College, FDR and ‘Stagecoach’: The surprising socialist side of John Wayne
It took years for Marion Morrison to cultivate and curate the persona of John Wayne, one that would be enshrined in Hollywood history as one of its most famous and instantly recognisable.
The laconic drawl, the signature strut, the staunch adherence to playing noble characters with a rigid moral code, and an aversion to even considering playing against type were all instrumental in turning ‘The Duke’ into the legend that he became, which meant that he had to adhere and uphold his self-professed principles at all times, both on-camera and off.
Almost as famous as his big screen exploits were his political views, with Wayne one of the most prominent figures in the industry’s anti-communist witchhunt of the 1950s, while he was a card-carrying member of the Republican Party who decried the drastic shift both his profession and his country began to make in the late 1960s and early 1970s when modernity and progressiveness took hold.
Like many of his generation, Wayne’s views haven’t aged well, but it speaks volumes to his enduring legacy that he’s probably still the most famous Republican that Tinseltown has ever seen despite being dead for almost half a century. Shockingly, though, The Duke copped to being a socialist in his younger days.
Socialism is hardly ten steps away from communism, and given his vocal opposition to the latter, Wayne even flirting with similar ideals boggles the mind. And yet, in his notorious 1971 interview with Playboy that’s aged about as well as milk catapulted into the sun, he didn’t skirt around the issue.
“In the late ’20s, when I was a sophomore at USC, I was a socialist myself,” he confessed. “But not when I left. The average college kid idealistically wishes everybody could have ice cream and cake for every meal. But as he gets older and gives more thought to his and his fellow man’s responsibilities, he finds that it can’t work out that way; that some people just won’t carry their load.”
Of course, anyone even vaguely familiar with The Duke will be fully aware that he hardly embodied socialist ideals. However, he did publicly back Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election, and two years later, the guy he voted for enacted the ‘New Deal’, a series of programmes and reforms designed to lift the United States out of the Great Depression.
It wasn’t a socialist strategy by any means, but those ideals were nonetheless inferred in his breakthrough movie. John Ford was another FDR voter who ended up a dedicated Republican, but the first collaboration between the duo on 1939’s Stagecoach was read by many as responding to not only the effects of the ‘New Deal’ but the rising tide of socialism in the States.
The film features an intentionally unlikable character who happens to be a banker, one who claims that “what’s good for the banks is good for the country.” Berton Churchill’s Gatewood is a hypocrite without any redeeming qualities in stark opposition to the rest of the ensemble, reflecting the mood of the nation at a time when the working classes felt more oppressed than ever before by those who held financial power.
That’s not to say Wayne went into Stagecoach knowing that he was headlining a film that can easily be interpreted as a socialist parable, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting to remember that his star-making turn came a decade after he embraced socialism, and just three years after he voted Democrat.
