Film, the most modern medium, can powerfully enhance the teaching of modern history. In my own courses on the twentieth-century United States, I have frequently relied on documents such as Birth of a Nation to illustrate the turn-of-the-century state of the national memory, as well as attitudes toward race relations; on Our Daily Bread to suggest the communitarian utopianism spawned in some quarters by the Great Depression; on The Decision to Drop the Bomb to recapture the self-conscious agonizing over the dawn of the nuclear age; on Point of Order to display the loutish viciousness of Joseph McCarthy; and on Hearts and Minds to recapture the anguish of the Vietnam era.
Showing films such as these in a classroom setting is not merely a concession to the intellectual habits of a generation weaned on television. A picture can in fact be worth a thousand words, particularly when the subject is something as impalpable and internal as memory or mood, or the tangled emotional texture of American culture during the Vietnam War.
World War II classically presents these elements of intangibility and interiority. It altered sentiments—about self, country, and the world—just as surely, though not as quantifiably, as it banished unemployment and inspired the manufacture of forty billion bullets. We know that the war constituted a great demographic cauldron, roiling and shifting the American people into unfamiliar regions and new walks of life. It boomed what later became known as the Sunbelt and vastly accelerated women’s march into the wage-labor force, as well as blacks’ escape from the confinements of segregation. And it laid the foundations for the decades-long stretch of post-war prosperity that is the salient characteristic of the modern American era. These are familiar textbook certainties. But what was the felt human significance of these developments?
Despite the availability of some excel lent scholarly books on this subject, including John M. Blum’s V Was for Vict01y and Richard Polenberg’s War and Society, the sheer scale of the war’s social and economic impact and the pervasive durability of its psychological effects can be difficult for students to grasp. These are precisely the kinds of points that Steven J. Schecter’s film, The Home Front establishes with artful vigor. Made with the assistance of historians Polenberg and Franklin D. Mitchell, it is an astutely conceived and superbly crafted work, not only the best documentary film I have seen on World War II, but among the most intelligent and impressive such films I have seen on any historical topic. Available on three individual reels to facilitate in-class viewing, the 90-minute film makes up a document of unusually fresh and appropriate footage invari ably well matched with its accompany ing-and unobtrusive-narrative.
The war is too remote in time to be part of the felt experience of today’s students, yet recent enough to provide the filmed images—and the human survivors—that can make it come vividly to life on the screen. The Home Front uses both images and interviews with sensitive economy. It deftly recollects the background of Depression against which the drama of war would unfold with a shot of a raggedly dressed child trudging to an outhouse. It evokes the spirit of war-time voluntarism and sacrifice by showing a little girl kissing her doll good-bye as she donates it to a scrap drive.
Among the opening scenes is a brief interview with a veteran who swiftly strikes a note that swells to one of the film’s dominant chords: “It’s terrible to say,” he admits, “but the war did great things for me.” Others repeat and elaborate this motif. A shipyard worker recounts his advancement from third-class machinist to progressman, his overtime bolstered paycheck bulging with “more money than I had ever heard of.” “During the Depression,” he explains, “I was really feeling bad about this country.” But the can-do cooperation of the war effort, he says with simple poignancy, “made me really love this country again. It made you think you were living in a great country. It made you proud to be an American.”
Other testimonials reveal darker aspects of the war experience: a black trolley operator describes the prejudice he encountered in war-time Philadelphia, where Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 had to send 8,000 troops to secure the jobs of eight blacks hired as transit drivers. A Japanese-American’s eyes glisten as she remembers her lonely sobbing on the bus taking her family to a “relocation camp.”
The film is especially effective in its treatment of women, and for me the star performer is Frankie Cooper, a Kentucky farm girl sucked by the war economy into a St. Louis steel plant, where, to everyone’s surprise but her own, she became an overhead crane operator. Belittled and resented by her male co-workers, she was horrified to learn that part of the operator’s job required sanding the crane’s rails high above the factory floor. “I thought, I can’t do that,” she remembers. But then, “one of the men said, ‘Well, that’ll get her. She’ll never sand them tracks.’ That’s what made me sand them. After that I had to. I had to show them I could do it.” Do it she did, “and I loved it, and I did a good job at it.”
The film is about the war itself, but also about the ways in which the war is remembered by those who lived it-a theme enhanced by the contrast be tween the black-and-white contemporary footage and the later reminiscences, shot in color. It is also, inevitably, yet at first somewhat curiously, about the particular remembrances of people then uniformly young. Their memories are of beginnings, of starting out in life and in a world at war, and, conspicuously, of youthful romances. This unavoidable selectivity perhaps introduces some distortion into the film’s portrait of the war’s human meaning, but it also provides a natural bridge to the concerns of students who are today at about the age these witnesses were during the war.
The Home Front touchingly connects those survivors’ personal experiences with the historic phenomenon of the war. In the manner of the best social history, it ski1lfully interweaves the private and the public dimensions of that seminal event, though in the end, like a good novel, it eschews generalization and asserts simply that though World War II was an enormously affecting experience for all who lived through it, every individual took from the war a meaning that is “personal and unique.” That is a modestly scaled but richly significant truth. The Home Front states it with a sensitivity and artistry that are rare in any medium. The Home Front is available from: Churchill Films, 662 North Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069-9990.
David M, Kennedy
Stanford University
