Thursday, August 1, 2024

August 1, 2024: Martin Sheen Studying: The West Wing

[This coming weekend, the great Martin Sheen celebrates his 84th birthday. Sheen’s life has been as impressive and inspiring as his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of threads to both. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even more inspiring Americans!]

On the iconic actor who was almost the fictional President Bartlett, and two ways to AmericanStudy the one who was.

As both a serious West Wing fan (especially in its particularly stellar first few seasons) and someone possessing a wealth of useless pop culture knowledge, I’ll admit to being surprised that I didn’t know until researching this post that the role of President Josiah “Jed” Bartlett was initially offered to Sidney Freakin’ Poitier. As that article notes, negotiations apparently didn’t get too far, but we can still imagine not just this particular show with Poitier in that lead role, but also and even more importantly a fictional Black President on television in 1999. On that latter note, it was only two years later that 24 debuted, featuring presidential candidate David Palmer (the great Dennis Haysbert) who beginning in Season 2 (2002-2003) would in fact become the nation’s first Black President. But important as Palmer was to 24, in season 1 and throughout his time on the show, he was always a supporting character to Kiefer Sutherland’s iconic and badass protagonist Jack Bauer, and so it still would have been quite different and far more significant for the President at the heart of The West Wing to be portrayed by a Black actor. What might have been!

When negotiations with Poitier fell through, the show’s creator Aaron Sorkin and his fellow producers decided to go with an actor with whom Sorkin had already worked on a presidential project from just a few years earlier: Martin Sheen, who had played Presidential Chief of Staff A.J. MacInerney in The American President (1995, and written by Sorkin). While it may have been simply the existing working relationship between the two men that led to this choice, it’s really interesting to think about President Bartlett as a West Wing promotion for Sheen from that earlier role, and I would say that there’s an ethnic American undercurrent to that trajectory (if not nearly as dramatic, or at least not as visible, of one as Poitier would have been). That is, as I’ve traced at length in this series, Martin Sheen’s birth and legal name of Ramón Estévez, and the Hispanic heritage through his Spanish immigrant father reflected in that name (as well as the multi-ethnic heritage and familial history of cross-cultural transformation contributed by his Irish immigrant mother and their marriage), make his President Bartlett very much an American first in his own right.

And yet (a phrase with which I’ve started many third paragraphs in this blog’s history, I believe). It’s not just that Sheen, through the name change I wrote about in yesterday’s post among other elements, could be described as white-passing (or at least not overtly Hispanic in any identifying ways for folks who don’t know his biography). It’s that the character of Josiah Bartlett is explicitly defined as part of a foundational and elite New Hampshire family that dates back to at least the time of the American Revolution (which we know because none other than Paul Revere designed their carving knife), and thus that both the family and the individual are almost certainly not intended to be Hispanic. If Sheen’s heritage and multi-generational family are definingly American in some of the best ways, I’d say that a politician having to minimize or even disguise ethnic heritage to be perceived as more of an “American President” is definingly American in some of the worst. Would The West Wing have been as successful or long-running if its President were overtly Hispanic (or Black, or any identity other than white non-Hispanic)? I’m not at all sure it would, and that’s a frustrating thing to recognize.

Last SheenStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

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