Picturing American modernity: traffic, technology, and the silent cinema

In December 1916, as Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company was crossing the United States to make its West Coast premiere in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Musical Bureau attempted to generate additional publicity and sustain excitement by publishing the first (and only) issue of the Diaghilef Ballet Russe Courier. Squarely in the center of the front page, under the headline “Ballet Too Expensive for Filming,” was a letter from American film director and producer Thomas H. Ince, purportedly responding to impresario and publicist Robert Grau's recommendation that Ince invite the ballet troupe to make a film: Dear Mr. Grau, I have read your communication in regard to the Russian Ballet. I fail to see the practicability of the idea of making a picture of the Russian Ballet, wonderful and unprecedented as the success of this notable organization has been. You understand, of course, that it would necessitate bringing the entire organization to Los Angeles, and any aggregation of dancers that can play to $100,000 dollars in two weeks would most assuredly demand all the money that I have, my right eye and left hand in addition to any hopes that I may have for a future life, in return for their service. Very truly yours, Thomas H. Ince.1Thomas Ince was not the only one skeptical of a Ballets Russes film project. The company's impresario, eager to position his company within the realm of high art, actively shunned mass culture and popular entertainment, including the still-young filmic medium: no Ballets Russes production was ever filmed.2 Despite this, there were numerous encounters between the Ballets Russes and the burgeoning Hollywood film industry during and immediately after the company's American tours in 1916 and 1917. Tales of these encounters paint a picture of the reciprocal fascination and mutual attraction of Diaghilev's troupe and the American film industry, and the spheres of stage and screen more broadly. A few of these connections have been examined: film scholar Gaylyn Studlar, for example, has discussed the influence of the Ballets Russes on the mise-en-scène of The Thief of Baghdad (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1924), particularly the extent to which the film's star, Douglas Fairbanks, was inspired by Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography and stylized movements.3 Scholars have also explored cases in which Ballets Russes dancers went on to choreograph dance numbers for American films, such as Adolph Bolm's work with director Dudley Murphy on Danse Macabre (1922) and Theodore Kosloff's collaborations with director Cecil DeMille on nearly thirty Hollywood productions following his time with the Ballets Russes.4 Relatedly, Lynn Garafola has cited such “crossovers and parallels” between film and the Ballets Russes, though she has focused primarily on the relationship between European avant-garde and experimental film strategies and the company's aesthetics.5 However, the Ballets Russes's sustained influence on silent film culture in the United States—its production, narratives, aesthetics, and exhibition—as well the extent to which Hollywood crafted and offered American audiences its own vision of the Ballets Russes and its dancers long after the company departed, remains largely unexamined. This omission is hardly surprising: not only have many of the silent films (and silent film scores) that may most clearly demonstrate these connections been lost, but crucial information about the production and exhibition contexts in which these relationships were most visible are scattered and incomplete as well. Finally, the West Coast leg of the Ballets Russes's second US tour, which brought the company into the orbit of the burgeoning American film industry, is rarely discussed.In this article, I examine this mutual attraction between the Ballets Russes and cinema, beginning with the company's arrival in Los Angeles for a week of performances in late December 1916, during which Hollywood elite attended performances that received rave reviews and company members, in turn, were treated to behind-the-scenes visits to the town's film studios. With this expanded vision of the troupe's activities and reception in mind, I examine two types of cinematic “appearances” that Diaghilev's dancers made in the years immediately following the company's US tours: first, the performances by company members and invocations of company repertoire and aesthetics in the live stage acts so often integrated into film presentations in the silent era and, second, the incorporation of Ballets Russes dancers, repertoire, and aesthetics, as well as the Ballets Russes as a broader signifier, into a number of feature-length films. In the former performances, I argue, the visual and narrative themes, music, and choreographies associated with the company were reprised on cinema stages, most often under the direction of the company's male dancers. The latter performances offered a more fanciful and imaginative vision of the company onscreen, frequently deploying either female Ballets Russes dancers or fictional modern Russian ballerina characters as visual—and highly visible—icons of the Ballets Russes and American mythologies of Russian culture and politics more broadly. Both types of cinematic (re)appearance, I argue, introduced new audiences to the company's choreographic, musical, and visual aesthetics, allowing these aesthetics to circulate and the company's influence to grow long after its departure. These performances also benefited the film industry, enabling filmmakers, studios, and exhibitors alike to associate themselves with the company's cultural capital, its status as high art, and the aura of mystique and intrigue that surrounded it.Scholars such as Hanna Järvinen have recently challenged standard narratives about why the Ballets Russes failed “to conquer America.”6 Yet the Ballets Russes spawned a fleet of reprises, tributes, and references on cinema stages and screens throughout the country. These cinematic performances generated their own advertisements, programs, and reviews that gestured toward the Ballets Russes and simultaneously invited an ever-expanding segment of the American public to engage with and find their own meanings in both these cinematic “texts” and the Ballets Russes performances and mythologies that they referenced.7 Perhaps this is not a conquest. But this complex, layered, and multivalent intermedial web, I believe, is evidence of the company's significant influence on art and entertainment in the United States, as well as its lasting resonance within American culture.Bypassed during the Ballets Russes's first US tour, Los Angeles audiences and critics were on pins and needles waiting for their first glimpse of the company in the fall of 1916. “Dancers Are Coming!” declared a Los Angeles Times headline, announcing that the company was set to arrive on Christmas day for a weeklong engagement at Clune's Auditorium.8 Over the next several weeks, audiences in Los Angeles were bombarded with glowing previews hyping premier danseur Vaslav Nijinsky; Schéhérazade and other signature ballets; the seventy-piece orchestra traveling with the troupe; and the “wild opulence” of the company's scenery and costumes.9 By the time the Ballets Russes arrived via train—six baggage cars of equipment, three coaches and a dining car for the performers, plus a private car for Nijinsky and an extra baggage car decked for the company's Christmas Eve party, the Los Angeles Examiner reported—the press was near fever pitch. Los Angeles residents were equally excited. The company's premiere, which featured Nijinsky's new ballet Till Eulenspiegel and the dances from Prince Igor, was completely sold out and began late due to the large crowd, which included film industry elite and familiar faces from the screen. As newspapers gleefully reported, the delay was compounded when the dancers, on hearing that Charlie Chaplin was in attendance, demanded that he be brought backstage. One critic explained, “[They] had all heard of him and seen him . . . so that Nijinsky, Revalles, Lopokova, all of them, kowtowed to him, and I shouldn't be surprised if someone kissed him; . . . foreigners do that when greatly enthused.”10That Chaplin and others working in early film would have been eager to see the Ballets Russes is hardly surprising. Those in the film industry had looked to the dance world for inspiration and personnel since its advent, yielding early moving picture experiments such as Thomas Edison's Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895) and silent feature films like director Lois Weber's The Dumb Girl of Portici, starring Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova (Universal, 1915). For early filmmakers, dance was understood as a means of displaying—and a model for exploring—film's capacity to represent movement, as well as a strategy for creating rhythm, pace, and mood onscreen. Many directors, such as D. W. Griffith, also believed that dance training cultivated an attention to physical presence and a slower, more musical movement style that worked far better on screen than that quicker, larger gestures that many theater actors brought to film studios.11 As a result, a number of dance schools and companies in and around Los Angeles—perhaps most notably Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn's Denishawn, but also former Ballets Russes dancers Theodore Kosloff and Alexandra Maria Baldina's ballet school and British dancer Ernest Belcher's Celeste School—quickly became affiliated with the film industry, training film actors and actresses to move on camera and providing a steady supply of dancers for film productions.12 That the principles of movement and gesture established by François Delsarte are as visible in the aesthetics of silent film as they are in the aesthetics of modern dance, as scholar Carrie Preston has demonstrated, is hardly a coincidence.13Reviews of the Ballets Russes's Los Angeles performances were strikingly enthusiastic, praising the company's vigor, speed, and variety. As Los Angeles critic Edwin Schallert wrote, “Daring to the last degree in its big conceptions, startling throughout in its massing of color, and breathtaking in the swiftness of its supreme moments, the first performance of the Diaghileff Ballet Russe . . . made all other dancing we have seen here seem like child's play.”14 Schallert continued at length, almost rhapsodic: “They have an all-consuming energy that leaves you dazed, captivated, and inspired at once. The dancers come and go like magic, they concentrate more motion into the minute than could seem possible, and they finally leave you again seemingly almost before you had realized their presence. . . . [T]here is something inconceivably swift in the magnetic power of this troupe.”15 As exciting to critics as the choreography were the musical performances that accompanied it. “The pulsation of the Borodine [sic] music to the Prince Igor, played in masterly style by an orchestra,” the Los Angeles Times reported, was “worth more than half the price of admission in itself.”16 A critic for the Los Angeles Examiner concluded a description of Cléopâtre by noting, “The Balakireff music is superb; rushing hither and thither with the sweep of the violins predominant—the clash of the cymbals and rumble of tympani combining with the winds to form an overwhelming tornado of Russian fire and expression.”17 The close relationships between music and choreography were praised as well; after watching the company's rendition of Carnaval, Schallert asserted, “Schumann must have dreamt something like this when he wrote this piano series.”18But it was the company's dancers—especially the company's male dancers—who stole the show. Descriptions of the grace and delicacy of female dancers including Lydia Lopokova quickly gave way to lavish praise for Nijinsky's “technical wizardry” and “many-sided genius,” his “rhythmic perfection” and “delicate yet virile suppleness.”19 As Edwin Schallert waxed in an account that, despite its euphoria, was fairly typical of the Los Angeles reaction, “Strange realms does the genius of Waslav Nijinsky invade. Amid the floating clouds of his imagination's horizon arise unreal colors and mysterious shapes of things wherewith to create the background for realities that venture into untried provinces in the world of art. He opens by turn the portals of charm, of fire, of magnificence, he treads the corridors of symbolism and drama and the plastic arts, and he and his assistants lead their audiences through the ever-varying suggestions of these things.”20 Similar accolades were awarded to the “wonderfully expressive” Bolm, whose “facial expression and muscular grace plac[e] him on a plane but little removed from the master, Nijinsky, himself.”21 A few critics acknowledged the company's difficulty moving scenery quickly on opening night, but the concerns about ticket prices, the sexual overtones of Faun, and racial representations in Schéhérazade that had dominated New York and Boston reviews were either absent, dismissed outright, or even mocked by the Los Angeles press.22 Los Angeles audiences, in short, loved the Ballets Russes.The Ballets Russes dancers and personnel were equally enamored with Hollywood, based on anecdotes that emerged in both trade press and first-hand accounts. Company members visited at least two film studios, where they watched the production process with curiosity and wonder. In the February 1917 issue of The Moving Picture Weekly, a short article described the company's tour of a Universal City studio, where they looked on as director W. W. Beaudine shot one of his many comedy shorts. The article reports, The particular set on which they were working had a living room and a hall room next door. In the hall was a telephone on a table. The [ballet master] remembered he had an appointment and was late, and he requested permission to use the phone. Beaudine's sense of humor immediately came to the surface, and he said, “Why, certainly.” The ballet master sat for quite a long time at the phone and then appealed to the director. He tried again. Finally Beaudine told him it must be that the line was out of order. But the Russian never knew that the telephone cord extended no further than the edge of the carpet and that it was merely a “prop” instrument.23About halfway through Charlie Chaplin's autobiography, there is a similar—albeit far more poignant—account of Nijinsky and other Ballets Russes personnel watching the production of a short film in which Chaplin was acting (see Figure 2). According to Chaplin, Nijinsky “sat behind the camera, watching me at work on a scene which I thought was funny, but he never smiled. . . . Before leaving he came and shook my hands, and in his hollow voice said how much he enjoyed my work and asked if he could come again. ‘Of course,’ I said. For two more days he sat . . . watching me. . . . [A]t the end of each day he would compliment me. ‘Your comedy is balletique, you are a dancer,’ he said.”24The details of both stories are likely exaggerated, and the Moving Picture Weekly tale seems particularly apocryphal: it is difficult to believe that anyone associated with the Ballets Russes was not intimately familiar with the concept of sets and props. Indeed, the story seems designed to tacitly imply that company members embodied a sort of innocence—an exotic primitivity—when it came to modern technology like telephones and film. It also conjures for readers an oft-cited distinction between stage and screen in the ‘teens and early 1920s: film's ability to achieve a sense of realism to which stage productions could only aspire—or, in the case of the Ballets Russes, to which many stage productions did not aspire at all. Yet while highlighting the radical differences between comedy shorts and Schéhérazade, these anecdotes also highlight the intimate connections between dance and silent film. Perhaps most importantly, they point to the shared artistry and imagination of these two projects: the continuity between the experiments in choreography, design, and music that the Ballets Russes was conducting onstage as the troupe reimagined twentieth-century ballet and the experiments in movement, mise-en-scène, and visual language that filmmakers and actors were conducting in studios and on location as they imagined into existence narrative cinema. In these visits by Diaghilev's dancers to film studios, in Chaplin's attendance at the Ballets Russes premiere, in the open-minded and enthusiastic reception of the company in Hollywood and beyond, a reciprocal patronage, engagement, and admiration comes into focus.Though Ballets Russes performances were never recorded, the and of the company made their way into American film culture before the company's United States tours even the cinematic in which Ballets Russes aesthetics and of the company's were most immediately were film By the late ‘teens and throughout the large in as well as throughout the offered a feature film as of a larger audiences were treated to a musical by a of live stage and comedy with short films including films, and by the feature and often an or other musical on the of a as much by as by many were around particular a an or or a particular were of acts believed to with the feature film at hand and even with theater or the of can be film trade and newspapers often only the of by the of the However, a number of male Ballets Russes dancers are more than in the of large in several that they in and dance numbers at these Adolph and also in the two US for example, were both in the worked at the and in New York and at the in Los Angeles, the in the in New York and with in but left the company before the 1916, was the at the in and a dance school in the and both of with in before dance numbers in at the and in New York and the in this is to a It is difficult to the they looked and but it is that many or at least Ballets Russes of the company's at the as did at the a of was included on a in and the dances from Prince are as of offered there in both and Ballets Russes to the United States in in the film an of a at the that it would the of the ballet in associated with or inspired by the Ballets Russes was also frequently integrated into at many film during and in the of the troupe's American According to and of at large in newspapers and film trade of Schéhérazade and Till Eulenspiegel were as on such of to the of a also became a popular musical of these were at accompanied by and choreography that Ballets Russes a at New that Schéhérazade as the for example, the stage was with two and in and and a as a of the I a with a scene with a and all to out the music associated with the Ballets Russes both in and as film was actively in the of film trade These of associated with the company such as and exhibitors on where to and piano of their and praised theater and music for their with A in a December issue of Moving Picture for example, with a letter from an in of of the dances in Prince you me how to the there is no music but popular music in my little The that exhibitors the in New York for As was often the case with in film trade this was likely a by a than the of an the simultaneously and a demand for the company's music, a popular with audiences from the company's and exhibitors the to of it into their programs, if only to with their were the filmic in which the music, choreography, and male dancers of the Ballets Russes continued to be to long after the company left the United States is not surprising. offered an for dance and music with exciting musical and stage acts week in and week likely at the to music associated with the Ballets Russes and to the male were with the company in the American The numbers both Ballets Russes eager to of the company's performances and to see the dancers had often been in the company's film art music and comedy from stage to screen from an experimental film short to a popular dance accompanied by a had been in the orchestra an the of the Ballets Russes that most American all-consuming color, and of and But even as these male dancers on their with the Ballets Russes, also the to with new movement aesthetics and performance the of the both to new and and to more and than the company's own performances had As Adolph wrote in his autobiography, is no better for dancer and public than the motion picture the stages of in New Los Angeles, and beyond, male dancers like and were to their aesthetics, of dance, and themselves as performers, while simultaneously and American with and admiration for Diaghilev's own the music and choreography of the Ballets Russes were reprised in film programs, of the company's aesthetics, and were visible and in a number of feature-length silent films in the late and early the company's male dancers and were most visible in both the press the Ballets Russes tours and on the stages of it was the company's female dancers were most visible onscreen. female Ballets Russes dancers were by studios to in films following the second American tour, often in that a to they had a number of films about fictional Russian often played by American were made during these These or in Ballets the and performances of the company's female dancers. Indeed, while film the company's male dancers a to themselves as and at a from Diaghilev's these feature films female Ballets Russes and time and their and performances became of the company and Russian more it is one of the films a fictional Russian ballerina that most conjures the Ballets Russes onscreen. The which and is was by in as the second Ballets Russes tour was to a by the film in the of Russian dancer and A the film as she to with a ballet company and an The company's director that she is the of a Russian and all is when and with making way for to a the film's narrative and visual there are several references to the Ballets Russes and the that had around the company by 1917. Perhaps most the film troupe's from to for its premiere Diaghilev's of the Ballets Russes in the for its first The director in the film also to was with a and around about sexual and a relationship with Vaslav Nijinsky However, the Ballets Russes is early in the film after several of dance an Ballet Russe Ballet In the that and Ballet by Theodore Kosloff's an extended by a large of dancers. It is not the Ballets Russes's choreography, of course, but the and are not the film and theater music would likely have attempted to highlight the by the with from Those had seen the company would have the and members could quite have it for the and publicity for the film on Kosloff's as evidence of the and of the film's dance if not the film as a A dancer had arrived in New York City to and in and would go on to as dance master of the Metropolitan Company in the Kosloff's with the Russian Ballet were and his by was described as a and Russian engagement for the the trade press was of the most ever made in the motion picture and the for Moving Picture came close to that the film was as as the Ballets other ever such of the art of the Indeed, went so far as to that the stage with Kosloff had into a As performance was and by the presence in the of . . . is of how these of the dance go about in and how they into of dancing These dancing in

For too long, many scholars have argued that Christian groups obsessed with a coming apocalypse are so other-worldly focused that they have little impact on the politics or cultures around them. Those scholars are wrong. Rather than fostering a sense of indifference regarding the coming of an inevitable end of days, apocalypse-obsessed Christians have used their beliefs as a call to battle rather than a justification for withdrawal. God, they insist, has given them much to do and very little time in which to do it. Positive that Jesus is coming soon, they have sought converts and engaged directly and aggressively with their cultures, preparing themselves and others for what is to come. Christopher James Blythe's Terrible Revolution shows us that this is especially true of those within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Since the time of Jesus, Christians have at times obsessed over the Bible's predictions of a coming Armageddon and its promises of a millennium of peace and prosperity. Millions of Christians have tried to make sense of local, national, and global events through the lens of biblical prophecy. In the United States, various groups have offered a complicated and convoluted reading of the biblical books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation, which they read in conjunction with one another and overlay with some of Jesus's and Paul's New Testament statements. The result is a plan of the ages that tells us what signs to look for, and what those signs reveal about where we are on God's cosmic timeline. Such readings offer a kind of secret knowledge to those anxious about everything from their own personal problems to the most complicated challenges faced by their generation. The Bible, these Christians believe, provides the key to understanding ages past, present, and to come.Among the most original and influential American apocalyptic groups is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Blythe's Terrible Revolution offers a smart, original, and compelling analysis of the evolving role of apocalyptic thinking in the LDS Church. In this impressively researched and important book, Blythe has marshalled thousands of sources, some long hidden away in obscure places, and diligently connected them to larger social and political trends. He demonstrates that we cannot understand the rise, growth, and success of Mormonism without taking seriously its apocalyptic origins and proclivities. Followers of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon chose to call themselves “Latter-day” Saints for a reason, after all. To ignore their conviction that they were living in the last days, and how that shaped their understanding of their lives, their church, their community, their nation, and their world, is to miss a central and distinguishing element of the Latter-day Saint faith, one that Blythe has brought to light.Blythe begins his study with the founding of the faith and the actions of Joseph Smith, whom Blythe calls “an apocalyptic prophet” (27). The angel Moroni appeared to Smith in 1823 in a vision, telling him that he had important work to do to prepare the world for the second coming of Christ. He then reminded Smith of some of the Bible's key passages regarding the last days. In the early years of the movement, while Smith both received and controlled authoritative revelations, he “simultaneously facilitated the communal project of apocalypticism among his disciples” (16). According to Blythe, Smith drew on the “traditions of biblical apocalypticism while simultaneously expanding on and going beyond the tradition. . . . The Second Coming in Smith's hands became not a single event, but instead an ongoing redemptive project whose beginning and end points remained conspicuously nebulous” (35).Smith grounded much of his prophetic work in his understanding of the United States. He and other early Mormons believed that the nation would play a central role in the fulfillment of last days prophecy, either in collaboration with the church, or in conflict with it. The publication of the Book of Mormon helped solidify this view by canonizing and preserving speculation about America's apocalyptic significance. This made Mormonism not just a religious project but a political one as well.Smith believed that the Saints needed to prepare “a populace to survive the coming cataclysm” (30). To that end, in 1839 he led a group of believers to Illinois, where they established a new community they called Nauvoo. There, Blythe notes, Mormonism became a “political messianic movement that could revolutionize the world” (36). Mormons built a temple, which they loaded with millennial symbolism—Blythe calls it an “apocalyptic monument”—and Smith introduced new rituals that he saw as fulfilling prophecy (39). In 1840, Smith prophesied that the Saints would preserve or save the US Constitution in a future moment of crisis. This conviction—that the Constitution is a sacred document that God has called the Saints to protect—has been an important tenet of the faith ever since. Smith also ran for president, making explicit his efforts to merge his political and religious agendas.The 1844 assassination of Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum had a profound impact on the growing church and how it understood its relationship to the United States government and the broader world. “John the Revelator's image of martyrs pleading for God to avenge their murders,” Blythe writes, “became a prominent element in Mormon apocalypticism” (8). Smith's death, in Mormon eyes, would spark God's avenging judgement on those guilty of both the murder and of the broader persecution of the Saints that the murder represented.In the spring of 1845, Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders announced that they would be leaving the United States. Judgment was imminent, and perhaps the United States could not be redeemed. They headed west to the Great Salt Lake region. There they reimagined and reconfigured their apocalyptic visions of the last days, incorporating their sense of themselves as exiles in the “wilderness” awaiting the judgements of God to fall on the unfaithful.But Young faced challengers. The Mormons had sacralized spaces in Missouri and Illinois, so the move west had the potential of raising uncomfortable questions about Smith's own understanding of prophecy and place. Young had to both justify the move to the Mountain West and also limit the influence of those who continued to believe that their faith should center on Nauvoo. Young helped Mormons come to believe that the new lands they inhabited were central to the old stories contained in the Book of Mormon, that their new homes were on sacred ground.As Young built the fledgling movement, he understood that too much apocalypticism could generate instability. He had much to gain by promoting a clear power structure, secure institutions, and reliable leaders. He started a process that grew over time in which church leaders used prophecy to encourage faithfulness, but they also carefully policed apocalyptic ideas that emerged from among laypeople. Their efforts were never perfect. “Those outside of the priestly power structure,” Blythe writes, “had much to gain from messianic posturing” (101), which meant that apocalyptic speculation was never as tightly controlled as church leaders wanted.As tensions between the Saints and the US government grew in the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century, the Saints’ belief that the United States government was a last-days enemy strengthened. From the Utah War in the late 1850s, to the federal government's crackdown on polygamy in the 1880s, Mormons believed that God would punish the nation's leaders and people for persecuting the Saints. “Both sides in this conflict subscribed to notions of holy war,” Blythe writes. “Federal troops saw themselves on a crusade against non-Christian fanatics in rebellion against the nation. Mormons, on the other hand, understood the army's march and occupation in terms of a foretold invasion of latter-day Israel” (137).These tensions led to a new surge in prophetic speculation. During this period, Blythe notes, leaders collected and recorded the most influential vernacular apocalyptic prophecies, and “Joseph Smith's prophecy of a future American civil war circulated widely in Mormon and non-Mormon circles” (9). Nevertheless, even as church leaders shared these prophecies among themselves, they hid many of them from the laity and the public. Church leaders continued to try to keep a lid on apocalyptic speculation.The Mormons’ relationship to the US government and their understanding of prophecy shifted again in the late nineteenth century. When Utah achieved statehood in 1896, Latter-day Saint leaders worked hard to build productive relationships with government authorities. They also sought to rein in voices of dissent, including some of the faithful most obsessed with prophecy. They especially aimed to curtail the older dualistic vision of an evil United States provoking God's judgment and a holy, separate, remnant of Saints who would escape that judgment. “Church leaders,” Blythe writes, “realized that the radical apocalypticism of the past had to be tempered because it stood in the way of assimilation” (180).Church leaders and laypeople alike continued to believe they were living in the “last days.” But they shifted their understanding of what that meant. Rather than trust that the apocalypse was imminent, they came to see the last days as a long era that might run for generations. War gave them the opportunity to demonstrate their American assimilation. During the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, and then World War I, Mormons made patriotism, serving in the United States military, and defending the nation from foreign threats top priorities. Their days of exile and anti-government prophetic denunciations were over, at least in official church publications.The last section of the book analyzes the evolution of Latter-day Saint prophecy in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Once again, Blythe covers a tremendous amount of ground. He tracks how the Saints increasingly embraced a form of Christian nationalism, seeing themselves as part of God's redemptive work in the world that he might channel through a godly United States. Church leaders kept prophetic speculation to a minimum and forced visionaries to the margins. Nevertheless, a vernacular prophetic tradition continued in small groups, through rogue leaders, in breakaway movements, and, most recently, on the internet.Apocalypticism has played an important role in the lives of countless Mormons. It has fostered in them a powerful sense of purpose and personal identity, helped them interpret the challenges they face all around them, and offered a triumphant vision of the future. This excellent work by Christopher James Blythe ensures that we all understand why the Saints put “Latter-day” in the title of their church and how apocalypticism became so important to the Mormon faith.

The Spanish-American War is best understood as a series of linked conflicts. Those conflicts punctuated Madrid’s decline to a third-rank European state and marked the United States’ transition from a regional to an imperial power. The central conflict was a brief conventional war fought in the Caribbean and the Pacific between Madrid and Washington. Those hostilities were preceded and followed by protracted and costly guerrilla wars in Cuba and the Philippines. The Spanish-American War was the consequence of the protracted stalemate in the Spanish-Cuban War. The economic and humanitarian distress which accompanied the fighting made it increasingly difficult for the United States to remain neutral until a series of Spanish missteps and bad fortune in early 1898 hastened the American entry to the war. The US Navy quickly moved to eliminate or blockade the strongest Spanish squadrons in the Philippines and Cuba; Spain’s inability to contest American control of the sea in either theater was decisive and permitted successful American attacks on outnumbered Spanish garrisons in Santiago de Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Manila. The transfer of the Philippines, along with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam, to the United States in the Treaty of Paris confirmed American imperialist appetites for the Filipino nationalists, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, and contributed to tensions between the Filipino and American armies around and in Manila. Fighting broke out in February 1899, but the Filipino conventional forces were soon driven back from Manila and were utterly defeated by the end of the year. The Filipino forces that evaded capture re-emerged as guerrillas in early 1900, and for the next two and a half years the United States waged an increasingly severe anti-guerrilla war against Filipino irregulars. Despite Aguinaldo’s capture in early 1901, fighting continued in a handful of provinces until the spring of 1902, when the last organized resistance to American governance ended in Samar and Batangas provinces.

Editorial| July 01 2021 Note from the Editors: Precarious Mobilities Paula J. Massood, Paula J. Massood Paula J. Massood is a professor of screen studies and chair of the Barry R. Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and on the doctoral faculty in the Theatre and Performance program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Temple University Press, 2003) and Making a Promised Land: Harlem in 20th-Century Photography and Film (Rutgers University Press, 2013), editor of The Spike Lee Reader (Temple University Press, 2007), and coeditor of Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (Duke University Press, 2021). She is currently president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pamela Robertson Wojcik Pamela Robertson Wojcik Pamela Robertson Wojcik is a professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame and a Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise (Routledge, 2020), Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction (Rutgers University Press, 2016), The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 (Duke University Press, 2010), and Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Duke University Press, 1996). With Paula J. Massood and Angel Daniel Matos, she coedited the collection Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (Duke University Press, 2021). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2021) 7 (3): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.3.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paula J. Massood, Pamela Robertson Wojcik; Note from the Editors: Precarious Mobilities. Feminist Media Histories 1 July 2021; 7 (3): 1–18. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.3.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search When we proposed this special issue of Feminist Media Histories on “Precarious Mobilities,” we were thinking about all the forms of precarity that engender mobility or make movement, in all forms, arduous or impossible. We were thinking about how certain forms of mobility could be precarious, risky, even dangerous. We were thinking about the long arc of precarious mobility, such as the forced enslavement of millions of Africans in the Americas. But we were especially attuned to contemporary dynamics of this state of being as it relates to what has come to be called the precariat, an intersectional class of people who lack labor security and thus have unstable sources of income, people who have “no ladders of mobility to climb,” for instance those from the traditional working or lower middle class, migrants and ethnic minorities, and youth.1 We were thinking about precarious labor in the academy and the... You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| November 01 1979 Filipino Resistance to American Occupation: Batangas, 1899-1902 Glenn A. May Glenn A. May Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1979) 48 (4): 531–556. https://doi.org/10.2307/3638699 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Glenn A. May; Filipino Resistance to American Occupation: Batangas, 1899-1902. Pacific Historical Review 1 November 1979; 48 (4): 531–556. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3638699 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1979 The Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Long before role-playing games or the popular first-person shooter games such as Hell Let Loose and Pavlov VR, people reenacted wars and global conflicts through tabletop board games, puzzles, and card games. Prior to World War II, no American conflicts were highlighted more in board and card games than the Spanish–American War and its offshoot, the Philippine– American War. Game designers joined other cultural producers such as journalists, novelists, and artists in crafting images of the battlefield for home front audiences. Between 1898 and 1902, the toy industry produced a multitude of games and puzzles focused on famous battles, military figures, and patriotism, informing both the public’s contemporary and historical understanding of these conflicts. Through an analysis of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century games depicting the Spanish–American and Philippine–American Wars, I argue that cultural producers used a variety of images, game-types, and instructions to lionize key military leaders, facilitate vicarious participation in the conflicts, and unify citizens on the questions about the wars and their consequences.

A largely overlooked conflict in American history, the Philippine-American War anticipated such wars as the Vietnam conflict, with U.S. troops ill prepared to deal with an enemy using unconventional guerilla tactics. The Philippine-American War began in early 1899, shortly after the defeat of Spain by the United States in the Spanish American War, which resulted in the liberation of the Spanish colony Cuba but the takeover of other colonies by the United States, including Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine islands. The Filipinos, who had taken up arms against their Spanish colonizers in 1896, assumed they would receive liberation once American soldiers arrived in the Philippines and became comrades-in-arms against a common enemy. But Filipino independence was not to be; the islands offered too many incentives for the Americans to abandon and watch another Western power or Japan undertake their annexation.

A largely overlooked conflict in American history, the Philippine-American War anticipated such wars as the Vietnam conflict, with U.S. troops ill prepared to deal with an enemy using unconventional guerilla tactics. The Philippine-American War began in early 1899, shortly after the defeat of Spain by the United States in the Spanish American War, which resulted in the liberation of the Spanish colony Cuba but the takeover of other colonies by the United States, including Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine islands. The Filipinos, who had taken up arms against their Spanish colonizers in 1896, assumed they would receive liberation once American soldiers arrived in the Philippines and became comrades-in-arms against a common enemy. But Filipino independence was not to be; the islands offered too many incentives for the Americans to abandon and watch another Western power or Japan undertake their annexation.

Cuba, the Philippines, and the Hundred Years’ War Frank Ninkovich (bio) Kristin L. Hoganson. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. xii + 305 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Louis A. Pérez, Jr. The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xvi + 175 pp. Notes, bibliographical essay, and index. $34.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Although the Spanish-American War lasted only four months, it has not ended for historians. Why the war broke out and why it should have culminated in the acquisition of an American empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific are questions to which historians have not been able to provide satisfying answers. Indeed, their explanations, provided in the course of a Hundred Years’ War of conflicting interpretations, have become part of the problem. The mountain of historiography that has been built up, far from furnishing a conceptual promontory from which to gain a clear view of the past, has in some ways blocked our vision. As one might expect, the recent celebration of the war’s centennial has stimulated renewed interest in the events of 1898. The works under review represent two of the more notable attempts at breaking the historiographical impasse. Kristin Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood brings the conceptual weapon of gender theory, which is relatively new to diplomatic history, to the fray. At a minimum, she considers gender to be a useful tool for linking together the jumble of unrelated causal hypotheses that now pretend to pass for explanations of the war, but she is clearly more attracted to the prospect of “grounding foreign policy decisions . . . in the gender politics of the turn-of-the-century United States” (p. 14). In other words, she advocates razing the existing incoherent structure of explanation and rebuilding on a gendered conceptual foundation. Her story begins with what she calls “the manly ideal of politics” in the 1890s. In a system that had a decidedly “fraternal character,” she says that “to win political authority, men had to appear manly” (p. 23). Hoganson argues [End Page 444] that the emphasis on fraternalism was partly related to increasing strains between classes which led to a growing concern that “the American political system was rotting from within because of an absence of manly honor” (p. 29). It was also coming under assault, she contends, from the outside, especially from feminist reformers who had rather different ideas about what the modal political personality ought to be. As some antisuffragists put it, “the transfer of power from the military to the unmilitary sex involves a change in the character of the nation. It involves in short, national emasculation” (p. 132). Male egos also suffered a body blow to their self-esteem from the Depression of 1893. The result of these concerns, she argues, was the rise of the jingoes, people who “regarded war as an opportunity to develop such ‘soldierly’ attributes as strength, honor, and a fraternal spirit among men” (p. 36). Emblematic of this threatened sense of masculine identity was the way in which the Cuban crisis was reported. Though the rebel forces who had been fighting for independence from Spain since 1895 were sympathetically portrayed by the jingo press, they were almost always depicted in chivalric terms. Cuban women were damsels in distress, eager for heroic rescue by American knights, while male insurrectos were written up as examples of chivalric honor—brave, fraternal, and respectful of Cuban womanhood. Accounts of Spain, by contrast, characterized the colonial relationship in negative gender terms “as one of lustful bondage” (p. 51) or else portrayed Spain as duplicitously effete and feminine. These images of the principals in Cuba appealed to many American males because they could imagine themselves in the benevolent role of rescuers and because “it dovetailed with their goal of revitalizing the manly ideal of politics within the United States” (p. 56). By aiding the Cuban insurgents, American honor would be vindicated abroad and American manhood revitalized within. The preoccupation with manliness helps to explain why honor was the key word...

(1987). “Cultivated Folks” and the “Better Classes”: Class Conflict and Representation in Early American Film. Journal of Popular Film and Television: Vol. 15, The Silent Cinema, pp. 120-128.

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.

Editors’ Introduction

Flattening Identity:Colonial Accumulation and Hidden Archives at Harvard's Philippine Collection Ingrid Ahlgren (bio) and Kathleen Trocino Geneta (bio) At the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, the Philippine collections amassed at the beginning of the twentieth century present an example of how the confluence of politics, science, and the urgent desire for accumulation precipitated—and continue to perpetuate—cultural erasure in museums. By critically and transparently engaging with these collections and the colonial legacies revealed in their associated documentation, museums like the Peabody can redress past practices and further serve as sites of reflection and learning. Introduction As one of the oldest and largest universal American anthropology museums, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University (hereafter Peabody Museum) was at the forefront of the development and professionalization of American anthropology. As such, it is implicated in century-old but still unresolved issues surrounding the subjugation and misrepresentation of indigenous peoples through the collection of their bodies and cultural heritage for the purposes of scientific inquiry. Despite a call for reckoning with these legacies over the last few decades, the sheer volume of unattended collections, limited access, and knowledge gatekeeping suggest the injustices of museum collecting are not relegated to the past. One year ago, Harvard University and the Peabody Museum issued an apology for the institution's links to colonialism and imperialism [End Page 254] through its collection of the remains of over ten thousand individuals.1 In confronting this legacy, the Philippine collections at Harvard must be critically investigated within these historic schemas of museum collecting practices and the context of the United States's policies of "benevolent assimilation" at the turn of the twentieth century. Far from being benevolent, anthropology and museum collecting were complicit in the development and application of the U.S. government's colonial experiment abroad. U.S. government officials, museums, as well as both professionals and amateurs within the burgeoning science of anthropology collaborated in the creation of a new Philippines. Engaging in "the first serious attempt to develop an Anglo-Saxon civilization in the Tropics and among a non-Aryan people," descriptions and portrayals of the diverse peoples of the Philippine archipelago as "semi-civilized" and "savage" were deployed to justify U.S. presence in the name of progress.2 The accumulation of museum collections was complicit in this process and, through a process of neglect, has manifested the same ethnic classifications the U.S. government "flattened" for political ends, collapsing diverse populations into a smaller number of simplified identifiers according to racial or cultural assumptions. This precipitated a pattern of ignoring cultural and historic specifics originally acquired during the collecting processes. Associated documentation became dispersed across multiple sites in the museum—effectively creating a hidden archive. Identifying data that has been disassociated from the objects themselves remains largely inaccessible to the public and hidden from view, perpetuating cultural erasure of Filipino identities and livelihoods today.3 To rectify this, more detailed data associated with the collections must be brought out of the archives and linked to the public-facing database. Engaging this documentation, alongside collaboration with source and descendant communities, can re-activate the collections in a more ethical and truthful manner, thereby reinventing the museum as a safe(r) space for stakeholder communities and reinvigorating it as a trusted site of learning for the wider public. Politics, science, and creating the Philippines The United States acquired the Philippines in 1898 from Spain after the Spanish-American War.4 Initially reluctant due to the glaring hypocrisy of interfering with the independence of a population, President McKinley eventually elected to subjugate the Philippines for its strategic geopolitical location and lucrative economic opportunities.5 He famously called the U.S. approach to civilizing the Philippines "benevolent assimilation," determining that the best solution for future Philippine sovereignty was to "as friends, protect the natives in their own homes."6 Motivated by the need for a roadmap after the Philippine-American War, the U.S. government required data to understand the diverse populations it was to administer. Science and the government became intimate partners where "modern industrial development is an outgrowth of pure science, and almost every discovery of science is ultimately...

Reviewed by: Cast in Deathless Bronze: Andrew Rowan, the Spanish-American War, and the Origins of American Empire by Donald Tunnicliff Rice John Lawrence Tone Donald Tunnicliff Rice. 2016. Cast in Deathless Bronze: Andrew Rowan, the Spanish-American War, and the Origins of American Empire. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-943665-43-3. Andrew Rowan played a small role in the American invasion of Cuba in 1898 by taking a message to Calixto García, the commander of Cuban insurgents operating in eastern Cuba, related to his assisting troop landings at Guantánamo and Daiquirí, just east of Santiago. I didn't know there was much more to the story until I read this enchanting book by Donald Tunnicliff Rice. Rice is actually writing about three separate things: Rowan, an article about Rowan written by Elbert Hubbard, and the Spanish-American War. On this last subject there are better books, and some readers may find themselves shaking their heads and skimming portions. Where the story of the war and Rowan are closely linked, Rice is on solid ground, and skillfully interweaves the two narratives. He provides interesting details about García, and the chapters on the war in the Philippines are very good. Nevertheless, readers are better off turning elsewhere for analysis of why the United States went to war with Spain, why Filipinos resisted the American occupation of their homeland, and other important subjects. That criticism aside, Rice is both authoritative and entertaining when dealing with his main topics: Rowan and the pamphlet written by Hubbard. Rowan, though a little-known historical figure, merits this [End Page 236] extended biographical treatment. Sometimes getting to know the minor characters in a story can be revealing, and that is the case here. Recounting Rowan's time at West Point, Rice tells us a lot in a few words about how the place operated in late 1870s and early 1880s. Upon graduation, Rowan served in dreary frontier posts with little hope of advancement, until a chance came to work for the Military Information Division (MID). Rowan became a spy, and everyone likes a good spy story. Rowan gathered intelligence across the border in Canada, then seen as a potential threat to the United States. He later participated in surveying a route for an intercontinental railroad to unite North and South America, a project never completed. He mapped the northern border and then created maps of Cuba on the eve of the Spanish-American War. While he was there taking his "message" to García, Rowan gathered intelligence, especially on roads and topography. The information he brought back went largely "unheeded" (87) and had very little impact on the outcome of the war, but it had a huge impact on Rowan himself, who rose to become a captain in the 19th Infantry, and was deployed to the Philippines in August 1899. There he participated in the hellish and shameful counterinsurgency campaign to crush Filipino independence. Rowan, like many other U.S. officers, commanded soldiers to make war on civilians by destroying crops, livestock, and homes. Likely he knew of the "water cure" (much like water boarding) and other tortures committed against suspected insurgents and their civilian supporters. Rowan continued to gather intelligence and to map the area under his command and seemed to be particularly effective at organizing his zone of occupation politically. By the time all this happened, Rowan was famous, because Elbert Hubbard, a "long-haired megalomaniac," had written "A Message to García" for the March issue of his periodical, The Philistine. I found the best parts of Rice's book to be those about Hubbard, who later recalled (112) that the article on Rowan "leaped hot from my heart." A mixture of almost no knowledge about Rowan or García and the inventions of an over-heated imagination, Hubbard's article never added much to our understanding of the war in Cuba. As Rice points out, many other people, especially journalists, had been embedded with the Cuban insurgents for some time and had been getting messages back and forth. Cubans in New York, Washington, and Cuba itself did the heavy lifting to make...

Using the Philippine–American War of 1899–1902, this article demonstrates how insurgency is a spatial process. The conflict broke out when the United States acquired the Philippines during the Spanish–American War and Filipino nationalists resisted American efforts to retain the Philippines. Consisting of forest covered islands, with rough terrain, the Philippines appeared to be an ideal location to wage an insurgency but the Americans, with their control of the sea, exploited the fragmented territorial morphology of the Philippines, denying the insurgents inter-island mobility, foreign assistance, and foreign sanctuaries. American forces exploited the fragmented human geography of the Philippines by using ethnic divisions in the Philippines against the insurgents. The Americans implemented a territorial occupation system where soldiers were kept in one area, thus providing them with knowledge of local conditions. American forces also separated the insurgents from the population by concentrating the population and denying the insurgents recruits, supplies, and intelligence. The costs of the conflict were, however, significant and, in the long-run, the conflict contributed to the entrenchment of the elite in Filipino society.