Wayne, John

1907–1979

American Actor, Director, and Producer

As a movie actor, director, producer, and right-wing political activist, John Wayne (nicknamed “The Duke”) became an iconic symbol of an idealized model of American masculinity that reflected American cultural and political concerns during the mid–twentieth century.

Wayne began his career in 1928 as a prop man on movie sets, after an injury prevented him from completing his football scholarship at the University of Southern California. He began acting in films in 1930 and appeared in approximately seventy films before achieving stardom as Ringo Kid in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). The film became a model for subsequent film Westerns, and Wayne became a model for portrayals of masculinity in the Western film genre: the lone, tough, confident, emotionally reserved, yet humane cowboy-warrior, unwaveringly committed to justice and the protection of the weak.

Wayne went on to play similar roles in nearly 150 more Western and war films from the 1940s to the 1970s, achieving superstar status through his role as isolated cattleman Tom Dunson in Red River (1949) and his Oscar-nominated performance as Sergeant Stryker of the Marine Corps in The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). Consciously seeking to cultivate an on-screen image of manliness, Wayne rarely acknowledged his birth name of Marion Morrison and was trained by stunt performer Yakima Canutt to develop what became his trademark speech pattern and swagger. Such later films as True Grit (1969), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor, and The Shootist (1976), his final film, added elements of patriarchy and paternalism to his masculine persona.

Wayne's performances offered American audiences an ideal of masculinity that served their need for assurance of American toughness and moral righteousness amid the tribulations of World War II and the subsequent Cold War. For Americans wanting to discourage boys and adolescent males from behaviors considered deviant—such as homosexuality, delinquency, and communism—Wayne's films provided a model worthy of emulation.

Off-screen, Wayne sought to associate his masculine persona with his right-wing political posture and a particular brand of patriotism. This commitment led him to support Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Republican president Richard M. Nixon, who served from 1969 to 1974. It also motivated his financing, directing, and producing of The Alamo (1960), which associated the United States, and particularly the American West, with masculine heroism and the defense of freedom. Wayne responded to opponents of the Vietnam War by denouncing them as effeminate and cowardly, and by producing, directing, and starring in The Green Berets (1968), a war film that advocated U.S. intervention in Vietnam. In the 1970s he recorded the record album America: Why I Love Her (1973) and filmed television commercials for the Marine Corps.

Wayne's status as an icon of American masculinity was clearly evident when the Veterans of Foreign Wars awarded him its National Americanism Gold Medal in 1973, when Congress awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal in 1979, and, most recently, when the U.S. Army named a RAH-66 helicopter “The Duke” in 1998. The continuing familiarity of Wayne's film persona testifies to its continuing power to shape American understandings of masculinity.

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