Best Years: Going to the Movies, 1945-1946

8. Homecoming: Chicago, December 18, 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives

8 Homecoming Chicago, December 18, 1946 ■ The Best Years of Our Lives 201 ■ We choose Chicago, capital of America’s heartland, as the setting for this chapter on homecoming. No sooner had GIs returned to the Windy City than they found the press, radio, and newsreels filled with speculation about a third global conflagration. Family and friends were already consumed, not with the war just ended but with its aftermath, with the deteriorating international situation, the threat of Soviet expansionism and rumors of rekindled Nazism, the latter echoed in titles such as Cornered , The Master Race, and The Stranger. Newly minted veterans were more immediately absorbed by economic worries, by the frantic search for housing and jobs, by the frequently strained reconnection with wives and sweethearts, and, in too many cases, by the pain of physical and mental rehabilitation. The reintegration of the veteran into American society was a question that Hollywood took on directly in, among other features, From This Day Forward, The Blue Dahlia, and Till the End of Time. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of The Best Years of Our Lives, the deepest, most moving, most disquieting, and, we believe, most authentically instructive portrait of the period. Through Wyler’s masterly work, we reprise the momentous issues of this now privileged period in the American imagination. Standing Room Only Best Years ■ 202 European Ideologies Lillian Hellman’s script for The Searching Wind, after her hit Broadway play of the same name (1944), aims its indictment of interwar American appeasement at the classism and cowardice of the powerful upper echelons of the diplomatic corps and the press. The villain of the piece is Ambassador Alex Hazen (Robert Young), for whom equivocation veers early in his career from a foreign service obligation to a moral deformation, with tragic results. Over the two decades and more of the flashback, and despite warning after warning documented in the historical reenactments that punctuate the narrative, he resists alerting his Washington bosses to the fearsome consequences of their politics of accommodation with not one but three fascist regimes. To that considerable extent he is complicit in the global and personal calamity that ensues. The film traces Alex’s deeply flawed trajectory from his posting to Italy, where he has a front-row seat at Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome, through the rise of National Socialism in the late 1920s while he is stationed in Berlin, to the slaughter of the Loyalists he witnesses as an official observer during the Spanish Civil War, to the Austrian Anschluss and the occupation of the Sudetenland. Hazen’s socially connected wife, Emily (Ann Richards), is pointedly indifferent to the dubious ideologies of the company she keeps; her father (Dudley Digges) is a liberal newspaper publisher who withdraws from the fray in the 1920s to shoot fatuously from the sidelines. Hellman’s brief against those who refused to oppose Axis tyranny is spoken by Sam (Douglas Dick), son of Alex and Emily, a young GI home on leave and facing the amputation of his badly mangled leg; and by the right-thinking, hard-hitting newspaper woman Cassie (Sylvia Sidney). Cassie is not altogether immune from the criticism leveled at her hopelessly compromised generation. She makes her living by writing for, as she puts it, the “conservative, isolationist” Washington Bulletin. Whether or not Hellman had in mind the Chicago Daily Tribune (since 1963, Chicago Tribune), and its publisher, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, in conjuring the fictitious Harvey syndicate that dictates the editorial policy of the fictitious Washington Bulletin, the comparison is tempting. Beginning in 1939 with the war in Europe, that is for the two years prior to December 7, 1941, the Tribune had hammered home the isolationist line promoted by McCormick, a leading supporter of the largely Chicagobased right-wing America First. On the interventionist side was Frank Knox, publisher of the afternoon Daily News. Just three days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor , at the urging of FDR and with presses lent in solidarity by the Daily News, Marshall Field III launched the Sun as a morning competitor to the Tribune. From the day after the “day that will live in infamy” to V-J Day, the three Chicago papers would be essentially on the same page with respect to America’s role on the world stage. Once the war was over, international coverage in the Tribune, like that of the...