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:
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)