DEDICATION
To Peter and Laura,
For the gift of their childhood, mature wisdom,
and sustaining love,
To William E. Leuchtenburg,
For his friendship, scholarship, and inspiring example,
And to Joy,
For everything!
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1SMILE LIKE ROOSEVELT
2SUCH A HAPPY LITTLE FACE!
3DANCING ALONG THE COLOR LINE
4THE MOST ADORED CHILD IN THE WORLD
5KEEPING SHIRLEY’S STAR ALOFT
6WHAT’S A PRIVATE LIFE?
Epilogue: Shirley Visits Another President
Notes
Acknowledgments and Permissions
Index
Also by John F. Kasson
Copyright
THE
LITTLE GIRL
WHO FOUGHT
THE GREAT
DEPRESSION
Smiling through the Great Depression: Shirley Temple, 1935. (Photofest/Twentieth Century–Fox)
INTRODUCTION
Her image appeared in periodicals and advertisements roughly twenty times daily, rivaling President Franklin Roosevelt and the United Kingdom’s Edward VIII (formerly Prince of Wales and later Duke of Windsor) as the most photographed person in the world. Her portrait brightened a poor black laborer’s cabin in lowland South Carolina, the mantel of the tumbledown house of a poor white childless couple in North Carolina, the living room mantel of preteen Andy Warhol’s house in Pittsburgh, the recreation room of Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover’s house in Washington, D.C., and the bureau of notorious numbers gangster Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson’s Harlem apartment. A few years later her smile cheered the secret bedchamber of Anne Frank in Amsterdam as she hid with her family from the Nazis.1
Conventional histories of the 1930s draw their emblematic faces from the period’s distinguished documentary photographers, such as Dorothea Lange’s careworn woman known as “Migrant Mother.” Yet the most popular and cherished images of the period were smiling ones, and the most popular and memorable of all were of the child actress Shirley Temple. At a time when movie attendance knit Americans into a truly national popular culture, they did not want a mirror of deep deprivation and despair held up to them but a ray of sunshine cast on their faces. In fact, such conspicuous demonstrations of confidence characterized the Great Depression, as President Roosevelt extended the politics of cheer deeply into the private lives of citizens and Shirley Temple did so into the private lives of even the youngest consumers. The complex and paradoxical effects of these efforts are with us still.
The emotional resiliency embodied in the smiles of Shirley Temple, Franklin Roosevelt, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and others in this decade has been largely taken for granted. Yet such smiling figures repay close investigation. They yield important insights into the character of American life during the greatest peacetime crisis in American history. They have broader implications for modern culture as well. “We can see emotional expressions as a medium of exchange,” the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has written. “Like paper money, many smiles and frowns are in circulation.”2
The circulation of a new emotional currency during the Great Depression formed a little-understood but essential part of the nation’s recovery, a sort of deficit spending with immense effects. In a time of great financial hardship, spending on amusements actually increased—eloquent testimony to its emotional necessity. Satisfying the craving of many deep in need of emotional loans and replenishments challenged political leaders and entertainers alike. The politician who succeeded most effectively was Franklin D. Roosevelt. The entertainer who did so most spectacularly was a little girl, Shirley Temple. Born in April 1928 in Santa Monica, California, to Gertrude and George Temple, Shirley began her film career at age three. Her performances attracted little notice until April 1934, the month she turned six. Then, with the release of Fox Film’s Stand Up and Cheer!, she catapulted to stardom. But what distinguished her from every other Hollywood star of the period—and everyone since—was how brilliantly she shone. For the next six years, before she left Twentieth Century–Fox in 1940, she made twenty-two feature films. Through four of those years, from 1935 through 1938, she was the most popular star at the box office both within the United States and worldwide, a record never equaled. At the end of this energetic period of performances (which would continue at a lesser pace through the 1940s), she was still under the age of twelve.
In all of her major roles in the 1930s Shirley’s central task was emotional healing. She mended the rifts of estranged lovers, family members, old-fashioned and modern ways, warring peoples, and clashing cultures. She accomplished these feats not by ingenious stratagems but by trusting to her inexhaustible fund of optimism. No loss ever troubled her for long, even the death of a parent or reversal of fortunes. No scolding matron or miser could dampen her mood. Money could not buy happiness, she repeatedly reminded audiences, and, although she often wore exquisite clothes and bounced between cramped quarters and palatial settings, riches never turned her head. She treated the lowly with kindness and approached the mighty without intimidation. Characteristically lacking one or both parents, she relied not on institutional charity (frequently personified by desiccated killjoys) but on the doting protection that she magically released from hardened soldiers, harried executives, vaudeville veterans, impeccable butlers, imperious aunts, grumpy grandfathers, courting couples—almost anyone with a heart. A tireless worker when the situation demanded, she could spontaneously tap-dance with a partner such as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and sing a cheerful ditty or a tender love song. While gracious and polite, she delighted in subverting stuffy decorum by sliding down a banister or popping a paper bag in a sepulchral men’s club. She bubbled over with laughter, especially at herself. Amid gloom, she encouraged everyone to keep on the sunny side of life. Bromidic as philosophy, vacuous as social critique, her example was nonetheless immensely satisfying as entertainment. As such, it exerted a phenomenal appeal in an especially anxious decade, and it continues to remind us that Hollywood escapism in the Great Depression was never empty. Rather it brimmed with pleasures that both diverted and sustained moviegoers within the United States and through much of the rest of the world.
Shirley Temple holds an autographed portrait of FDR, November 14, 1935. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
Like other movie actors of the period, Shirley Temple functioned as a persona effectively created, owned, and operated by the studio for which she worked, and most of her waking life was devoted to playing the part of a girl whom fans would find irresistible. Even as the Roosevelt administration sought to curtail exploitative child labor practices, it made a major exception for child acting, and both FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt heartily endorsed Shirley. Children still held an important place in the economy, but increasingly as consumers rather than producers, and particularly as beneficiaries of adult spending. As the most famous and commodified child in the world, Shirley Temple played a pivotal role in this revolution. She became a cultural fetish, whose likeness and outfits were endowed with magical properties, even as her role in producing that fetish was obscured.
Not only were Shirley and her parents transformed by Hollywood’s star machinery, so too were her fans and their families. All came to view themselves and one another through the lens of celebrity. As a result, the r
ays of Shirley’s star penetrated the deepest recesses of family life, recasting the terms by which parents valued their own daughters and those daughters imagined themselves. Within a year of Shirley’s breakthrough in 1934, hers was the second most popular girl’s name in the country. Twentieth Century–Fox staged promotional events, such as Shirley Temple look-alike contests and birthday parties, to solidify her bonds with individuals, families, and even entire communities, as when twelve thousand members of an Illinois town signed a congratulatory birthday telegram to Shirley. She quickly became the most adored and imitated child in the world. In Cuba contestants vied for the accolade of “la Shirley Temple Cubana.” A Tokyo newspaper reported a young girl on the street discovered as “the Japanese Shirley Temple.” Throughout the country and around the world, using every ploy that they could devise, movie theaters joined with merchandisers to promote Shirley Temple’s latest film and licensed products. Her power and presence could be purchased in Shirley Temple dolls, dresses, underwear, coats, hats, shoes, soap, books, tableware, and similar items. Her face beamed from cereal boxes and cobalt blue plates and mugs. Ideal Novelty and Toy Company’s Shirley Temple dolls accounted for almost a third of all dolls sold in the United States in 1935. Sheet music of her songs, such as “On the Good Ship Lollipop” and “Polly-Wolly-Doodle,” led the sales charts. Newspapers around the globe bulged with Shirley Temple stories, as did movie magazines such as Photoplay, Modern Screen, and Silver Screen, each of which claimed a circulation of roughly half a million.3
Shirley’s immense popularity reveals much about the ways in which Americans and many others around the world coped with the demands of this pivotal decade. The bright arc of her celebrity illuminates the dynamic relationship between the Hollywood film industry and movie fans, and between Shirley’s performances and fans’ dreams, as well as among those fans, the studio system, and the Temple family itself. Altogether, Shirley Temple allows us to explore the intricacies of Hollywood and consumer culture in the Great Depression more fully and freshly than any other figure of the decade. By placing Shirley Temple and her fans within the context of FDR and his constituents, we can see how popular entertainment as well as New Deal politics helped Americans to surmount the Great Depression. The forces set in motion by their smiling faces have shaped American life ever since.
CHAPTER 1
SMILE LIKE ROOSEVELT
In 1910 Gertrude Krieger and George Temple met at Henry K. Kramer’s dancing cotillion for adults in Los Angeles. Actually, she was not yet an adult but a shy, willowy seventeen-year-old high school junior with jet-black hair. She loved to dance, and the large ballroom playing phonograph records gave her an irresistible outlet. Still, she nervously entered this public stage, and to steady her resolve, she came hand in hand with a female classmate.1
Soon a short, compactly built young man of twenty-two approached. Not her equal in height, he nonetheless had a muscular body, an easy smile, an affable manner, and a fondness for bad puns. A snappy dresser, belying his modest clerk’s salary, he wore a three-piece suit and pearl-gray spats. He danced energetically if awkwardly, lead arm pumping up and down, no match for her in grace or practice. He immediately liked Gertrude and determined to make her like him. Gradually, she did.
Both had moved to Los Angeles in 1903 as children with their families, she from Chicago, he from Pennsylvania. Each had also lost a father and known financial uncertainty. By that fateful day in 1910 when George met Gertrude at the cotillion, he was still living with his mother and, along with his elder siblings, helping to support her. George and his sister, Grace, worked at the Southern California Edison Company, he as a clerk, she as a stenographer, while George’s older brother, Herbert, clerked in a hardware store, and younger brother Francis soon took a job as a messenger. For her part, within a year of their first dance, Gertrude was helping to pay her family’s bills as a stenographer.2
George and Gertrude married in 1913 and started their own household. Gertrude bore their first son, Jack (John), in 1915 and Sonny (George Francis Jr.) four years later. Yet family ties continued to bind. Gertrude’s mother, Maude, chain-smoking, sharply opinionated, bossy, increasingly morose, would live with or near her daughter and son-in-law and be supported by them for the rest of her life. Both the Temple and Krieger families knew how parents and children often had to pull together to sustain one another.
Still, all about them they could witness the boom of Los Angeles’s economy of oil, agriculture, maritime trade, banking, industrial manufacture, construction, moviemaking, and tourism. During the 1920s the city expanded by roughly eighty square miles through forty-five separate annexations. Newcomers poured into the county at the rate of 350 a day for ten years, and the city more than doubled its population from 577,000 to almost 1.24 million, making it the fifth largest in the country. Residents basked in what one journalist called “an easy optimism. . . . Anything seems possible; the future is yours, and the past?—there isn’t any.”3
George could confirm this optimism in the incremental improvements of his family’s life. To aid his advancement, he supplemented his limited education with night-school and correspondence courses in typing, bookkeeping, and accounting. By 1920 he had inched his way up to chief clerk for Southern California Edison and lived with his wife and young sons at 419½ Ocean Front Avenue, along with other white transplants from the Midwest and East, in the suburban beach resort of Venice. A year later, the family moved a short way to what were probably larger quarters at 125 Breeze Avenue. And by 1927 they resided in a stucco bungalow with a radio in the living room and a car in the garage in the quieter town of Santa Monica. George now worked as assistant branch manager for California Bank, where the city and the country’s speculative frenzy mounted almost day by day.
That year Gertrude Temple made a fateful resolution. In her mind it was not merely a hope but a determination: she and her husband would conceive a third child, that child would be a girl, ideally with naturally curly blond hair, and she would be named Shirley. The frustrated ballerina and movie-entranced mother launched her daughter’s career in the womb by exposing her to classical music, uplifting literature, great works of art, scenes of natural beauty, and romantic films. Her resolution and faith in prenatal aesthetic influences tapped popular beliefs and placed her within a tradition of stage and screen mothers who claimed to have willed their children into existence.4
A dimpled, brown-eyed Shirley Temple was duly born on April 23, 1928. She immediately became her mother’s pet project, displacing her older brothers as the center of Gertrude’s life. George too delighted in indulging his little girl, and, at age forty, he could confidently anticipate his family and career humming smoothly onward. After all, the economy boomed as never before, and its future glowed brightly. A lifelong Republican, as was Gertrude, George could also feel the city, the state, and the country’s government in the secure hands of the Grand Old Party. Indeed, the 1928 Republican presidential nominee, Herbert Hoover, himself a Californian and a self-made multimillionaire, epitomized sober, steady leadership.
Few national leaders in 1928 inspired confidence as did Herbert Hoover. For over a decade he had been one of the most respected figures in American government, and for almost two decades one especially praised for his ability to deal with calamities, whether of famine or flood. During the Great War, he spearheaded private food relief to German-occupied Belgium and coordinated American efforts to increase food supplies for U.S. troops and underfed allied nations, then organized food relief for millions starving in Central Europe at war’s end and in famished Russia in 1921. When, in the greatest natural disaster in American history, the Mississippi River flood of 1927 created a vast inland brown sea a thousand miles long and fifty miles wide, Hoover again took center stage in directing public and private efforts to help victims and stamp out disease. As secretary of commerce in both the Harding and Coolidge administrations, he was perhaps the most dynamic of all cabinet officials. Had his public career ended then, he would
have been celebrated in history as a brilliant administrator and one of the greatest humanitarians of his time.
In the context of the 1920s, Hoover’s very colorlessness befitted his technocratic competence. The financial titan Bernard Baruch, who had served as head of the War Industries Board during the Great War, said admiringly, “To Hoover’s brain facts are as water to a sponge. They are absorbed into every tiny interstice.” A longtime friend and member of Hoover’s cabinet, Ray Lyman Wilbur, likened Hoover’s mind to a searchlight that he could turn full-blast onto any subject at will. “Sedate, laconic, undramatic, berating nobody, asserting nothing that his laboriously gathered facts and figures would not sustain,” in the words of a Washington reporter, Hoover provided a figure of immense security amid the vicissitudes of the Jazz Age. In the public mind, he seemed to be a man who had “never known failure.”5
The presidential election of 1928 was his first campaign for elective office, and Hoover’s overriding theme was prosperity. In accepting the Republican nomination, he painted a vision of a nation steadily climbing on a broad, smooth highway through pastures of plenty. His honeyed words would quickly acquire a bitter aftertaste: “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but, given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last 8 years, we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this Nation.”6 Running against New York governor Alfred E. Smith, Hoover achieved one of the most sweeping victories in modern American history. With 58 percent of the popular vote, he won forty states (including four in the hitherto solidly Democratic South) and 444 electoral votes to Smith’s eight states and 87 electoral votes.
Less than eight months after Hoover’s inauguration, beginning on October 23 and tracing a jagged but inexorable descent, the New York stock market crashed. By mid-November, the Dow Jones index of industrial stocks, which had climbed to a dizzying peak of 381.17 on September 3, plunged to 198.60 by the closing bell on November 13—a loss of 48 percent. By any measure, this was a panic.
The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America Page 1