History in the Movies, “W.”

Cathy Schultz, Ph.D., a history professor at the University of St. Francis in Illinois; she writes a syndicated column on historical films.

George W. Bush. You either love him or hate him. And those feelings will undoubtedly affect how people react to “W.,” Oliver Stone’s new film on our 43rd president. Stone insists his film is not a hatchet job, but a fair and truthful portrait of the man, based on extensive research.

But ultimately, partisan leanings may determine how fair and truthful you find Stone’s film. Does George W. Bush, for instance, really have Oedipal issues with his father? Maybe. But maybe not. Does Condoleezza Rice really suck up to the president so blatantly? Maybe. Or maybe not. Is Dick Cheney really such a sinister megalomaniac? Maybe. Or … Oh, wait. That one, most of us do agree on.

Here’s a quick look at the accuracy of some of the other themes Stone tackles in his engaging film about the man, his Presidency, and his Texas-size daddy issues.

Q. Did George W. Bush actually get arrested when he was an undergraduate?

A. Yes. Twice, actually, but both were for minor offenses. While a student at Yale, Bush traveled to Princeton with fraternity brothers for a football game, and after a Yale victory he climbed onto a goal post and tried to break off a piece. The Princeton authorities weren’t too keen on that, and his father had to arrange to bail him out.

Bush was arrested once in New Haven, when he and a few other fraternity brothers stole a Christmas wreath as a prank.

Q. Does the younger George really call his father, “Poppy?”

A. This was news to me, but evidently everyone, including Barbara Bush, calls George H. Bush, “Poppy.” I confess I might have to suppress a giggle the next time I see the elder Bush on television.

Q. Did George and Laura meet at a friend’s back yard barbeque as the film shows?

A. They did, and the attraction was instantaneous and mutual. They were married on November 5, 1977, just three months from the day they met. By all accounts, the two have shared a warm and supportive relationship for many years, and the film does a nice job capturing this.

Q. Karl Rove suddenly appears midway through the film, but Stone doesn’t show us how he and Bush met. When was that?

A. Karl Rove met the father before he met the son. Rove worked for George H. Bush when both were at the Republican National Committee in the 1970s, then served on his exploratory bid for the 1980 nomination.

By 1988, when the elder Bush was running for president, the younger Bush and Rove worked together on the campaign team, and forged a close working relationship. The born-again George W. and the agnostic Rove shared two key campaigning philosophies. One was the conviction that Republican electoral success lay in the untapped power of the evangelical vote. The second was the willingness to use attack politics to tear down the opponent. Both of these would dictate all their future campaigns together.

Q. Stone suggests that George W. had a hand in creating the infamous Willie Horton television ad that helped sink Michael Dukakis’s campaign in 1988. True?

A. No. That “honor” goes to Roger Ailes, the current president of Fox News, and Lee Atwater, Bush’s 1988 campaign manager. Atwater is considered the godfather of modern attack politics. His political strategy employed smear campaigns, push polls, and reams of oppo research. Rove considered him a political mentor. George W. Bush considered him a friend.

Q. Did W. claim that God definitely wanted him to be president?

A. Close, but not quite. Richard Land, a Southern Baptist minister remembers a meeting with then-governor Bush in 1999, in which Bush said, “I believe God wants me to be president, but if that doesn’t happen, it’s okay.” Land points out that Bush didn’t say that God actually wanted him to be president. He said instead that he believed God wanted him to be president.

Q. But long before he thought about the Presidency, Bush wanted to be appointed baseball commissioner, didn’t he?

A. Former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent claims he did. Vincent recalled a conversation he had with Bush in 1992, in which W., a lifelong baseball fan and then-owner of the Texas Rangers, expressed a strong wish to be named the sport’s commissioner.

That gig never panned out for Bush, of course. But if it had? Stone’s film leaves the impression that “W.” might have been a heck of a lot happier. As many of us probably would.

You can reach Cathy Schultz at cschultz@stfrancis.edu.

History in the Movies, “Miracle at St. Anna”

Cathy Schultz, Ph.D., a history professor at the University of St. Francis in Illinois; she writes a syndicated column on historical films.

World War II has been a constant source of inspiration for Hollywood over the years, and filmmakers have responded with countless tales of G.I.s landing in Normandy, and Marines slogging their way over Pacific islands. Yet despite the abundance of films on the subject, Spike Lee’s new movie, “Miracle at St. Anna,” introduces us to aspects of World War II not previously explored by filmmakers.

Lee chronicles the story of African-American soldiers who were part of the all-black 92nd Infantry division, sent to fight the Nazis in northern Italy in 1944. The story follows four soldiers who, thanks to an act of kindness toward an abandoned Italian boy, find themselves behind enemy lines and forced to seek refuge in a Tuscan village. Their encounters there with the Italian villagers, and their collective struggle against the advancing German forces, transform all their lives.

Based on James McBride’s novel of the same name (McBride also penned the screenplay) the historical accuracy in “Miracle at St. Anna” reflects the years the author spent researching the war in Italy. But it was initially inspired by the stories McBride heard as a child from his uncle, who served in the 92nd. “While the story is fictional,” the author has said, “there is truth at its core.” Below are some questions you may have on the real-life history to be found in the film.

Q. Were black soldiers usually kept out of combat?
A. Yes. In the segregated military of World War II, African-American units were frustrated to find themselves disproportionately assigned as laborers and support troops. Of the 900,000 black soldiers serving in the Army in the European theater, only one black division saw infantry combat — the 92nd Infantry Division, known as the Buffalo Soldiers division.

Q. Why were they called “Buffalo Soldiers?”
A. The name originated in the 1870s when black soldiers volunteered to serve in the U.S. cavalry. Their Indian enemies grew to respect them and gave them the nickname. Some say the name stemmed from similarities between the curly hair of blacks and the hair of a buffalo. Others attribute it to the buffalo robes many black soldiers wore to supplement their skimpy, army-issued clothes in the cold winters on the Plains.

Q. One of the film’s flashbacks shows black soldiers being refused service in a Louisiana diner where German POWs were welcomed. Did that really happen during the war?
A. Unfortunately, numerous incidents like that were reported throughout the Deep South. In 1944, a black soldier named Rupert Timmingham wrote an angry letter to Yank magazine, describing a similar incident in which he and eight other black soldiers were refused service at a lunchroom of a Texas railroad depot, and told they could get coffee only if they “went around back to the kitchen.” As they did, “about two dozen German prisoners of war, with two American guards, came to the station. They entered the lunchroom, sat at the tables, had their meals served, talked, smoked, in fact had quite a swell time. I stood on the outside looking on, and I could not help but ask myself why are they treated better than we are? Why are we pushed around like cattle? If we are fighting for the same thing, if we are to die for our country, then why does the Government allow such things to go on?” To its credit, Yank published the letter, but could offer no good response to Timmingham.

Q. The film shows Axis Sally broadcasting from a truck on the Italian front. True?
A. This part is a bit farfetched. Axis Sally, a.k.a. Mildred Gillars, was an American turned Nazi propagandist whose sultry voice was well-known to Allied soldiers. But though the Nazis sent her radio broadcasts around Europe, she herself stayed put in Berlin. The film does nail the tone of her broadcasts, though — her warnings to American soldiers that their wives and sweethearts were cheating on them, and her urging them to lay down their weapons to save themselves from certain death.

Q. Did the Nazis really issue an order to shoot ten Italian civilians for every dead German?
A. As the numbers and daring of Italian partisan fighters grew in 1944, so, too, did the Nazi determination to destroy them. This particular order had its roots in an incident in Rome in March of 1944. After partisans attacked and killed a group of thirty-two SS officers, a furious Hitler ordered a massive retaliation. Three hundred thirty-five (335) Italians were rounded up and taken to caves where the SS shot every one of them, then dynamited the caves shut to conceal the atrocity.

Q. So, the massacre shown in the film actually happened?
A. Though the German motivation for it is different than shown in the film, that infamous massacre did take place. In August of 1944, the SS rounded up 560 villagers and refugees — primarily women, children, and old people — in Sant’ Anna di Stazzema, and gunned them all down. And though the film implies differently, there were, sadly, no survivors.

Q. Where can I find more information?
A. McBrides’s novel is great, or look at “Italy at War” by Henry Adams.

Cathy Schultz, Ph.D., is a history professor at the University of St. Francis in Illinois and writes a syndicated column on historical films. You can reach her at cschultz@stfrancis.edu

History in the Movies, “10,000 B.C “

Cathy Schultz, Ph.D., a history professor at the University of St. Francis in Illinois; she writes a syndicated column on historical films.

The title, “10,000 B.C.,” recently released on DVD, probably calls to mind the last film to use B.C. in its title: the 1966 epic, “One Million Years B.C.” While that movie is best remembered for its iconic image of Raquel Welch in skimpy cave-girl attire, it also boasts scenes of scrappy humans battling ferocious dinosaurs. Entertaining, to be sure, but complete nonsense.

One million years ago, dinosaurs had already been extinct for millions of years, and modern homo sapiens were still hundreds of thousands of years away from making an appearance.

Like its predecessor, “10,000 B.C.” also has gorgeous actors (of both sexes) battling prehistoric animals. But at least this film tries a bit harder to mesh those cool special-effects creatures with some plausible history.

Well, a little bit, anyway. Let’s see what it gets right, and where it wanders off the mark.

Q. Is there any significance to that date — 10,000 B.C.?

A. Actually, there is. 10,000 B.C. marks the tail end of the Ice Age, when woolly mammoths were dying out, though not yet extinct. So it rings true when a character in the film remarks that the mammoths were appearing less frequently.

10,000 B.C also marks another significant turning point. Before then, everyone in the world lived in rather small, migratory hunter-gatherer tribes. Starting roughly around 10,000 B.C, a tiny handful of those hunter-gatherers began transitioning to agriculture, which meant more fixed settlements. But it took another six to seven thousand more years before the world’s first civilization and cities arose in Sumer (Mesopotamia.)

Q. Was the big city in the film supposed to be Egypt?

A. It sure looked like it, with its Pyramids, and its Nile-like river, and its thousands of multi-racial slaves. But the timing is all wrong. Egypt didn’t coalesce as a civilization until about 3000 B.C., and its pyramids were built about 500 years later. That’s certainly many thousands of years too late to be using woolly mammoths as pack animals

Q. Since both white and black characters are in the film, was this supposed to be set in ancient Europe and Africa?

A. The geography in this film is a head scratcher. The home village of our mammoth hunting heroes looks to be set somewhere in north-central Europe. After a raid on their village, our heroes set off– on foot, mind you– to rescue their friends, and soon find themselves in what seems to be an Asian jungle. After walking some more, they meet up with African tribes near something suspiciously like the Sahara desert. And before too long, they’ve gotten to what appears to be the Egyptian civilization, on the banks of the Nile. In the end, the survivors head back home and arrive without anyone looking a day older. All this calls for some serious suspension of disbelief.

Q. Are the woolly mammoths accurately shown?

A. The mammoth hunt looked pretty plausible. Ancient hunters armed with just spears had to find creative ways to kill those large animals, and they often sought to drive them off a cliff, or into some kind of trap. Cave art from the era shows hunts like these, and the remains of a hundred mammoths were discovered in pits at a site in the Czech Republic.

But there’s no sign that woolly mammoths ever got to the tropical climes shown in the film. As for people harnessing them as work animals? Never happened.

Q. What was that freaky bird creature in the jungle?

A. A history degree doesn’t help me much here, so I turned to my paleontologist friend, Dr. Tim Gaudin at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. “Those were terror birds,” said Gaudin. “Flightless, carnivorous birds that typically preyed on small mammals.”

So, could they have hunted our “10,000 B.C.” heroes? No, according to Gaudin. “For one thing, they were only in the American continents. Also, they died out about two or three million years ago.”

Q. How about those saber-tooth tigers? Were they shown accurately?

A. Sort of. Smilodon is the most well-known saber tooth cat (saber tooth “tiger” is a misnomer, Gaudin tells me, since they weren’t closely related to tigers.) And while Smilodons lived long enough to be chomping on humans in 10,000 B.C., they weren’t found in the Old World, only in the Americas. Eurasia did have a variety of the saber tooth cat, but that one probably died out around 30,000 B.C.

The film has one more glaring inaccuracy, as Dr. Gaudin points out. The woolly mammoth, the saber tooth cat, even the terror birds: they’re all just too big. In the film, the mammoths tower some twenty feet high, but in reality, “woolly mammoths stood just about ten feet high at the shoulder,” notes Gaudin. Terror birds were also “close to ten feet high,” though the movie shows them far bigger. And real saber tooth cats were “about the size of a lion.” By contrast, the sabertooths in “10,000 B.C.” make a Siberian tiger look like a house cat.

But in the end, perhaps all my quibbling about history and paleontology is misplaced. Most of “10,000 B.C.’s” intended audience probably doesn’t care much about its accuracy. And after all, as the filmmakers say on the film’s website, “We didn’t intend for this to be a documentary.” In other words, I think they want me to lighten up, grab some popcorn, and cheer on those supersized beasties.

Cathy Schultz, Ph.D., is a history professor at the University of St. Francis in Illinois and writes a syndicated column on historical films. You can reach her at cschultz@stfrancis.edu

History in the Movies, “Leatherheads”

Cathy Schultz, Ph.D., a history professor at the University of St. Francis in Illinois; she writes a syndicated column on historical films.

“Leatherheads,” George Clooney’s affable film, now available for viewing on DVD, opens on a shot of a huge football stadium, packed with cheering fans. “College Football, 1925,” reads the screen. The scene then shifts to a handful of fans, along with a bored cow, who watch a motley group of guys scrabbling over a football in a muddy field. This, we’re told, was “Professional Football, 1925.”

An exaggeration, of course, but there’s more than a kernel of truth here. While college ball in the 1920s (and earlier) attracted the best players, the most talented coaches, and the massive crowds, professional football was its disreputable cousin, known for its bankrupt teams and brawling, blue-collar players. Most “respectable” players — and fans — stayed away.

But all that started to change in the 1920s, when the fledgling NFL began to lure the best college students into its ranks. “Leatherheads” chronicles this transformation, offering a lighthearted take on how professional football made its first steps toward respectability — and big bucks. Here’s some of the real history behind this entertaining story.

Q. Were the Duluth Bulldogs a real pro team?

A. They were, though they weren’t the “Bulldogs.” They were called the Kelley-Duluths, after the local hardware store that sponsored them (and paid for their uniforms). Although not quite as hardscrabble as the film shows, the team did struggle to stay afloat in the early 1920s. But in 1926, the Duluth team (now called the Eskimos) got a new lease on life when Ernie Nevers joined their ranks.

Nevers was the most exciting college player of 1926, a Stanford fullback who could run, pass and punt. The Duluth Eskimos enticed to him to chilly Minnesota with the princely sum of $15,000, plus a cut of the gate receipts. Eager to cash in on their new attraction, the team scheduled an ambitious barnstorming tour, designed to bring Nevers to the (paying) masses. The Eskimos played twenty eight games on the road and only one at home that season. But it paid off, as Nevers packed stadiums around the country for the Eskimos.

Q. So, is Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski) actually Ernie Nevers?

A. In part. The Rutherford character seems to be a composite of Nevers and Red Grange, two college stars who helped popularize professional football in the mid-1920s.

Grange, the star running back from the University of Illinois, joined the Chicago Bears in 1925. Like Nevers a year later, Grange immediately attracted huge crowds. The Bears went from pulling in a few thousand spectators per game to packing stadiums around the country. Thirty-nine thousand people showed up for a game in Chicago, 35,000 in Philadelphia, and 70,000 packed the Polo Grounds in New York City to see the “Galloping Ghost.”

So lucrative was the tour that the team tried to milk every last cent from the arrangement. During one punishing twelve-day stretch, Grange and the Bears played eight games in eight different cities.

But despite the hectic pace, Grange enjoyed his status as professional football’s first wealthy star. And like the film’s Carter Rutherford, Grange got quite good at promoting himself as well. He made a killing in advertising, hawking everything from sweaters and shoes, to cigarettes, dolls and ginger ale.

Q. What about Dodge Connelly, George Clooney’s character? Was he a real person?

A. Connelly is loosely based on Johnny “Blood” McNally, who played with Nevers on the 1926-’27 Duluth team. A great pass receiver, McNally was also a flaky free spirit with a fondness for booze. Chuck Frederick, a journalist with the Duluth News Tribune, and author of “Leatherheads of the North,” tells a story of McNally in 1929, when he played for the Green Bay Packers. The Packers gave McNally a choice. He could get $100 a game, or, if he chose, $110 per game, provided he prepare for the weekend game by stopping his drinking by Wednesday nights.

McNally elected for the $100.

Q. How long were those funky leather helmets in use?

A. Football players started wearing them around 1900. They cut down not only on concussions but also on torn ears, a common problem in the rough and tumble play of football. By the 1940s, plastics helmets had largely replaced the leather ones.

Besides the leather helmets, the film offers some other nice moments of verisimilitude, according to journalist Frederick. Laundry really was hung out to dry from the train windows, especially during the busy stretches of the barnstorming tour. And since many stadiums lacked good facilities, players often did get cleaned up after games by having buckets of water thrown on them, uniforms and all.

Q. Did 1926 bring a football commissioner and tougher rules?

A. That part is kind of exaggerated. Rules and referees had been a part of the game for decades, though enforcement varied. And the NFL owners had elected Joe Carr as league president back in 1921. Carr was no pushover. He reigned over the league’s schedules and standings, and cracked down on teams breaking his rules. So, in all likelihood, the film’s loveably wacky Leatherheads wouldn’t have stood a chance against him.

Q. Where can I find more information on football’s early day?

A. For Duluth and Nevers, look at “Leatherheads of the North” by Chuck Frederick. For a broader look at early football, check out “Pigskin,” by Robert Peterson.

You can reach Cathy Schultz at cschultz@stfrancis.edu.