page_1136 < previous page page_1136 next page > Page 1136 later recalled. "My job was to lug furniture and props around." His screen debut, as an unbilled stunt man in Brown of Harvard, came in 1926. The following summer, he and his teammate Ward Bond appeared in The Drop Kick. But it was in his capacity as a prop man at Fox that he first attracted the attention of John Ford. Beginning with Mother Machree (1928), Ford directed him in fourteen films over the years, including Stagecoach (1939), The Long Voyage (1940), The Quiet Man (1952), and The Searchers (1956). A fatherson relationship developed between them that endured until Ford's death in 1973. In 1930, another Fox director, Raoul Walsh, was casting The Big Trial. When Gary Cooper refused the leading role, Ford suggested his protégé. "To be a cowboy star," Walsh contended, "you've got to be six-foot-three or over, have no hips, and a face that looks right under a sombrero." Another stipulation was a "manly" name, and for The Big Trial, Marion Michael Morrison was given the nom-de-film John Wayne. The Big Trail launched Wayne as a leading man, but Fox did not renew his contract. For the next nine years, he toiled in a long succession of B-movies. In a 1932 serial, Singing Sandy, Wayne achieved a dubious distinction  he became Hollywood's first singing cowboy. But Stagecoach rescued his career. It was, he later said, "my passport to fame." Although mainly identified with westerns (he made over eighty in all), Wayne made a significant contribution to yet another distinctly American genre: the war movie. From John Ford's Men without Women (1929) to his most propagandistic picture The Green Berets (1968), Wayne appeared in seventeen war movies. As a rule, the setting was World War II  America's last "good" war. Most of these films  and, beginning with Red River (1948), his westerns as well  are characterized by a generational plot: Wayne, as either charismatic leader or unabashedly patriotic role model, guides the younger generation through its rite of passage to responsible adulthood. Wayne's portrayal of Rooster Cogburn in True Grit earned for him the 1970 Academy Award, and was, in the words of critic Richard Schickel, "the true climax of a great and well-beloved career, if not as an actor, then as an American institution." His last film, The Shootist (1976), was on the order of an epitaph. In it, he plays an aging gunfighter who is dying of cancer, an illness that Wayne himself succumbed to three years later. Of all the tributes to John Wayne, perhaps the most fitting was Vincent Canby's in the New York Times: "Mr. Wayne's extraordinary physique, along with his particular grace of movement and self-assurance of style, gave weight to minor movies and certified the authenticity of the great ones, to such an extent that we eventually came to see the myth as the man." Emanuel Levy, John Wayne: Prophet of the American Way of Life (1988); Mark Ricci, Boris Zmijewsky, and Steven Zmijewsky, The Films of John Wayne (1972). R. FRANCE See also Movies. WCTU See Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Wealth and its Distribution For early years in America, more is known about aggregate wealth and its distribution among people than about income. Usually, individuals knew, and sometimes preserved in written records, what they held in land, housing, barns, livestock, and so on, as well as their financial assets such as currency, bank deposits, bonds, stocks, and loans, and details of their inheritances. In contrast, there are few data on individual incomes, particularly for farmers and independent employees, at least until the advent of the federal income tax. We can make some definite statements about the distribution of wealth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but we must bear in mind the serious weakness in these calculations  namely, that a large minority, if not the majority, of families and single people had few assets other than farm animals, clothing, cooking utensils, and some consumer goods. Records of wealth, then, are largely for people whose income was above the average.  < previous page page_1136 next page >