Hollywood

Hollywood: A Novel of the America in the 1920s - Gore Vidal

In fact, about half the book is set in 1917-18. This finely written novel features historical figures such as Woodrow Wilson and megalomaniac William Randolf Hearst and fictional ones like Caroline and Blaise Stanford, who entertained in the previous novel Empire (1987).

The history covers the material never dealt with in school and handled with kid gloves in teevee documentaries: the unpopularity of WWI in the US and its corrosive aftershocks on social and political attitudes, the bitterness between Wilson and TR, the poor health of Wilson, AG Palmer’s crackdown on leftists and “hyphenated Americans,” the corruption under Harding, etc. The book also examines the development of Hollywood as an economic and propaganda force.

One reviewer says that Vidal is good at putting words in other people’s mouths so it’s worth this lengthy quotation:

''I was three years old,'' [Woodrow Wilson] said at last, ''when Lincoln was elected and the Civil War began. My father was a clergyman in Staunton - then, later, we moved to Augusta, Georgia. I was eight years old when the war ended and Mr. Lincoln was killed. In Augusta my father's church was a . . . was used as a hospital for our troops. I remember all that. I remember Jefferson Davis being led a captive through the town. I remember how he. . . . My family suffered very little. But what we saw around us, the bitterness of the losers in the war and the brutality of the winners . . . well, none of this was lost on me. I am not,'' a wintry close-lipped smile divided for an instant the rude stone face, ''an enthusiast of war like Colonel Roosevelt, whose mentality is that of child of six and whose imagination must be nonexistent. You see, I can imagine what this war will do to us. I pray I'm wrong. But I am deathly afraid that once you lead this people - and I know them well - into war, they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. Because to fight to win, you must be brutal and ruthless, and that spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life. You - Congress - will be infected by it, too, and the police, and the average citizen. The whole lot. Then we shall win. But what shall we win?”