[Late last year, in preparation for a podcast appearance of my wife’s, we watched Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and through it were introduced to the groundbreaking cinematographer and all-around amazing American James Wong Howe. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for Howe’s exemplary life, leading to a post on that podcast!]
On two fraught mid-century histories which contextualize Howe’s fascinating marriage.
First things first: Sanora Babb, the novelist, poet, and editor to whom James Wong Howe was married from 1937 until his passing in 1976 (she would live another three decades, passing away in 2005 at the age of 98), was plenty fascinating in her own right, without any need for broader historical or cultural contexts (or perhaps even for references to their marriage, as it’s not mentioned in the front-page bio on her website!). For proof I need only share this sentence from her Wikipedia page: “She also had an affair with Ralph Ellison between 1941 and 1943.” But that’s just the tip of the iceberg of her unique and impressive life and career, which also includes: her Depression-era work with the Farm Security Administration that became her first novel Whose Names Are Unknown (written in the late 1930s but unpublished until 2004); her relationships with Native American communities in her birthplace, the Oklahoma Territory, that feature significantly in her memoir An Owl On Every Post (1970); the important posthumous publication On the Dirty Plate Trail: Remembering the Dust Bowl Refugee Camps (2007); and many other publications and achievements.
But while her career was very much her own, as Howe’s was as well of course, I don’t agree with that website bio choice—not only because a forty-year marriage is a significant part of any person’s biography, but also and for this blog especially because that marriage opens up multiple compelling and crucial mid-century American histories and issues. The most overt is that the marriage was not legal nor in many ways recognized at all in California (and much of the U.S. as a whole) for more than a decade: anti-miscegenation laws meant that the couple had to go to Paris to wed in 1937; while social and cultural prejudices against mixed marriages meant that the “morals clause” in Howe’s studio contract prohibited him from publicly acknowledging the marriage at all. Those horrific realities would start to change after 1948’s California State Supreme Court decision in Perez v. Sharp overturned the marriage ban, but wouldn’t fully change on the legal and national level until at least the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia (1967). As the Dad of two multiracial sons, young men who have Chinese American heritage on their Mom’s side and European on mine, I find those details—part of the life of a man who died just a year before I was born—even more striking and painful to contemplate.
Just as painfully, right at that same post-1948 moment when Babb and Howe’s marriage became legal in California, they were separated for another very contemporary reason: the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings on Hollywood. Babb was a dedicated leftist activist, and her longstanding association with the U.S. Communist Party led both to her own targeting by HUAC and to Howe’s own graylisting in the industry (not quite blacklisting, but with some tangible effects on his job prospects nonetheless, as illustrated by the absence of any 1949 entries on Howe’s filmography). In order to protect him and his career as well as flee any possible jail time for refusing to cooperate, Babb moved to Mexico City, staying there for at least a couple years before returning to Los Angeles and Howe in the early 1950s. My own wife Vaughn Joy’s excellent book on Hollywood and HUAC has far more to say about those histories and that period than I can in this brief space (check out the weekend post and the podcast episode I’ll share there for more), so I’ll just note that this is one more way—like all those I’ve traced in this week’s series—that James Wong Howe embodied so much of the American story across the 20th century.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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