Abstract
Examining archival footage and documents about the cultural work of silent film during the 1910s and 1920s, this essay reveals the complicity of film with the work of organized Americanization at both federal and industrial levels. Specifically, it argues that early American cinema is complicit with and critical of Americanization, as it negotiates multiple new immigrant concerns. Joining the recent work of film and immigration historians, it argues that just as Americanization did not produce compliant citizens overnight, silent film as a new and powerful medium of persuasion could influence the new American viewers’ transformation only in part. Of particular interest is the use of film in industrial and educational contexts – which sometimes overlapped – purporting to both “educate” and Americanize the new immigrants to the US. It asks, what cultural work did silent film do for Americanization, the active and sometimes coercive campaign aiming to make new immigrants into good Americans? The films I read as case studies later in this essay – industrial, educational, and nontheatrical films such as An American in the Making (1913), The Making of an American (1920), and others – illustrate the potential of silent film both as mimesis (or representation of ideology) and as ideology.
Highlights
Examining archival footage and documents about the cultural work of silent film during the s and s, this essay reveals the complicity of film with the work of organized Americanization at both federal and industrial levels
It argues that early American cinema is complicit with and critical of Americanization, as it negotiates multiple new immigrant concerns
What cultural work did silent film do for Americanization, the active and sometimes coercive campaign aiming to make new immigrants into good Americans? The films I read as case studies later in this essay – industrial, educational, and nontheatrical films such as An American in the Making ( ), The Making of an American ( ), and others – illustrate the potential of silent film both as mimesis and as ideology
Summary
Examining archival footage and documents about the cultural work of silent film during the s and s, this essay reveals the complicity of film with the work of organized Americanization at both federal and industrial levels It argues that early American cinema is complicit with and critical of Americanization, as it negotiates multiple new immigrant concerns. As nativism and nationalism intensified during and after World War I, the term “Americanization” acquired negative connotations; if hyphenated identities thrived at the turn into the twentieth century, the war-era nationalism shaped Americanization into a patriotic enterprise, compounded by fears of racial and ethnic difference and threats to Anglo-Saxonism Historians such as Gary Gerstle have argued that “coercion, as much as liberty, has been intrinsic to our history and to the process of becoming American.”.
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