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• 1 2016-06-23T14:37:30-07:00 American Pulp Fascism (Old): Tarzan, Birth of a Nation, and the Ku Klux Klan, 1912-1930s 12 plain 2017-08-15T15:57:01-07:00 This essay maps the birth and rise of an American version of fascism, which is given the name here of "pulp fascism" because it first appeared in a cheap, serialized novel of the lest type: pulp romantic thrillers on the cheapest type of paper (hence "pulp"): Edgar Rice Burroughs'a Tarzan and Princess of Mars potboiler series that began in 1912. It next appeared in the founding movie of the Hollywood industry: D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) which also caused the re-birth and revival of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), America's uniformed fascist movement which reached a membership of 4 million by its peak 1924.  American fascism pre-dated the Italian version by several years, was not limited to the KKK, and had far less direct political power than the Italian and German moments, which dominated those nations by the 1930s. Instead, American pulp fascism saturated American mainstream culture and power, guiding and reproducing sustained injustices and also episode violence of horrific proportions, doing its worst damage during the Nixon and Reagan years, but it still lingers, in part because its lineage and operation is not well enough understood.  These essays seek to map its career in order to better resist it.

  Tarzana of the Apes

  On 1 March 1919 the Chicago novelist and militarist Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950),  made a permanent move to Los Angeles, using the fortune he made from his Mars and Tarzan novels to purchase the San Fernando Valley estate of the late Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis, who had built “Las Flores” on the model of his own Mexican haciendas, acquired through the generosity of the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Burroughs renamed the estate “Tarzana” in tribute to the source of his own fortune, the pulp novel and subsequent serial, Tarzan of the Apes (1912).
  
  The symbolic succession of Burroughs to the seat of the arch-reactionary Otis signified a profound shift in the sources of political power in Los Angeles, the United States, and eventually the world. Burroughs, along with many other culture producers on the right, would insert his racial Darwinian, anti­democratic vision into the Hollywood culture industry, shifting the work of political repression into the sphere of spectacular entertainment.
  
  Edgar Rice Burroughs was born and raised in Chicago while that city organized the conquest of the American West. [1] Son of an affluent Union soldier, Burroughs was educated in the classical curriculum at Andover Phillips Academy in the 1880s and then at the Michigan Military Academy in Orchard Lake, Michigan during the 1890s. There Cadet Burroughs became the pupil of the veteran Sioux, Apache, and Nez Percé fighter Capt. Charles King. Known as “America’s Kipling,” King was a role model for Burroughs. The author of sixty romantic books about the European conquest of the “savage” tribes who ruled the Great Plains, King showed Burroughs how actual race wars could become profitable raw material for popular fiction. Burroughs was eventually posted with the late George Custer’s 7th Cavalry in Arizona, a miserable assignment that fulfilled his hopes of military glory only in a fruitless chase of an alleged bandit known as “The Apache Kid.” “I chased Apaches but never caught up with them,” Burroughs remembered.[2] But Burroughs loved the military regardless and made its virtues a major theme of his life’s work as a novelist and nationalist ideologue.
  
  In fiction he did catch up with those Apaches, whose legendary ferocity he transposed into the Tharks, green men of Mars, the “anthropoid” apes of Africa, and scores of other invented races. His first product, serialized in 1912 in the New York pulp magazine The All-Story, was a tale called “Under the Moons of Mars” earned him $400.[3] Burroughs retitled the story The Princess of Mars for book publication in the same year, and that novel became the cornerstone of a series that eventually totaled 25 books. The plot of the Martian cycle revolves around a Civil War veteran named John Carter who is mysteriously transported to Mars in the midst of a desperate battle with Apaches in remote Arizona. Carter’s human qualities (and strength enhanced by the weaker gravity of Mars) establish him as a master of various Martian races, eventually emerging as the supreme leader, the “Warlord of Mars” in the third novel.
  
  The Mars series is a tour-de-force of the racial imagination. A once-mighty seafaring “white-skinned, blond or auburn haired race” called the Orovars had ruled the red planet for a half a million years, creating imperial, technologically advanced cities. “As the seas dried up, most of the Orovars entered into a cooperation with the black and yellow races, and their interbreeding over ages produced the modern red race.”[4] This cooperation was necessary to fight the horrifically savage “green men,” or Tharks. Tharks stand 13-15 feet high (10-12 feet for the females), have “two legs and two arms, with an intermediary pair of limbs which could be used at will either as arms or legs.”[5] With eyes set in the sides of their heads so that they can see backward and forward, a pair of sharp tusks, and blood-red eyes, the green men are a nightmare picture of uncivilized ferocity. Their children, hatched from eggs, are raised utterly without love. Their culture is brutal: laughter among them only signifies the appreciation of “torture, suffering, death.”[6] Organized as “hordes,” this race is obviously modeled on the Apaches, a comparison John Carter makes almost immediately.
  
  Burrough’s Martian allegory for the race wars of his own Age of Empire is obvious enough, but the stories also allegorize his intense hostility toward socialism, whose popularity in the United States had peaked in 1912 with the Socialist presidential candidacy of Eugene V. Debs. The Tharks had once been a civilized race, but they had lost all humane sentiments, “the victims of eons of the horrible community idea,” in which all is held as common property—including the women and children. They had degraded themselves into “a people without written language, without art, without homes, without love.”[7] The readers of these science-fiction novels were mostly boys like the young Ray Bradbury, another Midwest migrant Angeleno, who credits Burroughs with inspiring his own literary career. After gaining advice at a carnival in his hometown from Mr. Electrico, Bradbury sat down to write his first story, “Burroughs’s ‘The Gods of Mars’ A Sequel by Ray Bradbury.” As Bradbury observes, “Burroughs’s forte is not stylistic but romantic.”[8] His two most successful series each star supermen protagonists (Carter, Tarzan) who rescue fair maidens from dark savages; each episode being an opportunity to demonstrate the superior manhood of Whites in terms of civility, courage, refinement, and physique. “We all loved him,” the opening narrator of the book’s original “Foreword” writes, of the hero Virginian John Carter, “and our slaves fairly worshipped the ground he trod.”[9] What better heroic image for a white supremacist than an Antebellum Virginia slave owner?
  
  But Burroughs was only sharpening his knives with John Carter. His enduring popular masterpiece will undoubtedly remain Tarzan of the Apes, also published in The All-Story, in 1912, on the heels of the first Mars story. Burroughs was to write another 25 Tarzan novels and license his invention to comic­-strip serials, then to National Picture Corporation, who produced a series of silent films starring Elmo Lincoln (One of D. W. Griffith's favorite actors), and then an even more profitable license to M-G-M for twelve Johnny Weismuller movies produced from 1932 to 1948. [10] In Tarzan Burroughs created an original hero for the 20th century, the Century of Race, one that combines the deepest elements of European folk narrative with the deepest anxieties of imperial America’s racial Darwinism.[11]
  
  Burroughs eventually admitted that Kipling’s Mowgli in Jungle Book was a model for Tarzan (and Kipling believed that Tarzan was the best of hundreds of rip-offs). But Burroughs was not merely rewriting Mowgli; he was tapping the same well as Kipling: the mythic story of feral man, the recurrent leitmotif of urban civilization. Romulus and Remus were suckled by wolves. Burroughs chose apes as Tarzan’s parents according to the theory of racist Darwinism, in which the English are supposedly the most highly-­evolved humans, and the British aristocracy the most highly-evolved of these. Burroughs created a refined British Lord and Lady, the Greystokes, and orphans their heir in the deepest, most primeval jungle, so that their baby would be nurtured by the lowest species of proto-humans—a fictional ape tribe that has language. These speaking apes are promoted on the evolutionary scale better to fit the racist scale between beasts and the African humans, who play only a wicked role in the novel. Tarzan, whose name means “white skin” in the language of this ape tribe, emerges from the jungle as a perfect Nietzschean ubermensch. He is master of huge beasts and of all men, physically and mentally superior in every way. Setting aside the playboy image of Johnny Weismuller, the original Tarzan is a complex mix of savagery and civilization: he is stronger than a tiger, loves to kill, but he speaks French and English and has impeccable, inbred aristocratic manners.
  
  Writing from Tarzana in 1922, on the occasion of the novel’s tenth anniversary re-issue, Burroughs succinctly stated his core ideology: "[T]he life of Tarzan of the Apes is symbolic of the evolution of man and the rise of civilization, during which mankind gained much in its ­never-­ending search for luxury; but not without the sacrifice of many desirable characteristics, as well as the greater part of its liberty."[12] It can hardly be an accident that this 1922 passage almost perfectly expresses a central tenet of European fascism. The Burroughs-Tarzan opus continuously extols a master-race savagery. The lust for the hunt and joy of killing overwhelms Tarzan in many scenes. After he defeats lions, tigers, and giant apes with his bare hands and a very phallic knife (his father’s sole heirloom and symbol of Tarzan’s true human family), Tarzan always shouts his blood­curdling triumph-cry. An African man killed Tarzan’s beloved ape foster-mother, so Tarzan hunts African humans simply for revenge. Burroughs offers no other justification nor any apology for Tarzan’s many gratuitous murders. Given Burroughs’ tireless exaltation of refined humanitarian sentiments, Tarzan’s massacre of Africans can only signify that they do not merit human sympathies. Neither did the Jews of Europe, in the contemporary ideology of Germany’s National Socialists.
  
  Burroughs had created an instant pop-culture icon for the self-proclaimed “white” race. It is no exaggeration to say that Tarzan was a proto-fascist hero for the mass consumers of North American racialized capitalism. The masses who raised their children on Tarzan and Tom Carter were evidently unperturbed by dehumanizing, genocidal romances. But then, neither were countless generations of Europeans, for Burroughs’s singular achievement was to update antique warrior heroes: Ireland’s Cúchulainn, England’s King Arthur, Spain’s Amadis de Gaula, and his son, the Esplandían who conquered California itself and helped drive Alonso Quijano to Quixotic madness. Those heroes also improbably slew horrific giant monsters, vanquished fierce foes by the thousands in battles of impossible odds, and behaved politely toward fair maidens.
  
  In the twentieth century, mythic heroes were to fight, not only Muslim Moors, but all the world’s nonwhites. The appeal of this formula is proven by the speed with which the story of Tarzan spread through the European diaspora. Significantly, one of the Europeans touched by the Tarzan legends was an Scottish ivory trader living deep in the jungles of the Belgian Congo, one Alfred Aloysius Horn, who spun a yarn conflating Tarzan and other white captive stories with his own experiences among the African tribesmen. That tale, written in collaboration with the South African novelist Ethrelda Lewis, became the bestseller Trader Horn in 1927. And that, in turn, was the basis for M-G-M’s Africa/Tarzan productions of the 1930s.
  
  The 1914 outbreak of war in Europe also encouraged Burroughs to pursue nationalist propaganda. By 1918 he was not only a wealthy author of the Tarzan and Mars fantasies; he was the aggressive public foe of Huns, Communists, Bolshevists, Anarchists, and pacifists. His Darwinian worldview was inextricable now from his political expression. Burroughs denounced Germans and pacifists as “anthropoid creatures,” a phrase he had invented for the advanced apes the first Tarzan novel. "It is very possible that we shall see loosed upon the community a raft of ­street-­corner orators of the I.W.W and Bolshevik types....We have thrashed the trouble makers of Europe and it is within the range of possibilities that we may have to deal with similar cattle here."[13] In 1918, the year of the Armistice and the onslaught of the Red Scare, the budding movie industry produced its first adaptation of Tarzan, and the business opportunities of Hollywood, along with the congenial climate, beckoned. Burroughs pulled up all his Chicago roots and purchased the 570-acre “Las Flores” estate of Harrison Gray Otis. “The world was combed for the greenery on this knoll,” reported the Los Angeles Times, “hundreds of the plants coming from Asia and Africa.”[14] Burroughs renamed the estate “Tarzana” and rapidly conceived plans for an entire residential community by that name.
  
  Once he had settled himself and his family on the Tarzana estate, Burroughs of course resumed Tarzan production. Tarzan the Terrible (1921: manuscript finished in December 1920) is entirely about black and white races in a new fantasyland he invented called “Pal-ul-don”. His preparatory notes make the premise clear enough: “At­den – (Tall-Tree) White, hairless warrior, Tarzan’s first acquaintance. Om-at (Long­Tail) black, hairy warrior, Tarzan's second acquaintance”[15]
  
  Burroughs, now a landed squire with his own Mexican peones, living in the very mansion of the hated foe of the organized working class, had settled in the ideal environment for the production of the cultural hegemony of white supremacy. He followed Tarzan the Terrible with a direct consideration of his new milieu, his only work of social realism. In The Girl from Hollywood (1922), Burroughs attacked the moral decadence of the movie colony (already evident to many even in the beginning of the 1920s). Innocent daughters of virtuous ranchers in the suburbs of Los Angeles become ensnared by lecherous directors, lose their virginity and dignity on the casting couch, and become cocaine-addicted sex slaves.[16]
  
  At the same time, Burroughs was now selling residential lots to the ordinary “white” Angeleno, giving them a slice of Tarzana. Metaphorically, this is exactly how he spread the Tarzan myth.[17] Tarzana became the plantation from which the ­proto-­fascist superhero was harvested. Burroughs then joined Thomas Ince as an initial investor in Hollywoodland. Such are the dreams that stuff is made from.

  Maestro of the Master Race

  In 1914, D.W. Griffith set-up shop in Los Angeles to recast the standards of the entire industry with his 3-hour epic film, Birth of a Nation (1915).  Until that point Griffith was just one of many directors and producers.  His opus of one-reelers hardly left a lasting impression on the public mind.  Most of these were almost immediately tossed on a shelf to be forgotten because of the insatiable demand of audiences for new scenes.  But the longer, multi-reel films like the 1903 Great Train Robbery or DeMille's 1914 The Squaw Man, with more time to develop characters and plot, were gaining public attention, and Griffith had a vision about taking this trend to a whole new level.
  
  The feared moral power of movies led to a wave of censorship, begun when New York City shut down all of its nickelodeons in the winter of 1908-9 -- a moment comparable in some ways with the closure of London's theaters under Queen Elizabeth during Shakespeare's career. Some shorts did contain sexually explicit material, but the censorious city officials were motivated by a much more general concern about the socially disruptive nature of the cinema--the unregulated treatment of capital-labor relations, often taking radical positions, and the failure of many movies to take a clear stand against criminals, prostitutes, “new women.” The nickelodeons themselves were seen as disreputable dives by the moral reformers just then gaining power in the so-called Progressive Movement. Panicked, the industry founded its own National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures,” seeking (not for the last time) to stave-off government control by policing the industry’s “morals.” The industry spent several years in a “search for middle-class approval.”[19]
  
  Griffith, the veteran author and director of hundreds of Biograph melodramas, and a “progressive” reformer par excellence, was by all accounts and his own reflections, a patriarchal, Victorian moralist. He sought to police the virtue of pure white womanhood with an entire army of white-hooded Victorian gentlemen. The “morals” of Birth are impeccable by the standards of a society that was becoming ruthlessly committed to the inhumane ideology of white supremacy. Based on the segregationist novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon and endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson (whose History of the American People is quoted throughout the film), Birth won wide dramatic acclaim as a quality production that placed cinema in the exalted category of fine performing art. Despite generations of industry attempts to sanitize Griffith’s appalling assault on human rights, the film is profoundly anti-­democratic. Among its many loathsome scenes is one that advocates terror at the election booth to prevent African Americans from exercising their franchise, a right won at the cost of 600,000 dead. Few scenes can better illustrate the dismal condition of American political culture than this, in a wildly popular film endorsed by the President of the United States.
  
  Griffith’s film about the Civil War and Reconstruction, replete with enormous battle scenes staged on the open spaces of the San Fernando Valley, lionized the Ku Klux Klan as the heroic Christian avengers who save the defeated South and entire nation from the purported evil of African American political enfranchisement. The irony of this particular film’s foundational role in the origins of the industry requires a little explanation.  The film’s mass libel against the entire race of African Americans, portraying them as pretentious idiots at best, and bestial, foolish, venal, rapists as the norm, was deeply disturbing, not only to African Americans, but to even to many whites. A strange process ensued: White racial liberals allied with African American activists to ban the film under local motion picture censorship board authority, while the film itself established the legitimacy of the medium. Censorship movements were successful in many cities, including Chicago, where Jane Addams, a ­co-­founder in 1909 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was instrumental, and was almost banned in Los Angeles itself, where Harrison Gray Otis, a Union veteran and like Addams, a Lincoln Republican, lent his support to the anti­racists. Many censors, not unsympathetic to the film’s racism, were simply worried that the film would spark race riots and that was the leading argument used before censorship boards.[20] The result was even worse than race riots, which did erupt massively in 1917-1919.  While direct causation is unprovable, every racist murder and act of terror by the Ku Klux Klan committed after 1915 owes a debt to Griffith and Birth of a Nation.  At the very least inspired the legitimacy of the hooded terror organization, which paraded openly in the nation's capital during the 1920s.  The Klan was the U.S. version of fascism, a movement impeded quite possibly by the stupidity of their uniforms, compared with the military-style outfits of the Mussolini's fascisti of the same decade and the Nazis after them.
  
  Censorship of speech was a very live issue in the very year that Griffith released Birth of a Nation.  The U.S. Supreme Court made its 9-0 landmark ruling in that year, in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230. Mutual, a film distribution company, had challenged Ohio's 1913 law establishing a board of censors and requiring all films to be approved by it before being exhibited. The unanimous court ruled that "…the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit … not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution, we think, as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion." This categorical dismissal of cinema from the protections of the 1st Amendment took place alongside the massive limitations on free speech enforced by municipalities, including Los Angeles with its "no-speech zones," and remained in effect until the successor landmark ruling, in Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495 (1952), reversed Mutual and restored to cinema its status as public expression. The great irony is that films like Birth of a Nation were absolutely intended to take part in the public debates about the most important issues of the day. Griffith and many other filmmakers saw themselves as active participants in the political public sphere.  Mutual was probably a foregone conclusion, given the lack of sympathy shown by the Supreme Court to free speech during the early 20th century.  But the effect was to reinforce the commercial-entertainment approach to films, and left the power to census ultimately, not in the hands of petty State Board,s but in the industry itself.  The Production Code of 1934 was the most signifiant censorship regime that the U.S. movies ultimately faced. [B-1] 
   
  The Supreme Court's Mutual decision was a self-fulfilling prophesy: Birth and The Cheat made it clear to investors that movies could be big business, and by 1920, they were, with capital requirements so high that the only big investors and corporations could afford to compete.  The pro-capitalist and antifeminist, anti-radical proclivities of the filmmakers, plus their desire to maximize box offivce by minimizing controversy or wedge issues that would keep some moviegoers away, led almost directly to the triumph of the DeMille formula. [B-2]
  
  The City of Los Angeles’s ordinance action to ban Birth was overruled by the California Supreme Court and a phalanx of mounted, hooded Clansmen (presumably actors) paraded to promote the official premiere of Birth of a Nation at the city’s largest venue, Clune’s Auditorium, on Fifth Street at Olive facing Central Park (renamed Pershing Square 1919), in Downtown Los Angeles on 8 February 1915.[21] The movie proved an unprecedented success, with an estimated 25 million tickets sold, at the astronomical price of $1 dollar, during its first year. It is estimated that 200 million Americans eventually viewed the film in theaters by the end of the 1920s. The attempts at censorship probably had the usual effect of increasing publicity and curiosity. Its racism proved more appealing than revolting and sparked a national revival of the Klan, which opened terrorist klaverns (local cells) by the thousands across the North and West, Birth of a Nation also demonstrated to Wall Street investors that the movie industry was ready to enter respectable middle-class theaters as a highly profitable form of entertainment. We need to etch this linkage in our minds if we are to understand the cultural power of Hollywood: an overtly racist movie lionizing the Ku Klux Klan established the middle-class respectability of the new medium.[22]
  
  Seizing on their respective achievements, Ince and Griffith, along with the comic film producer Mack Sennett, formed the Triangle Film Corporation in 1915, capitalized at $5 million, and headquartered it in Los Angeles. Soon “Universal, Triangle...Lasky, Vitagraph, Metro, Hodkinson, and Fox all erected sprawling studio facilities so imposing that tourists well might have mistaken them for factories.”[23] They were factories, and the terms “dream factory” and “culture industry” are not facetious or merely metaphorical. Movie makers materialized the dreams of writers by building the required realities inside the studio, outside the studio, or simply by appropriating reality in available urban and regional landscapes. The raw materials for these dream factories encompassed the entire human landscape. 
   
  D.W. Griffith burned himself out, along with his spectacular moralistic propaganda approach, not more than a year after the stunning success of Birth.   Stung and outraged by the attempts to censor his masterpiece, Griffith launched into an even more ambitious project in 1916, Intolerance, treating the theme of “intolerance” in four epochs of human history: ancient Babylon; during the life of Christ; medieval France; and contemporary urban America. Supremely unaware of the irony, Griffith castigated the enemies of intolerance as intolerant. He also set a new standard for budgetary incontinence at the corner of Sunset and Western. There Griffith had constructed a fully-scaled replica of Babylon for his ill-fated epic. Soaring walls exceeding ten stories in height supported hundreds of actors in an audacious demonstration of the industry’s new, unbridled ambition.[24]
   

  White Shadows in the South Seas

  The story I tell here is the dramatic reconfiguration of global space accomplished in Los Angeles during the 1920s. Movies not only became a global commodity: they actually transformed the shape and experience of intercontinental space. The visible world expanded exponentially during the 1920s, as Hollywood producers learned not only to fool the mind's eye, but also not to fool it, by filming “on location” in far-flung places.  The production of movies both represented and performed Euro-American colonialism.
  
  The vast majority of movies about foreign lands and exotic places were made on artificial sets, of course.  Eric Von Stroheim’s Monte Carlo in Foolish Wives (Universal Film Manufacturing Company, 1922) was filmed on a lavish set built on the rocky shores of Monterey California. The Swiss Alps could be filmed in the San Gabriel Mountains, or Tahiti on Santa Monica Beach.   In their bid to outdo their competitors with a new standard of “realism,” Louis Mayer and Irving Thalberg at M-G-M began to ship large and expensive ­first-­unit crews farther away on the North American continent (War Paint, 1926), and then overseas (White Shadows on the South Seas, filmed in the South Pacific, 1928; Trader Horn, filmed in Africa, 1931).  This essay follows these productions and the career of the director Mayer and Thalberg employed--as Elizabeth I employed Sir Francis Drake--in this imperial manner.
  
  High upon the soaring ramparts in a long shot of ancient Babylon, a tiny soldier battled furiously until the director signaled “Cut!” That unknown actor, named Woodbridge Strong “W.S.” or “Woody” Van Dyke (1889-1943) got his break working for D.W. Griffith, in his 1916 epic Intolerance. Van Dyke, until then an itinerant child actor, miner and logger in the Pacific Northwest, played various parts among the cast of hundreds of Babylonians until he was noticed by Griffith and became the legendary director’s grip and water boy. Literally watching over the industry founder’s shoulder, Van Dyke became Griffith’s disciple. “It was a case of hero worship, pure and simple, on my part,” recalled Van Dyke. “I took advantage of every opportunity I could to watch his technique.”[1] Woody Van Dyke eventually became one of M­-G­-M’s most valuable and prolific directors. At his death of a heart attack in 1942 he had directed 89 films, including the popular Thin Man series starring William Powell and Myrna Loy.[2]
  
  Van Dyke, like his mentor and lifelong friend D.W. Griffith, spent years directing westerns and serials before landing a directorial assignment for a major studio production. Van Dyke quickly earned a reputation as “One-Take Woody,” a movie factory foreman who could keep costs down, move hundreds of persons and tons of equipment across the countryside or through the studios, all the while improvising thrilling action scenes and coaxing actors to look authentic. The skill set for the autocratic director of Hollywood’s classic era was a mix of vaudevillian impresario, military commander, and machismo. Van Dyke, a Marine during the Great War, handled the live ammunition on set when real shooting was required. By the late 1920s Van Dyke was well-known as an adventurous tough-guy who made fine B movies, but was considered unsuited for subtle, artistic assignments.[3] His break into the premium assignments came with White Shadows in the South Seas (1929), starring Monte Blue and Raquel Torres, filmed on location on the Marquesas Islands.
  
  Van Dyke was also Griffith’s heir as producer of social relations. Far more “mainstream” and prolific than his master, he carried forward in powerful new ways the founder’s project of using Hollywood to establish the global mastery of the white race. With Griffith that project was a self conscious and highly articulated ideology. Griffith was a severe segregationist who would not allow a black actor to touch a white actress. Accordingly, most “negroes” in Birth of a Nation were played by whites in blackface.[4] With Van Dyke, white supremacy was largely second nature. His household servant was an African American whom he called by a single name--according to plantation custom--“Napoleon.”[5] Unlike Griffith, he didn’t see movies as vehicles for social change, but simply vehicles for profit that needed all the elements of entertainment. Racial difference, like sexual and class difference, was (and remains) a most seductive engine for plot development: Van Dyke, as screenwriter and director, exploited social difference to the fullest extent possible.[6]
  
  But Van Dyke also trod the path of empire as he exploited racial difference. We cannot say, simply, that he was “a product of his times,” as many apologists for Hollywood racism have done. He was a manufacturer of racial boundaries, working on the same frontiers as the actual Euro-American imperialists. Fittingly, he began his ­on-­location filming experiments in the American West, working with Indians and Calvalrymen who had just finished battling one another. After directing prizefighter Jack Dempsey in the action serial “Daredevil Jack,” Van Dyke met and became friends with the renowned “Indian expert” Col. Tim McCoy, who was working in Hollywood as an advisor. When Irving Thalberg decided to make McCoy into a cowboy hero, Woody was the obvious choice to lead a film crew to execute an ­on-­location drama in the Wind River Reservation, where McCoy had spent his life among the Arapahoe and Shoshone.
  
  It becomes hard to draw the line between reality and fantasy in War Paint (1926), as Van Dyke and McCoy commanded a private army of subjugated Arapahoe and Shoshone warriors along with a contingent of Cassock mercenaries. The Cassocks, refugees from the Russian Revolution, found employment in Hollywood as “cowboys” because of their unsurpassed horsemanship. Among the actors was Left Hand, who in his youth had helped to slaughter General George Armstrong Custer’s detachment at Little Big Horn, and later served as a scout for General Crook in the war against the Apache. Another was Charlie White Man, an acculturated Shoshone who had been captured as a baby from the white settlers.
  
  Thalberg and Van Dyke used actually subjugated peoples as actors to portray their own defeat or humiliation. Fittingly, War Paint is the story of Arapahoe “Chief Yowlatchie” (played by Iron Eyes--the presumed namesake of Iron Eyes Cody, who decides to escape the reservation. His rebellion is crushed by a cavalry detachment under the command of Lt. Tim Marshall (played by Tim McCoy, who had earned the rank of Colonel killing Indians in the actual U.S. Cavalry). Not so long after the raw territorial battles had been won—still within living memory—Hollywood policed the boundaries of racial territories through the re-enactment of nationalist conquest stories.[7]
  
  Mayer and Thalberg were determined that the ­newly-­formed ­M-­G-­M would surpass, in quality and spectacle, the products of its competitors. Encouraged by Van Dyke’s ability to make films on budget at a distance of 1,000 miles from Culver City, they decided in 1927 to take much bigger risk to stay ahead of the pack, sending a complete crew of actors and equipment 10,000 miles away, to the Marquesas Islands (a French colony) in the South Pacific, to film White Shadows in the South Seas (1928).
  
  Set in Tahiti, the script for White Shadows portrays a kindly but alcoholic European Dr. Matthew Lloyd (Monty Blue) who, in the opening scene, has become a discouraged and dissipated observer of the corruption Europeans have brought to the colonized islands of Tahiti. Driven off by ruthless pearl traders, Dr. Lloyd is shipwrecked on a previously undiscovered island and falls into the idylls of innocent and sensuous life. After saving a boy from drowning, the chief rewards him with the hand of his beautiful daughter Fayaway (Raquel Torres). The two fall in love and hope to keep their undiscovered island untainted by European ways. The uncorrupted islanders supposedly place no value on pearls, and one day, while watching an islander toss aside a huge pearl while making fish hooks from the oyster shell, Dr. Lloyd is consumed with greed—as though the avarice is an inherited, latent European trait. After collecting a wealth of pearls he lights a signal fire, which attracts the rapacious European pearl traders. He realizes his mistake too late: the rapacious pearl traders kill him and reduce the islanders to miserable workers, spreading material and sexual corruption. While superficially sympathetic to the plight of colonized peoples, the script is a standard case of romantic racialism. South Sea Islanders in general, were usually portrayed as inferior in a lovable way, representing the lost innocence of the human race in general. But they are also represented as simple, lascivious, and easily dominated by unscrupulous whites. The plot is much more legible as a nostalgic lament for the urban masses who paid to see the idealized opposite of their own grimy city environments.
  
  Thalberg, in an obvious attempt to achieve realism, chose Robert Flaherty (1884-1951) to direct the film. Considered a true ethnologist, Flaherty had directed two successful documentaries: Nanook of the North (set among the Eskimo in the Arctic Circle) and Moana of the South Seas (set in Hawa’ii and Samoa). Mayer and Thalberg believed Flaherty could achieve both the required “realism” as well as handle the “natives.” Mexicana Raquel Torres was to play the Tahitian princess, presumably because Thalberg thought her features would match those of the Polynesians who would play most minor roles. But Thayer wasn’t sure that Flaherty could handle such a large and expensive expedition, so, to hedge his bets, he sent along the reliable Van Dyke, who had been part of the development team, as an associate director. Sure enough, Flaherty fell on his face and the panicked Thalberg, losing $10,000 a day, handed the bullhorn to One Take Woody.
  
  Van Dyke’s intentions are well documented in journal entries and letters that he wrote during the film’s production, beginning with preparations during the long journey across the Pacific. To begin, Raquel Torres wasn’t dark enough for Van Dyke. “I wired the studio telling them to tell the girl to sunburn on the way down,” he wrote in his journal: “but of course she didn’t do it and she is way too light to work with the other natives and is going to have to make up...”[8] Mexicans were “natives” in Van Dyke’s Los Angeles—not far from the mark in fact, but he didn’t mean it as a compliment. His journals, sent monthly by steamer to his lover Josephine “Jo” Chippo in Hollywood, show unvarnished contempt for the culture he was portraying in the film. “The governor wants to read our story to see if there is anything therein derogatory to the natives. If he ever reads that script we will get nudged right off the island.”[9] Van Dyke knew the script very well indeed: he was one of its authors. “It begins to dawn on you,” Van Dyke wrote, “that this tropical beauty also has its ugliness and that it is not the immaculate thing that South Sea enthusiasts are continually harping on....The natives are plentiful and I would like to get out and play with them but I am told that the great majority of them are full of syphilis.” Days later he complained of the difficulty in finding “good looking natives.” “Such a thing is turning out to be a myth....Have been sadly disillusioned in regard to the beauty of the native women.... If they are beautiful then I am Adonis.”[10]
  
  When White Shadows opened in July of 1928, D.W. Griffith performed the ceremony of introducing the previously obscure director Van Dyke.[11] The movie was a runaway success, vindicating for Mayer and Thalberg their new formula, the in situ recruitment of colonial peoples as actors. Wasting no time, Thalberg sent Van Dyke to Tahiti to direct Ramon Navarro and Renee Adoree to film Van’s first “all-talkie” The Pagan (1928). Van Dyke had not only broken into the inner circle of first-line directors; he was now M-­G-M’s foreign privateer.  His contribution to U.S. racial ideology formation will be explored in essays examining the origins of the African Jungle and Tarzan genre that he founded with his M-G-M films, Trader Horn (1931) and Tarzan (1932).
  
  
  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.\\
  
  
  NOTES ARE MISSING TO MAESTRO OF THE MASTER CLASS
  
  
  NOTES TO LAST SECTION
  
  [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.
   
• 1 2016-06-23T14:28:38-07:00 Maestro of the Master Race: D.W. Griffith, Birth of Nation, the Rebirth of the KKK 5 Narrative Essay image_header 2016-06-23T19:19:25-07:00
  In 1914, D.W. Griffith set-up shop in Los Angeles to recast the standards of the entire industry with his 3-hour epic film, Birth of a Nation (1915).  Until that point Griffith was just one of many directors and producers.  His opus of one-reelers hardly left a lasting impression on the public mind.  Most of these were almost immediately tossed on a shelf to be forgotten because of the insatiable demand of audiences for new scenes.  But the longer, multi-reel films like the 1903 Great Train Robbery or DeMille's 1914 The Squaw Man, with more time to develop characters and plot, were gaining public attention, and Griffith had a vision about taking this trend to a whole new level.
  
  The feared moral power of movies led to a wave of censorship, begun when New York City shut down all of its nickelodeons in the winter of 1908-9 -- a moment comparable in some ways with the closure of London's theaters under Queen Elizabeth during Shakespeare's career. Some shorts did contain sexually explicit material, but the censorious city officials were motivated by a much more general concern about the socially disruptive nature of the cinema--the unregulated treatment of capital-labor relations, often taking radical positions, and the failure of many movies to take a clear stand against criminals, prostitutes, “new women.” The nickelodeons themselves were seen as disreputable dives by the moral reformers just then gaining power in the so-called Progressive Movement. Panicked, the industry founded its own National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures,” seeking (not for the last time) to stave-off government control by policing the industry’s “morals.” The industry spent several years in a “search for middle-class approval.”[19]
  
  Griffith, the veteran author and director of hundreds of Biograph melodramas, and a “progressive” reformer par excellence, was by all accounts and his own reflections, a patriarchal, Victorian moralist. He sought to police the virtue of pure white womanhood with an entire army of white-hooded Victorian gentlemen. The “morals” of Birth are impeccable by the standards of a society that was becoming ruthlessly committed to the inhumane ideology of white supremacy. Based on the segregationist novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon and endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson (whose History of the American People is quoted throughout the film), Birth won wide dramatic acclaim as a quality production that placed cinema in the exalted category of fine performing art. Despite generations of industry attempts to sanitize Griffith’s appalling assault on human rights, the film is profoundly anti-­democratic. Among its many loathsome scenes is one that advocates terror at the election booth to prevent African Americans from exercising their franchise, a right won at the cost of 600,000 dead. Few scenes can better illustrate the dismal condition of American political culture than this, in a wildly popular film endorsed by the President of the United States.
  
  Griffith’s film about the Civil War and Reconstruction, replete with enormous battle scenes staged on the open spaces of the San Fernando Valley, lionized the Ku Klux Klan as the heroic Christian avengers who save the defeated South and entire nation from the purported evil of African American political enfranchisement. The irony of this particular film’s foundational role in the origins of the industry requires a little explanation.  The film’s mass libel against the entire race of African Americans, portraying them as pretentious idiots at best, and bestial, foolish, venal, rapists as the norm, was deeply disturbing, not only to African Americans, but to even to many whites. A strange process ensued: White racial liberals allied with African American activists to ban the film under local motion picture censorship board authority, while the film itself established the legitimacy of the medium. Censorship movements were successful in many cities, including Chicago, where Jane Addams, a ­co-­founder in 1909 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was instrumental, and was almost banned in Los Angeles itself, where Harrison Gray Otis, a Union veteran and like Addams, a Lincoln Republican, lent his support to the anti­racists. Many censors, not unsympathetic to the film’s racism, were simply worried that the film would spark race riots and that was the leading argument used before censorship boards.[20] The result was even worse than race riots, which did erupt massively in 1917-1919.  While direct causation is unprovable, every racist murder and act of terror by the Ku Klux Klan committed after 1915 owes a debt to Griffith and Birth of a Nation.  At the very least inspired the legitimacy of the hooded terror organization, which paraded openly in the nation's capital during the 1920s.  The Klan was the U.S. version of fascism, a movement impeded quite possibly by the stupidity of their uniforms, compared with the military-style outfits of the Mussolini's fascisti of the same decade and the Nazis after them.
  
  Censorship of speech was a very live issue in the very year that Griffith released Birth of a Nation.  The U.S. Supreme Court made its 9-0 landmark ruling in that year, in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230. Mutual, a film distribution company, had challenged Ohio's 1913 law establishing a board of censors and requiring all films to be approved by it before being exhibited. The unanimous court ruled that "…the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit … not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution, we think, as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion." This categorical dismissal of cinema from the protections of the 1st Amendment took place alongside the massive limitations on free speech enforced by municipalities, including Los Angeles with its "no-speech zones," and remained in effect until the successor landmark ruling, in Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495 (1952), reversed Mutual and restored to cinema its status as public expression. The great irony is that films like Birth of a Nation were absolutely intended to take part in the public debates about the most important issues of the day. Griffith and many other filmmakers saw themselves as active participants in the political public sphere.  Mutual was probably a foregone conclusion, given the lack of sympathy shown by the Supreme Court to free speech during the early 20th century.  But the effect was to reinforce the commercial-entertainment approach to films, and left the power to census ultimately, not in the hands of petty State Board,s but in the industry itself.  The Production Code of 1934 was the most signifiant censorship regime that the U.S. movies ultimately faced. [B-1] 
   
  The Supreme Court's Mutual decision was a self-fulfilling prophesy: Birth and The Cheat made it clear to investors that movies could be big business, and by 1920, they were, with capital requirements so high that the only big investors and corporations could afford to compete.  The pro-capitalist and antifeminist, anti-radical proclivities of the filmmakers, plus their desire to maximize box offivce by minimizing controversy or wedge issues that would keep some moviegoers away, led almost directly to the triumph of the DeMille formula. [B-2]
  
  The City of Los Angeles’s ordinance action to ban Birth was overruled by the California Supreme Court and a phalanx of mounted, hooded Clansmen (presumably actors) paraded to promote the official premiere of Birth of a Nation at the city’s largest venue, Clune’s Auditorium, on Fifth Street at Olive facing Central Park (renamed Pershing Square 1919), in Downtown Los Angeles on 8 February 1915.[21] The movie proved an unprecedented success, with an estimated 25 million tickets sold, at the astronomical price of $1 dollar, during its first year. It is estimated that 200 million Americans eventually viewed the film in theaters by the end of the 1920s. The attempts at censorship probably had the usual effect of increasing publicity and curiosity. Its racism proved more appealing than revolting and sparked a national revival of the Klan, which opened terrorist klaverns (local cells) by the thousands across the North and West, Birth of a Nation also demonstrated to Wall Street investors that the movie industry was ready to enter respectable middle-class theaters as a highly profitable form of entertainment. We need to etch this linkage in our minds if we are to understand the cultural power of Hollywood: an overtly racist movie lionizing the Ku Klux Klan established the middle-class respectability of the new medium.[22]
  
  Seizing on their respective achievements, Ince and Griffith, along with the comic film producer Mack Sennett, formed the Triangle Film Corporation in 1915, capitalized at $5 million, and headquartered it in Los Angeles. Soon “Universal, Triangle...Lasky, Vitagraph, Metro, Hodkinson, and Fox all erected sprawling studio facilities so imposing that tourists well might have mistaken them for factories.”[23] They were factories, and the terms “dream factory” and “culture industry” are not facetious or merely metaphorical. Movie makers materialized the dreams of writers by building the required realities inside the studio, outside the studio, or simply by appropriating reality in available urban and regional landscapes. The raw materials for these dream factories encompassed the entire human landscape. 
   
  D.W. Griffith burned himself out, along with his spectacular moralistic propaganda approach, not more than a year after the stunning success of Birth.   Stung and outraged by the attempts to censor his masterpiece, Griffith launched into an even more ambitious project in 1916, Intolerance, treating the theme of “intolerance” in four epochs of human history: ancient Babylon; during the life of Christ; medieval France; and contemporary urban America. Supremely unaware of the irony, Griffith castigated the enemies of intolerance as intolerant. He also set a new standard for budgetary incontinence at the corner of Sunset and Western. There Griffith had constructed a fully-scaled replica of Babylon for his ill-fated epic. Soaring walls exceeding ten stories in height supported hundreds of actors in an audacious demonstration of the industry’s new, unbridled ambition.[24]