This page has tags:

1. 1 2018-08-15T07:37:20-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5 1910s Phil Ethington 4 Decadal Tag structured_gallery 2018-08-15T15:36:25-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5

This page is referenced by:

• 1 2013-07-14T14:11:54-07:00 Regime VIII -- U.S. Industrial Empire on the Porfirian Borderland, 1881-1940 21 image_header 2017-07-24T11:12:48-07:00 After 1880, we observe a dramatic shift toward Anglo domination of Los Angeles. Founding dynasties of their own, a new class of rulers with the names Otis, Chandler, Doheny, Huntington, and Getty moved into the region, operating huge landed estates and employing thousands of laborers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. Leading capitalists in Los Angels participated in the rapid dislocation and exploitation of Mexico, which to the overthrow of Diaz and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910.  Los Angels then became a headquarters for both the Revolution and Counterrevolution, just as the Los Angeles elite were massively growing the LA metropolis.
  
  These new rulers aggressively recast the region as an emerging industrial powerhouse, invented Anglo-centric cultural traditions, and defeated labor-based challengers to their rule, all before the outbreak of the Great War. Anglo oligarchs, operating in concert though the Chamber of Commerce, the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, and other business-led networks, laid the groundwork for a mighty industrial metropolis by amassing property, planning the infrastructure, attracting capital, labor, and millions of settlers. During the 1920s, this infrastructure already enabled a massive boom in population, productivity, and most crucially, in technological and economic innovation. By the end of this period in 1940, three giant industrial sectors had made Los Angeles a global city: oil, aircraft production, and motion pictures. Through all three, the autocratic political culture of the previous regional regime was reinforced and magnified.
  
  How all these factors came together is a very large and complex story, but the single most important key to understanding the formation of the eighth regional regime is the influence of the preceding regional regimes and Los Angeles’s deep integration with the Borderland political culture, binding its destiny with that of Mexico. That political culture was characterized by the porfiriato—the rule of the Mexican dictator and modernizer General and President Porfirio Diaz (José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori, president almost continuously from 1876-1911), and by the Mexican Revolution (1910-1929), which was caused by the policies of the porfiriato and those of its allies in the United States, including prominently the Anglo elite of Los Angeles.  The counterpart of Porfirio Diaz in Los angels was the formidable General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, undisputed leader of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, and corporate magnate whose holdings included much of Northern Mexico. The porfiriato greatly enriched the Los Angeles Anglo ruling class, and the Revolution deeply threatened it.   Both reinforced the autocratic, reactionary nature of the eighth ruling regime.
  
  The Racial Coup D'Etat of the 1880s
  
  The 1850-1880 period of U.S. occupation of Alta California was one of relative conviviencia for those in Southern California. But in a concerted effort to re-define Los Angeles as a "white spot" (in their own words), an Anglo oligarchy seized economic, social, and political power from Californios in the 1880s, by imposing a variant on Jim Crow segregation.  This new Anglo ruling class appropriated a stylization of "hispanic" heritage as a thematic backdrop, while purging Latinos from the apparatus of power. During the 1880s, Mexican American office holding virtually ended, and, as indication of a hierarchy of legal rights, those with Spanish surnames were increasingly barred from jury service.[1] Integral to the Anglo consolidation of hegemony was the invention of traditions during the 1880s and 1890s that culturally “whitewashed” the Spanish-Mexican heritage of the region, re-casting the missions and ranchos as romantic symbols of a quaint but backward and inferior culture.[2] So successful was this new cultural hegemony in constructing narratives to support the Anglo right to rule, that subsequent historians have lost sight of the profound and ongoing Mexican shape of regional power. The Spanish-Mexican socioeconomic institutional influence was all too real, even while the Anglo-invented cultural heritage was fake, but historians of recent decades have been distracted from the former by debunking the latter.
  
  From the 1880s through the 1914 outbreak of the Great War, a peculiar combination of natural assets, labor relations inherited from the Spanish-Mexican periods, and a concerted lifestyle marketing campaign (touting the Hispanic “fantasy heritage,” Mediterranean climate, citrus culture, real estate opportunity, and health) literally prepared the ground of Los Angeles for its meteoric rise to globalism in the 1920s. A railroad rate war began in 1886 between the established monopoly, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the Santa Fe Railroad, which opened its Los Angeles service from points east in that year. Combined with massive advertisements about the utopian climate and cheap land, this rate war produced an instant flood of middle-class Anglo Americans eager to migrate to the region.[3]
  
  The Southern Pacific delivered 120,000 people to Southern California in 1887 alone, and the Santa Fe was arriving with as many as four passenger trains every day. Carey McWilliams called this the “Pullman Car Migration.” But the boom also led to a bust, so the region’s business leaders held an “Emergency Meeting” in October of 1888, during which General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, led the formation of the Chamber of Commerce and its battle plan for infrastructure development and aggressive promotion throughout the United States and the world. Typical of this plan’s audacity was the proposal (which instantly caused a diplomatic incident) for the United States to purchase Baja California from Mexico.[4]
  
  In short order, this business-industrial oligarchy successfully planned and realized massive infrastructural projects: the federally-funded dredging of a deep-water port at San Pedro, and the bond-funded construction of the Owens Valley Aqueduct—still the longest aqueduct ever constructed in human history.  While all city boosters have been stricken with grandiose dreams, the Los Angeles oligarchs actually succeeded in laying the foundations, in these massive infrastructure projects, for a megacity. Once the liquid assets of water and oil began to flow, this Mediterranean landscape simultaneously bloomed fragrant orchards and belched the smog of industrial progress.[5]
  
  Several great migrant population streams ran to Los Angeles between the 1880s and the Crash of 1929. The first, composed of relatively affluent Anglos from the Midwest, overwhelmed the resident Mexicanos and Californios. Highly visible among the newcomers were thousands of affluent Iowa farmers looking for a place to insert their surplus wealth, leading to the joke that Los Angeles was the “sea coast of Iowa.”[6] These Pullman Car Anglos largely drove in the stakes and set the agenda for those who followed: founding more new cities and hiring the incoming workers. After the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910-11, ten percent of the entire Mexican population moved north of the border, and Los Angeles became the most important portal for this flow (El Paso/Ciudad Juarez being the second). With the concurrent regional industrial boom, the Los Angeles population became dramatically more working-class and non-Anglo. By 1930 about 100,000 Mexican immigrants, 30,000 Japanese, Chinese, and Korean immigrants, and 40,000 African Americans had settled in the city of Los Angeles. But it is very important to remember that the majority of the much larger Anglo population of about one million persons were working- and lower-middle-class migrants.[7] Citrus, the first of the major new productive sectors developed by Anglo leadership, grafted easily onto the rancho territories and labor system. Eventually, the citrus belt “stretched sixty miles eastward from Pasadena, through the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Valleys, to the town of Riverside.” By 1946, about 40,000 workers toiled in the orange and lemon groves of Southern California. The growth of this agribusiness deepened the Mexican communities eastward across this belt, laying the groundwork for the massive Latinization of the San Gabriel Valley decades later. The citrus labor force decidedly was mixed: Mexican, Filipinos, Japanese, and Chinese, as well as “Whites.” As historian Matt Garcia recounts, as the workforce became more nonwhite, wages dropped, to about $13 per week during the late 1920s and 1930s.[8]
  
  The citrus industry was only one of many race-specialized productive sectors as the new Anglo overlords magnified the racial hierarchies of the Spanish-Mexican periods. When Simons Brick Company opened a new worksite in Montebello in 1907, the owners supplied barrack housing for Mexican workers and their families, on-site housing that recalled the former rancheria of the San Gabriel Mission, which lay within sight just to the north.[9] Gradually at first, and then rapidly after 1910, the older sedentary, landholding Mexican elite that had mentored the new Anglo elite was lost in a sea of Mexican immigrant laborers, who arrived to take an increasingly racialized position in a fixed social hierarchy.
  
  Mexicanidad of Southern California
  
  The key to understanding the rise of Los Angeles to globalism in the 1880s-1930s is its relationship to Mexico. Don Porfirio Diaz, who ruled almost continuously from 1876 until his ouster at the onset of the Revolution in 1911, set out to modernize Mexico through partnerships with foreign investors, who poured a staggering $1.2 billion into Mexico, building its railroad infrastructure, developing its mines, and agricultural estates. “Diaz’s policies of keeping down popular protest, muzzling the opposition press, preventing the formation of labor unions, and not allowing strikes,” writes Friedrich Katz, “greatly contributed to this enrichment”[10] The porfiriato also sharply centralized political power, in the hands of local caudillos and the wealthy beneficiaries of foreign investment.[11]
  
  The new industrial elite of Los Angeles, Edward Doheny, Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, were among the major porfirian capitalists in Mexico. Although not a permanent Los Angeles resident, the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst founded the city’s second-largest newspaper, the Los Angeles Examiner, in 1903 and joined this elite as an eccentric but powerful force in the political public sphere. His father had purchased the giant 1,000,000-acre Rancho Babicora in Chihuahua in the 1880s. In 1899 Harry Chandler bought an option on 862,000 acres of land in the Colorado River drainage and formed the California-Mexico Land and Cattle Company (its U.S. name) and the Colorado River Land Company, S.A (its Mexican name), which became the largest cotton plantation in the world, employing 8,000 Mexican peasants and yielding in one year alone $18 million in cotton.[12] “Ultimately,” writes John Mason Hart, “Americans came to own the majority of land along the Mexico’s entire periphery.”[13]
  
  Los Angeles became a key contested space within the emerging revolutionary / counter-revolutionary dynamic of the Borderlands. Drawn by the expatriate community of Mexican workers, the revolutionaries Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón had made Los Angeles their frontier headquarters during much of the first two decades of the century, where they were constantly harassed by the Los Angeles Police Department’s “Red Squad,” frequently imprisoned and threatened with extradition. But the political Left was very strong in Los Angeles as well, at least until 1911—with unionist and socialists very active among the burgeoning working classes of the industrializing city. The Magonistas were successfully defended in court by Socialist attorney Job Harriman, avoiding extradition and a firing squad.[14]
  
  Indeed, the spectacular Mexican events of 1910-1911 were paralleled by the near-overthrow of the Otis-Chandler regime in Los Angeles, in one of the true “turning points” of history, as Harriman ran a nearly-successful campaign for Mayor in 1911. That election outcome would be determined by the course of the trial of John and James McNamara, accused of plotting the October 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building at First and Spring Streets. Harriman officially joined the McNamara brothers’ defense team headed by Clarence Darrow and backed by union leaders across the country. But when the McNamaras confessed their guilt on the eve of the election, Harriman was disgraced, and lost the election. His defeat on December 6, 1911 “aborted the labor movement in Los Angeles” in the words of McWilliams. Otis was vindicated as the righteous defender of “industrial freedom” and the middle classes, whose loyalty was at stake, was easily persuaded to back the forces of security.[15] With firm control of the local political apparatus lasting through the 1950s, the Otis-Chandler oligarchy headed a pro-growth coalition to promote an “open shop” (non-union) landscape that attracted major established industries, like rubber and automobiles, and also incubated brand-new, leading-edge industries—principally motion pictures and aircraft.
  
  The great burst of population growth took off after the Great War (1914-1918). A staggering volume of materials and human labor was required to achieve the building boom of approximately 600,000 new homes during the 1920s, necessitated by the migration of 1.2 million new residents to the county in that decade. Port activity at the twin harbors of Long Beach/San Pedro increased from 2.4 million tons in 1917 to 27 million tons just five years later.[16] Investors poured billions of dollars into the region and in turn, hundreds of thousands of workers migrated to Los Angeles.
  
  Oil
  
  The ambitions of the Otis-Chandler oligarchy were greatly aided by the commercial development of the huge oil fields beneath the Los Angeles Basin. The credit for developing this regional extractive industry belongs to Edward L. Doheny who dug his first well by hand in 1892. Doheny realized his first fortune not from the bounty of Southern California geology, but from a shrewd alliance with the railroad industry.37 When the Santa Fe Railroad bought Doheny’s Petroleum Development Company in 1902 for $1.25 million, he immediately invested his capital in the Veracruz-Huasteca region along the Gulf Coast of Mexico. There, fostered by the generosity Porfirio Diaz, Dohney led the founding of the Mexican oil industry, and in turn became a leading counter-revolutionary for the next two decades.[17]
  
  Doheny was only one of several types of “oil men” operating the Los Angeles Basin. Like him, many of these figures played leading roles in shaping the reactionary political culture of the region. The earliest oil corporation was Union Oil of California (later UNOCAL), incorporated by the State of California in 1890 by Lyman Stewart, Wallace Hardison, and Thomas Bard. Stewart founded the Pacific Gospel Mission, later the Union Rescue Mission in 1901, and in 1908, when Union Oil’s market capitalization had reached $50 million, Steward teamed-up with the Christian author T.C. Horton to found the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, (later renamed Biola University). It was within these walls that the modern “Fundamentalist” movement was born, through the Bible Institute’s publication in 1910 of a series called The Fundamentals, advocating the literal reading of the Scriptures in opposition to the liberal Progressive “social gospel” movement. In 1913 the Bible Institute began construction of its new home, at thirteen stories, the tallest building in Los Angeles, at 550 South Hope Street.
  
  J. “Paul” Getty had arrived in Los Angeles as a teenager with his wealthy family in 1906. George Getty had made a small fortune as an oil man in Oklahoma and the move to Los Angeles was the work of a nouveau riche seeking refinement in the pleasant Mediterranean setting—all according to the plan of the Boosters. At first holding themselves aloof from the oil business in Los Angeles, the conservative Gettys changed their attitude when the Union Oil Company brought in a gusher at Santa Fe Springs in November of 1921. Encouraged by their first good luck, the Gettys moved rapidly into the local market, buying-­up leases throughout Huntington Beach and Long Beach: the main site of the action during this, the region’s second oil boom.43
  
  By the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, industry, shipping, navies, heating and automobiles had created an unquenchable international thirst for fuel oil and refined gasoline. The oil that Doheny had begun to exploit in the 1890s suddenly gained a new value, and the industrial infrastructure of Los Angeles enabled its exploitation. Exploration by a wide range of oil companies rapidly opened new oil strikes erupted in Culver City, Torrance, Dominguez, Santa Fe Springs, Whittier, and Montebello. The fantastic wealth of the Getty Oil Company was now pumped from Los Angeles. By the time of George Getty’s death in 1930 and transfer of control of the family business to his son, the Getty Oil Company had practically started over again from a new foundation in Los Angeles.[18]
  
  The presence of gushers and automobiles in the middle of a metropolis attracted the major auto and rubber manufacturers. Goodyear opened its plant in 1919, followed by Firestone, Goodrich, and U.S. Rubber. Ford built its first branch plant in 1917 and a much larger plant in Long Beach in 1927 (later moving to Pico-Rivera), Willys-Overland built a plant in Maywood in 1929, and auto plants continued to open throughout the 1930s: Chrysler began production in the City of Commerce in 1931; Studebaker in Vernon in 1936; General Motors in South Gate in 1936. By the end of the 1920s, Los Angeles boasted the highest per-capita rates of automobile ownership in the world, with one auto for every 3 persons. Richard Nixon’s father Frank failed as a citrus farmer in Yorba Linda (on a parcel that struck oil shortly after he sold it) but he eventually settled comfortably at the bottom level of the supply chain from 1921 onward, selling gasoline and rubber tires, as well as fruits and vegetables, at the Nixon Market on the corner of Whittier Boulevard and Leffingwell Road.[19]
  
  Motion Pictures
  The social power of the new economic sector of motion picture production would be hard to exaggerate. As they produced movies, the studio chiefs, directors, camera operators, actors, set builders, and myriad assistants inscribed specific workplace relations and other social forms into the Los Angeles landscape. Their product was another, imagined and enacted social landscape, circulated to millions worldwide, depicting the maximum range of historical and topical subject matter. These two landscapes were deeply interrelated. The movies were much more than entertainment to the hundreds of thousands who made their living making them. And these cultural products proved to be far more than entertainment to the millions who spent their leisure time and money watching them. The stars became role models and the sets became utopias and dystopias. Indeed, the Hollywood motion picture industry managed to re-invent aristocracy itself by creating a class of celebrities for mass entertainment, whom the masses have taken very seriously as the cultural icons of a society that no longer has an aristocratic class as that phrase was understood in 1900. Movies were also adopted by warring nation-states as vehicles of propaganda, which thrust Los Angeles into the role of international relations. Because of how they were made, and why and where they were made, motion pictures attributed to “Hollywood” circulated the visions and ideologies of the men and women who made them.
  
  As a photographic industry, light is the most indispensable raw material for motion pictures (even more so than actors). Southern California, supplying an average of 300 cloudless days each year, made Los Angeles an obviously attractive production location. The Biograph Company had maintained a branch studio in Los Angeles from 1910. Thomas Ince headquartered his production company in Los Angeles in 1913 and developed the “central producer system,” which “shifted control from the individual director units making films to a single producer who now oversaw several productions simultaneously.”[20] Ince found ample movie factory space in 1919 at 9336 West Washington Blvd in the newly­incorporated suburb of Culver City. There he built the most venerable studios in the industry: some buildings still in use, after changing many hands, in the twenty-first century. Along with Culver City, movie production took root in the former city of Hollywood in the nineteen-teens.
  
  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.”[21] They were factories, and the terms “dream factory” and “culture industry” are not facetious or merely metaphorical. Moviemakers materialized the dreams of writers by building the required realities inside the studio, outside the studio, or simply by appropriating it from available urban and regional landscapes. The raw materials for these dream factories encompassed the entire human landscape.
  
  The movie industry flourished so spectacularly by 1919 that New York capitalists could no longer resist. By that year Americans flocked to 15,000 movie theaters, leaving an estimated $800 million at the box office. As historian Steven Ross puts it, “The movie industry entered the world of seriously big business in 1919 when several powerful investment banking houses arranged stock offerings of $10 million and $9.5 million...respectively, for Paramount and Loew’s Inc.” The New York Stock Exchange soon listed the stocks of the major studios, and by 1930, the capital invested in the movie industry had reached the staggering figure of $850 million (Ross 2001: 260-62). Capital concentration reorganized the movie industry during the 1920s into eight major studios: Columbia, Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, Paramount, RKO, United Artists, Universal, and Warner Brothers.135 These studios, born largely from exhibition itself, also continued to expand their own theatre chains, controlling not only production but also distribution. They amassed a huge pool of talent, with “stars” locked into long-term contracts and treated as capital stock. The apogee of the studio system was reached in 1946, when the motion picture industry sold 4.5 billion tickets per year, or 33 movies consumed annually per capita.[22]
  
  The immigrant entrepreneurs who had built their movie empires from scratch had no sympathy for labor unions and hated their growing presence in the studios. Jack Warner called the union organizers “communists, radical bastards and soapbox sons of bitches." William Fox, himself a former socialist, waxed democratic about his populist-themed movies starring Will Rogers, but his studio chief, Darryl Zanuck, threatened to “mow down” the unionists if they picketed the Paramount studios. The unions themselves became a violent arena of struggle, between a mob-controlled International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the progressive Congress of Studio Unions (CSU). While the liberal studios made their populist message films about historical gangsters, the living gangsters kept those studios free of unions.[23]
  
  The regional regime’s political culture took a distinctive turn with the sudden arrival of nouveau-riche Jews of great power, wealth, and influence—a very unusual phenomenon in the Euro-American world, during the height of anti-Semitism. The relationship between this group and the established leadership is important to understand, because within it we have an example of the mentorship that reproduces elements of a grounded (regional) political economy. As Mike Davis observes, the nouveau-riche Jews staked-out a new center of power to the West, along Wilshire Boulevard, mitigating the supremacy of the Otis-Chandler dynasty, whose headquarters lay in Craftsman Pasadena and San Marino. The geographic salient of this second, rival head, was the “Westside”- Beverly Hills, Westwood, Brentwood, Santa Monica, and Pacific Palisades.[24]
  
  But a larger and more complex process was at work than merely the division of power: the new ruling elite underwent a segregated mentorship in the ways of economic relations and public ethics that were necessary to do business in Otis and Chandler’s world. The new men had entered a milieu that already had a chieftaincy and their hard-bitten rise from the status of pogrom-fleeing peddlar refugees to captains of mass culture made them very sympathetic to the anti-union reactionaries at the Times, and they needed the publicity that a friendly Times gave them. Thus, the notoriously autocratic and exploitative Studio system can be seen as a product of the regional regime milieu.
   
  Aircraft and Warcraft
  
  Also world-historic in scale was the rise of the Los Angeles aircraft industry. The first aircraft built in Los Angeles were made by the employees of Glenn L. Martin in 1912, but these were far from Martin’s headquarters in the nation’s industrial core: the Ohio River Valley. As part of his “crusade for industry,” Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler sent his reporter Bill Henry to Cleveland in 1919 “to investigate the possibilities of the aircraft industry” for Los Angeles. Henry was actually an industrial spy who got a job at Martin’s factory and, while working there for a full year, met and wooed the company’s vice president, the MIT graduate Donald Douglas (1892-1981). Douglas had his own dreams, but zero capital, so Chandler underwrote a $15,000 initial investment, and gave Douglas access to nine “other prominent Angelenos to contact for the rest of what he needed.”[25] Douglas won his first military order in 1921 to build torpedo bombers for the U.S. Navy. He delivered six DT-1’s (Douglas Torpedo, First) in 1922, for $130,890. By 1928 the Douglas Company was worth $25 million.[26]
  
  At about the same time, the Loughead brothers, Allan and Malcolm, who had built two flying boats for the Navy in Santa Barbara, relocated as Lockheed Aircraft to Hollywood in 1926, and again in 1927 to Burbank, in the large empty spaces of south-eastern San Fernando Valley, near the sprawling Universal Studios, where they could maintain an airfield adjacent to their expandable factory space. After some rocky years, they won in 1936 from the British Royal Air Force “the largest contract ever placed with an aircraft company,” for 250 reconnaissance bombers. By 1938, Lockheed employed 2,500 workers and by the end of the Second World War Lockheed was the largest aircraft producer in the world. They had produced 19,000 aircraft with a workforce of 60,000.[27]
  
  Douglas, meanwhile, established spin-off plants in El Segundo in 1932 and in Long Beach in 1941. By 1939 Douglas employed 11,000 workers and by 1941 the company held $78 million in military orders.[28] In 1935 North American Aviation, headed by former Douglas vice president J.H. “Dutch” Kindleberger, located in Inglewood with 75 employees. By January the following year North American had 250 employees building their first Army Air Corps NA-16 trainers. By 1941 more than 14,000 employees labored in one million square feet of factory space to produce 325 units per month.[29] Similar stories could be repeated for Vultee Aircraft (later General Dynamics Convair), which began production in Downey in 1936, and for Northrup Aircraft, which began production in Hawthorne, headed by Jack Northrup, another of Douglas’s star production chiefs.
  
  As this brief history illustrates, the airframe industry created a regional critical mass of university-trained talent, production facilities, and subcontractors that gave it an unrivalled global position that would last for a half a century.[30] Although they could not predict it, the early successes of the Los Angeles airframe producers positioned the region to benefit mightily by the arrival of another world war in 1939. In that year 15,000 Angelenos were employed building aircraft, but just four years later this sector employed nearly 200,000 workers.
   
  --- --- ---

  
  By the time of the United States entry into World War II, the eighth regional regime (1881-1940) of Los Angeles had produced a mighty regional metropolis with wide global reach, a major seaport, an extensive transportation system, and two new world-transforming industries: motion pictures and aircraft. The city achieved major global recognition in hosting the 1932 Olympics in its purpose-built Coliseum south of downtown. The Otis-Chandler oligarchy had also magnified the racial-caste labor system of the Borderlands political economy. They had organized an interlocking directorate of reactionary economic and political leaders.
  
  This leadership had been mentored in the ways of exploitive labor relations by their predecessors the Mexican Rancheros; their ally and benefactor had been the dictator Porfirio Diaz, and their counter-revolutionary zeal against democratic movements was reinforced by the autocratic structure of their new industries, especially oil and motion pictures. Those leaders now became the mentors to an even mightier generation of leaders, who remade Los Angeles as an exporter of its regional political-economic regime, a global city of truly world-historic proportions.
  
  NOTES
  
  [1] Griswold del Castillo (1982: 117).
  
  [2] Deverell (2005).
  
  [3] McWilliams (1980); Starr (1991: 45-64).
  
  [4] McWilliams (1980: 113-137).
  
  [5] Deverell (1996); Erie (2004).
  
  [6] McWilliams (1980 [1946]: 164).
  
  [7] Romo (1983: 3-11); Laslett (1997); Sabagh and Bozorgmehr (1997).
  
  [8] Garcia (2001: 19, 38-9, 49).
  
  [9] Deverell (2005: 135).
  
  [10] Katz (1998: 15-6).
  
  [11] Coatsworth (1974); Hart (1987).
  
  [12] McDougal (2001: 73-5).
  
  [13] Hart (2002: 170-172).
  
  [14] Escobar (1999: 53-76).
  
  [15] McWilliams ([1946]1980: 281-3).
  
  [16] Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce (1928): pp. ***
  
  [17] Ansell (1998); Davis (2001).
  
  [18] Getty (1963: 9, 77-8); Miller (1985: 26-7, 47).
  
  [19] Pitt and Pitt (2000): 31; Bottles (1987); Ambrose (1987: 34-5).
  
  [20] Ross (2001: 258).
  
  [21] Ross (2001: 260-62).
  
  [22] Ross (2001); Sedgwick (2002).
  
  [23] Horne (2001).
  
  [24] Davis (1990: 91-150).
  
  [25] Lotchin (1992: 108-110, quotation at 109).
  
  [26] Hise (1997: 127-8).
  
  [27] Scott and Mattingly (1989: 49).
  
  [28] Keane (2001: 251n7).
  
  [29] Hise (1997: 123).
  
  [30] Scott and Mattingly (1989); Hise (1997).
• 1 2013-07-14T15:17:14-07:00 Infinite Landscapes of the Motion Picture Industry 5 plain 2013-10-21T17:35:03-07:00 Global power of an even more revolutionary sort than oil or aircraft came to be concentrated in Los Angeles by 1929: the motion picture industry. As they produced movies, the studio chiefs, directors, camera operators, actors, set builders, and myriad assistants occupied specific Los Angeles social landscapes. Their product was another, imagined and enacted social landscape, circulated to millions worldwide, depicting the maximum range of historical and thematic subject matter. These two landscapes were deeply interrelated. The movies were entertainment, to be sure, but they were much more to the millions who spent their leisure time and money to see them. The stars were role models, the sets were utopias and dystopias. The culture industry created a “world in a frame,” the world that extruded itself as an extension of the vast geography of society itself. Early production arose close to the origins of the industry, the vaudeville venues of immigrant New York City and Chicago. The Biograph Company, among the weightiest producers in the embryonic stages of the industry, made most of its films from 1908 to 1912 in its New York City “studio,” a brownstone mansion at 11 East 14th Street. The leading director of those films was D. W. Griffith (1875-1948). Griffith and his contemporaries produced an endless stream of “one-reelers,” silent sketches of every imaginable subject matter, from slapstick comedies to dramas about the injustices of the capitalist system.[1] Considering their meteoric rise to the very highest social and political circles of the United States, the humble origins of the movie moguls is a story as fantastic as any they put on the screen. In 1883, fed up with the pogroms and lured by stories of fantastic opportunity, 26­year-old Benjamin Warner (1857-1935, originally Varna or Varnerski?)[2] left the tiny Polish village of Krasnashiltz to gain a foothold in America. A cobbler by training, Ben saved enough by the end of his first year repairing shoes on the streets of Baltimore to send for his wife Pearl (1858-1934) and their two children Anna (1878-1958) and Hirsch (later called Harry, 1881-1958). Pearl eventually bore twelve children, nine surviving to adulthood. Ben, a tireless entrepreneur, sought fortune wherever he learned of a potential customer base. He and Pearl also created an extraordinary family culture of love and economic solidarity. As soon as each child was old enough to do something productive, they became part of single diversified company, each always proudly waving the Warner banner. By 1899, the family had sold pots and pans to railroad workers in Bluefield, Virginia, tramped the woods of Canada trading furs (Jacob, called Jack, 1892-1978, was born in London, Ontario), and finally settled in Youngstown, Ohio catering to the huge Polish immigrant steelworker population. Part of the family ran a combined shoe repair shop and grocery store, while the enterprising older sons Harry and Albert (called Abe, 1884-1967), ever excited by new consumer technologies, ran a bicycle sales and repair store. But at $30, the market for luxury goods like bicycles was necessarily limited. The hottest new consumer product was the motion picture, shown for just five cents in “nickelodeons.” The Warners watched with awe as thousands of patrons left their nickels at the box office each day in the tiny theatres in Youngstown. One day in 1904 the boys learned of a Kinetoscope movie projector available for $1000, complete with a copy of Edwin S. Porter's pathbreaking The Great Train Robbery (1903). The aggressive family threw their meager fortune at the opportunity (even after hocking Ben’s prized gold watch and “Bob,” the horse that had dragged them around Canada, they only came up with $950, which was accepted by the seller).[3] Exhibiting in a tent, the Warners chased carnivals around Ohio, wearing out The Great Train Robbery and the audiences at the same time. By 1905 they sold the bicycle shop to rent a theatre, called “The Cascade,” in New Castle, Ohio, limiting the seating to 99 to avoid fire regulations. The enterprising Warners quickly realized that much more money could be made distributing films. With characteristic chutzpah, Abe and Sam (1888-1927) approached the theatre magnate Marcus Loew, and talked him out of several trunks full of movies for $500. With this capital stock, they established the Duquesne Amusement Company in 1907. “Harry sent Sam and Abe to Pittsburgh to manage the exchange while he kept control of their New Castle theatre for security. Jack was to remain in Youngstown” cutting leather for shoes.[4] That same year, a twenty-two year old Louis B. Mayer also entered the movie business, when he and his wife Margaret took possession of “The Gem,” a grimy burlesque theatre in Haverhill Massachusetts known to neighbors derisively as “The Germ.” Painting over the spit stains on the walls, the Mayers renamed the homely venue “The Orpheum” and the observant Jewish couple began showing wholesome films (for an overwhelmingly gentile audience), beginning with Pathé’s [*anti-Semitic? Check plot] Passion Play.[5] The Mayers were so successful that only a year later they had persuaded a local investor to pump $28,000 into a complete remodeling of the ex-Germ. The 900-seat New Orpheum signified the both small-time origins of the entire industry, the business strategy of establishing movies as “respectable,” and the enormous profit potentials involved. Marcus Loew converted Brooklyn’s Cozy Corner to the “Royal” while in Chicago, Carl Laemmle remade ­amusement-­zone nickelodeons into upscale “White Fronts,” and A.J. Balaban and Samual Katz created a chain of theatres that tapped into the massive vaudeville and legitimate theatre audiences working- and middle-class population of that city.[6] The hundreds of ­small-­time entrepreneurs like the Warners and the Mayers spread the new medium faster then anyone had expected, least of all its principal inventor, Thomas Edison. In 1908 Thomas Edison, resenting that millions were being made from his patented invention, created the Motion Picture Patents Company and persuaded the early production studios (Selig, Essanay, Kalem, Lubin, Vitagraph, Gaumont, Pathé, and Méliès) to join. The “Edison Trust,” backed by a federal court ruling, set out to eliminate all independent producers and distributors. By 1910 they caught up with the Warners, buying out the Duquesne Amusement Company for $10,000. By 1912 Harry decided to join forces with Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture Company, and dispatched Sam to Hollywood to open a new exchange.[7] In the early days of small-scale production, it was a short step for the Warners to start producing movies of their own. By 1917 they opened their first big hit in New York City. The patriotic My Four Years in Germany, based on U.S. Ambassador James W. Gerard’s book by the same title, grossed $800,000. For the Warners, this was only the beginning.[8] Ten years later, in 1928, Harry borrowed $100 million from Goldman, Sachs and Hayden and Stone and Company to buy First National Pictures and the Warner Brothers were producing eighty-six feature films a year. Their stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange for $130 a share.[9] Light is the indispensable raw material for this intrinsically photographic industry.   Light is more indispensable even than actors.  Southern California, supplying an average of 300 cloudless days each year, made Los Angeles an obviously attractive production location. The Biograph Company had maintained a branch studio in Los Angeles from 1910. Thomas Ince-credited with founding the industrial character of the business--headquartered his production in Los Angeles in 1913 and developed the “central producer system,” which “shifted control from the individual director units making films to a single producer who now oversaw several productions simultaneously.”[10] Recasting the movie business to the industrial model of centralized mass production, Ince found ample movie factory space in 1919 at 9336 West Washington Blvd in the newly­incorporated suburb of Culver City. There he built the most venerable studios in the industry: some buildings still in use, after changing many hands, in the twenty-first century. “It later became known as DeMille Studios, RKO, Pathe, RKO-Pathe, Selznick, Desilu, Culver City Studios, and Laird International.[11] Movie production in the teens took root primarily in the former city of Hollywood but it was still rather dispersed across the metropolis and conducted by a bewildering array of now-forgotten studio companies. One of these was the Robert Brunton Studios, Inc., at 5341-5601 Melrose Avenue. A rental studio, it provided “seven covered stages, 300,000 props, and thirty acres of land available for exterior scenes. Twenty production companies could operate there at one time.” This lot eventually became the home of Paramount Pictures.[12] Another important early site of production was the Selig Mission Studio, operated by “Colonel” William N. Selig, a Chicago-based traveling magician and minstrel show actor who was an early founder of the industry. Selig began making movies in Chicago in the 1890s and operated a major studio there through 1910, but began shifting his operations to Los Angeles beginning in 1909. By 1911 he had built a ­self-­contained studio and laboratory complex opposite Eastlake Park on Mission Road. This was the facility used by Louis B. Mayer’s first production company until 1924.[13] Selig also supplied a major raw material to the motion picture industry when he and “Big Otto” shipped a trainload of wild animals to Los Angeles from Jacksonville Florida. By 1915 the Selig Jungle Zoo had grown to be one of the largest collections of wild animals in the world, with 700 animals on ­thirty-­two acres. In that year, Carl Laemmle opened his Universal City studios in North Hollywood (a term that evolved to designate the lower San Fernando Valley just over the Cahuenga Pass from the original Hollywood. On its 250 acres, Universal City not only included its own zoo, but also a fire station and a city hall.[14] Prior to the formation of great ­factory-­model centralized studios in Los Angeles, the creation of motion pictures left open a remarkable range of opportunities for women, who were prominent as writers, directors, and producers during the early silent era. Alice Guy Blaché began as an assistant to the French industry founder Leon Gaumont, eventually rising to director of the Gaumont studio until 1907, when she came to the United States, where she and her husband formed the Solax Company, where she was “director-general.” Solax’s movies were impossible to distinguish from movies made my men, but Lois Weber, one of the most prolific and accomplished directors of the silent era, made womanhood a major theme of her filmmaking. Weber, a former street evangelist for the Church Army Workers, “used film as a platform from which to explore a range of social ­issues—­political corruption, poverty, birth control, capital punishment, and religious and social hypocrisy.”[15] In the years before Hollywood’s corporate capitalization and active suppression of leftist content, “message” films were part of the mainstream of movie culture, as Steven Ross has shown. “In motion pictures, I can preach to my heart’s content,’ Weber told one interviewer.”[16] The rapid disappearance of women from leadership in the motion picture industry by the end of the 1920s is in part an answer to the question put by numerous magazine articles in the early 1920s, with such titles as “Will Women’s Leadership Change the Movies?”[17] According to the gendered ideologies of the era, women were expected to bring either elevated morals or erotic pleasure to the screen. Weber was the exemplar of the former, and the model she represented failed to “change the movies.” The confinement of women to the role of actress in the hierarchical “star system” followed the logic of the latter. To the inventors of the star system, “confinement” was hardly the verb in mind. When Mary Pickford negotiated a $10,000 per week contract (and a $300,000 signing bonus, plus 50% of film profits) with Adolph Zukor in 1916, she became one of the most highly paid women in the world. Although an advocate of women’s suffrage, Pickford, along with her husband Douglas Fairbanks, was a conservative Republican and not at all interested in social change. The exaltation of women stars became part of the studio system, which required huge profit margins and wide distribution to justify such lavish salaries. But the star system rewarded just a tiny symbolic few, leaving the masses of women and men actors struggling in the reserve army of labor that gathered in the fiercely anti-union territory of Open Shop Los Angeles. The early movie industry was emphatically demand­driven, as evidenced by exhibition origins of the major production companies. By 1916 the theatre-chain magnate Adoph Zukor (1873-1976) and impresario Jesse L. Lasky (1880-1958) had established Paramount Pictures as a production company, built from Famous Players Film Company (1912), the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company (1913), and the “Paramount Pictures Corporation” (established strictly as a distribution company in 1914). Cecil B. DeMille, who produced one of the first feature-length movies in Los Angeles, The Squaw Man (1914) for Jesse Lasky, became Paramount’s most important creative asset.[18] Marcus Loew, who had amassed a giant theatre network, was also driven by the need for a supply of films. In 1924 he created the General Motors of the motion picture industry by merging Metro Pictures Corporation, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, and Louis B. Mayer’s independent company. The new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio arose on the former Goldwyn lot in Culver City to dominate the industry in scale, aesthetic standards, and political culture. In 1914, D.W. Griffith set-up shop in Los Angeles to recast the aesthetic character of the entire industry with his 3-hour epic film, Birth of a Nation (1915). 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 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. Movies themselves had been under attack as evil, immoral influences following a wave of censorship begun when New York City shut down all of its nickelodeons in the winter of 1908-9. 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 melodramas, and a “progressive” reformer par excellence, policed 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 terrorist intervention 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. The unmitigated evil of 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 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 theatres 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 theatres 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 it from available urban and regional landscapes. The raw materials for these dream factories accordingly encompassed the entire human landscape. Stung and outraged by the attempts to censor his masterpiece, D.W. Griffith launched into an even more ambitious project in 1916, 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] Initially shunned by Wall Street’s conservatism and the anti­semitism of the goyem bankers, the movie industry flourished so spectacularly by 1919 (despite the miserable showing of Intolerance) that New York capitalists could no longer resist. By that year Americans flocked to 15,000 movie theatres, leaving an estimated $800 million at the box office. As historian Steven Ross put is, “The movie industry entered the world of seriously big business in 1919 when several powerful investment banking houses arranged stock offerings of $10 million and $9.5 million...respectively, for Paramount and Loew’s Inc.”[25] The New York Stock Exchange soon listed the stocks of the major studios, and by 1930, the capital invested in the movie industry had reached the staggering figure of $850 million. Capital concentration reorganized the movie industry during the 1920s into eight major studios: Columbia, Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, Paramount, RKO, United Artists, Universal, and Warner Brothers.[26] These studios, born largely from exhibition itself, also continued to expand their own theatre chains, controlling not only production but also distribution. They amassed a huge pool of talent, with “stars” locked into long-term contracts and treated as capital stock. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, from its formation in 1924 under the production leadership of Louis Mayer and the “wonder boy” Irving Thalberg, came to dominate “Hollywood” (from their actual location on Washington Boulevard in Culver City). The ­political-­economic geography of the giant studio by the end of the 1920s provides an anatomy of the industry as it crystallized as a regional phenomenon. The Hollywood studios were not branch plants, but they were subject to the financial control of New York City. “Clark Gable may have posed for cameras in Culver City, but his paycheck was signed at 1540 Broadway, across the street from the Camel Cigarette sign blowing smoke rings.” Mayer and Thalberg answered to their employer, Marcus Loew, who lived on Long Island and worked on Times Square. Adolph Zukor’s office was in the Paramount Building on Broadway. The headquarters for Warner Brothers and RKO Radio Pictures were also in New York, kept close by the investors that capitalized them.[27] But the control from New York was deeply compromised by the regional monopoly on movie production held by the Los Angeles studios. The corporate bosses meddled constantly through budget and product decisions, and through their power to fire the studio chiefs. From 1915 to 1920, “Uncle Carl” Laemmle hired and fired no less than sixteen managers of his giant Universal City studio complex (averaging 4 months tenure), before sending his young assistant Irving Thalberg out to clean the place up (before Thalberg went over to M­G-M). But the dense concentration of talent and subsidiary industries in Los Angeles was simply irreplaceable.[28] The financial chieftains wanted only one thing in the end: for the culture industry to supply them with and endless stream of ­box-­office hits. By the end of its first year in operation in 1925, ­M-­G-­M was producing one feature film per week. Mayer and Thalberg successfully married quantity to quality, hiring only proven stars, quickly amassing “more stars than there are in heaven.”[29] Before the end of the classic era, these included Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Lon Chaney, Elizabeth Taylor, the Marx Brothers, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, John Gilbert, Ramon Navarro, Jeanette MacDonald. M­G-M’s directors were no less impressive: Todd Browning, George Cukor, King Vidor, W.S. Van Dyke, Vincente Minnelli. Despite their aura, “stars” were only workers, a small fraction of the thousands who produced movies. By the mid-thirties, the 117-acre M-G-M studio had more than 4,000 employees under contract. The sprawling complex of 23 sound stages included its own fire department, studio police, a hospital, commissary, makeup and costume departments, trade shops, a laboratory, and even a school for child actors. The geography of the studio itself was an inscription of the power practiced on a daily basis. Mayer and Thalberg occupied the “Front Office” near the entrance gate; Mayer’s suite decorated in mahogany and traditional furniture; Thalberg’s in stylish Art-Deco. “Adjacent to the Front Office was a low, two­story building that was home for directors and writers, who dubbed it the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory—­it was crawling with insects and rodents.”[30] The reference to the most notorious of North American industrial labor disasters (141 women and girls were burned alive or jumped to their deaths in a fire-trap Manhattan sweatshop in 1913) was not an accident. The studio chiefs were grateful allies of the Otis-Chandler anti-union regime. Strikes by studio employees were ruthlessly suppressed until the New Deal’s Wagner National Labor Relations Act of 1935 empowered a breakthrough in labor organizing. One early organizer, fired multiple times, had to meet secretly with employees in Paramount’s moth-proof fur room, ironically muffled by the sumptuous garb of the ruling class, like a rebellious servant in the Great House.[31] [1] In 1913 Biograph moved to a new studio in the Bronx, at 807 East 175 Street. Biograph also operated studios in Los Angeles: in 1910 at Grand Avenue and Washington Street; and from 1911 to 1915 at Georgia and Girard Streets. Slide (1986): 39-40. [2] Although Ben obviously anglicized his surname upon immigration, he and his family successfully kept the original name a secret. It may have been Varna or Varnerski, according to his great-granddaugher Cass Warner Sperling. Sperling and Millner (1998): 20. [3] Sperling and Millner (1998): 27-8. [4] Sperling and Millner (1998): 41. [5] Altman (1992): 2-15. [6] May (1983): 148. [7] Sperling and Millner (1998): 53-4. [8] Sperling and Millner (1998): 59-65. [9] Sperling and Millner (1998): 150. [10] Ross (2001): 258. [11] Slide (1986): 192-3; Quotation is from Culver City Historic Site #7 marker on the property, signed by Culver City Historical Society, February 21, 1986. [12] Slide (1986): 291. [13] Marx, (1975): 42-49. [14] Lahue (1973); Slide (1986): 306-307; Pintar (2001): 322-323; Edmonds (1977). [15] Mahar (2001): 90. [16] Ross (1998); Mahar (2001): 91. [17] E. Leslie Gilliams, “Will Women’s Leadership Change the Movies?” Illustrated World (Feb 1923); Henry McMahon, “Women Directors of Plays and Pictures,” Ladies Home Journal (Dec. 1920), both cited in Mahar (2001). [18] Slide (1986): 256-7. [19] This phrase is given to the period 1909-1916 by Karen Ward Mahar, in Mahar (2001): 81. [20] The campaign against the film in Los Angeles, led by Charlotta Bass and Frederick Roberts, is detailed in Flamming (2005): 86-9. [21] According to Lillian Gish, William Clune had become an investor during the filming of Birth, striking a deal with Griffith to hold the premiere. Gish (1971): 52-53. [22] Rogin (1987): 190-235. [23] Ross (2001): 260. [24] Drew (2001). [25] Ross (2001): 262. [26] Ross (2001): 262. [27] Altman (1992): xii. [28] Marx (1975): 25. [29] Gary (1981); Marx (1975): 67-76. [30] Slide (1986): 210; Marx (1975) 51; Quotation from Carey (1981): 144. [31] Pintar, (2001): 333.