Showbiz Politics: Hollywood in American Political Life by Kathryn Cramer Brownell (review)

American historians have been slow to explore the relationship between power and art. Political and social historians have generally used art, when they use it at all, as an illustration of themes developed from traditional primary documents, such as political speeches, archival materials, and newspapers. Until recently, art and popular entertainment have not been used as sources to comprehend the ideology, ideas, or motivations that animated or caused the eruption of new political or social events. Kathryn Brownell’s Showbiz Politics: Hollywood in American Political Life is an outstanding example of new historical scholarship in this area. In a sweeping study that covers most of the twentieth century, Brownell places Hollywood and entertainment at the very centre of modern American politics. Drawing on the papers of media and advertising consultants who advised several Presidents, Brownell traces the origins of modern media politics to Hollywood’s embrace of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. She then moves forward in time to explore the way that the film industry promoted the cause of World War II, followed by the engagement of producers and stars in the fierce anti-Communist politics of the Cold War at home.

Brownell then investigates how film personalities and producers in the postwar era mobilized behind the presidential campaigns of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s and Richard Nixon in the 1960s. In some of her most important findings she looks at the media consultants for Eisenhower and Nixon. She shows how Eisenhower cultivated film star and director Robert Montgomery, and Nixon after his 1960 loss turned in 1968 to celebrities such as Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, and John Wayne. Nixon also used advisors like Roger Ailes, who later founded Fox News, to promote his candidacy at the Republican Convention and to develop advertisements and short documentaries for his campaign. On the other side of the coin, as the Vietnam War and riots in the cities generated the cultural wars, Hollywood stars joined the fray. In the l972 presidential campaign, the Democrats and George McGovern marshalled the services of what at the time was called the “New Hollywood” composed of stars such as Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine. These left-leaning stars made films that appealed to new youth audiences who were critical of the war in Vietnam and traditional sexual mores and gender roles.

Brownell’s central explanatory theme is that as Party loyalty weakened its hold on voters, politicians saw the need to become personalities whose appeal transcended traditional communal and political roots. That is why they turned to media advisors to show them how to perform before the camera. These advisors were so important Robert Montgomery had his own office in the White House to advise the Chief Executive when he appeared on the new medium of television. This focus on the fusion of mass entertainment, with its appeal lying in personality and presentation before the cameras, opens up new questions that can provide the basis for future research.

One question begs for an answer: What is the relationship between a star’s political choices and the ideas and emotions that the artist conveys on the screen? In the Hollywood star system, the actor’s roles and real life merge. Producers capitalize on that by making films that draw on the formulas developed over the course of a star’s career. In other words, a Jane Fonda or a Will Rogers, in their best films, portray characters who critique the tradition that they inherited and struggle to forge a fresh identity which guides their future actions. Fonda, for example, in Coming Home played a young woman rebelling from her role as the wife of a loyal Marine committed to the Vietnam War. As Fonda carried that ideal into war protests, she was admired by liberals and the young but reviled by the right wing as “Hanoi Jane.” Rogers was advertised as the “Number One New Dealer” who...