Making america home: Racial masquerade and ethnic assimilation in the transition to talking pictures

Journal of American History

Volumn 79, Issue 3, 1992, Pages 1050-1077

  Rogin, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84963002157     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: 19452314     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2080798     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. Ronald Sanders, The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation (New York, 1987), 104-9.
2. Herbert Ward, “Life Among the Congo Savages,” Scribner’s Magazine, 7 (Feb. 1890), 135, 152-54, 186.
3. Frederick E. Hoxie, “Exploring a Cultural Borderland: Native American Journeys of Discovery in the Early Twentieth Century” Journal of American History, 79 (Dec. 1992), 969-95.
4. Jacob A. Riis, “How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements,” Scribner’s Magazine 6 (Dec. 1889), 655, 657, 659.
5. Sanders, Downtown Jews, 197-204.
6. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago, 1988), 109.
7. L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, 1971). Sanders identifies Henry M. Stanley as the author of the article Cahan translated, but Stanley’s Scribner’s article (see note 3) was published the year after the first issue of the Arbeiter Zeitung. Ward’s travel account, which centers on cannibalism as Stanley does not, must be the essay in question. It appeared one month before Cahan’s translation.
8. Henry M. Stanley, “The Pygmies of the Great African Forest,” Scribner’s Magazine, 9 (Jan. 1891), 3, 8, 17. On Henry M. Stanley, see Maria Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, 1990), 26-33.
9. Ronald Takaki, “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,” Journal of American History, 79 (Dec. 1992), 892-912.
10. From the enormous body of work on which this paragraph draws, I cite here only Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, 1973).
11. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York, 1985).
12. Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1974).
13. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (London, 1990).
14. Eric Lott, Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, forthcoming).
15. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991).
16. “The wilderness… strips off the garments of civilization and arrays [the colonist] in the hunting shirt and moccasin.… The outcome is… a new product that is American,” wrote Frederick Jackson Turner in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” the 1893 paper reprinted in Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), 4. Hoxie, “Exploring a Cultural Borderland.”.
17. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York, 1986), 4-5.
18. Kenneth Cmiel, “ ‘A Broad Fluid Language of Democracy’: Discovering the American Idiom,” Journal of American History, 79 (Dec. 1992), 930.
19. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (New York, 1914), 207.
20. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 71.
21. Henry O. Osgood, So This Is Jazz (1926; reprint, New York, 1978), 55n.
22. Babes in Arms, dir. Busby Berkeley (MGM, 1939).
23. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1988).
24. Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York, 1980).
25. Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley, 1987), 190-235.
26. The Jazz Singer, dir. Alan Crosland (Warner Brothers, 1927). This paragraph summarizes Michael Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice,” Critical Inquiry, 18 (Spring 1992), 417-53. For Werner Sollors’s amusement at urban Irish blackface spoofs of the tragic Indian, see Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 132-38.
27. Old San Francisco, dir. Alan Crosland (Warner Brothers, 1927).
28. The King of Jazz, dir. John Murray Anderson (Universal Pictures, 1930).
29. The Singing Fool, dir. Alan Crosland (Warner Brothers, 1928).
30. Whoopee!, dir. Thornton Freeland (Samuel Goldwyn, 1930). Thanks to William Nestrick for his copy of The King of Jazz.
31. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786-1789,” Journal of American History, 79 (Dec. 1992), 841-73.
32. James R. Barrett, “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880-1930,” Journal of American History, 79 (Dec. 1992), 1006.
33. Takao Ozawa v. U.S., 260 U.S. 178 (1922).
34. Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston, 1989), 208. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
35. William K. Everson, undated program notes, Old San Francisco file, Clippings Collection (Pacific Film Archive Library, University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley).
36. Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley, forthcoming), ch. 1, 2.
37. Nick Browne, “American Film Theory in the Silent Period: Orientalism as Ideological Form,” Wide Angle, 11 (Oct. 1989), 26-30, esp. 30.
38. Matthew Bernstein, Walter Wanger: “Independent” in Hollywood (Berkeley, forthcoming), ch. 4.
39. Michael Rogin, “The Great Mother Domesticated: Sexual Difference and Sexual Indifference in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance,” Critical Inquiry, 15 (Spring 1989), 522-28.
40. Hansen, Babel and Babylon.
41. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971).
42. Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington, 1984), 64-164.
43. Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise,” 422-28.
44. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), 124. Sollors acknowledges the shift from aristocratic blue, to racialized black, blood but fails to see how that transfer of taboos calls into question his subsumption of race by ethnicity. Thus his enthusiasm not simply for the intermarriage praised in Zangwill’s Melting Pot but also for the playwright’s “spiritual miscegenation” collapses racial expropriation into ethnic romance. See Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 38, 71.
45. “Jazz Singer Souvenir Program,” in Souvenir Programs of Twelve Classic Movies, 1927-1941, ed. Miles Kreuger (New York, 1971), 13. On Jewish orientalism, see Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise,” 440.
46. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 102.
47. Riis, “How the Other Half Lives,” 155.
48. William F. Wu, The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940 (Hamden, 1982).
49. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 14, 41, 121-23. For the identification of the 1927 pulp novel by Allie Lowe Miles from which Darryl Zanuck wrote the screenplay for Old San Francisco, see Dorn, “San Francisco from Gold Rush to ‘06,” 15.
50. Review of Old San Francisco, June 29, 1927, in Variety Film Reviews, 1907-1980 (16 vols., New York, 1983), III, n.p.
51. The Ten Commandments, dir. Cecil B. De Mille (Famous Players-Lasky, 1923).
52. The Godless Girl, dir. Cecil B. De Mille (C.B. De Mille Productions, 1928).
53. Cf. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 171-84, 197-200.
54. Mordaunt Hall, review of Old San Francisco, June 22, 1927, in New York Times Film Reviews (6 vols., New York, 1970), I, 372.
55. Eric Lott, “Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy,” Representations (no. 39, Summer 1992), 23-50. On the origins of minstrelsy in Jacksonian mass politics and culture, see Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 165-82.
56. Paul Whiteman and Mary Margaret McBride, Jazz (New York, 1926), 122.
57. Samuel B. Charters and Leonard Kunstadt, Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (New York, 1981), 246. On the relationship of the jazz age to jazz, see Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise,” 447-49, and the sources there cited.
58. Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York, 1957), 98-100. The first version of this book was published in 1924.
59. “King Jazz and the Jazz Kings,” Literary Digest, Jan. 30, 1926, pp. 37-42.
60. Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 3-4, 17, 176, 265.
61. Osgood, So This Is Jazz; William Weaver, “Jazz in Jackets: Cultural Commodification in the Jazz Age,” seminar paper, Johns Hopkins University, 1988 (in Michael Rogin’s possession).
62. Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 15, 19, 27-28, 122-27, 178, 237.
63. Arnold Shaw, The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s (New York, 1987), 47-53.
64. Isaac Goldberg, George Gershwin (New York, 1931), 136.
65. Creighton Peet, “The Movies,” Outlook and Independent, May 14, 1930, p. 72.
66. Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 94-99.
67. Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 178-79.
68. Isaac Goldberg, “Aaron Copland and His Jazz,” American Mercury, 12 (Sept. 1927), 63-64.
69. Peet, “Movies,” 72.
70. Richard Dana Skinner, review of The King of Jazz, Commonweal, May 21, 1930, p. 80.
71. Peet, “Movies,” 72; review of The King of Jazz, Variety, May 3, 1930, Variety Film Reviews, III, n.p; review of The King of Jazz, Nation, May 28, 1930, p. 633; review of The King of Jazz, Time, May 12, 1930, p. 64.
72. Barrett, “Americanization from the Bottom Up,” 996. Mordaunt Hall, review of The King of Jazz, May 30, 1930, in New York Times Film Reviews (6 vols., New York, 1970), I, 623.
73. Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 15.
74. “King of jazz,” Photoplay, 38 (June 1930), 56, in Selected Film Criticism, 1921-1930, ed. Anthony Slide (Metuchen, 1982), 157.
75. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 75-99.
76. Whiteman and McBride, Jazz, 17.
77. On feminization in The Jazz Singer, see Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise,” 441-44. Box office figures are from William K. Everson, American Silent Film (New York, 1978), 373-74.
78. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, dir. Edwin S. Porter (Edison, 1903).
79. Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise,” 444-49. On transitional objects, see D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York, 1982), 1-25.
80. Richard Koszarski, “On the Record: Seeing and Hearing Vitaphone,” in Dawn of Sound, ed. Mary Lea Bandy (New York, 1989), 18. Cf. David Bordwell et al., The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York, 1985), 3-39.
81. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 245-94.
82. Kramer v. Kramer, dir. Robert Benton (Columbia, 1979).
83. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 131-48.
84. Charles Musser, “Ethnicity, Role-Playing, and American Film Comedy: From Chinese Laundry Scene to Whoopee (1894-1930),” in Unspeakable Images, ed. Friedman, 62.
85. Blazing Saddles, dir. Mel Brooks (Warner Brothers, 1974).
86. Eddie Cantor, as told to David Freedman, My Life Is in Your Hands (New York, 1928). (I am indebted to Mark Slobin for directing me to this source.) Whoopee! is also an early example of the male buddy film, pairing a straight, macho man with a clownish feminized cross-dresser (Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope). See Rebecca Bell-Mettereau, Hollywood Androgyny (New York, 1985), 23.
87. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 132-38.
88. Cantor as told to Freedman, My Life Is in Your Hands, 82.
89. Musser, “Ethnicity, Role-Playing, and American Film Comedy,” 64.
90. Musser, “Ethnicity, Role-Playing, and American Film Comedy,” 62, 43; ad for Whoopee/, New Yorker, Oct. 6, 1930, p. 87.
91. Cantor as told to Freedman, My Life Is in Your Hands, 29-30.
92. Lott, “Love and Theft.”.
93. A1 Smith was Cantor’s ghetto boyhood hero, “as if the lady of the statue of liberty had sent her own son to receive these poor, bewildered immigrants,” the actor wrote in his autobiography. Cantor as told to Freedman, My life Is in Your Hands, 44.
94. Roman Scandals, dir. Frank Tuttle (Samuel Goldwyn, 1933).
95. William D. Routt and Richard J. Thompson, “Keep Young and Beautiful: Surplus and Subversion in Roman Scandals,” Journal of Film and Video, 42 (Spring 1990), 17-35. Thanks to Vivian Sobchack for this reference.
96. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (New York, 1823).
97. Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril,” 22-27.
98. Cf. Routt and Thompson, “Keep Young and Beautiful,” 24-27.
99. Lenny Bruce’s Jewish/goyish monologue is legendary. I heard it in Chicago c. 1960.
100. Musser, “Ethnicity, Role-Playing, and American Film Comedy,” celebrates ethnic performance as a vehicle for American self-making. Although I have learned and borrowed from Musser’s rich essay, which I read after completing a draft of my own, he takes a sunnier view of the material.
101. Cantor as told to Freedman, My Life Is in Your Hands, 40, 44, 186-87.