Post WWII America: Life in the ’50s

World War II is over, and now everyone can get to living life as it should be lived.  Men are returning home to their dream girls they’ve written during the war.  However, the life the veterans returned to was not the life they expected.  The society they lived in was full of racism, dominating gender roles, and a scripted lifestyle.  Instead of having to face these problems, men people escaped into heroic movies of the wild wild West, like John Ford’s Fort Apache, to escape the inadequacies of their lives and forget their problems.  Analyzing the characters, symbols, and scenes from Fort Apache and various stories from John Cheever reveals the shortcomings of men in heroism, materialism, and passivism and their attempts to escape them in the postwar era. 

Nearly every Western film is centralized around a man exhibiting above average courage and heroism under extraordinary pressure.  John Wayne shows ample courage as he plays Captain York at a small fort at the border of an Indian reservation.  When a telegraph line was severed in Apache territory he musters a four-man unit to go fix it and coolly claims “I will lead the unit”.  This situation is very similar to the one faced by men in World War II.  There was a need to make split second decisions that will risk your life.  However, sometime after the end of the war this attitude began to fade away.  In John Cheever’s The Country Husband, former WWII veteran Francis Weed flies home in stormy weather and is so “shaken up” that he desperately looks to the man next to him for alcohol to help cool his nerves. 

In many of Cheever’s stories and in Fort Apache, there are certain symbols that personify a character’s courage.  Alcohol in Cheever’s stories is a symbol for fear and cowardice.  Often you see a man escaping having to confront his problems by drinking them away.  In The Country Husband Francis Weed tries to drink to cool his nerves when his airplane is in some turbulence.  In Cheever’s The Enormous Radio, Irene Westcott has two martinis to help calm her fears as she realizes that everyone has a dark secret and worries that she may too.  A cigar in Fort Apache symbolizes the exact opposite emotions.  Captain York is shown several times smoking a cigar as part of his image of being a hero.  It portrays the hero as being tough and prepared to fight to whatever end in a battle.