I am a sucker for old musicals (pre-1960s). I especially like the movies from the 1930s that featured Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. I was recently re-watching one of my (obscure) favorites, 1937’s Varsity Show, when I was reminded that Hollywood’s meddling in pro-Democrat politics is nothing new. Back in the 1930s, Warner Brothers was big on Roosevelt and the Democrats. Since it’s Sunday and I’m tired of writing about depressing news, I thought I’d share a little bit of Hollywood history with you.

In 1933, at the very beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, Warner Brothers released Footlight Parade, which has a ridiculous plot about a hoofer/choreographer who creates live musical acts as pre-shows for movies. Add in romance, industrial espionage, and lots of singing and dancing, and you’ve got a perfect 1930s, Depression-era musical.

Image made using AI.

What makes Footlight Parade even more fun is that the male lead is Jimmy Cagney. Most people remember him as a snarling gangster, but he started as a hoofer, and he always loved to dance.

Cagney was also an ardent Democrat and FDR supporter, so he probably approved of Busby Berkeley’s grand finale number, “Shanghai Lil,” which included an homage to Roosevelt and the NRA. (This number was one of three fantastic, over-the-top finale numbers in the movie. It’s also the best one.).

Shanghai Lil’s premise is that an American sailor in Shanghai is looking for his love, who is quite obviously a Chinese prostitute. He’s hunting for her in a bar and opium den. When he finally finds her, he suddenly has to ship out. The number is so richly constructed that it’s a movie in a movie. It was also pre-code, which explains the more...um, sophisticated fare.

I’ve embedded the entire number, which is long and unavailable as a single video. Beginning at 2:30 in Part II, you can see the blatant promo for FDR and his policies:

Four years later, the Depression had been dragging on for eight years, five of which were on FDR’s watch. As Amity Shlaes explains in her eye-opening The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, things in 1937 were so bad that the country was suffering from a devastating depression within the Depression. FDR’s policies were failing left and right.

Yet Roosevelt got reelected in 1940. How did this happen?

Well, it might have been with some more help from Hollywood. Take, for example, Varsity Show.

In that movie, there’s a little ditty called “We’re Working Our Way Through College.” One of the verses explains that college graduates will vote for Democrats because—get this—the Republicans promised in 1928 that there’d be a chicken in every pot and, nine years later (and, again, five years into FDR’s administration), that promise had failed. (I’m sorry about the poor video quality but getting it right was taking too long. At 14 seconds, this is a fair-use snippet):

When we get out of school, we’ll vote the Democratic ticket.

The Republicans made promises that weren’t exactly cricket.

Do you recall they said we’d have a couple of chickens in the pot.

We wonder where the chickens got.

We haven’t even got the pot!

Ironically, by 1952, an election year, Warner Brothers removed that lyric when it updated the song for a movie called She’s Working Her Way Through College (starring, among others, Ronald Reagan). I can’t get hold of a video of the movie or the song, and I’ve forgotten the lyrics, but I know for sure that the Republicans versus Democrats crack didn’t end up in the updated song.

But back to the Depression, Warner Brothers wasn’t done promoting Roosevelt, though. In 1940’s hugely successful (and enjoyable) Yankee Doodle Dandy, again starring Jimmy Cagney, the movie portrayed as one of the highlights of George M. Cohan’s life the fact that he got to meet FDR:

In that same year (1940), Roosevelt got elected for a third time.

Did these, and other Hollywood homages to Roosevelt, make a difference to his presidential popularity? I’m sure they did. After all, in those days, people had very limited information, so much so that most Americans didn’t even know that Roosevelt had been paralyzed from the waist down by polio. Hollywood, as I said, has been meddling in politics for a long, long time.

Ironically, both Cagney and Reagan, who had been staunch Roosevelt Democrats in the 1930s, were changing their tunes. Neither supported communism, and they started fearing communist inroads into the Democrat party after WWII.

By 1980, Cagney unreservedly supported his old friend Reagan for president. In his autobiography, he explained his political move to the right as “a totally natural reaction once I began to see undisciplined elements in our country stimulating a breakdown of our system... Those functionless creatures, the hippies...just didn't appear out of a vacuum.”