[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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