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CHAPTER 1
Indigenous Students and Students of Color in Silent Cinema
Building on Cedric Robinson's analysis of how anti-Black film representations fortified racial capitalism, in this chapter I argue that the genre of silent college films succeeded academic race science in legitimating the racial common sense of white superiority by depicting it as the aim and proper outcome of higher education. In White by Law Ian Haney López analyzes the so-called prerequisite cases, early twentieth-century Supreme Court cases that legally defined whiteness based on a combination of supposedly scientific knowledge and "common sense." When science failed to affirm prejudice, justices increasingly relied on commonsense ideas about racial difference. In what follows I suggest that films were central sources of such ideas. The majority of silent college films celebrate white men and heterosexual romance while explicitly or implicitly denigrating people of color as deviant or "queer" relative to white norms. The comparatively few films that depict Indigenous college students or students of color focus on young men and represent them as inferior to their white classmates, thereby justifying segregation. Such scenarios fetishize male Indigenous students and students of color while rendering women invisible. While I've found only two silent films that include Indigenous women college student characters, I have not been able to locate any examples featuring Black, Asian, or Latina women students. (For that we need to turn to films from recent decades — see chapter 4.) During the early twentieth century, at a time when only a tiny percentage of the U.S. population attended college, films represented the most important and influential resource for imaging universities as heteronormative, white nationalist, antimiscegenation dream factories.
Concretely exemplifying the university-cinema–industrial complex, many silent films were shot on prestigious college campuses, and university presidents, students, and alumni all appeared in them. The Courage of the Common Place (1917) is a striking example of an Ivy League–supported film that resolves conflict between white labor and management under the leadership of a student. Yale undergraduate John McLean is appointed superintendent of the Big Oriel Mine, where he succeeds in gaining the respect of the miners except the foreman, O'Hara, a hotheaded labor agitator. When fire breaks out in the mines, O'Hara panics, endangering the other miners, so John knocks him unconscious and emerges a hero. He returns for Yale's commencement, where he is praised by the president, celebrated by his classmates, and reunited with the girl he loves. The film's conclusion was shot at Yale, with Yale president, railroad director, and labor economist Arthur Twining Hadley playing himself. In other silent-films football extras and even leading men were recruited from the ranks of college all-Americans.
By contrast, in this chapter I also analyze the experiences and perspectives of Indigenous students and students of color, including filmmakers and actors. While Indigenous women, Black women, and other women of color are largely excluded from college films, a few mainstream movies feature Indigenous women students, while independent Black uplift films include women students. When viewed from the perspectives of Indigenous students and students of color, then, silent college films project forms of multiple consciousness that make visible the violence of early twentieth-century racial capitalism. From that vantage point, such movies represent critical reflections on white racism and its imbrication with heterosexual desire. The dominant arc of the college film thus emerges in partial reaction to a history of counterhegemonic interventions by Indigenous people and people of color. Centering Indigenous students and students of color raises epistemological questions about who can be a student and what counts as knowledge. By posing such questions, Native American, Asian, and Black students and filmmakers challenged an emergent, white common sense about higher education as the servant of capitalist nation-building projects based in patriarchal families, settler colonialism, labor exploitation, and global imperialism.
IMAGINING WHITE HETEROSEXUALITY IN COLLEGE
A subject search for the key word "college" from 1898 to 1930 in the American Film Institute's AFI Catalog of Feature Films yields 157 titles, the overwhelming majority of which focus on white college students. Silent college films foreground white men, especially athletes, and, secondarily, white women, with character arcs ending in marriage. While the earliest works are documentary "actualities" of college dances and sporting events, the titles of early narrative films suggest the genre's development along heteronormative white lines: A College Girl's Affair of Honor (1906) and College Chums (1907). Research in queer history locates the construction of homosexuality and the heteronormative in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and both university research and cinematic representations of heterosexual romance were pillars of such formations.
As the college film genre develops, the most common stories are set in all-white milieus and focus on a white male college student who wins the game (usually football) and the love of a white girl, while reconciling with white family members (usually a father). Disobedient, dissolute, or otherwise disappointing white sons are redeemed in their father's eyes by success on the college athletic field. In a smaller number of cases white women in college films are reunited with lost white fathers. The narrative momentum of college films is thus toward the reconstitution of white families, headed by white patriarchs and valorized by their associations with higher learning. A number of white college student characters are working-class boys, but others are the children of industrialists or work as mine managers, hence representing the interests of racial capitalism analyzed by Robinson. As imagined by Hollywood, college is a white melting pot that yields cross-class white friendships and marriages while uniting white people from east and west, north and south. Such films resolve differences of class, region, and generation among white men, projecting forms of white kinship across difference and composing visions of white nationalism. In Rose of the South (1916), for example, an elderly man returns to his alma mater and tells students the story of two of his classmates, rivals for the same girl who fight on different sides in the Civil War before ultimately reconciling on the battlefield and dying in each other's arms. The dream of going to college further unifies white immigrants and white college boys, as in Frank Capra's For the Love of Mike (1927), where three working-class immigrant men (a German, an Irishman, and a Jew) raise an orphaned white boy and ultimately send him to Yale, where he becomes a star in the varsity crew and wins the love of his hometown sweetheart.
College films further address white gender differences by incorporating white women into respectably subordinate roles relative to white college men. For the most part, white male students are the genre's protagonists and their potential love interests are nonstudents, who can be divided into good working girls (boardinghouse proprietors, servers, or shop girls) and bad working girls (vampish cabaret singers or dancers). Whereas the vamp threatens to dominate the boy, the good girl props him up. The hero ends up with the right girl, thereby defining proper white femininity. Excluded from male college settings and thus marginal to their combination of gender and class privilege, white working women are framed as junior partners in love and marriage. In the unusual silent college film with a female student as protagonist, she is matched not with a fellow student but a superior authority figure — a coach, a professor, or an older benefactor. In a variant of that narrative the white college girl can marry a white college boy only after she has been disciplined and reformed out of her bad-girl party ways. A common formulation in period reviews of such films suggest that by winning the game the white boy athlete gets the girl, indicating that women are the stakes in a competition between men. An aspirational character arc, the college boy secures whiteness by winning the deference of a good white girl. One lesson college films teach is that the proper subordination of women to men is a definitive feature of whiteness.
The college athletic field further anchors patriarchal white families in settler colonialism and imperialism. With the closing of the frontier, college football quickly became a highly capitalized, hugely popular spectacle in which fans could take pleasure in struggles over territory, often literally enacted on Indigenous land and in some cases involving Indigenous teams. In the first decades of the twentieth century, college football rivaled Hollywood as a mass entertainment. Thousands of people attended big games, and many more followed them in the press and in newsreels. One of the most famous early twentieth-century college football games took place in 1912, when the army team, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, lost to Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School team. (The game was played at West Point, not far from the campus grave of alum George Armstrong Custer.) By contrast, the monotonous repetition of scenarios of white college boy sporting victories suggests a settler-colonial structure of feeling, anxious to reassert and naturalize forms of dominance over people and land that are never given but must be constantly renewed in the face of new challenges and contradictions. Similarly, building on dime novels such as the Frank Merriwell series, the white college boy is a figure of imperial adventure. Silent films suggest, for example, that white college boys are a bulwark against Latin American revolutions.
Imperial white nationalism based in patriarchal marriage and family is well represented by the careers of "Hollywood's first couple," Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who were among the biggest stars of the silent era. Pickford and Fairbanks helped found the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1929, the same year Fairbanks, along with USC's eugenicist president Rufus von KleinSmid (see the introduction), also helped found the university's film school. Fairbanks was an icon of athletic, U.S. whiteness, whose films and publicity represented him as the winner in physical competitions with Latino, Black, Arab, and Indian men over access to and control over white women. In Bound in Morocco (1918), for example, he plays a U.S. American in northern Africa who saves a white woman from being forced into the harem of the cruel Basha El Harib. A year later he starred in The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919), about a New Yorker who travels to a U.S.-Mexico border town and fights Mexicans who menace the hero's white love interest. As he explained to a reporter while making the film, "I was trying to get a fight scene yesterday ... and I told the bunch of Mexicans to come for all they were worth. There were five of them, but I knew I could take care of myself. Well, one of the bunch was a tough customer, and I really had to beat him before he would quit." Fairbanks condescendingly told the same reporter that he liked to spend his spare time on set "playing tricks on the former Mexican generals who were now working for him," as though the film's Mexican extras represented the tribute of Anglo-Saxon Manifest Destiny. He further promoted white privilege in his most famous "brownface" roles as Latino and Arab men in The Mark of Zorro (1920) and The Thief of Baghdad (1924).
But before graduating to such parts, Fairbanks began his career embodying the athletic college man in silent action comedies. In The Americano (1916) he starred as a recent graduate of a mining school who is contacted by his former dean to take a job managing a mine in a fictional Latin American country. There the title character uses his athletic abilities to prevent a revolution and save a white U.S. American woman from a general who would force her into marriage. Similarly, in American Aristocracy (1916) Fairbanks plays an entomologist who takes a break from his research to foil a plot to smuggle guns to Mexican revolutionaries led by a "mysterious dark-skinned foreigner" masquerading as a porter. Both films foreground the white college man as a counterrevolutionary hero who keeps racialized miners and railroad workers in line. His white collegiate style of heroism is further inflated by contrast with his comic Black sidekicks (played in The Americano by a white actor in blackface). The college connection was so important to Fairbank's performance of white imperial masculinity that in numerous interviews he falsely claimed that he had attended both the Colorado School of Mines (recalling his character in The Americano) and Harvard.
By contrast, at about the same time that Fairbanks was playing imperial college boys, Mary Pickford was most famous for her roles as white children, notably in The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), films she made when she was twenty-five. As Richard Koszarski explains, "audiences insisted on seeing her in this characterization, and as she grew older the women she found herself playing grew younger." While Pickford wielded immense institutional power in Hollywood, demanding and receiving high salaries, film profits, and production credits, and while she is regarded by film historians as the moving force behind the founding of United Artists, the cost was that, to epitomize white U.S. American femininity onscreen, she was infantilized relative to white men. She was so successful at such roles that Pickford was billed as America's sweetheart even though she was a Canadian immigrant. Like Fairbanks, moreover, she also performed her whiteness through brown-, red-, and yellowface roles in Ramona (1910), A Pueblo Legend (1912), and Madame Butterfly (1915).
Pickford did, however, star in one film as a college student: Daddy-Long-Legs (1919). In the first third of the film, she plays an orphaned child named Judy Abbot, who is ultimately sent to Princeton by an anonymous benefactor on the condition that they never meet. Judy sees only his tall shadow and so nicknames him "Daddy-Long-Legs." The film presents an all-white world, with the exception of the Black porter who carries Judy's luggage onto the train transporting her to college. At Princeton she is pursued by two suitors: her classmate Jimmie McBride and her roommate's wealthy uncle, Jarvis Pendleton. While she rejects McBride as too young, Judy is drawn to Jarvis, but fearing to reveal her orphanage background, she initially tells him that their age difference is too great. After graduation, however, she discovers that Jarvis is actually "Daddy-Long-Legs." At first repelled, she shouts "you brute," but then Pendleton grabs her by the wrist and pulls her down on to his lap for a forced embrace to which she ultimately yields — and there the film ends. Throughout, Daddy-Long-Legs visually emphasizes gendered hierarchies of white age and size differences, the latter in the form of shot compositions contrasting Pickford's diminutive five-foot-one frame and her older costar's much larger body. The film thus frames college as a site for the eroticization of white nationalist kinship, where white fathers morph into college-girl husbands.
NATIVE AMERICAN COLLEGE FILMS
If it seems as though white characters in silent college films were dedicated to triumphing over Indigenous people and people of color, it is partly because Hollywood brought white actors and filmmakers into direct contact and competition with them. As Michelle Raheja argues, Ho-Chunk silent filmmakers Princess Red Wing (Lillian St. Cyr) and James Young Deer became "one of Hollywood's first 'power couples' alongside their contemporaries, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks." A graduate of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Red Wing starred in a number of important silent films, including Cecil B. DeMille's Squaw Man (1914). As such, Red Wing was the rare example of an Indigenous woman college graduate in silent film. Her husband, James Young Deer, was an actor, director, and screenwriter of over a dozen silent westerns. The couple's films inverted conventional white man/Indian woman narratives with miscegenation plots involving Native American men and white women that undermined settler hierarchies of race and gender.
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Excerpted from "University Babylon"
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Copyright © 2020 Curtis Marez.
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