On Sunday night, someone posted screenshots of offensive comments that John Wayne made in a 1971 Playboy interview. People who had previously been going about their lives not caring about retrogressive ideas expressed decades ago were suddenly outraged, and the material was shared and liked more than 20,000 times.
Liberals and conservatives all reacted predictably. Some on the Left called Wayne racist, the “worst human,” and “rotten.” On the Right, people excused Wayne as simply reflecting the prejudices of his time.
Some of Wayne’s comments were typical of mid-20th-century, anti-communist conservatism. Subsidies and socialism abuse tax dollars. Hollywood shouldn’t try to meet diversity quotas. The U.S. should remain in the Vietnam War.
Others were typical, not necessarily of the Republican Party he supported, but of the right-wing reactionism he also maintained. If white settlers had driven Indians from their land, the Native Americans were “selfishly” trying to keep it for themselves. Sex should be in movies, but not homosexuality. And certainly the worst of it has to be this: “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.”
The fact that some of those opinions were mainstream at the time, or had been within the 30 years preceding, doesn’t excuse them. But unless your entire point is to upset people, why would anyone waste their energy slamming a long-dead actor for reciting old prejudices?
In his films, Wayne held the persona of the virile Western man, who spoke little and felt less. In real life, he enjoyed challenging people. What he needed, and what the Playboy interviewer offered, was pushback. He’s getting it now, not that it matters so long after his death.
Katharine Hepburn once refused to co-star with Wayne for his attitudes toward supposed communist sympathizers. “Politically, he is a reactionary,” Hepburn wrote. “He suffers from a point of view based entirely on his own experience.”
Perhaps people like Wayne — the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps types who are high on work ethic and low on sympathy — could benefit from discussions with people from varied perspectives. But Wayne can’t have those now. His Newport Beach tombstone has no ears.
At a dinner party, Wayne once went on a sexist diatribe about how women in film took away jobs from men who needed to feed their families. Cinematographer Kristin Glover told him he was hurting the feelings of her and the other highly qualified women at the table. He immediately apologized. Glover said she realized Wayne “loved to start arguments” and he was, at least, a “charming chauvinist.” The last comment lets him off a little easy, but Glover did what Twitter outrage can’t do — she began a conversation, and she did it while Wayne was still alive.
There is no statute of limitations on bad ideas, but there may be an expiration date on the value of discussing them. And there must be limits on the ex post facto condemnation of attitudes that were once commonplace. In death, Wayne can become one-dimensional enough to serve as an easy target, instead of people who are still alive and making decisions and spreading their ideas — modern-day losers like Virginia politicians or anti-Semitic congresswomen.
