The Eisenhower Blues: Returning GIs and Racial Masquerade in Post-War American Film and Fiction

Abstract

This article considers cross-racial encounters as well as racial mimicry and masquerade in works from the 1940s and 1950s, arguing that thrillers and other works of popular culture prove fertile ground for tracking the intersections of race and masculinity. Popular cultural texts of the period present a surprisingly uniform and articulate resistance to the consolidation of consensus culture. Pulp and paperback fiction reflect a crisis of assimilation on the part of returning white soldiers, depicting their predicament in the rhetoric of alienation and existential despair. Male protagonists resist their socially designated roles as responsible, married, breadwinning members of the managerial and professional classes. In novels by writers ranging from Nelson Algren to Richard Yates, prosperity is depicted as variously undesirable, unachievable, or too loathsome a burden to bear. Movies by directors such as Jules Dassin and John Huston lament the sacrifices men are seemingly compelled to make to enter into middle-class respectability. In these works, African American characters figure as “authentic bearers of alienation.” Consequently, the hard-boiled and noir melodramas of male “self-reliance” typically featured white protagonists navigating highly “racialized” and/or ethnic social spaces as they measured existential alienation against the economic disfranchisement. Often, as in Charles Willeford’s fiction, such texts adopt a form of literary blackface to articulate discontent with the emerging post-war social order.