Black hands and white hearts: Italian immigrants as 'urban racial types' in early American film culture

Urban History

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 375-399

  Bertellini, Giorgio ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ETHNICITY; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; IMMIGRANT POPULATION; MEDIA INDUSTRY; TWENTIETH CENTURY;

NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES; WESTERN HEMISPHERE; WORLD;

EID: 22444445943     PISSN: 09639268     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0963926805002427     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York, 1971 [1890]), 52.
2. George Beban, Photoplay Characterization; One of a Series of Lectures especially Prepared for Student-Members of the Palmer Plan (Los Angeles, 1921), 19.
3. I here adopt the film studies convention between 'early' (pre-1915) New York-based productions and 'silent' Hollywood films (1915-27). Given the paucity of extant films of this period, many of my discussions stem from a small sample of surviving film texts, but mostly from plot summaries, photographs and existing reviews.
4. Jane Gaines, 'The Scar of Shame: skin color and caste in black silent melodrama', Cinema Journal, 26,4 (1987), 3-21.
5. Whiteness defined, in legal, social and representational terms, civil entitlements and rights (citizenship, contracting loans, purchasing real estate and freely choosing marital partners) that certain individuals enjoyed, while others did not. For Europeans, for instance, assimilation was open to question but not denied a priori.
6. Bi-racialism' emerged within the new 'race-consciousness' of the mid-1910s in the works of such different authors as Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard (who coined the term), W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Cf. Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 6 and 12ff.
7. P. Kolchin, 'Whiteness studies: the new history of race in America', Journal of American History, 89, 1 (2002), 1-41.
8. See my entry ('Migrations') in R. Abel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (New York, 2004).
9. J. Strong, The Challenge of the City (New York: 1911 [1907]), 100.
10. Cf. Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000).
11. See Shelley Streeby's fundamental American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002).
12. Cf. Auna L. Meeker, Lend-a-Hand (1886),
13. quoted in Nathan Irvin Huggins, Protestants against Poverty: Boston's Charities, 1870-1900 (Westport, CT, 1971), 73 (my emphasis).
14. Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career (Cambridge, MA, 1965), 17.
15. An eloquent and harsh criticism of the moral righteousness of the approach of charity organization and a move toward an examination of the environment in which immigrants found themselves was Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (New York, 1902).
16. Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890-1917 (Pittsburgh, 1962), 88-9, 91.
17. Cathy Boeckmann, A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912 (Tuscaloosa and London, 2000), 4.
18. At the end of the nineteenth century, George W. Stocking writes, '"Blood" - and by extension "race" - included numerous elements that we would today call cultural; there was not a clear line between cultural and physical elements or between social and biological heredity. The characteristic qualities of civilization were carried from one generation to another both in and with the blood of their citizens.' G.W. Stocking, 'The turn-of-the-century concept of race', Modernism/Modernity, 1, 1 (1994), 6.
19. Emerging in England at the end of the nineteenth century, cosmopolitan in scope, but jingoistic in purpose, this form of social Darwinism quickly developed in the United States where its 'scientific' tenets were popularized in the press and lay culture and ended up informing the biological engineering of the body politic of early twentieth-century immigration restrictions. Cf. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA, 1985).
20. Stocking, 'The turn-of-the-century', 6.
21. On Riis as a writer and photographer, see Keith Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York, 1997),
22. and Bonnie Yochelson, Jacob Riis (New York, 2001).
23. Riis collected his lectures to middle-class audiences of church and charitable groups in several anthologies, including The Children of the Poor (1892), Out of Mulberry Street: Stories of Tenement Life in New York (1898) and The Battle with the Slum (1902).
24. This distinction was widely popularized by a series of articles which appeared in Harper's Weekly, titled 'The foreign element in New York City'. Cf. Harper's Weekly, 18 Oct. 1890, 817-19.
25. Riis, The Battle, 176 and 177.
26. John Dickie, Darkest Italy. The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860-1900 (New York, 1999).
27. The review was apropos Riis' The Making of an American (1901), quoted in Gandal, Virtues, 12.
28. Between 1892 and 1893, Scribner's Magazine ran a series of articles (including one by Riis) about urban destitution grouped under the titles of 'The poor in great cities'.
29. Editor of the Atlantic Monthly between 1871 and 1881, after moving to New York to direct Harper's Weekly, Howells fully realized the dramatic linguistic and cultural differences among old and new Americans. Cf. Elsa Nettels, Language, Race, and Social Class in Howell's America (Lexington, KY, 1988).
30. Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York, 2002 [18901), 182.
31. Italian Dialect Joke Book (Baltimore, MD, 1909), 74.
32. For a problematization of highbrow and lowbrow cultural realms within the American context of the time, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA, 1988), and the debates included in the special Forum of the American Historical Review, 97, 5 (1992).
33. G. Bertellini, 'Epica spettacolare e splendore del vero. L'influenza del cinema storico italiano in America (1908-1915)', in Gian Piero Brunetta (ed.), Storia del cinema mondiale: Gli Stati Uniti, vol. I (Turin, 1999), 227-65.
34. For a useful summary of the debate around the class and racial composition of early film patronage in urban America, see Cinema Journal, 35, 3 (1996).
35. Richard Gambino, Blood of my Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans (Toronto, 2000 [1974]), 278ff.
36. On Petrosino, see Arrigo Petacco, Joe Petrosino, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York, 1974),
37. and Humbert Nelli, The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States (New York, 1976), 95-8.
38. MPW, 30 Jan. 1909, 125.
39. MPW, 16 Nov. 1912, 668.
40. Plot summaries and visual advertisements for these films are to be found in Kemp R. Niver (and Behe Bergsten) (eds.), Biograph Bulletins, 1908-1912, 2 vols. (New York, 1971-73).
41. The development of longer feature productions of 'tenement dramas', both on stage and later in film, allowed for more complex melodramatizations of Italian characters and, consequently, of audience's emotional responses.
42. Shirley Samuels (ed.), The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1992).
43. Particularly appreciated was the pathos of the narrative, the realism of the setting and the poignancy of the acting performances. Cf. NYDM, 30 Dec. 1914, 26,
44. and MPN, 2 Jan. 1915, 81.
45. George Blaisdell, 'The sign of the rose', MPW, 1 May 1915, 740.
46. MPW, 24 Apr. 1915, 561.
47. George Beban, 'Taking a comedian seriously', The Green Book Album (Sept. 1911), 511-18.
48. Beban, Photoplay, 19 and 15.
49. NYDM, 3 Feb. 1917, 27.
50. His other films include Pasquale (1916), Lost in Transit (1917), One More American (1918), One Man in a Million (1921), The Sign of the Rose (1922), The Loves of Ricardo (1926).
51. Guterl, The Color, 6.
52. In the mid-1910s, such talented screenwriters as Sonya Levien, Anita Loos, Frances Marion and June Mathis had a chance to emerge and have a creative impact since the scenario department was the least sex-typed of all studio divisions.
53. Some examples include Pickford's Poor Little Peppina (1916) and The Love Light (1921), and Gish's religious The White Sister (1923).
54. Consider A Woman's Honor (1917), The Ordeal of Rosetta (1918) and Who Will Marry Me? (1919).
55. G. Bertellini, 'Divo/duce: masculinity, racial identity, and politics among Italian-Americans in 1920s New York City', Journal of Urban History (forthcoming).