’s From V. J. Jerome’s "The Negro In Hollywood Films" (1950) Essay, Research Paper
About the Author
The
text of this booklet is an expansion of a lecture, "The Negro in Hollywood
Films," delivered at a public forum held under the auspices of the Marxist cultural
magazine, Masses & Mainstream, at the Hotel Capitol, New York, on February 3,
1950.
The lecture, which dealt with fundamental and theoretical aspects of the film medium
and the Negro question, and which projected a rounded program for uniting Negro and white
Americans in the fight against chauvinism in the film and other cultural areas, was
received with enthusiasm by the audience, and its publication urged upon the sponsors of
the meeting.
The author, V. J. Jerome, is editor of Political Affairs, leading journal of
Marxist thought and opinion in the United States, and also chairman of the Communist
Party’s National Cultural Commission. He is the author of several books and pamphlets,
including Social-Democracy and the War, War and the Intellectuals, The Treatment of
Defeated Germany, and, most recently, Culture In a Changing World, which has
been translated in a number of European countries.
The Underlying Strategy
The treatment of Negro themes and characters by Hollywood during the past fifty years
has borne a clear relationship to the concrete political program of monopoly capital in
each successive period. Each phase of Hollywood policy in this regard must be considered
in the frame of reference of the particular stage of the Negro people’s movement, and of
its alliance with the American working class.
While making certain concessions on the screen, designed to "adjust" to the
Negro people’s forward movement, the controlling interests have sought tenaciously to
retain the clich?s and discriminations of the past in one form or another. These
concessions, being tactical in character, have always been utilized by monopoly capital
with a view to furthering and strengthening its basic strategy. The objective
of that strategy is to perpetuate the odious myth of "white supremacy" in order
to hold back the developing labor-Negro alliance for the common struggle against fascism
and imperialist war; to weaken the fight of the trade unions and white progressives for a
Fair Employment Practices Commission bill, for the abolition of the poll tax, and for the
outlawry of lynching; to prevent the organization and the full integration of the Negro
workers into the trade unions, in order to hamper the unification of the white and Negro
workers in a powerful American labor movement. It is the objective of that strategy, at
all times, to undermine the movement of the Negro people and to prevent it from developing
its full force, and to keep the Negro people from understanding the true basis and nature
of their oppression. The objective is to keep them from understanding that the lynch-law
and Jim-Crow discrimination and segregation are inspired by Wall Street and Southern
landlord reaction.
The objective is, furthermore, to keep from the Negro people the scientific teaching of
the Communist Party that their oppression is national in essence, and that their struggle
is fundamentally a struggle for national liberation.
Finally, it is the objective of that strategy to weaken the ties of the Negro people
with the white workers and other popular allies and thereby to retard the general
working-class struggle for emancipation from capitalism. It is the aim of that strategy to
isolate the Negro people’s movement and rob it of self-confidence, thus to prevent the
Negro people from taking the anti-imperialist road to national liberation.
Roots of Hollywood’s Racism
The fact is that the imperialist credo of chauvinist nationalism and "white
supremacy" dates back to the very origin of commercial film making in the United
States. It is no mere chance that the very first dramatic film, which was shown in 1898,
the year in which American imperialism, fully emerging, announced its "Manifest
Destiny" with the launching of the robber war to wrest colonies from Spain, bore the
title Tearing Down the Spanish Flag. Not less significant is the fact that in
1901–barely two years after announcement of the "Open Door" policy for the
spoliation of China–the public was subjected to the racist film The Boxer Massacres in
Pekin, designed to "prove" that the anti-imperialist struggle of the Chinese
people constituted a "yellow peril" to "white civilization." Street
Scene in Pekin, released the same year, portrayed British police in front of their
Legation breaking up a demonstration of Chinese "unruly citizens" (Edison
Catalogue, 1901).
The imperialist mythology of the Anglo-Saxon super-type was methodically
cultivated in a variety of motion pictures, of which Fights of Nations, released in
1905, was perhaps the most viciously chauvinist. In that picture the Negro was caricatured
as a "razor-thrower," the Jew as a "briber," the Mexican as a
"treacherous" fellow, the Spaniard as a "foppish lover," the Irishman
as a "drunkard," while in the final tableau the United States was presented as
the bringer of peace to all the nations. As a contemporary trade publication described it:
"The scene is magnificently decorated with emblems of all nations, the American eagle
surmounting them. In harmony, peace and good will the characters of the different nations
appear, making it an allegorical representation of "Peace," with the United
States presiding at a congress of Powers" (The Moving Picture World March 9,
1907, as quoted by Louis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, New York, 1939, p.
75). How prophetic of the day when this imperial eagle would seek to commandeer the United
Nations into line for atomic "Peace"!
The policy of setting native against foreign-born, white against Negro, non-Jew against
Jew, of dividing all in order to conquer all, but with the special, racist design to keep
the Negro people upon the bottom rung of the ladder–that has been the studied policy of
the rulers of this land. In this service they have methodically used the film medium.
The economics and politics of "white supremacy" were reflected in film after
film that maligned, ridiculed, and disparaged the Negro people. Not only was Negro life
ignored, not only were the struggles and aspirations of the Negro people undocumented, but
such characterizations of Negroes as were given were the vilest caricatures, the most
hideous stereotypes, designed to portray the Negro as moronic, clownish, menial, and
sub-human. One need only bear in mind such characteristic titles as Rastus in Zululand
and How Rastus Got His Turkey, which were made about 1910; the equally insulting Sambo
series, which were turned out between 1909 and 1911; and the above-described Fights of
Nations. To that high level of capitalist culture belonged also the series of shameful
racist screen "comedies of errors," typified by The Masher (1907) and The
Dark Romance of a Tobacco Can (1911), in which a man in romantic pursuit of a woman
discovers the object of his quest to be a Negro woman. With such impudence was the
chauvinist "morality" presented!
The ruling class, be it remembered, had long before the advent of the cinema betrayed
the Negro people in the South to the counter-revolutionary plantation oligarchy. The
Hayes-Tilden perfidy of 1876 had sealed the restoration to power of the Bourbons in the
post-Reconstruction state governments of the South. In the opening years of the century,
with the newly emerged epoch of imperialism marked by "reaction all along the
line," the completion of the systematic disfranchisement and segregation of the Negro
in the South was carried out in flagrant violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments to the Constitution. Colossal fraud, terror, lynch-law, and the Ku Klux Klan
ruled the South to keep the Negro in "his place." The "white
supremacy" stratagem served the Southern plantation feudalists and the controlling
finance capitalists of Wall Street as an ideological mainstay of their white ruling-class
oppression. Wall Street’s Manifest Destiny ideology, first projected to rationalize the
brutal oppression of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Cuba, and in its latter-day
form of the "American Century" serving to conceal designs for global conquest,
found expression at home in the white chauvinist ideology used as a weapon to oppress the
Negro people. This ideology increasingly permeated the bourgeois cultural field in all
areas. The "white superiority" cult enforced the misshaping of American history
and social science as a whole to a Bourbon bias.
Toward the opening of the second decade of the century–roughly from 1910 until the
outbreak of World War I–a new trend came into evidence in the treatment of the Negro on
the screen, side by side with the continued slap-stick, low comedy films of the past. The
new trend was the Uncle Tom ideology.
To understand this turn, we need to see the political and social background of the
United States during the years immediately preceding World War I.
It was a period of "popular distemper" and mass stirrings, brought to a head
by the severe economic crisis of 1907. It was a time of strong anti-trust currents among
all sections of the people, of agarian discontent, of mass wrath against the spoils system
and against corruption in administration, Anti-militarist sentiments pervaded the country;
everywhere demands rose for the outlawing of war. The woman suffrage movement was gaining
momentum, together with the struggle for equal rights for working women.
It was a decade of significant advances in trade-union organization and of bitter
strike struggles. Those were the years, too, of the growth of the Socialist Party and of
mass socialist sentiment, which was registered, in the Presidential elections of 1912, in
a vote of 900,000 for Eugene Debs. Within the Socialist Party a tide of struggle had set
in, marking the rising challenge of the Left-moving proletarian rank and file to the
petty-bourgeois opportunist leadership. The great defense movement of 1906-07 in behalf of
the framed-up leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone,
which forced their acquittal, further evidenced the temper of the workers. Thus, President
Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1906 to a leading senator: "The labor men are very ugly
and no one can tell how far such discontent will spread."
To stay "this rising tide of discontent," the bourgeoisie, by a division of
labor, both intensified its exploitation of the masses and assumed the reformist mask.
This was evidenced especially, during the 1912 election, in Roosevelt’s demagogic attempt
to capture the popular vote with his "Bull Moose" offshoot of the Republican
Party. As in the simple binary fission of the one-celled amoeba, science could reveal no
basic organic difference between the "Grand" Old Party and the Rough-Riding
"Progressives." Capital trotted out its most consummate hypocrite in the
Messiah-tongued Woodrow Wilson, whose "New Freedom" purporting to blow taps over
the trusts, proved to be a proclamation of unlimited license for corporate plunder.
These developments found their reflections in the film–basically and predominantly
carrying the message of reaction, but also expressing to a very minor degree the militancy
of the people’s struggles.
In those years immediately preceding World War I, there emerged a series of anti-trust
films, and a number more or less sympathetic to labor. The Power of Labor (1908)
showed industrial workers on strike carrying their struggle to victory. The Egg Trust (1910)
served to expose profiteering in food. Tim Mahoney, the Scab (1911) dealt
with the shame of a worker who betrayed his union brothers. Another film with
working-class sympathies was Locked Out (1911). Notable in this series was the
screen version of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1914).
The period of mass ferment before World War I involved also the continuing struggles of
the Negro people, marking the beginnings of the present-day Negro liberation movement.
These struggles inspired to action a section of Negro middle-class intellectuals, advanced
in thinking and fired with zeal for the freedom of their people. Under the leadership of
W. E. B. Du Bois, then a young professor at Atlanta University, there sprang into being in
1905 the militant Niagara movement. Its birth was a Declaration of Independence
challenging the dominance of the Booker T. Washington ideology of accommodation and
acquiescence to the white ruling class, of dependence on the good graces of the white
bourgeoisie for "improvement" of the Negro people’s "lot." The Niagara
organization made clear its stand, in the ringing declaration of its spokesmen: "We
claim for ourselves every right that belongs to a free-born American, civil and social,
and until we get these rights we shall never cease to protest and assail the ears of
America with the stories of its shameful deeds towards us."
Although the Niagara movement was short-lived, its effect on the white ruling class was
unmistakable. Recognizing the growing ferment among the Negro intellectuals, the
capitalist masters of America worked assiduously to "take over" the leadership
of the emerging movement of the Negro people. To this end, they sought to impose on the
movement a deadening "patronage," which could only have the effect of retarding
a militant movement of the Negro people, led by Negroes and consciously, directed toward
national liberation.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People appeared in 1910 and
reflected in its origins both that militancy and that patronage. The former was shown in
the fact that nearly the entire membership of the Niagara Movement merged with the
N.A.A.C.P.; the latter in the fact that the new organization’s entire official leadership,
with the lone exception of Dr. Du Bois, was composed of whites. As Harry Haywood remarks
in his Negro Liberation, ". . . with the launching of the N.A.A.C.P., a new
pattern in ‘race’ leadership was set. It was the pattern of white ruling-class paternalism
which, as time went on, was to cast an ever-deepening shadow over the developing Negro
liberation movement, throttling its self-assertiveness and its independent imitative,
placing before it limited objectives and dulling the sharp edge of the sword of Negro
protest" (Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation, New York, 1948, p. 181.).
In the face of these developments in the political sphere, the screen portrayal of the
Negro could not continue solely on the buffoon level of the Rastus and Sambo films.
Hollywood continued, and even extended, its depiction of the Negro as mentally
"inferior," continued his relegation to slap-stick roles. Yet, simultaneously,
the times compelled something of a tactical departure from the old stereotype. Thus, there
emerged in a number of films of that period a "sympathetic" Negro type–the
classic Uncle Tom.
The Uncle Tom theme found expression in such films as For Massa’s Sake (1911),
The Debt (1912), and In Slavery Days (1913). The first of these shows a
"faithful" slave who tries self-sacrificingly to discharge his white master’s
gambling debts by offering himself for sale.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin itself appeared during these years in three film versions, with
distorted emphasis upon the theme of Uncle Tom’s devotion to little Eva, thus eliminating
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s central indictment of slavery.
It was also in this period, during 1911, that The Battle was directed by D. W.
Griffith, who, four years later, was to make The Birth of a Nation. The Battle set
a precedent for all future Hollywood pictures dealing with the Civil War. It romanticized
the Old South and the "sweet slavery, days." It crystallized for film audiences
all the high-flown, hypocritical legends of the slavocracy–the "generous"
colonels, the fine, indulgent masters, the "happy, carefree state" of the
plantation slaves portrayed side by side with their "brutishness."
What was the significance of all these pictures? Essentially, they represented a shift