"Democracy and Burnt Cork": The End of Blackface, the Beginning of Civil Rights

Abstract

THE NEW DEAL brought the immigrant to the center of American politics. Shifting the orientation of the majority party from the hinterland to the metropolis, Franklin D. Roosevelt's victories were foreshadowed by the Catholic Al Smith's 1928 run for the presidency. The 1930s and 1940s were also the golden age of the Hollywood studio system, with the coming of talking pictures. In the standard film-history accounts, urban, Americanizing immigrants watched massproduced, studio-made, genre films purveying the quintessential national narratives-gangster pictures, musicals, screwball comedies, domestic melodramas, westerns. The 1930s left its mark on the genre mix, from this point of view, bringing together the urban milieu of gangster films and screwball comedy's class reconciliation-the movies of Frank Capra celebrating populist politics, on the one hand, and the cinema of escapist entertainment allowing moviegoers to flee the Depression, on the other. Some of the most important and popular films of the period are missing from this picture: films grounded in race. As the Jazz Age came to an end, Al Jolson's blackface TheJazz Singer (1927) and The Singing Fool (1928) broke all existing box office records. At the same time thatJolson was the top Hollywood box office star, Amos 'n' Andy was the most popular radio show. The Motion Picture Exhibitors' coveted top ten list of stars was headed in 1934 by Will Rogers, who put on Stepin Fetchit's blackvoice in the southernJudge Priest (1934); from 1935 through 1938 by Shirley Temple, who starred in a series of Civil War southerns with Bojangles Robinson (and put on blackface in one of them); and in 1939 by Mickey Rooney, who led a blackface minstrel show that year in Babes in Arms. Far from being a blockbuster exception to New Deal cinema, David 0. Selznick's Gone with the Wind (1939), the most popular film in Hollywood's first half century, proves the rule.' TheJazz Singer and Gone with the Wind were transformative films in the history of Hollywood, combining box office success, critical recognition of innovative significance, and shifts in the cinematic mode of production. The two earlier revolutionary moments in film history similarly addressed the fundamental conflict in American history, given in Winthrop Jordan's formulation as white over black; they also show, in Edmund Morgan's terms, how American freedom was born from American slavery. I have in mind the Edwin S. Porter trilogy of