Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

262 // THOMAS CHIRPS
veteran of Black theatre and race movies who had been lingering at the gate hoping
for a gig. The studio, in fact, had been looking for a capable Black actor to
star in Hearts in Dixie, a pet project that Sheehan had promoted with the result
that it had grown from a sentimental two-reeler into a feature-length celebration
of Dixie. In it Muse became Nappus, an exceptionally wise man whose ponderously
resonant voice dominated his scenes. Moreover, the movie, along with
Metro's Hallelujah! created a brief vogue for all-Black material and may have
served as teaser to the movie version of Marc Connelly's Pulitzer-prize musical
drama, Green Pastures (1935).
Thereafter, Muse not only became famous as Nappus but also redefined at least
one sort of social role for Blacks in Hollywood. Clearly, despite an unctuous manner
that made young Black activists wince, Muse advanced the cause of Blacks in
Hollywood. His quiet dignity, his advice to young Black performers, his reputed
study of the law, his solid training on the stage, his complex mix of Black cultural
nationalism and assimilationism, and his resistance to wartime NAACP activism
that seemed to run counter to Muse's hope of "buildfing] ourselves into"
Hollywood all conspired to give Muse an authority among Blacks precisely
because in Sheehan he possessed a "friend at court" on the white movie lots. 14
Later, he acquired yet another friend at court, the young Frank Capra, for whom
he appeared in Dirigible, Broadway Bill, and other movies.
Why should Sheehan's Jewish bosses have taken counsel from Muse? Perhaps
because they were as assimilationist as Muse seemed. A look at the movies on the
screens at the onset of the Great Crash reveals a rage for a comic assimilationism
that almost every studio played to: Kosher Kitty Kelly, Clancy's Kosher Wedding, the
Cohens and the Kellys series, and others of the decade that saw Anne Nichols's play,
Abie's Irish Rose run on Broadway for years. The apogee of the era came in the form
of The Jazz Singer (1927), Samson Raphaelson's own assimilationist account of a
cantor's son who becomes a jazz singer. Far from a fluke of facldishness, the ideology
of universalism extended into almost every immigrant-themed movie thereafter,
often embracing African Americans in the resulting lovefeast as in the 1946
temake of Abie's Irish Rose (following its success as an ongoing radio series) when
at the wedding that forms the climax of the movie the Black servant intones her
own "Mazeltov." Even in their own lives, the moguls reflected their immigrants'
wish to belong by voting Republican, modulating, even muting, their
Jewishness, and marrying goyishe women. To find in these drives the source of
Jewish conspiracy is as absurd as to find a Jewish predominance in another field,
that of furriers, a plot against foxes and ermines. 15
But what of African Americans? Did they take Jewish Hollywood as conspiracy
or merely as a ruling class with whom they could deal? Certainly both in the
trades and in the Black press the relationship between the two groups of outsiders
was celebrated as sanguine. As early as 1922, Jewish-edited Variety praised Love is
an Awful Thing for its "Bert Williams touches. ..that are most welcome" while
complaining of "needless" quivering Negro servants. Whenever some odd racist