How Troubled Was My Valley? 1941’s How Green Was My Valley and Contemporary America

In his blog post, Rhys Peregrine, a PhD student at Cardiff, writes about how How Green Was My Valley, a defining ‘Welsh’ film, can tell us more about the troubled American society from which it came than it does about a Welsh community.

In 1942, the black and white film How Green Was My Valley, the story of a 1890s Welsh mining village, beat Citizen Kane to the Best Picture Oscar. Destined to be compared forever unfavourably against its bolder and more revolutionary counterpart, How Green Was My Valley may seem painfully conventional – the undemanding fodder of a weekend matinee. Yet, such characterisations are misleading. The product of a turbulent 1940s America, the film was riven with anxieties over the future, defined by an almost apocalyptic angst about social change and the ability of traditional communities to survive in an era of upheaval.

Image 1: Hollywood at its most schmaltzy?

There are parallels here with Michael Sheen’s and the Welsh National Theatre’s current production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (another sprawling family melodrama), which has transplanted the play’s American story to a Welsh setting and populated it with Welsh characters. Discussing their decision, Sheen and co. stated their intention to examine Wilder’s play through a Welsh lens; conversely, when we watch How Green Was My Valley, we are seeing late-Victorian Wales through a 1940s American lens. A notoriously inauthentic portrait of a 1890s mining village, this Hollywood blockbuster might not tell us much about Welsh history, but it can reveal a great deal about the contemporary United States. In this blog post, I explore how this defining ‘Welsh’ film –  planned in Hollywood and filmed in a mock Welsh village in the Santa Monica mountains – was a reflection of the troubled American society from which it came.

Image 2: ‘Various kinds of social and political strife await Huw and his family’

In the early 1940s, that society was caught between the grip of two colossal, traumatic events: behind it was the Great Depression, the lingering economic effects of which were still being felt, while looming in the future was the shadow of Pearl Harbour. Meanwhile, rapid urbanisation was threatening the existence of traditional rural life, ruining green landscapes and replacing small towns with sprawling industrial centres. Women, too, were a cause for increasing concern for some. Enabled by the economic demands of the 1930s, female workers were entering paid employment in unprecedented numbers, challenging patriarchal America’s notions of the male breadwinner. Finally, the unemployment and desperation of the depression had led many to embrace trade unionism and radical politics with a new aggression. Roosevelt was in the White House, causing some to worry that the new creed of socialism was undermining the nation’s Chrisitan foundations. This was the America in which How Green Was My Valley was created, caught in a dialogue between old and new, and unsure of which way to turn.

Certainly not everyone welcomed these changes. While some were embracing the modern, secular America, others were more dubious about the nation’s trajectory. When How Green My Valley was released, many of its audiences were looking to the past for comfort, fantasising about an earlier way of life. ‘If only I could close my eyes and go back to the valley of my youth,’ one member of the public mused to the film’s publicists, ‘I had everything I wanted. Today is so different. Oh if it were only as green as then! But it never will be.’

At least in its early stages, How Green Was My Valley offered a welcome sanctuary for such audiences to retreat into. Although the film opens in the present day, within minutes the middle-aged narrator, Huw, transports us to the late-Victorian days of his childhood, where the rest of the picture will take place. Huw spends his days basking in the memories of that time, summoning up the taste of confectionery, recreating first-time encounters and exploring every corner of his recollections. ‘There is no fence nor hedge round time that has gone,’ he reassures us, ‘you can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember.’

Image 3: ‘A vision of a simpler time’

Contemporary American cinemagoers delighted in this confection of God-fearing families and demure women in bonnets and lace collars. ‘[The] green valley … becomes one with our own remembered past’, wrote one US newspaper, ‘the little Welsh mining town becomes the symbol of our own little town or village. Its people become the remembered Beloveds of our own childhood’. Although set in Wales, How Green Was My Valley managed to evoke the memories of devout, small-town life that many Americans were still clinging to.

However, How Green Was My Valley was not safe in its historical setting for long. Even if it wanted to, it could not hide forever from the disruption that was taking place outside of the cinema.

The idyllic community of film’s early stages is destined not to last, and whatever spell or enchantment that held it together is shattered as industrial modernity appears. The problems begin when a trade union is formed: the men decide to take industrial action against their employers. ‘What does it mean?’ Huw asks the minister, Gruffydd, after the strike has been called. ‘It means,’ Gruffydd replies sombrely, ‘that something has gone out of this valley that may never be replaced.’ From this point on, the labour movement expands, sons defy their fathers, women challenge patriarchal boundaries, and the green surroundings are turned into industrial waste.

In the end, the arrival of social change does not lead to a new age of happiness. Instead, it results in an Edenic fall from grace, turning the village into the site of a social apocalypse, leaving only crumbling architecture and an ever-growing slag heap, with almost no one left to bear witness except emaciated women in shawls. Trade unions do not usher in a fairer settlement between employee and employer, but gangs of hard-faced thugs and violent attacks on political enemies. In How Green Was My Valley, the past is doomed to be swept away by progress. Even worse, that so-called progress turns out to have not been progress at all.

Image 4: ‘Social change leads only to violent union thugs and ruined landscapes’

This, therefore, is a darker and more pessimistic film than many assume. Given the historical context of its creation, that should not be surprising. How Green Was My Valley was the product of a 1940s American society that was Janus-faced, looking both forward and backward in time, and, ultimately, deeply uncertain of each direction. This was a time in which the past was uncertain and the future terrifying. The film’s Welsh village was, after all, as troubled as the American society from which it arose.