Adak, 27 May 1944 -- The Ox Bow Incident

Dearest Nunny,

 ...

"Peace is indivisible" and lynching is bad.

Yesterday was one of the best I have had up here. Three good letters from you, the Toscanini performance of the Beethoven sixth -- and the room quiet for it, to boot, and finally, the second show I have gone to since coming here. It was "The Ox Bow Incident," with Henry Fonda playing the lead. The story was simple. A couple of strangers come into a western town, get dragged into a mob bound for a lynching and go along lest they be mistakenly picked as the men the mob is after. The posse discovers three men and after a drumhead trial led by a crazed Confederate colonel, hangs them. On the way back to town they meet the sheriff who has captured the real culprits. At the end Fonda reads a letter written by one of the victims to his wife. It was a slightly Hollywoodish letter, almost too beautiful and written after the phrases "for whom the bell tolls" and "peace is indivisible" had been popularized by Mssrs Hemingway and Molotov, but it was good propaganda. Everyone was moved. Everyone left the theatre agreeing that lynching is bad. Even our hut Texan agreed that lynching was bad. "But of course," he added, "they shoulda made it plain there's a difference between hanging a n----- and a white man." Somehow I don't quite think the picture made its point.

...

All my love, Nunny,

M

Murray misplaced a quote: "peace is indivisible" is from Maxim Litvinov, the prewar Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, not Molotov. He tried unsuccessfully to broker an alliance between Britain, France and the U.S.S.R. to rein in Nazi Germany.