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1915: Movies and the State of the Union
- Rutgers University Press
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1915 Movies and the State of the Union LEE GRIEVESON The United States marks the completion of the Panama Canal with two international expositions in California, celebrating the remarkable technological achievement of the creation of a passage across the continent between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The expositions seek to fashion a national self-identity marked by technological advancement and a new position of hemispheric and international leadership. The canal radically reduces the time it takes to transport trade across the United States (shortening the route from coast to coast by as much as 8,000 miles and thirty days). Business and government forces use the canal to conquer South American markets, contributing significantly to the emergence of the United States as the world’s dominant economic power, and extending the influence of “the American way of life” in South American countries. (The occupation of Haiti on 3 July is further evidence of U.S. imperialist ambition .) At the expositions, in San Diego starting in January and San Francisco in March, the idealization of an American modernity of technology and commercial and governmental expansion is figured in particular through exhibits of industrial advancement. On display is a model of the canal itself and, the most popular exhibit, a replica of the recently created moving assembly line at the Ford Motor Company, which greatly speeds up production time of each new Model T. Watching the creation of an automobile from start to finish, crowds witness the new power of industrial organizations to compress time, manage and discipline the bodies of workers , and increase profits accordingly. Ford celebrates the manufacture of its one millionth Model T in October; other technological advancements this year—including notably the first transcontinental telephone call from Bell Telephone—further solidify the compression of space and time and enable the circulation of information and capital. Yet other developments threaten this image of American modernity, both at home and abroad. The excursion steamer ship The Eastland sinks in 139 Chicago in July, killing 844 people. Women march in record numbers (estimated at 40,000) in New York City to demand the rights of citizenship, responding to the rejection of a proposal in the House of Representatives and in New York State to extend the vote to women. Likewise, African Americans continue to demand an end to racist practices and representations. “Gathering clouds along the color line,” to use journalist Ray Stannard Baker’s words, play out in various arenas: protests occasioned by the film The Birth of a Nation; a sickening tide of lynching, which reaches an all-time high in this year (seventy-nine African Americans are murdered in this way; 10,000 African Americans march in New York City in July to protest this); the segregation by President Woodrow Wilson of federal government employees; the white-led celebrations when the African American boxing champion Jack Johnson is defeated in April. Xenophobia and racial violence are not directed solely at African Americans, however, as perceived racial and ethnic differences solidify more broadly throughout the nation. In August, a Jewish factory owner named Leo Frank, who had been framed for the rape and murder of a young girl, is convicted by a jury amid an environment of sensationalism and public fury, then abducted by a mob from Atlanta’s state penitentiary and lynched. Fifteen thousand people go to see the corpse. Abroad, the conflict in Europe is brought closer to the United States in May by the German sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland. Among 1,198 passengers who perish are 128 American civilians. Wilson immediately initiates a tense stand-off with Germany over its use of submarine warfare, which is seen to contravene the accepted code of war and of maritime rights. Whilst the policy of neutrality continues, debates about military preparedness flourish, leading to the resignation of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who regards Wilson’s position as one that will inevitably lead to war. Indeed, preparedness plans are proposed to Congress in December. The year sees a number of notable literary works that would become significant film adaptations in future years, such as L. Frank Baum’s The Scarecrow of Oz, John Buchan’s The Thirty-nine Steps, and Edgar Rice Burroughs ’s The Return of Tarzan. Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Genius, banned by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, tells a semiautobiographical story about a young...