Hollywood and Ince

[Black Irish]

HOLLYWOOD

In 1913, William Randolph Hearst, in addition to his newspaper empire, had made a fortune on a photoplay serial called 'The Perils of Pauline'. It was a huge success even in primitive countries, where it was shown only to illiterate Chinese and Hindus, proving that moving pictures were truly an international language. Unfortunately, the next year saw all of Europe plunged into war, eliminating a large overseas market for film distributors. But it continued it's rapid development regardless.

Edison's attempts to create a monopoly on the film industry through equipment patents were thwarted by filmmakers, who simply moved away from Edison's home base of New York City and settled as far away as possible in southern California. Here they found every kind of terrain necessary for outdoor adventures which the public loved. The town of Hollywood did not really have ideal weather, but it was close to the Mexican border, so filmmakers who were using patented equipment illegally could easily escape if Edison's goon squads showed up. Many of the leading film distributors at this time were Jewish immigrants, like Adolph Zukor, who had made money in furs, bought up all the nickelodeons in New York, moved west to Hollywood, and then, after D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation in 1915, discovered that the public would watch movies the length of plays. Before long, literary and theatre critics were beginning to bemoan the death of those institutuons, due to photoplays; and Hollywood's original residents, mostly retired midwestern farmers, were now astonished to find their little town being overrun by beauty, vice, Jews, and detectives from the east.

Birth of a Nation had changed everything about the film industry, which was why Griffith was so revered. Even President Woodrow Wilson had praised the film, calling it 'history written with lightning'. But 'Birth' had some terribly negative consequences as well. Not only was the film brutally racist against blacks, but it did more to revive the Ku Klux Klan then anything in years. But then, even the president himself seems to have had a subtly racist streak. While president of Princeton University, Wilson discouraged blacks from applying, and as president, did not want blacks in civil service jobs. Wilson was the first Virginian president since the Civil War, and so with him, the South had returned to it's home.

Wilson had won the election of 1912 because of the rift in the Republican Party between Taft and Teddy Roosevelt over conservationist policies. Wilson had won reelection in 1916 by promising to keep the U.S. out of the war in Europe; but was now sending aid to England. He greatly admired England's parliamentary system, and behaved more like a prime minister then a president. This has endeared him to New England conservatives despite being a southerner. His power has come from his ability to maintain the fragile bond between the two factions of the Democratic Party: the disreputable, minority eastern wing, made up of Tammany Hall, Hearst and himself; and the southern and western wings, led by William Jennings Bryan, who hated war, England, and by and large, Wilson. But pressure was now beginning to mount on Wilson to declare war on Germany, as U.S. financial aid to England has provoked German submarine attacks on U.S. cargo ships. The Jennings faction of the party - growing obsolete, but still the majority - was prepared to support Wilson should he declare war. The novel opens in 1917 as another political bombshell makes the U.S.'s entry into the war seem even more inevitable.

Hearst has obtained a copy of the so-called 'Zimmerman letter', a document which confirms that the German foreign ambassador advocates submarine warfare against any U.S. aid to England or France. Some think England has concocted the letter in desperation, as they are losing to the central powers, led by Germany. The letter also says that Mexico should by armed as a German ally to distract the U.S., and that Japan should possibly be armed as well. Hearst has frequently made much of the 'yellow peril' from Japan, but thinks the letter is a fake, concocted either in England, or by U.S. officials eager for the U.S. to enter the war. He still has huge support from German and Irish Americans, and like many others, thinks the U.S. should stay neutral, let Germany crush England and take over Europe, then form an alliance with Germany to counter Japan's growing power with all-white power. Hearst also still dreams of running for president, and thinks that whoever wins in 1920 will have great power.

This is all in addition to his growing interest in the movie industry. He wants to set up a photoplay company in New York, his base. But although most newsreel companies are still located in New York, almost all photoplays are now being filmed in Hollywood, which Hearst knows is the place to be.

Pro-war sentiment exists mainly in the east. The midwest is against it; and Wilson, the most scholarly and uxorious of recent presidents, is against it as well. He has simply wanted to sever ties with Germany in the hope that they will allow the U.S. to stay neutral but helpful to England and France. Then the U.S. can be mediators at the war's end. He cannot believe that Germany is now being so stupid as to force his hand into war. As a child, Wilson had seen the brutality of the reconstruction after the Civil War, and is afraid that war will mainly benefit the trusts, the cartels, and Wall st. speculators that democrats have fought so long to control. They will have unlimited power again, like in the age of Grant. And if the war is long and the U.S. weakened, there is the yellow peril, ready to overwhelm with sheer numbers.

In addition to this, there is still plenty of pro-German sentiment in the U.S.. General Pershing is of German nationality and rumored to be sympathetic to the German cause. And Mrs. Wilson, who has much influence over the president, is rumored to have had a German lover before she became Wilson's second wife. She is even decoding many of the secret messages from Col. House, the president's eyes and ears in Europe. Ohio senator Warren G. Harding's German mistress, Carrie Phillips, has threatened to expose him if he votes for war against her native land. This leaves Harding having to placate both his German and anti-German constituents. Hearst still thinks that the German and Irish mob will carry him to the presidency in 1920, and so supports U.S. neutrality through his papers. But all other papers want war and are now vilifying the murderous 'huns' as baby killers, etc. The press still controls, and easily manipulates, public opinion.

Theodore Roosevelt, who also wants to run again in 1920, is also hollering for war against Germany. His self-love is still contagious to many, but not to Wilson who thinks him like a child of six. TR's energy has been inherited by both his daughter Alice and his niece Eleanor who he has brought up with great influence. Some gossipers question whether Eleanor really likes her new husband, the assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, who is a second cousin to both Eleanor and Theodore; and who has, like most of the men in the Roosevelt family, copied many of his cousin's mannerisms, also his enthusiasm for war.

A smart president like Wilson, once committed to war, takes advangage of the fact that in the U.S. a war-time president has extraordinary powers. During his speech declaring war on Germany, Wilson, amidst all the 'rebel' yells, makes the famous statement that the 'world must be made safe for democracy', using the word as a glittering generality, a term of deceit. What is democracy, anyway? Is Tammany Hall part of democracy? Most of the 'democratic' congressmen are millionaires.

Also, in the same speech, Wilson makes an allusion to Germany's submarine warfare, which he refers to as 'a war against commerce'. The perplexing problem of the German subs has recently led Wilson to consult his trusty Ouija board, which told him to use mines to sink them. Now he has become like a warlock - part Martin Luthor, part Milton's Lucifer - casting a spell on the nation, turning them into a prehistoric tribe eager to shed and spend blood for the sake of wealth and power. By entering the war, The U.S. is fatally violating it's own Monroe Doctrine, not for the sake of democracy - practiced only nominally in the U.S. anyway - but for the sake of enriching itself.

After the Civil War, bankers and railroad men, moneylending Jews and Catholics, had destroyed the last vestiges of power in the old south by using freed slaves to help them foreclose on southern land. The disposessed confederates turned to politics, their only weapon besides the terrorism of the KKK. Populism, the party of the people, began to flourish all over the south. James Burden Day, a democratic senator of the Jennings faction, was brought up to help in this fight against the yanks.

One of the fruits that has come out of the populist cause is that senators, formerly selected by the moneyed class, are now popularly elected. Not surprisingly, this has led to a rift between old senators and new ones, and a great new age of filibuster has dawned, with young senators able to get favors just by threathening one. Burden is one of this new brand of senator, while Franklin Roosevelt yearns to be one of the old, money-elected kind. In Washington though, regardless of how he attained his seat, a senator has no power without a committee, and although Burden's is normally agricultural, he occasionally has to depend on the banking commitee, a twin of the Ways and Means commitee, which is the fount of all expenditure, and so, of government patronage.

Even though Wilson's hold over it is fragile, democrats have a majority in the Senate, so the war vote goes through. One of Wilson's first acts under his new war powers is to use ghoulish 'anti-hun' rhetoric to secure what are called 'liberty loans' to help bail out the British pound, which is about to become worthless and go off the gold standard. The stupid and wasteful war has bankrupted England, making the U.S. the world's richest nation, and these loans are likely to ensure that England will always be a debtor nation to the U.S..

Next, while still in the first flush of war fever, Wilson introduces the Espionage Act, which effectively suspends freedom of speech in matters of national security, thereby nullifying the 1st amendment and muzzling the press. Hearst's papers, which are anti-England, anti-France, anti-Japan, and anti-Mexico, but pro-Germany, are shut down everywhere except New York, where he and Tammany still have some power. This leaves Wilson and his pro-war lobbyists with an almost complete monopoly on the press and public opinion. In order to make the world safe for democracy they have destroyed most of what little democratic freedom there is at home.

Wilson then plots to take control of vital necessities like water, electricity, transport, etc., like most countries. He thinks he should take a page from the socialists before they take the whole country. He also wants to control the prices on food and hires a successful mining engineer named Herbert Hoover as his department head. After having seized the food industry, the railroads, and the coal industry, due to alleged 'shortages' (Coal minor strikes always seemed to coincide with blizzards), Wilson next sets his eye on the motion picture industry. His chairmen of the commitee for public information, George Creel, begins trying to persuade Hollywood producers to make propoganda films for the war effort. The audience for movies is fast becoming the largest audience for anything in the world, and the full power of their influence is made apparent when Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford raise a million dollars of bond money for Engand's liberty loans in less then an hour. Creel feels that if the government can influence what Hollywood produces, it can control not just national, but world opinion. Hollywood is the key to just about everything. So, the Espionage Act is used to put pressure on producers and distributors - now, anyone making fims that do not meet with government approval can be thrown into jail.

With Hollywood's help, it is amazing how easily the government manipulates public opinion against Germany. The American people have great inner vitality, but are ignorant about much of history and the real world. This combination makes them ideal subjects for propaganda and idealistic rhetoric. Americans have a curious capacity for absolute belief in the absolutely untrue. Thus, public opinion can be made to swing back and forth like a pendulum, manipulated by the press and the media. When it stops swinging and can be manipulated no more, the president, like a barometer, takes it's temperature and then acts accordingly.

Anti-German propoganda emphasizes the fact that the Germans were the last Europeans to be christianized and have always resented it. With the slow decline of the Holy Roman Empire over the last 400 years they have been gradually returning to their heathen ways, and all their wars have been, in some way or another, wars against Christianity. Within a short time, German-Americans are being forced to cover up all signs of their German heritage, and the government begins looking for suspected German spies, including Harding's mistress, Carrie Phillips. One of the most amazing feats of anti-German propoganda is the way it has converted New York's Jewish bankers and their press, almost all of whom had been supporting the Kaiser. Wilson has persuaded them to betray their beloved country by appointing several Jews to high-ranking posts in government. 'He that makes friends with Isreal sleeps well at night', quotes Wilson. When the British take Jerusalem from the Turks, Mr. Balfour writes a note giving it back to the Jews, undoing all the work of zealous Palestinian Christians over the centuries.

Before being turned by Wilson, Jewish bankers in the U.S. had helped Germany by using their financial influence to help bring down the most anti-semitic and autocratic regime in the world - that of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. Russia is now out of the war, the government having been seized by Bolshivik extremists. Just as some say that the war in Europe is comparable in many ways to the American Civil War (with Germany in the role of the South), they also compare the Russian revolution to the American revolution. In any event, with Russia out, Germany can devote all of it's strength to the western front, making it much more difficult for the U.S. to aid France. Furthermore, Wilson begins to suspect that, by helping to finance the bringing down of the Czar (in order to weaken and decentralize Russia), the U.S. has merely exchanged one tyrant for another, and he is afraid that the Bolshevik leader Trotsky will stir up labor agitation in the U.S..

The support for socialism is still potent in the U.S., and even the great historian Henry Adams considers republicanism to be merely an intermediate stage between monarchy and socialism. But Wilson is anti-socialist and closely allied with the eastern business ruling class with it's foreign entanglements. Trotsky even suggests that the U.S. has joined the war to protect J.P. Morgan's loans to the allies. Wilson is definitely not an isolationist or a populist. He and the U.S. are being drawn into the net of England's imperial propaganda, and Wilson is potentially the U.S.'s first dictator, solving all domestic problems by government seizure, and using his 'peace without victory' plan to set himself up as the chief of a world concert of nations. Some even joke that Wilson's fourteen points, including the League of Nations, are four more then God's.

Titled white Russians, having been kicked out of their own country after the Bolshevik revolution, are all over Hollywood, trying to break into the movies. By this time there are nearly 30-40 movie studios in Hollywood, with the most pleasant of them being Inceville, the creation of pacifist western filmmaker Thomas Ince. So thinks Caroline Sanford, a Washington newspaper publisher who is one of those sent by Creel to Hollywood for the propoganda effort. Ince had been in a partnership with fellow filmmakers Griffith and Mack Sennet. But Griffith had lost a fortune on a mammoth production called Intolerance, so Ince and Sennet were bought by another studio, Lassky's Famous players (which would eventually become Paramount). Ince then became successful enough to form his own studio, although his 1916 pacifist film Civilization was something the government wanted to prevent from happening again. The stars were also forming partnerships as well. Pickford, Chaplin and Fairbanks joined Griffith to form United Artists so that Zukor and Ince would not make all the money. This prompted Zukor to make his famous statement, 'Now the inmates are running the asylum'.

Ince has also worked with Hearst, a fellow isolationist. Hearst has moved to California and is now building an enormous castle in the hills for himself and his mistress, Marion Davies. Hearst thinks Griffith a fool for his artistic pretensions, and yet he himself will later lose a fortune in his unsuccessful attempt to promote Davies as a movie star. Caroline makes a few amatuer movies for Hearst, who likes her as she is a fellow publisher. She finds film astonishing as one can now capture the ephemeral past, see someone as they were 'then'. The Hollywood scene at this time is an amusingly slapdash environment where many actors mouth dirty jokes for the camera when they run out of dialogue. But, as many in the audience are now learning to lip read, this is usually no longer allowed. Caroline's small parts allow her to land a leading role in a propoganda film called 'Huns from Hell' where the emphasis on the German's anti-Christian bias shows them using churches for offices and violating women at any chance they can get. Despite all the atrocities, the allies emerge victorious in battle at the film's end. Having worked in newpapers like Hearst, Caroline realizes that 'propoganda' is an inadaquate term to describe the potential power of motion pictures. At a time when the allies are losing the war, photoplays can actually create the illusion that they are winning. It is conceivable that they could even lose the war and yet convince Americans that they had won.

As a deadly flu virus sweeps the nation and the world, repression under the Espionage Act tightens. Eugene V. Debs, a socialist who had actually received two million votes on the 1912 presidential election as the socialist candidate, is sentenced to ten years in prison simply for speaking his views. Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes has ruled that the 1st amendment is valid unless there is a 'clear and present danger'. Caroline has had a cartesian education which makes her wary of all illogical propositions. Either one has freedom of speech or one does not. The term 'clear and present danger' is a clear and present danger to freedom itself. Furthermore, as blacks and women have no vote and little in the way of rights, it is hypocritical of the U.S. to think it should be spreading 'democracy' to the rest of the world when it does not even exist in America. But of course, the contradictions of the U.S. are, in some mystical way, it's strength.

After America enters the war, Germany fights on for awhile but eventually sues for peace. The U.S. begins pressing it's allies to accept Wilson's fourteen points as a condition for peace. The allied press in England and France is trying to downplay or even ignore the U.S.'s effort in ending the war. But, of course, a few propaganda films marketed overseas can amend that easily enough. Colonel House is going to Paris for the peace conference with a team of young Jewish and socialist scholars to compromise between Wilson's generous 'peace without victory' offer to Germany and all the secret treaties the allies have made for dividing up Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire. These have been published recently by the Bolsheviks, to Wilson's embarrassment.

To Wilson, making the world safe for democracy is essentially a protestant mission. He wants to free the world from tyranny the way Jefferson had freed the original thirteen colonies from the tyranny of England. He has also decided to go to the peace conference himself - a mistake, say his advisors who think the simple christian will be eaten alive by political streetfighters like Lloyd-George and Clamenceau, who think England should rule the seas and France the continent. Italy, which had been promised parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire in exchange for supporting the allies, is now mad that it won't get them. Clemenceau, the French premiere, has agreed to support Wilson's league of nations only in exchange for ruinous reparations to be paid by Germany to the allies. That a bankrupt Germany might turn Bolshevik does not concern him, as long as France and other nations around Europe have a buffer state torn from Germany as protection. Clemenceau not only wants no more German empire, but wants the Bolsheviks thrown out as well, so the allies can carve up Russia for themselves. The U.S. and Japan both have their eyes on Siberia. The young British commander Winston Churchill is also eager to take out the Bolsheviks, even though a full-scale war with Russia could turn all the English people communist.

These troubles with the allies are exacerbated when Wilson's power at home is seriously undermined. His appeal to the people for a democratic congress, lest Europe think he has been repudiated, is a disastrous move that gives Teddy Roosevelt and the republicans ammunition to convince German and Irish workers that Wilson wants to be a world dictator, and that the Republican Party will rescue the nation from the tyrant and his decadent allies in old Europe. Thus, republicans win the congressional election of 1918, when southern Bryanish democrats are voted out by women who have just been given the right to vote. Wilson is rumored to be secretly pleased, not realizing how much he needs them, how much this opposition within his own party is the party's true core.

Franklin Roosevelt, an ardent supporter of Wilson, thinks he has had his coattails ridden by all the democrats who are either supported by big city bosses and their obediant German-Irish immigrant masses, or are Bryan populists like Burden-Day. In many ways, though, Wilson is almost more like a republican, whose party, run by big business merchants and bankers, is more international, always looking outside America for trade and profit. The league of nations was really the idea of republicans like Taft, Root, and the recently deceased Teddy Roosevelt, who couldn't stand to see a democrat get the credit, especially TR.

Europe's allies have their way at the Treaty of Versailles, breaking Wilson's armistice terms, and now mean to bankrupt Germany with war reparations; a carthaginian peace that will certainly lead to another war. Europe's 'king of the hill' propensity has led it into murderous barbarism, with Germany, Russia, France, and England each having lost over a million men. An entire generation is gone from Europe. In contrast, the U.S. has lost only 50,000 men and the war has effectively made it the leader of the world, even though many American homes are so backwards that they still have outhouses. The war has been fraudulent. Crude, unremitting propoganda has fooled

Americans into believing that they care about who rules Europe and that they are destined to be preeminent in the world. But there is a huge discrepency between America's shining image of itself and the grim reality. America is still an ignorant, superstitious peasant nation, too proud of it's easy climb to preeminence. Unlike Europe, the U.S. has not yet acheived a civilization from which to fall.

As for democracy, another financial crisis has deepened the people's resentment against the ruling class, but there is no way the people will ever by organized enough to unseat the gilded rulers and have a truly representational government. The gilded, mysterious 'they' still own just about everything, including all the senators. The very idea that the people control the country or the government is fiction. The constitution has largely excluded them, and the extension of the right to vote has coincided with the rising power of demagogues and the press to manipulate the people's emotions so easily that any meaningful participation in government is severely limited and controlled. That's all there is to politics in the great democracy.

Thanks to the Sedition Act, anyone that even looks wrong can be arrested or deported. Freedom of speech is something Americans can have only as long as it conforms to majority opinion. In fact, the only real freedom that an American has is to conform, and in 1918, that means being intensely anti-red. Anti-communist paranoia has created xenophobic fears that Americans are losing their country to foreigners, suspicions that the New York Times has supported England in exchange for a communist homeland in Palestine, that Senator LaFollete of Wisonsin is getting orders from Moscow to incite labor strikes in the U.S.. It is now considered communist to be against any form of management whatsoever.

There are also suspicions that Trotsky has been ordering Jews in Hollywood to make communist propaganda. This has led to a backlash from the government. George Creel begins pressuring Hollywood to replace the Huns with Bolsheviks as America's chief villian, and producer Timothy X. Farrell is derided as a communist. All this hysteria obscures the fact that the business climate in Hollywood is actually becoming increasingly monopolistic. America has become addicted to the movies, and it is almost impossible to lose money on one, unless someone like Griffith tries to create mindless spectacle for the sake of art. But the great wealth is not so much in making movies as in distributing them. Adolph Zukor is not only ruthlessly absorbing other movie companies, but through Paramount, a distribution company for Famous Players, he is buying alot of theatres as well. Soon, Famous-Players Lasky owns so many theatres that they can show only their own films if they want, a practice known as blockbooking.

Wilson's nemesis in the senate is Henry Cabot-Lodge, a bearded, conservative throwback to the age of Grant. Lodge does not want the U.S. embroiled in too many treaties with little countries, which was what brought on the war for the European powers in the first place. Suspicious of Wilson, he prefers an eastern and western league of nations. He also wants to protect U.S. corporate investments overseas, and so riddles Wilson's league plan with amendments. This ruination of his brainchild takes a toll on Wilson, already in declining health, according to observers. Rumors are that he has suffered a stroke while in Europe. Shortly after an arduous tour of the country to promote his original league plan, Wilson falls gravely ill, and there are again rumors of a stroke. For nearly six months the White House is literally padlocked in secrecy, but the first American regency continues as long as Mrs. Wilson and her helpers tell the public that the president is OK. However, there are still bills to sign or veto, including prohibition of alchohol - partly a leftover result of anti-German hysteria - as Germans drank and sold a lot of beer - and partly a plot to weaken democratic political machines by eliminating the 'tavern' politician.

But the most critical decision to be made is on the League of Nations vote. Populist senator James Burden Day, while visiting the now near-invalid Wilson, hears of his plan to have democratic senators nullify the League treaty because of Lodge's amendments, and thinks that it is the kind of petty partisan bickering that is likely to put the republicans in the White House in 1920. Burden thinks that any treaty, no matter how corrupted by amendments, is better then no treaty at all, and most of the European nations would agree. But Wilson, ever the pedagogue, has to have it all his way or no way. Teddy Roosevelt's daughter, Alice Longworth, the spiritual leader of the republican troops, begins to see the possibility of a reconstruction-style foreclosure on the mortgage of Wilson's southern presidency; and dreams of mounting Wilson's head as part of her father's collection...right next to the bull moose.

In Hollywood at this time, stars frequently invent exotic backgrounds for themselves to entrance the public. Some photoplay stars, like Francis X. Bushman, have to pretend to be single, as married people are not popular with the public. Also, Hollywood is filled with white Russian royalty, mixed with people pretending to be white Russian royalty. Often, the con-men are more convincing then the originals. The spirit of Hearst now informs the Hollywood studios, and Hearst himself is trying to get ahold of an L.A. paper. But Hollywood can do Hearst one better. Where Hearst can only define what news is supposed to be for the people, Hollywood can define what people are supposed to be for the people. Hollywood picks up where Hearst leaves off.

Despite it's ritzy nightclubs, Hollywood is still in many ways a primitive looking settlement, with massive ruins of old sets everywhere. The whole Hollywood atmosphere is like some kind of fake, exotic jungle, although it is starting to become a real one too, as the town fills up with criminals. Many of these are becoming involved in the booming drug trade which has become the easiest way to make a fortune in California, replacing the gold which has been pretty well panned out by now. Hollywood is rapidly becoming a surreal world of it's own, a place filled with sex, drugs, and money, where, as in some kind of opium dream, it is easy to lose touch with the real world.

Meanwhile, in the real world, labor strikes are being broken up by progressive republicans using federal troops, anti-communist crusaders are shutting down publications, firing teachers, and jailing labor organizers. The country seems to be going mad with lurid dreams of absolute conformity to some rustic ideal out of the Old South. The self-made peasant of the Jacksonian myth is being glorified by American nationalists who want the U.S. to have no part of the old world across the ocean. Civilized old Europe has decayed into war, revolution, and Bolshevism, say these isolationists. But what are they really afraid of?

At the League of Nations vote, both Wilson's original and Lodge's amended versions are voted down, and the U.S. begins it's ultimately disastrous policy of isolationism. One man that gets alot of attention at the league vote is Warren G. Harding, who makes the speech in favor of Lodge's version. With Wilson out, the 1920 election is up for grabs and Harding is one of those hopefuls. His supporters feel that, after the imperial Wilson, the country will be in the mood for a quieter president like Harding, so that money can be made again by businessmen. He has many competitors, but none are without flaws. For example, his main competition in the midwest is Governor Lowden of Illinois, but Lowden is married to Pullman's daughter, so he may be too stained with railroad money. Harding has serious flaws himself, chief among them being his relentless womanizing. In addition to Carrie Phillips, who is now trying to blackmail Harding, there is a young woman named Nan Britton, who not only has had a lifelong infatuation with Harding, but has recently given birth to their illigitimate daughter; a fact that Harding's henchmen, Daugherty and Jess Smith, must go to great lengths to keep secret.

The republican convention winds up deadlocked among several different candidates, so the selection must be done in one of the notorious 'smoke-filled rooms', led in this case by Lodge, and hosted by the Postmaster General Will Hays. In addition to the smoke, most of them drink liquor that they have just voted to prohibit the public from having. Prohibition was designed to cut down on the kind of corruption the republicans are now practicing. It has also made the U.S. the laughingstock of Europe. At any rate, Harding's strategy of being everyone's second choice pays off brilliantly. He has few delegates himself, but he is the least hated of the candidates, so when the leaders cancel each other out, Harding gets the nod almost by default. He gets selected over such candidates as the governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, who was popular for putting down a police strike in Boston. The true people's choice would probably have been Herbert Hoover - but of course, what the people wanted was irrelevant. Coolidge becomes Harding's running mate. Their democratic challengers, Cox and his running mate Franklin Roosevelt, don't get much support, even from Wilson; and Harding is elected president in '20 by a 2 to 1 margin.

With Harding president, and both House and Senate securely republican, the age of Wilson now seems as remote as the age of Cleveland. Harding finds the presidency comparable to the Borgias or the Louises of France. He still has to beware of Hearst's papers, so is careful about what he says. He finds it frustrating that a president has to spend all his time making deals to get reelected. One of Harding's first major speeches as president comes at the dedication of the tomb of the unknown soldier, a ceremony that Burden-Day sees as hypocritical. He sees it as a chance for the world's leaders to show their respective peoples that they honor the anonymous multitudes that they spent years sacrificing for nothing, except so that national boundaries could be redrawn by shady men of state for the sake of profit. The dedication has been carefully calculated to demonstrate that never again will there by such a slaughter. But Burden-Day knows that all it takes is a generation or so to forget war's horrors and hunger again for war's thrills and profits. The white caucasion tribe needs little encouragement either, overly endowed as they are with racial pride.

Senator Borah is now the top republican, having broken Lodge for supporting a league without Wilson - against the electorate's wishes. Borah is leery of Harding's plan to have all nations drastically cut down their militaries, and warns Harding not to let this international disarmament turn into another league of nations. That would be struck down by red tag conservatives thinking the U.S. should stay out European affairs. Harding's disarmament plan is also angering many military war lords who want to prepare for an inevitable showdown with Japan. Oil reserve lands in Wyoming and California that had been set aside for the navy by Wilson are now being auctioned off to the highest bidder since there is no more war. But Secretary of the Interior Fall is having his graft cut into by T.R. conservationists who want the lands kept for the federal government and the military.

With or without his knowledge, Harding's administration has become as riggled with corruption as Grant's was. Harding seems to be just a puppet of his attornet general Daugherty, who seems to be the real string puller of the administration. As the nation's chief enforcer of the law, he is jealous of veteran's bureau chief Charlie Forbes because Forbes is getting big graft from all the new veteran's hospitals being built. Jess Smith, Daugherty's assistant, is closer to the graft action and is making money hand over fist from letting bootleggers burrow from the treasury.

This contempt for morality has it's counterpart on the other side of the country too. The Fatty Arbuckle scandal, which arises when the heavy set comedian accidently kills a woman during a wild sex and drugs party, finally brings America's puritan wrath down on Hollywood. Hearst's papers and all other papers across the country begin having a field day printing story after story about immorality and drug addiction in this new Babylon. In desperation, Zukor suggests that someone from the government be brought in to police Hollywood, like Will Hays. Because of the Arbuckle scandal, Hollywood films begin being boycotted in the Bible belt, the people there being spurred on by Hearst to bestial hatred, which is his specialty. Then, after director William Desmond Taylor is shot to death, great efforts are made to cover up and obscure his private life; for if his sexual preference for young boys is discovered, it will be a second blow that Hollywood might not recover from.

In Washington, the Teapot Oil Dome scandal begins to blow the lid off Harding's corrupt administration. Cramer, Jess Smith, and Harding are all dead within a short time, while Daugherty goes to prison. The public, largely unaware of the scandals, mourns the death of a popular president. As Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge - an expressionless man of few words - begins to clean up Washington, Will Hays begins doing the same for Hollywood. Under Hays, the new Hollywood will begin making films that appeal to people's sense of justice, and warn them against sin and vice. In short, Hollywood will make the kind of films that glorify ordinary virtues for ordinary people.

[Black Irish]

ordinary people.[/size]

[Black Irish]

http://www.libertaddigital.com/chic/cor ... 276595495/
The action takes place in Hollywood and his argument was based Orson Welles on an old glory of silent film, the Irish Rex Ingram, discoverer of the mythical Rodolfo Valentino, whom he wanted to unmask as responsible for a lot of horror films.