Jimmy Cagney — or Does the Way We Fight Make Us Strong or Weak?

Fighting Injustice Is a Fight for Kindness

Aesthetic Realism shows that when we fight injustice and want the goodness of the world to win, we are kind and strong. Cagney was contracted to Warner Brothers and though he was a star, felt he was being exploited financially. "It became apparent to me," he writes:

that the studio was...interested in paying me only a very small percentage of the income dollar deriving from my work. Therefore I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances. I walked away [and] filed suit against Warner's... [He said:] The major studios had a...very elemental point of view about their actors: anybody they paid a dollar to belonged to them, but body and soul.

Cagney would not schmooze the studio executives—Jack Warner called him the "professional against-er." He joined the Screen Actors Guild in its first months of existence, even when the studios tried to frighten actors away. Jimmy Cagney was also angry at what other people endured economically. He said:

If you've never been poor, you're automatically a stranger to more than half of the men and women in the world...

He made headlines when he gave money to striking cotton pickers in 1935, and to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys—black men unjustly accused of a crime—in 1936. With others, he donated ambulances to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, American young men fighting for the democratically elected government of Spain against the fascist dictator Franco in 1936.

For these activities Cagney was labeled "pink" and called before the Dies committee, a forerunner of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Cagney was cleared, and then when he made the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy—a choice partly and carefully made for this very reason—narrow-minded politicians never touched him again.

Yet because he didn't know clearly what to fight for or against, over the decades Jimmy Cagney's ethics changed tragically—he became increasingly selfish. Certainly he was frightened by the blacklisting of people in Hollywood, but he also changed his purpose. His kindness and feeling for people took a back seat as his salary skyrocketed to make him, year after year, the top money maker in America. Writes Doug Warren, "He did not become happier as his income increased," and I believe the reason is he used that income to be colder.

Sadly, Jimmy Cagney sold out one of the best things in himself—he lost the fight. He said years later—and horribly—that he contributed those ambulances to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade because he had been a "soft touch." Patrick McGillian, in Cagney, writes:

Once good friends, Cagney and Spencer Tracy ultimately almost stopped talking to each other—over Tracy's disappointment at Cagney's shifting...disposition. Spencer observed that the richer Jimmy became, the more right wing and intolerant he became.

In the latter part of his life Jimmy Cagney retired from the movies and lived a somewhat reclusive life with his wife for twenty years on his farm in upstate New York. After a brief comeback to the movies, he died in 1986. Had the press not boycotted Aesthetic Realism, he could have studied it and learned about that battle in him between the respect that made for art and the contempt that had him increasingly sad, lonely, and bitter.

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