Americanizing the Movies and "Movie-Mad" Audiences, 1910-1914

Notes

Abbreviations For the purposes of space, the following acronyms are used for frequently referenced magazine and newspaper sources from the period as well as film archives. Trade Press notes 257 B Billboard Bio Bioscope CJ Ciné-Journal FI Film Index M Motography MPN Motion Picture News MPSN Motion Picture Story Magazine MPW Moving Picture World N Nickelodeon NYDM New York Dramatic Mirror NYMT New York Morning Telegraph PM Photoplay Magazine V Variety Newspapers BA Boston American BJ Boston Journal BP Boston Post BS Baltimore Sun CC Cleveland Citizen CG Cleveland Gazette CL Cleveland Leader CN Canton News-Democrat CR Canton Repository CRR Cedar Rapids Republican CT Chicago Tribune DFP Detroit Free Press DMN Des Moines News DMRL Des Moines Register and Leader DMT Des Moines Tribune E L’Etoile (Lowell) LAT Los Angeles Times LCC Lowell Courier-Citizen LDI Lynn Daily Item LE Lawrence Eagle LoST Lowell Sunday Telegram LS Lawrence Sun LT Lawrence Tribune LyST Lynn Sunday Telegram MJ Minneapolis Journal MT Minneapolis Tribune NCH New Castle Herald NYT New York Times Introduction 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 1–7, 42–43. 2. Ibid., 25, 44–45. 3. Ibid., 202–3. Awareness of the challenge offered by the United States’ unusually diverse population sometimes cropped up in the US trade press, as in this quote: “No other country on the globe has as great a number of varied nationalities, creeds, and sects in touch with each other, and purveyors of amusements cater to all of them”—“Observations by Our Man About Town,” MPW (15 August 1914), 949. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the concept of an “imagined community of nationality” has reemerged to become unusually conflicted, exacerbated by the current US government’s promotion of an internal “culture of fear” in the “war on terrorism” (specifically, in the 2004 presidential election) and its divisive, arrogantly misguided, deceptive war on/in Iraq. 4. Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1879–1914,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 279. 5. See especially Philip Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization,” in Stephen Thernstrom, ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 38–47. 6. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 68. 7. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class, Politics, and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990), 10. 8. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 41, 68. 9. Ibid., 75. 10. See also Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 11. Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization,” 39. 258 notes to pages 3–4 PP Pittsburgh Press PT Pawtucket Times RDC Rochester Democrat and Chronicle RH Rochester Herald SFC San Francisco Chronicle SLR St. Louis Republic SLT St. Louis Times SPN St. Paul News SPPP St. Paul Pioneer Press TB Toledo Blade TNB Toledo News-Bee TUL Toledo Union Leader WS Washington Star YV Youngstown Vindicator Archives AMPAS Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences GEH George Eastman House LoC Library of Congress MoMA Museum of Modern Art NFM Nederlands Film Museum NFTVA National Film/Television Archive 12. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Re-inventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), 339–44. In 1929, Will Hays gave a concise, early summary of Hansen’s point: “America is in a very literal sense the world-state. All races, all creeds, all the manners of men that exist on the globe, are to be found here—working, sharing and developing side by side in a reasonable degree of understanding and friendship”—see Hays, Moving Pictures: An Outline of the History and Achievement of the Screen from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Present Day (New York: Doubleday , Doran, 1929), 506. 13. See, for instance, Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Janet Staiger, Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema (Minneapolis...