Into the Bright Sunshine by Samuel G. Freedman

Author:Samuel G. Freedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

A similar message in dissimilar form reached America’s young people just before dinner time on June 10, 1946, airing in Minneapolis on station WLOL. The Superman radio show launched a new series that would stretch for sixteen shows over the next three weeks, culminating just before Independence Day. The character of Superman had been invented a decade earlier by two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and the superhero started out as a crime-fighter in the mode of the FBI’s G-men, albeit with X-ray vision, the ability to fly, and so forth. During World War II, however, Superman comics featured him directly battling Hitler. Now, in the postwar years, Superman turned to a domestic villain—a secret society called the Clan of the Fiery Cross, plainly meant to be the Ku Klux Klan.

The storyline begins with the competition between two teenaged boys to be the starting pitcher for their baseball team in Metropolis’s youth league. The coveted spot goes to one named Tommy Lee, the Chinese American son of an immigrant. His white rival Chuck Riggs, in turn, is enticed to take vengeance through the Clan, whose Grand Scorpion is the boy’s uncle. Within the norms of comic-book derring-do, with its requisite cliffhangers and narrow escapes, the radio shows present an unflinching portrayal of terrorism driven by bigotry. Clan members first try to kill Tommy by placing a bomb under the seat of his bicycle, then beat both him and his father, and finally plot a mass shooting at the baseball championship game. Predictably enough, Superman flies to the rescue, intercepting every fatal bullet in midair. What was less typical for the cops-and-robbers genre were the words the winning players received along with their trophies: “You’ve not only proved that you’re the best baseball team, but you proved that youngsters of different races and creeds can work and play together successfully—in the American way.”71

Four months later after Clan of the White Cross concluded, the November edition of Cosmopolitan magazine brought a similar message into the mailboxes of its own, very different target audience: America’s fashionable young women. The cover illustration characteristically enough showed a young blonde woman as she coquettishly toyed with an autumn leaf. Beneath the image, though, appeared a splash of bold type promoting the issue’s major article. “ ‘Gentleman’s Agreement,’ ” it read, “the novel all America will be talking about.” Prior to its publication in early 1947, the book by Laura Z. Hobson was being excerpted in Cosmopolitan.

Though her married surname obscured the fact, Hobson was the daughter of two Jewish immigrants of socialist leanings, and the Z stood for her family patronymic of Zametkin. Gentleman’s Agreement told its own story of blurring identities, and it relied on a version of Avedis Derounian’s undercover sleuthing as John Roy Carlson. Hobson inverted the tactic by having a Gentile journalist, Philip Green, pretend to be Jewish in order to write a magazine exposé about anti-Semitism. And while Derounian revealed the virulent and violent style of Jew-hating embodied by

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.