"The house I live in"--the Ena Thompson lecture

Before we get a lot of responses to “The Women Outside,” I wanted to write a little bit about the Ena Thompson lecture from last Wednesday night. The featured speaker was David Roediger, a historian from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. His academic work is primarily a study of the development of whiteness in the US, and he has also worked as a community activist for anti-racist causes. His lecture last week centered on “The House I Live In,” a short film that won a special Oscar for its patriotism back during World War II.

In the film, Frank Sinatra takes a break from recording in a studio, only to stumble across a group of boys chasing after a dark-haired kid who they accuse of not being of the same religion as the rest of them. Sinatra intervenes, invoking the idea of a shared American community to demonstrate to the boys that ostracizing a neighbor over this type of difference is more in line with America’s fascist foes than real patriots. Offering an example from wartime and singing the titular song to them, Sinatra changes their minds, and the persecuted boy is accepted by the group. At the time of its release, the film was seen as anti-racist (even though every single person in it is white) and groundbreaking. Roediger contextualizes this characterization through his work on race in America during the first half of the twentieth century: as immigration patterns shifted to favor Eastern and Southern Europe around the close of the nineteenth century, these new immigrant groups suffered discrimination and bias that was transmitted through the framework of race. As such, the little boy being attacked is supposed to be Jewish, his accusers Catholics from Ireland, Italy, and other ‘non-white’ areas of Europe. Sinatra, himself an Italian Catholic (representing an assimilated success), is thus a credible moderator. Essentially, the anti-racism that the movie espouses is particular to its era, and while relevant to a type of ‘racism’ practiced then, it nevertheless ignores racism against groups that are still targeted today.

Sinatra’s song “The House That I Live In” highlights this discrepancy. Its lyrics operate by metaphorically considering the neighborhood as a representation of America. However, there was a possessive investment in whiteness taking place at the time. Through the mechanisms of the New Deal, restrictive housing covenants, the GI Bill, and other legal and social means, the neighborhood in which most whites lived during and after the war was informally segregated, even as these institutional directives made it easier for new immigrants to buy homes. When Sinatra preaches tolerance towards everyone he meets on his way to work, the butcher he buys his steak from, he may be referring to members of new immigrant groups, but he’s still only talking about white people. Although to an extent anti-racist, the film’s message normalized other kinds of discrimination against other groups of people.

The film also carries disturbing implications about the construction and performance of masculinity. Sinatra’s argument about race is preceded by a taunt at a gang of boys willing to attack a lone victim, smaller and younger than they, and he uses the threat of violence to force the boys to listen to him. His prescription for how to act patriotic is also rooted in violence—Sinatra’s example of interracial cooperation is when a Protestant pilot and Jewish bombardier team up to avenge the (emasculating) attack on Pearl Harbor by bombing a Japanese battleship. It is in this example that the film proclaims its affirmation of other kinds of racism: not only are “the Japs” a monolithic and incomprehensibly foreign foe, conflated with Japanese American citizens, but the retargeting of racial violence from assimilating new immigrants onto people of color is legitimized as a means of staying masculine. Sinatra, despite being a tenor (an unmanly vocal range) who is singing Stateside while most men his age (probably his 20s around this time) are overseas killing fascists, is able to reach the gang of boys principally (maybe even solely) through the employment of violence—first in the threat against them if they don’t listen, then in the way in which Americans can show their solidarity despite their differences by directing violence outward. While the special Oscar the movie receives for its patriotism does not arise from anything that would today be called “idealism,” its messages about acceptable targets of discrimination and violence is nothing if not American.