From Moving Picture World, October 19, 1912. (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

Chapter Eleven

INDUSTRY

 

CHILD LABOR

“Probably no other evil of modern industrialism has had a more devastating effect upon the home and family than child labor,” said Judge Ben Lindsey.¹ But his attempt to impose Colorado’s child-labor restrictions on a local cotton mill led to the closing of the factory.² The families who depended on their children’s earnings and were now reduced to the bread line did not thank the judge for his moral rectitude. It is significant that his attempt to make a film on the subject did not succeed. Relatively few films on this most provocative of topics were produced, perhaps because of this very paradox: the children working down the mines or in the factories were usually there with the knowledge and complicity of their parents.

By 1900, with more than 1,790,000 child laborers in America, most industrial states had enacted some form of protective regulation, but few of them had enough power to be effective.³ The problem was at its worst in the South.

Carl Laemmle, president of the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, took frequent tours among small-town exhibitors, and it was while visiting the Mississippi Valley that he became aware of the widespread use of child labor. The result was a two-reeler called The Blood of the Children (1915), written by Bess Meredyth and directed by Henry MacRae.

Shot partly in a cotton gin, the film was an exposé of conditions in cotton factories, both in the South and in New England, where lint was a constant hazard to health. William Clifford played a senator ready to vote for a child labor bill, whom two mill-owners (Sherman Bainbridge and Rex de Rosselli) attempt to buy off. Overcoming his anger, the senator tells them, in a series of flashbacks, of his days as a factory employee and later owner and of the number of men, women, and children who were injured each year or who died from disease. The mill-owners are won over to his side, and they put the bribe money into a fund to support the passage of the act.⁴ Prints of the film were sent to Atlanta and New Orleans for exhibition to cotton men, many of whom admitted that the conditions shown in the film were all too true.

The fight against child labor had been initiated largely by settlement workers. In 1903, Lillian Wald put forward a proposal for a children’s bureau. President Theodore Roosevelt invited her to Washington, but nothing much happened until 1909, when Roosevelt called a White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children. Miss Wald testified before a Senate committee, comparing the treatment of children to that of pigs. A bill drafted by Wald and Florence Kelley of Hull-House eventually received President William Howard Taft’s signature in April 1912, but it achieved little. The problem persisted, and in 1920 one of the most famous settlement workers made a film on the subject.

Sophie Irene Loeb, who had been brought to the United States from Russia at the age of six, was a reformer and sociologist who, like Jane Addams, succeeded in bettering the society in which she lived.⁵ She is remembered in particular for her work in connection with child welfare. Besides books, she also wrote a film called The Woman God Sent (1920) dealing with the efforts of a young woman (Zena Keefe) and a senator to enact a law forbidding child labor in factories. It was directed by Larry Trimble.

Children forced to work at making artificial flowers: Child Labor, 1913. From Moving Picture World, January 18, 1913.

“The hammer of propaganda is skillfully wielded,” said Photoplay, “for the picture is well told and holds your interest.”⁶

The fact that child labor should still be an issue at the end of the Reform Era is an indication of the strength of the opposition. The industrialists had found an all-purpose answer to their critics; they described the issue as “a Trojan horse concealing Bolshevists, Communists, Socialists and all that traitorous and destructive brood.”⁷

Back in the 1890s reformers thought that photographs showing children at work would arouse so much sentiment that none but the most rabid capitalist would stand in the way of a Constitutional amendment. They were fortunate to acquire the services of a great photographer, Lewis Hine. As staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), he smuggled his camera into factories, risking violence from foremen and mill-owners, and produced a series of brilliant still pictures.

“Winning the confidence of the children,” wrote Robert Doty, “he would interview them while scribbling notes on a pad inside his pocket. These would be rewritten later, in a legible form.… These photographs and information formed the backbone of the publicity efforts of the National Child Labor Committee. They were used to illustrate booklets, posters, magazines and even as source material for several films.”⁸

CHILDREN WHO LABOR     One of these films was Children Who Labor (1912), made by the Edison Company in cooperation with the National Child Labor Committee and highly praised for its artistry. It featured the Flugrath sisters, later known as Viola Dana and Shirley Mason, and it was filmed in Paterson, New Jersey, and at the Bronx studio.⁹ A print survives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, confirming that a great deal of care and skill went into it. But it cannot compare with the work of Lewis Hine.

It is an unlikely but nonetheless compelling little melodrama, with good lighting and inventive art direction. The playing is unrestrained, although Viola Dana is both natural and beautiful. The film opens with a title, “The appeal of the child laborers,” and an allegorical double exposure shows the figure of Uncle Sam looming over lines of children filing into a factory beneath a lowering sky. They raise their hands beseechingly; Uncle Sam takes no notice. Over the factory appears the word “GREED.”¹⁰

John Sturgeon (left), Robert Conness (right), and Viola Dana (center). From Edison Kinetogram, London Edition, May 1, 1912. (David Robinson)

Outside the gates, an Italian (John Sturgeon) vainly tries to get work. No men are wanted; the foreman is far more interested in his daughter. Members of the NCLC endeavor to persuade Hanscomb, the factory owner (Robert Conness), to abolish the evil, but he refuses. Nor will he listen to the Italian who pleads with him when he drives up to the factory. The daughter is put to work.

Hanscomb’s wife (Miriam Nesbitt) takes a train journey with her daughter Mabel (Mason). Playing on the observation platform, the girl drops her handkerchief and steps off the train to retrieve it. The train pulls out without her. She is stranded in the town where the Italian lives, and he and his wife give her shelter. Her mother is frantic, but not even a detective can locate the child. The needy Italian reluctantly sends Mabel to the factory along with his own child (Dana). Hanscomb becomes an even more ruthless employer and expands his empire—buying another factory, the very one in which his daughter is employed. During a visit to the factory by the Hanscombs, Mabel collapses and is rushed home on a stretcher. Kindhearted Mrs. Hanscomb calls on the Italian with sustenance and discovers her daughter. The child refuses to greet her father until she has berated him for employing children. Hanscomb is converted and we see grown men taking over the work, but the film ends with a reprise of the opening scene, Uncle Sam now looking with concern at the upraised arms.

“Sincerity glows in every one of its scenes,” said Moving Picture World. “This reviewer has heard audiences receive good pictures before, but he has never heard the applause that this picture got.”¹¹

THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN      In 1912, a presidential election year, the Thanhouser studio released a film which was described as “the boldest, most timely and most effective appeal for stamping out the cruelest of all social abuses.”¹² Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate, cited it as an instance of the outrages permitted by the Taft administration, even though Taft’s signature on the Child Labor Bill was hardly dry.¹³

Thanhouser used the words of Theodore Roosevelt, who had formed the break-away Progressive party, in the advertising, suggesting he had endorsed the film: “When I plead the cause of the overworked girl in a factory, of the stunted child toiling at inhuman labor … when I protest against the unfair profit of unscrupulous and conscienceless men … I am not only fighting for the weak, I am fighting also for the strong.”¹⁴

The Cry of the Children, seen today, is a primitive film. Conceived in the direct-to-camera style of 1912, it nonetheless achieves a kind of elegiac quality through its use of the poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning¹⁵ from which it takes its title and the solemnity with which its players conduct themselves. The poem does not dictate the story, but a prologue illustrates the lines:

The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,

The young birds are chirping in the nest …

But the young, young children …

They are weeping …

In the country of the free!

The day starts before dawn at the millworkers’ home. Father wakes first, and we see him tying his boots by candlelight. The wife and two of the children are careful not to wake little Alice, who is to be kept from “the shadow of the factory.” After a meager breakfast, they go to work and are checked by the supervisor at the gate. The mill-owner and his wife leave their palatial home in a luxurious car for a tour of the factory. One glimpse is enough for the wife; she retreats, deafened by the roar of the machines.

At the end of the day, Alice takes her bucket to the stream. The owner’s wife sees her from her car and chats to her. Enchanted by her radiant good nature, she offers to adopt her, but Alice loyally refuses to leave her family.

The millworkers strike for a living wage, but the owner stands firm and, after months of privation, the workers are defeated. The owner gathers his supporters for a celebratory supper and reads them the news: STARVATION WILL SOON FORCE MILLWORKERS TO ABANDON STRIKE—Large Families Endure Heavy Hardships—Children Cry for Bread.

The owner is congratulated.

Weakened by hunger, the mother collapses and little Alice is obliged to go to work in her place. “All day she drives the wheels of iron.” The mother’s illness worsens, and to help her family Alice offers herself for adoption. But now the owner’s wife is repelled by the child’s haggard appearance.

“It is good when it happens,” say the children,

“That we die before our time.”

Exhausted by overwork, Alice collapses at her machine. The supervisor lays her on a chair in the owner’s office. Her father is summoned to remove her.

From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her Crying, “Get up, little Alice! it is day.”

After the funeral, the family encounters the owner and his wife in their car. The wife is full of tearful self-reproach. In an astonishing series of dissolves, unique for their time, the mill-owner and his wife are linked in responsibility to the factory and the wage-slaves who work in it yet are shown to be as touched by grief as the bereaved family itself: the husband takes the wife’s hand, mix to a long shot of a factory complex, to the supervisor pushing Alice back to work, and her collapse, to the father and mother at the graveside, and back to the owner holding his wife’s hand. She breaks free and, choking with sobs, sinks to a chair. And then we mix back to the long shot of the factories.

Intended to form part of a series called Can Such Things Be?—which was not completed—The Cry of the Children is an unusually restrained and moving film for 1912. The performers are comparatively natural except for Marie Eline, “the Thanhouser kidlet,” as little Alice.¹⁶ She hops, skips, and jumps until her demise at the factory comes as a welcome relief.

The Cry of the Children would be called naïve today, and with justice. Its treatment is sentimental, its story only a variation of the hoary melodrama of the mill girl who resists the owner’s advances until she must yield in order to buy medicine to save her mother’s life. Yet it carries evidence of a more creative mind than one normally encounters in a picture of 1912. The director (who is unknown, alas)¹⁷ used a real mill for the interiors (which tend to be underexposed as a result). One or two shots carry the influence of Lewis Hine, though they lack his pictorial flair. And while the cutting between poverty and luxury is as obvious as in Edwin S. Porter’s 1905 The Kleptomaniac, the editing is handled with a trifle more skill than in most productions of the time.

W. Stephen Bush considered the film so important he devoted a lengthy essay to it in Moving Picture World:

“More than two generations have passed away since Elizabeth Barrett Browning told of ‘the children weeping ere the sorrow comes with years.’ Since that time, great efforts have been made by many good men and women to stop this evil. The best that had been accomplished was a law establishing a Federal Bureau, which could do nothing but investigate conditions. However, it could arouse public sentiment through the publication of reports. We are glad to say that the Thanhouser picture will accomplish the same results … the arousing of public indignation. The pictures are admirably conceived, do not at any time go beyond the line of probability and bring home their lesson in a forceful but perfectly natural and convincing way.… While the picture skillfully paints the extremes of our modern social life, it has steered clear of the fatal error of the old time melodrama in which, instead of human beings, the spectator was compelled to see a set of angels and a set of devils. The Cry of the Children makes it plain that the mill-owner is as much a creature of circumstances and surroundings and economic conditions as the laborer.

Frame enlargements from The Cry of the Children, 1913. Before dawn, father (James Cruze) rises.

Marie Eline as Alice at work in the mill. Frame enlargement from The Cry of the Children, 1913.

Alice (Marie Eline) collapses at the mill. (Gerald McKee)

“The report of the Federal Bureau will be read by hundreds, at best, while the picture will be seen by millions … we will confess ourselves much mistaken if The Cry of the Children will not serve as a valuable campaign argument long before the votes are counted in November.”¹⁸

SOCIALISM AND POPULISM

Five times the Socialist candidate for president, Eugene Debs seemed within reach of the White House in 1912. A few years later he was in jail. While the fire of socialism swept over Europe, its flames found damper fuel in America. The working class was divided. American workers (many of them foreign-born), alarmed by the increasing influx of immigrant labor, formed trade unions to protect their own positions, unions which were not allied to a political party, as in England. Samuel Gompers, British-born head of the American Federation of Labor, rejected socialism and depended on the self-interest of the workers to improve conditions.

Socialism and anarchism were confused, intentionally by the press, unintentionally by the public. And whenever the workers resorted to violence, they made it easier for the authorities to act against socialists, anarchists, and unionists alike.¹⁹

In April 1911, John J. McNamara, secretary of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, and his brother, James B., were charged with dynamiting the Los Angeles Times Building on October 1, 1910. Twenty-one people were killed.

The American Federation of Labor produced A Martyr to His Cause in 1911 to defend the McNamaras; it depicted John as the innocent victim of open shop militants and had him pleading to the public “to suspend judgments … until opportunity for a fair and full defense had been afforded.”²⁰ The film attracted large audiences until the McNamaras pleaded guilty. After the trial Clarence Darrow, their attorney, was himself tried—and, after two trials, acquitted—for attempting to bribe a juror.

The McNamara trial was worked into a film called From Dusk to Dawn (1913) in which Darrow played himself. It was written and directed by Frank E. Wolfe, whose ambition was to “take Socialism before the people of the world on the rising tide of movie popularity.”²¹ Produced by the Occidental Motion Picture Company of California, the four-reeler was advertised with a significant slogan: “85 Per Cent of your Theatre-Goers—the Numberless Working Class—Will Want to See This Picture.”²²

The main part of the film dealt with Daniel Grayson, a union man forced to leave an ironworks, who is involved in strike, riot, and explosion. Eventually, he is nominated for governor on the working-class ticket. All parties unite to defeat him. Then comes the “conspiracy” trial. With Darrow found not guilty, a wave of enthusiasm carries Dan to victory.²³ There was irony in this, for Job Harriman, running for mayor of Los Angeles on a Socialist ticket, was soundly defeated as a result of the McNamara case. Also defeated was Frank Wolfe, running on the same ticket for city councilman.

The nickelodeon was not a forum for politics, and films on working-class themes were rare. Tom Brandon has established the fact that of 4,249 films reviewed in the trade press in 1914, a mere nineteen were directly political. Seven were prolabor (one being Germinal from France), six antilabor, and six “populist.”²⁴

The populist films have been mistaken for socialist tracts because populism embraced certain socialist ideas. Formed in 1892, the People’s party was a coalition of those united by fear of big business, disgust with corruption, and sympathy for labor. America was divided into “producers”—those who worked with their hands—and “nonproducers.” But populists did not want the means of production owned by the state; they cherished the system of free enterprise and opportunity for the individual. And they prided themselves on being “home-grown”—not like that imported doctrine of socialism—and were distinctly unfriendly to immigrants.²⁵ Populist films about poverty or capital versus labor refused to condemn the system but blamed the grafting politician or the selfish millowner. Once the villain was removed, the sun came out and the workers marched happily back to their machines.

Films which adopted a socialist view were few and far between. The miracle was that any were made at all.

The Eclair production Why? (1913) asked unpalatable questions: “Why do we have children at hard labor?” “Why do we have men who gamble at the race track?” “Why are trains run so fast that fatal accidents occur?” (It had been revealed, in 1912, that railroad travelers had sustained more than 180,000 injuries—10,000 of them fatal—in a single year.)²⁶

H. C. Judson wrote that it was not within the province of a reviewer to discuss politics, yet the exhibitor had to take careful account of them, for what might appeal in one neighborhood might infuriate another. He dare not wholly commend this film.²⁷

“The motive of the story,” wrote another critic, “is to show the manner in which capital and labor clash. Much of it is socialistic doctrine, strongly presented … perhaps too strongly for many audiences.”²⁸

The picture employed photographic trickery in the French style. In a dream, the wealthy hero travels the word and is struck by the hardship of labor. He sees children working on a factory treadmill, women working at half pay and using blood to make red thread, horses being killed because their owners would not insure them. To demonstrate that it is impossible to kill capital, he shoots the child-labor employer who is transformed into a bag of gold. The hero is invited to a feast; working men break in, demanding a seat at the table. Frightened capitalists rally round the generals as they shoot the people, who fall beside the food-laden table.

“Following this comes the most sensational picture we have ever seen; it is nothing less than the burning of the Woolworth Building and all the other buildings in the lower part of Manhattan Island. They are shown all going up in red fire and it is indeed a tremendous spectacle.”²⁹

The Socialist allegory, Why?, 1913. Child laborers on the treadmill of the Almighty Dollar. (Robert S. Birchard Collection)

H. C. Judson did not think the picture taught anarchy. It was only a dream, after all: “Things are bad enough, but they are not as this picture shows them.”³⁰

In 1914, a multireel spectacular appeared from an independent company called the United Keanograph Film Company of Fairfax, California. Entitled Money, it was said to have 2,000 extras. James Keane, president of the company, wrote the scenario and directed the picture. George Scott was the cameraman;³¹ the picture was shot largely on location.

In a scene filmed at the Union Iron Works in San Francisco, Baroness von Saxe, a member of an aristocratic German family, appeared with her daughter, Leonora. Her unlikely interest in the cinema arose because her father, a general, was the first nobleman in Germany to install a projection machine in his Schloss. The baroness explained to the press that some of her happiest moments were spent in the theatre watching American films, so she was only too pleased to distinguish another with her presence. Had she been aware of the content, she might have hesitated. Announced as a six-reeler, advertised as a seven-reeler, but reviewed as a five-reeler, Money was described as “the frankest kind of socialism.”³² It was, perhaps, inspired by Why?, for one of its big scenes had the starving workers storming a banquet.

The melodramatic coating to the political pill dealt with the pursuit of a stenographer by the youthful partner in a steel works, a pursuit which involved mistaken identity and a chase by car and boat. But because it was a political film, there were three villains: the capitalist who reduces wages, gives banquets, and oppresses the poor; his young partner; and an anarchist who aids and abets him. The hero was a poor worker, who took the daughter of the capitalist to see poverty in all its squalor and misery.

“When Keane hired 2,000 ‘roughnecks’ to storm the palace of Croesus, at which was being held the Million Dollar Dinner,” said Moving Picture World, “he wanted the consequent battle between them and the police to look like a battle.… One of Keane’s jokeful friends ‘tipped off’ the police that an attack in all sincerity was being made. The effect of a hundred coppers wielding clubs on 2,000 underworldlings … can be imagined.”³³ A typical piece of publicity nonsense of the time, which undermined the talent Keane must have had as a director, for the action had “snap and fire.”³⁴

Money was first shown at Grauman’s Savoy Theatre in San Francisco on September 2, 1914. Among the audience of 1,500 was a Judge Lawlor, who declared: “The most powerfully written, intensely acted and photographically perfect picture I have ever witnessed.”

Other local personalities included Andrew J. Gallagher, president of the San Francisco Labor Council, who called it “the greatest labor picture ever thrown on the screen. Every union man SHOULD and I know WILL see it.”³⁵

UPTON SINCLAIR      What did socialists think of the American motion picture? Upton Sinclair left his thoughts on the subject in a letter to Nicolai Lebedev of Proletkino, Moscow: “The moving pictures furnish the principal intellectual food of the workers at the present time, and the supplying of this food is entirely in the hands of the capitalist class, and the food supplied is poisoned. I cannot speak concerning the moving pictures of Europe, but I can tell you that so far as the American workers are concerned the moving pictures are vile beyond the possibility of words to describe, and the whole industry is so completely controlled by big business that there is practically no chance of breaking in with a true idea.”³⁶

Sinclair’s own experience with the picture business had been brief and unhappy (and worse was to come in the 1930s, when he financed Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico!). He was so disgusted that he had given up all idea of using the new medium to express his ideas:

“Again and again some smooth-spoken gentleman, wearing silk stockings and the latest tailored clothing, and perhaps a diamond ring on his finger, comes to me to propose to put my ideas into a moving picture. With time I discover that what he really means to do is to use my name as a means of selling stock, sometimes to a few friends of mine who happen to have money, and other times to the gullible public.

“Time and again I have had propositions to make one of my novels into a picture but always upon condition that I would ‘leave out the Socialism.’ And of course I have turned such propositions down.”³⁷

One of these smooth-spoken gentlemen was Herbert Blaché, educated in England and France and the husband of Alice Guy Blaché. Like others of his kind, Blaché wanted to exploit the name of the author but little of his work. Sinclair needed the money and tried to disassociate himself from the film. Blaché sent him a telegram offering $500 cash: “Cannot very well agree to purchase story without your name and you must yourself realise the necessity to alter the story as it is impossible to produce a good picture with the story in present form and you would not want a bad picture.”³⁸

Sinclair relented and the picture was released in 1917 as The Adventurer, “based on the famous novel by Upton Sinclair.” But Sinclair never wrote a novel of that name. The scenario, which had elements of a play within a play called The Pot-Boiler, was written by Harry Chandlee, who would, during the Red Scare, write a profoundly anti-socialist picture, and Lawrence McCloskey. The featured players were Marian Swayne and Pell Trenton. At least the film retained something of Sinclair in its exposure of graft and dishonesty in organized charities, but basically it was a melodramatic thriller.

Sinclair does not appear in Benjamin Hampton’s book of film history, nor does Hampton appear in Sinclair’s autobiography. With good reason, as Sinclair related: “A friend of mine undertook to make a moving picture version of my novel The Moneychangers [sic] and I helped in the making of a scenario, which faithfully followed the story. But after the scenario had been read, the producer [Hampton] told me that it was not suitable for a moving picture; it was, he said, ‘a grand opera.’ I was very much impressed by this pronouncement even though I did not understand it. The producer said that he would have to make another scenario for the picture, and he made one. And then I discovered the difference between a motion picture and a grand opera. In a grand opera the heroine dies in the last act. While in a moving picture she marries the hero amid a shower of spring blossoms, and lives happily ever after in the imagination of the feeble-minded audience.

“So it happens that there is a picture entitled The Moneychangers by Upton Sinclair going the round of the United States, presumably a great many members of the working class go to see it, expecting to see something of mine, but as a matter of fact it has literally nothing to do with anything I ever wrote. My novel tells how Pierpont Morgan the elder caused the Wall Street run of 1907. The thing which is called The Moneychangers in the moving picture version is a blood-and-thunder melodrama of the drug traffic in Chinatown. And lest people should think that I am growing wealthy out of thus exploiting the incredulity of the workers, let me say that I was unable to stop the picture and as usual the financial organizations which are distributing the picture have made off with all the profits.”³⁹

It should be pointed out that the “feeble-minded” viewers for which The Money Changers was altered was precisely that working-class audience Sinclair refers to in another context. It was not merely for the middle class that happy endings were invented. The film was a commercial success, in any case, grossing $100,000 by March 1921.⁴⁰

In 1918, Sinclair was approached by two delegates of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, who proposed a propaganda film to advocate continuing government control of the railroad system. Sinclair agreed to write a scenario and accepted the post of editor of the Motive Motion Picture Company (MMPC). The director-general of the company was David Horsley, who, with his brother William, had founded the first studio in Hollywood in 1911.⁴¹

Filming Upton Sinclair’s The Money Changers, 1920. Jack Conway in the director’s chair, Harry Vallejo at the camera. Players relax while opium scene is shot.

Sinclair was paid an advance of $300 for his work, and he duly presented an outline for the scenario. Brave announcements were made, Samuel Gompers was conferred with and was “vitally interested.” But nothing was filmed.

“I realize now,” said Sinclair, “that I put myself in an unfortunate position by permitting them to sell stock upon the basis of my work, and I will never make that mistake again.”⁴²

But Sinclair did not give up. In 1917, he tried to interest D. W. Griffith in The Daughter of the Confederacy, and in 1918, he wrote a synopsis for a comedy called The Hypnotist for Charlie Chaplin.⁴³ Neither was made.

A CORNER IN WHEAT      The socialists were only too anxious to use motion pictures to further their cause. Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon was filmed by the Bosworth Company in 1914; its story of a young couple freeing themselves from the suffocating grasp of a big city and escaping to the wilds of California carried a socialist message.

The Valley of the Moon, 1914, from Jack London’s novel. The battle in Oakland between strikebreakers and teamsters. The picture was used as Socialist propaganda. (Robert S. Birchard Collection)

“The strike scenes where a huge mob battled with the police, where the patrol wagons seemed to trample the rebellious workers, where men lay with broken heads and bleeding freely in the open, were, like the scenes which started the picture, true to the spirit in which Mr. London painted them—brutal, revolting and truthful,”⁴⁴ reported the New York Dramatic Mirror.

But such presentations frequently encountered the opposition of the police. In Pittsburgh, they put an outright ban on the showing of socialist pictures on Sunday. “So they won’t allow you to show moving pictures, eh?” asked a socialist member of the Allentown (Pennsylvania) City Council of his packed audience. “If it were a booze joint, it probably would be given police protection.”⁴⁵

Nothing encouraged socialism so much as the behavior of the robber barons, whose companies wielded the power of the multinational conglomerates of today. D. W. Griffith’s pioneering A Corner in Wheat (1909), taken not from Frank Norris, but, as Russell Merritt has discovered, from Channing Pollock’s 1904 play, The Pit,^* was full of striking imagery and the kind of intercutting that would serve the cinema for decades. A scene inspired by Jean Millet’s painting The Sower opened the film, which dealt with a great wheat speculator whose intrigues would wreck the lives of these simple farm laborers. “No subject has been produced more timely than this powerful story of the wheat gambler, coming as it does when agitation is rife against that terrible practice of cornering commodities that are the necessities of life,” said The Biograph Bulletin.⁴⁶

Contrasts from D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat, 1909. The Wheat King lauded for his acumen …

 … the poor confronted by crippling prices. (Museum of Modern Art)

Griffith shows the excitement in the wheat pit at the stock exchange, “where we see them struggling like ravenous wolves to control the wealth they did nothing to create.”⁴⁷ “The Gold of the Wheat” is represented by a lavish banquet where the Wheat King is lauded for his acumen, “The Chaff” by a bakery where the poor are confronted by crippling prices. A mother is forced to go without. The bread fund for the poor is reduced, and the police club the unlucky ones away from the bread line. At the moment of his triumph, when the Wheat King is told he has cornered the world supply, he trips and falls into one of his own bins of wheat, to be smothered, symbolically and literally, by his source of wealth. The film ends with a haunting shot of a figure broadcasting the seeds for next year’s crop—alone in a vast landscape.

One feels the film is not so much silent as gagged—having to convey points by waving arms, notices, and letters. The silence has yet to become eloquent. Nevertheless, a modern critic, Richard Schickel, calls it “a model of compression” and says, “Even now, one can scarcely speak too highly of the film.”⁴⁸

The film was made again in 1914, when the cinema was growing more sophisticated and the story could fill five reels. The director was Maurice Tourneur, newly arrived from France, who, for a few prolific years, looked set to steal the crown from Griffith’s head. The Pit set a new mark for artistry and realism, with an almost full-size replica of the Chicago Board of Trade built by Ben Carré and filled with 500 extras.⁴⁹

C. Gardner Sullivan, who so often wrote new versions of Griffith films, reworked A Corner in Wheat with The Corner (1915), about millionaire David Waltham’s attempt to corner the country’s food supply. We see the effect of his scheme on the family of a prosperous workingman who loses his position and then his savings when there is a run on the bank. His children are starving. He breaks a bakeshop window and steals four loaves, for which he is sent to the workhouse for thirty days. His wife, left destitute, is forced to sell her body to obtain food for her children.

Unusually for a film of this period, the husband is shocked, but does not blame her. He sets out to capture Waltham, ties him up in a warehouse surrounded by the food he has been stockpiling, and leaves him to starve to death. The picture ends with cases of food toppling over and smothering the millionaire.⁵⁰

The New York Dramatic Mirror thought the film “startlingly well acted” by George Fawcett and Willard Mack, and Variety considered it among the best Ince productions. It was directed by Walter Edwards. Memories were short, and no reviewer connected it with the 1909 Biograph.

A remarkable socialist drama called Dust was made in 1916 for Flying A by writer Julian Lamothe and director Edward Sloman. A symbolic opening showed the laboring class coining their lives into money for their employer, a vision of the idealistic hero of the film, the young sociologist Frank Kenyon (Franklyn Ritchie). Dust was a clever title, referring not merely to the poor—“dust beneath the feet of the rich”—but to the deadly dust of the woolen mills which, so far as the workers were concerned, was as destructive as war itself.

The Corner, 1916. The impoverished wife (Clara Williams) “sells her body” to the rent collector (Charles Miller) in order to survive. Directed by Walter Edwards, written by C. Gardner Sullivan for Thomas H. Ince. (George Eastman House)

During the war, the concern and compassion of so many films of the Reform Era were replaced by hatred of the Hun. With the armistice, the Hun was transmuted into the Bolshevik.

In November 1918, the following letter was circulated to the heads of the film industry by David Niles, chief of the motion picture section of the U.S. Department of Labor:

“Gentlemen:

“The Motion Picture undoubtedly shortened the war by at least two months. This is the opinion of officers in the army who are in a position to know. The Motion Picture can do more to stabilize labor and help bring about normal conditions than any other agency. An injudicious use of Motion Pictures, on the other hand, can do our country incalculable harm.

“Constructive education will do infinitely more good than destructive propaganda. To portray the villain of a photo-play as a member of the I.W.W. or the Bolsheviki is positively harmful; while portraying the hero as a strong, virile American, a believer of American institutions and ideals, will do much good.”⁵¹

Directors and producers had to consult Niles before embarking on films about socialism or labor unrest, and he warned those who failed to cooperate of Federal censorship.⁵²

Socialist projects, like Upton Sinclair’s for the railroad men and Frederick Collins’s for McClure’s Magazine on the achievements of American labor, collapsed. Antisocialist films proliferated in the postwar atmosphere of reaction. And whether Niles’s department approved or not, Bolsheviks were the all-purpose villains.

“There is much freedom of thought that should be imprisoned,” wrote the editor of Photo-Play Journal, “especially at this critical time in our national history. We should not lose sight of the fact that there are some writers with wildly socialistic ideas which should not be permitted the privilege of visualization.”⁵³

That was written in 1919, the year of the Red Scare.

THE RED SCARE

     Charlie Chaplin entertained two prominent people at his studio in 1918. One was General Leonard Wood, former U.S. Army chief of staff, who had organized the Rough Riders with Theodore Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War. The other was Max Eastman, an American aristocrat who had become the country’s leading socialist writer. He had edited The Masses until its suppression; he supported Lenin and Trotsky and said so in his new paper, The Liberator.

In 1919, Chaplin was accused of financing Eastman’s paper and of being a parlor socialist. Chaplin agreed he was a friend of Eastman’s but denied backing his magazine: “I am absolutely cold on the Bolshevism theme; neither am I interested in Socialism. You know my war record. If The Liberator is seditious, it certainly should be suppressed.”⁵⁴

At the same time, General Wood noted with approval a clergyman’s call for the deportation of Bolsheviks “in ships of stone with sails of lead, with the wrath of God for a breeze and with hell for their first port.”⁵⁵

Such was the atmosphere during the year of the Red Scare, of which William E. Leuchtenburg has written, “Perhaps at no time in our history has there been such a wholesale violation of civil liberties.”⁵⁶ Anarchists, aliens, Jews, socialists, pacifists, labor leaders, unionists, and even “hysterical women” were wrapped up together and popped into the same compartment of the popular mind: “Reds.”

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched the Palmer Raids on November 7, 1919. In a number of cities, members of the Union of Russian Workers were arrested and treated brutally by the police. President Woodrow Wilson was ill and may not have known. The following month 249 aliens, virtually none of whom had committed an offense, were deported to Russia on the army transport Buford (the same ship Buster Keaton would use in The Navigator in 1924). Most of these people were anarchists, not Bolsheviks, and while some professed violence, like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, others were passionately nonviolent.⁵⁷ The Commissioner of Ellis Island, Frederic C. Howe, resigned over the deportation issue.

The turn of the Bolsheviks came in January 1920 when, in a single night, more than 4,000 alleged Communists were arrested in thirty-three cities. In one town, prisoners were handcuffed, chained together, and marched through the streets. But by the end of 1920, as the threat of a Communist takeover of Europe receded, the Red Scare faded and the Wilson administration was replaced by the government of Warren G. Harding and a desire for “normalcy.”

As the Palmer Raids climaxed a long campaign against the left, so the Red Scare films were antisocialist tracts given new relevance by the word “Bolshevism.”

BOLSHEVISM ON TRIAL      Bolshevism on Trial was adapted from the novel Comrades by the Reverend Thomas Dixon, a Southern populist who also wrote The Clansman, on which The Birth of a Nation was based. Published in 1909 as “A Story of Social Adventure in California,” Comrades was a satire on Upton Sinclair’s socialist experiment at Helicon Hall (sometimes referred to by those writing of the experiment as Halcyon Hall!) at Englewood, New Jersey, in 1906–1907. This colony had been a success, most obviously with children, but the press ridiculed it, deciding Sinclair had started it in order to provide himself with plenty of mistresses.⁵⁸

The picture was originally entitled Shattered Dreams.⁵⁹ The new title was adopted to boost it at the box office with the lure of the latest headlines. The film was an attack on socialism, intended to make it seem ludicrous in theory and impossible in practice.

Robert Frazer as Captain Norman Worth in Bolshevism on Trial, 1919, an attack on Socialism by the Rev. Thomas Dixon. (Museum of Modern Art)

The plot is a hotchpotch about a true-blue capitalist, Colonel Bradshaw (Howard Truesdell), whose inventions have “created work for thousands.” He is furious to discover that his son Norman (Robert Frazer) has fallen for a Red, a college girl named Barbara Alden (Pinna Nesbit). She takes Norman to the slums, where he is horrified by the squalor and begs her to leave such wretchedness to the charity workers.

“If you love me,” she says, “you should help me.”

Herman Wolff (Leslie Stowe) is a professional agitator; beetle-browed and villainous in every way, he sits at his desk surrounded by socialist pamphlets and a volume by Karl Marx.⁶⁰

Posters on the exterior of a meeting hall make it evident that the scene was filmed in December 1918 and that the next event at the hall was to be a ball in aid of the Galician town of Przemysl, besieged by both Russian and German forces. Even more fascinating, the posters reveal that the heroine’s name was to have been Barbara Bozenta. One can only assume that by 1919 the foreign name would have lost her a degree of audience appeal.

Wolff uses the meeting to raise funds to purchase “the one spot on earth where they can all be free”—Paradise Island in Florida, with its vast hotel.⁶¹ Norman, carried away by the rhetoric, offers to buy the island. But the first few days in paradise prove purgatorial. No one volunteers for menial labor, and when the jobs are imposed the response is: “Unwilling labor is slavery!” A festive ball revives spirits and everyone is delightfully equal except the electricians in the basement. “Pretty soft for dem—dancin’ while we sweat for nothing a week,” says one. “Let’s give ’em a dose of darkness.” He pulls a switch and causes alarm on the dance floor. The lights are not restored by the electricians until Norman pays them out of his own pocket.

But then strikes spread like wildfire, Wolff deposes Norman and seizes power, and makes a speech not even the maddest socialist would dream of making: “Comrades, we can spread the Red Brotherhood over the world and come to power and riches.” Religion will be abolished, marriage laws banished—no wonder the white-garbed forces of righteousness race to the rescue. It can’t be the Ku Klux Klan this time, so it’s the U.S. Navy.

At this point appears the one memorable image of the film—a reversal of the scene in so many later Russian films when sailors tear down the Imperial banner and replace it with the red flag. An officer orders the red flag removed, and Colonel Bradshaw runs up the Stars and Stripes. The sailors cheer. It was an axiom of the industry that the one sure way of ensuring applause was to end on the United States flag, and this picture fades to its end title with the somewhat superfluous words “AMERICAN MOTION PICTURE.”

Just before the picture’s release, the trade press grew so excited it inadvertently caused a crisis. Moving Picture World felt the antisocialist propaganda was so strong it ought to have government support. It advocated exhibitors sending letters attacking socialism to the press—“then the battle is on.” It told its readers to exploit the fears of factory owners by linking socialism to Bolshevism—they would buy blocks of seats for their employees.

The U.S. Navy storms the Red enclave in Bolshevism on Trial, 1919. (Adam Reilly)

“Put up red flags and hire soldiers to tear them down … come out with a flaming handbill that the play is not an argument for anarchy.… Work out the limit on this and you’ll not only clean up, but profit by future business.”⁶²

The protests flooded in, and Moving Picture World was forced to print a retraction. The producer, Isaac Wolper of the Mayflower Pictures corporation, and the distributor, Lewis J. Selznick of Select, were driven to deny that the film was propaganda and disowned their advertisements.

A year after this picture came out, its director, Harley Knoles, set up an independent production company in Los Angeles. He thought it would be equitable if he, his cameraman, the leading players, and the scenario writer all drew the same salary. He must have been staggered by the headline in Variety: “Communist Scheme Tried in Pictures.” The reporter described the idea as “Bolshevistic.”⁶³

Not long afterward, hounded by creditors, Harley Knoles moved to England.

DANGEROUS HOURS     Although prevailing opinion did not distinguish socialism from Bolshevism, it became a matter of box-office expediency to do so. When Thomas H. Ince announced a project called Americanism (versus Bolshevism) he quoted Samuel Gompers: “If I thought that Bolshevism was the right road to go, that it meant freedom, justice and the principles of humane society and living conditions, I would join the Bolsheviki. It is because I know that the whole scheme leads to nowhere, that it is destructive in its efforts and in its every activity, that it compels reaction and brings about a situation worse than the one it has undertaken to displace that I oppose and fight it.”⁶⁴

Americanism was released in 1920 as Dangerous Hours. I wrote about this Fred Niblo film in The Parade’s Gone By …, but looking at it after a gap of twenty years, I was amazed by it once again. I knew it was an attack on socialism, but I never realized how vitriolic it was, nor did I remember artist Irvin Martin’s painted title backgrounds, which contained lurid symbols of death and destruction.

The film depends on the titles. The images are cut very fast, as if the editor⁶⁵ could not wait to get to the meat of the scene—the text. It is another silent talkie. The performances are either wooden—Lloyd Hughes in particular—or absurd, and although the exterior sets of factory, shipyard, or Russian town are elaborate, they remain sets, and Niblo’s direction is too pedestrian to bring them all alive. The film is not badly made; it is simply prosaic. Had its visuals had the passion and hatred of its titles, Dangerous Hours might have been dangerous indeed.

The cinema was a populist medium. It favored the ordinary man, and it was surprisingly hard to make a right-wing film which denigrated him. Audiences responded with distaste to scenes of workers being beaten. Thus, the crowd had to be portrayed as a mob, snarling, waving cudgels, or tearing a town apart. There are just four policemen coping with the strikers in the opening scene of Dangerous Hours; in the attack on the shipyard town there are none at all.

But there was a strenuous effort to distinguish between the honest union man and the Bolshevik agitator. The strikers have “an honest grievance,” but we see another group, obviously based on the International Workers of the World, who are described as “the dangerous element, following in the wake of labor as the riff-raff and ghouls follow an army.” Among them is John King (Hughes)—“graduate of an American University—but … owing to his ardent sincerity, rich soil for the poisonous sophistry of fanatics, drones and dreamers”—and foreign-born Sophia Guerni (Claire Du Brey), the movement’s vamp, who feigns passion for him. He is attracted by her, “translating the feverishness of her shallow, thrill-craving soul as the Sacred Fires of the New Womanhood.”

The meeting of the revolutionaries in Sophie’s Greenwich Village studio is strikingly lit by George Barnes and given a smoky, conspiratorial atmosphere. The faces are carefully selected to send a shudder through the audience. There are even a couple of lesbians—“intellectuals abandoning their ‘mighty interests’ for the cause.”

Other major characters include Mary Weston (Barbara Castleton), “a sweet type of American womanhood,” who loves John and who just happens to have inherited her father’s shipyard, and Russian agent Boris Blotchi (Jack Richardson), “one of the bloodiest butchers of the Revolution.” (A blood-spattered cleaver decorates his titles).

At Mary’s shipyards, strikers refuse to have anything to do with the “four-flushing Bolsheviks,” and thus the film assuages the A.F.L. But the Bolsheviks try to seize control and at last King realizes their true purpose. “You are not interested in humanity—but murder!… We in America do not fight that way and what you say shall not be. This is America!”

Bolshevik conspirators from Dangerous Hours, 1920. (Museum of Modern Art)

The titles blossom in stars and stripes, but King is beaten up and abandoned, while the Bolsheviks carry “the Freedom of the World” to town. This played on the same fears as the German invasion pictures: a church is set on fire, a lavish home destroyed. King staggers into town, takes on Blotchi single-handed, and blows up the Bolsheviks with their own fiendish bombs. The picture ends happily with glimpses of contented workers in the shipyard and agitators, tarred and feathered, being carried out of town on a rail.

C. Gardner Sullivan brought to this Donn Byrne story the black and white politics of a Western.⁶⁶ “Draw a strong line between laborers and agitators,” advised Moving Picture World, whose exploitation advice was considerably muted after its embarrassment over Bolshevism on Trial.⁶⁷

The president of the Saginaw, Michigan, Manufacturers’ Association announced that he would buy 5,000 tickets for his employees to see Dangerous Hours: “I consider this production a most powerfully appealing picture for fairness, squareness and truthfulness and the very best method with which to combat the most dangerous evil that has confronted America since the subjugation of the diabolical Hun.”⁶⁸

More than any other event of the Russian Revolution, the nationalization of women caught the imagination—or lack of it—of scenarists. Instead of what it was—a mobilization order to bring women into the labor force—American films passed it through the filter of melodrama and portrayed it as a license to rape. It lay behind one of the most lurid moments in Dangerous Hours: we see a soldier walking out of a cell, leaving a half-naked woman lying unconscious, and then a representation of Lenin addressing the Supreme Soviet, followed by columns of soldiers tramping past the body of a dead woman and her baby. Boots stamp on her outstretched arm.

“The nationalization of women was not invented by a motion picture producer,” said Gilbert Seldes. “It was published as a fact in all of our newspapers. The assassination of Lenin occurred seven times, until the poor man died of natural causes. For something like ten years, the most respectable and even then I suspect in many ways the best newspaper in this country—I’m speaking of the New York Times—did not have a true word out of Russia.”⁶⁹

THE NEW MOON      Soon after the Bolsheviks seized control of Russia, the American papers announced the abolition of the marriage law. The Soviet province of Saratov had decreed that it would be unlawful for a man to possess his wife alone but that she would become public property. This would ensure the propagation of a declining race.

“Such a story … had never been equaled in history,” wrote H. H. Van Loan, a former newspaperman who had become a successful scenarist. “It was a tremendous piece of news, and the most barbarous document ever conceived by the most brutal forces of man.”⁷⁰ He claimed to have seen the original decree (actually a forgery).⁷¹ “It was horrifying. After reading its sixteen articles I wondered if I couldn’t, in at least a small way, prevent that decree from becoming active in the other provinces of Russia. At least, I could reveal to America and the rest of the civilized world the illiterate souls of a degenerate group of leaders.”⁷²

Russian frightfulness—and Orel Kosloff (Stuart Holmes) isn’t even a Bolshevik, although he is “in the pay of a foreign government.” New Moon, 1919, directed by Chet Withey, from an H. H. Van Loan story, with Norma Talmadge.

Van Loan wrote a story called “The New Moon” and sold it to Joseph Schenck for Norma Talmadge. It was directed by Chet Withey in 1919 in so exaggerated a fashion that even Variety was driven to call it “cheaply melodramatic.”⁷³ Although it merely recalled the old anti-Russian pictures, with aristocrats escaping from revolutionaries instead of the other way around, it was taken more seriously than it deserved. “The newspapers have prepared people to expect any sort of outrages … so that nothing can well be presented, however brutal it may be, that is likely to be dismissed as an exaggeration,” wrote Wid Gunning.⁷⁴

Julian Johnson of Photoplay was not hoodwinked, however. “Good morning,” he wrote. “Have you written your Bolshevist story yet? H. H. Van Loan has written his, and here it is. It is the sort of story you always find the literarily ambitious Dubuque young lady writing about New York; that is to say, she doesn’t know a blamed thing about New York except what she has read in the papers. And while I am wholly ignorant of Mr. Van Loan’s real and first-hand knowledge of Russia, his atmosphere and phraseology sound like studious cramming out of the Saturday Evening Post, the Literary Digest and the morning front pages, rather than resembling a personal reflection.”⁷⁵

Van Loan was hurt to the quick by this review. He retorted that he had represented a chain of American newspapers abroad, had traveled the length and breadth of Russia, and would vouch for the accuracy of the detail in his story.⁷⁶

The nationalization of women soon became a staple ingredient of movie hokum. Common Property came out at the end of 1919; Universal, having digested their H. H. Van Loan, set their story in that same “Saratov.”

“This decree may not be authentic,” admitted Picture Play, “but it carries a forceful idea for dramatic exposition.”⁷⁷ The picture made inventive use of the American Expeditionary Force to Russia; troops arrive in the nick of time to rescue the women from a fate worse than death. “One can overlook their presence under the circumstances,” said Picture Play, “for it is easy to violate truth where the madmen of Russia are concerned.”⁷⁸

THE BURNING QUESTION      In October 1919, 17,000 Roman Catholic churches began showing films in their parish halls on a nonprofit basis.⁷⁹ Films were produced especially for this network, to the distress of the exhibitors, whose trade suffered as a result.⁸⁰ The Burning Question, one of the first releases, attacked foreign-born (i.e., Jewish) agitators.⁸¹ In case anyone was in any doubt, one title linked the three New Evils: “Socialism … Bolshevism … Anarchism …” After a skittish opening—an employee caught smoking his boss’s cigar—the humor evaporates and the film becomes Very Serious. The contractor is waging war on Reds. “Unless Bolshevism is checked,” he says, “its evil influence will crush the whole world.” Conviction is undermined by a subsequent title, “The Day the United States Declared War.” But this date was April 7, 1917, a full six months before the October Revolution; when the word “Bolshevik” was still virtually unknown in America. Russia was ruled by the Social Democrat Alexander Kerensky with the financial support of the United States.

The Burning Question, an anti-Bolshevik melodrama made in 1919 by the Catholic Art Association. (John E. Allen)

Having lost its sense of direction as well as its sense of humor, The Burning Question now loses its point in a lengthy subplot on the battlefields of France to show “the great work done by the Knights of Columbus.”⁸² “By the time the war is over, the Bolsheviks have to indulge in sabotage and rape to help us remember how they were trying to wreck the United States. By which time, we are too bored to care.

It was not long before the forces of anti-Semitism joined with those of anti-communism, although the first example came from an unexpected source, the playwright Augustus Thomas. He had been responsible for the film of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (see this page–this page), which was regarded as powerfully socialist. His The Volcano (1919), a distinctly antisocialist film, was made by the same team, directed by George Irving under Thomas’s supervision for producer Harry Raver. The original version was strongly anti-Semitic⁸³ (the audience cheered it in some theatres),⁸⁴ and it was only as a result of a campaign by a Yiddish newspaper that Raver was forced to make alterations.

The portrayal of Jews as Bolsheviks was a reflection of the popular belief. Allen Holubar made a picture for Universal called The Right to Happiness (1919), which opened, like the earlier anti-Russian pictures, with a pogrom that separates the two daughters of an American who happens to be living on the outskirts of the Jewish quarter of St. Petersburg. He retrieves one, but mourns the loss of the other, who is given a home by an outcast Jewish family and grows up a Red revolutionary. “Lenine and Trotzki send her to America to stir up trouble, and, of course, she stirs it up in her father’s factory without knowing who he is. In the end she is shot trying to protect her sister from the mob that has journeyed down to Long Island to attack her father’s house. The story ends in a haze of inconsistencies, with everyone weeping, and repenting and shouting nonsense about love.”⁸⁵

Universal publicized it as “The Greatest Love Story Ever Told”⁸⁶ and the public liked it. One theatre owner was so rapturous that his letter was used in the ads: “We had throngs of eager patrons lined in front of our box offices … exceeding our greatest expectations.”⁸⁷

Arthur Guy Empey, the famous soldier who turned his book Over the Top into a film in 1918, came up with a sequel called The Undercurrent (1919) in which he played an American soldier returned from France and working in a steel mill. He falls prey to Red agents. Empey favored the deportation of radicals—“My motto for the Reds is SOS—Ship or shot”—and his picture was a diatribe. Julian Johnson thought it showed little knowledge of the subject beyond “a perusal of newspaper headlines.”⁸⁸

The film was directed by Wilfred North, who had made The Battle Cry of Peace in 1915. Variety considered that Empey’s popularity had run its course (this proved accurate) and that the film, like his acting, was ragged and crude. But it admired the fact that it exploited “the evils of Bolshevism” and approved particularly of one episode in which a woman Red, “seeing that the law is about to checkmate her career, draws a revolver, kills her cringing associates, and fires the lead into herself. This bit is worthy of no less a Russian than Turgenev.”⁸⁹

Bolshevik firebrand Sonia (Dorothy Phillips) leads the mob against the employer—who turns out to be her own father. The Right to Happiness, 1919. (National Film Archive)

But the audience at the Capitol Theatre, New York, far from being alarmed by it, laughed at this superpatriotic drama.

LAND OF OPPORTUNITY      In the same year, 1919, a nationwide “Americanization” process began. Progressives hoped this would mean aid for immigrants. But in postwar America it meant a tough “Love us or leave us” policy. The melting pot had been replaced by the branding iron.

In December 1919, Franklin Lane, Secretary of the Interior, met with a group of producers and distributors to discuss the making of “Americanization” films “for the purpose of counteracting Bolshevism, radicalism and discontent against the U.S.”⁹⁰ A committee was formed, which included Adolph Zukor, Lewis J. Selznick, and Lane as chairman. To prove how unlike the Bolsheviks they were, the producers took advantage of the situation to raise the price of the films. Exhibitors protested,⁹¹ but they were not supposed to make a profit any more than the producers were. The idea was circulation.

Lane said that he knew of no better weapon to stop the grave menace to civilization than the motion picture.⁹² He suggested that the industry organize immediately to spread the story of America as exemplified in the life of Abraham Lincoln. A round robin was sent to authors asking them to contribute screenplays for one- or two-reelers “not praising the government to the skies as perfect or Utopian”⁹³ but pointing out in simple lessons the advantage of the republican system and the need for united and patriotic sentiment.

Selznick produced a two-reeler called Land of Opportunity especially for the committee. Ralph Ince, who directed the film, was featured as Lincoln and also played Merton Walpole, “an idler with an inherited fortune—busy with ‘pink’ theories for lack of a real share in the world’s work.” The story is set in a club, where this unlikely member assails his rich friends for buying their way into the courts and government and blinding the eyes of the poor by gifts to flashy charities. The others, who have no answer to this, accuse him of being a “Bolshevist,” and of belonging to the herd of uplifters who never lift anything but their voices. They walk out, leaving him with an elderly butler. “They don’t understand,” says Walpole, gazing at the pages of his book, Classes versus Masses by Yakem Zubko.

“Pardon me, sir,” says the butler, “but it is you who do not understand.” And he tells, in flashback, a story of how Abraham Lincoln, campaigning in a rural district and hearing of a boy on trial for murder in a nearby town, walked twenty miles to take charge of the defense and win the boy’s freedom.

“You tell the story as though you had been there,” says Walpole.

“I was the boy,” says the butler. “And the same America that gave Lincoln the opportunity to rise from a rail-splitter gave me justice in the courts—freedom —work—the opportunity to save—the field to serve.”

Left alone with his thoughts, Walpole tears out the pages of his subversive book and throws it on the fire. The film ends with the title “AMERICAN MOTION PICTURE.”

This curious anecdote, well produced though it was, hardly brought the socialist case crashing in ruins—it merely suggested the haphazard nature of American justice. The producers intended to release Land of Opportunity on Lincoln’s Birthday and to follow it with fifty-two more such films at weekly intervals.⁹⁴ But the Red Scare was running out of steam, and in the end only a few more anti-Bolshevik films appeared.

STARVATION      Hard as it is to believe, one film used the hungry masses of Europe to preach an anti-Bolshevik sermon. Behind it, thinly concealed, was Herbert Hoover, whose American Relief Administration was feeding the starving millions. And behind him was George Barr Baker, a lieutenant commander in the navy, who was based in Paris, where he worked as a publicist for the A.R.A. Historian Bert Patenaude, who has examined Baker’s papers in the Hoover Archives at Stanford University and who found documents quoted here, describes him as “a cultivated man, very sharp politically and with a good sense of humor.”⁹⁵ Baker, like Hoover, was dedicated to the overthrow of Bolshevism, and he devoted months of his life, and thousands of dollars of his own money, to the documentary Starvation (1920).

The A.R.A. cause was aided by a number of newsreel cameramen, including George Zimmer, a navy photographer who shot most of Starvation, edited it, and received credit as director. Another was Donald Thompson,⁹⁶ a maverick from Canada, who was paid by Leslie’s Weekly in New York. His footage and still pictures of child welfare work was “the best the A.R.A. has ever had.”⁹⁷

Baker went into partnership with a shady distributor called Fred Warren. When he sent out invitations for the premiere, he was careful to distance himself from Warren: “We have not been able to control the announcements because the matter is now in the hands of the professional moving picture people and they use the methods of Barnum wherever possible. They have used Mr. Hoover’s name too freely in spite of all my efforts, nevertheless, every incident in this picture is absolutely authentic.… I do not believe that any woman in the working class who sees it will sit down at home with her children and calmly permit talk of direct action and other forms of radicalism.”⁹⁸

Of course it was not the working class Baker had invited to the premiere, on January 9, 1920, at the Manhattan Opera House. He had invited the very rich—Otto Kahn—the very powerful—William Randolph Hearst—and the very influential—the editors of all the big newspapers.

The critical reaction was just what Baker needed. “Pictures of the worst cases of children—with protruding bones, swollen abdomens, and tight eyelids—brought sympathy and tears and relief at the thought that America was doing something to alleviate their sufferings.”⁹⁹

“No fair minded person,” said Variety, “no matter what their leanings politically, could view this picture, particularly the scenes showing the frightful conditions in Russia, where the red banner of the Bolsheviki flies, and still have the slightest doubt as to whether or not a condition of government such as they have now is the best for the people.”¹⁰⁰

(Herbert Hoover Archives, Stanford University)

Included in Starvation was footage of Bolsheviks being hanged and executed by firing squad. This all had a most unfortunate effect on audiences; Whites shot by Reds might have been more salutary. But here sympathy went to the victims. The scenes “left one cold with an unameliorated terror,” said the New York Times.¹⁰¹

Moving Picture World found a way of dealing with it, however: “At every point we have before us the contrast between the American way of dealing with a festering situation, and the unmerciful and less efficient way of the Central Powers. America erected a bulwark of food to stem the tide of the Bolsheviki, while the brutal methods of hanging and shooting … were resorted to as the only remedy by those of a lesser understanding.”¹⁰²

“It is the first really powerful anti-Bolshevist and anti-Radical lesson offered in the United States,” Baker wrote to Alexander J. Hemphill of the Guaranty Trust Company, “which carries with it by indirection, instead of having all the earmarks of propaganda, the story of what happens to countries which abolish law and God and refuse to understand that without work there is no bread.”¹⁰³ He gave the film its slogan: “The United States of America fights nations and men—but never women and children.”

It was not the ideal time for such a film. The price of food had soared in the United States thanks to the war, and by 1919 the cost of living was 79 percent higher than it had been in 1914.¹⁰⁴ Food riots had scarred American cities only a couple of years earlier. Attendance at performances of Starvation was patchy, and the film was forced out of the Manhattan Opera House two weeks into its run.¹⁰⁵

The film was hastily reedited. “The material very much shortened, and the shock very much reduced,” Baker wrote to Hoover. Having put $18,000 into the venture, he declared his confidence undiminished; he wanted to go ahead with it, “doing away with the professional crowd and reconstructing according to our ideas as generally carried out in the A.R.A. This plan does not involve you in any way.”

He had said he would not get Hoover into trouble, and “I have not done so. The enclosed clippings indicate that the public is not led to believe that you have any interest in the film.”¹⁰⁶ Variety must have been among these clippings: “It was said to be propaganda for Hoover in his attempt to secure the presidential nomination, but there was so little of Hoover, it was propaganda of the subtlest kind.”¹⁰⁷

Baker had a long talk over lunch with independent film distributor Fred Warren, then watched the film again. He drew up a list of cuts and alterations—a shot of Zimmer went from the opening—and suggested a new approach: “I would start off … by showing that even after the war much that was beautiful remained in the various countries of Central Europe; fine buildings and bridges undisturbed; that life was still worth living. Gradually I would drift into the question of Bolshevism as an after the war terror, and while doing this would show the blown bridges, White armies, and general scenes of the desolation which comes from revolution and unemployment. After all of this misery, which apparently began to spread widely with the initiation of Bolshevism, I would show the result; the bread lines and the starving children … As a climax to this, I would show the little naked girl, the little girls who are being stripped and weighed by the doctors and nurses, and who, if they are proved to be normal weight, will not be fed again until they begin to show fresh signs of the effects of starvation.”¹⁰⁸

The film went round the country but never recovered from its initial failure, and Baker lost nearly $11,000.¹⁰⁹ Hoover was not elected president until 1928, but Baker worked under Calvin Coolidge and was closely associated with Hoover during his presidency.

In 1923, Baker wrote to the Income Tax Bureau: “The film had various degrees of misadventure over a considerable period. It was always just about to be made to pay. However it never did reach that point and I paid the losses out of my own pocket, as indicated by my tax return. My advice to a young man about to risk money in motion pictures is—‘No.’ ”¹¹⁰

The fact that American cameramen were present to film these German troops executing Bolsheviks in Latvia in 1919 aroused angry comment in the German press. The Berlin Tagliche Rundschau called the filming “brutal,” while the execution itself was “quiet, dignified, and free from all offensive excitement.” A frame enlargement from a surviving fragment of Starvation. (Herbert Hoover Archives. Stanford University)

Perhaps the most effective anti-Bolshevik film did not deal with Bolshevism at all. It was D. W. Griffith’s epic of the French Revolution, Orphans of the Storm (1921). Griffith succeeded brilliantly in recreating the Terror at his new studio at Mamaroneck, on Long Island Sound, not far from the homes of some of the wealthiest people in the country.

Before portraying the bloodthirsty behavior of the mob, Griffith declares in a memorable title: “The French Revolution RIGHTLY overthrew a BAD government. But we in America should be careful lest we with a GOOD government mistake fanatics for leaders and exchange our decent law and order for anarchy and Bolshevism.”¹¹¹

THE ETERNAL CITY      The first version (1915) of Hall Caine’s The Eternal City was a film of socialist idealism. Caine lived in Rome when he wrote the novel, which was published in 1900, and told of the establishment of a socialist state and the appointment of a prime minister who put into effect the Christian socialism of Giuseppe Mazzini. The film was made on location in Rome, with the cooperation of the Italian government and the Vatican, and was exhibited throughout the world, “apparently without offence,” said Caine, “except perhaps in certain states of America.”¹¹²

Famous Players made the first version, and Sam Goldwyn decided to remake it in 1923. Caine assumed that he would film the story as he had written it, but he reckoned without Benito Mussolini. He was informed that the representatives of the Italian government in Washington objected to the subject and Mussolini himself had denied them all facilities in Rome for a film that would be based on the socialistic Eternal City.

Caine tried to withdraw from his contract, but the Goldwyn people told him they considered location scenes in Rome essential and that they had already spent a great deal of money preparing for them. They had been promised full civilian and military cooperation for a film which supported Fascist policy and argued that a free adaptation of the story was the only way out of the impasse.

“To this I objected,” wrote Caine, “that it would be false to the theory of my story to put Mussolini and Fascism into the places of Christian Socialism and the disciple of Mazzini; but the ultimate result of prolonged and sometimes painful legal negotiations was that I consented that an independent scenario should be written by another author, under her own name, and coupled with the name of my book. This has now been done, and the film shortly to be released will present a picture (no doubt vivid and faithful) not of the triumph of Socialism as dreamt of and desired by me, but of the triumph of Fascism as foreseen and desired and brought to pass by Signor Mussolini.”¹¹³

Like so many adults, Caine was bewildered by the whole experience. Why on earth would a film company buy a novel which had sold a million copies and render it unrecognizable to its devoted public? He could not understand, either, why Christian socialism, a worldwide movement, should be replaced by fascism, which was confined to Italy and of no appeal to any other country.

The official publicity was as mendacious as ever:

“It isn’t often that an author, and one of the most noted in the world at that, will agree to allow his story to be altered for the screen.… But such was the case with Sir Hall Caine’s immortal story of love and adventure.… Many producers had sought to purchase the film rights to the story before George Fitzmaurice made the successful offer. Not only was he able to induce the titled English novelist to agree to the changes, but the latter even assisted in working out the continuity, in conjunction with Ouida Bergere, Fitzmaurice’s wife.

Free extras for The Eternal City, 1923. Fascisti at the Coliseum, Rome. (Museum of Modern Art)

“The story was written years before the Fascisti of Italy had been thought of; but due to the modernization of the tale, and the persuasive tongue of Producer Fitzmaurice, Premier Mussolini, the chief of the Fascisti, appears in the picture.”¹¹⁴

Actually, Hall Caine had tried not merely to withdraw, but to stop the production while the company was on location in Rome, as he saw the film developing into Fascist propaganda.¹¹⁵

Goldwyn proceeded with the film, which turned into a very curious production indeed. David Rossi, an Italian orphan, has been cared for by a tramp (Richard Bennett) and is adopted by Dr. Rosselli, a pacifist, who rears him together with his daughter, Roma. They grow up (and become Bert Lytell and Barbara La Marr). David joins the army at the outbreak of war and Roma becomes a sculptor with the financial assistance of Baron Bonelli (Lionel Barrymore), the covert leader of the Communist party. David is reported killed.¹¹⁶

This is how the Daily Worker recounted the rest of the plot: “Despite the fact that this wealthy, world-wise Baron buys up her ‘masterpieces’ and pays her board bill, she returns pure and undefiled to her young lover who wasn’t killed after all.… The rich art patron, Baron Bonelli, is made into a war profiteering capitalist, who seeks to become Dictator of Italy by the road of the proletarian revolution. The wickedness of ‘red strikers’ is pictured by putting axes into the hands of a crowd of roughly dressed ‘extras’ and setting them to making kindling out of a railroad coach.… The brave youths return from the war, and find that their medals and banners are not properly respected. So they organize into mobs, and fling stilettos bearing anti-strike warnings at darkened doorways. When the reds organize to counter-attack, they are dispersed by the police, but the title-writer explains that Italy was fortunate in having a King with enough sense to turn the government over to Mussolini, the ‘man of the people.’ Mussolini and the King appear in person, of course.”¹¹⁷

The film’s cameraman, Arthur Miller, has recorded in his memoirs how scenarist Ouida Bergere had altered the story to include Mussolini and the Fascisti: “Mussolini was so impressed with the idea that his office was open to us at any time.” Blackshirts were provided to help with crowd control: “They did anything we asked of them. One Sunday we shot in five different locations in Rome, walking two thousand extras from one location to another and ending at the Coliseum.”¹¹⁸

As the advertisements said, “3,000 years ago they began building sets for The Eternal City.”¹¹⁹

Unhappily, Mussolini saw The Man From Home (1922), which Fitzmaurice had also made in Rome, and was apparently infuriated by its portrayal of Italian nobility. He demanded to see Fitzmaurice, who left for New York, and Miller sneaked out of Italy via Venice, with the last of the negative. “If the blackshirt boys had gotten their hands on the film that would have been the end of it.”¹²⁰

THE VOLGA BOATMAN      In 1926, the International Motion Picture Congress, held under the auspices of the League of Nations International Commission on Intellectual Co-operation, declared that while Russia should henceforth be treated in Western films in such a way that its “ancient culture” would be respected, the present government and conditions within the Soviet Union were to be ignored.¹²¹

But it is hard to ignore a regime with whom you are anxious to trade. The anti-Bolshevik films had died out by the early twenties, although some were still in circulation in Europe, representing the tip of an iceberg of propaganda freezing the waters between Russia and the United States. Lenin’s adoption of the New Economic Policy in 1921 suggested that capitalism was returning, albeit to a limited degree. And it altered America’s attitude. Russia had begun to look outward, and American tourists had begun visiting Moscow, prompting the Russian comedy Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, which used serial techniques to parody the American image of Soviet Russia.

The one gesture of goodwill, the one picture which portrayed the Bolsheviks in a relatively favorable light, was made by perhaps the most conservative figure in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille. That film was The Volga Boatman (1926).

DeMille had been considering a film on the Russian Revolution, and to this end he had brought in books by Upton Sinclair and John Reed, and even The Outline of the British Labour Movement. According to a DeMille biographer, John Kobal, he had, for a while, “an idealistic sympathy with the Russian Revolution.” DeMille admitted in his autobiography that had he made The Volga Boatman in the 1950s, he would have been ordered before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “In 1925 most of us were more naive politically. Prohibition seemed a more burning issue than Communism. Not that Volga Boatman was communistic in either its inspiration or its effect; but we were still close enough in history to the tyranny of the Czars to look upon their overthrow with at least guarded optimism. And to the average American at that time Russian Communism had not yet been revealed as a tyranny far worse than that which it replaced.”¹²²

The left-wing writer Konrad Bercovici had written an outline for the story, which DeMille handed to Lenore Coffee, and she came up with a scene which caught DeMille’s interest at once, a scene which would show that the Bolsheviks and the aristocrats could behave equally badly once in the saddle.

“When the Bolsheviks are victorious,” said Coffee, “in capturing a palace filled with women in beautiful evening gowns, wearing superb jewels, and men in Court dress with decorations, the Volga Boatmen harness these proud people into the ropes which pull the barge, while they watch in triumph from the boat.”¹²³

The aristocrats were played by real White Russian emigrés. William Boyd (later Hopalong Cassidy), played the hero, wearing an armband with the Cyrillic letters KOM POL., indicating his status as a political commissar. The film is every bit as preposterous as the most lurid of the anti-Bolshevik films, but with DeMille’s characteristic good luck, he got away with it—at least as far as the public was concerned.

“A beautiful picture,” wrote a fan. “Mr. DeMille idolized the Bolshevists, with their demoralization of social life, but the horrible realities of the Russian Revolution are forgotten for a time, while we sit entranced with this stirring romance.”¹²⁴

Critics thought it artificial. Said Picture Play: “All we learned about the revolution from this film is that the Red gentlemen invariably craved the aristocratic gals, and that the boys with the ‘clean white hands’ constantly yearned to carry on with the lady peasants. That, in fact, is the whole story of the film.”¹²⁵

What makes it all the more surprising that this film was made is that it was financed by Jeremiah Milbank, DeMille’s backer, who had a horror of his films being used as Communist propaganda. When John Hampton, owner of the Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles, tried to acquire the film years later, he found it exceptionally difficult—probably because of its political associations.

DeMille made much of his team of researchers and historical advisers, but he conveyed no feeling for authenticity at all. The technical adviser, a former Russian general, said: “They wanted to put it into the present day and make it a Bolshevist film, but I told them that Volga boatmen haven’t existed for over fifty years. They got all the details and the costumes wrong. Oh, absolutely. And because I really tried to get things right and tried to insist, they paid me my money and turned me out. I tell you that the job of the technical expert is to say, ‘Yes, that’s all right; yes, that’s all right’—whatever they do.”¹²⁶

The film did surprisingly well in America (it cost $497,356 and grossed $1,275,374, according to figures from the DeMille Estate), and it was even shown in Russia. One film showing Bolsheviks in a dimly favorable light, however, could hardly cast into the shadows a dozen showing them as they knew the Americans really thought of them.

Prince Dmitri (Victor Varconi) faces the stern gaze of Bolshevik commissar Feodor (William Boyd) in The Volga Boatman, 1926, directed by Cecil B. DeMille—the only American film to present the revolutionaries in a relatively sympathetic light. (Museum of Modern Art)

“The tendency has been to brutalize the acts of Socialistic revolutions,” said Motion Picture Magazine, when the United States finally recognized the U.S.S.R. in 1933. “No attempt has been made to qualify the brutalities as natural impulses, under the eye-for-an-eye creed, in retaliation for centuries of oppression and serfdom. The first sympathetic presentation was probably DeMille’s Volga Boatmen. Yet no charge can be made that this picture contained dangerous propaganda.”¹²⁷

Or, as Picture Play put it, “DeMille had made the Russian Revolution safe for American audiences by making it merely a movie.”¹²⁸

Two supposedly lost films of this period—both of which I have seen in a private collection in England—display a fascinating contrast in their handling of radicals. The One Woman (1918) is a diatribe against socialism written by the Reverend Thomas Dixon and made by his company. The Lion’s Den (1919), written and directed by George D. Baker, is a far more typically American film—moderate, sensible, and humorous. But in each film, a clergyman takes political action, alienates his congregation, and arouses the anger of powerful men.

Despite the fact that The One Woman was directed by the brilliant Reginald Barker (The Coward, The Italian), it is essentially a silent talkie. A fire-eating pastor (Lawson Butt), whose vitriolic sermons are the sensations of the day, is warned by his deacon: “You are driving the best people out of your church with your socialist rubbish.” A female admirer (Clara Williams) encourages him to regard himself as a leader of men, but when he tries to raise money for a temple, a friendly banker warns him that socialism strikes at “the heart of human society—the Home.” He uses chickens as an example: “Full brothers, yet ready to fight at the drop of a hat, why? Both want the same pullet! Man, too, is a fighting animal, and when Socialism comes to pass, the EAGLE will light in the barnyard—and then—good night, roosters!”

This somewhat bizarre lesson gives way to a red-hot affair between the pastor and his female acolyte. The pastor’s wife remains steadfast, refusing the advances of a politician, even when the man becomes governor. The pastor is engulfed “in a whirlpool of violent radicalism,” and when he finds his banker friend taking advantage of his mistress, he kills him during a fight. He is brought to trial and sentenced to death. His wife, still loyal, appeals to the governor, who admits he sanctioned the death penalty to clear the field for himself. “Your love for this man is a thing divine,” he says. “You have nailed me to the cross. Marriage is a divine sacrament. I bow to the will of God and grant him a new trial.” And the pastor, pardoned, returns to the bosom of his family, rejecting what Thomas Dixon clearly considered to be the politics of the farmyard.

The Reverend Sam Webster (Bert Lytell), in The Lion’s Den, is no socialist. Instead of trying to destroy capitalism, he joins it. But he, too, rails against injustice, virtually emptying his church by attacking his congregation for its complacency. How can the members allow their boys to hang around the pool hall, smoking, swearing, and listening to salacious stories? There should be a boys’ club in town! He tries to raise funds, but is made to feel like a beggar. Webster reminds the richest man in the area, grocer Stedman, that he has won his wealth from the town and asks him to put up the first $500. Stedman writes a check—for a mere twenty-five dollars. Infuriated, Webster tears the check up in front of him and goes into business in opposition. At first Stedman uses underhanded methods to force his new rival to the wall, but Webster gathers all the boys at a movie show and puts a proposal to them: each one to become a partner and every penny he makes will go toward the club. The boys enter the scheme with enthusiasm, and soon Stedman is defeated. In a melodramatic ending, Stedman’s clerk sets fire to his store and the boys have to rescue him. He then agrees to build their clubhouse.

Such an ending was unnecessary for so exuberant and realistic a portrait of small-town life. (The small town was Hollywood.) The shots inside the pool hall and barbershop are fascinating and give the film a value not apparent when it first appeared, when it was dismissed as mere program fare. The movie theatre sequences show the boys roaring with laughter at a Chaplin comedy (Metro made its own with a Chaplin imitator). The Lion’s Den, which was adapted from a Saturday Evening Post story by Frederick Orin Bartlett, acknowledged the tyranny of some capitalists, but showed that society didn’t need a Bolshevik revolution to get rid of them.

CAPITAL VERSUS LABOR

     The long struggle between capital and labor reached a peak of violence when the motion picture was present to reflect it and sometimes to record it.

A strike was usually regarded by an employer less as a legitimate expression of a grievance than as a declaration of civil war. He did not seek negotiation—he sought strikebreakers. He did not offer arbitration—he stockpiled guns and gas grenades. To give the strikers a “rifle diet,” he hired an army of “guards”—often gangsters. The strikers were sometimes driven to do the same. Politicians automatically sided with the employer and used the National Guard as a private army. The railroad baron Jay Gould put it succinctly: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”¹²⁹

The more civilized employers felt a paternalistic responsibility toward their employees. A railroad president wrote: “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian gentlemen to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country.”¹³⁰

When model towns and model factories were built, notably by the sleeping-car tycoon George M. Pullman, rents were high and the company kept the workers in a state of feudal serfdom. Wage cuts led to rent arrears. A series of smaller strikes over this issue culminated in 1894 in a massive one, led by Eugene Debs, which was put down by troops with considerable ferocity.

But not all strikers were browbeaten and defenseless. In a country where the right of the citizen to bear arms is (tragically) written into the Constitution, guns were all too easily available. And it took the merest flick of a trigger finger to transform solidarity into slaughter.

Armed conflict was never part of socialist policy. During the 1877 railroad riots, The American Socialist declared that laborers “have no legal or moral right to insist that certain men who have been employing them shall pay them whatever wages they demand. They have a right to quit work and seek better pay elsewhere, but have no right to make war or destroy property or prevent others from taking their places at the reduced wages.”¹³¹

Employers’ associations financed an anti-union open-shop campaign at the turn of the century. (Los Angeles was well known as a nonunion town—one reason the film industry settled there.) Most workers distrusted the unions, which were infiltrated by the employers’ spies. But without solidarity, no strike could succeed. The I.W.W. was formed in 1905 as a militant organization dedicated to the idea of “One Big Union” and determined to challenge the conservative policies of the A.F.L. Notoriety came quickly: the former governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, who had beaten striking miners at Coeur d’Alene, was killed by a bomb, and Big Bill Haywood, one of the founders of the I.W.W., was among those arrested. Sentenced to twenty years in jail, he fled to Soviet Russia—an act which incensed even his supporters—and never returned. He died in Moscow in 1928.

The I.W.W. were known as “Wobblies,” and the initials were translated as “I Won’t Work.” The movies had endless fun with them in comedies, but never took them seriously. Or perhaps they took them too seriously, for no film was made which dealt with them directly. They were invariably referred to, mysteriously, as “outside agitators.” But the I.W.W. achieved the solidarity other unions never attained. It offered to organize anyone, even the despised Chinese and Japanese,¹³² and won many strikes, for, unlike most socialists, its members believed in violence. They did not, however, believe in the power of film.

An I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) parade in Los Angeles on May Day, 1913.

The film industry had an early encounter with the I.W.W. in 1914, when a crowd scene involving 600 extras was disrupted by demands for higher pay. Otis Turner was filming Damon and Pythias at Universal, and the strikers, playing Greek soldiers returning from a victorious campaign, were armed with swords and spears. Universal, fearing a riot, solved the problem by firing the lot of them and hiring another 600 extras to complete the scene a few days later.¹³³

The majority of the capital-versus-labor films used the subject as the focal point for melodrama, the villain being a mill-owner or superintendent. Vitagraph’s The Mill Girl—A Story of Factory Life (1907) was the classic tale of the boss who desires a working girl. Her worker fiancé defends her honor. The boss hires thugs to ambush him, but he proves too strong. Fire breaks out at the factory, and the boss seizes his chance to ravish the girl. The hero climbs a drainpipe to rescue his sweetheart.

Sophisticated in technique, if not in story, The Mill Girl contained an interior of a genuine cotton mill. But its makers had not the slightest interest in social conditions. Nor had Selig, which made The Power of Labor in 1908. This one-reeler portrayed a mill superintendent acting with such brutality that no one would believe it had similar cases not been reported. An absentee owner leaves his steel mill in the charge of John Flack, a man with a criminal past. Flack plays the stock market and, when he needs extra cash, orders a cut in wages. A worker emerges as a champion of labor, and Flack has him kidnapped and thrown into a blast furnace. Unexpectedly, the owner returns to the mill and Flack is confronted by the worker he thought he had killed—who proves to be the owner’s son. After a fight, Flack meets the fate he had reserved for his antagonist.¹³⁴

Variety thought it “a dramatic triumph,”¹³⁵ and Moving Picture World described it as “a powerful argument for fair play between employer and employee.”¹³⁶

Industrial unrest was feared as much by the bosses of film companies as those of regular factories, so the majority took care to avoid controversy in their films. But some were openly anti-labor, like Kalem’s The Molly Maguires, or the Labor Wars in the Coal Mines (1908). The events had long since passed into history, but by reviving memories Kalem drew parallels with the I.W.W.

In the Pennsylvania coal fields in the 1870s, the Molly Maguires were said to be terrorists, killing bosses who were hated by the workers, provoking strikes, and murdering alien miners—but no one has proved that the band ever existed. The detective Allan Pinkerton and his spy James McParlan were the source of most of the stories, but labor historians have accused them and the coal ring of inventing the Molly Maguires.¹³⁷

Pinkerton planted spies among the miners. During the strike, the coal ring’s private army, the Coal and Iron Police, was reinforced and its attacks on the workers passed off as Molly Maguire operations. After five months, the starving miners gave up; those not blacklisted returned to work with a 20 percent wage cut. Some radicals were found dead in disused mine shafts. Others were branded as Molly Maguires, which was enough to hang a man. McParlan produced his “evidence,” and in 1876 the first trials of the Molly Maguires began. July 21, 1877, became known as “Pennsylvania’s Day with the Rope”; ten were hanged that day, nine more later.¹³⁸

The Kalem film was a re-enactment in one reel and eight scenes. Even by the standard of 1908, The Molly Maguires was not rated highly. “Created no strong impression,” said Moving Picture World.¹³⁹

The attempt of some film companies to quench the flames of industrial conflict was occasionally a little too obvious, as in The Right to Labor (1909). Said Moving Picture World: “The closing scene, where Capital and Labor grasp hands and the angel of prosperity waves the olive branch above them, is well worth preservation as an inspiration to conservative action when any dispute of this character arises.”¹⁴⁰

Most people felt that the bridge between capital and labor had long since been burned. But Vitagraph’s Capital vs. Labor (1910) was optimistic. An industrialist’s daughter, courted by both an officer of the militia and a clergyman, cannot decide which to marry. When a strike at her father’s factory develops into a riot, the officer runs off to alert his troops. The mob attacks her house, breaking the doors and windows and threatening her father. “While the fury of the mob is at its height, the young minister rushes into the room, checks and silences the strikers, and gains from their employer all their claims and privileges. Naturally, the young clergyman has won the respect of the capitalist, the cause of labor and the heart of the young girl.”¹⁴¹

Directed by Van Dyke Brooke, the picture featured Maurice Costello, Harry T. Morey, and Earle Williams. As Lewis Jacobs wrote, “The message of the film, that capital would accede to labor problems if approached properly by the right people,” prompted Moving Picture World to call the film ‘one of the most extraordinary motion picture dramas of the year … powerful in its purpose.’ ”¹⁴²

The paper added that it was much too realistic to be comfortable. “Perhaps the picture will have a salutary influence during the season when strikes pervade the air.’ ”¹⁴³

A surprising number of films used the device of an owner’s son who works incognito at the factory to experience conditions firsthand. Sometimes he organizes the strike, sometimes he stops it. In Thanhouser’s The Girl Strike Leader (1910), he falls for a radical. Her strike is crushed, but she accepts his hand in marriage, whereupon he reveals his identity and gets his father to restore a wage cut. These were films designed to offend no one and, apart from the odd documentary scene, were of no great significance.

Vitagraph’s Tim Mahoney, the Scab (1911), however, was one of the most talked-of films. Its neutrality was deceptive; for once, the filmmakers put the case for the ordinary human caught up in conditions beyond his control. Wrote Moving Picture World:

“Tim is a union man … and he also believes in the righteousness of this particular strike. But the strike finds Tim, in spite of union help, if there is any, unprepared. His children are hungry when the story opens, and are going to be hungry three times a day right along. Tim’s case is special. We are not shown just what elements make it harder for him than for all the others, but we see at first he is loyal to the union.

“It’s a weakness of the photoplay that it cannot tell us plainly all the reasons that there were for such a step, but on the other hand, it’s the photoplay’s strength that it can picture so vividly the state of mind in which Tim makes his decision.”¹⁴⁴

Tim is judged harshly, and the other youngsters stone his children.

“When the works open again and Tim stands at the door while his former friends pass by, five or six pass him, some with contempt, and one looks upon him, Tim Mahoney, his old friend who is now a scab, with such wonder that the fact seems not believable. It is a shaft that goes home to Tim’s heart.… That scene has not been beaten in any picture, so far as we know.”¹⁴⁵

Alice Guy Blaché, as a director of Solax, was a factory owner herself, and her films on labor problems were thus unlikely to contain much of a radical flavor. Gerald Peary, who has seen some of them, says they were “reactionary … stringently anti-strike, pro-management and deal typically with a worker protagonist forced to strike against his will who discovers proof of the ‘goodness’ of the boss and leads the men back to work, and away from their ‘unreasonable’ demands.”¹⁴⁶

This is certainly true of The Strike (1912). It is impossible to know whether Madame Blaché directed it, but she would have supervised it even if one of her employees did the actual directing. At a meeting in a union hall we are introduced to the Agitator (who looks Italian) and the Hero, Jack Smith (who looks Anglo-Saxon). Jack is appointed to speak to the boss, but the latter refuses the workers’ demands. They pour out of the factory and, ignoring their employer’s pleas, express their anger by smashing windows. The union committee decides to wreck the factory at midnight. Once again, our man Jack gets the short straw. After hiding the bomb, Jack goes to a mass meeting which is hardly under way when he is called to the phone. A split-screen effect conveys that his home has caught fire. Jack runs out and flags down a car. It contains the boss. Together they speed to the burning house and rescue Jack’s wife and child. And Jack disposes of the bomb. Next morning, the workers deliver a letter via Jack’s little girl: “We’ve had enough strike, boss, and are all ready for work. We all think you’re a fine fellow after last night, so let the whistle blow.” At the factory, the boss stands beside the little girl and shakes the hand of each worker as he reports for duty.

The film is melodrama rather than propaganda, but the message is strong, nonetheless: survival means cooperation. It is perhaps significant that the “hero” seems committed to placing a bomb in the factory, as though, after the McNamara case, Madame Blaché imagined all discontented American workers were potential dynamiters.

How different is Solax’s The High Cost of Living, a courtroom drama also made in 1912. Joel Smith, an old ironworker, tells his story to the judge. He has given half a century to his employer. While the cost of living has soared, he and the other workers have had no raise in pay. They strike, but the boss stands firm. Faced with starvation, Joel tries to beg, but cannot bring himself to do so. His only alternative is to go back to the forge. A young worker calls him a coward; they fight with sledgehammers, and Joel kills the youth. In jail, he hears of the death of his youngest child. Joel pleads with the judge to put an end to his sufferings.

The old man is played by a young actor, in unconvincing make-up. Equally artificial are the sets. But what a fascinating glimpse into the conditions of the time this film represents!

Mindful of their audience, manufacturers usually avoided showing workers at each other’s throats. But the Selig film The Girl at the Cupola (1912), directed by Oscar Eagle, dealt with the painful subject of industrial inefficiency. Jessie Wilson (Kathlyn Williams) is engaged to Jack Berry (Charles Clary), who is known as “the Business Doctor” for his success in reviving ailing companies. Jessie’s father runs just such a company, the Wilson Iron Foundry. Jack Berry takes the reins and fires the elderly workers, explaining that more expert men are required.

Jessie, furious with Jack, supports the employees who go out on strike. She tips them off when Jack brings in a trainload of strikebreakers. The strikers fortify themselves at the saloon, then pounce on the new men. Jessie retreats to the factory to protect Jack, but the fighting men burst in. They find him at the cupola door, trying to keep the fire burning. They almost kill him before Jessie, heating an iron in the furnace, repels them.

A week later a letter is circulated by Wilson: “My daughter has pleaded your case and won. Men over 60 years of age will be pensioned; all others may go back to work.”

The print ends here, so we don’t see how the Business Doctor copes without his expert foundrymen. What is fascinating, apart from some fine exteriors and shots of the foundry in action, is to see a film, albeit only mildly pro-labor, which condones violence.

Thanhouser’s The Strike (1914), directed by Henry Harrison Lewis and Carl Louis Gregory, who was also the cameraman, deplored violence. Although its aim was to show the need for arbitration, reviewers found it far too partisan toward the employers: “The one error seems to be the placing of labor unions in a too unfavorable light, even granting the dangerous character of professional agitators such as Black, the troublemaker in this story. We are shown the worst elements of organized labor and none of the better; whereas capital is the virtuous, innocent party, save for a persistent obstinacy in refusing to compromise.”¹⁴⁷

The film does not say so, but the implication is that Black is an I.W.W. man. He enters the contented village of Peacedale and unionizes the employees of the Trask factory. When a worker is fired for incompetence, Black triggers a strike, which brings misery and poverty to the community. A worker who protests is beaten up. Finally, Black dynamites the factory. Trask declares that rather than rebuild it and have to deal with such an impossible man, he will quit the business. And so he does, leaving the community shattered and without prospect of employment.¹⁴⁸

AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING      Thanhouser had made The Cry of the Children, and its policy was not wholeheartedly anti-labor. But it was perhaps significant that the company made films “sponsored” by the big corporations. A good example is An American in the Making (1913), which Thanhouser identified as a safety-first film produced by the National Social Betterment Association.¹⁴⁹ Actually, it was produced under the direction of the United States Steel Corporation, and its Committee of Safety, for the Bureau of Mines.¹⁵⁰

A Hungarian peasant receives passage money from his brother in America. He kisses his parents with joy and starts packing. We see him arrive in America, disembarking from the Ellis Island ferry at the Battery.¹⁵¹ A label on his coat is clearly visible; Bela Tokaji, Gary, Indiana. Unusually for an immigrant film, an American comes to his aid and helps him load his heavy trunk on his shoulder.

His brother greets him at Gary and shows him the workingman’s model city. Bela works hard, attends night school, becomes a skilled laborer, and marries a schoolteacher. “His happiness as the head of a family is shown, and also the interest which the great Corporation takes of its employees, and their willingness to advance those who are ambitious and competent.”¹⁵²

Up to this point, the film might be a thinly disguised recruiting film for cheap foreign labor. Only at the end comes the sequence which justifies its description as a safety-first film: shots of the protection installed on machines, guards over belts and pulleys, and the fans used to cool the fierce heat of the steelworks. (Such evidence was also good for recruiting.) There are some impressive shots of Bessemer converters, showering the screen with sparks. The picture ends with the immigrant’s son going to school—another American in the making. (Gary’s schools were the country’s leading exemplars of progressive education.)

The National Association of Manufacturers showed this at their convention at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York. An Italian is put to work on a lathe; he leaves the safety device open and mangles his arm. Bigelow Cooper (left) and George Lessey. (David Robinson)

The attitude of the employer was revealed in a U.S. Steel publication which referred to the film as the story of an “ignorant Hungarian peasant … stupid and uneducated,” who prospers thanks to the company’s safety and welfare programs.¹⁵³

The yellow press, which found no space to discuss documentaries in the normal course of events, leaped on this one. “Samuel W. Gleason, superintendent of the Gary steel mills, is wondering what his daughter, Mary Louise, will say when she gets back from California and finds a majority of the workmen believe she is the heroine of the courtship. The mill scenes, the office scenes displayed in the movie being real, it is puzzling the superintendent how to suppress the belief among the workmen that the remainder of the scenes are real.”¹⁵⁴

C. J. Hite, president of Thanhouser, angrily replied that the Gleasons had not insisted on changes; the film did not tell the story of the superintendent, nor did it portray the courtship of his daughter: “The film merely tells the story of an immigrant who gets a job in the steel works and is enabled in time to buy a little house and marry a young school teacher. The whole article is an injustice to Mr. Gleason and his daughter, who were not mentioned even remotely in the film.”¹⁵⁵ Employers did not often sponsor entertainment films. Their use of the moving picture reflected their self-interest. During strikes, some employed cameramen to film disturbances so that troublemakers could be recognized and charged.¹⁵⁶

So few pictures supported labor that union men protested. In 1910, delegates to the American Federation of Labor convention had called for a boycott of movie theatres which showed antilabor films. The “boycott” was too mild to have any effect. In 1915, union men were still protesting—still far too mildly. One wrote to a Washington paper that he resented “these flagrantly unfair and prejudiced attacks upon the workers of the country, and on more than one occasion have expressed my opinion to the managers of the theaters, who have usually replied that this is the sort of play the film companies furnish, and that they are obliged to take what they can get. If this is the case and if it is the result of a definite policy of the film manufacturers to discredit working men, who are the chief patrons of the 5 and 10 cent houses, I should think this would be a subject which union labor might do well to look into.”¹⁵⁷

But at least one film presented a strike with approval. George Melford’s The Struggle (1913), from a story by Henry Albert Phillips, was praised for its unusual theme: the scandalous absentee owners of industrial property, who take the profits but care nothing for the welfare of their employees. Melford staged scenes in a rolling mill, and steelworkers played alongside the actors. The foreman whose brutal behavior causes the strike was played by Paul C. Hurst, who specialized in villains (and later became a director).

Steel workers played alongside the actors in this drama, directed by George Melford. The Struggle, 1913, was one of the few films to sympathize with strikers. Paul Hurst plays the brutal foreman (left). From Moving Picture World, June 7, 1913. (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

Melford returned to this theme in 1915 with Out of Darkness, a Lasky feature from a Hector Turnbull scenario. An accident causes Helen Scott (Charlotte Walker) to lose her memory, and she is obliged to earn her living (thirty cents a day) in a Florida canning factory where hundreds of children are employed. The workers strike, and the factory is set on fire. A mob tries to kill the manager. The excitement restores her memory—she recalls that she is the owner of the factory. “She sets to work to rebuild it to conform with the laws of sanitation and humanity.”¹⁵⁸

The Strike at Coaldale (1914) presented a more ambivalent situation. This Eclair drama featured Stanley Walpole as Joe Gregory, a power in the union and an engineer on the Coaldale Railroad. Conditions are bad; a strike is threatened. Edith Harland (Mildred Bright), daughter of the president of the line, pleads with Joe to avert the strike. The president, a proud and autocratic man, rejects the workers’ demands. The strike begins.

The president hires strikebreakers; violence erupts. Edith suffers a concussion and must be rushed to the hospital, but no trains are running. The president pleads with the strikers, who refuse to cooperate. Joe Gregory intercedes: a human life is at stake, says he. Do the men want to be branded as murderers? But they are adamant, so Gregory takes a train out himself. The strikers set fire to a trestle bridge in the path of the locomotive, and Gregory, risking death, drives through the flames.

He gets Edith to the hospital in time, but Gregory is repudiated by his union. The strikers capture the president and threaten to kill him. Gregory appeals to them, successfully this time, and regains his former position. Then he turns on the president and, with Edith, pleads the strikers’ cause. At last, the men’s demands are met. And Gregory is promoted to superintendent of the Coaldale Railroad.¹⁵⁹

All this in one reel! Moving Picture World thought it achieved “perfect direction and the strike is most realistic.” A railroad trestle was actually burned for the making of this picture, costing the Eclair Company hundreds of dollars.¹⁶⁰ Pennsylvania and Ohio censors banned the film because, despite the desperate acts committed by the strikers, it was still regarded as being prolabor,¹⁶¹ too inflammatory to be let loose on the people without being slashed to ribbons.

A film about a labor leader was an unlikely subject for a feature, yet Favorite (not Famous) Players produced a six-reeler called The High Hand in 1915.¹⁶² Directed by William Desmond Taylor, it showed “Honest” Jim Warren (Carlyle Blackwell), a former foundryman, waging war against entrenched graft and rising to governor. Oddly enough, the film’s history worked against it in the opinion of reviewers: “That he himself, feeling unable to cope with political conditions by open-handed methods, stoops to do the same kind of dirty work that his opponents do, even with the clean purpose of doing away with bad conditions, is the story’s most hampering burden,” said Moving Picture World, admitting that in real life the man might have done just that, but in the story the audience’s interest in him drops as a result.¹⁶³

Considering that most films—populist, socialist, or simply the many apolitical melodramas—showed factory owners as villains, it is surprising that the industrialists permitted film people anywhere near their property. (Perhaps they never went to the movies.) Homestead Mills, Pennsylvania, was used as location for The Cave Man (1915); Galloway Oil Fields, near Franklin, Pennsylvania, for Those Who Toil (1916); and cotton mills at Anniston, Alabama, for The Quality of Faith (1916).

The whole town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, turned out to help Romaine Fielding stage The Golden God (1914), a capital-versus-labor epic set in 1950, when “giant labor will strike its tyrant Gold.”¹⁶⁴ Fielding imagined that by that time, labor unrest would be on the scale of a small war, and with the example of Ludlow (see this page), no one could blame him.

Fielding himself led a cavalry charge in a car fitted with a machine gun, while a fleet of airplanes flew overhead. The National Guard, surprisingly (considering its record in the suppression of strikes), cooperated in all this.

When a film was intended to condemn the very manufacturers whose cooperation it sought, the filmmakers were forced to disguise their intentions. So it was with the most notorious of all anticapitalist films of this period, The Jungle.

THE JUNGLE      An ironic paragraph appeared in the trade press in April 1914, in a review of a Victor film called U.S. Government Inspection of Meat: “It was seven years ago that the present law came into effect, requiring veterinary inspectors authorized by the U.S. Government to be stationed in every slaughtering and packing establishment of importance in the country. These experts safeguard the public health by detecting tuberculosis and other diseases in animals and carcasses. But the average person knows little about how this work is carried on. The film goes into practically every detail of the inspection work.… The various scenes have been taken in one of the biggest slaughtering and packing establishments in the country.”¹⁶⁵

The reviewer stopped short of saying where the scenes had been shot, for the very name “Chicago” summoned up horrific images from Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, a film version of which would be reviewed in this same column within a couple of months. The Jungle was the most scathing indictment of an industry ever written. Published in 1906, it was described by Jack London as “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery.”¹⁶⁶ The meat packers did all they could to suppress it. But a congressional committee vindicated Sinclair and the public outcry brought about the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. An American industry, responsible for poisoning its own country’s troops in the Spanish-American War, was reformed by a book.

By the time the film version of The Jungle appeared, the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act had improved the situation. But it was still far from satisfactory, and films like Poison (Kalem, 1915) charged the food industry with continued negligence.¹⁶⁷

The Jungle, turned down by five publishers, had been translated into seventeen languages. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” wrote Sinclair, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”¹⁶⁸ The book is so graphic and uncompromising that certain passages are still hard to read without a sense of nausea. As an indictment of the meat-packing industry, it is shattering. Yet it was not meant to be so restricted: Sinclair intended it as a study of the worst effects of capitalism, followed by a lecture on socialism.

The story centers on a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis and his family, who arrive in Chicago (Packingtown in the film) and go to work in the stockyards. Jurgis is laid off when he sprains his ankle, and soon his family faces starvation. He beats his son to force the lad through the snow to work.

A member of the family dies from eating poisoned food—much of what the packing plant ships to the public is poisoned in one way or another. (Occasionally, a worker will slip and fall into one of the vats. There is no way the others can get the body out, so he goes on to be processed as pure leaf lard.) Jurgis eventually gets a new job in the fertilizer plant, where all workers are doomed, so appalling are the conditions. He takes to drink, discovers his wife is earning extra money as a part-time prostitute, smashes the head of the man who led her to this fate, and is sent to jail for thirty days. When he is released he finds that his family has been evicted. His wife dies in childbirth; Jurgis becomes a hobo. He returns to the Chicago packers as a strikebreaker and is promoted to foreman. But it doesn’t last, and soon he is back on the streets again, facing a slow death by starvation in the icy winter. Dropping in at a political meeting to keep warm, he is introduced to socialist doctrine and becomes a new man. He takes part in a wildly successful socialist campaign, and the story ends on a note of optimism: “We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us—and Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!”¹⁶⁹

Margaret Mayo, wife of dramatist Edgar Selwyn, adapted the book as a play, but Sinclair considered it poor. It came to New York and lost money—much of it Sinclair’s. So the scenario for the film was taken from the novel, following it closely, although a layer of melodrama was inevitable. “But all the scenes of the packing house and the doping of the meat are shown, and likewise all the sufferings of a working-class family.”¹⁷⁰

The film was produced by the All-Star Feature Corporation, whose president was Harry Raver, a former publicity man with a circus. The vice president was Archibald Selwyn, the theatrical producer, and its director-general Augustus Thomas, the distinguished playwright.¹⁷¹ All-Star publicity stressed that every film would be made under the personal direction of Thomas.

This was the 1914 equivalent of Arthur Miller directing films of his own plays. A former newspaper reporter, illustrator, and law student, Thomas had written his first successful play, Alabama, in 1891. He was probably best known for The Witching Hour (1907). More significantly, he had been a labor leader for six years while working as a railroad brakeman.¹⁷²

To help Thomas with the technical side, two other directors, George Irving and John H. Pratt (who also acted in the film), were brought in. Virtually all the players were active on the Broadway stage and had to be rushed back to the theatres every evening. Picture people wondered how All-Star got the footage of the stockyards without the owners realizing the true nature of the film. In fact, the yards were filmed in New Jersey rather than Chicago,¹⁷³ and, according to William S. Hart, All-Star represented its film to the meat packers as something other than The Jungle. The meat packers granted permission for exteriors to be filmed at their yards, and the company matched these exteriors with studio interiors “showing all sorts of frightful stockyard stuff that was as revolting as it was untrue.”¹⁷⁴ (Why Hart took the meat packers’ side is unknown.)

The picture cost $17,000.¹⁷⁵ Sinclair himself considered it “a great success” and “an honest attempt to represent my ideas.”¹⁷⁶ Moving Picture World called it “somewhat daring and powerful. Many gripping scenes obtain, especially where Jurgis, after a desperate struggle, flings the foreman into the cattle run of the stockyard. The mob scenes during the strike against a reduction of 20 per cent in wages, ordered by the packing house magnate, on account of the extravagance of his family, are cleverly directed and extremely realistic.”¹⁷⁷

The cast included George Nash, Gail Kane, Robert Cummings, Clarence Handyside, Julia Hurley, and Ernest Evers. Upton Sinclair was seen at the start at his typewriter, and he acted in the closing scenes, playing the socialist orator. He appeared onstage when the film was shown at the Broadway Theatre in New York.¹⁷⁸

Clement Wood, writing in the socialist paper Appeal to Reason (which had first published the novel), described the film with enthusiasm: “And all this being shown in pictures that stir the brain and tear the feelings, that bring tears to the eyes of women and men, that shock and arouse and awake … all combine to drive the lesson of Socialism home with a point and a snap that it has never before possessed.”¹⁷⁹

Variety’s critic Sime (Sime Silverman, the paper’s founder) was one of the few dissenters on June 6: “More misery! And the gloom in The Jungle was laid on with a shovel. This is not a feature picture of wild animals, just about wild socialists, that’s all—and the Lord knows that’s enough.”

The picture opened on June 1, 1914, at the 2,000-seat De Kalb Theatre in Brooklyn, and later at the Broadway Theatre in New York City. It had a two-week run at Woodley’s Theatre in Los Angeles before moving to Clune’s, where The Birth of a Nation would open. Here it was accompanied by a twenty-piece orchestra and, according to Sinclair, was highly profitable.¹⁸⁰ “The board of censorship barred it from Chicago,” he wrote, “and you will understand that this is a compliment to its truth.”¹⁸¹

By the end of 1915, Sinclair began receiving disturbing reports. One correspondent told him that some of the best scenes were missing or incomplete and the film kept breaking. Sabotage was suspected, but actually the prints had been run to death. New copies were made and fan mail from socialists across the country flooded in, calling The Jungle the best socialist film in existence.¹⁸² Sinclair felt that Augustus Thomas had more honesty and fair-mindedness than the average. But those who handled the picture, Harry Raver and Co., “milked the company of the profits, and then threw it into bankruptcy and I got practically nothing from this play.”¹⁸³ What he did get, however, was the negative, which his wife purchased for $250 during the bankruptcy proceedings. He made many attempts to have the film shown and in 1920 began negotiations with Joseph D. Cannon, founder of the Labor Film Service, to reissue it.

(Pacific Film Archive)

Cannon was a Seattle-born Socialist candidate for governor of New York who had been an organizer with the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers of the Mining Department of the A.F.L. He was a great admirer of Sinclair’s work and thought parts of the picture “splendid,” but that overall it did not measure up to the novel. “The Jungle is entitled to something bigger and better than that.”¹⁸⁴ He suggested cutting certain scenes and filming additional material.

Sinclair was happy about these changes,¹⁸⁵ and Cannon agreed to distribute the film, perhaps through Pathé—although they soon dropped the idea. For a while nothing happened, and Sinclair, with his very low opinion of moving picture people, suspected he had been double-crossed yet again. But Cannon was fighting to survive in an atmosphere poisoned by the Red Scare. Once he had found the money, he embarked on all the changes he had promised, spending the sum of $2,498.13. In August 1921, he submitted the film to the National Board of Review (together with The Contrast, about a coal strike).

“One heavy-set man of about fifty became almost choleric,” he wrote to Sinclair. “He branded The Jungle as the most un-American picture that was ever shown. The very idea that we invited foreigners to come over here and then even to intimate that they received any such treatment as shown in The Jungle was an outrage.”¹⁸⁶

The subcommittee turned the picture down, and Cannon appealed for a showing before the full board: “Two members of the Board were friendly, not friendly perhaps to The Jungle, but friendly to common sense. They felt that in the end an adverse report on the picture would hurt the board more than it would hurt the picture, although it would have been extremely embarrassing to Labor Film for the time being.” At the end of an exhausting, four-hour session, Cannon reported that both The Jungle and The Contrast had been passed. But he warned Sinclair, “There is going to be a terrific fight to keep The Jungle off the screen.”¹⁸⁷

The Jungle was passed … with cuts. “You remember when they held their noses while passing the yards. We had put a title in there ‘Not just the “sweet” land of liberty.’ Some members of the Board objected that that might be interpreted as unpatriotic.”¹⁸⁸

Cannon reported that Armour and Company had asked Exhibitors Trade Review for details of the personnel of the Labor Film Service.¹⁸⁹ And Augustus Thomas, presumably regretting his association with the film, wrote to the Labor Film Service denying any connection with The Jungle. (By this time, Thomas had made the antisocialist film The Volcano, and he undoubtedly knew that he would be selected as executive chairman of the governing body of theatrical producers, the Producing Managers Association, to which he would be appointed in 1922.) Sinclair was baffled and, somewhat naively, wrote to him: “I am not sure whether this is a lapse of memory on your part, or some misunderstanding on my part as to the meaning of the word ‘direct.’ ”¹⁹⁰ He recounted how he had watched Thomas, apparently in full charge of the making of the film, giving instructions to the actors and how his name had been used in the film’s advertisements. Thomas’s reply is missing, but somehow Sinclair became convinced that another man with a similar name had done the work, for in his autobiography he wrote: “An odd confusion there—the show was being directed by A. E. Thomas; I took this to be Augustus Thomas and named him so as the director, greatly to his surprise.”¹⁹¹

A. E. Thomas was also a playwright who specialized in light comedies. He was never credited as being part of All-Star, whereas the name of Augustus Thomas was boasted in almost every advertisement. But even if there was confusion, and A. E. Thomas had been mysteriously introduced into All-Star, posing as his namesake, there is one other fact to be taken into consideration. The star of The Jungle was George Nash. And George Nash was Augustus Thomas’s favorite actor.

In November 1921, the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, C. W. Pugsley, wrote to the Labor Film Service that The Jungle gave an erroneous impression of the conditions existing at packing houses under the supervision of the federal meat inspection force.¹⁹² He objected to the display of filthy conditions in the manufacturing of sausage: the scene showing that the contents of a tank in which an employee had been scalded to death is manufactured into edible lard, the scene showing a spoiled ham. And the department had worked out a way to play upon the feelings of the Labor Film Service: “You are doubtless familiar with the condition of agriculture at the present time. The prices of grain, forage and other farm products are ruinously low. The film will certainly interfere with the consumption of meat and such interference will be to the great disadvantage of farmers and consumers directly and labor indirectly.”¹⁹³ Furthermore, the department did not consider adequate the insertion of statements, suggested by Cannon, that there was now a federal inspection of meat and that the packing houses were sanitary.

Cannon sent this letter to Sinclair, who replied, “I will carefully cherish their letter.”¹⁹⁴ And when the picture was presented at Tucson, Arizona, on Labor Day 1921, Sinclair declared: “The condition of the stockyard workers is exactly the same today as in 1906.”

In 1922, Cannon spent a great deal of money on publicity for the new version of The Jungle. He had a new print struck, but he was horrified by the result, for the laboratory had done a wretched job. “The thing has done us irreparable harm,” he said. Worse news followed for the perennially hard-up Sinclair: The Labor Film Service could send him no money.

The laboratory’s excuse was the one used to this day: it’s an old film, what do you expect?¹⁹⁵ There was a further setback when it opened in May at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, for the picture drew a response very different from its first appearance in 1914. The left-wing New York Call attacked it so vehemently, accusing it of overemphasis and melodrama, that Cannon was driven to defend the film in print.¹⁹⁶

In June, the picture was booked into the Winter Garden Theatre on Houston Street and Second Avenue.¹⁹⁷ The month’s run proved a disaster. That, and the faulty film, came close to putting Labor Film Service out of business.¹⁹⁸ Sinclair came east to help with the publicity, but exhibitors would have nothing to do with Labor Film Service. “The financial interests which control the trade were too strong to overcome,” wrote Sinclair.¹⁹⁹

The following year came enquiries from Russia. The president of Politkino, Joseph Malkin, ^† asked Sinclair to send The Jungle to the Soviet Union. Sinclair explained that he had examined the negative and found it absolutely ruined: “When it was unwound this time great strips of the material came off entirely, so there is nothing left.” Sinclair was probably mistaking the simple breaking of joins with disintegration of celluloid, but in any case he decided the only course was to make a duplicate negative from his print. “I take it you would rather have a picture which is poor from the technique point of view, but which speaks to the working class in its own language, rather than have the most perfect and costly reproduction of the trash and corruption which fills our moving picture theatres at the present time.”²⁰⁰

The Russians decided they could not afford a negative, even at cost, but after fresh negotiations they imported the picture. So did the Scandinavians. In 1927, Sinclair attempted to distribute the film himself, but encountered even stiffer resistance. The New York censors reported, “Too many immoral scenes and subtitles. At the conclusion of the picture and throughout there is an attempt to force Socialistic propaganda on the minds of the audience, with a general denunciation of factory workers as the slaves of greed. The picture is immoral throughout, both in theme and subtitle, and is unsuitable for public presentation.”²⁰¹

The only way the censors would permit it to be shown was in fragments. They demanded the removal of the following titles: “This ham is rotten,” “We sell every part of the pig except the squeal,” “The workmen refuse to accept the wage cut—they are underpaid as it is,” “They grind up the workers as well as the animals in their great machines. They turn sweat and blood into gold. They care nothing for the workers save the money they can make out of them. The workers are slaves of greed.”²⁰²

And besides the titles, many scenes had to be sacrificed.

By the time he wrote his autobiography, Sinclair had changed his mind about the quality of the film: “It was a poor picture; the concern went into bankruptcy, and so ended another dream. All I got was the film, and I loaned it to some organization and never got it back. Whoever has it, please return it!”²⁰³

THE TRIANGLE FIRE      Safety precautions in factories and sweatshops were rudimentary at best; 15,000 people were killed in industry every year, and half a million were crippled.²⁰⁴ The greatest danger was fire. On March 25, 1911, a blaze at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York killed 146 girls, some in the flames and others who jumped out the windows. Overcrowded, poorly ventilated, the floor littered with combustible material, the place was a tinderbox, and when the owner bolted the steel door leading to the stairway to prevent “interruption of work” by employees using the toilet,²⁰⁵ he condemned most of them to death.

Selig’s The Still Alarm, 1911, came out two months after the Triangle Fire and was thus highly topical, even if it was based on an old play. Selig remade it in 1918. (Robert S. Birchard Collection)

The Crime of Carelessness (1912), written by James Oppenheim, a former settlement worker who had scripted Hope, was produced by Edison for the National Association of Manufacturers, so it could hardly lay the blame entirely on employers. But while it shows a worker causing a fire, it has the employer admitting his own responsibility, too.

A worker called Tom (Barry O’Moore) becomes engaged to Hilda (Mabel Trunnelle), who works in the same mill. They plan their future home. Although reprimanded for smoking, Tom lights up in the cellars, discarding a match which ignites a pile of rubbish. As the flames spread, the workers panic. Hilda rushes to the nearest fire door to find it locked; she faints in the heat. Tom races back into the inferno and rescues her. When he admits his responsibility for the fire, he is discharged. All the workers are laid off; the feeling against Tom is so strong he cannot get work. He becomes poorer and poorer, and he lives with the agony of having crippled Hilda. He considers suicide.

Visiting the mill-owner (Bigelow Cooper), Hilda accuses him. “It’s your fault I have crutches,” she shouts, referring to the locked fire door. He is stunned and sits for a moment in shock. At length, he writes a letter to Tom, admitting they are both to blame and offering him a job in the new factory.

A couple of interiors were filmed in a real mill, but the acting is exaggerated, and the burning factory is a palpable miniature. The one-reeler is primitive in every way, but it undoubtedly caused people to think—a considerable achievement in itself.

As Steven Ross points out, however, the fact that mill and garment factory owners had persistently ignored union demands for improved safety conditions was overlooked.²⁰⁶

Based on the Triangle fire, and widely admired at the time, although forgotten since, was a three-reeler called The Locked Door (1914). Produced in collaboration with the Fire and Police Departments of New York City, it was written by W. B. Northrup, and directed by Tefft Johnson, who played a leading role.

“Among photoplays with a deeper purpose than that of fleeting entertainment,” wrote the New York Dramatic Mirror, “The Locked Door must be given a prominent place. With the horror of the Triangle fire fading into the shadow of years, it is quite worthwhile to produce a picture illustrating the way to invite and the way to avert another such catastrophe.”²⁰⁷

The film contrasted the attitude to safety of two companies. In the Atlas Syndicate loft, run by Jacob Emanuel (Edward Elkas), young women work at sewing machines with scarcely any elbow room between them. The narrow aisles are littered with discarded material; the foreman is a chain smoker. The door to the hallway is locked, and fire extinguishers are regarded as a needless expense.

In the same building, one flight up, Arnold Forsythe (Tefft Johnson) and his son (William Dunn) run a much safer establishment, fitted with fire extinguishers, sprinkler pipes, and containers for waste material. Stella Rubinow (Eulalie Jensen) is discharged for repeatedly breaking the safety rules and gets her revenge—and another job—by telling Emanuel of a door in Forsythe’s factory that violates fire ordinances by opening in, not out. Emanuel, who has often been threatened by Forsythe, calls in the Fire Department. Forsythe demonstrates his safety devices and promises to fix the door—then suggests an examination of Emanuel’s factory. The old man is shocked when he sees the inspector and complains that he cannot afford proper fire prevention devices. “You’ll have to afford it,” says the inspector, threatening to close him up in a week. When he has gone, Emanuel creeps upstairs and sets the Forsythe factory alight. The safety devices save Forsythe’s, but the Emanuel floor is soon consumed in flame.²⁰⁸

Viola Dana and director John Collins (perched at the foot of the bed) on the set of The Children of Eve, 1915. Ned Van Buren at camera, with Robert Walker, the leading man, and assistant Albert Kelley. Filmed at Edison Studios, Bronx, New York. (George J. Mitchell)

The Children of Eve (1915), a Lower East Side drama, directed by John Collins and starring Viola Dana, climaxed with a horrific fire sequence (with the inevitable locked door) shot at Fort Schuyler. An empty four-story brick factory, filled with waste film and gasoline, was set alight. It burned too well, and Ned van Buren, the cameraman, was marooned on a camera platform sixty feet above the ground, in considerable danger, until the front of the building collapsed and the heat was reduced.²⁰⁹

The same year, John Noble made The High Road, a Metro five-reeler adapted from an Edward Sheldon play. It was a pre-Hays picture in every sense, with the leading character, Mary Page (Valli Valli) becoming the mistress of a man in the city. After three years, she “suddenly awakens to the enormity of her offense” and leaves for a job in a factory. She leads a strike which is unsuccessful. The girls are forced to work overtime to make up for lost orders. To prevent anyone leaving early, the manager locks the door. The building catches fire; panic and terror lead to many casualties.

In the last sequences, Mary Page prevents the factory owner from avoiding the blame.²¹⁰ (The owners of the building destroyed in the Triangle fire brought in a devious lawyer who won their acquittal, proving that the deaths of the garment workers were all their own fault.²¹¹

THE LUDLOW MASSACRE      The Ludlow Massacre of Easter 1914 was triggered by a strike at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The company was run as a dictatorship—it even censored the movies its employees saw.²¹² The workers were housed in deplorable conditions.²¹³ When the United Mine Workers attempted to negotiate such improvements as an eight-hour day, the company refused even to enter discussions and forced striking employees to move from these company-owned houses to union-built camps which were even worse—pits covered with tents.

After a savage battle at Trinidad, Colorado, the National Guard arrived to be welcomed by the strikers as peacemakers. The Guard imposed a truce, but when Governor Ammons decided it should be used to protect strikebreakers, the truce was shattered.

The strikers at Ludlow took on the militia, who blazed away at them with rifles and machine gun for hours. The Guardsmen charged part of the camp, where women and children were sheltered, and doused the tents with kerosene. “There rose up,” recalled a lieutenant, “the most awful wail I ever heard in my life.”²¹⁴ The flames roared through the camp; soldiers and guards fired at anyone trying to escape. When the fire died down six adults were found shot in their tracks; eleven children and two pregnant women were found burned to death.

The strikers’ grief and fury caused the warfare to spread as the fire had done. Governor Ammons appealed to President Wilson, and Federal troops put an end to Colorado’s civil war, in which more than forty people had died.

Congressional investigations laid the blame on John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who had become a figure of odium in both working-class circles and on the screen.

By a remarkable coincidence, two future Hollywood cameramen, Harry Perry and Victor Milner, were on opposite sides of the Colorado coal mine war. Perry had joined the National Guard for fun, but in 1914 he was called out on strike duty near Trinidad, and, as he put it, “The fun was running out. I will always regret having had any part in those infamous days of 1914.

“The National Guard had been called to duty to restore order. Our troops were posted over an extended area, on the fringe of engagements between rightfully bitter, striking coal miners and some very tough, company-hired strike breakers.

“Many of us who had to serve felt that we were being ‘used,’ to help the mine owners more than the miners—who had really been getting a raw deal for too long a time. They worked extremely long hours underground for terribly inadequate pay.”²¹⁵

One afternoon Perry was drowsing in his saddle when explosions of dust erupted on the ground.

“Looking up, I saw the flash of rifle fire repeated in the hills. Somebody was trying to kill me. Crouching low over my mount’s shoulder, I wheeled him about and gave him the spur for both our lives. Thank the Lord, whoever was shooting was a lousy marksman!”²¹⁶

Milner, at that time known as Miller, was a newsreel cameraman covering the strike for Pathé News. He, too, came under fire—although from the other side.

“The most hostile reception that I ever received,” he wrote, “was in the city of Trinidad, Colorado. The editor of the Denver Post informed me that there was a real mean strike going on. The miners there were justifiably striking for better wages, treatment and living conditions. The owners of the mines who for all purposes owned Trinidad were militantly determined to break the strike. Up to the time I got there, they had been able to prevent any news not to their liking getting out of the area. When I checked into the hotel, I was met by the local sheriff and told that I had better not take my camera out of the hotel, if I knew what was good for me and wanted to remain healthy. He also told me to leave town the following day. He did let me wander out of the hotel that evening and I dropped into a local bar where I met a few miners. When they learned my business, they arranged to get my camera, film and suitcase smuggled out of the hotel. Early the next morning they took me to the scene of the strike. It was really a battlefield, trains had been sandbagged and everyone was armed to the teeth.”²¹⁷

Denver Post reporters filled in the next chapter of the event, which Milner was too modest to describe. Their account is undoubtedly exaggerated, but the conflict at Ludlow was murderous enough to justify some of it. The reporters were amazed at Milner’s courage and gave him considerable space in the coverage of the fight:

“The bullets came so fast and thick about the newspapermen at the depot that the telephone and telegraph wires overhead were repeatedly struck, as if from hailstones. The zip-zip of the dying lead continued unabated all about the station for twenty minutes, but not a person was scratched.

“But what was even more remarkable and what will explain at least in a large measure just why it is that so many shots are wasted in a gun fight of this character, was the escape from injury of Victor Miller, cameraman for Pathé’s Weekly. He stood out in the open, grinding away at his camera as calmly as though he was taking moving pictures of one of those ‘actor’ battles.

“All about him, kneeling, lying flat, or crawling across the ground almost beneath his feet, the strikers were emptying their rifles at the approaching guards. Over on a hillock came the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun that was belching 250 steel-jacketed bullets a minute in the direction of the miners.

“Those bullets sang a song of promised death as they whirred just over Miller’s head. Watching him closely, and noting from the freight cars on adjacent side-tracks to his rear the course of the bullets, it was seen that he was directly in the path of the big gun’s hail of lead. It seemed that he must be struck. But still he continued to grind away, and even after the guards had retreated to their train and it had pulled out around the distant curve, Miller remained on the job, taking ‘movies’ of the returning miners, who had started in the futile pursuit of the guards.

“ ‘I didn’t have time to get scared,’ said Miller, packing up his camera. ‘It was too rare a chance for a real battle picture for me to think of anything else but the work ahead of me.… After it was all over I began to think of the many narrow escapes I must have had, but it was all over then, so why worry?’ ”²¹⁸

In a letter to me, Milner added the climax to the incident: “I got a car to drive me out of town. Somehow the locals learned about it and chased me for a long way. I am sure to this day that if my Model T hadn’t been a bit faster than theirs I would have been buried in Trinidad. I don’t think I was ever more scared in my life, but the pictures I took were of considerable value in getting public opinion and the law on the side of the miners. This was probably my most humanitarian achievement.”²¹⁹

When the newsreel was released in Colorado, it was confiscated by the state’s attorney general and used as evidence in the prosecution of the striking miners.²²⁰

Selig joined in the labor wars with The Lily of the Valley, a 1914 Colin Campbell production which reminded a reviewer of “the very tragic conditions in Colorado recently.”²²¹ The picture opened with a pitched battle. A militia lieutenant (Joe King) is half crazed by the killing of his sister, a mission worker, by strikers. He infiltrates the workforce and meets a girl (Bessie Eyton) as driven by revenge as he. She swears to kill the man who fired the machine gun which killed her father and brothers. That man happens to be the lieutenant; they fall in love and are on the verge of marriage when another strike breaks out and she discovers the truth. “Fortunately, he is killed by a bullet from the guns of the strikers,” said the New York Dramatic Mirror unequivocally, “and the offering closes, as it opened, sadly.”²²² The reviewer thought there was too much slaughter; otherwise he admired the film. “The mob in the attack on the factory shows its disorganized and alarming poverty as contrasted with the clean-cut and efficient militia and the smug satisfaction of the plutocrats.”²²³

The synopsis of “Old King Coal,” an episode of the 1915 Universal serial Graft, described “the usual misery attending the coal strikes; the brutality of the militia, and the savagery of the strikers towards strike breakers.” At the end, “The militia quell the riot with the usual loss of life.”²²⁴

The Blacklist (1916), a drama based on the system by which the big mining companies exchanged information about suspect employees, was written by Marion Fairfax and William de Mille, who also directed it. Fairfax obtained much of the material from firsthand interviews.²²⁵

According to Variety, “Superintendents of the mines are the real oppressors in most instances, the owners being uninformed of the local conditions. At one of the mines the state of affairs reaches fever heat over the killing of a miner by an armed guard. It causes unrest in the camp and the school mistress for the company (whose father is a miner) writes to the president complaining of conditions. He immediately leaves for the mine. Things become acute with his appearance and at first unwilling to give in to the demands of the men he is confronted with a strike. A number of the strikers are killed by the guards who use a rapid firing gun against the orders of the president. The strikers have a meeting in which the one drawing a black pea from a bag is to kill the president. The school mistress is the unfortunate person.”

William de Mille’s drama based on the Ludlow miner’s strike, The Blacklist, 1916, with Blanche Sweet (center). (DeMille Collection)

She goes to the office but cannot bring herself to do it. Her dying father renews her courage, and she loads her gun with two bullets, one for the president and one for herself. “He in the meantime has fallen in love with her, the feeling being mutual between them. She has to fulfill her vow and fires at the man, only wounding him. In the ensuing struggle the other shot explodes with no material damage. His wound is slight. When recovering he grants the demands of the men and he and the school mistress intend to run the mine in co-partnership from then on.”²²⁶

Variety omitted to mention that the schoolteacher (played by Blanche Sweet) was named Vera Maroff and was the daughter of a Russian anarchist, head of a group planning the overthrow of the corporation. The New York Dramatic Mirror called it “a socialistic drama.” It thought Cecil B. DeMille had made the film and congratulated him on his realistic battle scene: “A spectacular climax was reached in the burning of the tent camp of the striking miners.”²²⁷

Upton Sinclair was infuriated by the film, particularly since William de Mille was a friend of his: “He wrote me that he had made a drama of the struggle between capital and labor; he had really told the truth, he said, and I would be interested. So I went. Here were scenes in which the tent colony of the strikers was burned down by the mine guards—quite an unusual lot of industrial truth. But in the very beginning, I noticed that the movie star had had her hair dressed by a hairdresser … If I had not been told on the screen that this was a miner’s cabin and a miner’s daughter, I would not have recognized it … The strike was fought through and the problem of capital and labor solved. And how was it solved? Why, of course, there is only one way to solve the problem of capital and labor in the movies. It was solved by the daughter of the miner marrying the handsome young son of the owner of the mine.” Sinclair admitted he could not recall the exact details—he was writing for Screenland in June 1930—but he intimated that he did not hurt William de Mille’s feelings by telling him his opinion.

A more important truth the movies could not tell, and that was why the owner of the coal mine did not pay a living wage. “If he made terms with the union which didn’t please the coal mine owners’ association, he would be blacklisted and have his credit cut off; then he would find he couldn’t get coal cars and before he knew it he would be out of business.”²²⁸

Sinclair may have found the interior of the miner’s cabin unconvincing, but the exteriors were authentic enough. De Mille took his company to a small mining town in Nevada for locations, where he found conditions more relaxed than in Colorado. The superintendent gave the miners a day off to play in mob scenes—the company being handsomely rewarded by the Lasky Feature Play Company.²²⁹

Schoolmistress Vera Maroff (Blanche Sweet) pleads on behalf of the children in The Blacklist, 1916, William de Mille’s drama of the Colorado mining camps. (DeMille Collection)

The San Francisco Call and Post considered The Blacklist a masterpiece, “with compelling situations, great story, flawless acting and wonderful photography.”²³⁰ After the film’s first engagement at the Strand in New York, the Labor Forum endorsed it and sponsored an additional showing at Washington Irving High School to support their cause. William de Mille was rewarded by being placed on a blacklist himself. The Bureau of Investigation listed him as one of Hollywood’s leading radicals.²³¹

D. W. Griffith made John D. Rockefeller, Jr., responsible for the massacre of strikers in his The Mother and the Law (1914), which became “The Modern Story” in his massive Intolerance (1916). Using information from the report of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, the film showed strikers being attacked by National Guardsmen with rifles and machine guns. Griffith shot the sequence in the streets of Los Angeles, staging part of it against a huge advertising sign: “The same today as yesterday.”

We see Rockefeller (Sam de Grasse)—called Jenkins in the film—disbursing charity at the expense of his employees.²³² We see him supervising the morals of his workers by visiting a dance. (In reality, after the strike, Rockefeller had danced with miners’ wives.) From the sidewalk he picks up a dime. The 1916 audience would know that Rockefeller’s father liked to hand out shiny new dimes to small children.

But Griffith dared not sail too closely to the wind. His workers are not miners. They are not shown to be immigrants. Only one or two are armed. And while there is no atrocity like the burning of tents at Ludlow, even the use of machine guns by National Guardsmen is thought to be embarrassingly far-fetched by modern viewers unfamiliar with the labor wars.

Griffith could not have perpetrated so radical a scene in the year of the Red Scare, when he reissued The Mother and the Law. He was obliged to put this title into the strike sequence: “The militiamen having used blank cartridges, the workmen now fear only the company guards.”²³³

Rockefeller came under more direct fire in a one-reel Lubin film, Two News Items (1916), written by the prolific Julian Lamothe and directed by Edward Sloman. A reporter is reprimanded by his editor for his poor sense of news value. The body of a woman, identified as Katie Eagen, is found in the East River, but this is deemed to be of little interest, whereas news of a prominent person gets front-page headlines. The film delves into the dead woman’s background. Katie (Adda Gleason) is a typical product of the tenements. Her husband Dan (Jay Morley) works in the great factory of millionaire “John Rockland” (L. C. Shumway), who also owns the tenement in which they live. Drink causes Dan to maltreat Katie, but when she tells him she is pregnant, he helps her to save money—for the baby’s sake.

Then Rockland cuts wages by 25 percent and a strike breaks out. Katie clings to the baby’s savings, but the rent collector is both punctual and insistent. Dan goes to Rockland’s magnificent home to appeal to him, but is thrown out. With all their money spent, they are faced with eviction. Dan secures a job as a janitor at the Children’s Outing Association, but Rockland, on one of his charitable tours, spots him and has him discharged. Dan decides to break into Rockland’s mansion and steal the money that is rightly his. Rockland has him arrested. The men arrive to dispossess Katie, who is already wild with grief. As the Lubin Bulletin put it: “She told them to take everything, and holding the baby’s things tightly to her, she made her way blindly to the river, a victim of John Rockland.

The militia opens fire on the strikers, as at Ludlow. A scene from the modern story of Intolerance, 1916.

“The same paper also contained the reporter’s other bit of real news, in front-page headlines: ‘JOHN ROCKLAND AGAIN CONTRIBUTES TO CHILDREN’S OUTING ASSOCIATION/NOTED PHILANTHROPIST GIVES CHECK FOR $50,000/TEN THOUSAND CHILDREN TO BE MADE HAPPY BY WEEK IN COUNTRY.’ ”²³⁴

WHO PAYS?      While serial manufacturers were vying with each other to make the most lurid and implausible tale of the week, Pathé released a series of thought-provoking social dramas, complete within themselves, entitled Who Pays? (1915). Featuring Ruth Roland and Henry King in twelve episodes of three reels each, Who Pays? used the same basic cast in each story, though they played different characters.

“The series had a sociological twist, as it put up to the spectators the question as to who was morally responsible for the various and sundry misfortunes suffered by the principal characters,” wrote Alfred A. Cohn in Photoplay.²³⁵

The entire series was discovered by UCLA Film Archives a few years ago, at Ruth Roland’s former home. I have viewed the final episode, “Toil and Tyranny.” Although the performances tend to be of the shaking-fist variety, the film is a solid piece of work, well photographed on authentic locations and marred only by an unusual lapse of editing in the final sequence. (Shots are fired at a car, and there is a cut to the window several long seconds before the holes appear in the glass.)

Henry King and Ruth Roland in Toil and Tyranny, the final episode of Who Pays? 1915, in which a worker is robbed of his livelihood through a momentary flash of temper. (Robert S. Birchard Collection)

Whatever its failings, “Toil and Tyranny” is a powerful piece of socialist propaganda,²³⁶ showing how a man can be robbed of his livelihood through a momentary loss of temper. The intercutting of scenes of poverty with the indolent life of the boss’s daughter would have delighted Soviet directors of a decade later. Once again, however, the capitalist system is not blamed so much as the tough old curmudgeon of a boss.

Karl Hurd (King) works for lumber tycoon David Powers (Daniel Gilfether), who condemns him to long hours for low wages. When he rests to recover from a fit of exhaustion, the foreman treats him so badly that Hurd slugs him in a sudden fury and runs away. Powers and his cold-blooded legal adviser, Travis (Edwin J. Brady), watch as the foreman corners Karl and batters him with a plank. “If you handled these fellows any other way, they wouldn’t understand it,” remarks Travis.

As Karl is brought home to an overworked wife who already suffers from consumption, Powers officiates at a splendid luncheon for his daughter Laura (Roland), whom he idolizes. Despite a fractured skull, Karl is obliged to return to work long before he has recovered, so low are the family’s resources. But no sooner does he set foot inside the mill than Powers fires him.

When hours are extended with no extra pay, the workers strike. Powers brings in police and strikebreakers. Travis convinces him to evict the strikers from their company houses. Laura, shocked by all she has seen and heard, can stand no more and pleads with her father to treat his men decently. She is particularly concerned with the plight of Karl Hurd; his wife has just died, he has to care for his daughter, and he is being thrown out of his home. Powers is unmoved.

The strikers determine to confront the boss in his limousine and give him a beating. Hurd, who blames all his agony on Powers, steals a revolver and opens fire on the car himself. How could he know that Laura had borrowed it and was using it to aid the strikers’ families? And it is she who is killed. As a final title puts it: “Who pays for this tragedy of toil and tyranny?”

Who Pays? was made at the Balboa Studios, in Long Beach, California. It was an experiment, but it did good business and was regarded as a success.²³⁷ The same studio, however, turned out a series called The Grip of Evil as an antidote to Who Pays? An episode entitled The Dollar Kings was a capital-versus-labor story showing that the same evil existed among the workers as in the upper class. A young man creates a capitalist Utopia—a factory in the country, good wages, sunshine, and fresh air. His ideal is wrecked from within by agitators. Humanity was shown to be in the “grip of evil.”²³⁸

FIRES OF YOUTH      As one of the few surviving capital-versus-labor films, Fires of Youth (1917) should by rights be a brilliant example, with a panoply of documentary sequences, a sophisticated and radical story line, and a stunning climax. In fact, it is primitive, looking many years earlier than its date. Its direction is incorrectly credited to Rupert Julian. Written by Agnes Christine Johnston, it is actually one of the very few extant works of Emile Chautard, a Frenchman whom Josef von Sternberg acknowledged as “a studious and cultured man with exceptionally high standards … not only well qualified to direct but a gracious teacher.”²³⁹

A Dickensian fable about a small boy’s friendship with a lonely old mill owner (Frederick Warde) and a fantasy of a ruthless boss who becomes an ordinary worker, the film was an attempt to counter socialist propaganda by preaching tolerance. The error of the “bad” boss is ignorance, not cruelty. The picture is quite well put together for all its obviousness, but there are some outrageously theatrical performances, particularly from Warde, a celebrated stage actor.²⁴⁰

The most fascinating aspect of the film is that it features the legendary Jeanne Eagels. She had recently been George Arliss’s leading lady²⁴¹ and had played a streetwalker in Thanhouser’s The World and the Woman (1916), her first film.

Filmed by Thanhouser in and around New Rochelle, New York, Fires of Youth included footage shot at a factory, which was vivid, though tantalizingly brief (in the surviving version of three reels cut from five). Dilapidated houses and industrial areas were well photographed by Chautard’s French cameraman, M. Bizeul, although the surviving print is a miserable dupe.

The picture was not much of a success, judging by an exhibitor’s report from the Dreamland Theater in South Carolina: “Hardly an ordinary business—no business.”²⁴²

“Considered as a whole,” said Wid’s, “the story was very old stuff.” Wid thought that Jeanne Eagels was very effective but that some of the extras were bad: “The scene outside the mill owner’s home where a group of extras was going to do violence was awful. They shoved one another around in the usual manner, with much arm waving, and of course there was one gink that wanted to fight his way through, and somebody wished on us the title ‘Let me get at him!’ Oh boy, why will they do those things!”²⁴³

While the war gave an unpatriotic tone to capital-versus-labor stories, it provided an ideal villain in the person of Count Bernstorff, the German ambassador to the United States. In The Key to Power (1918) he was shown organizing coal shortages to wreck industry and freeze the population.²⁴⁴ Produced by the Educational Film Corporation, The Key to Power was not a documentary so much as an industrial melodrama. Directed by William Parke, from a scenario by Caroline Gentray and E. Lloyd Sheldon, it was shot in the coalfields of West Virginia.

Another made-to-order villain was the war profiteer—a man who cheated the government on vital contracts. Arrow’s The Profiteer (1919), directed by J. K. Holbrook, leveled the spotlight on a vicious character who might have appeared in many more films were it not for the fact that war profiteers were at that very moment buying stock in picture companies and (as in the case of Frank Godsol and Goldwyn) were soon to take over the company itself.

The industrial disturbances of 1919 caused the subject to disappear from the screen except in the anti-Bolshevik pictures. And the Republicans planned to bring federal censorship to bear in the hope of calming the situation: “UNCLE SAM TO EMPLOY SCREEN ON BIG SCALE TO STILL UNREST,” said Variety.²⁴⁵ Herbert Hoover was the choice for the first national censor.

“A major industrial idea is back of this movie,” said Variety. “It is to be an important part of the ‘back to the farm’ movement and the attempt to keep labor stationary and happy and prevent expensive turnovers.… Wealthy commanders of industry since the war have realized the prime importance of amusement to replace the influence of liquor.”²⁴⁶

THE CONTRAST      “We are going to make the projecting lens a weapon for labor,” declared one of the men involved in producing prounion films. After the war, while it was still possible to make films relatively cheaply ($500 to $2,500 for a one- or two-reeler), nearly a dozen radical groups produced and distributed their own pictures—the Federation Film Corporation and the Labor Film Service among them.²⁴⁷

Joseph Cannon, the field director of the Labor Film Service,²⁴⁸ was angered by the way the motion picture was being used to distort socialist ideals and the activities of labor. The Labor Film Service, incorporated in April 1920, planned to combat the Red Scare pictures with films which would not be mere propaganda but which would be based firmly on fact. The company intended to produce Animated Labor Review (newsreels), Lecture Lyceum (films and slides), and films on labor and construction as well as “dramas based on the writings of the iconoclasts” such as Dickens, Jack London, and Tolstoy.

Anita Loos and husband John Emerson and the headline: GOVERNMENT ASKS FOR INJUNCTION TO HALT GREAT SOFT COAL STRIKE. In 1921, virtual civil war reigned in West Virginia as mine owners hired private armies to protect their property.

In August 1920 the Labor Film Service began showing weekly news reviews, the first of which, besides an item on a Socialist party picnic at Manhattan Casino, contained shots of Eugene Debs in prison garb. This aroused “a storm of applause.”²⁴⁹

That same month, Cannon wrote to Upton Sinclair to tell him about the weekly news reviews and to say that his company was negotiating with the Interchurch World Movement (“this is strictly confidential”) for the privilege of visualizing the report of that organization on the recent steel strike. While admitting that he lacked the capital to produce a feature picture, Cannon was convinced that this film would prove such an effective method of publicity that “the Garyites will find it difficult to get any sympathy from the public.”²⁵⁰

Cannon sent details of the second Animated Labor Review, which featured a strike (some would term it a mutiny) by Italian sailors aboard the S.S. Calabria, which was carrying munitions and Polish reservists to reinforce the White Russian army. Such explosive subjects were not often seen by the general public; the New York Police Department made sure of that. When Cannon tried to launch a labor film magazine, the department refused him a license.

The Kansas Board of Censors rejected The Contrast (1921), produced by the Labor Film Service and dealing with the coal strike, precisely because it depicted a coal strike—in which the miners appeal to the railroad men to join them. The film had been financed by contributions from miners in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and showed scenes of cave-ins caused by the owners’ negligence.²⁵¹

The board received a shock when Cannon took it to court. Judge F. D. Hutchings said, “I don’t believe the board of censors has the authority under the law to pass upon a social question so long as the picture in question does not depict immoral, obscene or inflammatory scenes.”²⁵²

The Kansas attorney general claimed that the picture was a violation of the state’s Industrial Court Law, which made it a crime for men engaged in essential industry to strike.²⁵³ Attorneys for the distributors responded that The Contrast was basically a love story woven around the industrial situation, and they invited the court to see it. Kansas was given twenty days in which to file its rejoinder, but the state’s machinery ground exceeding slow. Seventeen months later, with the strike already history, the film was passed—with the elimination of several scenes of violence, the funeral of a striker and a scene showing “a minister denouncing labor at a meeting of capitalists.”²⁵⁴

Yet it proved the biggest success of all the Labor Film Service films. The Contrast was written by John W. Slayton and directed by Guy Hedlund; it was shown across the nation, often in secret. “Its aim was to dramatize the contrast of the life of the poor and the rich in the United States; for example, a starving girl steals off with garbage that a pampered dog passes up.”²⁵⁵

So violent a change had the American cinema undergone that the kind of film which would have been seen on the screen of any nickelodeon now had to be shown in secret, its makers condemned by labor leaders as “radical.” The stage for the House Un-American Activities Committee was now set. The wonder is that it took another thirty years for it to materialize.

 

THE F. F. C.     The Federation Film Corporation was a Seattle-based company founded in 1919 by radicals and militant trade unionists. Their first important film was The New Disciple (1921), set in the small town of Harmony, where industrial relations are calm until the advent of the war. Then the class struggle begins. The town’s leading capitalist becomes a profiteer. “There are stool pigeons and raids and an attempt at installing the ‘American plan’ in the shops.” The hero, John, returns from the war and leads the workers in reestablishing Harmony by allowing the workers to take over the mills with capital secured from the farmers in the area. “As the workers are the greatest consumers of farm products, it is to the advantage of the farmers to stand by them and break the strike. The big climax comes when the farmers outbid the capitalists in the foreclosure of the mills.”²⁵⁶

The film was written by William Pigott from a story by F.F.C. director John Arthur Nelson and was directed by Ollie Sellers.²⁵⁷ Inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s The New Freedom (1913), it used passages from the book in the titles. Photoplay thought the story could have been made into a stirring and intensely significant picture, “but it falls rather flat through lack of subtlety, mediocre direction and an indifferent cast.” It did, however, consider the film suitable for the family—after a tiring day. “And that’s commendation—if you think it over.”²⁵⁸

Variety was more scathing: “There was only a sprinkling of people in the orchestra [seats] at the opening, and the film shows nothing calculated to bring them in. It has little entertainment value and even less value as propaganda.”²⁵⁹

Even the Daily Worker agreed: “Its ideology would certainly not stand the test of Communist principle; from Main Title to ‘The End’ it reeks with the ‘Social Compact’ reformist viewpoint of those who call their unionism ‘pure and simple.’ The picture is just this—pure enough for the babies and simple, too—too simple. It even has the praise of Sam Gompers.”²⁶⁰ Steven Ross asserts that Gompers refused to help either the Labor Film Service or the F.F.C., fearing them “too radical” and “tainted with communism.” In 1920, the youthful J. Edgar Hoover put agents on to the Labor Film Service, and they supplied him with extensive reports.²⁶¹

The largest American Federation of Labor campaign involving film was its “union label” drive of 1925, for which the film Labor’s Reward was made. The Union Label Trades Department of the A.F.L. checked the script, which was produced by the Rothacker Film Manufacturing Company.

“After depicting scenes in the slavery days of antiquity and the slave markets where white men and women were sold on the auction block, the story comes down to the latter part of the nineteenth century.… The ten-hour day put in by Mary taxed her every energy. One day … she fainted and was sent home.

“Tom was a union man.… He took advantage of every occasion to impress upon his fellow workers that they should buy nothing that did not bear a union label. He assured them that the union label represented that the articles … had been made in sanitary workshops … that safety appliances protected the workers and in purchasing union-labeled articles they were adding to the wages and bettering the working conditions of those who produced them.”²⁶²

One of the girls expresses sympathy for Mary; the forewoman discharges her, and the girls go on strike. Mary, recovered, joins the picket lines and helps form a union. The strike is won, and the sweatshop becomes a union shop with an eight-hour day.

“Scenes in and about the homes of union and non-union men are shown and the difference is so great that it will be an impressive lesson to those who see the picture.… In the non-union shops, the workers are sullen and look suspiciously around as if afraid of being reprimanded or discharged.… In the union shops, the men and women hold their heads high, bear a contented look and sing or whistle while running the machines.”

A short history of labor was provided via the subtitles to demonstrate the benefits of membership in a trade union.²⁶³

The drive, which opened on October 10, 1925, covered thirty states; the film was seen by an estimated 479,000 people. But the A.F.L.’s continued refusal to support the makers of the more radical labor films meant that even independent distributors and exhibitors regarded them as too much of a risk, while the main theatres, controlled by the big chains with their Wall Street finance, would hardly consider them appropriate family entertainment.²⁶⁴

MEN OF STEEL      Director King Vidor’s desire to make films on epic themes—steel, wheat, and war—was only partly realized in the silent era. He made his great war film, The Big Parade in 1925, but wheat and steel had to wait for sound.

An epic of steel was, however, undertaken at this period at First National. The story and scenario for Men of Steel were written (with John Goodrich) by Milton Sills, who played the leading role. It was suggested by Ralph G. Kirk’s Saturday Evening Post story “United States Flavor,” published in 1924.²⁶⁵

Sills, who had starred in The Honor System in 1917, was one of the few highbrows in pictures. A former fellow in philosophy at the University of Chicago graduate school,²⁶⁶ he had also had a thorough stage training. His ambition was to become a director. An outspoken critic of the average film, he wrote: “The motion picture, although quite an art in its present state, is still in its mediocrity … Producers have been made to believe that the 20,000,000 people who make up the daily motion picture audience average are but twelve years of age in intelligence. Fearing that an adult type of photoplay might be ‘over the heads’ of the average audience too many producers have made pictures so silly, so puerile that a good percentage of the public is cynical in its attitude toward the screen.”²⁶⁷

The Honor System had convinced Sills that artistic things could be done in pictures, but he was too often cast as a tough he-man in unchallenging melodramas. Although one might have thought he would be more uncompromising, his script for Men of Steel proved a combination of social drama and hokum—the same kind of hokum that made him so impatient. He admitted it had a lot of old stuff in it, “but it’s the background and the manner in which the story is handled that is turning it into a big and unusual picture. Steel pictures have been done before, it’s true, but never on so large a scale or with such a painstaking effort to achieve realism.”²⁶⁸

Sills was profoundly impressed by The Big Parade. “But we can’t have many movies that truly picture life,” he said. “We can’t really present sex problems, nor social problems, nor marriage problems, nor any other kind of problem, because the censors won’t let us!”²⁶⁹

In Men of Steel (1926), an immigrant mine laborer called Jan Bokak (Sills) is wrongly accused of murder, escapes, and becomes a labor leader at the steel mills owned by “Cinder” Pitt (Frank Currier). Agitators try to wreck the mill, and Jan is seriously injured saving the life of Pitt’s daughter, Clare (May Allison). He becomes engaged to her, but he has left a fiancée called Mary (Doris Kenyon) in the mining town. Mary’s mother confesses on her deathbed to being the estranged wife of Pitt, the millowner. Mary finds her way to the Pitt home, sees Jan with Clare, and accuses him of murdering her (Mary’s) brother, Anton. But Jan forces a confession from the real murderer, Massarick (Victor McLaglen). On the day of Jan and Clare’s wedding, Mary is hurt in a car smash and Jan decides to marry her instead, incurring the wrath of the workers. Pitt learns of Mary’s parentage and quells the mob, assuring them that Jan will get half interest in the mill.²⁷⁰

The director was the French-born George Archainbaud, whose most outstanding film this proved. The foster son of Emile Chautard, he turned out many conventional films from 1915.

The picture was made on location at the huge Ensley Mills of the United States Steel Corporation in Birmingham, Alabama. Judge Elbert Gary, chairman of the corporation, traveled to Birmingham to organize the facilities required by the picture company. No professional extras were required for the mill scenes—the steelworkers played themselves.²⁷¹

“It was very difficult,” said Sills, “and we had to work under very trying conditions—the heat from the furnaces, the gas fumes and the constant noise were not conducive to inspired acting—but I believe that we have managed to get into the film the real spirit of the steel industry.”²⁷²

The publicity declared it took two years to produce Men of Steel, a claim not borne out by Milton Sills’s crowded acting schedule. Variety thought it qualified as a corker: “A big picture with some faults, but so many thrilling virtues it should stand up beautifully as a de luxe program feature.”²⁷³ Its demerits were its length—ten reels—and its comedy, “both deplorable.”²⁷⁴ But it was handsomely produced. “Included among the thrills are the many industrial scenes; molten steel in its red, flaming color, also in the white heat state; the crash of a water tower into the molten steel with the subsequent spattering of the vicious liquid over many people (badly done in miniature but effective); and most impressive of all, the burial of a man who fell into a pot of molten metal.”²⁷⁵

Photoplay thought it a box-office picture if ever there was one and felt Milton Sills gave his best performance since The Sea Hawk: “It is an unusual characterization, reaching its high point in a remarkable scene in which the starving Jan Bokak steals a dinner from a dog.”²⁷⁶

Motion Picture Magazine called it “a moving, rugged story.” As the raw ore enters the crucible to emerge as steel, so the raw, stolid workman becomes through a refining process a power in the community. “That’s the idea behind this picture, regardless of any plot ramifications. Some may scoff at its obvious treatment, and its melodramatic fireworks (they do become a trifle far-fetched)… but these scoffers will have missed the simplicity of its theme, the ruggedness of its action, and the lusty vigor of its characterization.… The impression gathered is one of a surging realism which swallows up its hokum. The energy of America is being released … it presents a kaleidoscopic sweep of events—moving graphically and directly to a climax.”²⁷⁷

V. Hagedorn of Minnesota wrote to Picture Play to say he found the picture engrossing. “But I really was amazed at the presentation of the Mesaba range. I just wish the director had taken a little trip up here and looked around for himself. Mesaba is large. None of our mines is as small as the one pictured in the film. Here in Nibbing we have the largest open-pit mine in the world, and believe me, it is some hole! It seemed rather ridiculous the way Doris Kenyon dressed as a range girl. You could never at any time in the past have found an American girl dressed in that way here.… I feel highly indignant at the way we were represented and I speak not only for myself but for my many friends who have dwelt here and have watched the range grow from timber country to ore mines.”²⁷⁸

The ads claimed “Two Years in the Making—Will Live for Decades.” But the picture was destroyed along with so many other “obsolete” productions, depriving us of the most graphic documentation of a 1920s steel mill ever put on film.

Above: Filming Men of Steel, 1926, in the Open Hearth Section of the Ensley Mills of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. Birmingham, Alabama. (Museum of Modern Art). Left: Hooker Grimes (George Fawcett) buried alive in tons of iron ore in the hold of a Great Lakes ship of which he is captain, in Men of Steel. (National Film Archive)

Above: According to custom, a man who falls to his death in a vat of molten metal is buried in that vat. amid impressive ceremonies. The steel mill officials attend, with workers, and even supply a choir. (Museum of Modern Art). Below: The Men of Steel company acts as host for Major Dodge of the United States Steel Corporation and officials of the Ensley Mills: director George Archainbaud is master of ceremonies at a Thanksgiving dinner. (Museum of Modern Art)

THE PASSAIC TEXTILE STRIKE      The tumultuous labor confrontations bequeathed precisely one feature film to record a strike as it happened. I put off writing this book until I saw that film. I had long accepted it as “lost,” but I could not see how this history could be written without a glimpse of at least part of it. Not that I expected a masterpiece. Highly paid film technicians would hardly want to be involved in a film supporting a strike. And amateurs, however skilled, seldom produce brilliant films.

What I hoped for was another view, a contrast to the stereotyped melodrama about factory life in which foul conditions were attributable only to foul characters. I wanted an unadulterated view of reality.

It was during a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in 1983 that the subject came up. Film curator Eileen Bowser was showing me around the museum’s new premises when she told me her department had acquired the collection of the late Thomas Brandon. Knowing him to have been a distributor of labor films, I mentioned the subject of my new book.

“Oh,” said Bowser, “then we have something for you. We have found The Passaic Textile Strike.”

Before I had time to recover, the museum staff had organized a viewing. As a work of cinema, the film proved to have only one sequence of merit; the prologue. Significantly, this is fiction, acted by Polish immigrant workers and showing the sort of events that set the scene for the strike. It lasts a mere few minutes; it shows the living conditions and portrays the bosses—in this case a Mr. Mulius—in a villainous light.

After that stereotyped but promising beginning, the film develops into an extended newsreel. Union meetings and propaganda were dependent on words, and so is this film. Lengthy subtitles, written by Margaret Larkin,²⁷⁹ accompany virtually every shot. Some scenes are clearly reconstructed, others covered as they happened. Silent newsreels tend to show history as the movement of crowds, and this film follows that tradition: the endless picket line, the ecumenical demonstration by the local churches in support of the strike, the arrival of relief trucks, hailed by the beleaguered workers. It is a “mass film” in true Communist style, the first such film ever to be made in America.

When individuals are picked out, they are likely to be hectoring orators or demonstrators displaying their wounds to the camera. The effectiveness of the faces of ordinary workers, which so enlivened the documentaries of the thirties, had not been thought about. (Eisenstein’s Potemkin had yet to be seen in the United States.) When faces are shown they are included in groups—batches would be a better word—posed as if for the standard group photographs of the time. Even so, the faces are extraordinary. They belong to another world, another age—ancient, gnarled, peasant faces. The presence of these almost-old people from Central Europe, some still wearing traditional peasant clothes, gives the film a poignant sense of reality no reconstruction could achieve. The sight of the young, jackbooted cops, swinging their clubs, inevitably reminds one of the fate lying ahead for the Poles and Slavs who stayed at home. The people on screen will be clubbed and gassed, too, but the support of their comrades will be so solid that the forces of law and order will be brought if not to law, at least to some semblance of order.

Striker Martin Winkler under arrest in The Passaic Textile Strike, 1926. Civilian vigilante in background. (Martha Stone Asher)

Since 1926 is still within living memory, I set out to trace some of the survivors of that strike. Eileen Bowser gave me the address of Albin E. Zwiazek, who was only a schoolboy at the time, although he had vivid recollections. His family was employed in the textile industry in various plants throughout the area. His mother had had to give up her job in 1925 because of tuberculosis, which was especially prevalent around Passaic. His father, from Poland, was a striker, and so were other members of his family. He attended many strike meetings with his father. “The meetings were raided by the police many times. The freedom to assemble is granted to Americans by our constitution, but the police and National Guardsmen ignored this. I have seen strikers beaten by police as well as scabs beaten by strikers.”²⁸⁰

He saw a woman worker, returning from the Forstmann plant, knocked over in the street. Two men jumped from their car and kicked her. A neighbor’s house was bombed during the night.

“Many people with cameras were running around making photographs and films. We used to leave early for school so the strikers would recruit us to picket with them. We did it to get our pictures in the newspapers. Of course, we also wanted the strikers to win out.”²⁸¹

Mr. Zwiazek did not see the film during the strike, but finally saw it at the Museum of Modern Art’s tribute to Thomas Brandon on February 22, 1983. He advised me to contact Gustav Deak, the retired city manager of nearby Garfield, New Jersey. Since Mr. Deak appeared in the film and was a leader of the strike I was only too eager to make contact. It was some months before I had a reply, for he had suffered a minor stroke. By that time, I was in New York, able to take a bus to Garfield and meet him. In his late seventies, he was a handsome, stockily built man who, despite his stroke, had an excellent memory. But he could not recall one vital fact—the identity of the director.

Gus Deak (left) in The Passaic Textile Strike, 1926. (Museum of Modern Art)

“I was in the film, but I had no knowledge of who the contractor was or how they hired this man. It was an independent group, and it was all handled by the Relief Committee. Alfred Wagenknecht, who was head of the Relief Committee, wanted me to work with the director of the film. I don’t remember his name. He was not involved with the party. He was working for pay. He was not a sympathizer with the strike at all. He was a director, hired from an independent company. And he had all the equipment. He knew his business.

“I had to assemble the cast for him, so he said, ‘Okay, you’re going to play this part.’ That’s how it all started. Most of the people in the cast I knew, and I put the cast together, naturally with his okay. He directed the picture, and the script was his.”²⁸²

This director (there may have been two) was eventually fired, and the Relief Committee asked Sam Russak to take over. He was a professional still photographer with some experience of motion pictures. He was also a labor activist and an ardent supporter of the strike. According to Sam Brody, “there would have been no film without him. He did the whole thing practically on his own.”

Brody was later celebrated as the cofounder, with Lester Balog, of the Film and Photo League. Balog and Brody served as cameramen, along with Bill Schwartfeller. “I used a hand-held 35mm DeVry,” recalled Brody, “and a borrowed Bell and Howell Eyemo. I went to Passaic on four or five occasions and covered certain peripheral phases of strike activity, mainly strike relief. I don’t remember being attacked by the police, but I was there when many heads were bashed in.”²⁸³

To Martha Asher, at the time a member of the Young Communist League who came from New York to work with strikers’ children, the police violence was a response to open rebellion. The fact that the strike had been initiated not by trade unions but by a political party—and the Communist party at that—undoubtedly scared them. “The attacks of the authorities were so great they fired up the whole East Coast. In the town itself, the entire community came to support that strike. Doctors would give free service—‘pay me when you get back to work.’ Storekeepers would give you credit as long as they could hold out. The small landlord suffered rather than evict. Food was donated from all over the country. Strikers would come in with their card to one of the relief stations, and they would get a certain amount of food, according to how many were in the family. The film was used to raise money for this relief.”²⁸⁴

Picket line at the United Piece Dye Works in Lodi, New Jersey: The Passaic Textile Strike, 1926. (Museum of Modern Art)

The film was only part of the enormous publicity given to the strike. Passaic was close enough to New York for newspapers and newsreel companies to rush cameramen down at short notice. It has been suggested that the film used scenes from newsreels. Some of the scenes suggest the skill of a professional behind the camera, but I cannot imagine the major newsreel companies supplying material to the strikers. For one thing, they would want too much money. For another, this was the first important strike in American history to be instigated and led by the Communists.

For the Communists behind the film, it was a tremendous risk to spend thousands of dollars on a movie rather than on food for strikers’ families. People remembered the Paterson Pageant^‡ at Madison Square Garden, and the “disappearance” of the profits—in many people’s minds, into the pockets of the organizers. But presumably Alfred Wagenknecht and his committee remembered Lenin’s words: “For us, the cinema is the most important of all the arts.” And what better weapon to help in the fight toward “One Big Union”?

At the turn of the century, the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 and the 1897 Dingley Tariff Act made it profitable for foreign manufacturers to operate in the United States. Most of the mill-owners in the Passaic area were German. The little town exploded into a full-scale industrial center, the country’s chief producer of fine woolens and worsteds.²⁸⁵ The surrounding towns—Clifton, Garfield, Lodi, and Wallington—became part of the complex. To the north was Paterson, the silk center.

The German mill-owners filled the towns with Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Germans. They were said to have men stationed at Ellis Island to carry out their plan; by hiring so many different nationalities—and tongues—they avoided worker solidarity.²⁸⁶ Certainly the workers remained hopelessly disorganized.

During the war, the German bosses were temporarily unseated or replaced. Workers went overseas and learned English in the army. They came back, their heads full of idealistic slogans, only to be disillusioned. The Germans returned, hours were increased, discipline heightened, speed-ups imposed. The introduction of new machinery transformed skilled men into unskilled and threw many out of work. For those who remained, sanitation and other conditions in the factories and the disease-ridden slums were appalling.

In October 1925, due to depression in the industry, a 10 percent wage cut was imposed. Three hundred and eighty workers promptly went on strike at the Passaic Worsted Spinning Company. Albert Weisbord, a graduate of Harvard Law School, had been elected leader and spokesman for the United Front Committee of Textile Workers of Passaic and Vicinity. Weisbord, who was only twenty-five, was a Communist, and the participation of Communists strengthened the opposition.

Picket line going to afternoon strike meeting near Belmont Park, New Jersey: The Passaic Textile Strike, 1926. Steel helmets are worn as protection from police attacks. (Martha Stone Asher)

“Weisbord was a brilliant man and a good speaker,” said Gus Deak. “He asked me, working at the Botany Mill, if I knew some young men to get organized. I called them together and we had about twenty-five. Then we moved inside the mill and organized there. I was in the Finishing Department and in two or three months we organized membership of about one thousand, right in my department. But it was hard to get a meeting place; we had to meet secretly.”²⁸⁷

To maintain secrecy, when hundreds of workers were flooding on to the streets after late-night meetings, was equally hard. Weisbord ordered a strike before the opportunity was lost.

On January 21, 1926, a worker was fired from the Botany Mill for being a union member. The next day, Vice President Colonel Charles F. H. Johnson told a committee from the United Front that all union men would be fired. Johnson had a fear of communism, which he had seen in action when he visited Russia.

On January 25, Gus Deak and forty-five other delegates stopped their machines and confronted Johnson as a committee. “We demanded the restoration of the 10 percent wage cut,” said Deak. “This was rejected by Colonel Johnson, who asked the committee to stay in his office to discuss the matter. We found out that one of his clerks had called the police, so we rushed back to our departments and called the strike. On our call, one thousand employees walked out. We immediately formed a picket line around the gates of the mill. The next day we pulled out the entire plant [of four thousand].”²⁸⁸

“Children were trampled down and men and women were injured in a mad flight before enraged police charging the strikers’ picket line at the Gera Mills in Passaic.” The Passaic Textile Strike, 1926. (Martha Stone Asher)

In the second week, workers from other mills walked out. The police were short-tempered and charged the crowd frequently. “The first month was not too bad,” said Gus Deak, “but when they found they had these massed picket lines, they decided to break them up. They hired extra cops and probably fed them a lot of whiskey. And when they were half drunk they were fearless. So they were really tough with the people—they beat them up and clubbed them, and that was how they broke the picket lines.”²⁸⁹

Deak was himself clubbed and restricted to the office thereafter by Weisbord. The police, finding tear gas ineffective, turned powerful fire hoses on the strikers, in bitterly cold weather. The next day’s newspapers carried vivid pictures, and the police turned their anger on cameramen—press and newsreel.

Karl W. Fasold of Pathé News was beaten up by a posse of policemen, while John Painter of Fox News had his tripod wrenched off and used as a weapon with which to batter his $2,000 Akeley camera to “a mass of junk.”²⁹⁰ The police did not realize that three cameramen were operating from roofs and fire escapes.

The following day, the newsreel men took to an airplane, while thousands of strikers paraded past the mills, many with steel helmets and gas masks they had worn in the army. An armored car, of the kind used by banks, rumbled through the streets packed with cameramen, together with a sedan with bulletproof glass marked “News photographers getting pictures at the Passaic front.”²⁹¹

The idea of using motion pictures to raise money had occurred to the Relief Committee early in the strike,^§ but Alfred Wagenknecht was unquestionably the driving force behind the making of the film.²⁹² According to him, the Relief Committee had invited two professionals from Boston to undertake the film. Wagenknecht said: “They knew what we wanted but they hung around in their studio, planning fake scenes and talking of putting pretty girl strikers into the foreground of the film with lots of romance for the American movie public. We protested and told them to go to the picket lines and relief kitchens. But they did not like the idea of having their heads battered by police clubs for taking pictures of the lawless cossacks doing their stuff, so we had to get rid of them.

“We then bought a movie camera and a projector, got together a staff from the strikers and photographed the real happenings. It was dangerous but it was genuine adventure, not the warmed-over thrills carefully dolled up by Hollywood methods.”²⁹³

The United Front Committee began showing its footage even before the film was complete, probably thinking the strike would be over before the film was ready. The fact that the strike dragged on for so long gave the film exceptional value, both as a historical document and as a fund raiser. One of its “scoops” was the arrest of Albert Weisbord, on a trumped-up breach of promise charge, even though part of that scene was staged.

Ten thousand people had joined the United Textile Workers as a result of the strike, and Weisbord wanted them to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor, despite that organization’s opposition to the Communists. The A.F.L. insisted that he step down, and he agreed to do so in September 1926. In gratitude, the strikers gave him gifts including a gold watch and a silver loving cup. Gus Deak was elected to succeed him.

After the police attack on cameramen, these men from the newsreels returned properly prepared. (Albin Zwiazek)

Only strikers were permitted to attend the first showings of the film in September 1926. Robert Wolf, writing in the Daily Worker, said he had seen more interesting movies—one or two—but he had never seen a more interesting audience:

“They were packed into Belmont Park … and as far as I could see the only reason there weren’t sixteen thousand instead of ten was that there wasn’t room. Gustav Deak, the young chairman of the strikers’ local, came out on the screen. ‘There’s Deak,’ yelled the crowd, hugely delighted …

“The movie itself was a first-class professional production, even to the usual amount of hokum. Before the strike drama there was a prologue which, as far as hokum was concerned, was just a little bit bigger and better hokum than anything I have ever seen on the screen before …

“If I did not know that Potemkin was not shown here till after the Passaic movie had been produced, I should suspect its continuity writer of having been influenced by Potemkin. The scenes came one, two, three, bang-bang-bang-bang—with that dynamic quality that we have learned to associate with all good movies. Scenes were torn out of their chronological order and slight violence [was done] to technical historical details, but [there was] much greater accuracy in the spirit of the strike—in other words, instead of a newsreel, we have a movie.”²⁹⁴

Kanter’s Auditorium at Passaic was jammed for the first public showings, in October. The profits went for the relief of the strikers’ children. Said the Daily Worker: “The Passaic police have tried unsuccessfully to prevent this celluloid record of their atrocious brutality against the girl pickets and even the children of strikers. The woolen-mill owners likewise take no pleasure in these motion picture photographs of their misconduct.

“But the 16,000 strikers, sustaining a heroic battlefield for three-quarters of a year against police violence, employer greed, detective frame-ups and starvation, are rejoicing in this movie history of their tremendous fight.”²⁹⁵

The film was taken on tour by Bertha Kuppersmith of the Relief Committee, and in each city labor groups showed their support, not only by buying tickets—and sometimes reselling them and giving the money to the Relief Committee—but by carrying out, without charge, such vital tasks as bill posting.²⁹⁶ The film was brought back again and again. Distribution was in the hands of the International Workers’ Aid, who released Soviet films in the United States.

Ella Reeve Bloor—“Mother” Bloor, the Communist activist—accompanied the film and gave a talk on the strike, telling her audience that for the strike to be sustained, union people throughout the country must furnish the funds. The response was invariably generous, for few strikes had aroused such widespread sympathy.

The Federated Press Labor Letter reported the reaction in Seattle: “A showing  … so aroused the members of the Seattle Milk Wagon Drivers that they voted an assessment of 50 cents a member for the benefit of the strikers and their children. The secretary was instructed to send on a check for $200 at once.”²⁹⁷

Only occasionally did the film encounter opposition; in Erie, Pennsylvania, for instance, the Chamber of Commerce managed to intimidate the manager of a theatre into canceling the booking.²⁹⁸

The picture reached New York in November 1926, where it was shown at the New Waldorf Theater, accompanied by a Russian balalaika orchestra. Here it was seen by 3,000 people, grossing about $2,000.²⁹⁹

The strike continued with renewed violence, further arrests, and a great deal of prevarication by the A.F.L. It was finally brought to an end in February 1927, after thirteen months, in bitter defeat for the strikers. The wage cut was not rescinded. The workers won merely the right to affiliate with the A.F.L. and a promise that no discrimination would be shown in reemploying them.

Many strikers could not be rehired, however, because the economic problems of the mills had been exacerbated by the strike. Relief funds were still desperately needed. Said a full-page advertisement in the Daily Worker: “Passaic Textile Workers Still Need You! Hundreds of families need relief. A year’s strike has caused such destitution. Thousands are unemployed. If we are to build a union we must aid until they secure employment. Also—hundreds of strikers are to be placed on trial. Many have been in jail for months. Defense must be provided. Their families must be supported. This aid given now will assist in organizing thousands into a union. You will help in this organization campaign by seeing the motion picture of the Big Passaic Textile Strike …”³⁰⁰

The film was now the principal source of relief funds for the Passaic workers.³⁰¹ But as the memory of the strike faded, so did bookings.

Alfred Wagenknecht moved from one massive strike to another. The Daily Worker reported in 1928 that he was supervising the production of a six-reel film called The Miners’ Strike, covering the sixteen-month struggle in the Pennsylvania coal fields.³⁰²

Albert Weisbord failed in his efforts to organize the textile workers into one big union. The strike was a disaster for the area. Weisbord was expelled from the Central Committee of the Communist party in 1929. Gustav Deak left the labor movement and became a supporter of Roosevelt and the Democratic party and eventually became city manager of Garfield. “So after being clubbed by the cops, I became boss of the entire police department.”³⁰³

In the early 1950s, a worker approached a Passaic resident called Emil Asher and gave him a copy of the film, on 35mm nitrate, in seven reels (two of which later disappeared). “We showed it around 1955 in Passaic, and about two hundred people turned up,” said Asher. “There were quite a few participants from the strike. It was a successful event, although the cops arrived just after the movie was shown.”

“After that,” said Martha Asher, “it remained in the offices the Communist Party used in Newark, New Jersey. I had resigned from the National Committee, and this was my last day at work. I looked at the metal cans and I said to myself, well, rightfully, I ought to take this. There weren’t many people around any more who were participants in the strike. But I decided no, it wasn’t mine and I would leave it … I remember in the missing reels there were more scenes of trucks loaded with relief, more scenes of terror—probably repetitious, and somebody may have cut them. And there was something included at the end having to do with the settlement of the strike. I must admit when I first saw the film, I didn’t view it as a patched-up thing. The whole film was quite precious. Now we take it around and lecture with it. At Paterson Community College recently, we showed it to black kids of fifteen and sixteen from Passaic. About thirty-five of them. Nobody budged, nobody was bored. They took notes and sat all the way through it. They couldn’t believe that this is what happened in their town.”³⁰⁴

^* Based on Norris—and Norris used similar intercutting in The Octopus.

^† One of the emissaries sent by Lenin to D. W. Griffith asking him to take charge of the Russian film industry (William Drew).

^‡ The I.W.W. organized a silk strike, led by Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, at Paterson, N.J., in 1913. John Reed staged a Pageant of the Strike in Madison Square Garden with a cast of millworkers. The managers announced a profit of $10,000; later it proved to have sustained a loss of $1,000, triggering a financial scandal. People complained that the money should have been used for relief. (Graham Adams, Jr. The Age of Industrial Violence 1910–1915. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966, p. 97.)

^§ On February 24 the committee had presented Labor’s Reward and, to celebrate May Day, the Soviet feature Polikushka. They also staged plays about the strike.