Best Years: Going to the Movies, 1945-1946

3. Nation: Atlanta, April 12, 1945, Wilson

3 Nation Atlanta, April 12, 1945 ■ Wilson Best Years ■ 46 American Romances During preproduction and production MGM announced An American Romance under a series of working titles: American Miracle, The Magic Land, American Story, This Is America, and just plain America. What Vidor had in mind was not simply the romance of America with the automobile but the at-first-sight and enduring love affair between the immigrant and the adopted country. Stefan Dangosbiblichek arrives at Ellis Island in 1898 with $4 and change in his pocket, hopelessly short of the $25 required for entry. He is waved through nonetheless by an immigration official perceptive enough to recognize the makings of a genuine American in the young man (Brian Donlevy is decidedly overage for the film’s opening sequences) who refuses to take no for an answer. The forty-four-year sweep of Steve’s adventures in the New World proves the inspector right. He makes his way on foot from New York to Minnesota , becomes obsessed with mining and the forging of metal, learns to read in order to exhaust the literature on iron and steel, marries his English teacher, has five children (four of whom he names after U.S. presidents), and seizes every opportunity America sends his way.1 The kinship of An American Romance, The Valley of Decision (1945, also MGM), and Universal’s Pittsburgh (1942) could not have escaped regular moviegoers. Pittsburgh opens in 1920 and closes, like the Vidor film, around 1942; The Valley of Decision , like the Universal release, is set in Pittsburgh, several decades earlier. The heroes of all three, whether capitalist-saint, like the privileged second-generation Paul (Gregory Peck) of The Valley of Decision (who reconciles enlightened management and responsible unionism), tycoon-sinner, like the working-class “Pittsburgh” (John Wayne) of Pittsburgh (whose freewheeling greed lands him in welldeserved bankruptcy), or self-made, bullheaded entrepreneur, like Steve Dangos (who walks away from the dynamic enterprise he built rather than negotiate with labor), hone their exceptional mettle in the crucibles of industrial production. In the end each prevails for the greater political and economic power of the nation and, of course, to the advantage of his own fortunes. Theodore Roosevelt Dangos, the youngest of Steve’s children, narrates his father ’s life, including the loss of the eldest son, George Washington Dangos. Before leaving for camp in 1917, George had made his father promise that he would sit for the citizenship test. Steve applies himself to learning the answers to questions that the scriptwriters might have lifted from official 1917–18 study guides for prospective citizens: the date of the Constitution, the text of its preamble, the functions of the three branches of government. He memorizes the Pledge of Allegiance and struggles with the sequence of U.S. presidents, stumbling, of course, over the hapless Millard Fillmore. Steve’s curriculum would have been familiar to new Americans in the An American Romance: prerelease advertisement, Steve (Brian Donlevy) discovers America. AUTHORS’ COLLECTION. 47 ■ Nation Best Years ■ 48 mid-1940s audience. They would have pored over similar material in the Department of Labor’s “Citizenship Program of the Immigration and Naturalization Service” (1936), or the American Legion’s “Know Your America” (1944), or “The D.A.R. Manual of Citizenship” (1945). Little had changed in the intervening quarter century. The 1941 notebooks of Estreya Touriel Tarica,2 who emigrated from Rhodes in 1921 and settled in Atlanta, reflect subject matter identical to that recited by Steve and in the same impressive detail: United States history, particularly of the early years of the republic, the articles of the Constitution, and the names of cabinet members. The daunting task of identifying the presidents in date order is documented in her meticulous entries. On the day of the exam Steve is notified of George’s death in battle. Grief-stricken, he passes the test just the same and proudly joins a diverse cohort of fellow immigrants in reciting the oath to the flag. He becomes as American as the film’s picture-book Fourth of July sequence. If the preceding chapter, “Over Here,” and the next, “Over There,” speak directly to our period, war as experienced at home and away, offscreen and on, this chapter addresses the nation as idea through contemporary Hollywood’s construction of its history, culture, and, above all, mythology. We begin with codings of regionalism, the East as it turns...