Revisiting a Classic II: American Propaganda

The word propaganda has sinister connotations. Hearing the word makes me think of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, whose secret to success was defined in his famous quote: 

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

It's also makes me think of the current dictator of Russia who recently used the feckless Tucker Carlson as a vehicle to distribute nonsense, trying to justify his criminal invasion of Ukraine to any American willing to listen.

But propaganda is not the sole domain of tyrants, and while it implies bias, it needn't consist of misinformation or outright lies.

Does that mean there can be good propaganda? I guess that all depends upon whose propaganda it is and which side you're on.

In the mid-1930s, Americans were reeling from the Great Depression. Many men in this country who were approaching middle age were still living with the memories and the effects of what was arguably the most terrifying war from the viewpoint of the average soldier, World War I. 

The same was true in Europe only more so. The big difference is in Europe, another war was on the horizon. And the vast majority of Americans at the time wanted no part of it. Who can blame them?

The support for isolationism and non-intervention in foreign wars among Americans in the thirties was overwhelming. So much so that Congress passed several neutrality acts late in the decade, which not even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in marked opposition to them, would dare veto.

The chief problem with those acts is that they were blanket declarations, forbidding any kind of participation or aid in a foreign conflict, even in support of an ally who was attacked. Roosevelt understood the threat that Hitler and the Nazis posed to the free world, but politically there was little if anything he could do about it until September 1, 1939.

On that day, the Nazis invaded Poland resulting in Britain and France declaring war on Germany. This changed American public opinion only slightly. FDR managed to push through arms sales to the Allies on a cash and carry basis which passed with only a small majority in Congress. Eventually the Allies' reserve of liquid currency began to run out and Britain, alone in Europe in the fight against Hitler after the Nazis marched into Paris, was desperate.

Enter Lend-Lease, Roosevelt's plan to send arms and materiel to the Allies free of charge with the stipulation that the supplies be returned after the conflict. The president used marketing, (another word for propaganda) to explain his plan to the American people by appealing to their sense of self-interest. He used the simple analogy of a homeowner lending a neighbor his garden hose to put out a fire. The logic was that A) putting out the fire while it was still small not only would save the neighbor's house but perhaps also the home of the lender and B) the hose would be returned when it was no longer needed. 

Roosevelt succeeded in passing the Lend-Lease Act which was signed in March of 1941. Again, much of the country balked. 

That is exactly where the United States stood when the main action in the film Casablanca takes place.

In one of the film's most famous scenes, Rick is alone, drinking himself into a stupor after earlier that evening, the love of his life walked into his nightclub in the arms of another man. It is very late, long after the joint has shut down for the night. Sam walks in and tries to console his friend but to no avail. Rick asks Sam a curious question: "It's December, 1941, what time is it in New York?" "My watch broke" replies Sam, We understand the question better with Rick's next line: "I bet they're sleeping in New York, I bet they're sleeping all over America." 

 

Then comes one of the most famous lines of the movie: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

I saw Casablanca probably a dozen times before I noticed the "It's December, 1941" part. During all those viewings I just assumed Rick was commenting on how really late at night it was; if they're asleep in New York, it must be at least 3am in Casablanca, if the rest of America is asleep, even later.  

But if it was December, 1941, they were also figuratively asleep all over America, as Europe and the Pacific were going up in flames. On the seventh day of that month, we were finally awakened.

Until I noticed Rick curiously pointing out the date, the ambiguity of that line was lost on me, along with one of the film's most important aspects. Along with being a splendid wartime drama and love story with elements of film noir, mystery, suspense, and even comedy thrown in, above all, Casablanca was a propaganda film.

The message the film was marketing to the American people and to the rest of the world was clearly anti-fascism. We learn in the film that in the years before the action takes place, its protagonist Rick Blaine had actively fought on the Republican side against the Franquistas in Spain and had run guns to the Ethiopians in their struggle against Fascist Italy. Meanwhile the other hero Victor Laszlo was busy fighting the Nazis. 

The line with the double meaning was written before December 7, 1941. but the film wasn't shot until the following year, well after the United States had entered World War II. Why then bother including the line in the film which wasn't originally set to be released until 1943, long after we as a country had supposedly woken up?

My theory is that as much as Casablanca was making a clear statement against our enemies in the war, the film is also a critique of American society, at least the part of it that still had reservations about our participation in the war, many of whom had sympathies with and philosophical ties to the Nazis. 

There was a great deal of anti-Nazi sentiment during the thirties in Hollywood. Warner Brothers (who produced Casablanca) was especially active having closed all its operations in Germany back in 1934. But American film companies were hesitant to make anti-Nazi films as the Hays Office (see my last post), strongly discouraged production of movies that had biases against foreign countries including Germany, out of fear of offending both the country, and this nation's German speaking population,

So rather than making overtly anti-German films, in 1937, Warner Brothers produced two movies that were set in the United States, but were unmistakable allegories for what was going on in Europe at the time. Black Legion, (with Humphrey Bogart) was a fictional story about a white supremacist group in Detroit modeled after the KKK. They Won't Forget (with Claude Rains), was a fictionalized account of the real-life story of Leo Frank, a young Jewish man who was (by most accounts wrongfully) convicted and lynched for the murder of a 13 year old girl in Atlanta. 

In 1940, after the war began in Europe, Warner Brothers purchased the rights to Everybody Comes to Rick's, an anti-Nazi play written by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. The film company paid a king's ransom for the work, all the more so as the play had never been produced. By then, other film companies felt the time was right to make anti-Nazi propaganda films. Some were forgettable such as Hitler-Beast of Berlin, others were classics like Charles Chaplin's The Great Dictator. 

Yet there were still Americans who felt the time wasn't right to offend the Nazis. In 1941, members of Congress conducted hearings investigating Hollywood's anti-Nazi "motion picture propaganda". The two senators who initiated the hearings were Gerald Nye of North Dakota and D. Worth Clark of Idaho.  Both senators had ties to the America First Committee, a group founded in 1940 to promote isolationism. Two of the group's most prominent members were industrialist Henry Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh, both barely concealed anti-Semites. On September 11, 1941, Lindbergh who had Nazi sympathies, gave an infamous speech in Des Moines where bemoaning "the Jewish problem", claimed that Jews were controlling "our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government” all in the effort along with FDR and the British, to lure us into the war. 

In response President Roosevelt commented:

When I read Lindbergh’s speech, I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient.

It all became moot after December 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Four days later the America First Committee was no more. We were at war with both Japan and Germany and work was well underway to turn Everybody Comes to Rick's, which the writer James Agee claimed was the worst play ever written, into the screenplay for what was to become Casablanca, which some to this day claim to be the best movie ever made. 

My argument that Casablanca should be in the running to be considered among the best of the best*, is the fact that over eighty years after its release, it continues to speak to us in its universal themes of love and sacrifice, of values and forgiveness, of right and wrong, of the importance of looking beyond our self-interest, and the lengths we would go just to survive. 

In light of the last decade, especially the last two years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine and even more recently, the war in Gaza , Casablanca is especially relevant today. 

My current obsession with the movie was inspired by the resemblance of the late Alexei Navalny, the heroic Russian opposition leader, to the character Victor Laszlo. Mind you it is only a superficial resemblance at best. Once out of harm's way in a German hospital after being poisoned in Russia, the real Navalny returned to Russia to carry on his work, where he knew he would end up in prison, standing a good chance of meeting an untimely death as is the case with everyone who runs afoul of Vladimir Putin. That chance became a reality this February 16 in a gulag in Siberia.  

Navalny's life and tragic death touched people's lives far and wide. Even Putin's two most useful idiots in the United States couldn't stay silent. Without placing any blame, Tucker Carlson said: "The whole thing is barbaric and awful. No decent person would defend it." Donald Trump went one step further paying Navalny the greatest compliment his twisted mind could come up with, comparing Navalny's ordeal with his own.

The fictional Victor Laszlo's life was peaceful by comparison, escaping Europe for the relative safety of America. But there is one particular line in the movie that by changing a few words, could define Navalny's legacy. 

As he is interrogated by the antagonist in the film, Major Strasser of the Gestapo (Conrad Weidt), Laszlo is offered his freedom if he divulges the names of the resistance members all over Europe with whom he has been in contact. After refusing to comply he explains to the Major the inevitable futility of the cause of the Nazis and all totalitarian movements: 

And what if you track down these men and kill them? What if you murdered all of us? From every corner of Europe, hundreds, thousands, would rise to take our places. Even Nazis can't kill that fast.

Relevant or not, an eighty-year-old movie is bound to appear dated, especially when it comes to current attitudes, values and sensibilities, and Casablanca is no exception. I generally shy away from judging the past through the lens of contemporary standards; however I believe that blindly dismissing acts of the past as simply products of their time is a cop-out. 

One objection I've read about Casablanca is that despite being a movie about refugees from Nazi Germany, no Jews are depicted. On one hand, this is a curious assertion as while there was no attempt to identify characters in the film as being Jewish, there is absolutely no reason to believe they were not Jewish. The fact is a great number of people responsible for making Casablanca, from the authors of the play it was based upon, to the screenwriters, the director, and the producer of the movie, to the owners of the company that made the film, were Jewish. Even more telling is that a high percentage of the cast was Jewish, themselves refugees from the Nazis. 

Perhaps the film makers elected to portray World War II as a crisis affecting all of humanity by not singling out any one particular ethnic identity as its victims. 

On the other hand, the dark side is that the makers of the film had to have been cognizant of the fact that had they emphasized the Jewishness of the refugees, they would have been called out in the antisemitic climate of the U.S. by folks such as Lindbergh, as being producers of Jewish propaganda.  

Another bone the filmmakers threw at potential American censors including the OWI, (Office of War Information, the official department of U.S. wartime propaganda) was to give the impression that America was the great beacon of hope for the world's oppressed, who opened its arms to anyone who sought refuge here. That could not have been further from the truth as the U.S. imposed strict immigration quotas even on refugees, based upon ethnicity and race. 

In 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis departed Hamburg with 937 passengers aboard, nearly all of them Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The ship was bound for Cuba where the refugees hoped to stay until visas for them to enter the United States were granted. During the trans-Atlantic voyage, the government of Cuba rescinded its offer to accept the refugees. When the ship docked in the port of Havana, only a handful of passengers, those with the appropriate immigration documents were allowed to disembark. The ship with rest of its passengers aboard sailed north toward Miami where they hoped to land safely. But the immigration quota of the U.S. was already filled, there was in fact a waiting list a mile long and welcoming the refugees aboard the St. Louis into the country would have meant they would have "jumped in line" ahead of those who had already applied for entry. 

Rules are rules after all.

The United States could have raised the immigration quota on humanitarian grounds but the vast majority of Americans, many of whom were sympathetic to the plight of the refugees aboard the St. Louis, were still opposed to changing the quota. The same situation applied in Canada. 

Without any other option, the ship sailed back to Europe where some of the passengers were granted asylum in Great Britain. Those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones ended up in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, all of which would become occupied by the Germans. Some of those refugees were eventually able to obtain immigration visas to the United States. Of the rest who did not, 254 souls, more than one quarter of those who departed Hamburg on the St. Louis for a new life in America, perished in the Holocaust. 

The refugee situation only got worse in the States as the war waged on. Among the refugees aboard one ship headed for the United States was a confirmed Nazi spy. The government used this bit of anecdotal evidence to mount a case for the inherent danger of allowing refugees into this country, and further restricted immigration, despite the mounting evidence of genocide in Europe.

While the race and ethnicity of the refugees depicted in the movie were never established, the character of Sam was unequivocally black. That goes back to the original play, where the character of a different name who would become Sam in the movie, was identified throughout the play's script simply as "the NEGRO". The screenwriters gave Sam a little more humanity, identifying him by name in the film script, but they wrote his lines in what could best be described as a white person's idea of the way black people speak. 

Here's a little snippet of the script's dialog between Sam and Rick:

RICK:

Sam, Ferrari wants you to work for him at the Blue Parrot.

SAM: 

Ah likes it fine here.

RICK: 

He'll double what I pay you here.

SAM:

Ah ain't got time to spend what ah makes here.

Fortunately, Dooley Wilson who played Sam, toned down the patois considerably. 

In the line that immediately proceeds this dialog, the aforementioned Signor Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet) offers to buy Rick's nightclub, along with its piano player Sam. Rick responds: "I don't buy or sell human beings." That line was obviously written to help establish Rick's left-of-center credentials. It was hardly revolutionary in 1941, nearly eighty years after the issue of slavery was resolved in this country. But you can begin to appreciate the line when you consider that a mere three years earlier, Hollywood produced Gone With the Wind, a movie that earnestly celebrated the antebellum South and the institution of slavery with as much glee as Mel Brooks's farcical music number "Springtime for Hitler" celebrated the Nazis. 

In his commentary to Casablanca that I linked to in my previous post, Roger Ebert argues that Sam, a black man and Rick, a white man are equals in the film, something unheard of in Hollywood at the time. Well, the being equal part is not entirely true as Sam is in Rick's employ. But he is Rick's best friend and only male friend whose relationship is not transactional. Yes, Sam gets a paycheck from Rick but as is made abundantly clear, he could do better elsewhere if he chose.

As tempting as it is to say that Casablanca was ahead of the curve if only slightly in terms of the way Hollywood portrayed black people, there is one word in one line of the film that sends everything into full scale retrograde. It's Ilsa's first scene where she and her husband walk unawares into the club owned by her former lover Rick. She spots Sam who was with Rick and her in Paris. Trying to play it cool and not let on about what happened while her husband was away in a concentration camp, she says to Captain Renault in front of Victor, "Captain -- the boy who is playing the piano -- somewhere I have seen him." 

Dooley Wilson was 56 when he played Sam, Ingrid Bergman who played Ilsa was 27.

It is the cringiest line of the movie and has been for at least six decades. No amount of explaining or putting it into the context of the era can change that.**

No one has ever accused Casablanca of being ahead of the curve as far as women are portrayed in the movies. By 1941, although it was the exception rather than the rule, Hollywood had given us a number of films featuring strong female characters in firm control of their destiny.*** Let's face it, Ilsa Lund, the spouse of Victor Laszlow, is no Yulia Navalnaya, the spouse of Alexei Navalny. After her husband's death, Navalnaya pledged to carry on her husband's work making herself not only persona-non-grata in her own country but also risking becoming a dead-woman-walking wherever she is as Putin's pathological fear of opposition and his homicidal impulses know of no national borders. 

By contrast Ilsa, not long after learning erroneously of her husband's death, falls in love with Rick in Paris. Then to the consternation of a great many contemporary feminists, once reunited with her husband, AND her lover, she tells the latter that she can no longer stand being separated from him and leaves the decision of how to proceed up to him. 

But for most feminists, far and away the most unsettling part of Casablanca is its treatment of the character of Captain Louis Renault. 

If you were to take the most corrupt police official you have ever read about in the news, then multiply that person's malfeasance tenfold, you would still come up a bit short of Louis Renault.

The crazy, inexplicable and for many, unacceptable thing about him is that despite being a despicable individual, he is one of the most likable characters in the movie, he gets the funniest lines and in the end, becomes a hero to the cause, so to speak. Among the many unspeakable acts and outright crimes he commits while abusing his role as the Chief of Police of Casablanca, Renault routinely extorts women by offering highly coveted exit visas to them, in exchange for sex. 

Casablanca was obviously made several decades before the women's movement gained momentum and several more decades before the advent of the MeToo Movement. It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that while the attitudes about sexual harassment and the exploitation of women were different eighty years ago, there was no justification then or now for finding light in the actions of Renault, and that the filmmakers by making Renault a likable character despite his crimes are guilty of obfuscating and trivializing his actions. 

I have a slightly different take on that last part, namely that the filmmakers did not cover up the actions of Renault in the slightest, but rather made them crystal clear and out in the open. It is we the viewers who through our fondness of the character over the decades, have overlooked his actions and trivialized them. 

Let me explain.

The Spanish have a humorous expression: Mas lento como el caballo del malo, (Slower than a bad guy's horse). It refers to the predictable Hollywood Westerns of old, where characters were clearly defined, and the good guy always caught the bad guy because for some reason, the bad guy's horse was always slower.

In a widely referenced and decidedly not so silly essay despite its title: Casablanca, or, the Cliches are Having a Ball, philosopher Umberto Eco describes the film as a pastiche of several historical literary and dramatic themes, taken from works ranging from Homer to the most current popular entertainment of the time. According to him, set into those themes are characters who, like the Spanish idea of American Westerns, are "stock figures, either all good or all bad." 

 

It's at this point in the essay where it appears that Eco and I had not been watching the same movie.****

From my point of view, there are only two characters in Casablanca who fit Eco's "stock figure" description. Representing the forces of good versus evil, in one corner is Victor Laszlo, the noble Resistance fighter risking life and limb to defend freedom and democracy. In the other corner, equally devoted to his cause of preserving, protecting and defending The Third Reich, is Major Strasser of the Gestapo.

In the end, just like the Westerns, the horse belonging to good guy dressed in white, Victor Laszlo, ended up being faster than Major Strasser's, as if by design.

As portrayed in the film, Victor Laszlo is an extraordinary person. I suppose in his one-dimensionality, so too is Major Strasser. The rest of the characters in the film are ordinary people doing their best to survive under extraordinary circumstances. 

In other words, they're complicated.

I honestly can't name any character in Casablanca (with the exception of Major Strasser) who is all bad, but Captain Renault comes mighty close.

His trademark line "round up the usual suspects" defines Renault's approach to his job, that is to say throw as much shit against the wall to see what sticks. If nothing sticks, at least it looks like he's doing something. 

Before we even meet him in the film, we witness one of those brutal round ups he speaks of, as officers under Renault's command terrorize the streets of Casablanca, capturing any character they deem suspicious looking.  One unlucky soul is even shot dead in the back as he runs away from the thuggish cops. Renault may not himself be a Nazi, but without people like him, the Nazis would never had been able to wreak the amount of havok they did. 

We don't see the death of Signor Urgate (Peter Lorre) while in the custody of Renault, we only hear the Captain mention his death while debating casually, as if he were deciding what to order for lunch, whether to report that Urgate committed suicide or was killed trying to escape. 

 

And we never see Renault assaulting women, he only alludes to those actions with little more than a wink and a nudge.

What we do see is a prolonged scene with one of his prospective victims deeply searching her soul, pouring her heart out to Rick by contemplating what appears to be the only chance to get her and her husband out of Casablanca. Check out my last post which features both a video clip from, and the script of that scene.

Yet bad as he is, at the end of the film Louis Renault gets to walk arm and arm into the mist with the hero Rick in the last shot of the movie, redeemed by his sudden conversion into a patriot, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 

All is forgiven and our sense of justice is thrown askew because Renault's horse turns out to be the swiftest of all, not quite as we think it should be.

Is it an injustice of the filmmakers to portray a scumbag such as Renault as a likeable character?

Well in the real world, bad guys' horses aren't always slow, despicable people sometimes can be quite charming when they're not doing despicable things, and in a time of war, combatants don't have the luxury of screening allies for their moral character. Remember, by the time Casablanca was released, Joseph Stalin was our ally.

 

No, I think given the two distinct sides of Louis Renault, it's up to viewer to decide. It's the kind of moral dilemma that Alfred Hitchcock, a master of telling stories with moral dilemmas, would be proud of. *****

 

If we end up liking Louis, it's on us, not the filmmakers. 

Back when I was an impressionable youngster studying film, I pooh poohed Casablanca for its over-the-top sentimentality and its heavy-handed dialog, but especially because the film theorists whom I respected were dismissive if not outright hostile to it. In other words, it wasn't cool to like Casablanca. 

But I got older and stopped caring so much about what other people told me to like. I grew to love the movie simply because it was so entertaining, especially the performances from the leads, to the greatest supporting cast ever put together in a motion picture, to the bit players who only have one line of dialog if that, to the of hundreds of extras, a great many of whom were themselves refugees from the Nazis. It's spectacularly beautiful to look at, thanks to the efforts of the director Michael Curtiz and the cinematographer Arthur Edison. And the screenplay despite its hiccups, gives us a story filled with characters we care about, not to mention all the great lines that have become woven into American culture.

It's a movie that stands up to multiple viewings as every time you see it, you pick up on details you missed before. By now I've probably seen Casablanca fifteen times and am still discovering new things, whether they be unnoticed comic gems, or clues that give heretofore unrealized insight into one of the characters. Some of those moments from my most recent viewing helped guide these two posts. It's a work of extreme economy, there's not one superfluous scene or even shot that is not essential to telling the story.

Mostly it stands the test of time.

That's especially true given the current state of the world. We've always had police corruption, sexism and racism, but I never thought I'd see the following again, especially in the United States: 

• A return to pathological self-interest and isolationism as expressed by the term "America First."
• Indifference and outright hostility to the plight of the refugee.
• An acceptance of totalitarianism because of its apparent efficiency.
• Joseph Goebbels inspired "alternative facts" making a comeback. 
• A criminal European dictator with absolute control and impunity being admired and embraced by a good many Americans including a former and possibly future president of the United States. 

Before getting on that plane to Lisbon, Victor Laszlo's parting words to Rick are: 

Welcome back to the fight, this time I know our side will win.

Watching Casablanca today and exploring it in the context of the time in which it was made as we just have, makes us realize we've been through all this before. Today our world is not in an altogether different place than it was in the late thirties/early forties. Because of that, in our own time we share something with the original viewers of the film more than eighty years ago:

Our story is still being written.

The best either of us could do is hope and pray that Victor Laszlo is right.

More than eighty years after it was made, Casablanca still has something to say to us.

We should listen.

Here's looking at you kid.

NOTES:

* Well, in the top one hundred films at least, in my humble opinion.

** That's not to say people haven't tried to explain that line away. One explanation is that in French, the official colonial language of Morocco, the archaic colloquial term for waiter is "garçon", in English, "boy". It might stand to reason that for folks of a particular social strata like Ilsa's, there would be no distinction between the workers in a nightclub, as they would all have been considered "the help". Consequentially, restaurant staff whether they be waiters or musicians might all be addressed in a similar fashion. In the words of a comment I read, it would be "a classist" form of addressing someone rather than a "racist" one. 

I think the most logical explanation is the line was directly lifted from the play as were many others, and it simply didn't set off alarm bells in the minds of the screenwriters or anyone else involved, as it certainly would today. Regardless, the choice of Ilsa referring to Sam as "the boy" is a truly unfortunate, disrespectful one. 

*** Three strong female characters immediately come to mind: Rosalind Russel's Hildy Johnson from Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday, the eponymous role in Ernst Lubitich's Ninotchka .played by Greta Garbo,  and much as Scarlet O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) in Gone with the Wind was not particularly admirable as a character, it would be hard to argue that she was not truly badass.

**** Umberto Eco over-plays his cliché card when he writes the following: "And so we can accept it ... when whores weep at the sound of “La Marseillaise.” The character he is referencing is Yvonne (Madelaine Lebeau). When we first meet her, she is at the bar at Rick's, obviously quite smitten by its proprietor and not a little tipsy. We can tell they've having a relationship or did, because he treats her shabbily. The next evening, Yvonne walks in with a German officer, obviously an attempt to get Rick's attention. Later that evening when the Germans start singing their patriotic tune Die Wacht am Rhein, Laszlo with Rick's approval, commands the house band to strike up the Marseillaise, and the voices of the rest of the patrons at Rick's singing along drown out the Germans. It's Yvonne's face we see in extreme closeup, tears in her eyes, singing the French national anthem more fervently than anyone in the room. When the tune finishes, she yells “Vive la France! Vive la démocratie!” That is her entire contribution to the movie. Did I mention that she was a prostitute? No, because there is no reason to believe she was, clichés be damned.

 

***** Ah but did the writers have the intention of setting up a moral dilemma for us, or was it just an accident? Did they simply assume viewers in 1942 wouldn't be bothered by Renault's actions? Let me point out one line that makes the answer pretty clear to me. When Rick first sets his eyes on young Annina, the Bulgarian girl set to be Louis' next conquest, the first thing Rick says to her is "Hey you're underage, how did you get in here?" Frankly I don't know how a typical 1942 audience would judge Louis coercing adult women to have sex with him. But extorting a child to have sex is another story. There was no reason to portray Annina as a minor other than to illustrate Loius Renault's depravity. The writers knew what they were doing.

Revisiting a Classic

This past weekend three quarters of my family drove up to Minnesota to look at colleges for our youngest child. Killing time during the six-hour drive, on her cellphone my wife opened up a random list of the 100 greatest films ever made. I'm kind of a sucker for these lists for many reasons, not the least of which is they provide an endless source of discussion, controversy and argument, due to their sins of commission and omission.

For starters, the film I brought up in my last post was not to be found on the list. Do you really mean to tell me that the comedies This is Spinal Tap and Airplane, funny for their time but not nearly as much today as when they were made, are deserving to be among the 100 greatest films ever made, but the sublime Local Hero is not???

You know, that kind of stuff. 

Frankly I could never put together a list like this as I don't think I've seen one hundred films in my life truly deserving of such a distinction. I mean, there are probably dozens of films by great directors like Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, Varda and scores of others I haven't seen yet that simply have to be better than say, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which might come in around number 100 of the top movies I have actually seen.

But in the end it's all subjective isn't it?

Well no, not really. There's a reason why certain films like Citizen Kane are always on these lists.

But not Casablanca, which some critics place at or near the top of their lists of greatest films ever made, while others like the authors of this list, don't think it even merits a spot in the top 100. I wasn't surprised by the snub as the 1942 Hollywood classic is somewhat polarizing; people either love it passionately or think it's overrated. Foremost among the latter group are the followers of the Auteur School of film criticism which places the worth of any film squarely upon the shoulders of its director, whom they consider the true author (auteur) of the work. Auteur criticism places a film within the context of its director's body of work and judge it primarily by whether it contributes to the particular vision and style of that director. Alfred Hitchcock would be a prime example of a director admired by the auteur critics as he has a unique vision and a definite visual and thematic style. *

Not so Michael Curtiz, who before directing Casablanca, already had dozens of Hollywood films and before that, many more in Austria and his native Hungary to his credit. Curtiz (an Americanization of his true surname Kertesz, a name familiar to anyone who is acquainted with the art of photography), made films in practically every popular genre at the time, from horror to mystery to film noir, from thriller to adventure, from love story to comedy to musical, including the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole (probably the star's best film). Because of his tremendous output, Curtiz is often considered the ultimate Studio System director, one of many workers in the industry who were assigned films as much or more for practical reasons like his technical chops, his reputation for working within schedule and never going over budget, rather than for his personal vision. 

And because of that, as his output was all over the place stylistically and thematically, most auteur critics feel Curtiz represented the studio's vision rather than his own. To them he is a craftsman rather than an artist. In less generous terms, some would call him a studio hack, albeit a very, very good one. 

So where does Casablanca stand with the auteur critics? Respect, but often in the form of backhanded praise. This is from none less than Andrew Sarris, the American film critic who expanded upon the auteur theory from its origins in France:

...the director’s one enduring masterpiece is, of course, "Casablanca", the happiest of happy accidents, and the most decisive exception to the auteur theory.

Not all of the detractors of Casablanca were subscribers to the auteur theory, here's Paulene Kael:

It's far from a great film but it has a special appealingly schlocky romanticism, and you're never really pressed to take its melodramatic twists and turns seriously. 

Responding to that comment, in an essay for The Atlantic celebrating the 70th anniversary of the film in 2012, David W. Brown, himself a great fan of Casablanca writes this:

Nobody ever walked away from a screening of Casablanca and said, "Well I don't get it."  Not with regard to its reputation as a great work, nor to the nature of its characters or plot. It's not a challenging work. But its universal themes and accessibility are inseparable from its place in the American film canon.

Therein lies the issue with the movie, it's a great film because its themes are universal, we all get it; it's less than great because it doesn't challenge us.

Brown points out in his essay that greatness of any work of art comes from either smashing accepted standards to bits to create something entirely new, or taking those established standards to heights never realized before.  

Citizen Kane would fit into the first category, and Casablanca into the second. 

If you've seen the movie, you might be interested in this shot by shot analysis of Casablanca by one of its greatest supporters, the late Chicago based film critic Roger Ebert.

Ebert does a nice job putting everything into place. What the auteur critics seem to ignore is that film making is perhaps more than any other art, a collaborative effort as anyone who has ever sat through the closing credits of a movie realizes. Without minimizing the efforts of Curtiz one bit, Ebert points out that the greatness of Casablanca lies in the efforts of everyone involved from its producer Hal Wallis who probably shaped the final product more than anyone else, through the writers, (Julius J. Epstein, Phillip G. Epstein and Howard Koch), the cinematographer, (Arthur Edison), the editor, (Owen Marks), the music director, (Max Steiner), the costume and set designers (Orry-Kelly and George James Hopkins), the rest of the technical staff and of course, the amazing cast all the way down to the extras, truly one of the greatest collections of talent ever gathered for one film.

I admire Ebert for his point of view and keen sense of observation but there are a few points he makes here that I have some issues with.

THE SCREENPLAY

 

It's no secret that Casablanca is probably the most quotable movie ever, at least in American cinema. In his analysis, Roger Ebert says the true sign of a successful screenplay is when the audience leaves the theater quoting lines from the movie. I'm not sure I agree, it's kind of like saying the sign of a great work of music is if you're able to hum tunes from it after leaving the concert hall. That would certainly disqualify most western classical music written after 1850.

Regardless, for all its memorable snippets of dialog, Casablanca also has more than its share of roll-your-eye inducing lines as well. Consider the following:

"Was that cannon fire or is it my heart pounding?"

One would be hard pressed to write a cheesier line.

The son of actress Joy Paige who played the young Bulgarian bride in the movie, recounted in her 2008 obituary in the LA times that his mother, in 1942 a high school senior with family connections to the film industry, read an early draft of the screenplay but was not impressed. She told her son she felt it was "corny and old fashioned." Fortunately for her despite her reservations, she got and accepted the role which turned out to be her one true shot at silver screen immortality.

You be the judge. The following is a transcription of the screenplay highlighting Page's one big scene in the movie where her character, Annina, is looking for some advice from Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). The action takes place in the dining room of Rick's Cafe Americain:

 

Annina meets Captain Renault, Chief of Police, in the hallway as she leaves the gambling room:

RENAULT: How's lady luck treating you? 

Annina looks down.

RENAULT: Aw, too bad, you'll find him over there.

 

Renault points in the direction of Rick. Annina sees him and goes to his table as Renault watches her attentively.

ANNINA: Monsieur Rick?

RICK: Yes?

ANNINA: Could I speak with you for just one moment please?

Rick looks at her.

RICK: How'd you get in here? You're underage.

ANNINA: I came with Captain Renault.

RICK (cynically): Oh I should have known.

ANNINA: My husband is with me too.

RICK:  He is? Well Captain Renault is getting broadminded. Sit down.

Will you have a drink?

Anina shakes her head.

RICK: No of course not, you mind if I do?

ANNINA: No.

Rick pours himself a drink.

ANNINA: Monsieur Rick, what kind of a man is Captain Renault?

RICK: Oh he's just like any other man, only more so...

ANNINA: No I mean, is he trustworthy, is his word...

RICK:  Now just a minute, who told you to ask me that?

ANNINA: He did, Captain Renault did.

 

RICK:  I thought so, where's your husband?

ANNINA: At the roulette table trying to win enough for our exit visa.

Well of course he's losing.

RICK:  How long have you been married?

ANNINA: Eight weeks, we come from Bulgaria.

Oh things are very bad there Monsieur, the devil has the people by the throat.

So Jan and I we, we do not want our children to grow up in such a country.

RICK (wearily): So you decided to go to America?

ANNINA: Yes but we haven't that much money and,

traveling is so expensive and difficult, it was much more than we thought to get here.

And then Captain Renault sees us. and he is so kind he wants to help us...

RICK: Yes I'll bet...

ANNINA: He tells me he can get us an exit visa but, but we have no money..

RICK: Does he know that?

ANNINA: Oh yes.

RICK: And he's still willing to give you a visa? 

ANNINA: Yes monsieur.

RICK: And you want to know...

ANNINA: Will he keep his word.?

RICK: He always has.

There is a silence. Annina is very disturbed.

ANNINA: Oh monsieur you are a man, if someone loved you very much so that your happiness was the only thing that she wanted in the world, and she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her...

Rick stares off into space.

RICK: Nobody ever loved me that much.

ANNINA: ...and he never knew, and the girl kept this bad thing locked in her heart,

that would be alright, wouldn't it?

RICK (harshly): You want my advice?

ANNINA: Oh yes please.

RICK: Go back to Bulgaria.

ANNINA: Oh but if you knew what it means to us to get to America...

oh, but if Jan should find out, he's such a boy, in many ways I am so much older than he is.

RICK: Yes well everyone has problems in Casablanca maybe yours will work out. You'll excuse me.

Rick abruptly rises.

ANNINA (tonelessly): Thank you Monsieur.

He quickly goes off, leaving Annina alone at the table. She remains seated, too demoralized to move.

And... cut.

Are you moved to tears by reading that? Probably not.

The sincerity Joy Page brings to the role of Annina kind of sort of pulls off all that wonky dialog ("The Devil has people by the throat" really???). But I'm afraid even a more seasoned actor could never take that claptrap beyond grade B level melodrama. Conversely, Rick's one-line responses, at least on paper, convey the level of indifference and snarkiness we've come to expect from his character up to that point, not much more.

You wouldn't know it just from reading the dialog, but this is the pivotal scene in the movie, there's a lot going on here. 

First, Rick is defining for us his complicated relationship with Renault (Claude Rains). He knows full well that Renault is a scoundrel as his snide comments suggest. The conversation is rapid fire, both actors starting their lines before the other has a chance to finish, except for one time not indicated in the script. When Annina asks if Renault will keep his word, Rick pauses only for a second, but it seems much longer. For the first time in the scene, he speaks without irony:

"He always has."

Rick and Renault share a mutual admiration, even affection, yet neither would hesitate throwing the other under the bus if it were necessary. Here Rick withdraws his glance from the young woman as if to wash his hands of the sordid affair. He tells the young woman in not so many words that yes Renault, a man of his word, will indeed grant her and her husband the exit visas, after he fucks her. The way Bogart delivers that line, he conveys both fondness for the man, and contempt.

Talk about complicated. 

Then Rick exposes his vulnerability in the middle of Annina's sad confession about her dilemma.

His face changes from an expression of compassion to anguish when her words hit close to home as she talks about a woman loving a person so much she would do anything to make him happy. Rick has just been reacquainted with the love of his life Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) in the arms of another man. He allows himself a moment of self-pity when he responds: "Nobody loves me that much."

Then fatalism sets in as he crushes Annina's dream of a better life by advising her to just give up and go back home.

After some more mushy words from the poor girl, Rick abruptly gets up and leaves her in the lurch, telling her dismissively that everybody's got problems in Casablanca, so leave me alone and have a nice day.

Same old Rick sticking his neck out for no one.

At least that's what we're led to believe as the scene shifts to another part of Rick's place where back to business, he welcomes Ilsa and her husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) back to his nightclub. This scene is so filled with tension between Rick and Ilsa that we forget about poor Annina. 

But not Rick. In the subsequent scene Rick enters the gambling room where Annina's husband Jan is sitting dejectedly at the roulette wheel. The croupier Emil (played by the great French actor Marcel Dalio in an uncredited role) asks Jan, who is only holding a few chips, if he'd like to place another bet. "I'd better not" he says, those chips probably representing the last of the couple's savings. Rick, looking over his shoulder says: "have you tried 22?". "I said 22" he repeats a little louder, speaking to Jan but looking at Emil who gets the message. 

 

Of all the memorable lines from Casablanca that are quoted endlessly, the last one Rick says to Annina before darting out of the room...

Yes well everyone has problems in Casablanca maybe yours will work out.

... is not one of them. But it dawned on me after having seem the film for the umpteenth time this week that it should be.  When he says everyone has problems in Casablanca, perhaps he is referring to his own. Thinking of it in those terms, in his mind he is first diminishing his own suffering by empathizing with another person's pain. Doing his part to help ease that pain is step two.

In that gesture at the roulette wheel, coming at no small cost to both Rick and his business's reputation, he solves Annina'a dilemma, much to Renault's consternation. And there in one fell swoop, the pathologically guarded Rick at last reveals who he really is for all to see, including himself.

That seemingly dismissive line to Annina foreshadows the greatest line of the film:

I'm not good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.

Screenwriters provide the architecture of a film, not just the dialog. They don't write for the printed page any more than an architect designs for the blueprint. They depend on the cast, the director, the cinematographer, the editor, and a whole cast of characters to make their words come to life. That's the magic of cinema.

Watch this clip of the two scenes involving the Bulgarian couple to see what I mean. Pay close attention to Bogart's physical reactions to Joy Page and especially to his exquisite timing. If you doubt what a great film actor he was, you have the script, give it a go yourself.

Unfortunately, the middle scene has been edited out of this clip. Better yet, watch the whole movie, watch it again if you've already seen it.

Do I consider this great screenwriting despite its not always stellar dialog? 

You bet I do, along with great acting directing, cinematography and you name it.

VICTOR LASZOW

Roger Ebert claims in his analysis that Casablanca is a near perfect movie. Then he points to some small issues such as continuity errors and the many parts of the story that challenge one's suspension of disbelief, all of which he admits, don't really take anything away from the film.

I agree.

It seems Ebert's main objection to the film is the performance of Paul Henreid in the role of the unassailable resistance hero, Victor Laszlo. Laszlo, a Czechoslovak with Hungarian name**, is a continuous thorn in the side of the Nazis. He has escaped from a concentration camp and found his way to Morocco, then part of unoccupied France.*** From there he hoped to obtain two official letters of transit that would permit him and his wife Ilsa to leave the country for neutral Portugal, then on to the United States, where he could continue his work in relative safety. 

If you've seen the movie you can skip the next paragraph. If not and you're interested in how Rick got involved in all this, read on:

FOR THAT WE MUST GO TO FLASHBACK, cue the harpist...

PARIS-1940: It turns out that while Victor was in Nazi captivity, Ilsa mistakenly learned that he was dead. Thinking herself a widow, Ilsa met Rick in Paris, fell in love with him, hears the first of many "here's looking at you kids", yadda yadda yadda, then in march the Nazis. Rick, himself no friend of the Third Reich, decides to skedaddle, but not before Ilsa finds out that Victor is very much alive, has escaped from the concentration camp, and is back in Paris. She can't face Rick with the news so instead of joining him on the last train out of town, she sends a note with Sam (Dooley Wilson, more on him later) telling Rick without explanation that she can never see him again, have a nice life. 

So back to the present and Victor and Ilsa end up unbeknownst to them at the club of Ilsa's lover and now we've got ourselves one barnburner of a love triangle.

So what's wrong with Henreid's performance according to Ebert? There's no chemistry between Victor and Ilsa, he claims. I believe at one point Ebert says that Henreid is too stiff, apparently not realizing the mixed message that term sends.

Anyway, stiff or flaccid, it hardly matters, the character of Victor is all about his work. He certainly loves Ilsa, we know that because he says so, even if Ebert is not convinced. Ingrid Bergman always said that when they were making the film, she asked director Michael Curtiz which character Ilsa was supposed to really be in love with. He reportedly told her to dole out the loving equally between the two and that they'd sort it out at the end of the story, which legend has it, was not determined until the day they shot the final scene.  

But it's clear to me in the final cut that Ilsa worships Laszlo (perhaps more like a father), but loves Rick.**** That is what defines her conflict. Had there been more "chemistry" between Laszlo and Ilsa as Ebert and others suggest, and all else had been the same, she would have chosen her husband in a heartbeat without all the drama.

Not a very interesting ending.  

AND SPEAKING OF THAT ENDING (spoiler alert!!!)

If you've read anything about the making of Casablanca, you know that the filmmakers were flying by the seat of their pants, making everything up as they went along. At times it is said, any given day's shooting could have included dialog that was written that very morning and rushed over to the set. As I mentioned above, Ingrid Bergman didn't know which man she was supposed to be in love with. Some suggest even the screenwriters had no clue which of the two, Laszlo or Rick, she would end up with in the end. 

Roger Ebert points out quite logically that there is no way Ilsa could have ended up with her lover Rick rather than her husband, as it would have been strictly forbidden by the enforcers of the extremely conservative Motion Picture Production Code, the self-regulating moral police force better known as the Hays Office. With its intimations of extramarital goings on, and even a not too subtle suggestion of latent homosexuality, (remember this is 1942), Casablanca was already pushing the envelope, and the producers had to do several end-runs around the censors to get the more titillating scenes on the screen. But an ending where Ilsa leaves her husband for her lover and not getting her comeuppance for it would have been a non-starter in 1942 Hollywood, strictly on moral grounds. *****

But there is a vastly more profound reason why Ilsa got on that plane with Victor and not Rick. It would have made no sense insofar as the trajectory of the story.

For decades, Casablanca has been described as a love story set to the backdrop of war. But the war was not a backdrop, it wasn't even the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the room. World War II was the story. Without it, the film would not have been Casablanca, it would have been Paris, Oslo, Prague, New York, Berlin, Sophia and all the other places the characters escaped from to end up in Casablanca. In other words, without the war, there would be no Casablanca the movie because nobody in it would have met each other.

More important, the film was made during the war. When Rick in a perplexed drunken stupor cynically asks Ilsa how the story of their love triangle ends, she responds, "I don't know, the ending hasn't been written yet." That response has a double meaning clearly not lost to the people who were watching the film at the time of its release. On the surface she's saying she doesn't know which man she'll end up with. In a much deeper sense, she, everyone watching the film in 1942, and for that matter anyone alive all over the world at the time, had no idea how the only important story of the day would turn out. It certainly wasn't looking good at the time for those who preferred freedom, justice and democracy to fascism, tyranny and genocide.

By the time the film was released, the United States government was demanding sacrifice from every single American, Tragically and unjustly, Americans of Japanese descent were forced to sacrifice more than any other group. The government was drafting American sons (the daughters went voluntarily), asking of them the biggest sacrifice of all. 

Imagine an ending where Ilsa and Rick, both it turns out with skin in the game, throw away all their commitments and values to run off together and live happily ever after, while the rest of the world was sacrificing, suffering and dying.

Preposterous.

What most people who have written about Casablanca for the past fifty years or so seem to miss is its unmistakable role as a propaganda film.

As usual, I've gone on much too long, so we'll save that part of our story for another day.

Stay tuned, les jeux sont faits.

NOTES:

* There's definitely an auteur theory bias to this list. For the record, three Hitchcock films made the list but surprisingly none are in the top ten. Stanley Kubrick has five including number one, 2001: A Space Odessey.

**The writers probably thought a truly Czech name like Jiři Dvořák would be too hard to pronounce. Ebert could have commented on Henreid's Austrian accent too, but like the inappropriate name, that didn't seem to bother him either. Fortunately, none of the actors in the international cast bothered to fake an accent to mimic the nationality of the character they were supposed to be playing. I guess having any kind of foreign, i.e. non-American accent was enough to lend the film a hint of authenticity, at least to the American audience. The one exception is June Page, one of only three Americans in the credited cast, (Bogey and Dooley Wilson were the other two). Given the diverse accents in the film, Page's American accent is a little off putting when she says she's from Bulgaria. 

***A little history lesson. Roger Ebert claims one of the biggest inaccuracies in the film is the idea that Victor Laszlo, an enemy of the Third Reich, could arrive in French controlled Morocco and not be immediately arrested by the Gestapo as by this time France was occupied by the Germans. This is not quite so. While the northern portion of contiguous France, including Paris was occupied by the Nazis, the southern part of the country and its North African colonies were governed by l'État français (The French State) better known as Vichy France, named after the city which was its capital. While Vichy had signed a peace treaty with Germany and collaborated with the Nazis, it was still an independent state at the time the film takes place, and the Germans despite their influence, would have had no official jurisdiction there. Of course, to paraphrase Carl (S. K. Sakall) the ex-pat German waiter at Rick's: "being Germans they would have taken him anyway."

**** All the chemistry on screen may have been between Ilsa and Rick, not Ilsa and Laszlow, but in real life, legend has it that Ingrid Berman and Paul Henreid had an affair, while she and Humphrey Bogart barely spoke to each other off the set. I guess that's why they call it "acting."

***** The Hays Office did let another moral transgression slide, in our day a far greater sin, the sex crimes of Captain Renault. I'll get to that in my next post. 

Revisionist History

In Chicago's Grant Park there is a statue that was commissioned in 1933 by the Italian community of this city, devoted in the words inscribed on the front of its pedestal: "To Christopher Columbus, Discoverer of America"

In Humboldt Park about five miles to the northwest, there is another sculpture, this one commissioned by the Norwegian community of Chicago, devoted, in the words inscribed on its roughly-hewn granite base, to  "Leif Erikson, Discoverer of America."

This city also has a significant Native American community, most of whom would more than likely dispute either claim, as their ancestors lived in the Americas tens of thousands of years before either European explorer set foot upon these shores.

Depending upon your definition of the word "discovery", any one of these claims could have merit. Such is the challenge of history, the narrative depends upon who is telling the story.

In 1893, Chicago hosted a tremendous World's Fair, held in honor of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first journey across the Atlantic. (Actually the 401st anniversary as the city couldn't quite pull off the event in time). Ninety nine years later on the 500th anniversary of the event, there was barely any mention of the milestone. And today, nearly thirty years after that, while Columbus Day is still an official holiday, mostly I think out of deference to the Italian-American community, there are plans afoot to keep the holiday but swap the recognition of it from Columbus to Indigenous Americans.

"It's about time", says one segment of society, while another segment indignantly shouts: "revisionist history."

I found a wonderful quote about that old bugaboo "revisionist history" from a noted historian. James McPherson, the author of several books on the American Civil War such as The Battle Cry of Freedom writes that far from something to be avoided, revisionism:

...is the lifeblood of historical scholarship. History is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past.

I didn't find the quote in a story about the Civil War or the "discovery" of America, but in a recent Chicago Sun Times article about the founder of the Chicago White Sox. The article titled Pop History Gave a Bad Shake to 1919 ‘Black Sox’ owner Charles A. Comiskey, written by Richard Lindberg, tells the story of how Comiskey's bad reputation comes from the characterization of him in the novel Eight Men Out by Eliot Azinov, the story of the notorious Black Sox Scandal of 1919. The book was made into a popular movie in the eighties.

Quoting myself from a piece I wrote about this very subject four years ago:

The book and especially the film depict Comiskey as a real bastard; imagine a pre-redemtion Ebeneezer Scrooge mixed with old man Potter and Simon Legree without the good side, and you get the picture.

Without understanding (or caring) that Eight Men Out is essentially a work of fiction with a few historical facts thrown in for good measure, popular historians such as Ken Burns have taken the book to be the definitive source on the scandal that rocked baseball in the second decade of the twentieth century. In doing so, they have perpetuated the myth that Comiskey was a notoriously greedy tightwad who all but forced his players to take money from gangsters to throw the 1919 World Series. Research in the past decade has shown this to be pure rubbish, as is another popular myth also perpetuated by Burns and others about the character of one of baseball's greatest players, Ty Cobb.

Yet despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, many people still hold on to their strong biases against the two men, claiming the serious research that went into discovering irrefutable facts that ended up clearing both their names, is not to be trusted as it is merely "revisionist history". In my piece about Ty Cobb, I quoted the estimable baseball writer and statistician Bill James who speaks eloquently not only about the ballplayer, but also about the general public's attitude about history:

If one were to take the time to document a thousand times in which Ty Cobb went out of his way to be kind to other people, including black people, would this change his image? I fear it would not.

Why is it so hard to let go of our historical biases, especially when confronted with compelling facts to the contrary? In his book Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, Author Charles Leerhsen's theory is that we all need people like the mythical bad guys Charles Comiskey and Ty Cobb because they make us feel better about our own inadequacies. We say to ourselves, I may be bad, but hey, at least I'm not as bad as those two. In other words, if we like the story, it becomes a part of us and we stick with it, come hell or high water.

In the past couple of years, the interpretation of history has been at the center of a controversy involving the removal of century old monuments to Confederate leaders in the American South. The argument against the removal of the statues is that by doing so, communities are practicing their own brand of revisionism by "whitewashing history." In a sense the critics are right, but the history being removed is the history of the statues themselves, NOT the history of the event they were intended to commemorate. Decades after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, VA., marking the end of the Civil War, a movement that would become known as the "Cult of the Lost Cause" took it upon themselves to revise history by portraying the Confederacy in a kinder, gentler light. According to members of this group, which included historians responsible for much of the understanding of the Civil War for many subsequent decades, the Confederate States fought not to preserve slavery, but to defend states' rights over what they viewed as a tyrannical federal government, to preserve the noble "southern way of life", and to defend their land from the onslaught of Northern aggression.  Union leaders were portrayed, not always wrongly, as drunken, incompetent fools, and the institution of slavery was quite wrongly explained away as one of benevolence, not oppression. Capping it off. the leaders of the Confederacy were portrayed as heroic defenders of the lost cause and tributes and monuments to them went up all over, some even in the north.

No matter how fair-minded the observer, debunking the revisionist history Cult of the Lost Cause is not difficult. All one has to do is read the Articles of Confederation of the states who seceded from the Union (you can find them all online) and right there in black and white, usually near the top of  the documents, is the mention of slavery and its importance to that particular state. The truth, at least as best as we know it today, is that the Civil War did not begin as so many assume, with the Union demanding that slavery be abolished in the South. The issue was the expansion of slavery into the western territories which President Lincoln vehemently objected. Had the Southern states not pressed the issue of expansion, the Civil War may have been delayed or avoided altogether and slavery may have continued for a while until it one way or other, it would have most certainly faded away.


Unlike the popular misconceptions of the causes of the Civil War and the legacies of Ty Cobb and Charles Comiskey, the history of Columbus's voyages to the Americas were not clouded in false assumptions, diversions and outright lies. There was never any question that the results of the European invasion, or expeditions depending upon your point of view, of the Americas initiated unwittingly by Columbus (he never realized that he didn't actually accomplish his goal of reaching Asia), greatly benefited the conquerors, and all but destroyed the conquered, the indigenous people of the so called "New World." What we once viewed as a magnificent accomplishment that ushered in the dawn of the modern age and one of the great triumphs of the human spirit, is now generally viewed as a dark point in history that triggered unconscionable suffering, genocide and the destruction of ancient civilizations. The difference between the way we view the legacy of Columbus today and they way we viewed it in the past is a matter of changing values. Today we are telling the same story but from a different point of view. The truth is that both views of Columbus's legacy are essentially correct.

The most vilified term in academic circles today, next to racism, is colonialism. It's almost impossible to get into any deep conversation about politics, current events, history or just about anything that concerns how we live our lives these days, without the issue of the evils of colonialism coming up. Merely implying that anything good may have come out of colonialism is grounds for at the very least a stern lecture from the rarified world of the cognoscenti. Having just said that, lest you think I am a defender, apologist, or someone who is trying to make a case for colonialism in any form, let me assure you I am not.

The following is my litmus test for judging the merits of anything, asking myself to argue the pros and cons of a particular topic and comparing their merits. Here is my most compelling argument against colonialism:

How would I feel if my country were invaded by another country which enforced its system of rules and government upon us, subjected my people to second class citizenship or worse, and denied us our basic rights? 

You're right I wouldn't like it, not one bit. So why on earth would I advocate subjecting someone else to colonization? On the other hand, here's my best argument in favor of colonialism:

-  -  - 

That's right I don't have any argument supporting colonialism. In my head, the Golden Rule (or whatever you prefer to call the universal gold standard for distinguishing right from wrong), trumps all the fringe benefits that may occur as a result. Wrong is wrong and extenuating circumstances cannot make a wrong a right.

Proponents of a return of colonialism in our time point to liberal democracy, the advancement of science, liberation theology, racial, ethnic and sexual equality, freedom of speech, of religion, of association, and a slew of other ideas and values that have spread throughout the world as a direct result of western colonialism.  Are they wrong? Well those things are all good in my opinion anyway, and whether you like it or not, have all come to us part and parcel as a result of European colonialism.  Yet as far as using those values and attributes as excuses for the continued violation of human rights, then, no, I have to draw the line there.

Which brings to mind this chilling scene from the classic film from 1948, The Third Man, where the character of Harry Lime, as played by Orson Welles, tries to rationalize his evil deeds to his boyhood friend played by Joseph Cotten. Make sure you watch the entire clip as the payoff is at the very end:





Here is a link to an article that chastises as dishonest, a historian favorable to the re-birth of colonialism who happily lists all the glad tidings it has brought to the world, yet failed to note any of the horrors and atrocities of which there were countless.

I get it, but isn't it equally dishonest to only point out the injustices of something we don't like while avoiding any mention of the positive? It is an inescapable fact that our world would be a very different place today, for the worse AND the better, were it not for colonialism. The inconvenient truth historians must accept is this: civilizations of all stripes, both good and evil from time immemorial have been built upon the backs of unfortunate people who suffered greatly in one way or other. This is something we needn't celebrate, nor model our own civilization upon, but need to accept just the same.

I'll give you a personal example of a very inconvenient truth regarding my own life. Had it not been for the events surrounding World War II, a time that witnessed some of the greatest atrocities the world has ever known, and the subsequent Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe that was the direct result of that war, my father would not have left his home of Czechoslovakia, come to Chicago, and met my mother. In other words, I owe my very existence, and by extension my children's and God willing that of their children, to World War II.

Do I wake up every morning thanking my lucky stars for the suffering of tens of millions of people in the thirties and forties and advocate for a return of the conditions that led to that terrible time? Of course not. And while I am never unaware of this terrible truth, I do not dwell upon it because it would drive me insane.

Nonetheless it is still a very real fact.

My point is that we should avoid the telling of history simply to fit our own needs, ideologies and belief systems. There is an old adage that says those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. But it is essential that we not just know history, but continually question our understanding of it, reject verifiable falsehoods no matter how appealing they may be, and understand the point of view in which that history was told or written. Finally, hard as it may seem, we must learn to appreciate that different tellings of the same history need not be mutually exclusive, but serve to paint a fuller picture of the past, how it relates to the present, and how we can use it to shape the future.

Like everything else in life, context is essential.

75 Years

Today is the seventy fifth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the entry of the United States into World War II.

Here is a recording of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's message to the American people before a joint session of Congress made the following day:

Gives you goose bumps doesn't it? Well it does me anyway.

The war in Europe was already over two years old by the time the US was drawn into the battle. France and the rest of mainland Western Europe had fallen, leaving Britain alone to fight Germany. Then in June, 1941, Hitler reneged on his non-aggression pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. Meanwhile in the Pacific, Germany's ally Japan, whose empire already included Korea, Taiwan and significant portions of China, Indochina and Mongolia, looked to expand further south.

Despite all that, before Pearl Harbor, public sentiment in this country was strongly opposed to entering the war. Roosevelt understood the threat of Hitler and Nazism, and the aggression of Japan, but knew he could not declare war against the Axis powers without the support of the American people and Congress. In order to help the Allied effort as best he could, Roosevelt signed the "Lend-Lease" act, which enabled the United States to send food, oil and supplies to Great Britain, Free France, the Soviet Union and China, in return for their leasing us territories for the use of strategic military bases. In theory, the supplies would be returned after the war. Roosevelt, as a means to sell the still skeptical American public, likened the act to "lending a neighbor your garden hose to put out a fire."

German U-boats attacked and destroyed merchant marine vessels transporting lend-lease supplies across the Atlantic. Roosevelt ordered US war ships to protect those vessels and threatened Germany that any attack on the US Navy would constitute an act of war. A perturbed Hitler, already with a two front war on his hands, was not eager to engage the United States. He ordered his navy to withhold attacking US ships.

For Japan's part, the only thing stopping them from expanding their empire to the Philippines, Indochina in its entirety, Indonesia and beyond, was the U.S., who at the time controlled the Philippines and had significant economic interests in the rest of the region. Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on Japan after their aggression in French Indochina.

Most likely the attack in response to the embargo on the enormous American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii had been planned at least one year in advance.

As Roosevelt mentioned in his December 8th address, late in 1941 with relations between the two countries at all all time low (up to that point), Japan's ambassador to the US, Kichisaburō Nomura met with US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, attempting to negotiate an end to hostilities between the two nations. Nomura went to his grave claiming he knew nothing of the imminent attack, and his claims were backed up by Hull who insisted that the Japanese ambassador was sincere in his attempts to make peace with the Americans. His bosses in Tokyo were obviously not on the same page.

Conspiracy theories abound that Roosevelt and his generals knew in advance of the attack, but did nothing to stop it in order to rile up American sentiment in favor of going to war. Plausible as it may seem, there is little evidence to back this theory up. Roosevelt's biggest concern at the time was the war in Europe and it's very unlikely that he relished the idea of his own two front war.

Not only is it unlikely that Roosevelt knew about the attack in advance, but apparently neither did Japan's buddy, Adolph Hitler. Rumor has it that when the news of the attack reached Nazi headquarters in Berlin, one of the generals present asked the assembled group where Pearl Harbor was. Nobody knew.

Hitler reportedly said after the attack:

Now we can’t lose the war. We have an ally that has not been defeated in 3,000 years of history!” 

Still he wasn't eager to declare war on the United States. He was on the other hand, eager to engage Japan in his war against the Soviet Union. Japan clearly had a bargaining chip, and demanded that as fulfilling terms of their Tripartite Pact signed with Germany and Italy in September of 1940, Germany and Italy declare war on the United States.

Despite objections from his generals, Hitler did so on December 11, 1941.

Next to invading the Soviet Union, that was his biggest blunder. Allied troops in a combined effort led by U.S. General Dwight David Eisenhower, attacked mainland Europe via the English Channel on June, 6 1944 and began their inexorable push east toward Berlin. Meanwhile the Soviet Army did the same from the east. The Third Reich met its end with the suicide of Adolph Hitler in his bunker on April 30, 1945. Germany unconditionally surrendered seven days later.

Which leads to the obvious question: what would have happened to Europe, and the rest of the world, had Japan not attacked Pearl Harbor?

Only God knows.

I for one, shudder to think about it.

And So It Goes...

Nearly six years ago, on September 3rd, 2009, I wrote this post observing the 70th anniversary of the declaration of war against Germany by France and Great Britain, marking the beginning of the greatest human-initiated calamity in history. In what seems to be the blink of an eye, we are now about to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, which officially took place on September 2, 1945 when officials of the Imperial Government of Japan signed the documents of surrender to Allied officials aboard the battleship USS Missouri.

The defeat of Germany in April of that year meant the eventual defeat of Japan seemed inevitable by the summer of '45. Just how eventual was anybody's guess at the time. On August 6th and August 9th of that year, the United States dropped two atomic bombs, one over the city of Hiroshima, the other over Nagasaki. Nobody knows for sure but most likely around 130,000 human beings perished either as a direct result of the blasts, or because of disease caused by nuclear fallout, something that was not completely understood at the time. Facing the prospect of the annihilation of their country, the Japanese government, still with their Emperor at the helm, agreed to the Allied terms of surrender.

The only thought more horrible than the devastation resulting from those two weapons of mass destruction, is the contemplation of what most likely would have happened had the bombs not been dropped. In the works was a massive invasion of Japan by Allied forces who freed from the conflict in Europe, could now concentrate their efforts in the Pacific. By August of 1945, the list of Allied nations ready and willing to participate in the invasion included the Soviet Union who had just reneged on their non-aggression pact with Japan. Conservative military assessments of the operation, anticipated the loss of one to two hundred thousand Allied personnel in the invasion. Less optimistic planners put the number closer to one million. For the defense of their island home from an attack they knew was coming, the Japanese were in the process of assembling a civilian militia to augment their military which had been severely depleted in the war. Estimates of civilian losses by the Japanese government in the event of an invasion, were in the neighborhood of twenty million.

Given the carnage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it may seem trite, even cruel to suggest that those two attacks actually saved lives, but the numbers are difficult to ignore. In the years that followed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world became fixated on the horrific fate of the victims of the nuclear attacks. While it is entirely appropriate to remember the appalling destruction of the two Japanese cities and their people, those attacks must be looked at within the broader context of the war. Many cities in Japan and Germany had already been bombed with Allied incendiary devices which set off massive, horrifying fire storms. Literally hell on earth, those fire storms consumed everything in their path, including people seeking shelter in air raid shelters, burning them alive. In Tokyo alone, 100,000 people perished in these attacks. Had the United States not developed the atomic bomb, and perhaps more significantly, displayed the will to use it, death by incineration would have been the fate of several more Japanese cities and millions of their inhabitants.

There are many alternate scenarios that critics of the bombings believe might have ended the war without reverting to the use of the deadliest, most indiscriminate weapon to date. Some argue that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war would have been enough of an incentive for the Japanese to surrender. Some suggest that deploying the bomb over a non-populated area would have been enough to convince the Japanese to throw in the towel. Others say that while the first attack on Hiroshima may have been justified, the second on Nagaski was entirely unnecessary and amounted to nothing more than premeditated, cold blooded, mass murder. These are all justifiable arguments based upon speculation, but little evidence.

After the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan remained resolute in dictating the terms of its own surrender. These included no foreign occupation of Japan, Korea or Formosa, and Japanese control of their own disarmament, demobilization, and prosecution of war criminals. Not surprisingly, the terms were not accepted by the Allies.

We can speculate until kingdom come but by the beginning of August, 1945, it was obvious to everyone that the cost of ending the war, whatever it would be, was going to be appalling. What everyone does agree upon is that after the United States dropped the bomb, the world was never the same. We may have won the war in the most efficient way possible in terms of loss of life, but it may have come at the cost of our moral credibility. The United States remains the only nation that has used an atomic weapon against human beings.

In the years following the war, weapons became more deadly and indiscriminate. Soon the richest nations of the world, at least those on the winning side of WWII, all developed their own nuclear weapons. Former allies became enemies, each equipped with the means to destroy the other. Some felt, erroneously of course, that this nuclear stalemate would mean the end to all war as the threat of mutual annihilation would encourage negotiation at all costs over hostility. In reality all it meant is that the superpowers neutralized each other while smaller nations, breakaway republics or even renegade groups of radicals without a nation, learned how to subvert traditional rules of warfare, undermining the big powers who were understandably loathe to use their most lethal weapons. This happened to the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and to the United States again in Iraq.

Unfortunately, with our sophisticated technology we still haven't been able to make war obsolete. Ironically, the more sophisticated the weapons became, the less effective they were. As we have seen recently, our most effective and terrifying adversaries are people whose weapons could have been found in the Middle Ages or earlier. They are people who are willing to violate all sense of human decency, are wholeheartedly devoted to their cause, are not afraid to die.

And all of our superior technology and firepower is powerless to stop them.

So what  have we learned from the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Not much I'm afraid.