Shirley Temple is a familiar name even among people (and that’s most people under age 60) who have never actually watched a Shirley Temple movie. Her impression has lingered long after her none-too-soon retirement from movies in 1949. According to cultural historian John F. Kasson, Temple was not only the most popular child actor as measured in box office receipts, but the child actor who most characterized the aspirations of her era (and left a mark on our own).
In The Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (W.W. Norton), Kasson explains her appeal to an audience short of money and in need of a lift. Americans escaped from their troubles into the fantasy of Hollywood movies; in Temple, Kasson says, they found “emotional healing,” a phrase that would have puzzled her audience. But yes, Temple’s plucky characters “mended the rifts of estranged lovers, family members, old-fashioned and modern ways, warring peoples, and clashing cultures.”
Kasson links Temple’s smiling uplift with the tone of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Unlike his dour predecessor, Herbert Hoover, whose administration coincided with the Wall Street crash, Roosevelt was a relentless optimist whose smile was a beam of radiance in the dark days of massive unemployment. Temple beamed with a similar light. “She treated the lowly with kindness an approached the mighty without intimidation,” Kasson writes, describing the characters she played.
FDR was a fan, and exempted actors from legislation curbing child labor.
Aside from helping cheer the American public, “the rays of Shirley’s star penetrated the deepest recesses of family life, recasting the terms by which parents valued their own daughters and those daughters imagined themselves.” An industry of Shirley Temple merchandise flourished as children became consumers—a targeted demographic. And there was a dark side: her family ripped her off, she later discovered, draining her trust fund as if it was their own bank account.
Like many child actors, the transition into teenage and beyond proved more embarrassing than endearing. Temple retired from pictures, but, serving as a U.S. ambassador, became an early example of Hollywood crossing over into politics. Her smile was probably disarming at the negotiating table.
