Last week, in my look back at the movie version of the musical 1776, I mentioned learning, well into adulthood, that much of what I'd been told about American history wasn't true.
To be more specific, I found out that that left's narrative about America was largely libellous. That is, it fit the legal definition of "malice": Knowing information to be false but printing it anyhow, to further a grudge or agenda.
For instance: Everything I thought I knew about the Scopes Monkey Trial, an event used to ridicule American evangelicals for close to a century, was wrong.
Joseph McCarthy was (mostly) right.
The "research" touted by liberal heroes like Betty Friedan, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, Rachel Carson, and Mitch Snyder, to name a few β whose work fuelled societal upheavals that left numberless victims in their wakes β was conducted unethically or just plain made up.
Speaking of heroes, the left sure do love their "martyred" criminals, don't they? Turns out that contrary to popular belief, Alger Hiss was guilty. The Rosenbergs were guilty.
Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty too.
Theirs was the "trial of the century" of its time. In 1920, the two anarchists were convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during an armed robbery. Until their execution seven years later, the world's radicals orchestrated campaigns proclaiming their innocence β and condemning America's villainy for "persecuting" them.
Money was raised, of course, and petitions signed, and mass protests staged, with demonstrators numbering in the tens of thousands at any one time and place. Furious essays duelled in the nation's press, and many bad poems and songs were written (well into the rest of the century, because as I always say, "progressives" live in the past). Books too, of course, the most famous of which was a novel that touted Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence: Boston (1928) by Upton (The Jungle) Sinclair.
Sacco and Vanzetti's letters from prison became talismans for radicals around the world. Penguin released a commemorative collection on the 80th anniversary of the men's execution, hailing these epistles as among "the great personal documents of the twentieth century, (...) famous for the splendor of [their] impassioned prose."
Indeed, it became a fashionable article of faith that, surely, men who could write so affectingly couldn't possibly be guilty.
(By the way, this perverse "logic" isn't confined to the stupid, or even those of one political orientation: Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley were separately entranced by the writings of prison inmates, and campaigned for their release β only for these criminals to go on to harm more innocent people.)
Anyhow, it is one of Vanzetti's letters that sets the plot of The Male Animal (1942) in motion.
Originally a hit Broadway play by James Thurber and Elliot Nugent, the film concerns Tommy Turner (Henry Fonda), a college instructor who plans to read one of Vanzetti's letters to his English Composition class. When word gets out, the school's trustees, who've been zealously firing teachers suspected of being "reds," threaten Turner with the same fate.
Turner insists that he wants to read Vanzetti's letter merely to demonstrate that even someone who writes in "broken English" is capable of composing powerful prose. Politics has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Now, Henry Fonda could tell me, "My second of five wives DID NOT" β can't you just hear him? β "slit her throat with a razor after I demanded a divorce so I could marry a 20-year-old!" And I'd believe him.
And alas, in The Male Animal, Fonda's skill at conveying somber sincerity, arguably his greatest actorly gift, is deployed here β to return to that legal lingo β maliciously.
Professor Turner is a befuddled, cerebral naΓ―f to be sure, but despite his, Penguin's, and any random radical's protestations, Vanzetti's letters are inescapably political, however majestic (or mediocre) one judges his style to be.
Turner is on a firmer foundation when he defends his choice on free speech grounds, and proclaims correctly that a college is precisely where any and all ideas should be presented and debated. I wish Thurber had chosen to emphasize that earlier and more often; Turner's ever-changing motives muddle the film's message.
Anyway, Turner does read the letter (as you had guessed, because Henry Fonda.)
Again, given James Thurber's one-time reputation as A Great Writer, I'm floored that he considered a drug addict the moral equivalent of a convicted terrorist, or thought name-dropping Karl Marx was any more ameliorative. Were those examples the best he could come up with? Contrary to Turner's fulminations, murder is neither a "personal habit" nor a "political opinion," but conveniently, Sacco and Vanzetti's actual crimes β the reason they were, you know, writing from prison β are never broached in the film.
Presented without such context, Vanzetti's musings about sacrificing his life for the causes of love and justice and the brotherhood of man duly render the formerly hostile crowd in the auditorium mute with admiration. Burly, cocky, all-American Jack Carson is made to whisper, "Is that it? That's not such a bad letter," so you know what you're supposed to think.
(Hit Broadway play or not, how this movie got green-lit by the staunchly anti-communist studio heads at Warner Bros., I'd love to know.)
Twenty years after The Male Animal was released, the leader of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defence Committee told writer Max Eastman that "Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was innocent" β meaning, Vanzetti was an accomplice, which makes him, in fact, guilty under American law. A former member of the pair's anarchist cell admitted the same thing, on tape.
This wouldn't have been news to Upton Sinclair. While working on Boston, he met with Sacco and Vanzetti's lawyer Fred Moore:
"Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth. He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them." (...)
"I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point. I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case."
Those are excerpts from a cache of Sinclair's letters, serendipitously discovered in a California auction lot in 2005.
"This letter is for yourself alone," Sinclair wrote to his attorney. "Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter."
Meanwhile, he kept writing his novel, and lied.
As I've complained before, American conservatives have long been instructed to say that those on the left "aren't evil, they're just wrong."
Why can't it be both, and more?
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I feel better about my public school education in the 70s & 80s. I recall Sacco, Vanzetti, Hiss and the Rosenburgs as all being the bad guys.
I'm a huge film buff but I have never seen "The Male Animal." One reason is that a little Henry Fonda goes a long way for me except in a John Ford context. Fonda, for me. is summed up by his interchangeable performances in "Advise and Consent" and "The Best Man" - An overly-sincere, bromide-spouting and self-righteous stiff who is barely concealing something really creepy beneath the surface. As for Sacco and Vanzetti, they are an early reminder of the tenacity and success of the Left in creating martyrs and downloading propaganda to gullible white liberals and academics. Since Fonda was certainly the former and often played the latter he was the perfect choice to play the lead in "The Male Animal."
P.S. - Jack Carson was consistently more relaxed, watchable and entertaining then Fonda ever was.
The apples didn't fall far from the tree.
So we can add lefty rewrites of history to anti-scientific claptrap like Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb"
Another excellent column, with a feast of information in both it and the comments!
I believed that I had never heard of this "Sacco and Vanzetti." So spurred on by the information about Buckley's championing of Edgar Smith, which I have heard of, I looked up the story in a Buckley book that I have on hand (Right Reason). In the first page of his story, he mentions "Sacco and Vanzetti could have strangled Barbara Writers on the 'Today' show and we'd have books and magazine articles proclaiming their innocence." So it looks like I have heard of those two when I originally read the Buckley/Smith story.
I'm now interested in seeing this film, just to see what they do with the story, while knowing something of the background truth.
With regard to "Inherit the Wind," I do recall when seeing it thinking that whoever writes this stuff could not have been a Christian, because they don't seem to understand the faith at all.
These comments really are the best yet! I appreciate everyone weighing in with more info.
Well, that is pretty rich coming from Buckley... :-) I must say I never understood his appeal.
I vaguely remember a Saturday Night Live skit on "Inherit the Pride of the Wind" that absolutely ridiculed its subjects.
Loved the column, Kathy, and all the intelligent responses.
The label Conservative is worthless. It encompasses libertarians, fiscal conservatives, anti-abortionists, religious fundamentalists, neo-cons that are military hawks and the chamber of commerce types that are pro-business and pro-immigration. These groups have nothing in common across the board and sometimes are in direct conflict. The Left, on the other hand, always has a thread of socialism running through it. Giving away something for nothing is a strong advantage for the Left.
Thanks, Walt. Yes these comments are a feast of information. And you make a good point, but once labels are affixed, they stick. It's just easy shorthand and makes communication easier, if not clearer.
Until they run out of Other Peoples' Money. They're debasing the currency like the (most recently) Ottomans, Weimar Republic or (Don't Cry for Me) Argentina did. Wouldn't the world bank love to ensnare the US as their latest (and fattest) victim.
Buckley's behavior was demonstrably worse than Mailer's, with a higher body count, and he suffered fewer consequences. All of these things need to be laid at the right door: no, not Reason magazine, though they often fall for putrid soliloquies for violent offenders, but National Review's.
After Mailer's little pet spree killer Jack Abbott killed again, as he promised he would do, Mailer at least apologized to the victim's family, renounced his former position, and ceased to support him.
Buckley's pet killer was more lurid and evil. He kidnapped and stomped a young teen's head to pieces while sexually assaulting her, and then he seduced William F. while more bragging about than denying the crime. Yet Buckley relentlessly demonized the police who proved their case against Edgar Smith, sexually degraded the murdered teenage victim; lobbied for the killer's release and pulled political strings to get it done; got him published, and encouraged other conservatives to distrust law enforcement. He then refused to apologize or even comment when Smith, caught after yet another female rape/torture victim managed to throw herself out of his car and survive, thanked Buckley for helping his escape punishment for his first and subsequent torture-killings of women.
If anyone at National Review at the time possessed a shred of moral fortitude, they would have fired Buckley. Having less of a conscience than Norman Mailer is impressive but bad for fundraising?
The proper comparison to Buckley is Susan Sarandon, who, unlike Mailer, continued supporting Mailer's pet killer after his own post-celebrity-release-murderin'. Sarandon attended Jack Henry Abbott's next trial while she was pregnant and named her baby after the killer. Jack Henry Sarandon, now an actor himself, cannot be held responsible for being named that way, but he never altered his name and proudly uses his middle name to highlight being named after the killer.
William F. Buckley had the morals of Susan Sarandon.
Tina, I doubt that National Review could have fired Buckley since he basically WAS National Review. But to the best of my knowledge this spectacle didn't prompt a mass resignation from the magazine tells you a great deal of what you need to know about the publication.
National Review is the small press literary theory magazine of the right-of-center.
Not a compliment.
They're about as useful as the Eastern European structuralists who decided to avoid angering the Stalinist quangos by pretending to be studying the phonemes vibrating between syllables in poems.
Smart move in the short term: disastrous in the long.
"As I've complained before, American conservatives have long been instructed to say that those on the left 'aren't evil, they're just wrong.'"
In your earlier complaint, you named Ronald Reagan and Dennis Prager as those preaching tolerance toward the left. They're both ex-lefties, as are you and I. As are an august line-up of proud and outspoken conservatives (neo- and otherwise). I would suggest, humbly, that merely being leftist is not itself evil; rather, it is the behavior of the person qua leftist that marks his or her character.
"Why can't it be both [evil and wrong], and more?" Oh, it can. When did it become not just wrong to support the Soviet Union, but evil? On the execution of the Czar and his entire family? (Omelets and eggs, and all that.) The purges and famines in which millions perished? (Unproven [per the New York Times]! And anyway they had it coming.) Surely, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 should have removed all doubt. (Well, see, Hitler...) The Berlin Wall and the rest of the Iron Curtain? Hungary in 1956? Czecho in 1968? Say when. Some did, and became (neo)conservatives; most did not.
Credit to Bari Weiss for calling out the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the New York Times--but child, please. I'm as thick as two short planks, and I knew the Times was Pravda in pinstripes from 9/12/01 (my personal VL Day). Their demonization of W was second only to that of Trump, and a pretty close second if we're being fair. As a former Times-reading, NPR-listening lib, I have long said that anyone who relied on those media for their news and information are about as well informed as dimmest Neanderthal, but without the survival skills. The Times may be the worst (though the WaPo tries harder), but it merely leads a phalanx of falsifiers, a legion of liars, a-- (that's enough -ed.).
I'll confess my chief (can we say that anymore?) motivation for not reflexively ascribing evil to the Left is that's what they do to us. They're not shy in saying so. But if it is to come to some manner of civil war (which might be an improvement over the incivility of the moment), I will not fire the first shot, I will not secede. In the words of the martyred St. Rodney of the Angels, "Can't we all just get along?"
PS: I love more every day, and often quote, Mrs. Thatcher's dictum, "The facts of life are conservative." She also said, "First you win the argument, then you win the vote." I know she's right about the first point; I pray she's right about the second.
Josh, Prager has always drawn a clear distinction between Liberal and Left as well as between today's Liberal and Classical Liberalism. Both Prager and Reagan were Classical Liberals who fully embraced the Constitution and its founding principles. Today's Liberals are lost in our post modern world and are swimming in a sea of relativism and humanism. They have become unmoored from the Constitution and its founding principles which has turned them into useful idiots for the Left.
The Left has always been an evil force directly opposed to the Constitution and its founding principles because the Left lust after power and control over humanity. The pillars of our nation - our Constitution and founding principles, our love of God and family - all stand in direct opposition to the Left's objectives. That is why they hate us and this nation so much. They know that if they can destroy just one of those pillars they will be able to obtain the power and control for which they lust.
Our country and the world need to get a firm grip on the fact that lying, deliberate falsification of any kind, baseless slander and accusations are all, in fact, evil. It has almost become impossible to imagine this suffocating stench being removed from the air it is so commonplace. Being commonplace doesn't make these things not evil. For those who believe, Jesus called the devil the father of lies. That pretty much seals the indictment. I would say John 8:42-44 describes the Left about as succinctly as it can be done.
Right on!
Henry Fonda appears to have been a sleaze ball in his marriages which could give his daughter some excuse for her follies. At least she was apparently able to reconcile with him, which seems a better situation than that of Angelina Jolie and her dad John Voight. On the other hand, the fact that Voight is a vocal righty could be an insurmountable obstacle to reconciliation.
The human monkey, male and female, drifts naturally in the default leftward direction. If the direction is not corrected through sound upbringing, or rebellion against bad upbringing, or even just an inspired ability to learn lessons from life (mugged by reality), it passes from simple gullible folly, to outright folly, to entrenched delusion, to outright evil, which is the point where the devil is happy to take over and drive the individual.
Karl Marx was a case in point. One of those brilliant, mad, troublemaking 19th century philosphers, drunk on human reason, and following it wherever it led so long as it did not veer rightward into doing sensible work with one's own hands, or into revealed wisdom handed down from the generations, and above all not into what would today be called the God delusion. He, perhaps, did not go all the way into outright evil himself, but his successors in the manmade Marxist faith took it on to that level.
It's been decades since I've read Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", but I watched the film sometime recently and was appalled at the film's ending. As in The Male Animal Henry Fonda participates in a piece of unabashed propaganda for the Left.
I would love a Steyn or Shaidle backstory on Henry Fonda. Was he a force behind the film productions of The Male Animal and The Grapes of Wrath? Are there other Henry Fonda films with similar Leftist elements and in what ways did he influence them? Did he merely jump at the opportunity to portray leading characters in films he knew had elements, both subtle and overt, of Leftist propaganda? Or was he merely a useful idiot for Hollywood's Left?
I recommend Charlotte Allen's 2014 essay in the LATimes, "Why celebrate The Grapes of Wrath? It's bad history and bad fiction"
Voight rocks! From Deliverance (better book than film) to the Transformers movies.
Marxism is the purest form of slavery. "From each according to his abilities ;to each according to his needs." In capitalism, you get to negotiate the price and decide not to buy/sell if you can't reach a voluntary agreement. If abilities don't equal "needs", guess who becomes the master? And Mr. Lennin/Stalin/Mao/Pot/Castro/Maduro will take very good care of you. Ayn Rand's "We, the Living" is more history/autobiography than fiction.
Ann Coulter's book, "Treason," sets the record straight on the Left's heroes.
Alger Hiss was guilty. Her book led me to read Whitaker Chambers' book "Witness", which is beautifully written yet chilling in its description of communist infiltration into our country.
The lies have been repeated for so long that people really believe the Leftist version of US history. Our under educated population of useful idiots must be reached somehow or we will lose our republic.
Watergate was not about a small time break in, it was payback for Nixon's anti-Communist work when he was in Congress. Nixon kept an enemies list because he had a lot of enemies. The Hollywood of The Male Animal was full of Communists. Like some noxious weeds, they grew back.
I hope everyone has seen "Hail, Caeser!" It is an uproarious comedy about Hollywood in the early 1950s when the studios still protected their stars from scandal, and vast legions of screenwriters were active communists.
I haven't seen "The Male Animal", but I have seen the 1952 remake called "She's Working Her Way Through College". In the remake, the professor is played by Ronald Reagan, but the matter of conscience does not revolve around reading a letter by Vanzetti. Instead, the college scandal is the presence of a new student, a former burlesque dancer who used to go by the stage name of "Hot Garters Gardner". Ms Gardner is played by the lovely Virginia 'hold the" Mayo (she was great in Captain Horatio Hornblower).
The college administrators want to expel Mayo, but The Gipper sticks up for her. It's frothy and fun and sounds a bit more charming than The Male Animal. An interesting back story is that Mayo was a lifelong Republican and friend of Reagan's. Maybe that and the times led to them saying IxNay on ArxismMay.
So disappointed. Thought you were going to publicize a 1971 Quebec comedy Les Males about two backwoods lumberjacks fighting over a woman they have captured. Such a funny film featuring hunk Donald Pilon.
Every word that Prof. Turner speaks constructs the foundation upon which our 1st Amendment was built. Yet, it is completely implausible for Thurber's motivation regarding the Vanzetti letter's existence in the script to be anything but political. This should instantly set off flashing lights and alarms regarding the film's intent for anyone familiar with Vanzetti and his crimes.
It is indeed a "serpent in the garden" moment with the evil lie this time lusciously disguised and packaged in the hilarity and high-jinks of an innocent Hollywood rom-com.
As if there isn't enough evil to be found on college campuses today, we are now finding the CCP using its hairy hand to plant its pitchfork in our college campuses via its Confucius Institutes. The CIs offer loads of cash as well as speaking engagements in China that include lavish dinners and accommodations to the schools and select professors where the CI's exist. In return the schools and professors must toe the CCP line regarding all comments spoken and published about China and the Confucius Institute, allow China to supply the textbooks used by the CIs, and accept Chinese students to the university. These are just three of many requirements.
By way of the Confucius Institute the university then becomes an effective propaganda arm for the CCP and the CCP is nicely embedded in the university for stealing science and technology secrets. Thankfully the Dept. of Homeland Security is catching on and moving on the universities hosting the CIs. There had been 110 CIs in the US. It's been reduced to 70 but that's 70 too many. And China is clever, cash rich, and committed long-term to its objectives, so like whack-a-mole the CIs will pop up again in new locations and/or with a new identity.
Thanks, David. I really struggled describing that "faulty mechanism" in the film to myself, let alone to readers.
I was reminded of the "Hey, I'm just asking QUESTIONS" disingenuousness of conspiracy theorists. Ask away! We need people to ask questions. But we don't need people PRETENDING to ask questions, out of mischief and bad faith.
You're right: more and more colleges are kicking out their CIs, and China has even "rebranded" the whole enterprise in an attempt to take some of the stink off them. Too little, too late?
Kathy, I don't think it's too little, too late if we were to wake up and grow up. But as a nation our great success which has led to our great affluence is resulting in self-moronization (to use another of Mark's great coinages).
We've self-moronized to such a regressive degree that we've become consumed with trivial and unworthy issues (like preferred pronouns). We've made virtue signaling an art form. Add to that our internecine political warfare that is fed by a press that brazenly lies to us and is nearly completely derelict in its duty, and we are left constantly distracted and incapable of mounting focused and consistent long-term campaigns against serious internal and external threats.
China and Islam study us carefully. Our weaknesses have provided them with the opportunities they've needed to get their Trojan Horses inside our gates. Now they are each patiently fattening the calf they expect to eventually slaughter.
You are correct, virtue signalling is the fastest growing art form. It's inevitable that actors, whose only requisite skill is the ability to fool an audience by playing make-believe, are drawn towards this form of self-gratification. (I wanted to use a stronger term but it is Sunday after all!).
It's not just the current generation of luvvies. Their predecessors and often their relatives have been stealthily promoting the message for longer than most of us have been alive.
I teach part time for a university where many faculty and students feel the need to follow their names on correspondence with a list of their preferred pronouns. If anyone from the school wants me to display my preferred pronoun, it will be "Colonel".
Yet it's like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Can't China and the Middle East see that they'll quickly stagnate and/or starve to death if they extinguish Western Civilization?!?!
Neither China nor Radical Islam care about its people, or any other nation's people for that matter. Both are completely committed to world domination and the US is the biggest obstacle in their way. They have no problem if the world ends up looking like North Korea as long as they end up on top like Kim Jong Un.
I think it likely that the left champions the causes of people like the Rosenbergs, and Sacco and Vanzetti, and Angela Davis, not because they believe them to be innocent, but because they know they are guilty. Else, why are so few of the "innocent" people they support actually innocent?
I think the people at the top, running these campaigns to "Free so and so" know they are guilty and approve of their actions, while many well-meaning, gullible people at the bottom are duped.
They don't want a case where the person can be proved innocent, released and everyone moves on. They want a pretext for endless social justice war.
I believe there is a saying that goes something like, "The road to Hell is paved with well-meaning gullible people!"
Yes whole cottage industries build up around these causes. The Communist Party of America raised millions of dollars to "defend" the Scotsboro Boys and kept most of it. Which reminds me: Maybe we'll find out they were guilty too. Nothing would surprise me.
We'll never know the whole truth: the Scottsboro Boys were likely more sinned against than sinning, but, then again, as with so many famous lynching cases, so were the white women demonized for purportedly accusing them.
I say "purportedly" because they really didn't: a group of white hobos accused the group of black hobos of attacking the girls, who were jumping train cars to turn tricks to make money to survive like so many other people of all races and (at the time only two) genders.
The two girls tried to escape when the police stopped the train. They were detained, jailed, and threatened with prison time if they didn't testify against the "boys."
One did and was stalked by jerks like Emory Professor Dan Carter to the end of her life; one didn't and dined out with Stalinists for the rest of her life.
We'll never know. This will only grow more confusing as the gender theorists force us to remove the pronouns from the historical record.
The Scottsboro Boys case is famous because it was appealed to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that Due Process of Law guaranteed by the 5th and 14th Amendments required that any person who was being tried for a capital offense has a constitutional right to have competent defense counsel at trial, and that the court must provide such counsel for anyone too indigent to hire his own attorney. It was the most significant opinion authored by Justice Sutherland, the only Utah attorney ever appointed to the Supreme Court.
Indeed.
In subsequent years, most of the popular retellings of the story focused on the "heroic white judge" plots, such as Judge Horton's Boys. Sort of embarrassing.
Thank you, Kathy. Hope you are well. I find your reviews to be excellent and thought provoking. I think I'll skip this movie, though. It doesn't sound too uplifting. I do agree that most of what passes for "history" is left wing garbage. Keep up the good work.
Thanks, Papa Doc.