 81 George Lakoff, “Empathy, Sotomayor, and Democracy: The Conservative Stealth Strategy,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/empathy-sotomayor-and- dem_b_209406.html. 82 Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, 1st ed. (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006) 66. George Lakoff also uses this quote in his piece, see above. Obama’s statement sounds very similar to the message in To Kill A Mockingbird and the liberal influence this literary work has had on legal discourse and political ideology. To Kill A Mockingbird will be discussed later in Chapter Three. 83 Ibid., 62-63. 62 84 Joe R. Feagin, Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (New York: Routledge, 2000) 254. 85 See Charles Mills, George Lipsitz. 86 Feagin, 254. 87 Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) 2. 88 Ibid., 2-3. 89 Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 90 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2007) 26. 91 Ibid., 32-33. 92 Ibid., 29. 93 For example, see Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1962); and Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1994). 94 Henry A. Giroux, “Stealing Innocence: The Politics of Child Beauty Pageants,” in The Children's Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1998) 265. 95 James R Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992) 5. 96 Jacqueline Rose, “The Case of Peter Pan,” in in The Children's Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1998) 65. 97 Giroux, 266. 98 Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Elian Gonzalez and “The Purpose of America:” Nation, Family and the Child-Citizen,” American Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 2 (June 2003), 153-154. 99 See Christine Acham, “I’m rich, bitch!!! Comedy of Chappelle’s Show” in Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, ed Sarah Banet-Weiser (New York, N.Y: New York University Press, 2007). 63 100 Stan Lathan, Dave Chappelle: Killin' Them Softly, DVD, Platinum Comedy Series (Urban Works, 2003) 101 Gary S. Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 80-81. 102 Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (New York: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1998) 8. 103 Higonnet points to the works of contemporary photographers Anne Geddes and Betsy Cameron. 104 Ibid.,12. 105 Ibid., 119. 106 Sharon Stephens, "Children and the Politics of Culture in 'Late Capitalism'," Children and the Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995) 13. 107 Ibid., 13. 108 Higonnet, 117. 109 Higonnet, 117. 110 Stephens, 11-12. 111 Lathan. After a show, at three in the morning, his limo driver takes him to a ghetto to take of some personal business. While race is never directly stated, it is inferred. Chappelle remarks, I didn’t know he was taking me to the ghetto at first. I started lookin’ out the window, and what the fuck, gun store, gun store, liquor store, gun store, where the fuck you taking me?... Just pulled up front of an old rickety building, that looked like a project. Now, I had never been there before, not sure if it was a project, but it certainly had all the familiar symptoms of a project. A fucking crackhead ran this way, then another jumped out of a tree… That is when I knew I was in a bad neighborhood. You only see this in the worst neighborhood. Now remember it is 3 o’clock in the morning, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning, I look out the window, there was a fucking baby standing on the corner. And the baby, the baby, didn’t even look scared, he was just standing there. I mean it made me sad, made me sad, really did, ‘cause I wanted to help the baby. Hmm, I don’t trust you either, sorry, click, click. 64 The old baby on the corner trick, heh? Not goin’ to fall for that shit… I start feeling bad. As time goes by, start feelin’ worse, man what is wrong with you? What the hell is wrong, I’m scared of a baby? This baby could be in trouble, he might need my help, I got to do something. But I wasn’t gonna get out of the car. I’m serious man, I was cracking the window a little bit… “Hey Baby! Baby, go home, man, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning. What the fuck are you doing out?” The Baby said “I’m selling weed, nigga.” “Oh, shit.” I wasn’t expecting that… That Baby was still standing there man. Then I start feelin’ bad again. You know how weed make you feel guilty sometime. Man, what is wrong me? I just bought weed from an, from an infant. I can’t condone this kind of behavior. What am I thinkin’? I can’t let the fear ruin my morals. Got to do something. “Hey Baby, stop selling weed, alright, you got your whole life ahead of you.” He said, “Fuck you nigga’! I got kids to feed.” I was like “God dang-it.” Sad. 112 Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a Postfeminist Age (New York: Routledge, 1991) 7. 113 Cohan, xi. 114 The term “personae” in relation to masculinity is borrowed from Cohan. 65 Chapter One Domestic Threshold: Home of the Brave, Innocent and Marginalized The early post World War II era is commonly identified for its baby boom period and emphasis on the child-centered suburban family. The large numbers of white working and middle class families that flocked to the suburbs cited the primary reason for moving as “for the sake of the children.” 1 These suburban enclaves offered a safe haven from the noisy, crowded city and a place for (white) children to flourish. The domestic containment of the suburban home was a bounded place, both geographical and representational, of security for the 1950’s (white) family. As cultural historian Elaine Tyler May argues, discussion of the Cold War family cannot be separated from the political culture that existed outside the boundaries of the suburbs. The suburban space reflected the Cold War socio-economic foreign policy of containment and integration: containment of the Soviet Union and communism around the world; integration of democracy and free trade around the world to create an integrated global economy. As the United States settled into the position of post World War II democratic world leader, its policy was “grounded in the central belief that the liberal, democratic, capitalist world order of the United States represented a more open and humane society than that of Communist states.” 2 However, the U.S treatment towards its “non-white” citizens contradicted this prevailing political ideology. International scrutiny and a variety of other domestic forces--such as the modern Civil Rights movement--compelled the U.S to 66 confront its unequal race relations and gradually reform legal policies and overt forms of racial discrimination. This chapter will investigate how the figure of the black child is employed in two films, The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) and The Well (1951), in the early 1950s within the context of the domestic containment of childhood innocence and the push for racial reformation. As the United States expanded its influences, the suburbs tried to maintain boundaries, stability and limit exposure to particular types of “otherness” and knowledge, which manifested in “for the sake of the children.” To understand the strategic and symbolic use of the black child, this chapter will briefly provide an overview of the historical representation of the black child in American culture and the dominant ideology of the space of the suburb and childhood innocence. What is compelling in this cultural and historical investigation is how the black child is utilized to transgress (white adult) boundaries of power towards a politic of integration and transracial compassion, while simultaneously providing foil for the development of a liberal (white) masculinity to shelter white hegemonic power structures. An-“other” Innocence In her essay, Black Babies, White Hysteria, cultural scholar Laura Dawkins examines the trope of the black child in American “black baby” fables and in African American writings of the Harlem Renaissance. 3 Dawkins opens with the an old Louisiana Creole 67 scary folktale of “The Thing in the Woods” in which a young Creole white wife, desperate for a child, discovers “swaddled in sky-blue cloth [was] a handsome little baby boy, with skin as white as milk.” 4 When the woman prays to the Virgin to give thanks for a “son” and picks up the child, “No perfect infant with milk-white skin was in her arms. Instead she was holding something that was all black and shiny and ugly—like some beetle…Poor Odette was so frightened she nearly died on the spot.” Dropping the black “evil one,” “Odette saw something that looked partly like a giant beetle, and partly like a little hunched-up man with shiny insect skin, run off into the woods.” 5 Acknowledging the long history of black bodies being devalued and demonized in American culture, Dawkins identifies the black baby as a specific figure in American culture. She argues there exists “a startlingly large group of folktales, stories, anecdotes…that focus specifically on the black baby as an emblem of horror, disruption, or simply imperfection—the antithesis of “perfect” milk-white babies.” 6 Dawkins claims the tales emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reflecting and reinforcing dominant views of African Americans. During this time period, atavism and “the notion that the Negro or mulatto, despite ‘[his] veneer of white civilization,’ can unexpectedly ‘revert’ to the savage, primitivistic behavior of the jungle’” were popular theories embraced by white supremacists at the time—this spawned, in turn, “a number of apocryphal accounts of black sexual marauders” and “several cautionary fables about coal-black babies born to white (or nearly white) mothers.” 7 The black baby possesses the potential to expose that which has been hidden or repressed. The horror is the revelation 68 that one who appears “white” can be unobservedly “black.” The baby can reveal the connection to the biologically “uncivilized,” and defy systems of (white) order and power. Dawkins asserts that this figure of the horrific black baby still haunts American culture as affirmed in the recovery and republishing of the tale of “The Thing in the Woods” in Robert D. San Souci’s children’s book More Short and Shivery, published in 1994 and reprinted in 2002. In many works on children and innocence, the “black” or racialized child is absent or rarely recognized. Anne Higonnet’s work, discussed in the previous chapter, attests that innocence is traditionally ascribed to the white middle and upper class child; and when race and innocence is addressed, it is a different type of innocence. In The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture, Gary Cross Figure 4: Jack-in-the-Box, Harper’s Weekly, December 7, 1870 69 locates the development of the cute and cool child from the late nineteenth century to modern day. To illustrate an example of ideal middle-class childhood in the American press, he analyzes a cartoon from the December 7, 1870 cover of Harper’s Weekly. The cartoon is of a father playing with a jack-in-the-box with his two white young daughters. The figure in the jack-in-the-box that is meant to frighten is a black pickaninny figure. Yet Cross’ own examination of the image fails to acknowledge the racial dynamics in the cartoon. He writes, A Harper’s Weekly cover illustration of 1870, portraying a father turning the crank of a jack-in-the-box with his toddler on his lap, shows a frightened child, not a delighted one. The toy lets the adult feel powerful and superior, but it also gave them a way of evoking a dramatic response from children that also made the young and vulnerable desire the adult’s love and protection. Fathers and other male relatives surely found this a way of relating to the innocent. 8 In Cross’ interpretation, he notes the power dynamics between children and male adult, but not of innocence and the black figure as a means to monitor young white purity. The absence of engagement with the racialized figure is not anomalous and the discourse over the history and representation of innocence and the child is commonly spoken of in terms of class, which is deeply interwoven with race. In both the examples of the “black baby” fables and the Harper’s Weekly cartoon, the frightening black figure is exploited to maintain boundaries of whiteness. The dread invoked by the black child and toy is to inspire fear in the white reader/listener/spectator from trespassing dominant standards, while supporting white patriarchy/supremacy as protector. 70 Historically, the black figure in American culture has been one of apprehension, problematic, and embedded in white power structures. In film history, Donald Bogle claims all stereotypes of black characters are to establish and emphasize black inferiority. 9 Black characters are portrayed as either childish and foolish or brutal and dangerous. Film representations simply replicate “black stereotypes that had existed since the days of slavery and were already popularized in American life and arts. The movies, which catered to public tastes, borrowed profusely from all the other popular art forms.” 10 In his description of the coon stereotype, Bogle identifies the pickaninny figure as, the first of the coon types to make its screen debut. It gave the Negro child actor his place in the black pantheon. Generally, he was harmless, little screwball creation whose eyes popped, whose hair stood on end with the least excitement, and whose antics were pleasant and diverting. Thomas Alva Edison proved to be a pioneer in the exploitation and exploration of this type when he presented Ten Pickaninnies in 1904, a forerunner of the Hal Roach Our Gang series…In the 1920s and the 1930s, such child actors as Sunshine Sammy, Farina, Stymie, and Buckwheat picked up the pickaninny mantle and carried it to new summits. 11 Bogle discussion of the pickaninny caricature refers to historical dehumunaizing aspects projected onto black characters, stemming from (white) colonialist mindsets. It is of significance that Bogle recognizes the child pickaninny figure as “the first of the coon types” to appear on screen. This corresponds with not just the historical trajectory of demeaning stereotypes of black children, but also the infantilization of black adults. In her study of representations of African American children in popular print during 1850-1930, Carolyn Dean finds that black children were frequently positioned in adult 71 roles and metaphorically doubling in for the African American adult, specifically the black male, and that problematic race relations at the time period were “broached almost exclusively alongside images of children”. 12 Dean argues when these popular images are juxtaposed beside the popular beliefs of black men at that time, “the message is clear: childish children are naturally acceptable and controllable; childish men, however are socially unacceptable and need to be controlled. [sic]” 13 Formulating African Americans as children sanctions the white supremacist logic, which regards black citizens as in need to be dominated and civilized just like children. These childish images “offered reassuring interpretations of contemporary social conditions to an implicitly paternalistic and authoritative Euro-American audience.” 14 Dean’s argument reinforces Charles Mills’ standpoint of reducing “nonwhite” people and societies to a child-like state, an essential praxis in upholding of the Racial Contract. By perceiving “nonwhite” people as childlike, this reinforces the colonial mindset of “nonwhites” as “incapable of self-rule,” devoid of autonomy and full citizenship. Even in historical discourses, locating and apprehending the distinction between actual African American adults and children is difficult. In Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth Century America, Wilma King studies the childhood of slaves. In piecing together historical documentation, she confronts the challenges of reconstructing a historical perspective on slave childhood. Much of what was officially documented makes no differentiation between girl and woman, boy and man; "since historical records 72 are often unclear in distinguishing between enslaved adults and children. Social customs rather than age alone determined whether one called bond servants 'boy' or 'girl'." 15 Defining African American adults and children in the early twentieth century is further complicated by African Americans’ survival strategies in a white supremacist environment. Culturally, this childish image was forced upon African Americans, but it also developed into a persona Africans Americans could use to mask themselves as a method of defense in a racist and violent society. 16 The infantilization of African Americans by mainstream culture and this mode of survival makes the task of categorizing the black child all the more intangible. Both Dean and King observe that the popular depictions of African-American youth in the early twentieth century are exaggerated caricatures, in part to emphasize the “racial” difference between the black child and the intended white mainstream audience. King notes, “unkempt black children with wide toothy grins, rolling white eyes, shiny dark faces, and uncontrollably kinky hair are typical in these images.” 17 In addition, these Figure 5: Alligator and Child in Palmetto Grove, Florida (date unknown) Postcard caption: “I’m just as scairt as I can be, I’m afraid this gater’s goin’ to get me, Oh, mammy, get me soon, Or you won’t have no little coon.” 73 characters often have overstated dialects, and are staged with stereotypical props— watermelons, bales of cotton, sheep (alluding to their “wooly” hair), ink jars (alluding to their skin color) or alligators. Dean observes that quite often black children’s bodies were “literally transformed into dark-colored, edible, commodities;” 18 while King denotes that these scenes “devalued black children’s lives to the extent that entrepreneurs claimed they were ‘dainty morsels’ appropriate ‘free lunches’ or ‘gator bait’ for carnivorous reptiles,” 19 or white consumers. This brief discussion of historical depictions and attitudes of black children quickly demonstrates the long account of problematic representations, which function to establish and maintain racial boundaries of power, and serve as a historical pretext for the contents I examine in this chapter. Furthering negative public attitudes towards black children were changes in federal assistance policies in regards to black single mothers. For the first time in the 1940’s, argues Ricky Solinger, public money became available to black recipients, resulting in a public opinion of regarding black single mothers as a public burden and bolstering false beliefs in the constructed myth of black endemic pathology. According to this white logic, black single mothers, Solinger states, “became bearers of syndromes for which white society could not be blamed and for which it should not be forced to assume responsibility.” 20 With social, political and cultural emphasis on home, family, and domesticity in post World War II United States, attitudes towards white children born to white single mothers vacillated to viewing these children as opportunities for childless 74 white couples to adopt and become a complete nuclear family. Solinger argues that, “after World War II, the white bastard child was no longer the child nobody wanted. Adversely, the black illegitimate baby became the child white politicians and taxpayers loved to hate.” 21 However, as black children emerged as an expense to taxpayers, white demonstrators relied on stereotypical images that had been conceived by white popular culture to demonize and blame the black child and mother, often fostering lack of compassion and discriminating social attitudes. While (white) mainstream culture propagated negative racist attitudes, the black community resisted and advocated for racial democracy and positive representations. The NAACP, since its founding in 1909, protested racism and stereotypical images in media. Eventually by the mid-fifties, the battle over children’s education and the argument of the effects of racism, including these dominant negative depictions, and segregation on minority children’s health would lead to the 1954 decision of Brown v. the Board of Education. Although the Brown decision was a significant legal triumph for civil rights, consequences of negative public opinions based on these historical and cultural constructions linger and are intertwined with the cultural and social discourses of current day--if in submerged ways, as seen in the opening meditations on the aftermath of Katrina--and in the next discussion of white flight and the maintenance of white boundaries, childhood innocence and space. 75 For the Sake of…: White Flight, the Child and Suburbia As boundaries of whiteness were reliant on the perceived contrast of Others, boundaries of space were also dependent on popular imagination, representation, social relations and difference. The United States moved into the chaotic period of modernity in the early twentieth century, and it is in this time, historian Grace Elizabeth Hale argues, that American society sought to establish order through space and racial identity in the new complex world; To make order within the seeming fragmentation of their world, some Americans elaborated spatial mediations of modernity--ways of attaching identities to physical moorings, from bodies to buildings to larger geographies like region and nation. They produced new grounds of difference to mediate the ruptures of modernity. 22 Hale further argues "it was racial identity that became the paramount spatial medium of modernity within the newly reunited nation…race…became the crucial means of ordering the newly enlarged meaning of America." 23 She further perceives the advance of visual culture as aiding in the reinforcement of racial difference and meaning: As important, these mass racial meanings were made and marked at a time when technological change made the production of visual imagery possible and the development of a mass market provided a financial incentive--selling through advertising--to collate the imagery…Focusing on the visible, they attempted to control both geographical and representational mobility of nonwhites. 24 Hale's statement implicates the role of visual culture in relation to race/racist relations, space and the power structure of American society. With Jim Crow laws and informal housing covenants, blacks and “nonwhites” were excluded and restricted from certain spaces and choices. As the suburban landscape developed in post World War II, the 76 illusion and desire of spatial homogenization and social coherence and safety was fabricated, generating further race and class segregation. For many white families in the post World War II era and the childhood “experts” they relied on, the suburbs represented a safe haven to raise children and contain the ideals of childhood. In his essay "Davy Crockett and Children's Space," Sean Griffin contends, With the onset of the baby boom, there was an even larger perceived need to regulate children's spaces…in this regard, urban living was found wanting. The suburbs …invoking a more open space that would allow the postwar family (at least the white, middle-class family) the safety and freedom that urban dwellings could not. 25 Protection of children often appears as a natural parental instinct, but as Lynn Spigel argues, protection of childhood is also intertwined and maintained the social and political systems at a particular historical and ideological moment. 26 Doreen Massey’s discussion of home and space exposes a sense of identity (and safety) is frequently thought in terms of a “negative counterposition” with the Other. Furthermore, in a sociological study of Levittown, New Jersey (developed in 1958), the authors note that “Levittowners wanted homogeneity of age and income—or rather, they wanted neighbors and friends with common interests and sufficient consensus of values to make for informal and uninhibited relations.” 27 With concern over collective values, tensions over “nonwhite” citizens moving into the suburbs were expressed as “the decline of the community.” The worry around black families moving into the suburbs and shifting boundaries manifested in the concern of black children befriending and interacting with white suburban children, 77 or worse leading to interracial marriage. The black children of these neighboring families challenged the idealized notions of childhood and "contaminated" the space of the white suburban fantasy. The American post World War II (white) family was experiencing a world of challenged boundaries (both domestically and globally), shifting values around race, class, and gender, and an array of technological advances. In Children and the Politics of Culture, Sharon Stephen notes that the growing concern over lost childhoods in the late twentieth century, "includes not only physical assaults on and threats to children's bodies, but also the threatened spaces of an ideally safe, innocent, and carefree domain of childhood." 28 Not only were parents concerned about the maintenance of innocence in geographical space, but also through the invisible airwaves. Lynn Spigel’s study of television in the 1950’s points to the tension between the control over media and television, and ultimately knowledge, in the 1950’s suburban home and childhood innocence. Innocence is maintained by controlling what knowledge is inscribed on the child’s mind. In the context of television history, Spigel argues the “challenge to the commercialization of the airwaves has taken place in the name of the child,” which becomes a discourse of power through which adults express their own disenfranchisement. 29 As Massey confirms, tensions arise when those invested in the bounded static construction of home feel those boundaries threatened by the outside. 78 In her work Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Elaine Tyler May argues that focus on the family and children provided American citizens with a “feeling of warmth and security,” a connection to the future, a sense of accomplishment and sign of a successful marriage and family life. 30 As May states, “Children promised to fulfill both sides of the postwar domestic equation: security as well as fulfillment.” 31 Married (white) couples having children also demonstrated American citizen’s “loyalty to national goals by having as many children as they could ‘raise right and educate and be a benefit to the world’... Rather than representing a retreat into private life, procreation was one way to express civic values.” 32 If children provided suburban parents with a sense of security, identity and civic duty, childhood innocence was a key factor in the illusion of coherence and safety. If “being home” is a place of familiar and protected boundaries, there is little room for difference. In a U.S. News and World Report article entitled, "When a Negro Family Moved into a White Community," the sentiments of the Levittown, PA community are split with supporters welcoming the black family and those who threatened to move. One neighbor expresses, "'I don't have any objections to colored people, but I don't think they ought to live in white neighborhoods,' he says. 'A lot of people moved into Levittown from Philadelphia and other places for just one reason--to get away from colored people in their old neighborhoods'." 33 This statement certainly does not represent all families in the suburbs, however this was the general sentiment of resentment surrounding nonwhite families. 34 79 However, by the late 1950s, the sheltered space of the suburbs became increasingly recognized with its own set of problems and it became debatable in public discourse as to whether suburbia was the premium space for children. In the 1954 hearing of the Brown case, Dr. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s work on black children, segregation, and self- esteem was pivotal in the argument against “separate, but equal.” In 1955, Kenneth Clark published his studies in Prejudice and Your Child in which he mapped out the negative effects of segregation on both black and white children, and made the compelling argument for the benefits of desegregation. Clark himself critiques the homogenization of housing. He writes, Residential segregation spawns not only segregated public education but also such other symptoms of social disorganization as overcrowded and substandard housing, public-health problems, juvenile delinquency, and crime…the development of rigid patterns of segregation and other forms of homogeneity in housing reflects the absence of any conscious planning in this area, or of a willingness to anticipate or assume responsibility for the social consequences of this pattern. Now that it is clear that racial segregation in housing brings detrimental consequences both to society and to the growth and development of our children, it becomes necessary to develop a program to eliminate existing patterns of residential segregation as soon as practicable. 35 Growing white liberal sentiments echoed Clark’s concern of homogenization of children’s environment. The September 19, 1954 (five months after Brown) edition of the New York Times Magazine, the published an article "Homogenized Children of New Suburbia." It states that The children growing up in New Suburbia run the danger of becoming 'homogenized.' In many of the new suburbs the white child never sees a Negro. In others the Jewish child never plays with any but Jewish children. Some of these suburbs are all Catholic. In others there are no Catholics. Even without racial and religious segregation--and in these new developments groups tend to 80 segregate themselves in an alarming degree--the pressure to conform is intense and stultifying." 36 In the February 2, 1958 edition of the New York Times Magazine published an article entitled, "Suburbia--Is it a Child's Utopia?" It opens with, the following: Every suburban parent is familiar with the phrase 'for the good of the children.' It explains very neatly why he's living where and as he's living in 1958. Experts began pointing out a score of years ago the importance of green grass as an adjunct to child development; parents heard, heeded and began what has become a near stampede to the suburbs. And now as they compute the monthly mortgage payments for their little semi-country homes, what are these parents hearing? That for the young, that outward trek may not have been such a good idea after all. Who says so? The experts--the very same sociologists, mental hygienists and other specialists (or their first cousins once removed) who encouraged the massive suburban shift in the first place. 37 The childhood experts and therapeutic community concern seemed to suddenly focus on the adversity of homogenization and its effect on children: The suburbs, they say, are homogenized like peanut butter--grouping families all too much alike in age, income, education, and pattern of life. The areas are likely to be child-centered…Pressures on children to conform, to be popular, to achieve and generally to fit in with the group amount to a squeeze. 38 Homogenization and the lack of individuality was a large concern among critics. In the July 1958 issue of Parents Magazine the article "Is it true what they say about the suburbs?" listed three primary problems with the suburbs: 1) economic and social homogeneity, 2) the teenager, who was either "displaced in the suburbs, suffering from a 'spectator adolescence,' or soaking up suspect values," and 3) "the 'homemaker' who was overworked with the duties of marriage, motherhood, and community service." 39 Seemingly, suburbia and the ideology of domestic containment was not the utopian child- centered environment it was imagined and designed to be. 81 In addition to the overtaxed housewife and displaced teenager, masculinity was experiencing its own crisis in the post World War II period. There were several factors contributing to the perception of (white) masculinity in crisis—postwar economic boom, the breadwinner ethic, the rise of the seamless middle-class mentality to name a few. Post World War II culture glorified the promises of domestic containment and the home, yet the emphasis on domesticity, Steven Cohan argues, also roused cultural anxieties around the “decline,” emasculation and homogenization of the American male. For both men and women, the child became a cipher for filtering and managing adult anxieties of the unfulfillment, disillusionment, and alienation of domestic containment. These increasing concerns over the homogenized suburbs and gender roles corresponded with the emergence and popularization of modern liberal sentiment and the United States as global leader. In regards to domestic race relations, these shifting contexts veiled the evolving practices and strategies of covert racism. This chapter will look at two Hollywood films—The Jackie Robinson Story and The Well—that reimagine black-white racial and spatial relations and locate the black child as a catalyst for alternative conceptions of national unity and racial democracy, transracial compassion, masculinity, and expansion of boundaries. Both films champion the black child and infuse this figure with (white) innocence--borrowed from the “Romantic child”- -and sentimentality, which moves blackness away from historical stereotypes and encourages (white) familial concern and paternal protection. As both films were low 82 budget, which allowed for deviations from dominant entertainment patterns and produced in the early fifties, they foreground the emanating cultural strategies of racial integration, without disrupting white hegemonic power structures. The Jackie Robinson Story: A Story of Integration This is a story of a boy and his dream, but more than that; it’s the story of an American boy and a dream that is truly American. 40 (The Jackie Robinson Story) On May 16, 1950, The Jackie Robinson Story was released in the United States. The low budget film was based on Jackie Robinson’s early life and entry as the first black baseball player to join a Major League baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1947. Lawrence Taylor wrote the initial script on Robinson’s rookie years. When shopping it around in Hollywood, Taylor notes that he “quickly discovered that not one studio would agree to make a picture with a leading black man. ‘Two of the big studios were interested…if the story could be changed to show a white man teaching Robinson to be a great ball player. Of course this was out of the question.’” 41 Eventually the film found a studio, Jewel Pictures Corp., willing to produce the film. It was shot in about a month, in time to be released for baseball season. 42 Once the film was green-lighted, the film’s story was closely overseen by Branch Rickey, the Dodger’s general manager, and Rickey’s assistant, Arthur Mann. The film was to chronicle Robinson’s life, and “would have its grand climax in his (Robinson’s) appearance before HUAC in Washington. Baseball would be integral to the story, and Robinson at its center, but ultimately it would be about 83 triumph of democracy and of Americans of goodwill, including both Robinson and Rickey.” 43 The film opens with a black boy walking down a house-lined street, his back towards the camera and audience. A narrator’s voice enters and announces, “This is a story of a boy and his dream, but more than that, it’s the story of an American boy and a dream that is truly American.” Although the boy is not identified as Jackie Robinson, it is assumed. With the voice-over, Jackie Robinson, the subject, is immediately positioned as passive in the narrative structure. He is a child, a subject who is under adult (and narrator) authority. His back is facing the camera, creating a generalized harmless figure for the audience to confront. And the narrator’s voice, which is the first voice the audience hears, not Jackie Robinson’s, begins and ends the tale, acting as bookends to further contain the story. Robinson’s story is mapped onto the figure of the child. The first lines of the film are essential in framing the narrative of integration, which is through the allegory of an American boy’s dream. The film was aimed towards a white audience; and, as the hesitancies of production companies with having a strong, central, and black character demonstrate, there was concern about depicting an authoritative and talented black figure transgressing the status quo. To downplay Robinson’s “blackness,” the opening narration makes no reference to race; “This is a story of a boy, but not just any a boy, an American 84 boy with an American dream” highlights the liberal democratic philosophy of equality. Although Jackie Robinson is black, navigating a society that practices overt institutionalized racism, the film attempts to define him as “just” an American boy. While the film falls into the sports biopic genre, the tone of the film is light, and sometimes comedic, in contrast to the heavy and serious issues of racism, segregation, and the actual life experience of Jackie Robinson. In addition, the line between fact and fiction is blurred as Jackie Robinson plays his adult-self in the film. Critics commented, “because he himself (Robinson) plays the character, conviction really pervades these scenes.” 44 Fortnight noted on the realist style: “the film ‘strives hard to be inline with the popular documentary technique of the moment.’” 45 As a result of style and casting, the film is an odd combination of fact and creative reenactment that promotes select integration. Figure 6: Jackie Robinson as a boy in the opening of The Jackie Robinson Story 85 Robinson’s talent is discovered as a young boy. The scene following the opening sequence has Robinson as a boy running onto a neighborhood baseball field with other white children. He takes position in the outfield, near first base. The film cuts to two white men, standing on home plate with a bat and ball; they hit the ball to the field. When the film cuts to the field, Robinson is out of frame. This occurs twice. As they prepare to hit the ball out to the field a third time, the film cuts to Robinson, face towards the camera, who asks, “Hit me one mister?” The men ask him what he wants. He replies, “Rounder, fly, anything.” The batter whispers to his friend, “Watch this,” in a tone that implies Robinson will miss the ball. Of course Robinson catches the ball, without a glove. “How’s that for a ballplayer?” asks the friend, who is playing catcher. The batter replies, “Yeah, we out to give him another chance.” Impressed, they hit him another ball, and then ask him to come over. Robinson is polite and friendly. When the men discover Robinson does not own a glove, the batter pulls out a torn glove from the trunk of his car Jackie Robinson as a the cute boy to be embraced in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) Figure 7: Figure 8: 86 and gives it to Robinson. Elated, young Robinson cries out “yay,” turns around and takes off running, with a clear rip in the seat of his pants. He runs home, into the kitchen to find his mother and shows her the glove. She asks where he got it, and he replies “a man” and turns around, points out the door to indicate where. His mother notices the rip in his pants and sighs, “Torn.” Robinson, thinking she is responding to the damaged glove, responds, “You can sow it up.” His mother laughs, and says, “Oh, Jackie!” In this first segment of the film, Robinson is portrayed as an affable, mannerly, cute, good- natured and talented boy, who is grateful for his second hand baseball glove. He is compatible with white children; he respects his mother and the white adults around him. The torn pants joke portrays him as innocent and funny. Depicting Robinson in this manner as a typical lovable kid serves to endear him to the audience. The film does little justice to the actual experience of the Robinsons, a black single- working-mother family living in a white section of Pasadena, CA. As might be anticipated in the 1920s and 1930s, animosity was prevalent among white residents. Robinson’s sister, Willa Mae, recalls, “‘We went through a sort of slavery…with the whites slowly, very slowly, getting used to us.’” 46 And Robinson was not always the amenable boy the film represents. In his biography of Jackie Robinson, Arnold Ramersad describes one tense moment with neighbors and a young Jackie Robinson: The worst episode on Pepper Street touching Jack directly occurred when he was about eight years old. One day, he was sweeping the sidewalk when a little girl from the poorest house on the block, almost directly across the street from Robinson’s, began to taunt him: “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” Incensed Jackie 87 answered in insulting kind. Her father, a surly, shiftless fellow, stormed out of the house to challenge Jack. Soon stones were flying between boy and man until his wife came out to scold him for fighting with a child. 47 Events such as these are absent from the film. The narrative, focusing on the good nature and athletic talent of Robinson creates a character who can easily be embraced. The film’s narrative quickly follows Robinson from college to his recruitment by Brooklyn Dodgers’ manager, Branch Rickey, to play for Montreal and then eventually for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jackie Robinson, the adult, comes across as a “gentleman,” and as a man who “just” wants to play baseball. The difficulties Robinson encounters in his first year of the Dodgers are drastically minimized, and by the end of the season, Dodger fans, who were antagonistic, are rooting him on in the finals. The democratic American Dream message is delivered by Branch Rickey who is portrayed as a sympathetic white manager, fighting for democracy and rights for all citizens, while also simultaneously searching for talent that can booster his sports teams, and pocket book. In his offer to Robinson to join Montreal, Rickey correlates citizen rights to baseball’s box score: Rickey: “Box score is really democratic. Doesn’t say how big you are, or how your father voted in the last election, or what church you attend. It just tells you what kind of ball player you were that day.” Robinson: “Isn’t that what counts?” Rickey: “It’s all that ought to count. Maybe someday it’s all that will count. We are dealing with rights here. The right for any American to play baseball, the American game.” 88 The film ends with Robinson winning the hearts of fans and the pennant for the Dodgers. As the players head into the locker room, Robinson stops to ask Branch Rickey a question, Robinson: “By the way Mr. Rickey, there’s something bothering me. About that invitation to Washington, do you really think I should go?” Rickey: “Yes, Jackie, I do, for once. To the Senate, to the House of Representatives, to the American people. You’ve earned the right to speak. They want you to speak. About things on your mind, about a threat to peace that is on everyone’s mind, Jackie. Now you can fight back.” The film dissolves to an establishing shot of the Capital in Washington D.C. and then to a medium shot of Robinson sitting in front of microphones on a table. He begins his speech to “Washington:” Robinson: “I know that life in these United States can be mighty tough for people who are a little different from the majority. I’m no fool because I’ve had a chance open to very few Negro Americans, but I also know democracy is willing to work for those who fight for it. And I’m sure it is worth defending. I can’t speak for any 50 million (at this point the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island in New York harbor fades in, at medium transparency, over Robinson so now the two images are superimposed) people. No one person can. But I’m certain that I and other Americans of many races and faiths have too much invested in our country’s welfare to throw it away (at this point, Robinson looks directly into the camera) or let it be taken from us.” Robinson pauses for a second. The image of Robinson in Washington fades out, and the image of the child walking down the street from the opening scene fades in; now the Statue of Liberty is superimposed over the figure of the boy. The narrator’s voice from the opening sequence, comes in and concludes: “Yes, this is the Jackie Robinson story. But it is not his story alone. (image of the boy fades out. Scene of Robinson proposing to Rachel fades in) Not his victory alone. It is one that each of us shares. A story, (scene of proposal fades out, 89 medium shot of Branch Rickey’s office door fades in) a victory, that can only happen in a country that is truly free (image of door fades out, scene of Robinson at bat for the Dodgers fades in). A country, where every child has the opportunity to become President (scene of Dodgers fades out, scene of Robinson sliding into home base for the Panthers, a black league, fades in). Or play baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers.” (Scene of the Panthers and Statue of Liberty fades to black).” The End. The ending is an upbeat, patriotic close to a story of racial integration and democracy. Robinson’s life becomes a narrative enforcing the idea of democracy and equal rights for all, or at least those who are talented, while minimizing Robinson’s actual struggles and contributions to the fight for racial democracy. As in the opening, the closing remarks make no mention to race, and collapses Robinson’s story onto the average (white, middle-class) citizen, adult and child. These last few scenes depoliticize the actual story of Robinson’s struggle and fight for black rights, as it tries to portray Robinson as a good citizen. The diagetic “invitation” to Figure 9: The Statue of Liberty superimposed on Jackie Robinson testifying before HUAC in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) Figure 10: The Statue of Liberty superimposed on Jackie Robinson as a child in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) 90 Washington is actually a request to speak to HUAC (House of Un-American Activities Committee) against Paul Robeson and to “refute anti-American statements” made by Robeson. Robeson had declared that it was unimaginable for black Americans to “go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country (USSR) which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.” 48 Robinson strategized with Branch Rickey and Lester Granger, the executive director of the National Urban League, on how to testify before HUAC and took the moment to speak against Jim Crow laws while vouching that if Robeson asserted the statement, then he had the individual right to express himself. Instead, the film presents the hearing as an opportunity for Robinson to use his voice, a privilege that he has finally earned, rather than a civil right. Robinson’s statement in the film becomes a pro-American statement championing United States democracy without harsh criticism of Jim Crow laws and racial inequalities. He is also positioned as a good talented citizen, dismissing any potential discord or risk to the white status quo. Robinson’s adult life and struggles, outside of the film, were more complex, which the print media represented with more disclosure. U.S. audiences would have been familiar with Robeson’s pro-Communist statement and Robinson’s testimony before HUAC, as both were published in major newspapers and magazines. Life magazine printed Robinson’s testimony in their August 1, 1949 editorial section, entitled Negroes are Americans: Jackie Robinson Proves it in Words and on the Ball Field. In comparison to 91 Robinson’s full testimony, the film uses lines that emphasize equality and citizenship without direct comments on the racial tensions of American citizenship at the time. For example, Robinson asserts in his actual statement: “And just like any colored person with sense enough to look around him and understand what he sees, I know that life in these United States can be mighty tough for people who are a little different from the majority…” 49 , but the film omits the overt racial recognition. In his full testimony, Robinson seizes the opportunity to address the white public on the inequitable treatment of African Americans: The white public should start toward real understanding by appreciating that every single Negro who is worth his salt is going to resent any kind of slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he’s going to use every bit of intelligence, such as he has, to stop it…And one other thing the American public ought to understand, if we are to make progress in this matter, is the fact that because it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality and lynching, when it happens, doesn’t change the truth of his charges. Just because Communists kick up a big fuss over racial discrimination when it suits their purposes, a lot of people try to pretend that the whole issue is a creation of Communist imagination…Negroes were stirred up long before there was a Communist party, and they’ll stay stirred up long after the party has disappeared—unless Jim Crow has disappeared by then as well. 50 All of these candid political opinions are absent in the film. On reflection, years later, upon his “invitation” to speak in front of HUAC, Robinson states, In July, 1949, I was asked to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee …I was impressed by the fact that a Congressional committee had asked for my views, but realized that they must have felt my popularity with black and white sports-loving masses would help them refute the Robeson statement. I was in dilemma because the statement was disturbing to me in some ways, although I believed I knew why it had been made… Rachel and I had long talks about it… I didn’t want to fall prey to the white man’s game and allow myself to be pitted against another black man. I knew that Robeson was striking out against racial inequality in the way that seemed best to him. However in those days I had 92 much more faith in the ultimate justice of the American white man than I have today. I would reject such an invitation if offered now. 51 This recollection clearly displays Robinson’s politically conscious strategy on his position as a black man in the United States and awareness of the political game of race during the Cold War. Robinson’s political savviness needed to be concealed and contained, which the closing montage and narration neatly supply. 52 In regards to how space, home and race are represented in the film, Robinson inhabits public space while the home is the space of the maternal, Robinson’s mother, the only mother portrayed in the film. The house Robinson’s mother occupies appears to be a “nice” working class home. There is no father and the only other person to occasionally appear in space of the home is Mack, Robinson’s brother, who has a family of his own but they are omitted from the film. Robinson and his wife Rachel do not have a home within the film’s imaginary. They are seen traveling and in the space of buses and hotel rooms. Limited in its scope of integration, the film gives Robinson no family, only space to be a good player for an all-American sport. Although Robinson and Rachel did have a child during this time, the film leaves the baby out, as well as the prominence of Rachel’s relationship. In general, Robinson, not viewed as a family man, occupies public space, the ball field, and space connected to baseball—locker rooms, training camp, the dugout, and Rickey’s office. Portraying Robinson in public space without a home and family allows the film to easily reframe and contain Robinson’s black masculinity, and to make liberal democracy more palatable. In not depicting Robinson as a father with his own 93 children, the narrative deprives him of his full personhood, restricts black presence from the private (white) sphere, and allows for a more nuanced form of infantilization. In addition, the film’s closing voice-over produces a patriotic and positive summary mapped on to the figure of the child. As the narrator claims, “…this is the Jackie Robinson story. But it is not his story alone.” The story of Robinson becomes the tale of the average American citizen and child, in which any child can grow up to be President or play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The film attempts to present an encompassing view of American citizenship through a containment of black masculinity. As mentioned previously, dominant white culture has a history of ascribing black adults, particularly men, as childish and in need to be regulated. By overlaying Robinson’s story onto the child, the film breaks from egregious blunt stereotypes of the past, and moves to a subtle form of infantilizing black masculinity and covert racism. The Jackie Robinson Story uses the figure of the child to endear audiences to Jackie Robinson as a sympathetic citizen to be embraced while refashioning narrative strategies of containment of black masculinity. In The Well, the black child is employed for transracial empathy and helps to reframe white patriarchy into a new liberal paternal force for the nation and the democratic world. To understand the power and potential of the black child in The Well, one must examine the event that inspired the film. 94 One Little Girl Who United the World for a Moment 53 The world is full of kids like Kathy Fiscus—plump, blue-eyed, and blond. Until Friday afternoon, April 8, the world didn’t even know that 3-year-old Kathy was alive—and it didn’t care. And then, suddenly, it became very important that Kathy was alive and that she stay alive. For a moment in the world’s history, nothing else seemed to matter. 54 (Newsweek, April 18, 1949) Little Kathy’s life on earth is ended—but her going has shown the entire world how closely our country is knitted together—how in crisis, we are completely ONE. Gone are the big or little differences of opinions and policies—gone all thought of anything but working, pulling, sweating in one great spirit of brotherhood.” 55 (Louise Dresser, Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1949) On the afternoon of Friday, April 8, 1949, 3½ years old Kathy Fiscus fell down an abandoned well in a field near her home in San Marino, CA. The rescue efforts that lasted until Sunday, April 10, 1945 became national news through newspapers and was one of the first live events covered by television news. As KTLA, the local news station that reported on her rescue, retrospectively remarks, …she had become a kind of a legend, as the TV cameras kept vigil at the well site, informing viewers of every development, no matter how small. Television coverage made this incident a transformative event, a precursor of every wall-to- wall news event that was to come…the entire nature of news—and the way we interact with it—had been irrevocably altered, bringing the most personal of stories to the public with an immediacy that would have been unimaginable just a few short years before. 56 Television and cultural scholar, Mark Williams argues that, “the Fiscus telecast, which has achieved an almost mythical status in accounts of television’s local impact, can be seen as genuinely singular and potentially pivotal in forging a public awareness of the experience of television in relation to emotional identification and social mobility.” 57 95 The importance of the Kathy Fiscus story lies in this “emotional identification and social mobility” and how the local community and nation became “completely one” at a particular moment. The legend of communal response to Kathy Fiscus even became a categorical syndrome when in 1969, sociologist, Allen Grimshaw, labeled the “Kathy Fiscus syndrome” as when millions of people are concerned over one child that is trouble, while ignoring millions of others who are starving or in other despair. 58 Almost sixty years later, the impact of the Kathy Fiscus event can still be witnessed if one does a search on the Internet. Several websites come up; some noting the significance of the event for television; some inquiring about the Jimmie Osborne song “The Death of Little Kathy Fiscus;” and some with personal remembrances of the Fiscus tragedy, such as: “I too remember Kathy Fiscus. Although we did not know the Fiscus family, we all cared about Kathy and she was the first person whom I really cared about who died. I was nearly eight at the time it happened, just old enough to read about it in the papers.” 59 I was 9 years old at the time living in Palms, Ca. Kathy’s tragedy is well remembered by most of my friends and me...I not only remember watching on a neighbor’s TV, but one of the LA papers, I think it was The Herald published the story with a circle representing the size of the well on its front page. I remember putting the paper on the floor and standing in the circle telling my parents I could fit down the well and get Kathy. We were all hoping for a better ending. I hope the years were kind to the family there after.60 My Father was one of the ones that helped on the attempted recue little Kathy Fiscus. I never realized how important this rescue was to him until I was older. My dad was heart-broken when he couldn’t save her. I know for a fact that that story made it into the papers all around the world, even in Soviet Russia... 61 96 My grandmother told me this story and sang the song to me when I was little, now I will tell my little girl. I will do this so that Little Kathy’s memory lives on… Her smile so innocent hurts my heart, to see that she died so young... 62 While Williams’ focus is on television and argues “the popular memory of the Fiscus rescue seems to be strongly intertwined with television,” 63 these personal narratives also indicate sentimental personal memories from childhood passed from generation. Williams claims that the spectacle of the live television coverage of the Fiscus rescue created a short-lived “social” viewership. He writes, In its social impact, the Fiscus telecast seems to have broken down social boundaries, momentarily reconfiguring the already strongly-demarcated class, ethnic, and racial lines of post-was Los Angeles. In other words, it subverted the domestic separation/isolation (rooted in the “patriotic” consumerist ethic of privatization) that enforced and shielded from view these social divisions. 64 Figure 11: Kathy Fiscus Image on the left is rescuers bringing her body up from the well. Image on the right is of Kathy Fiscus. 97 And in fact, readers and viewers at the time of the event comment on the sudden network of community and “brotherhood.” In the actual story of Kathy Fiscus, all participants are white, but from various socio-economic classes. And just as important to the story were the men who attempted to rescue Fiscus. Several were unemployed miners, and after the rescue efforts, a community fund was established for the men and their heroic efforts, hospitals canceled rescue workers’ bills and wealthy citizens offered to pay for health operations and procedures. Papers focused on the men’s altruism: “the unselfish devotion of the many volunteers who were engaged in the rescue attempt is a tribute to the great heart of America…the work done by these self-sacrificing individuals was a source of inspiration to parents throughout the world.” 65 Williams identifies “the child in the well” as a cross-cultural subgenre in catastrophe broadcasts and narratives. He refers to Megan Morse’s work to describe the appeal of the “child in the well;” “the idea of a child falling into a well appears to have deep psychological resonance. Something symbolic, beyond the individual fate of the child, appears to be at stake in attracting a massive and live presence of the media and the widest concern and sympathy in the public imagination.” 66 Yet it cannot just be any child. It needs to be a child popular audiences can feel sympathy and compassion towards. Williams remarks on the Fiscus case, It should be mentioned that the child’s own social status probably enters into this fantasy of identifications at some level: the fact that Kathy was white and middle- class certainly would not preclude the wide-spread concern for her condition among an LA population (and TV ownership) which was predominantly also 98 white. That child was female seems to have engaged a certain additional protective level of the Symbolic (patriarchal) aspects of the rescue effort... 67 It is well documented that certain children, mainly white and middle to upper class, can attract the attention and sympathy of the media and popular audiences, while others, often a child of color or of the lower class, is relegated to the invisible sidelines. 68 In his studies of communities in times of disaster, sociologist, Allen Barton states, “Sympathetic identification involves a desire to help the victim because we ‘suffer with’ him; we feel a sense of identity with him and are made unhappy by his deprivation.” 69 However, when there is a history of dehumanization, such as racism, then “sympathetic identification takes on negative values.” 70 The politics of compassion and feelings are deeply enmeshed with identity politics and structures of power. In contrast, Barton notes when sympathetic identification is positive in times of disaster, there is a potential moment of possible transformation, again a “presence of mind.” Williams also recognizes the impact of shock in catastrophe narratives as “a moment of danger that might portend change,” and argues that the “child in the well” subgenre “can be seen to offer the potential for anti-symbolic, even revolutionary configuration of identification and socio-political mobilization: a kind of avant-garde of the ‘real’.” 71 In the witnessing of a catastrophic event, whether on site, in a newspaper, on television or the Internet, there is a utopian moment of unity and a potential moment of action (the “real”). The opening quotes of this section reflect and frame this moment of identification and potentiality. 99 Despite the death of Kathy Fiscus, within the context of the Cold War, the Fiscus story provided a national uplifting tale to American citizens and a “model” for international allies. The sympathetic identification exhibited by concerned citizens represents a compassionate civilization that values the “innocent” individual life. The Fiscus story represented the “best” of the United States at that moment in history, despite U.S.’ practice of racial discrimination on its’ own citizens. In the Fiscus case, the emotional and civil response demonstrated to the world that American citizens and democracy cultivated a generous humane society, the antithesis to Communist states. The communal response was also a narrative that could remind U.S. citizens of the positive qualities of their own humanity. The April 15, 1949 issue of the Los Angeles Times printed readers’ letters that commented on how the Fiscus incident could supply a moral model for the world. Robert B. Madison wrote, Let us remember Kathy as a little girl for whom the whole world had compassion and hope of life. In these ties it wonderful that everyone wanted to help. It was a symbol of humanity at work as it should be, not only the desire to help one little girl. Let this girl’s memory be set up as a monument to the people of the world as a symbol of humanity, unselfishness, and love. 72 And Douglas Field sent in, The recent MIT convocation in Boston seemed to present disquieting evidence of our increasing rather than diminishing materialistic and even atheistic attitude towards life. The inadequate response of the public to this year’s financial appeal by such charities as the Red Cross, Community Chest and March of Dimes, has been construed by many as further evidence of a growing selfishness and stifling of our social conscience. Then suddenly the epic story of a little girl’s fall, her lying hundred feet below the earth’s surface, the instant response of heroic men to the call for aid, and the gargantuan scale of the rescue operation not only held the nation in the grip of anguished suspense but laid bare to the world one of the most deep-down expressions of warmth and devotion that this country has ever 100 manifested. There emerges the stimulating outline of our nation’s basic moral and spiritual fiber. It proved once again how quickly and completely we can be welded into a people with a singleness of heart and nobility of purpose. 73 This moment of crisis and sympathetic identification created a moment of utopian communal promise, and the child had a central role in this narrative. However, this account glossed over the problematic social and racial relations that dominated U.S. politics and society. The story of Kathy Fiscus and its affect on U.S. citizens inspired filmmakers Leo and Harry Popkin to craft a similar narrative of a child falling down a well, but they strategically made the decision to use the narrative to explore racial relations in the United States. The child in need of saving in the 1951 film is black and becomes a transformative figure that forces the racially divided community together and ushers in unification despite racial differences. The Popkins were interested in imagining how the power of this real incident could unite citizens who were deemed separate, while also supplying good entertainment. The Well The Well proposes that discriminating racial attitudes can be transcended and transformed by rallying around the well-being of a child. The child is the coalescent force for the town; the child in the film becomes the hidden, lost, desired object that has the potential to for the rebirth of society. 74 In essence, the film offers a glimpse into the changing value 101 of the racialized child in post World War II America. It also provides insight into how the racialized child acts as a cipher for dominant cultural anxieties and a refashions hegemonic power embodied in white masculinity. The Well is a fairly overlooked film in the racial problem genre and in film history, even though it was nominated for an Oscar for both Film Editing and Writing. It was directed by Leo Popkin, but produced by both Leo and his brother Harry Popkin. The Popkin brothers had a history of capitalizing on films for black audiences in the 1940s. Film historian Thomas Cripps explains, during the 1940s, “they failed to develop a coherent black approach since (Harry) Popkin was a Hollywood liberal who, like the black middle class, saw racial progress as the assimilation of middle-class values,” and their goal was not to make “race propaganda,” but simply good entertaining films. However, film scholar, Ellen Christine Scott claims that although the Popkins were “not insiders of the Black community,” their history of business and interaction with the Black community positioned them to at least partially understand the struggles and cultural dynamics of African Americans. 75 Produced in 1951 by Popkin’s low budget production house, Cardinal Productions, Inc., The Well was a film intended and marketed for both white and black audiences. 76 The Popkins deliberately borrowed from the Fiscus story to structure The Well’s racial narrative and to transfer the emotions provoked by Kathy Fiscus’ story onto an African-American girl, and ultimately to the African-American community. 77 This strategy conforms to the liberal democracy’s maneuvering of compassion, which can 102 conceivably conquer social divisions among citizens and nation through feelings. As with The Jackie Robinson Story, the figure of the black child is endowed with qualities of “Romantic” innocence and cuteness. This application encourages emotional identification and for audiences to rally around the protection and innocence of a child, which smoothes over any social and historical racial conflicts. While the child is the central emotional device in The Well, the protagonist is a modern sheriff who provides a liberal alternative to traditional white masculinity and power. The film was well received by critics, and even former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt expressed a nod of approval. Critics commented on the high tense drama and “uncommon freshness.” The Los Angeles Times called it a film of” sensational values and high intensity;” 78 and “the picture ‘must rank as one of the best, most generally stimulating of the year because its flaws do not conceal its rare virtues’.” 79 The L.A. Examiner claimed, “It is also magnificent proof that a highly controversial and ‘touchy’ subject can be handled with good taste and sensitivity without pulling any punches in the process. It is proof that a ‘message’ movie of social significance can, at the same time, be tremendously exciting and fine film fare.” 80 The Foreign Languages Press Film Critics Circle noted the film’s “inspired use of the motion-picture screen to combine dramatic film entertainment with a high sense of the basic humanities in all of us.” 81 Overall, critics were surprised that a low budget film dealing with serious racial issues could be thrilling and entertaining. As many critics comment, the film used realism to 103 capture audiences, not only in its cinematic style, but also in its use of real life events as inspiration. The Los Angeles Examiner stated “the final sequence…is reminiscent in many ways of the tragic Kathy Fiscus case, and as the desperate operations continue through the night, the heartbreaking suspense (remembering little Kathy’s fate) [sic] becomes almost unbearable.” 82 The New York Times quotes The Well’s screenwriter Clarence Greene stating that the filmmakers used “authentic, factual material drawn from actual race-riots in American cities, notably one in Detroit on June 20, 1943 in which thirty four persons died.” 83 The film’s reliance on popular memory of the Fiscus story and race riots from the 1940’s was a key tactic in engaging both black and white audiences, and envisioning alternative understandings of the U.S.’ racially divided society and gender roles. 84 While Carolyn Crawford, the “child in the well,” is the uniting thread of the narrative, the first half of the film does explores the disuniting themes that tear the community apart across race lines, culminating in a racial riot. Despite critics’ claim that the racial violence is instigated by a conflict between Caroline Crawford’s male family members and the white businessman, Sam Packard, I would argue that it is white teenage female deception and emotional manipulation that triggers the race riots in town. The problem with uncontained white femininity in relation to white liberal masculinity and race in the fifties and early sixties will be revisited in greater detail in Chapter Three, but in the The Well, we begin to see the burgeoning critique of white femininity. The film also explores 104 white systems of power, embodied in the self-declared, privileged, and heartless attitude of the local business man, Sam Packard and the black assumption that the “System” will not help its community and will only protect whites, even if guilty. The film is divided in two action-packed acts: the first is the escalation of the race riots caused by the three elements listed above; and the second half is the rescue efforts to save Carolyn from the well and the rebirth of the united racial community. As opening credits play, the film opens with an establishing shot of a field, playful cheerful music in the background. Carolyn Crawford is viewed in the distance walking along a road, and then detours into the field. Once the credits end, the film cuts to a wide shot of Carolyn, center-framed, walking towards the camera. She is by all (white, middle-class) standards cute. She is in a short-sleeved dress with a ruffled collar, bobby socks and mary-jane shoes, braided pigtails, holding a bouquet of flowers, a book and sweater. There are no clear racial markers, except that she appears to have a light brown Figures 12-13: Carolyn Crawford, the girl in the well, in The Well (1951) 105 skin color. She walks towards the camera, her eyes looking down, she stops and crouches down to pick a flower to add to her bouquet. Her actions, wardrobe and the nondiagetic music ascribe her body with innocence. She is non-threatening, meek, and simply doing what young girls apparently do—picking flowers. She is clearly well-taken cared off, and the book signifies education. This first introduction to Carolyn is crucial, because it is the only onscreen time the audience sees her and it must endow her with qualities that make her worth saving. The final shot of Carolyn is another wide shot, a clump of tall grass is in the foreground. Carolyn, center-framed again, skips towards the camera, this time looking directly at the camera, smiling. As she enters the tall grass, she skips right into a hole and disappears from the screen into the ground. The music changes dramatically, from playful to threatening tone. The camera cuts to a medium shot of the hole in the ground (the abandoned well), Carolyn’s sweater and her ABC book lay on the perimeter. The camera pans up and back to a wide shot of the field, the music returning to its calm sweet emphasis. The overall effect is that the earth has swallowed her up. 85 Beyond the physical attributes, the descriptions town citizens recount of Carolyn also bestow her with non-threatening innocence. Her mother reminiscences that “she is so little, so helpless.” Carolyn’s white teacher describes her as a “shy, sensitive child; she could be frightened so easily.” The only negative qualities that are revealed is that she wanders off every now and then and that she is easily distracted by her love of flowers, 106 which can make her late to school. It is clear that she is loved and cared by both the black community (represented by her family) and the white community (represented by her school teacher and friends). Carolyn’s home is the only private space that is portrayed in the film, and as Scott points out, is the only home that is threatened. The other spaces are public spaces, mainly of the town’s streets, the police station, Casey’s restaurant, and the field. Carolyn’s mother is the only mother that is portrayed, and occupies the home, never venturing into the town’s public sphere except to the field in the rescue efforts. Scott claims the black mother represents the emotional: It is “the emotion of mother-love,” as one Black commentator in the Black press suggested, that is the emotive center of the final sequences of the film. This is important not because Mrs. Crawford is Black, but also because the mother—the Black mother—is able and allowed here to take her subjectivity out into the open—to publicly display her emotionality and grief… 86 Revising dominant Hollywood stereotypes by portraying the black girl as innocent and cute, and the mother figure as black and simultaneously open with her grief, the film frames the black family and home with a particular middle class light. The absence of a white family and home allows the white audience to potentially relocate their sympathetic identification onto the black family and accordingly the community, dislodging tightly contained (emotional) “boundaries.” 107 Whiteness in The Well is portrayed as a binary model: the new liberal—Sheriff Ben Kellogg and Casey—who uphold “truth” and justice for all of humanity; and the archaic traditional—Sam Packard and most white denizens—who maintain and is blinded by old habitual power structures. In the end, it is the child and concern for her survival that bridges both paradigms of whiteness with the black community. The opening sequence of Carolyn falling down the well, not only establishes her innocence and cuteness with the audience, but also gives the audience the omnipotent knowledge of what actually has happened to Carolyn. With this information, the film’s audience watches the racial tensions in the town mount and turn into a race riot. Neither side of the town’s community is correct, and tensions have risen due to assumptions based on past injustices and gossip (the black side) and devious lies, misuse of power, town rumors and a sense of entitlement (the white side). Both sides have lost sight of the child who is missing. The sheriff, Ben Kellogg, is the only man who stays level-headed and continues to search for the truth, while preserving justice and not taking sides. By furnishing the audience the knowledge of what happened to Carolyn, the riot, and the various causes of tension seem a ridiculous distraction to what really matters—saving Carolyn. This narrative framework, again, potentially positions the white audience to question and perceive traditional systems of power, racial tensions and division with a critical eye. For both sides of the town community, the initiating factor for racial tensions and riot is the concern for the protection of femininity. With regards to the black community, it is 108 the concern of Carolyn’s safety. Initially not knowing that she is trapped in the well, black citizens assume that Packard’s nephew Claude Packard has sexually assaulted her and has either killed her or hidden her away. For the white community, although there is initial concern that the Crawford men confronted and “attacked” Sam Packard, it is a teenage white girl’s allegation of a black man’s attempted assault on her femininity that sparks action. It is unclear how audiences would have responded to the accusation. Historically, a white woman’s declaration of a black man’s advances would give justification for white “quick-justice” mobs to kill the accused assailant, however the scene in The Well depicts this scenario as a deceitful lie and motivation for destructive, unjust and unnecessary violence. The insidiousness of white adolescent femininity is a stark juxtaposition to Carolyn’s youthful innocence, and those of her young white classmates. Disappointed that Chip pays little attention to her, Lois claims a “nigger” made a pass at her, hoping this will get Chip and his friends to demonstrate their interest in her: Boy 1: Gotta know how to handle them. Gotta keep them in line. Chip: Well, don’t think we won’t when the time comes. (Lois and Sally walk by the boys) Lois: Hi Chip! Chip: (looks over shoulder, mumbles) Hi. (Turns back to the boys) When they start beatin’ up wite guys that’s the time to do something. (Lois and Sally continue walking down the sidewalk) Sally: Well, Chip isn’t exactly all over you. He seems a lot more interested in talking about those niggers. And you told me he’s so gone on you. 109 (Lois turns around and walks back to Chip. Sally follows) Lois: Chip Williams! I don’t think you even care that I was just insulted. Chip: What are you talkin’ about? Boy 1: Who insulted you? Lois: A nigger! Sally and I were walking along Parsons Street. Sally: Lois! Chip: You mean one of ‘em made a pass at ya’? Lois: (coyishly) What do you expect us to do? After all, we’re just a couple of helpless girls. But if you want to stand around and yak about it. Come on Sally. (Lois and Sally walk away) Sally: Lois, how could you do a thing like that? The reconfiguration of the white female/black rapist tale and race riots attempts to re- imagine the U.S.’ racial past and navigate beyond it, past Jim Crow, past the history of lynching and slavery, by using the figure of the child as the anchor. By focusing on the child in the film, the established and conventional ways of being and understanding are remodeled without confronting systematic inequity and revolutionary transformation, while condemning a certain type of femininity. In contrast to this cunning model of white femininity, Casey represents a progressive liberal femininity. She runs the local café, “Casey’s Café,” assumed to be owned by her. When she is first introduced she is hanging a Japanese print on the wall of the café; as white male patrons are sitting at the counter, gazing at her backside as she stands on the table. She turns around to face them and asks, “Anything wrong with the food?” The men turn around to face the camera. These simple actions establish her as independent and open-minded. The Japanese print, in the context of the Cold War, represents her receptiveness to difference and indicates a 110 liberal mentality. Whereas Lois is jealous and hurt that she is not the object of Chip and the boys’ gaze, Casey does not relish or define her existence by the male gaze. One of the customers remarks, “That is a very pretty picture you put up, Casey.” She retorts, by giving him a sarcastic glance, “How could you tell from where you were looking?” It becomes apparent that she is interested in Sheriff Kellogg, but it is ambiguous as to what the relationship is between them. He is unresponsive in her attempts of flattery as he is caught up in thinking about the Crawford case. Unlike Lois who resorts to fabrications for male attention, Casey does not find offense at Kellogg’s dismissal. As the film progresses, Casey continues to represent liberal femininity—showing compassion for Carolyn’s mother, confronting angry white mobs, and protecting the black cook from the mobs—and is eventually at the end paired with the new white patriarchy personified in Sheriff Kellogg. In regards to white masculinity and leadership, there are two models: Sheriff Kellogg and Sam Packard. Furthermore, there is Sam Packard’s nephew, the man accused of abducting Carolyn. Claude Packard is presented as an outsider and an odd version of masculinity. As Kellogg investigates the last whereabouts of Carolyn Crawford, a flower shop, he discovers the eccentricity and “danger” of Claude’s contact with Carolyn. The strangeness of a white man buying a young black girl flowers—the transgression of color, age and gender boundaries—validates community speculation of inappropriate relations, again an unusual reversal of the endangered white femininity/ dangerous black 111 masculinity scenario. When Claude Packard is brought into the sheriff’s office, he does not portray the ideal masculine type. He is belligerent as the police ask him questions; the only moment he responds in a calm voice is when he recollects, fondly, Carolyn pressing her face against the window of the flower shop. He is a small man compared to the other officers, which contradicts his average description. He is a family man—a wife and two kids—unemployed, traveling north to see if he can get a job with a new mining project. The audience, however, with their knowledge of Carolyn in the well, is aware of Claude’s innocence. His oddities are simply idiosyncrasies, and the audience may feel for Claude as they witness the police, the town community and Sam Packard assume him guilty. The community twists Claude’s paternal concern for Carolyn into an incestuous and dangerous bond, but it will be Claude’s expertise as a miner and his petit stature that will lead to Carolyn’s rescue. Again, the film frames the unconventional as something to embrace, not reject. Claude’s masculinity does epitomize ideal white masculinity as with Sheriff Kellogg, but it does offer an imaginary alternative for the common denizen. Accompanying Claude Packard’s heroic, yet atypical, contrast to “standard” white masculinity, the film endorses a new white liberal patriarchy, represented by Sheriff Kellogg. Through people’s description of her, Carolyn is portrayed as helpless, small, shy, scared easily and sensitive. And although her parents and extended family love and care for her, they cannot contain her meandering ways or shelter her from the dangers of the outside world. Carolyn needs white protection. Although the town community bands 112 together to save her, it is the power of focused white masculinity that rescues her. As soon as it is discovered that Carolyn is trapped in the well, word starts spreading around town and the wild white and black masculine mobs lose energy and disperse. When Sam Packard, leader of the white mob, hears the news, he responds, “Kid! What kid? (pensive pause) “Oh yeah,” remembering that it was the missing child that was at the center of the pandemonium. Juxtaposed against Sam Packard, Sheriff Kellogg is portrayed as a fair man who is removed from the petty divisive attitudes of the white community. He has respect and sympathy for the Crawfords with regards to their concern about Carolyn’s disappearance; he orders his deputies to stop their jokes about racial and class difference; he works with both black and white community leaders and citizens in attempts to prevent racial riots. At the end of the film, he represents the new “Father,” the new white patriarchy that is based on legal and civil justice and compassion. The film experiments with different conceptions of white masculinity alongside racial relations and child innocence. Ultimately the film is promoting a progressive liberal model that embraces the welfare for all citizens, yet maintains a white patriarchal power structure. In the second half of the film, the rebirth of the community and white masculinity is forefronted as the focus turns to the rescue efforts of Carolyn. The thirty-minute rescue sequence consists mostly of a montage to the power of the machine and the communal unity to rescue Carolyn. The sequence of sinking the shaft with heavy equipment is pure constructive masculine (and phallic) energy at work. In fact it is putting technology to 113 good use that the community can come together. Sam Packard’s self-interest and egotistical destructive force is transformed into productive energy when he refocuses on the rescue of the girl and donates his company’s resources. Gleason, the white radio repairman, who is seen in the first part of the film spouting prejudicial comments, uses his radio equipment to hear Carolyn and communicate with the community that is on the sidelines. Using the radio equipment helps to centralize information and prevents the networking circle of gossip from distorting information and facts. These scenes are cinemagraphically reminiscent of the Kathy Fiscus rescue, both in regards to story and cinematography. Once the shaft is sunk, men are lowered in to dig a tunnel over to Carolyn. This sequence plays out like a (re-) birth sequence, or what Dieter Rath would call an epiphany, as the community waits in anticipation for Carolyn’s reappearance. 87 When Claude emerges Figure 14: Rescuers bringing Carolyn Crawford’s body up from the well in The Well (1951). Note the similarities to the news photo of Kathy Fiscus (see figure 11). Figure 15: Sheriff Kellogg, the new liberal “father” holds Carolyn Crawford after she is rescued from the well in The Well (1951). 114 from of the shaft, he has Carolyn bundled in a blanket in his arms. He hands her to Sheriff Kellogg, who gently carries her like an infant into a white ambulance. A black doctor helps him in and then climbs in himself and shuts the ambulance door. At no point in this sequence is Carolyn revealed. The sheriff finally exits the ambulance after a full onscreen minute and informs the Crawfords “she’s going to be all right.” Triumphant music begins and the camera focuses on the Crawfords’ emotional reactions. Martha Crawford looks exultingly towards the sky and her eyes well up with tears, her husband embraces her with tears in his own eyes, and she lets out a cry of relief. A man gets on the microphone and announces to the crowd “The little girl is alive and is going to be alright.” The crowd rejoices and runs from behind the ropes onto the rescue site. The film ends with the ambulance leaving with Carolyn and the crowd, along with her parents, dispersing. Sheriff Kellogg and Casey remain on the field until the crowd dissipates, and walk off-screen, holding hands, representing the new progressive liberal white couple. It is unclear if the unification of the town is circumstantial or if it is truly transformed. This seems less important than the film’s privileging of the white couple, specifically white masculinity, and displaying the potential of racial unification. The black child in The Well is the uniting force and catalyst for communal unity. Using sympathetic identification that was witnessed with the Kathy Fiscus, the film envisions how this could be transferred to racial relations. If the child that fell down the well in the film had been white, the power dynamics of the black/white community would not have 115 been challenged. With the child being black, the white power systems--Sam Packard and his company, the government, legal forces, and local businesses--must come to the aid of the black community. The film not only challenges the white community in the film, but also the white audience who must care for the fate of the imagined black child. The film’s positive reception suggests a general openness to this “imagined empathy.” In both The Jackie Robinson Story and The Well, the black child is used to promote a more democratic and just society among black and white citizens. Both films moved the black child away from demeaning stereotypes—pickaninnies, alligator bait, etc.—to one that represented aspired national unity. These representations did not generate a rush in racial acceptance or revolutionary change, but they do signal a shift and different attitude towards racial relations. Within the context of Cold War containment and integration, both films deploy the figure of the black child to expand boundaries of home and nation towards a politic of integration and restabilization of (white) power structures. The Jackie Robinson Story maps a sanitized version of Robinson’s life onto the black child to re-imagine black masculinity. Albeit this falls into the historical pattern of the infantilization of black masculinity, the film attempts to reposition and incorporate the black man/child into an uplifting contained national narrative of the American Dream, without altering (white) dominant systems of power. The Well utilizes the child to create transracial empathy while reconstructing white masculinity. The racialized child in both films becomes a 116 pawn in the intricate unfolding of American white liberal sentiment and covert racism. The next chapter will continue with this exploration as it examines how the foreign orphan played central role in transforming white masculinity into the Gentle Warrior. Home and Guilt In Marian Perry Yankauer’s 1956 article “Homes for Sale,” she attempts to persuade white suburbanites to reevaluate the housing restrictions for African American middle class families. By implementing rigid racial boundaries, Yankauer laments that this compounds the U.S.’ housing problem: When we fail to do even that, the ghetto walls break periodically. A small portion of the unhappy prisoners rush into any area where housing is to be found, creating a new ghetto. Whereupon we proceed laboriously to build a new dam. How much easier to let Negroes live where they choose! Some will choose a ghetto, some will choose our block, but we will be through with the impossible ghetto- building and through with evading our own guilt. 88 Yankauer’s rhetoric locates the suburban bound white landscape in guilt. This acknowledgment of guilt suggests a liberal sentiment towards the issues of race, citizenship and discrimination. Likewise, the 1956 Douglas Sirk film Battle Hymn film, based on a true story and which will be discussed in the ensuing chapter, opens with Minister/Colonel Hess questioning, "so we ask ourselves, how can we be free of guilt?" Hess resolves his guilt in rescuing 400 Korean orphans in the unfamiliar space of Korea. Chapter Two will examine the redemption of (racial) guilt through foreign children, familial love and the development of the Gentle Warrior. In similar fashion to Hess, middle-class suburbanites turned towards the concerns of the welfare of foreign children 117 in attempts to relieve not only urban and foreign despair, but to also resolve conflicting and problematic racial ideologies and practices. 118 Chapter One Endnotes 1 See Charles E. Strickland and Andrew M. Ambrose, “The Baby Boom, Prosperity, and the Changing Worlds of Children, 1945-1963,” in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, Eds: Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Westport, CT: 1985). 2 Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001) 2. 3 Laura Dawkins, “Black Babies, White Hysteria: The Dark Child in African-American Literature of the Harlem Renaissance,” The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, Eds. Caroline F. Levander and Carol J. Singlehy (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2003) 167-183. 4 Robert D San Souci, More Short & Shivery: Thirty Terrifying Tales (New York: Delacorte Press, 1994) 135. 5 Ibid., 136. 6 Dawkins, 168. 7 Ibid. 8 Gary S. Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 45. 9 Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1994) 4. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 7. 12 Carolyn Dean, “Boys and Girls and ‘Boys’: Popular Depictions of African-American children and Childlike Adults in the United States, 1850-1930,” Journal of American Culture, no. 23 (Fall 2000) 17. 13 Ibid., 18. 14 Ibid., 18. 119 15 Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) xix. 16 See the works of Booker T. Washington and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. 17 Wilma King, “The Long Way from the Gold Dust Twins to the Williams Sisters: Images of African American Children in Selected Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Print Media,” in African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 123. 18 Dean, 22. 19 King, AAC, 123. 20 Rickie Solinger, Wake up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe V. Wade (New York: Routledge, 1992) 18. 21 Ibid., 148. 22 Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998) 6. 23 Ibid., 7. 24 Ibid., 7-8. 25 Sean Griffen, "Davy Crockett and Children's Space," The Children's Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1998) 105-106. 26 Lynn Spigel, “Seducing the Innocent: Childhood and Television in Postwar America,” Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001) 190. 27 Strickland and Ambrose, 542. 28 Sharon Stephens, "Children and the Politics of Culture in 'Late Capitalism'," Children and the Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995) 9. 29 Spigel, 136. 120 30 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988) 23. 31 Ibid., 142. 32 Ibid., 136. 33 "When A Negro Family Moved into a White Community," U.S. News and World Report (August 30, 1957) 31. 34 This sentiment still resides today. See Leonard S. Rubinowitz and James E. Rosenbaum, Class and Color Lines (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000). In their study of the Gatreaux program (1976-1998), which promoted housing in communities rather than building more public housing, Leonard S. Rubinowitz and James E. Rosenbaum examine the black families who move to suburbs. In their study they find, "The very presence of these African-Americans appeared to elicit curious, suspicious, even hostile reactions," (112). In one woman's description, she expresses, "I believe there's a little bit of wariness in most of their being friendly…there are smiles…the smiles say one thing, but the eyes say 'stay back, I don't really want to mingle with you. But since you moved next door to me, I'll be civil'," (113). In experiences of the children, much of the racial exclusion and prejudices were due to parents. Black children were kept at a distance by white parents, not allowing their children to play in homes or perceived black children as bad influences such as not pronouncing words correctly, (115). These studies illustrate the continuing prejudice and resentment towards black families who move into white spaces. 35 Kenneth B. Clark, Prejudice and Your Child, 2nd ed. (Middleton, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988) 131-132. 36 Sidonie M. Gruenberg, "Homogenized Children of New Suburbia," New York Times Magazine (September 19, 1954) 14, 42. 37 Anne Kelley, "Suburbia--Is it a Child's Utopia?," New York Times Magazine (February 22, 1958) 22. 38 Ibid., 22. 39 Helen Puner, "Is it true what they say about the suburbs?," Parents Magazine, vol. 33 (July 1958) 43. 121 40 Alfred E. Green, The Jackie Robinson Story, DVD (20th Century Fox, 2005). 41 Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1997), 223. 42 Ibid., 223-224. 43 Ibid., 224. 44 Edwin Schallert, “Robinson Story Novel, Dramatic,” Los Angeles Times (July 15, 1950) 9. 45 “The Well,” American Film Institute Catalog, http://afi.chadwyck.com/film/full_rec?action=BYID&FILE=../session/1261719323_1621 5&ID=53432 46 Rampersad, 23. 47 Ibid., 24. 48 Ibid., 211. 49 “Negroes are Americans: Jackie Robinson Proves it in Words and on the Ball Field,” Life, vol. 27 (August 1, 1949) 22. 50 Ibid., 22. 51 Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made, as told to Alfred Duckett (New York: Putnam, 1972) 94-96. 52 Disillusioned over time, Robinson comments with less hope and more experience in 1972, “That statement was made over twenty years ago, and I have never regretted it. But I have grown wiser and closer to painful truths about America’s destructiveness.” See Robinson, 98. 53 This is the epigraph on Kathy Fiscus’s grave marker. See “Find A Grave - Millions of Cemetery Records and Online Memorials,” http://www.findagrave.com/cgi- bin/fg.cgi?page=pif&GRid=10679&PIgrid=10679&PIcrid=7988&ShowCemPhotos=Y&. 54 “The Importance of One Little Girl,” Newsweek, vol. 33(April 18, 1949) 19. 122 55 Louise Dresser, “Letters to the Times, Los Angeles Times (April 15, 1949) A4. 56 “KTLA The CW | Celebrating 60 Years,” KTLA.com, http://ktla.trb.com/extras/ktla/60th/news-kathyfiscus.html. 57 Mark J. Williams, From "Remote" Possibilities to Entertaining "Difference": A Regional Study of the Rise of Television Industry in Los Angeles, 1930- 1952 (PhD diss., University of Southern California: December 1992) 125. 58 Allen D. Grimshaw, “Review of Communities in Disaster,” in Annals of the American Academy, vol. 385 (September 1969) 219. 59 “Re: Kathy Fiscus, died April 8, 1949,” Genealogy.com, http://www.genforum.familytreemaker.com/fiscus/messages/125.html. 60 “Little Girl Who Brought the World Together,” First Draft: Laying Down the Words, http://kathyrhodes.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/little-girl-who-brought-the-world- together/. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Williams, 124. 64 Ibid., 141. 65 “Kathy, in Casket, Wears Easter Frill,” Los Angeles Times (April 13, 1949) A1. 66 Williams, 162. 67 Williams, 168. 68 For example, Scripps Howard News Service claims, “for a missing child to attract widespread publicity and improve the odds of being found, it helps if the child is white, wealthy, cute and under 12. Experts agree that whites account for only half of the nation's missing children. But white children were the subjects of more than two-thirds of the dispatches appearing on the Associated Press' national wire during the last five years and for three-quarters of missing-children coverage on CNN, according to a first-of-its- kind study by Scripps Howard News Service. ‘I don't think this results from conscious or subconscious racism,’ said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and 123 Exploited Children. ‘But there's no question that if a case resonates, if it touches the heartstrings, if it makes people think 'that could be my child,' then it's likely to pass the test to be considered newsworthy. Does that skew in favor of white kids? Yes, it probably does’.” (From “Media focus on white, wealthy in missing children cases,” Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=MISSING-MEDIA-11-23- 05) 69 Allen H. Barton, Communities in Disaster; a Sociological Analysis of Collective Stress Situations, 1st ed. (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1969) 238. 70 Ibid., 239. 71 Williams, 169. 72 Robert B. Madison, “Letters to the Times, Los Angeles Times,(April 15, 1949) A4. 73 Douglas Field, “Letters to the Times, Los Angeles Times,(April 15, 1949) A4. 74 To unravel why such a story has such an impact on audiences, Mark Williams refers to Claus-Dieter Rath’s article Live Television and its Audiences, in which Rath discusses the aura of the “inaccessible”—“that which can be imagined, yet…is not actually perceived.” Rath specifically mentions the Kathy Fiscus coverage as an example of live coverage in which people are trapped in a location that prohibits visual access, such as a cave or mine. Rath claims that what audiences wait for in these circumstances is “evidence, the visualization of facts.” Rath states, “Of course, hundreds of movies are based on the same situation…, but live television works like an epiphany: the appearance of a hidden or lost, a desired object. It may appear from one moment to the next. Will the victim live or die? Who is guilty? Will Mother Earth set her prisoners free? Are there any heroes to snatch the victim from the jaws of death? What we are facing here are facts (birth and death) which can be dealt with in terms of stories. Birth and death cannot “tell themselves” since they are hypolinguistics phenomena, but they have an enormous cultural and subjective value, as we can easily perceive if we examine our birth phantasies or our phantasies of danger, threat, and death. As discourse events they appear in the form of myths, pseudo-myths or narrative stereotypes. Thus, the events themselves acquire the status of topicality, because in a particular socio-political situation they trigger phantasms of universal or at least broad cultural range. They become local, regional, national, or even planetary affairs which we face privately in our cosy living-rooms…thus sometimes a private event can become an emblematic affair whose solution symbolically stands for the state of things.” 124 75 Ellen Christine Scott, , Race and the struggle for cinematic meaning: Film production, censorship, and African American reception, 1940--1960 (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2007), 553. 76 For an excellent summary of the production history, formal analysis and reception of black audiences of The Well, see “Chapter 6: Racial Production Poltics, Reception, and Censorship: The Meanings of The Well” in Ellen Christine Scott’s dissertation. See note 75. 77 As Scott states, “The producers used the innocent white child’s endangerment and eventual death (referring to Fiscus), still fresh in the minds of the audience, and translated it into a Black context as a way for audiences to enter into identification with a Black child victim and by extension with Black community and culture.” Scott, 549. 78 Edwin Schallert, “Mob Violence and Rescue Stirring Feature of ‘Well’,” Los Angeles Times (October 26, 1951) B9. 79 Richard Griffith, “Economical Artistry of ‘The Well’ Hailed,” Los Angeles Times (October 2, 1951) B6. 80 Kay Proctor, “‘The Well’ Stirring Film,” LA Examiner (October 27, 1951) A1. 81 “Foreign Critics Honor “‘The Well’,” New York Times (October 22, 1951) 33. 82 Proctor. 83 J.D. Spiro, “New Slant,” New York Times (October 1, 1950) 113. 84 See endnote 76. 85 And many may relate this scene to the abduction of Persephone by Hades, in which she was picking flowers in a field when she was abducted. 86 Scott, 588. 87 See endnote 74. 88 Marian Perry Yankauer, "Homes for Sale," Chrisitian Century, vol. 73 (November 28, 1956) 1385-1386. This also represents a religious liberal ideology that was prevalent at the time, which will be discussed in Chapter Two. 125 Chapter Two Intruder in the House?: The Gentle Warriors, Foreign Children & Adoption in Post-World War II United States “So we ask ourselves, how can we be free of guilt? Through patience and humility will we find happiness of a broken contrite heart; thou will not despise.” 1 (Colonel Dean Hess in Douglas Sirk's Battle Hymn (1957)) Community development is a better way of helping people…but that's not something people are moved to give money for; it doesn't give them an emotional reward. Whereas they are rewarded emotionally by helping an individual child. 2 (Robert Brooks, National Director of Christian Children's Fund of Australia, 1991) There is a moment in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much that can be easily overlooked but encapsulates the domestication of the postwar white middle class family and frames driving questions for this chapter. It occurs relatively early in the film; the McKenna family is in the Marrakech market with the Draytons before Louis Bernard is mysteriously murdered. Jo and Ben McKenna (Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart) are walking together through the foreign market, making jokes about Ben’s patients’ illnesses paying for their trip, clothes, and other luxuries. There is a close-up of Jo’s face; she is clearly staring at something that distracts her from the conversation with her husband. The film cuts to reveal what has captured her gaze. It is a Moroccan woman, dressed in burka, completely covered with only her eyes exposed, which the audience cannot see. Tied to her back is a baby, whose brown fuzzy head hangs to the side, completely uncovered except for the swaddling that is fastened around it. The film cuts back to a medium shot of Jo and Ben walking: Jo: “Well, I’d like to say something where nobody can hear us.” Ben: “Well, this is the safest place.” 126 Jo: (looking determinedly straight ahead) “When are we going to have another baby?” (Ben appears completely surprised and shocked, as he turns to her, they stop walking) Jo: (coyly and ironically) “You’re the doctor, you have all the answers.” Ben: (still shocked) “Yeah, but this is the first time I’ve heard the question.” 3 Their son Hank, calls out to them, and interrupts their conversation. The sight of the Moroccan baby seizes Jo’s (white) gaze and activates her maternal instinct and desire. What has been revealed until this point in the film is that Jo had a successful career as a singer in the U.S. and in Europe that she quit for her marriage to Ben and to live in Indianapolis to support his career. While there is not a moment in which she directly states her regret of this choice, there is a tense interaction before the market scene in which there appears to be frustration around Ben not wanting to live in New York, where both Ben and Jo could have active careers. The moment she views the baby in Marrakech, she returns to domestic longings. What is it about the foreign baby that captivates Jo’s gaze and desire for familial love? If the previous chapter discussed post-World War II’s containment of (white) innocence in the suburbs and the black child embodying the narrative of Cold War integration and development of liberal democracy. Chapter Two focuses on transformative narratives and demonstrates how the figure of the foreign child, particularly the Asian orphan, resolves and transforms racist and discriminating domestic ideologies embodied in white masculinity into the Cold War Gentle Warrior. However, while this model of masculinity seemingly deals with problematic race relations at home, it reflects the shift 127 into a post Civil Rights covert mode of racism and maintenance of status quo. The orphan child figures as a powerful nodal point in the transformation of this masculinity. This chapter will argue that the U.S. culture placed a particular focus on foreign children to help resolve and transform deeply-ingrained discriminating domestic ideologies. Two Hollywood films Three Stripes in the Sun (1955) and Battle Hymn (1957) will explore how white masculinity is remade in relation to the shifting times of power and policies, and how foreign children are the antidote for American racism; yet, it is only particular types of children that inspire, are desired, and redeem. These films limn the outlines of the new Cold War masculinity Gentle Warrior that must leave the confinements of the U.S. home for a foreign space to atone and remake himself, overcome racist ideology and guilt and become a gentle warrior to rule and guide the new interracial global family. If Chapter One explored the role of the child in mitigating a post-war crisis in masculinity on the domestic front of home, this chapter expands the imaginary terrains of American masculinity in an era of Cold War expansionism while also extending my analysis beyond a black/white binary frame. In these transformative narratives, redemption seems to apply only to white men, and while foreign space is not off limits, it is treacherous and dangerous for white women, children, and nonwhite citizens. Returning to The Man Who Knew Too Much, the film takes place in Marrakech and Europe. Marrakech is represented as foreign space, but it is not the foreign “Others” who are the enemies. The enemy turns out to be a white childless British couple, an enemy that appears to be just like the McKenna’s, just like 128 “us.” Foreign “Others” are represented as suspiciously innocent; there are dangers lurking and cultural differences that (white) Westerners must be learn in order to navigate safely. The film opens with Ben, Jo and Hank McKenna sitting in the back of a bus, traveling from Casablanca to Marrakech. The opening shot is a close-up of the family, introducing them to the audience; the camera zooms out, revealing a busload of Western tourists and Moroccan citizens, many dressed in traditional Muslim and Moroccan garb. In this simple opening shot, the foreignness of the space and the displacement of the American family are accentuated. As the family takes in the sights through the bus windows, Hank, the young son, asks: Hank: “Daddy, are you sure I’ve never been to Africa before? It looks familiar.” Jo McKenna: “You saw the same scenery last summer driving to Vegas.” […] Hank: “Hey, look a camel!” Jo: “Uh, Uh. Course this isn’t really Africa, honey; it’s the French Morocco.” Ben: “Well, it’s Northern Africa.” Hank: “Still seems like Las Vegas.” Ben: “We’re just a hundred miles north of the Sahara desert. You realize that, son?” Hank: “I don’t know. In school they call this the Dark Continent. This is twice as bright as Indianapolis.” While a seemingly amusing conversation among the family, the child of the family sees no difference between Africa / the French Morocco (foreign space) and Las Vegas (home space); and in fact discerns his education to be contradictory to his experience and understanding of the “Dark Continent.” This childish observation of there being more light in Morocco/Africa than in his home town of Indianapolis points to the false logic of 129 adult and Western explanations of foreign space, and consequently its inhabitants. Hank’s parents demonstrate a paradoxical understanding of the foreign space. Jo refers to it as the French Morocco, not Africa, framing it in its French colonial history and therefore connecting it to a European and Western space. Ben claims it as Northern Africa, separating it from the rest of Africa, and pointing out the remarkable natural novelty of the Sahara desert. It is also revealed that Ben has a nostalgic connection to Morocco, as he was stationed in the country during World War II. For the (white, middle-class) adults, Morocco is an exotic Western space and a natural foreign phenomenon to be explored. However, for the child, Hank, it is just a desert that is not distinctly unordinary. Situating the American family in a foreign space reflects the complex, tangled relationship of the United States, its citizens, and the US’ position as new world leader. 4 While maintaining a culture of containment on the domestic front, the United States also needed to reach out to other nations, particularly in the Third World, and forge new alliances against Communist forces. Foreign allegiances could not be made by force or by past imperialist ways. Alliances needed to be redefined and remodeled. To aid with this reframing, the family, traditionally thought of as a private sphere, and familial love provided a public model for the New Free World order and community. 5 And again, the child will prove a central cipher in this new puzzle. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, the family is placed in the foreign space of Morocco, which includes different customs and bodies to build more suspense by removing the comfort of the Western familiar. 6 However, it is the familiar that is most dangerous. The 130 British couple that the McKenna’s befriend kidnap their son, are involved in murder and an assassination plot. What is most disturbing to the filmic story is that the couple who first appear as similar to the McKenna’s in culture, class, and race turn out to be traitors. The American family in Hitchcock’s film is confronted with foreignness and while it may appear different and threatening, it is not the enemy—it is that which masks itself as familiar that should be scrutinized. This suspicious nature reflects the cautious approach and culture of America’s Red Scare and the fear of secret Communist spies and enemies, and an insinuation to the instability of the familiar logic of the status quo and the changing times. At home, in the United States, the family is a primary metaphor of the nation. Cultural scholar Robert Lee contends, “the idea of Americans as family is the discursive basis for an imagined nationhood…[it] is also the primary ideological apparatus, the central system of symbols, through which the state contains and manages contradictions in the social structure.” 7 As touched upon in the previous chapter, the racial injustice occurring at home encumbered the United States’ selling of American democracy worldwide, particularly to the Third World, whose citizens by Western standards were considered racially “Other.” Not only did the U.S. need to present itself as racially tolerant to its foreign allies, it also needed to promote a culture of integration, abroad and at home. Many of these Third World countries were war-torn, impoverished and appeared to be in desperate need to be “rescued.” The children of these spaces became “ambassadors,” 8 who could easily be embraced by American citizens, and represent imaginary collective 131 human and family bonds. These foreign children in destitute, particularly orphans, furnished the average American denizen a method of assistance in the formation of the global family. It is no coincidence that organizations such as the Christian Children’s Fund and World Vision rapidly expanded during this time period, with aid and sponsorship primarily in Asia. In the same way, the foreign baby captures Jo’s gaze and kindles parental desires, the foreign orphan inspires American citizens to re-envision the family. However, one question to ask is why was there tremendous momentum to assist foreign children in need, while children in American urban and rural impoverished areas were more often than not perceived as burdens? Revisiting the death of Kathy Fiscus and the immense communal sympathetic identification her story created, a Los Angeles Times reader encourages fellow U.S. and global citizens to transfer their compassion to the “children of the world” (but note only certain children of the world): Parents, children of America, and of the entire world, I entreat you: Don’t forget this weekend. Don’t sink back into everyday indifference. Let your thoughts go beyond the fate of little Kathy. Think further, don’t let your imagination go to sleep too soon. Think of all the thousands of children killed in this last war, of the thousands of English children trapped under the rubble of bombed houses. Think of the French, the Chinese, of the Italians, the German children. Think of the Russian children. Think of the Japanese children dying in indescribable agonies after Hiroshima, after Nagasaki. But don’t stop there. Think of yourselves. Think of the millions of children entombed in the ruins of the next war—your children, anybody’s children. Make your pity for Kathy Fiscus, your sympathy for her parents, a source of thought, a decision for action. It’s too late to help poor little Kathy; it’s too late to spare her parents their awful grief, but it’s not too late to help yourself to help your own children and the millions of children all over the world. They will be equally innocent causalities. Let’s try to make “Operation Rescue” world-wide. 9 132 The children in need of “rescue,” for this reader, are children of war, particularly victims of World War II, outside the boundaries of the United States. Once more, domestic children, and black children in general, are dismissed from the rhetorical call of compassionate action. Focusing on children beyond U.S. borders, promotes disengagement from the social issues, such as race and class, at home, and allows for superficial relations in the name of empathy and global democracy. In his 1969 study, Communities in Disaster, sociologist Allen Barton notes, “motivation to help reduce suffering among community members in general is much more problematic in modern societies…arousing active altruistic behavior in a large part of the population is a most unusual event.” 10 In examining modern American community behavior in a time of a disaster, he observes and inquires the following: Dust Bowl refugees, migrant farm workers, the unemployed in declining mining areas, the mentally ill in “snake-pit” public institutions, have all suffered intensely and on a mass scale without rousing the “natural instinct” to relieve suffering among most Americans. The United States tolerated slavery for three generations after the Declaration of Independence, and racial oppression almost as bad for three more generations after the Emancipation Proclamation. Why, for example, is Harlem not defined as a disaster, worthy of a mass therapeutic response?...Why do some situations of large-scale human suffering generate a high rate of supportive behavior toward the victims, while others do not? 11 Barton’s questions are interesting to ponder and are inspiration to question what motivated thousands of postwar American families to aid in the plight of the foreign orphan; and to speculate what were the intricate social forces at play in relation to the high rate of transnational interracial adoptions? What do these humanitarian and Asian war orphans narratives reveal about racial and class dynamics in postwar United States? 133 In the period after World War II, paradigms of race move away from theories of biology and essentialism; and theories of ethnic assimilation are embraced in the discourse of American race relations. Lee claims liberal theorists “subsumed race relations to ethnicity. Ethnicity theory was grounded in the belief that while certain historically anachronistic patterns of racial segregation persisted, modern American society was open to the full participation of all who were willing to participate.” 12 Theories of ethnicity and assimilation embraced Asian Americans, according to Lee, and the myth of the model minority became a dominant Asian Americans stereotype, particularly in relation to other minorities. Lee argues that Asian Americans serve as the “model of successful ‘ethnic assimilation’ in American culture, which has less to do with the actual success of Asian Americans than to the perceived failure—or worse, refusal—of African Americans to assimilate.” 13 This allows dominant American culture to pit different ethnic groups against one another and ignore underlying discrimination practices. In examining the narratives of foreign children with regard to domestic racialized children, the contradictions of innocence, race, and who is worthy of saving come to the surface. 14 The Dilemma of “The Negro Problem” 15 Recalling Anne Higonnet’s discussion of innocence in the ethnographic photograph, a different type of innocence is identified in comparison to the Western “Romantic” child. Whereas the “Romantic” child is naturally innocent and a tableau rasa, the child in ethnographic photographs of non-Western people and culture, displays an innocence that is endearing, uncultured, and flawed, however with the potential to be rehabilitated and 134 rescued. In contrast to both of these categories of innocence, the child in social protest photography is situated in a Western context and whose purpose is meant to subvert white hegemonic ideals and notions of innocence and childhood. One example of social protest photography is Godfrey Frankel’s 1943 photographs of Washington D.C.’s infamous alley housing. In the "Forward" of the 1995 publication In the Alleys: Kids in the Shadow of the Capital, which features Frankel's photographs, Gordon Parks, social protest photographer and filmmaker from the forties and until his death in 2006, writes his account of his experience and reaction to the alley and Frankel's photos. Despite his own engagement with race, racism and poverty in his own creative work, Parks' amazement at the world Frankel exposes and his own personal memory reinforces how images of low income, racialized child bodies (everything the “Romantic” Child is not) rupture reality. 16 Park writes, Godfrey's Frankel's photographs of black street kids offer me a window to a bothersome memory I failed to escape…I was in Washington for the first time…It was a fine day for walking…As I walked on, the morning gradually began to take on gloom. A weariness began to set in. Then suddenly I was moving in an arena that had rippled into existence with such hardness it shook me. A crowded trash- littered street paved of aged brick and enclosed by a maze of gloomy alleys. Smoke curled into the air over long lines of squalid brick tenements…the most intense presence in this dirty disgruntled place was that of black children…Poorly clothed, some romped about in a way that seemed to have no purpose other than to keep themselves warm. Others walked the endless alleys, silently disappearing into the shadows. 17 (Italics are my emphasis) Parks' shock of the space and children he encounters describe an entry into the foreign and unfamiliar. The recognition that children live in dismal conditions is jolting, unpleasant, and disruptive. In her accompanying text of In the Alleys, editor Laura 135 Goldstein describes Frankel's photos, in a manner that echo the description of the "Knowing Child". She writes, Many of the children in Frankel's photos appear poised on the cusp of adolescence, caught between unknowing fantasy and the stark reality of life in the alley. We see it in the pose of a boy who stands with his hands thrust in his pockets and a faraway look in his eyes. His shirt and shorts are dirty, his little- man's shoes scuffed and untied. Though only a child, he carries himself with an air of maturity beyond his years, as if by passing through the open gate behind him he has suddenly entered the world of grownups. 18 Albeit written in 1995, Goldstein’s description captures the lack of innocence that is projected by writer and photographer on the African American child’s image. Again this space is distinguished as foreign, as a portal into the world of adults, a strange place to find a child. The discussion of social protest photography points to how the lower- income racially marked child occupies an "other" space that makes the status quo uncomfortable. The fantasy and Western ideal of childhood is disrupted and either forces the mainstream viewer to deal with the image and come to terms with it, although this often achieved on a purely superficial level of social policy, or to ignore the existence of such an image and subject. And this is exactly the problem and difference between the innocence of the US’ urban poor children and foreign children. The innocence of the African American child in Godfrey Frankel or Gordon Parks creative work is that of the “Knowing” Child. The knowledge this child represents and reflects is the devastating effects of racial discrimination. This is a social consequence that many, particularly those who benefit from the Racial Contract and white hegemonic system, want to overlook and reject. The ethnographic image of the foreign child does not possess or reflect this knowledge. The foreign child can be embraced or saved. 136 In contrast to the social protest photography of the first half of the twentieth century that advocates social critique, Edward Steichen’s Family of Man epitomizes the neutral global family of the post World War II nuclear age. In 1955, Edward Steichen curated the Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It consisted of 503 photographs from 68 countries taken by 273 photographers. The exhibit was a huge success within the United States and toured 38 countries. Interestingly enough, the exhibit included both ethnographic and social protest photography, but Steichen claimed the exhibit was concerned with “human consciousness rather than social consciousness.” 19 By placing these photos within the umbrella of the global family, the social critique is minimized and displayed as just part of the human condition. The exhibit certainly was not without critique, as it included an image of the mushroom cloud of the Bikini Island hydrogen bomb. However, any divisive categories, such as nation, gender, race, religion, class, were blended together to form the homogenous human race. Figure 16: Embodiment of the racialized “Knowing” child (Godfrey Frankel, 1943) 137 The success of Steichen’s The Family of Man exhibit demonstrates the desire to perceive the world as one global family. Cultural scholar, Christine Klein, comments on the use of “familial language” of middlebrow-culture and the socio-economic and international policies of the time: In publicizing the idea that all humanity belonged to the same family, the show reinforced the terms through which the U.S. explained and justified its reshaping of the international order. America’s claims of global “responsibilities,” “obligations,” and “commitments” became more acceptable when they were embedded in a logic of family. Imagined as an extension of family love, the extension of American power became somewhat less objectionable. The bonds of family rendered the inequalities of political and economic power less visible and partially defused the charges of racism and imperialism. 20 Despite American political and culture desire for a harmonious global community, the racial “problem” did not vanish. Figure 17: Death Slump at Mississippi Lynching (Anonymous, 1937) was removed from Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibit, but published in Life (February 14, 1955) 138 In the initial exhibit of The Family of Man in New York, a photo of a lynched black American man was included (see Figure 17). When the photo seemed to garner more attention than the other photographs, the decision was made to remove it from the exhibit. Wayne Miller, Steichen’s chief assistant, explains the choice: It was removed because he felt that this violent picture might become a focal point…so that people would focus on that and that would be used in the press stories about the show and people would miss the point, the theme of the show being interrupted by this individual photograph. 21 The emphasis of the exhibit, according to Steichen, was the “essential oneness of mankind throughout the world,” and “the universal elements and aspects of human relations and experiences common to all mankind rather than situations that represented conditions exclusively related or peculiar to a race, an event, a time or place.” 22 In choosing to incorporate the photo of the lynching, it is said that Steichen wanted to include something on human and civil rights, but as art historian John O’Brian points out, “by including and then withdrawing the controversial image, he became responsible for raising a socially contentious issue only to suppress it.” 23 The problem of American racism needed to be removed in order to maintain the fantasy of the global family. In removing the lynching photo, and placing photographs of the American “experience” within the context of photographs from around the world, the exhibit both created a neutral space, continuing the blindness of white supremacy, and allowed U.S. patrons to imagine the subjects of the photographs to possess the same inner emotions and experience of “whiteness.” 24 139 Although the picture was removed, Life magazine carried the lynching image in the February 14, 1955 issue that reviewed the exhibit. Life’s coverage of the exhibit provided a sampling of photographs and devised its own five thematic subcategories to group the sampling that were not part of the official exhibit: “Ties of Family, The Face of Love,” “Harmony in Work and Play,” “Loneliness—Even Among Many,” “Tensions Turned to Dread and Hate,” and “Fellowship in Silent Faith.” In addition, Life both published the original titles of the photographs, which were not included in Steichen’s exhibit, and grouped photographs that were not together in the exhibit. The effect of these editory decisions produced very different interpretations than Steichen’s Family of Man. For example, under the subcategory of “Loneliness—Even Among Many,” Life published two full-page photos: Jerry Cooke’s Withdrawal in an Ohio Insane Asylum and Andreas Feininger’s Anonymity in a Fifth Avenue Crowd. With the subcategory and the title of the photographs, a viewer would interpret these the two images as a critique of the disconnection in modern day urban life. In Steichen’s exhibit, audiences would happen upon Feiniger’s photo-- following the section that focused on the universal experience of death—as a marker to a new section that refocused on the energy of life (Steichen also included the Kobodaishi quote “Flow, flow, flow, the current of life is ever onward…” with this photo) and not the disenfranchisement in urban life. 25 Life placed the death slump lynching photo in the subcategory of “Tensions Turned to Dread and Hate.” This subcategory included four images (see Figures 18-21), the death slump, Nasuhiro Ishimoto’s Playtime Tormented in Chicago Park, George Heyer’s Son’s Rebellious Fury on Connecticut Lawn, and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Panic as Communists Approach 140 Shanghai. In Steichen’s catalog of The Family of Man, the lynching image is not included so it is unknown as to where he placed this image within the exhibit. Cartier- Bresson’s image appeared in a section of political unrest in The Family of Man, while both Ishimoto’s and Heyer’s photographs appeared in a section in which (white) children’s play seemed to turn somewhat violent. Life’s grouping of these four photographs, along with Life’s subtitle, again create a different reading than what would be experienced at Steichen’s exhibit. Obviously the subtitle of “Tensions Turned to Dread and Hate” refer to the image of the death slump, implicating American racism, and the panicked Shanghai crowd, clearly displaying the fear of Communism; but what does one make of the two images of American children’s play included in this subcategory? Do these children’s actions display tendencies of the hatred of racism and Communism? Is this critiquing (white) American children’s innocence? Or is it dismissing racism and Communism as acts of foolish children’s games? It is unclear. 141 Godfrey Frankel’s and social protest photographs of children demonstrate the uneasiness, and perhaps guilt, of fully embracing the domestic lower-income racialized child and the “knowledge” they represent. On the other hand, Steichen’s display of the global family and its immediate public success suggest the American public’s endorsement of the neutral family as a model to conceptualize the integrated democratic world. The stories Figure 18 and 19: Nasuhiro Ishimoto’s Playtime Tormented in Chicago Park (left), and George Heyer’s Son’s Rebellious Fury on Connecticut Lawn (right) appeared in Life under the subcategory “Tensions Turned Dread and Hate.” Figure 20 and 21: Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Panic as Communists Approach Shanghai (left), and Death Slump at Mississippi Lynching (right) appeared in Life under the subcategory “Tensions Turned Dread and Hate.” 142 of war orphans, particularly Korean, and adoption by American families play into this American fantasy of the global family. The mixed-race families, created by choice, in these tales offered Americans a way to imagine overcoming ingrained domestic racism that threatened foreign policy, particularly between the U.S. and Asia. 26 In this political scenario, “the family became a framework within which these differences could be maintained and transcended.” 27 The next section will examine one cinematic narrative, Three Stripes in the Sun, that proposes familial love cures American racism. Three Stripes in the Sun In the 1955 film, Three Stripes in the Sun, American racism is solved through familial love and the concern for orphans in a foreign space, which eventually leads to interracial romantic love. 28 This film is one of many Hollywood creations from the 1950s that picture American military men, outside of home, and their interactions, usually romantic love, with Asian women. Based on a true story and a New Yorker article The Gentle Wolfhound, Three Stripes in the Sun tells the story of Sergeant Hugh O’Reilly who is stationed in postwar Osaka and overcomes his racism towards the Japanese people through his interaction with Japanese orphans, and eventually falls in love with a Japanese interpreter and marries her. O’Reilly’s “true” story offers an example to American (white, male) citizens and the world of how racist ideology can be resolved. The romantic love between an Asian woman and a white man is not a new story to film. Gina Marchetti in Romance and the “Yellow Peril:” Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies 143 in Hollywood Fiction traces the long history of this story-line throughout film history, and argues that these formulaic tales follow the “Madam Butterfly” narrative. In these stories, A Caucasian man, far from home and its morally moderating influences, falls in love with, and often marries, a young girl from another race and culture. He leaves his young bride, and, back in the West, marries another. When he returns, he discovers his nonwhite wife has had a child, whom he and his white wife adopt. Abandoned by her husband, sacrificing her own happiness for the “good” of her child, the cast-off lover kills herself. 29 Marchetti argues that postwar Hollywood embraced the romance of Japanese American love affairs, and took advantage of exotic locales afforded by the occupation of Japan, capitalized on the topicality of U.S.-Asian relations in the aftermath of the Korean War, sensationalized domestic racial tensions by transposing them onto the less threatening sphere of white-Asian rather than white-African American relations…(and) used the myth of the subservient Japanese woman to shore up a threatened masculinity in light of American women’s growing independence during World War II. 30 Marchetti groups Three Stripes in the Sun (and mistakenly distinguishes The Gentle Wolfhound as a separate film, which in fact is the UK title for Three Stripes in the Sun) within these narratives. I would argue that while Three Stripes in the Sun does fall into the Japanese American romance films and uses the white-Asian relations to explore issues of domestic racism; the film, however, does differ in that the transformation of white masculinity occurs through the process of helping and interacting with children (the Japanese orphans) rather than tragic romance. As with The Well, it is only through focused male energy on the welfare of, in this case homeless and foreign, children that the successful building of interracial relationships is possible. Again, the child figures as a powerful nodal point in the remaking of (white) masculinity. 144 To emphasize the actuality of the story, the film opens with a military plane flying in the air; the following opening text scrolls up the screen: In December, 1949, this plane was carrying a group of servicemen to occupation duty in Japan. With the cooperation of the United States Army and working in the original Japanese locations, we have tried to show you what happened to one of them. (The film cuts to the inside of the plane, showing three servicemen.) This is the story of Master Sergeant Hugh O’Reilly. The film immediately informs the audience what they are seeing is based on a true story and they are witnessing actual locations and artifacts from Hugh O’Reilly’s experience. In addition, the film closes with the ensuing epilogue: This is an ending, but not an end—for our story, being true, is still being lived. The Wolfhounds continue to support the Holy Family Orphanage in Osaka, Japan, and O’Reilly and his Yuko now make their home at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Again, the film reminds the audience that this is based on a real story, and couple. In addition to the story of O’Reilly, the film also acts as a tourist film, capturing scenic sights and active life in Japan. The film attempts to illuminate the exoticness of Japan, but also demonstrate the Japanese are people “just like us,” and are not to be feared because of cultural differences or past war-time relations. The film constructs a comparable Steichen global family ethos. After the opening credits, the film cuts to an establishing shot of a bustling nightlife of Tokyo and blinking neon signs. Hugh O’Reilly (Aldo Ray) and Corporal Neeby Muhlendorf (Dick York) walk down the sidewalk. O’Reilly is visibly uncomfortable, while Neeby seems taken in by the sights. They stop and noticing Neeby checking out a passing Japanese women, O’Reilly comments: 145 O’Reilly: “Busy little beaver aren’t you?” Neeby: Man, did you ever see so many pretty girls?” O’Reilly: Yeah, Parker Street, San Francisco. Neeby: “But they ain’t that friendly.” O’Reilly: “They’re American!” Neeby: (distracted) “Hmm?” O’Reilly: “I said they’re American.” O’Reilly clearly despises the Japanese people, however Neeby and the other American servicemen throughout the film are captivated by the people, particularly the Japanese women. Immediately after the above conversation, O’Reilly and Neeby run into their friend Idaho. Observing a white serviceman and a Japanese woman, embracing each other while walking down the street, O’Reilly asks, O’Reilly: “They married?” Idaho: “Sure, why not? These gals are the greatest Sarge!” O’Reilly: “Let’s get out here. This place gives me the willies.” Idaho suggests a night club, which once inside, O’Reilly again expresses his disapproval of white servicemen with Japanese women: O’Reilly: “Are these guys all nuts or were they in high school during the war?” Idaho: What are you talking about?” O’Reilly: “We fought these people for three lousy years and everybody is acting as if nothing ever happened.” Idaho: “Nice way to get even though ain’t it?” (as he walks to the dance floor with a Japanese woman). It is revealed that O’Reilly’s abhorrence at the miscegenation between white GIs and Japanese women stems from his experience in World War II. Up until Idaho’s comment, the relationship between servicemen and Japanese women was presented as fun, however 146 Idaho’s comment of “Nice way to get even” suggests that the war is still being played out, except the battlefield is now in relation to Japanese women’s bodies. It is worth noting that anti-miscegenation laws were not completely overturned in the United States until 1967 with Loving v. Virginia. However, while in a foreign space boundaries upheld at home in the US could be transgressed. In fact, it is because he is in a foreign space, unobstructed from the confines of the contained home front, that Hugh O’Reilly can shed his racist tendencies and transform into a postwar gentle warrior. The voice of moral consciousness comes from the American Colonel in Osaka. Unlike O’Reilly, the Colonel must maintain law and order, and is therefore not allowed to transgress or fully transform into the new Gentle Warrior. The Colonel reprimands Neeby and O’Reilly for causing a ruckus in Tokyo and reminds them of their mission: Colonel: “You are supposed to represent the United States in a foreign country…You are part of a very small occupation force in a country of 80 million people. And when we leave this occupation, we would like to leave them as friendly allies. And while this may come as a surprise to you two rugged individualists, we can use friends and allies. Just keep in mind, the Japanese are about the same as anyone else in the world as far as Americans are concerned. They’ve been told about us, read about us, heard good and bad propaganda. But they’ll probably get their real feelings of America from the Americans they meet and observe in daily life. Right now that’s you. So act accordingly!” Neeby: “That’s kinda like being ambassadors, huh sir?” Besides garrison duty, the role of the American troops as an occupational force is to positively represent the United States and endorse Japanse-U.S. partnership against Communist forces. The Colonel’s speech to O’Reilly and Neeby discloses and denounces the outdated mode of American masculinity, the rugged individualist who is 147 independent and self-reliant, with no need for others. The Colonel’s speech reflects the U.S.’ postwar approach to the world and the required shift in American (white) masculinity. The majority of the speech focuses on the demand for respect and tolerance towards Japan and the essential duty to establish them as U.S. allies. However, memory of the past should not be completely forgotten. Japan should be treated as an ally, but cautiously trusted: Colonel: “You were at Pearl Harbor. What were you doing that Sunday morning?” O’Reilly: “Looking for a weapon sir. The guy next to me looked out to see what was going on and got himself splattered all over the barracks sir.” Colonel: “My wife was the curious one in my house. I’d like to be better prepared next time.” Like Idaho’s unveiling of the hidden agenda for the relations between servicemen and Japanese women, the Colonel preaches tolerance and a new American masculinity, but one that is a masquerade, that transforms the appearance of traditional white masculinity, but maintains the core of the American hero. While O’Reilly represents the traditional male American hero (and even actor Aldo Ray’s appearance and demeanor fit this category), the Colonel lectures him on the necessity to convert the pre-war belief into the appearance of tolerant and friendly. The continuation of the film is O’Reilly’s transformation as he interacts with the Japanese orphans and Yuko, the Japanese interpreter, who will eventually become his wife. The metamorphic narrative of O’Reilly parallels with what will become the emergence of covert racism in post-Civil Rights American culture. It indicates that American culture was experimenting with different narrative models of whiteness that appeared to reach across racial boundaries, albeit in a 148 furtive manner. The blending of truth and fiction in this filmic narrative accentuates the undeniable and real possibility of “transformation.” Redemption for O’Reilly comes in the form of his interaction with the Japanese orphans. The rugged hardness of O’Reilly abates when he first witnesses the orphanage, he shockingly exclaims, “You mean to tell me this is an orphanage?” As he enters the complex, the children surround him asking for chocolate and gum. Apologizing that he doesn’t have any, Sister Genevieve proclaims, “It’s the attention they want anyway.” O’Reilly: “yeah, uh, uh, what’s the matter with that one?” (O’Reilly sees a little girl lying down in her “bed” on the floor, inside one of the buildings which has an open wall. The little girl is extremely cute and waves directly to the camera from her bed). Sister Genevieve: “That’s Mitsuko. She has a cold. And so she is staying in bed.” O’Reilly: “Bed? You mean to tell me they sleep there?” Sister Genevieve: “Each one has its own sleeping mat.” O’Reilly: “Yes, but in the winter, when it rains or when it’s cold.” Sister Genevieve: “Well, there’s shutters. And when it’s too cold, we play games to keep warm.” O’Reilly: “Well, they do look healthy enough.” (Camera cuts to a little boy sitting alone, away from the crowd) “What’s with him?” Sister Genevieve: “That’s Chiyaki. He’s been adopted three times, but they say he is too wild.” O’Reilly: “Just a minute kids.” (O’Reilly walks over to Chiyaki and squats down next to him) “Hello Chaki. What’s a matter sport? Somebody giving you a bad time? I know how it is.” (O’Reilly pokes at Chiyaki’s arm. Chiyaki shakes him off) “Come on now.” (O’Reilly tickles him and Chiyaki tries to resist but eventually smiles and laughs). “I know the score. That a boy. That’s more like it.” (O’Reilly puts Chiyaki on his shoulder, stands up and walks back over to the group). Sister Genevieve: “Amazing. You have made a conquest Sergeant.” 149 O’Reilly: “I know how it is sister. I was shipped off to relatives a few times myself when I was a kid. Rough ain’t it Chaki?” (pats Chiyaki’s leg. O’Reilly looks across the street of the orphanage) “Is that a racetrack over there sister?” Sister Genevieve: “Yes.” O’Reilly: “The horses look better off than the kids.” Sister Genevieve: “I suppose so. But not everyone is interested in orphans.” O’Reilly continues to thaw as he witnesses the orphans’ plight as he has dinner with them. At dinner, Chiyaki, O’Reilly, Yuko, and Father Yoshido sit at a table. The other orphans sit at tables further away. Chiyaki reminds O’Reilly that grace must be said first before eating. As Father Yoshido says grace, the camera cuts to a shot of the children around the tables, bowing their heads and saying grace in Japanese. This scene positions the children not only as cute, for O’Reilly and the audience, but potentially good, obedient and Christian citizens. The children, throughout the film, are positioned as bodies in the backdrop of O’Reilly’s conversion. They do not speak, except as a group in song, laughter or prayer, and they do not speak English. Even Chiyaki, the central child character, does not speak. Press around the film discussed how Japanese orphans and Chiyaki play themselves in the film. Again, the lines between fiction and reality are blurred with the children, as transracial compassion is provoked for them. The orphans reiterate an “ethnographic innocence” while eating, bathing, playing and seen in need. As in The Man Who Knew Too Much, certain foreign children’s bodies inspire a parental instinct and a (white) desire to create a home and family. 150 O’Reilly is humbled and transformed by this experience and it motivates him to provide aid to the orphans. On the way back to the base, O’Reilly’s mood becomes silent. Yuko coyly asks if he is angry. O’Reilly reveals that he relates to Chiyaki’s situation, or rather projects his own childhood traumas onto Chiyaki’s situation: O’Reilly: “No, I was thinking about the kid. The one that got sent back three times. Why do people want to do that to a kid? Push him around. Make him thin he’s not wanted. Let him know he’s living on charity.” Yuko: “This happen to you too?” O’Reilly: “I made out alright. Now nobody pushes me around.” This moment exposes a reason behind O’Reilly’s tough exterior and a softer glimpse into his complexion. O’Reilly convinces the other servicemen, the Wolfhounds, to help the orphans. He collects money to fund a new orphanage and becomes project manager of the construction. As the Japanese government is unable to provide appropriately and relies on the compassion of the Holy Family organization and the American GIs, this displaces the paternal responsibility onto the US military. Through the process of harnessing his energy on providing the orphans a home, the relationship between Yuko Figure 22: Three Stripes in the Sun (1955) Cuteness on display. Korean orphans in need of help. 151 and O’Reilly evolves, and they fall in love. O’Reilly’s racism flares up in a fit of jealousy when he sees Yuko with a Japanese man: O’Reilly: “You want to marry a stinkin’ Jap, it’s your business. I, uh, I didn’t mean you when I said that.” Yuko: “Don’t speak that way. I am Japanese too.” O’Reilly: “I know. You think I haven’t thought of it.” Yuko: “But you do so much for the children. I do not…” O’Reilly: “They’re kids. They’ve got nothing to do with it.” Yuko: “How old we have to be before you hate us?” O’Reilly’s comments divulge his hidden and lingering racism, that for the most part is contained. The children are immune from his hatred because of their perceived innocence of youth. Before apologizing and making amends, O’Reilly is sent to Korea. At an undisclosed time in the Korean War, O’Reilly and Neeby are injured and return to Osaka’s military hospital. Back in Osaka, the Colonel and a reluctant O’Reilly attend the opening ceremony for the orphanage at which O’Reilly is declared an honorary citizen of Osaka and “Man of the Year.” He is reunited with Yuko, who is dressed for the first time in the film in the traditional Japanese kimono. In asking Yuko why the Osaka government acknowledged him, he feels remorse for his racist ways: O’Reilly: “They know what I am. Know how I felt and the terrible things I said.” Yuko: “No. Please. Not matter. No one care what you think or say. Only what you do.” O’Reilly’s statement places his racist and xenophobic transgressions in the past tense, signaling that he no longer identifies with overt racist convictions. Yuko’s response places emphasis on O’Reilly’s actions, which reflect his sensitive paternal core, and can overlook and excuse past racist thoughts. This odd and ambiguous exchange--while 152 combining overt and covert racist language--signifies O’Reilly’s and Yuko’s transformation. Yuko, up until this scene, exhibited an image of a modern Japanese woman. She worked outside of the home, dressed in contemporary Western clothing, possessed a confidence about her, and defied traditional Japanese customs. In this and subsequential scenes, she continues to wear the traditional kimono, suppresses her feelings for O’Reilly (until he tells her otherwise) and appears fearful and reticent. After her reunification with O’Reilly, she claims their relationship “should never be,” echoing the words of her father, and runs off. For O’Reilly the reunification and discussion of Osaka’s embracement of him solidifies his love for Yuko and completes the conversion of his racial intolerance. After Yuko runs away, O’Reilly searches for the Colonel and finds him meditating at a Shinto shrine (the Colonel clarifies to American audiences, “Don’t worry, I haven’t taken up Shintoism.”). O’Reilly requests to be discharged in Osaka rather than returning to the States, so he can stay in Japan and marry Yuko. The Colonel, again the voice of morality, challenges O’Reilly’s request: Colonel: “Beautiful girl. Going to marry her? Pretty dirty trick on her, isn’t it?” O’Reilly: “Sir?” Colonel: “You’re a professional soldier O’Reilly. How would you make out as a civilian, I don’t know. But here in a strange country, among people you don’t understand and don’t even like? Not a chance. And after a few years, who you goin’ blame?” O’Reilly: “I made the choice myself sir. It’s my idea.” Colonel: “Alright. I can’t stop you. But I’m certainly not going to help you. The Army is opposed to these marriages for good and sufficient reasons. The chief one being a large percentage of them end up unhappily.” 153 O’Reilly: “This one won’t sir.” Despite the portrayal of interracial relationships, the official sanctioning of these relationships was generally forbidden by the US military at this time. These intimate exchanges are dalliances, existing outside of domestic boundaries, and are not to be brought home, which would transgress and disrupt status quo. The Colonel confronts O’Reilly about the relationship exiting in home space: Colonel: “O’Reilly, if a man is lucky enough to find himself a good wife and one as lovely and intelligent as this one seems to be, he should be the happiest man alive. He should be proud to take her anywhere in the world, in any company.” O’Reilly: “Sir, I’m crazy about this girl and not ashamed of her and I would take her anyplace.” Colonel: “Except home! To the States. That’s why you want a discharge here isn’t it? O’Reilly: “Maybe it is sir. But it is because I am in love with her. I don’t want to take her back there and have people pushing her around or sneering at her or, or laughing at her because she is Japanese.” Colonel: “You really think American people are like that? Or are you just telling me how you would react to a man with a Japanese wife?” The tables have turned on O’Reilly. The racist behavior of home he describes to the Colonel is his own behavior before his transformation. The bound U.S. home is an uncomfortable and unwelcoming place for the interracial couple. Yuko struggles with O’Reilly’s marriage proposal as she considers children and moving to a new country to call home. Her father warns her of mixed-race children when O’Reilly is first introduced to the family. He counsels her with: Father: “This must not be, my child. You are of different races. It is not right you be together.” Yuko: “But it is stupid custom of Old Japan.” 154 Father: Custom? Yes, my child. But to mix blood and culture is to bring pain to lovers, to family, to children. Much pain…” Yuko’s father’s warning positions the Japanese family as having the same concerns as Americans in regards to the outcomes of interracial marriage and relationships. O’Reilly’s answer for her concern about interracial children is that they “will just have to take their chances” and support each other. Their love can provide a safety net for any social and cultural difficulties that may come up due to their relationship in an environment that is contained and not completely welcoming. Home for O’Reilly and Yuko is embodied in their love for one another. The film ends with the reminder that their story is still being lived out in West Point, New York, one of the few states that did not enact anti-miscegenation laws. Marchetti argues that while these American-Asian Madame Butterfly forbidden love narratives confirm the separation of the races between the interracial couple, the adoption of the mixed-race child allows for the possibility of assimilation. Due to O’Reilly’s “true” story of an interracial couple that did marry, the narrative of Three Stripes in the Sun does not fit neatly into the Butterfly narrative. Instead of the interracial child, the couple is allowed to be together and propose redemption to American racism. Hugh’s racism is portrayed as a symptom of being a good American soldier and citizen who has been traumatized by World War II and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It is also revealed that he came from a dysfunctional family and did not have a stable home or family as a child, which is healed in his relationship with Chiyaki, the process of building the orphanage and providing the orphans a home. Also in this process, he is able to let go 155 of his prejudices towards Yuko, and she and the children are able to transform him into an upstanding white American hero, a Gentle Warrior. O’Reilly’s story portrayed a successful American humanitarian and integration narrative. The child in this narrative is the agent of change and transforms World War II American white masculinity into a gentle Cold War warrior, ready to confront the challenges of integration at home. In the October 31, 1955 issue of Life magazine, an article The Good Sergeant’s Return, features Hugh O’Reilly’s return to Osaka for the production of the film, complete with images of the orphan children, Chiyaki, Yuko O’Reilly and the Japanese in-laws. The article begins with O’Reilly’s problem of racism--“Like many another veteran of the war in the Pacific, Sgt. Hugh O’Reilly hated the Japanese so much he couldn’t bear to go near them…” 31 -- and credits his work towards the orphanage for thawing his hatred and converting his hate to humanitarianism, and leading to marriage. The article has several pictures of O’Reilly and Aldo Ray with Chiyaki. One image is of smiling Yuko O’Reilly and Mitsuko Kimura (the actress who plays Yuko) and reveals that both are “expectant mothers.” The article portrays the O’Reillys as a typical happy couple, and Hugh O’Reilly as both an American and Osaka hero. The Life article endorses the interracial relationship, the gentler form of white masculinity, and compassion for cute foreign orphans. 32 The welfare of foreign orphans, particularly Korean orphans, was a national discourse in the fifties. The World War II and Korean Wars had orphaned many children, but what 156 was also an all too common story were the children fathered by American soldiers and consequently unwanted in their native countries due to their mixed-race and illegitimacy. Three Stripes in the Sun hints at this problem with Yuko’s constant concern of O’Reilly being “like all the others.” This refers to American GIs falling in love with Asian women, getting them pregnant, and then returning to the States never to be heard from again, in other words the Madam Butterfly story, except without the reunion of child and father, and the mother while perhaps not killing herself, disgraced in her own culture for having a mixed-race child out of wedlock. This is clearly, and somewhat awkwardly, acknowledged in the film, when after the dedication ceremony of the new orphanage, Sister Genevieve asks the Colonel, now a General, to come see something: Sister Genevieve: “You must see this before you go, General.” Colonel: “I’d like to very much, Sister.” (They and the representatives of Osaka who conducted the ceremony walk over to a section of the orphanage. The Sister enters a room and returns with an infant in her arms.) Colonel: “Well, get a load of him. Hi, Buster. He’s not entirely Japanese, is he?” Sister Genevieve: “No. His father was killed in Korea.” Colonel: “I see. Could I hold him?” Sister Genevieve: “Surely.” Colonel: “Hi. Getcha-goo.” It is never stated directly, but it is assumed that the father is an American GI, who was killed in Korea. The American public would have been well versed in this alluded and problematic story of GI-fathered orphans who needed homes. The following section will look at the press around U.S. foreign adoption within the context of American racial relationships. Paradoxically, while many white middle class suburban families in the 157 1950’s were reluctant to welcome families that deviated from the white suburban norm, many families were open to transnational adoption, particularly children from Europe and Asia. What is also important to recognize in these adoptions was the role of Christian missionary work and the role Christian morality played in American culture. Overall, many concerns were expressed by U.S. media and welfare organizations over international and domestic orphans and children who did not have nuclear families. As Klein states, the family was based on familial love (vs. romantic love), which is based on compassion, sympathy and commitment to others, essentially forming the ideal community, but American familial love was only extended so far. 33 In analyzing the media's “concern,” it becomes apparent that black children still occupied a conflicted and devalued space, and domestic race relations were remapped onto the global terrain. Brown Babies In the January 1958 issue of Parents Magazine, a lengthy article entitled "The State of the Nation's Underprivileged Children" was printed and discussed the large number of children who have not benefited from the prosperity of the postwar period. According to the publication, many children suffer from emotional and economic stress due to problems within marriages or single parent households. This places many children in foster homes and institutions because "no American family wants to adopt them." The only direct reference to race in the article appears in this context of unwantedness; "Some children, unfortunately, nobody seems to want. The hard-to-place children are usually non-white or of school age or handicapped. The non-white hard-to-place children 158 alone number over 96,000 a year." 34 In particular, the large number of black children in need of homes became an issue for social policy makers, and particularly the African American middle-class community. In her study of American black and white illegitimacy prior Roe v. Wade (1973), Rickie Solinger examines the differences in public perception and policies towards white and black unwed mothers. As discussed in Chapter One, she notes that in the 1940’s, public money became available to black unmarried mothers and their children. This resulted in white tax-payers and policy makers to regard the single black mother and her children as burdens and symptoms of a social illness white society should not be blamed or forced to assume responsibility. 35 In the postwar culture that promoted the family agenda, white illegitimacy, in contrast, began to be perceived not as a social syndrome, but as “socially productive” as infertile white couples were offered a chance to consummate proper families. 36 Solinger argues that white illegitimacy was spun to not be recognized as “cultural or racial defect,” while black illegitimacy was constructed to be viewed as “socially unproductive breeders.” 37 In addition to dominant postwar white culture’s perception of the burden and valuelessness of American black children and orphans, black middle-class culture possessed its own aversion towards adoption. Ebony published several articles on the issue of adoption and black children. The article, "Why Negroes Don't Adopt Children," in the July 1952 issue, declares, "For every white baby offered for adoption, there are at least ten eager, prospective parents. The situation 159 in regard to Negroes is just the reverse. For every ten homeless Negro children, there is scarcely one interested couple." 38 The article continues to question why black families-- particularly at a historical moment when black homeownership was at a high rate--are disinclined to adopting children; and concludes, "misinformation concerning the adoption process, economic factors and deep-seated prejudices about taking 'other people's children'," are the primary reasons for the lack of adoptions. In attempts to encourage black families, Ebony featured reports on black celebrity adoptions--such as Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Josephine Baker—and emphasized "although many Negroes still attach a certain stigma to adoptions, still feel that going outside the family circle for a baby is an admission of sterility and therefore a reflection upon the sterility of the male, an increasing number of prominent and celebrated brown Americans are finding their way into courtrooms to make other people's children legally theirs." 39 Interesting is the social stigma attached to adoption and black masculinity. Whereas cultural narratives, such as Three Stripes in the Sun, position the foreign orphan and paternal love as a means for white masculinity to redeem itself, black masculinity has a conflicted relationship to the parentless child. As seen with The Jackie Robinson Story’s erasure of Robinson’s child, mainstream culture reinforce the ambivalent relationship of fatherhood, familial love and black masculinity, which culturally limited and contained black masculinity. The place for the black child abroad was also difficult to reconcile. In an Ebony June 1958 article, " Should White Parents Adopt Brown Babies?," author Pearl S. Buck addresses the issue of not so much whether white families should adopt "brown" babies-- 160 referring to the black mixed children of Asia--than making an urgent plea for American black families to adopt Asian children whose fathers where African-American G.I.s; "There will be enough homes for the half-white children but not for those who are half- Negro. And alas, the half-Negro children will have the most difficult time in the lands of their birth." 40 Ebony published several articles of white European families adopting "brown" babies, however very rarely did stories of white American families adopting "brown" babies appear. If stories did surface, often times they were reporting a flaw in the adoption process, in which a "brown" baby was accidentally adopted, however becoming a beloved member of the adoptive family despite the "tragic" mistake. 41 Worry and concern existed in the postwar era press over the children left orphaned by the ravages of war and those fathered by American GIs, most likely in order to foster better foreign relations with nations who were dealing with the numerous unwanted children. After World War II, American families developed an amplified interest in international adoption. Approximately 300 children from European nations were brought over to the United States, while thousands of children from Japan and China were requested. 42 The Korean War marked the "next phase" of international adoption, and was initiated by good Samaritans, such as Oregon rancher, Harry Holt and new policies within the American government, particularly the 1953 Refugee Relief Act which made international adoption of children, from war-torn countries, much easier for American families, both black and white, to open their doors to foreign children. 161 Both mainstream media and the black press published stories around international adoption. The black press concentrated on the desperate plight of the “brown babies” abroad, as demonstrated with Pearl Buck’s article, and at home. In the Ebony, the September 1953 issue ran an article of the first black G.I. to adopt a Korean orphan, and in the September 1955 issue, an article entitled "How to Adopt Korean Babies: Three Hundred Oriental-Negro foundlings are available for adoption by Americans" appeared with thirteen photographs of available Korean orphans. The article claims, "they are war babies, offspring of Oriental-Negro romances that flowered between battles and faded with the first hint of armistice…It is doubtful that any of these youngsters will find sanctuary in their native land. There, as in other Oriental countries, racial purity is a deeply entrenched social fetish. The child of mixed origin is regarded as inferior and unclean." 43 An article on Harry Holt's Korean Baby Lift was published in the May 1957 issue of Ebony, entitled "Negro Families Open Homes to Korea's Brown Babies," and discusses the Holts’ wish to place half black / half Korean orphans in black American families; "In the beginning, most of the parents who wrote to Harry Holt about adopting war babies were white people who preferred children of white fathers…the Holts decided to place offspring of Negro fathers in Negro homes." 44 In response to the number of international children being adopted by Holt’s Korean Baby Lift, a December 1959 Ebony article reminded their readers of the many "brown" babies in the US that needed good homes; "At the end of World War II, the big news in adoptions was the 'brown baby,' offspring of American Negro G.I.s and white European women. Many compassionate Americans rushed to adopt such children…but long overlooked is a 162 booming homegrown market of such children, available in greater variety, and adoptable at less effort and expense that their European cousin." 45 In comparison, Korean orphans and adoption were framed in a different light in American mainstream (white) press. Narratives in the popular press tell the "happy" stories of children being adopted by a white family or by a woman who saw a child's picture in a mainstream publication. 46 Life magazine printed "A Famous Orphan finds a Happy Home" in its May 14, 1956 issue, chronicling the successful tale of Ri Kang Yong, a Korean orphan, adopted by a widow in Los Angeles. Yong had become a brief celebrity in the American imagination as a poster child in advertisements for overseas relief in 1951 with the caption "The Little Boy Who Would Not Smile." Moved by the sad face in the poster photo, Mrs. Cordelle, according to the story, prayed for him and "was told to adopt him." The brief article emphasizes that Kang "was happily learning about life in the US." 47 The photos accompanying the article display a smiling Kang in "American" clothes on a carousel, talking on the telephone and watching television. In fact, several articles on adopted Korean orphans showcased them watching television. Apparently watching television, or being intrigued by some other technological contraption, attested to American (white) audiences that these orphan children were adapting and assimilating into American life. Not only was television an American activity, but it also differentiated the American landscape from the impoverished image of the war orphan in the setting of his/her native country. These pictures "proved" these foreign children were "better off," while neatly suturing them into America’s emerging commodity and leisure middle class culture. 163 Kang's and the many other stories that appeared in mainstream (white) media stressed a narrative of the united white family and their adoption of an international child. In contrast, the black press had very few "happy" tales of adoption and generally expressed more concern to inspire black readers to adopt the thousands of "brown" children that would not be taken in by white families. To discuss the immense compassion invoked for the Korean war orphans by the American public, one must recognize the intimate relationship between American GIs and the orphans during the Korean War. The attention and care towards the orphans was principally due to the American servicemen and women serving in the Korean War and the letters they sent to their families in the U.S. The Korean War Children’s Memorial organization explains, When the American servicemen and women saw the condition of the children that were victimized by the Korean War and sought to address those needs they wrote home calling for help. They asked for clothes, food, toys, medicines and whatever other help they could get, including money. They wrote to parents, relatives, neighbors, home town newspapers, schools they recently graduated from, former employers and whoever else they could think of. And the American public responded in force. Thousands of tons of aid for the children and their caregivers began arriving in small packages addressed to servicemen in Korea. Help came in boxes, then crates and then by the boatload. 48 One GI wrote to his wife, These kids are just like our own, except that half of them will freeze or starve to death this winter, so here’s what I’m asking you to do. Get our minister or some civic organization to collect food, clothes, shoes and so on. Anything to keep these kids going this winter. I’m enclosing a note from our chaplain about what we’re trying to do. Try to get something in the paper if you can, honey, send it to Mom and Dad and have them do the same. 49 164 Not only did the stories of American troops coming to the orphans’ aid generate a good humanitarian anecdote, bit also highlights American altruism and morality, in contrast to the brutality the communist enemy. Stories of communist Chinese troops ignoring or throwing stones at the Korean children distinguished the good will of American troops and citizens as a powerful weapon against Communism. The same GI mentioned above wrote Michigan’s Free Press thanking American citizens for their support and contribution to defy Communism: “The people at home…through their generosity have done more to thwart Communism in this area than all our bullets have done. For Communism cannot live where love, kindness and generosity exist.” 50 Decades later, summarizing this massive American humanitarian support during the Korean War, William Ashbury, a former field director for the Christian Children’s Fund, writes in the preface for the photo catalogue GIs and the Kids—A Love Story: American Armed Forces and the children of Korea, 1950-1954, The GI was up to those needs. He and she took responsibility for individual kids. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and even Merchant Marine units “adopted” entire orphanages. American military forces became an army of compassion, perhaps as never before or since. Privates, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants and colonels sent home pictures of baby Kim or Lee or Shin and thus solicited enormous help from their stateside American families. It was personal help, with gifts of cash or substance accompanied by letters. At this writing five decades after the outpouring of love and life-saving gifts by American servicemen and women in Korea, the talk of this decade is about family values. Shall we discern in Korea in the early 1950’s anything less than manifest and genuine family values? Perhaps the difference between then and now is that the GI then defined “family” as a global entity, without ethnicity and not necessarily within the boundaries of his native America. 51 [Italics my emphasis] Ashbury’s preface distinguishes the U.S. Cold War military as an “army of compassion” and notes the American GI, who is outside the boundaries of “his” home-land, recognizes 165 his “”family’ as a global entity.” While both men and women served in Korea, images and stories of American male GIs with Korean orphans prevailed, and presented a particular type of masculinity—a Gentle Warrior, who is able to fight for and protect American democracy, while also exude paternal compassion and empathy for his global family (see figures 23-27). This Gentle Warrior persona plays into the multiple masquerades of fifties masculinity and also functions as a representation of normative (white) masculinity that masks social differences, such as race, that divided the U.S. The Gentle Warrior, similar to Steichen’s The Family of Man exhibit, highlights the commonality and “best” traits of democratic humanity and veils the (white, patriarchal, and national) power dynamics in operation. The (white) gentle warrior materializes alongside the racialized child. In The Well, we witness Sheriff Kellogg positioned as a new liberal white masculine leader to the united biracial community that rallies around the rescue of the black child. Kellogg and the town are able to transcend racial history and tensions by focusing on the well-being of the child, concluding with the liberal white protector presiding. In similar manner, the images of the American male GI and the Korean orphan construct a narrative of a benevolent paternal force defending American citizens and allies from communist forces and protecting innocent children in the name of familial love and values. This “hard” and “soft” representation of masculinity corresponds with the “contradictory ideals for American manhood”—the tough soldier defending the nation’s boundaries and the “soft” kinder paternalistic protector, which was “the foundation of an orderly, responsible home life.” 52 As Steven Cohan argues, on the domestic front there was cultural concern on the decline of the (white) American male for 166 a variety of different socio-historic reasons, but within the international context and beside the child, the Gentle Warrior is seemingly able to successfully embody and smoothly resolve conflicting masculine and national traits and imagine a cohesive global and domestic home-front. Figure 23: Three Stripes in the Sun (1955), the” Gentle Warrior,” Hugh O’Reilly (Aldo Ray), with Chiyaki. Figure 24: Battle Hymn (1957), the “Gentle Warrior,” Dean Hess (Rock Hudson), with Chou and En Soon Yang (Anna Kashfi)—the global family. Figure 25: The “Gentle Warrior”—American GI bathing Korean orphan who was “adopted” by his regiment. Figure 26: The “Gentle Warrior”—American GI with his adopted daughter in Korea. Figure 27: The “Gentle Warrior”— American GI with his adopted daughter in Korea. 167 Compassion and Christian Americanists Familial love and American compassion represented in the Gentle Warrior cannot go with out mention of the intricate role of Christian morality in American culture, particularly in the fifties. Familial love is also the foundation for American Christian morality. In her article entitled, “A New Kind of Missionary Work: Christians, Christian Americanists, and the Adoption of Korean GI Babies, 1955-1961,” Arissa Oh identifies an undefined religion, Christian Americanism, as one of the central motivating factors for American families’ adoption of Korean orphans. She argues, The move to adoption was largely propelled by religious and humanitarian beliefs and a desire to “save” children from the effects of war, but it was also a manifestation of a peculiar kind of secular religion that arose in the Unites States in the 1950s…That undefined religion—which I call “Christian Americanism”— was a fusion of vaguely Christian principles with values identified as particularly “American”—specifically, a uniquely American sense of responsibility and the importance of family. 53 Oh identifies mainly white middle class devout Christians and Christian Americanists adopting Koran orphans in the mid-fifties, and ties this to the Cold War policies of time claiming a racial democracy and solidifying American-Asian relations, in addition to the Christian mission of spreading Christian values. In other words, adoption became a new form of missionary work and American duty for U.S. families. Compassion for Korean orphans combined with the Christian mission, ostensibly gave license to adoptive parents seemingly to transcend the question of race.” 54 Oh attests, mixed-race children (referring to Korean American children) were considered more adoptable than non-mixed-race Asian children. Whereas one drop of black blood made a person black in the United States, one drop of Asian blood did not seem to render a person Asian. Instead, in a reversal of the one-drop” rule, Korean-white children were thought to be whitened—redeemed—by the presence of “white” blood. Although other, they were tolerably so. 55 168 This tolerable acceptance and assimilation of Asian ethnic groups into American society and whiteness, I would argue, is deeply related to and reflects the shift of racial paradigms particularly in regards to blackness. 56 Oh’s article does not address the role of guilt--guilt as a force in the Christian mindset and ideology—in respect to racial relations in the United States. In general, guilt and shame are not engaged in the U.S.’ attempt to promote itself as racially tolerant and democratic in the fifties when it clearly practiced discrimination against its own minority citizens. Writer Shelby Steele notes, “I don’t remember hearing the phrase ‘white guilt’ very much before the mid-1960s. Growing up black in the 1950s, I never had the impression that whites were much disturbed by guilt when it came to blacks.” 57 While white and privileged guilt or shame might not have been overtly expressed, there are traces that convey American culture was struggling with humanitarianism, ethics and domestic racial human rights. As Sergeant Hugh O’Reilly is Three Stripes in the Sun expresses remorse for his past (racist) ways, is redeemed through his interaction with the orphans and personifies the Gentle Warrior, the narrative of Battle Hymn examines the redemption of American guilt and white masculinity through Korean orphans. The next section looks at the 1957 film, Battle Hymn and Hollywood’s representation of Korean orphans, white masculinity, and American guilt. 169 Battle Hymn: “The Greatest Compassion your Heart Can Feel” 58 In February 1957, both Life and Reader's Digest featured articles on Colonel Dean Hess and the then upcoming Douglas Sirk film Battle Hymn (released in March 1957), a film based on the existential journey of Hess and his rescue of over 400 Korean orphans during the Korean War. Life magazine actually presented two stories related to Hess and the film. The first focused on Hess and the second was a promotion of the film through the tale of Jung-Kyoo Pio, “Sam,” the leading child character and one of the actual orphans that Hess saved in Korea --"When Universal Pictures set out to make Battle Hymn, a haunting story of a gentle warrior, it imported 25 Korean orphans to Hollywood as extras--and thus America acquired Sam." 59 Like Kang, through the U.S. press Jung became another Korean child whose image captured the heart of an American family and was adopted into a white family home. Battle Hymn’s diagetic narrative of the rescue of Korean orphans became indirectly linked to the adoption of Korean orphans by American families, not only with stories such as Jung, but with the history of the Christian Children's Fund (CCF). 60 The Cheju Island orphanage, to which Hess transported the children, became a sponsored CCF orphanage. An American family could "adopt" ("sponsor" in today's terminology) a Korean child for a small monthly sum of money, and in exchange pictures of the "adopted" child were sent to the American family. Although Universal Pictures had no association with the Christian Children's Fund, the CCF perceives the film Battle Hymn as a public relations success. In A Book about Children: Christian Children's Fund 170 1938-1991, Larry E. Tise claims, "J. Calvitt Clarke's dream of an international child 'adoption' agency able to intervene in the war zones of the world achieved its greatest pinnacle of success in the late 1950's…The Universal-International Pictures release of Battle Hymn in 1956 telling the story of Colonel Dean Hess's dramatic rescue of CCF's Korean children touched hearts throughout the world." 61 And indeed, the annual revenues for CCF went from $1,953,975 in the year 1955-1956 to $3,577,755 in the year 1956-1957. Since its establishment, the CCF has become one of the leading private non-profit international organizations for children's welfare. Through the sponsorship program, the CCF relies on "personal affection and caring to fund a global network of child welfare, community development, and ultimately, socioeconomic progress." 62 However, the reliance on personal affection for community development and socioeconomic progress is a carefully orchestrated execution shrouded behind the image of a foreign child in need. Recalling the quote from the beginning of this chapter, Tise directly states, "Community development is a better way of helping people…but that's not something people are moved to give money for; it doesn't give them an emotional reward. Whereas they are rewarded emotionally by helping an individual child." 63 In one CFF sponsor's explanation for her interest in the program, she discloses, "It's like having another child…It's not only an investment for the child, it's an investment for me as well." 64 Larry Tise interprets this sponsor's "eagerness to form and maintain a close relationship with a child halfway around the world," as the exemplary of the simple human caring 171 CCF was founded on. 65 Yet why an eagerness for a close relationship with a child halfway around the world? Again, why not for the child in need on domestic soil? Why the discrepancy in compassion for children in need in a foreign space verse one in the domestic space; and what cultural, socio-economic, political and individual factors play into what constitutes a worthwhile investment? This project does not answer these broad questions of American denizens’ motivation for humanitarian aid, but it does propose that at this particular historical moment of shifting racial and gender paradigms and Cold War political projects, the cultural relationship to international Asian children is interconnected to adjusting and reformulating (white) American notions of home, gender, and race. As demonstrated throughout this project, the foreignness of international children endows them with a particular kind of appeal and innocence. The children in Battle Hymn play only a minor role, however the cute-ness of the children is highlighted in the reviews of the film. The critic of the New York Times review writes, "it is noticeable that the starving orphans are remarkably neat and plumb. But that shouldn't affect the popularity of the picture. They are disarmingly cute." 66 The Variety film critic asserts, "Jung Kyoo Pyo, one of the children brought over from Korea, captures the heart." 67 Jung is the only child who develops an individual personality in the film, and is also the only child who displays his body in a bath scene, which captures the sentiments of the ethnographic photograph--innocent and in need of rescue. Even Sirk, has a special affection for the foreign child. In interviews written in Sirk on Sirk, Jon Halliday questions Sirk on his use 172 and attitude of children in his films. Sirk replies "I like young children a lot. I had wonderful children in Take Me to Town; they were really great. I did Weekend with Father only for the children. And I loved the children on the Korean picture (Battle Hymn), may be because of their foreignness." 68 This foreignness allows the child to be removed from social complexities of the U.S. context, and encases the foreign orphan— devoid of family, home, personal history—and its own native context in adult projections. While Three Stripes in the Sun presents a story of overcoming xenophobia and racism through Asian orphans, Battle Hymn is the narrative of overcoming guilt through Asian orphans. Hess, unable to work through his guilt at home, discovers resolution through saving the Korean orphans, and transformation through his experience in a foreign space and encounters with racial Others. Like O’Reilly, Hess’ conversion is one into the Gentle Warrior that is only offered to white masculinity. And although the narrative positions Hess’ guilt around his actions in World War II, the film imagines his atonement through a racial lens. Like Three Stripes in the Sun’s narrative and structure, the film combines true story and fiction, and opens with establishing the film and military artifacts as “real” and authentic. Following the opening the credits, the film commences with General Earle E. Partridge of the United States Air Force, inspecting a Korean fighter plane, and then walking to face the camera to introduce the film. He states, During the war in Korea, I was in command of the 5 th Air Force operating under the United Nations command. This plane was just one of the many involved in our operations. Its pilot I shall never forget. I am pleased to have been asked to introduce this motion picture, which is based on the actual experiences of this 173 pilot Colonel Dean Hess of the United States Air Force. The remarkable story of Colonel Hess is poignant and often secret struggle with a problem peculiarly his own. His courage, resourcefulness and sacrifice have long been a source of inspiration to me and the fighting men who have known him. But the story of Colonel Hess is more than a dramatic demonstration of one man’s capacity for good; it is an affirmation of the essential goodness of the human spirit. For this reason I am happy it is told. It begins in the summer of 1950, five years after the end of World War II and one month after the invasion of South Korea. It is a quiet sunny Sunday morning, in the pleasant little town of West Hampton, Ohio. [italics my emphasis] This opening introduction, with the General as a source of sanctioned authority, establishes the story’s official truth. Although Hess’ “secret” problem of guilt is individualized—rather than related to a larger social pathos--and dismissed as his own; yet his actions are recognized a model of the “essential goodness” in (American) people. In corresponding Steichen fashion, the narrative is framed with an emphasis on global humanity albeit through the actions of one good American man, one good gentle warrior. The film immediately delves into the issue of guilt as the next scene cuts to an establishing shot of a small town church and shows Hess at the pulpit, giving a Sunday sermon. Hess states, “And so we ask ourselves how can we be free of guilt? Through patience and humility will we find happiness. A broken and contrite heart Thou will not despise. Amen.” Guilt is established as his problem in this opening scene. After the sermon, Hess expresses to his wife, Mary, his feeling of failure: Mary: “ Dean, why are you punishing yourself with these doubts. It’s not fair.” Hess: “I’m trying to face the truth. I’m just not cut out to be a minister. Tried it now for almost two years, trying to make amends.” Mary: “You can’t forget those children in the German orphanage, can you?” Hess: (nodding No) “Never…When I became a minister, I hoped I could find a way to live with it but I haven’t.” 174 Through a flashback sequence, the audience learns that during a World War II mission in Germany, Hess accidentally bombs a church and an orphanage. Hess suffers from extreme guilt over the deaths of the orphans, which the film locates as his motivating force to become a reverend. This new occupation and way of life as reverend does not release him from his guilt. Unable to cope with his guilt in the small town and home with his wife, he decides to volunteer for the Air Force for the Korean War; as he tells Mary, “Don’t look for any sense in this Mary, you won’t find it. One doesn’t always have to have a clear reason for the things he does. Just how I feel that’s all. Mary, this is what I have to do.” Unlike Aldo Ray’s macho Master Sergeant Hugh O’Reilly, Rock Hudson’s Dean Hess comes across as a sensitive man, whose emotions are just under the surface, and is grasping with deep existential issues, which is also a reflection of the melodrama genre. Once in Korea, Hess postures as a leader who can command, yet privately is emotionally conflicted with guilt, his faith and the necessary killing in war. The redemption of Hess’ guilt is interconnected to his masculinity and its restoration. Hess’ masculinity is not the white macho hero that existed during World War II, which is represented by Hess’ colleague Skidmore. In a confrontation with Hess, noting that he is not the “killer Hess” that existed in World War II, Skidmore claims, “once I thought you knew what war was about, but not any more. Just keep this one thing in mind. All that counts is who wins. Not how nice a guy you are. You win or you die. You go soft, and you’re one step from being dead.” Hess’ redemption of his masculinity is not the rugged masculinity of the World War II hero; it is a new postwar and white liberal Civil Rights masculinity, a softer and kinder version that still maintains power, respect and control. 175 As with Hugh O’Reilly, this transformation must occur outside the domestic containment of home. Home for Hess is an impotent, restricting, and overly emotional space. In foreign space, with the removal of the domestic (white) nuclear family, action, strength, and order reign, allowing room for metamorphosis through interaction with difference. In addition to the Korean orphans, a vital person to help in Hess’ redemption is Lieutenant Maples, an African American. In a training exercise with Skidmore, Maples and Skidmore encounter and fire on North Korean enemy ground troops. Skidmore spots a truck moving away from the line of military vehicles and orders Maples to take it out. Maples realizes, only after firing on them, that truck is full of women and children. After landing, Maples is in visible distress, and Hess, not knowing about the attack, inquires what is the matter. Maples replies, dramatically, “Those kids. Those poor little kids,” and runs off. This instantly links Maples and Hess emotionally together. With intent to comfort, Hess visits Maples in his tent in which he finds Maples reading the Bible: Hess: “Just wanted to tell you to try to forget it as soon as you can.” Maples: “Thank you sir. I’m sorry I lost control out there. I’m alright now. I’m better now.” Hess: “I had a similar experience once. Something I’ve never been able to completely shake. So I’m not exactly the one to give you advice, but I…” Maples: “Sir, it’s the way of things, I guess. I figure it’s all God’s making and will. Doesn’t the book say it—‘No sparrow shall fall to the earth unless He first gives His nod.’ Well, He must have given His nod to what happened out there today too. He must have. He’s the Almighty, isn’t he? No, we have to trust Him, sir. How can we live out there? Hess: (stands up, clearly moved and inspired by Maples) “Go on, Maples.” Maples: (standing up now; The Battle Hymn of the Republic begins to play in the background) “Well, you see Colonel, I’ve come to the conclusion God and all His 176 reasons are invisible to the eyes of man. So I guess we have to be satisfied if He even gives us light enough to take our next step. Do our next chore.” Hess: “Thank you, Maples. Thank you.” Evoking Toni Morrison’s observation of “the way black people ignite critical moments and discovery or change,” this scene is a critical juncture in Hess’ redemption. Although he visits Maples as his commander to provide him sage advice, it is Maples who restores Hess’ faith in God and begins Hess’ reconciliation with his guilt. In contrast to his interactions with Skidmore, the tough hero, Hess is able to learn and grow from his relationship with Maples, who presents a sensitive, loyal, religious and alternative masculinity. Maples is one of two Air Force men who help Hess evacuate the orphans. Maples’ character can also be perceived as a non-threatening African American man who audiences could embrace. However, Maples’ presence does little in addressing a racial power dynamic. The film does not directly confront the issue of race in its narrative, yet within the context of the Civil Rights movement of the late fifties, domestic racial relations are displaced onto Hess and Maples. In regards to black/white relations, the African American man plays a significant supporting character to the white hero, and is treated equally and steers away from common African American stereotypes. The film hints at the theme of equality with the use of music (The Battle Hymn of the Republic, a Civil War abolitionist song and Maples’ singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot, a song with origins during slavery and said to be about the Underground Railroad. Both songs were popular during Civil Rights). Yet, the history and struggles of African Americans is erased in the narrative. While the film seems to want to promote racial tolerance, Maples’ inspiring speech is devoid of political action and instead privileges a passive stance in 177 Christian rhetoric, and leaves domestic racial dynamics unchallenged. It is Hess’ new form of white masculinity that maintains power and order. Once Maples fulfills his supporting role to Hess and the rescue of the orphans, he vanishes from the narrative as so not to compete with Hess’ masculinity. In the closing scene, Hess, Mary, and Sergeant Herman (the other (white) serviceman who helps with the evacuation) drive up to the new orphanage, but Maples is missing, replaced by Mary. Home must remain white and return to the status quo. The “other” person who offers Hess salvation and helps with the children is Lun-Wa, a mysterious elderly Korean Christian ivory-carver. He offers enlightened advice to Hess, presented in a mix of Bible passages and Korean expressions. After his first “kill” since World War II, Hess confesses his grief to Lun-Wa: Hess: “There’s nothing so terrible as war. I killed today.” Lun-Wa: “Yes, war is evil.”… Lun-Wa: “May a poor old carver of ivory babble for a moment. Understand it is only babble, and may have no worth than a handful of sand. In times like these, can a man of good conscious ask others protect me, kill for me, but do not ask me to stain my hands? What must one do when a choice between two evils is all that is offered? To except the lesser sometimes can be our only choice. In order to save at times, we must destroy and in destruction, create new life.” Hess: “Is that the answer?” Lun-Wa: “The true answer, Colonel, is not in my babble, ‘tis in the book—‘Oh Lord, Thou has seen my wrong, judge Thou my cause.’” Hess: “Who are you?” Hess’ reaction seems to demonstrate slight disbelief that he is receiving advice that resonates with him from a poor elderly Korean man. Shortly after, in a letter to Mary, Hess reveals, “Through the agony of war, I have finally done what I never before was 178 able to do. In reaching beyond myself, I have found myself.” Through the spiritual inspiration of Maples and Lun-Wa, Hess is able to rediscover his faith in himself and the unfortunate, yet necessary, act of killing in war in the name of democracy. Hess’ redemption comes from his greatest act of saving the Korean orphans and his expression of familial love. Hess establishes a makeshift orphanage with the help of Maples, Herman, Lun-Wa and En Soon Yang (Anna Kashfi), a local woman who volunteers to oversee the children. The character of En Soon Yang is completely fictionalized for the filmic narrative and to provide a feminine presence and romantic tension in the narrative; and it could be argued that she is a modified version of the Madame Butterfly character. When Chinese troops invade the area, Hess, despite many obstacles, arranges an evacuation airlift to the island of Cheju, the home of En Soon Yang. Before they can evacuate, En Soon Yang is killed by an enemy plane. It becomes clear that she is fond of Hess, but she never acts upon it or speaks of it directly, only through a metaphor of two pines in Cheju who grow entwined together, supposedly on the graves of two lovers who could not be together. Hess loyal to his wife, Mary, does not encourage the relationship. He does however take a piece of pine from En Soon Yang as she explains the story of the two pines, places pine on her grave, dedicates the orphanage to her memory, and gazes on the two pines outside the orphanage at Cheju, which is the closing image of the film. Although En Soon Yang and Hess do not act upon any romantic feelings, this allows the emphasis to be placed on familial love for the orphans, who stand in the place of the “Madam Butterfly” child. Hess’ love for his own 179 family is minimized. While in Korea Mary discovers she is pregnant which Hess is excited for, but his transformation is not through his own family or child. It is through the Others he encounters and the Korean children, his global family. When Mary, Hess and Herman visit the Cheju orphanage at the end of the film, Mary is not pregnant, nor does she have the baby. She comments to Hess, “Darling, you look as happy as the children.” Hess replies, “It’s always been the children.” The orphans break into song, in English, and sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, while Hess gazes at the entwined pine trees. This concluding scene favors the Korean orphans with familial love and patriotism. Although Maples is oddly missing form this last scene, he and his transformative speech are referenced through the song The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and the Gentle Warrior is left standing triumph. As in the case of Jackie Robinson, Dean Hess, the actual man, and his wife Mary had a son before he left for the Korean War that is absent in the film. According to the Reader’s Digest article, it is Hess’ own son that inspires his actions to aid the orphans: Hess looked at all these homeless kids and he felt helpless; there were so many of them. One evening as he watched the sea of small faces the features of one boy suddenly came into sharp focus, and Hess found himself gripped with a strange fancy: Suppose this were his own six year-old son, Alan. For a moment Hess the pilot, who had flown more than 300 combat missions in two wars, was replaced by Hess the spiritual leader. He found himself praying that something more than just fistfuls of beans could be provided for these pitiful waifs. And the he made a vow that, so long as he lived, he would do what he could. [sic] 69 By removing Hess’ son from the narrative, the relationship between Hess and the Korean children becomes more important. The film Battle Hymn takes great liberties to the actual story of Dean Hess and the events of the evacuation. Presumably this is to create a 180 more focused and engaging narrative. The character of Dean Hess in the Reader’s Digest article and in Hess’ own book Battle Hymn, on which the film is based, is a dedicated family man, military man and American citizen. He does not have the spiritual crisis of Sirk’s melodrama or the paralyzing guilt of bombing an orphanage in World War II, although based on an actual event. Hess’ encounter with Maples, Lun-Wa, En Soon Yang, and even the depth of friendship he develops with the Korean orphans are fictionalized. 70 Ultimately, Sirk’s portrayal of Hess is a new white masculinity that regains his strength from Others and reestablishes himself as the paternal force that can protect the international and domestic innocent. Both Three Stripes in the Sun and Battle Hymn construct a narrative of the Gentle Warrior that addresses cultural anxieties around race, nation, and power (both embodied in white masculinity) through the figure of the child, and allows (white) hegemonic power to transform and adapt to fluctuating social forces under the guise of upholding democracy. Residual Relations of Home In 1957, Battle Hymn was nominated and won the Golden Globe award for Best Film Promoting International Understanding. 71 Nominated alongside Battle Hymn was Walter Lang’s The King and I, which won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture— Musical/Comedy. In her reading of The King and I, Christina Klein argues the film and the genre of the musical “offers an exemplary instance of the culture of integration: it imagines that Others, rather than being exterminated, could be modernized through an intimate embrace.” 72 For Klein, Anna represents the realm of culture and American 181 modernization of postwar global culture, not through force, but non-imperialist means, mainly through culture and sentiment. While this chapter has focused on American culture’s approach to international children of Asia, the narratives of international integration can stand in for the cultural anxieties of domestic integration. During this time period, the United States found itself having to convince its new allies in the postwar period that domestic racism was no longer a problem. While transitioning into a new racial relationships and paradigms, one strategy Klein point out was linking “slavery” to communism and Cold War rhetoric. She states, Like the many cultural diplomacy efforts that addressed the question of American racism, they were part of an effort to acknowledge and lay to rest a dark period in the American past by suggesting that the worst wrongs of racial oppression had been resolved a hundred years ago. These references to slavery suggested that America was best represented by its traditions of antiracist activism rather than by its racist, slave-holding history and its lingering consequences. This rhetorical strategy of defining the United States in opposition to slavery was part of the larger effort to identify it as a revolutionary force in the world, rather than ceding that status to the Soviet Union. 73 Klein argues that this rhetorical strategy attempted to show “residual traces of older discourses that imagined transcending boundaries of difference at home.” 74 In a similar fashion, the Gentle Warrior figure imagines transcending boundaries of difference and racism through transracial compassion for the child. However racialized adults occupy an uneasy position in relation to this Gentle Warrior figure, and relegated to a ghostly residual presence. 75 182 The specter of blackness occurs in Three Stripes in the Sun. The film’s opening of the Tokyo night scene references the international influence of African American jazz culture with a blackface advertisement blinking in the background. No real African American human, just the stereotypical caricature. However, in the scene of the opening ceremony of the orphanage, in the back of the audience are African American servicemen. Presumably these are actual Wolfhounds as the film used actual serviceman as extras. These men are not acknowledged, and serve as mere backdrops, yet also as references to the conflicted, oppressed, and “erased” culture of American labor policies and racism. Battle Hymn has an African American actor, Maples, and Korean American actor, Lun- Wa, as significant supporting characters. However, once Hess has resolved his internal conflict of guilt, both of these characters along with Anna Kashfi’s character, disappear to allow the status quo of whiteness to return to balance. Whiteness, redeemed by otherness, is able to exist without the Other. The integration narratives of the Gentle Warriors, the war orphans, and domestic issues of race may best be understood as a movement towards a lenticular racial logic. Tara McPherson coins this particular logic as “a monocular logic, a schema by which histories or images that are actually copresent get presented (structurally, ideologically) so that only one of the images can be seen at a time. Such an arrangement represses connection, allowing whiteness to float free from blackness…” 76 Furthermore, this chapter has also traced the shift of overt to covert racism through the transformation of white masculinity by way of the foreign child. The culture deploys the child to do a particular work that has 183 little to do with the actual child. The Gentle Warrior figure culminates in the presidential election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, and begins to fade after his death in 1963. The next chapter, Unrest in the Home: Civil Rights, will return home, and examine the figure of the African American child and the solidification of the domestic Gentle Warrior as the United States moved into the modern Civil Rights period. It will also question what happens to whiteness, particularly working class maternal femininity, if white masculinity is able to transform its overt racist ideologies. 184 Chapter Two Endnotes 1 Douglas Sirk, Battle Hymn, DVD (Universal International, 1956). 2 Larry E. Tise, A Book about Children: Christian Children's Fund 1938-1991 (Falls Church, VA: Hartland Publishing, 1992) 73. 3 Alfred Hitchcock, The Man Who Knew Too Much, DVD (Universal, 1956). 4 As mentioned earlier, foreign space has dangers within the film. Hank standing in the aisle of the bus, accidentally grabs hold of female passengers veil and pulls it off as he tries to maintain his balance as the bus swerves. The presumed husband of the woman gets up and starts angrily yelling at Hank in a foreign language. Hank slinks back to the clutches of his mother, yet neither parent can understand or communicate with the angry man; they are unable to fully protect him. A stranger named Louis Bernard, sitting in front of them, intercedes and calms the man down and returns the woman’s veil to the man. He explains to the McKennas that the man is upset because Hank pulled off the veil and exposed his wife’s face to the public, breaching Muslim tradition. Jo incensed, explains that this was an accident, yet Bernard replies that the Muslim religion allows for few accidents. American families must be careful, aware and respectful of foreign space and the native cultural traditions. 5 See Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945- 1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) for a discussion of familial love and middlebrow sentimental culture during the post World War II Cold War culture in the mid forties through the early sixties. 6 In Hitchcock’s 1934 British version of The Man who Knew Too Much, these first series of events occur while the family is visiting Switzerland (a white neutral space). 7 Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Asian American history and culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999) 7. 8 For American servicemen in Korea during the Korean War, the war orphans were referred to as “mascots.” 9 Charles David, “Letters to the Times: Thoughts about Kathy,” Los Angeles Times (April 15, 1949) A4. 10 Allen H. Barton, Communities in Disaster; a Sociological Analysis of Collective Stress Situations, 1st ed. (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1969) 205-206. 185 11 Ibid., 208. 12 Lee, 158. 13 Lee, 145. 14 As with any racial relations in the U.S., the anxieties over American and Asian relations have long and troubled history and subjected to stereotypes. In a 1941 episode of Our Gang entitled, Baby Blues, Mickey’s mother is expecting a baby, which will be the fourth child in the family. Mickey reads in the Almanac “one out of four children will be Chinese,” which he misinterprets as his new baby brother or sister will be Chinese, which terrifies him. The gang suggests going to visit Lee Wong, the son of the Chinese launderer. The gang saves Lee Wong from bullies making fun of him (because he is Chinese) and Lee Wonginvites them to lunch. As the gang sits down at the Wong family table, the gang is worried that the food will be too exotic. To their relief, it turns out to be ham and eggs. Mickey’s fears are subsided as he realizes the Wong’s are nice and similar to any other American family. This amusing Our Gang short reflects the need for interaction with the Other to overcome anxiety and fear. Also important to note that this was produced during World War II, in which the U.S. needed to distinguish specific Asian ethnic groups from the Japanese. 15 This subtitle refers to Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 report An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. See Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma; the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944). 16 Gordon Parks is best known for his photographic essays in Life, including “American Gothic” and the 1961 essay on a Brazilian boy Flavio da Silva. He is also remembered for the 1971 blaxploitation film Shaft. 17 Godfrey Frankel, In the Alleys: Kids in the Shadow of the Capitol, text by Laura Goldstein (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995) ix-x. 18 Ibid., 23. 19 Edward Steichen and Museum of Modern Art, “Introduction,” The Family of Man; the Greatest Photographic Exhibition of All Time: 503 Pictures from 68 Countries (New York: Maco Magazine Corp, 1955) 5. 20 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945- 1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 188. 21 Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America, 1st ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995) 50. 186 22 John O'Brien, “The Nuclear Family of Man,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, http://japanfocus.org/_John_O_Brian-The_Nuclear_Family_of_Man, (July 11, 2008) 8. 23 O’Brien, 11. 24 See Elizabeth Wheelers’ chapter “Neutralizing New Orleans for an interesting analysis on how New Orleans is portrayed as a neutral white space in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Elizabeth Wheeler, “Neutralizing New Orleans,” Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001) 134- 279. 25 This refers to how the photographs were arranged in Steichen’s catalog Family of Man. 26 Klein, 146. 27 Ibid. 28 Richard Murphy, Three Stripes in the Sun (Columbia Pictures, 1955). Many thanks to Bob Proctor and Don Devaney for providing me with a copy of the film. 29 Gina Marchetti, Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 78. 30 Ibid., 158. 31 “The Good Sergeant’s Return,” Life, vol. 39 (October 31, 1955) 101. 32 The last image of the article is of Aldo Ray “doing ring-around-a-Rosy” with a group of orphans on the set. Those familiar with Steichen’s Family of Man might associate this image with Steichen’s ring-around-the-rosy carousel, which displayed children from all over the world playing ring-around-the-rosy, with John Masefield’s quote, “…Clasp the hands and know the thoughts of men in other lands…,” emphasizing the similarities among children of all nations. 33 Klein, 150. 34 George J.Hecht, "The State of the Nation's Underprivileged Children," Parents Magazine (January 1958) 32. 35 Rickie Solinger, Wake up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe V. Wade (New York: Routledge, 1992) 18. 36 Ibid., 20. 37 Ibid., 24-25. 187 38 "Why Negroes Don't Adopt Children," Ebony, vol. vii, no. 9 (July 1952) 31. 39 Ibid., 32. 40 Pearl S. Buck, "Should White Parents adopt Brown Babies?," Ebony, vol. 13, no. 8 (June 1958) 27. 41 In Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Dorothy Roberts questions the value of black reproduction and children in relation to current fertility technologies and developments. Roberts argues that new fertility technology exposes the devaluation of Black reproduction. These new technologies mainly assist middle-class white couples and ultimately reinforce the status quo. These infertility clinics "deny service to single women, lesbians, welfare recipients, and other women who are not considered good mothers," and "privilege men's genetic desires and objectify women's procreative capacity…High tech procedures revolve around the male anxiety over ascertaining paternity." Roberts argues that if new fertility technology fails or couples can not afford fertility prices, then the couple often considers adoption. However, according to Roberts, "the vast majority of white adoptive parents are only willing to take a white child. Even when they adopt outside their race, whites generally prefer non-Black children with Asian or Latin American heritage." Roberts' main argument is not concerned with white families not wanting to adopt black children, but the fertility and adoption systems designed around white families' desires; "what is objectionable about both these systems is not so much white people's desire for a particular child as the way these markets are structured solely to fulfill that desire." Roberts' argument reinforces that even today blackness is an undesirable element in children and the American status quo. See Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997). 42 Madelyn Freundlich, Adoption and Ethics: The Role of Race, Culture, and National Origin in Adoption (Washington D.C.: Child Welfare League of America, Inc., 2000,) 89. It would also be interesting to explore the connection of the large number of children in connection to the guilt over the nuclear bomb. 43 "How to Adopt Korean Babies," Ebony, vol 10, no. 4, (September 1955) 31. 44 "Negro Families Open Homes to Korea's Brown Babies," Ebony, vol. 12, no. 7 (May 1957) 82. 45 "Adoption agencies say thousands of mixed children are available for adoption here in US," Ebony, vol. 15, no. 2 (December 1959) 65. 188 46 McCall's January 1958 issue featured an article "Adoption by picture" in which the story of white family's adoption of a young Korean girl whose photo they saw in McCall's is relayed. "Adoption by Picture," McCalls, vol. 85 (January 1958) 51. 47 "A Famous Orphan Finds a Happy Home," Life, vol. 40 (May 14, 1956) 129. 48 “Help from Home,” Korean War Children's Memorial,” http://www.koreanchildren.org/index.html. 49 “Better than Bullets,” Korean War Children's Memorial,” http://www.koreanchildren.org/index.html. 50 Ibid. 51 George Drake and Al Zimmerman, “GIs and the Kids---a Love Story,” Korean War Children's Memorial,” http://www.koreanchildren.org/index.html. 52 Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xii. 53 Arissa Oh, “A New Kind of Missionary Work: Christians, Christina Americanists, and the Adoption of Korean GI Babies, 1955-1961,” Women’s Studies Quaterly, vol. 33, no. 3 & 4 (Fall/ Winter 2005) 162. 54 Ibid., 176. 55 Ibid., 178. 56 By the mid-sixties, reflecting the times of Civil Rights, many white families began adopting Korean-black babies. 57 Shelby Steele, “White Guilt,” American Scholar, vol. 59, no. 4 (Autumn 1990) 497. 58 Tagline in trailer for Battle Hymn. 59 "A Saga of Sam and a Colonel," Life, 42 (February 25, 1957) 137. 60 There is now controversy that Hess had little participation in the operation Kiddie Car and that it was actually U.S. Air Force Chaplain Russell Blaisdell who is responsible for saving the orphans. 61 Tise, 60. 62 Tise, 98. 189 63 Tise, 73. 64 Ibid., 98. 65 Ibid., 95. 66 "Battle Hymn, The New York Times (February 16, 1957) 14:1. 67 "Battle Hymn, Variety (December 19, 1956). 68 Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk: conversations with Jon Halliday, 2 nd ed. (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1997) 120. 69 Quentin Reynolds, “The Battle Hymn of Dean Hess,” Reader’s Digest, issue 70 (February 1957) 200. 70 In his book Battle Hymn, Hess explains “a writer in Air Force Times conjectured that guilt stemming from this incident may have been partially responsible for the aid I rendered Korean orphans in the airlift that became known as Operation Kiddy Car. I do not know,” (2). There was an African American air force officer, Craigwell, in Hess’ command and who Hess had a close working friendship with and who Maples is based on. However, in the incident of attacking innocent civilians, Hess recounts the story with no mention of an inspiring talk with Craigwell: “It was a tragic accident of war—not his fault; but what good would it do to tell him that? The scene was forever imprinted on his mind. I did my best to console him, even telling him how I too had fired on just such a target, undergone just such a chock. Sitting beside the battered plane, watching the waves of agony lessen on his face, I gave thanks that it should be I of like guilt who was with him now,” (175). See Dean E. Hess, Battle Hymn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956). 71 www.goldenglobes.org. “Best Film Promoting International Understanding” was an award given out between the years 1946-1964, essentially the years after World War II until the Civil Rights era. 72 Klein, 193-194. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 207. 75 The residue of past racist discourses was present in the making of The King and I. Originally Darryl Zanuck of Fox planned to cast Dorothy Dandridge in the role of Tuptim, after her international success in the lead role of Carmen Jones. Still under contract with Fox, Dandridge with reluctance agreed to play the part. Upon further consideration, Dandridge “started having misgivings about The King and I. In trying to 190 convince her to agree to the role, her publicist claimed, “It has nothing to do with Southern slavery…it has nothing to with Black history in America. This is a different country. It’s a wonderful opportunity for you.” Just finishing Carmen Jones and involved with director Otto Preminger, Dandridge apparently was unclear as to what would help her career. In the end, Dandridge decided against the role. It would take three years for Dandridge to appear on the screen again, and she would never regain the success she experienced with Carmen Jones. The story of Dandridge and the part of Tuptim reflects the common experience of light skin actresses in Hollywood, who could interchangeably play any ethnicity, and relegated to supporting roles, often as servants, with lack of opportunities for lead parts. See Donald Bogle, Dorothy Dandridge: A Biography (New York, N.Y: Amistad, 1997). 76 Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) 7. 191 Chapter 3 Unrest in the Home: The Civil Rights Era Things would never be the same again. No one could plead ignorance. Everyone had to take responsibility for what our society had become. Anybody who did anything to make it happen. Anybody who did nothing to stop it from happening. There could no longer be any innocent bystanders. For an entire nation, the murder of Emmett Till marked the death of innocence. 1 (Mamie Till-Mobley, mother of Emmett Till) These years have been fraught with struggle, a struggle in which children, Negro and white, play a leading role. 2 (Dorothy Sterling, Tender Warriors, 1956) For they are doing a job for not only themselves, but for all of America and all of mankind. Somewhere we read, “A little child shall lead them.” 3 (Martin Luther King, Jr.) One persistent image of the modern Civil Rights period is children, black and white, going to school among protestors, or they themselves marching in the streets with their parents. Shari Goldin, in her essay "Unlearning Black and White," remarks on the central role of the child-figure in Civil Rights rhetoric. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s infamous "I Have a Dream" speech revolves on the image of innocent children to arouse and inspire the utopian fantasy of peace and integration. King declares, "I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama…little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!" 4 Goldin argues that this dream-image of holding hands--a joyous physical bond between white and black children-- suggested the shared sense of freedom achieved through integration; the alternative--children standing alone, being called names--powerfully expressed adult fears of unfairness and inequality. However, the image of black and white children standing together suggests yet another role: a shared victimhood of all children to racist society and to continued adult attempts to "orient" children in 192 certain directions, using them as tropes for political justification and as sops for popular sentiment. 5 The juxtaposition of King's utopian vision of children and the reality of black children escorted into schools by the National Guard and federal marshals while white protesters screamed obscene and violent threats exposes this central role of the child both as embodying the victim in contemporary racist society and “the vehicle for a more just society in the future." 6 This chapter returns to the United States cultural landscape in the late fifties and early sixties and examines the figure of the African American child in the early Civil Rights period, while focusing specifically on two historical cases--Emmett Till (1955) and Ruby Bridges (1960)--in which images of a black child become national discourses and symbols of both the ugliness of racism and the hope of integration and racial justice. As the previous chapters have demonstrated, cultural narratives furnished American white masculinity with the possibility of transformation and preservation of privileged in a period of shifting political, gender and racial ideologies. This chapter will argue that this gentler model of masculinity displaces the overt problem of racism onto other subjectivities, notably white working class men and women. While children and their innocence provided masculinity a new way of being, women and the maternal posed a particular problem as they held primary connection to children and occupation of the home. In the first chapter of this project, the black child is positioned as a potential symbol of national unity and expansion of domestic boundaries as the United States 193 entered the Cold War period and an environment of containment of white middle-class innocence. The second chapter interrogated how the image of the foreign Asian orphan provided white U.S. citizens with a fantasy of overcoming American racism, despite an inability to deal with blackness, while positioning white masculinity as a new Gentle Warrior paternal figure. This chapter will examine how the “Knowing” African American child took center stage in the Civil Rights era and confronted American citizens and government with its policies of racial discrimination. Simultaneously, this chapter investigates how the concretion of the Gentle Warrior figure produces a white working-class maternal femininity that presents a monstrous distorted quality in relation to race. In reviewing the actual cases and narratives spun around Emmett Till and Ruby Bridges, working class femininity represents as a specific social problem and overt source of American racism, while covert forms of racism prosper in the new liberal democracy. In addition to the historical examples of Till and Bridges, this displacement of social ills onto the maternal is expressed in cultural narratives of the time. In analyzing three films--Imitation of Life (1959), To Kill a Mockingbird (1963), and A Patch of Blue (1965)—white maternal femininity is portrayed as problematic and liberal masculinity is the healing agent to save and reeducate American home and children. Emmett Till Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not. Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder 194 children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't. 7 (William Faulkner, in reaction to the lynching of Emmett Till) In his review of Steichen’s Family of Man exhibit in Paris, Roland Barthes critiques the exhibit for its lack of grounding in “History” and its saturation in universal (bourgeois) sentimentality: Everything here, the content and appeal of the pictures, the discourse which justifies them, aims to suppress the determining weight of History: we are held back at the surface of an identity, prevented precisely by sentimentality from penetrating into this ulterior zone of human behavior where historical alienation introduces some ‘differences’ which we shall here quite simply call ‘injustices’. 8 Barthes locates the ur-myth of “Nature” as inseparable from social history.” Steichen’s exhibit, according to Barthes, is the classic humanist approach that removes “Nature” from “History” and social critique; The myth of the human ‘condition’ rests on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom History. Any classic humanism postulates that in scratching the history of men a little, the relativity of their institutions or the superficial diversity of their skins (but why not ask the parents of Emmett Till, the young Negro assassinated by the Whites what they think of The Great Family of Man?), one very quickly reaches the solid rock of a universal human nature. 9 Barthes’ reference to the Emmett Till lynching ironically both points to the omitted lynching photograph in Steichen’s exhibit, and uses the Till murder to reveal the impact of History and racial injustices in the American landscape that the Steichen exhibit represses. 10 195 The story of Emmett Till became a national and international sensation in the mid-fifties and symbol of the brutality of U.S. racism. In August 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen- year-old African American boy living in Chicago with his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, traveled to Money, Mississippi with his cousins to visit his great uncle for a couple weeks. Late in the evening of August 28, 1955, two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, abducted him from his relatives’ home and three days later his battered body was found in the Tallahatchie River. The white men accused Till of insulting and accosting Bryant’s wife while she tended the Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. The lynching of Emmett Till, the images of his unrecognizable body, and acquittal of Bryant and Milam sparked a national media storm and, as Clenora Hudson-Weems argues, was a defining catalyst of the modern Civil Rights Movement. 11 The case of Emmett Till’s lynching-- although officials in Mississippi categorized it as a murder, not a lynching--and the national and international interest in the story demonstrate the shifting national consciousness around race and citizenship at the time. 12 The questions pertinent to the Till case and this project revolve around how the cultural understanding of innocence, race and the child participated in the awakening of political consciousness and as a rupture in dominant racial systems in the American social landscape. Until now, this project has focused on children under the adolescent stage, the transitional period between childhood and adulthood. In modern times, children at this point in life are expected to shed the mantle of innocence and begin accumulating knowledge and transitioning into adulthood. Adolescents have an ambiguous relationship to innocence, 196 and are no longer the perceived blank slates of early childhood. Emmett Till was fourteen-years-old, in these early stages of adolescence. As discussed in Chapter One, African American children have been historically constructed with lack of innocence and have been victims of white supremacy and violence; so one must ask why did the lynching of Emmett Till become a national and international discourse, symbolizing U.S. racial injustice? As the United States assumed into the position of global leader, tremendous pressure was placed on the federal government to promote racial equality within its own boundaries. In May 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS was passed, legally ending pubic school segregation, followed with the passing of Brown v. Board of Education II in May 1955. Reaction to integration occurred across the nation; resistant white families retreated to all white enclaves, such as the suburbs, or established private schools to counteract the impact of national legislation. The South and its culture of segregation was the most defiant (however not every white southerner, as popular culture would like us to believe, was resistant to integration), and in the late fifties and early sixties spectacles of both white and black protests around integration of southern schools became national news. In her study of southern segregation, cultural historian Grace Elizabeth Hale argues “the culture of segregation was always a process, never a finished product.” 13 She claims, 197 The creation of a separate white southern world, a culture of segregation, implied that somewhere there existed a separate black one. As whites strove to create an all-encompassing system of separation, then, they also risked aiding African Americans in the very struggle for more autonomy that white supremacy sought to deny…black southerners continued to fight separation and exclusion, pushing against each new boundary…the expansion of transportation systems across the region rapidly increased spatial mobility, for blacks as well as white southerners. As threatening to whites as the development of a separate black world was the ways changes in leisure, consumption, and travel threatened to blur the edges of those carefully constructed white and black spaces. 14 Emmett Till’s visit to his great Uncle was a by-product of the changes in modern times, and of the available spaces for black families. His mother left Mississippi, as would several of his relatives after his murder, to escape the oppressive culture of segregation. His return to the South and his unfamiliarity with traditional southern black and white ways pushed against the frame of white southern culture, particularly white working class masculinity, which ultimately led to his death. In the January 24, 1956 issue, Look magazine published interviews with the acquitted Milam and Bryant in which they discuss how and why they murdered Till. In the article “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” J.W. Milam explains his reasoning for killing Till, I like niggers -- in their place -- I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you -- just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.'" 15 198 Although white southern paternal power maintained its position with a not-guilty verdict for Milam and Bryant, community support, which was already divided by class, quickly abandoned the two men after the trial, eventually including their wives. 16 The Till case unveiled various southern white class interests that Hale identifies as already existing in the 1920’s and 1930’s, …some southern elites increasingly saw their own interests connected culturally and economically to a North whose conception of justice did not routinely include extralegal violence, lynchings could no longer conjure southern unity across a growing class divide. The contradictions between more dominant American conceptions of “civilization” and southern whites’ claim of superiority cracked whiteness in a way that lynching, as the cause, could not seal…By the 1930s, violence became one way to mediate between the desire for Americanization, a connection to the larger nation, and the fear of losing the white southern self. 17 Twenty-five years later, the coverage of the Emmett Till case on both television and national and international print news exposed, “nonsouthern” whites were Americans who would not tolerate such violence, who understood the deadly irony that such barbarity could never protect “civilization.” Unlike the Brown decision, the Till lynching divided rather than united southern whites, splitting apart those who were invested morally and practically in national opinion from those who were not. 18 While violence was historically used in the culture of segregation to maintain white supremacy and boundaries, the desire of white middle and upper class southerners was to connect to the nation as a whole, and to the global world, resulting in many to reject the blatant, overt, and violent ways of maintaining white power structures. And, the Emmett Till case brought a particular unwanted spotlight onto the culture of southern segregation. 199 Along with press accounts, television covered the funeral and trial of Emmett Till and further incensed the world and nation on the culture of southern segregation and the regional struggle for black civil rights. This class desire to imagine the nation as a whole and the distinct regional cultural differences of race play out in the rhetoric of the Till case, and the ambivalent positioning of Till as child. Examining newspaper accounts on Till’s abduction, murder, and trial against Bryant and Milam, the uncertainty about adolescent innocence--and particularly black adolescent--becomes apparent. Till’s age is reported to be fourteen-years-old in some accounts, and fifteen-years-old in others. He is referred to as child, as boy, as Negro, as lad and in Carolyn Bryant’s testimony she refers to him as a “Negro man.” In Look magazine, William Bradford Huie titles the Till case as “The Wolf-Whistle Murder: A Negro ‘Child’ or ‘Boy’ Whistled at Her and They Killed Him.” 19 The interchange around Till’s age and status as child, boy, or man is entwined with American culture’s confusion around adolescents’ transitional stage and their relationship to innocence, and, in this case, Till’s relation to his innocence in the accusation against him. In the black newspaper Chicago Defender, an article on the effect the murder had on Chicago black teenagers, reports, The fact that Emmett Till was a child has much to do also with the universal horror which has [his] killing evoked, not only among Negroes, but universally. There are plenty of white folks who would have been horrified if the lynchers had strung up Emmett’s aged grand uncle instead of the boy. But the youth of the victim helped bring the horror home with more impact to many white as well as Negro parents and other persons humane enough to believe a youngster enjoys a certain amount of immunity even for misdeeds. The new significance lay in the age of the victim as contrasted to the brutality of the crime. 20 200 Echoing the disgust of the child-murder, one reader of the Chicago Defender wrote in, “The cold blooded murder of a child. It must take lots of nerve to murder an innocent child.” 21 Another reader of the Pittsburgh Courier wrote, “Emmett Till was a child. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have been punished if he insulted Mrs. Bryant—but there is a law for such things.” 22 A reader from Los Angeles wrote, I have never been so ashamed of being a member of the so-called “white race” as I am now as I think of the horrible slaying of a Negro child, Emmett Till in the cesspool of our nation, Mississippi. I feel it is President Eisenhower’s responsibility as the leader of our nation to voice the outraged feelings of decent citizens all over the country. As an American citizen I am ashamed to say that my President has not spoken out against this monstrous lynching of a child. 23 Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, made an official statement concurring, “It would appear from this lynching that the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children.” 24 The Mississippi press accused the NAACP of inflaming the black public with its comments on lynching children. On the whole, the coverage of the Emmett Till strategically interpreted him as a child, martyr and national symbol of the “ugliness” of racism. The emotional impact of the Till case was considerably strengthened with the visual coverage of Till’s family, specifically his mother, his open casket, funeral, the Mississippi landmarks and trial. Everything related to the murder is visually documented, while the grotesque images of Tills’ unrecognizable body in his open casket are emblazoned in national memory. In her recollections of her decision to have the body 201 displayed at the public memorial and pictures printed in Jet magazine and other newspapers, Mamie Till-Bradley recalls, It would be important for people to look at what had happened on a late Mississippi night when nobody was looking, to consider what might happen again if we didn’t look out. This would not be like so many other lynching cases, the hundreds, the thousands of cases where families would be forced to walk away and quietly bury their dead and their grief and their humiliation. I was not going quietly. Oh, no, I was not about to do that. I knew that I could talk for the rest of my life about what had happened to my baby, I could explain it in great detail, I could describe what I saw laid out there on that slab at A.A. Rayner’s, one piece, one inch, one body part, at a time. I could do all of that and people still would not get the full impact. They would not be able to visualize what had happened, unless they were allowed to see the results of what had happened. They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness to this. 25 In coverage of the three day public viewing in Chicago, 250,000 people are reported to have attended and every tenth viewer reportedly fainted at the sight of the mutilated body—“All were shocked, some horrified and appalled. Many prayed, scores fainted and practically all (men, women, and children) [sic] wept.” 26 The Chicago Defender claimed both white and black citizens were affected by the image of Till’s body: When a white woman accidentally brushed against a Negro woman on a trolley car with her newspaper opened to the account of the finding of the body, the colored-woman’s immediate reaction was to deliver a kalloping [sic]backhand blow. But the carful of whites simply looked at the picture of the dead boy lying face up on the floor and bowed their heads in humiliation. The question heard again and again in the crowds waiting outside the church two blocks square and four abreast was: “What’s Ike going to do about this?” Lawyers agreed that the decision of Mrs. Mamie Bradley mother of the slain child to put the body on public view was more effective than the millions of words of copy written about the crime. 27 Gazing on the mutilated face of Emmett Till is a moment of self-recognition. 28 For the black community, they witness the cruelty and inhumanity of the white supremacist 202 culture they inhabit, and for the empathetic white community, they observe the monstrosity of their own dominant culture. The lynching of Till, the acquittal of Bryant and Milam, the inaction of the federal government in regards to the Till case, the sensationalist and abundant coverage of the trial, and the actions of the NAACP tapped into emerging political consciousness and to shifting registers of racialized practice. After Till’s trial, the NAACP and black political organizations capitalized on the names of Emmett Till, George Lee and Lamar Smith in their “register to vote” advertisements aimed towards black citizens. Black churches urged their communities to send postcards created by the Florence Fair Employment Practices committee depicting a drawing of Emmett Till’s mother, “mourning over the coffin of her murdered son with a crowd of irate people in the background to President Eisenhower and the Attorney General to ‘use the full power of the federal government to stop lynchings and protect the jobs, lives and voting rights of the Negro people’.” 29 According to the Chicago Defender, “100,000 Across the Nation” protested the acquittal of Bryant and Milam. 30 Membership to the NAACP jumped after the murder of Emmett Till, and the NAACP exploited the Till case well after the event to continue to incite support and membership. The rhetoric around the Till murder also became intertwined with the United States’ foreign policy of global integration against Communism in both the domestic and international arena. In a letter to the Los Angeles Sentinel, a reader wrote, “I stand shocked and ashamed, as should all whites, over the infamous slaying of young Emmett Till in Mississippi. If the men responsible for this boy’s death go unpunished, then surely 203 there is as little justice in Mississippi as there is behind the Iron Curtain.” 31 In a weekly column in the Chicago Defender, Louis E. Martin writes in the October 15, 1955 issue, “The Communists have made the lynching an international scandal and all we can get out of Washington are statements that the Federal agencies cannot interfere in the domestic affairs of Mississippi.” 32 Dr. Channing Tobias, a chairman for the NAACP, announced after the Bryant and Milam acquittal, “The jurors who returned this shameful verdict deserve a medal for meritorious service in Communism’s war against democracy. They have done their best to discredit our judicial system, to hold us up as a nation of hypocrites and to undermine faith in American democracy.” 33 An editorial in the Chicago Defender states, The lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Louis “Bo” Till of Chicago in Mississippi last week is an outrage to all decent American citizens, white, and colored, and dramatically points out to the world the ugliest aspects of life in our Democracy…No country that tolerates the barbarous hate-killing of a child within its midst deserves nor can it expect the respect of the civilized world. There can be no compromise this time. Your child can be the next victim of the white supremacists…Unless the Administration acts at once to stop this wanton and ruthless taking of lives, the blood of “Bo” Till, Rev. George Lee, Lamar Smith and the long line of martyrs in the fight for first class citizenship for the Negro in America will be on its hands and “all the perfumes of Arabia will not wash it away.” 34 After the publishing of the January 1956 Look article in which Bryant and Milam describe their killing of Till, Reverend Dennis’ editorial was published in the Atlanta Daily World in which he observes, The Till case bids fair [sic] to become one of America’s most famous murder cases. Coming at a time when world attention is focused on racial relations and tensions in this country and being a race killing, this case assumes great significance for all of us. It becomes, whether we wish it so or not, a sort of 204 commentary for world opinion on America’s race relations and what the world, which is three-fourths colored, thinks of America’s treatment of colored peoples, determines the effectiveness of America’s role as a world leader…There was little doubt in any mind unfettered by prejudice that the two men tried were guilty of the crime. That is why world opinion was outraged when Mississippi justice let them go. Thus world opinion is even more shocked now when LOOK not only puts in bold print the assertion that they did it but a description of how it was done…We must erase from our garments the stains of racial segregation, Jim- Crow and discrimination if we are going to command and deserve the respect and confidence of the world. 35 In the September 24, 1955 edition of the Atlanta Daily World, a cartoon depicts a globe with a spotlight on Mississippi; it is surrounded by the people of the world with an “African” native pointing to Mississippi, and the names “Willie McGhee, Geo. W. Lee, Emmett Till?” appears in the lower left of the globe. A poem, “Freedom’s Shame,” appears with the cartoon and states, “Freedom’s heritage as an American ideal is being challenged by the untimely lynching of Emmett Till. One imagines the whole word waits to see how we clean our own house of Hitler like actions.” 36 Figure 28: Freedom’s Shame, Atlanta Daily World, September 24, 1955 205 Additionally, the Emmett Till murder and trial became prominent headlines across the world. The lynching and acquittal of Bryant and Milam became fodder for debates around the United States as global leader. In an Atlanta Daily World article citing the shock of the European world in the acquittal of Bryant and Milam, it reports, Meanwhile British and French newspapers gave front page display to the “not Guilty” verdict. The Rightwing Paris newspaper L’Aurore headlined its front page story “Shameful Verdict At Sumner U.S.A. Two White Assassins of Young Black Acquitted!” L’Aurore’s report on the trial of the accused kidnap-murderers of Emmett Till called the court proceedings “An Awful comedy.” Paris Pro- Communist Liberation said the trial “Scandalized All Honest People in America.” France Soir printed a front page picture showing relatives comforting Till’s mother after the verdict. In London newspapers, the Till trial verdict took foreign billing with the Argentina story. The Daily Mirror gave its Sumner report a three-column head of heavy black type. 37 In October 1955, Senator Hubert Humphrey (NY, Dem) claimed, “Our responsibilities and requirements of our national security no longer permit us the luxury of temporizing and evasion on civil rights here in the United States. Communist propaganda has recognized that issue clearly and has effectively gone to work.” 38 And four years later in 1959, the Pittsburgh Courier’s article on Khrushchev’s visit to the States credits Till murder with tarnishing the United States image abroad: And most of us have gotten just as big a kick at sitting back in our comfortable living rooms watching the cold war between the East and the West. The real thrill comes in seeing Russia and the United States vie with each other for the heart and hand of the black and brown peoples of the world. For a long while America felt so cock sure of herself, that she as willing to sit back complacently expecting to lure these darker peoples by her vast wealth and pretty phraseology. While she was resting comfortably on her oars, Russia was working. The Soviets began to move into the emerging countries, promising the newly independent areas what they wanted, and offering them what they needed. They promised freedom and 206 equality and offered technical assistance for economic improvement. Finally America woke up to find herself on the short end of the rope in this tug-of-war. She had given financial assistance to undeveloped areas, but she had failed to win the confidence of the people. This failure was due to the treatment imposed upon their dark brothers who live on American soil. The Emmett Till, the Little Rock, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Virginia school situation and the Mack Charles Parker case had their effect upon America’s prestige abroad. Something had to be done, and fast. 39 The Till case contradicted the image of racial progress that the United States was eagerly trying to convey to its foreign allies. Civil Rights activists were acutely aware of racism’s liability to the U.S., as were the Communists, and both exploited on this to their advantage. The Till trial also exposed southern class and cultural differences of the South for the nation. In many of the accounts in black newspapers, journalists took note of the surprising fairness of the judge and prosecutors of the Till case. James Hicks reported in the Atlanta Daily World, I had come here almost with a preconceived idea that it would be a mockery of justice form the first day of the trial…instead of a mock court of law, the little courtroom at Sumner began to stand out as a hallowed place of justice. No prosecutors anywhere in the United States could have worked harder or longer for a conviction…and no judge whether on the Supreme Court bench or the rickety rocking chair at Sumner, could have been more painstaking and eminently fair in the conduct of the trial. 40 The blame of the racial injustice was placed on the class of sharecroppers who composed the jury on the case. Hicks writes, “Now I know, as they knew before me, that the hidden factor in the backwardness of this state is the blind spot of racial prejudice in the eyes of its sharecropper people which prevents them from seeing and thinking straight when they 207 look upon a black faces.” 41 He continues to describe this class of sharecroppers as uncivilized culture: The scales are unbalanced because in the hinterlands of the state from which they picked the jury such as we had at Sumner there is a horde of people living in a darkness that few enlightened Americans can visualize. Theirs is still the law of the jungle and the jungle is far more darker [sic] and many times greater than the small island of light and justice in the state. 42 In the Chicago Defender October 1, 1955 issue, Louis E. Martin prints in his column, Certainly, the publicity, via newspapers, radio and television being given the lynching of young Emmett Till is proving pretty painful to the whites of Mississippi. For the moment anyway, the color-crazed aborigines of Mississippi are standing stark naked before the whole civilized world. Everyone can see for himself, how utterly backward, ignorant and crude the so-called white culture of the South can really be. Most of the educated, upper class white Mississippians are desperately trying to dissociate themselves from the lynchers, trying to show that they are civilized and do not approve of such racial violence. 43 As Martin notes, white southerners’ reaction to the Civil Right movement was a motley combination of emotions and actions. Martin and Hicks’—as well as several white and black journalists—description of Mississippians is colored with class-based rhetoric, distinguishing the educated white class as “civilized” and nonviolent, while the less educated lower class personified as the violent overt racist mentality of white supremacy. In parsing out the varied class-based reactions, the culture of segregation was appearing to be splintering, and while perceived with optimism for social change, it allowed for blame to be placed on certain social groups--such as the lower class--rather than larger social structures, and obscured critical recognition of diverse and hidden political strategies of dominant groups and systems. 208 In the September 24, 1955 issue of his column, Martin writes, “ The dilemma of white Southerners, who are caught between the local heritage of race prejudice and the modern world-wide social dynamics of democracy, is keener and more painful to them today then ever before. Something is going to have to give and the whites recognize it.” 44 He continues with “Emmett Louis Till of Chicago may be regarded one day as the little child who led America, South and North, to a new chapter, a new and brighter period in the unfolding drama of democratic living so profoundly conceived by the founding fathers of the republic.” 45 Unlike the Brown decision, the Till case was exposing the fissures in a unified white southern front, and encouraged many to hope that the Civil Rights revolution would shepherd in a new racial democracy. Of particular interest in Martin’s comment above is his employment of the child figure as martyr. Martin describes Emmett Till as “the little child” which Till clearly was not. But the image of the child, particularly small and helpless activates audience sympathy. Frequently, in the press around the Till case, sympathizers to black civil rights, refer to Till as a child, while those siding with southern white segregationist culture do not wield the image of the child to narrate the Till story. Because Till was an absent living presence and represented by past photographs, including the deformed mutilated image of his dead body, the coverage of the case focused on Till’s mother Mamie Till-Bradley and pitted black motherhood against white segregationist culture that centered around preservation of white patriarchy in the pretense of the protection of white femininity. 209 Motherhood on Trial Mamie Till-Bradley was portrayed in the press as the grieving mother challenging white supremacy. While black motherhood is historically and culturally portrayed as deviant and devalued, Mamie Till-Bradley, with the support of the NAACP, countered this stereotype by participating in the national spotlight to highlight the injustice and murder of her son. 46 The majority of national sympathy in the press leaned towards Mamie Till- Bradley rather than the accuser Carolyn Bryant. A New York Post article on the coverage of the trial, identified her as a visionary: “Curtis Swago [the judge] and Mamie Bradley are the future; just the sound of their voices, speaking with dignity and without fear, is a death verdict for the beast that sits and swaggers all around them.” 47 Black newspapers called her pretty, while the white newspapers focused on the dignity she projected, and the “new” black middle-class she represented: “she wore a black bolero and a printed dress with a small black hat and a piece of a veil and she was very different from the cotton patch cropper who is the ordinary Negro witness in a Mississippi courtroom.” 48 Another article described her as “attired in a smooth charcoal grey shantung dress with a white collar under which was a black bow tie, the attractive young mother provided the greatest commotion of the trial thus far merely by her presence. Fanning herself with a beautiful black Japanese fan, she answered the barrage of questions newsmen fired at her.” 49 These accounts ascribe to her an allure that separates her from her southern (black and white) counterpart. Hale credits Mamie Till-Bradley’s actions as the fulcrum to transforming Emmett’s murder into national spectacle. She claims, 210 But what made Till more than just another black man murdered was the way his mother made the lynching into a different kind of spectacle through her choreography of the Chicago funeral…the national publicity began with Till’s funeral…Reporters not just from the newspapers but from the increasingly important national television networks poured into Chicago. And in a black northern neighborhood, in a black church, a black mother wrote her own ritual in answer to the white lynching story. 50 Cultural historian Jacqueline Goldsby argues that the innumerable photos of Till-Bradley in the press “stood as eloquent testimony to her belief in her son’s identity and innocence” and provided visual proof to her selfless character. 51 Mamie Till-Bradley epitomized the “good” mother. Contrarily, the defense attorneys of the case would place Mamie Till-Bradley’s motherhood in question. Their primary argument in the trial was that the decomposed body found in the river could not be clearly identified as Emmett Till, or even a black male. Mamie Till-Bradley’s testimony that the disfigured corpse was her son and claim that a mother would know the body of her child directly disputed the local sheriff and doctors who claimed the identity of the body could not be confirmed. In her testimony Figure 29: Mamie Till-Bradley, the grieving mother. Chicago Defender, September 10, 1955. 211 Till-Bradley stated, “I knew definitely that was my boy; beyond the shadow of a doubt.” 52 Yet in the end, the white jury ruled in favor of the defense. When asked by the press, “a spokesman for the jurors said they felt ‘the body was too decomposed to be identified.’ Asked about the weight given to his mother’s testimony, he said ‘If she had tried a little harder, she might have got out a tear.’” 53 The verdict of the jury shocked the nation and for a moment black motherhood had national sympathy. In contrast to Mamie Till-Bradley’s black motherhood were the white families of the Bryant and Milam. Carolyn Bryant, as Jacqueline Goldsby argues, “was associated with her static helplessness. Depicted as a creature of nostalgia and inevitably whose fate was inextricably bound to the history of the region’s sexual politics…” 54 Carolyn Bryant was speechless and passive in comparison to Mamie Till-Bradley. Carolyn Bryant, often described as a pretty mother of two, did not talk to the press, nor did the jurors hear her testimony. The judge ruled her statement irrelevant to the case, but it was documented in court records and told before the courtroom audience, without the jurors. In her testimony she describes Till as a “Negro man” and in recounting the scenario, she could not even repeat the words Till supposedly uttered: “she said the ‘man’ said an unprintable word as she freed herself. She hesitated, then refused to repeat the word or say what letter it began with.” 55 The black press called her story “fantastic.” Her performance and story of Till manhandling her and supposedly proclaiming “you needn’t be afraid of me...I’ve been with white women before” appeared untrustworthy to the national public. 212 Further, calling Till a “man” countered the national and international outcry of the murder of a child. Carolyn Bryant’s testimony reveals the contrived and calculated deployment of the image of the white child. While she refers to Emmett Till as a “man,” the defense creates a visual narrative of the white southern family under attack. During the trial, seated next to Milam and Bryant were their wives and children; each had two young sons. Newspaper journalists covering the trial comment on the Bryant and Milam children playing in the court and the pained grimaces on Carolyn Bryant and Juanita Milam; the black press in Figure 30: Carolyn and Roy Bryant with their two sons in court. Caption states: The Woman and Her Family—You are looking at a family portrait which can be described in one word: Unhappy. Chicago Defender, October 1, 1955. Figure 31: Juanita and J.W. Milam with their two sons in court. Caption states, “What’s This All About?” is the question on the puzzled faces of the two sons of J.W. Milam… Chicago Defender, October 1, 1955. 213 particular remarks on how the children and look on the women’s faces were a ploy to create compassion for the defense. James Edmund Boyack, a journalist for Pittsburgh Courier’s notes, I’ll never forget some of the mental pictures which are indelibly inscribed on my mind. The picture of two white defendants…balding, hairy-armed J. W. Milam and squint-eyed Roy Bryant…greedily puffing their big black, fat cigars in the court room. The “appeal to sentiment” spectacle of young “kids”…children of the two defendants…sitting through the trial. In Mississippi this is “routine,” but I’d never want my son to witness such a spectacle. The “phony” sad faces of the wives who sat with their husbands throughout the trial in an “obvious” attempt to drum up more sympathy. 56 The Memphis Commercial Appeal, aligned with segregation, begins a lengthy article dedicated to the families entitled Wives Serious, Children Romp as Trial Begins with: “The four handsome sons of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam squirmed, squealed, climbed, ran, cried, laughed, chewed gum, ate candy, drank liquids, and played cowboy in the courtroom Monday as their fathers went on trial for murder.” 57 Murray Kempton The New York Post writes in his article The Baby Sitter (ironically referring to the courtroom), The Bryant family came to watch and turned the courtroom into a nursery school with little boys tottering around and bleating and every now and again lifting their water pistols and pointing at a deputy sheriff and going “boom-boom” while the state went through the business of picking the jury to try their father for murder…There was Carolyn Bryant, who alone knows what touched the fuse, her lower jaw scarred by lipstick, her cheeks cadaverous and her eyes smoky. She sat there and soothed a puckerish vagrant child while the better element went on searching for a fair and impartial jury. Every time a stranger looked at J.W. Milam and wanted to hate him, there was always a little boy in the line of vision. That is the horror. For here was the man sitting in that place who was loved by his children and deserved their love and who is charged with killing a boy because he was black and didn’t know his place. J.W. Milam is a violent man of bad reputation 58 214 As inferred from Boyack’s and Kempton’s description, the narrative of loving fathers, created by the juxtaposition of Milam and Bryant with their children, did not hold up in popular opinion. This performance of happy and threatened white working class domesticity appeared as a charade to many observers, which fanned the flames of outrage when the jury eventually acquitted Bryant and Milam. The prosecutor of the Emmett Till case also utilizes on the image of the white family and child. To counter the defense, the prosecution needed to prove that the body was Emmett Till’s. Before DNA profiling, the prosecution had only Till’s mother’s memory and knowledge to confirm the decomposed body was that of her son. In the Atlanta Daily Word, James Hicks recalled prosecutor’s Gerald Chatham’s argument in which Chatham calculatingly evokes uses his own son to support Till-Bradley’s testimony: Chatham had relied heavily on the identification of the youth by his own mother. Recalling her testimony to the jury he told of the case of his own son who had a dog named “Shep.” He said one day his own son had come to him after his dog had been missing for a few days and said to him, “Dad, I’ve found old Shep.” The prosecutor said his young son then took him by the hand and led him to a hollow ravine behind the barn and pointed to the badly decomposed body of his dog. “That dog’s body was rotting and the meat was falling off its bone,” the prosecutor said, “but my little boy pointed to it and said, “That’s old Shep, Pa. That’s old Shep.” Dramatically tying this illustration in with Mrs. Bradley’s identification of her son, Chatham in a pleading voice to the jury said, “My boy didn’t need no undertaker or a sheriff to identify his dog. And we don’t need them here to identify Emmett Till. All we need is someone who loved him and cared for him.” “If there was one ear left, one hairline, one part of his nose, any part of Emmett Till’s body, then I say to you that Mamie Bradley was God’s given witness to identify him.”…Chatham did not miss any strong points in his plea for conviction of the two white men. He constantly reminded the jury he was a son of the South and he pointed out that the jury knew as southerners that even if the Till boy had done something wrong all the white men had to do was take a “razor strap—place him over a barrel and give him a good whipping.” “That’s 215 the way I deal with my boy,” he said. “You deal with a child as if he is a child— not as if he is a man.” 59 Chatham’s strategy of reminding jurors Till was a child and intertwining the story of his son with Mamie Till-Bradley’s identification of her son’s body attempts to profit from white (southern) child’s innocence and “wisdom” to appeal to white southern jurors as they would not empathize with a northern middle class African American mother. 60 As Carolyn Bryant and Mamie Till-Bradley demonstrate, one of the dominant narratives around the Emmett Till case is the public performance of family and motherhood. Before and during the trial, Mamie Till-Bradley, despite the jurors’ condemnation of her testimony, presents an image of the valiant mother, mourning the loss of her son who is murdered by the system of American racism. Although it is Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam who are on trial and confess to the murder, it is Carolyn Bryant’s white femininity and honor that is indirectly on trial. While Mamie Till-Bradley’s motherhood is placed on public display, Carolyn Bryant’s motherhood and femininity remains in the private realm with her public silence. However, it is Carolyn’s Bryant voice that is deadly; as it is presumably Carolyn’s private confirmation to Bryant and Milam that Emmett Till was the black boy/man in the store which leads to Till’s death. Carolyn’s testimony in court is ruled irrelevant to the case and becomes pure performance for the nation, yet this white motherhood presents a distorted and outdated notion of femininity. 61 216 The case of Emmett Till illustrate the vacillating gender and racial dynamics, and how the child played an integral part in ciphering cultural anxieties around shifting ideologies. As the previous chapter determined the remaking of white masculinity into the Gentle Warrior centered on the intimate relationship with the racialized foreign child, this chapter ponders on the consequential implications to white motherhood and the displacement of white racism. The remapping of racism allows for a particular type of white femininity and motherhood to be held in contempt. The following section examines the increasing monstrosity of white working class maternal femininity in relation to the black child. Ruby Bridges The period of American public school desegregation positioned African American children center stage in American history and culture. One of the chosen "stars" was Ruby Bridges, one of four six-year-old African American girls who was selected-- through standardized testing--to integrate two elementary schools in New Orleans in 1960. Six years after Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, the Louisiana State court ordered the integration of Louisiana public schools, the first state in the deep South to begin the process. Ruby Bridges was the one child to integrate William Frantz Elementary School, while the remaining girls attended McDonogh #19 Elementary School. 62 The image of the solitary single girl, Ruby Bridges, captured America's attention as she braved bawdy, unruly, and protesting segregationists. Bridges instantly became a figure of courage, determination and hope for the liberal “New Frontier.” 217 Further Norman Rockwell inscribed the image of the nameless African American girl, based on Ruby Bridges, in American public memory with his cover The Problem We All Live With for the January 14, 1964 issue of Look magazine. Rockwell’s image features an African American girl, walking between four federal marshals, in a pristine white dress, clutching her schoolbooks and ruler. The word "Nigger" is faintly painted on the wall behind her and splattered with tomato. The obvious question of Rockwell’s image is what or who is the problem we all live with? Is it the African American girl, or the source of the scrawled derogatory word and tomato? The discussion around Ruby Bridges and New Orleans integration will reveal it is not the child, but white working- class maternal femininity that is the dilemma. Figure 32: Ruby Bridges escorted from William Frantz Elementary School by her mother and the federal marshals. Figure 33: The Problem We All Live With by Norman Rockwell appeared on the January 14, 1964 cover of Look magazine. 218 On November 15, 1960, the New York Times published a piece entitled “The Battle of New Orleans.” It begins: “When a little girl in a white dress with white ribbons in her hair walked into the William Frantz Primary School in New Orleans yesterday, it seemed that the United States of America had won another battle.” 63 The article concludes with: It [the New Orleans Board of Education] permitted Federal marshals to protect these little girls in their innocent passage into classrooms which Negro taxpayers as well as white taxpayers had helped pay for. There was no serious disorder. If little girls in white dresses with white ribbons in their hair were a menace to the State of Louisiana or to American civilization as a whole, the fact was not yesterday apparent. New Orleans is one of the most relaxed and thoroughly charming cities in this country. It has an easygoing, tolerant tradition. It is, therefore, altogether fitting that in New Orleans the law of school desegregation should win its first, however slight, victory in the deepest South. 64 The writer of this New York Times piece could not have been further from the truth when s/he wrote, “there was no serious disorder.” The article emphasizes and reconstructs the girls’ innocence by focusing on their white clothes and ribbons, while also romanticizing the city of New Orleans and glazing over deep ridden racial and social class issues. Highlighting the girls’ apparel consequently unites the image of the children with the notion of naturally innocent and ideal (white) “Romantic” childhood. It is also important that these children were female due to black masculinity’s mythic perceived threat to whiteness, notably white femininity. The girls, being good citizens by abiding State law, are cautiously and trepidly able to transcend boundaries of space and innocence. On the same day of the New York Times’ article, the Hartford Courant published a photo of young white teenage boys outside William Frantz School with signs reading, “We Want 219 Segregation,” and “Don’t Want Integration.” 65 The Chicago Daily Tribune printed an article entitled, “Negroes Enter 2 Schools in New Orleans: Crowds Greet Them with Catcalls,” along with a photograph of white angry crowds held back by police outside McDonough school. 66 This article remarked on the heckles of the white crowd: “The whites booed and jeered when the marshals took the girls and their parents into the buildings. They cheered and applauded as white parents started taking their children out.” 67 It is this white crowd that would gain national attention and interest, as it is primarily composed of white working class mothers, who display a monstrous femininity and displace racism onto the domestic sphere of the white working class maternity. On the second day on New Orleans integration, the scene of rowdy protesters becomes front-page news across the nation as a mob of white teenagers caused a riot in the city. The Hartford Courant reports, Temperamental teen-agers—running in packs of 100 and 200—broke the peaceful mixing of the races in New Orleans public schools Tuesday…Police arrested at least 11 persons, including a blonde girl who bit the hand of an arresting officer…the teen-agers put into action the better-controlled anger of parents who shouted derisively as four 6-year-old Negro girls entered two white schools for their second day of integrated education. 68 The article continues to describe the chaos and returns to the blonde (white) girl; The blonde girl who ran afoul of the police was carrying a sign reading “Go home, police. Your kids may sit with niggers.” She fought fiercely to avoid arrest, finally being dragged to the police truck. The atmosphere was deceiving. It was almost homey and gay with neighborhood bars and soda fountains doing a brisk business and children dancing in play. But, behind the pseudo-Mardi Gras appearance lurked deep resentments. Mrs. Alta Drews, holding the arms of her fifth-grade pony-tailed daughter vowed she would leave the state if her children 220 could not attend segregated schools. Her sentiments echoed those of many of the hundreds who watched the schools. A heavy-set woman wearing toreador pants carried a sign reading, “Four Negroes raped our children.” She said she referred to a story in the New Orleans States Item reporting the arrest of four Negro teen- age boys charged with the aggravated rape of a 16-year old white girl Monday night. 69 The New York Times printed on its front page a picture of white teenage girls demonstrating against integration. The article oddly ends with the story of the four black youths accused of raping a white teen-age girl. These articles portray the convoluted sentiments around Southern femininity and race. The women are described are unbecoming, wild and uncivilized, contradicting the docile images of femininity. The articles also reference the “danger” of black masculinity to white femininity, but the juxtaposition of uncontained white femininity and black masculinity create a paradoxical portrait of gender and race, illustrating the shifting racial and gender ideologies. Despite the protesters and Louisiana government’s vocal resistance to Federal and State Court demands that schools begin integration, moderate and liberal white citizens initiated a small campaign within the city to assist white families who wanted their children to attend the integrated school. The Save Our Schools (SOS) organization was led by a white mother, Mary Sand, and included 2,500 members who conducted a “quiet campaign” and provided transportation to students and parents who wanted to attend the two elementary schools. The reputation of New Orleans, whose largest industries were tourism and trade, was a concern among business leaders as newspaper and television accounts depicted daily the angry mobs and described the segregationist protests as 221 nightmares. According to a New York Times article that focuses on the moderates of New Orleans, “forty-six clergymen of all major faiths” issued a public plea to end the violence and demonstrations in the local papers: “Responsible citizenship calls for respect of law and order,” asserted the advertisement in the city’s two daily newspapers. “In this period of unrest, we of New Orleans can achieve the greatest stature in the eyes of our fellowmen by conducting ourselves with charity and dignity and by adhering at all times to the teachings of our churches.” 70 Asked why “responsible citizens of the Frantz school area had not spoken up,” a Catholic priest responds, “The decent people here haven’t spoken up because they can’t. When the Governor and the Legislature and all the state officials refuse to take a stand for decency and law and order and when even the city officials begin every statement with ‘I am in favor of segregation but—‘[sic] how can you expect us to solve these problems?” 71 The article continues with the explanation that, “there is a fear of the Citizens Council, whose opponents often find themselves referred to as Communists. There is a fear of being labeled an integrationist, with a possible loss of business, social status and friends.” 72 And “unlike the Little Rock dispute, retaliation here has been directed against the whites.” 73 In late January 1961, one white student finally broke the white boycott at McDonough elementary. A journalist in the crowd at McDonogh reports, Some feet away, a comment by another mother expressed the conflict that has afflicted New Orleans since four Negro girls entered white schools for the first time in November. “My little boy is unhappy and wants to go back to McDonogh,” she said in a low voice. She looked around and said: “And I’d almost put him back if I wasn’t so scared of some of these other women.” 74 222 The demonstrators outside of the schools were principally white mothers, some with their small children. These groups of raucous women caught the attention of journalists and news reporters and became the main focus of the stories around the integration efforts in New Orleans. Newspaper reports call them “hecklers,” “angry housewives turned to hurling eggs,” “howling women,” and ultimately they become known as the “cheerleaders.” The New York Times “News of the Week in Review,” describes the scene: A cluster of shrieking white mothers set upon a Methodist minister taking his daughter, 5, to school, and pushed and grabbed him. At recess a Roman Catholic priest drew a swirl of cursing women as he approached the school to accompany the minister and his daughter home. “Bastard!” they screamed. “Communist! Nigger lover!” Later a score of women attacked a white mother escorting her daughter from school. 75 The black press presents more vividly detailed stories on the “cheerleaders.” The national edition of the Chicago Defender printed an article capturing a more animated and descriptive image of the women: “They oughta lynch the dirty black dogs,” screamed a woman in front of the William Frantz integrated school. She was one of about 40 regular members of a crowd…They curse, shout and insult white parents who insist on taking their children into the school with a lone Negro girl. Police call the hard core of the crowd “the cheerleaders.” But the cheerleaders don’t cheer—they jeer. Their “uniforms” consist of toreador pants, flat shoes, tattered coats and multi-colored bandanas. They complain when they are referred to as peaceful demonstrators. “Peaceful?” snorted one. “What do you want us to do, kill someone so you can say it’s violent?” Most of their aggression had consisted of taunting, shoving, pushing, kicking and spitting. But Thursday someone threw a stone that cracked the window of an automobile bringing a white child and her mother home from school. 76 The article identifies several of the women in the crowd and their nicknames: 223 The unofficial leader of the group of women is named Elsie, but police call her “Mother” because she brings them coffee. “Mother” is 29, and has two boys in a Roman Catholic parochial school. She fears the church schools will be the next to integrate…Her most consistent adversary is the Rev. Andrew Foreman, a Methodist minister who has never missed bringing his five-year-old daughter Pamela Lynn to kindergarten. “He is a stupid, nigger-loving minister who is making trouble,” “Mother” said of Foreman. Biggest of the cheerleaders is a tan, muscular woman called “The Fullback,” because she is tall and heavy. She said integration “will lead to intermarriage and result in murders and rapes.” Ramona, another cheerleader is a thin redhead who wears thick glasses…”Every time I see that nigger come out of this school I want to kill her,” Ramona said. Lil, her freckled-faced friend, said “I’ve taken milk to sick niggers and I’m not mad at these four little girls…but I’m worried about four years from now.” 77 Even Ebony focuses on the congregation of women in their coverage of the events of New Orleans. In the 1961 February issue of Ebony, the New Orleans desegregation events were reported in an article entitled, "The Shame of New Orleans," with the subtitle "Romantic city of pleasure turns into hotbed of hate." The opening paragraphs capture the disruptive events; New Orleans--until recently proud if its cosmopolitan past--today smarts from its notoriously bigoted present. Because of the mob action of a relatively few cursing and jeering women, the former tourist paradise now serves the world as an example of strife and hate. For the curses…were heard as clearly in Africa, Asia, and Europe as in the streets of New Orleans…The subsequent white boycotts of the schools, and its aftermath of bloody rioting by truant white youths and rowdy mothers lent substance to an earlier prophecy…that (Louisiana's) resistance would make Little Rock 'look like a picnic.' 78 Again it is the out of control woman/mother, destroying the image of romance and the traditional Southern white femininity trope, that disturbs and attracts the media's, and world's, attention. Appearing at the bottom of the page, is a photograph of the female crowd yelling at a car with the caption, "Unmotherly mothers." 224 James Hicks, an African American reporter who covered many civil rights stories, including Emmet Till, writes a moving and frightening report of his witnessing of the women. He begins, I’ve been threatened in Atlanta, GA. And thrown in jail in Sumner, Mississippi— all because of my race—but I’ve never experienced anything like I experienced in New Orleans last week. The strange part of it was that I was only mildly threatened…But in New Orleans—while both me and my people were the indirect causes of the hatred I saw—it was not directed at me or any other Negro when I saw it. And brother, I saw it. I saw it in its embryo stages and I saw it in its maturity. I think it was the embryonic stages which unnerved me the most. 79 Before launching into his description of the protesting women, Hicks uses the metaphor of the surgeon to introduce his description, however within the context of the story, the surgeon is a mad scientist, experimenting on the brain of an innocent baby: Can you imagine a brain surgeon in a laboratory working feverishly to change the brain of a normal baby into that of a maniac? Can’t you just about picture this man with all his skill, cunningly and diabolically, twisting the mind of the Figure 34 and 35: Protesting mothers outside William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. 225 innocent trusting child who is too young and too trusting to suspect anything? Can you imagine such a thing? Well that’s just about what I saw at New Orleans. The only difference was that the “laboratory” was a public school and the “surgeon” was the child’s mother. 80 He continues to describe his interaction with his children in telling them that he is going to New Orleans for a story. His children are concerned about his safety, but he reassures them that he will be safe. After this tender moment of his own parenting, he tells the story of his interaction with one mother in the crowd: A few hours after saying this to my kids a jet plane had me standing in the center of the loudest, wrongest group of women I have ever laid eyes on. A lonely little Negro girl has just entered the all-white William Frantz School in New Orleans and some of the women who had come to bar any white people from taking their children into the school were talking to a group of us newsmen of whom I was the only Negro. One of the most vocal of the women, a Mrs. Crews, was facing me directly as she blasted everybody under the sun who ever breathed the word integration. And she punctuated just about every one of her sentences with the words “those black bastards” or those “nigger loving bitches” depending on whether she was referring to Negroes, or the white women who were willing to let their children go to school with Negroes. Now get this picture: Mrs. Crews had a suckling baby in her arms and whats more Mrs. Crews suckling baby was busy at that very moment suckling at Mrs. Crews breast! (When the baby started to cry she simply had unbuttoned her dress, pulled out one of her breasts and put it in the baby’s mouth. All this was done in full view and within two feet of the eight or ten reporters). Standing at Mrs. Crews feet and tugging on her dress was her other child a tow-headed kid who must have been all of 4 years old. He took a liking to my portable radio which was hung around my neck and he spent his time reaching up for it while his mother told all of us reporters what “a bunch of bastards” the members of my race “really are.” As the little tot reached up for my radio I looked down on him and smiled—then I looked up again full in the face of his mother. Mrs. Crews saw what the tot was doing out of the corner of her eye and she rapped him on the head and said “let that alone” just as a million other mothers might have done. Then she went right back in saying that all Negroes were “Communist bastards” who should be “put on a boat and sent to Russia.”…At last Mrs. Crews did run out of words and then she turned to go. By this time the little tot at her feet had succeeded in reaching my radio at intervals and he and I had exchanged admiring smiles over his success. It was obvious that to him I was just another man who had something that caught his eye. And then 226 the little tot turned as his mother started for home. And there was a sign on the back on my little new found friend—that said “I Hate Niggers!” That was the hardest slap in the face I have ever received in any story anywhere in the Deep South. It made me sick the rest of the day. 81 The following week, Hicks follows up with a second article “Maids of Orleans,” which continues with amazement at the jeering women outside William Frantz School: Frankly before I tangled with those housewives in New Orleans I had a feeling that I as a man of the streets knew many many things about low life and low living that the average sheltered housewife simply did not know. I think I was justified in thinking like this: After all as one of the male species I’ve been hustling in the streets all my life where everything and I do mean everything happens…These New Orleans women came up with a new kind of cursing. I don’t know what to call it. I’ve never heard anything like it before. I have labeled it “situation cursing.” The way they do it is this: They picked out Mrs. Gabrielle [a white mother bringing her child to school] and then they built a situation around her and a Negro man and then they proceeded to actually tell what their sick minds felt aught happen in the situation. For instance they would say: “You dirty nigger loving bitch I suppose you’d like to have a nigger man tonight who would …” and then they would proceed to outline in the most gory detail the most wild lascivious conduct between male and female that one can possibly imagine to say nothing of experience. And as soon as one woman would finish such a narrative at the top of her voice, another New Orleans housewife would say “No—that’s not what this so and so wants—she wants a nigger to …” and then she would be off on the wildest sex tale right there just waiting for a chance to throw a few of the women. All of it shook me up—but what shook me up most was the kind of wild sex experiences that these housewives talked about. I swear I heard some of those women make up “situations” for Mrs. Gabrielle that I never dreamed the average housewife had ever heard of to say nothing of being willing to speak it in public. I mean this was the kind of low slimy muck that you only hear in Army barracks among frustrated men. Where these women ever heard such talk is beyond me as a man. I just don’t believe a man would sit down and talk like that to any woman and I’m sure these women hadn’t experienced any of things they said. How did they get this way? I finally said to myself “sick, sick, sick” and I began to wonder how many more southern minds were like that for after all these were average housewives. 82 With similar astoundment, author John Steinbeck, in his travelogue Travels With Charlie: In Search of America, witnesses and describes the confrontation between angry mobs and 227 Ruby Bridges at William Frantz. And like Hicks and other “outside” observers, the image of the African American girl becomes secondary in the discourse of the event. In fact, Steinbeck, in his literary approach, constructs her as a tiny speechless insect, a mite, that he must interpret and speak for. He emphasizes her small size and chooses the word "extract" to describe the girl being helped out of the car by U.S. marshals. She is a bug, plucked by the political system and placed on display for the crowds to threaten and the nation to observe. Despite his idiosyncratic, and racist, metaphor, it is not the image of the little African American girl that captivates Steinbeck's imagination, but rather the angry crowd, composed of white mothers. He writes the following description: late in 1960, the incident most reported and pictured was the matriculation of a couple of tiny Negro children in a New Orleans school. Behind these small dark mites were the law's majesty and the law's power to enforce… I had seen photographs in the papers every day and motion pictures in the television screen. What made the newsmen love the story was a group of stout middle-aged women who, by some curious definition of the word "mother," gathered every day to scream invectives at the children...she shoved through the dense crowd quite near enough to me so that I could see her coat of imitation fleece and her gold earrings. She was not tall, but her body was ample and full-busted. I judge she was about fifty. She was heavily powdered, which made the line of her double chin look very dark…She wore a ferocious smile and pushed her way through the milling people…The show opened on time. Sounds of sirens. Motorcycle cops... The crowd seemed to hold its breath. Four big marshals got out of the car and from somewhere in the automobiles they extracted the littlest Negro girl you ever saw, dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round. Her face and little legs were very black against the white…The little girl did not look at the howling crowd but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll, and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school. And the child was even more a mite because the men were so big. Then the girl made a curious hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle of her first skip the weight bore her down and her little round feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards…The papers had printed that the jibs and jeers were cruel 228 and sometimes obscene...No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted…But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate...These blowzy women with their little hats and clippings hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. There was the demented cruelty of egocentric children...These were not mothers, nor even women. 83 Similar to Hicks, Steinbeck creates a freak show scene composed of monstrous and uncontained femininity gone wild. Steinbeck is fascinated by the grotesque women, "who are not women." Both Hicks and Steinbeck are shocked by the working class “monstrous feminine,” which are constructed in their narratives as the embodiment of American racism. 84 As with the Emmett Till coverage, southern racism is displaced onto the bodies of the working class, distancing the middle and upper classes from the overt practice of white supremacy. Unlike Carolyn Bryant’s public silence, these working class white mothers display a carnivalesque spectacle of uncanny grotesque bodies and base language. Thus, not only is racism mapped onto working class but working class maternal bodies, while, correspondingly, the national antidote for overt and violent racism is embodied in white liberal paternal power. Throughout the 1950s, there was a general concern of mothering and its effect on (white) masculinity. It was a fine balance that mothers needed to manage in the forties and fifties; according to historian Elaine Tyler May, “mothers were praised for doing their jobs well, but if they were not attentive enough or were too attentive, they became the decade’s villain.” 85 In the early forties, writer Philip Wylie created the term “Momism,” which was, 229 the result of frustrated women who smothered their children with overprotection and overaffection, making their sons in particular weak and passive…Wylie argued that the debilitating effects of Momism would seriously weaken the nation and make it vulnerable to an enemy takeover. 86 “Momism” was a threat to a strong nation and blamed for what was perceived as deficient American masculinity in the forties and fifties. May claims men who were deemed irresponsible, immature and weak and displayed abnormal heterosexual behavior that did not lead to marriage was considered deviant, suspect and susceptible to un- American influences, such as Communism. 87 In his work on masculinity in Hollywood movies in the fifties, Steven Cohan remarks on how cold war narratives “imagined the political differences between the Soviet Union and the United States in gendered terms, picturing cold war conflict as a battle between masculinity and femininity, with perverse sexuality serving as the dominant trope for representing perceived imbalances of power.” 88 Cohan’s references political science scholar Michael Rogin’s work which, points out that cold war narratives typically close with the free man triumphing over communist agents while remaining, paradoxically, dependent on “the armed might of the state.” Such a resolution ends up making the United States and its communist enemies comparable in their techniques of a state power (militarism, espionage, surveillance). In order to evade this ideological contradiction, a false antinomy “between motherhood and communism” appears to resolve the contradiction by raising the Red Scare one notch to a higher level of cultural paranoia, the fear that absorption by the communist empire is like engulfment in femininity. 89 Already, cold war narratives pit masculinity, representing democracy, against femininity. The spectacle of protesting mothers and disruptive femininity exposes the perverse underbelly of American culture in a time when the U.S. was attempting to transcend overt racism and endorse itself as moral and political leader of the global world. Unbridled and 230 degenerate femininity paired with visible violent racism threatened the democratic standing of the United States. The women protesting outside of the New Orleans’ elementary schools shock the (black and white) male observer--Hicks, Steinbeck, and various other journalists--for not exuding the feminine qualities proscribed to American housewives at the time. These working class women upset gender roles and it is difficult to discern what is more monstrous to the writers, that these women express white supremacist and segregationist values, or their crossing of gendered boundaries. In her work on horror films and the maternal, Barbara Creed discusses the “horrors of unbridled maternal power” and the longing to express female desires, specifically anger. 90 One of the monstrous aspects of the maternal is often “the child is transformed into a visible image of its mother.” 91 According to Creed, “the horror film consistently places the monster in conflict with the family, the couple and the institutions of patriarchal capitalism.” 92 Using Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection and woman, Creed argues that the female monster is “abject because she disrupts identity and order…she does not respect the dictates of the law, which set down the rules of proper sexual conduct.” 93 Hicks’ and Steinbeck’s account of the female protesters exhibit Creed’s notion of the monstrous maternal. While these women express a white conservative working class political view that may resonate with some white citizens, focus is placed on their maternal embodiment (or disembodiment). What is often missing or faintly alluded to in the accounts of the protesting mothers is the 231 connection to the larger political movement of the White Council and the white supremacist (male) state government leaders who supported segregation, such as prominent district attorney Leander H. Perez, Sr. and Governor Jimmie Davis, or even simply the women’s husbands. Veiled behind these monstrous women is southern white male privilege. Lauren Berlant argues in “National Brands/National Bodies: Imitation of Life” that American citizenship is “veiled by rhetoric of the bodiless citizen,” which is represented by white male patriarchal privilege. White male privilege is non-corporeal and invisible, while women, African Americans and, I would add, other minority citizens in the U.S., are “embodied citizens,” who “never have the privilege to suppress the body.” 94 These female protesters embody the monstrosity of white supremacy and racism for observers, while white male (both white supremacist and liberal author) privilege and practice remains concealed. Ironically, as racial theories were moving away from biological determinism and antiracism was associated to democratic political development, public rhetoric linked poor southern white working class bodies and biological factors to racism. In the Emmett Till case, the NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins makes the following statement to explain why Bryant and Milam murdered Till: “It was because it was a boy, that they went there. They had to prove that they were superior. They had to prove it by taking away a fourteen-year-old boy. You know it is in the virus, in the blood of the Mississippian. He can’t help it.” 95 Mamie Bradley-Till refers to Bryant and Milam as “monsters.” 96 In an article in the Jackson Daily News, in an attempt to distance 232 Mississippi with Bryant and Milam, the article refers to the killing as “the act of a depraved mind, or minds…Intelligent Mississippians can only suppose it came about in the sick mind of men who should be removed from society by due course of law.” 97 In a September 17, 1955 article in the African American newspaper Chicago Defender, it questions “What angers can reach the proportions where white men are inspired to do bloody violence to a child? What fury can wipe the minds clean of reason and morality—and indeed Christian forbearance?” It concludes, “The fact is, the white men involved in Emmett’s lynching are sick—sick with racial prejudice, a disease that plagues the South today.” 98 In that same issue, Louis E. Martin questions, in his weekly column, the source of Southern racial hatred and equates the white racist man as a deformity of mankind; For 200 years violent impulses have been built up in the Negro by the brutal, cruel savagery of whites like those who mutilated the body of the boy from Chicago. This reservoir of hatred among Negroes has profound and historic depths and yet, awful as it is, it can be understood, explained and analyzed. We know why a Negro may hate a white American. What is the great mystery, what I have never understood and what no one has explained to my satisfaction is why the white American so violently hates the Negro. 99 Martin concludes, “This is a queer animal, this prejudiced white man, and I suppose he too is one of God’s children. Well for my money, God can have him.” 100 In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (which will be discussed later in this chapter) Bob Ewell’s hatred, which includes racism, is described as something beyond psychological: “He was out of his mind,” said Atticus. “Don’t like to contradict you, Mr. Finch—wasn’t crazy, mean as hell. Low-down skunk with enough liquor in him to make him brave enough to kill children… Atticus shook his head. “I can’t conceive of a man who’d—“ 233 “Mr. Finch, there’s just some kind of men you have to shoot before you can say hi to ‘em. Even then, they ain’t worth the bullet it takes to shoot ‘em. Ewell ‘as one of ‘em.” 101 In 1956 news accounts on the second year of integration in New Orleans, the “jeering faces of white women...the symbol of school desegregation in New Orleans were absent and dismissed for their lack of “class; “the four new schools to be desegregated Sept. 20 are in the uptown area of New Orleans where middle and upper middle class families live. McDonogh No. 19 and Franz were in poor sections of the city the most difficult to bring about social change.” 102 As these examples indicate, the source of racism and hatred is transferred onto the lower class white bodies in biological and sociopathic terms. Berlant states, “we can see a real attraction of abstract citizenship in the way the citizen conventionally acquires a new body by participation in the political public sphere. The American subject is privileged to suppress the fact of his historical situation in the abstract ‘person’.” 103 The law-abiding citizen, in this case the white middle and upper class, is able to remain screened off in the abstract body, despite their political stance; “it’s not because they are interested in integration as such but in the unfavorable image” the protesters created. 104 As a result, racism is embodied by the disrupting citizen, particularly one who crosses multiple lines of identity, and systematic racism, in effect, can flourish in new masked forms. 234 The Feminine Problem In her book Framing the South: Hollywood, Television and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle, Allison Graham argues that in the post-Brown v. the Board of Topeka, KS. Hollywood era, filmic narratives about the South exemplified the spectacle of southern decay: The mansions, juleps, and magnolias remained, but the residents of the screen South now began to enact the psychological crises of a dwindling subculture. Repression, hysteria, and sexual dysfunction were the new southern stories, as hothouse whites raged against the dying of a caste…Imagining themselves the last specimen of unadulterated whiteness, southern neurotics boasted of bloodlines while displaying all signs of pathological inbreeding. 105 Graham asserts that post-Brown Hollywood refined and perpetuated the stereotype of the white southern redneck as embodiment of American racism and tainted whiteness. Hollywood narratives, according to Graham, “of the civil rights era imagine the twentieth-century South as an arena of white—not black heroism.” They offered “the spectacle of racial redemption…with the expulsion of the lawless redneck from southern society. 106 The depiction of racist rural whites, Graham argues, was not new, but “in the post-Brown Hollywood, blackness but all disappeared from the screen as intraracial confrontation assumed interracial connotations, and white battled white for cultural supremacy.” 107 Gender plays a significant factor into these post-Brown Hollywood narratives and who is capable of being redeemed and embraced back into white southern society. In her analysis of southern segregationist resistance in the mid-1950’s, Graham observes the theme of “mongrelization” and the protection of white femininity become central motifs: 235 In the aftermath of Brown, the southern white woman became a pivotal figure not just in the propaganda strategies of segregationists but in the narrative strategies of the movies themselves. For all the apparent liberalism of the major studios’ message movies, one of their most insistent projects throughout the 1950s and 1960s was the rescue and resuscitation of a threatened race. With public education now contested territory in a racial war, the reeducation of America’s most wayward whites—poor southerners—became crucial to the reclamation of the South and, more importantly, to the redemption of white America itself. 108 The southern white poor and working class became convenient scapegoats for the (white) nation, and the protection of idealized white southern femininity became difficult to maintain and contain. By the end of the fifties, not only was southern white femininity being challenged, American (white) domesticity and the middle class housewife was descending from her pedestal and being questioned by the emerging feminist movements of the sixties. Critique of the fifties American housewife and domestic containment was entering public discourse. Elaine May Tyler describes the political conscious that developed in the late fifties as a reaction to the ideology of containment and conformant: In private life as well as foreign policy, containment seemed to offer the key to security. With security as the common thread, the cold war ideology and the domestic revival reinforced each other…But postwar domesticity never fully delivered on its promises. The baby-boom children who grew up in suburban homes abandoned the containment ethos when they came of age…Gradually, in the early 1960s, an increasing number of white middle-class Americans began to question the private therapeutic approach to solving social problems. Among the first to criticize the status quo were postwar parents themselves. In 1963, Betty Friedan published her expose of domesticity, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan gave a name to the “problem that has no name” for career homemakers. 109 Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, published in 1963 and a key text in shaping second- wave feminist thought, is saturated with allusions to disease and pathology in its 236 discussion of the state of entrapped women and men in domestic containment. Friedan writes, There are frightening implications for the future of our nation in the parasitical softening that is being passed on to the new generation of children as a result of our stubborn embrace of the feminine mystique. The tragedy of children acting out the sexual phantasies of their housewife-mothers is only one sign of the progressive dehumanization that is taking place. And in this “acting out” by the children, the feminine mystique can finally be seen in all its sick and dangerous obsolescence. 110 According to Friedan, “the feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive;” these women are trapped in “comfortable concentration camps” (connecting women’s oppression to racial genocide) and women may only escape by “putting forth an effort—that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of home, to help shape the future” by discovering and fulfilling “their own unique possibilities as separate human beings.” 111 Friedan labels the feminine mystique as a disease, creating “walking corpses” as seen in Nazi concentration camps, pathological, and beget (white) mothers who destroy and devour their children by displacing their dreams onto their children. Friedan’s “problem with no name” describes the experience of the white middle-class housewives, as Jacqueline Jones argues, “black women, with more and more of their families ‘crammed on top of each other—jammed and packed and forced into the smallest possible space’—could claim no mystique that inspired public celebration.” 112 Despite Friedan’s generalization of American women, her work denotes the larger cultural critique of white contained domesticity and white motherhood. 237 Taking these historical and cultural accounts as background, the following section will examine the unease around racism and white mothers and how these two threads of gender and white supremacy intersect in fictional narratives that center around children. Three films, Imitation of Life (1959), To Kill a Mockingbird (1963) and A Patch of Blue (1965) will be discussed; each exhibiting different concerns and representations, but all displaying the social anxieties accompanying the destabilization and shift of hegemonic powers and the mapping of these tensions onto the ‘problem’ of white maternity. The common themes uniting these films together are the attempts to deal with racial issues, racism, families and children. Within the context of historical events framed above and the emerging “racial break” in the firmly established white supremacist system, representations of race began to diversify, even if still based in stereotypical models, and became more prevalent in mainstream media. 113 However, images of black children in the imaginary space of film, which historically is a rare occurrence, seem to recede. Accordingly the films discussed below primarily deal with images of white children, but are entangled with race, the redemption of white femininity and the monstrous maternal. In addition, by 1960 the American film industry began reflecting the shifting social landscape due to a variety of factors. With the introduction of television into American homes, the film industry experienced a decline in mainstream audiences. With TV’s ability to immediately bring powerful images of the civil rights struggle, “Hollywood and independent filmmakers inaugurated explicit, socially relevant films addressing volatile civil right matters for racially segregated and declining mainstream movie audiences.” 114 238 American film in the sixties “reflected and refracted society’s newfound willingness to confront America’s complex racial politics on both the cultural and political fronts.” 115 The sixties also foster the dismantling of the Hollywood studio system and Production Code, which allows the film industry to transition and gradually adapt to the social times. Like Aldo Ray’s character in Three Stripes in the Sun, when racial issues are portrayed in Hollywood films, racism more often than not became an individual’s problem that needs to be overcome rather than a problem with the United States’ social system. In the films below, racism becomes a problem in the home closely linked to maternal forces, and it is through individual guidance of liberal paternal figures--the Gentle Warrior--that enlightened refined femininity emerges. Imitation of Life Douglas Sirk’s remake of the 1934 film Imitation of Life and popular novel was released in 1959. Much has been written on the film and of Sirk’s use of melodrama as social critique. 116 While my discussion will not focus in great detail on the film or the vast amount of scholarly work on the film, it would be an odd exclusion not to acknowledge as it is often recognized as a quintessential American narrative of the fifties concerned with race and the maternal. What is of particular interest to me is the film as a marker in the production process and narrative shift that would occur in Hollywood during the sixties. Imitation of Life was Sirk’s final Hollywood film, due to both illness and his assent to the new style of filmmaking: 239 I had outgrown this kind of picture-making which in a way was typical of Hollywood in the fifties and of American society, too, which then tolerated only the play that pleases, not the thing that disturbs the mind. I felt a totally new Hollywood would soon be in the making, a Hollywood open to pictures like Easy Rider—at any rate, pictures of a very different brand, and a different style. But I felt I wasn’t young enough any more to wait this out… 117 It is appropriate that a film that demarcates an endpoint of the Hollywood studio system is a narrative that critiques motherhood and race, as both were under social criticism. Sirk’s Imitation of Life represents a white fantasy and “longing for interracial unity.” 118 Yet, Sirk emphasizes the impossibility of a happy home, a critique of America’s superficial and commodified culture, and as Lauren Berlant argues “exposes the form of the white woman to the commodification she has for so long displaced onto the black woman’s body.” 119 The film’s narrative trajectory follows the rise of Lora Meredith from jobless widow to popular theater star, while focusing on the relationship and struggles between Lora Meredith, Annie Johnson their daughters, and the complications of race. When first introduced, Annie is an African American unemployed single mother and her light-skinned daughter expresses desire to pass for white. The women’s children bring them together when Lora loses Susie at the beach, a sign of poor mothering, and Annie watches over Susie until she can be reunited with her mother. The two children quickly become friends, and as Lora and Annie watch the children play, Annie slyly probes if Lora would like a live-in maid to take care of Susie and things at home. Annie discloses she is available for the position although Sarah Jane would be part of the package--“my baby goes where I go”—contrasting Lora Meredith’s inability to keep track of her own daughter. Initially, Lora declines the offer, and as she and Susie begin to head home, it is 240 revealed that Annie and Sarah Jane live “no place.” Sarah Jane begins to cry, “Mommy, I’m tired. I want to go home too.” Witnessing Sarah Jane’s forlorn cries, Lora Meredith invites Annie and Sarah Jane home, which begins their lives together. This moment is the only instance that appears to be a genuine selfless act on Lora Meredith’s part. Both mothers are revealed to be inadequate for different reasons. Lora Meredith focuses on her career and relegates Susie’s emotional needs to Annie. In the melodramatic scene of Lora confronting a teenage Susie about her feelings for Steve, Lora’s love interest, Susie claims, “Annie’s always been like a real mother. You never had the time,” and confronts Lora’s maternal ability: Susie: And how about a mother’s love? Lora: Love? But you’ve always had that. Susie: Yes, by telephone, by postcard, by magazine interviews. You’ve given me everything but yourself. Unlike Lora, Annie’s “problem” is her body that inscribes Sarah Jane’s own body as black. Likewise, home for Sarah Jane positions her as black. For her to live her fantasy as white she must disentangle herself from her mother and home. After she runs away, in a letter to her mother, she declares, “Mama, if you really want to be kind, really a mother, don’t try to find me. Just pretend that I died or was never born. This is my life and I’m going to live it my way.” For Annie to become the mother Sarah Jane wants, she must separate her black body from Sarah Jane’s “white” body and deny her daughter’s existence. Soon after, Annie becomes “tired,” sick and dies. Berlant argues “Anglo- and African-American women live the effects of their national identity directly on the body, 241 which registers the subject’s legitimacy according to the degree to which she can suppress the ‘evidence’.” For Berlant, the “evidence” is the body and she states, “American culture legitimacy derives from the privilege to suppress and protect the body.” 120 Annie is only able to suppress her body in death. While Annie’s death is the suppression of her black body, the last scene of the film reveals blackness through the crowd gathered for the funeral and Mahalia Jackson’s performance, rather than the elimination of it. According to Sirk, “The funeral itself is irony. All that pomp.” 121 When asked by film scholar James Harvey, “But surely there is no irony when Mahalia Jackson sings. The emotion is large and simple and straightforward.” Sirk replies, It’s strange. Before shooting those scenes, I went to hear Mahalia Jackson at UCLA, where she was giving a recital. I knew nothing about her. But here on the stage was this large, homely, ungainly woman—and all these shining, beautiful young faces turned up to her, and absolutely smitten with her. It was strange and funny, and very impressive. I tried to get some of that experience into the picture. We photographed her with a three-inch lens, so that every unevenness in the face stood out. 122 Harvey asks, “You don’t think the funeral scene is highly emotional?” Sirk responds, “I know, I know but I was surprised at that effect. When I heard how audiences were reacting too that…But that was the reaction of American audiences.” 123 Sirk’s scene of “pomp” and the uncanny fail due to Mahalia Jackson’s body, voice and the embodied power of her as an African American cultural and political figure. Despite the strange camera angles in the church scene, Mahalia Jackson’s performance overrides the ironic twist Sirk was attempting to produce. The culture and the power of the Civil Rights 242 movement bleed into and unravel the white male foreign director’s scene. The black newspaper Chicago Defender distinguishes Mahalia Jackson as the powerhouse of the film in an article entitled, “Mahalia Jackson Gives ‘Imitation’ New Gospel Kick.” The article claims, One of the kicks theatre goers will get from seeing the picture “Imitation of Life” is the religious fervor offered in the singing of Mahalia Jackson, divine gospel singer. The old version screened back in the thirties was favored with religious music but could hardly boast of a soloist the equal of Mahalia. As expected the number Miss Jackson does helps the film plenty…in Mahalia Jackson Hollywood now boasts a single with potency equal to its acting stars. 124 The dynamism of blackness and the Civil Rights movement disrupt the dominant narrative. The funeral is the only time groups of African American people appear on screen. Annie is an active member in the black community, which is only revealed in her death. Within the attendees of the church service and the street are a mix of black and white spectators. Lora Meredith, Susie and Sarah Jane, who arrives wailing with guilt as the coffin is placed in the carriage, sit in the back of a black limousine, secured from the crowd. The camera captures the reunited women huddled together in the same frame. Steve is also in the limo, but is shot separately, existing in a detached space from the maternal. This final sequence expresses a nascent cultural longing for another way to be, particularly around racial relations, yet it is unclear and ambivalent in regards to what this alternative way of being is. 243 With Annie’s black body absent, Sarah Jane’s direct connection to blackness is gone. Lora Meredith continues in her melodramatic and superficial ways. Sirk’s apparent intention was to suggest a hopelessness of change. He states, In Imitation of Life, you don’t believe the happy end, and you’re not really supposed to. What remains in your memory is the funeral. The pomp of the dead, anyway the funeral. You sense it’s hopeless, even though in a very bare and brief little scene afterwards the happy turn is being indicated. Everything seems to be OK, but you well know it isn’t. By just drawing out the characters you certainly could get a story—along the lines of hopelessness, of course. You could just go on. They’re all sitting in the limousine together—until everything starts to go wrong again, which it would for sure. 125 The funeral scene not only leaves the audience with the “pomp of the dead,” but also the black community. With both Mahalia Jackson’s performance and the image of the black crowd in the streets, the film hails the burgeoning civil rights movement. In Sirk’s discussion of Imitation of Life, he believes, The only interesting thing is the Negro angle: the Negro girl trying to escape her condition, sacrificing to her status on society her bonds of friendship, family, etc., and rather trying to vanish into the imitation world of vaudeville. The imitation of life is not the real life. Lana Turner’s life is a very cheap imitation. The girl (Susan Kohner) is choosing the imitation of life instead of being a Negro. The picture is a piece of social criticism—of both white and black. You can’t escape what you are. Now the Negroes are waking up to black is beautiful. Imitation of Life is a picture about the situation of the blacks before the time of the slogan “Black is Beautiful’. 126 Although based on a story and stereotypes that are outdated, Sirk strives for social critique which goes unrecognized at the time of its release. In the African American newspaper Dailey Defender, an article entitled, “’Imitation of Life’ Adds Real Imitation,” begins with, ‘Imitation of Life’ publicity guys already goofing by printing ‘sensational’ ads to read: ‘the color line won’t stop me, ma! I look, feel, think white…and I’m going 244 to marry white.”…What we’d like to know is—where do these guys get the stuff that Negroes WANT to be white???...Such plots for stories is strictly out of style—in fact it went out with the bustle—and in these days when Negroes are achieving success in every field—why would the boys at Universal, who have NO way of knowing how a Negro feels, have the nerve to dramatize and publicize such lines? 127 The article refers to Universal’s publicity of the film. As for the filmic narrative, many black critics chastise it for its obsolete story, particularly at that historical moment, but praise Juanita Moore and Jackson for their performance. White critics dismiss the film as “corn” and “soapy,” and interpret the story and Sirk’s direction literally while also critiquing female sensibilities. As one critic writes, the film “contains the sort of bathos that invariably stimulates the hearts of patrons, particularly women, whose emotional resistance is low. It is this kind that used to be called a ‘woman’s picture’ until the feminists let out a howl. It still may be called a ‘tearjerker’ without any pointed offense to any group.” 128 The “tearjerker” moment is Annie’s funeral and Mahalia Jackson’s performance; “A funeral replete with a spiritual solo by Mahalia Jackson, is the handkerchief-puller at the end…And still it is doing big business, for all its bathos and banality. People sit there and suffer with it, suffer pleasurably, twist their hands and weep.” 129 Another critic writes, “Men and women were sniffling and red eyed…if you like a good cry, this melodramatic affair may be for you: but I thought the story’s age showed unbecomingly. While I’ll grant you that some of the performances in the final scenes are excellent and that Mahalia Jackson sets just the right mournful note for the deathbed and funeral scenes…” 130 One reviewer connects the (white) women’s place within the culture of domestic containment with the melodramatic tears: 245 ‘Despite all the basic falsity if character, situation and social problem, the emotional onslaught is so powerful that it must appeal mightily to the handkerchief trade. ‘The performers do their jobs with sufficient skill to accomplish this purpose, and as the curtain closes at the end of a veritable volley of blown noses, sniffles and snuffles marks the successful return of Fannie Hurst’s most lugubrious tangle with interracial, maternal, financial fingerlings of a day when the FEPC had not yet cleared a path out of the kitchen.’ 131 Despite the criticism, the film was a huge box office success. While unclear if audiences consciously detected the social critique of Sirk’s melodrama and the ambiguous celebration of blackness, the final scene obviously inspired an emotional impact, which perhaps comprised some amount of transracial compassion. Returning to the concept of home and the black mother, home in Imitation of Life is a maternal feminine space and initially appears to be refuge from the racist and sexist realities of American society; however Sarah Jane’s desire to pass for white brings attention to the inherent racism in power structures between the two women and in society. The “happy” home is an “imitation of life,” a façade of white superficiality. The death of Annie reveals the emptiness of each woman’s life and that the foundation of Figure 36: Mahalia Jackson in Imitation of Life. Figure 37: The black crowd in Imitation of Life. 246 white power is Annie’s (outdated image of) blackness. After her death, the individual black body dissolves, with the unveiling of the black community and spirit, embodied in Mahalia Jackson and the crowd on the street. In the crowd, black children make their first appearance in the film. As the film shows various medium shots of the crowd observing the procession of the band and funeral carriage, there is one close-up that privileges the face of a small black boy, who dons a hat. This is the only shot of the crowd that favors an individual amongst the crowd. Next to this boy is another boy who has his back toward the street and is peering in a bakery window at a chocolate cake. Innocence, community and consumerism are collapsed into this single shot. Furthermore, the boy with the hat is placed in a position of performance as he is guided by an adult male hand (and by Sirk) to remove his hat as the funeral carriage moves past. Four years later in 1963, a similar performance would be repeated with John Kennedy, Jr.’s salute to his father, which was a staging by his mother Jackie Kennedy. 132 Childhood is a performance, as is Lora’s role as a mother. For Sirk, there is no redemption, even within childhood. Yet, Mahalia Jackson’s performance at that particular historical moment breaks the ironic intent, offering a moment of insight and possibility. 133 The story of Lora and Annie harkens back to the cultural narrative of Mamie Till-Bradley and Carolyn Bryant. Behind the black mother arises the black community. Although Annie’s black body is a problematic element to her ability to mother Sarah Jane in a white supremacist society, her martyrdom allows for the power of the black community to surface. In similar fashion, Emmett till’ martyrdom and the force of Mamie Till- 247 Bradley’s public fight for justice provides momentum to the modern Civil Rights movement as racial paradigms shift. The white mother in both narratives is skeptically questioned, if not critiqued. However, Lora Meredith’s upper class status, allows her to bypass white supremacist criticism, after all she supports Annie and Sarah Jane. Carolyn Bryant’s working class status and historical subject positions her as a principle agent and source of America’s racism. The following two films continue the critique of white working class femininity, while locating liberal paternalism as savior. To Kill a Mockingbird The film To Kill a Mockingbird is a narrative with themes of unredemptive femininity and the death of innocence within a white fantasy of liberal racial tolerance. Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, with great public success, and was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. 134 The story and the film is told from the point of view of Scout Finch reflecting on when she is a young girl growing up with her brother Jem and father in the segregated South during the 1930s. Her father Atticus Finch is a prosecutor who defends Tom Robinson, a black man accused of attacking and raping a white woman. Since his introduction to popular culture, Atticus Finch has become a leading role model of transracial empathy and social justice. 135 And I would argue that Atticus Finch is the domestic Gentle Warrior that guides not only his children, but white audiences, to a sympathetic understanding of difference; as Miss Maudie, describing Atticus, states, “some men in this world are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us.” While the story is celebrated for critiquing racial injustice in the segregated South 248 and calling into question the long history of lynching, the story--both novel and film—is actually concerned with redeeming whiteness, displacing racism on the southern poor, and critiquing a particular white femininity. In her book Framing the South, Allison Graham argues that in the modern Civil Rights era “the reeducation of the white woman was crucial to the reclamation of the South itself” and in her analysis of three films, The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Wild River (1960), and The Miracle Worker (1962), she claims that the “reeducation” of the southern white woman, in particular the “backwoods” low class woman, “could occur only through outside intervention.” 136 However in To Kill a Mockingbird, there is no rehabilitation for adult womanhood, and it is not an outside force that provides enlightenment. Progressive white femininity must be raised by the proper male model, and only then is she redeemed. The film opens with Scout, as an adult woman, recalling the summer she and her brother Jem met their friend Dill, which begins the events of the story: “Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning; ladies bathed before noon, after their 3 o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum.” This opening account recalls the romantic image of Southern gentlemen and women, an image the story will complicate. Scout’s mother is absent from the story, having died when Scout was young. She has no memories of her mother, and therefore no standard of white femininity to mirror. Calpurnia, “the (black) cook,” is the closest maternal figure in Scout and Jem’s life, by displaying a command of the household and disciplinary action 249 of the children, yet the film relegates her to a minor character. Scout is a tomboy and part of the amusement of the story is her rebellion against being placed in the traditional feminine position—Jem’s worst insult to her is that she “act(s) more like a girl all the time.” The story never reveals the adult Scout so there is ambiguity as to what type of woman Scout grows into—however the voice of the narrator speaks in a silky Southern drawl that conjures up the romantic image of the Southern belle. And although it is Scout’s voice that is the active voice, it is one that only recalls the past and memories of childhood. The other white feminine presences in the film are Miss Maudie, Mrs. DuBose, and Mayella Ewell. The film presents Miss Maudie’s role as the caring (white) neighbor to “balance” Calpurnia’s role as caretaker of the Finch’s children. Her presence is minimal and can hardly be considered a model. Mrs. Dubose represents the old South, still clutching to Confederate history, and is mean, delusional, out of touch, and a force the children try to avoid. Mayella Ewell is the daughter of Bob (Robert E. Lee) Ewell and is the young white woman who accuses Tom Robinson of rape. Mayella is only seen on the stand in the Robinson trial. It becomes apparent through Atticus’ defense that she is lying about Tom Robinson’s attack. The Ewell’s are a poor white farming family, with Bob Ewell as only parent; again the maternal figure is absent. It is implied that Bob Ewell beat Mayella and that the two of them conjure up the story about Tom Robinson in order to hide Mayella’s desire and advances toward Tom. While Mayella is a victim of her father’s abuses and social class, she is also an active participant in the acclamation 250 against Tom, knowing that her story as a white woman against a black man has grave consequences in the culture of Southern segregation. On the stand she becomes crazed and is the antithesis to the traditional distressed white damsel, displaying deviant sexuality, which in turn arouses sympathy for Tom Robinson. In his closing arguments, Atticus explains, She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance. But my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man's life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt. Now I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She’s committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society. A code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She must destroy the evidence of her offense. But what was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson - a human being. She must put Tom Robinson away from her. Tom Robinson was for her, a daily reminder of what she did. Now what did she do? She tempted a Negro. She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable. She kissed a black man. Not an old uncle, but a strong, young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards. Mayella represents the decaying myth of the white woman in danger of the black brute, and the unreliable logic of traditional segregationist culture as it is she who is revealed as the brute and the black man is the moral and upstanding citizen. By depicting the white southern woman who claims rape as “poor white trash” and deceitful, the film critiques the long history of southern lynching explanations of black male citizens. 137 Racism and racial injustice is manifested as an illness of the poor, and Mayella is presented as irredeemable. She embodies the cheerleaders who stood outside New Orleans’ elementary schools, and a figure the American public could project the source of the problematic racial relations in the United States. It is no longer the black male that is the threatening figure, but the poor white woman and man. This conveniently re-writes the 251 reality of white aristocratic power structures that stoked the fears of the myth of the black male rapist to solidify white unity at the expense of crass-racial class unity. As with Lora Meredith, the middle and upper white class are able to remove themselves from implication and involvement of racial injustice and oppression. The title To Kill a Mockingbird refers to the death of innocence. While there are many “innocences”--such as Jem and Scout’s childhood innocence, Tom Robinson’s innocence--that are destroyed in the course of the story, it is Boo Radley’s innocence that is endangered and must be saved. The mockingbird symbolically represents innocence in the story. At one point in the film Atticus explains to the children, it’s a “sin to kill a mockingbird… because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's gardens, don't nest in the corncrib, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.” After Bob Ewell is found dead, Atticus believes Jem stabbed Ewell, but Sheriff Tate realizes it is Boo Radley who saved Jem and Scout by killing Ewell. Tate, coming to Boo’s defense, claims, There's a black man dead for no reason. Now the man responsible for it is dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time, Mr. Finch. I never heard it was against the law for any citizen to do his utmost to prevent a crime from being committed, which is exactly what he did. But maybe you'll tell me it's my duty to tell the town all about it and not to hush it up. Well, you know what'll happen then? All the ladies in Maycomb, including my wife, will be knocking on his door bringing angel food cakes. To my way of thinking, taking the one man who's done you and this town a big service and dragging him with his shy ways into the limelight - to me that's a sin. It's a sin. And I'm not about to have it on my head. I may not be much Mr. Finch, but I'm still sheriff of Maycomb County and Bob Ewell fell on his knife. Good night, sir. 252 Scout, overhearing Sheriff Tate and Atticus, remarks “Mr. Tate is right” and “it would be sort of like shootin’ a mockingbird, wouldn’t it?” alluding to Boo Radley as a mockingbird. This reference of Boo Radley to a mockingbird connects him directly to innocence, but because Boo represents whiteness, his innocence is redemption of white (male) innocence. Throughout the film Boo Radley is the mysterious and rumored-to-be violent, nocturnal and sociopathic neighbor. Boo is assumed to be the horrific element in the story, until the end reveals Bob Ewell as the monster who attacks the children on Halloween, and has Boo Radley coming to their rescue. When Boo Radley is finally seen on screen, he is pallid white with bleached blonde bordering on white hair. In the novel, Scout describes Boo with “white hands, sickly white hands that had never seen the sun, so white they stood out garishly against the dull cream wall…” and “his face was as white as his hands, but for a shadow on his jutting chin. His cheeks were thin to hollowness; his mouth was wide; there was shallow, almost delicate indentations at this temples, and his gray eyes were so colorless I thought he was blind. His hair was dead and thin, almost feathery on top of his head.” 138 In her analysis of the story, Graham argues that Boo Radley is the “Confederate Gray Ghost himself, a spectral gentleman,” but I would argue that Boo Radley is the specter of a primordial whiteness. 139 His innocence references a whiteness that reaches past the culture of segregation to a mythic- realm of pure, just and good whiteness. This primordial whiteness becomes another tactic for whiteness to detach itself from past racial injustices and systems of power. It is Boo Radley’s innocence that must be protected from society, and from “ladies who come 253 bearing angel food cake.” The ultimate justice Boo Radley commits is the protection of white children from the violent forces of Bob Ewell. While legal justice fails the black man and protects whiteness regardless if guilty, true justice is committed in the protection of white children, the symbolic future of whiteness. The middle-class paternal white home is also redeemed and positioned as a safe place for (white) children. The Finch house is surrounded by broken homes, Miss Maudie and Miss Stephanie are single older women without children, their friend Dill comes from a troubled single mother home, Mrs. Dubose is a widow, and the Radley home is a frightening dilapidated home whose inhabitants appear to be dangerous. Atticus Finch is a widower with children; the gentle righteous warrior who is to shepherd society and his Figure 38: Scout with Atticus, the domestic “Gentle Warrior,” in To Kill a Mockingbird. Figure 39: Scout with Boo Radley, specter of whiteness, in To Kill a Mockingbird. 254 children to the right and just path. As discussed in Chapter Two, this gentler and liberal form of masculinity functions with the absence of the maternal and its intimate paternal relationship with children. Bob Ewell is the antithesis to Atticus’ gentle warrior persona, due to his social class and lack of education. He, like Mayella, is unable to transgress his monstrous pathology. The children deride Atticus as being too old and inactive, but he proves to be the male hero who has respect of all citizens except for the Ewells, who are a sickness society needs to douse. Atticus is able to transcend both white and black space, as are his children. He is the only one to enter the Robinson’s home (not even the camera enters this space) and his children watch the trial from the segregated balcony reserved for black citizens. The story is about Scout and Jem’s loss of childhood innocence as they become aware of the social evils, such as racism, in society. But it is also about Jem transitioning from boy to adolescence and acknowledging his father as a role model and a man whose footsteps should be mimicked. As it is the close relationship with children that the Gentle Warrior may materialize, it is through children that social justice and human decency can appear. In the mob scene, in which several white male farmers gather at the jail to abduct and lynch Tom Robinson, Atticus attempts to hold them off with logical reasoning, but it is Scout’s child innocence that subverts the mob. Scout recognizes Mr. Cunningham in the crowd and begins to question him: Scout: Hey, Mr. Cunningham. I said, hey, Mr. Cunningham. How’s your entailment getting’along? Don’t you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I’m Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one early morning, remember? 255 We had a talk. I go to school with Walter. I go to school with your boy. He’s a nice boy. Tell him hey for me, won’t you? The mob quiets as Scout talks and the scene transitions to an awkward tense atmosphere as she addresses Mr. Cunningham. He is reluctant to acknowledge her, but as she mentions Walter, his son, it resonates and he recovers his individual senses. Cunningham responds to Scout, “I’ll tell Walter you said hey,” and orders the mob to clear out. In the novel, there is further emphasis on the impact of the children on the mob; Atticus states as he tries to explain to Jem and Scout how Mr. Cunningham, a friend and client of Atticus, would threaten him: He might have hurt me a little…but son, you’ll understand folks a little better when you’re older. A mob’s always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. Every mob in every little Southern town is always made up of people you know—doesn’t say much for them, does it?...So it took an eight-year-old child to bring ‘em to their senses, didn’t it?...That proves something—that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they’re human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children…you children last night made Walter Cunningham stand in my shoes for a minute. That was enough. The power of children is their ability to civilize. Harper Lee strategically uses the point of view of the child (told from the memories of Scout and based on Lee’s own memories) to transform the unenlightened culture of southern segregation and the United States. The story uses the child’s point of view to arouse empathetic understanding in the reader and audience. The story’s major theme of innocence is ambiguously intertwined with the theme of tolerance. Atticus’ advises Scout after she gets in a fight at her first day of school, “if you learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of 256 view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Scout must shed some of her childhood innocence in order to learn and “see.” Yet for the “uncivilized,” such as Cunningham, they must come into contact with childhood innocence in order to be reformed. Similar to the role of children discussed in the previous chapter, children hold the key to transformation. They are also agents who will grow into adults and represent America’s future; and possessors of the innate ability to instill a moment of emotional transformative reflection to expose the latent “civilized” qualities in adults. While white adult men, although not of the pathological lower class, possess the potential to renew and develop, black women, men and children are relegated to the background and given little agency. White maternal femininity is irrelevant and outdated in To Kill A Mockingbird –it is dead (Scout’s mother), barren (Miss Maudie) or distorted (Mrs. DuBose and Mayella Ewell) and irredeemable--and progressive white femininity must be reborn and raised with the Gentle Warrior male model. A Patch of Blue A Patch of Blue was released in 1965 and tells the story of a young eighteen-year-old blind white “girl” (Elizabeth Hartman) who has been sheltered by her abusive working class mother (Shelley Winters) and falls in love with a young compassionate black man (Sidney Poitier) who introduces and reeducates her to the ways of the outside world. The film was a low budget “literate” film, released by MGM, based on Australian writer 257 Elizabeth Kata’s novel Be Ready With Bells and Drums. 140 The film was received with high critical praise by both white and black press for the story and acting. The black newspaper New York Amsterdam News listed it as one of the top fifteen films of the year, 141 and the film was nominated for four Oscars with Shelly Winters winning for Best Supporting Actress. Although leaning towards the didactic side on interracial relations, most reviewers believed the film dealt with the topic tastefully and sensitivity. A Los Angeles Times critic writes, They have taken a very special situation and tried to give it ordinary, decent values—human (again that word) values. But it remains special, so they cannot quite conceal from us the wires they are pulling in order to impart credence and cohesion to this case of an 18-year-old white girl who falls in love with an older Negro without knowing about his color because she was blinded…the pair have handled this difficult theme with restraint. 142 Bosley Crowther of the New York Times appreciates the good intentions of the film, but wishes it presented the story with the “tough, terseness and reality of a hard documentary style.” 143 Surprisingly, little is made of the interracial relationship between Hartman and Poitier; a Los Angeles Times critic remarks on the lack of public commentary around the onscreen kiss between Hartman and Poitier, which comes two years before the kiss in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), often mistakenly referenced as the first interracial Hollywood kiss: Time was when a Hollywood screen kiss was Page 1 news. For movies it was an age of innocence in which kisses were timed like Olympic runners and passion was measured by the sale of popcorn…Therefore, it’s as much a social commentary as anything else that the kiss between Elizabeth Hartman and Sidney 258 Poitier in ‘A Patch of Blue’ has caused so little comment…The fact that so far this has not been the kiss heard round the world perhaps is more significant than that it even took place. 144 The absence of public commentary hints at a continuous shift in interracial relationships, while still not popular in society or legal in all states at the time. In the same Los Angeles Times article, Elizabeth Hartman comments on the kiss scene: “there was a moment when you couldn’t hear a sound from the audience—and that was the moment…at another screening, someone shouted, “There goes Alabama.” 145 In a Daily Defender review, Lawrence F. LaMar comments on Sidney Poitier cast “as Gordon Ralfe, an innocent victim of an attractive blind white girl,” and “the story, plot, and direction which provided the picturization in an American film production of the kissing of a white woman by a black man, is to be highly commended.” 146 LaMar refers to the black man as an innocent victim of the white girl, yet also as perpetrator in the kissing scene, which oddly positions Poitier’s character in the ambivalent stance of victim/participant. Regardless, the film demonstrates the shift in representation of the black man as threat to white femininity, and portraying white femininity as an active member in crossing racial boundaries. It can also be argued that in this narrative the complexion of the Gentle Warrior is mapped onto the black man Sidney Poitier. One cannot discuss this representational shift of black masculinity and the Gentle Warrior without noting the numerous and consistent roles of Sidney Poitier as the non-threatening black man and “hero for an integrationist age” in his film career. 147 A year prior to this film’s release, Poitier won the Oscar for Best Actor in Lilies in the Field (1963). Poitier 259 is often praised for being the first African American actor to win an Oscar and to become a leading man box office draw, but he is also severely criticized for his roles as the uberly nice, ideal, desexualized black man, the “Ebony Saint,” and reinventing old stereotypes for mainstream audiences to consume. 148 Film historian Donald Bogle notes that Poitier’s roles were “educated and intelligent. He spoke proper English, dressed conservatively, and had the best table manners. For the mass white audience, Sidney Poitier was a Black man who had met their standards.” 149 In A Patch of Blue, critics comment that Poitier seemed to be just repeating his role from Lilies in the Field as the black man who comes to the rescue of the white damsel in distress. Contextualized within black film history, the film can certainly be critiqued for continuing Poitier’s “Ebony Saint” role and doing little in enhancing black representation on screen-- particularly since black femininity is completely absent—but I am interested in how the film plays into the larger cultural integrationist narrative of the Gentle Warrior redeeming the white (marginalized) child (Elizabeth Hartman’s character). Racism in the film is again relegated as a symptom of the poor and working class pathology, particularly via the image of the girl’s mother, Rose-Ann, who is monstrous and unsalvageable. Although eighteen, Selena is referred to as a girl and child (both in the film and in the circulating press), and her social isolation ascribes her naiveté and innocence appropriate for a young girl rather than young woman. Selena lives in a one-room cold water flat with her mother and alcoholic grandfather. She is consigned to taking care of the household chores and threading bead necklaces for extra income. She begs to be taken to 260 the park and left there for the day to do her beading. Rose-Ann objects, but Selena is able, behind her mother’s back, to convince her employer and grandfather to occasionally bring her to the park. It is in the park she meets Gordon who comes to her aid when a bug flies down her shirt. It becomes apparent to Gordon that Selena is uneducated to the ways of the world, and he takes pity on her. The film follows the development of their relationship over the course of a week during which Gordon teaches Selena basic skills to survive on her own in the world. Tension develops as Selena cultivates romantic feelings for Gordon, and is further intensified, as the audience is cognizant that Selena is unaware that Gordon is a black man. Selena comes from a dysfunctional working class family. Her grandfather, Ol’ Pa, is incompetent, routinely gets drunk and is bullied by his daughter Rose-Ann; but he has a soft spot for Selena and is her only refuge for love in the family. Rose-Ann physically and emotionally abuses Selena and keeps her confined to the one room apartment. Rose- Ann’s sexuality is uncontained; and in a flashback sequence it is revealed that Selena as a young teenager is raped by a man Rose-Ann brings home one night. Rose-Ann is an overt racist and will not allow Selena to befriend nonwhites. When Rose-Ann discovers Selena with Gordon, a black man, she beats Selena and hatches a plan with a friend to open a brothel, leaving behind the neighborhood and her drunk and ill father Ol’ Pa, while intending to use Selena as one of her “working girls.” Rose-Ann is not completely without sympathy, but this is due to Shelley Winter’s multi-dimensional performance. She is motherless herself and her father displays the same working-class “pathologies;” 261 these characteristics urge the audience to view Rose-Ann as a victim of her class and a generational line of social illness. In contrast to Selena’s family, Gordon is kind, compassionate, educated, and a model citizen. Compared to Rose-Ann’s excessive and destructive sexuality, Gordon is self- controlled and privileges education and development of the mind over love and self- fulfillment. He cultivates feelings for Selena as he teaches her skills that will allow her to escape the confines of her family. Unable to act upon any feelings for Selena, he arranges to send her to a school for the blind. It is implied that when she is through with her schooling, there might be a possibility and space for their relationship. Gordon understands the social controversies a relationship between a black man and a white “girl.” Gordon’s brother, Mark (Ivan Dixon), a medical student, disapproves of the relationship and represents the growing black power and separatist movement. The press around the film mentions Winters as representing the white perspective, while Dixon represents the black perspective against interracial relationships: “Miss Winters, as the girl’s mother gives a professional characterization, showing the contempt many white people have for such entanglements as an integrated love affair. Ivan Dixon, as Poitier’s brother, gives a similar rendition from the Negro standpoint.” 150 However, Dixon’s disapproval is linked to the political movement of the time as demonstrated in the scene when Mark confronts Gordon about Selena, race and class: Mark: I don’t like seein’ you waste your time either. I think that girl comes from the trash heap. 262 Gordon: Maybe, but she isn’t trash. Give her half a chance, she could be something. Mark: You plan on providin’ that chance? Gordon: I think I can help. Mark: How? Gordon: Get her in a school. Mark: You plan on educatin’ a white girl? Man, that’s not your job. Let whitey educate his own women. They’ve never given us anything but a hard time. Gordon: Ok Mark. Let’s not get into a political argument. This is a personal matter...Look on race and politics we don’t agree. So let’s drop this. Mark’s problem with Selena’s whiteness is a political and class issue. Unlike Rose-Ann, his point of view has been developed out of political consciousness, whereas bigotry is a naturalized element of Rose-Ann’s character. In one of the final scenes of the movie, Selena escapes home to find Gordon in the park to inform him that Rose-Ann is moving her and starting a brothel. Rose-Ann, with Ole Pa, ventures to the park looking for Selena. She confronts Selena and Gordon and grabs Selena to take her home. Selena escapes her grasp, runs and ends up falling in Figure 40: Selena and Rose-Ann, the monstrous maternal figure, in A Patch of Blue. Figure 41: The crowd rejecting Rose- Ann in A Patch of Blue. 263 rosebushes. Gordon rushes over to assist her. Rose-Ann approaches Gordon and tries to pull him off: Rose-Ann: Take your filthy hands off my kid. Gordon: (slaps her hand) Leave her alone, Mrs. D’Arcey. Rose-Ann: (Addressing the white crowd forming around them) Did you see that? He struck me! He struck me! [Gordon and Selena stand up and begin to walk away. The crowd does nothing.] Rose-Ann: You can’t get away with this. That’s my daughter. Ain’t anybody gonna do nothin’? (As she yells this, the crowd just looks at her with distain and walks away) Selena, you come back here! You realize what you’re doing’? You fool! You little blind fool! Come back here! [Gordon and Selena turn around and walk back to the rose garden to pick up the music box Selena dropped. They pick it up and walk away.] Rose-Ann: Selena! (Rose-Ann grabs at Gordon and Selena) Selena! (Ole Pa pulls back Rose-Ann) Selena! Rose-Ann: (addressing Ole Pa) Whose side are you on? Don’t you care what happens to the kid? Ole Pa: She ain’t a kid anymore, Rose-Ann. This scene is Selena’s escape from Rose-Ann and the repressive position she was born into; it is her transitional moment, with the help of Gordon, to liberate herself of her familial and cultural baggage. Guy Green, the director of A Patch of Blue, notes that the third act of the film differs significantly from the novel. 151 In the novel, the crowd in the park chases off Gordon, and Gordon does not send Selena to school. However in the film, the crowd rejects Rose-Ann and allows Gordon to escort Selena away from her family. Up until this point, he has not revealed to Selena that he is black; however, Selena already knows this by way of Rose-Ann. Selena protests slightly in being sent away from Gordon and expresses she would rather stay and marry him: 264 Gordon: Selena, there are many kinds of love. Most of them have nothing to do with marriage. Selena: You mean you don’t want to marry me? Gordon: I believe there are reasons it wouldn’t work out. Selena: Because of me being blind? Because of where I come from? … Gordon: There’s something I want to tell you about me. Selena: I know everything I need to know about you. I love you. (Selena begins to feel Gordon’s face with her hands) I know you are good and kind. I know you are colored. And I... Gordon: What’s that? Selena: And I think you are beautiful. Gordon: Beautiful? Most people would say the opposite. Selena: Well, that’s because they don’t know you. This scene captures quite literally the theme of liberal color-blind love. Despite Selena’s acceptance of Gordon and Gordon’s feelings for Selena, he sends her off to school, on a hopeful note that they will be reunited. Figure 42: Gordon, the “Gentle Warrior,” helping Selena in A Patch of Blue. Figure 43: Intolerant mothers in A Patch of Blue. 265 Despite the film’s positive message of color-blind liberalism and love between races, the film displaces society’s problem of racism on working class mothers who are incapable of being transformed and redeemed. In a scene in the park, Gordon is escorting Selena from the restroom, careful of not physically touching her—both to teach her independence and aware of his own position and the social conventions of white and black relationships in public— and they walk by a pair of unattractive older women who are dressed in simple dresses pushing a baby carriage. They look at Selena and Gordon with disapproval. Selena, unaware of the women, expresses: Selena: It’s wonderful to have a friend. You know that’s going to be my favorite word from now on. Gordon: I know a better word. Selena: Well, perhaps friend doesn’t mean so much to you. I suppose you got lots of them. Gordon: A few. (Gordon turns around to look back at the women) Selena: Well, what’s your word then? Or is it a secret? Gordon: Uhh. Tolerance. Selena: Tolerance? I don’t think so much of that. What’s it mean? Gordon: Well. It means… Selena: Oh, I know. Like when I’ve got a headache, Rose-Ann says ‘you’ve just have to tolerate it.’ Gordon: Well, it means more than that. It means you don’t knock your neighbor just because he thinks or looks different from you. Selena: That’s a pretty good word too. I bet you are full of tolerance. Gordon: No, I’m not. Not by a long shot. In this particular scene and throughout the film, lack of tolerance is embodied by the white working-class female, particularly Rose-Ann. Ol’ Pa is shown to have feelings for Selena and objects to the way Rose-Ann treats her. He also has a moment in which he 266 expresses his exhaustion with life and that there is nothing he can do except drink to escape it. One feels that if given a chance, Ol’ Pa may be able to transform himself. Rose-Ann on the other hand is lost in her own bigoted selfishness. She is the cause of Selena’s blindness (throwing a bottle at Selena’s father after he caught Rose-Ann with another man, however the bottle and its content miss him and hit Selena) and loss of innocence (bringing a man into the apartment who ends up raping Selena). Selena, despite the loss of her sexual innocence, is still naive to the world and her blindness makes her unique and marginalized in mainstream society. She is able to be saved and educated by Gordon, and uplifted from girl to an enlightened and liberal woman. 152 All three films—Imitation of Life, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Patch of Blue-- discussed in this chapter demonstrate a problem with the maternal presence and race. While Imitation of Life is a scopic social critique worked through in terms of both black and white motherhood, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Patch of Blue place society’s ills on the working class and the ineffectual white mother, whether they be absent (as in To Kill a Mockingbird) or monstrous. Outside of these fictional worlds, motherhood and domestic containment were being questioned for various reasons and point of views. As Civil Rights gained ground and the spotlight was placed on America’s legacy of white supremacy from both within and outside of its borders, the message was clear that there was a problem with (the white) “home.” 267 The films and historical events discussed in this project demonstrate the anxieties and shift in racial identity and logics in the post-World War II and early Civil Rights era. While Steven Cohan asserts that (white) masculinity in the fifties was going through a crisis, I would argue that the model of the Gentle Warrior takes shape to help address the white male and broader social crisis in relation to shifting racial logics. Through children, white middle and upper class masculinity is able to remove itself from its problematic racial history and metamorphose into a modern leader for the “New Frontier.” As seen in this chapter, racism becomes a problem that is mapped onto the poor working white class and maternal forces. Children (the future) and the new color- blind liberal society need to be led by a just and fair paternal model. By the mid-sixties, American culture seems to take another shift. With the death of Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., the rise of Black Power, and the momentum of the feminist movement, the gay movement, and the Chicano movement, cultural anxieties take even more complex forms and representations. 268 Chapter Three Endnotes 1 Mamie Till-Mobley, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (New York: Random House, 2003) 200. 2 Dorothy Sterling, Tender Warriors (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958) 24. 3 Steven Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-68 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1996) 97. King was referring to Isaiah 11:6 from the Holy Bible, “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” See also Wilma King’s “Emmett Till Generation: African American Schoolchildren and the Modern Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954-1964,” in African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Wilma King interrogates the use of African American children as active political participants in the Civil Rights movement. 4 Shari Goldin, "Unlearning Black and White," in The Children's Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1998) 136. 5 Ibid., 136-137. 6 Ibid., 136. 7 William Faulkner, “Faulkner Calls Lynching Test of Man’s Survival,” Chicago Defender (September 24, 1955) 3. 8 Roland Barthes, “ The Great Family of Man,” Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972) 101. 9 Ibid. 10 The photograph was removed in New York and was not included in the traveling exhibit, so it is doubtful that Barthes knew about the original lynching photograph. 11 See Clenora Hudson-Weems, “Resurrecting Emmett Till: The Catalyst of the Modern Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Black Studies, vol 29, no. 2 (November 1998) 179- 188. 12 Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary of the NAACP made an official statement referring to Till’s death as a lynching. In reaction Mississippi’s conservative paper Jackson Daily News ran a five part editorial claiming Till’s death was a murder and that NAACP is trying to inflame the public by calling it a lynching. The brutal and lengthy history of lynching in the United States is more often than not linked to the culture of Southern segregation after the Civil War, even though it occurred across the borders of the South in the United States. 269 13 Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998) 200. 14 Ibid. 15 William Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” Look (January 24, 1956). Quote taken from PBS, “American Experience | The Murder of Emmett Till | Special Features,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature/sf_look_confession.html. 16 In Mamie Till-Mobley’s book Death of Innocence, she writes, “I had kept up with him [Bryant] and J.W. Milam in the articles I had read over the years. They were abandoned by all their supporters after the trial. I guess the white folks of the Delta didn’t appreciate having all the attention that Bryant and Milam had attracted down there. Bryant and Milam had trouble getting credit, blacks boycotted the stores their families had run, and eventually they had to pack up and leave. Things never really worked out for them after that. Their wives left them.” Till-Mobley, 262. 17 Hale, 238. 18 Hale, 292. 19 Huie. 20 Alfred Duckett, “Teenagers Give Meaning to Money: It’s the Worst,” Chicago Defender (October 1, 1955) 5. 21 “Readers Flood Defender with Letters bout Till,” Chicago Defender (September 24, 1955) 3. 22 “Behind the Headlines,” Pittsburgh Courier (October 22, 1955) 17. 23 Gail Gaston. “It’s Ike’s Responsibility,” Pittsburgh Courier (October 8, 1955) 27. 24 The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative, Ed. Christopher Metress (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002) 17. 25 Till-Mobley, 139. 26 “Hundreds Weep, Faint at Sight,” Chicago Defender (September 17, 1955) 2. 27 “Reign of Horror,” Chicago Defender (September 17, 1955) 2. Ike is President Dwight Eisenhower. 270 28 George Lipsitz refers to Walter Benjamin’s use of “presence of mind” to describe a precise awareness of the present moment, which one must have in order to understand the racial politics at play and the possessive investment of whiteness. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998) 2. 29 “Urges Purchase of Till Cards,” Los Angeles Sentinel (October 20, 1955) A8. 30 “100,000 Across Nation Protest Till Lynching,” Chicago Defender (October 8, 1955) 4. 31 “Letters to the Editor,” Los Angeles Sentinel (September 22, 1955) A9. 32 Louis E. Martin, “Dope and Data,” Chicago Defender (October 15, 1955) 9. 33 Evelyn Burwell, “The Youth of Our Nation,” Los Angeles Sentinel (October 20, 1955) C8. 34 “Blood on their Hands…,” Chicago Defender (September 10, 1955) 1. “all the perfumes of Arabia will not wash it away” refers to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and a reference to a line of Lady Macbeth’s when she can not wash the blood off her hands after the murder of the King. 35 “Letter to the Editor,” Atlanta Daily World (January 27, 1956) 4. 36 “Freedom’s Shame,” Atlanta Daily World (September 24, 1955) 4. 37 “World Shocked By Till Trial: Old, Young Leave Mississippi,” Atlanta Daily World (September 27, 1955) 1. 38 “‘Must Be True to Ourselves’—Humphrey,” Atlanta Daily World (October 18, 1955) 1. 39 Alice Dunnigan, “Washington: Inside Out,” Pittsburgh Courier, National Edition, vol. 51, issue 47 (November 21, 1959) 6. The Virginia school incident that is referred to is the September 1959 closing of public schools to avoid integration and white students placed in private schools. Mack Charles Parker was an African American man accused of raping a white woman in April, 1959 in Mississippi. He was arrested, but before his trial in May, he was abducted by white citizens from prison and killed. His body was found in the Pearl River and no one was indicted for his murder. 40 James L. Hicks, “Mockery of Justice Seen by writer at Miss. Lynch Trial,” Atlanta Daily World (September 29, 1955) 1. 41 Ibid. 271 42 Ibid. 43 Louis E. Martin, “Dope and Data,” Chicago Defender (October 1, 1955) 9. 44 Louis E. Martin, “Dope and Data,” Chicago Defender (September 24, 1955) 9. 45 Ibid. 46 Mamie Till-Bradley would later come under fire from the NAACP claiming she was trying to capitalize on her son’s murder in her tours for the NAACP. This eventually led to a break between Bradley-Till and the NAACP, but the NAACP would still use Emmett Till’s name in their advertisements and pamphlets. 47 Murray Kempton, “The Future,” New York Post (September 23,1955). 48 Ibid. 49 James L. Hicks, “Till’s Mother, U.S. Congressman seated at Jim-Crow Press Table,” Atlanta Daily World (September 21, 1955) 1. 50 Hale, 290. 51 Jacqueline Goldsby, “The High and Low Tech of It: The Meaning of Lynching and the Death of Emmett Till,” The Yale Journal of Crticism, 9.2 (1996) 266. Mamie Till- Bradley would later come under fire from the NAACP claiming she was trying to capitalize on her son’s murder in her tours for the NAACP. This eventually led to a break between Bradley-Till and the NAACP, but the NAACP would still use Emmett Till’s name in their advertisements and pamphlets. 52 Murray Kempton, “The Future,” New York Post (September 23,1955). 53 “The Nation,” The New York Times (Septermber 25, 1955) E1. 54 Goldsby, 267. 55 “Was Asked for a Date, Mississippi Woman Says,” The Hartford Courant (September 23, 1955) 10C. 56 James Edmund Boyack, “Courier’s James Boyack Hangs Head in Shame,” Pittsburgh Courier (October 1, 1955) 1. 57 James Gunter, “Wives Serious, Children Romp as Trial Begins,” Memphis Commercial Appeal (September 20, 1955), from The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative, ed. Christopher Metress, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002) 50. 272 58 Murray Kempton, “The Baby Sitter,” New York Post (September 20, 1955) from The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative, ed. Christopher Metress (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002) 53. 59 James Hicks, “Writer Reviews Passionate Closing Plea of Till Case Atty,” Atlanta Daily World (September 25, 1955) 1, col. 5. 60 For this project I will forgo asking what the proper punishment is for a (black) man. 61 See endnote 51. 62 Originally five girls were selected and two were to attend William Frantz. However, one of the girls decided not to participate, leaving Ruby Bridges as the only black student to integrate William Frantz elementary school. 63 “The Battle of New Orleans,” New York Times (November 15, 1960) 38. 64 Ibid. 65 The Hartford Courant (November 15, 1960) 10. 66 “Negroes Enter 2 Schools in New Orleans: Crowds Greet Them with Catcalls,” Chicago Daily Tribune (November 15, 1960) 3. 67 Ibid. 68 The Hartford Courant (November 16, 1960) 1. 69 Ibid. 70 Claude Sitton, “Moderates: Whites Who Are Willing to Accept Token Integration Begin to Assert Themselves,” New York Times (December 4, 1960) E3. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 “White Boy Breaks New Orleans Ban,” New York Times (January 28, 1961) 16. 75 “The News of the Week in Review,” New York Times (December 4, 1960) E1. 76 “La. Jeerleaders Rage 2 nd Week,” Chicago Defender (December 10, 1960) 2. 77 Ibid. 273 78 "The Shame of New Orleans," Ebony, Vol. 16, No. 4 (February 1961) 79. 79 James L. Hicks, “Seeds of Hate,” New York Amsterdam News (December 10, 1960) 10. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 James L. Hicks, “Another Angle: Maids of Orleans,” New York Amsterdam News (December 17, 1960) 10. 83 John Steinbeck, Travels with Charlie: In Search of America, 6 th ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1997) 189-196. 84 The “monstrous feminine” is borrowed from Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993). 85 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988) 74. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 94-95 88 Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) 7. 89 Ibid., 7-8. 90 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993) 46. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 Lauren Berlant, “National Brands/National Bodies: Imitation of Life,” Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, ed. Hortense J. Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991) 112-113. 95 Henry Hampton, Eyes on the Prize, DVD (PBS, 1987). 96 Till-Mobley, 181. 274 97 “Designed to Inflame,” Jackson Daily News (September 2, 1955) from The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative, ed. Christopher Metress (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002) 21. 98 “Savagery, Southern Style,” Chicago Defender (September 17, 1955) 9. 99 Louis E. Martin, “Dope and Data,” Chicago Defender (September 17, 1955) 9. 100 Ibid. 101 Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 8 th edition (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1960) 360-361. 102 Elsie Carper, “1960’s Shame Haunts South as School bell Rings,” The Washington Post (August 27, 1961) E1. The article does not mention that many of the protesters from the previous year were not from the neighborhoods of the two schools. 103 Berlant, 113. 104 Richard H. Parks, “New Orleans’ Hopes Rise For Calm School Opening,” New York Times (August 20, 1961) 1. 105 Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race During the Civil Rights Struggle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) 20 106 Ibid., 13. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., 16. 109 May, 208-209. 110 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1963) 392. 111 Ibid., 462. 112 Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1986) 235. bell hooks claims Friedan “made her plight of white women like herself synonymous with a condition affecting all American women. In so doing, she deflected attention away from her classism, her racism, her sexist attitudes towards the masses of American women. See bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 2nd ed., South End Press classics v. 5 (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000) 2. 275 113 Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) xiii. 114 Anna Everett, “Movies and Civil Rights,” American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2008) 45. 115 Ibid., 47. 116 See Lucy Fischer, ed., Imitation of Life: Douglas Sirk, Director, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 117 Jon Halliday, ed., Sirk on Sirk: Interviews with Jon Halliday (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971) 154-155. 118 Borrowed from Tara McPherson’s Reconstructing Dixie. See, Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 119 Berlant, 128. 120 Ibid., 132. 121 James Harvey, “Sirkumstantial Evidence,” Film Comment (July/August 1978) 55. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 “Mahalia Jackson Gives ‘Imitation’ New Gospel Kick,” Chicago Defender (March 14, 1959) 19. 125 Halliday, 151-152. 126 Halliday, 148. 127 “‘Imitation of Life’ Adds Real Imitation,” Daily Defender (April 27, 1959) 17. 128 Bosley Crowther, “Detergent Drama: ‘Imitation of Life’ in Familiar Soapy Vein,” New York Times (April 19, 1959) X1. 129 Ibid. 130 Mae Tinee, “Tears Flow at ‘Imitation of Life’ Film,” Chicago Daily Tribune (March 18, 1959) B6. 276 131 Richard Griffith, “Critics Cry at, Public Cries With ‘Imitation’,” Los Angeles Times (May 8, 1959) A11. FEPC refers to Fair Employment Practices Commission. 132 However, as Joe McElhaney writes about Kennedy, Jr.’s salute, “John F. Kennedy, Jr. not only salutes his father, but with this salute go the dashed hopes of his father’s administration, a gesture of resignation and profound mourning as much as one of strength and resilience, all of this encased in the body of a three-year old boy.” Kennedy, Jr. is a performer for the “symbolic benefit of the entire country.” See Joe McElhaney, “1963—Movies and the Little Soldiers of the New Frontier,” American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2008) 92-93 and 108. 133 In in the Break, Fred Moten refers to the gospel moan (in black performance), which located within rests an implied critique and the possibility of renewal. See Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) 194-196. 134 Even in 2009, To Kill a Mockingbird was voted most influential book, beating the Bible, according to onepoll.com. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/5148664/To-kill-a-Mockingbird- beats-bible-in-book-poll.html. 135 For example, AFI named Gregory Peck in his role of Atticus Finch as #1 Hero in film (see http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/handv.aspx), and he has been a model for lawyers, for example see “Being Atticus Finch: The Professional Role of Empathy in To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 117, no. 5 (March 2004) 1682-1702. Steven Lubert, "Reconstructing Atticus Finch." Michigan Law Review, vol. 97, no. 6 (May 1999) 1339–62. 136 Graham, 54. 137 Many historical southern cases are said to be influences on the Tom Robinson trial. The Emmett Till case is one and the Scottsboro case another. 138 Harper Lee, 362. 139 Graham, 23. 140 Hollywood was beginning to produce more low-budget “literate” films were geared towards the educated audience in the 1960s which after foreign and amateur films demonstrated there was a market for a more sophisticated film. The term literate in relation to film is borrowed from Peter Bart, “The ‘Big’Little Picture,” New York Times (April 11, 1965) X7. 141 “Year’s Best 15 Movies,” New York Amsterdam News (January 1, 1966) 13, col. 8. 277 142 Philip K. Scheuer, “’A Patch of Blue’ Recognizes Man’s Humanity to Man,” Los Angeles Times (December 10, 1965) D21. 143 Bosley Crowther, “Moving Story is Spoiled by Sugary Treatment,” New York Times (December 16, 1965) 63. 144 Don Alpert, “Breakthrough in Movie Kisses,” Los Angeles Times (December 12, 1965) B1. 145 Ibid. 146 Lawrence F. LaMar, “New Poitier Film Hits Racial Bias,” Daily Defender (December 14, 1965) 20. 147 Donald Bogle refers to Poitier as the here for the integrationist age. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1994). 148 Again see Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1994); and John Nickel, “Disabling African American Men: Liberalism and Race Message Films,” Cinema Journal, vol. 44, no. 1 (Fall 2004) 25-48. 149 Bogle, 175. 150 Jesse H. Walker, “Poitier in Two Could Win Awards,” New York Amsterdam News (December 25, 1965) 18, col. 5. 151 In Guy Green’s special director/writer commentary, Green mentions Poitier had significant input on this scene. Guy Green, A Patch of Blue, DVD (Warner Home Video, 2003). 152 Ironically, Guy Green gives credit to his wife for his taking on this color-blind liberal project and the film is based on a novel by a female author. Yet these women are non- American (English and Australian respectively) and represent the enlightened civilized “English” woman. Guy Green, A Patch of Blue, DVD (Warner Home Video, 2003). 278 Epilogue: After the Storm, a Return Home “We’re out here suffering, and not just because your skin is black like mine, but (show) some fuckin’ sympathy, compassion, empathy, anything.” 1 (Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, resident of New Orleans East, survivor of Hurricane Katrina disaster, confronting an African American New Orleans airport security agent in the aftermath of Katrina) “Racism is a grown-up disease. Let’s stop using kids to spread it.” 2 (slogan for the Ruby Bridges Foundation) New strategies, new tactics, are developed as those marginalized and afflicted by the power and greed of the racial state and dominant elites rouse their anger and discontent yet again. A new movement trajectory begins. 3 (Howard Winant) New Orleans, LA. Convention Center. September 2005. “We just need some help out here. It is just so pitiful. Pitiful! And a shame…We have over 3,000 people out here with no home, no shelter. What are they going to do? What we gonna do?...We just need some help and support.” These words came from Charles Evans, a nine-year-old African American boy stranded at the New Orleans Convention Center days after Hurricane Katrina. Immediately after the airing of Charles Evans’ segment on NBC news, Evans became “Hurricane Katrina’s littlest media star,” poster child for the disaster. 4 Following his impassioned plea, he did numerous interviews with NBC,. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences had him appear on stage at the Emmy Awards show just weeks after his introduction to the world. The Internet was abuzz with comments and concerns about his well-being, and good-hearted denizens expressed desires to send him gifts and even the occasional offer to adopt him. In the context of the mismanagement of the Katrina disaster, Evans’ mature and indisputable comments voiced what many citizens felt. Charles Evans emerged as a traumatized racialized body American citizens 279 could embrace. Journalist Gina Piccalo states, “he became the innocent on whom viewers could project their grief.” 5 In a follow-up story, two months later, on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, Williams opens the segment with: “Regular viewers of this network remember when they first saw him, most of all when they heard him…He had all the maturity that the public officials around him apparently lacked. And he had wisdom beyond his years.” 6 Williams’ remarks ascribe Evans with the “Knowing” child archetype. This concern for Charles Evans by the media and American citizens would seem to indicate continual progress in the development of racial empathy. 7 But are there any connections to the image and sentimental response to Charles Evans that relate to the images of the children in the early Cold War period? And more importantly, why does the African American child need to be traumatized for anyone to notice? And ultimately what does this reveal about race and racism today? Certainly audience response to Charles Evans demonstrates a different perspective towards the African American child-figure when compared to the period of the fifties and early sixties. As this project has demonstrated, the figure of the child has been used in American culture in a multitude of ways—many which have nothing to do with the actual child. The child-figure is often exploited as a cipher for adult anxieties around shifting values and paradigms. In similar fashion, embracing Evans as the “innocent,” avoids severe social critique, just as it avoids traumatized adult bodies. In follow-up stories 280 about Charles Evans, the intricacy of his situation is cryptically referenced; and as any reality T.V. star, the spotlight on Evans was short-lived. Despite the considerable initial interest, the expected donations and help did not materialize. One year after Katrina in 2006, NBC’s Campbell Brown reports on the only citizen who actually came to Evans aid. She is a single African American woman in New York, and discovered that in helping Evans, it is just as much about supporting his in-need extended family. 8 The reality of Evans’ situation is too complex for the framework of popular media, or to hold the attentiveness of most American citizens. 9 American society has made great strides in racial justice and democracy, but we cannot fall into the lull and belief that the work is over, or that racism does not exist. The election of Barack Obama as President, and the first African American First Family is a sign of continued racial progress, even a racial shift. We are in a transitional stage in regards to race, but it is a false assumption to believe “we are beyond race,” on both the individual and social level. Howard Winant argues the post-race position, “must be challenged in different ways: by disputing it through historical analysis, by contrasting its variations among nations as they have emerged in recent years, and by exploring the interplay between global racial dynamics and national racial formations.” 10 There is still much work to do; and our cultural narratives and images can always reinforce and reframe the distorted reality of hegemonic racial, gender, and class power structures; or inspire and remind us of possibilities and new optical logics. 281 Epilogue Endnotes 1 Spike Lee, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts, DVD (HBO Home Video, 2006). 2 Ruby Bridges Foundation, http://www.rubybridges.com. 3 Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) 216. 4 Gina Piccalo, “9-year-old becomes Katrina’s littlest star,” The Seattle Times (September 25, 2005) http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20050922&slug=katboy22. 5 Ibid. 6 “Inspirational Katrina Kid Thankful,” Nightly News with Brian Williams (November 23, 2005). 7 In W.E.B. DuBois’ chapter “Of the Passing of the First-Born” in The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois describes the joys and anguish of the birth and death of his first-born son in the “Land of the Color-line” for the political purposes of racial transformation through human compassion. DuBois notes the mixed blood of his lineage in describing his son to complicate the dichotomy of black/white; “Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue?—for brown were his father’s eyes, and his father’s father’s eyes. And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.” On the child’s passing, DuBois emphasizes the baby’s innocence, and rationalizes death as an escape and freedom from the segregated and racist world: A perfect life was his, all joy and love…he knew no color-line, poor dear—and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun...We seemed to rumble down an unknown street behind a little white bundle of posies, with the shadow of a song in our ears. The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women; they did not say much,--they only glanced and said, “Niggers!”…All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart,--nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil,--and my soul whispers ever to me saying, “Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.” DuBois’ essay paints an emotional, yet restrained, scene of mourning in a segregated society. Susan Mizruchi argues that the essay “records a stunning lapse of fellow feeling, an inability to see beyond the Black type to acknowledge a universal grammar of suffering.” In particular, the scene in which whites pass by is, 282 not just a lack of identification with Black pain, but the possibility that sympathetic actions have themselves become the pathway of estrangement. Where we expect to find instinctive recognition of another’s feeling, we now find race hatred. It is not simply that sympathy is absent; it is that sympathy is supposed to be there…when Whites look at these mourners and mutter “Niggers,” they are defining Blacks through their exclusion from sympathy as outside the borders of community. Racial dynamics and boundaries have adjusted since DuBois’ writing, but the longing to be recognized as human, the longing for connection and humanity, the longing for compassion from both individuals and the social systems remains. See W.E.B. DuBois, “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” The Souls of Black Folk (Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, LLC, 2008) 92-94; and Susan Mizruchi, “Neighbors, Strangers, Corpses: Death and Sympathy in the Early Writings of W.E.B. DuBois,” The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999) 273, 278. 8 She provides housing for Evans, his grandmother, and other relatives. Charles Evans is being raised by his grandmother. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Ramsey, Deborah Elizabeth (author)

Core Title Caution children crossing: home, integration narratives, and the gentle warrior, 1950-1965

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 05/06/2010

Defense Date 02/25/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Children,class,film,gender,masculinity,OAI-PMH Harvest,postwar culture,Race

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McPherson, Tara (committee chair), Anderson, Steven F. (committee member), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member)

Creator Email d.elizabeth.ramsey@gmail.com,eramsey@cinema.usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3027

Unique identifier UC1481409

Identifier etd-Ramsey-3533 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-344516 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3027 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Ramsey-3533.pdf

Dmrecord 344516

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Ramsey, Deborah Elizabeth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu