UB Historian Looks at Hollywood Movies to Study Post-World War II America

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- By studying post-World War II Hollywood movies, University at Buffalo historian David Gerber has made some important discoveries in his career-long exploration of the impact of drastic change on the lives of individuals in American social history.

"I most enjoy observing the resiliency of individuals and their creativity in living, as well as their efforts to find meaning in their experiences," says Gerber, a professor in the Department of History in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, who also is studying how early 19th-century British immigrants sought to preserve their identity after coming to America.

His particular interest in how the plight of disabled veterans was portrayed in post-World War II Hollywood encouraged Gerber to study several movies of the era and to interview personally Academy Award-winning actor Harold Russell, whose performance in "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) and real-life adjustment to his own disability brought widespread encouragement to disabled veterans.

"Movies at this time were a powerful agent for representing the anxieties of American society following the war," says Gerber, who also has studied such movies as "Pride of the Marines" (1945) and "Bright Victory" (1951).

He feels that the movies reflect the hopes accompanying the end of World War II, as well as fears of how to reintegrate the veterans into society and of a return to the depression of the 1930s.

"'The Best Years of Our Lives,' is very skillful at dealing with these hopes and fears," explains Gerber. "The narrative elements of the movie closely follow the expert discourse of 'the veterans' problem,' both in its depiction of the able-bodied and disabled veterans' readjustment difficulties, and in its dependence on gendered prescriptions to resolve them."

The movie examines the reintegration struggle faced by Navy veteran Homer Parrish, played by Russell, a real-life bilateral hand amputee.

Gerber says he considers "The Best Years of Our Lives," to be "a cultural event, deeply rooted in its time and in the conventions of the Hollywood system, through which we can now locate the consensus of beliefs and attitudes surrounding the figure of the disabled veteran."

After interviewing Russell in 1991, Gerber discovered that the part Russell played in the movie was contradictory to Russell's own real-life experience as a disabled veteran.

Gerber argues that in actuality, persons with disabilities often come to feel their disability is little more than an inconvenience and see themselves not as defective or freakish, but as different in an unimportant way. This attitude, he notes, is especially prominent today, as both the social acceptance and the social roles of the disabled expand.

"Movies about people with disabilities of the mid-20th-century era tend to be narratives of struggle and overcoming, which accentuate the difficulties people face to make the overcoming more powerful, even if the portrayal is inaccurate," explains Gerber, who will publish a collection of original essays by historians titled "Disabled Veterans in History" in 2000.

Gerber also is studying personal correspondence of 19th-century British immigrants to the U.S. and how letters to family and friends were an attempt to preserve personal identity.

"Personal identity is rooted in continuity, having the sense of yourself that tells you that you are the same person today that you were last year, or 10 years ago or decades ago," Gerber says. "Immigrants -- like all people living within the circumstances of great personal transformation -- have to change many aspects of their lives. What is interesting to me are the ways in which people seek to preserve this sense of continuity in themselves.

"In the 19th century, communication with friends and family left behind, the medium of the personal letter served as a way for immigrants to achieve continuity," he says. "Through letters, they could renegotiate relationships vital to their self-understandings, but severed by distance and time."

Gerber believes his interest in studying the effects of social change on personal identity is rooted in his childhood, where he lived and observed the differences between the three generations of his family, beginning with his immigrant grandparents, who left Russia under difficult and dangerous circumstances.

"My father and his sisters were all born in the U.S. or came here when very young and grew up surrounded by immigrants and refugees and within my grandparents' 'Old World' household," he says. "Then there were my brother and I and our cousins, whose lives were spent enjoying the safety, prosperity and banality of a middle-class American childhood."