One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II

Introduction

  Take another look. Newspapers the world over published a photograph midway through World War II that fixed the United Nations (UN)—the wartime alliance spearheaded by the United States, United Kingdom, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Republic of China (ROC)—in the public imagination. Taken in November 1943, the photo focused narrowly on three Allied leaders— Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston S. Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—sitting under the portico of the Soviet embassy in Tehran, site of the first Allied summit. By association, the image illustrates the political, military, and economic issues that the larger-than-life figures discussed, and these issues together comprise the dominant narrative of both the war and the alliance to this day.1 Through its studied air of leisurely fraternity, the famous picture—a single frame that combined with other snapshots (of 1943’s Cairo summit with Jiang Jieshi, say, or of 1945’s victory parades) to create a visual history of the UN that plays like a movie in the mind’s eye—also conveyed, and intentionally so, senses of Allied unity, strength, and determination to worldwide audiences skeptical about the coalition’s staying power. Another unpublished shot of the same scene effectively pulls back the curtain to expose the puppeteer’s strings, revealing that the standard representation of the UN conceals as much as it reveals. The second photo, taken at a greater distance by an unknown photojournalist, incorporated not just Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin but also newsreel cameramen, photographers, and reporters dutifully recording the made-for-   media moment. Whereas the close focus on the high politics symbolized by the three figureheads—arranged at the top of the embassy’s stairway for a hero’s shot, to use the lingo of Hollywood filmmakers—once seemed natural, the lesser-known photo’s greater perspective shows the setup to be a contrivance. Attention turns from the iconic subjects to the active participation of the filmmakers, photographers, and journalists in creating an illusion of partnership. More broadly speaking, the second photo provides a window through which one can see a perception—of global unity, a family of nations—being formulated.2 One World, Big Screen, like that unpublished photo, takes a fresh approach that reveals a transnational cultural dimension to the histories of the United Nations,3 World War II,4 and foreign relations more Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill pose for the cameras, conveying an air of unity, at the Tehran Conference,  November . U.S. Army Air Force photograph, –(), Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, N.Y.   broadly.5 Despite the impression conveyed at Tehran, the UN’s greatest powers entered the fray with little in common beyond mutual enemies. Contemporaries recognized that the alliance was a shotgun marriage, consummated only because Axis aggressions—Germany’s June 1941 invasion of the USSR, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor the following December —unceremoniously thrust its members together. The Declaration of the United Nations, a January 1942 statement of loyalty and war aims, hardly obscured the obvious fact that the Allies made strange bedfellows. Their divergent geostrategic objectives detracted from the war effort by dividing Allied strength and complicating military planning.The vast distances and many languages separating the Allies slowed the transportation of supplies and transmittal of information. Their ideological, social, and even physical differences caused distrust, dampened popular enthusiasm for sacrifice, and limited the political support on which diplomatic flexibility depended. Moreover, mutual suspicion hindered the development of an internationalist spirit considered necessary for an effective postwar peacekeeping organization to become reality. Many Americans had reservations about the United Nations not because they were antiwar but because the idea of a multilateral alliance departed from established U.S. tradition. The UN, which grew to include forty-seven member states and involve U.S. soldiers in theaters of battle across the world, was the most extensive overseas entanglement in the history of the United States, a country that, by custom, steered clear of such snares. (The United States had fought in Europe for nineteen months only as an independent “associate” of the Triple Entente during World War I, the closest analogue.) That tradition only deepened during the interwar years, the heyday of U.S. isolationism, when Americans opted to go it more (but not completely) alone in a world that appeared hostile. Disillusioned, they remembered the Great War as a costly failure: fighting it had not made the world safe for...