John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties

3. John Wayne’s Cold War: Mass Tourism and the Anticommunist Crusade

chaPter three JohnWayne’s Cold War mass tourism anD the anticommunist crusaDe The soviet Premier josePh stalin, in the final, unstable years of his life, decreed that John Wayne had to die. According to the film historian and celebrity biographer Michael Munn, John Wayne was so associated with anticommunism that several attempts on Wayne’s life were undertaken by different communist organizations, including one supposedly orchestrated by Stalin himself (John Wayne, 125–128). By serving as president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals from 1949 through 1953 and participating actively in the House Un-American Activities Committee (huac) investigation into communists in Hollywood,Wayne was the public face of Hollywood’s anticommunism in the most intensive years of the Red Scare of the early 1950s. So in 1951, acting on Stalin’s orders, two Soviet hit men posing as fbi agents showed up at his office in Hollywood, seeking access to Wayne, but the real fbi, having already learned of the assassination attempt, arrested the men. Luckily for Wayne, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was a huge fan of the actor’s and rescinded the order to have Wayne killed. In 1955 (according to Wayne himself, as reported to Munn) a group of Burbank communists began organizing a plot to kill John Wayne, but were run out of town by stuntmen friends of Wayne’s. According to Wayne’s own accounts, his anticommunism made him a target of a vast, organized communist conspiracy to end his efforts to rid Hollywood of communists.1 While it is easy to associate Wayne with strident McCarthyism because of his role in Hollywood’s communist witch hunts, both of his anticommunist projects of the 1950s explore a much more complex set of justifications for fighting communism, melodramatically using the threat of domestic infiltration while simultaneously invoking the kinds of international capitalism and consumerism that modernization, development, and international trade hoped 74 | John Wayne’s World to produce. Because of Wayne’s political activism in the early 1950s, he made several propagandistic anticommunist films that crusaded against supposedly despicable and treacherous communists, be they hidden communist cells in the United States or Soviet military agents seeking tactical knowledge of the U.S. military: Big Jim McLain (1952) and Jet Pilot (shot between 1949 and 1953 but not released until 1957). But rather than functioning as straightforward mouthpieces for McCarthyism (although both do just that at times), the films attempt to balance a heightened and defensive sense of U.S. national identityand jingoism with the emerging internationalism of the period. Although pet projects of Wayne’s, both films were the products of a Hollywood studio system highly invested not just in U.S. global power but also in the creation and maintenance of international, capitalist markets for their products. Echoing the common anticommunist conspiracy theories of the day, both films concern themselves with the idea of infiltration and of the United States being under attack from within (the key rhetorical claim that helped McCarthy rise to poweroverotheranticommunist politicians). Each film constructs communism as an evil threat to the inherent goodness of the United States, valorizing the heroism and sacrifice of members of the U.S. military while railing against a perceived, vast communist conspiracy against freedom and America. Both films thus conformed to thedominant American anticommunist ideology of the period. As Bonnie Jefferson outlines it, in the 1950s several themes characterized American ideas about communism: • Communism was monolithic. • Communism sought world domination. • Communists were barbaric. • Communists sought to destroy the family, the church, and all personal freedoms. • Communism was a direct threat to the United States and its democratic institutions and would target these institutions from the inside; carefully placed spies would destroy important institutions of freedom before we could realize what had happened. (“Wayne: American Icon,” 32) Marked by a simplified good-evil logic and a fear of “outsiders” contaminating national values and institutions, the beliefs permeate Wayne’s anticommunist films of the early 1950s. Often relying on lengthy anticommunist sermons built into the dialogue, the films create a vision of the world in which the United States not only is under siege by communism but also has already been secretly invaded by communists and communist sympathizers. While Big Jim McLain and Jet Pilot explore nationalist fears of infiltration 75 | Wayne’s Cold War: Big Jim McLain and Jet Pilot indicative of McCarthyism, the films’ anticommunism cannot be...