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Shirley Temple’s Paradoxical Smile

The little girl wears the brightest smile of all. Only her mother, standing on the left and extending her hand, beams half so broadly. It is a practiced smile and wave as she pauses at the door of the waiting car, the skirt of her dress billowing like a dancer’s in the breeze. Other girls and adults cluster about her, attending her every move. A bodyguard with a small mustache stands right at her side, and a uniformed policeman sweeps the throng with searchlight eyes. The little girl whom they protect is indeed precious (her mother’s pet name for her). She has just completed a private visit at the White House with President Franklin Roosevelt. She is ten-year-old Shirley Temple, and the two of them have the most famous smiles in the world. Those smiles deserve further study. The Great Depression of the 1930s was not only the deepest and most protracted economic crisis of the twentieth century but also the most protracted emotional crisis. A problem that scholars might well pursue is the relation between American political, economic, cultural, and artistic recovery and the nation’s corresponding emotional resiliency. For, as historian William Reddy has contended, “Central to the life of individuals, open to deep social influence, emotions are of the highest political significance. Any enduring political regime,” Reddy observes, “must establish as an essential element a normative order for emotions, an ‘emotional regime.’ ”1 Both in politics and in commercial art and entertainment, the United States responded to the challenges of the Great Depression by creating a regime of confidence and cheer. The exuberant optimism of Franklin Roosevelt and Shirley Temple constituted an emblem of American life and an expansive emotional empire, with powerful and lasting effects nationally and internationally. Roosevelt’s example of smiling confidence stood as an eloquent rebuke to the frenzied emotional diatribes of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and other dictators. So too did the cheerful confidence of Shirley Temple and other Hollywood stars sustain audiences’ spirits worldwide.2 The character of this American emotional regime—at once political, commercial, artistic, and cultural—is perhaps best approached as a series of paradoxes. The first of these is that the Great Depression, a historic situation of sudden and deep deprivation, worry, uncertainty, and despair, was also a time of conspicuous demonstrations of confidence, cheerfulness, and optimism. At a time when movie attendance knit Americans into a truly national popular culture, they did not want a mirror held up to them but a ray of sunshine cast on their faces. To introduce a second paradox, the most ephemeral of expressions—a smile, a laugh—can have great value, not solely in matters of sentiment, which are in fact anything but trivial, but also measured in hard political and economic calculations. “We can see emotional expressions as a medium of exchange,” sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has written. “Like paper money, many smiles and frowns are in circulation.”3 The circulation of a new emotional currency during the Great Depression was a crucial aspect of the national economy and recovery efforts, a sort of deficit spending with immense consequences. Images and examples of cheer were at least as much a function of demand as of supply. In a time of great financial hardship, spending on amusements actually increased, eloquent testimony to its emotional necessity. John F. Kasson