(HOST) Recently, commentator and Vermont Humanities Council executive director Peter Gilbert went hiking in the Sierras of California. But where the hiking began and ended is the setting for today’s story.
(GILBERT) A few weeks ago, I went hiking in the high Sierras of California, a mountain range that runs north-south, with the Central Valley on the west and Death Valley on the east. I’d hiked there twenty years ago, but this time, in Lone Pine and Independence, the towns where my hike began and ended, I found two new historical, cultural sites. Both related largely to the same period of American history, the 1940s.
The first is the Museum of Lone Pine Film History. It turns out that the hills just outside the small California town of Lone Pine was, from the 1920s to the ‘sixties, the setting for over 400 Hollywood movies. Most of them were B-westerns, featuring stars like Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, "Gabby" Hayes, William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy, Randolph Scott, and John Wayne. It was also the setting for the TV show "The Lone Ranger." The movies were virtually mass-produced and highly formulaic – good guys versus bad guys, with lots of fist fights, chase scenes, and shootouts. Not too far from Hollywood, the region’s striking rock formations and snow-capped Sierras in the background made it an ideal movie location.
Setting aside a typical Western’s portrayal of Indians, those films are looked at as wholesome, moral, all-American entertainment, without sex or graphic violence, movies in which the good guys won and the villains were punished. They may not have been great movies, but for many people, they embody some of the best American ideals – gritty independence, honesty, the pursuit of justice, and basic decency.
The second site I visited is the Manzanar National Historic Site. Run by the National Park Service, Manzanar War Relocation Center was one of ten camps where 110,000 Japanese Americans — men, women, and children living on the west coast — were interned during World War II. Located between Lone Pine and the town of Independence, the camp was established in 1942 – the National Historic Site fifty years later, in 1992. I knew the story of the Japanese internments, but still found the exhibit both informative and deeply moving. I learned, for example, of Pfc. Sadao Munemori, who, a month before the war ended in Europe, died throwing himself on a grenade to save others. He received the Medal of Honor postumously; At the time his mother and siblings were interned at Manzanar.
And I was struck by the boldness of one exhibit panel at the National Historic Site. It featured two photographs side by side, one of the U.S.S. Arizona burning after being bombed at Pearl Harbor, the other of smoke pouring from the World Trade Center on 9/11, and beside them the well-known quotation from Benjamin Franklin, saying, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Two American historic sites, neither particularly well-known, virtually side by side in the high desert country of California, speaking powerfully of America’s past and of fundamental American values and ideals.