Grousing over an airport name. John Wayne Airport, Orange County, California
Let me start off by noting that I'm not really a John Wayne fan.
I'm not a John Wayne anti fan either.
As I've stated on one of our other blogs, I don't really get hero worship in regard to actors and actresses, or other entertainers. I don't expect actors in particular to reflect the characters they portray in any fashion whatsoever. Many, I'm sure, are the very antithesis of the characters they portray and as a general rule, actors and actresses (which I'll henceforth condense into "actors") are among the most screwed up demographic that exists.* This doesn't apply to all of them, by any means, but as a demographic they're genuinely pushing the envelope on odd and I've sometimes wondered, indeed I'm convinced, that quite a few actors take up that occupation to compensate for not feeling real, and then go on to adopt the cause de jour to try to give meaning to lives that otherwise lack them.
Now, I'm not saying that any of that applies to John Wayne. Wayne came up in the days of acting when a lot of early actors actually came into it through some other movie industry role. In Wayne's case he was an actor in Hollywood from the start, following a (fairly rare at the time) college career in which he played football.
I frankly don't think that Wayne was the greatest actor in the world either, or although I also think that he was a better actor than his detractors would have it. His greatest role was in the John Ford film The Searchers, in which he doesn't play to type at all. His portrayals in the John Ford Cavalry Trilogy films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Sands of Iwo Jima, and The Cowboys are all also excellent. His late film The Green Berets, in contrast, is horrifically bad and I don't even think Stagecoach, which is widely beloved and celebrated, is all that good. So my views are mixed.
Just because Wayne played a military man in a host of films in which all the portrayals were heroic doesn't make him a military man. When his time came, during World War Two, Wayne agonized over joining the service and didn't. His career was just taking off and he worried about serving wrecking that. He made, in my view, the improper choice.**
I know that his defenders here will cite a football injury but I just don't believe it. By the end of the Second World war American manpower was in such short supply that men were taken into the Army who were basically blind in one eye and had border line mental psychosis. With Wayne's connections, even if he had an injury, he could have gotten in.
So with all of that, I just regard actor John Wayne as an actor. He had some admirable qualities to be sure. He was apparently personally courageous in confrontation and even waded into a group of Vietnam War protesters to quiet them when he was somewhere with Jimmy Stewart, whose son had just been killed in Vietnam.*** That took guts.
Anyhow, I think it's silly in the first place that Orange County renamed their airport after John Wayne in 1979. I wouldn't have done that.
Indeed, I think airports that are named after people, generally ought to be named after somebody of significance, and I don't place actors in that category. It makes no more sense, in my view, for Orange County to have renamed their former military field after John Wayne (indeed, there's some ironies in that) than it would make for the Port of Port Arthur, Texas to rename that facility Janis Joplin Port. Indeed, the latter example might make more sense as Janis Joplin was actually from Port Arthur.
Port Arthur, Texas. Should it be renamed Port Janis Joplin?
Indeed, if there was a desire to name the airport after a movie industry figure with a real role in aviation, it would have been Howard Hughes Airport.****
But that's impossible to imagine.
Anyhow, I also think it's silly that the Los Angeles Times has started a debate over renaming it, which they recently did with this item by columnist Michale Hitzik:
Column: It’s time to take John Wayne’s name off the Orange County airportMost people familiar with the life story of John Wayne are aware that the late movie star was a dyed-in-the-wool right-winger — after all, he was still making a movie glorifying America’s conduct of the Vietnam War (“The Green Berets,” 1968) well after the country had begun to get sick of the conflict.But the resurrection of a 1971 interview Wayne gave to Playboy magazine has underscored the sheer crudeness of the actor’s feelings about gay people, black people, Native Americans, young people and liberals.This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s impossible or immoral to enjoy westerns and war movies starring John Wayne; that’s a personal choice. But it certainly undermines any justification for his name and image to adorn a civic facility.
Okay, anyone familiar with John Wayne is likely already familiar with his 1971 interview with the pedophilic, pornographic smut magazine Playboy. 1971 was about the high water mark of the detestable Hugh Hefner's objectification of women, although we certainly haven't recovered from that, and part of its cover for barely disguised misogynistic pedophilia was to run serious interviews with people. Next to Wayne's perhaps the most famous one came out a few years later when then Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter was so unwise as to allow himself to be interviewed by the rag.
Wayne's interview became famous, or perhaps more accurately infamous, due questions asked of him in the rag regarding race and other matters. Wayne didn't hold back on his views on various things in the magazine at all. The columnist repeated some of them in his article, in order to make his point. And indeed, Wayne made comments about homosexuals (Hitzik uses the term "Gay people", which isn't how I think they'd probably prefer to be referred to in this context), blacks and Indians.
We might note here from the onset that it's always baffled me why anyone cares what actors think about anything at all, and for that matter, any category of entertainer. Actors act. They aren't those real people. Who cares what they really think on any societal issue? And if people feel that's an excuse for excusing Wayne's comments, which I'm not going to do, I'll note that this extends out to every single topic that people ask actors to comment on. Whatever it is, if you are for it or against it, there's some actor you can get to comment on it, but why?
Anyhow, as we're opining on this, we'll take a look at Wayne's comments as well, although not in the order that Hitzik did, which probably wouldn't do them justice in context, and which isn't what made them initially controversial, which in fact they initially were. More on that in a moment.
Usually, you only hear about his comments on blacks, which were:
WAYNE: With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.
PLAYBOY: Are you equipped to judge which blacks are irresponsible and which of their leaders inexperienced?
WAYNE: It’s not my judgment. The academic community has developed certain tests that determine whether the blacks are sufficiently equipped scholastically. But some blacks have tried to force the issue and enter college when they haven’t passed the tests and don’t have the requisite background. … But if they aren’t academically ready for that step, I don’t think they should be allowed in. Otherwise, the academic society is brought down to the lowest common denominator. … What good would it do to register anybody in a class of higher algebra or calculus if they haven’t learned to count? There has to be a standard. …I think the Hollywood studios are carrying their tokenism a little too far. There’s no doubt that 10 percent of the population is black, or colored, or whatever they want to call themselves; they certainly aren’t Caucasian. Anyway, I suppose there should be the same percentage of the colored race in films as in society. But it can’t always be that way. There isn’t necessarily going to be 10 percent of the grips or sound men who are black, because more than likely, 10 percent haven’t trained themselves for that type of work.
Wayne was out to lunch in his comments and most particularly in his "white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility". These came in 1971. But they aren't unusual for the time. Indeed, because they weren't unusual, blacks of the era reacted less than a person might suspect, much less, as they were used to such arguments being advanced. Today the opposite is very much true, and no wonder.
They were clearly racist and a person who stated them held undoubtedly racist views. No doubt about it. And the old line about educating them up until . . was as old as the sun. Indeed, it dates back to slavery. No doubt in 1971 the percentage of college educated blacks was lower than it is now, but the overall American population in general was less educated in 1971. It wasn't until after World War Two that high school graduation became an absolute norm and college education became societaly common. The comment was absurd.
It's usually pointed out that Wayne personally had good relationships with black actors of his era, but that's hardly a defense to this. A person being personally nice to people he's biased against doesn't make him unbiased. Wayne was living in the past with these arguments, which were never valid, but that's part of the point. A lot of Americans of that era were and these views were surprisingly common. That's not a defense, it's just a fact. The politics of the early 1970s still reflected this.
Indeed, Wayne's interview is just two years prior to Lynrd Skinner releasing Sweet Home Alabama, which is a reaction to Neil Young's Southern Man. Almost nobody considers this, but Sweet Home Alabama excuses the same sort of views, with the lyrics noting that they hadn't supported Wallace for Governor of Alabama but that a Southern Man didn't need Neil Young around. That's very close to the same view, as what the Playboy interviewer was suggesting was the view that most Americans had but still had to argue, the time for waiting was over.
Put more bluntly, Sweet Home Alabama is also subtly racist. Consider the lyrics:
Well I heard Mister Young sing about her
Well I heard old Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A southern man don't need him around anyhow
That's also a "we can take care of it" type of excuse, quite frankly. But nobody gets too up and arms about the song and there's even been a movie in recent years that took its title from it.
Maybe they should.
Do these statements make Wayne a racist? Yes, but in the very common society wide manner of the era. That's not a defense to it, but it's also not a reason for the Los Angeles Times to reverse Orange County's 1979 decision.
It might have been a reason not to name the airport after Wayne in 1979, but a better reason not to name it after him is that he was an actor, and an actor with no connection to aviation.
Well, maybe the other things that Wayne said are. Let's take a look at them, going next to his comments about Indians.
PLAYBOY: For years American Indians have played an important — if subordinate — role in your Westerns. Do you feel any empathy with them?
WAYNE: I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that’s what you’re asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves. …
PLAYBOY: How do you feel about the government grant for a university and cultural center that these Indians [then encamped on Alcatraz Island] have demanded as “reparations”?
WAYNE: What happened between their forefathers and our forefathers is so far back — right, wrong or indifferent — that I don’t see why we owe them anything. I don’t know why the government should give them something that it wouldn’t give me.
PLAYBOY: Do you think they’ve had the same advantages and opportunities that you’ve had?
WAYNE: I’m not gonna give you one of those I-was-a-poor-boy-and-I-pulled-myself-upby-my-bootstraps stories, but I’ve gone without a meal or two in my life, and I still don’t expect the government to turn over any of its territory to me. Hard times aren’t something I can blame my fellow citizens for. Years ago, I didn’t have all the opportunities, either. But you can’t whine and bellyache ‘cause somebody else got a good break and you didn’t, like these Indians are. We’ll all be on a reservation soon if the socialists keep subsidizing groups like them with our tax money.
Shocking?
Yes, for sure.
Be that as it may, I still find plenty of people who, if you really know them, hold a basically similar view, and it was only in the 1960s that any other sort of view became widely held.
Indeed, the first time I heard it suggested that European Americans "stole" Indian lands was in the 1970s, when I was a kid and overheard it as part of a silent third party between my father and a colleague. The colleague mentioned that off hand. This comment really surprised me at the time and I later asked my father if a theft had really happened.
He answered no, but his view was really more nuanced than that in that he regarded the pre 20th Century clash of cultures as inevitable, which is different from giving it virtue. Plenty of people gave it virtue. In my grade school library at the time I recall there was a book on Custer I read, written I think in the 1950s, that was practically a hagiography. That sort of view had been extremely common into the 1960s and while there were those who swam against that current the entire time, it wasn't really until people like Mari Sandoz began to publish that there was any sort of wider reconsideration. By the 1960s the reconsideration had become widespread and was part of the era, and Indian activist movements developed and were in the news.
Wayne was still an active actor in the 1970s, to be sure. Perhaps his most famous movie, The Cowboys, was yet to come, being released the year after this interview in 1972. The interview obviously didn't impact his popularity much, if at all. But here its important to remember that he was really an actor from the 40s and 50s who was the exception to the rule as he managed to age into later roles in the 60s and 70s. By the late 60s his movies themselves, with the exception of The Cowboys, seemed to look back and Wayne was on record as hating some later Westerns, such as The Wild Bunch. 1971's movie, Big Jake, which I like, very much has that sense to it, amplified by the fact that it is itself a fin de siecle movie. Coming after Peckinpah's violent masterpiece, the latter film seems to be from a much earlier era.
It isn't surprising, therefore, that Wayne's views were completely anachronistic. Playboy likely knew that, and so Wayne was set up to look like a fool. Playboy itself is now a creepy anachronism and its only a matter of time until the Me Too era blows up all over it. Unfortunately the creep who created it is dead and won't be round to take the brunt of the inevitably coming blows.
So Wayne also talked about homosexuals in his interview, which the Los Angeles Times refers to as "Gay people". The term "gay" actually has, or at least had, a distinct meaning within the homosexual community and traditionally not all homosexuals have identified with it even if they identify as homosexual. In this instance, therefore, the columnist himself shows himself to be insensitive an uninformed.
Wayne: Movies were once made for the whole family. Now, with the kind of junk the studios are cranking out. … I’m quite sure that within two or three years, Americans will be completely fed up with these perverted films.
PLAYBOY: What kind of films do you consider perverted?
WAYNE: Oh, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy — that kind of thing. Wouldn’t you say that the wonderful love of those two men in Midnight Cowboy, a story about two fags, qualifies?
I've never seen Midnight Cowboy and I don't intend to. Wayne isn't alone in his view that it was "perverted" however and there are still those who regard the film as debased. It was an X Rated film at the time and won an Academy Award, the first film (and maybe the only film) in that category to win one. It came just after Hollywood abandoned the Hayes Production Code which resulted in an explosion of movies pushing the limits on depictions which indeed did result in a downward descent in what was portrayed on the screen which really hasn't ended. 1966's Best Picture went to The Sound of Music, 1967's to A Man For All Seasons, 1968's to In the Heat Of the Night, 1969 to Oliver!, and then 1970's to Midnight Cowboy. No matter what you think of any one of those films, the 1970 award reflects some sort of shift in what was being portrayed in film. For somebody who started making films in the 1930s, the shift would have been obvious and titanic. Indeed, very early in the early history of film the direction was going the opposite way.
The real shocker in this comment is the use of the slur "fags". That's an epitaph and in insulting one, and it was at the time. Now use of that term would destroy an actors career. Coming in 1971, however, it didn't. That probably says something about the times.
1971 was two years after the Stonebridge Riots in New York, but it was also a time of massive social unrest. Homosexuality may have come a bit more out in the open with the riots, but it certainly wasn't open. Indeed, that would take at least another twenty years. Wayne's views were probably the societal norm at the time, including a norm that was held by many others who people would regard as very liberal. Indeed, the accusation that somebody was a homosexual was libel per se in the law and was commonly used as a smear against figures of the right and left by their enemies.
The Los Angeles Times has been met with all of these criticisms but is sticking to its guns. It's noted that the civil rights "revolution" had been going on for years at the time that these statements were made, which is true. But that they were going on is different from claiming they'd been completed. In reality they'd been gong on to some degree since the Civil War, and yet it's probable that a review of the LA Times from various years would find shocking examples of views that we'd find absolutely appalling today. I'd be curious, for example, what its view as on Asian immigration to California? The Times itself has acknowledged that its view on Japanese internment during World War Two was "shameful".
The Times is correct that his view was in the nature of "reacting" to the developments of the Civil Rights Era. They were, and they were wrong. Indeed, we might go further and hold them to be reactionary. But they were apparently not shocking enough to keep the airport from being named for him when it was in 1979. And they weren't so shocking to people to keep them away from The Cowboys the following year and a handful of final big films he made in the next eight years prior to his death.
In something like this, it's always popular to say "we've come a long ways", when often we really haven't. The airport has its own problems and the naming of it after an actor in the first place is probably among the very least of them. If anything, the naming demonstrates the vapidness of California, which takes itself very seriously on everything but which strikes many elsewhere as constantly goofy. Celebrating an actor through the naming of an airport is just part of that. Renaming it would likely turn into an equally odd act if not a downright circus. Maybe if nothing else, this serves to focus on that.
If it were to be renamed, perhaps it might be time to actually consider that the figures of actors are poorly presented for anything serious. The Times columnist suggests naming the field after guitar figure Leo Fender. I don't know anything about Mr. Fender, but his guitars are great. Having said that, that doesn't have anything to do with aviation.
Lots of other aviation figures who played a role in California do, however. The Lockheeds, Donald Douglas, Glenn Martin. . .
and even Howard Hughes.
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*Anyone who follows actors and actresses biographies at all can't help not only to be appalled, but also note how often their personal lives grossly depart from the people they portray. Actresses playing nuns don't live chaste lives personally, cowboy actors who play rugged frontier individualist might very well be the polar opposite, and so on.
Occasionally the opposite is the case, but so occasionally its' often a surprise when you lean of it.
**This is noted in the LA Times op ed I'll refer to below, FWIW.
***This is omitted in the LA Times article, but it was genuinely courageous. That courage shows how people are often very mixed in their actual characters. When it was time to serve his country, Wayne didn't. But when a friend was under a type of assault, he intervened when he didn't have to.
Wayne struggled with certain deep personal convictions his entire life, it should be noted. Exposed to Catholicism through director John Ford, he flirted with becoming Catholic his entire life, and ultimately did, but in his final illness. Nonetheless, he was a frequent attendee at Mass for decades prior to that.
****Hughes, of course, was not only an early movie producer, but a giant for many years in the aviation industry.
Wayne did appear in a number of aviation related films, although I hardly think that qualifies you to have an airport named after you, and that's not in fact why it was. He lived as an actor in the community that is just outside this airport. Ironically, complaints from the community about the airport are constant.
Those Wayne films include the following, which I think is an inclusive list, but very well may not be.
Central Airport. (1933).
His role in this film was uncredited. He played a co-pilot. Until making this list, I'd never even heard of this 1933 film.
Flying Tigers (1942).
This film is famous, but in the bad category in my view. It's about the famous American Volunteer Group of mercenary pilots that flew P40s, with the American government's blessing, in support of the Chinese Nationalist prior to the American entry into World War Two (after Pearl Harbor the unit was converted into an American Army Air Corps unit).
I'm surprised that its cartoonish portrayal of the Chinese and Japanese didn't make the LA Times op ed. It's a typical World War Two film and is one of several in which, contrary to the myth, John Wayne's character dies.
Flying Leathernecks (1951).
This is a famous film, but I've never seen it. It concerns a Marine Corps squadron at Guadalcanal.
I've often been surprised that Wayne's roles portraying military heroes carried on after World War Two, in which he did not serve. But in fact, most of those roles actually came after the war, and they started during the war.
Island In The Sky (1953).
Island in the sky is about a DC-3 that crashes in the Canadian wilds. It's an excellent movie.
The High and The Mighty (1954)
The High and the Mighty was a groundbreaking film in that it was the first of a type, the on board air disaster type. It follows the crew and the passengers that are on a plane that's failing as they crew struggles to bring the plane in safely It's the first of its kind, and is very well done.
Wayne's aging makes an appearance here as he's cast as an aging co pilot, side lined because of his age, whose experience wars against the younger pilots education in his craft.
The Wings Of Eagles (1957)
This film is the biography of Naval aviator Frank "Sprig" Wead, an early figure in naval aviation who was severely injured in an aircraft accident. I've seen part, but not all, of this film.
Jet Pilot (1957)
Jet Pilot is a terrible film that can only be explained by the Hollywood studio system of the time, which also explains the shear volume of the films that anyone actor made as well. In 1957 Wayne made, for example, three films.
This film was made the year after his greatest film, The Searchers, and only his being a captive of the studio could explain his being in this Cold War dog about improbable spy craft and a romance with a female Russian pilot.
The Longest Day (1962).
In this great World War Two film based on the book by Cornelius Ryan, Wayne plays airborne office Lt. Col. Jim Vandervoot.
This isn't really an aviation picture, but I've included it here as Vandervoot was a real person, of course, and a paratrooper. To that extent, the film involved aviation.
This is a great film, but Wayne is far too old in the film for the role he occupies in it.
