American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations

INTRODUCTION: Movies and the 1910s

I N T R O D U C T I O N Movies and the 1910s BEN SINGER AND CHARLIE KEIL ■■■■■■■■■■ The Birth of a (Modern) Nation The 1910s represents a turning point for American society, a period that saw many of the key transformations that helped shape the United States into a modern nation. By the decade’s close, America’s global supremacy as a supplier of commercial goods was secured, in part due to the disruptions caused by World War I. Progressivism, the dominant political movement of the era, guided social policy and legislation with the goal of taming the mayhem of unchecked modernization. An enhanced sense of American identity was promoted by the spread of national distribution and communication networks that disseminated everything from mass circulation magazines to nationally branded consumer items, trends and fads like the wristwatch, the Raggedy Ann doll, and the Ouija board, and—of particular significance for a shared notion of Americanism—the movies. A host of new products, from Oreo cookies to the Frigidaire and the Model T, demonstrated how technological innovation continued to affect daily life. The horrors of World War I, the first highly technologized war, underscored that fact in a grim way. Liberalization within the social sphere brought the introduction of Planned Parenthood and the nation’s first no-fault divorce law (in Nevada). In popular culture, ragtime music, the fox-trot dance craze, and lavish revues like the Ziegfeld Follies signaled the weakening grip of Protestant moral austerity and the growing importance of amusements emphasizing stimulation and fun. In the realm of high culture, American artists in various fields participated in the modernist experiment, with figures as diverse as painter Joseph Stella and writers Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein redefining the boundaries of aesthetic expression. Stein, tellingly, related her stylistic innovations to a quintessentially modern and American mode of constant change encapsulated in the moviegoing experience. If the movies were indeed representative of American modernity during this decade, it was arguably the ever-changing nature of motion pictures and 1 the rapid transfiguration of the industry creating them that capture most vividly their representative quality. For many, the image that comes to mind when thinking about America at this time is of teeming masses and traffic jams in Lower Manhattan or Chicago’s Loop. Such pictures convey the strikingly modern experiential milieu of at least some portion of the population. It is important to bear in mind, however, that most Americans still lived in distinctly quieter places. The country’s population in the 1910s was one-third of its current size (around 100 million versus 300 million) and, while urbanization was escalating , America remained a predominantly rural society. Quantifying population distribution is complicated due to idiosyncrasies and changes in the categories and methodologies employed by the census bureau, but as a rough approximation one can say that in this period about 60 percent of Americans lived in small towns or rural areas. One person in three worked on a farm, compared with one person in fifty today. Only about one person in four or five lived in a major city (that is, one of the twenty to twenty-five cities with populations over a quarter million). Given the rural majority, what justifies emphasizing modernization as the keynote of the 1910s? One answer would be that all cultures have centers and peripheries, and it is invariably the centers—hotbeds of expression , innovation, industry, commerce, politics, and civil society—that define an age and rightly attract historical attention. A more compelling answer, the one that informs this volume, is that the 1910s was a time when the center reached into the periphery on an unprecedented scale, due to new technologies and systems of transportation, communication, and distribution. The boundaries between urban and rural America became less distinct. An urban national culture infiltrated the hinterlands as never before, rendering the periphery’s consciousness of and contact with the cultural center more extensive and palpable than in previous decades. With ever-expanding transportation networks and the emergence of mass production , mass marketing, and mass communications (especially the cinema), American society became more integrated, more interconnected, and more dynamic in its circulation of goods, images, ideas, and people. This is not to suggest that a rural/urban divide no longer existed; smalltown America was largely buffered from the sensory and heterosocial intensity of the nation’s metropolitan centers, and even a casual glance at the period...