The Oscar-Winning Old Hollywood Star With Decidedly MAGA Instincts

In her fascinating New York Sun article, “Hollywood Legends Who Would Have Supported President Trump,” Petronella Wyatt notes that “Sergeant York” is Trump’s “personal favorite.” It is not surprising that Ms. Wyatt should focus on Gary Cooper, the epitome of American manhood and patriotism, and also an arch conservative, but at his side in the film is Walter Brennan, three time Academy Award winner, paired with Cooper in several films that endorse an individualist credo.Brennan’s Pastor Pile persuades Alvin York (Cooper), a conscientious objector, to register for the draft, and then to serve in the army, becoming the greatest American war hero of World War I. The film forges a link between religious faith and national purpose that presages what has seemed to some observers an unlikely alliance between the worldly Mr. Trump and evangelicals.The conservative Pastor Pyle, like the actor who played him, steered clear of politics. Brennan, already a staunch supporter of the Republican Party in the 1930s, did not, until the 1960s, believe actors should become publicly involved in politics. What changed his mind was a series of Supreme Court decisions that he believed eroded the role of religion in American life. What gave Brennan a huge public platform was his role as grandpa Amos McCoy, staunchly independent and feisty, ornery and warm-hearted, in the very popular television series, “The Real McCoys,” which aired between 1957 and 1963. This catapulted him into stardom after so many years of supporting roles in motion pictures.Brennan was a three-time Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner for “Come and Get It,” “Kentucky,” and “The Westerner,” all released between 1936 and 1940. His other credits included “My Darling Clementine,” “Meet John Doe,” “To Have and Have Not,” “Rio Bravo,” and “Red River” the last two of which he co-starred alongside John Wayne.Walter Brennan in the trailer for 1941 film ‘Meet John Doe.’ Wikimedia CommonsDonald Trump’s presidential candidacy, which began as a full-frontal attack on Jeb Bush and other establishment Republicans, would have had its appeal for Brennan, a devout Roman Catholic who made common cause with evangelicals, appearing at their events while also supporting political candidates that challenged conventional Republican Party office holders. So strongly did Brennan believe that politicians of both parties had not done enough to affirm religious faith that he turned to extremist organizations such as The John Birch Society.Birchers, repudiated by conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Jr., deserve a second look as precursors of a movement that led to the triumph of Donald Trump. Founded in 1958 by Robert Welch in honor of a missionary who had lost his life in China to the Communists, the organization came into public view in the early 1960s, when a series of articles in the national press dispatched Birchers as right-wing fanatics headed by an ideologue with quasi-fascist views.Welch warned against the widespread infiltration of Communists in government— and also in every aspect of American life that led to the disintegration of American individualism, the rise of big government, well underway since the New Deal, and the steady remorseless march to the nation’s status as a slave state.The successful effort to sideline Birchers as an extremist element overlooked several important facts. In the early 1960s, many Birchers were Republicans agitating to make their own party more conservative — in effect, more vehemently anti-communist and anti-big government.The most telling point about the John Birch Society is that Brennan’s wife Ruth took her grandchild to some of the group’s meetings. For Ruth, and for Walter Brennan, the John Birch Society was a community-based assembly of citizens who wanted action, not just words from their political parties. As D. J. Mulloy notes in “The World of the John Birch Society,” it was “at the height of its power in the mid-1960s . . . taken very seriously by considerable swaths of the American population, as well as leading politicians, journalists, academic, and cultural commentators of all kinds.”I can easily imagine Walter Brennan on a platform with President Trump and prominent evangelicals in a rally resembling Mulloy’s succinct summary of the Birch mentality: “Prosaic yet grandiose; practical but conspiracy-laden; reassuring if fearful; radical and conservative: this was the world of the John Birch Society.”Walter and Ruth Brennan were, in their estimation, part of an exciting new vanguard. Like Robert Welch, this devoutly Catholic couple believed that conventional politics would not lead their country to salvation. The evangelical Welch saw himself as blazing a “path of truth through the darkness of deception and immorality and cruelty and corruption, which now hovers over our whole earth” in order to reach a new “plateau of light and sanity and freedom and kindness, and honesty and peaceful labor, which other men may then behold with longing and with hope.”Mr. Rollyson is the author of ‘A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan.‘

The Oscar-Winning Old Hollywood Star With Decidedly MAGA Instincts

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