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Silent Films and the Shaping of Class in America
Princeton University Press
December 1999
On Sale: December 16, 1999
392 pages
ISBN: 0691024642
EAN: 9780691024646
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Non-Fiction
This path-breaking book reveals how Hollywood became
"Hollywood" and what that meant for the politics of America
and American film. Working-Class Hollywood tells the story
of filmmaking in the first three decades of the twentieth
century, a time when going to the movies could transform
lives and when the cinema was a battleground for control of
American consciousness. Steven Ross documents the rise of a
working-class film movement that challenged the dominant
political ideas of the day. Between 1907 and 1930, worker
filmmakers repeatedly clashed with censors, movie industry
leaders, and federal agencies over the kinds of images and
subjects audiences would be allowed to see. The outcome of
these battles was critical to our own times, for the victors
got to shape the meaning of class in twentieth- century America. Surveying several hundred movies made by or about working
men and women, Ross shows how filmmakers were far more
concerned with class conflict during the silent era than at
any subsequent time. Directors like Charlie Chaplin, D. W.
Griffith, and William de Mille made movies that defended
working people and chastised their enemies. Worker
filmmakers went a step further and produced movies from A
Martyr to His Cause (1911) to The Gastonia Textile Strike
(1929) that depicted a unified working class using strikes,
unions, and socialism to transform a nation. J. Edgar Hoover
considered these class-conscious productions so dangerous
that he assigned secret agents to spy on worker filmmakers. Liberal and radical films declined in the 1920s as an
emerging Hollywood studio system, pressured by censors and
Wall Street investors, pushed American film in increasingly
conservative directions. Appealing to people's dreams of
luxury and upward mobility, studios produced lavish fantasy
films that shifted popular attention away from the problems
of the workplace and toward the pleasures of the new
consumer society. While worker filmmakers were trying to
heighten class consciousness, Hollywood producers were
suggesting that class no longer mattered. Working-Class
Hollywood shows how silent films helped shape the modern
belief that we are a classless nation.
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