The Green Book for the Black Traveller: Coping in a Segregated America

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture

❛❛Life is all right in America,
If you are all-white in America ❜❜
~ Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story

❛❛Travel is fatal to prejudice❜❜ – Mark Twain (inscription on the cover of the 1949 edition of ‘The Green Book’)

“Carry your Green Book with you … you may need it!” (the publication’s motto)

• • • • •

An earlier (and subsequently) a rival publication from the US Black community▼

imageIn the early 1930s an African-American postal employee from New York, Victor Hugo Green, came up with the idea of producing a book for Black Americans to guide them in travelling safely around their own country. Green got some inspiration from the Jewish-American press which for several years had been publishing travel guides for its community’s travellers, and from earlier, embryonic and less successful efforts to service the African-American community (eg, the Negro Business Directories from the early 20th century)[1].

In the 1930s, with the era of “Jim Crow” segregation still very much alive, the experience of Black Americans migrating or travelling around the United States was a very precarious and outright dangerous activity. The notorious white-only “Sundown towns”* were in force, not just in the South but right across the country. The open and legally sanctioned discrimination practiced against Black people in their everyday domestic lives extended to their travel experiences. Victor Green understood that the emerging Black middle class aspired (like all other Americans) to car ownership which held the tantalising promise of individual freedom. For African-Americans, having your own vehicle was the means of escaping a degrading reliance on segregated public transport[2].

▼ American auto dreams!
The project like many entrepreneurial dreams started small, The mailman-cum-entrepreneur Green initially focused his efforts on helping African-American motorists and travellers locate businesses (lodgings, restaurants and other food outlets and fuel stations) in the greater New York metropolitan area that would accept their custom. As the business grew (with assistance from the US Travel Bureau) Green expanded his guide to the rest of the US, and to Alaska, Bermuda and parts of Canada and Mexico. The Green Book’s aim was to help Black and Coloured travellers chart a safe path through a segregated America by pinpointing exactly where on route they could stop and get the services they required to make the trip a happy and pleasant one.

In 1947 Green retired from the New Jersey Postal Service, and together with his wife Alma, started their own travel agency in Harlem. International editions of the book followed with the firm also handling air travel business for the Black community. The Green Book gradually added extra service providers including drug stores, barbers and hairdressers, tailors, salons, garages, nightclubs, taverns, liquor stores and doctors’ offices.

According to the civil rights leader, Julian Bond, Green used his network of contacts in the Postal Workers Union to ascertain where Black visitors would be welcome[3]. Early on, Green visited the locations he would include in his Green Book to check them out personally, but when the book took on a national (and international) focus this became impractical[4]. Aside from hotels and motels, other accommodation options advertised in the Green Book included “tourist homes” (the private residences of African-Americans made available to travellers) and the Harvey House hospitality chain[5].

The Green Book, or to give it its full title, The Negro Motorist Green-Book (later called The Negro Travelers’ Green Book), had its debut edition in 1936 with a green-coloured cover. Green’s intention for the book was to equip Black travellers with the information to avoid the pitfalls, the very real dangers and manifold inconveniences of travelling across a landscape still largely hostile to their race. People could use the Green Book as a vade mecum to find African-American friendly services and hospitable havens on their journeys. It gave travellers the assurance that they could travel with dignity, and not have to suffer the ignominy of being constantly turned away and put down by racist accommodation providers. Green in fact advertised his book as making it possible to have a “vacation without humiliation”.


◥ 1949 Negro Motorists’ Green Book

The Green Book circulation was initially 15,000 copies a year. It was sold in the first instance by mail order through participating Black businesses, and later via Esso gas stations[6]. The cost of the 1936 edition was a Depression-conscious 25 cents, rising to $1.95 by 1960. Some Black enterprises, especially newspapers, eventually sponsored the book, as did Esso, whose gas stations had an unusually high number of Black franchisees in this period … this was reflected in its prominent place in the Green Book’s list of friendly businesses. According to historian Gretchen Sorin, under an agreement with Standard Oil, Esso service stations were selling two million copies of the Green Book annually by 1962[7].

◥ 1956 Negro Motorists’ Green Book

The 1956 edition – whose cover bizarrely featured two unmistakably fair-haired, white motorists(!?!) – made the assertion “Assured Protection for the Negro Traveler”, and it did offer Black travellers some element of choice, where hitherto going to an unfamiliar town was a total lottery. In 1955 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, only about six motels out of 100-plus on Route 66 took Blacks – so without a copy of Green’s road trip companion with them travellers could be faced with a long, frustrating and demoralising series of fruitless enquiries[8].

Ernest Green (a member of the defiantly brave band of schoolchildren known as the “Little Rock Nine” which ran the gauntlet of racist bullies at the first desegregated school in the South in 1957) used the Green Book in the 1950s to travel the 1,600km from Arkansas to Virginia. Green, no relation to publisher Victor, later described the book as “one of the survival tools of segregated life”[9]. Other accolades for the Green Book followed … “A credit to the Negro race” (William Smith); “The Bible of Black Travel”.

Undeniably, the book’s popularity for nearly 30 years (spawning imitators as well) is testimony to how appreciated it was by ordinary African-Americans … the practical guidebook was invaluable to travellers by minimising or avoiding inconvenience, embarrassment and harassment whilst on trips and vacations around the US.

Victor Green died in 1960 however his family kept the Green Book going until 1966. Rebranding was tried with the word ‘Negro’ dropped from the title to try to widen the publication’s appeal, but with the implementation of the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the outlawing of racial discrimination in public housing, it’s relevance to 1960s America had dwindled away.

.

Victor Hugo Green ▼
When the resourceful Mr Green published the inaugural Green Book in 1936, he wrote in the preface that he looked forward to the day when “this guide will not have to be published”. That day was a long time happening (sadly not in Victor’s lifetime) … but it did come.

Footnote: In the decades after the publication folded, the story of the Green Books slipped more or less completely out of the public consciousness. It was only by happenstance that it resurfaced after playwright Calvin A Ramsey met an elderly traveller in the South in 2001 who asked him where he could get a “Green Book”. Curiosity aroused, Ramsey did some background research and eventually wrote two books – a children’s story and a play – on the topic. Since then revived interest in the Green Books has amounted to a bit of a ‘Renaissance’ … there has been the Schomburg Center’s GB digitization project (‘Revisiting a Jim Crow Era Guide for Traveling While Black’), the National Parks Service Route 66 Corridor Preservation Project, as well as numerous recent articles, blogs, museum exhibitions, documentaries (including Ric Burns’ current Driving While Black project) and podcasts, all on the Green Books[10].

≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡
* so called because visiting Blacks were systematically warned to be out of town “by sundown” or risk violent reprisals from the local white population. This phenomenon was by no means restricted to backwater redneck, hick towns. Sundown towns included large suburbs such as Warren, Michigan (pop. 180,000), Levittown, New York (80,000) and Glendale, California (60,000).

[1] K Kelly, ‘The Green Book. The First Travel Guide for African-Americans Dates to the 1930s’, Huffington Post, 8 Mar 2014
[2] ibid. Although car ownership was liberating for African-Americans it did lead to other problems such as racial profiling by police (deliberate targeting, harassment and random arrest on suspicion of Black drivers on the street) … still very much a threat to the civil liberties of the African-American community today, T Owen, ‘Driving While Black: Cops Target Minority Drivers in this Mostly White New Jersey Town’, 11-Apr 2016, (Vice News) www.news.vice.com
[3] ‘ “Green Book” Helped African-Americans Travel Safely’, Talk of the Nation, 15-Sep 2010, www.npr.org
[4] C Taylor, ‘The Negro Motorist Green Book’, www.taylormadeculture.com
[5] C McGee, ‘The Open Road Wasn’t Quite Open to All’, New York Times, 22-Aug 2010
[6] Kelly, op.cit
[7] McGee, op.cit. Sorin, cited in J Driskell, ‘An Atlas of self-reliance: The Negro Motorist’s Green Book (1937-1964), 30-Jul 2015, www.americanhistory.si.edu
[8] ‘The Green Book Video Transcript – Route 66’, www.ncptt.nps.gov
[9] E Lacey-Bordeaux & W Drash, ‘Travel Guide helped African-Americans navigate tricky times’, 25-Feb 2012, www.edition.cnn.com
[10] See ‘Mapping the Green Book’, (MGB production blog), www.mappingthegreenbook.tumblr.com

Lexical Adventures in Suffixland: Getting Creative with Naut and Nik

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture, Society & Culture

Two of the more interesting suffixes borrowed by English and put to good neologistic use are -naut and -nik. The origins of the word ‘naut’ have connotations of travel and water, Naut derives from an Ancient Greek word, translated as ‘naútēs‘, meaning ‘sailor’, sometimes rendered as ‘to navigate’. From naut we get the word ‘nautical’, something nautical relate of course to water and ships, although the root word naut has been employed to form new words which relates more to the sky or to atmosphere rather than to water.

✒︎ The Argonauts

༒

The first use of this suffix in the above sense seems to emanate from Greek mythology and the story of Jason and his crew who sailed according to legend in search of the Golden Fleece – the Argonauts. The etymology is: Classical Latin Argonauta; from Classical Greek Argonautēs; from Argō, Jason’s ship + nautēs, sailor; from naus, ship [Webster’s New World College Dictionary]. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles dates it’s use in English from 1596, so it’s been in currency for a long time.

The post-war phenomenon that has given naut words their impetus and continued relevance was the Space Race from the late 1950s, initially involving only the USSR and the United States. The US space program brought astronaut into common use , a word formed by simply conjoining the prefix astro (= stars) with naut. Far from being newly coined, the word itself has a history that long pre-dates the 1950s and 60s “Race to the Moon”. In 1930 the term was used in a pioneering Sci-Fi short story, ‘The Death’s Head Meteor’ by Neil R Jones (and there are other instances of the word in fiction go back to the late 19th century). The explorations of space fired the popular imagination, propelling astronaut into common usage to describe those (especially American) who ventured into space on behalf of the “Free World”. Astronaut may have been influenced by the term aeronaut (aero meaning air or atmosphere, as in aeronautics, from Ancient Greek aēr = air) in use to describe balloonists dating from the 1780s [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut]. With the long-term goal of reaching the Moon accomplished by the US in 1969 and further Moon missions planned, it was of no surprise that the more precise lunarnaut soon crept into the vocabulary.

As the Soviet Union entered the bipartite race with the intention of ‘conquering’ space and establishing a technological superiority over the US, the Russian Cold Warriors wanted for ideological reasons naturally enough to differentiate their extra-planetary achievements from those of their capitalist foes. So when the first successful spaceman Yuri Gagarin went up in Vostok I in 1961, the word cosmonaut (from Cosmos, the Universe, from Ancient Greek Kosmos = order) came into the lexicon – the New York Times attributed its genesis to Premier Khrushchev “and Soviet publications” [‘Russians coin a word for him: “Cosmonaut”, NYT, 13 April 1961].

✒︎ “astroboy” touches down

༒

Astronauts by other names
The expansion of the Space Race to other nations outside of the big two spawned a whole lot of other naut-based neologisms. The first Indian in space (1984) was initially depicted as a cosmonaut (because he flew under the Soviet space program), but Indian pride and patriotism and the advancement of their own, homegrown space program, soon led to the evolution of a distinctive term for Indian space-traveller, vyomanaut (from Sanskrit vyoman (= sky). Although among Hindi-speakers there has been some debate about the rival merits of other terms, eg, there is a measure of support for anthanaut (or antharnaut), derived from anthariksh, meaning ‘space’ in Hindi.

When China joined the “Man-in-Space Club” by launching their own pilot beyond the stratosphere in 2003, the Chinese inevitably found their own term to describe it – tàikōnaut (taikon the Chinese word for space or cosmos, derived from tàikōngrén = spaceman) [‘Taikonaut’, Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/]. Although it was apparently a Chinese-Malaysian who first used the term for Chinese astronaut and the Xinhua News Agency uses it in its English-language publications (but not the Shenzhou space program).
NB: For a pure Chinese rendering of the concept, either hángtiānyuán or yūhángyuán (literally translated as sky navigator or sailor and Universe navigator or sailor respectively) more accurately capture the essence of the meaning [ibid.]

Another word invented to describe the profession of space explorer of a specific country or region is spationaut, meaning a French astronaut, from Fr: spationaute (= space navigator). Spationaut is also used more generally to delineate astronauts from other European states, although a more suitable, generic term for this might be Euronaut.

Along the lines of aeronaut we also have aquanaut which might be a grander way of describing an underwater diver (the prefix ‘Aqua’, from Ancient Greek for water), which is distinct from an oceanaut whose scientific marine exploration is done in a submarine. ✒︎ A NASA aquanaut (source: theatlantic.com)

༒

Other -naut-suffixed terms signifying navigation in either a precise or looser sense include:

• chrononaut (a time-traveller – inspired by Doctor Who or Back to the Future?)
• cryonaut (one whose body is preserved by cryonics)
• cybernaut (a voyager in cyberspace; user of the internet or virtual reality. Could also be called an infonaut)
• gastronaut (person with a keen appreciation of food, ie, a more formal name for a ‘foodie’)
• hallucinaut (a hallucinator)
• neuronaut (one who studies the brain especially the effects of psychedelic drugs). cf. psychonaut who explores one’s own psyche under the effects of drugs.
• oneironaut (one who explores dream worlds)

As can be gleaned from the above there is a high degree of artificiality in the construction of many of these naut words. Some involve the choice of a convenient word (eg, gastronaut) rather than involving an act of literal navigation. Another concocted naut word with an interesting medical-related origin is responaut. The term was first applied c.1964 to a group of people at a particular facility in England with severe breathing difficulties whose condition needed them to be attached virtually permanently to the newly invented iron lung (mechanical respirator) in order to preserve their lives. ‘Responaut’ (formed from combining respirator + naut) was chosen because these patients experience similar problems to astronauts and oceanauts in establishing and maintaining communications and vital air supplies [Sunday Times (Lon), 12 January 1964, cited in Word Finder (Oxford English Dictionary), http://findwords.info/term/responaut].

The word Juggernaut contains the form of the naut suffix only by coincidence. It it unconnected to the idea of navigation or sailing, having come into English currency from a difference language group. Juggernaut derives from Sanskrit via a Hindi word, jagannath, meaning literally, world lord or protector. In English it has come to signify anything to which persons blindly devote themselves to or are ruthlessly crushed by [Shorter OED on Historical Principles].

Yinglish and spacerace-speak
Turning to words with the suffix ‘nik’, these come to English from a different path being of Slavonic origin with some Yiddish influence. Nik suffixes are very common in Slavonic languages, we find for example polkovnik (meaning colonel) in Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and so on. Just as the Space Race gave naut words a new impetus, nik also found its way into English from Russian after the Soviet Union’s successfully launched a space craft named Sputnik in 1957.

The word beatnik was coined by journalist Herb Caen [San Francisco Chronicle, 2 April 1958] to describe adherents to the “Beat Generation”, a sort of subculture movement characterised by youthful anti-conformism, rebelling against the mainstream and hip culture (“being cool, man!”) (cf. the word ‘hipster’ as used today). Other traits include devotion to jazz, drug use and Eastern religions, and pseudo-intellectualism. Through the writings of ‘Beat’ leaders such as Jack Kerouac, other neologisms followed the pattern of beatnik … jazznik, bopnik, bugnik [Jack Kerouac, Brandeis Forum, ‘Is there a Beat Generation?’, 8 Nov. 1958, www.wnyc.org/story/.]

The Cold War tensions of the 1970s spawned another new word formed from the root nik – refusenik. Originally, refuseniks were individual citizens (many Jewish but not exclusively so) of the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries who were denied permission by the Communist authorities to emigrate. Over time the application of ‘Refusenik’ in colloquial English has broadened to take on the meaning of “a person who refuses to do something, especially by way of protest” [Oxford English Dictionary (online)].

Peacenik is a word which has often been used in a derogatory way to describe someone who is an activist or demonstrator who opposes war and military intervention [www.dictionary.reference.com/browse/peacenik] (cf. “woke”/”wokeism”).The term is thought to have originated in the 1960s [possibly 1962 according to www.wordorigins.org]. Its precise origin is not known but very likely the term arose out either out of the anti-nuclear weapons movement or the anti-Vietnam War movement of the sixties. Peacenik is a synonym for pacifist or dove.

Holics – taking it to the nth degree
An unrelated but similarly manufactured word to peacenik is peaceoholic (sometimes spelt peaceaholic). Peaceaholic and other words with an -aholic or -oholic postfix are back-formed by analogy with the word alcoholic (into English from Arabic via French or Middle Latin). So we have shopaholic, workaholic, chocoholic, sexoholic, etc. which convey the sense of an addiction to or obsession with an activity or object.

Other nik words with a Yiddish flavour to them include Nudnik and Kibbutznik. Nudnik means obtuse, boring, a bothersome person a pest (nudyen = to bore). The Jewish Chronicle reports (18 February 2009) that Nudnik has entered modern Hebrew … “a common and even respected modus operandi in Israeli society”. A nudnik is someone “who is constantly asking you for something or otherwise taking up your time” [www.thejc.com]. Kibbutznik is a name given to workers who are members of an Israeli collective farm (a Kibbutz).

Malice in Tinseltown: Hollywood’s Role in the Cold War and the Spy Sub-genre

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Cinema, Media & Communications, Society & Culture

Like the ‘Hot’ War (WWII) preceding it, the Cold War has always been fertile ground for the stuff of Hollywood drama (and melodrama). Right through the era the alleged plots of communists, whether identified explicitly or implicitly, provided inspiration for writers and directors of both film and television. The persona of the vilified communist agitator neatly slotted into the ‘bad guy’ role once occupied by the native American Indian in Westerns, particularly conveniently so at a time when the Western was starting to lose its mass entertainment appeal on cinema and TV screens.

‘The Avengers’: Gentlemen’s bowler hats & sexy black leatherwear

In the political aftermath of the Second World War the USA and the USSR found themselves locked into an international power struggle for global supremacy with the capitalist system pitted against the communist one, culturally as well as militarily and economically. In the prevailing atmosphere of tension and mutual distrust, espionage and counterintelligence flourished. Inevitably the new international “spy game” found its way on to the pages of novels, comic books and into films and television. In the 1960s the interest in the espionage/sabotage dimension of the Cold War escalated into a “spy craze” on both the big and the small screens. On television two successful British spy series, Danger Man and The Avengers❈, both preceded the first film of the cinematic espionage game-breaker, the James Bond series.

The espionage/spy film sub-genre of course did not begin in the 1960s but can be traced back to the pre-war era with its first-wave popularity established to a large extent by suspense king, Alfred Hitchcock, with films such as The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent and Sabotage [AMC Film Site, (Suspense/Thriller Films), www.filmsite.org ]. The driving force for the popularity of the 1960s Spy movie was the extraordinary (and enduring) success of the James Bond Agent 007 series franchise. The Bond movie phenomena spawned a flurry of imitators, including parodies (some good, some mediocre or worse), from the mid-sixties, eg, Our Man Flint, The Silencers (Matt Helm series), The Ipcress File, Agent 8¾, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Spy with a Cold Nose, Torn Curtain, A Dandy in Aspic, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, Get Smart, etc.

Despite the Communism (Soviet Russia) V Capitalism (America) conflict being at the core of the Cold War drama,it’s cessation by the early 1990s did not result in the demise of the TV and film spy genre, far from it! James Bond, post-Soviet Union, pits himself against “an (unnamed) international terrorist network far more amorphous than the KGB”. The ongoing success of the Jason Bourne series of movies in a post-9/11 world sees special agent Bourne foiling the evil schemes of one terrorist ring after another, some with a seemingly Slavic hue to them, others projecting something more generally Middle-Eastern in flavour. It seems, as Tony Shaw put it, “that the Cold War had never really gone away, at least not from our cinema and television screens” (T Shaw, ‘Hollywood’s Cold War’, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 21, No 1, Jul. 2008).

The original on-screen preoccupation with the theme of the Cold War has its origins in the McCarthyist intrigues in Hollywood. From 1947 the House Committee of Un-American Activity (HUAC), spearheaded by Junior Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, turned its attention on Hollywood with a view to systematically weeding out communists and “fellow travellers” from the film industry. As the fear and paranoia generated by the ‘Red Scare’ impacted on Hollywood, the studio moguls responded to HUAC’s pressure by voluntarily climbing on board the anti-communist witch-hunt for ‘subversives’, commissioning films with an undisguised anti-communist message. The upshot of the Committee turning the torch on Tinseltown was sadly the ‘blacklisting’ of many promising actors and behind-the-camera practitioners. Rising actors like Larry Parks and John Garfield had their careers truncated or ended by the activities of HUAC, as did the group of writers, directors and producers known as the Hollywood Ten.

Emerging post-war social realism films stymied
The big studio heads’ decision to focus on films exposing the supposed communist infiltration of the United States also had an adverse effect on social realism films which in that same year (1947) were starting to have an impact. Hollywood’s enlistment in the war against internal communism largely put paid to the trend towards “problem pictures” dealing with social issues such as anti-Semitism (Gentlemen’s Agreement), alcoholism (Smash-Up) and schizophrenia (Possessed)[Daniel J Leab, ‘How Red was my Valley: Hollywood, the Cold War Film, and I Married a Communist‘, Journal of Contemporary History, 19(1), Jan. 1984].

Following 1947 there was an ongoing sequence of crudely propagandist “Reds under the bed” films with titles like Walk a Crooked Mile, The Red Menace, Conspirator, I Married a Communist, Invasion, U.S.A., The Jet Pilot. The movies and especially ones like John Wayne’s Big Jim McLain and My Son John (both 1952 releases) overtly attacked the communist lifestyle and sought to show that subversives were actively at work undermining the American fabric of life. Most of the stock standard B-movies seeking to exploit the Red Scare were abysmal, often completing losing the plot and portraying Communism more as “a variety of gangsterism” than as an alternative ideology systematically trying to achieve world domination [ibid.].

Hollywood domestic shock/horror & scandal 40s & 50s style

Other US anti-Red films took a more indirect if thinly-veiled approach. Them (1954) employed the allegorical device of megasized mutant ants threatening society to convey the communist menace. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was thematically similar, depicting emotionless alien clones (read ‘Communists’ infiltrating Planet Earth). California Conquest (1952) put the issue into a historical context: Spanish Californians circa 1840 thwart a Russian attempt to take over the Pacific Coast colony [ibid.]. I Married a Communist (1950) took the laboured, crude message to a new height (perhaps that should be depth!). This RKO film was a pet project of Howard Hughes, the only Hollywood studio boss who fully shared HUAC’s conviction of the ‘Red Peril’ to heart, fervently launching his own anti-communist crusade within RKO. Hughes went so far as to remove the individual credits from industry persons he suspected of being communists [ibid.].

The television arm of Hollywood similarly wasted no time in jumping on the anti-communist bandwagon. From the early fifties right through the decade the studios turned out a slew of short-lived, jejune Cold War TV dramas with homogeneous-sounding names such as Shadow of the Cloak, The Door with No Name, Foreign Intrigue, I Spy (two distinct series used this title 10 years apart), Secret File, U.S.A., Top Secret, Passport to Danger, Behind Closed Doors. Counterspy was another one, interesting only because it had started life as a WWII radio drama with Nazis as the villains, only to be upgraded in the Cold War, swapping Nazis for communists as the new villains [‘Commie Fighters of the ’50s’, www.for-your-eys-only.com ]. The sole stand-out fifties spy series with any kind of longevity was I Led Three Lives, which dramatised the real-life experiences of American double agent Herbert Philbrick [‘The anti-communist spy as TV entertainer’, www.jfredmacdonald.com].

By around the end of the fifties the Cold War films and TV series of this ilk with their crude, oversimplistic and formulaic style, as West versus East propaganda had become out-of-date. McCarthyism was on the downward slide, détente had started to thaw out international relations with the Eastern Bloc. The ideological enemy to Americans was no longer a singular one, Communist China had cemented itself as the new bogeyman for the self-appointed guardian of democracy. The perception was now, mixing racism with politics, that a yellow threat to the Free World was a factor along with the earlier red one [Leab, op.cit.].

‘The Iron Petticoat’ 1956

The flip side of the McCarthyist-inspired pictures of the 1950s which were driven by the hysteria and paranoia of the communist witch-hunt was a whole host of movies which sought to exploit the Cold War for laughs. Among these pseudo spy/espionage comedies was My Favourite Spy, The Iron Petticoat and The Mouse that Roared (1950s), Carry On Spying and The Russians are Coming,The Russians are Coming (1960s), through to Spies Like Us and Stripes (1980s). These sort of movies tended to portray Russian agents and military types as often bungling, humourless semi-robots (or if female, stereotyped as cold, charmless and unsexed).

‘Casino Royale’ 1967

Note: the ‘spoofiest’ of all Bondesque films was the one based on the book written by the Bond author himself, Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (1953) (Ex-agent Fleming’s first James Bond novel), with David Niven (Sir James Bond) and Woody Allen (little Jimmie Bond) as the most absurdist of James Bond incarnations! Also see PostScript.

The Cold War has been the subject or inspiration for countless films and TV episodes over the past 60-plus years. The form of the sub-genre has shifted over time. In the black-and-white 1950s we had the crude, sombre “Reds under the bed” films and television programs. In the 1960s the hysteria diminished and celluloid representations of espionage were generally less bleak than in the preceding decade. The Ur-secret agent James Bond Agent 007 was the measure and model of the sub-genre, the unbroken series of films kicking off with Dr No in 1962.

PostScript: Spy Spoofery
The secret agent trope was in itself inverted with the advent of spy spoofs on cinema and TV screens (most famously Get Smart, but also Austin Powers, Johnny English, Spy Hard). The TV and movie spy satires weren’t really interested in peddling an anti-communist message, their creators just wanted to exploit the Cold War genre for all its comedic worth!

With the demise of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the slick, transparently escapist Bond film (not to mention it’s myriad of imitators using or misusing the skills of actors like James Coburn, Dean Martin and Dirk Bogarde) reinvented itself by discovering new (non-Soviet) antagonists and dangers, and the franchise continues to be mega-profitable, churning out a new Bond film for a receptive and insatiable global audience every couple of years.

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❈ Christopher Bray makes an intriguing comparison of the motives (or lack thereof) of The Avengers and James Bond. Whereas Bond’s rationale was clear cut, to stop Spectre from achieving its goal of world domination, Steed and Mrs Peel enter a Kafkaesque world each week to avenge the murders of public servants by villains acting for some ‘unseen’ and ‘unknown’ powers whose seem utterly motiveless, Christopher Bray, 1965: The Year Modern Britain Was Born (2014)

Mo and Onkus: Vaudevillian Kings of Comedy in the Antipodes

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Media & Communications, Society & Culture

Before there was motion pictures, radio or television in Australia, variety theatre and vaudeville flourished as the form of public entertainment. In the first half of the 20th century two performers in the absolute vanguard of Australian vaudeville comedy were George Wallace and Roy Rene. Both these standout comedy stars of the Australasian theatre, at their career high-point, were extremely well paid. Each had his own distinctive style and persona, as well as particular strengths and weaknesses in the differing modes of comic performance attempted.

George Wallace (above) had an early taste of the stage appearing in children’s pantomime at age three, but it wasn’t until after WWI that his career really took off when he teamed up with fellow vaudevillian Jack Paterson to form a knockabout comedy act called “Dinks and Onkus”. The duo performed their “couple of drunks” routine to packed audiences at the Newtown Bridge Theatre for five years before Wallace outgrew the partnership and joined up with bigger enterprises, first that of Fuller’s Circuit and then the Tivoli Theatre Circuit.

George was smallish in stature and quite chubby in build but despite this, on stage he was exceptionally acrobatic and agile on his feet. As part of his very physical act he became acutely adept at landing on his left ear during a deliberate fall. Wallace wrote witty songs and review sketches to perform in theatre, sometimes he told absurd stories about characters such as Stanley the Bull, the Drongo from the Congo and Sophie the Sort [Stuart Sayers, ‘Wallace, George Stevenson (1895–1960)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wallace-george-stevenson-8961/text15765, published first in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 4 April 2015]. The Wallace persona on stage and screen was that of a childlike man, portraying goggle-eyed, innocent characters well down on the social ladder, often farm boys, hicks and yokels ill at ease with women [Paul Byrnes, ‘George Wallace’, www.aso.gov.au]. The country bumpkin-cum-innocent in the big city association was further emphasised by George’s garb, comprising ill-fitting clothes and rumpled hat.

Wallace’s “working class zero” popularity attracted the attention of local film-makers and in the thirties he appeared in a number of films such as Gone to the Dogs, A Ticket for Tatts, mostly for Ken G Hall, Australia’s foremost (Cinesound) director in the interwar period. In his movies (some of which he co-wrote) Wallace reprised his theatre role as a bumbling, disaster-prone innocent. In his performances on the big screen Wallace demonstrated that he was able to make the transition from stage to cinema. After WWII however, finances dried up and the Australian film industry went into steep decline. Wallace returned to theatre including a return to pantomime and to the new medium of radio performance. In 1949 he began a weekly radio show with the Macquarie Network in Sydney. The one setback to Wallace’s career was his unsuccessful attempt in the early fifties to make it in the English theatre as a comedian, but this could be attributed partially to the English audiences’ unfamiliarity with his Australian accent [ibid.].

Roy Rene (born of part-Dutch ancestry, Harry Van Der Sluice) was a rival of sorts for Wallace in the interwar musical comedy theatre. Rene’s stage persona of ‘Mo’ and his successful partnership with Nat Phillips as “Stiffy and Mo” was the inspiration for Wallace to form “Dinks and Onkus”. Like Wallace, Rene started in ‘panto’ at 14 as “Boy Roy” in a Sydney production of Sinbad the Sailor. Rene’s popularity grew in musical comedy reviews all around Australia and NZ in the 1920s and 1930s. His theatrical career however was marked by tempestuous relationships with colleagues and proprietors. He broke up and then reunited with Phillips, and moved (sometimes sacked) from one theatre company to another (Princess Theatre, the National Amphitheatre, Fuller’s, Tivoli, Theatre Royal, etc) from one side of the continent to the other and on to New Zealand throughout his career.

Rene had a very distinctive on-stage appearance, striking black-and-white face paint which gave a nod to the influence of minstrelsy, baggy pants and a battered black top hat. In performance he exuded an extroverted and even exhibitionist style – he was the quintessential lair (the self-promoting “show-off”). Often he would robustly insult the audience with a spray of obscenities, both verbal and gestural. In today’s milieu of political correctness Rene’s act would in all likelihood be characterised as sexist and even racist (in its presentation of a Jewish caricature) and it did alienate some viewers in the day. This did not stop Fuller’s from billing him (pre-war) as “Australia’s foremost delineator of Hebrew eccentricities” [Frank Van Straten, ‘Roy Rene 1892-1954’, Live Performance Australia – Hall of Fame (2007), www.liveperformance.com.au ].

At the height of his career the wider public loved Mo’s humour and feted him as a great clown. The typically unrestrained expressions used by Rene in skits became the vogue, so much so that they entered the Australian lexicon. The numerous ‘Mo-isms’ that still colour the linguistic landscape of Australia include such perennial gems as “strike me lucky!”, ” you beaut!”, “strewth”, “cop that, young Harry”, “you little trimmer!”, “don’t come the raw prawn with me” and “fair suck of the sav” [‘Roy Rene’, www.skwirk.com].

Rene as a live performer was a forerunner of what a later generation would euphemistically call “working blue”. His work, especially in the Stiffy and Mo skits was punctuated with risqué humour and vulgar double entendre. One of their most celebrated routines had Mo, chalk in hand, saying to the “straight guy” Stiffy: “why is that whenever I write F you see K” (the audience apparently never got it at the time). How far Roy could be characterised as a “blue comic” is a moot point. A show biz contemporary of his, Bill Moloney in his autobiography, Memoirs of an Abominable Showman, cautions that this was more in the public’s perception than anything actually evident in Mo’s sketches. Moreover, in the light of the unfettered ‘blueness’ of later comics like Lenny Bruce and Rodney Rude, Mo’s ribald smuttiness comes across as very pale by comparison.

Roy as Mo struck a chord with the public partially perhaps because he was seen as being so far from being a hero, more of an everyman, and also because they saw him in the context of the Depression as a battler, an underdog barking back at his so-called ‘betters’ [ibid.]. At the peak of his fame a measure of his popularity were the stacks of unaddressed mail he received from his fans. Letters would somehow find their way to Roy Rene’s home or office with only the iconic, black and white image of Mo’s face scribbled where the address should appear on the envelope!

Inevitably the popularity of Mo led to attempts to establish Roy Rene as a film star. Strike Me Lucky! (1934) directed by Ken G Hall was not successful either critically or at the box office. The medium did not suit Rene who needed the spontaneity of performing before a live audience to feed off and sparkle at his best. The repetition of takes during scenes in movies was also to his distaste [Lesley Speed, ‘Strike Me Lucky: Social Difference and Consumer Culture in Roy Rene’s Only Film’ (Screening Australia), www.tlweb.latrobe.edu.au].

After WWII, with variety theatre in recession, Rene made a successful transition to radio. He was able to do this having learned from the lessons of his failed venture into films, because he made sure that his radio shows were presented before a live audience to ensure that his performances had that necessary edge. At Sydney radio station 2GB he found a niche as the bombastic “Professor Mo McCackie” of “McCackie Manor” finding a whole new audience for his unique sense of humour.

Because they possessed very different comedic styles, it is hard to detect any influences Rene and Wallace may have had on each other. Rene, hitting the boards a good decade before the younger man, led to him becoming the bigger star in the late 1910s to mid 1920s. The differences in style and content were quite pronounced: Rene’s speech drew on the broad Australian vernacular, he had an urban type of comedy influenced by the traditions of American Jewish (Yiddish) comedy. Roy/Mo was both raunchy and in-your-face in a way the simpler, more laid-back George/Onkus never was. Wallace was more influenced by the traditions and stories of the Australian bush (his adolescent years were largely spent working in the Queensland bush as a cane-cutter, horseman, dairy farming and the like). One critic has identified the influence of Charlie Chaplin on Wallace’s comedy in aspects like the use of athletic slapstick and the choice of costumes [Byrnes, op.cit.].

Wallace and Rene were gigantic figures in the first half of 20th century Australian variety entertainment, both were quintessentially Australian, both had exemplary timing in their comic delivery. The two plied the same trade but stylistically and temperamentally they were very different vaudeville comics. The two comedians did ultimately have one curious connexion: both men died in the same small Sydney suburb of Kensington, six years apart.

‘Mo Mac’ with another great master of comedy, Stan Laurel

Postscript: I have not included Jim Gerald within the purview of this survey. ‘Diabolo’ Gerald, the rubbery-faced clown, a contemporary of Rene and Wallace, was a theatrical performer who rightly deserves a place in the trio of 20th century Australian vaudeville comic greats. Gerald however differs from the other two Australia-focused comedians. He was more international in outlook, sourcing a large amount of his material during trips abroad, and working overseas extensively, eg, touring South Africa, Asia, North America; as part of the AIF Entertainment Unit in the Middle East and the Mediterranean during WWII; plus starring in a series of cinematic shorts in Hollywood during the silent era.