Glamour on the campaign trail

Though this book is published by Oxford University Press and the author teaches at the University of Southern California, it is really only semi-demi-academic.

Steven J. Ross has conducted interviews and trawled through archives, but his instincts are for the flat vividness of journalism rather than anything more scholarly or searching. In a footnote he may mention that Harry Belafonte, in an interview in the mid-1990s, got the date of a crucial meeting with Martin Luther King wrong by three years, but is happy to quote Belafonte’s version (in that same interview) of what King said — ‘We are caught up in a struggle that will not leave us’ — as if a memory confused about dates could be relied on for exact phrasing.

Ross has chosen ten exemplary figures (five conservatives and five radicals), from Charlie Chaplin to Arnold Schwarzenegger, to portray the changing tone of politics in the film industry. He recognises that there are variations of temperament and allegiance, so that Charlton Heston (at least in his middle period) and Schwarzenegger retained some libertarianism in their philosophies, while Chaplin was a romantic socialist who didn’t join groups and looked the other way when the collecting bowl came round.

The political terminology used here is sometimes eccentric. Belafonte is described as a ‘committed radical’ on the basis that he regarded one cause (racial equality) as so important that he would enter into any alliance to advance it. Isn’t that pragmatism rather than radicalism? A converse mangling of meaning seems to be happening here (à propos of Reagan and his forerunner George Murphy):

The 1960s are often thought of as a return to liberalism, but the era also experienced the rise of a grassroots conservative movement heavily financed and promoted by large corporations (especially those receiving Defense Department funding).