Often well educated in white schools and comfortable in white society, the first generation of Indian leaders to emerge on the national level included persons like Charles Eastman and Gertrude Bonnin. Yet despite their acceptance of assimilationist ideals, they also contributed a new ideal of their own: a Pan-Indian identity that emphasized the commonness of Indians of all tribes. They recognized things that Indians held in common, much more than previous tribal leaders had done. While they valued a "civilized" lifestyle, they also respected their native traditions enough to recognize the injustices of the federal colonial domination.
When, in the fall of 1936, Fitzgerald learned of Irving Thalberg's death, his first emotion had been one of relief. "Thalberg's final collapse," he wrote a friend, "is the death of an enemy for me, though I liked the guy enormously.… I think … that he killed the idea of either Hopkins or Frederick March doing Tender Is the Night." But whatever resentment he had felt toward Thalberg living soon evaporated after he had spent eighteen months on the M-G-M lot that no longer had Thalberg to guide its destiny. For, as Crowther documents again and again in his history of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, neither M-G-M nor the industry at large was able to find a successor to fill his place. Thalberg's death marked the ultimate triumph of the commercialism that for so many years he had successfully held at bay. The battle between the idealists still loyal to Thalberg and the cohorts of the New York financiers was still raging on the M-G-M lot when Fitzgerald arrived a year later. But the end was already in sight. It was this epic conflict, symbolized by the heroic figure of the dead producer, that Fitzgerald intended to portray in the most ambitious of all his books, The Last Tycoon.
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