Chapter 9 Blog Question #1

As world events gradually transformed America into a wartime state of mind, Hollywood operated as a instrument of antifascist directors and the Roosevelt administration for the educating of a isolationist and peace loving population into hesitant warriors. This conversion that takes affect in Sergeant York servers as a metaphor for the film industry’s project during the immediately prior Americas entry into World War II.

York’s education happens in two interrelated stages. First he is struck by lightning while he is protesting outside a local church in his home state of Tennessee. After he is struck York undergoes a miraculous religious conversion and is enlightened to the truth of what his pastor once told him, that an individual, much like a tree, is unable to stand alone. York becomes quite torn between his newfound religious faith which preaches to him that he should not kill, and his duty as an American Soldier in the upcoming war in Europe. York reconciles his responsibilities to both of these requirements on his loyalty through a rationalization that is inspired by two lines for the bible. Those lines being “He will render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s. He’ll obey his duty to the state and observe, as far as possible, his religious faith.” (Belton 212).

York’s religious and education transformation served as a major metaphor for the anti-war soldier prior to the start of World War II. Americans were, like York, not sure about entering the fighting of World War II. After the lasting effects of World War I, Americans went back to their previous isolationist stance. Though goings on in Europe in the 1930’s drove certain segments of American society (most notably Franklin Delano Roosevelt) to call for American troop intervention, many others, like York, needed to be exposed to their larger responsibility to the world’s community.

Works Cited

Belton, John. American Cinema American Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. 213-214.