The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America

by Kasson, John F.

  27 Shirley Temple earlier made a very brief appearance in another Hollywood homage to the NRA, Paramount’s New Deal Rhythm (1933).

  28 Mae Tinee, review of Stand Up and Cheer!, Chicago Tribune, May 2, 1934, 17; review of Stand Up and Cheer!, Boston Globe, May 4, 1934, 41; Boyd Martin, review of Stand Up and Cheer!, Louisville Courier-Journal, July 5, 1934, 8; George Shaffer, “Film Reporters See Stardom for Girl of 4,” Chicago Tribune, May 30, 1934, 28.

  29 “Shirley Temple a Sensation; ‘Little Miss Marker’ Cashes,” Hollywood Reporter, May 29, 1934, 7; review of Stand Up and Cheer!, Time, April 30, 1934, 28.

  30 Steven J. Ross, “How Hollywood Became Hollywood: Money, Politics, and Movies,” in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s, ed. Tom Sitton and William Deverell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 258–64.

  31 Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System: A History, rev. ed. (London: BFI, 2005), 74.

  32 Gomery, Hollywood Studio System, 76; Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 84–85.

  33 See the cinema attendance surveys in Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk, eds., Public Opinion, 1935–1946 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 486.

  34 Kerry Segrave, American Films Abroad: Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), 115; Thomas M. Pryor, “More on Foreign Quotas,” New York Times, October 24, 1937, 168; Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 145.

  35 Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (New York: Scribner’s, 1993), 13–18; Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975), 161; Douglas Gomery, The Coming of Sound: A History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 37–45, 115–16. Lary May calculates that “in six major cities, theaters failed at an average of 36 percent from 1930 to 1933.” Lary May with the assistance of Stephen Lassonde, “Making the American Way: Moderne Theatres, Audiences, and the Film Industry, 1929–1945,” Prospects 12 (1987): 121 n. 8.

  36 Daniel A. Lord, Played by Ear: The Autobiography of Daniel A. Lord, S. J. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1956), 295. The Payne Fund investigators were especially concerned that of those attending the movies on a given week on the eve of the Depression, nearly 36 percent were under twenty-one, and roughly half of these were fourteen or younger. Henry James Forman, “Movie Madness,” McCall’s, October 1932, 14–15, 28, 30. Among the many books and articles on the coming of the Hollywood Production Code, see especially Richard Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” in Balio, Grand Design, 37–72.

  37 Maltby, “Production Code and the Hays Office,” 37–72.

  38 “Good Cheer Wanted,” Moving Picture World, February 20, 1909, 196; Ian Jarvie and Robert L. Macmillan, “John Grierson on Hollywood’s Success, 1927,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 9, no. 3 (1989): 315–16.

  39 Vasey, World According to Hollywood, 204–5.

  40 Martin Quigley, Motion Picture Herald, February 22, 1936, as quoted in Vasey, World According to Hollywood, 205; Martin Quigley, “Radicalism—an Industry Peril,” Motion Picture Herald, December 11, 1937, 18.

  41 Cantril and Strunk, Public Opinion, 485.

  42 John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. And European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 227.

  43 Margaret Farrand Thorp, America at the Movies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), 2–3.

  44 Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 122.

  45 May, Big Tomorrow, 122–24, 130–31; Kevin Corbett, “Bad Sound and Sticky Floors: An Ethnographic Look at the Symbolic Value of Historic Small-Town Movie Theaters,” in Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing, ed. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 241–44. Thorp noted that movie theaters specifically catering to African Americans amounted to only one for every twenty thousand people. Thorp, America at the Movies, 9.

  46 Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World, 73; Mirra Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family: The Effect of Unemployment upon the Status of the Man in Fifty-Nine Families (New York: Dryden Press, for the Institute of Social Research, 1940), 124, 127.

  47 May, Big Tomorrow, 110–21, 127–28.

  48 Black, Child Star, 33, 39, 330.

  49 Black, Child Star, 80–81.

  50 “Just Pretending Nets Shirley Temple $1,250 a Week,” Newsweek, July 28, 1934, 24; Miguel Covarrubias, “Miss Shirley Temple Signs a New Contract,” Vanity Fair, November 1934, 33.

  51 Runyon’s short story first appeared in Collier’s, March 26, 1932, 7–9, 40, 43, 44. In an earlier dialogue script (February 24, 1934, pp. A17–19), Marthy’s father speaks more like a racehorse tout. Cf. later dialogue in script of May 9, 1934, Paramount Pictures Scripts, Special Collections, MHL.

  52 See Gary S. Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  53 Komarovsky, Unemployed Man and His Family, 27, 28.

  54 Komarovsky, Unemployed Man and His Family, 41, 45.

  55 Richard Lowitt and Maurine Hoffman Beasley, eds., One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 206–7.

  56 On the success of Baby Take a Bow, see Douglas W. Churchill, “Taking a Look at the Record,” New York Times, November 25, 1934, X5. Shirley Temple ranked eighth in the Motion Picture Herald’s 1934 annual survey of “The Ten Biggest Money Making Stars” in the period beginning September 1, 1933, and ending September 1, 1934, even though her first major film, Stand Up and Cheer!, did not open until April 1934. See 1935–36 Motion Picture Almanac (New York: Quigley Publishing, n.d.), 94.

  57 “Shirley Temple Wins,” New York Times, March 23, 1938, 18; Janet Shprintz, “Tarnishing Temple’s Image,” Variety, January 27, 2006, A7; Black, Child Star, 184–85. For more recent criticism in this vein, see Robert M. Polhemus, Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 253–80; Geraldine Pauling, “The Psychohistorical Significance of Shirley Temple Films: Images of the Sexualized Female Child in Relation to Depression Era Group Fantasy,” Journal of Psychohistory 30, no. 3 (2003): 306–9; Ara Osterweil, “Reconstructing Shirley: Pedophilia and Interracial Romance in Hollywood’s Age of Innocence,” Camera Obscura 24, no. 3 72 (2009): 1–39. On the larger shift in attitudes and behavior, see Ian Hacking, “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 253–88.

  58 Robert Eichberg, “Lines to a Little Lady,” Modern Screen, February 1935, 48.

  59 Review of Bright Eyes, Motion Picture Daily, November 23, 1934, 10.

  60 From 1935 to 1940 Withers was one of Twentieth Century–Fox’s top five most lucrative actors. Geoff Gehman, Down but Not Quite Out in Hollow-weird: A Documentary in Letters of Eric Knight (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 25 n. 4.

  61 See Mae Tinee, review of Bright Eyes, Chicago Tribune, December 23, 1934, pt. 7, 5; review of Bright Eyes, Motion Picture Herald, February 16, 1935, 69.

  62 “Peewee’s Progress,” 40; Edward Foote Gardner, Popular Songs of the Twentieth Century: A Charted History, vol. 1, Chart Detail & Encyclopedia, 1900–1949 (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2000), 25, 216.

  63 Motion Picture Herald, February 16, 1935, 69.

  64 Motion Picture Herald, November 30, 1935, 85; December 19, 1936, 81; December 31, 1938, 60; December 30, 1939, 58.

  65 On this scene and the larger issue of the affirmative role of commercial culture, see Lawrence W. Levine, “The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences,” American Historical Re
view 97 (1992): 1369–99; T. J. Jackson Lears, “Making Fun of Popular Culture,” ibid., 1417–26; Levine, “Levine Responds,” ibid., 1427–30; and Joel Pfister, “Complicity Critiques,” American Literary History 12, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 610–32.

  CHAPTER THREE: DANCING ALONG THE COLOR LINE

  1 “Cinema: Academy Awards,” Time, March 11, 1935, 52.

  2 Robinson also appeared in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938) and Just around the Corner (1938). He devised the choreography but did not perform in Dimples (1936).

  3 Among the many books on this topic, see esp. M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998); Ralph Ellison in conversation with Robert O’Meally, Robert G. O’Meally, “Checking Our Balances: Ellison on Armstrong’s Humor,” boundary 2 30, no. 2 (2003): 120.

  4 Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade, 30th anniv. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 44.

  5 Sitkoff, New Deal for Blacks, 27–28, 42, 31, 71.

  6 “Players Aid Roosevelt,” New York Times, October 24, 1930, 15; Nanette Kutner, “Hollywood Friendship No. 1,” Modern Screen, November 1936, 91; Bernice Patton, “The Sepia Side of Hollywood,” Pittsburgh Courier, November 30, 1935, A6.

  7 James Haskins and N. R. Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles: The Biography of Bill Robinson (New York: William Morrow, 1988), 106.

  8 Haskins and Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles, 26–28, 42–44, 50–53.

  9 Bushrod Barnum, “Bojangles,” Cue, August 14, 1937, 35. In one of Robinson’s versions of the story, the soup was oyster stew, and an oyster went wriggling down the customer’s neck. S. J. Woolf, “Bill Robinson, 60, Taps Out the Joy of Living,” New York Times, May 22, 1938, 117. For the contention that Marty Forkins concocted the story, see Haskins and Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles, 95–96.

  10 Haskins and Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles, 212.

  11 Robinson first appeared in the short Hello, Bill (1929) and performed a specialty number in RKO’s feature-length Dixiana (1930).

  12 Robinson was voted “best dressed” man as well as favorite tap-dancer in a 1935 Harlem poll. Ted Yates, “This Is New York: Popularity Poll,” Afro-American, May 11, 1935, 8. A white journalist noted with patronizing wonder Robinson’s “primitive taste for fine feathers” and jewelry (Barnum, “Bojangles,” 7).

  13 The honorary title was conferred in 1934 by the New York League of Locality Mayors, an unofficial philanthropic and boosters organization. Richard Strouse, “At 70, Still Head Hoofer,” New York Times, May 23, 1948, sec. SM, 17. The title was adopted by African American newspapers. See, for example, “Bill Robinson Is Mayor of Harlem, Hero of Broadway,” Chicago Defender, July 6, 1935, 9.

  14 Tommye Berry, “Kansas City Likes the Film, ‘Hooray for Love,’ ” Chicago Defender, August 17, 1935, 8. Despite black moviegoers’ approval, within the context of the storyline of Hooray for Love, “Living in a Great Big Way” is being performed for the entertainment of whites. The number is supposedly being rehearsed as part of the revue that the lead character, Doug Tyler (played by Gene Raymond) hopes to produce. The number begins with a parting of the theater curtains, and a quick shot in the middle of the number and a second at its conclusion furnish the approving seal of the white director and producer, a synecdoche for white approval in general.

  15 Marshall Winslow Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 187. For reminiscences of Robinson and his distinctive qualities as a dancer, see Rusty E. Frank, Tap! The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and Their Stories, 1900–1955 (New York: William Morrow, 1990), esp. 66, 72–73, 97–98, 180–82.

  16 Bernice Patton, “Bill Robinson Overcame Two Broken Legs to Become Greatest Tap Dancer,” New Journal and Guide, February 22, 1936, 18; Barnum, “Bojangles,” 7; Woolf, “Bill Robinson,” 117.

  17 In Shirley Temple’s 1936 film Dimples, to which Robinson contributed choreography, Frank Morgan’s character blacks up as Uncle Tom to elude pursuers. The movie ends in a full-scale black minstrel number, with Stepin Fetchit as Mr. Bones. Will Rogers sparked protests from African Americans when on January 21, 1934, in a radio broadcast he repeatedly used the phrase “nigger spiritual,” instead of “Negro spiritual” and “spiritual,” the words he had prepared in his notes. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which carried Rogers’s program, was immediately deluged with telegrams and telephone calls protesting the racial epithet. Roy Wilkins complained on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Rogers defended his good intentions, saying, “If the colored race has a more sympathetic friend than I have always been, I don’t know who it is.” Steven K. Gragert and M. Jane Johansson, eds., The Papers of Will Rogers, vol. 5, The Final Years (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), esp. 455–56, 460 n. 2, 461, quotation normalized from telegram style. Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 69; see also Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 51.

  18 Andre Sennwald, review of The Littlest Rebel, New York Times, December 20, 1935, 30.

  19 “You Ain’t Seen Nuthin Yet, Says Papa of Staircase Dance,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 29, 1934, sec. A, 8; Woolf, “Bill Robinson,” 117; James Haskins, Black Dance in America: A History through Its People (New York: Crowell, 1990), 54; Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 63–64. Cf. Robinson’s staircase dance in Harlem Is Heaven (1932).

  20 Here I adapt a phrase from Jacqui Malone, “Jazz Music in Motion: Dancers and Big Bands,” in Robert G. O’Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 284.

  21 Shirley Temple Black, Child Star: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 91–93; Kutner, “Hollywood Friendship No. 1,” 91; “Bill Sorry He Couldn’t See Shirley,” Chicago Defender, April 29, 1939, 21; Karen Chilton, Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 73.

  22 Haskins and Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles, 225–26; Black, Child Star, 92.

  23 This scene was Fox Film’s first venture into Technicolor. Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 95.

  24 Andre Sennwald, review of The Little Colonel, New York Times, March 22, 1935, 26; Motion Picture Herald, May 4, 1935, 64; June 1, 1935, 69; July 6, 1935, 87; October 5, 1935, 59.

  25 Sennwald, review of Littlest Rebel, 30.

  26 Edward Peple, foreword to The Littlest Rebel (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1914); Edward Peple, The Littlest Rebel: A Play in Four Acts (London: Samuel French, 1911), 9.

  27 Andre Sennwald, review of So Red the Rose, New York Times, November 28, 1935, 39.

  28 Review of The Littlest Rebel, Variety, December 25, 1935, 15. Like The Little Colonel and Shirley Temple’s film Dimples, The Littlest Rebel was notably popular in white southern theaters, such as those in Birmingham, Alabama. It was also the most profitable of Twentieth Century–Fox’s films for the 1935–36 season. Gomery, Hollywood Studio System, 1986 ed., 93; Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System: A History, rev. ed. (London: BFI, 2005), 72.

  29 Advertisement for Florence Mills Theatre, Los Angeles Sentinel, April 1936, as quoted in Karen Orr Vered, “White and Black in Black and White: Management of Race and Sexuality in the Coupling of Child-Star Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson,” Velvet Light Trap No. 39 (1997): 52–65; Richard Lacayo and Sue Carswell, “Mocking Black Stereotypes, a Black Artist makes Waves,” People, May 22, 1989, 151.

  30 December 25, 1935, 15; Littlest Rebel script, September 6, 1935, 14, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

  31 The ro
le was conceived with Stepin Fetchit in mind. See “first draft screen play” by Edwin Burke, 19, August 6, 1935, Lilly Library.

  32 Hill, Tap Dancing America, 122–23.

  33 Review of The Littlest Rebel, Atlanta Constitution, January 26, 1936, sec. E, 7; “Shirley Goes Harlem—Learns to Truck,” Chicago Defender, January 11, 1936, 8. The 26th edition of the Cotton Club Parade, produced by Ted Koehler and opening in July 1935, featured a “Truckin’ ” number. Robinson performed such a number at the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood later that year. “Bill Robinson at ‘Cocoanut Grove,’ ” Chicago Defender, December 14, 1935, 8.

  34 Littlest Rebel script, September 6, 1935, 122, Lilly Library.

  35 Littlest Rebel script, “first draft screen play” by Edwin Burke, August 6, 1935, Lilly Library; Raymond Griffith to Darryl Zanuck, August 8, 1935, 1, Zanuck Manuscript Collection, Lilly Library.

  36 Woolf, “Bill Robinson,” 116; Barnum, “Bojangles,” 35.

  37 Alain Locke, The Negro and His Music (1936; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1969), 134, 135.

  38 “ ‘Bojangles’ in a Fit of Temper as Hecklers Heckle ‘Uncle Tom’ Jokes,” Chicago Defender, November 1, 1941, 6. See also “Boston Patron Blasts ‘Bojangles,’ ” Afro-American, January 16, 1926, 4.

  39 Ralph Matthews, “The Negro Theatre—a Dodo Bird,” in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard and Hugh D. Ford (1970; rpt. New York: Continuum, 1996), 196; Ralph Matthews, “Dixie Prejudice Still Dominates the Movies but Not the Stage,” Afro-American, February 8, 1936, 8; Renzi B. Lemus, “Uncle Tom Roles for Stars on Screen Beat a Blank, Points out Lemus,” Afro-American, February 22, 1936, 11.

  40 Earl J. Morris, “Morris Interviews ‘Bojangles’; Learns He Is Real Race Man,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 31, 1937, 21.

  41 Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” in Majors and Minors: Poems (Toledo, OH: Hadley and Hadley, 1895), 21; Haskins and Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles, 28, 44; Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 184–85.