Jon Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520284319
- eISBN:
- 9780520959910
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520284319.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal ...
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The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal sheets that so successfully harried the Hollywood community after the war. Movie stars were lucky and pretty, rich and famous. But they were as well political neophytes and their everyday lives were, thanks to the columnists after the war, lumbered with undue consequence. It was one thing for the columnists to bemoan the unearned privileges of celebrity, and then to cut folks so lucky and full of themselves down to size. But it was quite another to cast the private and personal lives of these celebrities as fundamentally anti-social and un-American, to subject the lives and loves of movie stars to a narrow and frankly unrelated notion of patriotism, one that asked movie stars to behave, or at least pretend to behave, like the rest of us.Less
The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal sheets that so successfully harried the Hollywood community after the war. Movie stars were lucky and pretty, rich and famous. But they were as well political neophytes and their everyday lives were, thanks to the columnists after the war, lumbered with undue consequence. It was one thing for the columnists to bemoan the unearned privileges of celebrity, and then to cut folks so lucky and full of themselves down to size. But it was quite another to cast the private and personal lives of these celebrities as fundamentally anti-social and un-American, to subject the lives and loves of movie stars to a narrow and frankly unrelated notion of patriotism, one that asked movie stars to behave, or at least pretend to behave, like the rest of us.
Tameka Bradley Hobbs
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813061047
- eISBN:
- 9780813051314
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813061047.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
The first in the series of lynchings examined in this text is that of Quincy resident Arthur C. Williams, a twenty-two-year-old black man. Williams was accused of robbery and the attempted rape of a ...
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The first in the series of lynchings examined in this text is that of Quincy resident Arthur C. Williams, a twenty-two-year-old black man. Williams was accused of robbery and the attempted rape of a twelve-year-old white girl in May of 1941, the details of which make the truth of the accusation highly improbable. After being arrested, would-be lynchers twice kidnapped Williams from the Quincy jail and attempted to kill him, only succeeding the second time. Two diverging courses of activity followed the aftermath of Arthur Williams's lynching. On the local level, the results of both a coroner's inquest and an investigation of the state attorney failed to identify any responsible party. However, Quincy was skewered in the national media by nationally syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler. His comments, along with the angry reaction they inspired from white Floridians, demonstrated the increasing difficulty that perpetrators of racial violence would have in concealing their actions from national scrutiny, and given Adolf Hitler's rise to power, and connections to international battle between fascism and freedom.Less
The first in the series of lynchings examined in this text is that of Quincy resident Arthur C. Williams, a twenty-two-year-old black man. Williams was accused of robbery and the attempted rape of a twelve-year-old white girl in May of 1941, the details of which make the truth of the accusation highly improbable. After being arrested, would-be lynchers twice kidnapped Williams from the Quincy jail and attempted to kill him, only succeeding the second time. Two diverging courses of activity followed the aftermath of Arthur Williams's lynching. On the local level, the results of both a coroner's inquest and an investigation of the state attorney failed to identify any responsible party. However, Quincy was skewered in the national media by nationally syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler. His comments, along with the angry reaction they inspired from white Floridians, demonstrated the increasing difficulty that perpetrators of racial violence would have in concealing their actions from national scrutiny, and given Adolf Hitler's rise to power, and connections to international battle between fascism and freedom.
