1lawrence of arabia and american culture the Making of a Transatlantic Legend
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Eddie Rickenbacker provides the best example of a World War I American aviator, but he has not retained a prominent position in the gallery of American heroes or, like Lawrence, become a cult figure. Rickenbacker ended the war with the most hours in the air of American pilots and earned several medals, including the Croix de Guerre, Distinguished Service Order (DSO), and the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was feted upon his return to the United States and successfully used his war record to focus and hold the public's attention for a time. Because pilots were lionized, Rickenbacker was asked to lecture at fundraisers and, hiring a manager, joined the lecture circuit from February to June 1919. As a lecturer, he enjoyed a success similar to but less dramatic than that of Lowell Thomas. With the writer Lawrence La Tourelle Driggs, Rickenbacker told his story of fighting Von Richthofen's squadron in Fighting the Flying Circus. Belatedly, he also had his biographers. 10 American flying aces such as Rickenbacker were few and far between, and the experience of the flying ace was not indicative of that of the average American soldier. The man who ultimately came to represent the doughboy was Sergeant Alvin York of Fentress County, Tennessee. York was an unlikely hero, although he combined several qualities particularly appreciated in the United States. Initially a conscientious objector on religious grounds, he became the hero of the Meuse-Argonne campaign. On a foggy morning in October 1918, he reputedly captured 132 prisoners, killing twenty-five enemy soldiers and putting several machine guns out of commission. York's part in the American victory in the Argonne Forest, it has been noted, was a small one against a depleted, exhausted, and confused enemy force. It was not the only heroic individual action of its kind. Nevertheless, York became a national legend. He was glorified as a heroin-homespun, modern-day Leatherstocking. Like Rickenbacker he was decorated with the Croix de Guerre, DSO, and Congressional Medal of Honor. 11 York provides an excellent case study in the cult of popular heroes, and he is comparable to Lawrence in a number of ways. His fame, like Lawrence's, was primarily the work of a reporter. George Pattullo of The Saturday Evening Post happened upon York's story and interviewed him at the front. The resulting article, "The Second Elder Gives Battle," was published in April 1919, a month after Thomas had begun his AllenbyLawrence lectures in New York, and it made York a national hero overnight. York's biographer David Lee explains that it was only after Pattullo had brought York to the public's attention in the pages of the Post that newspapers picked up the story. " Pattullo's treatment of the story," he writes, "cast -64- York in a heroic mold and laid the basis for the York legend." 12 Pattullo fit York snugly into the American tradition of citizen-soldier as outlined by Marcus Cunliffe's study of the martial spirit in America, Soldiers & Civilians. As Thomas did for Lawrence, Pattullo worked several well-worn heroic themes that are popular in the United States, particularly that of the reluctant gunfighter. Like Lawrence, York had his detractors, both American and European, who labeled the hero a "braggart" and "liar," "the product of typically American megalomania." But his story initially took hold with the same tenacity as Lawrence's and with some of the same repercussions for the protagonist. Reacting to his sudden notoriety, York retreated to his home in Pall Mall, Tennessee, just as Lawrence had retreated to Oxford. Similarly, he turned down lucrative offers to tell his story and soon found himself a famous person stranded without funds to sustain his image or even to live on. Unlike Lawrence, of course, York was a simple, uneducated man, ignorant of politics and history, and never as flamboyant. 13 Despite several biographies and a film about his life, which in the flush of wartime brought York back into national consciousness in the early 1940s, his fame has not lasted. The same holds true for Billy Mitchell, Eddie Rickenbacker, and General Pershing. Today the names of the last two may be more easily associated with a failed car model and a missile than with the men themselves and their deeds of war. If Books in Print is an indication of the public's continuing interest, Mitchell, Rickenbacker, and York do not fare well. The 1994- 1995 Subject Guide lists only two books in print about Mitchell and none for Rickenbacker and York. By contrast, T. E. Lawrence has remained a major figure in twentieth-century history and popular culture, with a constant flow of books and articles about him. Books in Print lists twenty-five entries for Lawrence, not including several new critical studies and recent reissues. His major contemporary competitors for public acclaim in the United States, Sergeant York and Eddie Rickenbacker, were not recognized until after the Lawrence legend was established, and York faded back into the mountains of Tennessee shortly thereafter. Lawrence, on the other hand, continued to attract media coverage throughout the 1920s and beyond. Of the Allied heroes of the war, he has retained the most transatlantic currency. In fact, no military hero of the war continued to receive as much attention as Lawrence. 14 LAWRENCE AND THE ARABS IN FILM Another reason why the Lawrence of Arabia story retained currency in the United States during the 1920s is that Hollywood perpetuated it in the -65- so-called sun-and-sand films about romantic desert sheiks. The films were inextricably tied to popular stereotypes of Arabs, but they nonetheless exhibited something of Lawrence in them, and they contributed to his mystique. 15 The story of Lawrence of Arabia was ready-made for the new medium of film, which was still in its experimental stages in the early 1920s. It offered to a public already acquainted with Lawrence through Thomas's lectures an exotic setting, plenty of action, and a larger-than-life war hero. The story was nearly perfect for the "big picture" trend that D. W. Griffith had introduced into motion pictures in the teens through films such as The Birth of a Nation. Although a film about Lawrence's exploits was not made at the time, the influence of his story is evidenced in the sudden popularity of films about Arabs and the Middle East. Prior to the publication of Lawrence's story, few films had been made about Arabs or Arabia, or had used the word "Arab" in their titles. After Lawrence's story became public, a flood of such films appeared. Several of these, such as "The Sheik of Araby" ( 1922) and "The Arab" ( 1924), were remakes of earlier films with title changes to capitalize on the words "sheik" and "Arab." Their sudden popularity indicates a correlation with Lawrence. It is difficult, however, to assess how much the popularity of sun-and-sand films may be due to the story of Lawrence's exploits. Their appeal is based in large measure on an exotic setting, the prevalence of sex as a subject in early motion pictures, and the popular stereotype of the Arab as sensual being. It has been concluded that the stereotypical image of the sensuous Arab was from the beginning of commercial movie-making a proven box office draw. The oriental setting was laden with sensuality for early twentieth-century viewers, some of it titillatingly perverse: belly-dancing harem girls; depraved and sinister sheiks; and the white slave trade-captivity theme common to romances set among "native" peoples. The view that Arabs were cruel and repressive, living by the sword, while at the same time exotic and sexually exciting, was also well entrenched. 16 Popular images of the Arab have, in fact, a long history in the West, dating to at least the Crusades when the Arab became a symbol for anti-Western values. The most prevalent stereotypes in the early twentieth century were the lustful, dark, depraved abductor of white women and the Arab princeswashbuckler played on screen by Rudolph Valentino. 17 These images had previously been absorbed by the West from the fables of The Arabian Nights and from exaggerated accounts by nineteenth-century travelers to the Orient. Orientalist painters, from Delacroix to Matisse, added to the perception. Their paintings, along with those by American artists who had -66- traveled to the Middle East, were available to the American public in art galleries in Europe and the United States. 18 Institutionalized scholarly study of the Near East had begun in the United States by the mid-nineteenth century. Edward Said dates its beginning to the founding of the American Oriental Society in 1842. Whether systematic study began then or later, interest in the Orient was at first less political and economic than cultural. Cultural interest was anthropological in nature or, for the general public and as presented at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, a curiosity and spectacle. 19 Early twentieth-century American attitudes toward the Middle East differed little from those of the previous century. They can be understood by looking at how the Moslem world was depicted at the Chicago World's Fair, an often-used standard of measurement for fin-de-siecle values. The fair is remembered mostly as a grand utopian vision and a testimony to Western technological progress, a City Beautiful. But at the heart of "the monumental White City" was the Midway Plaisance, described by Robert William Rydell, a student of American expositions, as the "honky-tonk sector of the fair." The Midway had a carnival atmosphere to it. The Ferris wheel was located in the Midway, and visitors could see Arab horsemen and buy curios from turbaned vendors. The Midway offered, in stark contrast to industrial man's scientific progress being celebrated that year in Chicago, a view of how other people of the world lived, or at least how late-nineteenth-century America perceived these peoples, in their native garb. In other words, the Midway offered a view of the "lower races in costume." Native and African Americans were represented, but the center of the Midway was devoted to the Islamic world, peopled, as contemporary observer Hubert Howe Bancroft recalled, by "camel drivers and donkeyboys, dancing girls from Cairo and Algiers." One of the feature booths, "The Streets of Cairo," introduced belly dancing to the United States as essentially an Arab pastime. 20 Early twentieth-century writers of adventure romance capitalized on fascination with the Orient and the stereotype of the exotic Arab sheik. Edith M. Hull's The Sheik ( 1921), adapted for the screen by Monte M. Katterjohn and produced by George Melford, is indicative of this genre. The setting was the Saharan desert, but the story differed little in theme from earlier American Indian captivity novels: a white woman is captured and risks being ravished by a dark "primitive" abductor. The plot of the film followed the same conventional lines as the novel. The heroine, Lady Diana Mayo (played by Agnes Ayres), is the orphaned daughter of an English poet. She sets out recklessly on a sightseeing trip in the desert. Melodramatic twists of plot occur, and Sheik Ahmed (Valentino), himself first depicted as the -67- seducer, rescues Diana from a villainous sheik. As with many adventure romances of the period, from Horatio Alger stories to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes, the hero turns out to have aristocratic origins. In The Sheik, Ahmed had been lost in the desert as a child twenty-five years before when his British father and Spanish mother (a device used to account for Ahmed's dark complexion) were killed. The Sheik was not the first sun-and-sand movie, but it defined the genre. The major element of these films was abduction-sexual fantasy, which owed much to Valentino's sex appeal. They were not films about war and individual exploits, and they do not indicate a direct borrowing of the Lawrence of Arabia story. The success of The Sheik, however, led to a sequel, The Son of the Sheik ( 1926), a film set in North Africa rather than in Arabia. It included scenes that began to resemble Lawrence's story as it was known in 1926. By this time, Lowell Thomas's biography of Lawrence had gone through several printings. The Son of the Sheik begins with a curious disclaimer that the film takes place "Not east of Suez but south of Algiers." Since the original film, The Sheik, had also been set in North Africa, this disclaimer seems unwarranted, unless it was made in order to avoid a possible lawsuit or other charge that parts of the plot of The Son of the Sheik were derivative of Lawrence's story. Lawrence had been approached about film rights for his story around this time. 21 In The Son of the Sheik, Valentino plays the dual role of father (English born, desert bred) and son; Agnes Ayres (heroine of the original Sheik film) returns to play the mother. Thus, the son is "untainted" by Arab blood and can marry the European heroine without offending the audience with the suggestion of an interracial union. The new heroine, Yasmin, is played by Vilma Banky, Samuel Goldwyn's Hungarian discovery. In the film, she is portrayed as the daughter of a down-on-his-luck French expatriate who has fallen in with a band of desert outcasts, whose crimes "outnumber the grains of sands in the desert." Yasmin is forced to dance in bazaars and cafes to support the villainous band. Ahmed ( Valentino playing the young sheik) is lured by her beauty, captured, and held by the band for ransom. Like Lawrence, he is tortured but escapes. He blames Yasmin for his ordeal and abducts her in order to get his revenge. The predictable twists of plot follow, including Yasmin's recapture by the band of criminal outcasts, Ahmed's discovery that he has wrongly accused Yasmin, and her rescue. It is remarkable how much Valentino resembles Lawrence in this film. An Italian American, Valentino had a dark complexion and Lawrence, an Anglo-Saxon, was fair-haired. But once in costume, as pictures of Valentino -68- Lawrence, London, autumn 1919. Photograph by Harry Chase. Frontispiece for With Lawrence in Arabia ( Garden City, NY. Garden City Publishing Co., 1924). Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Published by permission of Lowell Thomas, Jr. -69- Rudolph Valentino in Arab garb. Production still from The Sheik and The Son of the Sheik films. Famous Players & Lasky Corporation. Illustration from Jerry Ohlinger Movie Material. -70- and Lawrence side-by-side show, the likeness is striking. Valentino's costume and the pose he strikes resemble closely those in a photograph of Lawrence that Thomas used as the frontispiece for his 1924 biography of Lawrence. In both films, Valentino is ostensibly an Arab until it is discovered that his origin is British. The opening scene of The Sheik is a marriage souk (market) in the Saharan desert; Arab women are being auctioned off as wives. Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan ( Valentino) is depicted as the tribal adjudicator, a role Lawrence often played in real life. Similar costumes, a statement that curiously disclaims the same setting as the Lawrence of Arabia story, and even scenes that resemble parts of it, indicate at best only an indirect influence on the sun-and-sand films. But these films do seem to capitalize on the story, and they undoubtedly contributed to its perpetuation. Before Lawrence, there were few films about Arabs or Arabia; after Thomas made him known to the world, a flood of Arab films appeared. The story thus helped to make Arabs and the desert setting popular, even if Lawrence's exploits were not immediately reproduced in film. Unfortunately, what Lawrence wrote about Arabs and Arab culture was not incorporated into the Hollywood depiction of Arabs in film, and so American public perception of the Arab did not change. Lawrence's writing demystifies the Arab; sun-and-sand films continue to propagate nineteenth-century stereotypes. THE CASES OF COLONELS LAWRENCE AND LINDBERGH Popular interest in Lawrence during the interwar years was also related to the press coverage he received as England's "mystery man." His enigmatic colonel-to-common soldier retreat into the ranks made for good copy in the tabloid press, which did not hesitate to invent or report unsubstantiated stories claiming he was a Soviet spy or cell leader of a revolutionary movement in Afghanistan. Rumor of his supposed secret activities kept speculation about Lawrence alive until well after his death, and made him at times as hot a news item as Charles Lindbergh, another individualist whose flamboyant heroics led to tragedy and self-exile. As individuals, Lawrence and Lindbergh had much in common besides the international celebrity they attained in the interwar years. Near contemporaries, they shared similar interests and kinds of experience. They were loners by nature who were fascinated by machines and speed. Lawrence of Arabia was also Aircraftsman Ross (and later Shaw), a skilled mechanic who helped to develop air-sea rescue boats for the Royal Air Force (RAF). -71- He knew planes well, their uses, potential, and dangers. Although not a pilot, he employed planes in the Arabian campaign and survived a crash after the war. As a close personal friend of Sir Hugh Trenchard, chief of the British Air Staff, Lawrence was, like Lindbergh, a strong proponent of air power. Obvious comparisons also exist between Lawrence and Lindbergh, taking into account the gestalt of the hero. However, their victimization at the hands of the modern press singles these two men out for comparison. In degree, it is perhaps unprecedented. At first, Lawrence and Lindbergh were raised to superhuman stature by a public hungry for heroes and press agents who showered panegyrics on them and created apocryphal analogies. Lowell Thomas made Lawrence a modern-day Achilles, a Lafayette of the Middle East, and the George Washington of Arabia. Lindbergh had his Boswell in Fitzhugh Green, a writer hired to accompany him on a post-flight tour of America and paid $10,000 to chronicle the hero's welcome. Green was also capable of sweeping analogies. Lindbergh was compared to Lafayette and also to the biblical David. His speech when receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross from President Coolidge was likened to Lincoln "Gettysburg Address." According to Green: "Caesar was glum when he came back from Gaul; Napoleon grim; Paul Jones defiant; Peary blunt; Roosevelt abrupt; Dewey deferential; Wilson brooding; Pershing imposing. Lindbergh was none of these. He was a plain citizen dressed in the garments of an ordinary man." 22 Green's intention, by comparing Lindbergh to conquerors and presidents, was to elevate him to the same rank, but in depicting Lindbergh as a common man, superior because of his modesty, he was playing to the democratic values of his American audience. Green failed to mention, however, that as a captain in the Air Reserve--who returned to the United States after his transatlantic flight on an American warship--Lindbergh did not want to arrive "dressed in the garments of an ordinary man." He had first put on a colonel's uniform for the occasion but was talked out of it by a public relations man. "America's Hero," as he was quickly labeled by the press, was put on a pedestal and literally tailored for the part. He had become public property so valuable, John William Ward noted in "The Meaning of Lindbergh's Flight," that he was not allowed to continue his plan of flying around the world but immediately brought home in the securest manner possible, on a warship. 23 In classical times, hero worship was the worship of the renowned dead. Whereas dead heroes are shielded from the public by the grave, modern heroes become the foci of the public. As such, their every move or word is scrutinized instantaneously by the mass media. Their faults are quickly -72-
Living with celebrity status was not easy for either Lawrence or Lindbergh. The American flyer, biographer Leonard Mosley writes, could not send his shirts to the laundry because they would be stolen as souvenirs. On his honeymoon, a boat trip from Long Island to Maine, reporters continually circled the Lindberghs' boat, finally driving Lindbergh and his wife, who became seasick as a consequence, out to sea, dragging their anchor behind them. Lawrence, whose various attempts to sidestep the press were also thwarted, was pursued by the sensationalist press all the way to the Afghan border where he was posted in 1928. False rumors generated by newsmen that he was a spy forced his official recall to Britain. Even in his brief retirement, he had to hide from reporters. They threw stones onto his cottage roof to force the famous Englishman outside in order to photograph him for the tabloids. 24 Few Americans have suffered as much from the press as Charles Lindbergh. The kidnapping and murder of his son and the cheap sensationalism of the Bruno Hauptmann trial are notorious incidents in American history. When the story broke on 1 March 1932, hundreds of newspaper reporters converged on the Lindbergh estate. During the ensuing investigation, newspaper circulation increased by as much as 15 percent in major U.S. cities. Yet, as Silas Bent pointed out in an article for Outlook in April 1932, the 2,000 reported abductions in the United States during the previous two years had hardly drawn notice. What made the event the biggest human interest story of the 1930s was the Lindbergh name. Bent's story-behindthe-story describes a kind of circular hysteria that gripped reporters and their readers when "America's Hero" was involved. 25 Press coverage, much of it invasive, made life in the United States intolerable for the Lindberghs. As a consequence, they fled to Europe in 1935. Under the front-page banner "America Shocked by Exile Forced on Lindberghs," New York Times reporter, Lauren D. Lyman, echoed other journalists in describing the move as "a national disgrace" due partly to "inexcusable meddling in the Lindbergh's private life" by the yellow press. By this time, however, the rift between Lindbergh and reporters was so wide that the flyer would never again trust them. Much of the rest of his life was colored by a constant battle with newspeople and a paranoia about publicity. 26 -73- caught out and not easily forgotten or forgiven. Their personal possessions become souvenirs and collectors' items during their lifetimes. Thus, when Lawrence entered Damascus at the head of the Arab army, or Lindbergh landed in Paris, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, they became objects of mass adulation. Living with celebrity status was not easy for either Lawrence or Lindbergh. The American flyer, biographer Leonard Mosley writes, could not send his shirts to the laundry because they would be stolen as souvenirs. On his honeymoon, a boat trip from Long Island to Maine, reporters continually circled the Lindberghs' boat, finally driving Lindbergh and his wife, who became seasick as a consequence, out to sea, dragging their anchor behind them. Lawrence, whose various attempts to sidestep the press were also thwarted, was pursued by the sensationalist press all the way to the Afghan border where he was posted in 1928. False rumors generated by newsmen that he was a spy forced his official recall to Britain. Even in his brief retirement, he had to hide from reporters. They threw stones onto his cottage roof to force the famous Englishman outside in order to photograph him for the tabloids. 24 Few Americans have suffered as much from the press as Charles Lindbergh. The kidnapping and murder of his son and the cheap sensationalism of the Bruno Hauptmann trial are notorious incidents in American history. When the story broke on 1 March 1932, hundreds of newspaper reporters converged on the Lindbergh estate. During the ensuing investigation, newspaper circulation increased by as much as 15 percent in major U.S. cities. Yet, as Silas Bent pointed out in an article for Outlook in April 1932, the 2,000 reported abductions in the United States during the previous two years had hardly drawn notice. What made the event the biggest human interest story of the 1930s was the Lindbergh name. Bent's story-behindthe-story describes a kind of circular hysteria that gripped reporters and their readers when "America's Hero" was involved. 25 |