American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations

1911: Movies and the Stability of the Institution

1911 Movies and the Stability of the Institution EILEEN BOWSER Fifty years after the Civil War, popular culture explored the deep scars in the national body from that divisive conflict that left a nation still in a search for reconciliation. Monuments to war heroes were dedicated, commemorations were held on the old battlefields, and historic battles were reenacted on the original sites. Such memorializing events established cultural traditions and enshrined tourist attractions that continue to flourish up to present times. Perhaps most impressive of all these endeavors was Francis Trevelyan Miller’s ten-volume Photographic History of the Civil War, an epic work replete with over one thousand Mathew Brady photographs. While endeavoring to heal the wounds of its own Civil War, the United States watched over its southern borders, monitoring the progress of the conflict in Mexico. The Mexican Revolution that began in November of the previous year led to the resignation of Porfirio Diaz in May and the shortlived presidency of the revolution’s leader, Francisco I. Madero, who was thrown out in December by the folk hero Emiliano Zapata, and eventually murdered by his replacement, Victoriano Huerta. American motion picture companies hurried to the border to film as much of the battles as they could to capitalize on the American public’s fascination with the turbulent events in Mexico. Kalem announced a series of Mexican war films, beginning with The Mexican Filibusterers. Images of Mexicans as “greasers” and stereotypical villains infiltrated popular culture. However concerned Americans were with Mexico, the efforts to assimilate the waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe loomed as the larger issue for the nation. As the old divisions of the Civil War seemed to be healing, the country had to deal with the absorption of great waves of newcomers: poor and unskilled, often non-English speaking, and Catholic or Jewish. The reformers of the Progressive Era sought new solutions to the problems created by the arrival of the immigrants. Because a paternalistic society under control and in good order was considered both desirable and possible in 48 this optimistic era, and good for business as well, some of the most successful businessmen and respectable members of society supported the growing number of institutions and programs dedicated to improving the lot of the poor and uneducated. Tragic events in the workplace heightened the need for greater oversight of labor practices. The most infamous of these was New York’s Triangle Waist Factory fire on 25 March that resulted in the shocking death of over a hundred young women. The executives of the company above the factory floor fled to the roof, ignoring the workers stuck below them behind locked or blocked doors. Spectators could never forget the heartrending sight of young women in billowing skirts leaping from ninth floor windows to certain death on the sidewalk below. The Triangle disaster gave strength to the labor union movement and immediately made unsafe working conditions a vital topic of concern. The working woman was a growing force in national life. In California, women won the right to vote, the sixth state to grant this right. Although the majority of accounts of the suffragette movement that appear in popular culture were comedies that mocked the movement, the heroine in a melodrama often was a strong woman taking her place in the world of labor beside men, driving cars, managing a lonely telegraph outpost, or working in the factory line. The labor movement, usually portrayed in the motion pictures from the viewpoint of management (film producers were management, after all), was nevertheless depicted in several movies from labor’s point of view: in one of the more sensational films, Reliance’s Locked Out (a lost film), the ghosts of strikers shot down by police confront the owner of the factory, who dies from the shock. The business world found supportive inspiration in efficiency expert Frederick Taylor’s seminal book on the influence of industry upon American life, The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor’s time-and-motion studies were the foundation of the assembly lines in modern factories and reinforced capitalism’s need to hold control of social forces. The scientific management principles introduced by Taylorism also infected the motion picture industry. David Hulfish published his manual Motion Picture Theater Management in an effort to bring scientific management to motion picture exhibition. The practices of the Motion Picture Trust Companies, soon copied by the Independents...