When We Were the Next Generation

A minority group is prevented from buying food and supplies because powerful people have intimidated storekeepers.  This group finally occupies the street and is preventing anyone from buying at the stores.  The leader of this minority has a brief conversation with a storekeeper.

"It's not right to make innocent people suffer," says the storekeeper, meaning his regular customers.

"Those who think themselves better than others are not innocent," says the minority leader.

"But don't you understand--I was forced to do what I did."

"Cowards are even less innocent than hypocrites."

Robert Loggia as Elfego Baca

So what philosopher, what great statesman or author wrote this dialogue?  It was Maurice Tombragel.

 You've likely never heard of him.  I hadn't.  But he wrote this episode of what by then was called Walt Disney Presents in the late 1950s.  It was one of the series of hour-long stories centered on Elfego Baca, a Mexican-born hero of the American West, played by Robert Loggia.

The people in this minority group were called Mustangers, apparently poor whites from the Blue Ridge Mountains who at this point were trying to farm in the cattle-range West.  But they had all the characteristics of a minority suffering prejudice by others and oppression by the powers that be.  It's not hard to see parallels with another minority prominent in 1958.

We often think of westerns, so popular in my 1950s childhood, as a lot of fistfights, shooting and riding, and especially cowboys v. Indians.  But many were more than that, and few were as simplistic.

One reason was Maurice Tombragel.  After a decade writing a variety of B movies, he turned to television, especially westerns.  Before Disney, throughout the 1950s he wrote for The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, Annie Oakley, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Jim Bowie, Bat Masterson, the Range Rider.  I watched them all.

But of course it wasn't just him.  The very first network western TV series was Hopalong Cassidy.  It starred William Boyd, who had played the character in more than 60 movies, beginning in 1935.  Boyd, who'd started in silent films, bought all the rights and produced his own series for this new medium of television.   It began broadcasting in 1949 and became wildly popular.

The series episodes were digitally restored and are now available on DVD and on YouTube.   They are kind of amazing.  The plots are both simple and complex (some involving finance and real estate deals), and there's plenty of riding, fistfighting and shooting.  But there is also a common thread: Hoppy is always fighting for the oppressed, for people who are helpless against the more powerful, including those in authority.  He fights for people who are being cheated, and are the victims of prejudice and hate.

When Indians appear, they are either being set up as villains by white land-grabbers or victims of attempted swindles. The bad guys are usually motivated by greed.  He defends Mexicans, and there's even an episode about human trafficking.

(The Lone Ranger, who rode into television next, was also this kind of western hero. Clayton Moore, who played the LR, appears in a Hopalong Cassidy episode--as a bad guy.)

The first two TV heroes I knew were Captain Video and Hopalong Cassidy. I had Hopalong six-guns and holsters, a Hoppy toy box and other Hoppy toys to put in it.  The only pun I remember my Italian grandfather making was calling me Hopalong que-se-dice. He was a hero.  I tried to imitate his walk and especially his laugh.

William Boyd was pretty old when he made these episodes, but we didn't notice (though once the series became a huge hit with kids, he played the parent--or grandparent-- figure with moments tagged onto the end, requesting that we brush our teeth and help out around the house.  I was probably around 5 at the height of my Hoppy obsession, and judging from these messages, so were a lot of his viewers.)

 Did I absorb attitudes from these shows, perhaps even develop a social conscience because of them?  I think I did, partly (though of course more generally with Hopalong and the earliest heroes.)  Not only from my TV heroes, but certainly they were powerful in reinforcing and defining who the good guys and bad guys were, and why.

It's especially interesting to me at this historical moment to observe the historical moment when these shows were made.  People think of the bland 1950s, but apart from the atomic bomb and the Korean War, there was Joe McCarthy and the Blacklist, and the early Civil Rights movement and events.

But I think in some ways the most important element was that the memories and the meaning of World War II were still being absorbed.  The end of the war was only four years in the past when Hopalong Cassidy first hit the airwaves, and the Nuremberg trials only three years.

Thanks in part to Frank Capra's Why We Fight series and other movies and short films, and Norman Corwin's eloquent radio programs for CBS, there eventually was widespread awareness of  the evils of Nazism and fascism in the 40s, and that education continued after the war.

The contrast was often drawn between the US as defender of the oppressed, as a citadel of freedom from oppression.  For writers of even TV westerns, that consciousness transferred to other causes.

It wasn't always westerns.  When Superman flew out of the comics and into radio, he was heard battling religious bigots and the Ku Klux Klan.  The opening familiar from television ("truth, justice and the American Way") also included on radio a description of Superman as “champion of equal rights, valiant, courageous fighter against the forces of hate and prejudice.”

Superman came to television in 1952.  In that first year a two-part episode had originally been the movie that introduced George Reeves as Superman.  In it, Superman defends aliens (from the center of the Earth) against a persistent mob.  At one point he accuses the mob of acting like "Nazi stormtroopers."

Superman in this series fought crime but also defended the unjustly accused, and in an early second season episode with a plot that had appeared in the comics, he battled against the clock to stop an innocent man from being executed.

The Depression in its way, and World War II in another provided the stories that gave content to social conscience.  They in turn led to other stories, including the ones my generation saw and heard on television.  (The Blacklist led directly to some of these.  Some blacklisted writers fled to England and wrote episodes of Robin Hood and Sir Lancelot that did exactly what the blacklisters feared--poisoned our minds against racial prejudice and towards equality.)

Despite the dangers (i.e. every online argument, it is said, eventually gets to one or both sides accusing the other of being Nazis), I hark back to the Nazi era pretty frequently here.  One reason is that the generation that experienced World War II and may have seen Nazi Germany up close and personal, is all but gone.  Those of us who grew up on stories that had the Nazi experience fresh in their backgrounds and perspectives are getting pretty old as well.  But for as long as we can, we have to represent that perspective when it is important to do so.  As it seems to be right now.