Media References
In the 1940s, Bilbo was referred to in multiple ways in the media. He was referred to in the 1947 Academy Award-winning film Gentleman's Agreement; a 1947 blues song "Bilbo is Dead" by Andrew Tibbs; in Bob and Adrienne Claiborne's song, "Listen Mr. Bilbo" (1946); and in Lee Hays' song, "Talking Bilbo". The character of "Senator Billboard Rawkins" in the musical Finian's Rainbow (1947) is believed to have been based in part on Bilbo.
Jack Webb devoted an episode of his crusading 1946 radio show One Out of Seven to attacking Bilbo's racial views. He dramatized extracts from Bilbo's speeches and letters attacking Negroes, "Dagoes" (Italians), and Jews, while asserting after each extract some variation of "...but Senator Bilbo is an honorable man. We do not intend to prove otherwise." (John Dunning, the author of On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, says this was a deliberate reference to Marc Antony's funeral oration in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar).
The novel Sophie's Choice by William Styron (1979), set in the postwar years of World War II, also makes reference to Bilbo.
Andy Duncan's short story, "Senator Bilbo," which appears in the collection, Seekers of Dreams (2005), edited by Douglas A. Anderson, takes the coincidence of Bilbo sharing a name with J. R. R. Tolkien's character as an excuse to imagine racial segregation in Tolkien's fictional village of Hobbiton.
Read more about this topic: Theodore G. Bilbo
Famous quotes containing the word media:
“Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why—but the editorialists forget it—terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)