The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts 1666913960, 9781666913965

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The Othering of Women in Silent Film

The Othering of Women in Silent Film Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts Barbara Tepa Lupack

L E X I N G T O N B O O K S / F O RT R E S S A C A D E M I C

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lupack, Barbara Tepa, author.  Title: The othering of women in silent film : cultural, historical, and literary contexts / Barbara Tepa Lupack.  Description: Lanham : Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “In The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts, Barbara Tepa Lupack explores the rampant racial and gender stereotyping in early cinema and demonstrates how that imagery helped shape American attitudes and practices”—Provided by publisher.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023039535 (print) | LCCN 2023039536 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666913965 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666913972 (epub) | ISBN 9781666913989 (paper) Subjects: LCSH: Women in motion pictures. | Other (Philosophy) in motion pictures. | Silent films—United States—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.W6 L87 2024  (print) | LCC PN1995.9.W6  (ebook) | DDC 791.43/6522—dc23/eng/20230913 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039535 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023039536 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

In loving memory of the remarkable women in my life: Jane Tepa, Olga Kuchciak, Maria Tepa, Halina Rowan, Hedi Kuchciak, Anita Krasuska, and Donna Schurmann And, as always, for Al

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix List of Illustrations

xv

Note on Terminology and Usage Introduction

xvii

1

Chapter 1: African Americans



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Chapter 2: African Americans: Race Films Chapter 3: Native Americans



35



91

Chapter 4: Native Americans: Native Response



133

Chapter 5: Asians



159

Chapter 6: Latins



193

Chapter 7: The New Woman Chapter 8: Suffragists Conclusion

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257

283

Bibliography Index



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313

About the Author



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Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to a host of people, libraries, and archives for their support during my research and writing of The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts. A number of grants and fellowships provided encouragement and assistance. My thanks to Humanities New York (especially Sara Ogger, Michael Washburn, Joe Murphy, and Scarlett Rebman); Florida Humanities (especially Stephanie Chill and Lindsey Morrison); the Helm Fellowship at the Black Film Archive and Center and the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington (especially Amber Bertin, Brian Graney, and Michael Martin); and both the Robert E. Lehman Fellowship and the later American Center for Visual Studies Senior Scholar Fellowship at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts (especially Stephanie Plunkett, Jana Purdy, and the late Joyce K. Schiller). My tenure as New York State Public Scholar (2015–2018) gave me an opportunity to develop and explore some of the ideas about race filmmaking, marginalized women, and “New Women” that became the basis for this book. Portions of the material in this book appeared in different form in earlier books of mine, including Nineteenth Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Classic Women’s Fiction to Film (Bowling Green State University Popular Press), Literary Adaptations in Black American Cinema: From Micheaux to Morrison (University of Rochester Press), Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking (Indiana University Press), Early Race Filmmaking in America (Routledge), and Silent Serial Sensations: The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Silent Film (Cornell University Press). I am grateful to the libraries and archives in which I conducted research or which provided materials necessary for my work. Among them: the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York (especially Ken Fox and Stephanie Hofner); the Dryden Theatre (especially Jared Case); the Norman Studios Silent Film Museum, Jacksonville, Florida (especially Rita Reagan); the Library of Congress, Moving Image Section (especially Mike Mashon and ix

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Acknowledgments

Rosemary Hanes); the Wharton Studio Museum (especially Diana Riesman); the History Center in Tompkins County, Ithaca, New York (especially Donna Eschenbrenner); Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, Big Rapids, Michigan (especially Cyndi Tiedt); Oklahoma Historical Society (especially Jon May); University of Rochester Rush Rhees Library and the Robbins Library (especially Anna Siebach-Larsen); Cornell University Library (especially the Carl A. Kroch Rare Book and Manuscript Library); Wisconsin Archive for Film and Theater Research (especially Mary Huelsbeck); UCLA Film and Television Archive (especially former director Chris Horak); Autry Museum of the American West (especially emeritus director Marva R. Felchin and Marilyn Kim); Black Film Center and Archive (especially Amber Bertin); New York Public Library (especially the Billy Rose Theatre Collection and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture); New York State Archives (especially Josie Madison); Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (especially Kevin Young); Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian; Museum of Modern Art (especially former Film Stills Archivists Mary Corliss and Terry Geesken); Museum of the Moving Image; Princeton University Firestone Library; Duke University (Thomas Cripps Papers and Archive); Women Film Pioneers Project at Columbia University (especially Jane Gaines); Separate Cinema Archive (especially founder and director John Duke Kisch); Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville (especially Kristen Zimmerman); Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave, Golden, Colorado (especially former director Steve Friesen); Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center (especially Jason D. Stratman and Ray Steinnerd); Saint Louis Public Library (especially Adele Heagney); State Historical Society of Missouri (especially William “Zelli” Fischetti); Santa Cruz Public Libraries (especially Deborah Lipoma). My own ideas about gender and race representation in silent film were shaped and influenced by the work of numerous film scholars and critics, whose pioneering work I deeply respect and admire. At Lexington Books, I am enormously grateful to Jessica Tepper, Acquisitions Editor for Communication, Film, Television, and Media Studies, who encouraged this book from its inception, strongly supported it throughout, and offered invaluable advice to the very end; Deja Ryland, Assistant Acquisitions Editor, for her enthusiastic and gracious assistance; and the anonymous reader, whose excellent suggestions and kind words carried me through the final revisions of the manuscript. I am grateful as well to Holly Buchanan, Senior Acquisitions Editor for World History and Literary Studies, for her ongoing support. My thanks also to Catherine Herman, Ryan Dradzynski, and everyone at the press who assisted in the production.

Acknowledgments

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Working with Lexington Books has been a delightful experience and a singular pleasure. A personal note of thanks to my friends Donna Bliss, MaryKay Mahoney, Mary Young, Kevin J. Harty, Ken Fox, Athene Goldstein, Maria Jacobson, and Jane Smith for their wit and wisdom, good cheer, and a few much needed laughs along the way. My late parents encouraged my interest in books and movies, and in so much else, too. They are behind all that I do. As always, though, my greatest debt is to my husband Al. As Herman Hesse wrote: “If I know what love is, it is because of you.” And I know.

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1. Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind (1939)

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Figure 1.2. Advertisement for a Tom spectacle

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Figure 1.3. The Mammy figure in popular advertising

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Figure 1.4. Old Mammy’s Charge (1913)

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Figure 1.5. The Duncan Sisters in Topsy and Eva (1927)

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Figure 1.6. In Slavery Days (1913)

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Figure 1.7. A segregated movie entrance

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Figure 2.1. The Trooper of Trooper K (1917)

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Figure 2.2. A Black Sherlock Holmes (1918)

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Figure 2.3. Within Our Gates (1920)

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Figure 2.4. The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920)

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Figure 2.5. Body and Soul (1925)

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Figure 2.6. The Green-Eyed Monster (1919)

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Figure 2.7. The New Negro Woman

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Figure 2.8. The Flying Ace (1926)

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Figure 2.9. Early race filmmaker Maria P. Williams

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Figure 2.10. Hell-Bound Train (1930)

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Figure 3.1. The Invaders (1912)

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Figure 3.2. Sioux Ghost Dance (1894) 108 Figure 3.3. The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913) xiii

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List of Illustrations

Figure 3.4. Mary Pickford in Iola’s Promise (1912)

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Figure 3.5. The Squaw Man (1914)

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Figure 3.6 The Vanishing American (1925)

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Figure 4.1. White Fawn’s Devotion (1910)

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Figure 4.2. For the Papoose (1912)

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Figure 4.3. Lillian “Red Wing” St. Cyr

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Figure 4.4. The Daughter of Dawn (1920) 148 Figure 4.5. Edwin Carewe

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Figure 5.1. Sessue Hayakawa in The Cheat (1915)

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Figure 5.2. Tsuru Aoki in The Dragon Painter (1919)

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Figure 5.3. Black Asian actress Lady Tsen Mei

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Figure 5.4. Anna May Wong in The Toll of the Sea (1922)

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Figure 5.5. Anna May Wong in Daughter of the Dragon (1931)

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Figure 5.6. Marion E. Wong and The Curse of Quon Gwon (1916)

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Figure 6.1. Dolores Del Rio in Ramona (1928)

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Figure 6.2. Myrtle Gonzalez in The Girl of Lost Lake (1916)

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Figure 6.3. Beatriz Michelina in Salomy Jane (1914)

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Figure 6.4. “Mexican Spitfire” Lupe Vélez

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Figure 7.1. Mary Fuller in What Happened to Mary (1912)

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Figure 7.2. The Hazards of Helen (1914–1917)

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Figure 7.3. Kathlyn Williams in The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913)

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Figure 7.4. Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline (1914)

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Figure 7.5. Pearl White in The Exploits of Elaine (1914)

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Figure 7.6. Grace Darling in Beatrice Fairfax (1916)

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Figure 8.1. Charlie Chaplin in A Busy Day (1914)

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Figure 8.2. Coon Town Suffragettes (1914)

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Figure 8.3. Your Girl and Mine (1914)

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Note on Terminology and Usage

Terminology and usage have evolved over the years. Words and phrases that were in common use a century ago have fallen out of favor today. Some, in fact, are now rightly considered offensive or even harmful because of the demeaning images they conjure and the prejudices they evoke. In a study on the marginalization and misrepresentation of women in early film, the inclusion of certain familiar late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century terms is at once unavoidable and singularly instructive. After all, those terms create a socio-historical framework and illustrate specific tropes and characters that are essential to a fuller understanding of the silent cinema era. For that reason, I deliberately reference them—although I do so selectively, critically, and exclusively for historical and contextual purposes. Similarly, in the case of words or designations that are specific to the 1910s and 1920s but no longer commonly used today, I have generally followed the practice of the period. The term “Latin,” for instance, was typically employed to describe people of Mexican, Spanish, Cuban, and occasionally even Italian heritage, without any further distinction among those groups. As appropriate, I observe that usage, although in my own analysis, I also use “Hispanics” or “Latinas.” Terms such as “Negro,” “black,” and “Indian” were also commonly employed during the silent period; and, again, especially in quotations, I preserve that usage. In my own analysis, I use “Black” and “African American,” often interchangeably, as I do with “Indian” and “Native American.” Likewise, the word “Oriental” appears in reviews and criticism, usually as a way of referring generically and indiscriminately to people of Chinese, Japanese, and other “exotic” origins. In such cases, I have preserved that usage. As a former English professor, I am sensitive to words that might be considered derogatory. And I am keenly aware that language can be politicized, wielded as a weapon in today’s culture wars, and employed to limit rather than to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. My purpose is just the xvii

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Note on Terminology and Usage

opposite: to respond to, not to revise or rationalize, the historic representation of women in early films; to examine, not to exploit, the nature and the genesis of the degrading stereotypes that have framed some women as outsiders; and to demythologize the enduring tropes of white supremacy and male superiority. My hope is that this study will be read as an appreciation, not an appropriation, of the struggle and the triumphs of “Othered” women and cultures in silent film, a topic that remains of vital importance to both cinema and social history. A final note: references to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.

Introduction

All of us have seen them on the movie screens. The dowdy Mammy so devoted to the “massa” and his family that she refuses release from slavery when it is offered. The hot-blooded, quick-tempered, hypersexual Mexican spitfire whom no man seems able to resist. The exotic dragon lady who uses her “Oriental” wiles to seduce, exploit, and deceive. The tragic Native American maiden who commits suicide after being abandoned by her white lover. The militant suffragist so determined to secure the vote that she neglects home and family and disrupts the social order. Historically rooted in the ubiquitous minstrel shows, dime Western novels, Wild West spectacles, vaudeville acts, magazines, cartoons, and other popular entertainments that dominated the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these images were appropriated by silent filmmakers, who advanced them widely, casually, and often blatantly as arguments for white supremacy, class superiority, and gender discrimination. “The birth of movies,” Marjorie Rosen observed in Popcorn Venus, “coincided with—and hastened—the genesis of the modern woman.”1 The converse is true as well: modern women hastened the development of film and played a vital role in popularizing the new medium. As moving pictures evolved from an inexpensive fleeting amusement into the nation’s first truly mass medium and a respectable amusement for people of all backgrounds,2 women constituted an increasingly large part of the filmgoing audience. Flocking to the local theaters and grand movie palaces, they found distraction, escapism, fantasy, and, sometimes, models of modern behavior. Women made their mark in the film industry in other ways, too. Off-screen, throughout much of the silent era of the 1910s and 1920s, they worked as set and costume designers, editors, directors, producers, screenwriters, and even as heads of their own production companies. On screen, the iconic “serial queens” Pearl White, Ruth Roland, and Helen Holmes played exciting action roles, while the girl-next-door types such as Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish became America’s sweethearts. 1

2

Introduction

At the same time, however, some women—paramount among them African Americans, Native Americans, Latinas, and Asians—were denied comparable opportunities. Viewed in early film as generic and interchangeable character types, these women went largely unacclaimed for their individual talents. Relegated to minor roles, often as background figures in the Westerns or plantation sagas in which they appeared, most were excluded from Hollywood’s evolving star system and deprived of even the simple dignity of accurate or sympathetic cinematic characterizations. Moreover, the depictions of them as politicized or exoticized became etched in the American imagination and shaped the way that they were perceived in real life. For filmmakers as for film audiences, there was an acceptance of a given set of stereotypes that provided a kind of shorthand, a set of conventions that established characters, plots, and conflicts that were immediately recognizable and familiar and, in many cases, highly derogatory.3 Vengeful Blacks sought to intermarry and pollute the race; Asians were a fearful “Yellow Peril” intent on destroying Western values; marauding Mexicans gathered at the border ready to invade and wreak havoc on unsuspecting citizens. For many Americans, especially those in small towns where they had never personally encountered actual Blacks, Asians, or Hispanics, the reel image became real. Cinema’s unprecedented power not only to cultivate but also to disseminate such imagery ensured that the false impressions became part of the larger culture.4 In the case of marginalized women, those formulas were usually a manifestation of sexism, racism, even nationalism. Coded as inferior and, worse still, as dangerous, those women were perceived as a threat to long-held and often conservative beliefs and practices—and especially to white men, whom they hoped to seduce, undermine, or displace, and to the traditional family, which they imperiled. The film stereotypes relied on routinized behaviors. As Gary Keller observed, the formula for Hispanic representation, for example, particularly in the Western genre, derived largely from popular novels and entertainments and depicted forbidden temptresses to offset virtuous white heroines. The loose-principled “brown woman” served as a counterpoint to the chaste white woman and as a test of the hero’s degree of moral commitment. “The white hero was often good-bad, failing in the middle of the work and ultimately rising at the end, overcoming base, interracial lust, and returning to lily white morality.”5 A similar formula was evident in the representation of other “outsider” women as well. The beautiful exotic Native American princess was often willing to deny, reject, or even betray her own people in favor of her white lover’s presumably superior Eurocentric religion and culture. Cross-racial acculturation on screen, however, was rare, and the prohibition against

Introduction

3

miscegenation demanded that the princess be sacrificially killed or that she die by her own hand. Her Orientalized counterpart, the fragile lotus blossom, was likewise an object of fascination and erotic desire. But her love, too, is inevitably thwarted, and she meets a tragic end that eradicates her, literally or symbolically, and allows her lover the opportunity to find happiness with a white woman in a more culturally acceptable union. The overtly sexual “mulatta,” typically presented as scheming and duplicitous in her racial passing and thus as the embodiment of white fears of “mongrelization,” was considered especially dangerous and despicable. Since her beguiling of white men, as in numerous early shorts such as The Octoroon (1911) and In Slavery Days (1913), could only bring them to moral and social ruin, she had to be punished or eliminated.6 And the militant suffragist—not racialized like the African American, Native American, Hispanic, or Asian woman, but more politicized—was, as Moving Picture World called her, “the last refuge for old maids and cranks.” By abandoning her traditional domestic role and forcing her way into the public sphere, she created disruption and chaos, often requiring her husband or some other male authority figure to intervene and restore the proper marital, domestic, and social order. Because the easiest way to generalize such female characters was by constructing them as extremes, early filmmakers resorted to techniques like caricature and exaggeration to emphasize their otherness. From the acquiescence of the Indian maiden and the Asian lotus blossom to the combativeness of the suffragist, these unfortunate misrepresentations exploited contemporary ethnic and gender assumptions and exacerbated social and racial prejudices. And they helped to frame the way that many Americans viewed those outside of their own experience. While dominant cinema fostered such indelible and largely pejorative typing, a number of early filmmakers and performers strove to respond to the degrading imagery. The attempts by such unrecognized or underappreciated independent filmmakers as the Johnson Brothers, Oscar Micheaux, and Richard E. Norman, for example, countered the images of Black servility and promiscuity with notions of racial uplift and ambition. Their landmark “race films,” produced between 1915 and 1928, defied mainstream movie representations and created a separate cinema7 that served as a counternarrative to productions such as D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), the technically sophisticated but venomously racist film that solidified racial characterizations and influenced social perceptions for decades. Griffith’s fabricated and unapologetically racist portraits of devoted Mammies, scheming Jezebels, and malicious mulattas confirmed the power of the new medium and ensured that false racial models were offprinted from celluloid onto mass consciousness.8 In contrast, the independent race filmmakers struggled to give women a more authentic voice by portraying aspiring, enterprising,

4

Introduction

well-educated heroines who were equal to the men in the films—women such as Southern schoolteacher Sylvia Landry in Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920), who understands that education is the key to race achievement, and homesteader Eve Mason in The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), who reverses the familiar convention and rides against the Klan to protect her fellow rancher. Native American filmmakers such as James Young Deer and his wife, actress Lillian “Red Wing” St. Cyr, used their films in similar ways: to challenge the image of the Hollywood Indian, to re-politicize the narratives by telling Native American stories from within the very forms that tried to erase them,9 and (as in White Fawn’s Devotion [1910], the earliest known Native American-directed film) to promote positive imagery of Native women as vital and empowered figures. Pioneering Hispanic and Asian performers and directors likewise tried to interrogate the stereotypes and introduce more modern sensibilities, albeit with varying degrees of success. And suffrage activists, frustrated by the derisive and mocking depictions of them and their movement, learned to harness the singular power of film to rebut the caricatures and to produce pictures that would make Americans more sympathetic to their cause. A comprehensive analysis of the representation of marginalized women in a multidisciplinary context, The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts explores the racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes that proliferated in early cinema and demonstrates how those stereotypes helped to shape American attitudes and practices. Using social, cultural, literary, and cinema history as a focus, it provides insights into issues of discrimination, exclusion, and sexism that are as timely today as they were a century ago. Yet, while the study centers on women in silent film, their representation is considered in a larger context that also includes the typing of African American, Native American, Latin, and Asian men, whose depictions often overlap, reflect, highlight, or otherwise comment on those of the women. The familiar Mammy, for example, serves as the distaff version of the faithful Uncle Tom, while the seductive wiles of the Dragon Lady correspond to the Yellow Peril threat posed by scheming and manipulative “Orientals” such as the ubiquitous Fu Manchu. The first two chapters, “African Americans” and “African Americans: Race Films,” examine the depiction of African American women (many of whom, in early film, were portrayed by white actresses in blackface) as it derived from the casual racism of the day and the racially-insensitive and blatantly offensive imagery of advertising, cartoons, and popular entertainment. Repudiating the belief that “Negros are funny”10—or, worse still, that they are subservient, sexually permissive, or vindictive, as suggested by the various iterations of Black women as devoted Mammies, silly pickaninnies, or

Introduction

5

vengeful mulattas in dominant white film—race filmmakers like Micheaux and Norman tried to counter the prevailing derogatory social stereotypes and reshape the cinematic narrative formulated by Griffith and other early directors. The third and fourth chapters, “Native Americans” and “Native Americans: Native Responses,” explore how the ubiquitous early Westerns, in their retelling of the national myth of conquest, recast Native American women and created common tropes that attempted simultaneously to glorify the lost frontier and justify the historical mistreatment of Native people. By contrast, the depiction of Hispanic women, as the fifth chapter, “Latins,” reveals, was characterized as much by their absence as by their presence. Generally relegated to incidental or demeaning roles as sexy señoritas or cantina girls, Latinas appeared as the forbidden objects of male desire in popular Westerns such as the Broncho Billy pictures and were given little opportunity to display their talents, only their exoticism—a representation that prominent actresses such as Dolores Del Rio tried to reverse. Similarly, Asian screen imagery, discussed in chapter six, “Asians,” relied heavily on offensive and opposing stereotypes. At one extreme was the deceitful, mysterious, and sexually alluring dragon lady, whose depiction was based in Yellow Peril fears and legislation such as the Page Act of 1875, which barred Asian women from entering the U.S. and branded them as threats to white supremacy. At the other extreme was the submissive, compliant china doll or lotus blossom who subordinated her own identity in order to please Western men. Even the refusal of Chinese American Hollywood star Anna May Wong to play roles that portrayed Asians negatively, like the efforts by pioneering director Marion E. Wong to introduce actual Chinese customs and themes into American film, however, largely failed to counteract the xenophobic distrust. The final chapters, “The New Woman” and “Suffragists,” treat the controversial New Woman in silent film. Removed from the confines of Victorian femininity and familial obligations, that woman could act in nontraditional ways typically associated with masculine brawn and bravado, which made her a popular heroine in serial and feature motion pictures. Yet, while she offered a template for negotiating gender stereotypes, for many male viewers as well as for many mainstream filmmakers, her empowerment raised anxiety about the transformations occurring in a society that was experiencing the upheavals of modernity.11 That anxiety was reflected most directly in the screen representation of the suffragist as a marginalized radical who had to be humiliated into returning to a more traditional role in the household. A handful of filmmakers associated with the movement, however, used the satire in a different way: to expose what they saw as the sexism and abuse women faced

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Introduction

in a society that was ruled by men and to counter the overblown depictions of “unwomanly” manhaters. Silent cinema was a mirror of Americans’ hopes, fears, and anxieties, reflecting women’s rapidly evolving roles and other socio-political changes that were occurring at the turn of the century. Its visual nature and wide popularity made the new medium a pervasive force for social influence, with an extraordinary power to propagandize and persuade. The stereotypes that film established circulated easily, repeated frequently,12 and had an enduring impact on popular thought and social practices. Consequently, as this volume demonstrates, in a curious symbiosis, history shaped the course of film, and, especially in terms of gender and racial representation, film shaped the course of history. NOTES   1. Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies & the American Dream (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973), p. 23.   2. Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 3.   3. Gary Keller, Hispanics and United States Film: An Overview and Handbook (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Review/Press, 1994), p. 109.   4. “The myths and stereotypes,” as Randall M. Miller noted in The Kaleidoscopic Lens: How Hollywood Views Ethnic Groups (Englewood, NJ: Jerome S. Ozer, 1980), p. 1, “simultaneously paraded across silver screens in small towns and big cities in America, gave the nation a common fund of references.”   5. Keller, p. 109.   6. Thomas Cripps’ observation (in “The Dark Spot in the Kaleidoscope: Black Images in American Film,” in Miller, p. 22), that Hollywood, which “knew little of black culture,” developed a habit of imitating success in search of surefire hits by creating sentimentalized or “political stereotypes”applies to Hollywood’s stereotyping of other ethnicities as well.   7. The term “separate cinema” was popularized by John Duke Kisch, photographer, world-renowned archivist, and founder and director of The Separate Cinema Archive, a prominent African American film history repository. It includes an important historic collection of rare film posters, lobby cards, and photographs, some of which have been reproduced in Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art (New York: Reel Art Press, 2014). Kisch’s Separate Cinema Archive was recently acquired by George Lucas for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.   8. James Snead, White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 107–8.  9. Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), p. 99.

Introduction

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10. Among the claims in ads by the General Film Company/Ebony Film Comedies was that “negro wit and humor is one class of entertainment of which the American public never tires. It has always been, in every form, a favorite pastime.” 11. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 5. 12. Clara E. Rodriguez, Heroes, Lovers, and Others: The Story of Latinos in Hollywood (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 2004), p. 1.

Chapter 1

African Americans

It has been more than eighty years since Hattie McDaniel became the first Black actress to earn an Academy Award.1 She won for her outstanding performance in Gone with the Wind (1939). The following spring, the Academy Awards were held at the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. It was the 12th annual ceremony, and most of Hollywood’s biggest names were there, including McDaniel’s co-stars Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, and Olivia de Havilland. But McDaniel, who was a close personal friend of Gable, was not seated with the rest of her Gone with the Wind cast. The hotel was segregated, so she and her escort F.P. Yober sat alone, at a solitary table, in the back of the ballroom. In fact, producer David Selznick had to call in a special favor just to allow her to enter the hotel.2 McDaniel had begun her show business career as a minstrel-show performer in her brother Otis’s troupe, as a singer-songwriter in the all-female McDaniel Sisters Company, and as a featured singer with the Black touring ensemble “Professor George Morrison’s Melody Hounds.” Like other Oscar-winning actresses, she would go on to have a long film career. But unlike her white counterparts, for whom the prestigious acting award provided opportunities to play a wide variety of roles, McDaniel found herself cast in the same part over and over again in more than seventy of the ninetyplus films in which she received a credit. Among her earliest appearances were uncredited roles as Cora, the maid to Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) in Blonde Venus (1932), and as the maid and manicurist to circus performer Tira (Mae West) in the campy I’m No Angel (1933). After joining the Screen Actors Guild in 1934, McDaniel began attracting attention in films such as The Little Colonel (1935), where she appeared as “Mom Beck” alongside Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson; as the slovenly maid Malena to the eponymous Alice (Katherine Hepburn) in Alice Adams (1935) (where, incidentally, her name was misspelled as Hattie McDaniels); and as the uncredited maid and traveling companion Isabel to China Doll (Jean Harlow) in China Seas (1935). Larger roles 9

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would follow, including the part of Queenie the cook on the Apple Blossom in Show Boat (1936), opposite Irene Dunne and Paul Robeson, and as Dehlia the cook in Zenobia (1939), with Oliver Hardy and Stepin Fetchit (a film in which she was again erroneously credited as Hattie McDaniels). Yet even after her star turn as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, she would continue to be cast in underwritten roles such as the sympathetic maid or the kindly “Aunt” in films such as Maryland (1940), Since You Went Away (1944), and The Song of the South (1946). And when McDaniel finally made the big leap to the new medium of television a few years later, she played an all-too-familiar character: Beulah, the maid, a role that she took over from another incomparable but underappreciated African American performer, Louise Beavers.3 As her biographer Jill Watts observed, from her Mammy characters to her comedic, sassy maids, McDaniel’s career was defined by roles that were usually demeaning, submissive, and disappointing in their lack of depth. Adding to her frustration was the criticism she received from organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for her portrayal of racial stereotypes on screen. McDaniel, who considered herself a proud “race woman,” insisted that her Oscar-winning performance had “prove[d] an inspiration to Negro youth” and opened doors for other African American actors and actresses in Hollywood. Even as late as 1947, in an article that she wrote for The Hollywood Reporter only a few years before her untimely death, she refused to apologize for the characters that she had played.4 Instead, she famously and pragmatically countered, “I can be a maid for $7 a week, or I can play a maid for $700 a week.”5 Nonetheless, even as she staunchly defended the opportunities for others that her groundbreaking achievement had created, she recognized that she had contributed to the perpetuating of unfortunate stereotypes that harked back to the beginnings of film. For many moviegoers today, Hattie McDaniel remains the embodiment of Mammy, one of the earliest, most enduring, and most pernicious stereotypes that limited and restricted highly-talented Black performers to servile roles in early mainstream film. To understand the genesis of that stereotype is to appreciate the historical circumstances that defined and circumscribed McDaniel’s performances and that gave rise to the pejorative cinematic imagery in the first place. SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL The emergence of cinema coincided with the turn of the twentieth century. The early decades of that century were an era in which the United States was establishing its industrial might and asserting itself as the up-and-coming, if not the dominant, economic power in the world.6 Recent immigration had

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Fig. 1.1.  Hattie McDaniel as Mammy to Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) in Gone with the Wind (1939), a role for which she would become the first African American to win an Academy Award. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

changed the nature and appearance of American society, and for most citizens or aspiring citizens, it was a time of great hope and great promise. But the situation was much different for Black Americans. For them, it was a time of great challenge. The return of white supremacy and the steady disenfranchisement of Black voters through grandfather clauses, poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, and other restrictive practices around the turn of the century crushed the hopes that they had for political change at the ballot box. And the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan reinforced their sense of helplessness in the face of brutal racial violence. Originally formed during Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Klan had virtually disbanded after whites in the South regained ascendancy and drove Blacks off the voting rolls.7 But it was re-established, with a fresh and horrifying vigor, in 1915 by a preacher from Atlanta, Georgia, named William J. Simmons. Reportedly, after viewing D.W. Griffith’s venomously racist film The Birth of a Nation (1915), Simmons took it upon himself to rewrite the Reconstruction Klan’s “Prescript” as a prospectus for a reincarnation of the organization, and he even served as Imperial Wizard of the reconstituted Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

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Griffith’s film, in fact, was reputed to be the most effective recruiting tool for the Klan, which, as Terry Ramsaye observed, “was the afterbirth of a nation, sprouted from the same root.”8 Using the picture as propaganda by which to air white supremacist grievances, the Klan hoped to attract like-minded followers. And indeed, by the mid-1920s, it had evolved into a national organization that claimed more than five million members. The Klan’s most public and sensational method of terror was lynching, a way that whites exercised social control by reasserting their dominance.9 Lynching was a deliberately performative and ritualized act of violence through its “displays of lynched bodies and souvenirs, as well as through representations of the violence” such as photographs, postcards, lurid ballads, stories, and news accounts that circulated long after the lynchings themselves were over.10 The “lynching climate” of the 1920s, as Jane Gaines described it, was clustered around a variety of social developments that included the extension of voting rights to Black men, Black economic successes, and consensual interracial sexual relations.11 Lynching, moreover, was hardly an uncommon act. According to Tuskegee University records, an average of sixty-six lynchings occurred annually between 1900 and 1925; and, in all likelihood, that number was much higher.12 Throughout the South and even in states as far west as Nebraska and California and as far north as Indiana and Illinois, innocent Black men, women, and children were hanged, tortured, or burned alive. Black homes and businesses were destroyed, and thousands without legal protection or recourse were driven out of their towns. In one horrible example, on November 2, 1920, in the largest incident of voting-day violence in the United States, at least fifty African Americans in Ocoee, Florida, were lynched or killed simply for trying to exercise their democratic right to vote. Virtually all of the homes in the community were burned to the ground, and most of the residents fled, never to return—an event, according to the Orlando [Florida] Sentinel, largely untold for almost a century.13 Seeking to escape the violence, many Blacks migrated North. But even there they found little respite. Instead, they experienced new, albeit different problems like ghettoization—that is, being forced to live like second-class citizens in undesirable or segregated areas of cities and in crowded tenements that only years before had been occupied by the very poorest of immigrants.14 Even the Supreme Court contributed to the racial division. With its Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, the Court upheld the constitutionality of state laws that provided “separate but equal” accommodations for Blacks, a precedent that aided the spread of segregation in public places and on public transportation throughout the nation and encouraged other legislation that codified racial discrimination.

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The Jim Crow laws, named for a racist nineteenth-century minstrel song written and performed in blackface by white actor Thomas Dartmouth (“Daddy”) Rice, ensured that the separation of races was rigorously observed in restaurants, hotels, railroad stations, schools, parks, beaches, cemeteries, and brothels.15 Even courts used different Bibles to swear in whites and people of color.16 In a 1919 incident in Chicago, when seventeen-year-old African American Eugene Williams was swimming in Lake Michigan with a group of friends, he allegedly crossed the invisible barrier that separated the Black beach from the white. For crossing that barrier and thus inadvertently integrating the beach, he was stoned and drowned by a white man, George Stauber, whom police refused to take into custody.17 Williams’ murder was one of the mobilizing events that led to the widespread race rioting of the so-called Red Summer of 1919, a period during which racial tensions came to a virtual boiling point in dozens of cities nationwide. The radically changed social landscape and the competition for opportunities in postwar America, exacerbated by the demobilization of millions of military personnel following the end of the war, had placed Blacks and whites in increased conflict with one another.18 The race hatred was stoked even more by reports of radicalism in the Black community and the “spirit of defiance and vengeance” exhibited by Blacks, even though that defiance was an understandable unwillingness to tolerate the intimidation and violence directed against them.19 Contrary to racist opinion, Blacks of that period were remarkably industrious. They had begun actively seeking leadership roles in their own communities and, by the late 1920s, in Congress as well, with the election in 1928 to the U.S. House of Representatives of Oscar De Priest, the first African American to serve in that body since George White of North Carolina left office in 1901. They published and supported newspapers, including the influential Chicago Defender (founded by Robert S. Abbott in 1905) and the New York Age (established in 1887). And they formed powerful and enduring civic and protest organizations that championed Black causes and mobilized dissent, like the National Negro Business League (1900), founded by Booker T. Washington, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), which grew out of the earlier Niagara Movement founded by W.E.B. Du Bois. Yet even as Blacks protested their humiliating and inequitable treatment, they readily demonstrated their patriotism. Black families bought millions of dollars in Liberty Bonds, while young Black men volunteered or were drafted for military service, despite the fact that they were prohibited from serving alongside white soldiers in the Army, afforded only the most menial positions in the Navy, and excluded entirely from the Marines, and despite the fact that many politicians expressed grave reservations about placing deadly

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firearms into Black hands. Notably, the Black 369th Infantry Regiment (the “Harlem Hellfighters”) assigned to the French Army saw more days in combat than any other American unit. For their extraordinary bravery, the Hellfighters were awarded the prestigious Croix de Guerre, making them the only American soldiers to receive that honor.20 Yet the democracy that Black troops fought for overseas was denied them once they returned home. In 1919, soldiers still in uniform were among the victims of lynching by whites who wanted to restore the prewar social order of race subservience.21 At the same time, Blacks were also making enormous strides in education, particularly at such prestigious institutions as Tuskegee, Hampton, and Howard, and in science, through the groundbreaking work of women and men such as heart surgeon Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, botanist/inventor George Washington Carver, and surgeon and blood preservation pioneer Dr. Charles Drew, who went on to become the first director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank. Black achievement in the arts was similarly impressive: in literature, with the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes, the novels of Charles Chesnutt and Jessie Fauset, and the folkloric tales of Zora Neale Hurston; in music, with such blues and jazz greats as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and W.C. Handy; and in professional musical theater, with exceptional talents such as Ethel Waters, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Eubie Blake. And the flourishing of a Black Renaissance that originated in Harlem gave rise to a new Black aesthetic and to a vision of the “New Negro” as an outspoken advocate for race pride and equality, unwilling to tolerate Jim Crow discrimination. Yet forging a strong Black voice in the new medium of cinema, the most accessible and popular form of mass entertainment in the early twentieth century, proved considerably more complicated. Because most early filmmakers were white, they simply participated in the life of their culture, absorbing and reflecting the racism of their era—casual or vitriolic, conscious or intellectualized.22 Consequently, although Black characters had appeared on film almost from the beginnings of cinema in the 1890s (albeit in racist shorts with offensive titles such as The Pickaninnies [Edison, 1894], Watermelon Contest and Dancing Darkies [both 1896], A Coon Cake Walk [1897], and Dancing N-----s [1899]), racial portrayal remained static or retrogressive. So there was a startling disconnect between the reality of Blacks in American society and the representation of Blacks on screen, who found themselves typed in outrageous and demeaning caricatures that marginalized them, burlesqued their everyday lives, and emphasized their servile behavior. Many of the stereotypes derived from the popular white literature of the day, which attempted to mask the disturbing social realities with depictions of Blacks as simple folk nostalgic for the “old ways” of the genteel South, as in the stories of Thomas Nelson Page, whose fiction idealized Southern

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life before the Civil War. Alternatively, some writers such as the divisive and provocative Thomas Dixon, whose novel was later adapted to film by D.W. Griffith as The Birth of a Nation, portrayed Blacks as vicious and misguided brutes who threatened an edenic land of mosses and magnolias and whose unruly behavior demanded the restoration of the so-called “natural” order. Other popular entertainments, such as the ubiquitous minstrel shows, further glorified the plantation tradition as a model for the subjugation of Blacks and reinforced the racist codes. Part of that minstrel tradition was the longstanding practice of blackface, in which white performers donned outlandish costumes and heavy burnt-cork make-up to give them an exaggerated and comical appearance.23 Blackface permitted whites a way to demean Blacks even further by illustrating rather vividly—and, even more importantly, visually—the prevailing racist beliefs about the limited abilities of African Americans, who were portrayed as simpletons, clowns, and stooges. Many of the Black roles in early films were, in fact, played by white actors; and even years after the silent era, a number of mainstream white performers continued the pervasive and appalling practice of blackface. Actors as diverse as Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Shirley Temple, the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Edgar Bergen’s dummy Charlie McCarthy, and even beloved cartoon character Bugs Bunny assumed the racist posture, normalizing blackface minstrel performance as appropriate family entertainment. Such pejorative racial imagery not only became indelibly etched in the American imagination; it also reinforced existing racial prejudices, encouraged racial division, and reduced real Blacks to “reel” Blacks. GRIFFITH AND THE BIRTH OF A NATION While pioneering director and producer D.W. Griffith did not originate the racial imagery, he certainly perpetuated it in his early short films and especially in The Birth of a Nation, the most influential film in cinema history, which fanned the fires of race hatred to almost unimaginable proportions. A masterpiece of filmmaking but at the same time an example of the most virulent racism, Griffith’s film was based largely on The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), the second in a trilogy of novels by former Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon, and on a dramatization of the novel that was produced soon afterward.24 Retrogressive and unrepentantly racist, Dixon was as romantic in his glorification of the Old South as he was vicious in his depiction of African Americans. And he used his works—all of which were notorious for their attacks on liberal ideological movements like integration, feminism, and pacifism—as an attempt to counter the powerful

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anti-slavery sentiments of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Reportedly, Dixon’s inspiration for The Clansman came in 1901 at a performance of a Tom play.25 Infuriated by what he saw as the injustice of the play’s attitude toward the South, he vowed to tell the “true story” of American history, from the glory of the antebellum South to the evils of miscegenation and postwar Reconstruction and ultimately to the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, an order of contemporary knights whose holy quest, in Dixon’s view, was the restoration of the American way of life (or rather Dixon’s idea of the American way of life). At the opening of a stage version of his novel in 1906, he spoke during the intermission about his hopes and intentions: “My object is to teach the north, the young north, what it has never known—the awful suffering of the white man during the dreadful reconstruction period.” He concluded by insisting that “Almighty God anointed the white men of the south by their suffering during that time . . . to demonstrate to the world that the white man must and shall be supreme.”26 The panoramic sweep of The Clansman clearly appealed to Griffith, whose own vision was as epic and whose perspectives on history were as sentimentalized as Dixon’s. Born a child of the Confederacy in Kentucky in 1875, Griffith was steeped in an atmosphere of racial intolerance. Keenly sensitive to the South—its travails, its burden of race, its rural inferiority— and full of reverence for its heroes, among whom were numbered some of Griffith’s own forebears (including his father, “Roaring Jake” Griffith, a Confederate veteran), he displayed a “unique mind-set [that] made him the most credible interpreter of Southern and black experience on film, at least to a generation wanting relief from the clatter of urban change, with the result that the new Negro of the cities was drowned in the martial vision of Griffith’s Southland.”27 Not only in short pictures such as His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled but also in the scores of other Civil War melodramas like In Old Kentucky and The Battle that he produced for the Biograph Company and released between 1909 and 1911, Griffith promoted his racist attitudes about “faithful” and “right-thinking Negroes”—attitudes that most Southerners shared and that many Northerners and Middle Westerners casually accepted. As long as Blacks stayed loyal to their white masters and their land, Griffith’s films seemed to say, all was right with the world; their mistreatment, impoverishment, or other sacrifices were inconsequential. And nowhere was that sentiment more adamantly expressed than in The Birth of a Nation. In its redefinition of the “real” nation as a white Anglo-Saxon America, that film, as Sarah Churchwell observed, supported the premise of the glorious Lost Cause, normalized the mythic account of Reconstruction, and taught enduring lessons of white supremacy.28

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It was soon after the Christmas holidays of 1913 that Griffith and Dixon left for the West Coast, whose atmosphere, film scholar Thomas Cripps suggests, reinforced their traditional Southern values. Remote from urban life, the two romanticized the Old South; cast several actual Southerners (such as Henry B. Walthall and Lillian Gish, Griffith’s favorite actress at the time) in key roles; and even replicated the Dixie of Dixon’s works to the extent of segregating the barracks of the Black extras, most of whom were Californians so grateful to have work that they did not complain.29 According to Karl Brown, Griffith’s assistant camera operator, the director also instructed the carpenters to build the street set in such a way as to re-create the familiar and crucial architecture of the popular “Tom shows” that had amused and entertained white audiences for decades.30 Rehearsed for six weeks, shot in nine weeks, and edited for three months,31 the film previewed under the title The Clansman in California early in 1915 and premiered under its new title The Birth of a Nation a few weeks later in New York. In an age during which most moving pictures were crude shorts made on small budgets, Griffith’s $100,000 spectacle was a polished, expertly-edited, and well-lit masterwork with an unprecedented running time of more than two hours (twelve reels). After a private screening of the film in the White House,32 President Woodrow Wilson, a staunch segregationist and one of Dixon’s former classmates at Johns Hopkins, reportedly compared it to “writing history with lightning” and regretted “that it is all so horribly true.”33 Contrary to Wilson’s pronouncement (which Wilson later disavowed), The Birth of a Nation was not horribly true; but it was surely remarkable in other ways.34 Griffith, a bigot in his politics, proved to be a technical genius in his filmmaking. Utilizing numerous innovations such as cross-cutting, close-up and fade-out shots, effect lighting, iris shots, and split screens, he was able to create stunning images and sequences like the battle scenes and chases. Most surprising, perhaps, was Griffith’s reworking of Dixon’s novel into a compelling although still poisonously racist story of the Cameron family, who, along with their devoted slaves, lead an idyllic existence in Piedmont, South Carolina. That existence, of course, is shattered by the Civil War. Terrorized by “Negro raiders” during the war, the Cameron family must deal with even more horrors during Reconstruction, as carpetbaggers and Northern Blacks move into the area and exploit the Southern former slaves by unleashing their bestial natures and turning them into renegades. Under the new “Negro rulership,” Blacks begin subverting the whole social order: they push whites off the walkways, steal their property, keep them from the ballot boxes, turn a legislative session into an occasion for chicken-eating and whiskey-chugging rather than governance, and—most unforgivable of all, in the film’s view— assault white women and attempt to intermarry. Meanwhile, Senator Austin Stoneman, patriarch of the Pennsylvania Stonemans whose lives have

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become intertwined with the Camerons, insists on equal rights for Black citizens.35 After dispatching his mulatto protégé Silas Lynch “to aid the carpetbaggers in organizing and wielding the power of the Negro vote” (according to the title card), Stoneman travels to Piedmont and sees for himself the damage that has been wrought. As Blacks continue to terrorize whites, even Gus, a former Cameron family slave, becomes “the product of the vicious doctrine spread by carpetbaggers.” In a harrowing seven-minute sequence, he chases the Camerons’ daughter Flora through the woods until she leaps to her death in a ravine to escape his lecherous advances.36 Then Lynch (played by white actor George Seigmann in dark theatrical makeup to heighten his character’s blackness, which Griffith equated with savagery) presumes to marry Elsie Stoneman, portrayed by the light-haired, pale-skinned Lillian Gish.37 When Elsie refuses, he binds and gags her in order to enact a “forced marriage.” The social chaos created by arrogant and aggressive Blacks in The Birth of a Nation leads the disenfranchised Southerners to form the Ku Klux Klan, who begin their nights of terror by capturing, castrating (a scene excised from most versions), and murdering Gus and depositing his corpse on Lynch’s doorstep.38 After learning of Lynch’s intention to marry his daughter, Stoneman finally recognizes the error of his views on racial equality, which the film attributes to the wiles of his mulatta mistress and housekeeper Lydia Brown, whom Griffith calls the “weakness that is to blight a nation.”39 Naturally, Ben Cameron and his fellow Klansmen rescue Elsie in time to thwart Lynch’s plans and to save Dr. Cameron and his family from the renegade Blacks who have surrounded the cabin where they are hiding. And, in a symbolic new union of opposing sides, Ben and Elsie join Phil and Margaret Cameron on a double honeymoon. With the white Southerners again in command and the Blacks obediently under control, the world is set aright, a conclusion reinforced by Griffith’s original allegorical final shot of Christ ascending into Heaven after having vanquished the God of War. If the film was like history written by lightning, then the response, especially among Black Americans, could only be analogized as thunderous. Finding no redeeming artistic value in Griffith’s picture, Blacks, according to Thomas Cripps, saw only “the retelling of Reconstruction history as a Gothic horror tale haunted by black brutes”; and they rued the timing of the film, coming as it did at a point when Black status had deteriorated, lynchings persisted in the rural South, conditions of life in Northern cities worsened, and progressive reforms further excluded Black citizens.40 Religious and civic groups joined the various protests nationwide, and a number of newspaper editorials came out strongly against the picture’s racism. White reviewer Jane Addams wrote caustically that the movie misused history and that Griffith gathered “the most vicious and grotesque individuals he could find among the colored people” and then tried to show them “as representatives of the . . .

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entire race.”41 The Black press, even more direct in its attacks, used the film as a vehicle to promote Black self-determination and to encourage filmmakers to provide more complimentary and realistic representations of Black life in their productions. James Weldon Johnson, for instance, charged in the New York Age (April 15, 1915), “Not in this whole picture, which is supposed to represent the birth and growth of the nation, is there one single Negro who is both intelligent and decent.”42 New York Age publisher Lester Walton, angry that Griffith had managed to create the perception that Blacks were not “true” Americans, demanded action. Hinting darkly that the matter would have been regarded differently had it been the Jews or the Irish who were so badly maligned, Walton concluded that “the photoplay is vicious, untrue, unjust, and had been primarily produced to cause friction in Northern cities.”43 Despite the controversy, The Birth of a Nation was a tremendous commercial success. Even at the steep ticket prices that Griffith charged, it found a large and receptive audience.44 As Wil Haygood noted, more than twenty-five million people, “a quarter of the population, . . . eventually saw the film during its initial run,” during which “the movie grossed between fifty and sixty million dollars.”45 And precisely for that reason—the enormity of Griffith’s audience and the ease with which they accepted his racial cant—Griffith was able to shape the way that Blacks would be portrayed in American films and to perpetuate racist character types that other directors would adopt for decades to come. “More than any other director,” Thomas Cripps observed, “Griffith gave future moviemakers a model, a cinematic language, and a richly romantic tradition that would define an Afro-American stereotype.”46 Nonetheless, the sharpened racial consciousness resulted in some small successes. As The Crisis editor W.E.B. Du Bois reported, while the backlash may have failed “to kill The Birth of a Nation, [at least] it succeeded in wounding it.”47 And it helped to give shape to a new Black aesthetic, which over the next decade manifested itself in the rise of independent Black filmmakers who challenged the monopoly of white studios and producers. MAMMY AND TOM Among the earliest and most enduring of the stereotypes that Griffith perpetuated was the self-sacrificing Uncle Tom, today the character most immediately associated with Black servility and subservience. Uncle Tom first appeared in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel of protest against the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Act that enforced the return of escaped slaves to their owners. Stowe’s Tom was an exceptional and unusually strong character who suffered tremendous hardships but remained

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faithful to God as well as to his own principles. And it made his martyrdom because of his refusal to betray another slave as redemptive as it was tragic. Yet even before the final serial installment of the novel was published in 1852, Stowe’s eponymous character had become a familiar part of American popular culture, and generally not in a positive way. His story—routinely truncated to eliminate the harsh reality of his suffering and death, which was the whole point of Stowe’s novel—was so frequently dramatized and trivialized throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century that it became known as “the world’s greatest hit.”48 In addition to the legitimate American stage versions, there were lucrative Tom spectacles, like the one mounted by renowned showman P.T. Barnum; Uncle Tom musical extravaganzas and parades; and, of course, countless parodies and crude take-offs. For example, the comic cartoon Uncle Tom’s Bungalow ends with Uncle Tom buying back his own freedom in a game of craps and driving away in a Rolls Royce. And in another cartoon, Uncle Tom’s Cabaña, Tom turns his cabin into a lucrative juke joint, with a not-so-little Miss Eva as his star cabaret performer. Common to almost all of the Tom productions, however, was a distortion of the title character himself. Increasingly, Stowe’s dignified and exemplary

Fig. 1.2.  In addition to the many silent film versions, the Tom story was retold in stage plays, spectacles, parades, musical extravaganzas, parodies, and cartoons. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Uncle Tom was portrayed as a happy, sappy, wooly-white-haired plantation slave content to abide by his master’s wishes. Such vulgarizing not only carried a message substantially different from the novel’s strong condemnation of slavery. It also encouraged the perception of Tom’s acquiescence and obedience as a model of good racial behavior. Incredibly, some of the silent film versions even tried to give the Tom story a happy ending, in an attempt to prove that slavery really was not so bad after all.49 Just as Tom became the model of the submissive but contented slave that white moviegoers wanted him to be, Mammy became a character whom white audiences grew to love. As early as the 1870s, her face and figure began appearing on boxes of pancake mix, baking powder, peanuts, and detergent. Her broad smile and jolly demeanor assured American consumers that the product in question was dependable and reliable, just like Mammy herself. That same racial iconography carried over to early cinema.50 A staple of the so-called genre of plantation pictures, the movie Mammy was usually middle-aged, dowdy, big, and dark (often exaggeratedly so, as in the many early films in which she was played by white actresses in blackface). But whereas most servants were respectful, Mammy could be cantankerous and feisty, albeit in a good-natured and familiar way. Yet her irrepressibility and single-minded dedication to those whom she served endeared her to white audiences. Mammies also tended to be nonthreatening, especially in their sexuality, and unfailingly loyal. Like McDaniel’s Mammy in Gone with the Wind, who prides herself on the fact that she has diapered three generations of O’Hara

Fig. 1.3.  An iconic figure in early film, the Mammy frequently appeared in advertising for a variety of household products, which used her image to promote dependability. Courtesy of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Ferris State University, Big Rapids, Michigan.

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women and who is privy to all of Scarlett’s secrets, from her infatuation with Ashley Wilkes to her enduring love for Rhett Butler, Mammies were indispensable to the families who enslaved them. Yet while Mammy is a vital part of Scarlett’s life, next-to-nothing is known about Mammy’s own family. Almost totally depersonalized and reduced to her servant position, she lacks even a proper name. She is simply “Mammy.”51 The cinematic notion of the Mammy was clearly an artificial construct, a racist caricature divorced from the reality of race relations during slavery and the years afterward. As Ellen E. Jones explained, that version of Mammy never actually existed. Citing research from historians Cheryl Thurber and Patricia Turner, Jones notes that “while the care of white children in the antebellum US South was sometimes entrusted to enslaved people, these ‘house slaves’ were typically light-skinned teenage girls (conditions for enslaved Black women were, in any case, so harsh that 90 per cent died before their 50th birthday).” And “given the poor diet available to slaves, they were also highly unlikely to have been either fat or jolly,” all of which affirms that the movie Mammy was largely a creation of white supremacy, a mythical figure with little basis in the lived experiences of Black women.52 Typical of McDaniel’s character and of all film Mammies, particularly in the silent film era, was their absolute devotion and their willingness to sacrifice themselves and even their own families for “missy” and “massa,” supposedly endearing terms that found their way into scores of movie titles. In Mammy’s Ghost (1911), for example, Mammy hides Colonel Berkley and his son from Union soldiers and later cares for the boy throughout the war until his father returns. In Old Mammy’s Secret Code (1913), Mammy sacrifices even more. The faithful servant of the Durard family, she pretends that she has run away from a cruel master and asks Union soldiers to protect her. Assigned work at the officers’ headquarters, she overhears General Grant’s plans to attack Lee’s army. Using her laundry line, she signals in code to the Confederates, an act of treason for which she is court-martialed and executed by the Yankees.53 And in Old Mammy’s Charge (1913), advertised as “The Sweetest Southern Story Ever Told in Pictures,” the eponymous Mammy travels north with her beloved mistress Beatrice Prentiss. After Beatrice and her husband die, she endures many hardships in order to keep their young daughter safe. Taking in laundry in order to support the girl, self-sacrificing Mammy “brings little Beatrice up and takes great pleasure in keeping the child dainty and pretty.” Years later, Major Prentiss arrives in the city in search of his estranged daughter. Upon learning of her death, he takes Mammy and his little granddaughter back home where “peace and comfort await them.”54 The film expects viewers to believe that Mammy willingly leaves the freedom of the North to return to bondage in the South.

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Similarly, in Mammy’s Rose (1916), Mammy, “a withered colored woman,” fondly recalls her master’s late son, Frank, whom she tended from infancy. After war breaks out and Frank is called upon to defend the South, she dutifully attends his pregnant wife Beth. When Frank returns to Beth’s bedside in time for the birth, “a stray troop of Yanks” spies his horse. Mammy’s husband Mose tries to prevent them from entering the house, but he is killed. Frank, too, is shot and mortally wounded. Notably, though, it is Frank, not Mose, to whom Mammy runs, supporting him in her arms as he dies. Back in the present, while “Mammy lives over these memories[,] a chill passes through her body and she falls back dead.” As her soul flies, “The spirit of Frank enters the cabin, and he and Beth and old Mammy are together at last.”55 And in The Mistake of Mammy Lou (1915), Mammy Lou goes to great lengths to protect her mistress from an intruder and to reunite her with her fiancé after a misunderstanding threatens to estrange them.56 BEYOND THE TOM AND MAMMY STEREOTYPES Mammy was not the only recurring and demeaning racial stereotype in early silent film. A particularly vicious and lingering character type was the doltish figure described by Donald Bogle and others as the “Sambo” or by other even more unsavory terms, who served as a figure of laughter and ridicule for white audiences. Film historian Daniel J. Leab described that figure as “subhuman, simpleminded, superstitious, and submissive to whites, frequently childlike in his dependence, with foolishly exaggerated qualities, including an apparently hereditary clumsiness and an addictive craving for fried chicken and watermelon.”57 The most prominent representation was Stepin Fetchit, who perfected the slow-gaited, dim-witted demeanor that the role demanded

Fig. 1.4.  In Old Mammy’s Charge (1913), Mammy devotes herself to raising little Beatrice, the daughter of her late mistress. Typical of many early shorts, Mammy is played by an actress in blackface. Image from Moving Picture World.

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and his name (“step” and “fetch it”) implied. Tall, thin, his head clean-shaven, dressed in clothes so loose-fitting that they looked passed down, he gave the appearance of being naive or clownish (although, in real life, attuning his act to popular tastes, he became one of the first Black contract players and first Black millionaires). Another such figure of ridicule was Willie Best, better known by his unfortunate nickname “Sleep ’n’ Eat.” The Sambo’s female counterpart was the comic character personified most memorably by the scatterbrained housemaid Prissy, played by Butterfly McQueen in Gone with the Wind. Flighty, squeamish, and inclined to exaggeration, Prissy, who is Scarlett’s personal slave throughout most of the story, provides much of the film’s comic relief as she pretends to have some experience as a midwife but then admits, in her singularly whiny high-pitched voice, that she “don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies.” And indeed, many white film producers saw every plantation and slavery saga as an opportunity for laughter and light comedy. There were as many variations on this comic character type as there were Black performers relegated to the demeaning role. A particularly popular version was the “pickaninny,” a staple of early shorts and plantation pieces. Probably film’s most recognizable pickaninny—and one of film’s most damning early examples of racist portraiture—was Topsy, the wild slave child entrusted to Aunt Ophelia for moral and social instruction in the numerous versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Unlike the dignified and obedient Uncle Tom, she was mischievous, unrestrained, and comical in the disruptions that she created (though, for Stowe, she was above all a symbol of the dehumanization caused by slavery). In one widely-viewed early adaptation, the 1927 silent movie Topsy and Eva, the very white and very blonde Duncan sisters brought their unabashedly vulgar vaudeville minstrel act to the screen. In the film, the beautiful little Eva is safely delivered by a doctor after the stork visits her family home on Valentine’s Day. Topsy, however, is delivered a few weeks later, on April Fool’s Day, by a black stork who drops her into a barrel of trash. Eventually purchased by Eva for a nickel at a slave auction at which no one else even bids, Topsy proceeds to turn life on the plantation into an utterly foolish blackface version of the Keystone Kops as she flies downhill on borrowed skis, lands atop a snowshoe-wearing horse, and playfully leaps onto cakes of ice. Slave life, the garish and insipid film implies, is nothing but a series of laugh-out-loud low adventures to be savored by white audiences. There were other damaging female racial stereotypes as well, such as the oversexed temptress, or Jezebel, who seduces and betrays the white men who fall under her sway—a type that was popularized in D.W. Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation. The temptress was the female counterpart of another unfortunate type popularized by Griffith: the lusting, hulking Black brute who

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Fig. 1.5.  The Duncan Sisters brought their vaudeville act to the screen in Topsy and Eva (1927), which reinforced ugly racial stereotypes. Courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library.

terrorizes and seeks to sully and deflower white women. The brute would reappear in later pictures by filmmakers, who, like Griffith, employed his character as an argument for the need to repress and control what they alleged were innately violent and hateful Black men.58 Closely related was the stereotype of the malicious mulatto/mulatta—that is, the mixed blood character, half Black, half-white, who tries to insinuate himself or herself into white society by passing and who “pollutes” and attempts to undermine the white race with their racial impurity. The great irony with respect to this type is the fact that the mulatto was usually the product of the relationship between the planter class and the slave class—in other words, typically the child of a white man who had forced himself sexually on his Black slave. So the racial taint that whites found so abhorrent in the mulatto was actually a consequence of a deliberately violent act by a white man, which was the converse of Griffith’s portrait of highly sexualized Black men lusting after and menacing white women. The cinematic depiction of the mulatto figure derived from the “passing” trope in literature, which Black authors such as Francis E.W. Harper, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen

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used to expose the racial disparities in American society. For white filmmakers, though, the mulatta was far more insidious and irredeemably evil: her racial taint contributed directly to her treachery and served as the basis for some misfortune or tragic event. In the picture In Slavery Days (1913), for example, Carlotta, an octoroon substituted during infancy for the daughter of the Warner family, turns into a half-caste monster who, out of jealousy over a suitor, tries to sell the real daughter into slavery.59 And in The Octoroon (1911), based on the wildly popular play by Dion Boucicault, the octoroon of the title brings sorrow to all who are associated with her.60 Similarly, in The Debt (1912), a man fathers children by both his wife and his octoroon mistress. The children meet, fall in love, and the night before they are to be married, discover the truth of their sibling relationship. The film makes clear, though, that the problem is not so much that the two are actually brother and sister; rather it is the presence, or the mere suspicion, of Black blood. The intense repulsion over racial impurity was also evident in In Humanity’s Cause (1911), in which a wounded Confederate soldier is saved by a transfusion of blood that comes from a Black man. The title card reads “Blood Will Tell,” and soon, according to the film, it does just that: the officer, now a man of “mixed blood,” is changed from a pleasant and loving fellow into a brute so disgusting that he repulses even his sweetheart. The horror of his racial situation so overwhelms him and negates any possible sense of gratitude that he hunts down his Black donor, grapples with him at the edge of a cliff, and, locked arm-in-arm with him, falls to his death below. BLACK ERASURE/ABSENCE The degrading roles that Black performers were assigned on screen, by their very nature, relegated them to the background and contributed further to the sense of Black erasure in cinema. In some cases, that erasure was literal: in parts of the South, entire production numbers featuring Black performers would be cut from films in order to placate white audiences who did not want to watch Black entertainers showcased in prominent roles. That erasure was evident as well in events such as the world premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta, to which Hattie McDaniel was not invited; and her name was excluded from many of the programs that were distributed in Southern theaters. Black absence also extended to the theaters where mainstream white films were shown. Since segregation practices ensured that most movie houses accommodated only white patrons, Blacks were restricted to occasional off-hour movie screenings called “midnight rambles”; to the “Colored Only” sections of select theaters, pejoratively called “buzzard’s roosts” or “crow’s

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Fig. 1.6.  In In Slavery Days (1913), the jealous and vindictive octoroon Carlotta tries to sell her rival into slavery. Image from Moving Picture World.

nests,” which they entered and exited through separate doors away from the view of whites; or to Black theaters, sometimes called race or ghetto theaters, which were established to accommodate the new Black audiences but struggled financially to survive.

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Early movies thus underscored the racial and social divide and reinforced the racist characterizations of women in many ways. Through their “repeatability,” movies “offprinted false racial models from the screen onto the culture; and real viewers came to expect unreal Blacks on the screen and in the real world.”61 Not only in small communities throughout the United States where residents had never personally encountered Blacks but also in countries throughout the world where American films were shown, the racially polarizing film imagery fixed in people’s imagination the impression of Blacks as ludicrous and cartoonish figures who required the indulgence and the intervention of their white intellectual superiors.62 Unfortunately, lack of a strong visual past made it difficult for Blacks to counter the gross distortions. It is little wonder, therefore, that Black audiences found such early character depictions offensive or that they sought out films that would speak to their particular cultural experiences, offer effective visual models of race ambition and uplift, and portray Black women in a more honest and more positive light. Those models would come in the new genre of pictures created in the 1910s and 1920s by independent race producers, who committed themselves to addressing the concerns of the neglected but steadily increasing market of Black moviegoers. Instead of just perpetuating crude and retrogressive

Fig. 1.7.  Segregation practices typically restricted Black moviegoers to balconies in white theaters, which they had to enter and exit from separate entrances, away from the view of white patrons. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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representations, race filmmakers determined to present realistic depictions of Black Americans and especially of Black women by creating an alternate set of cultural referents and establishing new Black character types and situations that reflected postwar social changes. Their race films, which almost exclusively featured Black actresses and actors, afforded that opportunity. As products created by and for their Black community, the movies became a way of “produc[ing] images that didn’t go through white culture. Seen by Blacks, largely unseen by whites, race movies featured a Black-centered world”63 and, above all, one with which Black moviegoers, especially the growing number of Black female attendees, could identify. And while race films did not, by any means, shatter the racial clichés or halt the negative imagery that dominated American film, they offered a clear alternative to those troubling depictions and challenged other movie producers to strive for more balanced racial and ethnic portrayals in their pictures. The very term “race film,” as Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence suggest, was one of pride. Race consciousness and identification were cohesive and binding forces, “and these movies were an articulation of self that challenged the dominant culture’s ordering of reality.”64 NOTES 1. This chapter contains certain terms that were commonly used during the silent film era and that may be offensive to some readers. Those words and terms, most of which occur in the titles of films or in newspaper and trade publications, are used here exclusively for historical or analytical purposes. 2. Seth Abramovitch, “Oscar’s First Black Winner Accepted Her Honor in a Segregated ‘No Blacks’ Hotel in L.A.,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 27, 2015. 3. Notably, Louise Beavers took over the role from another remarkable African American performer, Ethel Waters. The “Beulah Brown” character had first appeared on radio and was played on various radio programs by white actor Marlin Hurt (and after Hurt’s death, on The Beulah Show [formerly The Marlin Hurt and Beulah Show], by another white performer, Bob Corley). 4. Hattie McDaniel, “Hattie McDaniel Defies Critics in 1947 Essay: ‘I Have Never Apologized,’” The Hollywood Reporter, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ movies/movie-news/hattie-mcdaniel-defies-critics-1947-774493/. 5. Jill Watts, Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood (New York: Amistad, 2007). See also Carlton Jackson, Hattie: The Life of Hattie McDaniel, rev. ed. (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1993). 6. André Gaudreault, American Cinema 1890–1909 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), p. 10. 7. See Langston Hughes, Milton Meltzer, and C. Eric Lincoln, A Pictorial History of Blackamericans, 5th rev. ed. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1983); Paul

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Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); and James R. Grossman, A Chance to Make Good: African Americans, 1900–1909 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).  8. Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Movies (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926), p. 638.   9. See, for example, Sarah Churchwell, The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells (London: Head of Zeus, 2022), especially pp. 159–66. 10. Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. 2. See also Stewart A. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1995). 11. Jane Gaines, “Fire and Desire: Race, Melodrama, and Oscar Micheaux,” in Manthia Diawara, ed., Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 54. 12. See C.W. Johnson, “Lynching Information,” November 16, 2020, Tuskegee University, http://archive.tuskegee.edu/repository/digital-collection/ lynching-information/. 13. “Yesterday, This Was Home: The Ocoee Massacre of 1920,” https://www. thehistorycenter.org/exhibition/the-ocoee-massacre/. Also, “Story of Ocoee Massacre Finally Being Told,” Orlando Sentinel, October 29, 2020, https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2020/10/29/story-of-ocoee-massacre-finally-being-told-100-years-afterit-happened-special-report/. See also “Nov. 2, 1920: The Ocoee Massacre,” The Zinn Education Project, https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/ocoee-massacre/. 14. See, for example, Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010). 15. See History.com editors, “Plessy v. Ferguson,” https://www.history.com/topics/ black-history/plessy-v-ferguson. 16. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). See also Richard Wormser, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), and C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Margaret A. Burnham, in By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners (New York: W.W. Norton, 2022), not only discusses Jim Crow’s enduring legacy but also makes a case for reparations. 17. For a full description of the event, see “The Murder of Eugene Williams and a Racial Reckoning,” Chicago Stories Every Day, Chicago History Museum, https:// www.chicagohistory.org/the-murder-of-eugene-williams-and-a-racial-reckoning/. See also Robert Loerzel, “Blood in the Streets,” July 23, 2019, in Chicago Magazine (https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/august-2019/1919-race-riot/), and William M. Tuttle Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (Champaign: University of Illinois, 1996). 18. “Red Summer: The Race Riots of 1919,” National WWI Museum and Memorial, https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/about-wwi/red-summer. 19. Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011), pp. 239–41.

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20. See, for example, Kinshasha Holman Conwill, ed., We Return Fighting: World War I and the Shaping of Modern Black Identity (Washington, DC: National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2019); Peter N. Nelson, A More Unbending Battle: The Harlem Hellfighters'’ Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home (New York: Basic Civitas, 2009); and Stephen L. Harris, Harlem’s Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2003). 21. “Army Uniform Cost Soldier His Life,” Chicago Defender, weekend edition, April 5, 1919, reported on the lynching death of veteran Wilbur Little, who was killed by whites in his hometown of Blakely, Georgia, for refusing to remove his military uniform. Other veterans suffered similar threats. On April 5, 1919, Black veteran Daniel Mack reportedly brushed against a white man while walking on a busy street. After getting into a scuffle with the man, Mack was arrested for assault and sentenced to a thirty-day prison sentence. But an angry mob broke into the jail and lynched him, a lynching he survived only by playing dead. The Zinn Education Project, https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/lynching-clinton-briggs/, reported a similar incident: Clinton Briggs, a twenty-six-year-old World War One veteran, was walking down the street in Arkansas when a white woman brushed up against him. After the woman stated he was not allowed to walk on the sidewalk, he replied “This is a free man’s country.” Within hours, Briggs was dragged outside of town by a group of white men who chained him to a tree with car chains. The men shot him several times, and his body was found days later by a farmer. 22. Robert Jackson, “The Celluloid War before The Birth: Race and History in Early American Film,” in Deborah E. Barker and Kathryn McPhee, eds., American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (Athens: University of Georgia, 2011), p. 29. 23. See, for example, Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 24. The play also incorporated aspects of Dixon’s first novel about the Reconstruction period, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden—1865–1900. 25. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 101. 26. Dixon, as quoted in Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 44. 27. Cripps, SFB, pp. 26–27. According to Bosley Crowther (in “The Birth of Birth of a Nation,” in Lindsay Patterson, ed., Black Films and Film-Makers [New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1975], p. 77), “he believed that the white population had been abused and exploited by Northern carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags who had incited the emancipated Negroes, and he wanted to make a film on this theme.” 28. Sarah Churchwell, pp. 212, 215. Churchwell noted, for example, that after watching the film in Atlanta, fifteen-year-old Margaret Mitchell wrote her own theatrical adaptation, made a Klan costume, and cast herself in the lead. 29. Cripps, SFB, p. 45. 30. As Brown explained in his memoirs: “I doubt if there was a man on that work crew who hadn’t been out with a ‘Tom’ show, as the Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows were called. There were Tom shows scattered all over the country by tens and dozens. It

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was not so much a show as an institution, a part of the American scene for the past sixty-odd years” (qtd. in Williams, Playing the Race Card, p. 97). 31. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, new 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 10. Other scholars offer varying times for filming and editing. 32. Wil Haygood, in Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021), pp. 2–21, devotes a chapter to “Movie Night at Woodrow Wilson’s White House.” Numerous other critics, among them Lawrence Reddick, in “Of Motion Pictures,” in Lindsay Patterson, Black Films and Film-Makers, p. 6, also note or discuss the showing of The Birth of a Nation at the White House. 33. Qtd. in Crowther, “Birth,” p. 80, and elsewhere. 34. Sarah Churchwell, p. 214, writes that Wilson had a larger role in Griffith’s film than many people assume. Wilson’s History of the American People (1902) “had validated the Lost Cause version of Reconstruction as a ‘veritable overthrow of civilization in the South.’ . . . and Griffith quoted from Wilson’s book liberally in the titles of The Birth of a Nation.” Griffith also made clear “that Wilson’s authority had helped sway him” in his sympathetic view of the Ku Klux Klansmen as rescuers of the downtrodden South. 35. Stoneman was modeled on Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress (Clyde Taylor, “The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” in Daniel Bernardi, ed., The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996], p. 21). 36. The “extreme ‘better dead than raped’ implications” of Flora’s tragic suicide,” writes Jane Gaines (in Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], p. 239), reinforce Griffith’s portrait of “the Negro as nothing more nor less than a sexual monster.” Gus’s chase of Flora, in fact, is prefigured in other Griffith films such as The Girls and Daddy (1909), in which a “lowdown Negro” burglar and sexual predator preys on two angelic white girls (Daniel Bernardi, “The Voice of Whiteness: D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Films,” in Bernardi, ed., The Birth of Whiteness, p. 122). 37. According to Clyde Taylor (“Re-Birth,” p. 22), “the later sequence in which Lynch, the upstart mulatto carpetbagger politician, salaciously entraps Elsie Stoneman, serves to communalize the threat that by Gus’s action alone might be taken as individual aberration.” 38. Gaines (FD, pp. 242–43) comments on the symbolism of Lynch’s name. Griffith and Dixon avoid “the imagery of hanging” in The Birth of a Nation, she writes, “even trying to lay the blame for the practice of lynching on Negroes by the curious device of naming the mulatto villain Sylas [sic] Lynch.” In Playing the Race Card (p. 107), Linda Williams cites Michael Rogin, who also remarks on Lynch’s name, which he suggests “turns Black victims of lynching into aggressors.” Williams also raises questions about the “missing scene” of Gus’s castration—that is, about whether it ever actually existed or whether it is simply a misremembering of the film’s plot by Griffith biographer Seymour Stern; see pp. 124–27.

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39. As Williams (p. 108) writes, Dixon turned the mulatta victim into a mulatta villain and hinted that Lydia “was the real power behind the throne of radical reconstruction.” Griffith similarly reversed the racial markers of villains and victims and “shifted the blame for forced white male/black female interracial sexual relations from the white man to the colored woman.” 40. Cripps, SFB, p. 42. 41. Ibid., p. 58. 42. Charlene Regester, “The African-American Press and Race Movies, 1909– 1929,” in Charles Musser, Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, eds., Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 36. 43. Cripps, SFB, p. 58. 44. Viewer interest was further sustained by various effective stunts like “having a troop of horsemen dressed in the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan ride through towns in advance of showings of the film” (Crowther, “Birth,” p. 82). 45. Haygood, pp. 20–21. Other critics have placed the number a little lower. Daniel J. Leab, in From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 34, for instance, wrote that, within the first months of its release in 1915, the film had been seen by an estimated six percent of the American population. 46. Cripps, SFB, p. 29. 47. Gaines, FD, p. 230. 48. Harry Birdoff, The World’s Greatest Hit: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: S.F. Vanni, 1947). 49. Barbara Tepa Lupack, “Uncle Tom and American Popular Culture: Adapting Stowe’s Novel to Film,” in Lupack, ed., Nineteenth Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Classic Women’s Fiction to Film (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), pp. 207–56. 50. The popularity of Aunt Jemima inspired many giveaways and mail-in premiums, including dolls, breakfast club pins, dishware, and recipe booklets. 51. Mammy became the central character of a much later novel, Ruth’s Journey (2014), in which author Donald McCaig reimagines her and gives her both a name and a backstory. McCaig is also the author of Rhett Butler’s People (2007), about Rhett’s family history, a work authorized by the Margaret Mitchell Estate. 52. Ellen E. Jones, “From Mammy to Ma: Hollywood’s Favorite Racist Stereotype,” BBC Culture, Film and Film History, May 31, 2019. Jones also cites the work of Chanequa Walker-Barnes. 53. The Billboard, August 2, 1913. 54. Moving Picture World, May 3, 1913. 55. Atlanta Georgian and News, October 24, 1911, and Billboard, November 18, 1911. 56. Reel Life, November 16, 1915, and Moving Picture World, November 6, 1915. 57. Leab, p. 1. 58. According to Mark A. Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 12, one of the strengths of Micheaux’s first film The

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Homesteader was the way that it gave “black audiences a favorable image to combat D.W. Griffith’s image of ‘pure black bucks.’” Donald Bogle, TCMMB, p. 13, described those “bucks” as “over-sexed and savage, violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh.” 59. Moving Picture World, May 17, 1913. 60. There is some confusion about the date of Kalem’s version of The Octoroon. Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995), lists it as 1911; TCM and IMDB list it as 1909. Louisiana Film History cites a 1913 Kalem version directed by Kenean Buel. There was also a 1912 Australian production directed by George Young as well as numerous stage versions. 61. James Snead, White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 15. 62. Leab, p. 8. 63. Gaines, FD, p. 13. 64. Bowser and Spence, p. 14.

Chapter 2

African Americans: Race Films

Although Oscar Micheaux is now widely regarded as America’s first important Black filmmaker, he was preceded by a number of Black independents, most of them largely forgotten today, who tried to establish a Black voice in the emerging medium of cinema and reshape the representation of Black women on screen.1 Among the earliest was William Foster, a former newspaper man, vaudeville booking agent, and theatrical manager who recognized the incredible economic promise of the developing motion picture industry. Foster, as Henry T. Sampson writes, “also saw an opportunity to make films that countered the objectionable racial stereotypes so prevalent in motion pictures being made by white film companies.”2 Former publicist for Cole and Johnson’s “A Trip to Coontown” Company and later for the musical shows In Dahomey and Abyssinia that starred the legendary comedy team of Bert Williams and George Walker, Foster became the business representative for Robert Motts’ Pekin Theatre in Chicago, a position that allowed him to view and book numerous Black vaudeville acts. Under the pen name of “Juli Jones,” he also began writing articles on Black show business for various Black weeklies such as the Chicago Defender; and by 1913, he decided to enter the movie profession himself.3 After scraping together enough money to found the Foster Photoplay Company, he produced his first short called The Railroad Porter (also released under the title The Pullman Porter), starring Lottie Grady and Howard Kelly, both former members of Pekin’s stock company. That short (which, like Foster’s other pictures, does not survive) was in many ways a crude effort that followed the established comedy formulas of the day. It centered on a young wife who, thinking her husband is out on his railroad run, invites to dinner a waiter whom she mistakes for a well-dressed man. Returning home, the husband pulls out his gun; the waiter, according to the New York Age, “gets his revolver and returns the compliment . . . no one is hurt . . . and all ends happily.”4 35

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Early white filmmakers had used that theme of mistaken identity for comic effect, often to belittle Black characters. An especially popular variation involved the substitution of a Black woman into a situation that leaves the white character in a compromising or embarrassing position in the final scene of the film.5 In What Happened in the Tunnel (1903), for example, a young lady and her Black maid are traveling aboard a train. As it enters a tunnel, a fellow in a nearby seat reaches out to embrace the woman. But, according to the Edison Catalog, to the fellow’s “disgust,” he realizes that she has switched seats with the maid, whom he has kissed instead. Similarly, in A Kiss in the Dark (1904), after a young white man tries to kiss an attractive woman, she tells him to close his eyes; and, as he discovers to his astonishment and dismay, she substitutes in her place “a fat black Mammy.” In another American Mutoscope and Biograph film, The Mis-Directed Kiss (1904), an old man believes he is kissing the hand of a young woman; when he puts on his glasses, he is shocked to learn he has kissed her Black maid instead. That plot is repeated in Under the Old Apple Tree (1907), in which an elderly man with poor eyesight mistakenly kisses the hand of another large Black woman. In Nellie, the Beautiful House Maid (1908), it is not just one but three elderly men who are fooled. After advertising for an attractive housekeeper, they are surprised when the ad is answered by Nellie, a big Black woman in a plaid dress. In An Exciting Honeymoon (1913), a newly-married man loses his glasses and is unaware that he has embarked on his honeymoon voyage with his wife’s Black maid, not his wife. And in another wedding comedy, A Double Wedding (1913), a Black couple is mistakenly greeted at the train station with a grand reception intended for a high-society white couple who were wed on the same day. Likewise, the substitution of Black babies for white ones in films such as Cause for Thanksgiving and Mixed Babies invariably brought huge laughs from white audiences. Although there was no cross-racial element in The Railroad Porter, Foster used the mistaken identity theme for similar comedic purposes. Yet, as Allyson Nadia Field writes, race audiences found something both aspirational and representational in the film’s imagery of Black life. Countering the sensibilities of white-authored Black images, the film championed the new professional possibilities open to African American men and the relative wealth and leisure enjoyed by Black middle-class women who were part of the broader social transformation that was occurring after the turn of the century. “With its urban setting and references to travel and social encounters in the public sphere,” it asserted a view of Black modernity that refuted stereotypes of Blacks as provincial and unsophisticated; and it played off “familiar tropes of Black comedic performance tropes while setting them in real urban contexts.”6

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Foster repeated the formula in later comic shorts such as The Barber (1916), in which a barber who is posing as a Spanish music teacher engages in a series of Keystone Kops-type of chases as he tries to evade an angry husband, the local police, and even an old woman whose boat he overturns when he jumps in a lake to avoid capture. Beneath the humorous misadventures, though, The Barber capitalized on the notion of Black advancement through education, with the wife who is the barber’s student hoping to broaden her worldview by learning a new language and her husband, at least initially, supporting her ambition. By “representing Negro life without putting the race in a ridiculous light,” Mark A. Reid argues, Foster “broke with the ‘coon’ tradition established by Thomas Alva Edison’s Ten Pickaninnies (1904) and The Wooing and Wedding of a Coon (1905) as well as Sigmund Lubin’s Sambo and Rastus series (1909, 1910, and 1911)” and tried to “appeal to the widest segment of his [Black] audience.”7 In fact, by giving that audience characters from the recognizable social milieu of respectable Black society, Foster created what Allyson Nadia Field called an in-joke comedy for Black moviegoers to enjoy that was distinct from productions geared to white audiences. In that sense, according to Field, “Foster’s project should be understood as a strategy of asserting African American modernity that constituted a key iteration of uplift cinema.”8 Around the time that Foster was producing his shorts through his Foster Photoplay Company, Emmett J. Scott, the personal secretary to Black leader and Tuskegee Institute president Booker T. Washington, aspired to make a major Black film that would counter the racist portrayals in The Birth of a Nation, which had been released in February, 1915. Although his initial attempts to finance and produce the picture (then called Lincoln’s Dream) were unsuccessful, he signed a contract for The Birth of a Race, a film that, according to its prospectus, would depict “the true story of the Negro—his life in Africa, his transportation to America, his enslavement, his freedom, his achievements, together with his past, present and future relations to his white neighbor and to the world in which both live and labor.” Drawing on Black talents both on and behind the screen, the production was intended to serve as an inspirational plea for mutual respect between the races. But financial mismanagement (including the fraudulent promotion and sale of stocks) and confused leadership created numerous and ultimately insurmountable problems, with William Selig, the original producer, and his associates pulling out halfway through production, and Daniel Frohman, a New York veteran vaudeville producer, taking over. Scott and the other Blacks involved found themselves losing virtually all control of the venture.9 When The Birth of a Race was finally released, it bore little resemblance to the ambitious prospectus focusing on Black accomplishment that Scott had originally proposed. Rather, it moved from the creation of the world to

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numerous other scenes from sacred history, all of which were re-created employing mammoth sets—and all to no artistic purpose. According to Moving Picture World (May 10, 1919), in keeping with contemporary anti-German propaganda, “a disconnected war story [was thrown in] for good measure” but it only rendered the film more structureless. That subplot, about Oscar and George Schmidt, two brothers in a German-American household divided against the war, tried to rouse patriotic fervor and celebrate America’s entry into World War One and likely was meant to parallel the internecine North/South division in The Birth of a Nation. But the plot was too garbled to be anything other than “the most grotesque cinematic chimera in the history of the picture business.”10 Nonetheless, The Birth of a Race was a valiant attempt to establish a Black aesthetic and to provide a kind of cultural restitution by exploring what Gladstone L. Yearwood called “an alternative terrain” resulting from an “interest in forging different representations of race.”11 JOHNSON BROTHERS The bungled Birth of a Race was clearly a lost opportunity for achievement in early Black film, especially for the prospect of more realistic representations of Black women. But even before it was completed, the popular Black actor Noble M. Johnson, with the support of his brother George P. (Perry) Johnson, formed the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, based in Los Angeles and incorporated in 1916. Determined to produce films designed to speak to Black audiences unmediated by Hollywood stereotypes, the brothers released their first feature, The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (1916), a two-reel film that starred Johnson and featured actors Clarence Brooks, Beulah Hall, and Lottie Boles, all of whom played non-stereotyped, middle-class roles. A Black recasting of the Horatio Alger story, the film told the story of James Burton, a young Black civil engineering graduate of Tuskegee Institute who leaves his parents’ farm and his sweetheart Mary Hayden to seek his fortune in the West, a place of opportunity that race filmmakers often portrayed in opposition to the corruption of city life. After being rejected for a job at an oil field in California because of his race, he rescues the owner’s daughter and is offered employment as the head of an exploration team. Eventually he realizes that the same kind of geological conditions that he is studying exist on his father’s farm; with a subsidy from the owner, he returns home and starts drilling for oil. Meanwhile, Doris and George Babbit, the children of wealthy gentleman Sam Babbit, who own land adjacent to the Burton farm, try to discredit Mary. But James, who strikes oil and becomes rich, proposes to Mary anyway; and together they realize all of their ambitions: family, friends, and home. Significantly, as Jane Gaines notes, given the means and opportunity,

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James goes “directly back to his ‘own people,’ a recurring narrative device in race movies, which restrict action to an all-Black world within which everything is won or lost—a circumscribed miniature of the white world.”12 Although the film does not survive, it was notable for many reasons, not least of which was its emphasis on family values and race uplift—that is, the philosophy and practice of self-help through education, achievement, and respectability as a way of promoting positive racial identity and refuting white racism. Burton is an educated and ambitious young man who is typical of the New Negro; deprived of opportunity, he persists in creating his own. And he is supported in his striving by Mary, a modern woman who works as a stenographer and who shares his principles and his dedication to advancing himself and his race through the traditional markers of success. It is her reinforcing and encouraging of his ambition that helps him to achieve the social mobility and respectability that he seeks. The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition was well received; as the first “Negro feature film produced without burlesque comedy,”13 it set the standard for future race films. One Black reviewer described it as a reflection of “the business and social life of the Negro as it really is and not as our jealous contemporaries would have us appear.”14 Shown in churches and schools as well as in movie houses, the picture created great demand for a new Lincoln feature, which the company met with The Trooper of Troop K (1917), also known as The Trooper of Company K, a fictional story about the massacre of the Negro troops of the “famous fighting Tenth Cavalry” during the battle of Carrizal in Mexico.15 Starring Noble Johnson as Jimmy Warner, a goodhearted but careless fellow nicknamed “Shiftless Joe” who eventually proves his heroism, and Beulah Hall as Clara Holmes, the proper young woman who takes an interest in his welfare, the film was another story of racial achievement.16 To prove himself worthy of Clara’s faith and love, Jimmy improves himself, becomes a good race man, and demonstrates a heroism and patriotism that earn them both a rightful place in society. “Clara is in fact credited with Joe’s eventual success,” and the implication is that, especially with the help and dedication of a strong woman, every “Shiftless Joe” can be reformed and can better himself personally and socially by adopting the values of the Black middle class.17 Like other films of racial progress, it was “a strong counter-discourse that actively criticized those social discourses that so painfully disrupted the Race’s sense of self.”18 Even the film’s posters, in which “Joe” carries a wounded fellow soldier to safety, emphasized his heroism and lauded his patriotism. Another of the Johnson Brothers’ films was interesting in the way that it reversed the trope of the desertion plot in which the husband abandons the family and leaves the wife to fend for herself and her children. In The Law of Nature (1917), a beautiful socialite (played by Albertine Pickens) marries

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Fig. 2.1.  Beulah Hall (as Clara) and Jimmy Smith (as the suitor whom she rejects in favor of “Joe”) in the Lincoln Motion Picture Company’s The Trooper of Troop K (1917). Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

Jess, a wealthy cattleman (Noble Johnson). Unable to forget the glamour of her earlier days, she convinces him to move the family to the East. But Jess’s social crudeness and the persistent attention of her former admirer create innumerable complications. After her husband and son return to the West without her, she realizes that she has chosen poorly. Finding herself cast aside, humiliated, alone, and ill, she recognizes her folly and the inevitable consequences of her violation of “Nature’s Law,” which leads her to rejoin her family. “The regeneration complete, she succumbs to the will of God.”19 “A fine story,” “an artistic and well portrayed success,” and a “good box-office attraction,” the picture was “classy” and had “a wholesome moral.”20 Using

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the wife as a focus, it reinforced the significance of Black family respectability and extolled the enduring moral values of the frontier. Lincoln’s fortunes changed, however, with the resignation of Noble Johnson in 1918, after the Universal Picture Company of Hollywood, which employed Johnson as a featured player, exerted pressure on him to step down from his responsibilities at Lincoln. The Johnson Brothers’ features had become such a box-office draw in the Black community that race audiences preferred them to white studio pictures. Ironically, therefore, Johnson’s popularity spelled doom for his own fledgling Black company, which Universal perceived as a potentially serious rival to their productions.21 After Noble Johnson’s departure, the company—under the leadership of his brother, former newspaper and real-estate man George P. Johnson—released a handful of pictures but soon discontinued operations. Beset by various financial difficulties that were exacerbated by the increased competition from white studios, Lincoln felt unable to compete successfully in the developing market of longer feature-length films. Unfortunately, only a brief fragment of one of those later productions, By Right of Birth (1921), survives. In that film, the heroine Juanita Cooper [aka Helen Childers], played by Anita Thompson, is portrayed as a well-dressed, athletic college coed typical of the respectable middle class; and after much suffering, she comes into the fortune that is her legacy from slavery and the happiness that is hers “by right of birth.” By carrying the notion of a Black aesthetic to new limits as a social force, Lincoln’s films set a high standard for other race filmmakers to meet. Unlike the frustrated efforts of Emmett Scott, their productions, according to Thomas Cripps, “sprang from black roots, and their idea spoke to blacks rather than to whites.”22 And those serious dramatic productions served as a welcome contrast to the low comedies that continued to be made and released, even by race film companies such as Ebony Pictures. In its ads, the white-managed Ebony, which reinvigorated rather than rejected stereotypes, claimed that “Colored people are funny. If colored people weren’t funny, there would be no plantation melodies, no banjoes, no cake walks, no buck and wing dancing, no jazz bands, no minstrel shows and no black-face vaudeville.” And to prove just how funny those “colored people” actually were, Ebony featured characters such as “Sambo Sam” in Spying the Spy (1918) who, believing he is about to capture a nest of German spies, infiltrates instead an all-Black secret society, and Detective Knick Garter, the titular Black Sherlock Holmes, who, with his assistant Rheuma Tism, goes searching for a missing young woman, Sheeza Sneeze, the daughter of inventor I. Wanta Sneeze. In a 1918 letter to George P. Johnson, Ebony’s sole Black officer L.J. Pollard explained that since nearly all Black-run companies specialized in the production of dramas, he was proud of Ebony’s comedies because they “proved to the public that colored players can put over good comedy without any of that crapshooting, chicken

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stealing, razor display, water melon eating stuff that the colored people generally have been a little disgusted at seeing.”23 Other race film companies competed to fill the void left by the dissolution of Lincoln Motion Pictures. The Frederick Douglass Film Company of New Jersey, which aimed “to give the public motion pictures which do not degrade the race,” produced The Colored American Winning His Suit (1917).24 Committed, according to the press book, “to offset the evil effects of certain photo plays that have libeled the Negro and criticized his friends; to bring about a better and more friendly understanding between the white and colored races; to inspire in the Negro a desire to climb higher in good citizenship, business, education and religion,”25 the film was a kind of modern morality play. Young Bob Winall, a humbly born Black who graduates from Howard University and becomes a lawyer, must fight various obstacles to win the hand of Alma Elton, a college-educated high school principal who recognizes the importance of education in promoting racial uplift. With Alma’s support, he squares off against a white man, Mr. Hinderus, in order to defend Alma’s father against a charge of theft; and with the help of Colonel Goodwill, he and Alma prevail. The white man’s attempt to “hinderus” having failed, Winall and Alma—through “goodwill”—indeed win all.26 As in the Lincoln Motion Picture films, the Black female lead served as a vital

Fig. 2.2.  In the Ebony Film Company’s comedy A Black Sherlock Holmes (1918), Detective Knick Garter (Sam Robinson) rescues Sheeza Sneeze (Yvonne Junior), daughter of inventor I. Wanta Sneeze, and reunites her with her lover. Screenshot by author.

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character in the action, initially as an inspirational helpmate and ultimately as a dutiful wife to the male protagonist. REOL PRODUCTIONS Emerging after World War One was another film company, Reol Productions of New York City, which distinguished itself in several important ways. Headed by Robert Levy, the white former manager of the Quality Amusement Company that sponsored the Lafayette Players Dramatic Stock Company, Reol aggressively promoted its Black performers to Black audiences—Edna Morton, one of the first Black movie stars (who also appeared in a number of Oscar Micheaux’s films), was billed as “the colored Mary Pickford”—and established large circuits of theaters throughout many sections of the South and in a number of northern cities where the company distributed its films. Reol also recognized the culture of the market that it served by the production of films such as The Sport of the Gods (1921), based on a novel and a screenplay by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Such adaptations of classic Black literature afforded the company another meaningful racial and cultural association.27 The Reol film, The Call of His People (1922), explored the meaning of race pride and refuted, a bit subversively, white misconceptions about Black characteristics and capabilities as well as white attempts to create racially pure cultural spaces.28 In the six-reel feature, Nelson Holmes, a Black man who is posing as white, advances from office boy to General Manager of the Brazilian-American Coffee Syndicate; his responsibilities include the enforcing of contracts with the rival Santos Company. Holmes’ new position stirs up jealousies within the Syndicate, particularly on the part of a fellow employee, Beauregard Stuart, who feels that Holmes’ job should have been his. Meanwhile, James Graves, brother of Holmes’ first love Elinor, arrives seeking employment. Fearful that his secret will be revealed, Holmes offers Graves a position as his personal secretary but encourages his old friend to pose as a Spaniard. Graves refuses to deny his race but agrees to keep Holmes’ secret, even though he despises the hypocrisy. When Holmes resists a bribe by the Santos Company, he is framed by Stuart for the theft of valuable contracts. As Stuart confronts and accuses him in front of their boss, Elinor arrives with missing papers, entrusted to her by her brother, that clear Holmes of wrongdoing. Moved by the loyalty of the Graves, Holmes confesses the secret of his identity to the boss, who assures him that it is the man, not the color, that counts. The brave deeds of James and especially of Elinor give Holmes, who had felt caught in the paradox of assimilation—that is, trying so hard to act white that he loses his Black

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cultural identity—a new appreciation of race. Thanks to Elinor, he experiences a newfound pride in his people; begging her forgiveness, he proposes marriage.29 It is a familiar but fundamental theme in race films: a strong and proud race woman guides her future husband to a new understanding and appreciation of his racial identity. Similarly, in Reol’s The Secret Sorrow (1921), Grace Dugan is a raceproud woman who helps to exonerate Joe Morgan, who has wrongly been accused of murder. Through her efforts, Joe, formerly a henchman for her corrupt politician father Sam Dugan, is reunited with Anne, his widowed and impoverished mother who gave him up for adoption. He also reunites with his brother, Arthur, an Assistant District Attorney, who (unaware of Joe’s identity) had been prosecuting him for the crime. Arthur marries Grace; and they all become part of a happy family.30 COLORED PLAYERS The Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia, another early film company, produced moralizing entertainments.31 Ten Nights in a Barroom (1926), starring veteran race actors Charles Gilpin and Lawrence Chenault, was a Black version of a familiar temperance story in which drunkard Joe Morgan’s actions inadvertently cause the death of his beloved daughter. The film used “its all-Black cast to achieve a certain poignancy, as though the actors themselves were making a special plea to urban Blacks, warning them against urban vices in a manner reminiscent of Micheaux.”32 The Chicago Defender called it a “racial novelty . . . which carries a deep moral.”33 An even more notable Colored Players’ film—and one of the best independent productions, Black or white, in the silent era—was The Scar of Shame (1929), which not only presented Black audiences “with sharply etched messages of advocacy, aspiration, group unity, and slogans against racism” but also “laid the blame for Black misfortune at the door of poor environment.”34 The story of an ill-fated marriage between Louise Howard (Lucia Lynn Moses), who is employed at Mrs. Lucretia Green’s “select boarding house,” and Alvin Hillyard (Harry Henderson), a promising Black composer and one of Mrs. Green’s boarders, revealed the caste divisions that existed even among Black Americans. A decent man, the educated and comfortably middle-class Alvin marries Louise out of pity to protect her from her drunken and abusive stepfather Spike Howard and from the racketeer Eddie, who covets her and wants to make her the star attraction at his nightclub. Like Joe Morgan in Reol’s The Secret Sorrow, however, Louise is “a child of

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environment” who lacks “proper training . . . [in] the finer things of life, the higher aims, the higher hopes.” Swayed by the promises of stardom, she rips up her marriage license to Alvin (thereby, according to Jane Gaines, destroying her marriage by her own hand)35 and decides to leave town with the brash Eddie. But the two men engage in a confrontation during which Louise is wounded by a bullet and her beauty marred by the resulting large and disfiguring scar on her neck. Convicted of the crime on the basis of Louise’s testimony, the innocent Alvin is jailed, but after a few years he escapes to a distant city and assumes a new identity as “Mr. Arthur Jones, Professor of Music, Piano and Voice.” There, he meets and falls in love with Alice Hathaway, a woman of his class; and through a series of coincidences, he again encounters Louise, who still wants him and who threatens to expose him if he does not do as she says. As Thomas Cripps observed, while Alvin has already “won the game of life by wanting it badly, Louise has lost because she sold herself cheaply.”36 After admitting that it was actually Eddie who shot her, Louise—burdened by her shame—kills herself, leaving Alvin free to marry Alice. The message of the film is synthesized in the final title, as Alice’s father, a corrupt lawyer, ironically remarks that “our people have much to learn,” particularly about the kind of class strife that is behind the picture’s various tragedies. The divisions that exist within the Black community are revealed in a variety of ways. The effective intercutting of scenes, for example, contrasts the two very different women and their social worlds (the debauched Louise at the noisy Club Lido and the proper Alice alone at home with her piano), while the recurring use of music serves not just as a leitmotif but also as a means of identifying the principal characters and defining them as “high” or “low.” The Black baby-doll puppet that Louise is first seen holding after her marriage to Alvin is another important symbolic marker. When Alvin confesses to her that his affluent family is unaware of their relationship and then leaves to attend to his sick mother, he accidentally strikes Louise’s doll with his suitcase. The doll falls to the floor; in his haste, he steps on it, crushing its face and destroying its beauty (just as Louise’s hopes are dashed and her beauty soon destroyed, albeit inadvertently, by Alvin’s actions). Although Louise cradles the doll and tries to make it whole again, it is as irreparably damaged as her marriage and her prospects for a better life. Through such subtle yet sophisticated oppositions, The Scar of Shame used its female characters to make a powerful statement on race relations among dark-skinned and light-skinned and among middle- and working-class Blacks, motifs that recur in productions by Oscar Micheaux and other filmmakers.37

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OSCAR MICHEAUX While early race filmmakers like Reol, the Johnson Brothers, and Colored Players helped to reframe the image of Black women by making them integral to the defining of race identity and the achieving of social mobility and advancement, two other race filmmakers provided even fuller and more nuanced cinematic portraits: Oscar Micheaux, by centering his plots on strong female characters, and Richard E. Norman, by making the women in his films powerful examples of the “New Negro Woman.” Micheaux was the founder of the Micheaux Film Corporation, which became the most successful of all the race film production-companies in the silent period. A shrewd businessman and self-promoter, he was a flamboyant figure who weighed over 300 pounds and often sported a big fur coat, no matter the weather. To make a point about racial perceptions, he insisted on being driven around town by a white chauffeur. Fellow filmmakers hailed him as a “genius,” and even rival George Johnson called him the “world’s greatest producer of all Negro Film productions.”38 Micheaux had worked as a Pullman porter before establishing himself as a homesteader in South Dakota, near the Rosebud Indian Reservation. After he was cheated out of his land by the machinations of his wife Orlean’s greedy father, he began writing a novel about that experience, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913), which he turned into his first feature film, The Homesteader (1919). Basing his hero on himself, he transformed the actual frustrating and disappointing story of his homesteading into an example of race ambition and race uplift for others to emulate, a pattern of reinvention that he followed for much of his film career. Over the next thirty years, in fact, Micheaux would make more than forty films—a staggering number for any independent filmmaker of that era, Black or white—and become the only race filmmaker to make a successful transition to sound. Micheaux’s films were not technically brilliant, which is hardly a surprise, given his lack of formal training. And they lacked high production values, in large part because, unlike the major white filmmakers, he operated on a bare-bones budget. Forced to cut corners wherever and whenever he could, he rented his equipment by the day. His crews were usually comprised of cameramen who had been left behind as the dominant white film industry moved west to California. His casts included both fine veteran actresses such as his second wife Alice B. Russell and family friends, whom he drafted in lieu of professional actors to minimize his costs. His sets were spartan, at best. Stories abound of his inventiveness. Actress Shingzie Howard recalled the time a wealthy woman came to his office. Micheaux graciously took her

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fur coat and asked her to sit down—and then ran into an adjacent room to film Howard wearing that coat, footage he used in a later film.39 Howard was one of Micheaux’s cadre of photo-players, many of whom he gathered from prestigious Black acting companies such as the Lafayette Players in New York.40 Modeling them after white Hollywood performers, he would cast them by type and publicize them accordingly. Sexy and insolent Bea Freeman was the “sepia Mae West.” The lovely light-skinned actress Ethel Moses was sometimes billed as the “Negro Harlow.”41 And Evelyn Preer, who first appeared on screen in The Homesteader (1919), went on to play key roles in numerous other Micheaux films—ten, in all—and became one of the biggest Black female stars of the 1920s before her untimely death in 1932. By affording them name recognition and promoting them widely in his ads, Micheaux helped to originate a “star system” among his Black performers.42 While Micheaux’s films were not technical masterpieces of filmmaking, they usually had a vital political, racial, and social message. Using the familiar Western or gangster-Hollywood script, he gave it a distinctly racial slant. He also treated timely topics such as interracial sexuality, gambling, prostitution, race denial, and lynching—topics that few other filmmakers, even race filmmakers, were willing to address as directly as he did. Challenging the familiar dominant white film trope of miscegenation as a way that Blacks hoped to infiltrate white society and undermine the race with their impurity, he introduced characters who appear white but later discover their actual racial heritage. Thus, the mixed-blood theme becomes an opportunity to question definitions of identity and blur the dichotomy on which race depends and white supremacy relies.43 Understanding both his audience and the art of self-promotion, Micheaux would film scenes that he knew would be censored because they gave him publicity; and he promoted his films with colorful provocative posters that drew moviegoers to the theaters. Notably, as Gerald R. Butters, Jr. observed, many of those films were centered on women.44 Whether cast in prominent roles or supporting ones, whether portrayed as “good” women who serve as models of race uplift or as unsavory figures who act as warnings against vices such as gambling and lax morals, women occupied key positions in the stories that Micheaux was telling. Not mere adjuncts to the action, they were essential to the plot lines. Within Our Gates, considered to be both Micheaux’s finest film and a highpoint of early cinema, is centered on Sylvia Landry, a young well-educated schoolteacher who, according to a title card, “is typical of the intelligent Negro of our times.” That intelligence is established early on, with an image of her as a genteel, proper woman seated at a writing table surrounded by books, which serve as symbols of striving and achievement throughout the

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film.45 It is Sylvia who unites the film’s seemingly disparate threads, and it is through her personal history that Micheaux re-imagines the larger, often tragic social history of Black Americans and fashions a discourse on the meaning of Black identity. Eschewing simple North/South or New Negro/ Old Negro dichotomies, Micheaux instead constructs the story around Sylvia and “along a complex topography of narrative and character relations” that mirror the diverse but interconnected experiences of his Black characters and audiences.46 Within Our Gates opens as Sylvia (played by Evelyn Preer) is visiting her cousin Alma in Boston, where she awaits the return of her fiancé Conrad. Alma, it seems, is also in love with Conrad and, out of jealousy, orchestrates a scene that puts Sylvia in a compromising situation with another man. Tricked into believing that Sylvia has been unfaithful, Conrad assaults her, knocks her down, and chokes her. Furious over what he believes is her betrayal, he breaks their engagement. Following Conrad’s rejection, Sylvia returns south to work in a school for Black students in Piney Woods, Mississippi. Hinting at what is to come, the title card describes Piney Woods as a hamlet “far from all civilization and in the depths of the forests of the South, where ignorance and the lynch law reign supreme.” When the school’s kindly administrator is unable to secure the funds to support his program, Sylvia is forced to travel north again to raise money to keep the school open. Soon after arriving in Boston, she suffers a series of misfortunes, beginning with a stolen purse that is fortuitously recovered and returned to her by the handsome, gentlemanly Dr. Vivian (played by Charles B. Lucas), to whom Sylvia is immediately attracted. Not long afterward, she dashes into the street to save a child from being run over and is struck by an approaching car. As she is recuperating from her injury in the hospital, she is visited by that car’s owner, a wealthy white philanthropist and suffragist named Elena Warwick. Learning of Sylvia’s mission, Mrs. Warwick decides to make a contribution, even though her bigoted friend Mrs. Stratton tries to discourage her by suggesting that it is an error to try to educate Blacks. “Education,” Stratton insists, “would only give them a headache.” Mrs. Warwick, however, not only ignores her friend’s advice but decides to increase her donation from $5,000 to $50,000, an amount that allows Sylvia to return south and save the school. A new misfortune, however, befalls Sylvia when Larry, Alma’s corrupt and scheming step-brother, attempts to blackmail her: he tells her that if she does not steal the school funds she has received (or, as some scholars suggest, if she resists engaging in a sexual relationship with him), he will expose the secrets from her past. Sylvia refuses and slips away by night, returning once again to Boston in order to escape him. Larry follows, but after a botched

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bank robbery, he is fatally injured. By chance, it is Dr. Vivian who treats the dying Larry’s wounds. From Alma, Vivian learns of the tragedies that Sylvia has endured and the unspeakable acts committed years earlier against her and her family—brutal violations that help to explain the various social, psychological, and moral factors that have prevented her from maintaining a stable family, home, and identity.47 The story of her suffering is revealed in a long flashback, which serves as a distancing device that removes the main characters from the immediate threat of direct violence at the same time that it protects the film’s unity.48 Adopted as a baby by the Landrys, a pair of kindly sharecroppers, Sylvia dutifully helps to provide for the family by keeping their accounting books. It quickly becomes apparent to her that her parents have been cheated out of their due by their white landlord, Philip Gridlestone. But when Jasper Landry goes to the office to confront him about the discrepancies, Gridlestone is shot dead by a bullet mysteriously fired through the window. On the basis of false testimony from the traitorous Eph, one of Gridlestone’s servants, Jasper is accused of the crime, and a mob comes after the Landrys seeking retribution for the murder. Their young son Emil barely manages to escape the noose and run away, but the elder Landrys—in a graphic and gruesome scene—are beaten and lynched and their bodies are burned. Eph, too, is lynched. Despite his collaboration with the whites, which he assumes will give him protection, he becomes another victim of Southern vigilantism. What makes the lynching episode even more horrific is the fact that the mob consists of ordinary citizens—including patrons from the local ice cream parlor, a boy on a bicycle, a man in a butcher’s apron, and a gingham-clad woman armed with a rifle—all of whom gather in what Bowser and Spence describe as “a festive picniclike atmosphere to hunt down the Landry family.”49 As the lynchings are occurring, Sylvia, unaware of what is happening to her parents, returns for provisions to the Landry home. There, she is assaulted by Armand Gridlestone, who, “not satisfied with the poor victims burned in the bonfire,” seeks further retribution for his brother Philip’s murder. As he chases Sylvia around the room with the intention of raping her, he notices a distinctive scar on her breast by which, according to the title card, he recognizes her as the mixed-race daughter by the Black woman he married and abandoned years earlier. (J. Ronald Green suggests that the surviving title card, discovered in a print of the film found in an archive in Spain in the 1970s, is an inaccurate translation: while Sylvia is indeed Armand’s daughter, it is far more likely that “the sexual relationship between the white aristocrat and Sylvia’s unknown mother was one of servitude such as concubinage, droit du seigneur privilege, or even rape”—a violent attack that Armand attempts to recreate in his assault on Sylvia.50)

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Fig. 2.3.  In parallel scenes, the white lynch mob rips the dress of Mrs. Landry (Mattie Edwards) before beating and lynching her and her husband in Within Our Gates (1920). At the same time, the Landrys’ daughter Sylvia tries to fight off her white attacker (Grant Gorman), who turns out to be the father who abandoned her when she was a baby. Courtesy of the Black Film Center and Archive, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Micheaux’s dynamic cross-cutting between the scenes of racial and sexual violence creates a kind of parallel narration and makes clear that the two acts of brutality are inextricably linked. The lynching and the rape, or what Jane Gaines calls “the fire and the desire,” are both egregious assertions of white prerogative and inescapable violations inflicted on helpless Black bodies. In Micheaux’s parallel editing, just as the white mob tears Mrs. Landry’s clothing before lynching her and burning her body, Gridlestone rips Sylvia’s dress and tries to force himself on her, a symbolic reenactment of “the White patriarch’s ravishment of Black womanhood, reminding viewers of all the clandestine forced sexual acts that produced the mulatto population of the American South.”51 Even more pertinently, as Gaines notes, “the parallelism of the rape and the lynching scenes asserts the historical connection between the rape of the black woman and the lynching of the black man, the double reaction of the Reconstruction period to whites’ nightmare of blacks voting and owning property.52 Toni Cade Bambara observed that the lynching scene was Micheaux’s attempt to “set the record straight about who rapes who.” Although, as justification for their lynching, Black men were regularly accused of raping white women, in fact it was white men who routinely raped Black women “as a form of social and political terrorism as African Americans expressed political and economic self-determination.”53 What therefore made the film so “real” was that it was “written by the oppressed,” showing the degree and kind of Blacks’ oppression, and resounding in “all phases of national life, aspiration, and development.”54 After Sylvia’s secret is revealed, she is reunited with Dr. Vivian, who professes his love. Encouraging her to be proud of her heritage, he urges her

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never to forget the achievements of their people, especially the heroism of Black soldiers in Cuba, Mexico, and the war in Europe (a reminder that, in struggle, there is the chance for glory).55 And, as many of the race films do, Within Our Gates ends with a happy marriage that reinforces the notion of Black middle-class values as key to racial uplift. In dramatic opposition to the racist North/South coupling that ends The Birth of a Nation, the conclusion of Within Our Gates brings North (Vivian) and South (Sylvia) together, though in a much different way: as a celebration of mutual racial advancement through a union that is at once progressive and traditional. In the final scene, Sylvia and Vivian, in a warm embrace, look out the window and into what Micheaux suggests is a boundless future together.56 Sylvia—who J. Ronald Green notes is “the agent of much of the dramatic action in the film”—is, for Micheaux, a symbol of Black suffering and endurance. She experiences racial discrimination as well as physical and sexual violence; but she uses her education and her own proud determination to surmount the personal and social obstacles. While Micheaux undercuts his own message at the very end of the film, when Dr. Vivian tells Sylvia she must abandon her “warped thoughts” and become a “tender wife,” he nonetheless portrays her as a strong race woman whose achievement is earned through her struggle, persistence, and dedication to unselfish service as a teacher and a social activist. Vivian’s optimistic nationalism likewise affirms the film’s uplift ideology. For Micheaux, both Sylvia and Vivian are race icons who represent all the qualities of race pride and advancement: intelligence, sophistication, proper speech, propriety of dress, culture, sexual morality, ambition, racial and ethnic loyalty, work ethic, patriotism, and, of course, romantic love.57 Especially in its Black-centered view of American society, Within Our Gates is the antithesis of The Birth of a Nation. Even the poor Southern farmer who hopes to enroll his children at the Piney Woods school recognizes the value of education as a way for them to escape poverty and oppression and “be useful to society.” Yet, despite its appeal to racial advancement (or because of it), Micheaux’s film generated enormous controversy, particularly among exhibitors and city officials who feared its message might spark race rioting. The move to ban it was therefore an attempt both to silence the protest against lynching and to suppress frustration over worsening housing and employment conditions in the North. Yet, as Jane Gaines writes, “while Griffith’s masterpiece was ‘enshrined,’ Micheaux’s answer to it was ‘run out of town,’ so to speak. While the white supremacist version of the Civil War survived, Micheaux’s African American history lesson disappeared and was classified by film scholars as ‘lost’ until its rediscovery seventy years later in the Spanish National Archive in Madrid.”58

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THE SYMBOL OF THE UNCONQUERED The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), subtitled “A Story of the Ku Klux Klan,” had a similarly compelling plot line. On one level, it focused on Hugh Van Allen, a young Black prospector who recently moved west to Oristown to find his fortune. A kindly man, he lives modestly and works hard. But when his land proves to be rich in oil, he becomes the target of greedy locals led by Jefferson Driscoll, a self-hating Black man who has been passing for white in the community and who apparently acts as viciously as he does because his identity is so tenuous.59 Owner of the town’s hotel and head of a land agency, Driscoll despises Van Allen, who had publicly humiliated him and bested him in a barroom fight. Driscoll is therefore doubly intent on forcing Van Allen off his property so he can claim it for himself, and he is willing to use any means at his disposal to achieve that end. When repeated threats of harm fail to convince Van Allen to sell, Driscoll and his fellow thugs turn to Bill Stanton, a member of the Ku Klux Klan. After Van Allen ignores their final warning— “If you do not sell your land by sunset, the silvery moon will bear witness to your agony”—the “Knights of the Black Cross” embark on a midnight ride that will “burn him alive in his lair.” Although vital footage of their so-called “Infernal Ride” is lost, it appears—from a contemporary review, inserted on the title card—that “the night riders are annihilated, a colored man with bricks being a big factor.” Van Allen’s life is miraculously saved; he is able to keep his land; and he soon becomes an oil king. The film, though, is equally, if not more so, the story of Eve Mason, a determined and independent light-skinned Black woman from Selma, Alabama. Having inherited property from her late grandfather, she travels, alone, to claim and homestead it. Upon her arrival in Oristown, she is refused lodging at the local hotel owned by Driscoll, who sends her outside to sleep in the barn. There, she is menaced and nearly assaulted; so, despite her exhaustion, she flees the barn and runs into the woods, where Van Allen finds her. Discovering that they are neighbors, he offers her a ride to her cabin and assists in getting her settled into her new life on the frontier. He even gives her a gun with which to fire warning shots should she find herself in any danger. Eve soon establishes a small coterie of female friends that includes Jefferson’s mother Mrs. Driscoll, who had earlier been rejected and physically abused by her son for fear that her dark skin would reveal the Black heritage he has been working so diligently to conceal. Eve also befriends Mary Barr, the ill-treated wife of the criminal August, who is working with Driscoll to steal Van Allen’s land. When Eve learns from them of the impending midnight Klan ride, she mounts her horse and gallops off to warn Van

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Allen of the dangers that await. Because of missing footage in the only extant copy of the film, how she effects the rescue is unclear; but there is no doubt that she is instrumental in saving his life. Two years pass. Having become aware of Van Allen’s success as owner of an oil company that is drilling on his land, Eve takes advantage of the opportunity to deliver to him a letter from the Committee for the Defense of the Colored Race. That letter attests that he can be confident of her integrity, since she “has rendered a great service to the cause of the black race”; and it adds that “despite her white skin, Miss Eve is born of black parents” and can be trusted to receive his contribution to their cause. Van Allen is bewildered. Believing Eve to be white, he had “never declared his love for fear of being scornfully rejected.” Seeing “the barrier that had separated them fall away,” he is finally able to express his true feelings, which she immediately reciprocates. The film ends in a joyous reunion and a forthcoming marriage, with the “rural woman of progress,” as Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence describe her, having proven herself an ideal partner for their hard but rewarding frontier life together.60 Like Sylvia in Within Our Gates, Eve is independent, self-sufficient, and fiercely loyal. When she jumps on her spirited horse and rides off to sound the alarm against the “Knights of the Black Cross” and protect Van Allen, she not only demonstrates her athleticism and fearlessness; she also becomes the rescuer, not the rescued. Jane Gaines remarked on the wonderful reversal of custom and expectation in this scene, which plays up the anomaly: “a black woman in buckskin riding against the Klan on her thundering steed!”61 J. Ronald Green likewise noted that Eve’s bravery gives her “a chance to strengthen the already strong tie that binds her with Van Allen by reversing the dynamics of rescue and protection” and ensuring his destiny.

Fig. 2.4.  In Micheaux’s The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), Eve Mason rides to warn her neighbor Hugh Van Allen of impending danger from the Knights of the Black Cross who want to drive him off his land. Courtesy of the Black Film Center and Archive, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

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It also counters the image of the Klan that Griffith established in The Birth of a Nation. “The Klan in The Symbol of the Unconquered does not rescue threatened [white] women from black men as the Klan does in The Birth of a Nation; instead, the woman rescues a threatened Black man from the Klan.”62 The film, moreover, confirms that Klan violence is not limited to the South but is an omnipresent danger. Although Micheaux centers his film on Eve, he employs other female characters such as Mother Driscoll to explore and exploit critical social issues. A loving mother to an ungrateful, race-denying son, Mother Driscoll is proud, proper, and family-oriented—another example of Black middle-class respectability. She serves as a foil to Jefferson, whose repudiation of and physical assault on her reveals his low moral nature and whose rejection of Black values contrasts with Van Allen’s race pride. Thus, like Eve, Mother Driscoll is transformed into a representation of the dilemma and the challenges that Black women routinely face. And, along with Mary Barr, Mother Driscoll becomes one of the “multi-generational ‘sisters’ [who] are actively heroic, as is often the case in Micheaux’s stories.”63 Among the most interesting aspects of the film and its depiction of Black characters is the way that it advances the story first told a few years earlier by the Johnson Brothers in their Realization of a Negro’s Ambition. As Mark A. Reid has observed, while both films are set in the opportunity-rich American West, they differ in the way that Black life is portrayed. In the Lincoln Company’s film, which is essentially a family drama, a Black protagonist patiently endures racism and obtains the right to prospect oil by saving a white oilman’s daughter. Micheaux’s film (originally titled “The Wilderness Trail”), though, is considerably more aggressive: the protagonists Van Allen and Eve Mason must physically battle against racism in order to retain what is legally theirs. The difference between the two films therefore “suggests that Symbol reflects a turning point in African-American thought” and cinematic representation. “Instead of emphasizing the long-suffering virtues of black Americans, Micheaux felt his black audiences would accept violence, urban lowlifes, [and] interracial intimacy.”64 And, it seems, they also welcomed an empowered heroine, another model of race uplift who embodies the values of Booker T. Washington, whose image, alongside Abraham Lincoln’s and Frederick Douglass’s, hangs prominently on the wall of her frontier cabin.65 BODY AND SOUL In Body and Soul (1925), Micheaux explored another familiar trope: corrupt preachers who use religion to destroy and victimize the innocent, a recurring

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theme in his early works beginning with his first film, The Homesteader. Body and Soul centers on the tribulations of two hard-working Black women: Sister Martha Jane (Mercedes Gilbert), a devoted Christian churchgoer, and her daughter Isabelle (played by Micheaux’s real-life sister-in-law Theresa Russell). Isabelle intends to marry her beau Sylvester, an aspiring and honest inventor (played by Paul Robeson in his film debut), who epitomizes Black manhood and respectability.66 But believing him to be a lessthan-ideal match, Martha Jane withholds her consent. When Isabelle draws the attention of the new preacher Reverend Isaiah Jenkins (Sylvester’s longestranged twin brother, also played by Robeson), Martha Jane is anxious to promote their relationship. Although Martha Jane and the rest of the congregation embrace Jenkins and fall under his sway, Isabelle harbors suspicions and resists his advances. Those suspicions prove correct: he soon demonstrates that his piety is merely an act. One afternoon, after Martha Jane leaves the two of them alone in her home, he coerces Isabelle into giving him the money that her mother has dutifully been saving and storing in her Bible. Afterward, knowing that Martha Jane would never believe that a preacher was capable of committing such a heinous crime, a shamed Isabelle runs away to Atlanta, where she falls into ruin. When Martha Jane finally locates her and learns the truth—that Jenkins is a rapist and a thief—it is too late; Isabelle dies in her arms. Mustering her strength and courage, a broken-hearted Martha Jane returns home and exposes Jenkins as the hypocrite, criminal, and con man that he really is. With his once-devoted followers now turned against him and with bloodhounds on his trail, he crawls to Martha Jane begging forgiveness. Then he takes flight to avoid arrest. In his attempt to escape, however, he kills one of the young men who is trying to bring him to justice. Micheaux very effectively intercuts that young man’s dying words, “Mama,” in such a way as to make it seem that he is calling out for Martha Jane, the grieving mother who feels guilt over her complicity in Isabelle’s death. A “surrogate son” to Martha Jane, the young man is depicted as another child lost to blind faith.67 The next morning, Martha awakens to realize that the entire experience had been a bad dream and that her daughter is alive and safe. That dream sequence, which according to Allyson Nadia Field reiterates the need to wake up to reality, is a critical part of the film’s message. As Charles Musser explains, “Martha Jane is a surrogate for the audience, and for Micheaux, it was the duty of these films to awaken their audiences and force them to reflect on their predicament.”68 With the money she has saved, Martha Jane blesses Isabelle and Sylvester and helps them embark on their married life together. Her gesture of good will coincides with the news that Sylvester’s dedication and ambition have been rewarded with a $3,000 royalty on his

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Fig. 2.5.  In Body and Soul, Isabelle (Theresa Russell), daughter of pious churchwoman Sister Martha Jane, is assaulted by a con man posing as a preacher (played by Paul Robeson, in his film debut). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

invention. Like Sylvia and Vivian in Within Our Gates and Eve and Van Allen in The Symbol of the Unconquered, Isabelle and Sylvester are thus portrayed as icons of virtue, middle-class propriety, and race uplift. In the final scenes of the film, the happy couple returns from their honeymoon to an elegantlyfurnished new home, a symbol of their respectability and success, which they share with Martha Jane. She too is rewarded for her hard work and devotion: no longer a laundress in a shabby dress and apron who must take in ironing for others in her small apartment, she has become a well-dressed woman who enjoys her newfound leisure and prosperity. Martha Jane’s nightmare of betrayal and loss has given way to a dream of happiness and fulfilment for herself and for Isabelle. Rarely in his early films, as Pearl Bowser and Louise Spencer write, does Micheaux deal with a character in as much depth as he does Martha Jane. Although still a sociological type, she is “psychologically individuated; the film is focalized through her, and all the other characters revolve around her.”69 By centering the story on her, Micheaux makes her at once the victim and the representation of the title’s body and soul—the body, through her caretaking of Isabelle, which is deserved, and of the sexually abusive

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and spiritually predatory Reverend Jenkins, which is not; the soul, by her earlier blind faith, which makes her vulnerable to the predations of jackleg preachers, and by her new hard-won faith, which allows her to recognize and address her own moral failings. Through her, Micheaux again offers an important comment not only on Black family values but also on the future of the race. As J. Ronald Green observed, Isabelle is the marriageable young woman, the winning of whom will determine, figuratively, the possibility of success for the next generation of African Americans in America. But it is Martha Jane “who holds the power to effect the desired outcome [and] whose consciousness must be adjusted if Isabelle is to marry the right man and thus form the working partnership that will accomplish the dream.”70 Although not as innovative or as compelling as his silent films, Micheaux’s sound films also depicted unusual and interesting women, among them such powerful underworld figures as “The Catbird” in Murder in Harlem (1935), Dinah in Underworld (1937), and Elinor Lee in The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940). Yet, despite Micheaux’s ambitious vision and his enormous contribution to race films, he died in virtual obscurity in 1951. By then, most of his films were lost and Micheaux himself had largely been forgotten. Only in recent decades have a few of his films been rediscovered and garnered the attention of scholars and film enthusiasts alike, particularly for their tackling of social issues from the clash of rural and urban values to matters of color caste among Blacks, from corruption in the Black church to Black/ white social relations. As Mark A. Reid writes, much of the significance of Micheaux’s films rests in the fact that they reveal “how blacks chose to represent themselves as opposed to how the dominant society represented them,”71 especially in family settings in which such accomplished and race-proud women as Sylvia, Eve, and Martha Jane play an integral role. RICHARD E. NORMAN Among the most prolific and possibly the most curious of the early race film pioneers was Richard E. Norman, a Southern-born white man. A savvy marketer, he capitalized on the popular fascination with exotic locales and new technologies like automobiles and airplanes, novelties that he incorporated into his films. A zealous self-promoter, he developed exploitation accessories like colorful, graphic posters, and he devised elaborate promotions called “ballyhoos” to draw moviegoers inside the theaters to see his feature films. A fierce independent, Norman refused to amalgamate with other filmmakers or to seek backing from outside investors in his company, as many perpetually underfunded race filmmakers (including Micheaux) often tried to do. Instead he self-financed his films, occasionally attempting creative

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alternative financing such as a profit-sharing franchise by which he tried to sell advance shares in his next picture. A businessman and true entrepreneur, Norman became the only early race filmmaker to purchase and operate his own studio, where he produced a number of his films. And after most early race filmmakers were forced out of the business by high production costs, poor distribution outlets, and the transition from silent to sound films, he found innovative ways to maintain his ties to the movie industry. Like Micheaux’s films, Norman’s spanned many genres: romance, Westerns, South Seas adventure stories, and detective mysteries, almost all of which emphasized racial uplift and illustrated the wealth and power that ambitious and enterprising Blacks, women as well as men, could achieve. Above all, Norman avoided the ubiquitous Mammies, Uncle Toms, pickaninnies, and other low-comic stereotypes that dominated mainstream film of that era. Rather, Norman’s characters were typically middle-class professionals in positions of authority and dignity: teachers, doctors, engineers, railroad superintendents, policemen, detectives, and advertising directors. Black moviegoers who were used to seeing Black characters typed by their tattered and exaggerated garb and restricted to roles as domestics and servants could, and did, take special pride in such anti-typing. It was not just Norman’s male protagonists, however, who were so ambitious and accomplished; his women were as well. And the ways that Norman shaped and cast their roles countered some of the prevailing stereotypes and provided positive role models whom Black audiences could emulate or aspire to be. In his early race film The Green-Eyed Monster (1919), two rival engineers compete to win not only the Great Mail Race but also the hand of Helen Powers, daughter of rail superintendent Bernard Powers. An enterprising woman who knows her own mind and who readily asserts it, Helen rebuffs Jim Hilton, who covets her affection, but welcomes the attention of Hilton’s rival, Jack Manning. Hilton bristles at Helen’s rejection and plots his revenge. By sabotaging Manning, he figures that he can win the race and change Helen’s mind with a victory over his rival. After the race begins, Hilton throws a switch that will de-rail several trains and ensure that Manning cannot possibly continue, much less win. But Hilton’s attempt fails. His treacherous scheme is exposed; and ultimately he is jailed for his crime. Meanwhile, Helen accepts Manning’s proposal, and the film ends happily with a large and extravagant wedding scene. As a story of middle-class life, The Green-Eyed Monster was exciting, well-crafted, and consistent with the theme of racial advancement and the motif of race ambition. Notably, Helen was an essential part of the story. Not only does her name—Powers—suggest the agency that she wields (just as Manning’s name reveals his); her depiction in the film also serves to emphasize the symbols of success and opportunity, which, Norman insisted,

Fig. 2.6.  Helen (Louise Dunbar) rebuffs the advances of schemer Jim Hilton, one of the two men who vie for her affections in The Green-Eyed Monster (1919). Courtesy of the Norman Studios, Jacksonville, Florida.

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are available to all aspiring Black women and men who are willing to work hard to achieve their goals. Sophisticated and well-educated, Helen lives in an elegant home that boasts flowering gardens and goldfish-filled fountains. Her expensive attire is both professional and refined. At her disposal is the family’s automobile, complete with a chauffeur to drive her wherever she wishes to go. And after her big gala wedding celebration, she is whisked away, with her new husband, in a flashy limousine. The home, the cars, the clothing are all obvious and immediately recognizable markers of Black achievement and success. And Helen herself is, quite simply, in many ways the embodiment of the “New Negro Woman,” the strong, self-possessed, and fashionable icon who was emblematic of modernity and particularly of Black respectability. THE NEW NEGRO WOMAN The “New Negro Woman” was a self-descriptive term coined by Margaret Murray Washington, educator, essayist, and wife of Booker T. Washington in her 1895 article, “The New Negro Woman,” published in Edward Everett Hale’s Boston monthly Lend a Hand, a journal committed to reform and philanthropy. Mrs. Washington saw the New Negro Woman as a symbolic leader in the Black uplift mission who would inspire white Americans to recognize the role of African Americans in the national rhetoric of progress.72 By signifying racial advancement, she could take on the cause of the so-called moral regeneration of a whole race of women; use her respectability to create a new ideal of womanhood; and serve as an agent of social change to counter the racist myths of Black female subservience and, worse yet, of immorality derived from, and endorsed by, slavery.73 In other words, the New Negro Woman could model a new definition of Black femininity based on intellect and respectability, not on tired stereotype.74 Marked by her neatness of dress, her propriety, her etiquette, her sense of family responsibility, and her pride in maintaining her possessions and her home, she could be the “starting point for the struggle to uplift the negro woman.”75 Under slavery, Mrs. Washington explained, “negro women had been given in marriage at the whim of the master’s family [and] . . . sold from her husband as the master’s financial interests demanded, with no more pity than was exhibited at the selling of a hog.” Yet even though those “awful days” had passed, conditions were not much improved. “Turned loose with little knowledge,” women had few opportunities to better themselves—“because of force of circumstances, and not because of a lack of desire to be otherwise.” So Washington encouraged those African American women who were fortunate enough to enjoy greater advantages to influence and inspire those with less. She urged them to “rise, shine, and push right along in the work

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of helping our women in the South, in the North, and everywhere that it is need[ed] . . . let us rise with our money, though it be little, let us rise with our voices, though they be weak, with our hands even though they be feeble, and do this all-important work.”76 By the 1910s, the white New Woman had become ubiquitous in mainstream American culture, film, fashion, advertising, even politics. And white filmmakers, especially early serial filmmakers like the Wharton Brothers and Pathé Studios, regularly featured her in their productions. Even the names of the most popular serial productions of that era reflected the white New Woman’s prominence: The Perils of Pauline, The Exploits of Elaine, The Adventures of Kathlyn, The Hazards of Helen, The Mysteries of Myra, Pearl of the Army. The New Negro Woman, however, was in many ways an even more radical and more complicated construct. As an editorial in Messenger, “The Only Radical Negro Magazine,” declared, “she is the product of profound and vital changes in our economic mechanism”; and “along the entire gamut of social, economic, and political attitudes, [she] has effected a revolutionary orientation.”77 The intersections between the media, consumer culture, and politics that gave rise to this more progressive understanding of Black femininity combined the ideas of the white New Woman and the New Negro movement promoted by Alain Locke. For Mrs. Washington, the term New Negro Woman denoted a middle-class propriety, domesticity, and race progress, all of which served as a political trope to counter racist stereotypes of the familiar Mammy. Notably, though, the New Negro Woman, while allied peripherally, was not synonymous with the white New Woman. As historian Einav Rabinovitch-Fox has observed, because of the problematic implications for Blacks, Washington deliberately refrained from tapping into the kinds of independence and sexual freedom associated with the white New Woman and instead emphasized the virtues of motherhood alongside professional accomplishments in education and work, framing the New Negro Woman as the epitome of middle-class refinement and genteel appearance.78 Although, as Martha H. Patterson writes, Mrs. Washington believed that the most “crucial race work was to be done in the South,”79 that image of the New Negro Woman quickly evolved to suit the new reality of millions of African Americans who left the South to seek better lives and improved economic fortunes in the growing urban centers, mainly in the North. According to Rabinovitch-Fox and other historians, although northern migration did not necessarily free Black women from racial discrimination or domestic service, it did provide more options for upward mobility and political participation through the right to vote.80 And it allowed them to shape a racial identity and political consciousness with a modern image of Blackness that was quintessentially urban and emphasized leisure and consumption rather

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than labor—even though some white critics openly lamented that those social gains were actually negated by the loss of “the uplifting influence of honest work” that Black women had enjoyed as “Aunt Dinahs” and “old black mammies” in service of whites. “There is something almost sardonically humorous,” wrote Eleanor Tayleur in a dismissive essay intended to respond to Washington, “in the thought of this [New Negro] woman, with the brain of a child and the [unruly] passions of a woman, steeped in centuries of ignorance and savagery, and wrapped about with immemorial vices, playing with the die of fate.”81 Some African Americans also opposed the emergence of the New Negro Woman. Although he later changed his position, Robert Abbott, founder of the influential Chicago Defender, initially called that figure an affront to romance and nature. “The new woman,” he wrote, “flies in the face of Great Nature and in her emancipation into the fields of trade and endeavor, demands the very pound of flesh that Shylock did.”82 But generally the Black press endorsed and promoted the notions of Black female uplift and upward mobility and often featured portraits of accomplished women of color that countered the imagery in the white press and refuted charges of inequality and moral inferiority. And, using the mass medium of film, race filmmakers sought to advance even more widely these ideas of racial progress, Black achievement, and race uplift by conveying positive visual imagery, especially of Black women.

Fig. 2.7.  Mrs. Booker T. Washington’s ideas of propriety and respectability influenced many young Black women, such as these four pictured at Atlanta University, Georgia, in 1899. (Photographer: Thomas E. Askew.) Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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So Norman’s depiction of Helen Cooper in The Green-Eyed Monster was a matter of considerable significance. Contrary to the Mammies and Jezebels who were ubiquitous in the popular white pictures by D.W. Griffith and others, Norman’s Helen was a deliberately and decidedly different kind of heroine—a model of the New Negro Woman who embodied African American modernism in postwar America and was capable of redefining ideals of womanhood, racial citizenship, female identity, and social mobility; a woman who was self-determined, independent, increasingly emancipated from older notions of gender politics; a woman who challenged exclusion from political and cultural currents; and a woman who helped to transform thinking about the role of Black women as they moved into the public sphere.83 NORMAN’S LATER FILMS New Negro Woman heroines featured prominently in Norman’s next films as well. His two Westerns, The Bull-Dogger (1922) and The Crimson Skull (1922), shot in the Oklahoma territory in the all-Black town of Boley, celebrated the novelty as well as the symbolic value of Western themes and characters, which served as stirring metaphors for Black individualism and opportunity (as the frontier locales had for the Johnson Brothers and Micheaux). Both Westerns featured renowned Black actress Anita Bush, known as “The Little Mother of Colored Drama.” A distinguished stage performer who had begun acting as a young girl and who later toured overseas in the landmark American musical In Dahomey with legendary dance-and-comedy team Bert Williams and George Walker, she formed her own acting troupes, first the vaudeville company called the Hula-Hula Dancers and then the Anita Bush Players, a company of highly talented and versatile Black actors that eventually became the famed Lafayette Players. Norman, a shrewd marketer, knew that Bush not only would bring a certain cachet to his films but also could draw on her extensive connections among Black actors. And indeed, thanks to her intervention, he was able to cast, opposite her, Lawrence Chenault, a longtime leading man in Black cinema. Although much of the plot of Norman’s Westerns centered on trick riding and rodeo performances by real Black cowboys such as Bill Pickett and other stars of the legendary Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show, Bush assumed the female lead. In the first of the Westerns, The Bull-Dogger, she received a prominent credit. Even more salient, though, was the conception of her character in the film. Bush played Anita, the daughter of cowhand and cowboy Bill Pickett. Although it had little to do with the actual plot, she was introduced as a graduate of Linwood College, thus an educated and

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progressive modern woman. That was no incidental detail, because it gave her character a far greater social resonance and established her as an example and model of female uplift and ambition. In the second of those films, The Crimson Skull, Bush received top billing, above that of her popular male co-star, which was a nod both to the importance of her character and to her unparalleled reputation in race films. Her role, pivotal to the picture, was that of Anita Nelson, daughter of cattle rancher Lem Nelson, who becomes entangled with the Terrors, a masked group of outlaws who prey on the citizens of the small town of Boley. Although Norman was not as overtly political as rival filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, whose Within Our Gates was a direct and scathing response to D.W. Griffith’s venomously racist film The Birth of a Nation, it was surely no accident or coincidence that the masked and hooded bandits in The Crimson Skull evoked images of the masked and hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan, who historically terrorized and brutalized Black citizens, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Like Eve Mason, who rides against the Klan in order to protect her fellow rancher Hugh Van Allen in Micheaux’s The Symbol of the Unconquered, Bush’s character Anita Nelson acts bravely and defiantly to exonerate Bob Calem, the foreman on her father’s ranch and the man whom she loves. An admirably strong-willed and determined woman, she is undeterred by the threats of the outlaws and unafraid to confront them directly. Consequently, she suffers some of the same tribulations at the hands of the Terrors that the male characters do. Like Helen Powers in Norman’s The Green-Eyed Monster, Bush’s Anita Nelson is another iteration of the capable and confident progressive Black woman. Violet Davis (played by Stella Mayo), in Regeneration (1923), was also independent and self-reliant. Upon her father’s death, she is bequeathed his mysterious treasure map, which directs her to an island in the South Pacific. To get her there, she hires Jack Roper, owner of a fishing schooner. But the journey is fraught with perils because the notorious Knife Hurley, a mate on Roper’s ship, conspires with the crew and plots to seize the map so he can secure the treasure for himself. After being stranded by Knife on a remote island, Violet and Jack spend several years living a rather primal Robinson Crusoe–like existence. Eventually they again encounter Knife, who has found his way to the island, which turns out to be the very spot pictured on the treasure map. But this time, Violet and Jack gain the upper hand. They confront and defeat Knife, find the treasure themselves, and are rescued. Although only a brief clip of the film is extant, Violet’s essential role in the action is clear. It is her legacy, the map, that is the key plot point in the picture. It is Violet who takes the initiative to travel to the mysterious island and who

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engages Jack to take her there. And it is Violet who, after being stranded and then left for dead by the scheming and treacherous Knife Hurley, tends the injured Jack and later fights side by side with him against the villain and his gang, all the while singlehandedly fending off Knife’s lecherous advances. Zircon, the serial that Norman conceived and plotted but never produced, featured another tough and capable female character, Helen Desmond, the daughter of the owner of the Egyptian Potash Company for whom the hero, research chemist John Manning, works. Helen matches Manning step for step as he journeys into the desert to discover more veins of the lucrative minerals, and together they endure numerous adventures typical of the episodic serials that were so popular at that time. They are nearly overcome by a cloud of poison, trapped in an ancient tomb, threatened by hungry crocodiles, dropped unceremoniously from a plane, left to roast alive on a burning ship, forced to fight both a monstrous tiger shark and a giant snake, and almost suffocated in quicksand. But a magical powder that renders them invisible allows them to escape and ultimately to return home with rich new deposits of the miracle substance that makes both of them—now happily husband and wife—millionaires. Helen is, in short, conceived and portrayed as being as much of an action heroine as Manning is an action hero. THE FLYING ACE The best example, though—in fact, the only actual extant example—of the way that Norman elevated the women in his films from mere adjuncts to vital and impressive characters in their own right is Ruth Sawtelle, daughter of the Black stationmaster Thomas Sawtelle in The Flying Ace (1926). A proper, educated, and highly competent young woman, she supports her father, to whom she is devoted (much the way Sylvia Landry supports her adoptive parents in Micheaux’s Within Our Gates). And after Sawtelle is wrongly accused of theft, she works closely with detective and ace pilot Captain Billy Stokes to exonerate him. A woman who thinks and acts independently and who is not bound by convention, she steadfastly refuses the advances of rival aviator Finley Tucker. Even after Tucker, in a fit of jealousy, kidnaps her and holds her hostage in his plane, telling her she must submit to his advances or “take a walk in the clouds,” she continues to rebuff him and effects her own rescue by making a daring mid-air escape. Rather than casting an unknown pretty ingenue—and there were many from whom Norman could choose, with numerous young women volunteering their acting talents—Norman sought out Kathryn Boyd, a distinguished performer from the Lafayette Players. Boyd, who had studied at Fisk and Oberlin Colleges, was, as Norman described her, “pretty, demure, yet

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Figure 2.8.  In The Flying Ace (1926), after being kidnapped by Finley Tucker (Harold Platts), Ruth Sawtelle (Kathryn Boyd) makes a daring mid-air escape. The aerial scenes were filmed on the ground, on location at the Norman Studios. Courtesy of the Norman Studios, Jacksonville, Florida.

possessed of the nerve of a female dare-devil,”84 a skill that served her well since she performed her own stunts in the film. Norman would utilize Boyd again, as part of a team with Laurence Criner, in his final film, Black Gold, in which she enacted a similar role. As the daughter of a bank president, she works zealously with her beau Ace Brand to exonerate Brand’s employer, who has been wrongly accused of robbing the local bank, as part of a scheme devised by greedy rivals to usurp his oil wells. Although the film (shot in the all-Black town of Tatums, Oklahoma) does not survive even in a fragment, Boyd’s character Alice Anderson was pivotal to the picture and figured prominently in the posters and ads as well. Norman also celebrated and modeled Black female achievement in other ways. He intended, for example, to collaborate on a film with Bessie Coleman, a prominent and much-admired figure in both the Black and white communities, who was renowned for her daring as an aviatrix and legendary stunt pilot. The first American woman to earn a pilot’s license—though it was earned in France, not the U.S.—Coleman was a true trailblazer, and Norman was anxious to capitalize on her fame. His plan was to feature her as one of what he called “Living Colored Examples,” which he envisioned as a series of stand-alone feature films (and only one of which, Black Gold, in 1928, was ever completed). Norman’s original intention was to film the photoplay that Coleman had proposed to him, a story based on her life. As they discussed the project, however, it evolved. Norman had a somewhat different vision in mind—less of a biography and more of an all-out aviation adventure, which ultimately became the idea underlying The Flying Ace. It seems that he and Coleman had reached an agreement concerning the nature of the project and the direction of the picture, in which she would star. But regrettably their collaboration never came to fruition. Only a few weeks later, as Coleman was practicing for an airshow to benefit the Negro Welfare

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League in Norman’s hometown of Jacksonville, she and her manager were flying over the city to scout landing locations for the parachute stunt that she would be attempting the next day. But the bi-plane went into a spinning dive, and Coleman, who was not wearing a seat belt, was thrown from the plane and died instantly. Her untimely death, at thirty-six, shocked the public and made her the object of even more interest and fascination. Despite the tragedy of Coleman’s death, Norman moved forward with his own version, an aviation adventure that he wrote himself and in which he modeled his adventurous heroine, Ruth Sawtelle, on the character of Coleman. Like the early race phenomenon itself, Norman’s active filmmaking career was short-lived—less than a decade, between late 1919 and 1928. Although he found ways to stay in the industry—by shooting industrial films and roadshowing his own features in the 1930s and by operating a movie theater for Black patrons into the 1940s—he never returned to race feature filmmaking. Nonetheless, like the Johnson Brothers and Micheaux, he made a significant change in the way that Blacks were portrayed on screen. By giving his audience the role models they craved but never saw in mainstream studio productions, he helped to reverse some of the old stereotypes, celebrate Black accomplishment, and create new visual imagery that countered the pejorative images in dominant white film of his era, particularly in terms of the representation of women. WOMEN AS RACE FILMMAKERS Not all the early race filmmakers were men. A number of talented and accomplished women also made valuable contributions to the industry and helped to promote an increasingly positive image of African American women. “Given the structural barriers confronting Black women,” as Christina N. Baker observed, “the powerful action of telling stories through film was inherently courageous.”85 And the stories they told provided a unique perspective on the representation of Black women in silent film, both in front of and behind the camera. Although there is some dispute about who was actually the first Black female filmmaker, it was likely Madame E. Toussaint Welcome.86 She was born Jane “Jennie” Louise Van Der Zee in Lenox, Massachusetts, to parents John and Susan Brister Van Der Zee, who had served as the butler and maid to President Ulysses S. Grant. A gifted musician, artist, and photographer, Jennie studied at the Kellogg School of Art in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Soon after the turn of the century, she moved to New York City with her father and two of her brothers, one of whom, the future Harlem Renaissance photographer James Augustus Van Der Zee, later became the personal photographer

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to Booker T. Washington. Jennie, too, was associated with the Harlem Renaissance.87 On 134th Street in Harlem, she established the Toussaint Conservatory of Art and Music, an art school and photographic studio that operated for more than forty years until her death in 1956.88 Together with her husband Ernest Toussaint Welcome, the artist, entrepreneur, and promoter whom she married around 1908, she ran a number of other businesses, including a realty company and a magazine.89 Between 1917 and 1918, the couple’s Toussaint Pictorial Company published A Pictorial History of the Negro in the Great War, which included some of Jennie’s work. A memorial book, it recognized and celebrated African American contributions to World War One, especially those of the 369th Regiment, the “Harlem Hellfighters.” The Toussaints’ company also published one million patriotic postcards of “race soldiers,”90 which, along with products such as inexpensive booklets and prints, had become a popular way within the Black community to express race pride. According to Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, the Toussaint Studios’ engravings sold for fifteen cents in stationery stores throughout New York City and through the mail. Demand was high, thanks to the advertising that the couple placed in publications such as the Chicago Defender.91 Additionally, in an ongoing effort to honor Black patriotism, Jennie painted “Charge of the Colored Division: Somewhere in France,” an image of African American participation in the war effort. That work—which featured a single Black soldier, with the insignia of the “15th Regiment” (later reorganized as the 369th/“Harlem Hellfighters”) on his canteen, as he is engaged in close combat on the battlefield in Europe—became the only painting by an African American artist accepted by the U.S. Government’s National War Savings Committee for use as a poster in the War Savings Stamp and Liberty Loan drives.92 Nearly 100,000 posters based on that image, retitled We Are Doing Our Bit, were distributed nationwide in what became one of Liberty Loan’s most successful campaigns, with more than twenty-million Americans pledging support.93 Perhaps the greatest achievement of Madame Toussaint Welcome, who referred to herself as “The Foremost Female Artist of the Race,” was the documentary film that she and her husband produced. With the young film industry taking root in New York City but with Black audiences and film critics, theater owners, and managers already beginning to protest the demeaning characters and stereotypes in many American films, a number of Black filmmakers hoped to counter the negative imagery with real stories of Black lives and especially of Black military service.94 The Toussaint Welcomes were anxious to join their ranks. Under the banner of the Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange, they produced the documentary Doing Their Bit (1916), described in an advertisement they took out in the Chicago Defender as “twelve stirling

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[sic] chapters of two full reels each” that portrayed the “military and economic part played by all the darker races in this WAR OF NATIONS, both ‘OVER HERE’ and ‘OVER THERE’”; and they urged “every Race man, woman, and child in America” to see “this wonderful picture.”95 Shown in two-reel segments, the film emphasized racial achievement by highlighting Black military participation in the war.96 As Jacqueline Stewart observed, many early race film producers echoed the popular race rhetoric of the period, including the need to define and assert the “Americanness” of the Negro; and, to that end, they frequently mobilized themes of patriotism in their films and promotional discourses “in order to create alternative narratives on ‘the nation’ that challenged the racially exclusionary ‘America’ constructed in white-dominated media (including The Birth of a Nation).”97 Doing Their Bit was consistent with those aims. Although the film is now lost, as Hannah Ahmed observed, it established Toussaint Welcome as part of a group of African American women filmmakers who contributed to the U.S. cinema industry through risk-taking and trailblazing, their efforts changing the prevailing view of African Americans and emphasizing the validity of the lives of African Americans.”98 Drusilla Dunjee Houston, a contemporary of Madame Toussaint Welcome, was also an influential figure. A prolific but now largely forgotten writer of the American West, Houston was a skilled journalist, an accomplished musician, a self-described “Racial Uplift matriarch,” and a community builder in early Oklahoma.99 Author of a number of pioneering historical studies of ancient African history, she worked as a contributing editor for the Oklahoma Black Dispatch, a newspaper she ran with her brother, the civil rights activist Roscoe Conkling Dunjee who founded the Oklahoma Branch of the NAACP. Over the course of more than three decades prior to her death in 1941, she wrote nearly 3,000 editorials on subjects such as the Tulsa Race Riot and railed against the lynching of Black men and women in Oklahoma and throughout the country.100 Apparently unknown to anyone at the time, around 1902 Houston began to write a refutation of Thomas Dixon’s works, a project that she continued for decades, especially after Dixon’s novels The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman were adapted to film by D.W. Griffith as The Birth of a Nation. As Peggy Brooks-Bertram writes, “Looking back, it is now clear that Houston was taking on the notorious motion picture.” In fact, “it may be that Houston was the first and only African American—male or female—to write a blow-by-blow refutation of Birth of a Nation, a challenge that she hoped would become, in her words, a ‘flashing photo play’” that she variously titled Spirit of the Old South: The Maddened Mob and The Maddened Mob—America’s Shame.101

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That fifty-eight page screenplay, which was written in verse as an “elegy,” addressed the Griffith film’s many lies and distortions; and notably, its female heroine gave the project a distinctly female perspective. Yet, despite Houston’s decades-long documentation of the destructive race-based social ideas espoused by Dixon and the poisonous stereotypes popularized by Griffith, her screenplay was never produced as a movie.102 In the prologue to that screenplay, which was only recently discovered, Houston explained that “The photoplay lay for long years, pushed aside by executive duties and also because the author knew that American literature was catering to Topsy, Uncle Tom, and slap-stick minstrel Negro types.” In 1933, when Houston first broke her silence, she provided a more extensive explanation, noting that she had deliberately kept the screenplay a secret, out of fear for the threats to her life and the danger to her family, because the content of Spirit of the Old South violated the Sedition and Espionage Acts and because the Ku Klux Klan was active in Oklahoma at the time. “For 23 years,” she wrote to a friend, “I have had lying unpublished a motion picture play almost as sensational as ‘The Clansman,’ but I did not dare offer it to the literary public because the American white man utterly refuses to recognize such a character as my heroine, though the race has many of her counterparts.” In 1938, furious over the widespread support for Dixon’s work and for The Birth of a Nation, which was still being played to enthusiastic audiences in movie theaters across the nation, she described to the Oklahoma Black Dispatch what Black women needed to do to counter Dixon’s racial cant. Since, as she wrote, the historical truth still needed to be brought to the attention of the nation, “The Negro must produce plays to answer and undo the work of ‘The Clansman.’”103 Not much is known about another early female filmmaker, Tressie Souders (aka Tressa Souders and Tressie Saunders), who is believed to have been employed as a maid in private white homes. Her only film, A Woman’s Error (1922), which she wrote, directed, and produced, was distributed by the AfroAmerican Film Exhibitors Company in Kansas City, one of several small film companies founded in the Midwest.104 Recognized by Billboard as “the first of its kind to be produced by a young woman of our race,” the film was hailed as a “picture true to Negro life.”105 Census and voting records show that by 1930, Souders had moved to Los Angeles, perhaps with the hope of working in the industry; but there is no evidence that she was involved in any further filmmaking. Nonetheless, as Christina N. Baker notes, on the basis of A Woman’s Error alone, “We can surmise that [Souders] defied expectations to create a film that spoke to the racialized experience of being a Black woman during her times and that, in doing so, she exhibited a womanist spirit of courage.”106

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Working around the same time as Souders—and working from the same city, Kansas City—was Maria P. Williams, who produced, distributed, and acted in the film The Flames of Wrath (1923), which, like Souders’ screenplay, featured women in lead roles. Unfortunately, as with Souders, there is little information about Williams’ early background. Thought to have worked as a schoolteacher, she was known to be an activist. In the short book My Work and Public Sentiment that she wrote and published in 1916, she described herself as “National Organizer, Good Citizens League, Lecturer and Writer.” After settling in Kansas City, Williams assumed the position of editor-in-chief of the weekly paper New Era and went on to edit and publish her own newspaper called Women’s Voice, which featured stories and essays on “timely topics” such as the freedom of Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Using some of the money she earned from her writing to advocate for various causes, including “the suppression of crime among Negros,” she spearheaded a number of progressive movements.107 After marrying African American entrepreneur and businessman Jesse L. Williams in 1916, Maria began working as assistant manager at the theater that he operated and managed in Kansas City. She also served as secretary and treasurer for the Western Film Producing Company and Booking Exchange, for which Jesse was listed as president. That connection to the distribution and release of films for African American audiences, combined with her zeal for racial justice, may have been the inspiration for her own film The Flames of Wrath, a crime drama “written, acted and produced entirely by colored people,” which she wrote and produced and in which she appeared.108 In the film, P.C. Gordon is murdered and robbed of a diamond ring that he had purchased for his wife. One of the thieves, a man named Dates, is apprehended, and after the female prosecuting attorney (played by Williams) makes a compelling case against him, he is sentenced to ten years in prison. But he escapes and tries to recover the ring from the spot where he had buried it, only to discover that he is too late: a young boy already found it and turned it over to his older brother Guy Braxton, a prosperous dry goods salesman. Guy in turn shows the ring to unscrupulous lawyer William Jackson, who devises a way to keep it for himself; and when Jackson’s young stenographer Pauline Keith learns of the scheme, he fires her. After being elected District Attorney, Jackson tries to exact revenge by ordering the arrest of Braxton. Fortunately, Pauline is able to prove Braxton’s innocence, and Dates, who has turned himself in, is pardoned.109 Only a single frame of the film exists. It is clear from the plot description, though, that the female characters—the prosecutor who indicts Dates and the stenographer who helps to exonerate Braxton of the crime—were prominent characters who were portrayed in the drama as accomplished and

Fig. 2.9.  Social activist and early race filmmaker, Maria P. Williams wrote, produced, and acted in The Flames of Wrath (1923). Courtesy of The New York Public Library.

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educated women in positions of considerable responsibility. Williams’ first and only film was therefore a historical achievement. She might have gone on to produce other films, but sadly she died an untimely death: murdered in 1932, her body was left on the side of the road, possibly in retribution for her social activism. Likely there were other ambitious women whose names are little known and whose works are lost today. Allyson Nadia Field, for example, alludes to Sarah Elaine Woods, an aspiring screenwriter about whom little information exists apart from the fact that she had initial success in selling a scenario to a “leading ‘movie’ house.” A pastor’s daughter, Woods was only a high school student in Milwaukee when she wrote The Sacrifice, which the Chicago Defender described as “a love story with adventure and trial interwoven.” It is not clear, Field notes, whether the film was ever produced, “but her aspiration and the press’s celebration of her success indicate a belief in the opportunities afforded to Black men and women by the moving picture business.”110 Other African American women who were involved less directly than Souders or Williams in filmmaking nonetheless played key roles in the production and even the direction of the race films that were credited to their husbands. Mrs. M. Webb, for example, is said to have written the original story for Shadowed by the Devil (1916), a three-reel feature film directed by her husband Miles M. Webb and produced by the Unique Film Company of Chicago that the couple co-founded. The film, which does not survive, reportedly featured three characters: a frivolous young woman who is the spoiled daughter of a wealthy family; Jack, the son of a businessman, who is possessed and shadowed from childhood by the devil; and Everett, the industrious son of poor parents, who reflects the positive traits of his early training and becomes a loving husband and father.111 Like many films of the period, especially those by women, it was a morality tale with an overtly religious theme. Alice B. Russell, the second wife of landmark filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, also worked closely with her husband, though their productions were far more secular than Mrs. Webb’s. In addition to starring in several of Micheaux’s films, including the silents The Broken Violin (1928), The Wages of Sin (1929), and Easy Street (1930), Russell is listed as a producer for the Micheaux Film Corporation’s production of The Darktown Revue (1931); and, according to Henry T. Sampson, she was involved in Daughter of the Congo (1930), The Girl From Chicago (1932), Ten Minutes to Live (1932), Lem Hawkins’ Confession (1935), God’s Step Children (1938), and The Betrayal (1948). J. Ronald Green speculates that one of the characters in Micheaux’s novel The Case of Mrs. Wingate, a woman who successfully takes on a variety of roles in the motion picture business, was based on Russell, whose superior education and middle-class background Micheaux valued and frequently

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utilized.112 Although Russell herself underplayed her contribution, suggesting (as she did in the 1930 New York City Census) that her occupation was that of “Helper—Motion Pictures,” she was actually a critical part of Micheaux’s business and of his success.113 Similarly, Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson, who married Paul Robeson in 1921, was instrumental in guiding her husband’s career. Talent manager for Robeson when he worked on his first film, Micheaux’s film Body and Soul (1925), which reportedly was an experience that they both later regretted,114 she also served as “manager-wife” for virtually all of his subsequent film, theatrical, and musical work.115 And she acted with her husband in the avant-garde classic Borderline (1930). A story of a biracial affair between a white man and a Black woman, that groundbreaking film dealt with issues of race and sexuality “at a time when such subject matter was still largely taboo and had only been previously tackled cinematically through oblique inference.”116 Robeson apparently had her own aspirations for performance and production. Aimee Dixon Anthony notes that, in her writing, Robeson referred to several of her own projects, including a play Black Progress, which she hoped to turn into a scenario, and an Uncle Tom’s Cabin play, neither of which appears to have been completed.117 But since Robeson, by her own choice, worked largely in her husband’s shadow, the extent of her influence and impact remains unclear. GIST AND HURSTON Better known today but still largely underappreciated for their pioneering film achievements are two other African American women: Eloyce King Patrick Gist and Zora Neale Hurston. Gist, who assisted her evangelist husband James Gist in his mission of moral and spiritual education for men and women, collaborated with him on three silent non-theatrical film productions: Hell-Bound Train (1930), Verdict Not Guilty (1933), and Heaven-Bound Travelers (1935). Designed to be shown in conjunction with religious services or revival meetings for African Americans (often with the endorsement and co-sponsorship of the NAACP), the Gists’ religious folk-dramas were typical of those created by early reformist Black exhibitors during the era of mass migrations and Jim Crow as a way of providing shared social experience for Black urban communities.118 According to their daughter Homoiselle Patrick Harrison, her parents’ exhibitions usually began with Eloyce playing the piano and leading the audience in hymns; then, prior to the screening of the film, James would offer a sermonette. Tickets would be sold in advance or a collection would be taken at the end of the service, and the monies would be shared with the church that provided the venue.119

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The couple had an intriguing partnership: Eloyce practiced the Bahá’í faith, while James was a Christian evangelical. Yet, as Gloria J. Gibson observed, “despite the difference in denominations, the Gists agreed upon basic Christian principles, which became deeply entrenched in their productions.”120 And their moralist and doctrinal films reflected the teachings and practices of the Black church, whose members were definitely among the Gists’ biggest supporters. In Hell-Bound Train (1930), the Devil, who identifies himself as “Satan Lucifer, Manager, Eng.,” offers a one-way ride to travelers who are willing to sacrifice their lives and souls. The various “coaches” on the train reveal the many temptations that he conjures to entice them: dancing, drunkenness, jazz music, immorality, flirtation, gambling, prostitution, disobedience, backsliding, hypocrisy, “used-to-be” church attendance, lying, false preaching, worship of material possessions, Sabbath breaking. And he revels and rejoices, sometimes almost comically, in the weaknesses of the passengers, many of whom are women, who are willing “to take a chance” by climbing aboard. The film ends with an extended shot of the train arriving at the “Entrance to Hell,” where it is consumed by fire—but not before a final warning to the

Fig. 2.10.  In the Gists’ morality tale Hell-Bound Train (1930), engineer Satan Lucifer conducts sinners on a one-way trip to Hell. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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passengers to “Get off this train by repenting, believing and being baptized, before it is too late.” The titular train served as an effective metaphor for the trials and temptations that viewers of the film might experience on their own journey of life. And the film spoke to a broad audience, from the young (who were advised not to be “impudent” to their mothers or to mistreat animals) to the old (who were discouraged from flirtations with younger women who were only after their money), from the men (who gambled away their pay and were therefore unable to support their families) to the women (who were unfaithful to, and undeserving of, their loving husbands). An especially daring and unusual scene depicted an ailing woman who had taken an unspecified “medicine to avoid becoming a mother,” whether by preventing or terminating her pregnancy, and who pays with her life for her transgression, despite a doctor’s earnest attempt to save her. Verdict Not Guilty (1933) was another morality tale in which a woman assumes the key role. After dying during childbirth, the woman is taken by the “Jailer” to the “Court,” where she is accused of a number of offenses and her soul is put on trial at the “Judgement Bar.” According to one title card: “Another baby and no husband.” According to another, she is accused of being a cardplayer and “a hypocrite” who has missed church for a whole year. Truth, the “Attorney for all Christians,” allows the woman to respond directly to the charges brought against her by Falsehood, the prosecutor. Although Satan encourages Falsehood to lie about the woman’s sins, her defense proves successful because “TRUTH cannot lie.” After being judged not guilty, she is invited to enter Heaven. And in Heaven-Bound Travelers (1935), the primary role is once again played by a woman. Falsely accused of adultery and abandoned by her husband, the unnamed woman remains true to her faith. Despite her financial struggles, she raises their daughter in a good Christian home, even as her husband battles temptations and ultimately regrets his poor decisions.121 Although rather amateurish in terms of technique and low-budget in terms of production, the Gists’ films were nevertheless moving little vignettes that captured the essence and dynamics of African American culture during the early decades of the twentieth century. And they surveyed Black lives, both good and bad, within a communal context.122 Like the Gists’ films, the fieldwork footage shot by Zora Neale Hurston explored Black cultural and folkloric practices, many of which were centered on the women of the community that she documented. A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance and close friend of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, Hurston is most remembered today as a novelist, playwright, and author of such enduring works as Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). But she was also a skilled anthropologist. At Barnard College and later again

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at Columbia University in New York City, Hurston studied with the famed anthropologist Dr. Franz Boas, who encouraged her to undertake immersive cultural studies. Under his mentorship, she traveled to the American South, specifically to Eatonville, Florida, where she had spent part of her childhood, to shoot ethnographic footage that captured and preserved the images and sounds of ordinary life. Considered the first professional recordings made by an African American woman, those films, shot between 1927 and 1930, reveal the deep connection between Hurston’s anthropological and cinematic work; and they demonstrate how she sought to depict and celebrate the richness of contemporary Black experience. Rare cinematic documents of the everyday lives of working-class subjects whose expressiveness underpinned so much of Hurston’s creative work and interwar U.S. culture more generally, the films—according to Hannah Durkin—“were conceived as a joint corrective to mainstream U.S. distortions of black artistry.”123 Hurston had developed a keen eye for detail, possibly honed by her work in 1925–1926 as assistant to screenwriter and novelist Fanny Hurst; and that sensitivity to detail was evident in her footage of seemingly mundane events such as those she recorded in Logging (April 1928) and Baptism (April 1929). In conducting her ethnographic research, Hurston usually selected a familiar location and, as Boas had urged, immersed herself in the culture, watching closely and learning the traditions of her subjects before she ever began shooting. What made the resulting films so remarkable, though, is the way in which they combined Hurston’s many talents. As Christina N. Baker notes, “she approached filmmaking with the curiosity of a researcher, the creativity of an artist, and the empathy of a southerner, and, as such, an insider among the people and culture she filmed.”124 Moreover, as Gloria J. Gibson has suggested, what Hurston captured in the background was as significant as what she shot in the foreground. In Children’s Games (April 1928), for example, she uses long takes with no editing, but incorporates a few close-ups to allow the audience to evaluate body movement and gesture as non-verbal communication and proxemic behavior. And in some instances she keeps the camera on after the game is finished, so that “even if the game itself has been ‘staged,’ the behavior captured afterward appears spontaneous.” Because of Hurston’s insider relationship, her presence does not affect or alter the actual event but rather introduces a kind of affectionate intimacy with her subjects.125 Yet, as interesting as the games may be in their own right, they are more than games for the sake of play; they are ways of enculturating the players and helping them to hone their abilities to socialize.126 So Hurston’s decision to preserve the games (and the songs, in audio recordings that were recorded separately) “reflects her understanding of play to children and to the total sociocultural development of the child” as

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well as to the “interactions of our gendered selves . . . [and the] anthropological discourses of the time.”127 Although Hurston’s work, like that of Souder, Williams, and the other early female filmmakers, has been largely overlooked, these women made a vital contribution to cinema and social history. Their work underscores the seminal role of women on screen and behind the camera and of the racial and gender politics they negotiated in their pioneering filmmaking. CONCLUSION The Hollywood film industry, which began its quick rise to prominence in the early decades of the twentieth century, saw the opportunity to gain an economic foothold in American society by exploiting the tremendous mythmaking potential of motion pictures, as it did with the reshaping of frontier history. Regrettably, that included the acceptance of anti-Black images, which, as Chester J. Fontenot, Jr. suggests, “can probably be explained by the willingness of white Americans to see confirmed in visual images their belief that Black people were subhuman”128 and which reflected the racial attitudes of the day. The minstrel shows, vaudeville, and plantation literature from which early cinema imagery derived helped to fix in the public’s mind the impression of African Americans—and especially of African American women—as servile, silly, submissive, even sexually indiscriminate. Cartoons and advertising reinforced that imagery. Early Black independent filmmakers also understood cinema’s mythmaking potential; but rather than promote negative types in their films, they tried to present more realistic portraits of Black Americans by creating an alternate set of cultural referents and establishing new Black characters and situations. Assuming the challenge of exploring the sophisticated expressiveness that was characteristic of the African American tradition, they let their films speak from the formal structures of that cultural tradition at the same time that they appropriated the tools of the emerging cinema to depict the Black experience. In other words, they sought to move beyond the traditional structuring of Blacks in a subordinate relationship to political and social power—beyond the prevalent “regime” of popular images and dominant film languages to “explore an alternative terrain” and forge different representations of race.129 Black audiences grew frustrated not only with the on-screen stereotypes but also with the exclusionary exhibition practices, which required them to sit in segregated balconies at white movie houses that they entered through side stairways or to view films in “midnight rambles,” long after white audiences had vacated the theaters. They also tired of the other demeaning accommodations they had to endure. As Allyson Nadia Field noted, when the polished

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comedy One Large Evening, produced by Hunter Haynes and praised as “one of the best visualizations of every-day [Black] life,” was screened in a white theater, it was retitled A Night in Coontown.130 While the Black-produced and Black-cast race movies did not reverse the many stereotypes and negative images of Blacks that dominated American film, they did offer a response to those troubling depictions and a challenge to other movie producers to strive for more balanced racial and ethnic portrayals in their pictures. And they took up the call to “duty” that publisher Lester Walton issued in the New York Age (September 18, 1920): “to present the Negro in a complimentary light, . . . to gladden our hearts and inspire us by presenting characters typifying the better element of Negroes.”131 Without glossing over legitimate problems and serious concerns such as racial violence and caste distinctions within the race, the films produced by the Johnson Brothers, Oscar Micheaux, and Richard E. Norman typically brought an honesty and realism absent in the dominant white cinema, as did the films of early filmmakers like Maria P. Williams and Eloyce Gist. And nowhere was that effort clearer than in the representation of Black women. Contrary to the dominant films’ depiction of jolly Mammies, servile domestics, scheming Jezebels, tragic mulattas, or foolish pickaninnies, the race filmmakers portrayed them as they really were: ambitious, independent, educated, proper, and race-proud—imagery that Black moviegoers found satisfying and compelling. By 1930, the landscape of cinema had shifted. The new technology of sound film, which Black filmmakers could not afford, was already revolutionizing the industry, while Hollywood had discovered what they called “Negro themes” with the 1927 Al Jolson film The Jazz Singer and the 1929 “talkies” Hallelujah and Hearts in Dixie. With the advent of the Great Depression, Black theaters, the primary and largest clientele for race filmmakers, were closing, thus making distribution of race films more problematic than ever. By the end of the decade, with the notable exception of Oscar Micheaux, virtually all of the remaining silent race producers had been forced out of business. Yet, even though the period of silent race filmmaking was relatively brief, roughly 1915–1929, it was an important if still underappreciated chapter in cinema history. The pioneering early race filmmakers blazed new social and cinematic trails. Their features were essential to the imagination and depiction of new roles that Blacks and especially Black women could assume in society and in the emerging fight for civil rights in this country and in the history and sociology of the Great Migration. Not only did those filmmakers make a crucial change in how movie producers viewed Black moviegoers; they also shaped the way that Blacks viewed themselves in the transition to

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modern urban life. Their race pictures provided a visual “space” for Black members of society, and particularly for Black women, that countered white cinema’s racial politics and on-screen racist portrayals. To be sure, the history of the cinematic representation of African American women in silent film, like that of all Othered women, is a complicated one. It is a story of repugnant stereotypes in the dominant white cinema, and of imagery that reflected the casual but vitriolic racism of the day. At the same time, it is also the story of a handful of accomplished, independent, but largely overlooked filmmakers and performers who were in the vanguard of social change. Their work, vital not only to American cinema but also to American socio-politics, helped to change the way that Blacks were represented and Black women were portrayed. NOTES 1. This chapter contains certain terms that were commonly used during the silent film era and that may be offensive to some readers. Those words and terms, most of which occur in the titles of films or in newspaper and trade publications, are used here exclusively for historical or analytical purposes. 2. Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995), pp. 2–3. 3. “Jones” was one of the first and harshest critics of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. In an article for the Chicago Defender (May 15, 1915), he not only voiced his anger at a picture that “has caused more trouble than all the moving pictures made in ten years” and whose “every scene is made up with subjects of race hatred”; he also argued in support of films like those Micheaux would make, films that offered the “true facts” of Black life, including some “spicey [sic] scenes.” The Negro, he concluded,“is trying to forget the days of lash and cruelty and to appreciate his white friend, but if the truth must be told nothing can beat a moving picture to tell it. . . . If the people of the north [want] to see the Birth of a Nation so bad, let’s deal fair: let’s see the Negro side of it” (qtd. in J. Ronald Green, Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000], pp. 2–3). 4. New York Age, September 25, 1913, cited in Mark A. Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 8. 5. Sampson, p. 35. 6. Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 196. While Field comments on the women, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, in Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 195, commented on the men. She noted that their occupations “reflect exciting new opportunities available to African American men—uniformed, well-traveled Pullman porters were often treated as cultural heroes within the Black

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community.” And the fashionably dressed waiter is said to be employed by a café owned by a well-known Chicago local businessman.  7. Reid, pp. 7, 9. Described by a contemporary journal as “one of the best informed men in theatricals hereabouts,” Foster had great hopes for Black filmmakers. In an article in the Chicago Defender (September 9, 1915), he observed that “in a moving picture the Negro would off-set so many insults of the race—could tell their side of the birth of this great race. . . . (qtd. in Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000], p. 97). And in an earlier article published in the Black weekly Indianapolis Freeman (December 20, 1913), Foster noted happily that the “colored man” was already establishing for himself a place in the film world and “that he is commencing to weigh the import and to calculate the value of the motion picture as a medium for portraying the finer and stronger features of his particular life. . . . Our brother white is born blind and unwilling to see the finer aspects and qualities of American Negro life. . . . We must be up and doing for ourselves in our own best way and for our own best good” (qtd. in Sampson, pp. 174–75).   8. Field, p. 196.   9. Thomas Cripps, “The Making of The Birth of a Race: The Emerging Politics of Identity in Silent Movies,” in Daniel Bernardi, ed., The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), pp. 45–46. 10. Variety, April 25, 1919. 11. Gladstone L. Yearwood, Black Film as a Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration and the African-American Aesthetic Tradition (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000), p. 9. 12. Jane M. Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 107. 13. Sampson, p. 130. 14. Bowser and Spence, p. 110. 15. A later Lincoln Motion Picture Company production revisited the Tenth Cavalry. A Day with the Tenth Cavalry at Fort Huachuca (1921) featured newsreel-type footage of the Black cavalry in training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. 16. Bowser and Spence, p. 110. 17. Gaines, FD, p. 109. 18. Bowser and Spence, p. 110. 19. Review, Chicago Defender, July 17, 1917, cited in Sampson, pp. 258–259. 20. Sampson, pp. 2, 258–59; Bowser and Spence, p. 90. 21. Gaines, FD, p. 99. Gaines notes that Noble Johnson went on to co-star in such Universal films as The Lure of the Circus (1919) and The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1922) as well as in the popular serial, The Bull’s Eye (1918). In later years, after the advent of sound films and until 1950, he appeared in about one hundred and fifty film productions. Clyde R. Taylor, “Black Silence and the Politics of Representation,” in Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, eds., Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 6, also comments on the way that

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Johnson’s resignation from Lincoln Pictures, the most adventuresome and promising Black movie company of its day, “altered the course of race movies.” Universal, he writes, “was exercising the power of monopoly against weaker competitors, in this case monopolizing talent the way the industry did through contractual development of superstars. By all accounts, Noble Johnson had the potential to become a very large star in race movies, a phenomenon they had never produced. So his departure was also a kind of brain drain.” 22. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 76. 23. Cited in Stewart, p. 197, who notes that the situation and characters in shorts such as Ebony’s A Reckless Rover (1918) resemble in many ways those “of anarchic white figures found in silent film comedy, such as Charlie Chaplin and other Keystone actors.” 24. Sampson, p. 5. 25. Ibid., p. 181. 26. A subsequent film The Scapegoat, also released in 1917, was an adaptation of “The Scapegoat” by the distinguished Black writer Paul Laurence Dunbar. According to New York Age (May 17, 1917), however, it was less impressive than the story, lacked “a certain cohesiveness of sequence,” and forced the characters—the doctors, ministers, and other “race representatives [who] are supposed to be classed among the ‘intellectuals’ of the race”—to speak in the degrading dialect that “seems to be the rage among writers of dramas and photoplays” (qtd. in Sampson, p. 269). 27. A few other race film companies also looked to literature. When True Love Wins (1915), a Southern Motion Picture Company movie, was adapted from a work by Tuskegee Institute essayist Isaac Fisher, who also wrote the screenplay (Sampson, pp. 276, 311). 28. Gaines, FD, p. 58. According to Donald Bogle, like other passing films, The Call of His People “seemed to be the wish-fulfillment yearnings” of its producers, and it “revealed the preoccupation of Black America at the time: how to come as close as possible to the great White American Norm” (Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in America, 3rd ed. [New York: Continuum, 1994]), p. 105. 29. Billboard (July 16, 1921) reviewer J.A. Jackson noted that the “natural story [is] based on a condition that is quite familiar to all of us” and that it “depicts in a dramatic manner the conflict of sentiments that assail the lighter complected among us who ‘pass,’ and the ever present anxiety that is associated with the practice that has become so prevalent” (qtd. in Sampson, p. 293). 30. Levy would eventually express his dismay. An article in the Baltimore Afro-American (May 2, 1924) quoted Levy as saying: “Negro amusement buyers are fickle and possessed of a peculiar psychic complex, and they prefer to patronize the galleries of white theatres than theirs.” Levy’s sentiments seemed only to confirm William Foster’s earlier fears that whites would inevitably “step in and grab off another rich commercial plum from what should be one of our own particular trees of desirable profit” (qtd. in Sampson, pp. 215, 174–75). See also Anna Everett,

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Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 150. 31. David Starkman, sometimes called the “Oscar Micheaux” of the white independent producers of Black films, was the driving force behind the Colored Players Film Corporation. Thomas Cripps, in “‘Race Movies’ as Voices of the Black Bourgeoisie: The Scar of Shame,” in Valerie Smith, ed., Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 54, called Starkman a “little Napoleon.” He and others also commented on Starkman’s methods of raising capital (from his wife’s inheritance, from local lawyers and merchants) and of filmmaking (from writing the scripts to delivering the prints personally). In “Colored Players Film Corporation: An Alternative to Micheaux,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, pp. 178–87, Charles Musser discusses the company’s history. 32. Thomas Cripps, Black Film as Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 29. 33. Chicago Defender, January 15, 1927. 34. Cripps, “Race Movies,” p. 47. Cripps suggests that the film is “one of the best examples of a movie intended to convey Black middle-class social values to a Black urban audience.” As with many early films, which generally did not list a date on the print itself, there is some question about the actual release date of The Scar of Shame. For years, film scholars have assumed that date to be 1926. But Charles Musser, in “A Colored Players Film Corporation Filmography” (pp. 278–85), Appendix C, in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, uncovers new evidence that indicates the film may have been several years in production and that its first screening may have been as late as April, 1929, in New York City. 35. Jane Gaines, “The Scar of Shame: Skin Color and Caste in Black Silent Melodrama,” in Valerie Smith, ed., Representing Blackness, p. 69. 36. Cripps, “Race Movies,” p. 56. 37. For an interesting discussion of “the case for the culpability of the upper as well as the lower classes” as supported by the structure of The Scar of Shame, see Gaines, FD, pp. 109–12. 38. George Johnson, Interview, Oral History Research Project, UCLA, Tape Two, July 28, 1968. 39. Bowser and Spence, p. 40. 40. For a good history of the Lafayette Players, see Sister Francesca Thompson, “From Shadows ’n Shufflin’ to Spotlights and Cinema: The Lafayette Players, 1915– 1932,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, pp. 19–33. 41. Bogle, TCMMB, p. 114. 42. Gerald R. Butters, Jr., “Centering Black Women: The Silent Films of Oscar Micheaux,” Finding Their Voices: The Representation of African American Women in Silent Film, http://normanstudios.org/nsdrc/project/butters-presentation/. 43. Bowser and Spence, p. 164. 44. Butters, “Centering Black Women.” 45. Bowser and Spence, p. 132. 46. Stewart, p. 227.

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47. Ibid., p. 228. Stewart adds that the flashback to Sylvia’s past makes clear the details of her being orphaned, rendered homeless, sexually attacked, and revealed to be biracial. “She is the product, and victim, of illicit racial relations, a southern legacy she can never escape.” 48. J. Ronald Green, With a Crooked Stick: The Films of Oscar Micheaux (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), p. 46. 49. Bowser and Spence, p. 133. 50. Green, Crooked Stick, p. 40. Bowser and Spence, p. 134, raise the same question. 51. Gaines, “Fire and Desire,” in Manthia Diawara, ed., Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp, 56–57. 52. Gaines, FD, p. 177. 53. Stewart, p. 230. Bambara’s quote, cited by Stewart, is taken from comments in the video film Midnight Ramble: Oscar Micheaux and the Story of Race Movies, directed by Bestor Cram and Pearl Bowser, The American Experience, 1994. 54. Cited in Bowser and Spence, p. 126. Not only, they write, is Within Our Gates a film by the oppressed showing their oppression. It is also “an expression of creative power” and “an important resistance to a system that would prefer opposition to be voiceless. . . . It is within these gates that the symbolic and political complexity of the discourses on religion, education, voting, service, miscegenation, peonage, and lynching are formed” (p. 155). 55. Ibid., p. 141. 56. The final scene parallels (and reverses) the earlier scene, in the same house (at the same window), in which Conrad rejects Sylvia. 57. Green, Crooked Stick, pp. 43, 8. Green also comments on Sylvia’s earlier daydream of standing together with Vivian as a couple, gazing out of the window with their backs to the camera, then turning inward toward each other and toward the camera, their hands intertwined, forming the familiar portrait of a happy middle-class couple. “This shot will be replicated in the last shot of the film, when it will finally happen ‘in reality,’ not in daydream.” 58. Gaines, FD, p. 63. 59. Bowser and Spence, p. 168. That tenuous identity marks him as “a man driven by fear” who uses the Klan as a personal instrument of revenge. 60. Ibid., pp. 38–39. 61. Gaines, FD, p. 213. 62. Green, Crooked Stick, pp. 61, 63. 63. Ibid., p. 63. 64. Reid, p. 15. 65. Images of Washington appear in many of Micheaux’s films, including Within Our Gates and Body and Soul. Micheaux, who believed in Washington’s philosophies and especially in Washington’s admonition to Blacks to construct rather than destruct, even dedicated his first book, The Conquest (1913), to the “Honorable Booker T. Washington.” 66. The definitive study of Black manhood is Gerald R. Butters, Black Manhood on the Silent Screen (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002). An interesting

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but less comprehensive study is Kimberly Fain, Black Hollywood: From Butlers to Superheroes, the Changing Role of African American Men in the Movies (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015). 67. Field, pp. 254–55. 68. Ibid., p. 256. Field cites Charles Musser, “To Redream the Dreams of White Playwrights,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, p. 128. 69. Bowser and Spence, p. 192. 70. Green, Crooked Stick, p. 77. 71. Reid, p. 33. 72. Elise Johnson McDougald, the first African American full principal of a public school in New York City, wrote that one of the ways that Black women can and must promote uplift is through education. In “The Negro Woman Teacher and the Negro Student,” originally published in Messenger, July, 1922, and reprinted in Martha H. Patterson, ed., The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894–1930 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), pp. 200–202, she observed that “throughout the North and the South, urban and rural teachers form an earnest and forward-looking body of women.” The Negro woman teacher is qualified for her unique task, “her inspiration [being] that the hope of the race is in the New Negro student.” It is up to her to “prepare the individual for a better world” by stimulating students’ spirits and showing them that they have a contribution to make to their group, to their nation, and to their world—qualities with which, for example, Micheaux endowed Sylvia Landry. 73. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, “New Women in Early 20th-Century America,” August 27, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.427. 74. Saydee E. Parham, in “The New Woman,” originally published in Negro World, February 2, 1944, and reprinted in Martha H. Patterson, pp. 297–99, noted that the New Woman was “at last rising to a pinnacle of power and glory so great, so potential that she has actually become the central figure of all modern civilization.” Parham added that in the business world, in the factories, in the political world, “she is always ready and responsive” to the great appeal and is the “principal actor . . . in the glorious unfolding of the higher and nobler changes” of progress. 75. Mary Murray Washington, writing as Mrs. Booker T. Washington in “The New Negro Woman,” originally published in Edward Everett Hale’s monthly Lend a Hand, October, 1895, pp. 254–60, and reprinted in Martha H. Patterson. 76. Patterson, pp. 54–59. Washington noted that the “negro race of women” was divided into two classes: the class that “had had opportunity to improve and develop themselves mentally, physically, morally, spiritually, and financially, and that class who, because of lack of these advantages, because of their unblamed-for ignorance, who, because of the cruelty of the master for more than two centuries,” has yet to be “lifted up, inspired, taught, and sustained.” After all, Washington asked rhetorically, “Are we all not of one race?” 77. McDougald, “The New Negro Woman,” in Patterson, ed., The American New Woman Revisited, pp. 87–88. 78. Rabinovitch-Fox, “New Women in Early 20th-Century America.” See also Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and

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Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), especially pp. 5–9, 14. 79. Patterson, p. 53. 80. Rabinovitch-Fox, “New Women in Early 20th-Century America.” 81. Eleanor Tayleur, “The Negro Woman—Social and Moral Decadence,” originally published in Outlook (January 30, 1904), reprinted in Patterson, The American New Woman Revisited, pp. 74, 77. 82. “The Sacrifice,” originally published in the Chicago Defender, September 9, 1916, reprinted in Patterson, ed., The American New Woman Revisited, pp. 177– 78. Notably, Abbott later supported the measure in Illinois in 1913 that granted women some voting privileges and agreed that women should have a hand in making the laws by which they are governed. Not surprisingly, the response to the New Negro Woman in the white press was even harsher. 83. Rabinovitch-Fox, “New Women in Early 20th-Century America,” not only discusses the “New Negro Woman” but also contextualizes her in the larger movement, including “The Political New Woman,” the Gibson Girl, and the Flapper. 84. Press materials for The Flying Ace, Black Film Center and Archive, Indiana University. See Barbara Tepa Lupack, Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), especially pp. 171–72. 85. Christina N. Baker, Black Women Directors (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022), p. 5. 86. Kyna Morgan and Aimee Dixon, “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry,” Women Film Pioneers Project (New York: Columbia University Libraries), https://wfpp.columbia.edu/essay/ african-american-women-in-the-silent-film-industry/. 87. Ibid. 88. The Conservatory’s first advertisement—a full-page advertisement placed by Jennie for her art school and photographic studio—appeared in the first issue of the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, in 1909. 89. Kate Abbott, “Jane Louise Van Der Zee: One of the First Black Woman Filmmakers in the Country,” The Berkshire [MA] Eagle, March 29, 2019. 90. Hannah Ahmed, “Legendary Harlemite Jane ‘Jennie’ Louise Van Der Zee Toussaint Welcome, 1885–1956,” https://hundredheroines.org/historical-heroines/ jane-louise-van-der-zee-toussaint-welcome/. 91. For example, “Our First Heros in France,” which pictured Privates Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts of the Fifteenth Infantry of New York, “the first Colored troops to reach the firing line in France and the first two Race men to be awarded the French War Cross for bravery,” was promoted as “The one picture that should be on the walls of every Colored Home in America” because “it encourages the old, inspires the young and teaches the children that bravery shows no color.” The company also advertised a series of pictures of “our first industrial heros,” beginning with Charles Knight, “The World Champion Riveter[,] and His Crew” (Bowser and Spence, p. 108).   92. Abbott, The Berkshire [MA] Eagle.

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  93. “We Are Doing Our Bit,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Online Collection, https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=3050&pid=3. As noted by the Society: “Compared to the very high standard of illustration seen in many World War I posters, the figures in We Are Doing Our Bit are stereotypes and have almost no connection with what troops actually experienced on the Western Front. . . . The artist clearly was not familiar with the details of modern combat: by 1918 German soldiers had long since abandoned their spiked leather helmets in favor of steel ones, and no flags, even tattered ones, flew over late-war battlefields. She did, however, add a telling detail—her African American soldier’s canteen cover bears the number ‘15.’ This is a reference to one of the most famous service American units in World War I, the segregated 369th U.S. Infantry Regiment. The original designation of the 369th had been the 15th Regiment, New York National Guard. The men of the 369th referred to themselves as ‘Rattlers’ (the symbol of the ‘old 15th’ was a rattlesnake), but they were to become legendary as ‘Harlem’s Hellfighters.’”   94. See Paula J. Massood, Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013).   95. Bowser and Spence (p. 108) noted that other filmmakers were proposing or making similar films. The Educational Film Company, for example, was intent on showing the progress of the race, and “one of its first pictures was going to be the Negro Regiment in Richmond, Virginia, the Fifteenth Infantry.” According to the Indianapolis Star, a local filmmaker, L.L. Alexander, had produced “an allegorical picture,” The Negro’s End of a Perfect Day, showing “the negro’s part in all branches of military service and in war work.”  96. Ahmed, n.p. Baker (p. 11) similarly observed that “the film presumably rebelled against the dominant negative ideologies and representations associated with Blackness by depicting Black men as patriotic heroes.”   97. Stewart, p. 191.   98. Ahmed, n.p.   99. Peggy Brooks-Bertram, “Drusilla Dunjee Houston,” Women Film Pioneers Project (New York: Columbia University Libraries), https://wfpp.columbia.edu/ pioneer/drusilla-dunjee-houston/. 100. Peggy Brooks-Bertram and Barbara A. Seals Nevergold, eds., Uncrowned Queens: African American Women Community Builders of Oklahoma, 1907– 2007. Master Plan Project, Oklahoma. 101. Brooks-Bertram, “Drusilla Dunjee Houston.” 102. Kyna Morgan and Aimee Dixon, “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry,” Women Film Pioneers Project. 103. Brooks-Bertram, “Drusilla Dunjee Houston.” 104. Morgan and Dixon, “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry.” Another of the race film companies founded in the Midwest was Peter P. Jones Photoplay (Sampson, pp. 183–84). 105. Yvonne Welbon, Sisters in Cinema: Case Studies of Three First-Time Achievements Made by African American Women Directors in the 1990s. Dissertation, Northwestern University, 2001. 106. Baker, p. 9.

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107. Kyna Morgan, “Maria P. Williams,” Women Film Pioneers Project (New York: Columbia University Libraries), https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/ maria-p-williams/. 108. Norfolk Journal and Guide described it as a mystery drama in five reels, “written, acted and produced entirely by colored people” (cited in Welbon, p. 40; also cited in Morgan, “Maria P. Williams”). 109. Summary provided by Ulf Kjell Gür. 110. Field, pp. 239–40. Field cites Genevie Reubin, “Miss Sarah E. Woods Movie Picture Writer,” Chicago Defender, May 22, 1915. 111. Sampson, p. 270. 112. Green, Crooked Stick, pp. 27–28, 151. 113. Kyna Morgan, “Alice B. Russell,” Women Film Pioneers Project (New York: Columbia University Libraries), https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/aliceb-russell/. Morgan notes that Russell routinely minimized her indispensability to Micheaux and to the motion picture business. Morgan cites a letter that Russell wrote to her sister Ethel in 1948, in which she mentions Micheaux’s travel to Chicago to make a motion picture. But of her own work, she writes only that “He took me along to help him.” 114. According to Charles Musser (as cited by Aimee Dixon Anthony, “Early African-American Filmmakers,” in Melody Bridges and Cheryl Robson, eds., Silent Women: Pioneers of the Cinema [Twickenham: Supernova, 2016], p. 61), the film became a “taboo” subject for both Robesons, an experience that “he and his wife avoided mentioning in writings and interviews.” 115. Kyna Morgan, “Eslanda Robeson,” Women Film Pioneers Project (New York: Columbia University Libraries), https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/ eslanda-robeson/. 116. Jez Conolly, “Close Up Look at Kenneth Macpherson’s Borderline,” Allvoices, https://web.archive.org/web/20131214234900/http:/www.allvoices.com/ contributed-news/6085279-close-up-look-at-kenneth-macphersons-borderline. 117. Anthony, p. 63. 118. Artfully described by Cara Caddoo in Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 119. Gloria J. Gibson, “Cinematic Foremothers,” p. 200, in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle. 120. Ibid., p. 200. 121. Ibid., p. 204. 122. Ibid. 123. Hannah Durkin, “Zora Neale Hurston, Film, and Ethnography,” A History of the Harlem Renaissance, published online by Cambridge University Press, January 20, 2021. 124. Baker, p. 14. 125. Gibson, p. 207. The surviving footage of the youngsters in Children’s Games shows them playing familiar ring, line, performance, and “it” games, including “Little Sally Walker/Water,” in which a child picks the one “she loves the best,” and “Sissy

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in the Barn,” in which the children break into pairs and perform a social dance with their partners. 126. Ibid. 127. Linda Connor and Patsy Asch, “Subjects, Images and Voices: Representing Gender in Ethnographic Film,” Visual Anthropology Review 11:1 (Spring 1995): 5, cited in Gibson, p. 206. 128. Chester J. Fontenot, Jr., “Oscar Micheaux: Black Novelist and Film Maker,” in Virginia Faulkner and Frederick C. Luebke, eds., Visions and Refuge: Essays on the Literature of the Great Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 111. 129. Yearwood, Black as a Signifying Practice, p. 11. 130. Field, p. 228. 131. Regester, “The African-American Press and Race Movies, 1909–1929,” in Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, eds., Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, p. 44.

Chapter 3

Native Americans

Considered one of the first great movie Westerns, The Invaders (Kay-Bee/New York Motion Pictures, 1912) had all the elements that early audiences wanted: grand scale, rugged frontier scenery, realistic period details.1 A far cry from the rudimentary Westerns of just a few years earlier, many of which had been filmed no farther west than New Jersey, the three-reel production used its large canvas to tell an exciting story that, while fictional in its particulars, was rooted in the “achingly authentic history” of the betrayal and mistreatment of Native Americans.2 At the same time, however, it helped to etch into the American consciousness the disparaging but enduring image of the Native American woman as a racial Other, an exotic, sexualized figure who becomes the object of white fascination and desire. The film was shot on location at “Inceville,” the studio ranch operated by director Thomas Ince, an innovator in the early film industry. After a brief stint as an actor in stock companies and on Broadway, Ince had worked as a production coordinator and director at D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Company before joining Carl Laemmle’s New York City-based Independent Moving Picture (IMP) Company. Following a move west to escape the attempts by Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company to drive independents out of the business, he became part of New York Motion Pictures (NYMP), a film production and distribution company that had been formed in 1909 and that, over the next few years, would release films under several different brand names, including 101 Bison, Kay-Bee, Broncho, Domino, Reliance, and Keystone Studios. Ince quickly discovered that NYMP’s California studio in Edendale was inadequate for the kind of epic Western productions such as The Invaders that he wanted to make. So he relocated to a nearby tract of land in the Santa Monica hills known as the Bison Ranch, which he initially rented by the day but later purchased, and then expanded that property with the lease of another 18,000 acres along the Pacific Highway (today, the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway). Owned by the Miller Brothers, 91

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whose popular Wild West Shows had become a national phenomenon, the property stretched up the Santa Ynez Canyon between Santa Monica and Malibu and afforded a wide variety of terrains, from mountains and canyons to sweeping ocean views and Old West vistas. It was there that Ince brought to fruition his ambitious vision of a complete production studio that included elaborate sets, stages, offices, labs, dressing rooms, other film equipment and necessities as well as commissaries large enough to accommodate up to seven hundred actors and workers at any given time.3 According to local historian Katherine La Hue, in addition to the hundreds of horses that he used for filming his action scenes, Ince also kept herds of cattle and raised feed and garden produce, since “supplies of every sort were needed to house and feed a veritable army of actors, directors and subordinates.”4 Large sheds spread across the property stored props that included wagons, stagecoaches, and even a fleet of prairie schooners. Innovations such as these gave Ince a tremendous advantage in meeting the demand for new action features in the theaters. By shooting from detailed scripts, he was able to plan his scenes carefully and efficiently, to control his budgets, and even to engage multiple crews to work on several pictures simultaneously. Dubbed the “King of the Westerns,” he kept his hand in almost every aspect of the films he produced, from script work and cinematography to the writing of the title cards, and reportedly he even rode his horse from one film shoot to another, sometimes directing from the saddle, often with his wife Elinor at his side.5 Ince’s use of genuine props and of real-life cowboy and Native performers hired from actual Wild West shows, many of whom lived on the site, added to the realism of the films and fed moviegoers’ appetites for frontier themes. Distinguished by its compassionate treatment of the Native Americans whose lands had been expropriated, The Invaders proved to be one of Ince’s best and most memorable productions. In the film, after signing a treaty with the United States Government, the Sioux nation cedes a large part of its territory in exchange for the promise that there will be no further settlement of Native lands. But that treaty is broken just a year later, when advance scouts arrive to survey the territory for the coming of the transcontinental railroad. The tensions that arise over the lack of enforcement of the agreement lead to an uprising by the Sioux, who ally themselves with the Cheyenne against the Army forces. After a series of bloody encounters in which each side suffers losses, the uprising is quelled. While notable both for its attempts at authenticity of Western details and its sympathy for the plight of victimized Native Americans, The Invaders was nonetheless quite typical, even stereotypical, in some of its depictions. That was especially true of the main female character Sky Star, daughter of the Sioux chief. Spurning the tribal suitor who had brought her father several

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ponies as a gesture of his earnestness, she goes walking alone in the hills beyond her village. There, she encounters one of the surveyors and is receptive to his amorous advances—so receptive, in fact, that when she returns to the village and learns that the Sioux, angered by the breaking of the treaty, plan an assault on the whites, she immediately rides off to warn the officers at the nearby fort. Interestingly, the first view that the surveyors have of Sky Star is through the lens of their telescope. By means of a clever reverse-shot that mimics the instrument’s apparatus, she is brought into their view as she roams the hills gathering wildflowers. In that moment, as Joanna Hearne has observed, “the land and the woman come to stand for one another as objects of the technologically enhanced gaze of the white surveyors, the invaders of the film’s title, whose economic interests lie in opening Native land to settlers through the railroad.” Their “mediated gaze” of Sky Star is thus a form of possession, a visual apprehension that is a prelude to the actual claiming of Native land.6 On the way to the fort, Sky Star falls from her pony and is injured, but she remounts and rides on, collapsing just as she arrives at the gates. Taken

Fig. 3.1.  The fascination in early film with the “gaze” of white people directed at Native Americans is evident in this image of Sky Star, first seen by white surveyors in a reverse-shot. The Invaders, Kay-Bee/New York Motion Pictures, 1912. Screenshot by author.

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inside, she is treated kindly by Colonel Bryson’s daughter and by the Colonel himself. It is too late, however, to prevent the attack, and a fierce battle ensues. Only after Lieutenant White, fiancé of Miss Bryson, returns from a neighboring fort with reinforcements is the Colonel able to put an end to the assault. By then, though, Sky Star lies dead from her injuries, leaving the whites to gaze at her a final time—this time to mourn her loss as well as to admire her sacrifice. That story line—in which an exotic-looking Native Other, the daughter of the tribe’s chief, is attracted to a white man and disavows her community, betrays her own people, and even sacrifices herself in order to save him and his white friends—was a familiar one; and it was retold in numerous early films. The resolution was familiar as well. Since interracial romances demanded that the Native woman eschew her cultural values and subordinate to the dominant white culture, they usually ended sadly, even tragically, resulting in the woman’s death or some other form of her erasure, either actual or symbolic. As Jacquelyn Kilpatrick explained: since miscegenation was historically a taboo for the Hollywood Indian, “the lovely princess who is enormously attractive must die before any real damage is done to the purity of the [white] gene pool.”7 The clash of Native and Euro-American values and cultures that is central to The Invaders is further underscored by the contrast between Sky Star and Miss Bryson, the Colonel’s daughter (played by Ethel Grandin). The latter, dressed in a long white gown that denotes her racial purity, is conventionally pretty. Reserved, demure, she enjoys—and, apparently, requires—the dual protection of her father and of her beau Lieutenant White. Sky Star, by contrast, wearing the highly-ornamented and colorful Native costume that marks her as a foreign and racialized outsider, is unbound by custom or protocol. She casts aside all caution and rides alone to the fort in order to warn the whites. Her action, though, is both a rejection and a betrayal of her own people, which parallels their betrayal by the government that has reneged on its promises of loyalty and protection. Sky Star’s heroism, if indeed it can even be considered such, is therefore tempered by her impetuousness and naiveté. Her desire to ally herself to the whites is a tacit acknowledgment of their culture as superior, and her attempt to transgress racial barriers contributes to her own untimely death and ultimately to the annihilation of her people. Although she befriends the injured Sky Star, Miss Bryson nonetheless reveals her instinctive fear of the marauding Indians. Terrified of being taken hostage by the hostile warriors who attack the fort, she begs her father to put a bullet through her head. (That radical fear of the racialized Other is echoed most famously in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in the scene in which Flora chooses to leap to her death rather than risk violation by the brutish, lecherous Black renegade Gus, and again later when a father is ready

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to execute his own daughter rather than have her fall into the hands of the rioting Blacks.) But Miss Bryson’s fiancé Lieutenant White, his very name an allusion to his presumed racial and cultural superiority, returns to the fort with cavalry reinforcements in time to save the day, thus ensuring a “white” victory, literally and metaphorically, over the invaders (though, in fact, it is the whites and not the Indians who are the invaders). So even in a film in which the depiction of Native Americans is sympathetic, there is no happy outcome for Sky Star. As in most pictures of the period, her death is inevitable. Playing the part of Army Colonel Bryson was the film’s co-director Francis Ford.8 One of the signers of the original treaty, Bryson feels empathy for the Native Americans whose trust has been broken, and he treats the injured Sky Star at the fort with gentleness and humanity. Sky Star’s father, the Sioux chief, was played by Oglala Sioux William “Good Lance” Eagle Short, a Native actor and screenwriter who was born and raised on the Great Plains of South Dakota. A frequent performer in early Westerns, he is credited with co-writing two films, The Battle of the Red Men and War on the Plains, produced the same year as The Invaders. Yet, consistent with the representation of Native American women in silent film, Sky Star was played not by a Native American actress—although there were certainly several who were available in Inceville alone—but rather by Ann Little, in heavy redface make-up. A common practice reminiscent of the blackface treatment of African American characters in early film and derived from the same nineteenth-century minstrel traditions, redfacing was an immediate visual indicator of racial difference and otherness. As Joanna Hearne observed, it also distanced the Indian image “from the sense of personhood signaled by familial contexts” and worked “to reduce ‘Indianness’ to an accretion of objects” such as generic costumes and hairstyles.9 Little, a white actress who regularly appeared as an Indian princess in Ince’s Westerns, had made her screen debut as Red Feather in The Indian Maiden’s Lesson (1911), opposite Gilbert M. Anderson, best known as the first cowboy movie star (under his stage name Broncho Billy) and a founding partner, with George K. Spoor, of Essanay Studios in 1907. In that picture, she played a typical role, in which she nursed an injured white prospector back to health and later used his Biblical instruction against killing to prevent him from taking revenge on the traitor who had left him to die (another example of the depiction of the Christian faith and white culture seen as being superior to traditional but more primitive Native beliefs).10 Interestingly, although Little was born on a ranch in California, her biographical accounts tried to promote her “authenticity” by suggesting that she indeed had Native American blood—though that claim was likely nothing more than a convenient reinvention by a studio promotional publicist. After all, as Peter Kobel observed, such reinvention was common: spin “became an art form,” and

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even press agents of that era admitted that “none of the publicity was truthful” because newspapers would print anything having to do with movie stars, despite the fact that “ninety percent of it was manufactured.”11 Likewise, the “achingly authentic history” that The Invaders depicted was not nearly as authentic as it purported to be. As so much early cinema tried to do, the film reshaped, reinvented, and retold the Native American story from a white perspective and largely for the enjoyment of a white movie audience, thus creating a dual stereotype that simultaneously romanticized the Indian warrior as a noble child of nature and vilified him as a blood-thirsty, vengeful savage. And, in the case of Sky Star, the film reduced her to an even more circumscribed and tragic type: the doomed “princess” whose allegiance to the whites over her own tribe reinforces the suggestion of the superiority of Euro-American culture and justifies the attempts at conquest and assimilation. Moreover, as Adrian S.A. Manning observed, her sexuality or promiscuousness “validates the American culture’s masculine privilege of sexual conquest.”12 REAL VS. REEL HISTORY The fascination with Native Americans derived not only from their exoticism and from the alienness of their culture but also from their intrinsic role in the national mythology of conquest, rugged individualism, and frontier spirit that characterized the western expansion and helped to define the American experience. The westward movement actually started, as Jim Hitt observed, “the moment the first explorers set foot on the American soil.”13 But it was the convergence of social, economic, and political factors beginning in the early nineteenth century that truly accelerated that expansion and initiated the displacement of Native peoples from their lands and the decimation of their culture. The mass immigration from Europe had swelled the East Coast of the United States to record population numbers, while the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 broadened the country’s boundaries and pushed both the population and the economy to the west. The presence of American Indian tribes living on the lands east of the Mississippi that bordered white settlements, however, presented a real obstacle to that expansion and to America’s economic and social development, especially as settlers became increasingly eager to appropriate the rich acreage that was home to tribal nations.14 The concept of Manifest Destiny to which many Americans subscribed held that such expansion was justifiable, inevitable, and divinely ordained. By retaining large tracts that were uncultivated and unspoiled for hunting, the tribes were thought to be squandering the land’s potential and impeding progress by preventing further settlement. So the seizing, settling, and cultivating

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of those territories seemed, to some, to be Americans’ obligation—their “manifest destiny.”15 The seizure was further justified by a rationalization that the removal of Indians would actually benefit them by introducing them to Eurocentric ways and culture, teaching them Christian values, and helping to assimilate them into white society—a rationalization that would continue to frame policy and shape perceptions of Native Americans well into the twentieth century, especially through the new medium of film, in which the clash of cultures became a central theme. The idea of relocation actually harked back to Thomas Jefferson, who, in a letter to Marquis de Chastellux in 1785, wrote that he “believe[d] the Indian to be in body & mind equal to the whiteman.”16 Nonetheless, Jefferson found the Native lifestyle and semi-nomadic traditions such as communal agricultural practices and hunting methods to be culturally inferior. Drawing on the Enlightenment notion of environmentalism—that is, that environment, including geography and climate, could affect appearance, culture, and political organization—Jefferson felt that by assuming a more Euro-oriented model, Native Americans could evolve from their natural albeit noble “savage” state to a more civilized one and “become one people with us.”17 Yet he soon began moving away from the prospect of Indian assimilation and toward dispossession, insisting that white settlement will “circumscribe & approach the Indians,” who will have to incorporate as citizens or face removal.18 It was Jefferson’s successor James Monroe who pushed for a more structured policy of removal and land acquisition. In a special message to Congress in 1825, he explicitly proposed the relocation of all American Indians east of the Mississippi to settlements in the west, arguing that “Experience has clearly demonstrated that, in their present state, it is impossible to incorporate them in such masses, in any form whatever, into our system.”19 That policy was formalized during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, a long-time proponent of removal. Signed into law in 1830, the Indian Removal Act, like so much later legislation, purported to be a humanitarian initiative that would benefit Native Americans and preserve tribal life. According to the conditions and offers that Jackson proposed, each tribe would receive a territory exceeding the size that they had relinquished. They would be moved to that new territory at the government’s expense, and for a year after their arrival, they would be supplied with clothing, arms, ammunition, and other provisions. As further incentive, their schools would be supported and the welfare of their poor would be assured. Most significantly, perhaps, in their new homeland, the Native peoples would be guaranteed the protection of the United States Government forever—such arrangements, Jackson insisted, being “for the physical comfort and for the moral improvement of the Indians.”20 Despite the myriad of pledges to provide improvement and to promote “liberty, civilization, and religion,” the Indian Removal Act had a much more

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insidious intent: to divest Indian tribes of their eastern land in exchange for less valuable and less productive lands in the west. With the act in place, Jackson and his followers were free to ignore the earlier assurances to negotiate treaties fairly, peacefully, and voluntarily. Instead, they began persuading, bribing, and threatening tribes into leaving. And indeed, by the end of his presidency, almost seventy removal treaties had been concluded and nearly 50,000 Indians had been relocated to the so-called “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi. The tribes that were unwilling to assimilate or to accept displacement voluntarily were forcibly removed. In the winter of 1831, the Choctaw became the first nation to be expelled from their long-held lands and compelled to make the arduous westward trek on foot, without food, supplies, or assistance from the government. As they marched on the “trail of tears and death”—the name given to the 1,200-mile journey by one of the Choctaw leaders—they suffered untold privation and indignities; some were even bound in chains. The forced removal that continued over the next decade subjected the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, and Chickasaw nations, among others, to similar mistreatment; and they too suffered exposure, disease, and starvation along the route. It was, as some historians have observed, the nation’s original sin21 and one for which some early filmmakers would try to atone. Even after tens of thousands of Native Americans had been driven from their land and relocated across the Mississippi, the federal government reiterated its promise that their new land would remain unmolested forever. But as the line of white settlement pushed westward, “Indian Country,” which was concentrated in what later became Oklahoma, continued to shrink. By the time that Oklahoma gained statehood in 1907, the area that had been Indian Territory was gone for good,22 leaving only a nostalgia for a vanishing wilderness that manifested itself in the culture and was evoked in early film. Despite the horrors and betrayals that they experienced due to the government’s aggressive attempts at ethnic cleansing, some of the relocated Native Americans tried to reestablish their communities and their way of life (efforts largely overlooked in cinematic depictions). The Cherokee, for example, under the leadership of Principal Chief John Ross, were able to organize businesses, initiate a public school system, and even publish what was then the only tribal newspaper. The American Civil War, however, brought new tensions as the Native peoples formed new alliances, almost all of which were motivated by a common desire to protect their remaining tribal lands and preserve their lifeways. The Museum of the American Indian estimates that over 3,500 Native Americans served in the Union Army, while even larger numbers allied themselves with the Confederacy. And still others participated indirectly, aiding or sabotaging one side or another while remaining outside

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the military. Rather than encouraging the federal government to acknowledge their service and to honor treaties that recognized tribal land rights, though, the war exacted a terrible toll on the Native nations. Among the Cherokee and Seminole in Indian Territory alone, one third died from violence, starvation, and war-related illness. Ultimately, despite their sacrifice, American Indians would discover that their tribal lands were even less secure after the war than they were before.23 Conditions did not improve in the ensuing decade. By the 1880s, almost all Native Americans had been voluntarily or forcibly relocated and detained on reservation lands that were generally so undesirable that whites had little use for or interest in them. The rations and supplies promised through the various treaties proved to be at best inadequate, at worst non-existent. Assimilation continued to be the policy aim of the federal government, increasingly so as the arrival of the railroad brought new waves of settlers into formerly Indian lands24—another recurring theme in early silent films such as The Invaders. THE DAWES ACT An even more devastating blow came as a result of the Dawes Act passed in 1887 under President Grover Cleveland, which outlawed tribal ownership of lands and allowed the federal government the right to offer homesteads to individual Indians and their families, with the promise of future citizenship to those Native men who accepted the terms. On the surface, the Dawes Act seemed well-intentioned, a way of promoting assimilation into mainstream U.S. society by encouraging Native peoples to pursue traditional farming and ranching on individually-owned plots of land, just as white homesteaders did. In fact, the measure led to the destruction of social cohesion among the tribes and created discord among them. Reminiscent of the displacement caused by the earlier Indian Removal Act of 1830, which freed Native lands for white settlement, the Dawes Act permitted the government to strip millions of acres of tribal land from Native Americans and in turn to sell it to non-natives.25 Specifically, the act provided one hundred and sixty acres of farmland or three hundred and twenty acres of grazing land to the head of each Native American family, an acreage allowance that was comparable to those promised to white settlers by the Homestead Act of 1862. But, according to the National Parks Service, there were important differences between the two acts. Foremost was the fact that the homesteads being offered to Native peoples were part of their own lands—that is, lands already, by treaty, under Native American control. Moreover, those allotments came with a new set of restrictions and conditions, including required registration with the Office

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of Indian Affairs (now known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs), which would help to determine the assignments and, in theory, provide an equitable distribution of the monies from the sales of surplus lands.26 The allocations and distributions, though, were anything but fair. The act itself overrode earlier treaties and regional tribal laws; some of the assigned homesteads proved unsuitable for farming, which was the ostensible purpose; and even on those that were, the life of standardized ranching and agriculture was not one to which Native Americans were accustomed. The compensation, if any, for appropriated territories was unreasonably low, while the Native people, unused to spending money for goods, quickly expended what little they received and were soon left without resources or recourse. At the same time, unscrupulous individuals capitalized on the prospect of land acquisition by claiming Native American heritage and cheating actual Natives out of the property that was their due. In the end, the majority of the one hundred and fifty million acres in their possession before the Dawes Act was lost to them. A further attempt to annihilate Native culture and social traditions was the establishing of residential boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Intended to “civilize” Native youngsters by assimilating them into white Euro-American culture, those schools— which often employed brutality, abuse, and sexual and psychological violation—merely stripped them of their Native names, language, customs, and other cultural identifiers, violations to which a number of early films alluded. THE GHOST DANCE MOVEMENT What whites viewed as attempts at assimilation, Native Americans rightly perceived as threats to their tribalism and culture. With all hope for military victory over the U.S. Army dashed and with no foreseeable relief for the poverty that had become rampant and endemic, some Native Americans responded to the unwelcome and ongoing white incursions by reverting to traditional practices.27 One of the most sensational was the messianic Ghost Dance movement that originated in the West among the Paiute in Nevada around 1870. Revived in the late 1880s across the Great Plains as a way of manifesting resistance to the Dawes Act and similarly oppressive legislation, it was associated with the visionary Wovoka, a shaman (medicine man) who foretold the extinction of white men and the return of Indian superiority. According to his prophecy, the earth would be renewed by a reuniting of the living with the spirits of their dead ancestors, who would rise to fight on their behalf to end colonial expansion into the west. Once the whites were eliminated, the buffalo would return, and peace and prosperity for the Native Americans would be restored.28 The appeal of Wovoka’s visionary religion

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was its promise of deliverance, which was welcomed by a people who had been defeated militarily, removed from their Native lands, forced onto reservations, and subjected to numerous indignities by a government that had consistently failed to uphold its agreements. An integral part of the practice was the actual circle dance. Dressed in ceremonial clothing painted with magical symbols and “ghost shirts” that were said to make wearers immune to injury or death, the dancers would frantically and feverishly maintain the ritual for days at a time. Their militance instilled terror in white settlers, who feared that the Ghost Dance foreshadowed an Indian uprising, which they believed could be quelled only by the intervention of the U.S. Military. And the response of the federal government was precisely that: a military solution that ended the movement, confiscated weapons, and suppressed the Native opposition. That suppression, though, had a particularly tragic result and led directly to the massacre on December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, during which as many as 300 Lakota—men, women, and children, including those who were simply trying to flee—were slaughtered by the Seventh Cavalry. While the massacre brought an end to organized resistance to reservation life, it marked an especially grim and bloody moment in American and Native history.29 By the beginning of the film era only a few years later, much had changed. The American landscape had been radically altered, both literally and metaphorically. The frontier had been settled. The West had been “won.” Most Native American males (though notably not the women) had been granted citizenship. And the actual and often-bloody conflicts were starting to fade into memory, mediated by a nostalgia for a distant past and an unspoiled place now lost to civilization—a nostalgia inherently paradoxical, since it concealed Americans’ own complicity in the process of destruction that they seemed to mourn.30 Native Americans themselves, however, remained the object of almost universal fascination; and the post-turn-of-the-century popular culture, particularly the emerging medium of film, became a powerful force in revising, re-writing, and romanticizing their image and re-casting their role in the construction of a new national identity. COOPER’S FRONTIER Just as the representation of African Americans in the early years of film derived in part from the plantation literature and minstrel shows of the late nineteenth-century, many of the early screen images of Native Americans harked back to the frontier literature of writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, the ubiquitous dime novels that sensationalized the western expansion, and the popular Wild West shows that visualized those stories, all of

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which re-created (or, in some cases, created) the pioneer mythology for audiences anxious to embrace a gauzier vision of the past. It was Cooper, in particular, who imagined the vivid portrait of western life that advanced the notion of American exceptionalism. After all, as Jacquelyn Kilpatrick noted, “the West made a perfect crucible for the development of mythology intrinsically American” by providing a challenge against which Euro-Americans, particularly white males, could pit themselves.31 Drawing on the subjects and especially the landscape of his native land, Cooper introduced themes of the frontier, the westward movement, and the interracial conflicts between whites and Indians that would shape the romantic image of the American West for years to come. In his historical romances, which were set largely in the Cooperstown area of central New York, he established a kind of template for Native heroes that later novelists and film producers would imitate. His rugged nature-loving hero Natty Bumppo, an almost elegiac figure, opposes the “march of progress” and laments the disappearing wilderness. Neither a “naturalized” nor a “civilized” man, he is an American individualist—an American Adam, to use R.W.B. Lewis’s term32—who creates a new society by a code of personal fulfilment under sound moral self-guidance, improvising as he goes along. A figure who resonated with readers and helped frame the perception of Native Americans in the American consciousness, Cooper’s “forest hero,” as Scott Simmon noted, is, like Cooper’s Indians, “equally doomed to extinction without heirs.”33 The significance of Cooper’s vision was in the way that he designed a deft catharsis that found acceptance in tragic closure, ensuring, as Eran Zelnik observed, that “the reader mourns the demise of the wilderness and its inhabitants yet accepts it as necessary.”34 Accordingly, Cooper’s Native Americans were neither simple nor stock figures but rather complex and often sharply contrasting characters; and their conflicted representations were quite in line with the very dichotomized thinking of his day.35 The villainous and vengeful Huron Magua in The Last of the Mohicans, for instance, betrays the whites out of the fear of the extinction of his race at their hands and plays on white prejudice by threatening to marry a white woman, the daughter of camp commandant Colonel Monro (interracial marriage being a familiar and provocative motif in early films). Conversely, Mohican chief Chingachgook, a uniquely American mythologizing of the noble savage, is not just Natty Bumppo’s long-time friend but also his noble, courageous, and heroic counterpart.36 There is also a certain complexity to Cooper’s women.37 As Nina Baym has noted, unlike the white women in Cooper’s novels who are largely dependent on the men around them for protection, direction, and decision, the Indian women “fend for themselves and do quite well at it,” even when their role in an “inferior” civilization compels them to labor for husbands who often treat

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them indifferently and “are ready to discard them if another woman catches their fancy.”38 At the same time, characters such as Chingachgook’s wife Hist, whose gentle nature and tenderness represent the best of Indian womanhood, confirm that Native Americans are as capable of love and emotion as whites. Since audiences wanted stirring and romanticized stories of frontier and Native life and since producers often looked to works of literature on which to base their pictures, Cooper’s popular novels became an obvious choice for adaptation. In the silent era alone, there were at least twenty pictures based on his work, beginning with Vitagraph’s one-reel The Spy (1907) and including a Chaplinesque comedy spoof The Last of the Mohee-cans (1926).39 DIME NOVELS Just as important to the perception of the Native American in popular culture and in early films were dime novels, which inherited their quintessential frontier hero from Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. A loner perfectly adapted to his wilderness environment, the dime novel hero was usually a white man who rejected civilized life in favor of a higher moral order shaped by the natural world. A mediating figure, he was associated with the “good” Natives while assisting the forces of progress.40 Transformed from Cooper’s woodsman into a gun-toting cowboy, he sought to eliminate the opponents of civilization, be they Indians or outlaws.41 Sensational stories filled with romance and adventure, the dime novels typically sold for a nickel or two, which gave them their name. Usually short (sometimes as few as eight pages in length), they were simple in plot and style and colorful, even provocative, in their illustration. Written by female as well as male authors—some of whom, like Horatio Alger, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London, published under pen-names—the novels were geared to the working-class reader but also attracted audiences across social, gender, and ethnic lines. Yet while they embraced a variety of topics, from Gothic thrillers to detective mysteries, among the best-selling subjects was the American Indian, especially the Indian princess, who provided readers with the exhilaration and the titillation they sought.42 The first book to be called a dime novel—so named by its publisher Beadle and Adams43—was Malaeska, The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860), written by Mrs. Ann Sophia Stephens. A reworking of the Pocahontas story in which the legendary princess turned her back on her own people, allied herself with the English, and adopted their culture,44 Malaeska recounted a tragic interracial union between a white hunter and an Indian princess who ultimately loses her husband and her son and who dies “the heart-broken victim of an unnatural marriage.” A simultaneous critique of white supremacy

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and patriarchy, it “appeal[ed] to women’s shared predicaments as wives, daughters, and mothers to expose the violence of white dominance and its destructive impact on both Native Americans and whites.” Not only did the novel raise surprisingly modern issues of race and gender; it also established several elements that would come to characterize the popular Western in later novels and films: interracial romance, the distinction between “good” and “bad” Indians, and a stirring melodramatic plot.45 Not all dime novels, though, were as sympathetic to their Native subjects as Malaeska was. Most, in fact, re-imagined the American West with myths of violent transgressions and thrilling rescues, thereby perpetuating many of the most insidious stereotypes of Native Americans that continue to influence American popular culture today. Stories such as Friedrich Gerstäcker’s The Giant Trailer, or, The Lost Scalp: A Romance of the Gold Regions (1875) and War Axe, or, The Trapper’s Revenge: A Romance of the Apache Trail (1875) justified Western expansion and Indian genocide to their readers, who accepted these often-sensationalized depictions of Indian savagery as authentic.46 Especially popular were the captivity narratives in which a white woman (or, occasionally, a white man) is kidnapped by Indians and sometimes even comes to sympathize with the abductors.47 That theme—explored in dime novels such as Newton Mallory Curtis’s Old Tiger, the Patriot, or, The Heroine of the Mohawk: A Tale of Patriot Devotion and Tory Treachery (1875), in which a white woman demonstrates her patriotism by resisting marriage to the Tory baronet who redeems her from her Indian captors, and others such as C.L. Edwards’ Silver Tongue, the Dacotah Queen, or, Pat among the Red-Skins: Romance of the Indian Country (1864) and George Henry Prentice’s On the Border, or, The Bride of the Wilderness: An Episode of the Border (1877)—rarely culminated happily, since, as in Malaeska (and as in many early silent films), interracial romance almost always ensured violent tragedy or erasure of Native identity and culture.48 The most influential of the dime novelists was Edward Zane Carroll Judson, Sr., better known by his pseudonym Ned Buntline. It was Judson, the author of more than four hundred dime novels over the course of his lifetime, who was responsible for creating some of the most highly romantic and often misleading images of the American West. Since most Americans had never encountered an actual Native American, they found those images irresistible and readily accepted them as honest representations. A prolific writer who reportedly once wrote sixty thousand words in six days, Judson realized that readers found special pleasure in Indian thrillers, particularly those that featured prominent female characters, so he continued to crank them out for receptive audiences.49 Judson is also remembered for discovering former buffalo hunter, U.S. Army scout, and Pony Express rider William Frederick Cody, whom

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he transformed into the iconic “Buffalo Bill.” The two met in Nebraska, as Judson was returning from a temperance speaking tour in California. Recognizing the financial potential in dramatizing and visualizing the West for an even broader audience, he persuaded Cody to star in his melodrama The Scouts of the Prairie, which opened at Nixon’s Amphitheatre in Chicago in 1872. Despite a somewhat shaky start on stage, Cody confirmed Judson’s suspicions that he was a talented entertainer and a natural showman who could draw enormous crowds—not because he was a good actor but because he was an authentic relic of the Old West. Judson also capitalized on Cody’s reputation in other ways, particularly through the dime novels he wrote, beginning with Buffalo Bill, The King of Border Men: The Wildest and Truest Story I Ever Wrote (1869–1870). WILD WEST SHOWS After a few years with the Scouts, Cody—by then the subject of thousands of dime novels, not only by Buntline but also by other writers—decided to leave the show and organize his own bigger, better, and even more extravagant production, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, which re-created exciting events from the Civil War, Indian battles, and buffalo hunts. (Reportedly, Cody deliberately left off the word “show” because he felt it diminished his productions, which he claimed were samples of the genuine Old West itself.)50 A popular pageant of historical melodrama and sensational displays of shooting and riding, that outdoor spectacle featured hundreds of trick-riders, expert marksmen and markswomen like Annie Oakley, and loudly-whooping, war-painted, tomahawk-wielding Indians, including the legendary Sitting Bull (who became part of the show, briefly, in 1885).51 Performed at Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 and staged throughout Europe, the show, renamed Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, kept adding new acts, drawing increasingly larger crowds, and burnishing Cody’s legend so that by the end of the century, he was one of the best-known men in the world.52 As acclaimed Western novelist Larry McMurtry explained, Cody’s entrepreneurial knack was in taking the kinds of pageants created by impresario P.T. Barnum and focusing them on the West, the conquest of which “thus came to seem a triumphant national venture. The audiences not only bought it, they loved it, at least as long as Cody was there himself.”53 Even after financial and personal hardships forced him to close his Wild West shows, Cody, the ultimate showman, continued to capitalize on and to monetize his image by re-creating it in a number of early films.

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It was the tremendous nostalgia for a rapidly disappearing frontier that made the Wild West shows so appealing and so iconic. And, without question, the Native Americans, who were integral to the shows’ popularity, provided the most enduring imagery. Yet, as Paul Fees, former curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum, observed, the role of the Native performers was as anomalous as it was essential. On the one hand, they were generally treated well and paid the same as other performers, and they had opportunity to travel with their families and earn a living not possible for them on the reservations. Encouraged by Buffalo Bill to retain their language and rituals, many were able to gain access to political and economic leaders. There was, however, a significant downside: stereotyped as “mounted, war-bonneted warriors, the last impediment to civilization,” they had to re-fight a losing war nightly; and “their hollow victory in the Little Big Horn enactments demonstrated over and over to their audiences the justification for American conquest.”54 That powerful and persistent stereotype perpetuated by the Wild West shows also made the Native Americans easy targets for historians in the telling of the story of the winning of the West. “Buffalo Bill and his many imitators became metaphors as agents of a ravaged wilderness, the exploiters cast as heroes,” while the “Show Indians became symbols of debauched humanity.”55 Native American women (and women posing as Native Americans) proved to be a special draw in the Wild West shows. The legendary Annie Oakley performed at least one of her acts in Buffalo Bill’s spectacle dressed in Native costume. Her rival Lillian Smith, billed as “Champion Rifle Shot of the World,” also performed with Buffalo Bill but gained even more notoriety after joining Mexican Joe’s Wild West, where she darkened her face, appropriated the princess mystique, and started posing as “Princess Wenona, The Indian Girl Shot.” Despite being the nearly thirty-year-old daughter of New England Quakers, she passed herself off as the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Sioux chief named Crazy Horse and a white woman; and she claimed to have been born in a “tepee on the south bank of the Big Cheyenne, near Fort Bennett, Dakota.” Her extraordinary shooting prowess, she boasted, had been bestowed upon her by supernatural spirits of the Indian world.56 Smith’s popularity spurred numerous imitators on the Wild West circuit, among them “Princess Mohawk” and “Princess Kiowa” (Lillian’s younger sister Nellie).57 A few, like “Princess Blue Waters” who proved to be a favorite of the Prince of Wales during Cody’s London engagement in 1887, had actual Native roots.58 But most were “Show Indians” created to capitalize on audience interest.59 Like the dime novels that helped to popularize them, the Wild West shows had a deep and profound cultural significance and became a key way that many Americans learned about Indian identity and customs. Moreover, the shows influenced early cinema, which effectively replaced them as mass

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popular entertainments. The shows also served as the subject of several of the earliest known films, marking an even smoother transition from the live to the cinematic spectacle.60 Many of the early film performers, including Tom Mix and Will Rogers, launched their careers in the frontier shows; and Buffalo Bill himself became a silent-film audience favorite. NATIVE AMERICANS IN EARLY FILM The first known appearance of Native Americans on screen is in Sioux Ghost Dance (1894; dir. W.K.L. Dickson), a kinetoscope film produced by Thomas Edison at his Black Maria studio facility in West Orange, New Jersey. Filmed the same day as the similarly-themed Buffalo Dance (1894; dir. W.K.L. Dickson), it featured Hair Coat, Lost Horse, Parts His Hair, and other Lakota members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show performing a Ghost Dance.61 Also produced at the Edison Studio was Indian War Council (1894; dir. W.K.L. Dickson), in which the real-life Buffalo Bill addresses a council of Sioux Indians as they deliberate.62 All of these films, Alex W. Bordino writes, inaugurated the new medium by invoking colonial practices already common in nineteenth-century theatrical production sites; but while they “aligned with a broadly conceived attempt to re-create culture” through what Bordino called a “salvage ethnography,” they offered little, if any, educational commentary.63 What they did afford viewers, however, was “a new kind of endlessly available tourist gaze for the masses, recycling contemporary racist modes of understanding ‘exotic’ cultures; and they challenged already prevailing notions of Native Americans as an extinct people relegated to dusty anthropological monographs and sepia-toned photographs.”64 A variety of Indian-themed shorts followed, among them Buck Dance, Ute Indians (1898), Eagle Dance, Pueblo Indians (1898), Parade of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (1898), and Procession of Mounted Indians and Cowboys (1898).65 Those films whetted the public’s appetite for other comparably “exotic” performances. The fascination with Cody was especially keen: over the next two decades, he served as the subject of numerous pictures such as Le Cirque Buffalo Bill Peaux Rouges (La Societé Lumière, ca. 1896 or 1897), Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Pawnee Bill’s Far East (1910), A Day with the Wild West Show (1917), and With Buffalo Bill on the U.P. Trail (1925). Understanding the power of the new medium, Cody eventually went into filmmaking on his own. The 1912 film, The Life of Buffalo Bill, produced by the Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill Film Company, for example, was an attempt to highlight his achievements. And The Indian Wars (1914; Essanay, with Col. Wm. F. Cody Historical Picture Company, dir. Vernon Day and Theodore Wharton) re-cast the fighting, including the massacre at Wounded

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Fig. 3.2.  Sioux Ghost Dance (1894), directed by W.K.L. Dickinson and staged at the Edison Studio in New Jersey, is considered to be the first appearance of Native Americans on film. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Knee, as a series of successful, heroic, and justifiable “battles,” with Buffalo Bill playing his singular role. A propaganda piece, it ended with scenes of Native Americans enjoying “civilized” life on the reservations in government schools and on farms, footage intended to validate and valorize the cavalry troops who fought the Indians and to show the generosity of the U.S. Government toward a defeated enemy. It was, as Jacquelyn Kilpatrick wrote, “an excellent example of the re-writing of the history of Indian-white relations, with the cinematic version becoming a hyper-reality.”66 NATIVE AMERICAN STEREOTYPES Closely associated with the closing of the American frontier and the vanishing wilderness, American Indians were regarded as being historic yet mysterious. Consequently, as Gregory S. Jay observed, they immediately and powerfully attracted the gaze of white people, “who for centuries had produced cultural

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representations of the racial other in a variety of artistic, intellectual, and scientific genres.” And since their stories provided the kind of conflict-oriented action (battles, chases, combat) that the camera loved, they were an ideal subject for early movie makers, who adapted stock narrative episodes from literature, photography, painting, and medicine shows to the dramatic pace and visual power of the new medium.67 From 1908 until 1912, as Peter Kobel observed in Silent Movies, “Native Americans appeared on screen more than in any other period in film history,” with between one and two hundred Indian/Western/cowboy one-reelers produced each year through 1914.68 Nonetheless, despite the fascination with and the ubiquity of Native Americans in film and in popular culture, their representation remained formulaic and clichéd. Depictions of Native American men continued to fall largely into two categories: noble and ignoble savages. The “Noble Savage,” a term ascribed to eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was perceived and portrayed as a child of nature “in a sylvan idyll free from the encumbrances of civilization [and] offered European social philosophers a vision of a simpler time, a golden age, when humans lived in harmony with nature.”69 A representative of the primitive and innate goodness of humanity free from the corrupting influence of civilization, he inevitably became the victim of aggressive white attempts to dominate and assimilate. The ignoble savage, on the other hand, was barbaric—blood-thirsty, vengeful, untamed, menacing, and sexually threatening. His violence, therefore, provided a justification for his extermination. Native American women did not fare much better. In fact, they were even more circumscribed in their cinematic typing. Silent Others—silent, because even in their own culture they played subordinate roles; Others, because their customs and practices clashed with those of white society and differentiated them from the Euro-American ideal of the white woman—they often appeared as desexualized “squaws,” incidental but sympathetic figures treated as drudges by their indolent husbands. Ranked low in the tribal patriarchal hierarchy, they were typically relegated to the background and largely ignored by audiences and by filmmakers. “Squaws suffered,” noted John M. Coward. “They begged or worked” and were often portrayed as “rough, rude, and grubby”; their toil rendered them “dirty and inferior.” Much of the hard work of the community fell upon them and demanded their labor and sacrifice.70 So their cinematic depictions were rather static. Alternatively, some “squaws” were portrayed as comic foils, as in An Up-to-Date Squaw (Pathé Frères, 1911), in which Ko-To-Sho, the Chief’s wife, admires the clothing worn by visiting tourists. In imitation of their elegant hats, she places a flat basket on her head; and the next day, after stealing away from the reservation, she decks herself out in new finery and parades through the town. Her appearance and demeanor lead to a series of humorous

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misunderstandings, including the attention she garners from an English dandy who mistakes her for a white woman. The dandy is soon “scalped” by Ko-To-Sho’s jealous husband; but the scalping is painless, since it turns out that the Englishman is wearing a wig. The comedy, drawing on the vaudeville tradition, makes Ko-To-Sho an object of ridicule at the same time that the anomaly of an Indian woman in such an incongruous situation—that is, shopping in town for “white” clothes—makes audiences “momentarily aware of the stereotypes as constructions while remaining embedded in the historical stereotypes that mark the moment as anomalous.”71 And in the comedy The Paleface (1922), Buster Keaton, a butterfly collector who wanders onto an Indian reservation, helps the tribe save their land from greedy oil barons, and is rewarded in the end by marriage to an “Indian squab [sic].” Although most of the “squaw” roles (like the term “squaw” itself) were demeaning, the occasional contemporary actress was able to make that role uniquely her own. Such was the case with Minnie Ha Ha (also known as Minnie Devereaux, Minnie Prevost/Provost, and Indian Minnie).72 As the star of more than fifteen films, most of them directed by Mack Sennett, she managed, as Michelle H. Raheja observed, to get the last laugh.73 For example, in the film Fatty and Minnie He-Haw (Keystone Film Company, 1914), a slapstick Western directed by Eddie Dillon and Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle, who also co-starred, Minnie stole the show. After the grifter Fatty is kicked off a train, he feigns injury and is rescued by her. An unmarried woman who nonetheless holds a position of prominence among her people, Minnie brings him back to her Indian village, where she attempts to seduce him and offers him, as the intertitle states, “her maiden heart in marriage.” When he balks and runs away to be with a white woman (played by Fatty’s real-life wife Minta Durfee), Minnie pursues him, shooting up a saloon with her gun and scattering the terrified men inside. The film’s Minnie is, to be sure, a singular character. Despite being overweight and dark-skinned and therefore not conforming to western standards of beauty, she demonstrates a strong sexuality and unambiguously amorous intentions. Intelligent and crafty, she proves to be as much of a grifter as Fatty. Not only does she act on her inclinations; she also possesses the agency to effect a marriage on her own terms. And although that marriage is ultimately thwarted, she is clearly no tragic figure: her infatuation does not lead to her death or even to her being ostracized from her community, which had earlier embraced Fatty as a potential husband. Just the opposite: the community assists her, albeit unsuccessfully, in trying to recapture him after he escapes. Fatty and Minnie He-Haw is especially interesting in the way that it reverses the usual miscegenation trope. To evade the law for his various frauds, it is Fatty who must decide whether or not to assimilate and become part of Minnie’s community. That cross-racial relationship plot thus overturns

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the narrative of other silent films, whose premise is that while miscegenation is possible, it requires the Native American woman to renounce her cultural values in order to live in a non-Indian society. Fatty and Minnie He-Haw, on the other hand, was a rarity insofar as most Native American actresses, especially those restricted to the traditional “squaw” roles, were unable to negotiate and upend the stereotypes as effectively as Minnie Ha Ha did. A more common and certainly a more popular type in early film was the Indian princess. Unlike the “squaw,” who was typically depicted as ugly, debased, mistreated by men, and restricted to a squalid life of servile toil,74 the princess was beautiful, natural, virtuous, and proud. Her portrayal centered around her rejection of her Native cultural values and her desire to assume a new identity in white society, as evidenced by her willingness to disavow her own people and ally herself with the settlers. That depiction of the young Native woman attracted to a white hero (and, by implication, to Western European culture) not only serves to highlight the differences between the two cultures but also creates tension. The princess’s qualities of innocence, virtue, and vulnerability make her appealing to the white characters and contrast her to the other Indians, who are often portrayed as “degenerate, violent, and untrustworthy.” Yet, at the same time, her ties to her tribe and heritage mark her as being “distinctly different” from the white characters and make her unable to divorce herself fully from one culture and integrate into the other.75 D.W. GRIFFITH Among the earliest and most prolific filmmakers to focus on Native themes, and especially on the character of the Native American princess, was pioneering director D.W. Griffith. During his Biograph years (1908–1913), he produced some thirty Indian-themed shorts that were widely viewed and that consequently helped to shape the image of American Indians in social and popular culture. Considered by some scholars to be rather sympathetic portrayals, Griffith’s Indian films nonetheless aligned with the notion of white supremacy, articulated most blatantly and most offensively in his landmark The Birth of a Nation (1915). In pictures such as The Massacre (1912) and The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1914), for example, the Indian assaults anticipate the brutality and sexual threat of the Reconstruction-era African Americans in Birth. In The Massacre, a woman embarks on a westward journey with her husband and their young child. That journey is led by the woman’s former suitor, a scout who had earlier mounted a raid on a Native American village that ended in a slaughter of most of the tribe. In retribution, the Indians take

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revenge on the whites, attack their wagon train, and kill all of the settlers except the woman and her child, who survive because they are hidden under a pile of slain bodies. Especially in the film’s opening shots of peaceful Native life, Griffith seems to demonstrate a certain sympathy for the Native Americans. The framing of the later action sequences, however, reveals his bias: the Indian characters are presented in extreme long shot, while the white actors are afforded reaction shots that provide insights into their emotions. As Kathleen M. German observed, while the Indian and white family scenes are juxtaposed as the wagon trek begins, “the white infant is seen close-up in a prolonged shot, but the Indian infant is not.” The scenes are crosscut again during the massacre, with the adorable white infant filmed in close-up and the soon-to-be-massacred Indian family as a full shot. “The camera lingers on white characters in more intimate, closer framing, while American Indian subjects are visually distanced from the viewer.”76 Griffith thus manipulates viewer response by making the audience empathize with the whites over the Native Americans—even though the massacre is a retribution precipitated, and arguably justified, by the whites’ attempt to exterminate the Indian village. And in The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, one of his last films for Biograph, Griffith was similarly manipulative. Although he used the familiar plot of the cavalry riding in to save the settlers from the Indians, “the scale here is grander,” Charles Silver writes, “the photography brilliant, the execution and editing of the action precise,” with Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh as the two orphaned sisters giving performances “that can be seen as rehearsals for the genius they displayed in The Birth of a Nation.”77 To make the contrast between the “savage” Indians and the “civilized” whites even sharper, Griffith depicted the Indians, literally, as dog-eaters who threaten the white women—a group that includes a mother, her adorable baby, the two young orphaned sisters, and their puppies—with brutal butchery. The visual and symbolic opposition could not be clearer: sexually menacing savages versus puppies and babies (an opposition that, as Gregory S. Jay notes, cries out for Freudian analysis). Notably, in this picture, as in Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (and as in Ince’s The Invaders), one of the white defenders is prepared to shoot a bullet into the young mother’s head rather than allow her to be taken alive by the racialized and threatening Other.78 Not all of Griffith’s Indian films, though, focused solely on the Indian’s brutality. The Redman and the Child (1908), for example, highlighted his fierce sense of loyalty. A noble Sioux who lives by fishing, hunting, and mining is well-liked by all, including a young white boy who is his close companion. When miscreants in search of the hiding place of the Indian’s gold capture and beat the boy and murder his grandfather, the “Redman” vows to avenge the death. Jumping into his canoe, he paddles swiftly after

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Fig. 3.3.  Indians threaten the white settlers, including two orphaned sisters and their puppies, in Griffith’s The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

the fugitives, kills them both, and rescues the boy, whom he brings back safely to the camp.79 That depiction of the loyal noble Indian was not unique to Griffith: in a film such as The Aborigine’s Devotion (World Film Manufacturing Company, 1909), an Indian cares for the child of a trapper who dies in a fall and protects him from harm, even killing a trader who assaults and tries to steal from the youngster, while in A Redskin’s Bravery (Bison, 1911), an Indian comes to the rescue of a woman who earlier had provided him with food. But Griffith’s exciting chase and combat scenes made his version especially memorable. And in A Mohawk’s Way, also known as The Mohawk’s Treasure (1910), a film loosely based on a work by James Fenimore Cooper, Griffith attempted to demonstrate that the Native American’s quest for vengeance could be matched by his expression of gratitude. After the Indian medicine man is unable to find a cure, a fever-stricken Native child is taken to the white doctor, who refuses to help. The doctor’s wife, however, surreptitiously provides the necessary medicine, which cures the child and sets to rest the long-standing enmity. But after the doctor insults one of the tribe’s women, war is declared. The doctor’s wife, though, is spared injury and carried to safety at the British camp across the river after an Indian woman comes forward to demand her release. The Indian woman’s expression of gratitude is as noble as the white woman’s earlier generosity. “The white woman’s parting kiss to the Indian mother,” as Angela Aleiss notes, “shows that mutual respect can cross racial lines.”80 Other Griffith films took an even more sympathetic view of Native Americans, especially of the women. In the case of both The Broken Doll

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(1909) and Iola’s Promise (1912), the Indian appears as an innocent “helper” whose involvement never manifests itself into a love relationship (as it does with the more mature Indian princess) but is nonetheless important for the girl’s attempt to warn her white friends of an impending Indian attack. By emphasizing gratitude and generosity, the action-packed narratives of those films “highlight the female lead’s athleticism and her desire to repay a kindness done to her by a leading white character”; and they end, as many of the later films do, with her accidental death. Yet, while both films seem to support what M. Elise Marubbio called an assimilationist agenda and a romantic nostalgia for Native Americans, their structure and reliance on the “savage” image nonetheless result in “a validation of westward expansion, conquest, and separation of groups.”81 In The Broken Doll, a Native American child has been cruelly mistreated by her mother and by other of her tribespeople. When she accompanies her family to a nearby town to purchase supplies, she is befriended by Joe Stevens, a white prospector who has come west to seek his fortune. Seeing how taken the girl is with their daughter’s doll, Joe and his wife give it to her as a gift. It is the first and only toy the girl has ever owned, and she cherishes it. After a member of her tribe is wantonly killed by a drunken white man, however, one of the Indians sees the white doll the girl is holding, seizes the effigy, and crushes it. Heartbroken over its loss, the girl retrieves the broken doll and buries it with traditional tribal honors. Later, after overhearing the Indians’ plan to mount an attack on the town in retribution for the killing, she races ahead of the war party to warn the settlers, allowing them sufficient time to mount resistance. In the melee, the girl is struck by a bullet. Making her way, ever so painfully, to the spot where the doll is buried, she dies. In that moment, according to the Moving Picture World reviewer, “her pure soul parts with the little body sacrificed upon the altar of gratitude.”82 Iola’s Promise told a similar story. The young Native American Iola (played by white actress Mary Pickford) is held captive and beaten by a gang of white cutthroats, from whose clutches and abuse she is rescued by prospector Jack Harper. In return, she promises to help Jack find the gold for which he is searching; and, upon returning to her own people, she extols the virtues of the “good” whites, whom she insists are different from the white people they had earlier encountered. Nonetheless, when Jack’s fiancée and her father arrive by stagecoach, they are attacked by members of Iola’s tribe, who bind them and plan to execute them. Immediately, Iola comes to their defense. Changing clothing with the fiancée just before she is to be burned at the stake, Iola runs away, knowing that the Indians—mistaking her for the white woman, whose clothing she has donned—will follow. Her ruse works: the diversion allows the fiancée and her father a chance to escape. In

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the process, though, Iola is shot and mortally wounded. But she lives long enough to repay her debt to Jack, whom she leads to a place where he finds the gold that he has been seeking. Iola’s death is, as Joanna Hearne notes, another kind of racial suicide because she dies by her own tribe’s action, which makes her sacrifice consistent with that of the traditional Indian princess who dies by her own hand, while Iola’s exchange of clothing with the fiancée is an expression of her desire to be white, perhaps even to occupy the role of the white man’s wife. And the gold ore that she, as a Native woman, makes available to the white settler is, Hearne suggests, another form of her devotion. Consistent with the selfless Indian princess trope, Iola “then disappears, enabling the white man to export the wealth to a new relationship with a white woman.”83 Notably, in these “helper films,” the notion of gratitude is a prominent characteristic of the Indian who wants to reciprocate, as Philip J. Deloria observed, “not simply for specific white favors, but for the gift of contact with civilization.”84 Likewise, in The Red Girl (1908), an Indian girl misdirects a search posse, thereby helping a Mexican woman who has stolen gold nuggets from Kate Nelson, a white miner working a claim in the mountains. The Mexican

Fig. 3.4.  Iola (played by white actress Mary Pickford), in Iola’s Promise (1912), sacrifices herself for Jack Harper, who had earlier rescued her from a brutal gang. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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woman, however, shows little appreciation and instead plies her wiles on the Indian’s “half-breed” husband, even inducing him to kill his wife. Together, the pair binds the Indian woman’s hands and feet to a tree that overhangs the river and suspend her, “like Tantalus, between water and sky.”85 But, using her teeth and the ornament on her necklace, she frees herself from the hanging they have devised; and she joins with Kate to run down the miscreants. Gold is once again an important plot point in the film: not only does it reinforce the closeness of the Native character to the land that is being appropriated and is rapidly disappearing; it also confirms the Native woman’s willingness to aid and enrich the white settler, even if (as in non-Griffith films such as Maya, Just an Indian [1913]) it means betraying her own culture. Even more sexualized and racialized than the female Indian helper in early films was the princess, who excited and titillated moviegoers with her exotic beauty and who, by her desire to engage in an interracial love relationship and her willingness to reject her own people through assimilation, reinforced for viewers their sense of superiority of white culture. In The Kentuckian (Biograph, 1908), for example, a rich young Kentuckian flees west after killing a man in a poker-related duel. Posing as a miner, he visits a saloon, where he carelessly reveals the large amount of money he is carrying. That foolish act attracts the attention of several disreputable Native Americans, who assault him and steal his money. After being saved by a Native woman who nurses him back to health, he marries her and fathers a son. But upon learning that his father has died and left him a large estate, the man realizes that he cannot introduce his wife into polite society back East; so he must decide whether or not to renounce his inheritance. In an act of self-sacrifice that is typical of the cinematic Indian princess, the wife resolves his dilemma by shooting herself in the head and allowing him to resume his former life.86 Rather than being portrayed as a domestic tragedy, her death is confirmation of the failure of Indian assimilation into white culture. The abandonment of the Indian wife for a white woman was, in fact, a common motif in early films. In Her Indian Mother (Kalem, 1910), a young man in the Hudson Bay country takes an Indian wife, fathers a girl, but returns to Montréal and forgets about the family he left behind. Only after going back to the wilderness sixteen years later, with the wife now dead, does he try to establish a relationship with the girl by assimilating her into white culture; but his attempt is unsuccessful, and she chooses to go back to her Native home. And in Just Squaw (1919), a Native American woman who is abandoned by her white husband attempts to give her daughter a better life by hiding the truth of her parentage.

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THE SQUAW MAN The most powerful treatment of the tragic princess character and the miscegenation/abandonment theme was The Squaw Man (Lasky Feature Play Company, 1914; dir. Cecil B. DeMille and Oscar C. Apfel). Based on the popular 1905 play by Edwin Milton Royle (and re-filmed by DeMille in 1918 and again in 1931),87 The Squaw Man not only marked DeMille’s directorial debut; it also had the distinction of being the first feature to be shot almost entirely in Hollywood. Its box-office success helped to reinforce a number of the tropes that came to define Native American representation in early film and that would be repeated in various Indian-themed films over the next decade and beyond, paramount among them being the self-sacrifice of the Indian maiden and the calamitous consequences of interraciality. After Henry (Monroe Salisbury), an upper-class Brit and trustee for an orphans’ fund, loses a large bet on a derby race, he embezzles money from the charity to clear his debt. To preserve Henry’s good name and to protect the reputation of Henry’s wife Lady Diana, James Wynnegate (Dustin Farnum) accepts the blame for the crime; and, as “Jim Carston,” he goes into self-exile in the American West. There, he rescues Nat-U-Ritch (Lillian St. Cyr), daughter of Ute Chief Tabywana, from local outlaw Cash Hawkins. Indebted to and enamored of Jim, Nat-U-Ritch soon returns the favor by killing Hawkins before he can shoot Jim. Later, Nat-U-Ritch again saves Jim’s life after he suffers an accident in the mountains. They wed and have a child, a sweet and loving mixed-race boy named Hal. Back in Europe, Henry suffers a fatal accident; but before he dies, he signs a letter of confession accepting sole responsibility for the embezzlement. When his widow Lady Diana, the woman whom Jim has long loved, arrives in Wyoming to locate him and share with him the news of his exoneration and his inheritance of the family estate, Jim must make a painful decision. Knowing that Nat-U-Ritch can neither travel with him to England nor survive without him,88 he chooses to stay. Without her knowledge or consent, though, he agrees to send Hal away to England to be educated as a proper gentleman and “the future Earl of Kerhill.” As Hal is about to leave with Lady Diana, a heartbroken and distraught Nat-U-Ritch finds Jim’s gun and commits suicide, thus freeing him of his obligation to her and allowing him to be with the woman he really loves. The opening scenes in England establish that country as a place of refinement and education, while the American West to which Wynnegate escapes is “constructed as a place of exile and savagery.” Similarly, Lady Diana, who serves as a symbol of England, is genteel, beautiful, wellbred, and properly-educated, while Nat-U-Ritch “is coded as culturally

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Fig. 3.5.  In The Squaw Man (1914), “Jim Carston,” a Brit in self-exile in the American West for a crime he did not commit, is rescued by Nat-U-Ritch, whom he marries (left). But when Lady Diana, the woman he has long loved, finds Jim and tells him he has been exonerated, Nat-U-Ritch takes her own life so that he can return with Diana to England (right). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

and intellectually inferior.”89 Although she is very much an innocent and unspoiled child of nature, as suggested by her name, Nat-U-Ritch speaks in a broken English (one title card reads “Me kill ’um”) that signifies her otherness; and ultimately she has little authority over her child’s future. The cultural contrast is further underscored by the costuming in the film. The son’s moccasins, for instance, are—from their first appearance, when Nat-U-Ritch holds them up to reveal her pregnancy—a visual marker of his Native identity and his connection to his Indian mother. But they are easily shed for western garments when the child is claimed by his father’s relatives. As Joanna Hearne writes, that shedding of the moccasins and other Indigenous clothing is actually a trope for the potential to shed Indianness that occurred historically in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, with the attempted decimation of Native customs through forced education at schools like Carlisle and other forms of the “domestication” of Native Americans and the extinction of their Indian identity. Yet, Hearne suggests, at the same time there is a certain optimism in the film’s resolution. The son’s “survival” through his mother’s sacrifice means that he will inherit western American land as well as an English estate and title, “uniting Europe and America through inheritance” and presumably “revitalizing a corrupt English gentry with an infusion of Native blood.”90 But Linda M. Waggoner offers a different reading: she observes that the resolution only serves to reinforce the stereotypical image of the Indian maiden in silent film. The white man’s transgression—that is, impregnating Nat-U-Ritch—can be forgiven, since their relationship is brief and he is able to resume his life in white society. Ironically, though, “the Indian female’s sexual availability and race (inextricably linked) can only be exonerated by her death.” Thus DeMille’s film “set this specifically American western narrative in stone with its trajectory that

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insures a happy ending for the white man—or at least America—but not for his Indian lover.”91 THE VANISHING AMERICAN A major landmark in the evolution of American cinema, The Squaw Man set the standard for later Indian princess films and illustrated the problems created by miscegenation and by the impossibility of the Native woman’s assimilation into white culture. The miscegenation theme was explored from a slightly different perspective in another noteworthy film, The Vanishing American (Paramount Pictures, 1925; dir. George Seitz), which, like The Squaw Man, portrayed the challenges of Native American survival within a white-dominated world. One of the most sympathetic cinematic depictions of the plight of Native Americans, the film was based on a novel by Zane Grey, the immensely popular author of adventure stories and frontier novels, almost forty of which were adapted to film in the silent era alone.92 Grey’s novels, in turn, had been influenced by the novels of Cooper, the dime novels about Buffalo Bill and other American icons, and the art of such distinctly American artists as Frederic Remington and Howard Pyle. The first of Grey’s novels to focus primarily on Native Americans, The Vanishing American was serialized in 1922 as a story in The Ladies’ Home Journal; and it appeared in book form in 1925, intended for release around the same time as the movie, with the two media reciprocally boosting sales and audience interest. Notably, however, both the publisher and the studio insisted on a number of changes, the most significant being a radical reworking of the fortunes of the main characters. In the original story, none of the admirable characters comes to a good end, while, by contrast, the villainous ones prosper. Especially for the moviegoing public, a different and more melodramatic outcome was required. A portrait of prejudice against and harsh treatment of Native Americans, the film depicts the tribulations of the Nopah (the fictional counterparts of the Navajo) who have been forced onto the reservation and are subject to ongoing injustices by the very people assigned to assist them in their acculturation. The powerful tribal leader Nophaie (“The Warrior”) persists in trying to reach fair agreements with the Indian agents who consistently betray their trust. One agent in particular, the hateful Booker, isolates the Indians, beats their children, insults their women, abuses their elders, and sells off the tribe’s strongest horses before usurping the best of their lands, leaving them to suffer even further. By contrast, the white schoolteacher Marion Warner feels great empathy for the Native Americans and especially for Nophaie, whom she teaches to read and to study the Bible and whom she encourages to fight

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for the American cause in the Great War. Believing that military participation will indeed lead to better relations, Nophaie enlists in the army and is posted overseas, where he and his people distinguish themselves in the fight for democracy. But upon their return, they discover that life is even worse for them than before. Booker has introduced draconian measures that reduce the tribe’s fertile land and create widespread starvation.93 While rousing in its authentic locales and especially in its graphic portrayals of injustice, the film was, at its essence, confused and confusing. Despite its attempts to address the social prejudice and discrimination that Native Americans suffered at the hands of greedy whites, it nonetheless contributed to the familiar stereotypes. Nophaie, the selfless and heroic warrior who leads his people from the reservation to the battlefields of the Great War, is indeed noble; but he is also doomed to lose the Darwinian struggle for survival. The film’s prologue—which traces the evolution of his ancestors from “Basket-Makers,” “Slab-House People,” and “Cliff Dwellers” to resisters of Coronado’s men in the 1540s and “rising Injuns” whom Kit Carson must calm three hundred years later—extols the bravery of the warrior (played, in each opening segment as well as in the main story, by Richard Dix). But that warrior, always named Nophaie, is ultimately defeated, a victim of and sacrifice to the Euro-American culture that seeks to eliminate him.94 A more subtle but significant stereotyping was evident in the relationships between the film’s female and male characters. The beautiful Native maiden Gekin Yashi, who is beloved by the warrior Topie, is at best a minor figure in the story; but her situation is emblematic of Native Americans in general and of their representation in most early films. Gekin becomes the object of unwelcomed advances by the evil Indian Agent Booker, who leers suggestively at her in front of the trading post, an example of the liberties that whites assume is their right. Her situation worsens after the Nopah men, roused by Nophaie’s patriotic fervor, enlist to fight overseas. Left without any one to protect her, she is coerced into service (and quite likely into sexual slavery as well) in Booker’s home, a kind of indentured servitude that parallels the situation of Native people on the reservations to which they have been relegated. When Topie returns from war, wounded and shell-shocked, he learns that Gekin has also returned to her people—in her case, to die, which she does, uttering Topie’s name with her last breath. Despite the fact that Booker has tried to break her spirit and bend her to his will, she has kept faith with the Native life and legacy that, as the title suggests, is nonetheless vanishing. Enduring prejudice and mistreatment over which she has little control, Gekin, like so many beautiful young Native women in early film, becomes a victim of the clash of cultures that demands her sacrifice. The more prominent female character is Marion Warner, the “White Desert Rose” whom Nophaie adores. A white woman who teaches the children at

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the Indian School, she too is subjected to Booker’s attentions; but Nophaie’s intervention, like the later protection she receives from white infantry officer Captain Earl Ramsdell, provides her with an insulation and a level of privilege that Gekin could never hope or expect to enjoy. The kindly Marion is an agent of change in the film: it is she who helps Nophaie to assimilate into the larger American culture by assuring him “You are an American as much as any of us.” It is she who convinces him that, despite his grossly unequal treatment on the reservation at the hands of the government and its agents, he must join the war effort. “This is a war for freedom,” he acknowledges in response, “for the right. For oppressed people everywhere. Out of it will grow a new order . . . a new justice . . . ” And it is she who teaches him Christian (and traditionally Eurocentric) values and who gives him the copy of the New Testament that he carries next to his heart during his time of service overseas. In fact, that copy saves him, literally as well as figuratively, since it deflects a bullet on the battlefield, thereby sparing him more grievous injury. On the one hand, Marion is a sympathetic character who cares deeply for her Native students and who ultimately reciprocates Nophaie’s affections,

Fig. 3.6. The Vanishing American (1925) highlights the harsh treatment of Native Americans. In the final scene, tribal leader Nophaie is killed as he tries to prevent an attack and dies in the arms of the sympathetic white schoolteacher Marion, who nonetheless contributes to the “vanishing” of his people. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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rejecting the attentions of the more culturally appropriate white cavalry captain who is attracted to her. Yet, at the same time, she is the assimilating force that estranges Nophaie from his traditional religion and his culture and who contributes to the “vanishing” of his people. In the film’s final scenes, after Nophaie learns that Marion has not married the captain, as he was led to believe, he is at last reunited with her. But, as is typical of early films, there can be no possibility of a happy ending, or mixed marriage, for them. In fact, as if to underscore his estrangement from the Indians who want revenge for their mistreatment by whites, Nophaie is killed, shot by one of his own people as he tries to prevent an attack on the white townsfolk. Even though the malicious Booker, who had intended to wield a machine gun (a symbol of both modernity and modern warfare) to exterminate as many of the invading Native Americans as possible, is killed by an Indian arrow, the familiar tropes are present: the requisite sacrifice of the Indian maiden; the destructive consequences of miscegenation; and the “triumph” of the Christian culture over the Native one. NOTES 1. This chapter contains certain terms that were commonly used during the silent film era and that may be offensive to some readers. Those words and terms, most of which occur in the titles of films or in newspaper and trade publications, are used here exclusively for historical or analytical purposes. 2. J.B. Kaufman, “Movie of the Month, The Invaders (1912),” jbkaufman.com/ movie-of-the-month/invaders-1912. 3. Suzanne Guldimann, “Inceville: Hollywood History on the Road to Topanga,” Topanga New Times, June 4, 2021. Reportedly, there were always at least two or three films in production at Inceville, and the site seems to have been a non-stop party. For more on Inceville, including photographs from early productions there, see Kevin Brownlow, The War, The West, and the Wilderness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 253–62, and Linda Waggoner, Starring Red Wing! (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019). 4. Katherine La Hue, Pacific Palisades: Where the Mountains Meet the Sea, cited in Guldimann. 5. Guldimann, n.p. 6. Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), pp. 86–88, argues that the image of the Native character is a kind of figurative “camera” that, in The Red Man and the Child and other early pictures, suggests “a complex process through which settler and Indigenous perspectives are imagined on film.” 7. Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. xvii.

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8. The question of directorial attribution is a tricky one. It is generally recognized that Ford and Ince were co-directors on The Invaders, though neither was officially credited. That was not surprising, since crediting of actors and directors in early films was often incomplete. With Ince in particular, there was considerable difficulty in properly crediting him on the films in which he was involved. As Angela Aleiss noted in Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), p. 12, “Although many Ince films were actually directed by others, he took credit and placed his name on all as supervising director.” Similarly, Peter Kobel, in Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007), p. 67, observed that The Invaders may have been directed by Ince or Ford, but “it is still not known for certain.”   9. Hearne, p. 31. 10. Among Little’s Native American character roles was the lead, as Naturich (whose name is spelled slightly differently in the various versions), in the 1918 Cecil B. DeMille version of the influential film The Squaw Man. 11. According to Irving Asher, the first press agent for Warner Bros., as told to Kevin Brownlow and quoted in Kobel, p. 151. 12. Adrian S.A. Manning, “The Differing Shades of Redface: The Evolving Image of Native Americans in Hollywood Comedies,” Studies in American Humor, 6.2 (2020), p. 309. 13. Jim Hitt, The American West from Fiction (1823–1976) into Film (1910–1986) (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990), p. 9. 14. “Manifest Destiny and Indian Removal,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, https://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Manifest-Destinyand-Indian-Removal.pdf. 15. Ibid. According to Arnold Krupat, Ethnocriticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 135, as cited in Kilpatrick, p. 7, the concept of Manifest Destiny was “a tale America told itself in order to create the self-image Euro-Americans needed.” 16. Thomas Jefferson, “The West,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jeffwest.html#:~:text=I%20believe%20the%20Indian%20then,he%20 would%20not%20become%20so.%E2%80%9D. 17. “From Thomas Jefferson to Indian Nations, 10 January 1809,” Founders Early Access Project, https://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/FOEA.html. Also discussed in John O’Connor, “The White Man’s Indian: An Institutional Approach,” in The Hollywood Indian: Stereotypes of Native Americans in Films (Trenton: The New Jersey State Museum, 1980), and elsewhere. 18. “Founders Online: From Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, 27 February 1803,” founders.archives.gov. Jefferson added: “The former [citizenship] is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves. But in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength & their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them.”

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19. Alysa Landry, “James Monroe: Pushed Tribes Off Land, But Boosted Indian Education,” in Indian Country Today, https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/ james-monroe-pushed-tribes-off-land-but-boosted-indian-education. 20. “Manifest Destiny and Indian Removal,” https://americanexperience.si.edu/ wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Manifest-Destiny-and-Indian-Removal.pdf. 21. Scott Stiffler, “‘Trail of Tears’ dissects America’s original sin,” https://www. amny.com/news/trail-of-tears-dissects-americas-original-sin-3/. 22. “Trail of Tears,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/trte/index.htm; and history.com editors, “Trail of Tears,” History, last updated September 26, 2023, https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/trail-of-tears. 23. According to the Smithsonian/National Museum of the American Indian, “Civil War,” https://americanindian.si.edu/static/why-we-serve/topics/civil-war/, Native allegiances varied. The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, and Seminole Nations, having survived removal from their ancestral homelands in the Southeast in the 1830s and 1840s, signed Confederate treaties that guaranteed title to territories west of the Mississippi (an allegiance motivated in part by elite tribal members’ enslavement of African Americans). Stand Watie (Degataga), elected principal chief of the Confederate-aligned Cherokee, was awarded the rank of brigadier general, becoming the only American Indian to achieve that designation in the Civil War; and he commanded the Indian Cavalry Brigade. On the Union side, William Terrill Bradby and other men from Virginia’s Pamunkey and Mattaponi Nations volunteered as river pilots, land guides, and spies for the Union, while Ely S. Parker, a lieutenant colonel and the highest-ranking American Indian in the Union army, served as General Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary and even drafted the terms of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. By supporting the victorious Union, the Native nations hoped their service would encourage the federal government to honor treaties that recognized tribal land rights. Ultimately, though, the war exacted a terrible toll on all sides. See also Bryan Pollard, “How the US Civil War Divided Indian Nations,” November 23, 2020, https://www.history.com/news/ civil-war-native-american-indian-territory-cherokee-home-guard. 24. “Homesteading in the Badlands,” History & Culture in the Badlands, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/homesteading.htm. 25. “The Dawes Act,” History & Culture in the Badlands, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/dawes-act.htm. 26. Ibid. 27. “The Federal Government Passes the Dawes Act,” https://historyengine. richmond.edu/episodes/view/4610. 28. Todd M. Kerstetter, “Ghost Dance,” http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.rel.023. 29. Buffalo Bill reportedly showed up during the last days of the Wounded Knee “campaign” and asked General Miles to allow him to take some of the prisoners, including Kicking Bear and Short Bull, to join his Wild West Show. “The tragedy of the ‘Battle’ of Wounded Knee,” Kilpatrick wrote, thus “became just another part of the show” (p. 15).

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30. Agata Frymus, “Pocahontas and Settler Colonialism in Early Film, 1907– 1910,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60.3 (Spring 2021), p. 99. 31. Kilpatrick, pp. 5–6. 32. R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955). 33. Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 14–15. 34. Eran Zelnik, “The New Testament Mythology of James Fenimore Cooper,” February 21, 2017, Society for U.S. Intellectual History, https://s-usih.org/2017/02/ the-new-testament-mythology-of-james-fenimore-cooper/. 35. Kilpatrick, p. 3. 36. As Raymond William Stedman notes in Shadows of the Indian: Stereotypes in American Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), p. 47, “to his white companion at least, he [Chingachgook] was a social equal. . . . They were joint victims of the white man’s civilization.” 37. Not all critics or readers agreed on this point. Contemporary poet and critic James Russell Lowell, for example, said of Cooper’s women: “The women he draws from one model don’t vary / All sappy as maples and flat as prairie.” And literary critic Leslie Fielder, in Love and Death in the American Novel, dismissed them as “wooden ingenues.” 38. Nina Baym, “The Women of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales,” American Quarterly, 23.5 (December 1971), pp. 701–2. 39. For a filmography, see, for example, Edward Harris, “Cooper on Film,” originally issued on disk as James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers—Electronic Series No. 2, now available on the James Fenimore Cooper Society Website, https://jfcoopersociety.org/content/02-works/drama/film.htm. 40. “Frontier Fantasies: Imagining the American West in the Dime Novel,” Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, curated by Laura Braunstein, https:// www.dartmouth.edu/library/rauner/exhibits/frontier-fantasies-dime-novels.html. 41. Kilpatrick, p. 11, noted that Indians could also fill the “outlaw” roles. 42. Anne-Marie Pope, “American Dime Novels 1860–1915,” Historical Association, https://www.history.org.uk/student/resource/4512/american-dime-novels-1860-1915. 43. The popular and prolific publishing company of Beadle and Adams had been established by Irwin and Erasmus Beadle and Robert Adams, which published its first dime novel in 1860. Between the years 1860 and 1865 alone, Beadle and Adams published more than five million copies of their dime novels. After a falling out between the Beadle brothers, Irwin pulled out of the partnership and teamed up with George Munro, a bookkeeper in the publishing house; together, they founded their own company, Munro, which published its own version of dime novels, called “Ten Cent Novels.” For more information, see, for example, Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), or “The Beadle and Adams Dime Novel Digitization Project” at Northern Illinois University (which reprints a portion of the Johannsen book), https://ulib.niu.edu/badndp/info.html.

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44. Jackie Mansky, “The True Story of Pocahontas,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 23, 2017, p. 5, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-pocahontas-180962649/. For more on Pocahontas, see, for example, John Coward, “The Princess and the Squaw: The Construction of Native American Women in the Pictorial Press,” American Journalism, 31.1 (2014). He writes that “an idealized Pocahontas became part of the iconography of early America, a widely accepted representation of the transformation of America and its people from wilderness and savagery to settlement and civility.” 45. Yu-Fang Cho, “A Romance of (Miscege) Nations: Anna Sophia Stephens’ Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 63.1 (Spring 2007): 1–25. The novel can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46160 and/or the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/resource/dcmsiabooks.malaeskaindianw i00step/?st=gallery. 46. “Frontier Fantasies: Imagining the American West in the Dime Novel,” https:// www.dartmouth.edu/library/rauner/exhibits/frontier-fantasies-dime-novels.html. 47. See, for example, Pauline Turner Strong, Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999). Raymond William Stedman, p. 110, writes that “During its early years the American film industry made dozens of films about women or girls captured by Indians, the first, probably, being a mini-drama of 1903 bearing the unvarnished title Rescue of Child from Indians. Most of these captive-and-rescue ventures were one- and two-reel films made between 1909 and 1915—the peak period for Indian movies in general. Usually the titles told the story: A Child in the Forest; Iona, the White Squaw; Company D to the Rescue; An Indian Vestal; Only a Squaw; Prisoner of the Mohicans; Broncho Bill[y] and the Settler’s Daughter.” 48. “Frontier Fantasies: Imagining the American West in the Dime Novel.” Similarly, in Ned Buntline’s The Red Warrior, or, Stella Delorme’s Comanche Lover: A Romance of Savage Chivalry (1874), when a Comanche chief cannot marry the white woman he rescued from capture by a rival tribe, he kills himself in an act of “savage chivalry.” 49. For more on Buntline, see Julia Bricklin, The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal, and the Creation of Buffalo Bill (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020); Thomas Kovalik, Ned Buntline—King of the Dime Novels (Charlottesville, VA: SamHar Press, 1986); or T.M. Bradshaw, Ned Buntline: So Much Larger Than Life (T.M. Bradshaw, 2019). 50. Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film, p. 61. 51. According to L.G. Moses, in Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), p. 30, Sitting Bull “became the first great Show Indian. A headliner himself, he attracted perhaps as much attention as Buffalo Bill. Although he toured just one season, his employment established a course for all subsequent shows.” Even in newspaper ads, his name would appear only slightly smaller than the caption for “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.”

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52. Max Goldberg, “Buffalo Bill Dime Novels,” Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections, Brandeis University, https://www.brandeis.edu/ library/archives/essays/special-collections/buffalo-bill.html. 53. Larry McMurtry, “Inventing the West,” The New York Review of Books, August 10, 2000, as cited by Goldberg. 54. Paul Fees, “Wild West Shows: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” Buffalo Bill Center of the West, https://centerofthewest.org/learn/western-essays/wild-west-shows/. According to Jacquelyn Kilpatrick (pp. 13–14), Indians may also have felt that the shows could allow them an opportunity to show the white man what they were really like. “Or maybe it may have been that because the shows were clearly playacting, they assumed that the viewing public would see that the Euro-Americans and Native Americans were both acting.” But, she concludes, the Indian actors may have under-estimated the power of “show business” and over-estimated the sophistication of their audiences. In 1931, Black Elk shared with John G. Neihardt his personal reason for joining the show: “They told us this show would go across the big water to strange lands, and I thought I ought to go, because I might learn some secret of the Wasichu [white people] that would help my people.” 55. Moses, p. 5. Cody was able to attract Native American performers, even highly respected Indian leaders, because by all accounts he treated them fairly even as he exploited their fame and enriched his own pockets through their participation in his shows. There is a certain irony in the fact that a man best known for killing and subduing Indians would become one of the best employers and promoters of Native Americans. 56. Julia Bricklin, “The Faux ‘Sioux’ Sharpshooter Who Became Annie Oakley’s Rival,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 8, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/ history/faux-sioux-sharpshooter-who-became-annie-oakleys-rival-180963164/. 57. Bricklin writes that Smith later performed in other Wild West shows, including Miller Brothers and Pawnee Bill. She continued to wear her Sioux garb and asked to be buried in it upon her death. When she passed away in February of 1930, her friends obliged. 58. According to Moses, p. 51, Rose Nelson was the daughter of John Y. Nelson, driver of the Deadwood Stage in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and his Native American wife. Rose performed with the rest of her family, including her brother Yellow Horse, and was billed as Wa-Ka-Cha-Sha (Red Rose), “The Girl-pet of the Sioux.” She later appeared professionally as Princess Blue Waters, “carrying on the family show business tradition well into the twentieth century.” 59. As Stedman, p. 41, noted (and illustrated), another purportedly Native American performer, “Arrow-Head, Belle of the Tribe,” was featured in a 1908 ad for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, but little else is known about her or her actual origins. Waggoner, in Starring Red Wing!, refers to an early film actress with the name “Arrow-Head,” who may have been the same person. 60. Gregory S. Jay, “‘White Man’s Book No Good’: D.W. Griffith and the American Indian,” Cinema Journal, 39.4 (Summer 2000), p. 5. 61. According to Simmon in The Invention of the Western Film, p. 6, “This brief (about twenty seconds long) kinetoscope of beaded and bare-chested men and boys

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is made even more otherworldly and death-haunted by the stark black backdrop common to all early films shot in Edison’s one-room studio in West Orange, New Jersey. The Oglala and Brule Sioux had stopped into the studio for a couple of hours one Monday morning while touring in Brooklyn with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. The link to recent cavalry battles against the Sioux was not lost in the arch New York Herald report of the filming, headlined: RED MEN AGAIN CONQUERED.” 62. Some sources, such as IMDB, date this short film to 1898, but it is far more likely that it was filmed, as the Indian dances were, in 1894. 63. Alex W. Bordino, “Antimodernism and Indigenous Reconstruction: Proto-Ethnographic Attractions in Early Cinema, 1894–1914,” The Journal of American Culture 45.1 (March 2022), p. 34. 64. Michelle H. Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), p. 35. 65. In the early ethnographic pictures, dances were especially popular subjects. Circle Dance (Edison, 1898), for example, depicted a ritual dance performed by “approximately fifty male Indians seen shoulder-to-shoulder in a circle revolving slowly in a dance.” Wand Dance, Pueblo Indians (Edison, 1898) showed “a group of Pueblo Indians, some with full feathers, some with no headdress at all, danc[ing] around a man beating a drum with each brandishing a stick or wand.” And in Parade of Snake Dancers Before the Dance (Edison, 1901), “Indians in ceremonial dress prepare themselves for a ritual dance involving snakes and water in Arizona.” Compiled by Karen Lund, “American Indians in Silent Film,” Library of Congress, Moving Image Research Center. 66. Kilpatrick, pp. 21–22. 67. Jay, pp. 5–6. 68. Kobel, Silent Movies, p. 17; Jay, p. 6. 69. Moses, p. 3, wrote that the “ignoble savage” had progressed very little. Whereas the noble “welcomed the colonists and treated them with generosity and courtesy, the ignoble savage contested the occupation and treated the interlopers with treachery and cruelty. The noble appeared handsome in features, dignified in manner, and brave in battle.” The ignoble “more closely resembled the brute beasts with which he shared the howling wilderness.” And while “the threads of these conceptions intertwined in strange patterns, and observers drew on them as suited the occasion,” the notions of “otherness, dependency, and inferiority of the Indians persisted. Savagism contrasted with civility; natural life in the wilds was opposed to disciplined life in civil society.” 70. Coward, pp. 83–84. Coward also examines the controversial history of the word “squaw” and the ways that “it has been associated with a long list of derogatory terms for Indian women.” 71. “The embedded structures of tourism on display in Indian dramas,” Hearne (pp. 62–63) suggests, are also evident in D.W. Griffith’s A Pueblo Legend, in which Mary Pickford, in redface, plays an adopted Hopi girl in precontact time. Her “embedded presence as a recognizable star ‘playing Indian’ acts as both a model tourist and tour guide.”

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72. According to Angela Aleiss, Hollywood’s Native Americans (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2022), pp. 13–14, Minnie’s real name was Minerva Burgess, and she was born in the Oklahoma Territory. “Depending upon her husband or male partner, she was also known as Minnie Burgess, Minnie Williams, Minnie Provost, Minnie Deveraux, or Minnie Carr.” In some of her early performances, she “appeared in blackface as the ‘nurturing mammy’ for several of Ince’s Civil War-themed films.” 73. Raheja, pp. 77, 75. 74. Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992), pp. 121–22, in fact, called the “squaw” an “anti-Pocahontas” figure. 75. M. Elise Marubbio, Killing The Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2006), p. 26. 76. Kathleen M. German, “American Indians in Silent Film, 1894–1929,” p. 25, in Elizabeth DeLaney Hoffman, ed., American Indians and Popular Culture: Media, Sports, and Politics (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), pp. 18–32. 77. Charles Silver, “D.W. Griffith’s The Battle at Elderbush Gulch and John Ford’s Straight Shooting,” An Auteurist History of Film, September 25, 2012, https:// www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/09/25/d-w-griffiths-the-battle-at-elderbushgulch-and-john-fords-straight-shooting/. 78. Stedman (pp. 108–9, 142) observes that in this scene, the huddled girl sobs in fear as “a revolver slowly moves into the film frame and descends toward her head. . . . But that bullet is never released.” He suggests that the “mercy-shooting” sequence derives from the David Belasco frontier drama The Girl I Left Behind Me, performed on Broadway in 1893. Stedman also notes that “Radio too used the device, the special variation of one Lone Ranger episode being a last silver bullet in the mercy gun.” Scott Simmon, in his analysis of The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (pp. 37–38, 74), likewise refers to the “sacrificial last bullet.” The mercy-killing threat also appears in early films such as The Invaders and later films such as Stagecoach. 79. Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film, p. 12, described the moment of the Indian’s discovery of his friend’s body: “he reacts in a way oft-repeated in these first Westerns: He strips off his civilized clothing and, in loincloth, gestures with his fists to the sky.” (The publicity material for the film suggests how such gestures came with established narrative when performed by an Indian character: “It is but a moment he stands, yet the pose speaks volumes.”) 80. Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian, p. 6. 81. Marubbio, p. 30. 82. Moving Picture World, October 29, 1910. 83. Hearne, pp. 67–69. Hearne suggests that Iola’s devotion is actually a sexual one and that her connection with the gold “identifies her with the riches that can be extracted from nature.” Her correlation with the land’s wealth—her figurative fertility—situates her as the vision of the “land-as-woman, specifically the land-as-Mother.” 84. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004), p. 88; cited in Waggoner, p. 100.

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85. “The Red Girl: Another Soul-Stirring Story of Life on the Frontier by the Biograph,” Biograph Bulletin 170 (September 15, 1908). 86. In another Griffith film, the one-reel melodrama The Chief’s Daughter (Biograph, 1911), a white prospector cruelly casts aside his Indian lover for his white fiancée. The Native woman exacts revenge, and ultimately the prospector (Frank J. Grandon) loses both women. 87. The Squaw Man’s Son (Lasky, 1917; dir. Edward J. La Saint), written by Edwin Milton Royle (based on his novel The Silent Call) and Charles Maigne, looked to the 1914 DeMille production but reversed the formula: Hal, the “half-breed” from the earlier film and now Lord Effington, is married to Edith, a white woman, in England. Traveling alone to the land of his mother in America, he falls in love with Wah-na-gi, a Carlisle graduate who is teaching at the Indian agency. After finding out about his British wife, Wah-na-gi is ready to commit suicide at his mother’s grave; but Edith’s death from an overdose allows the Native woman to marry her lover. 88. “Taking the Native mother back to England or the East Coast,” Hearne (p. 66) writes, “is never an option, either because the woman refuses or the man feels she would be unhappy.” Yet the children produced in these mixed-race marriages become the “property” of the father, with the eldest son in line to “inherit the father’s legacy” (thus becoming a property owner himself). The son will accompany his father “back East, transforming his identity and his destiny along the way.” 89. Hearne, pp. 56–57, 60, notes that “the child who represents the illegitimacy of cross-racial unions also becomes a legitimizing agent of white patrimony. The mixed-blood figure in these narratives does the concurrent work of revitalizing the aristocracy through assimilation and defining that aristocracy through abjection and difference. In The Squaw Man, James gains a fourfold entitlement, becoming titled as Earl, acquiring title to American land, and gaining a familial claim to land and an heir through his marriage to Nat-u-Ritch and the birth of their son. Through Nat-u-Ritch’s death, he becomes legally entitled to marry Lady Diana, gaining her title as well.” Scott Simmon does not find quite the same optimism. Although every interracial bond is “an expression of despair,” he notes that the film is “not without a certain perverse wit,” as in the scene of its reverse shotgun wedding, in which James must pull a gun on the Justice of the Peace in order to force him to perform his marriage to the pregnant heroine. 90. Ibid., pp. 57–58. 91. Waggoner, p. 222. 92. Grey’s works were so popular, in fact, that more than a hundred of them have been adapted to film or television. Not all response to the film, however, was positive. As Michael Hilger noted in The American Indian in Film (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986), p. 44, a Variety (October 21, 1925) critic wrote: “The story itself calls attention to the vanishing of the real America, the Indian, off the face of the North American continent. Nothing is said about the Indians who are living in Oklahoma at this time and drawing down a weekly royalty of about $1,750 and riding around in sedans which they discard immediately after a tire blows, so as to get a new car.” Hilger also references a Variety review (July 14, 1926) of The Big Show (1926), in which the reviewer expresses a similar prejudice: in one comic scene, he notes, the

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Indian chief dictates a letter to his daughter that instructs “his bank in Oklahoma to credit with oil royalties immediately to cover his checks drawn for a new runabout for his daughter.” 93. In Seitz’s film, Booker becomes the most despicable character and inflicts enormous suffering upon the Native characters. In Grey’s book, the missionaries were portrayed in a similarly negative way. But as Kilpatrick notes, “the filmmakers of the twenties were apparently reluctant to anger the Christian majority of their audience by presenting them as Grey saw them, so they were simply omitted.” There were other significant changes as well: in the book, Nophaie dies of influenza and is carefully described as having become white: “His face seemed that of a white man . . . ” His romance with Marion seems to have turned him away from his own people. But since it was undramatic to have the hero die of flu, in the film he is shot during a confrontation between the Indians and Booker. And in the final film version, Nophaie and his people represent a noble but doomed race, an ending that “allows the viewer to ‘tolerate’ the Native Other, even feel deep sympathy, but without responsibility since the Indians are soon to be no more.” Viewers could leave the theater “feeling sad about the demise of so exotic a people but also feeling that evil was punished (Booker is finally killed) and peace restored. It fit the melodramatic formula many American movie-goers at the time expected” (Kilpatrick, pp. 29–33). 94. For instance, in the Coronado episode, he is killed by a single shot from a Spaniard’s rifle because he refuses to “live as a white man.” And in the Carson episode he is killed by cavalry cannon-fire.

Chapter 4

Native Americans: Native Response

Despite the limitations of their portrayals, Native Americans were a major presence in both the plots and the subplots of many early silent films.1 And playing Indian roles, even stereotypical ones, as Michelle H. Raheja observed, provided Native actors with certain advantages, among them “class and geographic mobility, financial security, independence from the restrictions of white reservation agents, opportunities for political and social activism, and access to a limited range of institutional power.”2 The salaries were higher than what they could earn on the reservations, and the film work provided them with a greater level of personal and professional freedom.3 There is, of course, an undeniable irony in the fact that many of them found visibility in performing roles that heralded their death or disappearance. A few even became celebrities and “used their privileged status in the service of their reservation or home nation, as well as broader transnational, urban communities.”4 Oglala Chief Luther Standing Bear, for example, turned his Hollywood celebrity into an opportunity to promote Lakota heritage and sovereignty. A leader in the Progressive movement to change government policy toward Native Americans, he capitalized on his fame as an actor to become one of the leading Native American authors, educators, and philosophers of his time. In his autobiography My People, The Sioux, Standing Bear described his fascinating life, which had taken him from the reservation in South Dakota to the industrial school at Carlisle, then to London with the Wild West shows, and later to Hollywood. Reflecting on his years in the industry, he recalled that “acting in films permitted a socially acceptable way of talking back to colonialism” and challenging the distorted stereotypic film images. In 1912, after moving to California, Standing Bear was recruited as a consultant by motion picture director Thomas Ince to offer advice on the representation of Native peoples (as Native American actor and director James Young Deer and his wife Lillian “Red Wing” St. Cyr had done for both 133

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Griffith and Pathé); and he continued to press for change, since “none of the Indian pictures were made right,” and to explain the ways the representation could be more honest.5 Minnie Ha Ha, who found success in early Hollywood slapstick comedies, similarly observed about “White man’s history [that] they do not tell the truth.”6 Yet while she realized that her screen performances bore little resemblance to the actual experience of her Native community, she too participated in the creation of the Hollywood version of the Indian because, despite the stereotyping, the Native American story lines in many silent films gave Native people some visibility, in contrast to their diminished role in sound films and their virtual invisibility in popular media today. Some Native Americans were more direct in their rejection of the screen stereotyping. John Standing Horse, a student at the Carlisle School, for example, complained to the trade journal Moving Picture World that instead of the war-bonneted “made-up Indian men,” movie producers should get “real” Indian people, a criticism that was especially valid in terms of the representation of Native women. The motion picture companies, he insisted, should realize how foolish “their women and girls look in the Indian pictures, with from one to three turkey feathers stuck in the top of their heads.”7 Others were equally quick to point out that Native American plots were overwhelmingly rooted in stereotypes and that the industry’s hiring practices, which leaned toward non-Native actors such as Mary Pickford and Mae Marsh in redface, overlooked true Native actors who might bring authenticity to their roles. The response to the dishonest and pejorative depictions went beyond letters to the editors. In the spring of 1911, for instance, a delegation of Chippewa voiced strong opposition to what they perceived as alleged libel of Native Americans in moving pictures and demanded that President Taft impose regulations to halt the movies’ distortions. Shoshone, Cheyenne, and Arapaho raised similar concerns to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in hopes of eliminating some of the objectionable features that had become standard in many early films.8 Most filmmakers, though, continued to produce the standard plot lines that seemed to appeal to the majority of moviegoers. WHITE FAWN’S DEVOTION Yet even in the era of early silent film, there was a select group of filmmakers, directors, and actors who tried to defy, counter, or challenge the stereotypes. Among the most powerful of those voices was that of James Young Deer, whose White Fawn’s Devotion: A Play Acted by a Tribe of Red Indians in America, released in June, 1910, is the earliest surviving film directed by a Native American.

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In that film, a white settler named Combs lives with his wife White Fawn and their daughter in a log cabin in Pine Ridge in the Dakota territory. Informed that he is about to inherit “an immense fortune,” he prepares to travel east to claim it. But White Fawn fears that if he leaves, he will never return; so, in despair, “preferring death to losing her husband” (according to the title card), she stabs herself with his knife. Combs finds her and tries unsuccessfully to revive her. When their daughter returns to the cabin, she sees her mother lying lifeless on the ground and her father standing over the body with the knife in hand. “Deceived by appearances,” she assumes that Combs has committed murder. Running to the nearby Indian village that is home to White Fawn’s family, she alerts them to the crime. A long chase over cliffs and waters ensues. Combs is eventually captured, brought back to the Indian village, and bound for execution. Just as his daughter, on the Chief’s command, prepares (albeit reluctantly) to administer “justice,” White Fawn— now resuscitated—appears and vindicates her husband.9 Telling the Indians that she had incurred the injury by her own hand, she throws herself on her husband’s body and presses for his release, which the Chief grants. Reunited in “a repurposed Pocahontas moment,”10 the family resumes their old life in their cabin. Although there is some missing footage at the end of the picture, Pathé’s publicity describes the resolution: “The Combs take their departure and return to their home, for he feels he will be happier with his family on the plains than if he goes east and claims his legacy.”11 Drawing on the popular 1905 stage melodrama The Squaw Man by Edwin Milton Royle, White Fawn’s Devotion initially seemed to be just another version of the familiar story in which an Indian woman, abandoned by her husband, chooses to sacrifice herself by taking her own life. But, in fact, the film offered an alternative ending. “For all its simple pantomime style,” as Scott

Fig. 4.1.  In White Fawn’s Devotion (1910), White Fawn fears that her husband will abandon her and return to his white society. Ultimately, though, the family is reunited and finds happiness together on the plains. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Simmon writes, thanks to White Fawn’s initiative, it “arrives at a conclusion almost unknown in the era’s film or fiction: The interracial couple live happily ever after.”12 Romantic love triumphs over cultural divisions; and even racial barriers are overturned, as demonstrated by the mixed-race child who moves easily between the Indian and white societies. There are other notable twists to the standard narrative in White Fawn’s Devotion: the inclusion of a mixed-race daughter rather than a son (which, as M. Elise Marubbio notes, “works against the patriarchal ideology that values male over female children”); the wife’s recuperation; and the husband’s decision to abandon his fortune and remain on the plains with his family.13 Most importantly, perhaps, the film affords the eponymous Indian woman a real prominence in the plot and endows her with a sense of agency that most other female Indian characters in early film lack. Unlike the typically passive princess who often turns to suicide after her husband’s rejection, White Fawn not only recovers from her injury but also assumes an active posture: she intervenes to save her husband from death, which leads to his renewed appreciation of his family and his renouncing of his inheritance. It is a kind of reverse acclimation, of the white husband to the wife’s Native culture rather than of the Indian wife to her husband’s white culture. By privileging a female character’s perspectives (in this case, not only White Fawn’s but also her daughter’s), the film powerfully counters the audience’s expectation of a Native woman’s abandonment and tragic death. Also unusual is the film’s positive depiction of Native life. Neither primitive nor savage, the “Tribe of Red Indians in America” (as described in the subtitle) comprise an efficient community in which men and women interact, conduct work, and enjoy traditional rituals and pastimes such as music and dance. The fact that the roles are enacted by Native actors and not by white actors in redface enhances the film’s credibility and emphasizes the normalcy of the portrait of tribal existence. The significance of tribal connection comes into play again at the end of the film, which reverses the Griffith Western formula of the “ride to the rescue” by the white heroes, who liberate the women and children from the threat of the racial Other. In Young Deer’s film, it is White Fawn who provides the rescue; and, as Joanna Hearne writes, “it is the mother and child’s tribal connection that is recognized, honored, naturalized, and legitimated,”14 and not the usual primacy of white society. The first surviving film to be directed by a Native American, White Fawn’s Devotion was also one of the first films made in America by Pathé Frères, which was then the world’s largest film production company. After U.S. motion picture trade journals had ridiculed “the English saddles and gingham-shirted Indians” in Pathé’s European-made Westerns, the company’s answer was to open a studio in New Jersey and hire Young Deer.15 Soon afterward, when Pathé established its Los Angeles branch, it relocated him and

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promoted him to general manager. Over the next few years, he would work within the restraints of the industry to influence Hollywood’s perception of Indians and to create strong, willful, and individualized Indian characters, who, as Andrew Brodie Smith noted, sometimes defended themselves and their tribes from the abuse of whites, and other times wanted to become part of the dominant society, “but as equals and on their own terms.”16 YOUNG DEER Young Deer, also known as Jim Young Deer and J. Younger Johnson, was born James Young Johnson. Although he claimed that his birthplace was Dakota City, Nebraska, and that he was a member of the Winnebago (Nebraska) Tribe, it appears his heritage was actually Nanticoke of Delaware. According to Angela Aleiss, his military records indicate that he was born in Washington, D.C. around April, 1878, and that he was “mulatto” (Native, African American, and European)—though “his ruse as a [full-blooded] Winnebago served him well” in early Hollywood, at a time when an African American man would never have been promoted to “the rank of studio producer.” While he was too young to have personally experienced the forced removals and migrations of the mid- to late nineteenth century that some of his precursors did, his film work was likely influenced by their suffering.17 According to contemporary newspaper reports, Young Deer had performed as a cowboy-rider with both Barnum and Bailey and the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Wild West Show, where many early Western actors got their start. He began appearing in one-reel Westerns for companies such as Kalem, Lubin, Vitagraph, and Biograph and, under the Bison trademark, for the independent New York Motion Picture Company, where director Thomas Ince also gained some of his early film experience. From there, Young Deer moved on to a new role in the industry, as a technical advisor on Indian pictures as well as a scenario writer and director. The desire for authentic detail—or, as Linda M. Waggoner observed, “at least what the public deemed as such”—opened wide the doors of opportunity for him in the business; and ultimately he wrote and directed approximately one hundred and fifty films for Pathé.18 It is difficult to assess Young Deer’s career fully and definitively, since much of his work, both as an actor and as a director, was uncredited and most of his films are lost. What is certain, however, is that he was a well-known figure in early Hollywood. Skilled in negotiating both audience expectations and the restrictions of the burgeoning studio system, he tried in his films to portray Native life and customs sensitively and honestly; and he treated

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controversial subjects such as compulsory assimilation and racism. Pushing the limits of racial prejudice, he confronted the racist myth of miscegenation, which between a non-white male and a white female was even more taboo than the reverse.19 “In his movies,” Matthew Sweet observed, the Indians were never the villains. “Instead of howling around bonfires and turning stagecoaches into porcupines, they were figures of heroism and moral authority. When a red man sank his blade into a man in a Young Deer picture, he did it with justice on his side—and audiences applauded.”20 Young Deer also introduced several technical innovations, including what Moving Picture World called “a new photographic process for taking moonlight and firelight effects.”21 His most vital contribution, according to Joanna Hearne, was his “[intervention] in the cinematic imagery of the embryonic Western film genre by revising the dominant plot of the Indian drama” and his “reorientation of melodramatic images [of interracial romance, racial integrations, and modernity] to envision Indigenous futures and territorial sovereignty.” Rather than using his pictures as an attempt to insert documentary content or express specific tribal aesthetics, as many frontier melodramas did, Young Deer altered the typical narrative structures and outcomes for the Native characters as a way of addressing broader political concerns.22 Among the ways he accomplished that was by emphasizing the richness of tribal identity and by giving women a more prominent role. In Young Deer’s For the Papoose (Pathé, 1912), for instance, a Native American woman is married to a white settler named Young Buffalo, who tires of her and her tribe but continues to feel affection for their mixed-race child. So he betrays his wife (played by Lillian St. Cyr), kidnaps his own child, and plans to run off with a white female settler. The plot, however, reverses the familiar story of Cecil B. DeMille’s influential The Squaw Man. The husband in For the Papoose is decidedly an evil and lesser man: alcoholic, unfaithful, and abusive to his devoted wife, and deceptive in his provocation of the tribe. Rather than “innocently” gaining entitlements, as occurs in the film versions that DeMille produced, “his avarice here clearly destabilizes interracial frontier relations, resulting in his ejection from both [Indian and white] communities and eventually in his death” by the brother of his wife, who avenges his disloyalty.23 Moreover, the Indian wife is neither helpless nor suicidally-inclined; and despite her marriage to a white man, she continues to enjoy a close connection to her family and her tribe. Young Deer’s replotting of the familiar story thus undermines the legitimating conventions of the “squaw man” story and instead allows the stable identities and affiliations of the Native Americans to prevail and the tribal identity to be safeguarded. So, as Andrew Brodie Smith writes, “If Nat-u-Rich commits suicide so her son can return to European civilization, the death of the child’s white father in

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For the Papoose reaffirmed that the boy is an Indian and will live as part” of his mother’s tribe.24 And in The Falling Arrow (1909), Young Deer employed a variety of strategic interventions, telling the story of an interracial courtship but inverting the genders of those involved in a way that challenged the assumptions of The Squaw Man.25 After a white outlaw kidnaps a Mexican woman Felice (Lillian St. Cyr), Young Deer (played by Young Deer) rescues her, then seeks her father’s permission to marry. Although the father initially objects to the marriage and offers Young Deer a monetary reward instead, ultimately he gives his approval to the marriage. Notably, the relationship between Felice and Young Deer unfolds in a distinctly modern way: with tokens and photographs exchanged between the couple and then with a note written by the hostage Felice on her petticoat and shot with a bow and arrow from the outlaw’s hide-out into Young Deer’s camp. The use of photographs as part of their courtship provides another intriguing inversion: it allows the characters to “become consumers of photographs rather than objects in photographs purveyed and circulated by others.” Likewise, the film itself re-politicizes the representations of Native Americans in mainstream cinematic melodramas by “using the industry’s turn to authenticity to shift the plots and resolutions of Western narratives and emphasize Native familial continuity and political solidarity.”26 By giving his Native Americans agency and justifying their acts

Fig. 4.2.  For the Papoose (1912) reversed the familiar self-sacrificing princess plot by depicting a strong Native American woman who confronts her abusive white husband and fights for custody of their child. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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of violence, which Richard Abel suggests are often the direct result of disloyalty or aggression instigated by white settlers, Young Deer “offered white American audiences different perspectives on Native Americans and presented Native American audiences with less-biased versions of themselves.”27 LILLIAN ST. CYR (RED WING) Young Deer also distinguished himself by his marriage to Winnebago (Nebraska) Lillian St. Cyr, which established the pair as the first Native American “power couple” in the film industry. Like her husband, St. Cyr was an early film pioneer. Appearing under the stage names “Red Wing” and “Princess Red Wing,” she became the first Native American silent film star.28 She was so popular, in fact, that her name was incorporated into the titles of many of her films, including Red Wing’s Gratitude, Red Wing’s Loyalty, Red Wing’s Constancy, and Red Wing and the White Girl. As further evidence of her audience appeal, other studios capitalized on her image and appropriated the “Red Wing” name for characters in their own productions. Like many other Native young people of her day, St. Cyr and her siblings had been removed from the Winnebago reservation and sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.29 After her marriage in 1906 to the business-savvy Young, the couple discovered that during an era of dime novels and Wild West Shows, they could entertain audiences and “pass” for Plains Indians. So, as Angela Aleiss writes, they joined almost a hundred Lakota Sioux at New York City’s enormous Hippodrome Theatre as part of “Pioneer Days: A Spectacle Drama of Western Life,” where they reenacted stagecoach battles and performed “the Ghost Dance against a breathtaking orange moon.”30 After teaming with Chief [Sherman] Charging Hawk, they posed as “authentic” Sioux Indians from the Pine Ridge Agency and regularly appeared in Manhattan’s social clubs, where their performances allowed them to assert their Native identity. Knowing America’s expectations, the couple saw such acting as a way of advancing in the entertainment industry; and they soon captured the attention of early filmmakers who were capitalizing on the Western formula and churning out one- and two-reel shorts every week. D.W. Griffith even hired the pair as actors and as technical advisors for two of his Indian tales, The Mended Lute and Indian Runner’s Romance. Their involvement was no doubt the reason behind Biograph’s claim that The Mended Lute was “more than reasonably accurate, these details having been supervised by an expert in the matter.”31 It was after moving in 1909 to Los Angeles as part of Pathé’s new California studio that the couple gained real celebrity. They were, as St. Cyr’s biographer Linda M. Waggoner writes, “the Indian actors to meet or beat in

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California, both hailing from Carlisle and the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska, if anybody asked.” (In fact, Young Deer had never been educated at Carlisle or lived in Nebraska, but he clung to that story because it made good copy.) Even their stage names, Red Wing and Young Deer, were designed to attest to and promote their authenticity as Indians.32 Whereas Young Deer, a prolific director and scenario writer of Indian-themed shorts and Westerns, became known for delivering quirky stories with thrilling action, St. Cyr quickly established herself as an accomplished actress. Often cast as the female lead in her husband’s films, she earned a reputation for being fearless in the enacting of dangerous and daring stunts, not only her own but also occasionally those of others. For example, in The Cheyenne’s Bride (1911), a story of enmity between the Sioux and the Cheyenne and the love between Silver Rose, a Sioux woman, and Tiger Heart, the Cheyenne chief’s son, she was strapped onto the back of a galloping horse as punishment for her forbidden relationship. And in The Red Girl and the Child (1910), St. Cyr (billed as “Princess Red Wing”) played a heroic Indian. Disguised in men’s clothing, she saves a white child by tricking the kidnappers into following her over a rope she has strung across a sheer-walled river gorge, a ruse that sends the pursuers plummeting to their deaths. That film not only centered attention on an Indian woman but also cleverly reversed gender stereotyping by portraying her as an unconventional swashbuckler and an adventuress.33 St. Cyr’s bold performance elicited gasps from the audience and garnered notice from the trade journals, especially when she scaled a slate-covered hillside with a real baby strapped on her back “in her native way.”34 Similarly, in Red Wing’s Gratitude (1909), St. Cyr (as the eponymous Red Wing) is the object of her brutal Indian father’s contempt for women; yet she proves her worth by rescuing a white child who has been kidnapped by Indians. Fatally wounded in the process, she dies in the arms of the child’s father. Moving Picture World observed that the film was “notable in many particulars,” including the costumes, a number of which St. Cyr had created. “The Indian dresses are of actual native manufacture and are worn as the Indians wear them,” with “the rich bead work and the handsome headdresses add[ing] to the picturesqueness of the scene, and Indian customs observed throughout under the direction of the real Indians, who take the leading roles.”35 The characters St. Cyr portrayed were usually stronger and more empowered than the stereotypically helpless, tragic Indian princesses. In For the Love of Red Wing (1910), for instance, she refuses to honor the trade that her father has negotiated with an emigrant party—a handsome pony in exchange for her hand—and tries to escape her captors. But when that fails, she chooses

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to act by taking her own life rather than enduring captivity (an interesting twist on the captivity stories in which a white girl is taken hostage by savage Indians). In Red Wing’s Constancy (1910), she is able to accomplish what the sheriff and his crew cannot: she tracks down and overcomes the “half-breed” who has wounded her cowboy husband. After besting and killing the villain in a knife fight, she refuses the reward offered for his death: for her, avenging her husband is sufficient payment. In The Cowboy and the Schoolmarm (1910), she and her husband (played by Young Deer) devise a clever way to track the “bad man” who is stalking the young white schoolteacher. Dropping some of the beadwork that they are selling on the trail behind him, they ensure that he is caught and does not escape punishment. And in another Bison film, The Love of a Savage (1909), Arrow Head (St. Cyr) saves the life of Sioux brave White Elk by rescuing him from a jealous rival. St. Cyr found her greatest fame, though, in The Squaw Man (1914), where she contributed to both the shaping and the costuming of her character. Although, as she recalled years later in the New York World-Telegram, “I was hired mainly because I was a real Indian,” she received rave reviews from the press and her fellow actors, who praised the depth and sensitivity of her acting.36 Her performance reportedly stunned co-star Dustin Farnum, who played her husband. “In all my years on the stage I never saw anything like it,” he told an interviewer in 1914. “It was absolutely the reverse of everything we have been taught about Indians.”37 Moving Picture World film critic Louis Reeves Harrison concurred, calling St. Cyr “a remarkably fine actress” and according to her credit for making the film such an excellent visualization. “Indian girls who can awaken and hold sympathy for their roles are few and far between,” Harrison wrote, “but Princess Redwing performs her part with exquisite fidelity and great depth of feeling. The [photo]play’s highest merit is the opportunity it affords this accomplished actress.”38 St. Cyr also found her voice in other ways. As Emma Rothberg reported, when told that she should be proud to be acting alongside Farnum, a “$1,000-a-week star,” despite the fact that she was earning a considerably lower salary, she replied, “What about him? He’s working with a one hundred percent American.”39 Ultimately, she appeared in as many as seventy silent films and served in numerous other capacities, from writer to costume designer and stunt actress. Her next-to-last appearance was in the 1916 film version of Ramona (dir. Donald Crisp), which had first been filmed by D.W. Griffith in 1910. By then she had aged and her appearance had begun to change, so rather than playing the title role, she assumed a small part and was virtually unrecognizable as Ramona’s mother. Her final performance came almost a decade later, in another minor role, in Soul Fire (Tec-Art Studio, 1925).40

Fig. 4.3.  Lillian St. Cyr (who acted under the name Red Wing) distinguished herself by her on-screen performances as well as her off-screen activism for Native American causes. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

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After her film career ended, St. Cyr—by then divorced from Young Deer— remained an advocate and promoter of Native American culture. Over the next few decades, she participated in numerous cultural performances and recitals across the country and continued to create the exquisite costumes, beadwork, and apparel for which she was renowned. She also became increasingly engaged in political events and espoused many worthy causes, establishing herself as both a legend in the film industry and a role model in the Native American community. YOUNG DEER’S LATER YEARS After relocating to Hollywood, Young Deer not only directed and consulted but also continued to act, often alongside his then-wife, St. Cyr. Typical of their collaborations was Red Deer’s Devotion (1911), a film that elicited disgust from Moving Picture World for its bold depiction of interracial love. Young Deer played an Indian who saves the white daughter of the station agent at Coyote Junction from the cowboy who accosted her. When his marriage proposal is rejected by her father, she runs away to join him—a taboo-breaking decision.41 A similar rejection occurs in Young Deer’s Return (1910), in which Young Deer befriends and saves prospector John Scott from death but refuses any reward for his heroism. Later, after Young Deer distinguishes himself in the championship game at the Carlisle School to which he has been sent, he wins the love of Scott’s daughter. But when Young Deer asks for her hand, Scott is furious and rebuffs him. Although Scott later relents, it is too late. Proving the futility of attempts at assimilation, Young Deer “discards civilized garments,” returns to his old life, and weds a woman of his own race.42 While his acting talent and his creative directorial vision accorded Young Deer a kind of iconographic status, his position in the early film industry changed as censors, “high-class exhibitors,” and the trade press became more vigilant in policing “objectionable” race-oriented material. As Andrew Brodie Smith writes, Young Deer was forced to relinquish control over many of the motion pictures he produced, to rely more and more on standard conventions and narrow Indian stereotypes, and to avoid subjects such as interracial sexual situations and questions of Indian assimilation. Even as his artistic license became increasingly limited, though, he kept making Indian Westerns into the early 1910s; but “only a few of his later films dealt with social issues, and they did so in much less overt ways than his earlier works” had.43 Ultimately, his pictures became largely indistinguishable from those of other companies. Despite that fact, Young Deer might have continued to make movies. His career came to a premature close in 1913, however, after he was charged

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in California with public scandal, including co-conspiracy in a white slave ring and statutory rape of a fifteen-year-old girl. The charge, Young Deer insisted, was a racist conspiracy, “the vengeance that the white men meted out to Indians.” So he jumped bail, fled the country, and spent the next few years making films in Britain. When the charges against him were dropped, he returned to the U.S. Unable to restart his career, he tried other ventures, such as operating an acting school in San Francisco. But, by the 1930s, he had been reduced to occasional jobs as a second-unit director of independentlyproduced low-budget movies and serials.44 Nonetheless, Young Deer’s early films, especially those he made with St. Cyr, remain of much interest for the way they portrayed dignified and heroic Indian characters. Presenting a “criticism of the genre from within the genre that is far sharper in its advocacy for Indigenous rights than the ‘pro-Indian’ and ‘revisionist’ Westerns” of the second half of the twentieth century,” they tell Native stories within the very forms that try to erase them. “Instead of constructing interracial relationships that precede and enable the white settler ‘family on the land,’” his films envision Native and interracial family coherence. “Instead of crafting narrative closure through images of Indian death,” they end with images of interracial and intergenerational continuity that hint at later Native appropriations of dominant film industry narratives.45 Although many of those films are now lost, White Fawn’s Devotion survives, and in 2008 it was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. That film alone reaffirms the significance of Young Deer and St. Cyr in early silent cinema and particularly in the struggle for more sympathetic and realistic representation of Native American women as active characters, not simply as exotic Others. THE DAUGHTER OF DAWN Like White Fawn’s Devotion, The Daughter of Dawn (1920) was remarkable for the portrayal of its lead female character. One of the earliest extant productions to use an entirely American Indian cast, The Daughter of Dawn was described by a critic at a sneak premiere in October, 1920, as an “original and breathtaking adventure” that had “hardly been duplicated before.”46 Curiously, though, after only a handful of local showings, the film was withdrawn from release and for decades was considered lost until it was rediscovered in private hands after being given to a private detective as payment for his services in lieu of cash. It has since been preserved by the Oklahoma Historical Society, which also archives in its collections a tipi and other original artifacts from the filming.

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Produced by the independent Texas Film Company, the six-reel feature was conceived by the company’s founder Richard Banks and directed by Norbert Myles, an actor, director, and writer whom Banks had met on a film set in California in 1916. Over the years, the temperamental Myles had butted heads with several of Hollywood’s top brass and, as Leo Kelley writes, by the time he was approached by Banks, he had been blackballed by the industry. So he happily accepted the offer to collaborate with Banks, who “was impressed with the vigor and expertise of the fiery director.”47 Using an old Comanche legend as the basis for the plot, the men began scouting locations that would provide the authenticity they sought. Quickly settling on Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge Center near Lawton, Oklahoma, they assembled their actors, comprised mostly of Kiowa and Comanche; and they cast Esther LaBarre (“Princess Peka”) in the title role of Dawn, daughter of the chief (played by Kiowa Hunting Horse). In the film, she is courted by two braves: White Eagle (played by White Parker, son of the legendary real-life Comanche Chief Quanah Parker), and Black Wolf (played by Comanche Jack Sankeydoty). Like the soaring eagle and the stealthy wolf for which they were named, the two are opposites in their demeanor and conduct. Sincerely devoted to Dawn (“named because she was ushered into the world as the sun rose”), White Eagle treats her with gentleness and affection. Black Wolf, on the other hand, is rough and brutish; although he covets Dawn, he is largely motivated by a desire to use marriage to her as a way of advancing in the tribe and ultimately becoming chief. Initially the Chief looks favorably upon Black Wolf, whom he believes to be the better match because he “is one of my most powerful braves—he has much to give.” Yet while Dawn respects her father, she is in love with White Eagle. The situation is further complicated by Red Wing (played by Wanada Parker, real-life daughter of Chief Parker), who loves Black Wolf; but he is oblivious to her affection because he hopes to wed Dawn and rise in the tribal hierarchy. After Dawn tells her father that her heart “does not beat” for Black Wolf, the Chief admits that “White Eagle is very brave—and—it is the brave and not his goods that you must choose.” Unlike Black Wolf, White Eagle can offer “nothing but himself.” To prove his love, White Eagle offers to undergo any test in order to win the Chief’s consent. So the Chief devises a contest to determine which man is indeed the more courageous: they will jump from a cliff at Medicine Bluff, and the survivor can claim his daughter. But if one or both fail, the Chief warns, they will be unworthy of the name Kiowa and “shall be driven from the tribe to live among the coyotes.” Inspired by his beloved (whose face he imagines, superimposed on the rocks below), White Eagle takes the leap; and, although he is hurt, he survives—his physical injuries, according to the title card, “soon routed by youth, love, and happiness.” The craven Black Wolf, however, does not even attempt to complete

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the contest; after imagining his own corpse at the base of the cliff (another superimposition), he jumps a mere few feet down to a ledge, where he is found cowering and hanging by a tree limb. Banished from the Kiowa camp for his cowardice, Black Wolf seeks revenge. So he approaches the rival Comanche and asks to join their tribe. Knowing that the Comanche have “no young women while the Kiowas have plenty,” he promises to lead them on a raid of the enemy camp. The attack that follows is savage. Several of the Kiowa elders are killed, and the women, Dawn among them, are captured. The Kiowa respond, and after a fierce battle, they defeat their enemies. Once again, the traitorous Black Wolf tries to flee, but he is killed by White Eagle; and when Red Wing finds his body, she commits suicide rather than live without him. In the final scenes, after White Eagle rescues Dawn from her captors, the two lovers are happily joined. With the blessing of both the Chief and the Great Spirit, they paddle off in their canoe to start a new life together. In addition to its all-Native casting, the film was significant for its rich portrait of the Kiowa and Comanche: their customs, their lodging, their warfare, their dress, even details such as the bobbed and braided tails of their ponies. Without resorting to the usual cinematic embellishments or maudlin melodrama, the film meticulously re-created the feel of communal tribal life, documenting and preserving an important moment in history. From the raucous excitement of the buffalo hunts to the quiet dignity of the revered tribal elders, it offered an unparalleled depiction of the vanishing frontier, made all the more realistic thanks to the authentic tipis, clothing, and material culture that the three hundred actors provided.48 In many ways, though, the most striking aspect of the film is its depiction and treatment of the title character. While she is indeed an Indian princess, Dawn is not bound by the familiar trope of inferiority or restricted to the prevailing stereotype of the tragic self-sacrificing maiden unable to assimilate into the dominant white culture. Rather, she is independent, free-thinking, and content to live within her own culture. She asserts her will, respectfully rejecting her father’s choice of husband for her even as she seeks his consent to marry the man whom she loves; and she never wavers in her desire for the kind-hearted White Eagle or resigns herself to the prospect of an unfulfilling union with the ambitious, menacing Black Wolf whom she knows plans to use the marriage for self-advancement. In short, she recognizes her own worth, and, throughout the film, she demonstrates a clear voice and a sense of agency rarely afforded women, much less Native American women, in early cinema. Nor is Dawn the only strong and admirable woman in the film. She is surrounded by loyal friends her own age and counseled by female elders, who play an integral role in the community. All of them provide an unusually

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Fig. 4.4.  Dawn, in The Daughter of Dawn (1920), spurns the villainous Black Wolf, who wants to wed her so he can gain power in the tribe, and finds happiness with White Eagle, the man she truly loves. Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

warm representation of Native American women and emphasize the matriarchal aspect of their culture. The viewer even feels an empathy for the faithful Red Wing, who follows Black Wolf into exile from the Kiowa and then, after his fatal injury, chooses not to go on living without him. Dawn’s love story with White Eagle is atypical as well: set against the beauty of an unspoiled natural environment, it unfolds slowly yet romantically. Through the use of iris shots, close-ups, and blue tinting of the evening scene in which the lovers meet and woo, the film reveals Dawn’s oneness with the land. Her story, moreover, parallels the larger story of the richness of tribal life and the desire to protect and preserve it. EDWIN CAREWE Another notable Native figure in silent films was Edwin Carewe, a Chickasaw best remembered for his film Ramona (1928). The first Native American director since James Young Deer and the first Native American to direct a feature-length film, Carewe (born Jay John Fox) was one of three brothers, all of whom became movie directors. After starting his career as an actor in stock companies and on Broadway, Carewe migrated west to Hollywood, where,

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over the course of his career, he directed fifty-seven feature films, produced nineteen, acted in thirty-six, and wrote screenplays for four. Credited with giving early screen work to actors Wallace Beery, Francis X. Bushman, Mary Astor, and Gary Cooper, he discovered the Mexican beauty Dolores Del Rio, whom he signed to an exclusive contract and whom he cast in the starring role in Ramona (1928), his best-known film.49 Adapted from the 1884 novel by Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona had already been produced twice before in the silent era, by D.W. Griffith in 1910 and Donald Crisp in 1916.50 A poignant story about racial injustice, it was set after the Mexican-American War in Southern California, where the Scottish-Indian orphan girl Ramona, initially unaware of her Native heritage, is being raised on Señora Gonzaga Moreno’s ranch. Moreno, who adopted Ramona out of a sense of obligation, despises Indians. So when Ramona falls in love with one of the workers, Native American Alessandro, Moreno is enraged and refuses to allow her to marry. But Ramona, having learned by accident of her own Native heritage, ignores Moreno’s objections and elopes. Almost immediately, she and Alessandro become victims of white prejudice and endure a heartbreaking cycle of travails and discrimination. After their beloved daughter dies because a white doctor refuses to treat her, their lives become even more tragic: Alessandro, accused of horse-stealing, is murdered, while Ramona, suffering amnesia because of his loss, wanders aimlessly in the wild. In Carewe’s version, she is discovered by Felipe, the son of the now-deceased Señora Moreno and the childhood “brother” who has long been in love with her. Felipe brings Ramona back to the ranch and helps her to recover her memory of happier days. Although Carewe generally did not treat Indian topics in the films that he directed, Ramona was the exception; and it proved to be a popular, critical, and financial success.51 Audiences, especially women, responded enthusiastically to his visual interpretation of frontier race relations and to his promotion of the female character as “the underdog.”52 But unlike the interventions of Young Deer and St. Cyr that had changed some of the Western genre’s elements (such as the Native characters’ survival at the end of the story), Carewe’s version of Ramona did not significantly alter any early narrative structures. It did, however, fuse the Western’s visual discourse of spectacular violence with women’s sentimental melodrama and the social problem film; and it maintained “the tragic scenarios of the Indian drama and even amplifie[d] visual representation of tragedy,” which no doubt was influenced by Carewe’s own Native American ancestry.53 Organized around a female character in a time of crisis of identity, Carewe’s Ramona was a portrait of a family brought together by a process of adoption “but torn apart by murder and trauma in the wake of U.S. appropriation of Native land” and the government’s so-called “civilizing” policies intended to

Fig. 4.5.  A pioneering director during the silent era, Edwin Carewe was the first Native American to direct a feature-length film. Image from Motion Picture Story Magazine.

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assimilate Indians into white culture. Ramona’s amnesia, which temporarily erases her memory of her Native past, parallels the erasure of Native land rights and the enforced attempts at assimilation,54 while the discrimination that she and Alessandro face reveals the unfortunate reality of the Native American experience well into the early decades of the twentieth century. In Carewe’s adaptation, Ramona emerges as a symbol of Native suffering, endurance, and pride. Apart from Ramona, Carewe distinguished himself in a number of ways. Founder of Edwin Carewe Motion Pictures Corporation, whose purpose was to produce “high class films,” he was the first Native American to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, established in 1927.55 His career, however, declined after he was charged with income tax evasion over profits from a picture he produced abroad with Del Rio. Despite his attempt at a comeback, he directed and produced only one more film, the sound picture Are We Civilized? (1934), a poorly-reviewed veiled attack on Adolf Hitler, racism, and religious hatred. Although his films are little remembered today, Carewe remains, in Kevin Brownlow’s words, “a director of great importance” whose Native perspective as well as his very presence in silent film provided another significant voice.56 CONCLUSION The great “myth of the frontier,” as defined by Richard Slotkin and other historians, was a narrative of regeneration through violence that served as the structuring metaphor of the American experience. The moral landscape of that myth, according to Slotkin, “is divided by significant borders, of which the wilderness/civilization, Indian/White border is the most basic. The American,” he argued, “must cross the border into ‘Indian country’ and experience a ‘regression’ to a more primitive and natural condition of life so that the false values of the ‘metropolis’ can be purged and a new, purified social contract enacted.”57 That opposition of innocence versus experience and nature versus civilization underlies and, at the same time, helps to explain the great fascination that Americans had with the Western and especially with the role that Native Americans have played in its various reimaginings in popular history, culture, literature, and film. As Joanna Hearne observed, “the orientation of the Western to the national past also encodes a national future,” in which the genre’s visual representation of Native absence and presence is crucial.58 In silent film, however, Native American women were generally reduced to unfortunate and extreme types. They typically appeared as “squaws,” incidental characters who played drudge roles, or as Indian princesses, beautiful

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young maidens who reject, or are rejected by, their own people because of their attraction to white settlers and culture and who die or otherwise are eliminated as a consequence—a pattern established in films such as The Invaders and The Squaw Man and repeated by numerous early filmmakers. As Michael Hilger writes, the princess, an audience favorite, had a special ability to recognize the “superiority” of the white man and fell in love with one rather than with an Indian. Because of her exotic beauty, she was an appealing companion who often rescued the white man from her own people and who, occasionally (and conveniently) committed suicide to remove herself as an obstacle to her husband’s desire for a white woman.59 On screen in the dominant cinema, Native women were largely interchangeable. When they spoke at all, it was—as the title cards indicate—in broken English that was designed to demonstrate their cultural inferiority and otherness.60 Their costuming, like so many other aspects of Hollywood’s depiction of Native culture, was similarly generic, with scant attention paid to the actual distinctions of their tribes’ customs, rituals, and appearance. Whatever their actual heritage, they simply became “Hollywood Indians” and often went uncredited in the films in which they appeared. Moreover, apart from the rare performances by actresses such as Lillian St. Cyr or Minnie Ha Ha, the major Native female characters were not played by actual Native Americans. Instead, they went to “manufactured” Indians such as Mona Darkfeather (a white Scottish/Hispanic woman, born Josephine Workman, whose physical attributes, the studios decided, could allow her to pass and who promoted her accordingly, as a “full-blooded Indian girl”)61 or to the popular white actresses of the day. Norma Talmadge, for instance, starred in The Heart of Wetona (1919), while “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford was routinely cast as an Indian in films such as Griffith’s The Indian Runner’s Romance (1909), The Song of the Wildwood Flute (1910), Iola’s Promise (1912), and A Pueblo Legend (1912). Redfacing was so blatant and so common, in fact, that the practice was even parodied in the 1923 Hal Roach spoof Uncovered Wagons (aka Paul’s Last Stand), in which a group of automobile-driving and bicycle-riding Indians attacks a row of mobile “coaches” driven by whites—but not before stopping to apply extra “rouge” (so marked on the tin) for the camera. As Pickford later recalled, even in Griffith’s Indian films, the costumes were inauthentic, and the pictures themselves were “filled with mistakes.” She remembered one instance in which “a Frenchman who was cast for the part of a medicine man had been given permission to select a costume for himself” and chose “a weird one with short skirt[,] trimmed with bells. When he came dancing into the scene with bathing trunks under his short skirt the Indians were furious, because they thought we were trying to make fun of

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them. It seems that this was a sacred skirt, and they insisted that he take it off or that we all leave the village.”62 The portrayals of Native Americans as primitives and women as exotic and seductive Others who had to be erased only confirmed the popular stereotypes and reinforced long-standing beliefs and prejudices. As Jacquelyn Kilpatrick observed, “from adventure stories, reports of first contact, and captivity narratives, to the Indians of Cooper’s woods, the fabrications of Ned Buntline and other dime novelists, and finally the wild west shows and the first two decades of filmmaking, the public was presented with and consumed a distorted, shifting, polarized set of images that gave them a way to categorize and define the first residents of the continent.”63 The attempts by directors such as James Young Deer and Edwin Carewe and actresses such as Lillian St. Cyr to challenge the stereotypes and to provide more realistic perspectives are therefore especially noteworthy. Their desire to present sympathetic and honest depictions of Native Americans, especially of Native American women, and to counter the imagery of Hollywood’s Indians was in many ways a political act, a way of re-politicizing Native representation in mainstream cinematic melodramas by using the industry’s turn to authenticity to shift the plots and resolutions of Western narratives. Their appropriation of the narratives in the dominant film industry afforded them an opportunity to tell Native American stories from within the very forms that tried to erase them.64 And their character depictions were at once sympathetic and complex. White Fawn’s Devotion, for example, reversed the familiar “squaw man” narrative of the abandoned Native woman who sacrifices herself so her white husband can take a white wife by allowing White Fawn a means to effect the preservation of her family. In For the Papoose, the Indian wife manages to ensure the restoration of her child after her white husband tries to rupture their family by running off with a white settler woman. And in his version of Ramona, Edwin Carewe depicts whites as the villains who massacre the peace-loving Indians, a repudiation of the argument for assimilation of “primitive” Indians into “civilized” white society. Such pioneering efforts, to be sure, constituted a significant departure from “the ideologically burdened images” of Native women and contributed to the emergence of Indigenous filmmaking as a movement in the second half of the twentieth century.65 Characters such as White Fawn and Dawn helped to give Native American women a voice and to portray them as strong and individualized figures, not simply as stereotypes. By freeing them from the limitations of popular Indian and Western melodrama, the Native directors and actresses established them not as images of removal or erasure but as a real presence in cinema and in the American mythology.

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NOTES   1. This chapter contains certain terms that were commonly used during the silent film era and that may be offensive to some readers. Those words and terms, most of which occur in the titles of films or in newspaper and trade publications, are used here exclusively for historical or analytical purposes.   2. Michelle H. Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), pp. 13, 31.   3. See, for example, “Standing Up and Speaking Out: Native American Activism in Early Hollywood,” Dream Weavers: Native Americans Working in Silent Hollywood, https://dreamweaversfilmprogram.wordpress.com/.   4. Raheja, p. 39.   5. Ibid., pp. 31, 39. Standing Bear moved to California and was recruited as a consultant by motion picture director Thomas Ince because of his experience as a performer with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. For almost two decades, he was employed in the motion picture industry, working with Tom Mix, Douglas Fairbanks, and William S. Hart on early Hollywood Westerns. He made his screen debut in Ramona in 1916 and appeared in a dozen or more films (sources disagree on the actual numbers), playing both Indian and non-Indian roles.  6. Mack Sennett Weekly, February 12, 1917, cited in Raheja, pp. 56, 61.   7. John Standing Horse added: “We always laugh and think it is a great joke when we see the leading girls in the pictures made up as Indians, with the chicken feather in their hair” (Moving Picture World, November 11, 1911, p. 398).  8. Moving Picture World, March 18, 1911, pp. 581, 587, cited in Angela Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), p. 9, and Raymond William Stedman, Shadows of the Indian: Stereotypes in American Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), p. 157. See also Raheja, pp. 42–43.   9. Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian, p. 8, suggests that the abandoned Indian wife “feigns death, then suddenly reappears to save her husband from the tribe’s vengeance. It was a lesson fit for any wandering spouse.” 10. Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), pp. 92–93. 11. Scott Simmon, “White Fawn’s Devotion,” online essay for Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/ white_fawn.pdf. 12. Ibid. 13. M. Elise Marubbio, Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), p. 47. 14. Hearne, pp. 98–99. 15. Cited in Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 10.

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16. Andrew Brodie Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003), p. 72. 17. Smith, p. 75. According to Smith, Red Wing’s parents lived through that experience as well. 18. Linda M. Waggoner, Starring Red Wing! The Incredible Career of Lilian M. St. Cyr, the First Native American Film Star (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2019), p. 99. 19. Raheja, p. 35. 20. Matthew Sweet, “The First Native American director. Or was he?” The Guardian, September 23, 2010, The Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2010/sep/23/first-native-american-director. 21. Moving Picture World, February 11, 1911: “By his methods, the negatives show clearness of outline and background that could not be obtained by the old method” (cited in Waggoner, p. 144). Young Deer also attracted negative attention for other of his practices, including occasional cruelty to some of the animals that he employed in his films. 22. Hearne, pp. 52–53. 23. Ibid., pp. 90–91, 97. 24. Smith, p. 95. 25. Ibid., p. 92. Young Deer would use that basic plot of The Falling Arrow (alternatively titled The Friendly Indian) again in films such as An Indian’s Bride (NYMP, 1909) and Young Deer’s Return (NYMP, 1911). 26. Hearne, pp. 90–91. 27. Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900– 1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); “Directing History: The Short Films of James Young Deer,” Dream Weavers: Native Americans Working in Silent Hollywood, https://dreamweaversfilmprogram.wordpress.com/ directing-history-the-short-films-of-james-young-deer/. 28. Emma Rothberg, “Lilian [sic] St. Cyr [‘Red Wing’],” National Women’s History Museum, https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ lilian-st-cyr-red-wing. 29. As noted in “Red Wing: The First Native American Movie Star,” Dream Weavers: Native Americans Working in Silent Hollywood, https://dreamweaversfilmprogram.wordpress.com/red-wing-the-first-native-american-movie-star/, at Carlisle, St. Cyr was given a new name. She had to dress in western clothing and speak only English, and she was forced to convert to Christianity. “This desire to eradicate the children’s ties to their Native American heritage is a bit ironic considering that when St. Cyr began her career as an actress and technical advisor, she was valued for her ability to advise filmmakers on traditional Native American life and customs and was known for bringing that knowledge to her roles, resulting in greater cultural authenticity.” 30. Angela Aleiss, Hollywood’s Native Americans: Stories of Identity and Resistance (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2022), p. 8. 31. Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film, pp. 29–30. 32. Waggoner, p. 116.

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33. Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film, p. 30; Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian, p. 2. 34. Waggoner, p. 31. 35. A reviewer for Moving Picture World (October 23, 1909) called the film “a notable Indian picture in many important particulars,” not only in the authenticity of the costumes but also in the observance of Indian customs under the direction of the real Indians. 36. Dustin Farnum, who played opposite St. Cyr in The Squaw Man, later recalled in an interview in Moving Picture World that when they were rehearsing the scene in which the child is taken away to be sent back to England, “this pure-blooded Indian girl broke down and went into hysterics. It was pitiful. It was twenty-five minutes before we could proceed with the picture.” Like the others in the cast, Farnum had never seen anything like it before and remarked that St. Cyr’s performance countered all that they had been taught about Indians. Cited by Aleiss, Marubbio, Hearne, and others. 37. Moving Picture World, February 28, 1914, cited in Waggoner, p. 223. St. Cyr received similar praise for other roles, in which she was described as “delightful” and “a pleasure to watch.” 38. Louis Reeves Harrison, Moving Picture World, cited in Waggoner, p. 222. 39. Rothberg, “Lilian [sic] St. Cyr.” 40. In the mid-1910s, St. Cyr played other similar but smaller roles in films such as In the Days of the Thundering Herd (1914), Fighting Bob (1915), and Ramona (1916), based on the novel by Helen Hunt Jackson. But she never again achieved the success she had attained in The Squaw Man or her earlier films with Young Deer. 41. Moving Picture World, March 25, 1911, cited in Simmon, p. 31. As Smith (p. 94) noted, although Young Deer “would continue to deal with issues of assimilation and racism, Red Deer’s Devotion was the last film in which he explicitly treated romantic love between an Indian and a white woman.” 42. Moving Picture World, October 15, 1910. 43. Smith, p. 97. 44. Matthew Sweet, “The First Native American director. Or was he?” Young Deer’s “rather fast and elusive life” is also described in Aleiss, Making the White Man’s Indian, pp. 16–17. 45. Hearne, pp. 99–100. 46. Motion Picture News, October 16, 1920. Notably, White Fawn’s Devotion was the earliest surviving film directed by a Native American filmmaker to be added to the National Film Registry, which occurred in 2008. 47. Leo Kelley, “The Daughter of Dawn: An Original Silent Film with an Oklahoma Indian Cast,” https://www.academia.edu/15187573/The_Daughter_of_Dawn_ An_Original_Silent_Film_with_an_Oklahoma_Indian_Cast. 48. The film offered authenticity in many ways: White Parker, the film’s male lead, and Wanada Parker, who appears in a supporting role, were two of the twenty-five children of legendary Comanche chief, Quanah Parker. And, according to the background of the film provided by distributor Kino-Lorber, by accident or design, the

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film’s plot hinges on a story very similar to Quanah Parker’s actual encounter with his first wife. 49. Edwin Carewe Legacy Archive, https://edwincarewe.com/. 50. For a good discussion of the novel and the various film versions, see Jim Hitt, The American West from Fiction (1823–1976) into Film (1910–1986) (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990), pp. 84–87. 51. “Edwin Carewe’s Ramona,” Dream Weavers: Native Americans Working in Silent Hollywood, https://dreamweaversfilmprogram.wordpress.com/. As Angela Aleiss noted in Hollywood’s Native Americans, p. 29, he did occasionally cast Native Americans. For example, Minnie Provost appeared in his The Girl of the Golden West (1923), her last appearance before her death that same year. 52. According to Carewe’s granddaughter Diane Allen, “Even though most films he made didn’t portray Indians, he chose movies and casts that promoted the underdog especially the female character.” Cited in Aleiss, Hollywood’s Native Americans, pp. 27–28. 53. Edwin Carewe Legacy Archive; Hearne, pp. 152–153; and “Edwin Carewe’s Ramona,” Dream Weavers. According to “Edwin Carewe’s Ramona,” the film was thought to be lost but was discovered in the Czech National Film Archive in 2010. 54. Hearne, p. 171. 55. Aleiss, Hollywood’s Native Americans, pp. 27, 30. Aleiss also comments on Carewe’s desire to distribute some of the films he produced on a state-rights basis. “His plan was to release pictures with star names and allow independents to prosper while staying independent.” 56. Kevin Brownlow, The War, The West, and the Wilderness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 334. 57. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), p. 14, and Hearne, pp. 10–11. 58. Hearne, p. 11. 59. Hilger, The American Indian in Film, p. 2. 60. This was true even of a character like Wetona, in The Heart of Wetona (Select, 1919), who is educated in a seminary but who, according to the Variety reviewer (January 19, 1919), used “the stilted manner in which Indians speak English.” Cited in Hilger, The American Indian in Film, p. 33. 61. According to Smith (p. 82), “Darkfeather” was a white vaudevillian from the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Filmmaker Fred Balshofer, co-founder of New York Motion Pictures, hired her after Pathé had lured Young Deer and Red Wing away from that company; and he billed her as “Princess Mona Darkfeather,” the only authentic “Indian princess” working in the movies. He even ran a bogus story in Motion Picture News about how he had discovered her in an Indian village near Needles, California. Angela Aleiss, in Hollywood’s Native Americans, p. 6, notes that after their marriage, Darkfeather’s husband Frank E. Montgomery, an actor-turneddirector who worked with the Kalem Company as an independent producer, “created his own Mona Darkfeather brand of prictures.”

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62. Brownlow, pp. 330–31. Hoot Gibson had a similar recollection in Basinger and Wasson, Hollywood: The Oral History, p. 94. He remembered “playing Indians”: “why we’d put a feather in our wig on our head and we’d put makeup all over us with a breechcloth.” Then the same day, the actors would take off the redface, put on western clothes, and play cowboys. 63. Kilpatrick, pp. 34–35. 64. Hearne, pp. 91, 99. 65. Ibid., p. 9.

Chapter 5

Asians

“O-Lan, you are the Earth.”1 The most memorable character in Pearl S. Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Good Earth (1931), O-lan is representative of the plight of oppressed, dutiful women not only in traditional China in the early 1900s but also in other societies as well.2 She endures many hardships. Sold into slavery while still young so that her parents can have a better life, she is abused, mistreated, and raped in her new household. Even after her marriage to farmer Wang Lung, she continues to be treated in servile fashion. “A faithful, speechless serving maid, who is only a serving maid and nothing more,”3 she is forced to cook her own wedding dinner and does not even socialize with the invited wedding guests. Nonetheless, over the years, O-Lan perseveres, mostly in silence, and sacrifices herself to ensure a good life for her husband, who becomes a wealthy and prosperous man largely thanks to her efforts. Yet Wang Lung offers little love or loyalty in return. He constantly reminds O-Lan that she is ugly. He insults and degrades her, belittling her for not following the time-honored custom of foot-binding. He rarely shows concern for her well-being. In fact, when she becomes pregnant with their second child, he worries that she will no longer be able to work in the fields. He even takes her pearls, her only treasure, and gives them to his concubine. Yet, like the earth, O-Lan endures; and she gains dignity through her suffering and sacrifice. Only after she dies does Wang Lung begin to appreciate fully all that she has done for him by nurturing the family and honoring the all-important land.4 It was a plum role, and in 1935, when MGM decided to produce the film (which was released in 1937), a number of actresses were anxious to play it. Among them was Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American movie star, who had appeared in various successful silent and sound films over almost two decades in the industry, including key roles in such films as Daughter of the Dragon (1931), opposite Warner Oland as Fu Manchu, and Shanghai Express (1932), alongside Marlene Dietrich. Yet, while the beautiful and talented Wong seemed the obvious choice for O-Lan, she was screen-tested 159

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but ultimately passed over. The part went instead to the little-known German actress Luise Rainer, who co-starred opposite Paul Muni, another white actor, both of them appearing in yellowface. Despite Buck’s and producer Irving Thalberg’s initial belief that the actors should be played by real Chinese, as Variety reported, “Studio must avoid miscegenation angle to clear censorship,” the stumbling block being that “Hays’ office won’t stand for mixing racials in romantic sequences.”5 There are varying accounts of MGM’s controversial casting decision. According to some, Wong was considered “too Chinese to play Chinese”; according to others, she was the “wrong” kind of Chinese for the part.6 Wong herself recalled that, despite testing for O-Lan, she was urged to try out instead for the role of the scheming courtesan Lotus. But she refused, insisting that, given her “Chinese blood,” she was uninterested in portraying the only unsympathetic role in a picture that “feature[d] an all-American cast portraying Chinese characters.”7 The indignity was exacerbated by the fact that Luise Rainer would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance, “making the film an eternal sore point for Wong.”8 Wong’s situation was all too familiar to “Asians” (a term that, in early Hollywood, encompassed Chinese, Japanese, and other “Orientals”) and especially to Asian actresses, who were usually stereotyped as self-sacrificing “Lotus Blossoms” and “China Dolls” or as scheming, manipulative villainous “Dragon Ladies.” Rarely afforded major roles of any kind, particularly in romantic films opposite white leading men, they were barred from any on-screen interracial sexuality because of prohibitions against miscegenation. So the most interesting and most coveted parts usually went to white actresses who donned theatrical yellowface—Mary Pickford (Madame Butterfly, 1915), Norma Talmadge (The Forbidden City, 1918), Bessie Love (The Vermilion Pencil, 1922), Myrna Loy (The Crimson City, 1928; The Black Watch, 1929; The Mask of Fu Manchu, 1932), Helen Hayes (The Son-Daughter, 1932), Katharine Hepburn (The Dragon Seed, 1936). Interestingly, the special make-up procedure to create the requisite yellowface for white actresses was so intensive that it was described at length in fan magazines. Photoplay (March 1932), for example, in an article entitled “Loretta Goes Oriental,” described the transformation of Loretta Young into Sun Toya San in The Hatchet Man (1932), a dutiful daughter who marries out of obligation but is sold to an opium den. The two-hour-long process— reported to be “Discomfiture, pretty heavy!”—included pulling the skin back from Young’s eyes and pasting it down firmly with spirit gum and fish skin, which was then covered by make-up. That was followed by the lining of eyes, nose, and lips. Ironically, the article ends with the observation that “the finished job might make you think Loretta was Anna May Wong.”9

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A PAINFUL HISTORY Whereas early Hollywood was not especially generous to Asian Americans, American society was even less so. From the time of their earliest mass immigration in the mid-nineteenth century, the Chinese became victims of tremendous prejudice and even outright hostility; and as a group, they were singled out for more discriminatory legislation than almost any other. It was the news of gold in the California hills in the 1840s that drew starry-eyed dreamers and hopeful adventurers from across the Pacific Ocean. In 1849, three hundred and twenty-five Chinese passed through San Francisco’s customhouse. The next year, the number increased to four hundred and fifty. The year after that, it was twenty-seven hundred.10 By 1852, over twenty-five thousand Chinese immigrants had left their homes and arrived in California, the land some called gam saan, or “gold mountain.” By the end of the decade, those immigrants comprised ten percent of California’s population, and even more in mining districts. The gold mountain, they soon discovered, was merely an illusion, and the dream of vast and untold opportunities quickly lost its luster. Instead of gold, the sojourners found only a harsh reality of hard times and persecution as they scrambled to survive in a strange country.11 Mining was an uncertain occupation, and the gold fields were littered with disappointed prospectors and hostile locals. As the Library of Congress reports, “Work could be scarce, and new arrivals sometimes found it difficult to earn enough to eat, let alone to strike it rich.”12 Even worse, without any steady source of income, the immigrants could not afford passage for their wives and children to make the long journey to America; nor could they themselves afford the return. So they found themselves alone and isolated in an alien land that did not welcome their presence and often treated them with hostility and violence. Since the vast majority of the first group of immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s were young males who lacked formal education or work experience, they had to find jobs that did not require a knowledge of the language yet could teach them the necessary skills by which to earn a living. For many of them, that meant working in construction on the railroads, which needed cheap labor in order to expand into what was the western frontier. According to the Chinese Railroad Workers Project, the railroads initially were hesitant to hire Chinese immigrants, but after finding that whites “were reluctant to do such backbreaking, hazardous work,” they realized they had no other choice and relented. Chinese soon amounted to 90% of the railway labor,13 without whom, as Leland Stanford, president of Central Pacific Railroad and former California governor, told Congress in 1865, “it would be impossible to

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complete the western portion of this great national enterprise, within the time required by the Acts of Congress.”14 The railroad work itself was brutal and the pay was low. But because it allowed unskilled Chinese laborers a chance to enter the workforce, they accepted lower wages than most native-born U.S. workers would. On the Central Pacific alone, more than ten thousand Chinese blasted tunnels, built roadbeds, and laid hundreds of miles of track, often in freezing cold or searing heat.15 The toll that the labor exacted was heavy: many were injured or lost their lives to explosions, landslides, accidents, and disease. Yet their efforts went mostly unheralded. When the final spike was driven into the rails of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, the Chinese workers who were essential to the completion of the railway system were largely absent from the celebration. Moreover, they rarely appeared in the photographs or were included in commemorations of the event. Even today, the full story of their enormous contribution has yet to be told.16 Mining and rail construction, of course, were not the only occupations in which Chinese immigrants engaged. The combination of language barriers and racial discrimination, though, barred them from most established trades and led them to create opportunities and launch businesses for themselves. In particular, many of the shops, restaurants, and laundries in the growing mining towns of California were operated by Chinese immigrants, who also played a vital role in developing much of the farmland of the western U.S., including the plantations of Hawaii and the vineyards of California.17 Despite their desire to find productive employment and to assimilate themselves into their new culture, the Chinese immigrants faced very real and virulent racist attacks, including persecution and murder. From Seattle to Los Angeles, from the ranches in Wyoming to the small towns of California, they were harassed, forced out of business, run out of town, beaten, tortured, even massacred or lynched, usually with little or no intervention by the law. One of the largest mass lynchings in the U.S., in fact, occurred on October 24, 1871, when a frenzied mob of five hundred people stormed the Chinese quarter in Los Angeles, where they indiscriminately shot and stabbed residents and hanged others from makeshift gallows. When the mob ran out of rope, they used clotheslines to string up the victims, among them a respected doctor and an adolescent boy. By the time the attack was over, nineteen lay dead, their bodies mangled—a number that comprised ten percent of Los Angeles’ Chinese population at the time.18 Although that mass lynching was among the most sensational and egregious acts of brutality against Chinese immigrants, it was certainly not an isolated event. The Ku Klux Klan, which in the Reconstruction era targeted African Americans and their allies in the South, was also active in the West, where it focused its hatred on the Chinese. Klan violence in California, as

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Kevin Waite has demonstrated, ranged from violent threats to assault and arson. In the spring of 1878, for instance, white rioters raided a series of ranches in Northern California and beat the Chinese workers there. In 1879, after a Methodist minister opened a Sunday school for immigrants, vigilantes burned down his house and threatened his life. Klan-affiliated arsonists also destroyed churches in other cities that served the Chinese community and factories that employed Chinese workers.19 The anti-Chinese fervor even influenced public policy and perception. In his 1867 inaugural address, California Governor Henry Haight warned that an “influx” of Chinese would “inflict a curse upon posterity for all time.”20 Lawmakers campaigned against the two major civil rights measures of the era—the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which prohibited states from disenfranchising voters “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”—by claiming that the amendments would grant citizenship and voting rights to Chinese immigrants. The Sinophobia that was so prevalent ensured both measures were rejected outright, making California the only free state to take such action.21 The combination of racial hatred, an uncertain economy, and weak government in the new territories added to the climate of terror, and the perpetrators of the various hate crimes went largely unpunished. According to the Library of Congress, “exact statistics for this period are difficult to come by, but a case can be made that Chinese immigrants suffered worse treatment than any other group that came voluntarily to the U.S.”22 By the mid-1870s, as America plunged into an economic depression—and as nearly a quarter of the work force in San Francisco alone was unemployed—the resentment against Chinese immigrants became increasingly virulent. The conditions in those days were pitiful. As one Chinese American recalled, “We were simply terrified; we kept indoors after dark for fear of being shot in the back. Children spit upon us as we passed by and called us rats.”23 ANTI-ASIAN LEGISLATION It was not just public sentiment that was against the Chinese; it was also the restrictive laws and regulations, a number of which exclusively targeted them. The Foreign Miners Tax Act of 1850, for example, required all non-native-born workers to pay the exorbitant rate of twenty dollars per month for the right to mine. The Sidewalk Ordinance of 1870 banned the Chinese method of carrying vegetables or laundry on a pole, while in San Francisco, the Queue Ordinance of 1873 outlawed the wearing of the customary long braids by men. Chinese immigrants were prohibited from working for federal, state, and local governments, and from educating their children in

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public schools. For several decades, a law prevented them from testifying in court against Americans of European descent, effectively placing thousands of them outside the protection of the law.24 An even more significant piece of discriminatory legislation was the Page Act of 1875, which was aimed directly at Chinese women. Stereotyped as promiscuous or as prostitutes, the women were thought to pose a particularly dangerous and sexualized threat. And while it is true that some Chinese women worked in the sex trade in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, a trade that operated openly in mining camps and elsewhere in California, the Page Act singled them out from their white peers and accused them of spreading sexually-transmitted diseases. Ostensibly designed to ban certain “undesirables” from entry,25 the act explicitly forbade “the importation of women for the purposes of prostitution.” But, as Jessica Pearce Rotondi observed, in practice, by leaving the decision as to whether or not to permit an individual’s entry to the U.S. up to the consul-general or consul at port cities, the act was used as a way to prevent Chinese women from migrating.26 Those women who attempted to enter the country at Angel Island Immigration Station outside San Francisco were subjected to invasive and humiliating interrogations by U.S. immigration officials. The Page Act had numerous reverberations. In the Chinese American community, where men already radically outnumbered women, it further altered the gender ratio. And preventing women from immigrating with their husbands meant that these immigrants were unable to create traditional families or to establish real roots. Since some West Coast states prohibited marriage outside the race, the act resigned many Chinese laborers to bachelorhood, which in turn, escalated U.S. suspicions about them. As Melissa May Borja wrote, “they were portrayed as driftless,” which enhanced the view that “they shouldn’t be full Americans. Barriers justified other barriers.”27 THE CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT An even more damning and damaging piece of legislation was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur, it essentially reversed the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, which had encouraged Chinese migration and provided that “citizens of the United States in China, of every religious persuasion, and Chinese subjects, in the United States, shall enjoy entire liberty of conscience, and shall be exempt from all disability or persecution, on account of their religious faith or worship, in either country,” withholding only the right of naturalized citizenship.28

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Often seen as the first major legislation to limit immigration in the United States, the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed conditional entry for a small number of “diplomats, merchants, and students” but placed an absolute ban for ten years on all immigration of Chinese laborers, “skilled and unskilled.” The first federal law proscribing entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the good order of certain localities, it also placed new restrictions on the Chinese who had already entered the country. If, for example, they left the United States, they had to obtain certifications to re-enter, which effectively halted travel and froze the immigrants in place. Congress, moreover, refused state and federal courts the right to grant citizenship to Chinese resident aliens, although these courts could still deport them. The passage of the 1882 Exclusion Act virtually ensured that Chinese immigrants in the U.S. had little chance of reuniting with their families or of starting families in their new home. Taken together with the Page Act, it not only set an unfortunate precedent for discriminating against a specific group of immigrants. It also paved the way for other exclusionary legislation such as Congress’s extension of the original Exclusion Act in the form of the Geary Act, which was made permanent in 1902 and which added restrictions by requiring each Chinese resident to register and obtain a certificate of residence. Without that documentation, they faced deportation.29 (The Chinese Exclusion Act was expanded by the passage of the Immigration Act of 1917, also called the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, which barred Asians and other non-whites from entering the country. And the 1924 Immigration Act went even further, excluding all classes of Chinese immigrants and extending restrictions to immigrants from other Asian countries.) The various restrictions meant a dwindling of the U.S. Chinese population from about 107,000 in 1890 to a low of 61,000 in 1920.30 The restrictions also created a forced segregation that gave rise to “Chinatowns,” which, of necessity, became largely self-reliant. Operating as independent cities within the larger cities in which they were located, they served as safe havens for Chinese immigrants, who could live, shop, worship, socialize, and find employment in Chinese-run businesses. Ironically, some of these Chinatowns, with their authentic atmosphere of Asian life, became attractions for white tourists. At the same time, though, they reinforced the perception of Chinese as Others whose Eastern dress and customs immediately demarcated them as different from Westerners. THE YELLOW PERIL Eventually, as some restrictions loosened, immigrants were able to bring their families into the country; and, as children were born into the Chinese

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American families, the Chinese began to feel a greater sense of permanence and stability. Yet prejudices lingered, and the stereotypes became even more entrenched, especially as the anxieties about Asians condensed into a racialized fear of the “Yellow Peril.” Asians were increasingly viewed as a group that—from their linguistic differences to their clothing, from their dietary preferences to their music and entertainments—could not assimilate into American society and culture. Even more ominously, they were thought to be a threat to Western values and practices. The earlier challenge that the influx of Chinese laborers willing to work for low wages posed to Western living standards hardened into a perceived danger that the expansion of Asian power and influence would, if unchecked, undermine Western civilization. Such psycho-cultural fear, as Gina Marchetti observed, was “rooted in medieval fears of Genghis Khan and the Mongol invasions of Europe,” and it combined “racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxieties, and the belief that the West will be overpowered and enveloped, by the irresistible, dark, occult forces of the East.”31 The sexual connotations became an especially powerful and disturbing concern. As with the fear of Black miscegenation, for many the prospect of Asian miscegenation, either by rape or by desire for intermarriage, imperiled white purity and threatened to pollute the race. Such white supremacist beliefs were emboldened by eugenicists, who decried the inescapable damage that mixing with “Mongol blood” would have. Newspapers, journals, middle-class magazines, tabloids, cartoons, and comics began exploiting the racist fantasy and existential fear that the nameless, faceless hordes of “yellow” people were intent on conquering, subjugating, and even enslaving the Western world. Exaggerated images of wild-looking Chinese men wielding guns in their hands and knives in their teeth, their white female victims lying helplessly at their feet, filled the press and reinforced the notion of them as a threat to white women and to white men’s entitlement. And images of a “Chinaman” swallowing Uncle Sam whole or introducing “Eastern Barbarism to Western Civilization” encouraged perceptions of Asian dreams of dominance and desire to eradicate Western ways and culture.32 IMPACT OF POPULAR LITERATURE Popular literature further fanned the flames. In Victorian England, Charles Dickens, one of the literary architects of the Yellow Peril, envisioned the Chinese presence in Britain “eating out the heart of the empire,” while his vituperative descriptions of opium dens in The Mystery of Edwin Drood generated crowds of literary imitators.33 In 1909, P.G. Wodehouse wrote a short comic novel The Swoop! Or How Clarence Saved England: A Tale of

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the Great Invasion, which satirized the Yellow Peril and other invasion trends by depicting England under simultaneous attack by the armies of various nations, including the Chinese under “Prince Ping Pong Pang.” And a year later, in “Unparalleled Invasion” (McClure’s, July 1910), Jack London also imagined future Chinese aggression, which is quashed by genocidal biological weapons. In that story, based on ideas he first raised in his 1904 essay “Yellow Peril,” London visualized the modernizing of China as it breaks away from the influence of Japan and becomes an overwhelming force that is eventually destroyed by a campaign launched by the United States in conjunction with other Western countries. Yellow Peril stories even became a science fiction subgenre, with works such as M.P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898), which exploited fears that Chinese hordes could take over the world by simple strength of numbers; Roy Norton’s The Vanishing Fleets (1908), which focused on the invention of super “radioplanes” that shift an invading Japanese armada (and other fleets) to mysterious locations and save America; and Yates Stirling, Jr.’s tales in The Battle for the Pacific; And Other Adventures at Sea (1908), which showed America defeating Japan at sea in the near future.34 Few authors, though, had a greater impact in terms of perpetuating the racist scaremongering than Arthur Sarsfield Ward, a former clerk who gained international fame under the pseudonym Sax Rohmer, creator of the bestselling Fu Manchu novels. The propagator-in-chief of Yellow Peril lore, Rohmer published his first Fu Manchu story in 1912 and his last mystery, Emperor Fu Manchu, in 1959. Rohmer’s character, “the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man,” was a figure of mysterious malignance, possessed by an unexplained hatred of Caucasians and a desire for global domination.35 And thanks to the ubiquity of Rohmer’s works, people came to believe that they “knew all about Chinamen; they were cruel, wicked people.”36 Using the popular detective mystery format, Rohmer brought to life evil Chinese schemes and murderous plots—although, as he later admitted, “ I know nothing about the Chinese!”37 As the xenophobia pervaded the popular culture, the phrase “Yellow Peril” appeared regularly and menacingly in newspapers and journals, especially those owned by William Randolph Hearst. As Time Magazine observed, the Yellow Peril was “a great circulation-getter” for the Hearst papers, where it seemed to “squat permanently” and raise fears about Asians’ attempts at global domination. In his memoir Timebends, playwright Arthur Miller remembered how “the Hearst press went periodically frantic about an oncoming ‘Yellow Peril,’” with suggestions that the Chinese were “bloodthirsty, sneaky, and lustful for white women.” He recalled in particular “the front pages with the immense black headlines” and the drawings of extreme “Chinese violence” against American citizens.38

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Even as Hearst turned his attention from China to Japan, Time noted, his arguments—and especially his language—warning of the Yellow Peril were largely unchanged: e.g., “If our democracy continues to be as dull in defense as it has always been, the attack will find us unaware and unprepared, and as a consequence Japan may establish herself as the permanent dominant power of the Pacific, . . . possibly compelling us to pay a great indemnity and to surrender some part of our Pacific Coast mainland.”39 In the motion pictures that Hearst financed, he found an even wider and more receptive audience for his racist sentiments. The treacherous Chinese villain Wu Fang and his devil-worshipping followers, for example, menace Elaine (Pearl White) over the course of two highly popular serials, The Exploits of Elaine (1914) and The New Exploits of Elaine (1915), while the preparedness serial Patria (1917) portrayed the Japanese and the Mexicans as the two greatest enemies of the United States and the most imminent threat to its security and national identity. Yellowface performance, in which white actors donned heavy make-up and assumed exaggerated postures, became another way to ridicule Asians and to reinforce the familiar stereotypes. Just as blackface minstrelsy had solidified in the American imagination images of the comically urbanized “Zip Coon” and the servile Uncle Tom, yellowface acts in vaudeville and on the early stage often incorporated the character of “John Chinaman,” a Chinese laborer typically depicted wearing a flowing robe, a coolie hat, and a long queue.40 That caricature—and the related “John Confucius,” who represented Chinese political figures—reached back to the political cartoons of Thomas Nast, the popular poems and songs such as “John Chinaman” and “The Heathen Chinee,” and even to the Mark Twain-Bret Harte “Chinaman” character in their four-act play Ah Sin (1876).41 The theatrical depiction of Asians, with its distinct stage make-up, costumes, and mannerisms, was, as Mark Winokur suggests, “a vehicle within which whites can play out a fantasy of otherness.”42 It became especially common in the films of the 1930s, with white actors playing recurring characters such as the famous detective Charlie Chan and the dreaded villain Fu Manchu. The impression of Asians in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American society was shaped not only by the perception of their inability to assimilate or to identify with mainstream culture, which branded them as outsiders, but also by their cultural and linguistic differences, which highlighted the contrast they presented to Euro-American norms and the ways that they deviated from traditional gender roles. On the one hand, Asian men were considered feminine, childlike, or asexual because of their manner of dress (robes and long braided hair) and their willingness to assume positions that were considered women’s work (in the laundry business or in restaurants) or

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labor unfitting for adult men (as house servants).43 On the other hand, at the other extreme, they were thought to be scheming, dangerous, and aggressive, especially in their sexuality and their lust for white women. These unfortunate stereotypes carried over to early film, which reflected the larger popular culture in their emphasis on Asian otherness. So even though, as Lan Dong writes, “the American film industry sought out Asians as subjects in cinema as early as 1896,”44 over the first few decades of the twentieth century, Hollywood films remained essentially Orientalist. That, according to Edward Said in his groundbreaking book Orientalism, meant that they were based in the pervasively Western tradition of prejudiced outsider-interpretations of the Eastern world and that a process of “substitution and displacement” of real knowledge of the Orient served as the starting point for elaborate but inaccurate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the “Orient.”45 So, as Gina Marchetti observed, while the fascination with Asia, Asians, and Asian themes was long-standing, “Hollywood’s romance with Asia tend[ed] to be a flirtation with the exotic rather than an attempt at any genuine intercultural understanding.”46 Many early films promised glimpses of adventure and forbidden pleasures, of romances and sexual liaisons that were beyond the mainstream; and they featured Asian-white sexual liaisons that functioned ideologically to uphold (or occasionally to subvert) culturally accepted notions of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nation, and sexual orientation.47 On screen, the male characters typically fell into two types: either the rapist villains who embody visible sexual intimidations, like the mysterious Hishuru Tori in The Cheat (1915) and the notorious Dr. Fu Manchu; or the emasculated and domesticated figures, whose assimilation into Caucasian society controls their evil nature, which nonetheless poses a potential latent danger to society.48 Similarly, the representation of Asian women, usually fetishized and hypersexualized, was limited largely to two types: the wily “Dragon Lady,” the deceitful, cunning villainess ready to use her sexuality as means to manipulate and gain power, and the “Lotus Blossom” or “China Doll,” the meek and sexually submissive figure who (like the Native American princess in early films) often meets a tragic end. Underlying all of these types was the Yellow Peril imagery, which focused on some aspect of the sexual danger of contact between the races: the lascivious Asian woman who wants to seduce the white male, or the threat posed by the Asian man to the white woman. Such fantasies, as Gary Hoppenstand noted, linked together personal fears with larger national-cultural ones, in which the seduction of the white male or “the rape of the white woman becomes a metaphor for the threat posed to western civilization as well as a rationalization for Euro-American imperialist ventures in Asia.” Since race was often tied to religion, “the threat of rape, the rape of white society,

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dominated the action of the yellow formula,” and drew on Christian mythology, with the “Oriental” assuming the role of the devil or demon. Thus, “the Oriental rape of the white woman signified a spiritual damnation for the woman, and at the larger level, white society.”49 D.W. GRIFFITH Like other early filmmakers, Griffith incorporated Chinese images and characters into some of his films. In The Chink at Golden Gulch, for instance, laundryman Charlie Lee is “a saffron-skinned Pagan,” but “his soul is white and real red blood pulsates his heart.”50 Warned by his father to cherish his sacred hair queue, Charlie understands that, without it, he would be considered an outcast in his culture and barred from returning to his home country. One day, while carrying laundry, he is harassed and assaulted on the street by a gang of bullying cowboys; and after being rescued by Bud Miller and his sweetheart Miss Dean, Charlie vows to return the favor. That opportunity arises when he spies a dandy trying to win Miss Dean’s affection. Charlie follows the dandy and learns that he is actually the culprit behind a string of robberies of the registered mail carrier and that his capture promises a $5,000 reward. To apprehend the criminal, however, Charlie is forced to cut his queue and use it to bind the hands of the miscreant, whom he marches back to the camp. Yet the sacrifice of his queue, despite its honorable purpose, makes Charlie forever an outcast. Although he receives the reward, substantial enough to ensure a comfortable future for himself, he leaves it instead for Bud and Miss Dean, along with a note that reads: “Missie Dean alsame Bud Miller too. Charlie Lee wishee much glad you 2 when alsame one. Hope take money for blidel plesent. Goodby. Charlie Lee went away.” And then he disappears. While the ending is as far-fetched as it is melodramatic—in an age when Asians were prohibited from testifying against whites, it is unlikely that Charlie’s version of the robbery would have been believed by the locals— Charlie is nevertheless typical of Asian immigrants. He works a menial job and serves the whites in his community, who treat him with disdain and brutality. And his depiction employs all the familiar stereotypical devices: halting gait, non-western clothing, servile posture, exaggerated hand and body language, pidgin English. Notably, though, Griffith manages to imbue Charlie with a sense of loyalty that he calls “Mongolian Gratitude,” which explains his refusal to capitalize on his newfound fortune but rather to gift it to Bud, his former rescuer. But that too can be seen another way: as his sense of racial and social inferiority.

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Griffith tells an even more compelling and complicated story in Broken Blossoms (1919), probably the best and best-known Asian-themed feature of the silent era. In that film, Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess), a kindly but downtrodden Chinese shopkeeper, falls in love with a young white girl, Lucy Burrows, daughter of alcoholic prizefighter “Battling” Burrows. Cheng, who had left his native China with “dreams to spread the gentle message of Buddha to the Anglo-Saxon lands,” watches those dreams fade in the grim reality of London life—at least until he meets Lucy (Lillian Gish), whom he perceives as a fellow outcast. After enduring yet another brutal beating at her father’s hands, Lucy takes refuge at Cheng’s shop. There, Cheng nurses her back to health, replaces her rags with a brocaded robe, and gives her the doll from his shop window that she has long coveted. The two form a close but chaste bond. But when Burrows, in a drunken rage, finds Lucy and drags her back to their home, she again becomes the victim of his violence. Although Cheng tries to come to her rescue, by the time he reaches her, it is too late: she lies dead from her father’s beating. So Cheng confronts Burrows and shoots him. Carrying Lucy’s body back with him, he builds a shrine to Buddha and commits suicide. Griffith structured his film, which was based on the story “The Chink and the Little Girl” by British writer Thomas Burke, around several taboos—the suggestion of incest (by Burrows, who throws Lucy onto the bed and beats her, using the phallic butt end of a whip) and miscegenation (since Cheng’s adoration of Lucy at times suggests the fantasy and fetishism associated with sexual experience).51 The relationship between Lucy and the man she calls “Chinky” seems all the more unnatural because it threatens to cross the forbidden barrier of interracial love. Despite his devotion to the girl whom he tries to transform into his own Orientalized doll, Cheng is a representative of the implicit Yellow Peril—desexualized, perhaps, but nonetheless dangerous. His transgression of social norms and his intervention in the family drama demand punishment and make his own death inevitable. THE CHEAT Whereas Charlie and Cheng are examples of the meek, feminized Asian male cinema stereotype, Hishuru Tori, in the sensational The Cheat (1915), is the opposite: he is the evil aggressor. That film, which established Cecil B. DeMille as a director of the first rank, told the story of Edith Hardy, a spoiled socialite unhappily married to Richard, a stockbroker who is on the verge of making a fortune. But to ensure the capital he needs for the investment, Richard urges his wife to cut back on her spending, something she refuses to do. Using her position as treasurer of the Red Cross, she steals

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$10,000 from the donations that are intended for the welfare of war orphans and invests the money in a copper stock scheme. That way, she figures, she can get rich quick, return the original investment to the Red Cross, and keep the remainder for herself, with no one the wiser. But the stock fails; the money is lost; and to cover up her embezzlement, she is forced to accept a loan from wealthy Japanese merchant Hisuru Tori. (By the time the film was re-released in 1918, Japan had become an ally. So the original Japanese villain Hishuru Tori was renamed Haka Arakau and transformed into a wealthy Burmese ivory merchant—a collapsing nonetheless of specific national identity into a single racialized identity.)52 The terms of Tori’s loan, however, are quite unusual: instead of financial repayment, Edith must agree to surrender her virtue to him. In the meantime, Richard’s investment is successful, and, despite some suspicions, he gives Edith the $10,000 she claims to have lost in a bridge game. Although she goes immediately to Tori to repay the debt, he refuses the money and holds her to the original agreement. They struggle, and when she tries to escape his grasp, he exacts an especially painful toll: claiming her as his property, he brands her on the shoulder with a hot iron (just as, earlier in the film, he explained to her that he brands everything that he considers to be his). Before fleeing, she shoots him—a crime for which her husband, who has followed her to Tori’s house, is blamed. In the melodramatic courtroom scene that concludes the picture, Richard is convicted but cleared of the crime by Edith’s confession and by the dramatic revelation of her disfiguring brand. The Hardys are tearfully reconciled, and Tori is exposed as the sadistic villain that he is. The pandemonium that erupts in the courtroom is, Robert G. Lee writes, “an outburst of racial retribution” that reunites “the white bourgeois family, free to reproduce the new nation.”53 Yet while the film is clear in its denunciation of Tori as a villain and as an insidious Yellow Peril, it also hints that the duplicitous Edith, by her embezzlement and her abandonment of feminine virtue, is almost as much of a “cheat” as he is. The film was intended to be a star vehicle for the aging white stage actress Fannie Ward, who appeared opposite her real-life husband, Jack Dean. But, in fact, it was Japanese-born Sessue Hayakawa who garnered the most attention.54 His performance as the elegant and sexy businessman was at once menacing and titillating, and it established him as the leading Asian star of the silent era. Hayakawa had played similar roles—in The Typhoon (1914), for example, as a Japanese diplomat assigned to Paris, where he begins an affair with a chorus girl whom he strangles to death after she rejects and denounces him. But it was The Cheat that exploited his dangerous sexuality and cemented the popularity of his “forbidden lover” character. (Despite the often virulent racism of the day, that film proved to be such a sensation that it was remade several times.)55 According to Stephen Gong, the director of

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Fig. 5.1.  In Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915), Hishuru Tori (Sessue Hayakawa) reveals himself to be a sadistic but seductive “Oriental” villain. Courtesy of the Billy Rose Collection, The New York Public Library.

San Francisco’s Center for Asian American Media, “The idea of the rape fantasy, forbidden fruit, all those taboos of race and sex—it made [Hayakawa] a movie star. And his most rabid fan base was white women.”56 Yet, while Hollywood success afforded Hayakawa a fine cliffside California home, expensive automobiles, and other perks of stardom, he began to feel increasingly dissatisfied with his roles and to resist typecasting. The characters that he had played in films such as The Typhoon and The Cheat were, he insisted, “not true to our Japanese nature. . . . They are false and give people a wrong idea of us. I wish to make a characterization which shall reveal us as we really are.”57 So in 1918 he decided to form his own production company, Haworth Pictures—another first for a Japanese—through which he hoped to craft a more favorable screen image that simultaneously emphasized his assimilation into American culture and highlighted his Japanese traits. Over the next four years, Hayakawa’s company produced more than twenty films. In 1922, however, even after being offered another lucrative contract, Hayawaka left Hollywood. Upon his return to the United States around 1930, he appeared first on Broadway and in vaudeville and then began acting in

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talking films. Although his accent limited his roles, he nonetheless enjoyed a successful career for the next three decades, during which he played various parts, including villains (though less sinister ones than those in his silent films). The highpoint for him was his Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for the role of the Japanese Commander Saito in the World War Two epic, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). EARLY ASIAN ACTRESSES Whereas Hayawaka felt frustrated by his typecasting in silent films, the situation for Asian actresses in Hollywood was even more challenging. Restricted largely to Orientalized roles that roughly paralleled the male stereotypes, few Asian actresses achieved any real fame. In part, their lack of prominence was due to the prohibitions against miscegenation that ensured that the more substantive Asian roles, particularly those that featured a romance, went to white actresses. But it was also due to the fact that, in early Hollywood, Asian women were considered to be interchangeable, with little recognition paid to their individual ethnicities. Kyoto-born Toshia Mori (sometimes billed under her birth name, Toshiye Ichioka), for example, appeared in a number of sound films in the 1930s, the biggest being Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), in which she played Mah-Li, the duplicitous mistress who ultimately betrays the General and destroys his empire during the Chinese Civil War.58 She also assumed roles in two Charlie Chan films, Charlie Chan at the Circus (1936) and Charlie Chan on Broadway (1937), in which the legendary detective was played by non-Asian actor Warner Oland. Mori had earlier received some notice as the only non-white actress in the short-lived Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers “WAMPAS Baby Stars,” a group of fourteen actresses selected each year as Hollywood’s “Stars of Tomorrow.”59 Named to the line-up in 1932 as a replacement after Lillian Miles dropped out, she was, as Victoria Linchong reports, whisked into a flurry of WAMPAS publicity including “a cringeworthy promotional short,” in which she was introduced as “a bit of Dresden China.” When Mori responded, “No, I’m not Chinese. I’m Japanese,” the announcer replied in an exaggerated mock Asian accent, “Oh, ’scuse please!”60 That brief exchange illustrated all too clearly both the interchangeability of Asian actresses and the overt discrimination that so many Asians experienced. One of the handful of Asian women to achieve some measure of success in silent film was Tsuru Aoki. Best remembered today as the wife of Sessue Hayakawa, opposite whom she appeared in numerous films, Aoki was actually an accomplished actress in her own right. After making her Hollywood debut in 1912 playing a Native American in a film directed by

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George Osbourne, she appeared in similar roles in other productions, such as the Kay-Bee Western, The Death Mask/The Redskin Duel (1914), in which Moving Picture World singled out her “beautiful handling” of the part of Princess Nona.61 Reportedly, it was Aoki who brought Hayakawa to the notice of director Thomas Ince, who cast him in several films, including O Mimi San, A Relic of Old Japan, The Last of the Line (all 1914) as well as in The Wrath of the Gods (1914), in which Aoki and Hayakawa appeared together. After their marriage, Aoki assumed the part of the adoring wife both on screen and off, which contributed significantly to Hayakawa’s success as a romantic lead and bolstered his popularity by assuring audiences “that his exotic and inscrutable Oriental exterior hid a soft and romantic side, proof of which was his ‘little wife.’”62 Aoki performed with her husband not only in studio pictures but also in the films produced by his Haworth Picture Corporation, which attempted to counter the persistent American stereotypes of Asians. In the Haworth production The Courageous Coward (1919), for example, she played a young woman, Rei Oaki (a name that transposed the letters in her last name and hinted at her own American assimilation). Arriving from Japan in order to cultivate her singing voice, she falls in love with Japanese American Suki Iota (Hayakawa). When Suki goes east to finish law school, she fears that he will want an American girl rather than a traditional one. So she begins trying to Americanize her dress and behavior. Upon his return, Suki—now an assistant district attorney—is disappointed by her transformation and mistakenly assumes that, in his absence, she has become the girlfriend of Tom Kirby, son of a Chinatown boss. After getting implicated in an important murder case, Suki is branded a coward and a traitor; only Rei maintains faith in his integrity. That faith is rewarded: once the real murderer confesses, Suki emerges as a hero, and they are free to marry. Another intriguing film in which Aoki starred opposite Hayakawa was The Dragon Painter (1919), in which Tatsu, a wild and delusional young artist (played by Hayakawa), paints nothing but the image of his fantasy woman, a princess he believes has been incarnated as a dragon. When the aging master painter Indara takes Tatsu under his wing and convinces him that his daughter Ume Ko is actually the princess, Tatsu falls in love and weds her. With the realization of his fantasy, however, he loses all inspiration. To help him regain it, his wife pretends to kill herself. Once Tatsu feels inspired again, she returns, and they live out their lives happily, with Tatsu continuing to paint her. The film was an interesting twist on the self-sacrificing suicidal woman, especially the “Madame Butterfly” motif popularized in films such as Madame Butterfly (1915), which starred Mary Pickford in yellowface as the tragic Cho-Cho-San, and Mr. Wu (1927), in which Wu’s young daughter

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(played by French actress Renée Adorée) is seduced and abandoned by a Westerner, a disgrace that leads to her tragic death.63 And in The Breath of the Gods (1920), in which Aoki not only starred but also received credit as supervising set constructor, she played Yuki Onda, an Americanized Japanese student who is called home by her father once the Russo-Japanese War threatens the peace of Japan. Torn between her love for diplomat Pierre Le Beau and her obligation to marry Prince Hagane, she becomes entangled in a plot in which Le Beau, an attaché of the embassy of Australia in Japan, unwittingly attempts to secure valuable information from her. Thinking that she has failed in her trust, she kills herself, leaving the sorrowing Prince to deliver her body to Le Beau, her true love. As Sara Ross observed, on the one hand, Aoki’s real and screen persona was a complex blend of Orientalism and female modernity. Many of her screen roles “reiterated stereotypes of the Asian woman as the innocent flower, the self-sacrificing Madame Butterfly, and the picture bride.” Yet in some of her extant films, she also displayed “the rebellious spunk found in

Fig. 5.2.  Ume Ko (Tsuru Aoki) captures the imagination of the artist Tatsu (played by her real-life husband Sessue Hayakawa), who believes her to be the incarnated princess of his fantasies in The Dragon Painter (1919). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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many of the modern female paradigms of the period,” establishing herself as a self-possessed melodrama heroine who rebels against paternal authority and tradition.64 Although her career waned in the early 1920s, Aoki continued to act. Her last screen appearance, again with Hayakawa, was in the war film From Here to Eternity (1960), released just a year before her death. While Tsuru Aoki was one of the finest, a number of other Asian actresses in early film deserve mention as well. Anna Chang, a Hawaiian beauty of Asian descent and a seasoned vaudeville performer, starred in Singapore Sue (1932), a musical about a Chinese girl from Brooklyn and four sailors in a Singapore bar, but she is remembered less for her own talents than for appearing in what was Cary Grant’s debut film. Lotus Long, an actress of Japanese and Hawaiian descent, appeared with Peter Lorre in two Mr. Moto mysteries and with Boris Karloff in two Mr. Wong detective films, in which both male actors wore heavy yellowface, as was typical of the casting in that era. Another actress, Lady Tsen Mei, daughter of a Chinese father and a mixed-race mother, earned the distinction of being the first Black Asian movie star.65 A performer who began her career in vaudeville as a singer and imitator of bird-songs, she acted in films in New Jersey, the first of which, For the Freedom of the East (1918), billed her somewhat inaccurately as “the screen’s only Chinese star.” After moving to Los Angeles, she starred in Lotus Blossom (1921), directed by Chinese American James Leong, whose Wah Ming Motion Picture Company attempted to counter the unfortunate screen portrayals of Chinese.

Fig. 5.3.  Lady Tsen Mei, the first Black Asian movie star, assumed roles as both the seductive villainous “Dragon Lady” (in For the Freedom of the East [left]) and as the “China Doll” (in Lotus Blossom [right]). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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That film, based on an ancient Chinese legend, told the story of the inventor of the first clock, who is sentenced to life imprisonment because his invention renders the village’s sacred bell useless. But he escapes his fate by hiding out with a father and his daughter, who, according to the title card, “relieves the [exile’s] sorrow” with her gift of a lotus flower. (Although the film’s cast was largely Chinese, Leong included two white actors, Noah Beery and Tully Marshall, in Asian roles.) ANNA MAY WONG It was Anna May Wong (born Wong Liu Tsong), though, who is today the best known Asian actress in silent film. An exotic object of desire destined to remain unattainable because of censorial enforcement of racial taboos, she was, as Jeffrey Richards observed, “the only Chinese star in the heyday of Hollywood and [she] defined the Chinese Woman for several generations.”66 Her film career, in fact, spanned an astonishing four decades. Fascinated from an early age by movies and determined to become “a movie actress and not a laundrywoman,” Wong reportedly began skipping school to watch film crews on location near her Los Angeles Chinatown home and to enjoy Ruth Roland and Pearl White serials at her local theater.67 In 1919, with the help of her cousin James Wong Howe (later an Academy Award-winning Hollywood cinematographer), she appeared as an extra in The Red Lantern. The story of a EuroAsian woman who joins but betrays the Boxers and ultimately commits suicide, it was shot in Chinatown and required three hundred Chinese for atmosphere. Other small parts followed, including a role as a Christian female convert who is abused by her opium-addicted husband in Bits of Life (1921), which gave Wong her first billing.68 Unfortunately, it also reinforced her typing. As biographer Graham Russell Bao Hodges writes, her work in that film was cited in an article in Motion Picture Classic entitled “The Yellow Peril: China Invades the Screen.”69 After catching the eye of producer Joseph Schenk, Wong—then only seventeen years old—was cast to star in The Toll of the Sea (1922). In that retelling of the Madame Butterfly story,70 she played Lotus Flower, an exquisitely beautiful young Chinese woman who rescues Allen Carver, a white man who has washed up on the shore. Despite being warned by a wise elder that the sea takes more than it gives, Lotus Flower nurses Carver back to health, and the two quickly fall in love. Even though Carver assures her that he will take her with him to the United States, he is dissuaded by friends and departs alone. Nonetheless, Lotus Flower waits and waits, believing that he will come for her, as he had promised. She even counterfeits letters from Carver to create the illusion of a marriage and to silence the taunts of the local women who are

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aware that he has abandoned her. When Carver finally returns, she discovers that he is already married, to a white woman; he in turn is surprised to learn that he is the father of Lotus Flower’s son. Heartbroken by his betrayal, she gives the son to the Carvers to raise and throws herself into the sea. It was, to be sure, a rather familiar Asian role as a self-sacrificing and submissive lotus blossom, a type quite similar to the Native American princess who falls in love with a white man and is willing to die to save or protect him. And it helped to etch into the public’s imagination the trope of the submissive, sexually-available, and suicidal Asian woman, which would dominate so much of later cinema. The film, a stunning early example of Technicolor colorization (albeit of the “two-color” process rather than three),71 was widely viewed, including by actor Douglas Fairbanks, who cast Wong as a treacherous and “mysteriously inscrutable” Mongol slave girl who betrays her mistress in The Thief of Baghdad (1924).72 The Toll of the Sea’s Lotus Flower was a defining role for Wong. Throughout the silent era, she would go on to play similar parts, most of which failed to capitalize fully on her talents. Typed, at one extreme, as the doomed lover or exotic and hypersexualized but servile slave, or at the other

Fig. 5.4.  Heartbroken over her lover’s betrayal, Lotus Flower (played by Anna May Wong in her first major role) sacrifices herself so that he can find happiness with his white wife in The Toll of the Sea (1922). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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extreme, as the scheming and treacherous “Oriental,” she repeated images on-screen that reinforced the way that American audiences viewed Asian women. Those roles, moreover, shaped expectations of how Chinese females should appear and act to such a degree that, as one Chinese American actress lamented, producers regularly sought out “someone who looked like Anna May Wong” for their own films.73 Although Wong brought passion and strength to the parts she played and occasionally even stole scenes from her better-known white co-stars, she herself decried the twin legacy of dragon lady and lotus blossom that her performances had solidified. Referring to the fact that her film characters were often killed off, in large part because of impossible or failed interracial romances, she noted “after my death, my tombstone should engrave the words ‘she died a thousand deaths.’”74 Despite the worldwide fame she garnered for her early performances, Wong began growing increasingly dissatisfied with the roles she was being offered, many of them in mediocre films. To rectify that, she tried to establish her own company, Anna May Wong Production Company; but that effort failed due to her underhanded business partner. After assuming a few more small parts as a sexualized dancing girl in The Devil Dancer and The Chinese Parrot and as an (unbilled) barroom seductress in Across to Singapore, she felt that her career in Hollywood had stalled. So she moved for a time overseas, in hope of escaping the restrictive construction of her characters. And in her final silent film, Piccadilly (filmed in Britain in 1929), she was able to do just that, by subverting the familiar stereotype of the exotic club performer at the same time that she occupied it.75 Her Sho-Sho, a scullery maid-turned-dancer, understands that her Orientalized performance is “exactly what white society wants to see” and uses it as a way to climb the social ladder into the white world and exert absolute power.”76 It was also, arguably, a metaphor for Wong’s own career. In 1930, Wong returned to the U.S. to perform on Broadway and then to appear again in Hollywood films. Even into the sound era, though, the typecasting continued, as evidenced by her roles as an exoticized dancer (in films such The Flame of Love [1930], Tiger Bay [1934], Chu Chin Chow [1934], and Daughter of Shanghai [1937]), in which the camera emphasized her sexuality and presented her as a visual spectacle of desire. Similarly, the ongoing prohibitions against miscegenation prevented her from assuming the lead roles she deserved. Discussing her desire to portray the Asian wife of an Englishman who discovers that her husband is in love with another woman in the sound film Java Head (1934), for example, she explained, “I know I will never play it. The captain, you see, marries the woman. . . . But no film lovers can ever marry me. . . . I must always die in the movies, so that the white girl with the yellow hair may get the man.’”77 “Wong was wrong about Java

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Fig. 5.5.  To her great disappointment, Anna May Wong—the best-known Chinese actress of the silent era—found herself restricted to stereotypical roles such as Princess Ling Moy in Daughter of the Dragon (1931). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Head,” Karen Leong observed. “She eventually played Taou Yuen four years later. But [Wong] was also correct: her character kills herself at the film’s end under duress from her evil brother-in-law.”78 There were, of course, a few notable exceptions. In the sound film Daughter of the Dragon (1931), Wong starred as the beautiful Chinese aristocrat Princess Ling Moy, who learns that she is the daughter of her mysterious next-door neighbor, the evil Fu Manchu (Warner Oland), a discovery that

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leaves her torn between her loyalty to him and her responsibility to save the world from his attempted domination. And in a later film, King of Chinatown (1939), she played Dr. Mary Ling, a Chinese American doctor who defies the gangsters trying to take over the Chinatown rackets. The life-saving help she provides to one of the gang members inspires him to use his ill-gotten gains to establish ambulance units for war-torn China, where the patriotic Mary travels to join a Red Cross unit at the film’s end.79 After appearing as an astrologer in a Warner Brothers murder mystery, When You Were Born (1938), Wong also discussed with the studio the possibility of developing a series for herself as an “Oriental detective,” but nothing seems to have come of that.80 For most of her career, in fact, she continued to watch as major roles for which she was uniquely qualified went to white actresses such as Helen Hayes, who starred as Lien Wha, a powerful young woman devoted to fulfilling her father’s promise of aid to their homeland in The Son-Daughter, and Luise Rainer, who triumphed in the role of O-Lan in The Good Earth. “As to the medium I am playing in,” Wong ruefully recognized, “I have no choice in the matter. One has to take that which is available.”81 In the mid-1930s, disappointed by the casting decision for The Good Earth, Wong left the country again, this time to travel to China to learn more about her culture. But that trip too became a source of some frustration, since she was harshly criticized by the Chinese press for playing the exoticized and stereotyped roles that had made her a star. Nonetheless, she remained devoted to China throughout her life, and she worked to raise money for the country, especially after the Japanese invasion in 1937. Upon her return to the U.S. from China, Wong made a few more films, but by 1942, she largely retired from acting, making only occasional film and TV appearances such as the amateur detective in the DuMont Television Network series, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (1951). Notably, that role made her the first Asian American actress to play a lead in a U.S. television show.82 As the best known Asian actress of the silent era, Wong was at once hypervisible and invisible83—a darling of the trade papers and movie magazines but an underutilized talent. Yet, even to her most stereotypical roles, she brought a humanity and an intelligence; and occasionally she advised on some of the elements of the films in which she was cast, adding authentic details to the costumes and to the language on the title cards. While efforts such as her own production company failed, she continued to rail against Hollywood’s limitations. No doubt she spoke for many Asian actresses when, in an interview with British Film journalist Doris Mackie (later published under the title “I Protest”), she wondered, “Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece? Why should we always scheme-rob-kill? I got so weary of it all—of the scenarist’s conception of Chinese character.”84

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A courageous and talented artist, Wong is now recognized for her efforts “to negotiate a path through the racism and stereotyping of Hollywood and the competing demands of her American upbringing and Chinese heritage to achieve artistic fulfilment and racial dignity.”85As a testament to her talent, beauty, and tenacity in the industry, she was one of the five women selected to appear on the inaugural 2022 “American Women Quarters,” which featured a woman of distinction on the obverse of the quarter coin—an opportunity for a new generation to discover Wong and to appreciate the unique voice that she struggled to bring to the silent era and beyond. MARION E. WONG Another remarkable woman who made a significant contribution to early film was Marion E. Wong (1895–1965), whose very existence, Jenny Kwok Wah Lau writes, “challenges the received narrative of American film industry history in which Anglo-American men started the majority of the first companies[,] and the participation of Asians was limited to providing exoticism on screen as actors or extras.”86 A Chinese American, Wong was certainly ahead of her time. A singer-entertainer who became an actress, screenwriter, director, producer, and costume designer, she was determined to bring “some of the customs and manners of China” to the American film world.87 So, in late 1916 or 1917—almost five years before the Wah Ming Motion Picture Company (long considered by film scholars to be the first Chinese American film enterprise in the U.S.) was established and financed by James B. Leong— she founded the Mandarin Film Company in Oakland, California. Wong had great ambitions, and her intention was to produce a variety of pictures on Chinese subjects and to introduce a female perspective. But the first and only film completed by her company was The Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles with the West. Although only two of the original seven (possibly eight) reels survive, the extant footage provides a sufficient frame to understand and appreciate the story, in which the curse of a Chinese god descends upon those who have succumbed to the influence of western civilization. When a westernized Chinese American couple experience a clash of cultures with their more traditional family, the young bride (played by Violet Wong) must adopt the old ways. One of her husband’s relatives (played by Marion Wong), however, schemes against the bride, who suffers numerous tribulations as a result. Once the machinations are exposed, the relative stabs herself.88 The film was very much a family effort: in addition to Marion and her sister-in-law Violet, the film starred several of Wong’s family members, including Marion’s mother Chin See and her niece Stella. Marion, who wrote the script and directed and produced it, also provided all

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of the costumes, including the traditional wedding clothing; and many of the interior scenes were shot at her home, with exterior shots filmed in the nearby Niles Valley. Comparable to James B. Leong’s Lotus Blossom (1921) in terms of its cinematography, editing, acting, and story structure, the film was surprisingly polished for an early independent film. Although, as Jenny Kwok Wah Lau notes, the camera tends to be stationary and the shot composition frontal, with characters entering and exiting from lateral sides of the frame, there is an interesting dynamic between the actors’ bodies and the slight camera movement that prevents the scenes from being static. The acting style is more natural than stylized, and the Chinese-style set dressing appears more authentic than the so-called Chinese décor in films made by non-Asian directors of the same period, such as D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919).89 Wong’s use of special effects—a short sequence of super-impositions and dissolves in the middle of the film—expresses what seems to be the protagonist’s imagination of and fear about her impending wedding. A symbolic shot, it may also have been intended as a comment on the repressive nature of certain Chinese traditions.90 While The Curse of Quon Gwon was never widely or commercially released, its existence is important for several reasons. Paramount is the fact that it rescues Marion E. Wong and her Mandarin Film Company from obscurity.91 But it also suggests the extent of activity and innovation in the early years of cinema within the Asian community and the possibility that other early independent filmmakers may have found both the desire and the financial means to make a film, as Wong did, even if they were unable to publicize or to promote their productions.

Fig. 5.6.  Never commercially released, The Curse of Quon Gwon (c. 1916) was the only film produced and directed by Marion E. Wong through her Mandarin Film Company. Portrait courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Screenshot by author.

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CONCLUSION The Yellow Peril fear that gripped the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century arose in large part from the flood of cheap Asian labor that threatened to diminish the earning power of white European immigrants who had already settled here. So, as Gina Marchetti writes, it deflected “criticism of the brutal expansionist capitalistic economy onto the issue of race,” and—within the context of America’s consistently ambivalent attitudes toward Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans, and other people of color—“contributed to the notion that all nonwhite people are by nature physically and intellectually inferior, morally suspect, heathen, licentious, disease-ridden, feral, violent, uncivilized, infantile, and in need of the guidance of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants.”92 From the mysterious supervillain Fu Manchu in Sax Rohmer’s novels to the xenophobic editorials in William Randolph Hearst’s papers and magazines, Asians were branded as dangerous Others who posed a threat to American national identity. Different in language, dress, and customs, they were perceived as being unable or unwilling to assimilate into American culture, even though the exclusionary legislation aimed at them as a group virtually ensured the difficulty of such assimilation. As the racialized fears deepened, the “Orient” increasingly seemed not just a national but an existential threat, intent on conquering, subjugating, and enslaving the entire Western world. Those racial and racist perceptions were reflected in Hollywood films, especially in the dramas that featured the fear of rape or attempted rape of white women, which served as a metaphor for the larger threat. Asian men were portrayed as the embodiment of the Yellow Peril, sexualized aggressors typified by characters such as Hishuru Tori in The Cheat, and countered by the feminized but still fearsome “Oriental” such as Cheng in Broken Blossoms and the honorable but still tradition-bound Charlie Chan.93 Female characters fell into predictably similar roles, as seductresses, temptresses, or self-sacrificing subordinates. Yet while those images persisted throughout the silent era, a number of pioneering actresses attempted to interrogate the stereotypes. Tsuru Aoki, for example, tried to introduce a more modern sensibility to some of her roles. And Anna May Wong attempted to bring a quiet dignity to her performances, even those as restrictive as the lotus blossom or the exotic villainess, and to speak out forcefully about the limitations that Hollywood imposed. Her efforts, like those of Marion E. Wong, were notable in challenging perceptions and portrayals of Asians. And while these female silent film pioneers may not have achieved the success that they deserved, their efforts opened the door for new generations of Asian actresses and directors who followed.

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NOTES 1. This chapter contains certain terms that were commonly used during the silent film era and that may be offensive to some readers. Those words and terms, most of which occur in the titles of films or in newspaper and trade publications, are used here exclusively for historical or analytical purposes. 2. The bestselling novel, though, was not without its controversies, even after its publication in the early 1930s. Among those controversies were questions of cultural appropriation and authenticity: could Buck, who was brought up in China speaking Chinese, be considered an authentic cultural spokesperson? At the same time, how could—and should—a novel about China written by a non-Chinese be read? Was the novel an accurate history of the Chinese family, the rural economy, and the status of women, as some argued; or was it saccharine, overly sentimental, and unrealistic, as others contended? One thing is certain: for a generation of Americans, as Harold Isaacs observed, Pearl Buck “created” China in the same way Charles Dickens “created” Victorian England. Yet, as Celeste Ng writes in “Apologies to Pearl S. Buck” (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apologies-to-pearl-s-buck_b_471628), unlike Dickens’ novels, The Good Earth was not presented as a work of fiction but rather as a lesson on Chinese culture. Even today, “Too many people read it and sincerely believe they gain some special insight into being Chinese. In one quick step, they know China, like Neo in The Matrix knows kung fu.” In recent years, some scholars, including biographer Peter Conn, have argued for the reconsideration of Buck, a restoration of her reputation, and a reevaluation of her work. Others have lauded her feminist and anti-racist attitudes, which underlie the story of The Good Earth. In the end, as Charles W. Hayford suggests in “What’s So Bad About The Good Earth” (https:​//​ www​.asianstudies​.org​/publications​/eaa​/archives​/whats​-so​-bad​-about​-the​-good​-earth​ /), the novel remains readable and useful in “examining the problems of historical cultural understanding and representation, where it serves as a primary document [of Buck’s attitudes, experiences and impressions], not a sociological resource on China.” Not surprisingly, similar criticism was directed at the 1937 movie, which, as Hayford noted, “did not feature any Chinese actors, but appeared to speak for China.” Yet, like the book, the film “made Chinese people real for millions of Americans.” In “Rediscovering Pearl Buck, America’s Chinese Writer,” https://jamesweitz.com/ rediscovering-pearl-buck-americas-chinese-writer/, Celeste Ng offered some interesting insights into an earlier film version of The Good Earth. She writes that, when MGM shot a movie version in China in 1934, the Chinese government was concerned that the film might depict a country of ignorant peasants. “MGM complied with government requests to include anachronisms such as tractors instead of water buffalo and that the village women wear flowers in their hair. Despite this cooperation, the director’s house was burned to the ground and the film destroyed with sulfuric acid just before the crew returned to the USA,” a sabotage that Buck blamed on government actors. The final movie version had to be shot in the U.S. Controversy has also surrounded the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. Theodore Harris, a former dance instructor who became Buck’s confidant, financial advisor, and head of the foundation (from which he was to receive a lifetime salary), created a scandal

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when he was accused of mismanaging the foundation and diverting money to his friends and his own expenses. Buck continued to defend him and even left the bulk of her estate to a foundation that Harris controlled; but after her death, following a protracted litigation, her seven adopted children managed to break her will and share in the inheritance.   3. Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth (New York: John Day, 1931), Chapter Two.   4. Mick LaSalle, “Trailblazer Anna May Wong finally gets acknowledged—by the U.S. Mint,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 24, 2022, https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/movies-tv/ trailblazer-anna-may-wong-finally-gets-acknowledged-by-the-u-s-mint.  5. Variety, December 18, 1935, p. 3.   6. Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 154.   7. William Earl, “BAD: Luise Rainer and Paul Muni as O-Lan and Wang Lung in ‘The Good Earth,’” Variety, March 24, 2021, https://variety.com/1936/film/reviews/ the-good-earth-1200411335/.   8. Yohanna Desta, “Hollywood: The True Story of Anna May Wong and The Good Earth,” Vanity Fair, May 1, 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/05/ hollywood-ryan-murphy-anna-may-wong.   9. “Loretta Goes Oriental,” Photoplay (March 1932). Noted in “Loretta Young in ‘The Hatchet Man,’” https://www.themakeupgallery.info/racial/asian/hatchet.htm. 10. Michael Luo, “America Was Eager for Chinese Immigrants. What Happened?” The New Yorker, August 30, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/30/ america-was-eager-for-chinese-immigrants-what-happened. 11. “Chinese,” “Immigration and Relocation in US History,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/chinese/. 12. “Searching for the Gold Mountain,” “Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/ chinese/searching-for-the-gold-mountain/. 13. Chinese Railroad Workers Project, as noted in Lesley Kennedy, “Building the Transcontinental Railroad: How 20,000 Chinese Immigrants Made It Happen,” History, April 28, 2022 (update of original May 10, 2019), https://www.history.com/ news/transcontinental-railroad-chinese-immigrants. See also Matt Stirn, “Making the Connection,” Smithsonian Magazine (April–May, 2022), pp. 60–72, 122. 14. Kennedy, “Building the Transcontinental Railroad.” 15. “Struggling for Work,” “Immigration and Relocation in US History,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/chinese/ struggling-for-work/. 16. Matt Stirn, “Forgotten History of Chinese Railroad Workers,” originally published in the April/May, 2022 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.mattstirnphoto.com/Stories/ChineseRailroad/. 17. Ibid. 18. Kevin Waite, “The bloody history of anti-Asian violence in the West,” History and Culture: Race in America, National Geographic, May 10, 2021, https:​//​www​ .nationalgeographic​.com​/history​/article​/the​-bloody​-history​-of​-anti​-asian​-violence​-in​

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-the​-west. According to Waite, eight rioters were convicted of manslaughter, but all were soon freed on a technicality. See also Kelly Wallace, “Forgotten Los Angeles: The Chinese Massacre of 1871,” https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/ blogs/lapl/chinese-massacre-1871. 19. Ibid. 20. Henry Haight, Inaugural Address, December 5, 1867, “Governors’s Gallery,” https://governors.library.ca.gov/addresses/10-haight.html. 21. Kevin Waite, “The Forgotten History of the Western Klan,” The Atlantic, April 6, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/ california-klans-anti-asian-crusade/618513/. 22. “Intolerance,” “Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/chinese/intolerance/. 23. Luo, “America was Eager for Chinese Immigrants.” 24. “Legislative Harassment,” “Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/chinese/ legislative-harassment/. 25. K. Ian Shin, cited in Jessica Pearce Rotondi, in “Before the Chinese Exclusion Act, This Anti-Immigration Law Targeted Asian Women,” History, March 19, 2021, https://www.history.com/news/chinese-immigration-page-act-women. 26. Rotondi, “Before the Chinese Exclusion Act.” 27. Melissa May Borja, cited in Rotondi. 28. See “The Burlingame-Seward Treaty, 1868,” Office of the Historian, Department of State, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/burlingame-seward-treaty. 29. Ibid. 30. “Growth and Inclusion,” “Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/chinese/ growth-and-inclusion/#:~:text=Despite%20continuing%20restrictions%20in%20 immigration,the%20mainstream%20of%20U.S.%20society. 31. Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 32. See, for example, “Illustrating Chinese Exclusion,” https://thomasnastcartoons. com/the-chinese-cartoons/. 33. Julia Lovell, “The Yellow Peril: Dr Fu Manchu & the Rise of Chinaphobia by Christopher Frayling, A Review,” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/30/ yellow-peril-dr-fu-manchu-rise-of-chinaphobia-christopher-frayling-review. 34. “Yellow Peril,” Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, https://sf-encyclopedia.com/ entry/yellow_peril. 35. The character was first described as such in Rohmer’s The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu (1913), the first novel in the Fu Manchu (originally “Fu-Manchu”) series. For more on Fu Manchu, see Jeffrey Richards, China and the Chinese in Popular Film (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), especially chapter two. 36. Lovell, “The Yellow Peril.” 37. Ibid. 38. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove, 1987), p. 59.

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39. “Foreign News: Again, Yellow Peril,” Time, September 11, 1933, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,746032,00.html. 40. Whereas Asians were often caricatured in vaudeville by performers wearing yellowface, “at the first two decades of the early twentieth century,” Yingze Huo notes, “Chinese American vaudeville artists reinterpreted their appearances on stage by utilizing Black performative languages.” See Huo, “The ‘Strange Affinities’: Early Chinese American Vaudevillians’ Blackface Performance,” Journal for the Interdisciplinary Art and Education, 2.2: 157–168. Also, as Krystyn R. Moon, “Your Story, Our Story,” https://yourstory.tenement.org/stories/chinese-american-vaudevillians, observed, a number of Chinese Americans also worked in vaudeville with the intention of “countering popular stereotypes about the musical and theatrical abilities of persons of Asian descent and broader negative attitudes that undermined their inclusion in the nation.” See also Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 41. Naomi Greene, in From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American Film (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014), p. 8, comments on Harte’s view of the “heathen” Chinese, whom he considered “pitiful and deceitful.” 42. Mark Winokur, American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and the 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), cited in Yiman Wang, “The Art of Screen Passing: Anna May Wong’s Yellow Yellowface Performance in the Art Deco Period,” Camera Obscura 60.3 (2005), p. 167. Wang also notes Winokur’s suggestion that yellowface and racial masquerade “embody the American fantasy to create not only one’s persona, but also one’s origins.” She references Greg Smith, who, following Winokur, argues that “such racial masquerade not only gives whites the potential to try on Other subjectivities, but it opens up possibilities of expression that are generally repressed in white America” by displacing extreme expressions onto the less civilized racial Other. 43. “The Asian as ‘Unassimilable,’” Race in America, 1880–1940, https:// digitalgallery.bgsu.edu/student/exhibits/show/race-in-us/asian-americans/ the-asian-as-unassimilable-. 44. Lan Dong, “Cinematic Representation of the Yellow Peril: D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms,” in Lewis et al., p. 127; Marchetti, p. 1. 45. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 46. Marchetti, p. 1. 47. Ibid. Robert G. Lee, in Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), p. 118, writes that The Cheat, like Broken Blossoms, made explicit the Yellow Peril’s threat to white civilization. Those films “constructed and deployed the imagery of sexual relations between Asian men and white women in order to interrogate and ideologically resolve the twin crises of family and nation.” 48. Lan Dong, p. 129. 49. Gary Hoppenstand, “Yellow Doctors and Opium Dens: A Survey of the Yellow Peril Stereotypes in Mass Media Entertainment,” in Christopher D. Geist and Jack

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Nachbar, eds., The Popular Culture Reader, 3rd ed. (Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1983), p. 174. Cited in Marchetti, p. 3. 50. The Nickelodeon, Vol. IV, No. 977, p. 206; similar plot summary in Moving Picture World. 51. Naomi Green, p. 26, suggests that underlying the film is “a forbidden sexual passion” that is at once prohibited and denied. She writes that the passion is evident from the moment that Cheng installs Lucy in his home, and it continues as he “place[s] her in his bed and shower[s] her with fine clothes, gifts, and his most precious treasures.” Green adds that the nature of the Yellow Man’s love for Lucy “clearly constitutes a striking demonstration of one of the ‘sexual pathologies’—that of ‘unsullied purity’—used to define and categorize the racial other.” 52. Lee, p. 123. The change, he notes, was due in large part to protests to Paramount by the Japanese Association of Southern California. 53. Ibid., p. 121. 54. Fritzi Kramer, “The Cheat (1915): A Silent Film Review,” February 4, 2013, https://moviessilently.com/2013/02/04/the-cheat-1915-a-silent-film-review/. 55. The film was remade in 1923, with George Fitzmaurice as director and Pola Negri and Jack Holt in the starring roles. And in 1931, Paramount remade it again, with Broadway mogul George Abbott as director and Tallulah Bankhead as the star. 56. Nathan Liu, “Sessue Hayakawa: America’s Forgotten Sex Symbol,” Asian Cinevision, December 10, 2019, https:​//​www​.asiancinevision​.org​/sessue​-hayakawa​ -americas​-forgotten​-sex​-symbol/. 57. Katherine Luck, “Sessue Hayakawa: The Most Famous Actor You’ve Never Heard Of,” March 12, 2017, https://katherineluck.medium.com/ sessue-hayakawa-the-most-famous-actor-youve-never-heard-of-962de7bd3320. 58. According to Yiman Wang, p. 169, Anna May Wong had turned down the role. As her replacement, Mori was made to wear a wig in imitation of Wong’s hairstyle and was lit in such a way as “to conjure Mori as Wong” and to “retrench Wong’s presumed Oriental quality.” 59. Renowned “publicity man” Teete Carle discusses WAMPAS Babies in Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson, Hollywood: The Oral History (New York: Harper, 2022), p. 55. 60. Victoria Linchong, “Ode to the Asian-American Faces in the Shadows of Hollywood,” https://www.messynessychic.com/2021/10/26/ode-to-the-asian-americanfaces-in-the-shadows-of-hollywoods-golden-age/. Linchong notes that in the same 1932 group of Wampas Baby Stars were Ginger Rogers and Gloria Stuart. 61. Moving Picture World, September 26, 1914. There was an interchangeability even among other Othered women. Native American Minnie Ha Ha, for example, played a Black Mammy in several of Ince’s films, while Lupe Vélez enacted types that included Native Americans, Hindus, Swedes, and Malays. 62. Sara Ross, “Tsuru Aoki,” Women Film Pioneers Project, https://wfpp.columbia. edu/pioneer/ccp-tsuru-aoki/. 63. In Mr. Wu, the abandonment of the daughter by her Western suitor takes an especially unfortunate turn, since it falls to the patriarch Wu (played by Lon Chaney) to observe custom and tradition and thus to murder his daughter for having dishonored

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his house. And in the later film Shanghai Gesture (1941), based on a 1926 play by John Colton, the central character Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson) endures a similar experience. As Naomi Greene writes in From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda, p. 69, “Although born a ‘Manchu princess’ in her youth she met the same unhappy fate as Madame Butterfly: she, too fell in love with a treacherous Westerner who abandoned her when she became pregnant. Worse still her lover took her fortune, ferreted away the child she bore him and sold her into a life of prostitution.” While she is eventually able to put that life behind her, “she has never ceased to nourish hope of revenge.” 64. Ibid. 65. Linchong, “Ode to the Asian Faces.” 66. Richards, pp. 57–58. 67. Yiman Wang, p. 163. Wang references Wong’s autobiography, “The True Story of a Chinese Girl,” Pictures, parts one and two. Hodges (pp. 18–19) likewise relates Wong’s fascination with early serial heroines. Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 62–63, mentions it as well. 68. Notably, that film starred Sessue Hayakawa. Wong had performed, unbilled, in an earlier film in which Hayakawa starred, The First Born (1921). 69. Hodges, p. 35. 70. Screenwriter Frances Marion, who was among the highest paid screenwriters of her day, admitted her borrowing. She acknowledged that the film’s scenario was “practically the step-daughter of Madame Butterfly” (Hodges, p. 37). 71. For more on the film’s Technicolor achievement and its preservation, see the National Film Preservation Foundation, The Toll of the Sea (1922), https://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/the-toll-of-the-sea-1922. 72. See Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/ American Women on Screen and Scene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), especially pp. 63–77, for a fuller discussion of Anna May Wong as a hypersexual Asian female. 73. Leong, pp. 64–65. 74. Cited in Cinthia Chen, “Anna May Wong, The Actress Who Died a Thousand Deaths,” http://www.clairedeliso.com/anna-may-wong-the-actress-who-died-a-thousand-deaths. Also widely noted in other accounts of Wong’s life and career. 75. Yiman Wang, p. 177. Similarly, in a later film, Shanghai Express (1932), Wong ironizes the role by creating a tension between the stereotype and herself, the performer enacting it. 76. Ibid., p. 173. 77. Audrey Rivers, “Sorry She Cannot Be Kissed,” Movie Classic (November 1931), p. 41. 78. Leong, p. 185. 79. Reviews were largely negative. Frank S. Nugent in the New York Times (March 16, 1939), called it a microscopic melodrama that wasted its cast, while Harrison’s Reports found it to be “just another gangster melodrama” lacking in even the usual excitement.

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80. Leong, p. 66. 81. Ibid., p. 67. 82. Pamela Hutchinson, “Anna May Wong: The Legacy of a Groundbreaking Asian American Star,” The Guardian, October 19, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2022/oct/19/anna-may-wong-hollywood-legacy-us-currency. 83. Yiman Wang, p. 164. 84. This oft-cited quote appears in many accounts of Wong’s life, including Leong, p. 83, and Shimizu, p. 58. 85. Richards, p. 80. 86. Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, “Marion E. Wong,” October 15, 2019, https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-s9yz-e287. 87. Ibid. 88. “The Curse of Quon Gwon (1916): A Silent Film Review,” April 3, 2016, https:// moviessilently.com/2016/04/03/the-curse-of-quon-gwon-1916-a-silent-film-review/. 89. Lau, “Marion E. Wong.” 90. Ibid. As Lau noted, the wedding scene is evidence of director Wong’s cultural knowledge, and it may be significant here to note that at the time she produced this film, she herself was unmarried. 91. Ibid. 92. Marchetti, pp. 2–3. In fact, as Marchetti observes, Hollywood used Asians and Asian Americans “as signifiers of racial otherness to avoid the far more immediate racial tensions between blacks and whites or the ambivalent mixture of guilt and enduring hatred toward Native Americans and Hispanics” (p. 6). 93. A contravention of the Fu Manchu character, Charlie Chan, who was created by American novelist and playwright Earl Derr Biggers, appeared in six mysteries published between 1925 and 1932. The Chan character went on to attract considerable attention in feature films and serials over the next few decades.

Chapter 6

Latins

In the 1920s, Latin types were the rage in Hollywood, and the “Latin Lover” was the most seductive and attractive of them all.1 A “dark, mysterious, passionate, and highly charged sexual protagonist,” he appealed to moviegoers, especially to the growing number of women who comprised the audiences at the new movie houses and the “palaces” that were being built across the country. And he became a virtual gold mine for early filmmakers, who began producing films that centered on the mythology of this suave and sensual icon.2 The character type had been established not by an actual Latin actor but by Rudolph Valentino (Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaello Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla).3 An Italian émigré, Valentino came to prominence after being cast by June Mathis in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), where he stole women’s hearts in the first scene with his sexy tango. But it was his roles as a Bedouin chief who wins the affection of an Anglo woman in The Sheik (1921) and as a bullfighter who is engaged in a torrid affair with a wealthy widow in Blood and Sand (1922) that turned him into a silent film superstar. Quite simply, as H. L. Mencken wrote, he was “catnip to women,”4 many of whom swooned and fainted while watching him on screen. His sudden death in 1926, likely from a perforated ulcer (not, as suggested at the time, by poisoning or at the hand of a jealous husband—legends that still persist today), caused an outpouring of anguish. In both Europe and America, despondent fans reportedly killed or attempted to kill themselves over the news.5 More than 100,000 people, Smithsonian Magazine noted, gathered on the streets in chaos outside the funeral home. “Flappers tore at their own clothes, clutched at their chests and collapsed in the heat. The New York Police Department tried to bring the order to the mob . . . and inside the funeral home, four Black Shirt honor guards, supposedly sent by Benito Mussolini, stood nearby in stark tribute to the fallen star”—though it was later revealed that the men were actors, hired by the funeral home in a publicity stunt.6 193

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While Valentino epitomized the archetype, later Latin stars enhanced that figure’s mystique and allure. After Valentino’s untimely death, MGM studios, anxious to find a successor, began promoting Mexican-born Ramon Novarro (José Ramon Gil Samaniego). Novarro’s role as Ben Hur (1925), which allowed him to put his physical assets on full display, had already brought him considerable attention, while subsequent roles as an action hero confirmed his status as a romantic lead and anointed “Ravishing Ramon” as one of, if not the first, true Latin stars in Hollywood. Among Novarro’s contemporaries were other darkly handsome men such as Mexican-born Gilbert Roland (Luis Antonio Dámaso de Alonso) and Spanish-born Antonio Moreno (Antonio Garrido Monteagudo y Moreno). Both played opposite some of the leading actresses of their day, including Norma Talmadge, Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, and Dorothy Gish. And both became Latin matinee idols who successfully transitioned to sound films— Roland as a screen and television actor in roles such as “The Cisco Kid” in a series of 1940s films, Moreno as a director and versatile character actor. In an interview, Moreno later recalled that even though he was promoted as “a sex symbol” by the studios, he did nothing to encourage that perception. “But Americans [of that era] wanted to believe that people of Latin origins are more naturally ‘spicy.’” Moreno also noted that even though he was not a Latin American but a Spaniard, “in the American mind, it’s all the same.”7 (Notably, “Latin” was the term most frequently used in the early film industry to describe all Spanish-speaking people, just as “Asian” was a generic term for Japanese, Chinese, and other “Orientals.”) Another popular Latin actor was Ricardo Cortez. Tall, dark, and strikingly attractive, he was groomed by Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount) to become another successor to Valentino and assigned several “Valentino-esque” parts in pictures such as The Next Corner (1924), Argentine Love (1924), and The Spaniard (1925).8 But those roles were usually undemanding and relied more on his good looks than on his acting talents. Yet, while Cortez never achieved the legendary status of Valentino, he nonetheless became a popular screen star, one of the handful of romantic Hispanic leading men who captured the imagination of his audiences. According to Cortez’s biographer Dan Van Neste, even before Valentino’s untimely death, with the Latin Lover craze at its peak and the extremely profitable relationship between Famous Players-Lasky studio head Jesse Lasky and Valentino in some jeopardy because of that star’s increasing demands for creative control, Lasky realized he might need an actor to take Rudy’s place. Reportedly, after seeing Cortez in a dance contest and noticing his olive-skinned Latin looks as well as his resemblance to Valentino, Lasky signed the young man to a contract; and the career of “Ricardo Cortez” was born.9

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There was, however, one slight catch. Cortez, it turns out, was not a Latin at all. He was actually Jacob Krantz, born on New York’s Lower East Side to Austrian-Jewish parents. His concocted background was apparently unveiled during his divorce proceedings, when his estranged wife Alma stated that she thought she was marrying a “gallant Spanish caballero” but realized that “Ric was an awful prevaricator.”10 Hollywood publicists tried to repair the damage by strategically leaking to the public various anecdotes and schemes to advance the notion that Krantz was “almost” Latin—suggesting at one point that he was actually French, at another point, Austrian (which at least came a little closer to the truth). The revelations, though, did not damage Cortez’s career; he would go on to make sound films, direct a few pictures, and have a long tenure in Hollywood, as did his brother, a legendary cinematographer (born Stanislaus Krantz) who early in his career capitalized on his brother’s fame and renamed himself “Stanley Cortez.” In fact, such fabrications were not unusual. In her examination of Krantz’s transformation into Ricardo Cortez, Colette Shade observed that Hollywood had long been “the capital of reinvention—particularly Jewish reinvention.” Although Cortez reportedly was uncomfortable with the improvised identity, he appreciated the fact that it afforded him opportunities he might not otherwise have enjoyed. So he cooperated with the studios and, like Valentino, became a favorite of moviegoers. The largely positive representation of Latin Lovers was, however, quite atypical of the majority of Hispanic screen depictions, many of which were restricted to a different and more demeaning stereotype: that of the “bad guy,” or bandido, from south of the border. As film historian William K. Everson explained, that type became a staple in silent pictures because “The Mexican villain was not only convenient, but logical—just as the German or Japanese villain became a matter of course in wartime. . . . even when the Western didn’t use a Mexican villain, it took great pains to point out that the Texan or Arizonan badman was as bad as a Mexican.”11 And on those occasions when Latin actors were given non-villain parts, they were usually cast in minor and generic roles as cowboys, horse wranglers, or background extras in Western pictures.12 A COMPLICATED HISTORY Americans’ perceptions of Hispanics were based in large part on the long and complicated history of, and especially the competition between, the United States and Mexico. That history reached back to the sixteenth century, when Spaniards established colonies in North America. By 1800, Spain had governed those lands, including what is now Mexico and many of the

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southwestern U.S. states, for hundreds of years. The Rio Grande created a natural border, and the area north of the river was lightly populated, with small settlements centered around mission churches, an arrangement that remained mostly undisturbed after Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821.13 The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) that broke out over the U.S. annexation of Texas, though, brought consequential changes. Initiated by President James K. Polk, it was the first armed conflict to be fought largely on American soil; and it paved the way for many other important events, from the expansion and dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the California Gold Rush to the American Civil War.14 It also solidified belief in the concept of Manifest Destiny, confirming the idea that the United States had been destined by divine entities to expand into a continental empire resembling the present-day nation. Moreover, according to the National Park Service, for proponents of slavery and abolition, “the new territory provided a source of conflict over whether slavery would expand and continue in the West.”15 After Mexico’s defeat, the two nations signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ended the war; and in the “Mexican Cession,” Mexico ceded over half its territory, including the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. Mexico also relinquished all claims to Texas and recognized the Rio Grande as the southern boundary with the United States.16 Through the Gadsden Purchase that followed a few years later in 1854, the U.S. gained even more land, in what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico. That allowed it to extend its westward border to the Pacific Ocean, establish a much-coveted railroad route, and open the West to further expansion. Together with the Treaty of Hidalgo, the Gadsden Purchase, the last major territorial acquisition in the contiguous United States,17 not only enlarged the U.S. by one third but also made American citizens of tens of thousands of Mexicans. And, at least in theory, it guaranteed their safety and property rights. But, in practice, as with the Native American treaties that had been enacted during this same period, those guarantees were not always reliably enforced; and “by the end of the 19th century, many Mexican Americans had been deprived of their land, and found themselves living unprotected in an often hostile region.”18 The problems intensified as the borderlands between Mexico and the U.S. were torn by political and social instability, especially as more and more immigrants crossed the border. Some were preyed upon by bandits and rustlers, while even those who succeeded had to face harsh weather, an uncertain economy, and the possibility of attacks by both long-time citizens and Native American raiders. Exacerbating the situation, some lawmen, including the

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Texas Rangers, were said to be as much of a threat to Mexican Americans as to the criminals they were sent to arrest.19 The Mexican Revolution that began around 1910 broadened into a major economic and social upheaval that presaged the fundamental character of Mexico’s twentieth-century experience.20 Led by a number of groups including those headed by Francisco Madero, Pascual Orozco, Pancho Villa, and Emiliano Zapata, the Revolution had ended dictatorship in Mexico and established a constitutional republic. But despite the drafting of a constitution in 1917 that formalized many of the reforms sought by rebel groups, periodic violence continued into the 1930s.21 Notably, according to census records, between 1910 and 1930 a new surge tripled the number of Mexican immigrants (though the actual number was likely much higher, since then, even more than now, much of it occurred outside official channels). As the Mexican-American community became larger, it became increasingly prominent in American public life.22 That, in turn, created new problems, with fears of a shift in the balance of power as national political figures began to court voters in Mexican-American regions of the country coupled with a growing desire by some to ensure a more complete assimilation that would eliminate what were considered “the negative aspects of Mexican American life.” With the onset of the Great Depression, deportation (both voluntary and forced or coerced) posed a new threat. As the Library of Congress reports, “All in all, hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants, especially farmworkers, were sent out of the country during the 1930s—many of them the same workers who had been eagerly recruited a decade earlier—” before reestablishing themselves in the workforce by the end of the 1930s, as U.S. policies and attitudes toward Mexican immigration shifted yet again.23 Prejudices, however, had become entrenched, and misconceptions flourished. DISCRIMINATION AND VIOLENCE The discrimination against Mexicans and other Hispanics was, in fact, longstanding, harking back at least as far as the Treaty of Hidalgo; and it intensified with the rise in immigration, as new arrivals were barred entry into Anglo establishments and segregated into urban barrios in poor areas. “Although Latinos were critical to the U.S. economy and often were American citizens,” Erin Blackmore observed, “everything from their language to the color of their skin to their countries of origin could be used as a pretext for discrimination.” Anglo-Americans treated them as a foreign underclass and perpetuated stereotypes that “those who spoke Spanish were lazy, stupid and undeserving,” a prejudice that, in some cases, turned fatal.24

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Historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, who have documented much of the mob violence against Spanish-speaking people that was common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, estimate that the number of Hispanics killed by mobs reached well into the thousands, although definitive evidence exists only for 547 cases.25 That violence began during the Gold Rush, after California became part of the United States, as white miners who begrudged former Mexicans a share of the wealth yielded by the mines enacted vigilante justice. In 1851, for example, a mob of vigilantes accused Josefa Segovia of murdering a white man, whom she said had attacked her. After a fake trial, they marched her through the streets and lynched her. Over 2,000 men gathered to watch, shouting racial slurs. Other Mexicans were victims of similar attacks, sometimes on the mere suspicion of fraternizing with white women or insulting white people.26 The situation was just as bad in Texas, which, as Simon Romero writes, had enshrined white supremacy in its 1836 constitution when Anglo slaveholders seceded from Mexico. And the state was by far the site of the highest number of episodes of mob violence against people of Mexican descent. Reasons for the lynchings and the brutality varied wildly, including accusations of cattle theft, murder, cheating at cards, refusing to play the fiddle, and even witchcraft. In 1880, a mob in Collin County in North Texas accused Refugio Ramírez, his wife, and their teenage daughter, María Ines, of bewitching their neighbors.27 Consequently, according to historian Laura F. Edwards, the three were burned to death. In another episode in 1882, a man of Mexican descent identified as Augustin Agirer filed a complaint against an Anglo man who fired at his dog. In retaliation, Anglos tracked Agirer down and fatally shot him in front of his wife, The Austin Weekly Statesman reported at the time.28 The crimes continued well into the twentieth century. In 1922, a group of ten men snatched Elias Villareal Zarate from a jail in Weslaco in South Texas, where he was being held for fighting with a white co-worker. La Prensa, a San Antonio newspaper, described how the mob hanged him, raising the ire of Mexican diplomats who were trying to curb such incidents.29 One of the most contentious episodes of racial bigotry and brutality anywhere in the West occurred in the outpost of Porvenir, a remote stretch of West Texas on the Rio Grande, where Mexicans were eking out a quiet existence as farmers. But on January 28, 1918, a group of Anglo cattlemen, Texas Rangers, and United States Army cavalry soldiers descended on the village as the families slept. They seized fifteen men and boys, the youngest of whom was sixteen, marched them to a bluff overlooking the river, and fatally shot them at close range.30 Such violence occurred in other states as well. For instance, in 1919, two Mexican citizens were being held in a jail in Pueblo, Colorado, as suspects in the murder of a police officer. A mob broke into the jail, drove the two men

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to the edge of town, and hanged them during a heavy thunderstorm in front of about one hundred people. The El Paso Herald reported that Mexico’s consul in Denver investigated the episode and concluded that the mob had lynched the wrong men.31 THE “GREASER” STEREOTYPE As the discrimination against Mexicans became pervasive and the prejudices firmly ingrained in the culture, the derogatory images of arrogant hidalgos, lazy peons, evil bandidos, and loose-principled priests proliferated. The most prevalent stereotype, however, was the “Greaser”—the very word a slur that likely originated in the Anti-Vagrancy Act, passed in 1855 in California to legalize the arrests of those persons perceived to have violated the State’s anti-vagrancy statute. Known as “the Greaser Act” (since “Greaser,” referring to people of “Spanish and Indian blood,” appeared in the actual statute), it was part of a history of discriminatory anti-immigrant legislation such as the Foreign Miners Tax Act of 1850, which taxed noncitizen “alien caste laborers” who worked in the gold mines, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Although the act was amended a year later, at which time the word “Greaser” was removed from the statute, it continued to be applied to citizens of Mexican ancestry and to perpetuate nativist policies and ideologies not only against them but also against Native Americans and Chinese immigrants.32 With new laws that they enacted, Anglos persisted in using lynching and extra-legal violence to discriminate even further against Mexicans. Stereotyped with grossly exaggerated features that included “long greasy hair coiled under huge sombreros, scraggly mustachios . . . tobacco-stained fingers and teeth, and grotesque dialect and curses,” the Greaser—an unmistakable Other—became the object of unabashed racial bigotry.33 A staple of many dime novels and magazines, he could be counted on to provide conflict by his threat to the Anglo hero, as in the many “Young Wild West” versions. A character created by the pseudonymous “Old Scout” (likely Cornelius Shea, though other writers such as Kenneth Lowery and Justin Davis also published under that name), Young Wild West appeared in more than 600 stories in Wild West Weekly and similar publications from 1902 until 1915. Reincarnated in dime novels as “Prince of the Saddle” and “Champion Deadshot of the West,” he wanders from the Missouri River to the mouth of the Rio Grande and encounters Sioux, Chinese allies, a monstrous werewolf who attacks entire towns, and, of course, the inevitable Greasers, as in Young Wild West at Greaser Gulch and Young Wild West’s Greaser Chase, or, The Outlaws of the Border.34

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The “‘Tex-Mex’ formula scoundrel of the dime novel,” as Arthur Pettit observed, was so popular because he fulfilled the fictional need for villains who offered maximum contrast to the cowboy heroes and whose skin color and costumes highlighted the difference between the two ethnic groups. And he reinforced notions of Mexicans as racially inferior and innately evil.35 Consequently, as Raymund Paredes writes, “if one surveys the dime novels of the last third of the nineteenth century, it becomes clear that the Mexican—and not the Indian—is the most contemptible figure in western popular fiction.”36 Not only in the many dime novels that lauded the brave cowboy but also in much of the popular literature, especially the frontier tales of some of the most beloved nineteenth-century writers, the Greaser became a familiar and despised antagonist. In Stephen Crane’s story “One Dash—Horses” (1896), for example, he is depicted as “a fat, round-faced Mexican, whose little snake-like mustache was as black as his eyes, and whose eyes were black as jet [and who is] insane with the wild rage of a man whose liquor is dully burning at his brain.” In Bret Harte’s “The Story of a Mine”(1877), the Mexican appears as an “infernal Greaser,”37 and, in “A Ghost of the Sierras” (1906), as a “d----d Greaser.”38 Among Harte’s recollections of his “Bohemian Days in San Francisco” (1900) was that of the “modern ‘Greaser,’ or Mexican—his index finger steeped in cigarette stains; his velvet jacket and his crimson sash”—stinking of the “combined odor of tobacco, burned paper, and garlic.”39 Mark Twain, too, in Roughing It and elsewhere, used the insulting term, at one point even likening Balboa’s ecstasy of delight over his discovery of the Pacific to that of “any other Greaser over any other trifle.”40 That impression of Mexicans was echoed in the yellow press of the day, particularly in the newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, both of whom used topical events to capitalize on racist perceptions and to agitate for the Spanish-American War with their sensationalized stories. Hearst, especially, was an unrepentant xenophobe and war hawk who exaggerated Spanish brutality after the Cuban rebellion in 1895; and he used his newspapers as well as his magazines to foment racial animosity against Mexicans, both native-born and immigrant. In numerous articles, editorials, and advertisements, he described them as “rodent-like” and derided them as “undesirables” who smuggled drugs and stole jobs from Americans.41 And after Hearst expanded his empire by moving into the burgeoning motion picture business, he consistently sought to portray Mexicans on screen as criminal menaces and enemies of the U.S. The villain of the Hearst-financed serial Patria (1918), for example, featured a Mexican antagonist, Señor Juan de Lima, who epitomized Hearst’s belief, contrary to evidence, that the real threat to American security and democracy was from its southern border. That belief, likely rooted in Pancho Villa’s confiscation of Hearst-owned

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properties during the Mexican Revolution, further fueled Hearst’s racist vitriol and helped to shape Americans’ perception of the Hispanic Other.42 POPULAR CULTURE Mexicans received somewhat better treatment in the Wild West Shows, where they often appeared as skilled horsemen called “vaqueros,” with embroidered jackets and large sombrero-style hats. Pawnee Bill’s show, for example, featured a “Mexican Hippodrome” that included such acts as Riding Señoritas, Fancy Roping, the Mexican Contra Dance on Horseback, and a Mexican Band. And Mexicans were among the first to be employed by Buffalo Bill when he created his Wild West Show, where “they mesmerized the audience with the warm-up acts of Mexican bullfighting—which were roping, riding, and catching with bolas.”43 Some of the performers even achieved a kind of celebrity status. “The Greatest Roper in the World” Vincente Oropeza, who introduced into the tent-shows the trick and fancy roping techniques from his native Mexico, is said to have inspired some of Will Rogers’ cowboy routines. Mexican Joe (José Barrera) operated his own Wild West show and later performed with Pawnee Bill and the Miller Brothers, where his expert riding and roping made him an audience favorite.44 And Antonio (Tony) Esquivel, an excellent ranchero, toured extensively nationally and overseas with Buffalo Bill Cody; later, after Cody’s show went bankrupt, he joined the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show, where he continued to please the crowds. Yet even Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and the other popular traveling entertainment shows reflected U.S. anxieties concerning Mexican nationals and immigrants by referring to the Mexican vaqueros as “Spanish” or noting that they hailed from “Old Mexico” and not the West, thus severing (or at least distinguishing) them from the “true” American cowboy and further emphasizing their racial and national otherness. As the Mexicans’ performances moved from displays of genuine skilled riding and roping to more racialized staging of scenes such as “Overland Mail Held Up by a Gang of Mexicans,” some of the performers protested. Audiences, however, remained fascinated by the displays of bandido villainy,45 which confirmed their prejudices. EARLY MOVIES Not surprisingly, early film harked back to the established tropes and stereotypes of Latin characters. As Luis Reyes and Peter Rubie observed in Hispanics in Hollywood, most of the film portrayals of those figures

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“reflect[ed] the ignorance of the filmmakers and perpetuate[d] the myths that are for the most part negative.”46 Especially as Western films became increasingly popular and profitable, the Mexican evolved into a common and familiar type: “a dirty and grubby gunslinger with low morals, a conniving and shiftless soul with a tendency towards violence and of course, a taste for white women” who do not requite his affection. Thus, he seemed a perfect foil for the clean-cut white cowboy-hero47 and helped to establish a formula that was repeated in numerous movies such as The Mexican’s Revenge (1909), His Mexican Bride (1909), and The Mexican’s Jealousy (1910).48 Several of prolific director D.W. Griffith’s early films also incorporated Mexican characters, many of whom followed the pattern of the dime novel in which the hateful and hate-filled character is killed or forced by the Anglo to retreat. In Griffith’s The Tavern Keeper’s Daughter, for instance, a nameless Mexican frequents a rural tavern owned by an old trapper and run by his beautiful daughter. “One of those proletarian half-breed Mexicans, whose acidulate countenance was most odious to all, particularly the girl,” the Mexican dares to kiss her, but she rejects him. So, “scowling and towering with rage,” he returns later, and his brutish “cruel, black nature asserts itself” as he attempts to assault her. But the trapper engages the “half-breed” in a fight, allowing the girl to run away and seek shelter at the cabin of a neighbor. The “infuriated beast,” however, goes in search of his prey. Only the sight of the neighbor’s baby, chattering innocently in her cradle, softens his heart and leads him to ask for forgiveness for his villainy before he departs.49 Mexican identity is explicitly and derogatorily foregrounded in the very title of another Griffith film.50 In The Greaser’s Gauntlet (1908), Jose, who has been accused of stealing, is sentenced to hang. But he is saved by the intervention of Mildred, a young woman who discovers that a Chinese servant is responsible for the theft—a plot twist that allowed Griffith, in the same short picture, to denigrate not just one but two ethnic Others. The grateful Greaser gives Mildred a gauntlet embroidered with a cross by his mother. In the confused scenario that follows, he “takes to drinking and goes to the depths of degradation.” After Mildred is kidnapped, though, Jose comes to her aid and repays his debt, after which he returns to the mountains and to his mother. As Juan Alonzo writes, “Jose is redeemed twice, first by his mother’s cross, then by Mildred’s intervention”—a paternalistic resolution that suggests that the Greaser cannot act honorably of his own volition but only with the moral guidance of a woman.51 Redemption was also the theme of Tony, the Greaser (1911 [Méliès] and 1914 [Vitagraph]). In the later version, a virtual retelling of the earlier one, the eponymous Tony falls in love with Mary Blake, who is sightseeing among the ruins of an old mission on the Mexican border. When Mary’s father is injured, Tony comes to his aid, an act for which he is rewarded with the offer

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of employment on the Blake Ranch. There, however, he is treated roughly by the foreman and the other cowboys until Mary intervenes on his behalf. She even gives him a handkerchief of hers, which he treasures above all else. But when she accepts a marriage proposal from another man, Tony is heartbroken and returns to his old life in the Mexican quarter. Learning that Mexican insurrectionists are planning an attack on the ranch, he steals a horse and rides off to warn the Blakes. Although Tony succeeds in holding off the villains until reinforcements arrive, he is mortally wounded in the struggle and dies, clutching Mary’s handkerchief to his heart.52 The portrayals of “good” Greasers such as Tony, who is described by Moving Picture World as “a man of noble instinct and chivalrous nature,” were rare. More often, the Greaser was portrayed as ruthless, cruel, shiftless, and clearly inferior to the white cowboy hero, as in the Western Broncho Billy and the Greaser (1914). In that film, the popular Broncho Billy, who delivers mail by horseback, intercedes after a thuggish “half-breed” shows a lack of respect to a young woman in the town’s General Store. She in turn is instrumental later in saving Billy’s life, when the vengeful Greaser seeks revenge against him.53 And in An Arizona Wooing (1915), sheep rancher Tom Warner (played by another Hollywood cowboy, Tom Mix) and Mexican Manuel Paquito are in love with the same woman, Jean Dixon. After Tom is captured by rival ranchers and left to starve in the desert, Paquito finds him and tortures him. When Jean comes upon the scene, the villain kidnaps her and insists that she marry him or watch Tom die. Just as Paquito and Jean are to be wed, Tom, aided by Jean’s father, arrives at the clergyman’s home in time to prevent the ceremony. As Motography writes, after a revolver duel and some fancy and obligatory lasso work by Tom, “the Mexican is captured and is forced to stand by and see the marriage of his rival to Jean.”54 Although such films allowed filmmakers an opportunity to introduce interesting locales and unusual costuming into their pictures, the character depictions nonetheless exacerbated prejudices and fostered a negative image of Hispanics. Yet those unfortunate depictions persisted throughout the 1920s because, as leading man Ramon Navarro later recalled, “The Greaser was too popular to be successfully opposed by anyone in Hollywood. I, among several others, made strenuous objections to my studio and others. But we could not argue with financial success.”55 FEMALE STEREOTYPES Whereas male characters often appeared as Greasers or bandidos, Latin women were depicted in comparably stereotypical ways and relegated to roles such as servants, sexy cantina girls, or vengeful “spitfires.” For example, in

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The Red Girl (1908)—another short picture in which Griffith managed simultaneously to vilify two different ethnic Others—a Native American girl helps a Mexican woman steal a bag of gold nuggets from a white female miner; then the Mexican seduces the Native American’s husband and tortures her by tying her to the trunk of a dead tree that overhangs a river. The Native American eventually frees herself. In the meantime, the villainous Mexican woman flees but is captured and arrested after her canoe capsizes. Even in feature films, most of the early Latin character roles lacked depth and afforded actresses little more than an opportunity to showcase their earthiness and physical attributes. A rare exception was the early film The Mexican Joan of Arc (1911), which—like other “Joan”-themed films of the era—emphasized the lead character’s strength and determination.56 After Señor Talamantes and his sons are arrested by Colonel Cephis as suspected Insurrectos (rebels) and condemned to death, the Widow Talamantes swears retribution. Organizing a company of Indians and Mexicans, she joins the rebels, tricks and captures Cephis, and ensures his court martial and execution. Once her mission is complete, she returns to her people. Typically, however, when Hispanic female characters appeared at all, they were relegated to the background, primarily to provide local color, especially in the popular Westerns. The few leading “Latin” roles such as that of “The Señorita” in Griffith’s The Mexican Sweethearts (1909) or Francesca Hernandez in the Zorro parody Señorita (1927) often went to white actresses—in the former, to Mary Pickford; in the latter, to Bebe Daniels. Even Señora Talamantes, the eponymous Mexican Joan of Arc, was played by white actress Jane Wolfe. Nonetheless, a few female Hispanic silent film performers succeeded in distinguishing themselves in Hollywood, and, at least occasionally, in challenging some of the prevailing stereotypes. DOLORES DEL RIO The best-known Latin actress of the silent era was Dolores Del Rio (María de los Dolores Asúnsolo y López Negrete). Born in Durango, Mexico, in 1904, the beloved only child of a wealthy banker and his wife, Del Rio saw her lavish life collapse during the Mexican Revolution when her family lost its fortune at the hands of Pancho Villa. Over the next few years, as the political situation stabilized, her life improved as well: she attended a convent school; married Jaime Martínez del Río y Viñent, a wealthy man eighteen years her senior; and resumed a more privileged status in her Mexican society. Apparently, though, she had larger ambitions.

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When American director Edwin Carewe, then on his honeymoon in Mexico, saw Del Rio dancing a tango, he was taken by her beauty. Convinced he could transform her into a superstar, he began enticing her to come to Hollywood. “He told me I was the female Valentino,” Del Rio recalled years later in an interview. “He kept sending me wires and eventually my husband and I decided to go. I didn’t know what would happen but I thought it would be fun to meet all the people I idolized like Chaplin and Valentino.”57 (Carewe’s admiration for Del Rio, it turns out, was more than merely professional. After she separated from her husband Jaime, Carewe divorced his wife, anticipating a marriage with the actress. Del Rio responded by ending her contract with him, prompting the spurned filmmaker to file a lawsuit against her.58 Yet even after that, Carewe kept spreading rumors about their romantic involvement, rumors that were fanned by the popular press; and he continued to insist that he knew “Miss Del Rio better than she does herself” and that she was happiest acting in his stories, since he contrived “characterizations exactly suited to her abilities and limitations.”)59 Within a year of her arrival in Hollywood, Del Rio (who was the second cousin of screen actor Ramon Navarro) was appearing in small parts and exciting moviegoers with her exotic beauty. By 1926, she had moved up to lead roles such as Charmaine de la Cognac, a flirtatious French girl in What Price Glory?, based on the pioneering 1924 play by Maxwell Andersen and Laurence Stalling. The tagline for the film was “Two men and a woman work out their destinies on the Fields of Glory.” And Del Rio demonstrated her ability to hold her own opposite the male stars Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen, who played rivals for her affection.60 Del Rio’s early roles, though, were all largely of a type; and that type was the sultry, sensual beauty, the female equivalent of the Latin Lover. Those roles capitalized on her physical assets, while her light skin-coloring allowed her to enact a variety of ethnicities—all of which still emphasized her sexuality rather than her other talents. In Resurrection (1927), for example, which was based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy and a screenplay adapted by Carewe, she played a beautiful country girl seduced and abandoned by a Russian prince who later goes to great lengths to redeem her and himself for his actions. In Ramona (1928), based on the classic novel by Helen Hunt Jackson (which had been filmed twice before—by D.W. Griffith in 1910 with Mary Pickford and in 1916 with Adda Gleason—and which would be filmed again a few years later in 1936, with another white actress, Loretta Young), Del Rio played a woman raised by a Mexican family. But when it is revealed that she is half Native American, she chooses to marry Alessandro, a Native man who has been working on the family’s ranch. After the marriage, however, Ramona experiences racism and prejudice that ultimately result in the death of her baby, the murder of her husband, and her own grief-fueled amnesia.

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Only after she returns to her Mexican home and to the Mexican “brother” who has long been in love with her is she able to recover from her losses and begin a new life. And in Evangeline (1929), based on the Longfellow poem, Del Rio was cast in the title role as an Acadian woman who is separated from the man she is about to marry after he is sent into exile but who dedicates herself to searching for him. The typing that highlighted her physical attributes more than her acting persisted even after Del Rio made the transition to sound films. Despite her desire to expand the range of her roles, she continued to be cast as a sexualized exotic in formulaic but popular films. As an example of that formula, biographer Linda B. Hall writes that, at one point, producer David O. Selznick decided “that he wanted a movie starring Joel McCrea and del Río. It did not matter to him what the details were, but it would be named Bird of Paradise, it must have three big love scenes . . . it was to take place on a tropical island, and it had to feature Lolita [Del Rio’s nickname] jumping into the crater of a volcano at the end.”61 And indeed the pre-Code film was made (as Bird of Paradise, 1932), just as Selznick had insisted; and it included a scene of Del Rio swimming nude, which only added to her seductive image and to the film’s appeal. After she divorced her first husband, Del Rio’s life became increasingly turbulent: she terminated her association with director Edwin Carewe and married Cedric Gibbons, legendary art director at MGM, who was smitten with her and considered her the most beautiful woman in the world. When that marriage ended, she embarked on a passionate but stormy affair with Orson Welles. But it was not until she left Hollywood and, in 1942, moved to Mexico to seek better roles that she finally found some professional satisfaction. “I wish to choose my own stories, my own director and cameraman,” she explained. “I can accomplish this better in Mexico.”62 The Mexico City to which Del Rio returned was a bustling place and the center of a flourishing artistic renaissance. “[I had to] leave stardom to convert myself into an actress and I could only do that in Mexico,” she recalled.63 And there, at last, she was indeed able to assume the kinds of parts for which she had longed: serious dramatic roles that tackled social issues of war, race, and poverty. Partnering with director Emilio Fernández (with whom she had a violent affair), cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, and actor Pedro Armendáriz, she made a number of highly acclaimed Mexican films such as Flor Silvestre, Maria Candelaria, and The Abandoned; and she became the undisputed muse of this golden age of Mexican cinema, winning numerous accolades, including four Ariel Awards (the Mexican equivalent of the Oscar), including a “Special Golden Ariel” for her fifty-year body of work.64 In her later years, Del Rio returned occasionally to shoot a film in Hollywood, where by then she had assumed a legendary status as well. She

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Fig. 6.1.  After the eponymous heroine in Ramona (1928) discovers her mixed-race background, she experiences harsh prejudice and suffers numerous losses. Pictured are Dolores Del Rio as Ramona and Warner Baxter, who played her husband Alessandro. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

also continued to support the arts as well as other causes, such as opening day care centers for working mothers throughout Mexico, and she traveled the world in plays produced by her third husband, Lewis Riley.65

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Yet even for a star as accomplished and as internationally admired as Del Rio, the Hollywood experience proved challenging. Typical of Hispanic actresses, especially in the waning years of silent film, she could not escape typing on the basis of her sultriness and natural beauty. Nonetheless, as the American Film Institute noted, she persisted in using “her public image as a means to deflect racial stereotypes and represent the sophistication, dignity and grace of her homeland.” And in Hollywood, where she noted the significant lack of compelling roles for Hispanics, she spoke often about “the impact of projecting positive images onscreen as a way to shift cultural prejudices.” The inspiring legacy that she created paved the way for future Latina stars and inspired the next generation.66 MYRTLE GONZALEZ Although Del Rio is the best known and most influential early silent Latin movie star, she was not the first. That distinction belongs to Myrtle Gonzalez. In an era when most Hispanic actresses were relegated to minor roles as background figures in Western films and white actresses in brown make-up were cast in more prominent Latin parts, Gonzalez’s “ascendance to ‘American sweetheart’ status and tremendous success in the world of silent film,” as Mariana Viera observed, was “an exceptional example of Latinx representation in a narrative otherwise comprised almost entirely of White trajectories.”67 Born in Los Angeles to a father of Mexican descent and a mother whose parents were Irish immigrants, Gonzalez is said to have inherited her mother’s musical talent; and she displayed her own dramatic abilities at an early age. Her family’s proximity to Hollywood, by then the center of American moviemaking, proved a real advantage. After performing on stage in Los Angeles with the Belasco Stock Company, she began her screen career with Vitagraph in The Yellow Streak (1913), a short in which a debt-ridden husband who attempts to burglarize his own home is mistakenly shot by his wife.68 After a few years at Vitagraph, she moved to Universal, which described her in their promotions as an “artist in photoplays” and an “ideal leading woman . . . [who] photographs well.”69 Dubbed the “Virgin Lily of the Screen,” the light-skinned Gonzalez was often cast in non-Latin roles, particularly as a hardy action heroine. The Motion Picture Studio Directory extolled her athletic abilities, which included swimming and riding, while Photoplay (January 1916) noted that she also excelled at basketball and tennis. Accordingly, as one of Universal’s “out-of-doors girls,” she appeared in adventure stories such as The End of the Rainbow (1916), which were set in rugged, snowy, or forest terrains.

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Many of those features—promoted as good pictures “made without murder, double standards, or unfaithful better halves”—were produced through the studio’s Bluebird Photoplays division, which was famous for location shooting in various natural settings.70 In The Girl of Lost Lake (1916), for example, Gonzalez played Jude Clark, a mountain girl ill-used by a painter who hires her to model for him but then depicts her in a scandalous way. As a consequence, she is accused of lax morality and becomes the object of local gossip. Abandoned by her fiancé, shunned by her childhood friend Vaughn McAndrews, and bereft over the death of her father, she finds herself without a protector or means of support. Just as she is about to leave Lost Lake, though, Judge West installs her at his own camp as a full partner with him in his gold prospecting. After more a few more plot twists, gold is discovered at the site, and Jude is reconciled with Vaughn.71 Gonzalez’s final film, The Show Down (1917), about a party whose ship is torpedoed and sunk and who wash up on “a verdant island in the mid-Pacific,” was similarly full of action scenes. Moving Picture World praised the film’s “great pictorial beauty and its “well-selected cast”; Motography likewise noted “the refreshing outdoor scenes and beautiful locations.” And the New York Clipper commented on the “interesting screenplay” and called the acting throughout “excellent.”72 The film garnered even more attention after life imitated art, when an article revealed the dangers that had occurred during the

Fig. 6.2.  Despite becoming the victim of local gossip in The Girl of Lost Lake (1916), Jude Clark (played by Myrtle Gonzalez) perseveres and ultimately finds wealth as well as happiness with her old childhood friend. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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filming, including a three-hundred-pound wild hog that treed Gonzalez and her co-star Jean Hersholt for two hours before being shot and killed.73 Over her brief Hollywood tenure, Gonzalez starred in almost eighty silent pictures, most of them shorts. Given her popularity and her talent, it is likely that she could have gone on to enjoy a rewarding career in feature and sound films. But, despite the hardy heroines she played, her own health was frail, and in 1917, after her marriage to second husband Allen Watt, she retired from the industry. Less than a year later, at the age of twenty-seven, she succumbed to Spanish flu, a victim of the worldwide influenza pandemic, an untimely end for an actress now regarded as the first female Mexican American film star.74 BEATRIZ MICHELINA Like Myrtle Gonzalez, Beatriz Michelina was a well-known figure in silent cinema. And, like Gonzalez, she managed to shape a screen image that did not rely exclusively upon her sexuality. Instead, unlike the Latinas of that era who often appeared in the Greaser films as loose señoritas, easy cantina girls, and forbidden objects of desire for the male moviegoing public, Michelina enacted roles that showcased not only her natural light-skinned beauty but also her acting ability and versatility. And, at least briefly, she owned and operated her own production studio—another first for a Latin woman in cinema’s early years. The New York City-born daughter of Fernando Michelina, a famous Venezuelan tenor of his day, and his wife Frances Lenord, an operatic soprano and pianist, Michelina inherited her parents’ musical talent and especially their love of opera. Trained by her father in classical voice and drama studies, she began her own career as a singer and maintained her love of music throughout her lifetime. Salomy Jane (1914), her first film, brought Michelina immediate attention, landing her on the cover of the December, 1914 issue of the New York Dramatic Mirror. Produced by the fledgling California Motion Picture Company which aimed to capitalize on the natural beauty of northern California, the film was based on a familiar story by Bret Harte and was set in 1852, in the gold-mining settlement of Placerville, formerly named Hangtown. One of a very few women at the settlement, beautiful Salomy Jane Clay becomes the object of the affections of a number of men, all of whom vie for her attentions. When one of those men, Red Pete, makes unwelcomed advances, she is rescued by Jack Dart, who kills the ruffian. Later, Salomy Jane returns the favor, saving Dart from lynching by clearing him of a crime he did not commit. As Scott Simmon observed, “the film deftly interweaves older honor violence brought from the East (a feud from Kentucky and

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revenge for a wronged sister) with new Western threats (a stage robbery, quick-to-lynch vigilantes, and rivalries over Salomy as a rare young woman among the forty-niners).”75 Released in 1914, Salomy Jane was well-reviewed, with critical admiration split between the film’s photographic splendor and its dramatic arc. Moving Picture World praised the “exceptionally fine photography” and also “the love story that becomes more and more interesting toward the close.” The Chicago Tribune labeled it “a picture of fire and beauty,” while Variety noted that “the scenario is a model of clarity, despite its emphasis upon swift and frequent incident”—this at a time when writers were wrestling with longer film structure. The New York Dramatic Mirror summarized the film this way: “Unless nature betters her handiwork in the forests of California, it is difficult to see how producers are going to improve upon the scenic beauty of Salomy Jane. . . . Through a long cast, each character is made to stand out as a distinct personality. . . . Salomy Jane is in all ways a big Western drama, and soon audiences will draw their own conclusions about its most striking points. They may disagree on details but hardly on the essential fact—it’s a winner.”76

Fig. 6.3.  In Salomy Jane (1914), set in Gold Rush-era California, the eponymous heroine (played by Beatriz Michelina) is saved from the unwelcomed advances of a ruffian by a mysterious stranger. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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The California Motion Picture Company that produced the film had been founded by Michelina’s husband George E. Middleton, a successful automobile dealer in San Francisco, whose original intention was to shoot footage of the vehicles he was selling. But, believing his wife to be as beautiful and as talented as any woman on screen, he decided to turn the company into a studio for the production of films in which she would star. Over the next few years, the company released pictures such as Mignon (1915), based on the opera by Ambroise Thomas, which provided Michelina a chance to showcase her talents. Other films followed: The Lily of Poverty Flat, A Phyllis of the Sierras, Salvation Nell, and The Rose of the Misty Pool, all in 1915 and all based on works by Bret Harte; but a lavish production of Faust started in 1915 was never completed or released. It was the failure of Faust that caused Herbert Payne, president of the California Motion Picture Company, to file for bankruptcy, at which point Middleton and Michelena purchased it and renamed it Michelena Studios. The first of the new “Beatriz Michelena Features” it released was Just Squaw (1919), the story of a woman raised by American Indians who does not realize her true racial heritage until after she falls in love with a white man. Unfortunately, like some of the earlier films starring Michelina, it failed to turn a profit. Equally unsuccessful were the couple’s next productions Heart of Juanita and The Flame of Hellgate, for which their distributor Robertson-Cole was unable to find the right market. So by 1920, Middleton and Michelena abandoned movie-making altogether. She resumed her singing performances and he returned to his car sales; they divorced a few years later. Notably, Beatriz’s older sister Vera Michelina was also a talented performer—a contralto, dancer, and actress who, over the course of her career, appeared in light opera, musical comedy, vaudeville, and silent film. After making her theatrical debut in 1902 in a minor role in the comic opera The Princess Chic, Vera assumed larger roles in a number of productions prior to her New York debut in 1906. Her career thrived, and she continued to play a wide variety of musical roles, including as a principal performer in the Ziegfield Follies, both nationally and in England. Her work was not limited to musical performances, though. She starred in at least two silent films, appearing opposite her then-husband Harry Spingler in the family drama Driftwood (1916) and the social drama The Devil’s Playground (1917). But her film career never really rivaled that of Beatriz, who is still remembered today as one of the first Hispanic women to attain stardom in the silent cinema.

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LUPE VÉLEZ A contemporary—and reputed rival—of Dolores Del Rio, San Antonio-born Mexican actress Lupe Vélez (Maria Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez) filled a very different niche. In the waning years of silent cinema and throughout the next decade, she displayed and exploited her sexuality and Latin charm; and she defined the “Mexican Spitfire” stereotype on screen. When asked about the difference between her characters and Del Rio’s, she replied, with some understatement, “The señoritas I play seem to have more temperament. I don’t know if this is good, but my audiences enjoy it!”77 Within a year of making her screen debut in two 1927 shorts, Vélez was cast opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho (1927), about a dashing bandit leader-turned-hero who undergoes a spiritual transformation when confronted with the holy powers of a sacred shrine in the village that he and his men used as a base. Soon she was starring in films such as D.W. Griffith’s romance-drama Lady of the Pavements (1929) about a charismatic but manipulative cabaret singer and prostitute who passes as a noblewoman to fool Prussian Count Karl von Arnim. The trick, though, backfires, and she falls in love with him. “The rags-to-riches element of a Lillian Gish-type heroine,” Molly Caselli noted, “are on display,” but with one crucial difference: “Vélez’s potent character does not need any rescuing.”78 And indeed the rowdy nature of her role as an active heroine who defies contemporary mores was one that Vélez apparently embraced. In Wolf Song, released that same year, she appeared opposite Gary Cooper and brought a similarly passionate intensity to her role. As Lola Salazar, the daughter of a wealthy family in Taos, she longs to be swept off her feet. When the rugged “gringos” appear in her town, most of the townsmen are alarmed and hide their women. Lola, however, sets her sights on handsome cowboy Sam Dash. “If one of those Mexican gals gets aholt of you,” Sam’s fellow cowboy warns him, “she’ll never let you go”; and Lola is clearly the woman to make that prediction come true. But soon after Lola elopes with Sam, she finds herself abandoned when he decides to return to the mountains to continue fur-trapping. Their attraction, though, is so strong that he cannot escape her memory; so he risks everything to find his way back to her. As Michael Sragow writes, while their elopement rouses the wrath of Lola’s father and the astonishment of Sam’s cowboy pals, the “ultimate contest is waged inside his heart, between marital bonds and the call of the wild.” Sam’s painful trek back to Taos takes on the “feeling of a sexual mortification,” and the film, romantically ambivalent, mixes ecstasy with anguish, and romantic victory with personal defeat.79 Because of Lola, Sam is a changed man, scarred and

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weakened but, at the same time, more open and vulnerable.80 Although he is the hero, she is the catalyst. Even more than her earlier films, Wolf Song drew heavily on Vélez’s sensuality and beauty. As famed costume designer Edith Head recalled, director Victor Fleming “wanted Lupe to be so sexy that most of the time her bosom would be hanging out”; and Head accommodated his request. Apparently the lust was not confined to the screen: Vélez, barely out of her teens, had already been Fleming’s lover and became Cooper’s as well.81 Vélez’s career survived the transition from silent to sound films, in which she appeared in earthy roles such as the Indian maiden in Cecil B. DeMille’s sound remake of The Squaw Man (1931). It took an even more fortuitous turn when she moved from heavy drama to comedy. Quickly establishing herself as “the Mexican Wildcat,” “the Hot Tamale,” and “the Hot Baby of Hollywood,”82 she was cast in madcap comedies such as Hot Pepper (1933), in which her character, the “hot” and feisty nightclub performer Pepper, threatens to come between two friends and rivals for her affection (played by the popular comic duo Quirt and Flagg). And in Strictly Dynamite (1934), another pre-Code comedy, she co-starred as Jimmy Durante’s sexy fast-talking partner Vera Mendez, who becomes involved with a struggling writer hired to write for their radio show. “I never seem to play nobody normal,” Vélez stated.83 Yet she was well aware of the stereotype to which she was contributing and the inauthenticity of the Latin images that Hollywood created and that the press promoted. Nonetheless, in a Photoplay interview in 1935, she ruefully observed, “When they review my pictures, they review a carnival act. They write how funny I am, not about who I am playing. . . . This goes for any picture that goes a little south of the border! They don’t take those pictures seriously, or us seriously.” As if to prove her point, Photoplay quoted her comment this way: “ . . . Dey don’t take doze peectures seriously.”84 At the same time, though, Vélez relished the attention that her caricatures garnered, and she continued to assume parts that exploited the stereotype that she had helped to foster. In fact, after her career began to flag in the mid-1930s, she revitalized it with a recurring role as spitfire Carmelita in a series of eight films with such titles as Mexican Spitfire (1940), Mexican Spitfire Out West (1940), Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost (1942), and Mexican Spitfire’s Blessed Event (1943). Appearing opposite Leon Errol as her friend and accomplice Uncle Matt, Vélez played a comically exaggerated and explosive Mexican woman who marries an Anglo man and moves to the United States, where she experiences a variety of adventures and misadventures. As George Hadley-Garcia writes, in those films, “she was a veritable one-woman equivalent of the Three Stooges—yelling, punching, licking and throwing,

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Fig. 6.4.  On screen and off, Lupe Vélez embodied the tempestuous Latina and even starred in a series of “Mexican Spitfire” films. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

as well as mangling English in a way that prefigured Carmen Miranda and Charo.”85 Vélez’s private life further enhanced her spitfire image: she engaged in public and tumultuous affairs not only with Gary Cooper (her co-star in Wolf Song) but also with other Hollywood celebrities such as John Gilbert, Ronald Coleman, Arturo de Cordova, and Ricardo Cortez.86 And her rocky marriage to Johnny Weissmuller, film’s best-known Tarzan, was fodder for the papers

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and fan magazines. Hoping to re-establish herself as a serious dramatic actress, Vélez returned to Mexico in 1944 to star in Roberto Gavaldón’s Nana, which she thought could be her comeback opportunity. Indeed, it might have been. But on the night of the film’s Hollywood premiere, despondent over a broken love affair with a younger man and pregnant with his child, Vélez committed suicide.87 Unlike Del Rio, whose screen roles and press image underscored her elegance, decorum, and reserve, Vélez embodied the opposite: she was a vamp, a wildcat, a vixen. Whereas “Del Rio was internationally exotic, Vélez was decidedly ethnic and sexualized,” deliberately highlighting her Mexican background by her heavy accent and grammatically flawed English and earning herself nicknames such as “Tamale Vélez.” Captivating, energetic, and expansive, she retained the “comical, fun-loving, sympathetic and spunky qualities that endeared her to audiences.”88 By simultaneously playing and exploiting a stereotype, Vélez established herself as a popular transnational actress; and she achieved a level of fame and fortune in the silent era that extended into the next decade, a feat that few other early Hispanic actresses were able to match. CONCLUSION “From its beginnings,” Clara E. Rodríguez observed, “Hollywood film has served as a mirror and recorder of the times,” and its treatment of Latins is a prime example. The silent films of the 1910s established stereotypes that circulated widely and were repeated frequently. Over the next decade, Hispanic actors and actresses often became noticeable less for their on-screen presence than for their absence. Rarely cast as protagonists, they “generally appear[ed] as villains or dramatic foils or merely as local color or comic relief.”89 The few more substantial roles typically went to white leading men like Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who bought the rights to Johnston McCulley’s Zorro story “The Curse of Capistrano” and appeared on screen in heavy brownface make-up as the hero in The Mark of Zorro (1920).90 In that film, Don Diego de la Vega, the dashing son of a wealthy landowner in California, recognizes the great injustices that are perpetrated against abused Franciscans, peasants, and Native Americans.91 Assuming a secret identity as “Zorro,” a skilled swordsman and masked avenger dressed in all-black, he sets out to right the wrongs and protect the innocent, thus creating the first Hispanic superhero, decades before Marvel’s America Chavez (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness).92 “The consummate romantic, a combination of Latin Lover, gentleman, and charming rogue,”93 Fairbanks’ Zorro provided a rare cinematic antidote to early Hispanic representations

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By contrast, apart from the handful of Latin Lovers such as Ramon Novarro and Antonio Moreno who thrilled audiences with their action adventures and made female moviegoers swoon over their dashing good looks, most Latin men were limited to lesser and certainly less positive roles such as “Greasers” or bandidos. Latin women found themselves similarly typed and restricted to minor parts, usually as sexy señoritas and servants or, occasionally, as selfless helpers, the Latin counterpart of the Native American princesses and the Asian lotus blossoms. They watched as major roles went to white actresses such as Mary Pickford and Loretta Young, who performed in brownface. And the handful of real Hispanic women cast in larger parts were usually light-skinned, which allowed them to weave in and out of “white” roles. The generic grouping of actresses as “Latins,” however, essentially denied them their actual ethnicities and contributed to the perception of them as outsiders who were distinct from the white community. The transition to sound films brought little expanded opportunity and, in fact, made it even more difficult for Latin actors to succeed in the world of film. As Mariana Viera writes, “No longer able to hide their accents, silent film stars like Gilbert Roland became supporting actors essentially overnight.” And women like Dolores Del Río and Lupe Vélez, who got their start in silent films, “were forced to take roles that justified and often times significantly exaggerated their accented English.”94 Even EGOT (Emmy-GrammyOscar-Tony)-winner Rita Moreno bemoaned the fact that Hollywood had long insisted on casting her as a generic ethnic or as what she called the “Conchita Lolita” Latina. “I never ever was able to do a part without assuming some kind of an accent,” she told National Public Radio, adding that there were other challenges, such as being forced to wear a very dark face make-up, because Hollywood considered Hispanic actresses interchangeable and failed to recognize that even among them, the skin tones varied widely.95 Despite the challenges, a small number of early film actresses such as Myrtle Gonzalez, Beatriz Michelina, Dolores Del Rio, and Lupe Vélez were able to achieve real success on the silver screen in its nascent years. Shaped, even transformed, by the studios who selected their wardrobes, rewrote their personal histories, and skillfully marketed them to the moviegoing public, they became stars in their day. But that stardom came with sacrifices, perhaps none greater than the undemanding roles in which they were often cast—roles that showcased their beauty but downplayed their talents, and roles that often reinforced the ethnic stereotyping. Nonetheless, some of these women managed to create their own personae: Del Rio as the elegant sophisticate and film’s first crossover star, Vélez as the comic spitfire. As the media personalities of their day, they served as commercial spokespersons for various products, from Coca-Cola to cigarettes, and became known for the fashion trends they set. Although none was able to achieve what their

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pioneering contemporary Mimi Derba—actress, screenwriter, Azteca Film studio founder, and director—accomplished in Mexico, they remain important Latin figures in Hollywood, and their contribution to American cinema and culture is indelible. NOTES 1. This chapter contains certain terms that were commonly used during the silent film era and that may be offensive to some readers. Those words and terms, most of which occur in the titles of films or in newspaper and trade publications, are used here exclusively for historical or analytical purposes.   2. Stephen Sariñana-Lampson, “Silent Images of Latinos in Early Hollywood,” https://cinesilentemexicano.wordpress.com/tag/gilbert-roland/.  3. Distinguished veteran cinematographer John Seitz offered interesting recollections of Valentino in Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson, Hollywood: The Oral History (New York: Harper, 2022), pp. 87–88.  4. “Hollywood Heartthrobs: Rudolph Valentino,” May 26, 2017, https:​//​www​ .smithsonianmag​.com​/history​/the​-latin​-lover​-and​-his​-enemies​-119968944​/.   5. Hadley Hall Meares, “Unlucky Star: The Brief, Bombastic Life of Rudolph Valentino,” September 14, 2021, Vanity Fair, https://www.vanityfair.com/ hollywood/2021/09/rudolph-valentino-biography-death.  6. Gilbert King, “The ‘Latin Lover’ and His Enemies,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 13, 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ the-latin-lover-and-his-enemies-119968944/.   7. Ibid., p. 29.   8. “‘Latin Lover’—The 2nd Valentino & 1st (and Best) Sam Spade: Q & A with Ricardo Cortez Biographer Dan Van Neste,” https://www.altfg.com/film/latin-lover/.  9. Dan Van Neste, Magnificent Heel: The Life and Films of Ricardo Cortez (Albany, GA: BearManor Media, 2017), p. 36. 10. Colette Shade, “The Latin Lothario Who Wasn’t (But He Was Jewish),” https:// forward.com/culture/216481/the-latin-lothario-who-wasn-t-but-he-was-jewish/. According to some accounts, the revelation of Cortez’s ethnicity actually came earlier. 11. William K. Everson, The Bad Guys, as cited in George Hadley-Garcia, Hispanic Hollywood: The Latins in Motion Pictures (New York: Citadel Press, 1990), pp. 32, 34. 12. As Luis I. Reyes writes in Viva Hollywood: The Legacy of Latin and Hispanic Actors in American Film (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 2022), Latin actors were typecast in clichéd roles. “You know, the stereotypes: Oh, you’re Latino? You’ll play the bandido. There was a guy that played a bandido so often he had his own costume. It was about earning a living. ‘I got black hair, I look dark . . . No problem.’” Noted in Mandalit del Barco, “Latino legends helped pave the way in Hollywood, but the road is still rocky,” NPR, September 15, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/09/15/1121331955/ hispanic-actors-latino-representation-hollywood-movies-legends.

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13. “Becoming Part of the United States,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc. gov/classroom-materials/immigration/mexican/becoming-part-of-the-united-states/. 14. “The Mexican-American War,” National Park Service, https:​//​www​.nps​.gov​/ places​/the​-mexican​-american​-war. 15. Ibid. 16. See “The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848),” Milestone Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/treatyof-guadalupe-hidalgo#:~:text=This%20treaty%2C%20signed%20on%20 February,Oklahoma%2C%20Kansas%2C%20and%20Wyoming. See also “The Treaty of Hildalgo,” Hispanic Reading Room, Library of Congress, https://www.loc. gov/research-centers/hispanic/about-this-research-center/. 17. “Gadsden Purchase Treaty,” The Center for Legislative Archives, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/nm-az-statehood/gadsden. html. 18. “Land Loss in Trying Times,” “Immigration and Relocation,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/mexican/ land-loss-in-trying-times/. 19. Ibid. See also Suzanne Gamboa, “Grant Helps Spread Forgotten History of Racial Violence against Mexican Americans,” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/ grant-helps-spread-forgotten-history-racial-violence-mexican-americans-rcna25066. 20. “The Mexican Revolution and its Aftermath, 1910–40,” https://www.britannica.com/place/Mexico/The-Mexican-Revolution-and-its-aftermath-1910-40. 21. “Mexican Revolution,” History, https://www.history.com/topics/latin-america/ mexican-revolution. 22. “A Growing Community,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/ classroom-materials/immigration/mexican/a-growing-community/. 23. “Depression and the Struggle for Survival,” Library of Congress, https://www. loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/mexican/depression-and-the-strugglefor-survival/#:~:text=All%20in%20all%2C%20hundreds%20of,to%20survive%20 in%20desperate%20conditions. 24. Erin Blackmore, “The Brutal History of Anti-Latino Discrimination in America,” History, updated August 19, 2018, https://www.history.com/news/ the-brutal-history-of-anti-latino-discrimination-in-america. 25. Carrigan and Webb, as cited in Blackmore. 26. See, for example, Special Collections & University Archives, “Lynching of Ethnic Mexicans (1915–1920),” https://utrgv.libguides.com/SCA/lynching. 27. Simon Romero, “Lynch Mobs Killed Latinos across the West. The Fight to Remember These Atrocities is Just Starting,” New York Times, March 2, 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/us/porvenir-massacre-texas-mexicans.html. 28. Ibid. 29. Laura F. Edwards, cited in Romero. 30. Romero, n.p. 31. Ibid. 32. As with the “Greaser Act,” according to Kimberly Johnston-Dodds, “Early California Laws and Policies Related to California Indians,” California Research

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Bureau of the California State Library, the “Act for the Government and Protection of Indians,” passed in 1850, targeted Native Americans in California under the guise of stopping vagrancy and promoting apprenticeship. That act “facilitated removing California Indians from their traditional lands, separating at least a generation of children and adults from their families, languages, and cultures . . . and indenturing Indian children and adults to Whites.” 33. Juan José Alonzo, Derision and Desire: The Ambivalence of Mexican Identity in American Literature and Film, https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/ handle/2152/432/alonzojj032.pdf?seq. See also Gary D. Keller, Hispanics and United States Film: An Overview and Handbook (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Review/Press, 1994), for a good discussion of the “Greaser” (especially pp. 48–53) and of other male and female types. 34. Jess Nevins, “Young Wild West’s Weird West Weekly, a 1915 Dime Novel,” https://jessnevins.com/blog/?p=179. 35. Arthur G. Pettit, Images of the Mexican American in Fiction and Film (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1975). 36. Raymund Paredes, “The Image of the Mexican in American Literature,” cited in Alonzo. 37. See Bret Harte, “The Story of a Mine,” https://www.gutenberg.org/ files/2661/2661-h/2661-h.htm. 38. See Bret Harte, “A Ghost of the Sierras,” in Drift from Two Shores, https:// www.telelib.com/authors/H/HarteBret/prose/drifttwoshores/ghostsierras.html. 39. Bret Harte, “Bohemian Days in San Francisco,” https://www.online-literature. com/bret-harte/1667/. 40. Mark Twain, “A Blast for Balboa, the Discoverer,” http://www.twainquotes. com/18660417u.html. 41. Melita M. Garza, “Framing Mexicans in Great Depression Editorials: Alien Riff-Raff to Heroes,” cited in Bryan E. Denham, “Oriental Irritants and Occidental Aspirants: Immigrant Portrayals in Hearst Magazines, 1905–1945,” SAGE Publications, Google Books, https://www.google.com/books/edition/ Oriental_Irritants_and_Occidental_Aspira/BO_1zgEACAAJ?hl=en. 42. Notably, Pancho Villa (played by Wallace Beery) also appears in the serial. 43. “Mexican Joe, Pawnee Bill Ranch,” Oklahoma Historical Society podcast, September, 2013, https://www.okhistory.org/sites/. 44. See, for example, “When Mexican Joe came to Blackpool in 1890 his Wild West show was compared to that of Buffalo Bill,” https://www.blackpoolgazette. co.uk/heritage-and-retro/retro/black-sombrero-and-a-silver-star-3415021. 45. Pablo A. Rangel, “Racialized Nationality: Mexicans, Vaqueros, and U.S. Nationalism in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” (2013). Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research, Department of History, https:​//​digitalcommons​.unl​.edu​/historydiss​/62. 46. Luis Reyes and Peter Rubie, Hispanics in Hollywood: An Encyclopedia of Film and Television (New York: Garland, 1994), p. 2. 47. Sariñana-Lampson, “Silent Images of Latinos in Early Hollywood.” The term itself, according to DBpedia “About: Greaser (derogatory),” https://dbpedia.org/page/ Greaser_(derogatory), is a slur that “likely derived from what was considered one

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of the lowliest occupations typically held by Mexicans, the greasing of the axles of wagons; they also greased animal hides that were taken to California where Mexicans loaded them onto clipper ships (a Greaser). It was in common usage among U.S. troops during the Mexican–American War.” 48. Hadley-Garcia, p. 35. 49. “And a little child shall lead them,” ends the review of the film in Moving Picture World https://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/movingor03chal_0075. 50. Juan Alonzo, “From Derision to Desire: The ‘Greaser’ in Stephen Crane’s Mexican Stories and D.W. Griffith’s Early Westerns,” Western American Literature, 38.4 (Winter 2004), p. 388. 51. Ibid., pp. 391–92. Alonzo also comments on the replacement of a Chinese villain for a Mexican one—the only way that the film is able to deliver the Mexican from harm. The film “reenacts the historical machinations of Anglo-American railroad companies during the construction of railroad lines in the Southwest,” with the availability of cheap Mexican labor preferable to that of the Chinese. 52. Moving Picture World, May 16, 1914. 53. Motography, Vol. 19, No. 21, p. 1016; Moving Picture World, October 24, 1914. 54. Motography, May 8, 1915, p. 759. 55. Hadley-Garcia, pp. 36–37. 56. The Joan of Arc motif was a surprisingly familiar one in silent and early films, and it was used to highlight the female character as a model of conviction and dedication to a higher cause and a reactionary to an unjust system. 57. Interview, Bridget Byrne, San Francisco Chronicle, November 20–27, p. 81, cited in Reyes and Rubie, p. 389 58. “Dolores del Río—AFI Catalog Spotlight,” September 1, 2022, https:// www.afi.com/news/dolores-del-rio-afi-catalog-spotlight/. As Angela Aleiss writes in Hollywood’s Native Americans (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2022), p. 31, Carewe was obsessed with beautiful women. After discovering Del Rio, “Like the legendary Greek figure Pygmalion, Carewe created his own Galatea.” But the relationship ended in a flurry of angry accusations and lawsuits. 59. Marilyn Ferdinand, “Ramona,” https://silentfilm.org/ramona/. 60. Print Ad, Altus Times-Democrat (Altus, Oklahoma), September 29, 1927, cited in Reyes and Rubie, p. 390. 61. Cited in Hadley Hall Meares, “The Enchantress: Dolores del Río’s Spellbinding Life,” Vanity Fair, May 17, 2021, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/05/ dolores-del-rio-biography-old-hollywood-book-club. 62. Alicia Rodríguez-Estrada, “Dolores Del Rio and Lupe Vélez: Images On and Off the Screen, 1925–1944,” quoted in Rodríguez, p. 62. Del Rio also observed, in 1929, “Someday I would like to play a Mexican woman and show what life in Mexico really is. No one has shown the artistic side—not the social.” 63. Cited by Meares, Rodríguez, and others. 64. Hadley Hall Meares, “The Enchantress: Dolores del Río’s Spellbinding Life.” 65. Ibid. 66. “Dolores Del Rio,” AFI Catalogue Spotlight.

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67. Mariana Viera, “The Complicated Colorism of Latina Actresses in Film,” February 28, 2020, https://zora.medium.com/ the-complicated-colorism-of-latina-actresses-in-film-10db4fab5e4f. 68. See, for example, the review in Moving Picture World, August 2, 1913. 69. “Myrtle Gonzalez, Leads, Universal,” undated article. 70. Ed Lorusso, “Myrtle Gonzalez: Victim of 1918 Influenza Epidemic,” October 2, 2018, https://silentroomdotblog.wordpress.com/2018/10/02/myrtle-gonzalez/. 71. Moving Picture World, August 26, 1916. 72. Reviews cited in “The Show Down - Rotten Tomatoes,” https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_show_down. 73. Lorusso, “Myrtle Gonzalez.” 74. As Mary Mallory observed in “Myrtle Gonzalez—Early Latin Movie Star,” https://ladailymirror.com/2021/09/14/mary-mallory-hollywood-heights-myrtle-gonzalez-early-latina-movie-star/: “Dying so young, Gonzalez was quickly forgotten by the entertainment industry and press. Over time, many if not most of her films disintegrated, leaving little to display of her legacy. While little exists of Gonzalez’s career, she was the first major Latina film performer to succeed in movies, and for that she should be celebrated.” 75. Scott Simmon, “Salomy Jane,” National Film Preservation Foundation, https:// www.filmpreservation.org/dvds-and-books/clips/salomy-jane-1914. 76. Reviews as cited in “Film Notes” for Salomy Jane, National Film Preservation Foundation, https://www.filmpreservation.org/dvds-and-books/clips/ salomy-jane-1914. 77. Hadley-Garcia, p. 46. 78. Molly Caselli, “Lady of the Pavements,” https://silentfilm.org/ lady-of-the-pavements/. 79. Michael Sragow, “Wolf Song,” https://silentfilm.org/wolf-song/. Sragow notes that Sam’s “memories deny him sleep. Images of her wash through his brain and across the screen in an audacious montage done in lingering dissolves. Fleming delivers the erotic coup de grace when he superimposes Lola’s body crushing against Sam’s and a spectral, elongated hand caressing the side of his face. . . . Fleming proves himself a master of romantic ambivalence.” 80. Ibid. 81. Hadley-Garcia, p. 54. 82. Reyes and Rubie, pp. 510–11; Rodríguez, p. 68. 83. Hadley-Garcia, p. 54. Yet, as Allen L. Woll noted in “Hollywood Views the Mexican-American Film: From The Greaser’s Revenge to The Milagro Beanfield War,” in Robert Brent Toplin, ed., Hollywood as Mirror: Changing Views of “Outsiders” and “Enemies” in American Movies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), p. 45, Vélez did play “a variety of geographical types.” By her own recollection, those types included “Chinese, Eskimos, Japs, squaws, Hindus, Swedes, Malays, and Javanese” and even a Portuguese woman adrift in Africa. 84. Viera, n.p. 85. Hadley-Garcia, p. 54. 86. Rodríguez, pp. 70–71.

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87. That man was French bit player Harald Maresch. 88. Rodríguez, p. 72. 89. Ibid., p. 1. 90. The character of Zorro was said to have been inspired by the legendary figure Joaquin Murietta, the “Mexican Robin Hood.” Considered a patriot by some and a desperado by others, Murietta left his native Sonora for a better life in California; and he lived for a few years as a peace-loving miner during the Gold Rush years. But after his brother and wife were killed, he swore to avenge their deaths and devoted himself to hunting down the men responsible for the crime. Romanticized as an outlaw and a symbol of Mexican resistance against Anglo-American domination, Murrieta became the subject of numerous television shows and films, including The Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936), The Bandit Queen (1950), and Murieta (1965). 91. More than forty Zorro-titled films would be made over the years, along with at least ten television series and numerous take-offs or parodies, including Zorro, The Gay Blade. 92. See, for example, Stephen J.C. Andes, Zorro’s Shadow: How a Mexican Legend Became America’s First Superhero (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2020). Andes analyzes Fairbanks’ performance and shows how he made the first adaptation of the Zorro story his own: jumping, strutting, and performing his own stunts. Andes also discusses how the figure of Zorro owes a lot to Latin culture. 93. “Zorro,” https://www.encyclopedia.com/plants-and-animals/animals/ vertebrate-zoology/zorro. 94. Viera, n.p. 95. For the “Nuyorican musical” West Side Story, Moreno recalled, “We all had to wear one color makeup, very very dark. And I remember asking the makeup man in real annoyance, why can’t the makeup match our different skin tones because Hispanics are many different [sic]—some of us are very fair” (noted by Mandalit del Barco). For early Hollywood, though, Hispanics were largely interchangeable.

Chapter 7

The New Woman

“The little girl with the golden curls,” Mary Pickford was truly America’s Sweetheart.1 One of the most popular actresses of the 1910s and 1920s, she won the hearts of moviegoers with her sentimental portrayals of modest, waifish, often impoverished or unloved young girls—all variations of a familiar role that she played well into her twenties. Whether it was the sheltered and disabled Stella who becomes infatuated with a married man (Stella Maris), the plucky farm girl Rebecca who finds ways to bring cheer to her community (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), the “Glad Game”–playing Pollyanna who suffers grievous injury after saving a child (Pollyanna), the hard-working laundress Amanda who uses her meager savings to rescue a sick horse (Suds), the former rich girl Sara forced into servitude after her father is presumed dead (A Little Princess), or the abandoned Gwendolyn who survives by imagining herself in the “Garden of Lonely Children in the Tell-Tale Forest” (The Poor Little Rich Girl)—Pickford lit up the screen and brought a humanity and a poignancy to her characters. As Cari Beauchamp, Mary Pickford Foundation resident scholar, described her, she was “a girl with spunk, a girl with backbone. . . . She can be poorer than dirt and literally be covered in dirt, and yet she stands up for what is right, she stands up for her community and she has a sense of self” that is admirable and timeless.2 Pickford had begun acting at the age of seven, performing in theatrical staples such as the Toronto Valentine Stock Company’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At fourteen, she made her Broadway debut in a small part in The Warrens of Virginia, a play written by William C. DeMille, who was the brother of Pickford’s cast member Cecil B. DeMille. That play was produced by impresario David Belasco, who gave Gladys Smith the new stage name “Mary Pickford.” Not long afterward, Pickford caught the eye of film director D.W. Griffith, who signed her to a contract and featured her in a number of his Biograph productions.3 “He taught me a lot,” she told an interviewer. But while she had respect and admiration for him, she occasionally disagreed with him; 225

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and, at those times, she said she followed her own judgment instead of his.4 Pickford would go on to collaborate with Griffith in different capacities over the next years: after working for other studios, she briefly acted again for him; and in 1919, with Griffith and movie pioneers Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks (whom she married in 1920), she formed the powerful and influential United Artists, a studio designed to allow actors to control their own interests. It was Pickford who introduced Griffith to her childhood friend Lillian Gish and her sister Dorothy Gish, both of whom, like Pickford, became early Hollywood stars, with Lillian memorably starring in Griffith’s landmark features The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and Broken Blossoms.5 Called “the best known woman who has ever lived, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman that has been in all history,”6 she was a darling of the critics and praised for being a “star of the never-grow-old type.” But by the end of the 1920s, Pickford was ready to move on from the little girl roles that had virtually defined her for almost two decades over her acting career. Recognizing that the character of the acquiescent adolescent who never grew up was becoming as tiresome to audiences as it was to her, she took a decisive step. She cut her curls into a fashionable bob, an act that garnered front-page headlines in newspapers nationwide; and she began assuming more mature parts, including that of the flirtatious socialite Norma Besant in Coquette (1929), an early sound film for which she won the second Academy Award ever awarded for Best Actress. But the transition to the sophisticated roles that Pickford sought was not a seamless one, and the challenges were exacerbated by the low regard she had for sound pictures. By 1930, her career had largely faded. Three years later, following several failed films, she left acting entirely. But she remained a singular figure in the industry, making her mark off screen rather than on, through her production and philanthropic work and through the co-founding of the Motion Picture Academy. CHANGING TIMES The change that Pickford sought was coincident with the changes occurring both in cinema and in society at large. By the 1910s, a number of silent film producers and silent film actresses had begun bringing to the screen an early type of the so-called “New Woman.” That figure, as her name implies, was a very modern twentieth-century woman who was determined to reject Victorian-era proprieties and attitudes of female subservience. She challenged and then tried to redefine outmoded notions of her role in society by seeking some measure of personal, social, and economic independence: the right to own her own property, the right to an education, the right to participate

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meaningfully in the work force, the right to cast a vote. She sought control over other aspects of her life, too—to reject conventional marriage as the sole and automatic expression of her womanhood, to assert her sexuality (whether it be in terms of a greater partnership in marriage or in relationships outside of marriage entirely), to make her own reproductive choices. Newspapers, journals, and magazines were filled with discussions of this new female personality. As a type, the New Woman was usually young, increasingly well-educated (oftentimes with a college degree), independent of spirit, competent, and physically strong and fearless7—the antithesis of the nineteenth-century woman, whose life was more passive, restricted largely to the home, and circumscribed by her role as wife and mother. Her sphere of influence, moreover, was expanded by her role in shaping the production and consumption of goods—material, literary, and artistic.8 Not surprisingly, the New Woman created great consternation among her contemporaries, particularly among men who felt threatened by this new expression of female liberation and the challenge it offered to traditional domestic and social order. Yet, at the same time, her emergence brought enormous delight to others, especially to those women who longed to experience some sense of real autonomy. That included the growing number of young female audience members who packed the respectable movie houses that had evolved from the seedy nickelodeons and photograph parlors of the previous decade and who were finding role models to emulate on screen. The term “New Woman” is often associated with the dedicated and tireless suffragist, an icon of the 1910s who agitated for social parity, advocated for reform, and fought for the woman’s right to vote. But the New Woman’s roots actually went far deeper. Her origins, in fact, date to the early nineteenth century, her evolution to the late nineteenth century, and her emergence to the early decades of the twentieth century. LITERARY ORIGINS The earliest appearance of the New Woman was in literature, not cinema. As far back as 1801, in her novel Belinda, Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth went beyond the traditional marriage plot in exploring the expanding potential for women in English society and in questioning the conventions of courtship and the dependence of women. Some fifty years later, in her 1856 epic poem Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett (later Elizabeth Barrett Browning) took that notion even further as she depicted the plight of a woman in terms of the choice to be made between a conventional marriage and an unconventional career as an independent artist. Specifically, in the fifth book of Barrett’s “novel in verse,” Aurora Leigh expresses doubt that the modern age will

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afford her the opportunities to practice her craft, yet she determines not to be constricted by her womanhood. “Art for art,” she states. “We’ll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect / Although our woman-hands should shake and fail; / And if we fail . . . But must we?” Then she urges: “Measure not the work / Until the day’s out and the labour done, / Then bring your gauges. If the day’s work’s scant, / Why, call it scant; affect no compromise; / And, in that we have nobly striven at least.” And she concludes: “Deal with us nobly, women though we be, / And honour us with truth if not with praise.”9 In his celebrated plays such as the controversial Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893) and Candida (1898), radical thinker George Bernard Shaw posed similar questions about women’s roles and women’s choices.10 Bram Stoker, in his legendary Dracula, also made the New Woman a centerpiece of his novel. His two main female characters address the issue of New Womanhood directly in their discussion of changing societal roles. One of those characters, Mina Murray, embodies several qualities of the New Woman, including deductive reasoning and keen intelligence; and she is interested in innovative technology and proficient in shorthand, considered an advanced skill at the time. But she is still a dutiful wife and mother and a model of domestic propriety. The other, Lucy Westenra, embodies a different side of the New Woman: that is, she is more overtly sexual. Pursued by three different men and unsure which one’s affections to encourage, she wonders if she could avoid selecting among her suitors by marrying multiple men at once—a radical notion that shocks Mina.11 The concept of the New Woman was further popularized by British-American writer Henry James, who used the term to describe the increasing number of feminist, educated career women in Europe and the United States. In his fiction, James incorporated numerous New Woman character types such as Daisy Miller, the free-thinking, uninhibited young American woman in Europe who, in his novella Daisy Miller (serialized 1878), refuses to allow the open disapproval of others to curb her own conduct or to deter her, particularly in her romances, and the independent and highly imaginative Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady (serialized 1880–1881).12 Just as progressive in his thinking was Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, whose female characters were quite remarkable for the way that they pushed back against their male-dominated societies. Ibsen’s widely performed play A Doll’s House remains significant for its critical attitude toward nineteenth-century marriage norms and its exploration of a topic that is still timely. Highly controversial in 1879 when Ibsen wrote the play and when it was first performed, it tells the story of a strained marriage, which ends with the protagonist Nora leaving her husband and children because she wants to discover herself. Nora’s is quite likely the loudest and most momentous door slam in literary history.

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That ending, Ibsen stated, was inspired by his belief that “a woman cannot be herself in modern society,” since it is “an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint.”13 For Ibsen, it was incumbent upon a woman to find her own way—no matter how unconventional—by which to surmount social and gender constraints. And that is precisely what the title character of another of his plays, Hedda Gabler (1891), does. Unhappily married to a second-rate academic, Hedda reunites with her former lover and ultimately causes his suicide. Recognizing Hedda’s pistol in her ex-lover’s hand and therefore her complicity in his death, a judge threatens to expose her. But Hedda refuses to give him power over her, choosing instead to take her fate in her own hands by shooting herself before he can act on his threat.14 “THE WOMAN QUESTION” “The Woman Question” had been a matter of much discussion beginning in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. In an article by that very name in the North American Review, renowned American historian and author Francis Parkman helped to frame the debate. Just as the “marvelous people of [Greek] antiquity” had included women in their “modern democracy,” he noted, in his own day “vast changes for the better have already taken place in the position of women.” So it is “impossible not to hope that the future has still others in store.” Yet Parkman goes on to undermine his own argument. Despite his acknowledgment that women, like men, have a universal fitness to a purpose, he posits numerous and often startling gender differences, all attributable to women’s “nature.” For instance, whereas men have a certain propensity to conflict, women enjoy a “moral elevation”; whereas men are coarse, women are delicate in their “physical and mental constitutions”; and whereas men pride themselves on “resolution,” women place higher value on “will.” To support his position, Parkman points to the wrongheaded and emotional women of the South, “who were more ardent for secession and slavery than the men” and who refused to yield, even when their men knew that the cause was lost. He also contemplates the many dangerous scenarios that could result if women were permitted to direct their grievances in matters affecting their sex: “we shall have shrill-tongued discussions of matters which had better be let alone.” In particular, he imagines an animated scene in the future House of Representatives, in which, during some angry party debate, “in or out of order, the female members take the floor” to make “the tongue more terrible than the sword.” Women, after all, “are abundantly combative when excited.”15

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Moreover, Parkman insisted, in addition to undermining “the order of Nature” by destroying the existing “equal harmony,” granting women political access would have other unintended consequences. So he urgently entreated: “Let us save women from the barren perturbations of American politics. Let us respect them, and, that we may do so, let us pray for deliverance from female suffrage.”16 Such ideas were challenged by a number of the most progressive female thinkers of the day. In a multi-authored article on “The Other Side of the Woman Question” that was published in direct response to Parkman, poet and activist Julia Ward Howe (author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) observed that arguments by individuals of one sex against the political enfranchisement of the other were “no novelty nor rarity.” In fact, she likened them to the similarly invalid white man’s arguments for the political disenfranchisement of Blacks. To Parkman’s point that the best men naturally shun politics and that only the most “coarse and contentious” of women would be drawn to the political arena, she writes: “It is, to say the least, a singular method of argument to adduce the imperfections of government as actually administered, as so many reasons why good women should be satisfied to keep aloof from participation in any attempt to make it better.” Questioning why one sex should assume the right to govern for both simply because that is how it has always been done, Howe examines the false analogy that Parkman borrowed from the vegetable kingdom. The palm, Parkman had written, will not grow in the soil and climate of the pine. To Howe, this analogy seems “peculiarly unfortunate,” since man and woman, Parkman’s so-called “pine and palm,” necessarily grow in the same soil and climate. The real question, therefore, is “whether the pine shall make up his mind to allow the palm as much of the common soil and climate as he finds necessary for his own well-being.” She also attacks Parkman’s vision of the future female politician as an electrifying and “unlovely female phantom” conjured up from the “abyss of the unknown.” The true prophet, she suggests, discerns the signs of the times, “the deep, normal tendencies of human nature, which are ever more and more toward amelioration, and the greater good of the greater number.”17 The other co-authors of “The Other Side of the Woman Question” likewise applauded the rights that “have been won peacefully by argument and appeal to the conscience and good sense of the people”; and they argued with similar eloquence against “odious and unjust discriminations against women” and the “unjust and detestable” inequalities that still prevail. Prominent orator, abolitionist, and suffragist Lucy Stone (the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree), for example, cited the cruel but increasingly outmoded laws made by men that long subjugated women: giving custody of a woman’s person to her husband, along with the right to give moderate correction; making the children that she bore the absolute property of her husband; denying

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her compensation for her own labor and instead awarding it to her husband. When any causes, Stone observed, “make women less than their best, society feels it to its very core and is [in turn] less than its best.” She also wondered how the mother who sits by her baby’s cradle, having learned “no lessons of responsibility and self-reliance, whose mind is narrow, whose arm is weak, and whose heart is timid,” could be expected to impart to her child anything more than she herself possesses. Conversely, given the sensitivity of their conscience and the quickness of their religious susceptibilities, women can “raise the whole tone of national life, and give our civilization the fullness that it lacks; for, if they raise themselves, they will infallibly raise the men with them.”18 Another of Howe’s co-authors, abolitionist and writer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, also rebutted Parkman’s ideas about women’s inferiority. Rejecting his beliefs that suffrage is not a natural right and that female involvement would only debase politics, Stanton asserted that woman, despite being at “a disadvantage on account of artificial burdens and restraints,” has proved herself man’s equal in all the great struggles of humanity. Consequently, “the old idea of different spheres should now give place to the higher idea of different responsibilities in the same sphere.” And she proposed that “wherever duty summons man, woman has a corresponding duty in the same good place.” In time of war, for instance, when man fights the battles, woman performs good service in the hospital; at home, when the mother guides the household, the father supplements his domestic duties with some profitable occupation outside. In the professional world, both serve as “physicians, lawyers, pastors, teachers, and laborers in many forms of industry.” And, if permitted to become legislators, women could do “equally good work for the state,” whose “moral atmosphere” would be purified if “all these influences were turned in the direction of justice, equality, and honor for women.”19 COINING THE PHRASE While all of these discussions focused on the emerging role of women in modern society, the first actually to use the term “New Woman” was British writer Sarah Grand in her article “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” published in the North American Review in March, 1894. In her provocative article, Grand challenged the obsolete and regressive beliefs of what she calls the “Bawling Brotherhood,” that is, the men “who have hitherto tried to howl down every attempt on the part of our sex to make the world a pleasanter place to live in” and who are “so self-inflated with their own conceit that they cannot conceive of women” as equals or even partners. She noted that all too many of those men are content to relegate women to passive roles and

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unfortunate types such as “the cow-kind,” who are as docile and subservient as domestic cattle, or “the scum of our sex,” on whom they easily prey and by whom they alarmingly judge other women. But the “new woman is a little above him, and he never even thought of looking up to where she has been sitting apart in silent contemplation all these years, thinking and thinking, until at last she solved the problem and proclaimed . . . and prescribed the remedy.”20 Grand, however, acknowledges that women are not blameless for creating such a circumstance: they have allowed man to “arrange the whole social system and manage or mismanage it all these ages without ever seriously examining his work with a view to considering whether his abilities and his motives were sufficiently good to qualify him for the task.” They have listened to his “preachments” about a woman’s place, endured “the most poignant misery for his sins,” screened him when he should have been exposed or punished, and meekly bowed their heads to his insults without “demanding proofs of the superiority which alone would give him a right to do so.” They have permitted him to deprive women of a proper education and then to jeer at their lack of knowledge. Even though the truth “has all along been in us, . . . we have cared more for man than for truth, and so the whole human race has suffered.” But all that, Grand suggests, is over. While man, on the one hand, has “shrunk to his true proportions,” women are “expanding” to their own and must now come forward confidently to assert that there are “in both sexes, possibilities hitherto suppressed or abused, which, when properly developed, will supply to either what is lacking in the other.”21 Only then will the man of the future be better and the woman stronger and wiser. Of course, the responsibility for enacting such change, Grand asserts, falls largely to the “new” woman, who must teach man the same way that she teaches a child, since “morally [he] is in his infancy.” By putting fear and acquiescence behind her and rejecting the standard of man’s pleasure and convenience as her “conscience,” she will not destroy but rather will enhance her “true womanliness” and bring even more honor to her roles, even the traditional ones of wife and mother. “Let there be light,” Grand urges. “We suffer in the first shock of it, . . . but the first principle of good housekeeping is to have no dark corners, and as we recover ourselves we go to work with a will to sweep them out.”22 OPPOSING VIEWS Contemporary social critic Charles W. Elliott, however, took it upon himself to rehabilitate women by restoring them to what he believed was a path more logical and better suited to their nature and physiology. In an essay on

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“Woman’s Work and Woman’s Wages,” he identified what he alleged was a central problem: the destruction of the “great occupations of spinning, weaving and making clothes for men.” The result is that “to-day woman seems to be the least valuable of created things.” In Europe, for example, her worth is less than that of a horse (and, on average, “about one eighth of a man”). Thus, according to Elliott, “the foremost question” of the time is how to secure for woman, or to restore her to, her normal positions and value. His answer, like that of many traditionalists, is that she must reject competition with man in “the hard work of the world,” which only leaves her “common, coarse, ugly, dirty—undesirable, except as a beast of burden” and able to “produce [only] ugly, diseased, and deformed children.” Yet even if she is willing to risk dragging herself down and cheapening man’s labor, her effort would only bring her “ignorance and carelessness” to the workplace. “Many women operatives,” after all, “will dance half the night after the day’s work” and forget to report the next morning. And there are other problematic concerns, ranging from working-women’s “calls of nature” and “hasty eating” to their “great showing” on the lists of insanity.23 Perhaps Elliott’s strongest, if oddest, argument concerns “Brain-Work for Woman.” Noting that women’s physiology—lungs, vein blood capacity, and digestion, etc.—is significantly inferior to that of men, he states unequivocally that women’s brains are known to be smaller than men’s. Thus, their “brain-work” is correspondingly reduced, a difference that no legislation can overcome. A particularly odd coda to Elliott’s argument comes in the form of an anecdote related to him by “Dr. B—,” who reported that women in the same course of physician studies as men proved quick-minded, ambitious, and determined to excel. Yet “the result was that within the year more than one-half of all [women] were in my hands for derangements of the sexual organs.” And while “uninformed persons point to exceptional women as conclusive proof that she can do it,” those exceptional women “do not seem to prove anything.” In fact, just the opposite is true, with the weight of opinion and the crushing weight of experience only confirming Dr. B—’s opinion. Women, Elliott insists, are therefore unsuitable for virtually any important labor beyond housework. Type-setting and telegraphy are too demanding “upon the nervous energy.” Sewing-machine work is “injurious . . . upon the organs of menstruation.” And “counting of money” is too exacting in terms of “concentration, alertness, continued exercise.” So, he argues, women must be restored to their proper role in the home; otherwise, “Christianity is a delusion and Civilization a failure, and Society a ruin.”24 Curiously, Elliott’s views were shared not only by men but also by a number of women—though few performed such elaborate contortions to “prove” their points. In an article on “Women’s Relation to Government” published in the New York Times, co-authors Bertha Lane Scott and Mrs. William

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Forse Scott (notably writing under her husband’s name rather than her own) agreed that there was “a biological reason for the mental qualities which fit women for one type of work [that is, child care and rearing]—rather than another.” And they argued that, for the good of democracy, women should stop “caus[ing] economic disturbances” by shirking their social and domestic duties and “blindly try[ing] to occupy the field which naturally and rightly should be filled by men.” Instead of attempting to influence and enact legislation, women need to learn to make more “concessions” to those biological imperatives and to their predetermined “physical constitution.”25 As evidence of biology, the Scotts pointed to “the large number of women who are pregnant at the time of any national or political campaign and election,” for whom the “gravity” and “extreme irritation” of such events might create “injurious effect” upon mothers and “bad effect” upon their offspring.26 Both the term and the notion of the New Woman were soon adopted, even appropriated, by scores of women writers, social philosophers, and early feminists. Popular novelist Emma Wolf, in The Joy of Life in 1896, for example, used the phrase “New Woman” but explained that she found the term somewhat unsatisfactory, since, she felt, “There is nothing new or abnormal in a woman who believes in and asks for the right to advance in education, the arts, and professions with her fellow-man.”27 A few years later, in 1904, prolific novelist and feminist Winnifred Harper Cooley, in The New Womanhood, similarly hailed the New Woman and noted that her finest achievement was personal liberty, which is at “the foundation of civilization; and as long as any one class is watched suspiciously, even fondly guarded, and protected, so long will that class not only be weak, and treacherous, individually, but parasitic, and a collective danger to the community. “[Women] should have opportunities to inherit the accumulated ability and culture and character that is produced only by intellectual and civil activity [and not be oppressed by their duties to society but impressed with their own value as individuals]. The new woman, in the sense of the best woman, the flower of all womanhood of past ages, has come to stay—if civilization is to endure.” Cooley concluded that “the sufferings of the past have but strengthened her, eternity has deepened her, education is broadening her—and she now knows that she must perfect herself if she would perfect the race, and leave her imprint upon immortality, through her offspring or her works.”28 THE HISTORICAL REALITY OF THE NEW WOMAN Indeed, historically, the early twentieth century provided many of the intellectual, civic, and social avenues to which New Women aspired. Recent technologies made life less onerous and less dangerous. Mass production

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had become possible due to cheap labor and assembly-line manufacturing. Railroad networks carried the mass-produced goods around the country. Montgomery Ward, J.C. Penney, and other retailers expanded their operations and laid the foundation for the consumer-driven society that evolved later in the century. These and other developments not only created occasions for leisure, even for the lower classes, but also allowed women to expand their traditional roles and to begin to gain a foothold in the business and institutional sphere.29 The contributions of women to family and marriage were also being redefined. Women were perceiving sex not just as a marital obligation of procreation and male privilege but as an activity that could bring them pleasure, too. That was due, in particular, to the option of reproductive choice through birth control, which was becoming increasingly available to them. Margaret Sanger opened her first clinic in 1916, the same year that Trojan condoms were first manufactured.30 Women were demanding more of their husbands not only in the marital bedroom but also in other ways as well; and when they did not get it, they sought alternatives. Divorce rates in 1920 soared, because divorce no longer automatically meant economic instability for women. Many women, in fact, remarried, since the social stigma of divorce was fading. Some rejected marriage entirely, becoming what pioneering psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall called “bachelor girls” whose “mentality” made them “good fellows” and “compassionate in all the broad intellectuals spheres”—a situation distinctly different than the nineteenth-century characterization of unmarried woman as pitiable spinsters.31 Still other women openly formed lesbian relationships. Women who did marry often opted for smaller families, which meant that by their late twenties or early thirties, they no longer had young children in the house and thus could find other outlets for their energies apart from domesticity. In some cases, they joined women’s clubs or became activists for causes they espoused—not just suffrage, but also settlement work for the underprivileged, child labor regulation, and food purity legislation. To be sure, traditionalists were alarmed, as confirmed by the endless stream of satiric photos and cartoons of emasculated apron-wearing men and mannish pants-wearing women. The New Woman soon became as ubiquitous in visual and print media as she was in popular thought and literature. Her avatar was the so-called Gibson Girl, named for her creator, artist Charles Dana Gibson, who had begun drawing her for Life magazine in the late 1890s. Gibson’s girl was the visual ideal of the New Woman: an independent and often well-educated young woman poised to enjoy a more visible and active role in the public arena than her predecessors did. Her various guises, especially as depicted by Gibson, highlighted her talents and interests as well as her beauty, social skills, athleticism, fashion sense, and participation in civic

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life, including jury duty (which would become a recurring theme in suffrage films). Not restricted simply to the upper class, New Womanhood extended to all, as revealed in Gibson’s “The Reason the Dinner Was Late,” in which even a young servant does not want to be bound by traditional domestic responsibilities. Significantly, Gibson and his fellow progressives not only drew images of the iconic New Woman in their own illustrations; they also supported the actual New Woman’s artistic aspirations and welcomed her entry into their arena. Some of the most popular book and magazine illustrators of the early twentieth century, in fact, were women: Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, Jessie Willcox Smith, Rose O’Neill, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and Violet Oakley. The rise of those female illustrators and artists is unsurprising, given the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some 11,000 magazines and periodicals were being published, and women comprised more than eighty percent of the subscribers.32 For publishers, magazines were a new and very lucrative market, and they realized that women were anxious to see images and illustrations that depicted the world from their perspective. As opposed to many of the male artists and illustrators who represented the feminine in more retrogressive ways—that is, in floral depictions of passivity, ornamentality, and sexual purity—women artists often challenged those limited concepts. And they created a new genre of paintings and illustrations that offered a different and more active view of what femininity and womanhood meant. The New Woman also had an enormous impact on contemporary fashion and ushered in a number of trends. Victorian fashion had emphasized restriction and ornamentation: lots of ruffles and lace, which purportedly connoted femininity, and exaggerated bustles and crinolines that distorted the body shape and kept women, often literally, in their place since they could barely move. Long fitted sleeves restricted women’s arm movements. Undergarments and petticoats were usually multi-layered and weighed as much as ten to fifteen pounds, inhibiting women’s ability to move their legs freely. Victorian era corsets contained boning made of real bone that bound tightly around the mid-body, trained a woman’s waist, and fashionably slimmed her silhouette; but they caused a number of preventable injuries and illnesses, including curvature of the spine, deformities of the ribs, even birth defects.33 Hats were a necessity, the broader and more elaborate, the better. Hairstyles, on the other hand, were often austere: tight buns and braids, severe parts. Emphasis was generally on modesty rather than beauty. By contrast, the New Woman’s clothing reflected her new freedom. Her uniform was often a high-collared shirtwaist blouse and plain, dark, unruffled skirt that stopped around the ankle and was neither so full that it obscured her shape nor so narrow as to constrict her movement. Hats, if and when worn,

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were considerably more fashionable, an accessory rather than a cover-up. Hair was looser and fuller. The physical freedom of the fashion was closely linked to the New Woman’s newfound interest in sports and athleticism. Women started playing tennis, golf, basketball. They went swimming, sailing, skating, even bowling. And they rode bicycles, which became one of their insignias.34 It was the movies, however, that played the most prominent and vital role in the representation of the notion of the New Woman. In 1910, one third of Americans went to the movies on a weekly basis. Over the next decade, that number virtually doubled as movies became the locus of popular entertainment. For immigrants and the lower classes, the movies served as community centers. For the middle classes, they were places of leisure; and, for the so-called better classes, a form of entertainment. Theaters, once the realm of the classes, were, by the 1910s, transformed into places for the masses. And, as in other areas of society where they assumed a physical and social presence, women became an increasingly large part of the movie audiences. As exhibition practices shifted, and pictures moved from seedy nickelodeons to legitimate movie houses, female film-going became an altogether respectable activity. Big, elegant movie houses were being built, and, accordingly, women attended in ever larger numbers and constituted the majority of the audience in many of the theaters. Surprisingly perhaps, they often attended alone, without their husbands, especially during the day; and sometimes they even brought their babies and children with them.35 THE SERIAL MOTION PICTURE To satisfy the public’s desire and demand for films, producers started moving away from actualities, which were essentially newsreels of events, parades, and historic sites, to early forms of story films. And while it took almost a decade for technology to make the full transition to wide production of longer feature films, one notable type of motion picture filled that gap and captured the attention and the enthusiasm of the moviegoing public, particularly women.36 That type of picture—the moving picture serial, or “serial,” for short—was in itself a fascinating and influential cinematic phenomenon. And it proved especially influential in the way that it often highlighted and emphasized the New Woman and gave female moviegoers powerful visual imagery and new role models to emulate. Serials were multi-part short films, usually one to two reels long (typically ten to fifteen minutes per reel), that ran for six, ten, twenty, or occasionally more episodes and often ended with some kind of cliffhanger and a promise “To Be Continued Next Week.” Those cliffhangers were sometimes quite

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literal: numerous episodes ended with the heroine dangling from a cliff, from the side of a sinking ship or a burning building, or even from a hot air balloon, which was a surprisingly common device in early film, just as it had been on the nineteenth-century stage. Most of the non-serial short films of that era, which showcased male stars like Francis X. Bushman, Milton Sills, and Billy Quirk, emphasized themes of adventure, crime, and mystery. And they celebrated male athleticism, ambition, and fearlessness. Serials, by contrast, flipped the script and generally featured women who were athletic, ambitious, fearless, and independent. A significant departure and an important development in early silent American cinema, serials thus appropriated traditionally male qualities and ascribed them to the female protagonists. Even the most cursory look at the titles confirms this shift. Often alliteratively named for the actresses or the female heroines, they included Mary of the Mines (1912), The Romance of Rowena (1913), Lucille Love (1914), The Perils of Pauline (1914), The Hazards of Helen (1914), Dolly of the Dailies (1914), The Exploits of Elaine (1915), The Mysteries of Myra (1916), Onda of the Orient (1916), A Lass of the Lumberlands (1916), The Mating of Marcella (1918), Nan of the North (1922), and Ruth of the Range (1923). Relatively easy and usually very profitable for producers to make, the early serials took as few as two to three days per episode to shoot. Emphasis was typically on action rather than on character development, and the majority of the screen stars, including the women, performed their own stunts. And some of those stunts were truly wild and daring. Movie audiences could hardly wait to return to the theaters week after week to see where the next adventure would take the heroines. Timely and topical, those serials capitalized on contemporary subjects and events and sometimes used actual historical events such as the sinking of the Lusitania and the Black Tom disaster as plot points to heighten interest. They also incorporated innovative technologies that fascinated audiences—technologies such as automobiles, trains, and especially airplanes. Thus, serials not only entertained but also managed to capture the zeitgeist of the era, which, by the mid-1910s, also meant crystallizing the wartime mood of the country, evoking the anxiety of the age, and redefining the roles of women in society. EARLY SERIES AND SERIALS The serial form can be traced back to an early twelve-part Thomas Edison production, What Happened to Mary, whose first installment was released in July, 1912. Though more accurately considered a series rather than a true serial, What Happened to Mary employed a similar format. In other words, it

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had a narrative line that was composed of a distinct beginning, middle, and end, and its dozen one-reel episodes were filled with considerable physical action and suspense. Unlike the episodes (also called chapters) of a serial, though, the episodes of the series were autonomous and lacked sequential continuity. Edison’s production had its genesis in a “remarkable story of a remarkable girl” published in early 1912 in The Ladies’ World magazine, in which a baby named Mary is left on the doorstep of shopkeeper Billy Peart. Given five hundred dollars to raise her, Peart is promised another thousand if he finds her a suitable husband when she comes of age. Years pass. But when Peart locates a likely candidate, the now-eighteen-year-old Mary rejects him. Moreover, upon learning the circumstances of her “adoption,” she takes some money that she believes is rightfully hers and leaves town in search of the truth about her origins. In the series, which made a few changes to the story on which it was based, the eponymous heroine Mary Dangerfield, played by Mary Fuller, a principal player in the Edison acting company, has a slightly different challenge. She must claim her inheritance before she turns twenty-one, with the fortune going to Peart if she fails. Her quest takes her on adventures to some fascinating locations, from Broadway and Wall Street in New York to London at Yuletide, before she finally comes into her fortune of $10,000. That actually was a fairly paltry sum. In later serials, the fortunes get bigger and bigger, often approaching astronomical highs. The heroine in the 1917 Wharton serial Patria, for example, inherits the lucrative family munitions business as well as a one hundred million dollar bequest from an ancestor for a secret defense fund. An especially interesting aspect of the Mary series was the giveaways and contests that were associated with it and that would become a common and highly effective promotional tie-in for many later series and serials as well. The promotions began even before Mary became a film. The editor of Ladies’ World, who recognized that the preponderance of journal readership was female, and film producer Thomas Edison, who was a good businessman, wanted to keep increasing the number of women in the audience. Realizing that gimmicks would heighten interest in both media, they offered prizes for readers who correctly guessed what was in store for the heroine in the next installment.37 That, in turn, caused moviegoers to rush to the movie theaters to see the film version, which revealed how the story played out. The idea marked the beginning of a close and often symbiotic relationship between print media (newspapers, journals, and magazines) and film that still exists today. And it gave rise to giveaways such as the Crolette, a mini Ouija board that provided answers to users’ questions and reinforced the supernatural themes in the sensational serial The Mysteries of Myra (1916).

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Fig. 7.1.  Mary, “a remarkable girl” (played by Mary Fuller), is determined to uncover the truth of her identity and claim her inheritance in What Happened to Mary (1912). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The success of What Happened to Mary quickly led to other series with strong active heroines. Among the most popular was Kalem’s The Hazards of Helen (1914–1917), which, at one hundred and nineteen installments of twelve minutes each, was the longest series ever produced. Hazards featured quick-thinking Helen, played in the first forty-eight episodes by Helen Holmes, an athletic and versatile actress who reportedly did her own stunts, and in later episodes by a parade of other actresses including Helen (Mrs. “Hoot”) Gibson. The eponymous Helen found herself in various dramatic situations, which usually centered around the railroad, the series’ special gimmick, and which, apart from the occasional rescue by a handsome leading man, she resolved by her own wits. Similarly, another Kalem series, The Ventures of Marguerite (whose first installment was released in the fall of 1915), starred Marguerite Courtot as a young heiress who attempts to escape an Oriental mystic and other

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Fig. 7.2.  The Hazards of Helen (1914–1917) the longest serial ever produced, centered on the railroad and chronicled the adventures of Helen (played by a succession of actresses, including Helen Holmes and Helen Gibson). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

schemers who are after her inheritance. Like the theft of the heroine’s fortune, the character of the so-called inscrutable “Oriental,” performed by white actors in exaggerated yellowface (much like the unfortunate blackface of nineteenth-century stage and early twentieth-century cinema), became a familiar and recurring plot device. But, as in so many of the later New Woman serials, the heroine prevailed. THE ADVENTURES OF KATHLYN Most film scholars now agree that the first true motion picture serial was The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913–1914), which was produced in thirteen two-reel episodes by the Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago and in which the stories were not self-contained but rather carried over to the next installment. Starring as the daring Kathlyn was Kathlyn Williams, an attractive young actress and former comedienne. Known as “The Selig Girl,” she had earned

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a reputation for her fearlessness in working alongside the wild animals that William Selig loved and that he used in almost all his pictures. In the serial, Kathlyn’s father Colonel Hare is called from his California home to India, where, years earlier, he had rescued the King of Allaha. In gratitude, the King had decreed that, should he die without an heir, the Colonel would ascend to the throne. Before departing California, the Colonel leaves a message in a sealed envelope, which his daughters are instructed to open on New Year’s Eve in the event that he has not returned by then. On the designated day, Kathlyn opens the envelope, unaware that another letter has been substituted for the original. That letter states that the Colonel is being held captive in India and that Kathlyn must go to him immediately, which of course she does. Upon arrival, she is told by the devious Prince Umballah, who covets the kingship, that her father is dead, leaving her as the heir to the throne. Umballah, it seems, plans to force her into marriage and then to rule as her consort—the forced marriage serving as an interesting analogue for the restrictive societal role that women were expected to play but which the New Woman was resisting. Over the next few episodes, often with American hunter John Bruce at her side, Kathlyn faces mortal danger—in the jungle; in a ruined temple where she is menaced by a hungry lion; at the foot of a volcano as it begins to erupt—before Umballah is exposed and punished for his deception. Of course, Kathlyn is reunited with her father, after which the Hares return together to California, to make plans for her wedding to Bruce. The serial was an instant hit, and its popularity extended well beyond the episodes themselves. That popularity was heightened by the efforts of producer Selig, who devised various effective publicity gimmicks, such as the free distribution of a special edition of the novelization of the serial,

Fig. 7.3.  Considered to be the first true serial, The Adventure of Kathlyn (1913) starred Kathlyn Williams, the fearless “Selig Girl,” who travels to India to rescue her father. Courtesy of the Norman Studios Silent Film Museum, Jacksonville, Florida.

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illustrated with stills from the film, to all subscribers of Photoplay magazine. Kathlyn herself became a social phenomenon, the beautiful, adventurous New Woman whom women sought to emulate and whom even men admired. Couples danced to a hesitation waltz named in Kathlyn’s honor and sipped Kathlyn cocktails; women wore Kathlyn-style coiffures; and men carried postcard souvenirs with her image. A song “Kathlyn, Dear Kathlyn” was published and performed, and Kathlyn’s name was used to promote products as diverse as slippers, face powders, and cigars. The serial even spawned a 1916 feature-length film that used the same cast and crew. AND THEN THERE WAS PEARL Although initially serials seemed little more than a novelty, by 1914 they had become an all-out craze. With attractive and plucky heroines who paralleled “the real rise of women to a new status in society,”38 they offered models of female independence and ambition and illustrated the freedoms and opportunities to which the New Woman aspired. But at the same time, as Ben Singer noted, serials revealed “the oscillation between contradictory impulses of female empowerment and the anxieties that such social transformations and aspirations created in a society experiencing the sociological and ideological upheavals of modernity.”39 The best-known serial of its day and the one most remembered today is The Perils of Pauline, released beginning in March, 1914, and financed by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Anxious to expand his empire by getting into the movie business, Hearst was willing to invest as much as necessary to establish himself as a producer; and Perils proved a smart choice. An enormous hit with filmgoers, it established its star, Pearl White, and, thanks to Hearst’s massive press campaign, became part of a larger cultural phenomenon. In the serial, Pauline Marvin, the ward of wealthy mogul Sanford Marvin, is the personification of the era’s free-thinking woman. Although she loves Sanford’s son Harry, Pauline resists Sanford’s urging to marry because she wants “to see the world” and to embark on her own career as a writer first— not an unusual notion today, but a rather radical one more than a century ago. After Sanford’s death, Pauline is bequeathed a large inheritance, with the provision that, should she die before marrying Harry, the inheritance will pass to Sanford’s secretary, Raymond Owen (renamed Koerner during World War One, to make him sound more German and therefore more ominous). A villain at heart, Owen begins plotting ways to eliminate Pauline and secure the fortune for himself. The episodes find her in constant mortal danger, facing

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a host of threats from Chinese ruffians, fanatical Japanese patriots, Sioux Indians, Gypsies, even river pirates. But with Harry as her loyal companion and with her devoted dog often at her side, she survives every near-fatal mishap orchestrated by Owen, from a faulty parachute to a rattlesnake hidden in a bunch of flowers. The “Peerless Fearless” Pearl White became an instant celebrity—bigger, it seemed, with each episode of Perils that was released.40 Capitalizing on the public’s enthusiasm, Hearst, with his unparalleled resources, propelled White to “full-fledged stardom,” making her one of the most popular film actresses of her time. On Sunday, a day when the entire family was likely to read the newspaper, Hearst’s syndicated publications featured an eagerly awaited illustrated print episode of Perils. At the same time, Hearst drama critic Alan Dale published self-serving reviews of the serial, which in turn would be widely reprinted in other trade journals and magazines. Photographs of White appeared almost daily in the Hearst press, and Hearst’s publicists promoted her as the ideal of young womanhood—beautiful yet modest, daring but

Fig. 7.4.  Pearl White starred as Pauline Marvin, a free-thinking young woman who becomes the target of numerous villains who are after her fortune in The Perils of Pauline (1914). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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sensible—whose hairstyle and costume were emulated by women worldwide. In short, White, the quintessential New Woman, was everywhere. EXPLOITING ELAINE It was, however, two filmmakers, the brothers Theodore and Leopold Wharton, who would have the most profound and sustained impact on the serial format and in promoting the New Woman heroines. The first of the Whartons’ serials was the Hearst-financed The Exploits of Elaine, which was actually three different sequences of Elaine adventures—the original fourteen-part Exploits (1914), the ten-part sequel New Exploits (1915), and the final twelve-part Romance of Elaine (1915)—known collectively today as The Exploits. Starring in the lead role as Elaine Dodge was Pearl White, the reigning queen of serials, fresh from her national and international triumph in The Perils of Pauline. As the Exploits opens, Elaine is determined to track down the masked bandit responsible for her father’s death. That bandit is the “Clutching Hand,” the first mystery villain, whose identity is not revealed until the end and whose only distinguishing feature is his misshapen hand. Over the first five or six episodes, Elaine is largely his target and finds herself in need of rescue by forensic scientist Dr. Craig Kennedy and his assistant Jameson. Perhaps aware of the fact that the serial was squandering the considerable appeal of the free-wheeling White, however, the writers and producers quickly placed new emphasis on her character, allowing her to evolve into a more active and engaged protagonist—the very emblem of the New Woman who defies traditional gender roles and social expectations. Fearless yet feminine, determined but dutiful, Elaine assumes an increasingly vital part in the action, which finds her in some rather extreme situations typical of the serial genre: she is kidnapped, held hostage, drugged, poisoned, physically overpowered, threatened, and repeatedly terrorized by the faceless villain and his confederates. Yet she is able to hold her own, so much so that, at one point, she dies but is resuscitated by electro-shock, making her the only heroine in early serial history to survive even death. Not so bold as to intimidate the men who are devoted to helping and protecting her (or to alienate the male movie audience), she nonetheless displays a sense of daring and defiance that distinguishes her from earlier “damsels in distress.” Given Elaine’s popularity, it is not surprising that plans for an extension began even as the original serial was still in production or that the opening episode of The New Exploits of Elaine was released just one week after the first serial concluded. The New Exploits introduced a new villain, the “Oriental” Wu Fang (whose name derived from an actual Washington-based Chinese

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Fig. 7.5  The adventurous and resourceful Elaine (played by serial queen Pearl White) in The Exploits of Elaine (1914) epitomized cinema’s modern woman. Courtesy of the Wharton Studio Museum, Ithaca, New York.

diplomat, Wu Ting Fang), who epitomized the xenophobia of early cinema and of the early twentieth century in general, when fear of the “Yellow Peril” was prevalent. By the mid-1910s, in fact, the “Oriental”—a generic type that lumped together Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian “exotics”—had become the object of race fear and hatred or, alternatively, the victim of ridiculous stereotyping, with white actors made up in exaggerated yellowface. Since the Clutching Hand was exposed and killed off in the first Exploits, the plot of the second serial involves finding and retrieving the fortune that he had left behind. Elaine is again subjected to the dangers of serial film plots—that is, being drugged, kidnapped, and even carried out of her home in a suit of armor. And while she often relies on the assistance of Craig Kennedy, she nonetheless demonstrates a growing sense of her own agency. When, for example, she is taken hostage aboard a sloop that is smuggling her to Shanghai to be sold into slavery (white slavery being a popular theme in pictures of the period), she uses a wireless telephone and a flashing lantern to communicate her location, climbs a rope ladder to the topmast, and ultimately eludes her guard by making a bold leap into the dark water. Although

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these various plot twists were a bit repetitive and formulaic, they nonetheless illustrate Elaine’s daring, fearlessness, and athleticism. The third and final installment, The Romance of Elaine provided more of the same: recurring threats from a mysterious villain, death-defying escapes, car chases, explosions, and a romantic rescue. And, like the earlier installments, The Romance of Elaine celebrated Elaine’s tenacity and reinforced the image of her as a modern female type of protagonist within a sensational, action-packed, typically male-oriented and male-dominated story line. As feminist film scholar Marina Dahlquist suggests, especially for the women in the movie audience, Elaine offered “a template for negotiating gender stereotypes.” Removed from “the confines of Victorian domestic femininity and familial obligations and the meek modesty expected of women,” she performs tasks traditionally associated with masculine brawn and bravado—tasks such as firing a pistol, handling a bomb, and demonstrating keen athletic agility—that help to “destabilize traditional gender norms.”41 At the same time, though, as Ben Singer argues, Elaine personified the profound cultural discontinuity of modern society, as “traditional ideologies of gender, essentially stagnant for centuries, became objects of cultural reflexivity, open to doubt and revision”; and she demonstrated the conflict between the promotion and celebration of empowered women and the anxiety that such female empowerment and social transformation created.42 OTHER NEW WOMAN SERIALS Producers Theodore and Leopold Wharton followed up their immensely popular and successful Exploits with Beatrice Fairfax (1916), another production financed by William Randolph Hearst. The serial unfolded in fifteen episodes, each of which was largely self-contained. And each followed a well-defined pattern: newspaper advice columnist Beatrice receives a letter from a trusting reader, and, working closely with fellow reporter Jimmy Barton, investigates the situations, which take her all over New York City, from a high-society masquerade ball to the home field of the New York Yankees. Almost every episode ends with the pair returning to the newsroom to write up the story for the paper’s midnight edition. Although Beatrice Fairfax lacked the novelty of some of the Whartons’ earlier serials, it nonetheless offered solid entertainment. With her challenging job in the largely male newspaper business, Beatrice was an engaging lead character and indisputably a New Woman who found herself squarely in the midst of the action as she answered her readers’ calls for help. Her name boldly emblazoned on the glass door of the office in the newsroom made clear that she was on equal footing with the men—no mean achievement in any

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Fig. 7.6.  Responding to her readers’ requests for assistance, newspaper advice columnist Beatrice (played by Grace Darling) often found herself embroiled in some dangerous situations in Beatrice Fairfax (1916). Courtesy of the Wharton Museum, Ithaca, New York.

era. Her adventures not only spawned a popular song, “Beatrice Fairfax, Tell Me What To Do” but also initiated a genre of similarly-themed productions such as The Perils of Our Girl Reporters (1916) and helped to pave the way for numerous later “girl reporter” pictures such as Big News (1929), Dance, Fools, Dance (1931), Front Page Woman (1935), Nancy Drew, Reporter (1939), and Brenda Starr, Reporter (1943). The Whartons’ next serial Patria (1917), on the other hand, distinguished itself by having a distinctly political purpose. It was a so-called “preparedness” picture that drew on timely themes of patriotism to argue, directly and literally, for military readiness. As America was finding itself unable to remain distant from the conflict that had raged in Europe since 1914, Patria sought to prepare the American public for the possibility of entry into the war by sensationalizing the threat to national security. The Whartons were hardly alone in that initiative; numerous other studios had begun producing preparedness pictures as well. As Liz Clarke observed, “There were films in favor of war preparedness—building a strong

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army—and films in favor of peace, or staying out of the war,” almost all of which featured “melodramatic plots and gruesome violence [that] stoked the fires of fear” and “mobilized the peril and purity of white American women, more often than not, to call the nation to arms.”43 They included such titles as Lubin’s The Nation’s Peril (1915), J. Stuart Blackton’s Battle Cry of Peace (1915), and the Public Service Company’s Defense or Tribute? (1916). Even Thomas Dixon contributed to the debate with his “Mighty Message of Warning” in the seven-part The Fall of a Nation (1917), a sequel to the controversial Birth of a Nation (1915). Hoping to cash in on his earlier success, Dixon raised alarms by imagining a “European Confederated Army” headed by Germany, which invades the United States and, among other heinous acts, executes children and war veterans. In addition to the films, there were a number of preparedness serials, such as The Secret of the Submarine (May, 1916), a fifteen-episode thriller released by Mutual, in which Juanita Hansen and Tom Chatterton foil the efforts by agents of the Japanese and Russian governments to steal plans for a new submarine that can remain underwater indefinitely by means of an apparatus that operates like the gills of a fish. Universal’s twenty-part Liberty, A Daughter of the U.S.A., released in August, 1916, featured another strong heroine, seventeen-year-old Liberty (Marie Walcamp), the sole heir to her late father’s estate. Liberty is beset from all sides, as rebels try to have her kidnapped and held for ransom in order to secure funds to finance a revolution against the legal government of Mexico, while one of her guardians has a similarly nefarious plan involving blackmail and marriage to his son Manuel, who is in league with the rebels fighting border battles against the Texas Rangers. Among the best preparedness serials—and the one in most direct competition with Patria—was Pathé’s Pearl of the Army (1916), a twenty-part picture that starred Pearl White in one of her finest screen performances. The plot concerned the “Silent Menace,” an enemy who has stolen secret defense plans of the Panama Canal that Pearl is determined to recover. Pearl’s greatest moment occurs during a rooftop confrontation as the shadowy figure of the Menace attempts to lower the Stars and Stripes in a signal to his followers to begin the uprising. But Pearl fights valiantly to keep the flag waving and finally knocks the Menace off the building. The film ends in a spectacle of patriotic fervor as Pearl—described in publicity as “an American Joan of Arc”—is honored for her efforts with a full-dress parade of American troops.44 The Whartons’ Patria, however, was perhaps the most sensational of all. Drawing on the Joan of Arc films of that era that used the national heroine as a victorious military figure who, according to Robin Blaetz, “functioned figurally during the First World War as a sign of ultimate victory and glory,” Patria cast the heroine Patria Channing as a modern-day Joan, riding a horse into battle and saving her countrymen from a powerful enemy.45 “The first

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flowering of an idea not just of preparedness but of preparedness for women,” the serial conflated the patriotic wave with the new interest in feminism. It was, as film historian Terry Ramsaye affirmed, “a motion picture written to a prescription.”46 Loosely based on the history of the Dupont family of Delaware, famous munition makers for generations, Patria told a story that was dear to the heart of William Randolph Hearst. Adamantly opposed to involvement in the war in Europe—and to President Woodrow Wilson, who considered American entry into that war inevitable (and whom Hearst regularly excoriated in his newspapers and publications)—pro-German Hearst was convinced that the true enemy of the United States was much closer at hand. Specifically, he embraced the conspiracy theory that the Yellow Peril Japan, “interested in subjugating America to further its domination of the Pacific,”47 was secretly working with revolution-plagued Mexico to invade the United States from the south. Mexico, he concluded, posed the greatest and most immediate threat to this country’s security. And that became the plot of the film. Patria, the last of the fighting Channings, controls the largest munitions works in America. After Japanese Baron Huroki and Mexican leader Señor De Lima, the dual threats who represent a Mexican-Japanese alliance against the U.S., try unsuccessfully to purchase munitions from her, they start scheming to secure the defense fund of one hundred million dollars that she has inherited from an ancestor. Over the course of fifteen episodes, Huroki and De Lima come after Patria in various ways. She is kidnapped, locked away on a steamer, thrown overboard from a ship, rescued, plunged again into the sea, almost blown up in the Black Tom explosion disaster (an actual historical event), nearly killed aboard a train when the railroad trestle is sabotaged, and forced to leap off a cliff—an exciting series of adventures, even for a serial heroine. But Patria manages to survive all the attempts on her life by driving away, swimming away, and flying away (in a plane that she herself pilots). In a sensational conclusion, she prevents an invasion of the U.S. by mustering all of her resources and defeating the enemy, for which she receives the compliments of the army and the gratitude of a nation. As the glare of fire lights up the sky like a grand display of July Fourth fireworks, Patria shows that the New Woman is fit to command, a fact that even the Army officers in the picture are forced to concede. Apart from its preparedness theme, the most distinctive feature of the Whartons’ serial was its star, Irene Castle, who was hailed as “The Best Known Woman in America.” She and her first husband stage dancer Vernon Castle became an international sensation in Paris and later, upon their return to the U.S., fixtures on the social scene as well as a staple of the vaudeville and Broadway stages. But Castle’s influence was not limited to dance; she also became a leader in the world of fashion. Her elegant but modern

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clothing and hairstyle set new fashion trends. One writer noted that “Her slim athletic figure caused millions of women to throw away their corsets,” and her bobbed hair “was the windfall of beauty parlors the world over.” Thus, Hillary Rettig concluded, to Castle “must go the credit (or blame) for reshaping the American girl.”48 Frequently photographed, widely admired, and often imitated, Castle soon established herself as the new female ideal. The women-oriented serial films, particularly those in which Pearl White and Irene Castle appeared, were not just important milestones in cinema. They were also of immense cultural significance as the most prominent, accessible, and effective means for popularizing the politically and socially influential but often controversial American New Woman. NOTES 1. This chapter contains certain terms that were commonly used during the silent film era and that may be offensive to some readers. Those words and terms, most of which occur in the titles of films or in newspaper and trade publications, are used here exclusively for historical or analytical purposes. 2. Susan Stanberg, February 27, 2018, NPR, https://www.npr. org/2018/02/27/589061990/mary-pickford-darling-of-the-silver-screen-to-major-hollywood-force. 3. As Cari Beauchamp writes in “Mary Pickford Joins Biograph,” Mary Pickford Foundation, https://marypickford.org/caris-articles/mary-pickford-joins-biograph/, Pickford was initially reluctant to work for the movies. “She considered ‘the flickers,’ as almost everyone called the movies, lower class entertainment. Yet times were changing quickly.” 4. Ibid. According to the essay, Pickford told Kevin Brownlow: “I had an affection for him, but it didn’t stop me from always questioning him. We remained, until the day of his death, very good friends.” 5. Pickford biographer Scott Eyman, in Mary Pickford: America’s Sweetheart (New York: Dutton, 1990), suggests that Pickford was such a natural in these sensitive and sympathetic roles because of her upbringing. Her absentee father was an alcoholic who abandoned the family when she was very young. Forced to work from an early age to help her mother and siblings Lottie and Jack, who later became part of the film industry themselves, “She was just very attuned to human misery, because she’d grown up in human misery and she didn’t forget it.” See also Christel Schmidt, Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2012). Lillian Gish offers a charming recollection of Pickford and Biograph Studios in Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson, Hollywood: The Oral History (New York: Harper, 2022), p. 55. 6. Eileen Whitfield, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997).

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  7. Jean V. Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman: The Women’s Movement in America, 1875–1930 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), p. 13.  8. As Miriam Hansen noted in Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), the “shaping” extended to the cinema as well.  9. The epic poem/novel Aurora Leigh, which John Ruskin called the greatest poem of the nineteenth century, was first published in 1856. Told in nine books written in blank verse, it is narrated in the first-person by Aurora and depicts another heroine, Marian Erle, an abused and self-taught child of itinerant parents. In the Fifth Book, Aurora discusses her attempts to write and refuses to be constrained by the traditional roles of woman; ultimately she decides that she must travel in order to gain further inspiration. 10. See, for example, Maria Popova, “George Bernard Shaw on Marriage, the Oppression of Women, and the Hypocrisies of Monogamy,” https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/07/26/george-bernard-shaw-on-marriage/. See also Michiko Kakutani, “G.B. Shaw and the Women in His Life and Art, New York Times, September 27, 1981, Section 2, p. 1 https://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/27/arts/ gb-shaw-and-the-women-in-his-life-and.html, and Philip Graham, “This Criticism of George Bernard Shaw is Unfair. He was Strongly Pro-Woman,” in The Guardian, February 2, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/feb/02/ george-bernard-shaw-feminism-prostitution. 11. See, for example, Rheavanya Winandhini and Rahmawan Jatmiko, “New Woman as Seen in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Lexicon: Journal of English Language and Literature, https://jurnal.ugm.ac.id/lexicon/article/view/66570. 12. See, for example, Martha Banta, “Henry James and the New Woman,” in Henry James: A Historical Guide to Henry James, February 2012, Oxford Academic, https:// academic.oup.com/book/9970/chapter-abstract/157325896?redirectedFrom=fulltext. 13. Ibsen, “Notes for a Modern Tragedy,” 1878, cited by A.S. Byatt, “Blaming Nora,” The Guardian, May 1, 2009. 14. American novelist Kate Chopin, in The Awakening (1899), also chronicled a woman’s doomed search for independence and self-realization through sexual experimentation. 15. Francis Parkman, “The Woman Question,” North American Review, Vol. 129, No. 275 (October, 1879), pp. 303, 305, 308, 315, 317. 16. Ibid., p. 321. 17. Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Wendell Phillips, “The Other Side of the Woman Question,” North American Review, Vol. 129, No. 276 (November, 1879), pp. 413–14, 419–20. 18. Ibid., pp. 425–26, 431, 428. 19. Ibid., pp. 436, 434. 20. Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” North American Review, Vol. 158, No. 448 (March 1894), pp. 270–72. 21. Ibid., p. 272. 22. Ibid., p. 276.

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23. Charles W. Elliott, “Woman’s Work and Woman’s Wages,” North American Review, Vol. 135, No. 309 (August, 1882), pp. 146–48, 151, 153, 154–55. 24. Ibid., pp. 154–55, 161. 25. Mrs. William Forse Scott and Bertha Lane Scott, “Woman’s Relation to Government, North American Review, Vol. 191, No. 653 (April 1910), p. 553. “Absolute equality cannot exist with life, and inequality results in the gathering together of similar individuals into groups.” The resulting “difference of standards and desires . . . throws the various groups into a struggle in which each seeks to bend the machinery of government to its own purposes, often to the hurt of other groups.” This, Mrs. Scott writes, is the problem that occurs when women attempt to form a classification of their own based on sex. “Economically it is fallacious. Politically it is false. And thus it is doomed to failure” (pp. 551–52). 26. Ibid., p. 557. 27. Emma Wolf, The Joy of Life (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1996), p. 121. 28. Winnifred Harper Cooley, The New Womanhood (New York: Broadway Publishing Company, 1904), p. 32. 29. See, for example, Jeremy Greenwood, Evolving Households: The Imprint of Technology on Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), who argues that technology had as significant an effect on households as it did on industry. 30. The condoms were first manufactured in 1916 by Merle Leland Youngs through his company Fay and Youngs. Renamed Youngs Rubber Corporation in 1919, that company debuted the Trojan brand with the image of the Trojan helmet. Because of the Comstock Laws and similar state laws that prohibited the mailing of “obscene” items such as contraceptives, they were sold as protection against disease. 31. Matthews, pp. 50–51. See also G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (New York: D. Appleton, 1904), Chapter 17. Available online at https:// psychclassics.yorku.ca/Hall/Adolescence/chap17.htm. 32. See Mary Ellen Waller-Zuckerman, “‘Old Homes in a City of Perpetual Change’: Women’s Magazines, 1890–1916,” The Business History Review 63.4 (Winter, 1989), pp. 715–56; and Zuckerman, “Marketing the Women’s Journals, 1873– 1900,” Vol. 18, Papers presented at the thirty-fifth annual meeting of the Business History Conference (1989), pp. 99–108, published by Cambridge University Press. 33. See, for example, Ian Harvey, “Victorian Fashion: Restrictive, Uncomfortable, One Fashion Item Killed Over 3000 Women,” January 17, 2018, https:// www.thevintagenews.com/2018/01/17/victorian-fashion-3/?edg-c=1. See also “Historical Fashion: Women’s Victorian Clothing,” October 17, 2021, https:// justhistoryposts.com/2021/10/17/historical-fashion-victorian-womens-clothing/; and Atinuke A. Adedeji, April 25, 2012, “Victorian Fashion & the Corset: Bounded Oppression of Women,” https://vixgoestocollege.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/ victorian-fashion-the-corset-bounded-oppression-of-women/. 34. Matthews, pp. 12–14. See also Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, “New Women in Early 20th Century America,” Online essay, Oxford Research Encyclopedia, https://oxfordre. com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore9780199329175-e-427; Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining

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the American New Woman, 1895–1915 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005); and Victoria M. Lord, “Fashioning the New Woman,” http://ultimatehistoryproject.com/new-woman.html. 35. Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, pp. 7–8, 17. 36. Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture 1915–1928. History of the American Cinema Series. Vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), p. 184. 37. William Stedman, The Serials: Suspense and Drama by Installment (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), pp. 4–5. 38. Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York: Teachers College Press, 1975), p. 270. 39. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 202. 40. See, for example, Manuel Weltman and Raymond Lee, Pearl White, The Peerless Fearless Girl (South Brunswick, NJ: A.S. Barnes, 1969), and William M. Drew, The Woman Who Dared: The Life and Times of Pearl White, Queen of the Serials (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 2023). White’s co-star Crane Wilbur offered some interesting recollections in Basinger and Wasson, Hollywood: An Oral History, pp. 95–96. 41. Marina Dahlquist, “Introduction: Why Pearl?,” in Dahlquist, ed., Exporting Perilous Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), pp. 3, 13. 42. Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, pp. 222, 255. See also Jennifer M. Bean, “Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body,” in Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds., A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 20. 43. Liz Clarke, The American Girl Goes to War: Women and National Identity in U.S. Silent Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022), p. 79. Clarke provides some fascinating insights into women’s roles. See especially Chapters Four and Five, “Featuring Preparedness and Peace: America and the European War, Part I” and “From Serial Queens to Patriotic Heroines: America and the European War, Part II,” as well as the helpful filmography. 44. Just prior to its release, Motion Picture News described the serial’s Pearl as “an American Joan of Arc,” a prominent figure in American promotion of patriotism and a unifying national symbol (including, as Clarke, p. 90, suggested, for new immigrants, due to her own marginalization). 45. Robin Blaetz, “Joan of Arc and the Cinema,” in Dominique Goy-Blanquet, ed., Joan of Arc, A Saint for All Seasons: Studies in Myth and Politics (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), p. 144. See also Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood, Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc (New York: Garland, 1996); Nadia Margolis, Joan of Arc in History, Literature, and Film (New York: Garland, 1990); Robin Blaetz, Visions of the Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003); and Kevin J. Harty, ed., Medieval Women on Film: Essays on Gender, Cinema and History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2020).

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46. Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture Through 1925 (New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1986), p. 778. 47. Ed Hulse, Distressed Damsels and Masked Marauders: Cliffhanger Serials of the Silent Movie Era (Morris Plains, NJ: Murania Press, 2014), pp. 120–21. 48. Hillary Rettig, “They Made Movies in Ithaca,” Grapevine Weekly Magazine, September 6–12, 1984, p. 13.

Chapter 8

Suffragists

Perhaps no aspect of New Womanhood stirred more controversy than suffragism, and no figure became more immediately associated with change than the suffragist (a term used interchangeably with suffragette, especially in early film titles).1 In the South, for example, she was thought to constitute “a direct threat not only to patriarchal but racial hierarchies, to the entire social order that was mystified and justified by Lost Cause fictions.” As Sarah Churchwell explains, the great fear was that, by undermining the enduring patriarchal order of plantation politics, the enfranchised woman would plunge the South back into racial chaos; and even the Atlanta Constitution (July 25, 1919), in an image that “summoned the triple threat of abolition, feminism, and miscegenation,” denounced her efforts to secure the vote as a “socialist platform.”2 In fact, the suffragist was a threat—to corruption in politics, inadequate and dangerous tenement housing, sweat shop labor conditions, poverty, alcoholism, and disease. Typically independent, well-educated, and middle-class, she was a modern reformer who believed in “Deeds Not Words” and who assumed a leading role in a range of social and political movements.3 Yet the backlash against her activism was so powerful that she became the object of much derision, mockery, and satire, all of which portrayed her as a radical Other. The early decades of the twentieth century were a pivotal period for both the suffrage movement and for the budding film industry. As Kay Sloan observed, by 1907, eleven years had passed since any state had granted its female citizens suffrage, and the movement seemed to be losing momentum; so suffragists were anxious to find new ways to garner support and attract the attention of the working-class. Movie cameras, which offered both national visibility and the chance to entertain and educate the public, promised to provide the means for the publicity that the suffragists were seeking.4 Although resourceful independent film heroines were not entirely new—in early shorts such as Women of the West (Yankee, 1910), for example, the titular women 257

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were ready to “sacrifice their lives to eventually benefit all mankind”5—suffragists realized that cinema with explicit suffrage themes could afford a unique forum for the exploration and discussion of enfranchisement issues. As Shelley Stamp noted, suffrage films were in many ways allied to the popular serial motion pictures of the day and performed a similar function, only “in a much more tangible, and undoubtedly more threatening, arena: politics.” Just as serial fans were encouraged to follow the lives of celebrated serial queens like Pearl White and Irene Castle and to collect movie star paraphernalia, “pointed suffrage dramas invited audiences to carry lessons from the screen into the practice of their daily lives.”6 Recognizing the ease with which some of the early serial productions such as The Adventures of Kathlyn had captivated female audiences across the nation and galvanized their energies around a prolific fan culture, suffrage leaders hoped that a similar formidable constituency could also be mobilized for the right-to-vote fight, especially since the daring serial heroines “embod[ied] feminist ideals that might be grafted onto the era’s most pressing cause.”7 The earliest known suffrage film was Lady Barber (1898; dir. George Albert Smith), a primitive short that caricatured a woman suffragist who commandeered a barber shop and, “with the zeal of a latter-day Delilah,”8 began snipping the hair of bewildered men. It coincided with the beginning of a crusade against suffrage that was soon joined by politicians, journalists, and preachers, all of whom saw in the movement the death of femininity and the dissolution of the home and family. What followed was a cinematic representation from the late 1900s to the mid-1910s of those activists fighting for women’s suffrage as emasculating figures of mockery or horror.9 Their zeal for enfranchisement was sometimes conflated with other controversial reformist efforts, as in Why Mr. Nation Wants A Divorce (1901). According to the Edison Catalog, in that early picture, Mr. Nation, husband of the “Kansas Saloon Smasher” Carrie Nation, feeling overwhelmed by responsibility for their crying infant and other children, reaches for some whiskey for comfort, only to have his wife return home, break the bottle, and turn him over her knee to spank him.10 SUFFRAGE DOCUMENTARIES It was the early documentary footage that visually introduced the suffrage movement to a wide audience. Initially at least, until suffragists learned to harness its power for their own benefit, that footage failed to highlight the reforms that they supported but instead sensationalized the cause and exaggerated the militance of its adherents. Suffragettes Again (Pathé, 1913), for instance, featured firemen putting out a blaze ostensibly set by British

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suffragists—the fire representing the fury that suffragettes unleashed in their repeated attempts to strike out at a society that had disenfranchised them.11 Suffragettes (1913), another Pathé newsreel, wove together footage of various British and American activists as they marched, spoke, and got arrested. Most interesting, though, was the way it briefly cut away from the parading suffragists to young women in bathing suits competing in a beauty contest, as if to suggest that the latter pursuit—that is, the celebration of traditional female “virtues”—was women’s proper role.12 The parades and marches were notable for another reason as well. As Shelley Stamp observed, they symbolized the freedoms that women did not enjoy during these years. So “by insisting upon women’s right to participate in communal activities, these spectacles signified suffragists’ efforts to redefine women’s cultural interactions” and reappropriate female spectacle on feminist terms.13 The most sensational of the early documentaries was surely the Gaumont Film Company’s footage of the British Derby in 1913, during which Emily W. Davidson rushed on to the track just as the horse belonging to King George V approached; and, in a suicidal protest against women’s inequality, she tried to grab the horse’s reins. After being trampled—footage that the cameras captured and preserved—she was taken to the hospital, where she died four days later. Davidson’s protest was so disturbing yet so fascinating to moviegoers that Gaumont sent a crew to cover her funeral. The scores of suffrage-themed shorts that followed reflected both the immense cultural visibility and mass societal ambivalence about the politics of the right-to-vote movement. As Maggie Hennefeld has demonstrated, comedy became “the primary mode for depicting the vicissitudes of female activism and women’s civic-sphere participation.”14 The early comedies, which took an especially negative or mocking view of the movement, were nearly unanimous in their portrayal of suffragists as masculine, aggressive, and shrewish harridans who unloosed on their communities a tidal wave of irrational forces that threatened to revolutionize, damage, or destroy the traditional family and leave democracy in shambles.15 But the attempts to transgress social and gender barriers fail; and the women, humbled, humiliated, and ready to relinquish civic or political power, admit that their rightful place is, after all, in the home—a recognition that often coincides with a remasculinization of their husbands. In A Day in the Life of a Suffragette (Pathé, 1908), for example, a crowd of women begins making speeches, gets increasingly excited, and marches into the streets holding banners and singing revolutionary songs. They mow down the policemen in their path and, as their number expands, so does their mischief. Finally the militia is called out, and following a comic struggle, the women are hauled off to jail. The next morning, after their husbands bail them out, they return “meekly” to their domestic duties.16 In The Reformation of the Suffragettes (Gaumont, 1911), a group

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of women, angry at their husbands’ frequent fishing excursions, decide to ostracize them. But realizing they cannot live without the “tyrant” men after all, they rejoice in their return. And in A Militant Suffragette (Thanhouser, 1912), a young woman is so roused by the revolutionary fervor prevalent in England that she pledges herself to “annoy, harass and intimidate tyrant men, until we are permitted to vote.” Her rampage, which includes several episodes of window-breaking, leads to her arrest. After her ex-fiancé comes to her rescue at the jail, they are reconciled; so her militance ends in marriage and a honeymoon.17 Similarly, in Oh! You Suffragette! (American Films, 1911), the female head of the house becomes “inoculated” with the suffrage “germ” and believes that her mission in life lies outside of the family circle. But that mission proves short-lived: after being called upon to preside at an important rally, she and her fellow suffragists are scared off by a cage full of mice that has been released in order to break up their gathering. According to Moving Picture World, “Our wife runs home to the bosom of her despised family for man’s protection from the onslaught of a poor little mouse, her ideas and ideals in the air.”18 Her retreat affords her henpecked husband not just the satisfaction of her failure but also an “opportunity to reorganize his household.” (Rodents, apparently, were a familiar and effective device for restoring gender order: in The Suffragette’s Downfall; or, Who Said Rats [1911], another browbeaten husband takes action to resegregate what had been his haven of a stag golf course by unleashing a cage of rats on his terrorized wife and her allies.19 And in The Revolt of Mr. Wiggs [Vitagraph, 1915], the husband releases a bag of rats at the podium where his suffragette wife is speaking—only moments, in fact, after she proclaims that women should vote because they are “afraid of nothing,” the rats notwithstanding.)20 In these and so many other comedy shorts, once the balance of political or domestic power shifts from the women, who are laughably ill-equipped for the challenges, and returns to the men, the social order is quickly restored and family harmony is reestablished. Picture after picture both lampooned the women’s ambitions and ridiculed their methods of persuasion, which usually involved extreme and outlandish measures. In When Roaring Gulch Got Suffrage (1913), for example, after women narrowly win the vote, they immediately “relegate [the men] to the kitchen and the ironing board.” In When Ciderville Went Dry (1915), one of a number of films in which women attempt to gain control by assuming a policing role, the suffragists barrel into town, implement their new rule with “a force of ‘lady cops,’” and proceed to “put the reverse on the wellknown masculine thirst.”21 Even in films where the men exhibit a certain sympathy for the cause, the women are nonetheless depicted as pushing too hard, too far, and too fast. In Bringing Up Hubby (1914), a girl, at her mother’s instigation, uses womanly wiles to cajole her fiancé into supporting

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her irresponsible spending yet forces him to forego the enjoyment of a cigar because of the cost. Ultimately, he “recovers” his senses, reforms the wife, and regains control of his own bank account. Similarly, in Calino Marries A Suffragette (Gaumont, 1912), the title character endures “a domestic reign of terror” but “finally turns like the proverbial worm, and shows that it is man’s place in the universe to wear trousers, and in the last scenes he has friend’s wife eating out of his hand and giving the paw.”22 Whether in the comedies or in the melodramas that followed, the women’s attempts to assume more authority by swapping traditional roles rarely ended well. She Would Be a Business Man (Centaur, 1910) focused on what happens when a husband and wife reverse their respective business and housekeeping jobs. After the wife has problems with her new occupation, she returns, humiliated and repentant, acknowledging her mistake. The Moving Picture World reviewer likely spoke for many of those who opposed the movement when he wrote, “Perhaps this picture, intended as a bit of fun, will be the means of restoring to sanity some who are now dissatisfied with their lot in life.”23 When Women Win (Lubin, 1910) likewise speculated on the ways that women would attempt to circumvent gendered challenges to the political sphere; and it anticipated what they would do when they won the vote: change mail delivery, turn business meetings into tea parties, even pace the floor of hospitals where their husbands were delivering babies.24 And in Down with the Men (Lubin, 1912), the militant suffragist Mabel Mordant goes so far as to secure a detective’s badge and have a uniform tailored, just so she can dominate the men who will not let her associates hold their meetings in peace. In the end, though, one of the “tormentors” proposes and persuades Mabel that marriage “is a much better game than trying to be a man.” She is won over, presumably confirming “that when some women are put to the test they will go back to first principles—i.e., to the men.”25 First principles come into play again in When Helen Was Elected (Selig, 1912). The titular Helen is happily married to her husband Beacher, the Progressive Party’s nominee for mayor. Helen’s Aunt Frances, a “violent advocate of women’s rights,” however, tries to shake Helen out of her domestic complacency and convinces her to run on the women’s ticket. Since Helen knows nothing about, and cares little for, politics, she gets pushed by her campaign advisors into numerous ridiculous predicaments; yet somehow, when the ballots are counted, she emerges as the winner of the election. As if to prove that politics is still male terrain, one contemporary reviewer reported: “This is the last straw for the worn out little woman and she rushes home in an attempt to thrust the office off on her husband,” a dilemma that is resolved when it is discovered that Helen is not yet of legal age to serve.26 The Suffragette’s Dream (Pathé, 1909) imagined a reversal both of roles and of circumstances. When a strong advocate of women’s rights falls

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asleep, she finds herself in a society in which the tables are turned: women, “as masculine as men,” dress and act exactly in male fashion, while the men assume traditionally feminine roles, serving as nursemaids to babies and even crocheting on park benches.“Suddenly the scene changes and the dreamer awakens from her beautiful dream to find that her husband has just come in; the latter is so enraged because the dinner is not ready that he gives his frightened wife a sound beating.”27 The wife’s punishment for her desire for suffrage is translated into literal violence against her. It is a violence that the film seems to legitimate and that likely was intended to serve as a warning to other women who defy their traditional domestic roles. Even an old maid who is elected president of the Women’s Temperance Organization is punished—in this case, by her milkman, who spikes her milk with alcohol, so that she appears at a temperance rally in a state of intoxication. “This will cause shocks and smiles, depending upon the personal views of the observer,” noted Moving Picture World in its review of The Milkman’s Revenge (Thanhouser, 1913), which suggested that the picture could be viewed as a critique of suffragism as a whole.28 Looking Forward (Thanhouser, 1910), adapted from a short story by James Oliver Curwood, offered a more imaginative, and less violent, slant on gender role reversal. In the picture, Jack Goodwin, a young chemist discovers a compound that puts a person into a state of sleep for a determined period of time, and he decides to test it by placing himself in a kind of suspended animation for one hundred years. When he awakens in 2010, he discovers that the world is ruled by women, among whom is a woman mayor who takes a liking to him. After joining a society organized by the mayor’s father to advocate for men’s rights, he and the other members are jailed and brought before the mayor, who proposes marriage to Jack. He accepts, but only on the condition that she consents to restore men’s rights and liberties. After signing a decree to that effect, she tries to take Jack down the aisle. But he assumes the lead. Removing the bridal veil from his head and transferring it to hers, he reasserts his male role and prerogative. As Eric Dewberry has noted, despite Jack’s initial lack of power in the new era in which he has awakened, he manages to win the heart of a powerful woman and easily restore the rights of men. The film thus “mocks many female suffrage ‘fighting tactics,’ as suffragists, in an attempt to not appear too extremist and alienable, exploited conservative ideas of feminine virtue in order to assert their citizenship and reform desires.” It also alludes to the fears that many men harbored concerning the loss of power over females in public spaces, a threat to masculinity and manhood.29 The depiction of suffragists as unattractive “mannish” women gave rise to a new type of satiric picture, with cross-dressing as a prominent motif intended to underscore the gender dysphoria of the movement’s adherents.30 One of

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the most popular of these films was A Busy Day (Keystone, 1914; dir. Mack Sennett), originally titled The Militant Suffragist, a comedy in which the “woman” (played by Charlie Chaplin in his first drag role) is jealous over her husband’s flirting with another woman at a parade. As she follows the pair, she manages to disrupt everything around her, from the marchers to the photographers who are shooting the event; and ultimately, for her reckless and hot-headed behavior, she is pushed off a pier into the water so she can literally and figuratively cool off. “The final bubbles rising from the water’s surface,” Kay Sloan writes, “seemed to promise the last gasps of the votes for the women movement.”31 Chaplin’s depiction of the woman as jealous, belligerent, and unattractive not only reinforced the negative stereotypes of suffragists but also justified the violence committed against her by the police and by her husband as retribution for the aggressiveness she demonstrates.32 Wearing heavy mannish boots under her petticoats (which she flashes for the photographers and repeatedly displays as she kicks at the officers) and voluminous skirts (into which she blows her nose), Chaplin’s suffragist serves as the embodiment of the supposedly eroded femininity of militant activists and brings to life “the grotesque spectacle of androgyny” so often associated with feminism in the popular culture.33 In Mrs. Pinkhurst’s Proxy (Thanhouser, 1914), a male impostor assumes the suffragist role, leaving “her” admiring supporters none the wiser for the deception. After a women’s society in a little Western town decides to show how powerful it is, the members engage famous foreign reformer “Mrs. Pinkhurst” to deliver a lecture for $500 in their town hall. But when she sends word that she will be unable to fulfill the engagement, a careless messenger boy loses the telegram. It is found by a tramp, who had read about Pinkhurst in the papers. Hoping to collect the $500 fee, he substitutes himself for the reformer, secures the necessary disguise, and makes a very impressive speech.34 Totally intoxicated by what they perceive to be their own triumph, the foolish and gullible women seem unable to distinguish the impostor’s improvised nonsense from the actual party rhetoric.35 THE CRUSADING MOTHER STEREOTYPE Among the most common recurring stereotypes was the crusading suffragist mother whose extreme political views and manipulations wreak havoc on her family, cause alarm to her husband, and bring distress to her neglected children. A Cure for Suffragettes (Biograph, 1913; dir. Edward Dillon), written by Anita Loos, starred Dorothy Gish as one of the suffragists. Because Caroline Spankhurst (another thinly veiled version of famed British suffragist

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Fig. 8.1.  A Busy Day (1914), originally titled The Militant Suffragette, featured a woman (played by Charlie Chaplin in drag) who disrupts a parade and causes chaos with her antics. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Emmeline Pankhurst) and her suffrage brigade determine to stop at nothing in their dauntless enthusiasm and political fervor, they forget about their sleeping babies. An officer notices the deserted children and brings them to the station, where kindly policemen abandon their usual municipal duties (causing further chaos) in order to tend to them until their radicalized mothers return. The final title card, which reads “but even a suffragette can be a mother,” clouds what seems to be the film’s message.36 Loos, despite the fact that she herself was a reliable but notorious Hollywood scenarist, screenwriter, novelist, and playwright whose work often focused on sexual themes, was not a feminist. As Jason Barrett-Fox observed and as her film confirmed, Loos “saw her feminist contemporaries as self-important, turning to politics as a response to personal or sexual frustration,”37 a sentiment echoed in the film’s ambiguous ending. In several films, a single-minded and self-absorbed suffragist mother, either deliberately or inadvertently, nearly destroys her daughter’s happiness. In the short comedy Courting Across the Court (Thanhouser 1911), which was built around an actual New York City suffrage parade, a famed lawyer and devoted reformer presses her daughter to follow in her footsteps. Yet even as the daughter studies her “dry” law books, she has other plans: she wants

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to marry Jack, her wealthy suitor, a young man whom the mother regards as idle. To his credit, the young man is persistent in his affections; he even rents a suite across the court from the mother’s offices, just so he can “exchange loving glances with his sweetheart.” When the mother is invited to join a suffrage parade, she insists that her daughter attend. Although the girl dutifully begins the march, she soon slips away in order to cheer on her suitor, who is running in a marathon. Afterward, at the law offices, as the mother is celebrating victory with her suffragist friends, she glances across the court and is surprised to see her daughter and the suitor standing before a minister. And so, “in this particular family there is only one female lawyer, and that one the mother. Her daughter never graduated,” but despite her mother’s meddling, “became a happy and contented wife.”38 How They Got the Vote (Edison, 1913) used a clever and unusual plot to make its point. A society leader and suffragist is aggressive in her attempts to persuade England’s most prominent political figure to advocate her cause— so aggressive that she flashes him while wearing a “Vote for Women” sash; but he rebuffs her efforts. Returning to her home, she discovers a young man who is romancing her daughter and sends him away because he is not inclined to support suffrage. Distraught, the young man encounters a magician, who gives him two statuettes—one called “Progress,” which sets things in motion, another called “Sleep,” which produces inaction—and indicates how they could be used to his advantage. With the statuettes in hand, the fellow goes to London Bridge, where he makes all the traffic stop and causes everyone to fall asleep. He does the same at the crowded thoroughfares at Piccadilly Circus, and then at the banks. With the city in an uproar, he agrees to reverse the situation, but with one condition: the politician must accept suffrage and wear its banner. The politician has no choice but to agree, so the young man holds up the “Progress” statuette. As the city comes back to life, the suffragist mother wins the vote, and he gets the girl. Notably, however, it is not the mother’s campaigning but rather the young man’s efforts (including some supernatural help) that secure enfranchisement, suggesting that even the most zealous crusading women cannot achieve their goals on their own and are reliant on men for the exercise of their privileges.39 Another obtrusive mother figures prominently in A Modern Lochinvar (Thanhouser, 1913). Bashful Percy Lochinvar loves a girl whose mother, an ardent suffragist, considers him to be too mild-mannered; she favors a different young man, who has professed his loyalty to the cause of votes-for-women and who is set to speak at a suffrage parade. When Percy attends the parade and sees the girl riding in a car with his rival, he returns home in despair. There, he glances at a portrait of his ancestor, a bold Scotsman who won his sweetheart despite all opposition, and he decides that what one Lochinvar had done, another Lochinvar would do as well. Determined “to make history

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repeat itself,” he arrives at the grandstand, where his rival is “surrounded by his own eloquence.” The mother, having set her sights on the rival as her sonin-law, listens to his speech with such admiration that she does not realize that Lochinvar had “just stepped out and got[ten] married” to her daughter.40 And in Suffrage and the Man (1912), the main character becomes the victim of yet another manipulative mother. Disgruntled to learn that his betrothed is leaning toward the suffrage cause, Herbert breaks their engagement and seeks to mend his broken heart at a summer resort, where he is tricked by a designing mother into committing to marry her daughter. After he discovers the pair’s duplicity and withdraws his offer, the women bring a suit against him for breach of promise. In the meantime, the vote has been won; women have been afforded new civic responsibilities; and he learns that his old sweetheart is the foreperson of the jury that is hearing his case. With her help, he is acquitted. Accepting the suffrage cause, Herbert is reconciled to his former lover, and the two are married.41 RACIAL STEREOTYPES IN SUFFRAGE FILMS Some films not only ridiculed the suffragists but also resurrected ugly racial stereotypes. In Coon Town Suffragettes (Lubin, 1914), after attending a white suffrage meeting where the speaker admonishes her for foolishly assuming all the work while her husband loafs, Mandy Jackson starts her own Black suffrage party. With Mandy as their leader, the women raid the saloons and clear the place of all idlers. “Each suffragette gets her husband,” the Lubin Bulletin reports, “and marches him out. The coon police are summoned, but they, too, are soon subdued.” The husbands are then put to work, and Mandy’s militants proudly claim their first victory.42 Suffrage and the Man, endorsed by the Women’s Political Union, also had an unfortunate racist sub-theme. Responding to his daughter’s suffrage-opposing fiancé, the heroine’s father explains his sympathies by saying “My butler and my bootblack may vote—why not my wife and daughter?” The suggestion that women should vote because “even” butlers and bootblacks exercise that right reveals “the class nature of the movement” and the discrimination against African Americans.43 Similarly, a later film, Eighty Million Women Want—? (alternatively titled What Eighty Million Women Want), also produced by the Women’s Political Union, includes as part of a corrupt political clique a cigar-puffing Black henchman, who is outlandishly outfitted in top hat, tails, and cane. The implication, Kay Sloan writes, is clear: “a black man held political power while white women were denied the vote.”44 By questioning why society would entrust the vote to Black men but not to women, the activists in effect created the very kind of social

Fig. 8.2.  A program for Coon Town Suffragettes (1914) showing Mandy Jackson (played by Mattie Edwards) addressing her newly-formed suffragist brigade. Courtesy of the Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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inequalities they had pledged to eliminate.45 That racial bias was also evident in the early suffragists’ attitudes toward Black women, whom they largely excluded from their right-to-vote movement.46 The Indian Suffragettes (Kalem, 1914) centered on Dishwater, played by Princess Mona Darkfeather, a white woman whom studios promoted as an actual Native American, thus exacerbating the insult. A member of the “Oompah” tribe, Dishwater returns from the government school as a militant suffragist. Immediately, she begins beating the braves into submission with her umbrella and organizing the “squaws” in a demand for equal rights. Of course, trouble ensues. When the Indian women reverse roles and go out hunting, they encounter a war party from a neighboring tribe. The husbands come to the rescue, but only after extracting promises that their wives will return to their roles as “second fiddle[s].” As Maggie Hennefield writes, the film’s racist tropes of noble savagery authenticate its sexist division of labor; and only “Oompah masculinity saves modern society from its inevitable crises of gender roles” when women acquire political power.47 SUFFRAGE FILMS BY SUFFRAGISTS The issue of women’s enfranchisement through suffrage posed a significant challenge to the traditional and dominant organization of society, which, as Shelley Stamp noted, aligned men with political conduct and the public arena but relegated women to the private (and ostensibly non-political) realm of the home.48 Since suffrage demanded a reimagining of women in the public sphere, cinema, with its figuration of imaginary space on screen, afforded a key way to redefine the social landscape. Suffragists and their supporters understood that, as an essential instrument of visual spectacle, movies offered them a singular opportunity not only to rebut the pejorative representations and make Americans more sympathetic but also to recruit women to the cause. Their own efforts at film production began with newsreels, which they hoped would serve as counter-programming to the sensationalized images in journals, newspapers, and popular culture of suffragists as aggressive or violent militants. Footage of the 1912 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City provided the first honest representation of the movement by depicting suffragists as strong, dignified, well-organized women with a common purpose who were advocating for a worthy social goal. And it helped “to transform the perceived threat of women’s political power into a visual spectacle of moral heroism and beauty.”49 That parade footage was incorporated into numerous later films such as the NAWSA-sponsored Votes for Women (Reliance, 1912; dir. Hal Reid), in which suffrage workers attempt but fail to win the vote of

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U.S. Senator Charles Herman. In that film, which historian Kevin Brownlow called the first important suffrage film,50 one of those workers, the ardent May Fillmore, discovers that the late father of a tenement-dwelling family had tried but failed to get Herman, the owner of the building, to improve living conditions. So May takes action. First, she approaches the Senator’s fiancée Jane Wadsworth and secures her help. Then, together, the two visit the bereaved and orphaned family, which includes three young girls and a baby, and are shocked by the extent of their misery. One daughter, Elsie, does sweat-shop embroidery work at home, where she also minds the youngest; another, Hester, works as a shopgirl in a department store owned by Jane’s father, where she experiences ongoing harassment; the third helps out with piece-work. The horror of their plight registers with Jane, who pleads with Herman to intervene. When he refuses, Jane takes up the suffrage cause and determines to bring both him and her father to task. The situation becomes especially urgent after she contracts scarlet fever from her wedding dress, which came from Wadsworth’s store and was embroidered in Herman’s tenement. (That grim detail about contamination due to sweatshop labor recurs in a later film, Your Girl and Mine, which was also produced in collaboration with suffragist groups.) Although Herman and Wadsworth subsequently join the cause, as Shelley Stamp writes, it is only because “the ‘contagion’ of the working classes infects one of their own.:51 Nonetheless, they are later seen at a suffrage parade that featured a number of prominent suffragists, including Anna Shaw, Jane Addams, and Inez Mulholland. A reviewer for the Los Angeles Graphic noted approvingly that suffragists “have broken into the moving picture field,” and “average citizens cannot now long remain in ignorance of the meaning of the movement.”52 For years, activists had been promoting their cause through various means such as parlor dramas, pro-suffrage plays,53 lantern and slide-and-lecture shows, and public events such as “trolley tours” through small towns. The new medium of film, however, afforded a larger reach and impact, so even some of the suffragist leaders who originally condemned or resisted the movies soon changed their thinking. They recognized that feature filmmaking, in particular, was a proactive tactic that would allow them to put a human face on suffragists who had typically been caricatured as mannish militants in film comedies or “reduced to undifferentiated masses in media coverage of rallies.”54 And they began pursuing their own film initiatives, especially through scripts that allowed the crafting of energetic, likeable, and sympathetic heroines. Such depictions, they knew, could also provide dramatic roadmaps for future action off-screen.55 As a spokeswoman for NAWSA observed, motion pictures were an innovative medium by which to draw a wider audience, advance the suffrage platform, and “originate a means of really reaching the

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public.” Photoplays “would appeal to every man and woman, regardless of whether they knew anything about the suffrage movement or cared anything about it.”56 Activists also understood that making personal appearances to introduce the pictures and to answer questions afterward could boost the films they produced—an exhibition practice similar to that employed by such early race film producers as Eloyce and James Gist, who not only screened their morality pictures but also performed, lectured, and sermonized to their audiences. And, as Amy Shore demonstrated, since both suffrage and cinema were undergoing transformations from local to national entities, both were “in need of powerful, well-known figures capable of bridging that divide . . . national stars [like Jane Addams and Anna Howard Shaw] capable of bringing heterogenous audiences together through their images into communities of supporters for the suffrage movement and moviegoers for cinema.”57 YOUR GIRL AND MINE One of the most influential early suffrage feature films was Your Girl and Mine: A Woman Suffrage Play (1914), sponsored by the National American Woman Suffrage Association and Mrs. Ruth Hanna McCormick, NAWSA Campaign Committee Chairwoman and wife of former U.S. Senator and Chicago Tribune publisher Medill McCormick. It was produced by William Selig and directed by Giles R. Warren, with a script written by Gilson Willets, a journalist, author, and screenwriter of popular serial motion pictures such as The Adventures of Kathlyn. Shot at the Selig Studios in Chicago, Your Girl and Mine was touted as a “photo-play that would accomplish as much for their [suffrage] cause as the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the anti-slavery movement.” As Mrs. McCormick explained, using Stowe’s famous work as their guide, the “authors have been careful to avoid anything that might look like ‘just preaching.’” Instead, they based their plot “on conditions actually existing in many of the States where women have not yet won the right to vote.”58 Despite all the hype, however, the film was hardly radical: in its attempts to attract newcomers to the cause, it struck a compromise between new calls for women’s rights and conventional conceptions of femininity, the dual aspects alluded to in the title “your girl” and “mine.”59 In the film, Rosalind Fairlie is living in the mansion that she inherited from her wealthy father. Her Aunt Jane, an “ardent equal suffragist,” tries to interest her in the cause, but to no avail. Believing that a woman’s place is in the home, Rosalind chooses a more traditional path and marries Ben Austin, who seems to be a gentleman. But he turns out to be a “prodigal, spendthrift and

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libertine” who forces her to cover his massive debts. After all, as he tells her, “It is the law,” against which she has no protection. Living in a city tenement is Cordelia Price, a poor working girl and the mother of the child whom Austin has tried to keep secret from his wife. When he attempts to pay Cordelia off, she refuses the money, telling him that it is not his to spend. A “radiant” vision of “Suffrage” and “Justice” (images created through the use of double exposure) soon appears to both Cordelia and Rosalind, advising them that further troubles await but could be avoided if they work for the vote. The two women, though, refuse to heed the warning. In due course, the vision’s admonition comes true. Rosalind, now the mother of two children, continues to be liable for the money that Austin squanders on himself and his worthless friends. Cordelia suffers an even greater tragedy: she loses her son, who dies in a fire in their tenement home. Afterward, her troubles multiply: close to starvation, she visits a cheap restaurant, where a “brute” buys her a meal and then tries to take liberties with her. When she resists, the management calls the police, who not only fail to make the brute accountable but, on the basis of his false testimony, arrest Cordelia for robbery. Thankfully, Aunt Jane intercedes. Arriving in time to denounce the injustice of the court proceedings, she saves Cordelia from a prison sentence and finds her a job at a canning factory owned by one of Austin’s friends. Things are not much better in the Austin house, where Rosalind, sick of her husband’s drinking and debauchery, takes her two daughters and flees to Jane’s home. Austin, however, secures a court order compelling her to return the children. He also discovers Cordelia’s presence in his friend’s factory and orchestrates her discharge. In the struggle that ensues, Cordelia stabs Austin with a pair of shears, inflicting on him a fatal wound. Once again, she is arrested; and she dies in the prison hospital. On his deathbed, the malicious Austin learns that he has inherited great wealth from his grandfather. Instead of bequeathing it to Rosalind as restitution for his years of profligacy, he leaves it to his father, into whose custody he has entrusted his two daughters, as is his legal right. Although the daughters are treated brutally, Rosalind, now virtually penniless, is powerless to protect them, even after the older daughter Beatrice contracts scarlet fever from wearing clothes made in an unsanitary tenement and the younger daughter Helen is sent to work in a factory. With Aunt Jane’s assistance, both girls are rescued and returned to Rosalind, who is advised to take them and run away. Before reaching the state line, though, she is stopped and arrested for abduction. Thanks to her aptly-named suffragette lawyer Belle Justly, who argues her case, Rosalind is acquitted and her children are finally restored to her custody. Only then does she fully understand the law’s injustice to women, and she enthusiastically takes up

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the cause. Under her leadership, the women of her state secure the right to vote; and she herself finds love and happiness with the Lieutenant-Governor, who is a suffrage supporter. The closing scenes, according to one review, “show the jubilation which follows victory for the suffrage bill and some of the many changes for the better which results [sic] from women having the vote.”60 In addition to actresses Katharine Kaelred, Olive Wyndham, and Grace Darmond, the film featured appearances by actual suffragists such as Dr. Anna Shaw, president of NAWSA, who at one point is shown addressing the gathered crowd of supporters.61 According to Mary Mallory, creative advertising and promotions helped to spread the picture’s message even more widely. In addition to posters and lobby cards, “there were some streetcar displays in black, white, and yellow, the color of the suffrage movement, with a map of suffrage states printed on it, pointing out states that still had failed to pass these laws.” Some theaters decorated their lobbies in yellow, along with pennants printed with the words, “Votes for Women.”62 Premiering at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre on October 14, 1914, to a packed house of the city’s leading activists and society leaders, Your Girl and Mine received glowing reviews for the “broad, vigorous handling” of important issues such as the question of child labor and the overworking of women in sweat shops and factories and for “awakening sympathy without

Fig. 8.3.  Your Girl and Mine (1914) not only delivered a powerful message in support of enfranchisement; it also featured appearances by actual prominent suffragist leaders. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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descending to maudlin sentimentality.”63 The film would continue to be screened at suffrage events and in local theaters, where it generated similar praise. As the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, such serious treatments were vital and long overdue: “When suffrage was taken from the funny papers and given place in the news columns of the dailies, the women who are working for the ballot felt that much had been accomplished.” Since movies have taken up the cause, “women know they are in sight of their goal and have stopped asking ‘Will you let us vote,’ and are saying ‘How are you going to let us vote.’”64 Not all the response, however, was positive. The New York Dramatic Mirror’s critic, for instance, faulted the film’s “naked subject” as well as the indecent and exhibitionist female audience members at the premiere. He singled out their “daring, dazzling arms” and observed that only the orchestra “held [back] the army.”65As Shelley Stamp writes, such accounts merely reinforced the industry’s anxiety about films that appealed primarily or exclusively to women and revealed “the disparity between exhibitors’ aims and those of the activists” who were striving to inspire a politicized female constituency.66 Even some women’s groups spoke out against Your Girl and Mine. The Remonstrance Against Woman’s Suffrage in Boston, for example, described the film in its July, 1915 issue as propaganda of the worst kind and “a lurid melodrama in which every man (save one) is a villain and every woman and child at his mercy.”67 Yet most agreed with The Daily Missoulian which, on October 9, 1914, proclaimed, “Hurrah for the suffragists! This is the prime way to drive home a great truth.”68 OTHER SUFFRAGE FILMS The various social issues for which suffragists advocated were taken up in later films as well, including The Woman in Politics (1916), Thanhouser’s last suffrage-themed film. Dr. Beatrice Barlow, a recent appointment to the city’s health board, is advised by Joel Stevens, an old political war-horse, to loaf on the job and simply enjoy herself. But taking her duties seriously, Beatrice prepares a report that recommends drastic and expensive changes to a tenement house that is owned by Mayor Glynn. That report leads to her discharge from the position. Although she struggles to make known what she has uncovered, she is impeded by the fact that Glynn also owns the local newspaper and controls the coverage. Nonetheless, she decides to appeal to the governor, who has the power to remove incompetent mayors from office. When Glynn learns that she has filed charges against him, he panics because he knows she has “the goods.” So he determines to “get her in bad somehow.” After several unsuccessful attempts to compromise Beatrice and ruin her

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reputation, the mayor and his dupes abduct and imprison her. Yet, thanks to the efforts of a stranger (who turns out to be the governor’s private secretary), Beatrice is rescued in time to appear in court and testify against Glynn, who, along with his accomplices, is found guilty of graft and other crimes and sent to the penitentiary.69 Suffragists not only inspired or appeared in early suffrage films; sometimes they also wrote them. The First Woman Jury in America (Vitagraph, 1912), by Alma Webster Hall Powell, told the story of a corrupt young California newspaper editor who is arrested. Given the option of a male or female jury, he chooses the latter, believing that he will receive a more sympathetic treatment. And he is right. Among those selected to serve are Priscilla Simpkins, a spinster, and Matilda Jones, a suffragist, both of whom vie for his attentions. After the deliberations determine his innocence, Priscilla and Matilda compete to be the forewoman who delivers the verdict. The sheriff is able to settle their dispute and leads them back into the courtroom, where the editor falls into Matilda’s arms. The jury is dismissed, and the man, because of his flirtatious behavior, is once again free.70 While the message was hardly progressive, the film is notable for illustrating one of the privileges that women were seeking: parity in the civic arena.71 And in the similarly-themed Suffrage and the Man (Éclair, 1912; made with oversight of the Women’s Political Union), a man is sued for breach of promise by a jealous woman but exonerated by a jury led by his former sweetheart, a suffragist, who has since won the vote and, with it, the right to serve as a juror. The experience leads him to admit the merits of female liberation and helps him to win back his former love.72 Not only does the film imagine a world in which women enjoy full citizenship; it also confirms that men can benefit from their enfranchisement. EIGHTY MILLION WOMEN WANT—? Perhaps the best known of all the suffrage films was Eighty Million Women Want—? (1913; dir. Will Louis), a picture with a moral, though not always a clear or consistent one. Based on the book What Eighty Million Women Want by the activist journalist Rheta Childe Dorr, with a screenplay by suffragist Florence Maule Cooley and screenwriter B. P. (Budd) Schulberg, the dual story of romance and reform of political corruption was produced by the Unique Film Company in partnership with the Women’s Political Union. While it featured cameos by prominent suffragists, including Emmeline Pankhurst and Harriot Stanton Blatch, its message was arguably undercut by a title card at the end of the film, which asserted that the marriage license is actually “the most popular ballot for suffragette, maid or ‘mere man.’”

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The plot focuses on struggling young lawyer Robert Travers, who is involved with corrupt district leader Boss Kelly. After Travers tries to break ties, he finds himself falsely accused of Kelly’s murder. Since most of the town’s politicians are as dirty as Kelly was, it falls to Mabel West, Travers’ plucky fiancée, to find a way to exonerate him and clear his name. At the behest of the New York Women’s Political Union, whose leadership Kelly infuriated by denouncing suffragism to the press, Mabel manages to infiltrate the Boss’s racket. Using an attractive activist to pose as a secretary in his office, Mabel is able to undermine Kelly’s organization, expose and prevent their electoral fraud, prove Travers’ innocence, and promote the passage of an amendment to the state constitution giving women the vote. In short, she resolves all the threads of the plot: love story, suffrage argument, and machine politics.73 A very modern heroine, Mabel is fearless, cunning, committed to both the suffrage cause and to her fiancé, yet unwilling to sacrifice the former for the latter. In fact, she seems tailored to appeal to female audiences within a film that itself frames its platform in melodramatic terms and engages generic tropes familiar to and popular with women.74 Yet, while Mabel’s social perspective is progressive, her view of gender roles is rather traditional. Thus she is able to combine political activity with romance and family interests and demonstrate that suffrage is indeed compatible with romantic love and harmonious relations between the sexes.75 As Martin F. Norden observed, “the feminists who made this film and others were shrewd enough to couch their suffrage statements within traditional melodramatic frameworks, and thus were able to get their messages across without alienating the more conservative members of their audiences.”76 The film’s movement is primarily that of opposition: corrupt and self-serving Kelly opposes suffrage, which aims to clean up local politics. His operation thrives on graft and illegal activities, most of which he conducts with his shady associates behind closed doors. By contrast, Mabel and her fellow suffragists have a larger and more inclusive goal of enfranchisement; and they conduct their crusade openly, in parks and public forums that provide a transparency that directly counters Kelly’s clandestine machinations. “The very visibility of the suffragists’ rallying tactics is set against the invisibility of Kelly’s network,”77 which plots behind closed doors to fix the election. And visibility was indeed one of the aims of Eighty Million Women Want—?, which, like other pro-suffrage pictures, was designed to educate the public and generate support for the cause.

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CONCLUSION As the embodiment of a new and bolder feminism, the New Woman rejected Victorian-era restrictions and limitations and questioned traditional values, particularly presumptions of female inferiority. The suffragist brought even more radical challenges to American life. Her demands for greater autonomy and engagement, however, alarmed traditionalists, who warned that such expressions of female liberation would destroy what they perceived as the “natural” order of family and society and lead to unintended consequences, from the masculinization of the militants themselves to the coarsening of the culture. To establish the suffragist as a harridan and a rabblerousing Other, they peppered the popular press with an endless stream of satiric cartoons, photographs, and newspaper and journal illustrations that imagined a society of mannish, cigarette-smoking women presiding over emasculated apron-wearing men and neglected children. Articles and editorials attacked the suffragists for attempting to participate in public life, predicting that their reckless pursuit of enfranchisement would merely debase politics, not elevate it, as they claimed. Even religious leaders spoke out against women’s activism from the pulpit.78 Many of the comedic satires and melodramas produced by the studios reflected that alarm and reinforced the notion that women belonged in the home, not in the voting booth or the workplace. Yet, as Kay Sloan writes, the women’s movement for enfranchisement symbolized an even greater issue than political equality: “it swept the ancient struggle over sexual power out of psychic closets and into the public arena.”79 For opponents of suffrage, no weapon was too subversive; no caricature was too outlandish; no stereotype too offensive. The arguments against suffrage were themselves irrational: women either “neglected or abused their husbands; they alternately represented anarchy or authoritarianism; most insidious of all, the women were unattractive manhaters whose sexuality seemed to be in question.”80 As suffrage became an increasingly emotional issue, the public tensions were reflected on screen. Between 1908 and 1914, what Sloan called the peak years of suffrage films, the nation’s movie theaters grew from around eight or ten thousand to fourteen thousand; and moviegoing became a regular pastime for women, men, and children alike.81 Realizing the impact of the medium, suffragists recognized that their arguments for enfranchisement, if presented by way of film, could counter those of their opponents and indeed bring the public to their side. And they believed that pro-suffrage features such as Eighty Million Women Want—?, could, in Moving Picture World reviewer W. Stephen Bush’s words, “give a most attractive picture of the defeat of the old and the victory of the new in politics.”82

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Ultimately, suffrage films proved to be a short-lived genre that had its heyday during the years immediately prior to World War One and, as Martin F. Norden noted, “sank into morbundity after only one incarnation.”83 The onset of the war temporarily diverted attention from the suffrage issue, and the number of pictures about the movement dropped off dramatically around 1915. Although film companies continued their interest in strong and active heroines, as in The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine—serials that increasingly drew on and incorporated contemporary political concerns other than suffrage—“interest waned in portraying the movement on film.”84 That was due in large part to wartime and postwar changes such as the adoption of suffrage by more states (New York in 1917; Michigan, South Dakota, and Oklahoma in 1918); the beginning of the election of women to Congress (the first being Jeannette Rankin of Montana in 1916); and President Woodrow Wilson’s support of a federal suffrage amendment, which was ratified in 1920 as the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchising women and recognizing their full rights and responsibilities as citizens.85 Yet despite their relatively quick demise, suffrage films had an indisputably significant impact on the way that people thought—at the very least, “by making them aware of the suffrage movement and issues surrounding it—while reflecting societal and industrial attitudes toward the movement.”86 Above all, they revealed how women’s roles were defined and redefined in the early twentieth century and how cinema reflected those changes in the popular culture by portraying emancipated women as part of the fabric of American society and not only as radical Others. NOTES 1. This chapter contains certain terms that were commonly used during the silent film era and that may be offensive to some readers. Those words and terms, most of which occur in the titles of films or in newspaper and trade publications, are used here exclusively for historical or analytical purposes. 2. Sarah Churchwell, The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells (London: Head of Zeus, 2022), pp. 261–62. Churchwell references the Atlanta Constitution. 3. “Deeds Not Words” was, in fact, the motto of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903. 4. Kay Sloan, “Sexual Warfare in the Silent Cinema: Comedies and Melodramas of Woman Suffragism,” American Quarterly 33.4 (1981), pp. 414–15. 5. Moving Picture World, October 15, 1910. 6. Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 155.

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  7. Ibid., p. 154. In fact, as Stamp writes, “suffrage groups [were] among the earliest advocacy bodies to exploit moving pictures at a time when cinema’s powers of social commentary were not always appreciated.”   8. Kay Sloan, The Loud Silents: Origins of the Social Problem Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 99.   9. Matthew Wills, “How Women Suffrage Has Been Represented in American Film,” December 9, 2017, https://daily.jstor.org/daily-author/matthew-wills/. 10. Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies & the American Dream (New York: Coward, McGann & Geoghegan, 1973), p. 32. 11. Sloan, The Loud Silents, p. 101. 12. Ibid. 13. Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, p. 169. 14. Maggie Hennefeld, Specters of Slapstick & Silent Movie Comediennes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 173. 15. Sloan, “Sexual Warfare,” p. 420. 16. Moving Picture World, May 2, 1908. 17. Moving Picture World, December 28, 1912. 18. Moving Picture World, April 8, 1911. 19. Hennefeld, p. 186. 20. Reviewed in Motography, July 10, 1915. 21. Among the films in which women assume a policing role are The Petticoat Sheriff (Lubin, 1911), The Suffragette Sheriff (Kalem, 1912), and The Lady Police (Lubin, 1912). 22. Moving Picture World, noted in Sloan, The Loud Silents, p. 107. 23. Moving Picture World, July 16, 1910. 24. Martin F. Norden, “A Good Travesty Upon the Suffragette Movement: Women’s Suffrage Films as Genre,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 13.4 (1986), p. 173. Hennefeld (p. 174) notes that the film, through ambiguous language and comedic hyperbole, “reinscribes gendered social change as corporeal sexual differences, negating the impetus for politics to exceed anatomical essentialism.” 25. Moving Picture World, October 25, 1912. 26. Moving Picture World, December 21, 1912. Similarly, in The Suffragette Sheriff, a woman, influenced by her spinster suffragette sister, gets herself elected mayor of her town. All kinds of absurd complications follow. 27. Moving Picture World, March 6, 1909. 28. Moving Picture World (December 20, 1913) does not specify the nature of the so-called “offense” that causes the milkman to exact his revenge. Eric Dewberry, in “A Happy Medium: Women’s Suffrage Portrayals in Thanhouser Films, 1910–16,” https://www.thanhouser.org/Research/Eric%20Dewberry%20-%20Depictions%20 of%20Suffragists%20in%20Thanhouser%20Films.pdf, notes that the woman’s earlier disapproval of the milkman’s desire to date her maid was the only incident referenced in the reviews that might have provoked his reaction. 29. Dewberry suggests that some who were sympathetic to the cause might see that as proof that these tactics can work in politics. Another politically-themed Thanhouser film, A Dainty Politician (1910), which focused on activity during a

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convention in which a corrupt Congressman is running for re-election, also gave a nod to the movement, as a group of suffragists attempts unsuccessfully to get a “votes for women” plank admitted to the party platform. 30. Sloan, “Sexual Warfare,” p. 421, writes that anti-suffragist Robert Afton Holland proclaimed in 1909 that the vote would render women “ugly and coarse.” The suffragists themselves, he charged, were “large-handed, big-footed, flat chested, and thin-lipped.” See Holland, “The Suffragette,” Sewanee Review (July 17, 1909), p. 282. 31. Sloan, The Loud Silents, pp. 104–5. 32. Although there are no direct references in the picture to suffragism, the original title, A Militant Suffragette, establishes the connection; and the depiction of the obnoxious “female” would have been a familiar one to movie audiences. In For the Cause of Suffrage (1909), Mr. Duff, who appears at the suffragists’ meeting dressed as a woman, is similarly thrown into the water at the film’s end. 33. Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, p. 165 34. According to the plot summary, the $500 was in the impostor’s grasp when officers arrested him. Mrs. Pinkhurst, who was still abroad, had been impersonated by a clever bank embezzler, who dropped the impersonation just in time. And the unfortunate tramp picked it up at the wrong moment. Nonetheless, the fact of his deception makes the women look very naïve and silly. 35. Another young man gets hold of a misdirected letter and impersonates a famous female reformer in Billy the Suffragette (Powers, 1913), in this case not for the money but out of a desire to teach his suffragist sweetheart about feminine responsibilities. 36. A character named “Mrs. Spankhurst” also appears in Billy the Suffragette. 37. Jason Barrett-Fox, “Rhetorics of Indirection, Indiscretion, Insurrection: The ‘Feminine Style’ of Anita Loos, 1912–1925,” JAC, Vol. 32, Nos. 1–2 (2012), p. 221. 38. Moving Picture World, June 24, 1911. The Morning Telegraph, July 2, 1911, called it “an interesting film because of the views of the recent suffragette parade and the Marathon race, both held on the same day in New York, and entertaining because of the story it unfolds.” Moving Picture World, July 8, 1911, noted that “The recent ‘Votes for Women Parade’ has an important place in this film. A parade is usually a heart-stirring affair, and one with a purpose or for a cause is especially so. This parade, shown in the midst of a love story, makes the film effective.” And according to the New York Dramatic Mirror, July 5, 1911, the film is “a decidedly novel and original comedy[,] . . . that introduces the suffragette parade in New York.” 39. Sloan, “Sexual Warfare,” p. 418. 40. Dewberry, n.p. 41. Moving Picture World synopsis, June 8, 1912. 42. “Coon Town Suffragettes,” Lubin Bulletin, four-page program for the film, n.d. [February 28, 1914]. 43. Sloan, The Loud Silents, p. 111. 44. Ibid., p. 115. 45. See Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), as cited in Sloan, The Loud Silents, p. 115.

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46. See, for example, Lily Oppenheimer, “How White Suffragists Excluded Black Women in Their Fight for the Right to Vote,” WABE, www​.wabe​.org​/100​ -years​-after​-the​-19th​-amendment​-a​-look​-at​-how​-white​-suffragists​-excluded​-black​ -women​-in​-their​-fight​-for​-the​-right​-to​-vote​/. Also Becky Little, “How Early Suffragists Left Black Women Out of Their Fight,” https://www.history.com/news/ suffragists-vote-black-women. 47. Hennefeld, pp. 202–204. Hennefeld also notes the use of “ethnic masquerade as a pretense for inflicting colonial violence on politicized women’s bodies” in The Suffragette (Selig, 1913), in which Waggy Billy and his cowboy friends masquerade as Native Americans and abduct an elderly suffragette orator, Samantha Roundtree. 48. Shelley Stamp, “Eighty Million Women Want—?: Women’s Suffrage, Female Viewers and the Body Politic,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 16.1 (1995), p. 7. 49. Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 147, cited in Daniel Lawrence Aufmann, “Silent Suffragists: Activism, Popular Cinema, and Women’s Rights in 1910s America,” in Daniel Fairfax, André Keiji Kunigami, and Luca Peretti, eds., Zapruder World: An International Journal for the History of Social Conflict 6 (2020), https://zapruderworld.org/volume-6/ silent-suffragists-activism-popular-cinema-and-womens-rights-in-1910s-america/. 50. Kevin Brownlow, cited in “Women’s Suffrage and the Media, Film: Votes for Women (1912),” suffrageandthemedia.org/source/film-votes-women-1912/. 51. Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, p. 79, 52. Ann Page, “Suffrage Cause Aided by Movies,” Los Angeles Graphic, June 22, 1912, cited in Amy Shore, “Suffrage Stars,” Camera Obscura 21.3 (2006), p. 26. Shore also writes that the fact that the film ends with the suffragists speaking and their banners flying allows “the audience members to carry on their identification beyond the walls of the cinema and into the world at large to generate social progress and national uplift.” It also “carried out a marketing function akin to the newspaper in constructing imagined national communities.” 53. According to Daniel Lawrence Aufmann, the National American Woman Suffrage Association even credited the success of the suffrage campaign in California to the performance of suffrage plays, “noting that they were particularly effective in converting public opinion in rural districts where entertainment options were few and large-scale political rallies unworkable.” 54. Stamp, Eighty Million Women, p. 7. 55. Ibid. 56. Moving Picture World, November 7, 1914. Cited in Lindsey, p. 8. 57. Shore, p. 2. 58. “To Win Women Suffrage Through Motion Pictures” The [Richmond VA] Times-Dispatch, October 25, 1914. 59. Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, p. 183. 60. Your Girl and Mine, reviewed by, among others, James S. McQuade in Moving Picture World (September 26 and November 7, 1914); C.J. Ver Halen in Motion Picture News (November 7, 1914); New York Times (October 4, 1914); and Motography (October 31, 1914).

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61. Moving Picture World, September 26, 1914. 62. Mary Mallory, “Hollywood Heights: ‘Your Girl and Mine’ Promotes Women’s Suffrage,” The Daily Mirror, October 19, 2015, https://ladailymirror.com/2015/10/19/ mary-mallory-hollywood-heights-your-girl-and-mine-promotes-womens-suffrage/. See also Mary Mallory, “How a Pioneering Silent Movie Helped Women Get the Vote,” February 19, 2021, Historynet, https:​//​www​.historynet​.com› suffragette-cinema. 63. The New York Clipper, October 24, 1914. 64. The [Richmond VA] Times-Dispatch, October 25, 1914. 65. New York Dramatic Mirror, December, 1914, as cited in Stamp, Eighty Million Women, p. 10. 66. Stamp, Eighty Million Women, p. 10. 67. Mallory, “Hollywood Heights.” 68. The Daily Missoulian, on October 9, 1914, cited in Mallory, “Hollywood Heights.” 69. Motion Picture News, December 25, 1915, and January 15, 1916; Motography, February 12, 1916; Moving Picture World, January 8, 1916. As cited in AFI Catalog. 70. Moving Picture World, March 9, 1912. 71. In Jane, the Justice (American Film Manufacturing, 1914; dir. Harry A. Pollard), romance again clouds judicial judgment. The handsome young man brought before Justice Jane Higgins catches her eye immediately, and she releases him, behind closed doors, before his case even goes before a jury. 72. The comedy, made in collaboration with the Women’s Political Union, responded to the numerous comedies in which suffragists left their husbands or lovers. Nonetheless, it “cautiously played into stereotypes and conservative values,” with romance still serving as the central theme. Even its racist allusions to Black male voters seemed an appeal to conservative moviegoers. In short, despite its strong suffragist connection, the film—as Kay Sloan (“Sexual Warfare,” pp. 424–25) writes— “spoke soothingly to the prejudices and fears of mainstream America to expedite the suffrage cause.” 73. Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls, p. 185. 74. Stamp, Eighty Million Women, p. 11. 75. Sloan, The Loud Silents, pp. 100–104. 76. Norden, p. 175, 77. Stamp, Eighty Million Women, p. 12. 78. “National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage,” National Women’s History Museum, www.crusadeforthevote.org/naows-opposition. 79. Sloan, The Loud Silents, p. 107. 80. Ibid., p. 108. 81. Ray Fielding, The American Newsreel, 1911–1967 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), as cited in Sloan, The Loud Silents, p. 108. 82. W. Stephen Bush, Moving Picture World, November 15, 1913. 83. Norden, p. 176. 84. Ibid.

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85. Timeline Women’s Suffrage, National Women’s History Museum, https://www. crusadeforthevote.org/woman-suffrage-timeline-18401920. 86. Norden, p. 172.

Conclusion

From their beginnings in the late 1890s, movies have reflected Americans’ dreams and aspirations. As Ben Singer noted, subtly or overtly, they also helped to evoke the anxieties created in a society experiencing the sociological and ideological upheavals of modernity1—from the rapidity of change through industrialization and the influx of immigrants willing to work for lower wages to the long-simmering racial tensions and the increasing demands by women for a larger voice in the public sphere through enfranchisement. At the same time, though, cinema has been a distorting medium marked by omissions and denials that tended to protect American mythologies2 and to promote a kind of cultural script quite different from the historical reality. Such “revisionist realism,” as Sarah Churchwell called it, proved “so serviceable, so gratifying, to globally popular ideas about America” that it helped shape the world’s understanding of U.S. history, often to a gratuitous degree.3 And it allowed American audiences to avoid questioning the country’s “moral and historical complexity” by affording them refuge in the imagined perfection of a sentimentalized and idealized past.4 Based on a reconceptualizing of bygone eras and a reframing of actual historical events,5 that mythologizing required the identification and demarcation of certain groups and ethnicities as “outsiders” who were perceived as a threat to America’s values, practices, and national identity and whose very presence posed a challenge to white supremacy, dominant patriarchal structures, established gender roles, acceptable expressions of sexuality, traditional family order, even economic stability. Among the most frequently misrepresented and marginalized were women, whose depictions on film reduced them to unfortunate stereotypes that underscored their racial or cultural otherness and reinforced existing prejudices. Despite their inaccuracy, the racialized images of devoted Mammies, selfless Indian maidens, submissive Asian lotus blossoms, and adoring señoritas persisted throughout the silent film era, largely because they evoked a gauzy vision of a romanticized time—of the genteel South of mosses and magnolias, for instance, where contented slaves tended the plantation home and fields, and of the frontier West, where cowboy heroes “civilized” the 283

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Native Americans and Indian princesses abandoned their tribes in the hope of assimilating into the white man’s “superior” culture. Such tropes proved to be a profitable formula for early filmmakers, and the retrogressive images had an enduring impact on the imaginations of viewers who readily accepted the reel imagery as the historical reality. In the cinematic binary of “self” and “other,” the marginalized women fell into the latter category.6 Treated as generic and interchangeable types, they were often relegated to the background in early film, as minor figures in the popular plantation sagas, Indian adventures, Westerns, and “Orientalized” tales in which they appeared. Prohibitions against on-screen miscegenation ensured that they were denied more prominent roles, particularly in films that featured a romance plot. And the major roles for which they should have been considered went instead to white actresses like Mary Pickford, who played diverse parts—as a Native American (The Indian Runner’s Romance, 1909; Ramona, 1910; Iola’s Promise, 1912; A Pueblo Legend, 1912), an Asian geisha (Madame Butterfly, 1915), a Mexican (The Mexican Sweethearts, 1909; Fate’s Interception, 1912), and a Spanish temptress (Rosita, 1923). Moreover, unable to take charge of their own images, Othered women were often forced to participate in the production of the sexist and racist imagery that seemed to legitimate their marginalization.7 African Americans in dominant film were usually restricted to roles as scheming Jezebels, malicious mulattas, or servile and subservient “Aunties” (though the occasional performer such as the remarkable Hattie McDaniel was able to subvert the stereotype). And “Latins” (the loose and undifferentiated grouping of women of Mexican, Cuban, and Spanish origin) were portrayed as exotic temptresses and explosive “spitfires” who had to be tamed (though at times a Latina actress like Lupe Vélez embraced that characterization and made it her own, exploiting the type while simultaneously embodying it). The physical representations—that is, the exaggerated portrayals and frequent caricaturing through blackface, redface, brownface, and yellowface— reinforced the notion of the women’s separateness. The derogatory depictions of their customs made them objects of laughter and ridicule, while their clothing served as another visual indicator of their inferiority and marginalization: the fat dark heavily-aproned and rag-headed Mammy; the primitive Indian maid with a single feather in her braided hair; the demure kimonoclad, downward-gazing Asian delicate flower; the exotic bosom-baring Latina; the mannish pants-wearing militant. At times desexualized, at other times hypersexualized; at times fetishized, at other times scorned or ignored; at times portrayed as having low intelligence, at other times as possessed of malicious cunning—these Othered women were perceived as being unwilling to identify with or incapable of

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assimilating into the dominant society. Yet their so-called failure was often the result of cultural prejudices or exclusionary legislation that prevented their assimilation. As Jan-Christopher Horak observed, Hollywood was “colorblind to anything but whites.”8 A handful of pioneering early filmmakers—Oscar Micheaux, the Johnson Brothers, Richard E. Norman, Sessue Hayakawa, James Young Deer, and Marion E. Wong among them—and actresses such as Lillian St. Cyr, Anna May Wong, and Dolores Del Rio struggled to counter the sexist and demeaning tropes and reverse the stereotypes. Nonetheless, the pejorative representations persisted throughout the silent film era. And over the succeeding decades, as the most egregious portrayals of women in Hollywood films disappeared, the typing became more subtle. Imitation of Life (1934), for instance, told the story of two widows, Beatrice Pullman (Claudette Colbert) and Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers). Despite being hard hit by the Depression, the women become successful in business thanks to the marketing of “Aunt Delilah’s Pancake Flour.” Notably, however, while it is Bea’s recipe that brings them wealth, she receives an inequitable 20% of the profits as compared to Bea’s 80%. And, like the earlier Mammies in silent film who are depicted as never wanting to leave the plantation, Delilah, even after achieving financial independence, begs “Miss Bea” not to send her away but instead to allow her to stay on and tend the household. “I’se your cook,” she insists in what Hollywood considered “Negro dialect,” “and I wants to stay your cook.”9 The endurance of such disparaging stereotypes is evident in more recent films as well. The innocent but sexually available Kim in Miss Saigon is the archetypal Lotus Blossom, her life defined by her love for an American Marine. The lovely Princess Tiger Lily, who lives apart from “Mainland” in the aptly named “Neverland” (and who is described as one of the “Piccaninny tribe,” presumably a compilation of all Native Americans) risks her own life to save Peter in Walt Disney’s iconic and widely viewed adapted Peter Pan. And the forbidden interracial love between the white New Yorker Tony and the beautiful exotic Puerto Rican Maria in the various versions of West Side Story can only end tragically. Othered women in the early years of cinema may not have secured the roles they deserved or achieved the recognition that was due them. But an examination of their place in silent film reveals how they inhabited, negotiated, and occasionally even interrogated the discriminatory stereotypes that marginalized them. By revisiting and reanimating a neglected chapter in cinema history, The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts offers insights into the ways that racial, ethnic, and gender typing in film helped to shape American thought and practices.

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NOTES 1. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 5. 2. Numerous scholars have commented on cinema’s distortions and omissions. Among them: Robert Brent Toplin, ed., Hollywood as Mirror: Changing Views of “Outsiders” and “Enemies” in American Movies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993); Naomi Greene, From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American Film (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014); and Sarah Churchwell, The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells (London: Head of Zeus, 2022). 3. Churchwell, pp. 46–47, 69. Her observations about Gone with the Wind apply more broadly as well. Her comments about “a vast alternative historical reality” and about the myths that depict America “as perennially innocent, as if it were exempt from history,” are especially astute. 4. Jeva Lange, “The 16 Best Movies about America from the Past 10 years,” The Week, July 4, 2020, https://theweek.com/ articles/923079/16-best-movies-about-america-from-past-10-years. 5. Tom Foley, “Examining the Mythic Past: 1950 Westerns and Interdisciplinary Interpretation,” Concepts (2013), Villanova Journals. 6. Greene, p. 11, cites Gary Y. Okihiro, who (in discussing China and the Chinese), suggested that such binaries “inevitably raise the division between the self and the other,” an observation that applies to virtually all cinematic “otherings.” 7. Jan-Christopher Horak, Foreword, in Angela Aleiss, Hollywood’s Native Americans: Stories of Identity and Resistance (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2022), p. xx. 8. Ibid., p. xi. 9. For more on Imitation of Life, see Barbara Tepa Lupack, Literary Adaptations in Black American Cinema: From Micheaux to Morrison (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002; expanded ed. 2010), pp. 254–57, and Ariel Schudson, “Imitation of Life,” Online essay for the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/static/ programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/imitation_life.pdf.

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Wang, Yiman. “The Art of Screen Passing: Anna May Wong’s Yellow Yellowface Performance in the Art Deco Period.” Camera Obscura 20.3 (December 2005): 159–90. Ward, Richard Lewis. When the Cock Crows: A History of the Pathé Exchange. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2016. Watts, Jill. Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood. New York: Amistad, 2007. “We Are Doing Our Bit.” Massachusetts Historical Society, Online Collection. https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=3050&pid=3. Weatherford, Elizabeth, and Emelia Seubert, eds. Native Americans on Film and Video. Vol. 2. The Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation. Montpelier, VT: Capital City Press, 1988. Weaver, John T. Twenty Years of Silents: 1908–1928. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1971. Weiss, Ken, and Ed Goodgold. To Be Continued . . . New York: Crown Publishers, 1972. Welbon, Yvonne. Sisters in Cinema: Case Studies of Three First-Time Achievements Made by African American Women Directors in the 1990s. Dissertation. Northwestern University, 2001. ———. Sisters in Cinema. Documentary film produced and directed by Yvonne Welbon. 2003. Weltman, Manuel, and Raymond Lee. Pearl White, The Peerless Fearless Girl. South Brunswick, NJ: A.S. Barnes, 1969. Werlock, Abby H.P. “Courageous Young Women in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales: Heroines and Victims.” In James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art. No. 6. Papers from the 1986 Conference at State University College at Oneonta in Cooperstown, edited by George A. Test, 22–40. [Oneonta, NY]: [SUNY College of Oneonta], 1987. Whalan, Mark. The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. Wheeler, Bonnie, and Charles R. Wood. Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc. New York: Garland, 1996. Whitaker, Robert. On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation. New York: Crown, 2008. White, Frederick. “Ubiquitous American Indian Stereotypes in Television.” In American Indians and Popular Culture: Media, Sports, and Politics, edited by Elizabeth DeLaney Hoffman, 135–50. Whitfield, Eileen. Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997. Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. New York: Random House, 2020. ———. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010. Williams, Linda A. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

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Williams, Martin. Griffith: First Artist of the Movies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Wolf, Emma. The Joy of Life. Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1896. Woll, Allen L. “Bandits and Lovers: Hispanic Images in American Film.” In The Kaleidoscope: How Hollywood Views Ethnic Groups, edited by Randall M. Miller, 54–72. ———. “Hollywood Views the Mexican-American: From The Greaser’s Revenge to The Milagro Beanfield War.” In Hollywood as Mirror, edited by Robert Brent Toplin, 41–52. ———. The Latin Image in Silent Film. Rev. ed. Los Angeles: UCLA/Latin American Center Publications, 1980. Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1929. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Woolf, Emma. The Joy of Life. Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1896. Wormser, Richard. The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003. Yearwood, Gladstone L. Black Film as a Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration and the African-American Aesthetic Tradition. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000. ———, ed. Black Cinema Aesthetics: Issues in Independent Black Filmmaking. Athens: Ohio University Center for Afro-American Studies, 1982. Young, Earl James, Jr., Khafra K. Om-Ra-Zeti, and Beverly J. Robinson. The Life and Work of Oscar Micheaux: Pioneer Black Author and Filmmaker, 1884–1951. San Francisco: KMT Publications, 2003. Young, Joseph A. Black Novelist as White Racist: The Myth of Black Inferiority in the Novels of Oscar Micheaux. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989. Zelnik, Eran. “The New Testament Mythology of James Fenimore Cooper.” Society for U.S. Intellectual History, February 21, 2017. https://s-usih.org/2017/02/ the-new-testament-mythology-of-james-fenimore-cooper/.

Index

The Abandoned (1945), 206 Abbott, Robert S., 13, 62 The Aborigine’s Devotion (1909), 113 Abyssinia, 35 Across to Singapore (1928), 180 Adorée, Renée, 176 The Adventures of Kathlyn, 61, 241–43, 258, 270 Ah Sin (play by Twain and Harte), 168 Alger, Horatio, 38, 103 Anderson, Gilbert M. See Broncho Billy Anderson, Maxwell, 205 Anita Bush Players, 63 Anna May Wong Production Company, 180 Anti-Vagrancy Act of 1855 (aka Greaser Act), 199 Aoki, Tsuru, 174–77, 185 Apfel, Oscar C., 117 Arbuckle, Roscoe (“Fatty”), 110 Argentine Love (1924), 194 An Arizona Wooing (1915), 203 Armendáriz, Pedro, 206 Armstrong, Louis, 14 Astor, Mary, 149 Balshofer, Fred, 157n61 bandido stereotype, 195, 199, 201, 203, 217

The Bandit Queen (1965), 223n90 The Barber (1916), 37 Barnum, P.T., 20, 105 Barnum and Bailey, 137 Barrett (Browning), Elizabeth, 227; Aurora Leigh (poem), 227 Battle Cry of Peace (1915), 249 Beadle and Adams, 103, 125n43 Beavers, Louise, 10, 285 Beery, Noah, 178 Beery, Wallace, 149, 220n42 Belasco, David, 225 Belasco Stock Company, 208 Ben Hur (1925), 194 Best, Willie (nicknamed “Sleep ’n’ Eat”), 24 The Beulah Show, 10 Big News (1929), 247 The Big Show (1926), 130 Billy the Suffragette (1913), 279nn35, 36 Biograph, 16, 91, 111, 112, 137, 140, 225, 251n5 Bird of Paradise (1932), 206 The Birth of a Race, 37–38; originally called Lincoln’s Dream, 37 Bison Film Company, 91, 137 Bits of Life (1921), 178 The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932) 313

314

Black Elk, 127n54 Black erasure, 26–29 blackface, 4–5, 13, 15, 21, 24, 95, 168, 241, 284 A Black Sherlock Holmes (1918), 41 Black Tom disaster, 238, 250 Blackton, J. Stuart, 249 The Black Watch (1929), 160 Blake, Eubie, 14 Blatch, Harriot Stanton, 274 Blonde Venus (1932), 9 Blood and Sand (1922), 193 Blue Waters, 106 Boles, Lottie, 38 Borderline (1930), 74 Boyd, Kathryn, 65–66 Breath of the Gods (1920), 176 Brenda Starr, Reporter (1943), 248 The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), 174 Bringing Up Hubby (1914), 260–61 Broncho Billy (stage name of Gilbert M. Anderson), 95–96, 203 Broncho Billy and the Greaser (1914), 203 Broncho Billy films, 5, 203 Brooks, Clarence, 38 Brown, Karl, 17 brownface, 216–17, 284 Brownscombe, Jennie Augusta, 236 “brute” stereotype, 15, 18, 24–25, 26 Buck, Pearl, 159–60; The Good Earth (novel), 159–60 Buck Dance, Ute Indians (1898), 107 Buffalo Bill. See Cody, William Frederick Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill Film Company, 107 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 105–6, 107, 154n5, 201 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Pawnee Bill’s Far East (1910), 107 Buffalo Dance (1894), 107 Bugs Bunny, 15

Index

Buntline, Ned (pseudonym of Edward Zane Carroll Judson, Sr.), 104–5, 153 Bush, Anita, 63–64 Bushman, Francis X., 149, 218, 238 A Busy Day (1914), 263 California Motion Picture Company, 210, 212 Calino Marries a Suffragette (1912), 261 The Call of His People (1922), 43 Capra, Frank, 174 Carewe, Edwin, 148–51, 153, 205–6 Carewe film: Ramona (1928), 148–51, 153, 205, 207 Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 100, 118, 133, 140, 141, 144 Carson, Kit, 120 Carver, George Washington, 14 Castle, Irene, 250–51, 258 Castle, Vernon, 250–51 Cause for Thanksgiving (1914), 36 Chang, Anna, 177 Chaplin, Charlie, 205, 226, 263, Charging Hawk, Chief [Sherman], 140 Charlie Chan at the Circus (1936), 174 Charlie Chan on Broadway (1937), 174 The Cheat (1915), 169, 171–74, 185 Chenault, Lawrence, 44, 63 Chesnutt, Charles, 14, 25 Chicago Defender, 13, 35, 62, 68 China Seas (1935), 9 Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 164– 65, 199 The Chinese Parrot (1927), 180 Chopin, Kate, 252n14 Chu Chin Chow (1934), 180 circle dance, 101 Le Cirque Buffalo Bill Peaux Rouges (1896 or 1897), 107 The Cisco Kid, 194 Cody, William Frederick (Buffalo Bill), 104–8, 119, 201 Coleman, Bessie, 66–67 Coleman, Ronald, 215

Index

The Colored American Winning His Suit (1917), 42 Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia, 44–45 Colbert, Claudette, 285 Cooley, Florence Maule, 274 A Coon Cake Walk (1897), 14 Coon Town Suffragettes (1914), 266–67 Cooper, Gary, 149, 213–15 Cooper, James Fenimore, 101–3, 113, 119, 153; The Last of the Mohicans, 102–3 Coquette (1929), 226 Cordova, Arturo de, 215 Cortez, Ricardo, 194–95, 215 Cortez, Stanley, 195 The Courageous Coward (1919), 175 Courting Across the Court (1911), 264–65 The Cowboy and the Schoolmarm (1910), 142 Crane, Stephen, 200 The Crimson City (1928), 160 Criner, Laurence, 66 Crisp, Donald, 142, 149 crusading suffragette mother stereotype, 263–66 Cullen, Countee, 76 A Cure for Suffragettes (1913), 263–64 The Curse of Quon Gwon (c. 1916), 183–84 Curtis, Newton Mallory, 104 Curwood, James Oliver, 262 A Dainty Politician (1910), 278n29 Dale, Alan, 244 Dance, Fools, Dance (1931), 247–48 Dancing Darkies (1896), 14 Dancing N-----s (1899), 14 Daniels, Bebe, 204 Darkfeather, Princess Mona, 152, 268 Darmond, Grace, 272 The Daughter of Dawn (1920), 145–48 Daughter of Shanghai (1937), 180

315

Daughter of the Dragon (1931), 159, 181–82 Davidson, Emily W., 259 Dawes Act (1887), 99–100 Day, Vernon, 107 A Day in the Life of a Suffragette (1908), 259 A Day with the Tenth Cavalry at Fort Huachuca (1921), 81n15 A Day with the Wild West Show (1917), 107 The Death Mask/The Redskin Duel (1914), 175 The Debt (1912), 26 Defense or Tribute? (1916), 249 de Havilland, Olivia, 9 Del Rio, Dolores, 5, 149, 151, 204–8, 213, 216, 217, 285 DeMille, Cecil B., 117, 118, 138, 171, 214, 225 DeMille, William C., 225 De Priest, Oscar, 13 Derba, Mimi, 217–18 The Devil Dancer (1927), 180 Dickens, Charles, 166, 186 Dietrich, Marlene, 9, 159 Dillon, Edward, 110, 263 dime novels, 101, 103–5, 106, 119, 140, 153, 199–200, 202 Dix, Richard, 120 Dixon, Thomas, 15–17, 69–70, 249; The Clansman (novel), 69–70; The Leopard’s Spots (novel), 31n24, 69 Doing Their Bit (1916), 68–69 Dolly of the Dailies (1914), 238 Dorr, Rheta Childe, 274; What Eighty Million Women Want (book), 274 A Double Wedding (1913), 36 Down with the Men (1912), 261 Dragon Lady stereotype, 1, 4, 5, 169, 180 The Dragon Painter (1919), 175 The Dragon Seed (1936), 160 Drew, Dr. Charles, 14 Driftwood (1916), 212

316

Index

Du Bois, W.E.B., 13, 19 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 14, 43, 82n26 Duncan Sisters, 24–25 Dunjee, Roscoe Conkling, 69 Dunn, Irene, 10 Durante, Jimmy, 214 Durfee, Minta, 110 Eagle Dance, Pueblo Indians (1898), 107 Ebony Pictures, 41 Edgeworth, Maria, 227 Edison, Thomas Alva, 37, 91, 107, 238–39 Edwards, C.L., 104 Edwin Carewe Motion Pictures Corporation, 151 Eighty Million Women Want—? (aka What Eight Million Women Want) (1913), 266–68, 276 Ellington, Duke, 14 Elliott, Charles W., 232–34; “Woman’s Work and Woman’s Wages” (article), 233–34 The End of the Rainbow (1916), 208 Errol, Leon, 214 Esquivel, Antonio (Tony), 201 Evangeline (1929), 206 An Exciting Honeymoon (1913), 36 Fairbanks, Douglas, 179, 213, 216, 226 The Fall of a Nation (1915), 249 Famous Players-Lasky, 194 Farnum, Dustin, 117, 142 Fatty and Minnie He-Haw (1914), 110 Fauset, Jessie, 14, 25 Faust (1915, never completed), 212 Fernández, Emilio, 206 Fetchit, Stepin, 10, 23 Figueroa, Gabriel, 206 The First Born (1921), 191n68 The First Woman Jury in America (1912), 274 The Flame of Hellgate (1920), 212 The Flame of Love (1930), 180

The Flames of Wrath (1923), 71–73 Flor Silvestre (1943), 206 The Forbidden City (1918), 160 Ford, Francis, 95 Foreign Miners Tax Act of 1850, 163, 199 For the Cause of Suffrage (1909), 279n32 For the Freedom of the East (1918), 177 Foster, William, 35–37 Foster Photoplay Company, 35–37 The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), 193 The Frederick Douglass Film Company, 42 Freeman, Bea, 47 From Here to Eternity (1960), 177 Front Page Woman (1935), 248 Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, 19 Fu Manchu, 4, 159, 160, 167, 168, 169, 181, 185 Gable, Clark, 9 Gadsden Purchase, 196 The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (1951), 182 Garland, Judy, 15 The Gaucho (1927), 213 Gaumont Film Co. footage of the British Derby (1913), 259 Gavaldón, Roberto, 216 Gerstäcker’s, Friedrich, 104 Ghost Dance movement, 100–101, 107, 140 Gibbons, Cedric, 206 Gibson, Helen (Mrs. “Hoot”), 240 Gibson Girl, 235–36 Gilbert, John, 215 Gilbert, Mercedes, 55 girl reporter films, 247–48 Gish, Dorothy, 194, 224, 263 Gish, Lillian, 1, 17, 18, 112, 213, 226 The Girl of Lost Lake (1916), 209 Gist, Eloyce King Patrick, 74–76, 79, 270

Index

Gist, James, 74–76, 270 Gists’ films: Heaven-Bound Travelers (1935), 74, 76; Hell-Bound Train (1930), 74–75; Verdict Not Guilty (1933), 74, 76 Gleason, Adda, 205 Gone with the Wind (1939 film), 9, 10, 21, 24, 26; Mammy in, 10, 21–22; Prissy in, 24 Gonzalez, Myrtle, 208–10, 217 The Good Earth (1937), 182 Grady, Lottie, 35 Grand, Sarah, 231 Grandin, Ethel, 94 Grant, Cary, 177 Greaser Act. See Anti-Vagrancy Act of 1855 Greaser stereotype, 199–203, 210, 217 Great Migration, 79–80 Green, Elizabeth Shippen, 236 Grey, Zane, 119; The Vanishing American (novel), 119 Griffith, D.W., 3, 5, 11–12, 15–19, 24–25, 51, 54, 63, 64, 69–70, 91, 94, 111–16, 134, 136, 140, 142, 149, 152, 170–71, 184, 202, 204, 205, 213, 225–26 Griffith films: The Battle (1911), 16; The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1914), 111, 112; The Birth of a Nation (1915), 3, 11–12, 15–19, 24, 37–38, 51, 54, 64, 69–70, 94–95, 111–12, 226, 249; Broken Blossoms (1919), 171, 184; The Broken Doll (1909), 113–14; The Chief’s Daughter (1911), 129–30n86; The Chink at Golden Gulch (1910), 170; Fate’s Interception (1912), 284; The Greaser’s Gauntlet (1908), 202; His Trust (1911), 16; His Trust Fulfilled (1911), 16; The Indian Runner’s Romance (1909), 140, 152, 284; In Old Kentucky (1909), 16; Intolerance (1916), 226; Iola’s Promise (1912), 114–15, 152, 284;

317

Lady of the Pavements (1929), 213; The Massacre (1912), 111–12; The Mended Lute (1909), 140; The Mexican Sweethearts (1909), 204, 284; A Mohawk’s Way (aka The Mohawk’s Treasure) (1910), 113; A Pueblo Legend (1912), 152, 284; Ramona (1910), 142, 205–6, 284; The Red Girl (1908), 204; The Song of the Wildwood Flute (1910), 152; The Tavern Keeper’s Daughter (1908), 202 Griffith, “Roaring Jake,” 16 Ha Ha, Minnie (aka Minnie Devereaux, Minnie Prevost/Provost, and Indian Minnie), 110–11, 134, 152 Hall, Beulah, 38, 39 Hall, G. Stanley, 235 Hallelujah (1929), 79 Handy, W.C., 14 Harlem Hellfighters (369th Infantry Regiment), 14, 68 Harlem Renaissance. 67–68, 76, 87n93 Harlow, Jean, 9 Harper, Francis E.W., 25 Harte, Bret, 168, 200, 210, 212 The Hatchet Man (1932), 160 Haworth Pictures, 173 Hayakawa, Sessue, 172–77, 285 Hayes, Helen, 160, 182 Haynes, Hunter, 79 The Hazards of Helen (1914–1917), 61, 238, 239–40 Hearst, William Randolph, 167–68, 185, 200–201, 243–45, 247, 250 Heart of Juanita (1920), 212 The Heart of Wetona (1919), 152 Hearts in Dixie (1929), 79 Henderson, Harry, 44 Hepburn, Katharine, 9, 160 Her Indian Mother (1910), 116 Hersholt, Jean, 210 His Mexican Bride (1909), 202 Holland, Robert Afton, 279n30

318

Index

Holmes, Helen, 1, 240 Hot Pepper (1933), 214 Houston, Drusilla Dunjee, 69–70 Howard, Shingzie, 46–47 Howe, James Wong, 178 Howe, Julia Ward, 230–31; “The Other Side of the Woman Question” (article), 230–31 How They Got the Vote (1913), 265 Hughes, Langston, 14, 76 Hurston, Zora Neale, 14, 74, 76–78; Their Eyes Were Watching God (novel), 76 Hurston films: Baptism (1929), 77; Children’s Games (1928), 77–78; Logging (1928), 77 Ibsen, Henrik, 228–29 Imitation of Life (1934), 285 Immigration Act, 165 I’m No Angel (1933), 9 Ince, Thomas, 91–92, 133, 137, 175 Ince films: The Battle of the Red Men (1912), 95; The Invaders (1912), 91–96; War on the Plains (1912), 95 Inceville, 91, 95 In Dahomey, 35, 63 Independent Moving Picture Company, 91 The Indian Maiden’s Lesson (1911), 95 Indian princess stereotype, 95, 103–4, 111, 114–16, 119, 141, 147, 151, 283 Indian Removal Act (1830), 97–98 The Indian Suffragettes (1914), 268 Indian War Council (1894), 107 The Indian Wars (1914), 107 In Humanity’s Cause (1911), 26 In Slavery Days (1913), 3, 26 James, Henry, 228 Jane the Justice (1914), 281n71 Java Head (1934), 180–81 The Jazz Singer (1927), 79 Jefferson, Thomas, 97

Jezebel/temptress stereotype, 2, 3, 24, 63, 79, 185, 284 Jim Crow, 13–14, 74 Joan of Arc, 204, 249 “John Chinaman” stereotype, 168 Johnson, James Weldon, 19, 25 Johnson Brothers (Noble M. Johnson and George P. [Perry] Johnson), 3, 38–42 Johnson Brothers films: By Right of Birth (1921), 41; The Law of Nature (1917), 39–40; The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition (1916), 38–39; The Trooper of Troop K (1916) (aka The Trooper of Company K), 39 Jolson, Al, 79 Judson, Sr., Edward Zane Carroll. See Ned Buntline Just Squaw (1919), 116, 212 Kaelred, Katharine, 272 Kalem Company, 34n60, 137, 239, 240 Karloff, Boris, 177 Keaton, Buster, 110 Kelly, Howard, 35 The Kentuckian (1908), 116 King of Chinatown (1939), 182 A Kiss in the Dark (1904), 36 Ku Klux Klan, 11–12, 15–16, 18, 52–54, 64, 70, 162–63 The Lady Barber (1898), 258 The Lady Police (1912), 278n21 Laemmle, Carl, 91 Lafayette Players, 43, 47, 63, 65 Larsen, Nella, 25 La Saint, Edward J., 130 A Lass of the Lumberlands (1916), 238 The Last of the Line (1914), 175 The Last of the Mohee-cans (1926), 103 Laurel and Hardy, 15 Leigh, Vivien, 9 Leong, James, 177–78, 183–84 Levy, Robert, 43

Index

Liberty, A Daughter of the U.S.A. (1916), 249 The Life of Buffalo Bill (1912), 107 The Lily of Poverty Flat (1915), 212 Lincoln Motion Picture Company, 38 Lincoln’s Dream. See The Birth of a Race Little, Ann, 95 Little Big Horn, 106 The Little Colonel (1935), 9 A Little Princess (1917), 225 Locke, Alain, 61 London, Jack, 103, 167 Long, Lotus, 177 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 206 Looking Forward (1910), 262 Loos, Anita, 263–64 Lorre, Peter, 177 Lost Cause, 16, 257 Lotus Blossom (1921), 177–78, 184 Lotus Blossom stereotype, 3, 5, 160, 169, 179, 180, 185, 217, 283, 285 Louisiana Purchase, 96 The Love of a Savage (1909), 142 Lowe, Edmund, 205 Loy, Myrna, 160 Lubin, Sigmund, 37 Lubin Studios, 137 Lucille Love (1913), 238 Lynching, 12, 14, 18, 47, 49–50, 51, 69, 162, 198, 199, 210 Madame Butterfly (1915), 160, 175, 284 Madero, Francisco, 197 Maigne, Charles, 130 Mammy’s Ghost (1911), 22 Mammy’s Rose (1916), 22–23 Mammy stereotype, 1, 4, 10, 19, 21–23, 36, 61, 284 Manifest Destiny, 96–97, 196 Maria Candelaria (1944), 206 The Mark of Zorro (1920), 216 Marsh, Mae, 112, 134 Marshall, Tully, 178 Maryland (1940), 10

319

Mary of the Mines (1912), 238 The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), 160 The Mating of Marcella (1918), 238 Maya, Just an Indian (1913), 116 Mayo, Stella, 64 McCarthy, Charlie, 15 McCrea, Joel, 206 McCulley, Johnston, 216 McDaniel, Hattie, 9–10, 21–22, 26, 284 McDaniel, Otis, 9 McLaglen, Victor, 205 McQueen, Butterfly, 24 Mei, Tsen, 177 Mexican American War, 196 Mexican Cession, 196 The Mexican Joan of Arc (1911), 204 Mexican Joe (José Barrera), 201 Mexican Joe’s Wild West, 106, 201 Mexican Revolution, 197, 201, 204 The Mexican’s Jealousy (1910), 202 Mexican Spitfire (1940), 214 Mexican Spitfire Out West (1940), 214 Mexican Spitfire’s Blessed Event (1943), 214 Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost (1942), 214 The Mexican’s Revenge (1909), 202 Micheaux, Oscar, 3, 4–5, 35, 43, 44, 45, 46–57, 58, 63, 64, 65, 67, 73–74, 79, 285 Micheaux films: The Betrayal (1948), 73; The Broken Violin (1928), 73; Body and Soul (1924), 54–57, 74; The Darktown Revue (1931), 73; Daughter of the Congo (1930), 73; Easy Street (1930), 73; The Girl from Chicago (1932), 73; God’s Step Children (1938), 73; The Homesteader (1919), 46, 47, 55; Lem Hawkins’ Confession (1935), 73; Murder in Harlem (1935), 57; The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940), 57; Ten Minutes to Live (1932), 73; Underworld (1937), 57; The Wages

320

Index

of Sin (1929), 73; Within Our Gates (1920), 4, 47–51, 53, 56, 64, 65 Micheaux novels: The Case of Mrs. Wingate, 73; The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913), 46 Michelina, Beatriz, 210–12, 217 Michelina, Vera, 212 Michelina Studios, 212 Middleton, George E., 212 midnight rambles, 26, 78 Mignon (1915), 212 A Militant Suffragette (1912), 260 The Milkman’s Revenge (1913), 262 Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show, 63, 137, 201 minstrel shows, 1, 9, 15, 41, 78, 101 miscegenation, 3, 16, 47, 94, 110–11, 117, 119, 122, 138, 160, 166, 171, 174, 180, 257, 284 The Mis-Directed Kiss (1904), 36 Miss Saigon, 285 The Mistake of Mammy Lou (1915), 23 Mitchell, Margaret, 31n28 Mix, Tom, 107, 154n5, 203 Mixed Babies (1908), 36 A Modern Lochinvar (1913), 265–66 Monroe, James, 97 Moreno, Antonio, 194, 217 Moreno, Rita, 217 Mori, Toshia (b. Toshiye Ichioka), 174 Morton, Edna, 43 Moses, Ethel, 47 Moses, Lucia Lynn, 44 Motts, Robert, 35 Mrs. Pinkhurst’s Proxy (1914), 263 Mr. Moto mysteries, 177 Mr. Wong detective mysteries, 177 Mr. Wu (1927), 175–76 mulatta/mulatto stereotype, 3, 4, 17, 18, 25–26, 50, 79, 137, 284 Murietta, Joaquin, 223n90 Myles, Norbert, 145–46 Nancy Drew, Reporter (1939), 248 Nana (1944), 216

Nan of the North (1922), 238 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 10, 69, 74 National Negro Business League, 13 The Nation’s Peril (1915), 249 Native American maiden/princess, 1, 2–3, 95, 96, 103–4, 106, 111, 114– 18, 120, 122, 147, 151–52, 214, 283 Navarro, Ramon, 203, 205 Negri, Pola, 190n55, 194 Neihardt, John G., 127n54 Nellie, the Beautiful House Maid (1908), 36 New Negro, 14, 16, 39, 48 New Negro Woman, 46, 60–63 New Woman, 5, 61–62, 225–51, 257, 276; fashion, impact on, 236 New York Motion Pictures, 91, 137 The Next Corner (1924), 194–37 Niagara Movement, 13 A Night in Coontown. See One Large Evening Nineteenth Amendment, 277 noble and ignoble savages, 102, 109, 268 Norman, Richard E., 3, 5, 46, 57–60, 63–67, 79, 285 Norman films: Black Gold (1928), 66; The Bull-Dogger (1922), 63–64; The Crimson Skull (1922), 64; The Flying Ace (1926), 65–67; The Green-Eyed Monster (1919), 58–60, 63, 64; Regeneration (1923), 64; Zircon (unproduced), 65 Norton, Roy, 167 Novarro, Ramon, 194, 217 Oakley, Annie, 105, 106 Oakley, Violet, 236 Ocoee, Florida, massacre, 12 The Octoroon (1911), 3, 26 Oh! You Suffragette! (1911), 260 Oland, Warner, 159, 174, 181 Old Mammy’s Charge (1913), 22

Index

Old Scout, 199 O Mimi San (1914), 175 Onda of the Orient (1916), 238 O’Neill, Rose, 236 One Large Evening (retitled A Night in Coontown), 79 Oropeza, Vincente, 201 Orozco, Pascual, 197 Osbourne, George, 175 Page, Thomas Nelson, 14–15 Page Act of 1875, 5, 164, 165 The Paleface (1922), 110 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 264, 274, 277n3 Parade of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (1898), 107 Parkman, Francis, 229–31; “The Woman Question” (article), 229–31 Pawnee Bill, 107, 127n57, 201 Pearl of the Army, 61, 249 Pekin Theatre in Chicago, 35 The Perils of Our Girl Reporters (1916), 247 The Perils of Pauline (1914), 4, 61, 238, 243, 245, 277 Peter Pan (Disney version), 285 A Phyllis of the Sierras (1915), 212 Piccadilly (1929), 180 The Pickaninnies (1894), 14 “pickaninny” stereotype, 4, 14, 24, 58, 79 Pickens, Albertine, 40 Pickett, Bill, 63 Pickford, Mary, 1, 114, 134, 152, 160, 175, 204–5, 217, 225–26, 284 Pioneer Days: A Spectacle Drama of Western Life, 140 plantation sagas, 2, 284 Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, 12 Pocahontas, 103, 135 Polk, James K., 196 Pollard, L.J., 41 Pollyanna (1920), 225 The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), 225 Powell, Alma Webster Hall, 274

321

Preer, Evelyn, 47, 48 Prentice, George Henry, 104 preparedness films, 248–50 Procession of Mounted Indians and Cowboys (1898), 107 Professor George Morrison’s Melody Hounds, 9 Pulitzer, Joseph, 200 The Pullman Porter. See The Railroad Porter Quality Amusement Company, 43 Queue Ordinance of 1873, 163 Quirk, Billy, 238 Quirt and Flagg, 214 race films, 3, 29, 35–80 The Railroad Porter (also released under the title The Pullman Porter), 35, 36 Rainer, Louise, 160, 182 Ramona (1916), 142, 205 Ramona (1928), 148, 149, 205 Rankin, Jeanette, 277 Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), 225 A Reckless Rover (1918), 82n23 redface, 95, 106, 134, 136, 158n62, 284 The Red Girl and the Child (1910), 141 The Red Lantern (1919), 178 The Redman and the Child (1908), 112–13 A Redskin’s Bravery (1911), 113 Red Summer of 1919, 13 The Reformation of the Suffragettes (1911), 259–60 Reid, Hal, 269 A Relic of Old Japan (1914), 175 Reol Productions, 43–44, 46 Resurrection (1927), 205 The Revolt of Mr. Wiggs (1915), 260 Rice, Thomas Dartmouth (“Daddy”), 13 Riley, Lewis, 207 Roach, Hal, 152 Robeson, Eslanda Cardozo Goode, 74

322

Index

Robeson, Paul, 10, 55, 74 Robinson, Bill “Bojangles,” 9, 14 Rogers, Will, 107, 201 Rohmer, Sax (pseudonym of Arthur Sarsfield Ward), 167, 185; Fu Manchu stories, 167, 185 Roland, Gilbert, 194, 217 Roland, Ruth, 1, 178 The Romance of Rowena (1913), 238 Rooney, Mickey, 15 The Rose of the Misty Pool (1915), 212 Rosita (1923), 284 Ross, Chief John, 98 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 109 Royle, Edwin Milton, 117, 135 Russell, Alice B., 46, 73–74 Russell, Theresa, 55 Ruth of the Range (1923), 238 Salisbury, Monroe, 117 Salomy Jane (1914), 210–11 Salvation Nell (1915), 212 Sambo and Rastus series (1909, 1910, 1911), 37 “Sambo” stereotype, 23, 24, 41 Sanger, Margaret, 235, 236 The Scapegoat (1917), 82n26 The Scar of Shame (1929), 44–45 Schenk, Joseph, 178 Schulberg, B.P. (Budd), 274 Scott, Emmett J., 37 The Secret of the Submarine (1916), 249 The Secret Sorrow (1921), 44 Seitz, George, 119 Selig, William, 37, 241, 242, 270 Selznick, David O., 9, 206 Sennett, Mack, 110, 263 Señorita (1927), 204 serial motion pictures, 1, 5, 8, 20, 61, 65, 145, 168, n178, 200, 237–51, 270, 277 Shadowed by the Devil (1916), 73 Shaw, Dr. Anna, 269, 272 Shaw, George Bernard, 228 The Sheik (1921), 193

She Would Be a Business Man (1910), 261 Shiel, M.P., 167 Show Boat (1936), 10 The Show Down (1917), 209 Sidewalk Ordinance of 1870, 163 Sills, Milton, 238 Simmons, William J., 11 Since You Went Away (1944), 10 Sinclair, Upton, 103 Singapore Sue (1932), 177 Sioux Ghost Dance (1894), 107 Sitting Bull, 105 Smith, George Albert, 258 Smith, Jessie Willcox, 236 Smith, Lillian, 106 Smith, Nellie, 106 The Son-Daughter (1932), 160, 182 The Song of the South (1946), 10 Souders, Tressie (aka Tressa Souders, Tressie Saunders) 70–71, 73; A Woman’s Error (1922), 70 Soul Fire (1925), 142 The Spaniard (1925), 194 Spingler, Harry, 212 spitfire stereotype, 1, 203–4, 213, 214– 15, 217, 284 Spoor, George K., 95 The Sport of the Gods (1921), 43 The Spy (1907), 103 Spying the Spy (1918), 41 The Squaw Man (1914), 117–19, 214, 138, 139, 142, 152 The Squaw Man (1931), 214 The Squaw Man’s Son (1917), 130n87 “squaw” stereotype, 109–11, 151 Standing Bear, Luther, 133 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 231 star system, 2, 47 St. Cyr, Lillian “Red Wing,” 4, 117, 133, 138–45, 149, 152, 285 St. Cyr films incorporating the name “Red Wing” in title: For the Love of Red Wing (1910), 141; Red Wing and the White Girl (1910), 140; Red

Index

Wing’s Constancy (1910), 140, 142; Red Wing’s Gratitude (1909), 140, 141; Red Wing’s Loyalty (1910), 140 Stella Maris (1918), 225 Stephens, Ann Sophia, 103; Malaeska, The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (dime novel), 103 Stirling, Yates, Jr., 167 Stoker, Bram, 228 Stone, Lucy, 230 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 16, 19; Uncle Tom’s Cabin (novel), 16, 19, 24, 270 Strictly Dynamite (1934), 214 Suds (1920), 225 Suffrage and the Man (1912), 266, 274 suffrage films, 74, 235–36, 257–77 The Suffragette (1913), 280n47 Suffragettes (1913), 259 Suffragettes Again (1913), 258–59 The Suffragette’s Downfall (1911), 260 The Suffragette’s Dream (1909), 261–62 The Suffragette Sheriff (1912), 278nn21, 26 suffragists, 1, 3, 5, 227, 230, 257–77 Swanson, Gloria, 194 Taft, William Howard, 134 Talmadge, Norma, 152, 160, 194 Temple, Shirley, 9, 15 Ten Nights in a Barroom (1926), 44 Ten Pickaninnies (1904), 37 The Thief of Baghdad (1924), 179 Thomas, Ambroise, 212 Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, 91 Thompson, Anita, 41 Three Stooges, 15 Tiger Bay (1934), 180 The Toll of the Sea (1922), 178, 179 Tolstoy, Leo, 205 Tom shows, 17, 20 Tony, the Greaser (1911 and 1914), 202–3 Topsy and Eva (1927), 24–25 Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange, 68

323

Toussaint Welcome, Ernest, 68 Toussaint Welcome, Madame E. (b. Jane “Jennie” Louise Van Der Zee), 67–69 Trail of Tears, 98–99 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 196, 197 “A Trip to Coontown” Company, 35 Tuskegee Institute, 14, 37, 38 Twain, Mark, 168, 200 The Typhoon (1914), 172, 173 Uncle Tom stereotype, 4, 19–21, 24, 58, 70, 168 Uncle Tom’s Bungalow, 20 Uncle Tom’s Cabaña, 20 Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays, 74, 225 Uncovered Wagons (aka Paul’s Last Stand), 152 Under the Old Apple Tree (1907), 36 Unique Film Company of Chicago, 73, 274 uplift, racial, 3, 28, 37, 39, 42, 46, 47, 51, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 69 An Up-to-Date Squaw (1911), 109 Valentino, Rudolph, 193–95, 205 Van Der Zee, James Augustus, 67–68 Van Der Zee, Jane “Jennie” Louise. See Welcome, Madame E. Toussaint Jane “Jennie” Louise The Vanishing American (1925), 119–20 Vélez, Lupe, 213–16, 284 The Ventures of Marguerite (1915), 240–41 The Vermilion Pencil (1922), 160 Villa, Pancho, 197, 200, 204 Vitagraph Studios, 137, 208 Votes for Women (1912), 268–69 Wah Ming Motion Picture Company, 177 Walker, George, 35, 63 Waller, Fats, 14 Walthall, Henry B., 17 Walton, Lester, 19, 79 Warren, Giles R., 270

324

Index

Washington, Booker T., 13, 37, 54, 60, 68 Washington, Margaret Murray, 60–62 Watermelon Contest (1896), 14 Waters, Ethel, 14 Watt, Allen, 210 Webb, Miles M., 73 Webb, Mrs. M., 73 Weissmuller, Johnny, 214 Welles, Orson, 206 West, Mae, 9 Western Film Producing Company and Booking Exchange, 71 Westerns, 2, 5, 58, 63–64, 91–92, 95–96, 136, 137, 141, 144, 145, 204, 284 West Side Story, 285 Wharton Brothers (Theodore and Leopold), 61, 107, 239, 245–48 Wharton films and serials: Beatrice Fairfax (1916), 247; The Exploits of Elaine (1914), 61, 168, 238, 245, 247, 277; The Mysteries of Myra (1916), 61, 238, 239; The New Exploits of Elaine (1915), 168, 245–46; Patria (1917), 168, 239, 248; The Romance of Elaine (1915), 245, 246–47 What Happened in the Tunnel (1903), 36 What Happened to Mary (1912), 238–39 What Price Glory (1926), 205 When Ciderville Went Dry (1915), 260 When Helen Was Elected (1912), 261 When Roaring Gulch Got Suffrage (1913), 260 When True Love Wins (1915), 82n27 When Women Win (1910), 261 When You Were Born (1938), 182 White, George, 13 White, Pearl, 1, 168, 178, 243–45, 249, 251, 258 Why Mr. Nation Wants a Divorce (1901), 258

Wild West shows, 63, 92, 101, 105–7, 133, 137, 140, 153, 201 Williams, Dr. Daniel Hale, 14 Williams, Eugene, 13 Williams, Jesse L., 71 Williams, Kathlyn, 241 Williams, Maria P., 71, 73, 78, 79 Wilson, Woodrow, 17, 250, 277 With Buffalo Bill on the U.P. Trail (1925), 107 Wodehouse, P.G., 166–67 Wolf, Emma, 234 Wolfe, Jane, 204 Wolf Song (1929), 213–14, 215 The Woman in Politics (1916), 273–74 The “Woman Question,” 229–31 Women of the West (1910), 237–38 “Women’s Relation to Government” (article), 233–34 Women’s Social and Political Union, 277n3 Wong, Anna May, 5, 159–60, 178–83, 185, 285 Wong, Marion E., 5, 183–84, 185, 285 Woods, Sarah Elaine, 73 The Wooing and Wedding of a Coon (1905), 37 Wounded Knee massacre, 101 Wovoka, 100–101 The Wrath of the Gods (1914), 175 Wyndham, Olive, 272 yellowface, 160, 168, 175, 177, 189, 241, 246, 284 Yellow Peril, 2, 4, 5, 165–70, 171, 172, 178, 185, 245, 250 The Yellow Streak (1913), 208 Yober, F.P., 9 Young, Loretta, 160, 205, 217 Young Deer, James, 4, 133, 134–45, 149, 153, 285 Young Deer films: The Cheyenne’s Bride (1911), 141; The Falling Arrow (aka The Friendly Indian) (1909), 139–40; For the Love of

Index

Red Wing (1910), 141–42; For the Papoose (1912), 138–39, 153; Red Wing’s Gratitude (1909), 140–44; White Fawn’s Devotion (1910), 4, 134–37, 145, 153 Young Wild West, 199

325

Your Girl and Mine (1914), 269, 270–73 Zapata, Emiliano, 197 Zenobia (1939), 10 Zorro, 204, 216

About the Author

Barbara Tepa Lupack, a former professor of English at Wayne State College, Fulbright Professor of American Literature in Poland and in France, academic dean at SUNY, and New York State Public Scholar (2015–2018), has written extensively on American literature, film, and popular culture. She is editor of Early Race Filmmaking in America (2016) and author of Silent Serial Sensations: The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Early Cinema (2020), Literary Adaptations in Black American Cinema: From Micheaux to Morrison (exp. ed., 2010), and the award-winning Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking (2014).

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