Silent
Film and American Class Structure
Ross, Steven J. Working-class
Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1998)
The book I am discussing in this paper
is Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film
and the Shaping of Class in America, by Steven J. Ross. The book examines the relationship between
the fledgling American silent film industry and its primary audience of
working-class laborers throughout the first three decades of the twentieth
century and beyond.
Working-Class
Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America explored the
connection between the pro and anti-labor imagery, as well as social, economic,
and political propaganda distributed through silent films and the effect it had
on an impressionable, working class public.
Motion pictures were among the least expensive means of entertainment in
the United States during the post-WWI years and became very popular with the “middle”
and “lower” classes due to their affordability.
These groups included many recent immigrants unfamiliar with American
culture who were particularly susceptible to messages spread through this form
of entertainment.
Ross’ book gives a detailed account of
the history of the American silent film industry and the effect it had on
shaping the class structures and opinions of people in the U.S. during the
early twentieth century. The book
explains the motives behind many of the different types of propaganda,
opinions, and ideas that appeared in early motion pictures and were projected
upon audiences of the day by various political parties, businesses, and
commercial organizations, as well as the overall effect these messages and
their interpretations had on the nation as a whole.
Working-Class
Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America is largely
divided into four chronologically ordered sections that explain how the silent
film industry helped shape early American class structures. The book explores
the beginning attempts of the commercial motion picture industry to depict
working laborers in films, the rise and eventual fall of the first “worker”
movie movement, the ways in which silent films helped create the modern class
identity, and the effect that the emerging “Hollywood” studio system had on the
examples listed above.
Ross also cites in this work six basic themes
as being centrally important in his research of the silent film industry and
how it helped shape the American class system. To begin his book, Ross states
as his prime example that the depiction of class was a major concept in early silent
films, and working-class audiences could expect to see hundreds of movies
dealing with strikes, labor unions, and the attempts of everyday workers to
overthrow capitalism in America. Next, he points out that many of the early
silent movies revolved around the efforts of those workers to challenge the
ideas of well-established political parties of the day and to find ways to
improve democracy in the country. Third,
Ross explains that the government and censors during this time were afraid that
the radicalism depicted in silent films might possibly carry over into real
life, and tried to prohibit movies with radical imagery from being shown in
theaters. Fourth, the movie industry and the films themselves were shaped by
social, economic, and political pressures that directly influenced the content
of the films. Ross also asserts that these pressures were responsible for the
evolutionary course the film industry would take during the decades to
come. Finally, Ross explains that the
silent film industry played an extremely influential role in helping to shape
the predominate social identity in the United States that would eventually
become known as the “Middle Class”.
In the early years of the twentieth
century, well-paid skilled workers were quickly being replaced by non-skilled
laborers and factory workers who worked for fewer wages than had ever been the
case before. Life for these factory workers was hard and bleak, and many had
few options when it came to entertaining themselves due to their poor
wages. Vaudeville acts became popular in
the years prior to the advent of the silent film industry because the cheap
price of admission was affordable to the common worker and the acts themselves
were a well needed escape from their everyday lives. When silent films began to
become more widespread and commonplace in the 1910s, Americans flocked by the
thousands to movie theaters all over the country, particularly in the nation’s
larger cities. For the price of just a nickel or dime, the average worker could
expect to be entertained by these films for several hours a day, perhaps never
stopping to think that his or her opinions, ideals, or political associations
might, over time, become shaped and influenced by the images shown on the
screen. The typical American moviegoer during the early years of the motion
picture industry was usually of the immigrant and working classes, and
filmmakers began to steer the messages of their movies toward this demographic.
Immigrants made up a large percentage of
urban moviegoers in the silent film era and as a result many of the films from
that time dealt with the hardships and obstacles this population group had to
overcome in the United States, as well as “success stories” about those who had
grown wealthy and prosperous after moving to America. A large portion of silent films that were
produced during World War One centered on the issue of immigrant nationalism
during the War, and attempted to project a pro-American ideology onto that
target audience through the use of propaganda films. Many of these films also attempted to
determine whether those immigrants would remain loyal to their homelands or
align with the United States during the war effort.
Another central theme of silent films
directed at both immigrants and naturalized working class citizens was the
issue of acculturation and the commodification of culture between groups that
had previously been culturally segregated from each other. Movies from this era attempted to portray the
struggles and successes of immigrants as they tried to adjust to and adopt
American cultural practices and values. Films such as “Irish Rose” (1929)
celebrated intercultural marriages as a way to help immigrants acclimate into
American society. Another popular film, “The Jazz Singer” (1927) used a
different tactic, praising immigrants who resisted outside cultural pressures
and remained true to their native lands while living and working in the United
States[1]. Working and home life was equally difficulty
for the American farming and ranching families that had become settled in the
nation’s Southern and Western regions by the early 1900s and filmmakers began
to produce Westerns (movies that brought attention to the hardships of rural
life), as well. Films like these helped
create an image of sameness for Americans despite their cultural differences
and established an idea of tolerance and acceptance between American workers
and laborers that would eventually enable them to view themselves as one united
“class”, rather than many.
However, during the years between 1900
and 1930, a bitter feud existed between the “worker” filmmakers who sympathized
with the efforts of labor unions and workers’ rights organizations and the personnel
within the Hollywood studio system, federal agencies, and film censors who did
not share their views. Hollywood films,
in an attempt to gain a broader viewing audience, began instead to focus on
themes of capitalistic monetary spending as well as “cross-class harmony” films
that depicted (greatly falsified) positive personal or romantic relationships
between members of the upper class and those of the working and middle classes. Worker filmmakers struggled against the
opposition they faced from these parties by attempting to control what imagery
and political ideas audiences were able to view in “Hollywood” type working
industry films (those which used the common laborer as protagonist or romantic
interest of a person belonging to a higher class), with only partial success.
For the most part, the Hollywood movie industry would continue to exploit the
working class laborer in its films and create a false sense of “class harmony”
between wealthy and poor citizens, all the while keeping the actual worker
filmmakers and film crew unions confined largely on the outskirts of the movie
business.
Political parties and politicians also began
to recognize the value of the mass popularity of silent films as a potential
medium to spread their agendas and ideologies to an enormous percentage of the
United States’ population. Prior to the
advent of silent films, entertainment mediums such as the Vaudeville act and
the nickelodeon had not been considered to be effective platforms for political
messages. However, because a single, somewhat inexpensively produced silent
film was able to be screened in numerous cities across the country and was
likely to be viewed by thousands of Americans, a new way for political groups
to spread their messages was created.
Many luxury theaters began to emerge
after silent films began to gain a significant following in the 1910s and
throughout the 1920s. These expensive
movie theaters were as luxurious as their nickel and dime counterparts were
drab, and catered to a predominantly wealthy clientele. Despite the cost of
admission and their luxurious decorations, many of these opulent movie houses
screened the same films that were being seen by members of the lower classes in
their own theaters. Because of their accessibility and entertainment value, silent
films became a medium that both the wealthiest and most impoverished Americans
could enjoy equally, although in many cases, separately from one another. According to New York Socialist Assemblyman
Samuel Orr, theaters in the early twentieth century were the one place that all
people could go and see how much they had in common with each other, despite
their social and economic differences[2].
What
greater democratic institution exists than the movie theater? It is there where
rich and poor, young and old, men, women and children gather by the millions
everyday throughout the land to laugh together and cry together.
Working-class
Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America defines the role of the silent film as an extremely
important one regarding the shaping of class structures in the United States
during the early part of the twentieth century and continues to influence the
way Americans view class structure and society even today. I agree with Ross’ assessment of the motion
picture industry as an important influence on American society because the
medium reached an enormous amount of people during its heyday of the 1910s
through the 1930s because of its widespread availability and general popularity
with the American public of all social, political, and economic types. I
believe that silent films were in many cases vehicles for propaganda
distribution and were successful in influencing the beliefs and opinions of
their viewing audiences about a variety of subjects.
In conclusion, Working-class Hollywood: Silent Film and the
Shaping of Class in America author Steven Ross gives many convincing
examples of the ways in which class structure in the United States was created
and shaped by the early silent film industry from the turn of the century
throughout the Great Depression era. Silent
films and the pastime of movie going became something that the vast majority of
the American public could relate to from their working and home lives, and, through
this widespread and wildly popular medium, were also able to indirectly relate
to others of the same and different socioeconomic classes. This not only helped
groups such as the laborers and working classes draw together and view themselves
as one shared identity, but also created the illusion that the wealthy,
aristocratic upper class could possibly also relate to those in the lower
classes, both because of Hollywood films that depicted the two existing
together in a sense of class harmony and also because they shared the same popular
hobby: watching films.
[1]Digital
History, “Immigration and the Movies” (http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/immigration_movies.cfm)
Accessed April 3, 2011
[2]
Ross, S. Working-class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998) p.
175
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