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Ever since Arnold Schwartzenegger's victory in the California recall and replacement election on Oct. 8, we've been treated to anguished whining about how the country must be going down the tubes, what with glittering but shallow show business personalities invading the solemn precincts of political deliberation.
If there was a time to worry about this, the time has long past. Note that in modern America, campaigning for high office, as well as public performance in that office, consists of persuasively delivering lines that someone else wrote.
That wasn't always so. Thomas Jefferson wrote well but spoke poorly, so President Jefferson never delivered a speech to Congress. He wrote his annual State of the Union address, and a clerk read it to the assembled House and Senate.
Now specialized clerks write the message, and the
President delivers it. This has been true since 1921, when
President Warren G. Harding engaged a speechwriter, one
Judson Welliver, as his literary secretary.
Speaking lines that somebody else wrote is exactly how actors earn their livelihood. So why is it surprising that actors do well in modern politics?
Our Founding Fathers tried to reduce the influence of
show business
-- that is, the necessity to entertain
a crowd -- when they devised the federal constitution.
As written in 1787, only the U.S. House of
Representatives was directly elected. U.S. Senators were
selected by state legislatures, not public vote. Judges
were appointed by the President and confirmed by the
Senate. State legislatures would select an electoral
college to elect the President; this electoral college
would presumably be a group of sages who would consider
character and issues and what was best for the country, not
who was most telegenic. In those days, men stood for
office
; they didn't run for office.
But even as early as 1824, during Andrew Jackson's first campaign for the presidency, there were torch-light parades and brass bands, along with barrels of free whiskey. Critics then denounced this as vulgar spectacle, mere pandering to the mob, when the preferable course was to engage in rational debate about contemporary issues facing the Republic.
Granted, there really wasn't such a thing as show
business
in those days, but as soon as there was a
movie industry, it connected with American politics.
About a century ago, a fellow named Thomas Dixon wrote a
novel. He sold the movie rights, but the resulting film was
so widely denounced that he wanted to get someone
respectable, an old college friend, to praise the
production. The novel was called The Clansman,
the
movie was D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation,
and
the old college friend was Woodrow Wilson, president of the
United States, who commended the racist epic as writing
history with lightning.
Thus an infant Hollywood could stave off criticism by hustling a presidential endorsement. A few years later, Hollywood entered California politics in a serious way.
In 1934, Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination
for governor in California. He was famous as the muckraking
author of The Jungle,
a novel about the meat-packing
industry that inspired federal regulation. He was also more
or less a socialist, and his EPIC -- End Poverty in
California
campaign alarmed the state's rich and
powerful.
The Los Angeles Times denounced him as a menace who
would sovietize California and destroy her business and
industry by confiscatory taxation.
but as one
biographer explained, the most effective anti-Sinclair
campaign was that of movie mogul Louis B. Mayer.
who
issued newsreels with fake interviews with bewhiskered
actors voicing their enthusiasm for EPIC in Russian
accents.
Another newsreel
showed hired actors,
posing as hobos, poised near the state line, just waiting
to come in and mooch off the taxpayers once Sinclair got
elected.
By constructing faked scenarios, and presenting them as sober representations of reality, Hollywood was able to insure Sinclair's defeat.
That's just a start on the connections and mutual influence. Joe Kennedy, father of the president, owned a movie studio for a while, and of course there's the career of Ronald Reagan. Democrats go to Hollywood for money, and legislators respond to contributions by extending copyrights for the profit of the studios.
So enough with the hand-wringing. Schwartzenegger may not understand private business all that well -- does anyone else remember his failed Planet Hollywood restaurant chain? -- but these days, actors may be the ones who best understand our political machinery. After all, they're good at being mouthpieces.
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