I recently ran across an article by John W Sammon at the American
Chronicle entitled John Wayne is the Jesus Christ of the Right Wing and I found it an interesting read - but I am from the John Wayne generation. If you're younger, you might not find it so interesting.Here's a couple of clips...
The conservatives, hurting from recent election defeats, are going back to the "drawing board," as they used to say, trotting out their (Right Wing) icons.
Even though he´s been dead for thirty years, John Wayne is the top, the Jesus Christ, of conservatism. Every white boy in the country over the age of forty including myself, George Bush and Bill O´Reilly, grew up watching and loving John Wayne.
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But there was an extremely ugly side to the man. Wayne was part of Senator "Bogus Tail Gunner" Joe McCarthy´s movement of the 1950s, branding people who disagreed with the conservative credo as communist, or disloyal, or both. Some of his victims were in fact communist, but many were not. Much like the conservative extremism of today´s firebrands (O´Reilly, Karl Rove and Ann Coulter), Wayne was a promoter of political intolerance.
He once took out an ad in Daily Variety hinting strongly that anyone who didn´t vote an Academy Award for his movie The Alamo was in league with the communists. The movie, panned by critics, played loose with the historical facts and only got an award for best sound.
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Wayne never served in World War Two. He sat it out while other actors went and had their careers suffer because of it. Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda and even the older Clark Gable did their patriotic thing while Wayne remained behind in Hollywood, fighting the war on the screen.
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It´s also pretty obvious Wayne didn´t like blacks. He wasn´t a card-carrying cross-burning Klansman, but he seemed to have the usual prejudice of his day, I´ll tolerate ´em, as long as they don´t get uppity, and know their place, and don´t cause trouble.
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