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6. Representing Race in the Face of Civil Rights
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| 139 6 Representing Race in the Face of Civil Rights When Hedda Hopper appeared in the Women for Nixon commercial during the 1950 U.S. Senate race, she not only used the Republican Party’s Red-baiting campaign tactics and advanced the party’s electoral prospects . She also revealed her conservative racial attitudes. In planning for this radio broadcast, Hopper wanted a black actress involved. Until the 1930s, the majority of African Americans able to exercise their voting rights—mostly those who lived in the North—cast their ballots for Hopper’s Republican Party. By the 1950s, however, most enfranchised African Americans fell into the Democratic column, making Hopper’s task more difficult. She first asked Hattie McDaniel, famous for her Oscar-winning role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind. Although apologetic, McDaniel turned down the request. “I have made it a rule, never to openly endorse a candidate or work in a political campaign for any personality.” In the end, Louise Beavers, who had “perfected the optimistic, sentimental black woman whose sweet, sunny disposition and kindheartedness almost always saved the day” in films like Imitation of Life (1934), appeared in the radio commercial.1 A “kindly old Negress,” the character played by Beavers, had several lines. She declared her support for Nixon—“Ah’m votin’ foh him too”—and her membership in a “group dat is workin’ hard fuh to elect Mr. Nixon,” an organization for black women separate from Women for Nixon.2 In using Hollywood’s false and demeaning black dialect for Beavers’s character, the script reinforced racist images of African Americans as ignorant and inferior to white Americans. Hopper approved of this script despite the fact that black actors, actresses, and civil rights activists had been attacking the use of such dialect and what it signified for years. Indeed, a year later Beavers would play the television role of “Beulah,” a black maid to a white family, without “any trace of dialect.”3 Hopper’s endorsement of false black dialect for Louise Beavers’s character in the campaign commercial revealed her belief in and comfort with white 140 | Representing Race in the Face of Civil Rights superiority. Hopper was known within the motion picture industry as “deeply bigoted,” but she eschewed virulent expressions of racism in public.4 For Hopper, such expressions of racism were unrespectable. Moreover, they were unfitting for a member of the Republican Party—the “party of Lincoln”— and Hopper, unlike many white Republican women, did seek to involve African American women in her political efforts and activism, as her work on the Women for Nixon radio broadcast indicated. Her efforts were less than effective, however, when she decided to tell “an offensive joke” at a Women’s Division banquet at the 1956 Republican National Convention. “The principle character of the anecdote,” reported the Chicago Defender, “was a Negro maid whose dialect has long since been dead and buried.”5 Yet, “if anyone had accused her of prejudice, she would have been astounded, arguing that she liked Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen and Stepin Fetchit.” The African American actors of whom Hopper approved were all performers associated with racially stereotypical and often demeaning roles, and her interactions with them were characterized by paternalism and condescension, demonstrating her beliefs in black inferiority and inequality.6 For blacks in the post–World War II period who challenged Hollywood’s old stock stereotypes , offered new images of African Americans, and refused her paternalism , such as Sidney Poitier, Hopper’s support came much more slowly, if at all. In her racial beliefs and actions, Hopper was no different from most of white Hollywood. Her gossip rival Louella Parsons only stopped using the word “pickaninnies” in her column after World War II and only after receiving criticism.7 Where Hopper differed from her colleagues was in her very public efforts to “keep blacks in their place,” both in Hollywood and the United States generally. As civil rights activists sought to build on the momentum toward racial equality and more positive movie portrayals of African Americans gained during World War II, Hedda Hopper’s column became a site for a discussion of what cultural studies scholars have come to call “the politics of representation.”8 Two key events in this discussion were Hopper’s successful Oscar campaign for James Baskett, who portrayed Uncle Remus in Walt Disney’s Song of the South (1946), and a less successful 1947 defense of Hattie McDaniel’s typecasting as and portrayals of...