Hollywood’s Hidden History

It is always cheering to consider the myths that America constructs about itself. There is the enduring myth of innocence, for example, designed to show that our nation is a kind of renewable virgin, unhappily deflowered from time to time by scandal (Black Sox, “Quiz Show” or Watergate), but always bravely springing back to reassert her virtue. Then there is the myth that we are a classless society or, rather, that we are all (well, almost all) one contented class, occupying a comfortable center. Only five years ago, reality being no match for delusion, a poll showed that 93% of Americans thought they were middle-class.

This perception was not always the case, and in Steven J. Ross’ dense and valuable book “Working-Class Hollywood,” he shows that in the early part of this century, class consciousness as well as class conflict were very much on the American mind, and were expressed often and vehemently in the movies. “Audiences saw hundreds of movies that dealt with strikes, union organizing and socialist efforts to overthrow American capitalism,” Ross writes. “Workers and radicals made movies that challenged the dominant political ideals of the day. . . . [F]rightened that radicalism on the screen might inspire radicalism off the screen, censors and government authorities fought to keep these images out of American theaters.”

We all know how that fight came out. Today, there are few American movies that challenge anything at all, except possibly our belief in reason. But what Ross, who teaches history at USC, deals with is a period of turbulent film creativity that extended from the start of the century until after World War I. It is a period already explored by Kevin Brownlow, the indispensable British film historian, whose “Beyond the Mask of Innocence” showed the richness and diversity of these social films.

But Ross is a sociologist as much as a historian, and he shines a provocative cultural light on the period. He believes “class is a cultural as much as an economic formation,” and he is interested in movies as a language “that taught audiences, especially newly arrived immigrants, what it meant to dress, to think and to act like the members of a particular class.” He claims “a significant number” of films produced before the war dealt with the lives of this audience. A few film historians dispute this, but Ross thinks they’re wrong. He is polite about this. One of the satisfactions in reading “Working-Class Hollywood” is that the author is as happily polemical as his subjects and not afraid to take sides. This gives his impressively researched and annotated book a scrappy, personal tone that is refreshing to find in a work of such academic weight.

His book is divided into four parts: how silent filmmakers portrayed working people and their struggles; how the first movement of worker films developed, thrived and then expired; how silent movies played a critical role in shaping our modern class identities; and how the emergence of Hollywood screwed all this up. He does not believe it was inevitable that Hollywood became “the fantasy factory it is today.” There were fierce battles fought from 1900 to 1930 to define the kinds of subjects and images that audiences would be allowed to see. Filmmakers fought against an increasingly monopolistic movie industry, against federal agencies, against local and state censors. They fought for a vision of films that depicted working people not simply as passive victims or observers, but as active participants in their lives, makers of their own destiny. There was an ideological world to win. Capitalists, not the workers, won it, but not without the kind of fight that Ross believes can still be waged today.

At first, these social films were short, cheap and easy to make. The stories were simple. Virtue was not necessarily rewarded. “The Ghetto Seamstress” showed young immigrant women beaten down by a cruel piecework system. In “Simple Charity,” an elderly cigar maker was fired because he couldn’t work fast enough. Like other movies, they were shown in storefronts called “nickel dumps.” Then, as the audience increased, they could be seen in converted vaudeville houses and eventually in theaters built for movies. They were silent films, of course, but only the screen was silent. The audiences were not: “Life inside these theaters was filled with talking, yelling, fighting, singing and lots of laughter. . . . [A]udience interaction was as much a part of the moviegoing experience as the movies themselves.” D.W. Griffith made movies for this audience, and so did Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and William S. Hart, the cowboy star. So did the movie pioneer, William Fox, who called himself “a talking socialist” before he got rich. So did women like Lois Weber, who had been a social worker and street-corner evangelist until realizing she could spread her message more widely through film. She wrote and directed movies promoting birth control, attacking capital punishment and calling for stricter child-labor laws.

Films were made dealing with prostitution, adultery, child abuse, sweatshops, abortion, revolution, capitalism, socialism, political corruption, worker exploitation, alcoholism, pederasty, racism and sexism; nothing was taboo. They were made by individuals, unions, corporations, political parties, government agencies and anyone else who could put together a camera and a few dollars. Most were out to prove a point. They pulled no punches. Whether the filmmakers knew it or not, they were helping mold the political consciousness of a good part of the country.

Until World War I, their audiences were mostly working-class people, many of them immigrants. The films prepared them for an America not only rich in promise but also red in tooth and claw. It is startling to see how many films in those days were made not only to entertain and make money but to expose and change. The director King Vidor, a premature Oliver Stone, set the tone in his diary of 1914: “I see the Hand of Fate calling me to reform the world. I will start with the Movies.” He ended up with “Duel in the Sun,” but in between he made “The Big Parade,” “The Crowd” and “Our Daily Bread.”

The postwar period brought an end to all this. Movies became increasingly conservative in their take on class conflict and class relations. Ross gives four reasons (he likes things in fours): the growth of studios and the development of the studio system; a mounting Red scare after the birth of the Soviet Union (a rehearsal for what came 30 years later); political pressure on filmmakers by federal agencies and state censors; and a heightened and therefore equally scary labor militancy.

Movies grew longer and more expensive to make. They could no longer be financed by the filmmakers themselves. A studio electrician, Patrick Murphy of the Electrical Workers Union, had an idea. There were 1,500 labor “temples” in the nation, auditoriums that could be turned into movie theaters. Organized labor would then have the largest exhibition chain in the country. It could affect the kinds of films being made. The idea was heady and maybe even practical, but it went nowhere. Labor had too many other fish to fry.

Paramount’s Adolph Zukor, owning only one studio, went to the investment house of Kuhn, Loeb, which underwrote a $10-million stock offering. Fox got its money from Prudential Life Insurance. Samuel Goldwyn got his from the DuPonts, who sat on his board of directors, along with Chase National Bank, Central Union Trust and United Cigar Stores. Not everyone was happy, not even some conservatives. “When we operated on picture money, there was a joy in the industry,” lamented Cecil B. De Mille. “When we operated on Wall Street money, there was grief in the industry.” Grief or not, it was the way the country was going, and movies went along.

It would be unpatriotic to ask a studio beholden to Wall Street to tout socialism. And there were certainly a lot of Reds running around after World War I, although less after the period’s Palmer raids that deported any suspicious immigrant the government could get its hands on. Still, the postwar years saw open season on most of the liberal or radical ideas that permeated films before the war, whether they were overtly political or simply humanitarian. Censors were springing up like overwrought weeds. Pennsylvania censors demanded drastic changes in Hart’s “The Whistle,” which exposed unsafe conditions in textile mills. Various state censors also ordered newsreel companies like Fox and Pathe and even Hearst to cut scenes of labor agitation because “they tend to incite riot and disorder.” Footage deemed sympathetic to striking coal miners was cut entirely in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois and West Virginia.

Great movie palaces were being built to show the new, expensive movies, and an audience of all classes, but not of all races, was needed to fill them. In the South, the theaters that were not entirely denied to African Americans relegated them to segregated areas in the balcony. To entertain and pacify these audiences, “[l]abor-capital films that (formerly) focused on conflict between the classes were superseded by cross-class fantasy films that emphasized love and harmony among the classes.” From that time to the present, according to Ross, labor-capital films usually showed workers as easily manipulated dupes. Class conflict was the intemperate outburst of otherwise loyal Americans duped by union leaders or radicals. A few movies were sympathetic to labor, but even those “empathized with the plight of individuals, but not with their efforts at collective action.”

“What is to be done?” a certain Russian moviegoer asked almost a century ago, although he was not, in truth, asking about the movies. It is a question, though, that Ross is prepared to answer. He goes all the way back to the electrician, Patrick Murphy. “If Hollywood is afraid of going ‘working class,’ then the working class could go Hollywood.” The AFL-CIO could go into the movie business and “take a lesson from its silent-movie predecessors and produce movies that would bring labor’s message to the general public.” He even offers a way to finance this: place a $10 assessment on each member. This would immediately raise $140 million, enough to make a couple of movies, even with big stars. (There is an irony somewhere in that it would, however, not be enough to make a movie like “Titanic,” so reminiscent of silent movies both in its class-consciousness and its acting.)

It is probable that Ross’ proposal will fall on culturally deaf ears. The union movement has rarely had time or money to spend on anything except organizing and politicking. But his vision is noble and goes beyond unionism. He believes that “committed filmmakers could help replace the current politics of despair with the politics of hope, and replace the politics of pessimism with the politics of possibilities.” It is a belief that many of us share but few act upon. Ross has acted in his own way and written an important book.