Movies of Local People and a Usable Past

Movies of Local People and a Usable Past

Introduction

Photographer and filmmaker H. Lee Waters displayed these words on a plaque in his studio, conveying his role as preserver of the world around him. Born on August 23, 1902, near Shelby, North Carolina, Herbert Lee Waters developed an interest in photography as a young boy in a mill village outside of Lexington, North Carolina. He became a professional still photographer in 1925 and owned his own photography studio the next year, at the age of twenty-four. After ten years of successful portrait work, Waters expanded his picture-making pursuits to include motion picture filmmaking. From 1936 to 1942, he traveled the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee filming local people and places in small mill towns of the piedmont South and screening the films for local audiences. He fittingly titled these Movies of Local People. He produced 252 films in 118 communities in the Southeast by the time he ended his filmmaking career in 1942. Though he withdrew from active filmmaking in the early forties, he continued to screen the films periodically in the ensuing decades. He maintained his still photography practice in Lexington and remained a portrait photographer until his death in 1997 at the age of ninety-five.

H. Lee Waters's filmmaking career was part of the broad motion picture practice in the first half of the twentieth century known as itinerant filmmaking. Independent itinerants throughout the United States shared similar marketing and outreach strategies in the venues they visited, but their filmmaking styles varied sharply according to the aims or skills of the individual creators. Many itinerants aimed to mimic popular fiction and comedy films, some even posing as Hollywood agents to woo participants. Others merely downplayed their humble origins as they recruited local subjects and audience members for their homegrown productions. Some itinerants broke with Hollywood-inspired storylines altogether, choosing simply to record life "on the go" in individual communities, embellishing their recordings with trick effects, fades, and dissolves. H. Lee Waters was part of this latter trend, opting to shoot actuality footage of adults and children parading by the camera in tandem with their daily work, school, and social routines.

Movies of Local People present straightforward views of people and places that were seldom seen by American film audiences of the thirties and forties. Even today, the films are seldom mined as evidence of these communities. These films, along with others made by Waters's itinerant peers, are absent from published histories on documentary film and photography. To propel Movies of Local People to the center of historical discourse, this essay examines the films in the context of better-known documentary productions of the early and mid-twentieth century. Movies of Local People are an untapped historical resource of Depression-era culture that existed within the rural enclaves of the industrial South. The films provide a fresh visual perspective on a period and region that has been dominated by the views of the government-sponsored documentarians Lewis Hine and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers (Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Ben Shahn, and Alfred T. Palmer, among others). These still photographers traversed similar terrain in the South, focusing their gaze, like Waters, on Southern subjects and settings.

The photographs produced by Lewis Hine and the FSA have been widely available to the public for a number of years via free online access to digitized prints. In addition to the digital surrogates, users can request physical copies of these photographs at a nominal fee. Waters's films, in contrast, remain an obscure and underused body of work. The high costs associated with preserving motion picture artifacts and the expense of digitizing moving images for access have limited the ready availability and research potential of this collection of motion pictures. One of the aims of this essay is to raise public awareness about these films in the hopes of inspiring greater investment in the ongoing preservation of and, by extension, improved access to this and similar collections of unique orphaned works.

Movies of Local People are a distinct visual record of mill village life in the Southeast during the late Depression era. Interpreting the films as unique historical artifacts among the more familiar images by Hine and the FSA photographers necessitates a specific comparison of the numbers and names of communities documented by each. Rather than compare the overwhelming number of communities in each state that Waters filmed to those photographed by Hine and the FSA, however, I compare only communities in South Carolina.¹ This scaled-down comparison serves as a representative illustration of the original views that Waters produced.² The comparison among these documentarians in South Carolina, thereafter, informs my comparative interpretation throughout.

Of the nineteen South Carolina communities filmed by Waters in the thirties and forties, only five were likewise photographed by Lewis Hine and the FSA photographers. Even accounting for this slight overlap, Movies of Local People remain dynamic visual documents distinct from the series of frozen images produced by Hine and the FSA. In the context of these two collections of still photographs, Waters's films emerge as original insight about a particular time and region that would have otherwise remained hidden from the historical record.

To support this assertion, the following threads of discussion will be explored in this essay. Leading the discussion is an enumeration of the communities that Waters filmed in South Carolina in comparison to those South Carolina towns photographed by Lewis Hine and the FSA photographers. This comparison serves to legitimatize Movies of Local People as a valuable and discrete set of visual works and to orient readers to the distinctions in time and place among these works. Next, a general description of Movies of Local People is provided to acquaint readers with Waters's distinct filmmaking style as a documentarian and to speak specifically to the breadth of the visual record that he left behind. A specific case study of one South Carolina town filmed by Waters in the late thirties will also be provided as an in-depth representation of the significance of these films as historical artifacts. Finally, an analysis of the potential uses of Waters's films as historical evidence is provided through an examination of The Uprising of '34—a 1995 documentary film that incorporates clips of Waters's films as unique evidence of mill village life. This is the only known work to date to exploit Waters's films for their many historical riches.

South Carolina's Early Visual Legacy

Lewis Hine was the first itinerant documentarian in South Carolina, and a nationally preeminent one. Hine was in the state periodically starting in 1908, and then from 1911 to 1913, and again in 1916 to photograph conditions in the textile mills and mill villages of the state. Hine's images of mill workers and their families are typically isolated views, inaccessible to the larger mill village environment in these communities. Yet, these images starkly display significant details about cultural customs and social disparities of this region during the early 1900s. Hine's photographs of sixteen mill communities in South Carolina produced 235 views of these discrete communities.³ Hine visited and photographed Belton, Bluffton, Chester, Clifton, Clinton, Converse, Cowpens, Dillon, Lancaster, McClellanville, Newberry, Pelzer, Port Royal, Rock Hill, Spartanburg, Williamston (Chester, Lancaster, and Rock Hill were also filmed by H. Lee Waters).

The FSA photographers were the next to document South Carolina communities on a large scale. These photographers first visited the state in 1935 and continued to photograph rural settings in South Carolina until 1939. The photographers resumed their photographic documentation of South Carolina communities in 1941 and continued through 1943. The FSA generally photographed sharecropping families and farmhouses in the Southeast. Like Hine's photographs of mill villagers, these families are typically displayed in isolated settings, cut off from their ties to the larger community.

Nine photographers among the FSA division photographed towns in the state. They were Marion Post Wolcott, Barbara Wright, Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Jack Delano, John Vachon, and Alfred T. Palmer. The images by Wolcott, Delano, and Palmer constitute the majority of photographs in the FSA South Carolina collection.⁴ As a whole, the FSA produced 1,140 photographs in the state, documenting the following twenty-three South Carolina communities: Ashepoo, Beaufort, Bowman, Charleston, Chesnee, Columbia, Florence, Gaffney, Greenville, Hartsville, Jacksonboro, Laurens, Lobeco, Manning, Moncks Corner, Myrtle Beach, Pacolet, Pendleton, Spartanburg, St. Helena Island, Summerton, Summerville, Sumter (Gaffney and Hartsville were also filmed by Waters).

Waters began making Movies of Local People in South Carolina in 1936, just one year following the FSA's initial travels in the state. The first town that he documented in the state was Winnsboro, which is located in the central piedmont region of South Carolina. He continued to film mill towns in the piedmont region until 1939. He returned to make one last film in the state in Fort Mill, South Carolina in May 1942. He produced twenty-six South Carolina Movies of Local People in nineteen towns: Blacksburg, Bishopville, Camden, Cheraw, Chester, Chesterfield, Fort Mill, Fountain Inn, Gaffney, Great Falls, Hartsville, Lancaster, Lockhart, Rock Hill, Timmonsville, Whitmire, Winnsboro, Woodruff, and York. Fourteen communities among this collection were not photographed by Lewis Hine or the FSA, marking them as unique visual works. Waters's representations of the five overlapping communities (Chester, Gaffney, Hartsville, Lancaster, and Rock Hill) are equally unique. His movie lens captured dynamic views of the inhabitants, social interactions, and built environments in these towns that were not possible with the still cameras of his counterparts.

The FSA photographs of Gaffney and Hartsville were made in strictly rural, farming districts of these areas. Waters, in contrast, filmed in the downtown districts, schools, and mills of the two towns. Lewis Hine's photographs of Chester, Lancaster, and Rock Hill were made approximately thirty years prior to H. Lee Waters's films of the same towns. The distinctions in time between Hine's and Waters's South Carolina views and the distinctions in settings photographed by the FSA and Waters in Gaffney and Hartsville set Waters's films apart as an exceptional collection of visual artifacts of South Carolina culture and history. Waters's films of communities in North Carolina and Virginia are likewise distinct visual artifacts of Southern history. In this sense, Waters's films transcend their status as mere entertainment relics to become significant treasures of the historical record. Moreover, these three collections of works combined offer a visual map of the cultural changes over time in these settings, documenting the move toward modernization in rural areas of the Southeast.

H. Lee Waters's Reel Record

Propelled by his belief that "Everybody went to the movies during the Great Depression" and that "not even one in 100 had seen themselves on film before," H. Lee Waters began his filmic adventure in Cooleemee, North Carolina, in July 1936.⁵ He left his photography practice under the management of his photographic colorist and wife, Mabel, and his developing and printing assistant, Gertrude Cecil. Both women served as de facto portrait photographers in Waters's absence, keeping the studio afloat independently for six years. The women handled all photographic requests, excepting only middle-class businessmen who demanded that they sit for Mr. Waters only. Waters heeded the requests of these men, scheduling their portrait sessions during his return visits to Lexington on Saturdays.⁶

Waters completed a lucrative, first-year expedition of filming and exhibition in 1936, making his way to seventeen towns in the Carolinas by the end of December. Completely conscious of the interest that his films commanded in these towns, he continued shooting and exhibiting silent, 16mm footage in this vein until his third child, Mary Elizabeth, was born in 1942. He exhibited his films at local movie theaters in the towns during this six-year run, enticing townspeople with ads of "See Yourself in the Movies" and "See Yourself as Others See You" in local newspapers. Adopting a surefire approach of securing a return on his investments from box office profits, he screened his Movies of Local People at local cinemas before the main Hollywood feature du jour. His screenings generally lasted between twenty and forty minutes, animated by lively reactions and dialogue among audience members and with musical accompaniment from 78 rpm records.⁷

There is some indication that Waters, in conjunction with theater management, also created and narrated scripts to orient audience members to the images they were seeing on the screen.⁸

Yet, these silent films invited dynamic response from the close-knit crowds who made up his audiences, suggesting that additional sound was unnecessary. It seems that once Waters hit his stride with Movies of Local People, audience dialogue became the primary sound accompaniment for these films.

This factor alone sets these filmic documents apart from the documentary photographs produced by Lewis Hine and the FSA photographers. The images of Hine and the FSA were not typically disseminated to their photographic subjects but rather to the middle and upper classes whose support for social change they encouraged. Waters's images were literally made with the people and for the people he represented on film. Consequentially, his films present a distinct set of community views in sync with the lively social tendencies in the towns he visited. These views were all the more enlivened during the vibrant premier screenings in their towns of origin.

Waters filmed towns around a 250-mile radius of his hometown of Lexington, North Carolina, including the nineteen towns he visited in South Carolina, as well as eighty-nine towns in North Carolina, nine towns in Virginia, and one town in Tennessee. His filmmaking style was largely consistent throughout the six years of his itinerant efforts, with scenes ranging from groups of mill workers on break, individual portraits of mill workers and school children, advertising sequences of local businesses, groups of school children at recess, townspeople along sidewalks and in front of shops, and trick photography sequences.⁹

His films were community themed. Although Waters did shoot scenes of individuals in motion, film historian Tom Whiteside aptly observes that "a sense of the larger community pervades" these films.¹⁰ Subjects are more often shown interacting with others than posing alone for the camera. The brief shots of individuals that do emerge from the films are generally interlaced in quick succession with candid group shots. The shots were composed around community involvement, standing the films apart from the isolated framing of individuals and families depicted in Lewis Hine's anthology of textile mill photographs and the FSA collection of photographs of rural communities in the Southeast.

Waters stopped and started his camera repeatedly during filming to capture as many faces as possible in the towns. This effect produced a series of short, two- to six- second shots, entwined with rough, straight cuts between shots. The straight cuts are accompanied by abrupt transitions between scenes. Due to the fleeting shots and sudden transitions, repeated viewings are necessary to discern tangible evidence of mill village culture during this time period. Upon repeated viewings, significant details emerge, such as the appearance in each film of at least one child wearing "a leather Charles Lindbergh-style cap."¹¹ Dress among both young girls and women includes cotton print dresses and skirts, knit blouses, and sweaters, while boys and men wear a mix of denim overalls, dress pants, button-ups, sports jackets, leather coats, and a wide array of hats. The most common hats among men are fedoras. Though ostensibly minor on the surface, these details aggregately illustrate the value of these works as living time capsules of mill village fashion and customs in the 1930s South.

Waters made films of both white and African American subjects, with a few films made solely in African American neighborhoods and screened in black-only theaters. He welcomed African American subjects and audience members, dryly remarking that "their money spent just as good as anybody else's."¹² Two such films were screened in segregated schools for an African American audience in Concord and Hillsboro, North Carolina, in 1939. This practice was exceptional for a white filmmaker in the Depression-era South and, today, represents a rare, pre–World War II window into the lives of African Americans.

Waters often filmed black neighborhoods and black schoolchildren in tandem with whites in many of the towns. He focused on a democratic mix of social classes and races, especially in communities whose theaters served racially segregated audiences via a separate entrance and balcony.

Tom Whiteside explains that Waters's ledger often contains reference to "paid black attendance: 'Colored entrance' or 'col bal'" and "it is common to find black schools and white schools on the same reel."¹³ A savvy strategist, Waters likely inquired about the presence of seating for African Americans in commercial theaters before filming, correspondingly tailoring his footage to the racial makeup of the intended audience.

His representation of both African Americans and whites in the towns he visited offers evidence of the shifting cultural trends in these communities. Lewis Hine's photographs of mill communities rarely exhibit African American inhabitants or workers in the mills. Waters's films supply evidence in the decades following Hine's visit to the Southeast that whites increasingly sought domestic help and unskilled mill labor from African Americans in neighboring districts.

In comparing the views of the built environment in Waters's films to that of Hine's mill village photographs, it is possible to discern further changes over time among the inhabitants of these communities. Hine's photographs occasionally depict families outside of their homes, surrounded by small gardens and farm animals. Waters's films, in contrast, present a commercialized view of mill villagers along the main streets and shops of the towns, suggesting a firm move away from the mill villagers' sharecropping roots. Though the towns Waters filmed were still considered rural in the thirties and forties, it is also possible to detect a striking distinction between the rural tenant farming communities photographed by the FSA during the same time period and the mill towns documented by Waters. In comparing all three sets of works by Hine, the FSA, and Waters, one sees the emergence of an increasingly modernized mill community environment in the Southeast.

Many of the unique qualities that Waters's films exhibit were made possible by the motion picture camera that he acquired in 1936, after his first year of filmmaking. He traded in his "inexpensive home movie camera" for the best 16mm motion picture camera that was marketed at the time.¹⁴ Launched in April 1933 by the Eastman Kodak Company, the Cine-Kodak Special 16mm movie camera became the trade standard among amateur movie clubs and independent filmmakers in the thirties and forties. The Cine-Kodak, for instance, was "the only 16mm silent camera approved for documentary use by Walt Disney in the 1940s."¹⁵ Several factors added to the camera's distinction: a two-lens turret; a variable-speed option allowing anywhere from eight to sixty-four frames per second; built-in mattes for special effects; an adjustable shutter allowing fades and dissolves; in-camera rewind capabilities facilitating overlapping scenes; and an accessory mask kit making possible horizontal and vertical split-screen effects.¹⁶ Characteristic of his adventurous spirit, Waters incorporated all of these diverse features into his filmmaking efforts, humoring audiences with trick photography effects and Hollywood-inspired fades and dissolves.

Waters shot almost exclusively on Agfa reversal black-and-white film during his first few years of filmmaking, occasionally switching to the newly manufactured reversal color footage Kodachrome starting in 1938. The color footage was usually spliced together with black-and-white footage of the same town and projected together during screenings.¹⁷ He shot almost exclusively on Kodachrome for the last two years of his itinerant travels in 1941 and 1942, explaining that "I felt like everybody would like color better, I knew I did."¹⁸ Like all of his filmic endeavors, Waters was able to gauge audience response to new tricks and techniques because he served as the sole projectionist at each venue. Color undoubtedly wowed the early audiences and encouraged the filmmaker to continue with Kodachrome for those final two years.

Color continues to be an important factor in the historical significance of the films today. When an NBC television news crew came to Lexington, North Carolina, in 1989 to shoot a segment on Waters's Movies of Local People phenomenon, correspondent Bob Datson was quite astonished that this solo filmmaker from the Depression-era South shot footage in color. Datson commented on his surprise to a local newspaper reporter:

In the Depression, you think in terms of black and white...When you look at the '30s in color from the middle class point of view, it's fascinating. You never think about these people being able to live their lives, being able to afford bread and smiling. It puts it in our own perspective, and not something that's far away and long ago.¹⁹

Waters's success as an itinerant filmmaker was inextricably linked to his willingness to take chances on new techniques and technologies. Breaking out of the black-and-white mold of conventional documentary photography and filmmaking is only one way that Waters secured an abiding interest in his films. The films offer telling clues about the propensity of people to continue living their lives contentedly amidst a backdrop of economic despair. Their relaxed poses, projected in color, counter the burdened black-and-white images of Dust Bowl deprivation and sparseness so frequently featured in history textbooks and historical works about the Great Depression.

The black-and-white images of the FSA determined the Zeitgeist of the Depression-era and largely informed how we perceive the Depression today. These black-and-white photographs have appeared frequently as illustrations of the Depression in textbooks and historical works about the time period. The most famous of the FSA photographers, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, shot almost exclusively on black-and-white stock in the mid- to late thirties. Their images, along with the black-and-white photographs of Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, and Ben Shahn, have been the focus of most of the contemporary scholarship, and all the attention paid to the black-and-white realist trends of the era has shaped how current audiences perceive Depression-era culture. Yet, like H. Lee Waters's motion picture filmmaking during the thirties and forties, FSA photographers such as Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, and Marion Post Wolcott spent a considerable amount of their commissioned time during the same era photographing in color. Perusal of the extensive collection of FSA photographs available through the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog reveals the extent of color photography practices among these photographers. Some 1,600 color images from the FSA are available to view and download through this Web site.

Although black-and-white images certainly predominate among the vast amount of images within the FSA collection, it is interesting, and perhaps surprising to those unfamiliar with these photographs, to see this era illustrated in color.

FSA color photographs and H. Lee Waters's color films offer an alternative view of thirties and forties American life, providing audiences with a rainbow of visual perspectives on this time, filtered through Kodachrome film.

Though many of the studies of FSA photographs have focused solely on the black-and-white images, these studies have nonetheless laid the groundwork for continued debate, analysis, and an ever-broadening understanding of documentary works. In his seminal work Documentary Expression and Thirties America, historian William Stott finds James Agee and Walker Evans's 1941 documentary book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to be superior to Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White's 1937 documentary book You Have Seen Their Faces. Agee and Evans's book was originally commissioned by Fortune magazine as part of the Life and Circumstances series. Stott contends that Agee and Evans took great pains to "dignify the tenant farmers and to insist that they were, in all important respects, as worthy and precious as any Fortune reader."²⁰ Allowing his subjects leeway to compose themselves of their own free will for the camera, Walker Evans's photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men returned to his subjects "a dignity that welfare workers, radicals, social scientists, propagandists, the media, and liberals of all stripes have too often taken away...He makes his audience respect, not pity, them."²¹

The same air of respect, resiliency, and dignity that emanates from the subjects in James Agee and Walker Evans's documentary book is evident among the subjects portrayed in Waters's Movies of Local People. Waters's images reveal rural workers in the context of their daily work routines, casual conversations, fleeting interludes, and the general minutiae of their everyday lives, which render them as complete human beings. Waters's subjects are additionally presented within the context of their communities, which stand them apart from the air of isolation that reverberates from many of the FSA photographs. The community ties evident in Waters's films created a safety net among the many farming and working-class districts that persevered in the early twentieth century. Waters's representation of communal and familial solidarity is generally consistent with the current scholarship on both farm tenancy communities and mill villages throughout much of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. Authors of the study on cotton mill culture, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, explain that these communities' "survival rested squarely on a broader interdependence of kith and kin."²²

Consistent with this communal tendency in mill villages and farming communities, Waters sought out groups rather than isolated individuals for his films. His vision as a filmmaker and photographer was largely based on his own attachment to the community cohesiveness prevalent in small mill villages. Throughout the breadth of his portrait photography career in Lexington, North Carolina, long before his foray into motion pictures, he was attuned to snapping views of a wide variety of community inhabitants. He took photographs of whites and African Americans, adults and children, the physically healthy and the handicapped, at community events and along the Main Street of Lexington. His attachment to small communities is further evident among his thousands of still photographs housed at the Davidson County Historical Museum in Lexington. Waters donated several prints of his beloved Erlanger Cotton Mill and mill village to the museum. One print bears Waters's handwritten caption, "The Village Beautiful," attesting to his veneration of small mill communities.

Waters also relied heavily on the profits he received from the factory-dominated commercial theaters in the small towns he filmed. Unlike the FSA photographers who held security in their government-funded posts and could therefore bring attention to social ills without fear of reprisal, Waters worked as an independent cameraman who would have risked his itinerant trade by exposing questionable practices and racial injustices in the mills and towns he visited. Waters lacked the investigative tendencies of the FSA photographers. Movies of Local People are nonpartisan in their treatment of subjects, aligning them more closely with home movie footage from this time period. Home movies typically bear the stamp of the personal and the discreet rather than the broadly political and social. Waters extended the personal to the community, fashioning the recognizable images among intimate viewers of home movies on a grand scale in commercial theaters.

Great Falls, South Carolina: A Case Study

After viewing some of Waters's Movies of Local People in the 1980s, film historian Tom Whiteside began a dialogue with Waters (still living and active in still photography work at the time) about his filmmaking endeavors of the 1930s and 1940s. With Waters's approval, Whiteside embarked on a decade-long exposition of his itinerant filmmaking practices. Following the attention that Whiteside brought to Movies of Local People in the 1980s, the majority of the films have been identified and traced to various locales. The films are currently distributed among archives and individual collectors in the Carolinas and Tennessee. The University of South Carolina's Newsfilm Library serves as the custodian for three of Waters's South Carolina films. These reels include footage of Union, South Carolina (1937); Chester, South Carolina (1937); and Great Falls, South Carolina (1938).

The Great Falls footage is particularly compelling due to the amount of footage that survives and the distinct history of this small town. This footage includes approximately three minutes of interior classroom footage at the local public schools and approximately two minutes and thirty seconds of interior mill scenes. The classroom footage exhibits classes segregated by gender, as well as coed classes. The interior mill sequences show a variety of assembly line work areas. Of particular note are scenes showing African American men working in an out-of-doors area of the mill, presumably in an unskilled section of the plant. These scenes reiterate the changes in work culture and the larger mill village environment that emerged in the thirty years since Lewis Hine had visited the neighboring towns of Chester and Lancaster. Tom Whiteside explains that "rarely are there scenes inside a school classroom or a factory" among Waters's movies.²³ Several factors undoubtedly account for the limited scenes in mills, but the most likely reason is the controversy over textile mill conditions in the South during much of the early twentieth century.

By the 1920s, poor working conditions in Southern mills and an impending economic depression turned many mill hands to organized labor. Social activities were strictly controlled by the watchful eye of mill managers and owners, but union activity nonetheless peaked now and again in discrete communities throughout Southern states during the 1920s. Though never reaching the impact or proportion of union activity in Northern industries, Southern mill workers surprisingly found latitude to organize strikes against their employers. Strikes during the 1920s, however, were typically not well organized and were quickly dispersed by mill operatives due to the isolation of most mill villages and the ubiquity of mill hegemony in these communities.

By 1934, with the failed promise in the South of the National Recovery Administration's (NRA) commitment to fair wages, reduced hours, and the right of workers to organize, 400,000 mill workers collectively led a strike in several Southern communities throughout the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama to demand improved wages and working conditions. The strike lasted three weeks during September 1934. The strike ended to the advantage of mill owners, aided by the intimidation of the National Guard in several communities and manager-led coercion of nonstriking workers to take up arms against their striking fellow employees. The strike officially ended on 22 September 1934, with seven mill workers slain by gunfire at the Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina.²⁴ Thereafter, workers identified as former union members were blacklisted and repeatedly refused work at textile mills throughout the South for several years after the General Textile Strike of 1934.

Still reeling from the wounds of the General Textile Strike, it is likely that many mill communities, and particularly mill owners, would have refused H. Lee Waters the courtesy of filming inside the mills during the 1936 to 1942 period. So, why was he allowed to film inside the mills in Great Falls, South Carolina? The most likely explanation was that his reputation as an apolitical filmmaker preceded him to the town. His lighthearted treatment of subjects, which refrained from challenging industry-sponsored race and class divisions in these towns, no doubt made mill management amenable to his filmmaking and exhibition strategies. Management likely also viewed his approach to filming as a positive marketing opportunity for the mills and so granted Waters unrestricted access to mill work areas.

Demographically and developmentally, Great Falls is illustrative of the many mill communities that Waters filmed. During the thirties and forties, Great Falls existed as an economically homogeneous enclave driven by the entrepreneurial interests of mill industrialists. The mill existed as the center of community life, both in terms of providing the structure and fabric for familial and social camaraderie in the mill villages and in determining the economic character and direction for enterprise in the town.

Small mill towns were especially attractive to Waters, both in terms of his sense of self and his career. He once stated that a town with "about 15,000 to 18,000 was ideal."²⁵ He appreciated the solidarity that intimate communities engendered because it resonated with his mill village upbringing and because it secured a steady stream of subjects and patrons for his films. Word of mouth in small communities afforded Waters broad access to community residents, which also boosted attendance at the local theater.

The characteristics of Great Falls in 1938 were consistent with Waters's goals as a filmmaker and exhibitor. In fact, the town was actually smaller than his ideal of 15,000 to 18,000 residents. Great Falls is situated in the Southeastern corner of Chester County, thirty-nine miles north of the state capitol of Columbia, South Carolina, and forty-four miles south of the nearest major city of Charlotte. The Population and Economy of Great Falls S.C., prepared by the South Carolina Community Planning Division in 1971, reports that "in Chester County since 1930 the constant out-migration of persons in almost all age groups, and the rapid loss of population in the productive age groups between 15 and 44 years, may be related in great measure to the lack of diversity of economic opportunity in the County...the area suffers from continued and substantial losses in its younger and most productive age groups."²⁶ This excerpt illustrates the amount of control that mill proprietors wielded over the local economy in Great Falls and Chester County, discouraging competitive enterprise that may have otherwise secured employment for the younger population.

The town of Great Falls, South Carolina, was incorporated by the Republic Cotton Mill Company in 1910. North Carolina tobacco magnate and namesake to Duke University James Buchanan (Buck) Duke ordered the construction of three Republic Cotton Mills, Mill no. 1, Mill no. 2, and Mill no. 3, in 1910, 1917, and 1923, respectively. Construction of the mills capitalized on the prior construction of the Southern Power hydroelectric station and dam built on the Catawba River in 1907.²⁷ These mills gave rise to the surrounding town through the employment of 1,600 workers. Mirroring many small mill towns in the South, the Republic Mills owned virtually all enterprise in the town. The mill company owned not only the banks, the post office, the church, the cemetery, and schools but also the business district in the town. Competitive businesses were deterred in the business district for fears of declining profits and weakened mill hegemony.

Through the medium of his mill superintendents, James B. Duke circulated the myth that the mill was the only true salvation for social, spiritual, and economic fulfillment for workers. Duke was so successful at promoting this myth that "when a small section began to build up on the outskirts of the village, the folks of Great Falls resented it. The section was referred to uncomplimentary [sic] as 'Flop Eye,' which became the eternal scapegoat for all the community's wrongs, responsible or not."²⁸ This inherent distrust of those seeking to compete with the mill establishment was characteristic of the town throughout much of its development. This distrust was somewhat eased in 1946 when mill ownership was transferred from James B. Duke to J. P. Stevens and Co., Inc., eight years after H. Lee Waters filmed and exhibited his Movies of Local People footage.

Although J. P. Stevens loosened the reins over economic enterprise in the business district, large-scale industries were still dissuaded from setting up operations in Great Falls. Due to this lack of industrial diversity in the town and the subsequent market decline for textile production in the South, Great Falls has suffered significant population decline. In 1982, J.P. Stevens announced that the mills would be closed permanently, leading to the layoff of 1,100 workers in the town.²⁹ The town's population decreased more than 8 percent during the 1990s.³⁰ This trend is not limited to Great Falls but is characteristic of many of the small Southern mill towns that Waters filmed, towns that have experienced widespread mill closings and blighted economies since the latter half of the twentieth century.

Yet, the close-knit camaraderie in Great Falls, which was a product of this isolated mill village environment, served Waters's purposes quite well. Communal cohesion created an atmosphere that fostered positive reception of his unimposing style of filmmaking. Similar "see yourself in the movies" productions existed during the Depression in places such as Nebraska and New England, as well as in South Carolina, but such films were modeled after a Hollywood narrative style of filmmaking, marked by the recruitment of local people to "act" in screenplays adapted from mainstream productions.³¹ Venturing into fictional film territory would have greatly complicated Waters's filmmaking business, arousing suspicion of ulterior motives among mill management, as well as costing extra time and resources required to formulate a script and recruit local actors.

Movies of Local People are distinct in their actuality views of working class townspeople, school children, and community interactions, which were typically passed over in other itinerant productions. These views are also set apart from the isolated subjects and settings in Lewis Hine's and the FSA photographers' documentary images. Although several of Waters's films display similar scenes of mill workers and school children, he retained a greater degree of flexibility than his contemporaries as he entered the towns, preparing simply to focus his camera on "street scenes, candid shots, you know, children in the playground, people coming out of the factories after work."³² His propensity for capturing these images was the result of a candid style borrowed from his studio photography work. He frequently ventured outside of his studio to collect unexpected shots of people on the sidewalks as they passed by his building. Similarly, Waters explained that the candid moments captured in his movies were the result of filming "people walking along and [who] weren't expecting to see a movie camera."³³ His candid filmmaking style echoes the motto of Dziga Vertov: life caught unawares.

H. Lee Waters and The Uprising of '34

A documentary film by George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock, The Uprising of '34 (1995) recounts the history of the General Textile Strike of 1934. Originally broadcast on public television in 1995, this film tells the story of the strike that involved the walkout of 400,000 textile mill workers throughout the United States. A continuing silence about the event has pervaded Southern society and the nation at large, but Stoney and Helfand successfully identified a handful of surviving witnesses and their descendants willing to speak about the strike on camera. The film is driven by interviews with these witnesses and descendants, intermixed with still and moving images from the 1930s.

The historical images in the documentary include still photographs depicting strikers, industrial and newsreel footage of organized workers and national guardsmen in striking communities, and H. Lee Waters's actuality footage of Southern mill communities from the thirties and forties. Waters's footage is incorporated intermittently throughout the documentary in short segments, illustrating interviewees' testimonies about mill conditions prior to the 1934 strike. The Uprising of '34 is eighty-seven minutes long and has a three-act narrative structure. The first act recounts conditions in the mills in the years preceding the strike, the second act chronicles the participants' initial faith and ultimate disappointment in Roosevelt's New Deal National Recovery Act, and the third act delivers participants' perspectives on the strike and its aftermath. The three sections are interlaced with interview testimonies blended with archival stills, newsreels, and actuality footage. The first two sections of the film are heavily infused with selective footage from the Movies of Local People collection.³⁴ The third section relies mostly on period newsreel clips and photographs of strikers as illustrations of interviewees' recollections of the strike. The filmmakers close their film with interview testimonies about the status of unions in the Southeast in the years after the strike, once again incorporating H. Lee Waters's footage as historical evidence.

The following towns (in order of appearance in the film) serve as the focal settings of striking communities in The Uprising of '34. The towns in italics represent those also filmed by H. Lee Waters, after 1934: Gaston County, NC; Belmont, NC; Honea Path, SC; Kannapolis, NC; Newnan, GA; Gastonia, NC; Ranlo, NC; Spencer Mountain, NC; Columbus, GA; Birmingham, AL; Gadsden, AL; Atlanta, GA; Concord, NC; Greenville, SC; Graham, NC; Knoxville, TN; Rock Hill, SC; Cooleemee, NC; Chester, SC; Spartanburg County, SC; Pacolet, SC; Hogansville, GA; Guntersville, AL; Greenwood, SC; Opelika, AL; LaGrange, GA; and Macon, GA. Only seven of the twenty-seven towns examined in Uprising were filmed by Waters between 1936 and 1942. Yet, the filmmakers incorporated a number of diverse clips from Movies of Local People within the first two-thirds of the film. These clips are interwoven among interviews with Carolinians, Georgians, and Alabamians, even though Waters did not film in Georgia and Alabama during his six-year itinerant trade.

Instead of intentionally misleading viewers by pitting discrete interview segments about individual mill towns against Waters's footage of other communities, however, the filmmakers use Movies of Local People clips in a relatively nondescript, nondeceptive way. The clips are not incorporated into the film to literally represent each individual community but to represent typical mill communities in the Southeast. Similarly, the breadth of oral history interviews are not incorporated to represent individual mill communities but rather the overall mill conditions in the piedmont South as a whole. The various Waters clips, along with the oral history interviews, overlap to produce an aggregated illustration of Southern mill town life. This aggregated depiction is illustrative of the systematic nature of Waters's mill town movies, confirming their primary research value. The incorporation of Waters's footage in this manner represents a compelling use of these films as historical evidence and speaks to the uniqueness of these artifacts in conveying meaning about a particular time and region to present-day viewers.

The Uprising of '34 successfully balances an accessible documentary style with overtones of radical sentiments. During its original television broadcast the film promoted healing among former striking communities and facilitated community dialogue and activist efforts. The film widely engaged community participants and an active viewership in the South, aligning it closely with H. Lee Waters's itinerant filmmaking and exhibition strategies. Waters encouraged community involvement in his Movies of Local People productions, in terms of his inclusiveness of diverse subjects in the films and of audience members in the theaters. Likewise, Stoney, Helfand, and Rostock were receptive to a diverse range of interview subjects from the Southeast and audience members throughout the United States. Although their thematic aims were quite different, both Waters and the Uprising team crossed racial and class divisions in Southern piedmont communities to seek out a democratic mix of participants.

Other parallels between these filmmakers exist. Stoney, Helfand, and Rostock included segments of H. Lee Waters's Great Falls and Union, South Carolina, footage in Uprising. Reports of strike activity at the three Republic Cotton Mills in Great Falls and at the two Lockhart Mills in Union appeared in the local newspaper, The Chester News, on September 4, 1934.³⁵ Both the Republic Mills and the Lockhart Mills were shut down due to worker walkouts during the three-week strike in September 1934. Waters filmed these mills three to four years following the strike, in 1937 and 1938. Clips from these two towns are among the footage that the Uprising team worked into their storyline. Whether or not Stoney, Helfand, and Rostock knowingly chose Movies of Local People footage of towns that they knew were directly connected to the General Textile Strike of 1934 is unclear. Correspondingly, whether or not Waters consciously visited towns in which workers joined the strike a few years prior to his filming is uncertain. Whether knowingly selected or not, however, the presence of Waters's clips from mill towns that chose to strike in 1934 in this documentary represents a hidden parallel between Movies of Local People and The Uprising of '34.

Although the times and places explored in Uprising and in Waters's films do not conclusively match up, clips from his films ultimately function in Uprising in a way that is amenable to Waters's own career as a filmmaker. The parallels between Waters's community-inspired, inclusive filmmaking and exhibition style and the Uprising team's similarly inclusive strategies reveal these works to be more aligned than a superficial reading may suggest. In addition, Stoney, Helfand, and Rostock did not use the Waters's footage in a deceptive or manipulative way. The footage does not engender sentimentality or misrepresentation in a manner that would lead viewers to reach false conclusions about Southern mill village life in the 1930s. Rather, Waters's footage is used responsibly as a general illustration of 1930s mill town life. The filmmakers of The Uprising of '34 produced an engaging, healing, and motivational exploration of the failed strike and its ensuing consequences on labor unionizing in the South. They were able to achieve this with the aid of several discrete Movies of Local People clips from the Carolinas. The lack of additional visual documentation of this time and region in the South further affirms the value of H. Lee Waters's filmic legacy.

Conclusion

The films that H. Lee Waters produced and presented over a span of six years are rare but neglected historical documents that offer evidence of mill village life in the Depression-era South. Waters's films have transcended their original status as products for entertainment to become historical treasures worthy of attention from archivists, historians, film preservationists, filmmakers, and curators. These films offer insight about rural culture in the Southeast in addition to the visual evidence procured by Lewis Hine and the FSA photographers.

Waters stopped filming his Movies of Local People in 1942 with the beginning of American involvement in World War II. Soldiers scheduled to depart to military bases for the war effort were overwhelming Waters's photography studio by mid-1942. With the lure of this increased business, Waters returned home to Lexington full time to make portraits of soldiers for their families. His third child, Mary Elizabeth, was also born in 1942, and he made a concerted effort to "stay home with her, watch her grow up."³⁶ He continued to make portraits, commercial prints, and candid images as a still photographer in the decades following. He also offered restoration services to clients with old or damaged prints. Waters maintained an interest in motion pictures, however, purchasing prints of commercial features from distributors and screening these films for local audiences in Lexington. He screened these films at his studio, as well as on the sides of buildings on Main Street. His studio also served as a rental store for these prints during the fifties and sixties.

Waters screened his Movies of Local People of Lexington frequently, always to the delight of town residents eager to see themselves, their town, and their friends and relatives reproduced on screen. In the 1960s, he also returned to many of the towns he visited before the war to rescreen his local films in theaters, often finding the same cinema owners and operators running the show. These efforts gained the interests of local historical societies and civic groups. Waters began to sell his footage to interested parties leading to their dispersal among the North Carolina State Archives, the Duke University Archives, the South Carolina State Museum, the University of South Carolina Newsfilm Library, and private collectors. While "people just flocked" to these second-generation screenings of the 1960s, Waters's Movies of Local People have only recently begun to generate widespread recognition.³⁷

A resurgent interest in amateur and itinerant film productions resurfaced with the advent of the University of South Carolina's Orphan Film Symposium in 1999. Thanks to this renewed interest in ephemeral footage, Waters's films experienced the long-awaited recognition that film historian Tom Whiteside championed in the 1980s. The Symposium was launched as a vehicle for the exhibition and examination of films peripheral to the mainstream movie market. On the wave of this resurgence, Whiteside's prior studies of the Movies of Local People phenomenon came into prominence. With the support of orphan film enthusiasts and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Tom Whiteside and visual materials archivist Karen Glynn from Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library launched large-scale efforts to collect and preserve Waters's North Carolina films. The preservation efforts have since expanded to both South Carolina and Tennessee, where prints of Waters's films from these states have been rediscovered after years of disuse.

Following the increasing interest in these films and similar "town portrait" productions, the National Film Registry added Waters's Kannapolis, North Carolina, footage to its 2004 list of motion pictures deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically" significant, stressing that the "surviving footage of the towns and its [sic] people often became the sole record of these cultural enclaves."³⁸

The newfound interest in these films is encouraging. The attention paid to Waters's work will inspire researchers to mine this footage for its weatlh of historical detail. H. Lee Waters died in 1997 at the age of ninety-five, but his two surviving children, Tom Waters and Mary Elizabeth Spaulding, continue to encourage interest in their father's career and his extensive legacy of photographs, films, and associated documentation and ephemera. This legacy, of course, includes his 252 Movies of Local People, which offer original insight into mill village life and working-class culture of the 1930s and 1940s. His films both defy traditional visual evidence of the period and complement dense studies of mill village culture of the thirties. In Tom Whiteside's words, Movies of Local People offer "a silent body of oral history,"³⁹ equipped with images that facilitate a broader understanding of the past. The images may also facilitate understanding of our present by providing important clues about the changing terrain of Southern communities in this postindustrial era. With many of the Main Street districts that Waters's filmed nearly seventy years ago now reduced largely to silence and inactivity, historical perspective about the transformations of these communities propelled by the visual evidence of Waters's films is overdue.