The growth of the early film industry in the US coincided with the institutionalisation of racial segregation at all levels of society. At the same time, an increasingly self-assertive Black middle class had begun to organise itself culturally, socially, politically and economically in ways that contradicted the virulent cultural racism underpinning ‘Jim Crow’. The importance of the new medium is often stressed for its role in cohering America’s new immigrant communities. However, it is its political function in the service of white supremacy and big business - a cultural instrument to cement racism and foreclose any potential alliance between Black and immigrant labour - that is explored for the first time here.
Leslie H. Fishel, Jr and Benjamin Quarles (eds), The Black American: a brief documentary history ( Glenville, IL, Scott, Foreman and Co. , 1970), p. 238.
2.
In 1997, David Puttnam asserted: ‘The principal rationale behind the creation of the MPPC was to allow Edison and AM&B [American Mutoscope and Biograph Company] to reassert what they saw as their rightful dominance of their home market, regardless of whether the competition was American or foreign’, Movies and Money ( New York, Vintage , 1997), p. 41.
3.
Thomas Cripps , Slow Fade to Black ( Oxford, Oxford University Press , 1993), p. 96.
4.
Ibid., p. 95.
5.
Ibid., pp. 100ff. Cripps observes: ‘The studio research department even forgot the names of the tribes, eventually labeling them ‘‘Gibboneys’’ and ‘‘Joconeys’’ after Cedric Gibbons and J. J. Cohn, two studio executives’, ibid., p. 99.
6.
Ibid., p. 98.
7.
Cripps goes so far as to credit the ‘Southern mystique’ for the racial prejudices of Europeans in Hollywood, like the German actor Emil Jannings and unnamed Englishmen (the anecdote is attributed to Errol Flynn who was not English). Cripps, ibid., pp. 98-9, is suggesting that neither the Germans nor the English had their own histories of racism.
8.
Ibid., p. 94.
9.
and David Halberstam , The Powers that Be ( New York, Alfred A. Knopf , 1979), Ch. 3.
10.
see also Joe Domanick , To Protect and to Serve ( New York, Pocket Books , 1994), pp. 61-63.
11.
Felice A. Banadio writes: ‘[Amadeo] Giannini depended on these movie moguls and screen celebrities to serve as Bank of Italy ‘‘boosters’’ in attracting the payroll accounts from Hollywood’s major studios and the savings accounts of the industry’s tens of thousands of employees... [and in 1922, Cecil B.] DeMille became president of Bank of Italy’s Culver City branch... the bank’s advisory board included Louis B. Mayer... Joseph and Nicholas Schenck... Harry Cohn, Howard Hughes, Sol Lesser, Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck’, A. P. Giannini (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994), p. 113. For Kuhn Loeb, see Douglas Gomery , The Hollywood Studio System ( New York, St Martin’s Press , 1986), p. 28.
12.
See David Levering Lewis , W. E. B. Du Bois: biography of a race ( New York, Henry Hold & Co. , 1993), pp. 386ff.
13.
The 1917 Draft action would revive militant anti-capitalist movements in the rural South. See Jeanette Keith , Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: race, class, and power in the rural South during the first world war ( Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press , 2004).
14.
Wilson Record , The Negro and the Communist Party ( New York, Atheneum , 1971), p. 16.
15.
Ibid., p. 18.
16.
Kevin Phillips , Wealth and Democracy ( New York, Broadway Books , 2002), p. 52.
17.
Willard Gatewood reports: ‘Male members of the black upper class were virtually all ‘‘working aristocrats’’, who provided the principal source of income for their family. Most were employed in white-collar and managerial occupations. Many of the older members of the aristocracy of color were likely to be found in service trades - such as catering, barbering, and tailoring - or in government positions and small businesses. While some were attorneys, physicians, and teachers, a greater number of their children were more likely to be found in these professions’, Aristocrats of Color (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 191. Much of the following is drawn from Gatewood, Chs 7 and 8.
18.
‘The older families of well-to-do free negroes who count an unspotted family life for two centuries gather at St. Phillip’s Episcopal Church, on Twenty-fifth Street. This church is an offshoot of Trinity and the lineal descendant of Nean’s Negro School early in the eighteenth century’, W. E. B. Du Bois , ‘The Black North: a social study’ , New York Times (24 November 1901), SM 11 .
19.
Gatewood, op. cit., employs the term ‘upper class’ in deference, I suppose, to its members’ own self-description and their tendency to act as an exclusive caste. On the other hand, the most wealthy of them were, by income standards, upper class, but the largest proportion of the group fell into the upper-middle or middle class.
20.
For the clubs, see ibid., Ch. 8. Some of the clubs were athletic associations. For instance, in 1914, William M. Franklin of the Smart Set Athletic Club (Brooklyn) was defeated by Dr R. S. Fleming of New Haven, in what was reported to be ‘the first indoor tennis match played in New York before a colored audience’, ‘Dr. Fleming defeats Mr. Franklin at tennis’ , New York Age (26 March 1914), p. 1 .
21.
Ibid., p. 243.
22.
Ibid., pp. 245-6.
23.
Lawrence Otis Graham , Our Kind of People ( New York, HarperPerennial , 2000), p. 189.
24.
Ibid., p. 234.
25.
A’Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: the life and times of Madam C. J. Walker ( New York, Washington Square , 2001), pp. 215-216.
26.
Graham details the history of East Coast and Mid-West Black elites in resort towns like Oak Bluffs (Martha’s Vineyard), Sag Harbor, Highland Beach and Idlewild, op. cit., Ch. 8.
27.
Ibid., p. 190.
28.
‘Wilson behind segregation’ , New York Age (19 November 1914), p. 1 . The delegation had asserted that the architects of the Wilson policy were Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo, a former president of the Hudson and Manhattan Railway, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, a former Texas congressman, and John Skelton Williams, Controller of the Currency and former head of the Georgia and Florida Railroad.
29.
Gatewood, op. cit., p. 179.
30.
David Levering Lewis, op. cit., p. 414.
31.
Ibid., p. 416.
32.
Alice O’Connor , Poverty Knowledge: social science, social policy, and the poor in twentieth-century U. S. history ( Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press , 2001), p. 33.
33.
George Shepperson’s ‘Introduction’ to W. E. Burghardt. Du Bois, The Negro ( Oxford, Oxford University Press , 1970), p. xiv.
34.
Joseph C. Miller , ‘History and Africa/Africa and history’ , American Historical Review (Vol. 104, no. 1, February 1999), p. 5 .
35.
Leslie H. Fishel, Jr and Benjamin Quarles appended in their foreword to Vardaman’s declaration: ‘Vardaman’s speeches drew heavily from many of the scientific theories which were widely accepted during the 1910’s. Northern publishers and readers applauded The Negro, A Menace to American Civilization (1907), written by Robert W. Shufeldt, a popular biologist associated with the Smithsonian Institution, and The Color Life: A Brief In Behalf of the Unborn (1905), authored by William B. Smith, a philosophy and mathematics professor at Tulane University’, op. cit., p. 238.
36.
Du Bois, The Negro, op. cit., pp. 11-12.
37.
Ibid., p. 13.
38.
The article was originally published in the Journal of American History (June 1996), pp. 44-69 .
39.
Clyde Taylor, ‘The re-birth of the aesthetic in cinema’, in Bernardi, op. cit., p. 22.
40.
Lydia Smith was the mulatta housekeeper of Radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens. Dixon and Griffith portrayed her as Stevens’s mistress and the catalyst for the Civil War. Rachel Knight, another ‘cunning, seductive’ mulatta slave, was credited with inspiring the slave and poor white anti-Confederacy rebellion in Jones County, Mississippi, during the Civil War. See Victoria E. Bynum, ‘Misshapen identity: memory, folklore, and the legend of Rachel Knight’, in Hodes, op. cit., pp. 240ff.
41.
See Edward Sheldon , The Nigger ( New York, Macmillan , 1910). A playbill published with the play indicates that the play opened at the New Theatre, 4 December 1909.
42.
In the play, Phil (the grandson) and Cliff are cousins and share contempt for Blacks. Phil owns a cotton plantation which employs 600 Black workers. At one point Phil declares: ‘And while I’m good to my niggahs - I reckon that’s a well-known fact, too! - I don’t think they ought to have the franchise and I won’t treat ’em as equals’, ibid., p. 43.
43.
William Fox (Edgar Lewis, author), ‘Synopsis of The Nigger’ , LP 5235, Library of Congress.
44.
Ibid.
45.
Ibid.
46.
‘Author of Fox play discusses its basic idea’ , Motion Picture News (20 March 1915), p. 51 .
47.
Ibid.
48.
Pagination is from Sheldon, op. cit.
49.
‘Author of Fox play...’, op. cit.
50.
All the following summaries of the ‘mulatto genre’ are augmentations of the descriptions in Alan Gevinson’sWithin Our Gates: ethnicity in American films, 1911-1960 ( Berkeley, University of California Press , 1997).
51.
Abrams and Werner review of The Bar Sinister , Moving Picture World (5 May 1917), p. 751 .
52.
In this instance, race-mixing is divorced from the plantation legacy: ‘The heroine has negro blood in her veins, her father having been shipwrecked on an island inhabited by blacks and became the husband of the chief’s daughter’, Edward Weitzel , ‘BrokenTies’ , Moving Picture World (16 February 1918), p. 1001 .
53.
Gevinson, op. cit., p. 356. Ince’s role was described in Photoplay (April 1919), p. 104. After a brief exhibition in 1918, the film was re-released in 1925 with an epilogue and prologue that transformed the original film into a nightmare experienced by the mulatto which substantiated the Tuskegee creed that ‘the Negro should stay in his place’, ibid.
54.
Peter Noble, The Negro in Films (New York, Kennikat, 1969, orig. pub. 1948), p. 47. Noble amended his remarks: ‘Possible exceptions included such movies as ‘‘Free and Equal,’’ a direct appeal to intolerance, which attempted to capitalise on the eternal theme of Negro inferiority; and an adaptation of Edward Sheldon’s ‘‘The Nigger,’’ starring William Farnum. The latter film was a puerile attempt to foster even more racial hatred than already existed in American social life. ‘‘Broken Chains’’ [sic] followed in the traditions of ‘‘The Birth of a Nation’’ and showed the Negro as a murderous and scoundrelly agitator’, ibid.
55.
and Chris Steinbrunner and Burt Goldblatt , Cinema of the Fantastic ( New York, Saturday Review Press , 1972).
56.
For plot summaries of these films, see Gerald R. Butters, Jr , Black Manhood on the Silent Screen ( Kansas, University Press of Kansas , 2002), pp. 58-61.
