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American Pulp Fascism: Tarzan, Birth of a Nation, and the Ku Klux Klan, 1912-1930s

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This essay maps the birth and rise of an American fascism, an ideology and culture of extreme inhumanity, which combines authoritarian power with racist intolerance, reactionary public and private morality, political violence (terror), and mass, spectacular uniformed images and rallies rallies.  Fascism and Nazism are the greatest evils of the 20th century's long record of evils.  Fascism is a term based on the fasces, an axe emerging from a bundle of sticks--the symbol of the Roman Emperor's absolute power.  widely understood as the origins of the movement against Western Enlightenment humanism, later joined by Hitler's National Socialist Party. Most elements that are now understood to be essential to fascism-nazism were already fully present in US political culture years earlier, especially in the key year of 1915, with the release of D.W. Griffith's epic film, Birth of a Nation, featuring as heroes the terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).  The KKK was long dead by the time Birth of a Nation was released. It had been suppressed as a terrorist organization by the Force Acts of the 1870s under President U.S. Grant.  Birth sparked a massive revival of the Klan, essentially as a new political party in the United States, complete with showy, if impractical, uniforms--the infamous bedsheets with a pointed dunce cap, which doubles as a mask. 

This essay argues that Los Angeles played a central role in the global emergence of fascism, principally through Hollywood.  I call the form of fascism invented in the US "pulp fascism" because it arose from pulp fiction--cheap romance produced in great quantity. The term was coined for books printed on cheap paper, but it applies equally well to mainstream Hollywood movies, which reached hundreds of millions.  The motion picture is in many ways the greatest medium of propaganda in the 20th century, so mass movements like fascism are impossible to conceive without it.  By the 1930s, Los Angeles was crawling with American, home-grown fascist and Nazi organizations, like the Silver Shirts.  Because these parties never held power directly, they have been under-appreciated in comparison to the German and Italian parties.  But as historian Steve Ross shows, they enjoyed widespread sympathy among thousands of Americans, especially in the Los Angeles Police Department.  American pulp fascism was always cheaper, "lighter" than European fascism, but it has been deadly on genocidal scales, so it should never be underestimated.

Los Angeles, with its political culture of white supremacy and authoritarian rule, plus its motion picture industry, was an ideal breeding ground for fascism, and ideology of mass publics and distorted images of humanity.  Misinformation--lies of racist propaganda, is a key ingredient of fascism, and Hollywood excelled in that art: widely imitated in Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy.  It is estimated that 200 million Americans eventually saw Griffith's epic film, Birth.  The film also founded the motion picture industry, so it merits close attention.  This essay begins, however, with another proto-fascist fiction, Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan and Princess of Mars series.  In the 1912 novel, Tarzan is an ideal fascist-nazi ubermench, not like the half-dumb hunk of the M-G-M movies. Those Tarzan and jungle movies did inherit a huge debt from both Burroughs and Griffith, as the following essay, Hollywood's White Hunters, recounts.  This essay begins a methodical mapping of pulp fascism in Los Angeles's political culture, where it remained engrained and re-emerged with global impact in the Nixon administration, caused the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising, and continues visibly in the 21st century.  Fascism was not destroyed by the defeat of Hitler: Its ingredients and presence in American institutions is a threat the requires careful understanding.

This upsurge of home-grown American fascism also, and not coincidentally, emerged at just the moment of a wave of Socialist, Anarchist, and Mexican Revolutionary movements, in the years 1908-1924, as explored in a parallel essay.

There are three parts to this essay: Tarzana of the Apes, mapping Burrough's role as a hacendado, or Ranchero in Los Angeles onto the production of political ideology; Maestro of the Master Race, which recounts D.W. Griffith's production of Birth of a Nation; and White Shadows in the South Seas, which maps Hollywood's imperial projection of power into the Pacific, in a movie-making expedition to the Marian Islands led by D.W. Griffith's own protege, W.S. "Woody" Van Dyike, one of the most prolific directors in classic Hollywood era of the 1930s and 40s.

The argument presented in this narrative essay and the next in this path (Hollywood's White Hunters), is that the pulp-fascist racial grotesquerie mass-manufactured by D.W. Griffith, Irving Thalberg, and and Woody Van Dyke, and most of racially-organized Hollywood, with its degradation of the majority of humanity (European "Whites" have always been a minority worldwide), has contributed directly to the mass ideologies of racial hatred that poisoned the globe in the two World Wars, the Vietnam War, and eventually produced the Uprising of 1992.




​NOTES to TARZANA OF THE APES

[1] My biographical treatment of Burroughs is based on Porges (1975); Holtzmark (1986); and Lupoff (1965).

[2] Lupoff (1965): 8.

[3] Tucker (1970).

[4] Brady (1996): 249.

[5] Burroughs ([1912] 2003): 16.

[6] Burroughs ([1912] 2003): 58.

[7] Burroughs ([1912] 2003): 42, 60

[8] Bradbury (2003): xv.

[9] Burroughs ([1912] 2003): xxi.

[10] Tarzan the Ape Man (1932); Tarzan and His Mate (1934); Tarzan Escapes (1936); Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939); Tarzan's Secret Treasure (1941); Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942); Tarzan Triumphs (1943); Tarzan's Desert Mystery (1943); Tarzan and the Amazons (1945); Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946); Tarzan and the Huntress (1947); Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948).

[11] Holtzmark (1981).

[12] Porges (1975): 359-61.

[13] Quoted in Porges (1975): 299.

[14] Quoted in Porges (1975): 305.

[15] Porges (1975): 345.

[16] Porges (1975): 352.

[17] Schmeltz (1973): 29-35; Jurca, (2001): 20-43.

MAESTRO NOTES

ADD HERE ...

WHITE SHADOWS NOTES

[1] Van Dyke (1996): 4.

[2] According to International Movie Data Base (www.imdb.com, as of 6 August 2003), Van Dyke’s complete credited and uncredited directorial filmography is as follows: Land of Long Shadows, The (1917); Range Boss, The (1917); Open Places (1917); Men of the Desert (1917); Gift o' Gab (1917) ... aka Gift of Gab, The (1917) (USA: review title); Sadie Goes to Heaven (1917); Lady of the Dugout, The (1918); Hawk's Trail, The (1920); Daredevil Jack (1920); Avenging Arrow, The (1921); Double Adventure (1921); White Eagle (1922); Milky Way, The (1922); According to Hoyle (1922); Forget Me Not (1922); Boss of Camp Four, The (1922) ... aka Boss of Camp 4, The (1922); Destroying Angel (1923); Ruth of the Range (1923) (uncredited; replaced by Frank Smith); Miracle Makers, The (1923); Little Girl Next Door, The (1923) ... aka You Are In Danger (1923); ­Half-­a-­Dollar Bill (1924); Loving Lies (1924); Battling Fool, The (1924); Beautiful Sinner, The (1924); Winner Take All (1924); Gold Heels (1924); Barriers Burned Away (1925) ... aka Chicago Fire, The (1925) (UK); Trail Rider, The (1925); Hearts and Spurs (1925); Ranger of the Big Pines (1925) (as William S. Van Dyke); Timber Wolf (1925); Desert's Price, The (1925); Gentle Cyclone, The (1926); War Paint (1926); Winners of the Wilderness (1927); California (1927); Eyes of the Totem, The (1927); Heart of the Yukon, The (1927); Foreign Devils (1927); Spoilers of the West (1927); Wyoming (1928) ... aka Rock of Friendship, The (1928); Under the Black Eagle (1928); Adventurer, The (1928) (uncredited) ... aka Gallant Gringo, The (1928); White Shadows in the South Seas (1928); Pagan, The (1929); Trader Horn (1931); Never the Twain Shall Meet (1931); Guilty Hands (1931); Cuban Love Song, The (1931); Tarzan the Ape Man (1932); Night Court (1932) ... aka Justice for Sale (1932) (UK); Prizefighter and the Lady, The (1933) ... aka Every Woman's Man (1933); Penthouse (1933) ... aka Crooks in Clover (1933) (UK); Eskimo (1933) ... aka Mala the Magnificent (1933) (UK); Manhattan Melodrama (1934); Laughing Boy (1934); Thin Man, The (1934); ­Hide-­Out (1934); Forsaking All Others (1934); Naughty Marietta (1935) (uncredited); Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935) (retakes) (uncredited); I Live My Life (1935); ­Rose-­Marie (1936) ... aka Indian Love Call (1936); San Francisco (1936); His Brother's Wife (1936) ... aka Lady of the Tropics (1936) (UK); Devil Is a Sissy, The (1936) ... aka Devil Takes the Count, The (1936) (UK); Love on the Run (1936); After the Thin Man (1936); Personal Property (1937) (as W.S. Van Dyke II) ... aka Man in Possession, The (1937); They Gave Him a Gun (1937) (as W.S. Van Dyke II); Rosalie (1937) (as W.S. Van Dyke II); Marie Antoinette (1938) (as W.S. Van Dyke II); Sweethearts (1938) (as W.S. Van Dyke II); Stand Up and Fight (1939) (as W.S. Van Dyke II); It's a Wonderful World (1939) (as W.S. Van Dyke II); Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever (1939) (as W.S. Van Dyke II); Another Thin Man (1939) (as W.S. Van Dyke II) ... aka Return of the Thin Man (1939) (USA: promotional title); I Take This Woman (1940) (as W.S. Van Dyke II); Northwest Passage (1940) (background shots) (uncredited); New Moon (1940) (uncredited) ... aka Lover Come Back (1940); I Love You Again (1940) (as W.S. Van Dyke II); Bitter Sweet (1940) (as W.S. Van Dyke II); Rage in Heaven (1941) (as W.S. Van Dyke II); Feminine Touch, The (1941) (as Major W.S. Van Dyke II); Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) (as Maj. W.S. Van Dyke II); Dr. Kildare's Victory (1941) ... aka Doctor and the Debutante, The (1941) (UK); I Married an Angel (1942); Cairo (1942) (as Maj. W.S. Van Dyke II); Journey for Margaret (1942) (as Maj. W.S. Van Dyke II).

[3] Alva Johnston, “Profiles: Lord Fauntleroy in Hollywood,” New Yorker 28 September 1935, pp. 20-24; “W.S. Van Dyke-From Horse Opera to Epic,” Cue 16 March 1935, pp. 12-13; Cornelia Penfield, “Hollywood Helmsmen,” Stage April 1936, pp. 62-67.

[4] Van Dyke (1985): 156.

[5] Cannom (1948): 137

[6] Van Dyke (1996): 4-6.

[7] Cannom (1948): 145-56.

[8] [emphasis added] Van Dyke Journal 2 January 1928, in Van Dyke (1996): 33

[9] Van Dyke Journal, 12, 14 December 1927, in Van Dyke (1996): 23-4.

[10] Van Dyke Journal, 14-21 December 1927, in Van Dyke (1996): 24-27.

[11] Cannom (1948): 176 Edwin Schallert, “Romance of South Seas Exerts Fascination,” Los Angeles Times, 15 July 1928, p. I 4.




 

This page has paths:

  1. White Shadows: The Rise of Mass Media and Racial Propaganda, 1890s-1930s Phil Ethington
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