Introduction to
"The Pattern American"
Excerpted from REDISCOVERING AMERICA
Introduction to
"The Pattern American"
Excerpted from REDISCOVERING AMERICA
During the eight years of the Reagan administration
(1981-88), some critics who found the president’s affability and
charm irritatingly at odds with his often brutal social programs took
smirking delight in pointing out the chief-executive’s habit of
confusing reality with the make-believe world in which he had
achieved lengthy, if unspectacular, success: the movies.
In 1985,
the CBS news program 60 Minutes devoted a segment to Berkeley
professor Michael Rogin’s research linking many of Reagan’s
public statements and actions to the movies in which they
originated.
In 1980, when candidate Reagan welcomed the sudden participation of the entire slate of republican presidential candidates to a debate intended only to include front runner Reagan and his most viable opponent, future V.P. George Bush, Reagan responded to the moderator’s threat to turn off the sound system with the announcement, “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green.” It was later revealed that not only did Reagan not foot the bill for the debate, his defiant statement was not his own, having been uttered thirty-two years earlier by Spencer Tracy as a fictional presidential candidate in the film, State of the Union (7).
In 1983, when addressing an audience of 300 Congressional Medal of Honor winners, Reagan remembered the pilot of a W.W.II bomber plane who was posthumously honored with the Congressional Medal for choosing to die aboard his crippled plane rather than abandon a wounded crew member. It was soon discovered that the “hero” in question had existed only in the person of actor Dana Andrews whose bravery was fabricated on the backlot of 20th Century Fox for the movie, A Wing and a Prayer (8).
Even Reagan’s controversial Strategic Defense Initiative system appears to have been born on the big screen, inspired, not by Star Wars, the galactic fantasy whose title became the popular shorthand way of referring to Reagan’s brainchild, but Murder in the Air, a 1940 Warner Brothers potboiler in which crack secret agent Brass Bancroft (Reagan) must protect America’s “inertia projector,” a defense system that “stops and destroys anything that moves” from kidnapping by foreign saboteurs (1).
Then there’s Reagan’s nickname, the “Gipper.” It, too, came from a movie: 1940’s Knute Rockne, All American in which Reagan played the doomed Notre Dame halfback, George Gipp.
Long before their well-publicized friendship, Frank Sinatra
is said to have labeled Reagan “a stupid bore who couldn’t get a job
in pictures, which is why he went into politics” (Olive 190). What
Reagan actually did is reinvent himself. Dissatisfied with the
direction of his movie career, Reagan, with the aid of some
powerful and well-heeled supporters, simply traded one stage for
another, and created a persona more in keeping with the way he
saw himself. As Gary Wills writes in Reagan’s America, Reagan,
whom Warner Brothers repeatedly cast as “the hero’s best friend”
and in light comedy roles, “wanted to be like John Wayne, always
the hero walking tall in every role” (205).
To millions of moviegoers worldwide, John Wayne is America, on screen and off, and his creed a sort of personalized Declaration of Independence. In 1970, when President Nixon attempted to explain his stand on law and order, he cited a Wayne movie, proof to Gary Wills that “it is a very narrow definition of politics that would deny John Wayne political importance” (29). To his admirers, it didn’t matter, assuming they were aware, that the man who boasted in 1975 that “I must have killed off the entire Japanese army” never set foot on a battlefield, having used numerous excuses, “In short, the dog ate his homework,” to avoid military service in order to pursue his career (Wills 109).
As president,
Reagan walked every bit as tall as Wayne, and proved just as gifted
at perpetuating an image not always fixed in reality. Divorced and
rarely in touch with his children, Reagan praised and promoted
family values, and presented himself, “not simply as the man who
sent American boys to die in Lebanon but...as the mourner
identified with those boys, who stands beside their coffins” (Rogin
13). And just as Wayne could soften his hard-line, often violent
stance by contrasting it with savage Indians and trigger happy
gunmen, Reagan could keep his white hat clean when cutting
school lunch programs while increasing defense spending by
pointing to the real threat to our children: the Soviet Union, or, in
Reagan’s dictionary, “the evil empire.”
James Baldwin was speaking of Europeans when he wrote that they “avoid the really monumental confusion which might result from an attempt to apprehend the relationships of the forty-eight states to one another, clinging instead to...the myth that we have ourselves perpetuated” (120), but he might just as well have been speaking of Americans themselves. The myth of the “Gipper” was embraced by the majority of Americans because no matter how misguided or painful his policies, Reagan’s good-natured, confident approach “made people feel good about themselves again” (Wills 467), proving to columnist Jimmy Breslin that “senility is a communicable disease” (Slansky 172). The myth behind it, that of the “Duke,” shows signs of even greater endurance. The man who, when told that everything isn’t black and white said, “Why the hell not?” (Schickel 51), is the embodiment of the qualities that the world tends to regard as indigenous to Americans: masculinity, patriotism, self-reliance, and responsibility (Wills 29).
Of course, before the movies that helped a second rate actor be reborn as the leader of the free world, there was literature, and before Marion Morrison dropped his gender bending name for the masculine banner of John Wayne, there was Benjamin Franklin. There is no evidence to suggest that Franklin’s grasp of reality was as unwieldy as Reagan’s, but in his Autobiography, Franklin displays such a gift for reshaping reality to serve his needs that it brings to mind what writers Mark Green and Gail MacColl said of our fortieth president: “When facts differ from his beliefs, he changes the facts, not his beliefs” (17-18). Franklin himself stated that it is “So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do” (1339). Though the account of his life begins as a letter to his son, Franklin’s Autobiography was intended as a statement for public consumption at the insistence of friends who recognized that the world regarded Franklin as the definitive citizen of the new country fresh from a successful revolution, and, therefore, the ideal spokesman for the land of the free. In presenting his rise from rags to riches, Franklin also created what author D.H. Lawrence derided as “the pattern American” (64). In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson set down the principles upon which America is founded, but in his Autobiography, Franklin shows how those principles can operate for both the individual and public good. “A good example is the best sermon,” Franklin wrote in his persona of Poor Richard (1241), and to set a good example, Franklin reinvented himself, slyly turning negative aspects of his character into virtues, contrasting his faults with the more serious faults of others, and concealing some others to present himself and America in the best light possible. The pattern for success that Franklin found effective in eighteenth century America has not been discarded in the twentieth century, but for those who, like John Wayne, prefer that everything be either black or white, it’s been turned upside down, becoming a license for selfishness, deceit, and intolerance.
Illustration: "Reagan at the Movies" by the author.
© 1997
Brian W. Fairbanks.
