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| 91 4 Cold War Americanism, Hopper Style “My dear Miss Hopper,” wrote one of her readers in September 1953. “Every morning my husband, who is 90 years of age, and a very young fellow at that, says to me—read me Hopper.” The reader went on to praise Hedda Hopper ’s honesty and added, “We like your way of speaking out against subversion and policies detrimental to our form of Government.” “I want to thank you,” she finished, “for being pure grass roots American.”1 In describing Hopper as a “pure grass roots American,” this reader used exactly the terms Hopper herself would have chosen. She presented herself as ideologically pure, holding to a conservatism untainted by any outside ideas, and a believer in absolutes. As in the case of her contemporaries on the far Right, she rejected—at least on a rhetorical level—“ambivalence” and “mixed feelings.” One of her insults, in fact, was to call someone “a middle-of-the-roader.”2 Hopper also valued the second word in her reader’s description, although she most often conveyed the idea of the grass roots by using the phrase “the public.” She considered her politics to represent average Americans and, thus, reflected the “populist persuasion ” in American history. She used the language of populism to defend American citizens against threats to their rights and liberties, threats she saw as emanating from government elites and foreign enemies. Hopper’s populist rhetoric revealed how populism had changed from a political language of the Left—with banks and corporations posing the greatest danger to “the people ”—to that of the Right by the 1950s.3 But it was the last word in “pure grass roots American” that meant the most to her. Hopper’s writings were filled with “American,” “Americans,” and “America,” revealing the importance of the nation—as she imagined it—and feelings of nationalism to Hopper. In her mind, American national greatness was a given.4 Moreover, “Americanism” was the term she herself used to convey—in shorthand —her political perspective and positions during the Cold War. Americanism has been variously analyzed as an ideology, ideal, culture, way of life, and, by 92 | Cold War Americanism, Hopper Style historian Gary Gerstle, “political language,” but it functioned as an ideology— even if without a consistent internal structure—for Hopper.5 When Hopper contrasted Americanism with Communism, as she often did in the Cold War era, it waswiththeassumptionthatthetermsconveyedtwoopposingsetsofprinciples, even belief systems, and the correlating practices, rather than two languages. “Thesearchtodefineandaffirmawayoflife,theneedtoexpressandcelebratethe meaningof‘Americanism,’wastheflipsideofstigmatizingCommunism,”argues historian Stephen Whitfield.6 The ideological content of Hopper’s writings and speeches during the Cold War indicated that by then conservatives owned the concept of Americanism. Although Gerstle and other scholars are correct that Americanism historically sustained “a multiplicity of political visions,” the Cold War Americanism of Hopper, her respondents, and her allies in the Motion PictureAllianceandelsewherecarried “profoundlyconservativepoliticalimpulses.”7 The ideological positions encompassed by Hopper’s Cold War Americanism shaped the content and contours of her political advocacy and activism and deeply resonated with her audience at the height of her career in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. During this time, she achieved an estimated readership of 32 million for her newspaper column. She continued with her radio and film work and began to appear on television as both an actress and “herself.” She had two different radio series, This Is Hollywood and The Hedda Hopper Show, hosted television episodes of series such as Playhouse 90, explored a television series of her own, and published her first, best-selling set of memoirs, From Under My Hat. She earned an annual income close to $250,000 (the equivalent of about $2 million today) and made the cover of Time magazine on July 28, 1947.8 A Time cover was something Walter Winchell and Louella Parsons never achieved. Winchell “must have had a fit when he saw it” and Parsons “must be burning,” wrote publishing colleagues, but then neither had the favor of Time’s publisher, Henry Luce.9 YetHopper’scareerhighpointoccurredasthemotionpictureindustryreeled from a series of post–World War II shocks: sharply declining movie attendance as Americans moved to the suburbs and bought televisions, increased foreign taxation on Hollywood imports when overseas receipts could make or break a film, bitter labor conflict in 1945 and 1946, government investigations of Communism in the movie capital beginning in 1947, and the Paramount decision, which divested the big studios of their theater chains in 1948. Although Hopper ’s gossip career...

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