Henry Browne, Farmer

Mr. Browne is a farmer. He and his wife and two younger children work hard raising crops and vegetables. He took fifteen of his forty acres and put in peanuts, because he has been told that because of the war, more oil will be needed. He uses modern contour farming to make best use of land and seed. On their day off, they go to the local air corps base to visit the family's eldest son, who is training to be a pilot. Mr. Browne is a perfectly ordinary, hard-working American farmer during the Second World War. He is also Black.

Although Frank Capra's Signal Corps unit would make a couple of films about African-American soldiers, this short subject from Republic Pictures is an eye-opener. Republic specialized in movies for small towns: well-constructed westerns, Lum & Abner comedies and Judy Canova musicals, things that would never play the movie palaces in New York or Chicago or San Francisco. This movie was meant for a small-town audience. Given that it is set in Georgia (a movie theater is shown on their way to the Tuskegee air base; it is the Macon), this was meant for those theaters that wouldn't allow Blacks in, as well as the Colored Houses.

Henry Browne is a farmer of forty acres of reasonably productive land that he ploughs with his two mules and with the help of his young son Henry. His wife tends a wide variety of vegetables that keeps them self-sufficient and their daughter does quite a good job rearing twenty-odd chickens that keeps them sorted for breakfast. On Saturday, they set off early for a trip to visit the eldest son who is a trainee flyer in the Air Force. They are round of him and the narration is proud of the whole family and of their efforts to not just sustain their efforts, but to work even harder and longer to support the war effort. It's standard propagandist fayre that illustrates just how rudimentary some of the farming was in 1942 and at how hard an entire family had to work to live off the land. It steers completely clear of any racial commentary but I did wonder just how this family might have been treated by Uncle Sam ten years earlier, or later?