Talk Nation Spring 2017 Featuring Dr. Kamal Woods

41
Dr. Malino:
Yes.
Frank: Did he love these films for
the entertainment value, or did he
see that these were helpful in educating
the people, or maybe even
the red meat that people needed to
support the war?
Dr. Malino: Well, yes, I think,
you know, it was a different time.
We just have to realize that. We live
in a very different world than the
world of Roosevelt and the world of
the 1940s. That’s already more than
60 years ago. The wonderful story
about Roosevelt and Frank Capra is
that when Roosevelt, or Roosevelt’s
advisor thought up the idea of
getting Capra to make this series of
films, he said to Capra, “I want you
to make documentaries about why
we’re in the war.” Capra said, “Excuse
me sir, I’ve never made a documentary
before.” Roosevelt said, “I’ve
never fought a war before.”
Frank: Right, touché.
Dr. Malino: The two of them sort
of leaped into this process, and as the
films developed, they are a combination
of actual documentary footage
and a kind of cartoon depiction of
the world. A very over-simplified, I
mean, they do explain in that first
one that because of the Depression
in the 1930s, that people in Europe
suffered after World War I. The solution
left no one happy, really.
Frank: Right.
Dr. Malino: The people were
starving, and it was a historical opportunity
for demagogues like Mussolini
and Hitler and the Emperor of Japan
to mobilize their people for a cause,
and they felt that somehow they
would regain the power that they
once had -- that they had lost after
World War I. The Japanese weren’t
involved in World War I, but anyway
they were ready to sign on to World
War II. I may be wrong about that. I’m
not a European historian.
Frank: True.
Dr. Malino: All of this is explained
in the “What was our life like during
the 1930s.” In those films. There are
pictures of Americans who are trying
to recover from World War I, they’re
working in industry, et cetera. Their
children are playing happily on the
playground. They’re undisturbed by
the effects of World War I, and they
are, their lives are better than the
lives of the people in Europe. They
were persuasive to a very white, nonmulticultural
approach to, you know,
white-washed approach to American
history that is taken in those films.
They do quote in some of those films,
in this first film particularly, that some
American people didn’t feel that we
needed to be involved in a war. He
explains that the world is smaller now
because of airplanes, and so there is
a global threat, and that we need to
mobilize to face this global threat of
these three demagogues in Europe.
They are way oversimplified, but
they’re sort of appealing. They play
patriotic music through the whole
thing. They may have been effective.
I don’t know how they affected the
American public mind. That would
be the subject for another study.
Frank: Sure.
Dr. Malino: They certainly were
widely shown. They were shown all
the time. There are, I think, 11 films
in that series. He did it on each stage
of the war. They were certainly effective
in persuading people that they
needed to go to war, and as we spoke
about earlier, I think the Jewish community
was aware of what many
people, of more educated members
of the Jewish community were aware,
or people who had family in Europe
were aware that Jews were in danger
there.
Frank: You mentioned, almost in
passing, that the woman that basically
you knew as your grandmother,
your grandfather’s second wife, was a
socialist. Let me ask you, what affect
did that have on your growing up?
Was she an influence on you?
Dr. Malino: Yes, she certainly
was. She was a tremendous influence
on my mother as well. She was
also the daughter of immigrants. She
grew up in Denver. She worked in a
sweatshop with her mother doing
sewing as a child. She was a very
good student. Her mother worked
to send her to college. She went to
the college, she went to college at
the University of California Berkeley.
She was a very fine student there. She
majored in Classics. An immigrant
daughter majoring in Classics is really
kind of an odd thing to think about,
but she was a very well-read woman,
and she was an activist. She actually
visited, before she married my grandfather,
she took a trip with a bunch of
women who were her college friends
and her graduate school friends to
Russia to see what that country was
like, now that they’d had the Russian
Revolution, and what Communism
was like, and so on.
There were a number of welleducated
people during the 1930s
that flirted with ideas of Communism
and Socialism, because during the
Depression, people were worried that
democracy and capitalism wouldn’t
provide the answer to economic prosperity.
We went through many years
of hardship. People began to explore
those alternatives. Also, there had
been in Europe, a vibrant Socialist
TALK NATION |ISSUE VIII