Categories
Media, Wealth, & Poverty in Post-War America Visual and Performing Arts

American Theater’s Portrayal of Wealth and Poverty in the American 20th Century

A Micro-Study of Steppenwolf Theater of Chicago.

Matt Mulhern

In 1974, Steppenwolf Theater, having adopted their name from the Hermann Hesse novel, put on their first season of plays. Originally published in 1927, this choice of the company name from the Hesse book was more spontaneous than illustrative of any particular influence. They needed a name, and Ricky Argosh, the director of the first production, was holding the novel in his hand when founding member Gary Sinise decided they should have a title for their fledgling theater collective. But it was a reflection of the plea for self-examination of  Hesse’s protagonist and the intellectual hypocrisy of the Weimar-era setting of the book.[1]

           Jeff Perry and Gary Sinise, soon joined by Terry Kinney, started out in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, and began a journey that has taken them from putting on theater in malls and church basements, to national recognition as one of the most highly regarded theater companies in the United States. Influenced by the films of John Cassavettes and his sense of voyeuristic naturalism, and the ethos of The Group Theater, which embodied the voice of social drama in the 1930s, these three founders expanded into a company of actors, directors, and designers that have contributed over forty-five years of uniquely American theater that has added to a national conversation about American issues, including those addressed in this project: wealth and poverty. How so? In a study of the mechanics, goals, and results of Steppenwolf’s development over its decades of making American theater and undertaking outreach to the wider community, psychologist Bob Harlow identifies a set of core values held by the group that included the idea of building a new kind of theater where artists (not administrators) drove decision making, and the organization prioritized the cultivation of new voices and new artists. This is coupled with a sense of responsibility to the theatrical and cultural community.

          Martha Lavey, who served as the long-time Artistic Director for Steppenwolf, was instrumental in setting out these core values. Under her leadership, the group increased the level of the intellectual conversation to be found within its walls, favoring scripts that evidenced substantial societal debates, especially of the responsibilities and culpability of the upper-middle-classes. As she explained: “Steppenwolf began as a conversation among artists. … The ensemble members envisioned their role as speaking from a platform to an audience. There has been an evolution over the past number of years [to] where it now feels like a conversation with a community, where our role is the activation of a public discourse.”[2]

          How does theater move beyond its limitations to break through the fourth wall and inspire change? Presentation of wealth and poverty connects to cultural politics by presenting its audiences with portrayals of struggling Americans left behind and then asking “what can we do about it?” Charles Isherwood asked “Can art save the day? More specifically, can theater rouse the populace from a sense of numbed anxiety? Can a stage play change minds, or help channel passive beliefs into active commitment? Art’s ability to stir activism, an argument for the possibility of real impact.”[3]

          Steppenwolf Theater of Chicago has done something unique: they have created a thriving, living theater over forty-five years that has evolved artistically, spiritually, and in its financial approach to keeping its doors open. That commitment to a larger purpose, to theater that matters, to theater that challenges its audience and its community to look at these issues through the lens of provocative plays and consider if they themselves are part of the solution or part of the problem – and still be wildly entertaining and worth the price of admission – is rare. The Group Theater itself collapsed from infighting and lack of funding. However, Steppenwolf has not only survived, but thrived. Why? What sets them apart from a thousand other well-intentioned and passionate groups of actors looking to change the world, only to eventually bend their knees to the prohibitive economic reality of American theater? There are many fine regional theaters in the United States, but this one has been especially well-served through good times and bad times by its mission to show its audience fellow Americans who refuse to be categorized by tropes social scientists are rejecting about the notion of a “monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty.”[4] And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation. As Alice O’Connor points out, the “war on poverty” instead, became a war on the poor.[5] The unique ability of live theater to allow audience members to see themselves in the characters onstage while alone in a darkened theater; to walk out of a performance feeling an identification with a troubled soul they had just witnessed struggling to cope with systemic racism, or the crushing weight of poverty, is distinct. Bearing witness to our common humanity is live theater’s magic, its essence, and its power to promote change.

           In my conversation with him, Terry talks about Steppenwolf’s approach to issues of wealth and poverty, and gender and race in the troop’s development, while also commenting on the American government’s lack of commitment to the arts, and how theater goes forward in the age of Covid.

https://vimeo.com/user20009216/review/496600445/070a79a6f9

          The influence on Steppenwolf of the Group Theater, the ensemble created in the 1930s as the first not-for-profit theater collective during the height of the Depression, speaks to a shared vision of theater that matters, and a combination of entertainment and larger purpose. As Terry Kinney explains in the video, Steppenwolf actors self-identified as working-class kids born of working-class parents, and wanted to specifically perform plays by writers who focused on the kind of people they themselves felt they were. Why theater, and why Chicago, instead of dreams of film and Los Angeles? Steppenwolf inspiration, Harold Clurman, a founder of the Group Theater, argued that a play was different from a movie, or a radio broadcast, in that a play pretended to affect one’s heart, and awaken a social conscience. “In the end, however, the development of playwrights, actors, repertory and the rest are important only as they lead to the creation of a tradition of common values, an active consciousness of a common way of looking at and dealing with life.”[6]

          The three founding members were soon joined by John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Al Wilder, Moira Harris, H.E. Baccus, Joan Allen, and designer Kevin Rigdon. The working-class roots of this core group came through in their fierce depiction of the “communal spirit” that John Steinbeck wrote of. Steinbeck, in his series of articles, The Harvest Gypsies, written in 1936, focused on the plight of migrant workers of California’s Central Valley, a struggle Steppenwolf captured in productions of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men, directed by Terry Kinney. 

          Now in its fifth decade as a professional theatre company, Steppenwolf has received unprecedented national and international recognition, including a series of Tony Awards and The National Medal of Arts, the highest honor given to artists and arts patrons by the United States government. In Steppenwolf Theater Company of Chicago: In Their Own Words, theater historian John Mayer describes what started out as three teenage boys from corn-country Illinois, and became a national institution: “What Steppenwolf Theatre Company has accomplished is truly remarkable – here were some high-school students who had a dream, and they had no idea where it would take them. Look where they’ve ended up. They have become the model for the start-up of so many other companies. I compare it to Apple starting out in a garage and growing into Apple computers. That’s what Steppenwolf is to theater.”[7]

          Anna Shapiro, Steppenwolf’s current artistic director, cites a contemporary priority of “expanding the ensemble and nurturing new voices. We have to create more opportunities for young and diverse artists to work with us,” she said. “We want the art we make to look more like the world we all live in. Steppenwolf had a really homogeneous origin that does not reflect its interests now. We have an organic process now about what kind of conversations we want to be in, and we want those conversations to be wider and include more people.”[8]

          Through  their Community Partnership model,  which seeks to build authentic and mutually beneficial relationships and bring Steppenwolf’s programming outside of their theater walls, Steppenwolf aims to provide no-cost, barrier-free programming and establish long-term partnerships with community organizations working to empower Chicago youth through the arts. For four years, part of that outreach, Steppenwolf Education, has toured its acclaimed Steppenwolf for Young Adults productions to detained and incarcerated youth in juvenile justice facilities.  Also, BUILD, Inc. has been an important part of Steppenwolf Education’s work, bringing students from West Side Chicago communities to Steppenwolf and Steppenwolf to them. This program provides a lifeline to the youth they serve.

[1]  John Mayer, Steppenwolf Theater of Chicago: In Their Own Words (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 14.

[2] Bob Harlow, Thomas Alfieri, Aaron Dalton and Anne Field, Building Deeper Relationships: How Steppenwolf Theater Company Is Turning Single-Ticket Buyers Into Repeat Visitors, (New York: The Wallace Foundation, 2011), 45, 57.

[3] Charles, Isherwood, “The Culture Project and Plays That Make a Difference,” The New York Times, September 3, 2006, 35.

[4] Patricia Cohen, “Culture of Poverty Makes a Comeback,” The New York Times, October 17, 2010, 32.

[5] Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 197.

[6] Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the 30s, (New York: De Capo Press, Inc., 1975), 68-69.

[7]  Mayer, Steppenwolf Theater, 45.

[8]  Donald Liebenson, “How Chicago’s Famed Steppenwolf Became the Apple of Theater,” Vanity Fair, August 17, 2016, 31.

Categories
Visual and Performing Arts

Google Street View Photography and the Visual Culture of American Poverty

Owen G. Clow

Google Street View Photography and the Visual Culture of American Poverty

Note on copyright: This essay in its original form contained numerous in-text images. Out of an abundance of concern, these have been deleted and replaced with offsite links to the same images.

In May of 2007, a press release on the official Google Maps blog heralded “a new feature that will further enhance your ability to understand the world through images—Google Street View.”[1] Initially limited to the downtown areas of a few American cities, Google Street View (GSV) was the product of a complex system of car-mounted cameras and algorithmic image manipulation. At the heart of the project was a panoramic camera affixed to the roof of a car. This car would drive around each city, take pictures at regular intervals, composite them together into a fully contiguous panorama, and then load each interval into Google Maps, mapping the spatial coordinates given by the position of the vehicle on the street onto the corresponding Cartesian space of Google Maps.[2] In the intervening thirteen years, GSV has blossomed, both in geographical scope and technological sophistication.[3] As Street View vehicles continue towards their ultimate goal—traveling and documenting every road on Earth—GSV has produced a unique culture of public digital spectatorship. It has also, more broadly, patterned how we see and understand the world around us.

Like many Google projects, GSV originated from an unspecific and broadly utopian impulse to make the world more accessible. There are legitimate reasons to celebrate its existence. GSV is a corporate product, but it is offered completely free of charge to all who access the website (or who download the free Google Earth software, which has GSV content embedded). There is the potential in GSV for genuine cross-cultural understanding: rather than traditional travel, which can be expensive and physically onerous, GSV offers those curious about the life and landscapes of distant places a first-person perspective on just that. Moreover, GSV can serve as a valuable pedagogical tool: over the years, Google has partnered with museums and other cultural sites to provide a “Street View” of their spaces and displays, enabling virtual access to students and patrons who are unable to visit in person.[4] And, of course, GSV offers the entertainment value of pure escapism: it isn’t just that it’s interesting to virtually navigate a mountain pass in Kyrgyzstan, it’s that it’s fun.

Grigorievka Gorge in Kyrgyzstan. Imagery from Google, cropped and reproduced by the author.

GSV has also been highly controversial. It is, after all, a corporate surveillance project which renders the public landscape—not just trees and buildings but cars, people, animals, et cetera—permanently visible and permanently accessible. GSV photography is by definition nonconsensual. Within a year of GSV’s initial release, Google responded to complaints along these lines by adding an algorithm which procedurally blurred human faces, license plates, and other specifically identifiable elements of these images.[5] Even with this addition, however, privacy concerns underwrite much of the public discourse surrounding GSV, and Google has spent substantial resources trying to reconcile its practice with laws surrounding personal privacy in a number of states. Germany, notably, remains largely unmapped by GSV due to legal obstacles.[6] Sociological research has implicated GSV in perpetuating classist attitudes towards working class communities.[7] And, among some critics, there remains a distinct feeling of unease at the notion that this technological project to create a visual record of the entire world is owned and controlled by an incomprehensibly powerful corporation worth over one trillion dollars.[8]

The inherent tension between GSV’s utopian concept—enabling “people everywhere to virtually explore the world”—and the sophisticated apparatus of total public surveillance which drives the project has provided fertile soil for artistic exploration.[9] One of the earliest visual projects involving GSV material, Jon Rafman’s ongoing 9 Eyes series attempts to capture the disorienting experience of total technological surveillance by curating GSV images that evoke tension, unease, and melancholia–offering, in Rafman’s words, “a sense of what it feels like to have everything recorded, but no particular significance accorded to anything.”[10] Michael Wolf’s Fuck You, one of several of the artist’s related projects, criticizes GSV’s technique of surveillance by cataloging various instances of blur-faced humans on GSV holding up middle fingers to the passing camera.[11] Tim Tetzner’s If The Eyes Can’t Touch (Blurred Modernism) highlights the visually jarring GSV dataset for Berlin, featuring rows of buildings with certain addresses blurred beyond recognition–the product of Google’s aforementioned capitulation to German privacy laws.[12] Of course, not all GSV art is an implicit critique of corporate capitalism or unstoppable surveillance. Jacqui Kenny’sThe Agoraphobic Traveller uses GSV to create a comparatively traditional landscape/cityscape photo-series, its component images curated specifically to produce an attractive and glamorous photographic aesthetic.[13] Kenny’s work is also noteworthy for its explicit approval from Google, which recently authorized the sale of a number of her prints for charity.[14] Implicit in all of these projects is the notion that GSV reveals something about both the land and the human relations that take place upon it. But what happens when the revelatory, documentary power of GSV is directed towards questions of wealth and poverty?

Untitled, 9 Eyes, Jon Rafman, 2020.

“Synchronized Camels, UAE,” The Agoraphobic Traveller, Jacqui Kenny, 2017.

This essay examines three projects which use GSV photography to explore and question American poverty: Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture, Justin Blinder’s Vacated, and Alex Alsup’s GooBing Detroit. The technology of GSV informs both the aesthetics and the message of these projects: the panoramic visual field of the Street View camera reveals the world in a way that closely resembles reality, just as it conceals the ideology of benevolent corporate surveillance that enables this kind of seeing. Furthermore, the processing of each image to remove faces, text, or copyrighted content often yields a disorienting mixture of supposed verisimilitude and obvious visual manipulation. While animated by an activist motivation generally similar to that of social documentary photography—the belief that visually documenting and publicizing social ills fosters empathy and encourages the amelioration of those ills—the art of Rickard, Blinder, and Alsup deviates from the genre’s traditional tendency toward human portraiture. Where traditional forms of social documentary photography portrayed poverty inscribed on the human body, “Street View” photography portrays poverty in the landscape, in architectural shifts, in dilapidated houses and overgrown yards, rather than in the furrowed brows and dirty feet of indigent families. In this sense, the message is limited by the medium: GSV is a tool that catalogs and documents “real” property–land and buildings which people own, build, exchange, and destroy–and, consequently, GSV enables one to see clearly the street address of a house, to see its features and its architecture, all the while obscuring the people on the sidewalk, the stoop, the porch, all of whom become literally faceless. Rickard, Blinder, and Alsup make a useful intervention, but GSV technology nevertheless constrains their work within a visual vocabulary of American poverty that centers property in lieu of people.

Social documentary photography: poverty in image and imagination

Situating these GSV projects within the artistic tradition of social documentary photography provides important context for understanding their messaging and impact. It is admittedly an unusual designation, given that neither Rickard, Blinder, nor Alsup actually photographed their subjects, or even held (for these purposes) a camera. More accurately, these artists assembled procedurally-generated photographs and arranged them into a serial structure, adding captioning and contextual information where necessary, thereby making them viable for public presentation. Their works each resemble a photo-series, and in most senses function as one. The artists under consideration are not photographers per se, but they share an activist motivation and aesthetic orientation with a long tradition of similarly-intentioned social documentary photography.

Social documentary photography is, as the name implies, a tradition of photography that is both documentary, in the sense that it aims to document the visible conditions of reality, and social, in the sense that this documentation explicitly engages with social problems. In America, historians often use the turn-of-the-century reformer Jacob Riis’s widely-reproduced How The Other Half Lives, a photographic expedition into the tenements, boarding houses, and working-class environs of New York City to clarify the origins of social documentary photography.

Taken during the 1880s, Riis’s photographs reflect an embryonic stage of development, both for social documentary and for photography more generally. In his so-called “magic lantern shows” for middle-class audiences, Riis supplemented his visual content with extensive text and oratory, later claiming in an autobiography that he was “no good at all as a photographer.”[15] The formal content of the images is likely familiar, but one visual theme bears deeper analysis: an emphasis on human bodies—wiry musculature and crevassed facial lines—as a site for “reading” the human condition of poverty.[16] For Riis, the importance of his photography was not simply that the living environment of poor workers was dangerous and unhygienic, it was that his audience would work towards the alleviation of these conditions. It is worth remembering as well that Riis, though seemingly sincere in his concern for the suffering of New York City’s working class, was allowed access to these spaces primarily through a close relationship with law enforcement (he had worked as a police reporter for a decade prior), and his interest in photographic documentation dovetailed neatly with the rapidly developing practice of police surveillance.[17] Riis’s aim was to turn the slums into a visual spectacle for a philanthropic middle class, and the moral degradation of urban poverty was, in his work, seen most clearly on the bodies of the poor.

“In Poverty Gap, West Twenty-Eighth St. An English Coal-Heaver’s Home,” Jacob Riis, How The Other Half Lives, circa 1890.

By the 1930s, as the Great Depression made it increasingly difficult to ignore widespread suffering among the American working class, the federal government had begun to take a serious interest in social documentary photography. The most productive result of this attention was a public photography project conceived under the auspices of the Resettlement Administration (which quickly became the Farm Security Administration), managed by the economist and amateur photographer Roy Stryker. Stryker, a true believer in the potential of social documentary photography to create public support for New Deal social welfare programs, contracted a number of professional photographers and sent them on journalistic “assignments,” where they were given a paycheck and some freedom in selecting their subjects.[18] Like Riis, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers demonstrated a broad preference for human subjects, although Ben Shahn and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced a number of compelling photographs of ramshackle living quarters and degraded structural foundations. Some of the most enduring images of the Great Depression were products of the FSA program: Dorothea Lange’s portrait of farmworker Florence O. Thompson—a photograph often referred to as “Migrant Mother”—is perhaps its most memorable product. In the photograph, Thompson’s gaze is set on something distant, far past the camera; the lacework of wrinkles along her forehead and around her eyes suggests that her lifestyle has aged her beyond her years; her children (we presume) hide their faces entirely. The documentary value of the photograph was not in its ability to capture something specific about the conditions of poverty; indeed, research has shown that Lange’s minimal description of Thompson’s work and circumstances was somewhat inaccurate.[19] Rather, the value of the image was in its ability to foster empathy for the subject, to force the audience to connect a visible human face to the experience of destitution, and to transform this subjective empathy into support for the social welfare efforts of the federal government. Stryker himself called Lange’s portrait of Thompson “the picture,” and regarded it as the most successful photograph of the entire project.[20] Thompson, for her part, told a reporter in 1978, “I wish she hadn’t taken my picture.”[21]

Compare: “Destitute pea pickers in California,” Dorothea Lange, 1936 (the “Migrant Mother” photograph); “Migrant agricultural worker’s family,” Dorothea Lange, 1936, same subjects.

Social documentary photographers concerned with poverty have come to acknowledge a fundamental tension in their own project: if the ethos of the form demands that the audience see poverty as a problem of individual human suffering, then how does the photographer capture poverty, as manifested on the human subject, without rendering that subject pathetic or pitiable? Riis, and to some extent the FSA photographers, viewed the people they photographed as cautionary objects for a middle-class audience. The purpose of documenting their plight was to inspire a sensibility that poverty robs the poor of their dignity.

But, to their credit, later practitioners in the field have taken other paths. Milton Rogovin’s work, in particular his Lower West Side series,represents an important intervention in the form.[22] In 1972, Rogovin, a left-leaning optometrist who picked up photography after being effectively blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities fifteen years prior, began photographing residents of Buffalo, New York’s Lower West Side, which at the time had the highest rate of unemployment in the city.[23] Over a twenty-year period, Rogovin returned to photograph the same places, the same families. While no less given to portraiture than his predecessors, at the core of Rogovin’s work is a sense of dignity and autonomy in his subjects, and an understanding that social documentary photography could serve the interests of the poor without pitying or pathologizing them. While contemporary artists often recognize the “pitiable poor” as an avoidable trope, the degree to which activist photographers negotiate this problem successfully is often uneven, as common debates about “ruin porn” attest, and the role of the human subject in social documentary photography of the poor remains fraught.[24]

Compare: Untitled FSA photograph, Theodor Jung, 1936; Untitled, from Lower West Side series, Milton Rogovin, 1972.

“Street View” as a formal intervention

How, then, can GSV technology intervene on this fundamental representational problem in social documentary photography? Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture shows one potential avenue. Along with Jon Rafman, Rickard was one of the forerunners of GSV art, and A New American Picture represents one of the earliest attempts to illuminate the problem of poverty, in particular, through the use of GSV and the artistic arrangement of its content. According to Rickard, the “project started with a focus on African American communities to see what they looked like on the heels of our history,” but he soon expanded his project away from “African American communities” and into “broken areas as a whole.”[25]

The social documentary impulse in Rickard’s art is only broadly directed at an activist purpose; rather than subjective empathy, the images as a whole tend to inspire a melancholy distance from the subject. This is not to say that the images themselves are uninteresting, however. In one particularly haunting shot, “Okeechobee, FL,” the blurred face of a child stares directly into the camera, the backdrop a grid of off-white prefabricated houses. In “Atlanta, GA,” a similarly-inscrutable child bikes past a pair of boarded-up houses, the oversaturated blue of the sky muting the already-dull hues of the built landscape. The low-resolution quality of these photographs, itself an artifact from GSV’s earliest technology, amplifies the not-quite-real sensation Rickard intentionally evokes.

The presence of people in these images serves less to facilitate an emotive connection to the audience and more to suggest their complete alienation. But we see poverty not in the human subject as much as we read it in the mise-en-scène: the prefabricated houses, the upturned bicycles, even the featureless pit of sand underneath the child’s feet. In A New American Picture, poverty lives in the inanimate landscape; the spectral figures that haunt it are human, we know, but their featurelessness prevents identification and, by extension, empathy.

Atlanta, GA, A New American Picture, Doug Rickard, 2012.

Okeechobee, FL, A New American Picture, Doug Rickard, 2012.

While Rickard’s work is largely concerned with “finding” otherwise art-gallery quality photographs through GSV, Justin Blinder’s Vacated offers a more conceptually sophisticated approach to the representational problem of American poverty. Vacated draws from GSV imagery from New York City, and, in Blinder’s words, “reflect[s] the complexities of social impact and urban change in gentrifying neighborhoods.”[26] Blinder uses an array of manipulation techniques—cross-fades as well as .gif animations—to juxtapose different GSV iterations of the same scene, demonstrating change over time in a single image.[27]

Initially commissioned by the arts organization More Art to show “how New York City had changed under the twelve-year Bloomberg Administration,” Blinder found his sites through searching a New York City Department of Planning database for vacant properties and reverse-engineered the historical image data from GSV.[28] Google had not initially let its audience view older imagery of any given place; within a year of the project’s release, however, Google added a “Time Machine” feature that allows the user to easily view the material that Blinder had needed to extract from GSV manually.[29] The social commentary in Blinder’s project comes through quite clearly: gentrification modifies the urban landscape in ways that necessarily destroy the built environment and, by extension, the visual structure of community. Each image captures a transformation, but in each case it evokes a sense of destruction rather than  rejuvenation.

But Vacated’s intentional focus on buildings and structures underscores a fundamental and largely inescapable aspect of art through GSV: the medium itself is a tool for the documentation of land—and land, mediated by capital, is property. The element in Blinder’s images that changes is not the visible human relationships to their environment, it is simply the environment itself. We see in one image the grotesque form of a half-built glass-plated obelisk rising over a street, but the relationship being visibly reconfigured is one of property rather than of people. Or, perhaps, we know that urban development initiatives and real estate contractors are groups of people–but instead of seeing them, we see the visible effects of their negotiations. Vacated highlights the visual and spatial transformations of gentrification, but it cannot connect these transformations to the social lives of those affected through the image alone. The architectural historian Marta Gutman, who contributed an essay for Vacated’s exhibition at the MOMA in 2013, felt similarly: in contrast to the immense human suffering of being evicted or otherwise forced from one’s home, “the cache of photographs, captured by Google Street View, can only hint at the loss.” “Do I fault Blinder for being incomplete?” she continued. “He is recording violence, even if he won’t admit it, and his record is useful. It’s up to all of us to act.”[30]

Untitled, Vacated, Justin Blinder, 2013.

Untitled, Vacated, Justin Blinder, 2013.

Like Vacated, Alex Alsup’s ongoing GooBing Detroit project attempts to show the process of urban decay through time-lapse techniques. By taking the same shot of the same scene years apart, GooBing Detroit highlights the gradual decay of built spaces in Detroit. Alsup’s hook is clever, drawing on the fact that GSV imagery for Detroit largely began in 2008, in the early months of the Great Recession, and continues into the present. Some of Alsup’s images are visually arresting, and his use of in-frame captioning adds an element of starkness to the story his assembled images seem to tell.

One representative example, “Mackay Street, Detroit,” begins in 2009, focused on a row of four detached houses, one of which seems to be under construction. Three of these houses have front-facing porches, relatively manicured lawns, and embody in nearly every respect the archetypal single-family suburban house regularly associated with the ideal life of the American suburbs. By 2011, the unfinished house has been obscured entirely by overgrown shrubbery; in 2013, beneath an overcast sky, three out of four houses are in obvious disrepair, the lawns resemble a wilderness, and even the sidewalk is cracked as if by tectonic forces. The final shot, from 2015, carries the sense of the calm after the storm–but the damage has been done, and even the final remaining house, now thoroughly uninhabitable, has lost most of its roof. The temporal aspect of GooBing Detroit offers, in this sense, the ability to infer a narrative simply through visual/environmental cues.

Yet the project at large feels somewhat hollow and lifeless—which may, itself, be the emotive intent of the work. By dwelling on the material debris of the foreclosure crisis, Alsup’s work runs the risk of sidelining the human experience from the visual record. GooBing Detroit has a clear preference for residential properties, but it is up to the audience to imagine the process through which each house became vacant, became a ruin, and became an empty field. Alsup, to his credit, seems aware of the limits of GSV as a visual medium, and supplementary textual material on the project’s website leads to a more comprehensive accounting of the social problem of foreclosure. But the visual material of GooBing Detroit nonetheless privileges residential property as the photographic subject, rather than the residents themselves. The ultimate result is a series of stark, depressing images that fail to evoke a sense of human empathy because the human subject is absent almost entirely from the scene.

Mackay Street, Detroit, Alex Alsup, GooBing Detroit, 2019.

Hazelridge Street, northeast Detroit, 2009-2018, GooBing Detroit, Alex Alsup, 2019.

If the fundamental question underlying all these projects is whether the technology of GSV enables a new way of visualizing poverty, then the answer is a resounding yes. It absolutely does. But the ability to simply see poverty—and other social and economic issues—in novel and compelling ways is of ultimately limited utility.[31]

The GSV camera obscures as much as it reveals. Where early practitioners of social documentary photography saw the shocking spectacle of the urban slums or the hardscrabble lives of indigent “Okie” farmworkers, they conceived of the core foundation of the social problem at hand as one of human suffering. The visibility of human pain was often the point. Conversely, GSV algorithmically obscures the human form and any of its identifying features. We cannot see suffering on the faces of the poor, so we read it instead in the land upon which they live. Using corporate surveillance software designed to document land and property as a medium compounds this problem, even when artists like Blinder or Alsup try to turn the software against itself. To whatever extent the social documentary form depends on developing empathy for human misery, GSV redirects this human relation to the lifeless visual form of property. It is from this visual representation of property that the audience must extract some meaningful reflection not just on poverty, but on social relations more generally–and the economic system which determines them.

The impossibility of transformative art under capitalism is by no means a new complaint among socially conscious artists, and it is what lurks underneath the representational problem of art with GSV.[32] Inasmuch as these GSV artistic projects redirect human empathy towards property, property itself is embedded within the system of capital simultaneously obscured and revealed by the form of GSV software. In his book Photography After Capitalism, the art historian Ben Burbridge offers a close reading of Jon Rafman’s aforementioned 9 Eyes project. Burbridge envisions “mass photography” such as GSV as the sort of “participatory, egalitarian, and inclusive experiences of making, using, and accessing photography” which “signal precisely the principles according to which society could and should be restructured.”[33] It is a lofty dream. The free, easy, and massive public access to GSV even suggests that it might be attainable. But what Rickard, Blinder, and Alsup’s work reveals, unfortunately, is that GSV’s innate emphasis on land and property over the identifiable human subject runs contrary to this ideal, and that the social documentary form demands engagement with common humanity that no corporate surveillance software, as yet, can offer.

Bibliography

Anguelov, Dragomir, Carole Dulong, Daniel Filip, Christian Frueh, Stephane Lafon, Richard Lyon, Abhijit Ogale, Luc Vincent, and Josh Weaver. “Google Street View: Capturing the World at Street Level.” Computer, June 2010.

Associated Press. “‘Can’t Get a Penny’: Famed Photo’s Subject Feels She’s Exploited.” Los Angeles Times. November 18, 1978, sec. B1.

Blinder, Justin. “Absence in Context: Recontextualizing Civic Data, Critical Cartographies, and Gentrification in New York City.” Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive Media 4, no. 1 (2015): 23–37.

Brown, Abbie, and Tim Green. “Virtual Reality: Low-Cost Tools and Resources for the Classroom.” TechTrends 60 (2016): 517–19.

Burbridge, Ben. Photography After Capitalism. London: Goldsmiths, 2020.

Cain Miller, Claire, and Kevin O’Brien. “Germany’s Complicated Relationship With Google Street View.” Blog. Bits: Business, Innovation, Technology, Society (blog), April 23, 2013. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/germanys-complicated-relationship-with-google-street-view/.

Chau, Stephen. “Introducing… Street View!” Blog. Google Maps Blog (blog), May 29, 2007. https://maps.googleblog.com/2007/05/introducing-street-view.html.

Curtis, James. “Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, and the Culture of the Great Depression.” Winterthur Portfolio 21, no. 1 (1986): 1–20.

Danby, Susan, Christina Davidson, Stuart Ekberg, Helen Breathnach, and Karen Thorpe. “‘Let’s See If You Can See Me’: Making Connections with Google Earth in a Preschool Classroom.” Children’s Geographies 16, no. 2 (2016): 141–57.

Finnegan, Cara. Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2004.

Fulton, Christopher, ed. The Social Documentary Photography of Milton Rogovin. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2019.

Gandal, Keith. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Gansky, Andrew. “‘Ruin Porn’ and the Ambivalence of Decline: Andrew Moore’s Photographs of Detroit.” Photography and Culture 7, no. 2 (2015): 119–39.

Gutman, Marta. “Vacated (Justin Blinder).” Design and Violence (exhibition), January 21, 2015. https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/vacated-justin-blinder/.

Jacobs, Frank. “Why Germany Is a Blank Spot on Google’s Street View.” Big Think, September 26, 2019. https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/germany-street-view.

Lyons, Siobhan, ed. Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.

Metz, Holly. “Milton Rogovin: Seeing the Forgotten Ones.” Labor History 38, no. 4 (1997): 508–24.

Natanson, Nicholas. The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.

Power, Martin, Patricia Neville, Eoin Devereux, Amanda Haynes, and Cliona Barnes. “‘Why Bother Seeing the World for Real?’: Google Street View and the Representation of a Stigmatised Neighbourhood.” New Media & Society 15, no. 7 (2012): 1022–40.

Proctor, Nancy. “The Google Art Project: A New Generation of Museums on the Web?” Curator: The Museum Journal 54, no. 2 (2012): 215–21.

Rafman, Jon. “IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View.” Art F City, August 12, 2009. http://artfcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/.

Sandweiss, Martha. “Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age.” Journal of American History 94, no. 1 (2007): 193–202.

Shankland, Stephen. “Google Begins Blurring Faces in Street View.” CNET, May 13, 2008, Online edition. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-begins-blurring-faces-in-street-view/.

Stange, Maren. Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890-1950. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Strangleman, Tim. “‘Smokestack Nostalgia,’ ‘Ruin Porn,’ or Working-Class Obituary: The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Representation.” International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (2013): 23–37.

Stryker, Roy, and Nancy Wood. In This Proud Land: America, 1935-1943, as Seen in the FSA Photographs. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973.

Thielmann, Tristan. “Linked Photography: A Praxeological Analysis of Augmented Reality Navigation in the Early Twentieth Century.” Blog. Beiträge, April 5, 2016. http://www.mobilemedia.uni-siegen.de/2016/04/05/linked-photography/.

Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill & Wang, 1989.

Wakabayashi, Daisuke. “Google Tops Market Cap Of $1 Trillion.” New York Times, January 17, 2020, New York edition, sec. B.

Warren, Spring. “Screen Captures: Americans on Google Street, an Interview with Artist Doug Rickard.” Boom: A Journal of California 2, no. 4 (2012): 18–26.

Wolinski, Paul. “Fully Automated Luxury Composition.” Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 7, no. 2 (2017): 8–15.

[1]     Stephen Chau, “Introducing… Street View!,” Blog, Google Maps Blog (blog), May 29, 2007, https://maps.googleblog.com/2007/05/introducing-street-view.html.

[2]     For a more comprehensive discussion of the technology behind GSV, see Dragomir Anguelov et al., “Google Street View: Capturing the World at Street Level,” Computer, June 2010.

[3]     Competitor software also exists, but this essay largely focuses on Google’s proprietary software as it is by far the most recognizable and most comprehensive of such programs.

[4]     Nancy Proctor, “The Google Art Project: A New Generation of Museums on the Web?,” Curator: The Museum Journal 54, no. 2 (2012): 215–21. For pedagogical applications, see, e.g., Abbie Brown and Tim Green, “Virtual Reality: Low-Cost Tools and Resources for the Classroom,” TechTrends 60 (2016): 517–19 or Susan Danby et al., “‘Let’s See If You Can See Me’: Making Connections with Google Earth in a Preschool Classroom,” Children’s Geographies 16, no. 2 (2016): 141–57.

[5]     Stephen Shankland, “Google Begins Blurring Faces in Street View,” CNET, May 13, 2008, Online edition, https://www.cnet.com/news/google-begins-blurring-faces-in-street-view/.

[6]     Claire Cain Miller and Kevin O’Brien, “Germany’s Complicated Relationship With Google Street View,” Blog, Bits: Business, Innovation, Technology, Society (blog), April 23, 2013, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/germanys-complicated-relationship-with-google-street-view/. For a more current discussion of GSV in Germany, see Frank Jacobs, “Why Germany Is a Blank Spot on Google’s Street View,” Big Think, September 26, 2019, https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/germany-street-view.

[7]     See, e.g., Martin Power et al., “‘Why Bother Seeing the World for Real?’: Google Street View and the Representation of a Stigmatised Neighbourhood,” New Media & Society 15, no. 7 (2012): 1022–40.

[8]     Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Google Tops Market Cap Of $1 Trillion,” New York Times, January 17, 2020, New York edition, sec. B.

[9]     This quotation comes from the marketing copy on the GSV landing page at https://www.google.com/streetview/.

[10]    Jon Rafman, 9 Eyes, online photo-series, 2008-present (ongoing), https://9-eyes.com/. Quotation from Jon Rafman, “IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View,” Art F City, August 12, 2009, http://artfcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/.

[11]    Michael Wolf, Fuck You, online photo-series, 2010, http://photomichaelwolf.com/#fuck-you/1. Published in book format as Michael Wolf, FY (Berlin: Peperoni Books, 2010).

[12]    Tim Tetzner, If The Eyes Can’t Touch (Blurred Modernism), photo-series, 2018, http://www.timtetzner.com/files/Scharaun_BlurredModernism.pdf.

[13]    Jacqui Kenny, The Agoraphobic Traveller, online photo-series, 2016-present (ongoing), https://www.theagoraphobictraveller.com/.

[14]    Kenny’s website lists a forthcoming book version of The Agoraphobic Traveler in 2021. Google featured Kenny’s work in the “Stories” section of their website: https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/stories/agoraphobic-traveller/.

[15]    Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 26.

[16]    “Reading,” in this sense, suggests a certain critical relation to photography detailed in Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989).

[17]    Keith Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11-12.

[18]    For more on the FSA photography project, see Cara Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2004) and Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).

[19]    Martha Sandweiss, “Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age,” Journal of American History 94, no. 1 (2007): 195-196.

[20]    Roy Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America, 1935-1943, as Seen in the FSA Photographs (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 19, quoted in James Curtis, “Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, and the Culture of the Great Depression,” Winterthur Portfolio 21, no. 1 (1986), 1.

[21]    Associated Press, “‘Can’t Get a Penny’: Famed Photo’s Subject Feels She’s Exploited,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1978, sec. B1.

[22]    For a more comprehensive historical treatment of Rogovin, see Christopher Fulton, ed., The Social Documentary Photography of Milton Rogovin (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2019).

[23]    Holly Metz, “Milton Rogovin: Seeing the Forgotten Ones,” Labor History 38, no. 4 (1997), 509-511.

[24]    For a discussion of “ruin porn,” see Andrew Gansky, “‘Ruin Porn’ and the Ambivalence of Decline: Andrew Moore’s Photographs of Detroit,” Photography and Culture 7, no. 2 (2015): 119–39; Siobhan Lyons, ed., Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018); or Tim Strangleman, “‘Smokestack Nostalgia,’ ‘Ruin Porn,’ or Working-Class Obituary: The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Representation,” International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (2013): 23–37.

[25]    Spring Warren, “Screen Captures: Americans on Google Street, an Interview with Artist Doug Rickard,” Boom: A Journal of California 2, no. 4 (2012), 18-19.

[26]    Justin Blinder, “Absence in Context: Recontextualizing Civic Data, Critical Cartographies, and Gentrification in New York City.,” Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive Media 4, no. 1 (2015), 34.

[27]    For an example of crossfading and .gif animation, see, respectively, the first and second attached images from Vacated.

[28]    Blinder, “Absence in Context,” 30.

[29]    Ibid, 101.

[30]    Gutman, Marta. “Vacated (Justin Blinder).” Essay in Design and Violence (exhibition), January 21, 2015. https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/vacated-justin-blinder/.

[31]    The notion of panoptic street-level photography predates GSV, but the notion of using this method to document poverty is wholly novel. Rand McNally “Photo-Auto Guides” offer an early twentieth century example of a similar project. This topic remains underexplored; see Tristan Thielmann, “Linked Photography: A Praxeological Analysis of Augmented Reality Navigation in the Early Twentieth Century,” Beiträge (blog), April 5, 2016, http://www.mobilemedia.uni-siegen.de/2016/04/05/linked-photography/.

[32]    For commentary outside the realm of visual arts, consider Paul Wolinski, “Fully Automated Luxury Composition,” Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 7, no. 2 (2017): 8–15. Wolinski, an experimental musician as well as a scholar of popular music, considers whether algorithmically-generated music can “resist the pressures of capitalism.”

[33]    Ben Burbridge, Photography After Capitalism (London: Goldsmiths, 2020), 19.

Categories
Golden Age Hollywood

Film Noir and the Great Depression

By Ryan Fallon

When the Stock Market crashed in 1929, and subsequently led to the greatest economic collapse in American history, it did so in the midst of a steady climb of audience admissions for a burgeoning movie industry at the beginning of the 1930s. In addition to the financial turmoil that America was now steeped in, the advent of sound in motion pictures and the disappearance of silent films that had been universally popular in the 1920s led to a slowdown in admissions. However, beginning in 1934, admissions to films began to steadily climb again, and continued to do so throughout the rest of the decade and into the wartime years. Despite the widespread financial ruin the Depression had inflicted upon the country, American audiences returned to the movies in the mid-1930s in search of the escapism that cinema offered, primarily in the form of comedy films, westerns and musicals. 

Amidst the Depression-era blossoming of American cinema, both as an industry and an artform, a new genre formed: film noir. Recognized now for its aesthetic features, such as minimal lighting and use of darkness and shadows, as well as its depictions of the more nefarious aspects of American society, film noir has come to be associated with America’s postwar socio-political anxieties. Inner-city crime, atomic-age paranoia, the Communist threat, urban decay, postwar suburbanization, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and the criminal underworld became staples of the noir films that came to define the genre from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, as depicted in films like The Killers (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), Criss Cross (1949), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Touch of Evil (1958) and Shock Corridor (1963).

However, while film noir can be seen as both an exorcism of the collective trauma sustained during and after World War II and a reflection of the country’s paranoid psyche at the onset of the Cold War, the roots of these films can be traced back almost two decades prior, where, as film historian Eddie Mueller states, the noir genre was born in response to the economic turmoil of the early 1930s: “Frankly, I think the Depression was a bigger influence [on film noir] than World War II…the writers that influenced the more adult content and attitude found in film noir created their essential work in the thirties.”

With the economic suffering that moviegoing audiences experienced in the wake of the Depression, elements of early film noir, or what historian Joel Dinerstein calls “emergent noir”,  became more pervasive in American cinema from the early 1930s until the mid-1940s. proceeding chronologically, this essay examines how these early films reflected the fears and social anxieties of American audiences amidst the country’s economic downfall, as well as breaking down what these films had to say about the crisis of capitalism during the Depression era. 

The genesis of the noir genre began in the pre-code years of the early 1930s (1930-1934) with the production of “gangster” films. Released directly after the 1929 Crash and at the onset of the Depression, gangster films like Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), The Secret Six (1931), Quick Millions (1931), City Streets (1931), Scarface (1932), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Picture Snatcher (1933) were instrumental in establishing the criminal “protagonist” that operated in society without a moral code. 

The gangsters in these films occupied two different roles in the early crime cinema of the 1930s. Firstly, gangsters were interpreted by moviegoing audiences as stand-ins for corporate capitalists that had been to blame for America’s financial freefall. Within this context, audiences equated criminal gangdom with the gross overindulgence and corporate corruption inherent in capitalism, and in doing so, associated the idea of the businessman with that of a violent criminal. Often portrayed by Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, the capitalist/gangster subtext was further compounded by the depictions of characters describing their criminal syndicates as “businesses” and “organizations” that used crime to turn “profits”, often ending with the gangster’s grisly demise, which was seen by audiences as a come-uppance for banks and financial institutions that had allowed for the crash to happen.  

However, as the gangster films progressed in the early 1930s, a second role which the gangster occupied developed: the anti-authoritarian revenge character. Seen by audiences as a justified, vigilante figure, rather than a capitalist thug, Joel Dinerstein writes that this change in character provided “a revenge narrative…it provided a vicarious outlet for those who felt cheated of their savings, hopes, and future, without sacrificing the myth of upward social mobility.” It is in these films that the noir trope of the alienated, morally ambiguous protagonist, that would come to be a staple of the postwar noirs, was established. The anti-authoritarian attitude of the gangsters in the early 1930s crime films was also critical to the molding of this new noir character, one who acted in desperation and used violence as “the cinematic language of resistance” and “emerged as an inquiry into a fallen national mythos” in the wake of the failure of American industrial capitalism.

The implementation of the Hays Code in 1934 ended the gangster film boom in the mid-1930s. The Hays Code sought to censor depictions of overt violence and sexuality,  and censors feared that the depiction of the criminal antihero who resorts to organized crime to take from capitalists would serve as too much of a role model to a nation that, in the wake of the crash and Depression, had already turned on conservative political values, as described by Hanson Philip as “…a new disgust for leadership, it was business leaders, and especially the bankers and stock speculators, a group notable for their conservatism, who early in the 1930s caught the main force of the nation’s ire.”  

This public hostility towards bankers and businessmen also coincided with a robust labor movement, one that sought to organize support for industrial unionization and mass participation in strikes and protests during the 1930s. The crime films produced during the Depression-era gave credence to the audience’s notions of resistance, especially to the political powers that had destroyed the economy. The Popular Front movement that became synonymous with labor-rights and strikes was intertwined with a blossoming creative movement in art culture, in what Michael Denning calls “The Cultural Front.” Although by the late 1930s the gangster film had been phased out, the core themes and elements, namely the anti-authoritarian attitude towards power and the protagonist without a moral code, were manifested in a new iteration of crime film: the prewar “emergent” or early noir.

These early noirs capitalized on the notions of social and economic despair that the gangster film had previously established. Despite the influence gangster films had on the eventual formation of film noir, as they aren’t typically aren’t considered “noir” films. The early noir films of the late 1930s and early 1940s appropriated the themes of desolation and criminality and shifted the focus from the gangsters of the organized underworld and onto the alienated everyman, suggesting that engaging in criminal acts in the face of economic desperation was not exclusive to the flashy mobsters of the pre-code era. These noir films such as They Drove by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941) recast the criminal protagonist not as a murderous mobster, but instead as a conventional citizen forced into crime by necessity. According to Winfield Fluck in Crime, Guilt and Subjectivity in Film Noir:

Both gangster film and film noir deal with crime. However, there is one major difference. In film noir, the crime is no longer committed by a “professional” criminal but by an “ordinary” citizen who is drawn- or appears to have been drawn- into crime by accident or some strange, unforeseen combination of factors.

This new Depression-era protagonist in early film noir is often depicted as isolated and hardened, often working class, and usually resentful of the corrupt nature of authoritative entities. Though these protagonists operate without a moral code, they are presented to the audience as sympathetic figures that yearn for upward economic mobility. This is best exemplified by the characters portrayed by Humphrey Bogart from the late 1930s-1940s, most notably in They Drove by Night, in which George Raft and Bogart play overworked, poverty-stricken truck drivers desperate for money. In assessing the social and political subtext of the broken protagonist, film essayist Andrea Mattacheo writes that the aim of early noir was to

…make the nation feel understood through a shared imagination of failure, radical and disturbing images in which defeat, and breakdown were not represented as sins to make amends for; an imagination in which losers weren’t to be stigmatized but to be understood, since they were just men and women defeated by an unfair system. Like the great part of the American people after 1929.

The characters featured personas and qualities rooted in Depression-era social phenomena that novelist Sherwood Anderson called the “pervasive sense of failure in the wake of the loss of ‘dignified work.’” However, as Mattacheo also points out, these films did not limit their depictions of economic turmoil to the impoverished. Films like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and its follow-up The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) are stories of weKalthy characters that appear as isolated and alienated as the drifters and criminals typically portrayed in film noir. Prior to the production of Citizen Kane, Welles had emerged from the progressive Cultural Front movement of the 1930s with his Federal Theatre Project (FTP).

 In the 80 years since its release, Citizen Kane has been heralded not only a landmark artistic and cinematic achievement, but also as perhaps the most complete example of pre-war noir, with its nod to the German Expressionist-inspired dark shadows and minimal lighting, which had been absent in the early gangster films and slowly phased into noir in the late 1930s. Both Kane and Ambersons showcase characters that occupy the same world of Depression era despair and economic turmoil seen in earlier Depression films. Kane presents the story of Charles Foster Kane, a stand-in for the real-life business tycoon William Randolph Hearst, whose emotional downfall amidst his fortune spoke to the notions of loss and isolation felt by prewar moviegoing audiences. Similarly, Ambersons deals with the familial pitfalls of the Ambersons, whose vast fortune dwindles at the dawn of the automobile era.

As the early noir period moved in the 1940s, the last subgenre of early noir was formed: the hard-boiled private detective film. This genre was based on the works of 1930s crime writers like Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely, The Big Sleep, The High Window) and James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce) and best exemplified by films like The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Glass Key (1942), Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Double Indemnity (1944). Although postwar detectives were generally depicted as being one class above their clients, the detectives of the prewar and wartime years exuded a Depression-era working class sensibility, as seen in The Maltese Falcon and Murder, My Sweet. Here, the private detectives share the same alienation and post-Depression dismay for society that the working-class criminals embodied in the films of the late 1930s. They see the detective world as a dark “business,” one that pits them against criminal capitalists (such as the Cairo and Gutman characters who are searching for the Falcon in The Maltese Falcon), as well as corrupt authoritative entities (The police officers in Murder, My Sweet). In the works of Raymond Chandler that were adapted for the screen in the early 1940s, the antagonists are presented as upper-class, often wealthy and entirely corrupt and authoritative, channeling the resentment towards depictions of the wealthy that had been so prevalent immediately after the stock market crash. By the end of World War II, noir films had begun to assume the political and social contexts that would become synonymous with the Atomic age and anti-communist ideology. The economic factors that had shaped the noir genre in the 1930s and early 1940s had slowly dissipated from noir cinema, as America’s wartime economy boom had put millions back to work and the labor consciousness of the 1930s was replaced by hostile anti-labor attitudes, instigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) attacks on unions in the late 1940s and early 1950s. 

Though the focus of noir films shifted from the Depression era themes to those of America’s Cold War climate, these films of the 1930s and 1940s provided a depiction of the economic and social fears that audiences expressed after the financial collapse, while also reflecting the public sentiment that America’s financial and political structure had failed the working-class population.

Works Cited

Broe, Dennis. “Class, Crime, and Film Noir: Labor, the Fugitive Outsider, and the Anti-Authoritarian Tradition.” Social Justice, vol. 30, no. 1 (91), 2003, pp. 22–41.

Broe, Dennis. Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood. Univ. Press of Florida, 2010.

Butsch, Richard. “American Movie Audiences of the 1930s.” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 59, 2001, pp. 106–120.

Callow, Simon. Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu. Penguin, 2006.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Verso, 1996.

Dinerstein, Joel. “‘Emergent Noir’: Film Noir and the Great Depression in ‘High Sierra’ (1941) and ‘This Gun for Hire’ (1942).” Journal of American Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, 2008, pp. 415–448.

Fluck, Winfried. “Crime, Guilt, and Subjectivity in ‘Film Noir.’” American Studies, vol. 46, no. 3, 2001, pp. 379–408.

Gandini, Leonardo. “Crime as Business.” History of Economic Ideas, vol. 22, no. 3, 2014, pp. 159–165.

Hanson, Philip. “The Arc of National Confidence and the Birth of Film Noir, 1929—1941.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, 2008, pp. 387–414.

Hare, William. Pulp Fiction to Film Noir: The Great Depression and the Development of a Genre. Kindle Edition, McFarland, 2012. 

House, Rebecca R. “Night of the Soul: American Film Noir”. Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 9, no. 1, 1986, pp. 61–83.

Lott, Eric. “The Whiteness of Film Noir.” American Literary History, vol. 9, no. 3, 1997, pp. 542–566.

Mattacheo, Andrea. “Shadows of Forgotten Men. Film ‘Noir’ and the Great Depression’s Imagination: ‘Murder, My Sweet.’” History of Economic Ideas, vol. 22, no. 3, 2014, pp. 167–177.

Ross, Alex. “The Shadow: Orson Welles at a Hundred.” The New Yorker, 30 Nov. 2015. 

Categories
Visualizing Urban Poverty

Blighted: Slums, Renewal, and Photographic Depictions of New York’s Poor

Ryan Sullivan

Introduction 

For many years, West 98th and 99th Streets between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West was the site of a vibrant African-American quarter known as the “Old Community.” The area started out as a small settlement, but by the 1920s, had blossomed into something of a miniature Harlem with its own Renaissance. Billie Holiday, Arturo Schomburg, and the actress Butterfly McQueen of “Gone with the Wind” fame all called the Upper West Side neighborhood home. After the Second World War, the Old Community was still populated by African-Americans, but bohemians and free spirits had given way to poor and working-class families. Despite their lack of wealth, residents possessed a tremendous amount of comradery, togetherness, and local pride. It was the type of place where households relied on their next-door neighbors as much as they did each other. As Jane Jacobs would say, there were “eyes on the street,” her metaphor for the natural protective surveillance that occurs on vibrant city blocks. Jim Torain of the West 99th and 98th Street Old Community Association described the area as “like a big extended family.” Linda Burstion, who grew up on 98th Street recalled; “it was just a great neighborhood to live in, I remember playing jacks, eating ices, playing stickball and dodgeball, jumping double Dutch and when it got really hot out, they would open up the fire hydrants.” This is not to say that the Old Community escaped the problems that plagued minority enclaves, but communal bonds and kinship ties provided residents with a strong sense of hope for the future. Then, almost overnight, the Old Community was gone.

The Old Community’s disappearance was the product of mid-century urban reform and slum clearance which culminated in the sweeping 1949 Federal Housing Act. The bill’s infamous Title I clause, “Slum Clearance and Community Development and Redevelopment” federally authorized $1 billion in loans to help cities acquire “slums” like Old Community for public or private use.  The law did not, however, require that affordable accommodations be built for ousted tenants, and many of those who lost their homes to demolition were not re-housed at all. The few that did get relocated found themselves in massive housing projects, cut off from the intimacy of street communities and segregated as never before. 

Renewal advocates relied on the word blight more than anything else to secure public and political approval for their efforts.  Blight, they explained, was a malignant disease that threatened to turn healthy areas into slums. But lawmakers included no legislative definition for blight, which allowed these local leaders and developers great discretion about where and what parts of the city were suitable for clearance and replacement. To demonstrate blighted conditions to a wide audience, Title I proponents used a range of visual aids including brochures, maps, and most importantly—photographs. Examining these images reveals a great deal about the attitudes and presumptions held in postwar America about the urban poor. 

The Birth of City Planning 

To understand how blight emerged as a concept, we must understand the professionalization of city planning. In its modern form, city planning is very much a response to the changing dynamics of urban America in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Rapid urbanization, immigration, and industrialization created lamentable living conditions which shocked middle class onlookers. Most agreed with pioneering documentary photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis when he said, “cities had become nurseries of crime, and of the vices and disorderly courses which lead to crime.” 

Riding the wave of popular urban reform movements, institutions like Harvard and Yale began granting degrees in city planning, urban design, and architecture. By the 1910s city planners were building a new lexicon of terms filled with quasi scientific metaphors. The first use of “blight” to describe urban areas is uncertain, but scholars have pointed to the area around the Brooklyn Naval Yard which was described in a 1911 edition of the New York Times, as “a blighted neighborhood.” In the mid-1920’s, C. Earl Morrow and Charles Herrick, two students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Landscape Architecture published an influential article in City Planning. In the essay, they defined blight as “… a district [where]  normal development has been frustrated. Ordinarily property values are an index of the situation: wherever property values fail to keep pace with the increase in other similar districts in the same city, or have decreased, the district may be termed a blighted district” Therefore, blight is defined as slowing of the property values in one portion of the city when compared to other parts of the city, the result of which is a hindrance to “normal development.” While Morrow and Herrick’s definition of blight has several weaknesses, it stands as a landmark. It is the first serious attempt to give a precise, scientific, urban definition to the word—and it placed the meaning of blight firmly within a capitalist framework that defined good and bad areas of a city narrowly on property values alone.

Despite the efforts of city planners to define blight using scientific and empirical data, the term remained vague and amorphous throughout the first half of the 20th century. The slum, being the ultimate nadir of physical urban conditions, was relatively easy to define, but blight was something that existed in the eye of the beholder. Without a universal definition, the only metric to judge blight was perception. In other words—we all know it when we see it.   With the term almost always applied to spaces where Anglo-American families did not live, blight became infused with racial and ethnic prejudice.  By mid-century, most city planners could not—or did not care to—distinguish blighted areas from minority areas and vice versa.

Photographs as Conveyors of Truth  

The birth of the modern city planning profession coalesced with the rise of documentary photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time, many in the public believed photographs were inherently true and that cameras presented subjects as they really were. This credence also dominated Progressive reform and intellectual settings. Pictures thus became a reliable form of qualitative research and were used as evidence to advance the specific ideological underpinnings of the reformist vision in the areas of housing, philanthropy, education, and public health.  

Despite the insistence that photographs represented objective conditions, photographers and social reformers found themselves working harder and harder to establish the ideological meaning of the photographs they took. Jacob Riis, who made a career out of exposing urban conditions is an example of how ideology and photography are interconnected. Riis never allowed ambiguity to creep into his photos, not wanting his audience to draw conclusions that did not align with his reformist agenda. In lectures, Riis frequently included anecdotes about his subjects to advance ideological narratives that included the people photographed as well as his audiences. The result was a combination of entertainment and morality with photographs functioning as the mediated visual truth.  Even when he was not lecturing, Riis always presented his photos with captions and text, making sure that his interpretation was always clear.

Policymakers discovered the power of photographic interpretation when they sought to portray the poor during the Great Depression. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) desperately wanted to legitimize many of its controversial programs such as the resettlement of landless farmers, the building of model towns, and the establishment of rural cooperatives through publicity. FSA officials made calculated decisions over which photographs to include, how to present them, and what captions to write. The FSA documentary photographer thus became not only a cameraman “but a scenarist, dramatist, and director as well,’’ aiming at ‘‘not only the influencing of the subject before the camera, but also the influencing of the person looking at the finished print.” According to Tim Cressel, author of The Tramp in America: “FSA photography was an important propaganda tool that served to legitimate the New Deal . . . they [the photographs] were part of a national attempt to order society and nature through the application of rational scientific principles during a chronic depression . . . The images of migrants were a way of saying that things need to be made better for these people living disordered lives. They needed migrant camps—nicely ordered, geometric simulations of ‘normal life’, which the FSA also photographed.” 

The photographs used by urban renewal advocates may not have been as prominent as those of the FSA, but it is likely that Title I proponents were aware of the influence photographs had on the public. By employing this medium, they sought to combine scientific objectivity and rationalism with emotional appeal and popular understandings of the meaning and conditions of poverty to shape public opinion and further their ultimate agenda.  

“Demonstrations of Blight”

An invigorated push for urban redevelopment gained political steam once the Second World War ended. When President Truman signed the 1949 Housing Act, he proclaimed that the legislation “opens up the prospect of decent homes in wholesome for low-income families now living in the squalor of the slums”, and will equip “the Federal Government, for the first time, with effective means for aiding cities.” Idealists hoped the bill would uplift the poor, eliminate unsanitary conditions, and bring order to the messiness of urban life. But others, specifically businessmen and civic leaders, saw an opportunity to redevelop areas in strategic parts of their city that had experienced undesirable demographic and racial changes.

The Title I provision delegated leadership to local municipalities to acquire local lands for the purpose of redevelopment, and Robert Moses was soon named chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance. Between 1949 and 1960, Moses made New York City the capital of renewal, planning thirty-five slum clearing projects, completing seventeen, and receiving $65.8 million in Title I funds. To justify and promote these urban renewal projects, Moses published brochures for each renewal site (See Figure 1 for an example). These brochures were made of glossy paper and filled with statistics, graphics, charts, and photographs. According to historian Samuel Zipp, “the clean, orderly feeling of the designs, bold titles, seemingly objective amassing of data and photographs bled to the edges of the page.”   This made for a heightened sense of contrast with the dark, seemingly all-pervasive decay on display in the uncaptioned photos. Moses instructed his underlings that he did not want long texts in the slum clearance publications: ‘‘It’s the schedules themselves, the plans and pictures that count with the statement that we mean business, that the procedure will be entirely fair and orderly and that hardships will be, so far as humanly possible, avoided.” Moses’s direction gave the impression that the brochure’s photographs captured objective slum conditions that could be universally understood and accepted. Taking cues from both Riis and FSA photographers, these brochures presented a powerful visual argument and further demonstrated how a sophisticated use of visual material can shape perceptions.

Given that the brochures were intended to justify the clearance of areas designated as ‘‘slums,’’ the most important section was entitled ‘‘Demonstration of Blight” (Figure 2).  Here, the authors described matters such as land use, the condition and age of existing structures, zoning, and population density. The photographs that displayed ‘‘blighted’’ conditions in the most persuasive manner explored three themes: empty lots, back alleys, and abandoned buildings. Empty lots (Figure 3) appeared twenty-two times in the brochures and represented the most popular depiction of blight. Moses and his team implied that when a building was missing, that space was underutilized and would eventually be filled by garbage. Back alleys appeared twenty times. Mostly dark, these photos indicated that portions of the buildings did not receive proper sunlight. Abandoned buildings appeared seventeen times. Once again, abandoned buildings were viewed as natural statements of urban blight. They had a similar representational function as empty lots; abandoned buildings were uneconomic and the fact that their owners had not repaired them meant they were beyond repair or that their owners were not optimistic about the profitability of these buildings.

Race equals Blight

Many images included in “Demonstration of Blight” emphasized elements that made the built environment appear disorderly, obsolete, and beyond repair. Squalor and idleness were often associated with Black and Latino neighborhoods. But surprisingly, people are centered in only a few photos. According to urbanist Themis Chronopoulos “in these types of photographs, the presence of people is incidental,” because Moses and his staff members viewed “blight as a physical problem that required physical solutions.”

But upon closer look, the human subjects included in the photos are much more than incidental passersby. In one photograph, two Black men appear to be chatting on a stoop (Figure 4). At first glance, one might think the picture is meant to show the decay of the townhouse behind them. But there is a more coded message being relayed. The two Black men appear to be conversing in broad daylight, implying idleness or even unemployment. In another image, a young man is pictured crossing the street (Figure 5). This photograph was intended to show that commercial establishments existed in residential buildings and that the people frequenting these stores were doing so in a disorderly fashion. Although this photo is meant to demonstrate blight, the neighborhood appears to be quite vibrant, active, and safe.  Taken on West 63rd street, this area was once called San Juan Hill— a minority community made up of Black and Latino residents. The only evidence of blight in this photo is its subject’s apparent ethnicity. In a third photograph, also taken in San Juan Hill, a grocery store is shown with a soft drink sign on the ground floor of a brownstone (Figure 6). This image made the point that commercial establishments existed in residential streets, which according to modernist planning theories was unacceptable. Further, there is a sign advertising furnished rooms and apartments in the photograph. This detail implied that some of the buildings had been converted into single-room occupancies, attracting low-income and possibly homeless people. A caption for this photograph asked the question: ‘‘Is this a place for a woman and her child?” Although the picture is not in focus, the woman and boy’s dark features and complexion is meant to reinforce blight.

For the people who resided in these neighborhoods, the 1949 Housing Act destroyed lives and broke up families. In San Juan Hill, more than 7,000 lower-class families were displaced. Few, if any, of the 4,400 new housing units were intended for the area’s previous residents.  Similar demolitions occurred in the Bronx, Stuyvesant Town, East Harlem, and Manhattanville. The ousted population was 40% Black or Hispanic at a time when those demographics made up only a little over 10% of the city’s overall population, meaning that a large proportion of evicted tenants faced extreme discrimination in finding new housing. Today, most experts believe that the 1949 Housing Act and its urban renewal programs were in fact fostering the slums they were meant to erase. Although policy makers abandoned the methods of the bill, the widely viewed images created by Title I proponents made a lasting impression on the American public by reinforcing negative racial stereotypes.

Conclusions

In postwar New York, renewal advocates used photographs and visual aids to show blight. Images of empty lots, abandoned buildings, and nonwhite subjects were all used to demonstrate malignant urban decay and disease, and harmful visual depictions have continued to plague communities of color. In the 1990s, Rudolph Giuliani campaigned on the “broken windows theory,” which suggested that cleaning up the visible signs of disorder — like graffiti, loitering, panhandling and prostitution — would prevent more serious crimes. Such tactics did not make crime go down, but they helped minority incarceration rates go up.

As for the term blight— it is still used by those in power. In 2017, President Trump delivered his “New Deal for African Americans” at a Black church congregation in North Carolina and said: “I will … propose tax holidays for inner-city investment, and new tax incentives to get foreign companies to relocate in blighted American neighborhoods. I will further empower cities and states to seek a federal disaster designation for blighted communities to initiate the rebuilding of vital infrastructure, the demolition of abandoned properties, and the increased presence of law enforcement.” His repeated use of the word blight is telling.

Epilogue 

The neighborhoods destroyed by Title I were not slums or blighted areas, and many former residents recall vibrant and supportive communities. The Old Community was one of the first neighborhoods to be destroyed by the 1949 Housing Act.  But for the actual people who lived on blocks like 98th Street, the old neighborhood was never far from their minds. Sixty years after displacement, a bit of a reunion took place. A handful of former residents happily gathered and laughed at Frederick Douglass Center on Columbus Avenue (Figure 7). It seems all the seams all that was missing was the block, cleared long ago.

Bibliography

Chronopoulos, Themis. “Robert Moses and the Visual Dimension of Physical Disorder: Efforts to Demonstrate Urban Blight in the Age of Slum Clearance. ” Journal of Planning History 13, no. 3 (2014): 207–33.

Craghead, A. B. “Blighted Ambitions: Federal Policy, Public Housing, and Redevelopment on the West Coast, 1937-1954.” UC Berkeley. (2020) ProQuest ID: Craghead_berkeley_0028E_19828. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5m09ndm. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33c953w2 

Cresswell, Tim. The Tramp in America, London, UK: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2001

Forest, Steven C. “The Effect of title I of the 1949 Federal Housing Act on New York Cooperative and Condominium Conversation Plans.” Fordham Urban Law Journal, 13, no 3. (1985): 723-61.

Harry Truman,  “Statement by the President Upon Signing the Housing Act of 1949” ( press release, Washington,   DC, July 15, 1949), https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/157/statement-president-upon-signing-housing-act-1949    

Hoffman, von Alexander. “A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949” Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 2 (2000): 302-338.

Mock. Brentin, “The Data Can’t Be Ignored: ‘Stop and Frisk’ Doesn’t Work.” Bloomberg CityLab, August 2016. 

Mock, Brentin, “The Meaning of Blight.” Bloomberg CityLab, February 2017.

Riis, Jacob. How The Other Half Lives. New York: Garrett Press, 1970.

Schweber, Nate. 2017. “A Community Erased by Slum Clearance Is Reunited,” New York Times, Oct 2017.

The American Housing Act of 1949 (P.L. 81-171), https://legcounsel.house.gov/Comps/81-171.pdf

Williams, Keith “How Lincoln Center Was Built (It Wasn’t Pretty)” New York Times, December 2017.

Zipp, Samuel Taylor. Manhattan Projects: Cold War Urbanism in the Age of Urban Renewal, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Figure 1 Excerpts from the Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan released by Robert Moses’s Committee on Slum Clearance in 1956. Images courtesy of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., Archives.

Figure 2 Buildings demonstrating ‘‘blighted’’ conditions in the Manhattantown slum clearance site in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Manhattantown: Slum Clearance Plan Under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949.

Figure 3 Empty lot with children playing in the Lincoln Square site. Source:  Committee on Slum Clearance, Lincoln Square: Slum Clearance Plan Under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 as Amended (New York: The Committee, May 28, 1956)

Figure 4 Buildings that were viewed as obsolete in the Pratt Institute slum clearance area. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Pratt Institute Area

Figure 5 Commercial area in Lincoln Square. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Lincoln Square

Figure 6 Brownstones with rooming houses and a grocery store in Lincoln Square. Source: Committee on Slum Clearance, Lincoln Square

Figure 7 West 99th and 98th Street Reunion, Circa 1981. Photo courtesy of John Cornwall Collection

Categories
Visualizing Urban Poverty

ALMOST BEAUTIFUL: The City Beautiful Movement’s Attempt To Fight Urban Poverty

Christopher M. Talarico

Seeing the “Other Half” Through Jacob Riis’s Lens

J.R. Lowell of Cambridge, Massachusetts could hardly keep the sadness he felt to himself. Having just read Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, which depicted in vivid detail the crowded tenement neighborhoods of New York City, Lowell was compelled to write directly to the author, detailing his personal anguish in seeing the squalor, decay, and poverty that was rotting the nation’s cities: 

21st Nov: 1890
Dear Sir,
I have read your book with deep and painful interest. I felt as Dante must when he looked
over the edge of the abyss at the bottom of which Gorgon lay in ambush. I had but a vague idea of these horrors before you brought them so feelingly home to me. I cannot conceive how such a book should fail of doing great good, if it move other people as it has moved me. I found it hard to get asleep the night after I had been reading it.
Faithfully yours
J. R. Lowell

Lowell, like so many Americans, was dismayed as to how such conditions could exist; after all, America was becoming the beacon of prosperity and innovation around the world. The nation’s newfound industrial and economic success — producing sixty-seven percent of all manufactured goods sold around the world — was in many ways the greatest thing to happen to the country, and America’s urban centers were often considered the crown jewels of America’s new “gilded” image. New technologies and innovations, such as Edison’s electric light bulb, teemed across America’s cities, forever leaving behind the “head-ache” of gas lamps, and giving a “soft, mellow, and grateful” peek into a shining new future. But what most Americans did not see — or perhaps, chose not to — was lurking in the tenements untouched by Edison’s “wizardry.” The overcrowding, the stench, the buildings that crumbled only blocks away from the grand mansions of New York’s Madison Avenue were too much for people like Lowell to handle or accept. How could the buildings of America’s great cities be in such disrepair? How could Americans ever allow such conditions to be acceptable to live in? How did the nation’s cities become cesspools of inhumane poverty?

Figure 1: Jacob Riis, Dens of Death, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)

Figure 2. Jacob Riis, Survival of the Unfittest, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)

Figure 3: Jacob Riis, Bandits Roost, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)

The sketches and eventual photographs of Riis’s work stirred the public (some believed Riis’s project to be revealing and genuine; others thought Riis to be exploitative) while also inspiring some government action. The State of New York, for example, formed a special Tenement House Committee in 1894 to report first hand to the state assembly the social conditions of the nation’s largest city. What they determined to be the root of the social problems made public by Riis was familiar: overcrowding into narrow spaces and lack of open areas and facilities. This physical environment generated  “unhealthy growth” and living conditions which were the primary causes of the city’s  impoverished state:

The conditions affecting tenement-house life in New York are unique and render especially difficult  the correction of existing evils. The ample waterways which surround the city, while they give it commercial supremacy… at the same time crowd the chief part of its population into extremely narrow limits. Ferries, bridges, and transit facilities have not kept pace with the growth of population. In consequence land is held at high prices…[and] landlords are driven to pile story upon story upon narrow lots leaving on each lot insufficient uncovered area; and…authorities neglect to supply the necessary open spaces…making it the most crowded on the face of the earth. 

Figure 4:Jacob Riis, Arch & Alley at 55 Baxter Street, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)

Figure 5. Jacob Riis, Bona Alley Park Site, ca. 1888-1898. International Center of Photography, Gift of Alexander Alland Sr. with additional funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Zenkel Purchase Fund, 1982 (183.1982)

Addressing the Urban Sprawl: The City Beautiful Movement Successfully Fails

These reactions, investigations, and changes were the point of Riis’s photographic work: to create discomfort and to stir a desire to humanize and improve the cities and their inhabitants. As Lowell predicted, How the Other Half Lives “moved other people” to do good and change the state of the nation’s urban sprawl. One of those people “so moved” was Charles Follen McKim, one of three partners whose name christened one of the nation’s leading architectural firms: McKim, Meade and White. McKim saw in Riis’s photographs a need to restore American cities by reestablishing them as centers of splendor, dignity, and order. McKim’s vision of cities reborn with “palaces for the people” and large open-air public spaces became the hallmark of a massive architectural movement which engulfed America’s urban centers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From New York to Harrisburg and from Chicago to Detroit, the City Beautiful Movement drew on classic European design and philosophy and adopted new techniques of city planning to make America’s urban centers competitors to the great metropolises of old. 

With the partnership of “politicians, social workers, civic leaders, philanthropists, and of course architects and city planners,” the City Beautiful Movement would create some of the nation’s most renowned urban spaces, structures, and cultural institutions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But would this “dream of a beautiful, ideal city” actually assist in the extinction of inconceivable urban poverty? This is a critical question to ask of this architectural crusade. 

Often, the City Beautiful Movement is studied narrowly for its artistic value — particularly, its widespread adoption of an Ecole des Beaux-Arts style that drew inspiration from imperial France and ancient Greece and Rome. However, beyond its artistic merits, the City Beautiful Movement was first and foremost a movement, a philosophy of urban planning carefully crafted and executed to meet the needs of a crumbling and crowded urban space and the subsequent social issues that followed in its wake. It was often the assumption by proponents of the City Beautiful Movement that spacial limitations and lack of “noble architecture” combined  in creating impoverished urban communities. Simply, the movement posited that it was the space itself and its lack of aesthetic culture and beauty, that allowed poverty to expand and not the social and economic conditions of the time. The gatekeepers of alleviating this city/ urban poverty would be trained architectural professionals such as McKim. Architects dominated discussions of city beautification efforts, from the heavy reliance on the testimony of architects like David W. King during the Tenement House Committee Report to the inclusion of architects like McKim, Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Augustus Saint-Guadens during the 1901 redesign of the National Mall in Washington, DC. 

What historically hangs over the City Beautiful Movement is its misguided assumption that “noble architecture, heroic sculptures, refreshing fountains and lovely landscape parks” were the solution to fixing the nation’s urban economic and “moral” decay. Notwithstanding these serious oversights, the City Beautiful Movement’s analysis was nearly universally accepted by reformers and capitalists alike. Yet, despite success in creating new cultural institutions and public spaces that now accommodate millions of visitors and generate millions of dollars per annum, the City Beautiful Movement’s legacy in combating and eradicating the very poverty that spurred its existence is complicated and incomplete. Despite the enormous union and investment of public and private enterprise in the construction of new urban spaces, the movement focused too narrowly on the classical European concepts of being “changed by culture,” often at the expense of real opportunities to create improved living spaces and conditions for residents who suffered most. 

Combatting the Penn Legacy

As mentioned in the Tenement House Committee Report, poor living conditions were a product of “narrow” streets, cramped spaces, and few open areas for wellness. These issues were all characteristics of the “grid-system,” the popular urban design of most major cities, and, in the eyes of architects, city planners, and reformers alike, a major contributor to urban poverty.

Throughout the mid-19th century, William Penn’s Philadelphia 1682 grid system served as the standard for urban layout. While initially designed by Penn to accommodate green spaces, shrubs, and lawns, the grid system had also inadvertently promoted — and accommodated — unhealthy population and infrastructural growth in  America’s major cities. By creating streets and residential neighborhoods that required little physical space to construct, cities began to adopt this method of urban design as the  cheapest and expeditious way to create housing to accommodate the mass migration to urban centers, often at the expense of parks and open spaces thought to be required for health and wellness. As H.W. Brands notes in his book American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865-1900, cities exploded in population as more individuals flocked to America’s urban centers in search of better wages and job opportunities than had been available in America’s countryside. This explosion of urban centers occurred not only because of migration within the United States, but also because of the massive influx of “new immigrants” coming from Europe who arrived in American urban centers in hopes of finding steady work and prosperity otherwise unavailable to them in their native countries. 

It was these poorer “new immigrants” who were the primary subjects of Riis’s work, and for those who espoused the merits of the City Beautiful Movement, these urban poor were only able to live in the cities because of a blind adoption to a grid system and the ease to which — as the Tenement House Committee explained — landlords and developers could build more using less space, thus creating the “narrow,” “uncovered” living spaces. Furthermore, it was the grid system itself that was causing and perpetuating their pain and suffering. The grid system virtually imprisoned the urban poor into cramped streets and neighborhoods, and the conditions of poor sanitation, limited natural ventilation, and crumbling facades were all pieces of evidence that pointed to a dire need to revamp grid system layouts. Thus, to reverse the “evils” of such a design, the City Beautiful Movement focused on a new form of arrangement, one that would take the convenience of a grid system but refashion it in a way that allowed for grand vistas and open spaces. 

The World’s Columbian Exposition 

The first and perhaps most famous attempt to show the merits (and subsequent limitations) of such a concept was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the world’s fair commemorating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World. In addition to the symbolic nod to American exceptionalism and a city reborn from the ashes of the devastating 1871 fire, a consortium of the nation’s foremost architects, including Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Richard Morris Hunt, Frederick Law Olmsted, and McKim’s partners William Mead and Stanford White, presented to the nation the possibilities of a new American city, one that would leave behind the overcrowding, disease, crime, and social inequity of Riis’s tenements. The strategically designed “city from scratch,” however, showed more than just an urban space of beautiful buildings; it also displayed an active desire to transform America’s “ugly cities” into places where a well-organized environment with careful considerations of public spaces and structures that could promote civic and urban prosperity.

Figure 6: “World’s Columbian Exposition: exterior view, Chicago, United States, 1893”, 1893. Lantern slide 3.25x4in, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Goodyear. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S03i2183l01_SL1.jpg)<em>"World’s Columbian Exposition: exterior view, Chicago, United States, 1893"</em>, 1893. Lantern slide 3.25x4in, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Goodyear. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S03i2183l01_SL1.jpg” src=”https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/LCQ2xaINe0GPrt_ArgruKuwc9OrV9yUyltGrqWHJb_veaCX1oRZix54fOwDfEDCGwId7KRiQ9H0xSVX_KQiplZVkt8–uIsYMKsR0k62s3Y8qQIaR2RJ4Si4DzYoTwEbAZAyESgZ”></p> <p><em>Figure 7: “World’s Columbian Exposition: Court of Honor, Chicago, United States, 1893″, 1893. Lantern slide 3.25x4in, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Goodyear. </em></p> <figure class=<em>"World's Columbian Exposition: Court of Honor, Chicago, United States, 1893"</em>, 1893. Lantern slide 3.25x4in, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Goodyear. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S03i2165l01_SL1.jpg

Figure 8: “World’s Columbian Exposition: Horticultural Building; Illinois State Building, Chicago, United States, 1893”, 1893. Lantern slide 3.25x4in, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Goodyear. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S03i2213l01_SL1.jpg)<em>"World’s Columbian Exposition: Horticultural Building; Illinois State Building, Chicago, United States, 1893"</em>, 1893. Lantern slide 3.25x4in, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Goodyear. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S03i2213l01_SL1.jpg” src=”https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/Ih0oayIf7PP1OShqu526XOoijV9-L-CIl5jUfPcl9-2Q51FfEV_5iKj3fND5xAYJkc6uqDmM74hSt7e8T9wPzcvbaCzepG_JABVmXdga907S6ohtI2eFNw8iXyt6XQn9eP-NK56_”></p> <p><em>Figure 9: “World’s Columbian Exposition: Court of Honor, Chicago, United States, 1893”, 1893. Lantern slide 3.25x4in, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Goodyear. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S03i2166l01_SL1.jpg</em>)<img width=http://urbanplanning.library.cornell.edu/DOCS/wash02.gif

Figure 11: Plan of 1901 for City of Washington D.C. from the Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia. Cornell University. Department of City and Regional Planning.

Figure 12: Plan of 1901 for City of Washington D.C. from the Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia. Cornell University. Department of City and Regional Planning

Figure 13: Plan of 1901 for City of Washington D.C. from the Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, Report of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia. Cornell University. Department of City and Regional Planning

The McMillan Commission Report provided a picture for a Capitol City that was “restored, and developed,” a city where the “wretched slums” and incoherent public buildings had destroyed the great potential of the city, but now was to be renewed with scientific buildings and “parterres of green forming an organic connection” within the city. The results of the city’s construction were staggering in comparison to its state before the project’s undertaking. The plan of creating a well-ordered, well-designed city was successful in the eyes of architects and city planners. Not only was the new national Mall successful in its adoption of classical Roman and Greek architecture for government and cultural buildings that adorned the new public space, but the smaller neighborhood parks were soon ornamented with trees and statues that emphasized a more “humanistic” and “high culture” expression made popular in Europe. The European Classicism that the commission observed in the great European cities and that had dazzled the country at the Columbian Exposition had finally come to life. Not only was this project created with the betterment of the city’s citizens in mind, but it was almost entirely propelled and funded by the federal government. The City Beautiful Movement not only showed the nation the possibilities of a new grand urban space, but also emphasized that the government was playing a critical role in providing a better quality of life for its citizens. In a moment in history when President Theodore Roosevelt was calling for a “square-deal” for the nation, this instance of the government helping to create a truly “humane” cityscape did not go unnoticed.

However, despite the relative success of revamping the nation’s capital, those architects who contributed to the city’s redesign did not consider the other social conditions that were plaguing the city. The great consistent flaw in the City Beautiful Movement creed was that it focused too greatly on the city’s overall physical layout, the ultimate value of cultural institutions, and the overall aesthetics of a city. While the City Beautiful Movement aimed to achieve social improvement through such transformations in the physical surroundings of a city, on a practical level, the movement never thought to take into consideration areas that would more immediately address the poverty within the city. In the example of Washington, D.C., the Senate Commission repeatedly emphasized a city of magnificence, splendor, and dignity akin to what they had observed in Europe. Yet, at no point in the Commission report was there any mention about creating a city where new living accommodations would be built or how stricken areas of the city would be aided through new planning design and construction. There was additionally no mention or consideration as to what would happen to those mostly non-white city residents who were subsequently dispossessed by the demolition of their neighborhoods in order to accommodate the now open space around the mall.  With the destruction of slums with dehumanizing titles such as “Murder Bay,” “Louse Alley,” and “Rum Row,” thousands of African Americans, along with Irish and Italian immigrants, were forcibly removed from their neighborhoods. While the city was designed to create an area of harmony and enjoyment, it became very clear through the destruction of immigrant and black neighborhoods that race and ethnicity were qualifying criteria as to who was “worthy” of not only enjoying, but of being in the urban space. The City Beautiful Movement, despite all of its philosophical merits in “humanizing the urban sprawl” and providing “wellness” to its citizens, declined to take the opportunity to go beyond the public space and address the needs of the most vulnerable and consider the well-being of those most affected by the redesign. What instead occurred was a city in which carefully crafted open spaces were intended for all, but in reality were mostly enjoyed by those who had been less, if never, afflicted by poverty.

Conclusion 

When looking at the urban design crafted under the City Beautiful banner, it is easy to stay narrowly and pragmatically focused on whether this movement actually addressed the social and economic issues that spurred its existence. Despite the impact this movement had in cities all over the country, it could not adequately address the rise and expansion of industrialization and laissez-faire capitalism, racial tensions, and machine politics corrupting city offices that contributed heavily to the conditions of city slums made famous by Riis’s camera. As the movement reached all corners of America’s urban centers, those for whom the movement was most designed to help found very little in the way of practical change to their social conditions.  The benefit of this new urban design was predominantly enjoyed by the middle, and upper (mostly white) classes unaffected by poverty. The movement, despite the creation of popular public areas and institutions, did not on a practical level solve the poverty problems in America’s city as it intended to do. 

This is not to say that what the City Beautiful Movement did improve over time –the cultural experience of the nation’s cities– is not of import. Washington, D.C.’s renaissance, for example, had a great impact on other cities, becoming the framework by which more expansive and handsome designs would be created. The openness of the National Mall and the construction of the Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, Smithsonian Museums, Union Station, the Library of Congress, et cetera, allowed for an increase in public activity and a renewed emphasis on an “American Culture” that was thought to be significantly lacking by reformers and architects alike; it was this “lack of culture” that was as much to blame for urban poverty and poor urban planning. This tradition of promoting cultural structures and institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, New York Public Library, Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Hall,  has long-enduring impacts on the arts, music, and literature today.  Not only have these institutions and spaces been beneficial to America’s cultural fabric, but they have provided millions of dollars in economic impact in some cases within the cities in which they rest. In 2015, the Metropolitan Museum of Art — a City Beautiful project — estimated that the museum generated nearly one billion dollars in economic impact to the city of New York. In the example of the National Mall, the National Park Service in 2016 estimated that the National Mall and Memorials contributed over half of the estimated $1.6 billion in economic impact to the D.C. area.  With the current Covid-19 crisis threatening the health of these same City Beautiful projects, this cultural and economic impact on America’s cities cannot be ignored.  

But while these are impressive economic contributions, these same City Beautiful spaces and institutions provide no evidence that the communities of the cities most in need of economic generation are reaping the benefits of this impact. This issue is not too dissimilar to the issues plaguing this movement at its inception. Additionally, a majority of those “residents” enjoying these City Beautiful projects are not the local populations for whom these projects were designed. The same 2015 survey by the Metropolitan Museum of Art estimated that only twenty-eight percent of those visitors contributing the nearly one billion dollars in economic impact were actually from the five boroughs of New York City. While there was no evidence in the 2015 survey to certify it, it is not also unreasonable to hypothesize that of those New York residents who did visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a majority of the visitors were not residents that the City Beautiful Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were aiming to help.  After over 100 years, the City Beautiful Movement only partially fulfills its promise of creating a city for the people, or perhaps better put, for all its people. 

In the modern context of city planning, urban construction and design today try to mimic much of the mission of what the City Beautiful Movement hoped to accomplish at the turn of the century. New spaces and structures are often conceived as being for the public good, allowing for an opportunity for city dwellers to increase their health, wellness, and quality of life. As Richard Klein suggests:

Prior to [the City Beautiful Movement] planning was based almost exclusively on the needs of individual patrons who often responded to local economic, political and social pressures. Perhaps the greatest contribution…of the City Beautiful Movement was to get architects and planners to reconsider what constituted good design and think of the long-term ramifications of their efforts. Modern urban development is an outgrowth of this earlier planning form…and how rational design…can be successfully incorporated into…contemporary urban settings.

This tradition established by the City Beautiful Movement has left a permanent mark on architecture and urban planning. Although the City Beautiful Movement remains the blueprint for future urban construction, what cannot be forgotten is the impact that civic design possesses for the fabric of the city. Despite its positive impact on the urban space today in the form of public spaces and grand cultural institutions, the City Beautiful Movement was born out of an idea that urban squalor could be resolved through a vision of a city where the physical structures, parks, and spaces could help lift society out of the impoverished conditions they experienced. In many ways, it failed; in some, it succeeded. But what future architects and city planners must ask is: why do they build, and for whom do they build? Careful city planning and design cannot be rigid and for specific citizens. As the climate crisis, emphasis on “sustainability,” and the nation’s economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic become critical to city planning, the City Beautiful Movement can give some practical insight into how public spaces can be configured to last and prosper. Planners and architects today must still consider however the city at large and ways to which that city in its entirety can thrive, prosper, and, in the true memory of the City Beautiful Movement, be grand. 

Categories
Media, Wealth, & Poverty in Post-War America

Class on Social Values: Individualism and Collectivism in Three Reagan Era Blockbusters

Nathan Niehaus

Ronald Reagan entered office in January of 1981 facing a longstanding economic crisis, characterized by stagflation and rising unemployment. In his inaugural address, Reagan presented a diagnosis of the calamity, hinted at a plan of action to overcome it, and projected a vision of future prosperity and national renewal. Half a century before, Franklin D. Roosevelt had responded to the miseries of the Great Depression by expanding the role of the government in the everyday life of citizens, endowing it with a new role as caretaker. He created new agencies and programs which together established the New Deal welfare state. Reagan took a drastically different approach to national economic hardship. “In this present crisis,” he asserted, “government is not the solution to our problem: government is the problem.” 

If government was the problem, then what was the solution? In direct contrast to what he saw as a bloated, intrusive, and stifling bureaucracy, Reagan presented the ideal of the free, enterprising, creative individual. He evoked an exalted national past which he aspired to revive, an America whose flourishing was animated by the spirit of individualism:

If we look to the answer as to why, for so many years, we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here, in this land, we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on Earth.

Appealing to a transcendent American “we,” Reagan negated other possibilities of collective formation and action for groups centered around class, race, and gender. What’s more, what distinguishes this “we,” for him, is an individualism marked by ‘negative’ liberty, or freedom from restraint (in economic terms, free-market capitalism). As opposed to a collectivist understanding that places communal interest and identity above the desires of any one person, this view identifies anything beyond oneself as a mere limitation, something that gets in the way or holds one back. Reagan promoted a vision of the world where all significant action or toil fundamentally took place at the individual level, as did all true success and all due earning. This was a world where, with the government out of the way, every American citizen would have a fair and equal opportunity to build his or her own wealth, where the “unfettered, hardworking entrepreneur…living by the inexorable market laws of supply and demand, either fail[ed] the test or ma[de] a fortune.” It was a world where heroes were not confined to the movie screen, nor were they hard to find: great in number (though their greatness lay not in their numbers), they walked the streets of America every day.

Drawing on his long career as a Hollywood actor, the president expressed this ideology with romantic flourish. Indeed, if Reagan channeled his experience in the movies to dramatize these ideas, individualism featured on the silver screen as well. What do the major movies of the 1980s have to say about Reagan-era individualism? This essay answers this question by considering three Hollywood blockbusters, roughly spanning Reagan’s presidency: Rocky III (1982), Silkwood (1984), and Wall Street (1987). It pays attention to the role of class and how it informs each film’s position on the issue. In their depictions of the wealthy and the working class, how and to what extent do these movies affirm or challenge this individualist ethos? What particular meanings do they attribute to it? What do their representations of solitary struggle and/or communal solidarity suggest about American society at the time? 

Given the many layers of meaning associated with individualism (see Table 1), it’s impossible to claim any single version as definitive. While these movies’ articulations are not identical, we will see that they often overlap. Furthermore, many aspects of individualism involve an opposition to a collectivist value system. Thus I will also gauge how some form of collectivism appears in these movies, implicitly or explicitly. Beginning with a strident celebration and ending with a scathing critique of Reaganist individualism, we will see that even the most skeptical of these films attest to the powerful grip of this ideology in the 1980s.

Table 1.

Some elements of individualism I will be looking for in these movies
(note that some of these include opposition to collective ideals):
A. A belief in self-reliance and self-interest, often with an opposition to relying on anyone but oneself.
B. Conversely, a denial of obligation or duty towards anyone but oneself. 
C. A belief in the individual as the fundamentally meaningful social unit.
D. A belief in the individual as the fundamental source of action; the denial of collective action.
E. Heroization of the individual; in economic form, heroization of the self-made man/woman, or lone entrepreneur.
F. In economic form, a belief in “money meritocracy,” or the idea that the economy is an even playing field where individuals prove their worth. This view identifies wealth with success and with moral merit.

Rocky III

The third installment of the Rocky series arrived in 1982 and became the highest grossing movie in the series up to that point. In it, Rocky Balboa fittingly finds himself with more wealth than he has ever had. His life is unrecognizable from what it had been in the original Rocky, when he worked as a loan-shark’s debt collector while earning practically nothing as an amateur boxer. He has gained fame and fortune. Leather jacket and jeans have been traded for finely tailored suits. He has left his blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhood and brought his wife (Adrien) and trainer (Mickey) with him. The three of them, along with the couple’s child, now live in a lavish mansion, decked out with grand paintings, glass chandeliers, and expensive furniture. Rocky’s is a bonafide rags-to-riches success story. Meanwhile, his old friend and brother-in-law Paulie has seen no improvement in his economic standing. An early scene depicts Paulie’s sense of frustration at his immobility in comparison to Rocky’s success. A long night of drinking is followed by an interaction with a bartender who seems less interested in the man himself than in his connections to Rocky. Paulie wanders off into an arcade, nursing a half-pint of whiskey. Suddenly finding himself before a Rocky-themed pinball machine, he reaches the breaking point: he hurls his bottle at the arcade fixture in a jealous rage. 

In the next scene, Rocky collects his hungover, half-drunk friend from a jail cell, and the conversation that follows clearly illustrates the film’s individualistic core. Paulie berates the boxer for neglecting to share any of his newfound wealth or offer him a job. He feels that his past good deeds towards Rocky (which he exaggerates) have gone unrepaid. He takes off a watch Rocky had gifted him and throws it on the ground. Rocky responds, “You talk like everybody owes you a living! Nobody owes nobody nothing. You owe yourself.” (WATCH 2:05-3:06)

It is necessary to take a step back from the story and reflect on the scene’s basic elements to grasp the cultural “work” it performs. We have here what are basically two moral positions, one of which is collectivist, stressing social obligations, and the other of which is individualist, arguing for self-reliance. Who embodies these positions? Rocky is a self-made man, a heroic underdog from humble beginnings who overcame the odds to achieve success (in the boxing ring, a metaphor for the playing-field of life, and in material terms). Paulie, on the other hand, is an envious and crude friend hurling insults and accusations. Rocky isn’t too far off when he calls his friend “a jealous, lazy bum.” But by giving Rocky and Paulie these two moral positions, Rocky III identifies the positions with these characters: heroic economic individualism takes the moral high ground, while the argument for social obligations appears as a cheap way of masking one’s own envy and lack of will-power and self-discipline to go out in the world and work hard for an honest living.

The Rocky series was individualist from the start. The very genre of the boxing-movie focuses on two individuals struggling to triumph within the ring. And Rocky, of course, has become a legendary example of the underdog story, another genre which lends itself to heroic expressions of individual worth. The success of the first Rocky–released during the presidency of Jimmy Carter who, in contrast to Reagan’s vision of abundance, stressed the need to ‘cut back’ and frugally accept economic limitations–demonstrates that such stories were equally inspiring prior to Reagan’s particular promotion of individualism.

However, the differences between the two films are instructive, and they reflect different individualist ideals between these two presidencies. Whereas the original film romanticized the working class, Rocky III romanticizes the self-made economic success story. Rocky isn’t rewarded with a stable fortune for his struggles until the third film. The first movie displays a self-esteem battered by economic hardship: Rocky hopes that by enduring a match with the legendary Apollo Creed, he can prove to himself that he’s not “just another bum from the neighborhood.” (WATCH 3:40-4:10). Acquiring a fortune has nothing to do with proving this in the first film. Yet in the third, his wealth has become that proof, distinguishing him from the “jealous, lazy bum” Paulie. As the scholar Chris Jordan observes, this shift between the films reflects a new focus on upward social mobility as a proof of individual right to socioeconomic privileges. If the working class still forms any part of Rocky’s identity, it is only in the sense of “where [he] came from” (something Rocky’s new trainer, Apollo Creed, constantly reminds him to remember WATCH 0:46-0:52). But “where [he] came from” does not matter to him as a hometown community: he is no longer a member of this collective. Rather, for Rocky III, the boxer’s origins mean a tough condition that he rose above, by his own hard work, just as he climbed up the socioeconomic ladder. 

Silkwood

Set in Oklahoma, Silkwood is a working class drama about a woman’s efforts to combat the exploitation and corruption of her employer, a nuclear fuel production plant. With a limited release in late 1983 and wide release in early 1984, the movie is based on events which took place a decade earlier and generated a public controversy over the years: Karen Silkwood was a labor union activist who died in a mysterious car crash on her way to deliver evidence of corporate malpractice to a New York Times reporter. Her story first entered the public spotlight following her death, and it reappeared regularly as a result of lawsuits brought against the company, Kerr McGee, which eventually reached the Supreme Court. By the late 1970s, Karen Silkwood had become an icon for anti-nuclear and feminist groups who invoked her name in their protests. 

The premise and themes of the film lend themselves perfectly to a collectivist critique of the idea of money meritocracy: a woman joins her company union in order to fight against the corporation’s exploitation of her working-class community. Arguably, the logic behind labor unions is that, due to the unequal power of the rich over the poor, workers need to join together in solidarity to negotiate for more equitable working conditions. However, the movie suffers from a paradoxical mixture of individualism and collectivism. Unlike Rocky III, no central characters exemplify individualism (and certainly not of the economic variety). Rather, the movie itself is structured by it: Silkwood derives its meaning through the celebration of an individual, without dedicating space to an exploration of the meaning or significance of her struggle. As a result, the film’s initially collectivist message remains half-baked.  

Silkwood’s conflict emerges as Karen Silkwood comes to appreciate the grave threats to health posed by the plutonium she and her coworkers handle. The company had played down these dangers, but after Karen’s middle-aged friend gets exposed and undergoes a traumatizing emergency shower, her suspicions grow (WATCH). Then Karen discovers that her company has been shipping faulty and potentially deadly plutonium rods to their buyers in order to fulfill a contract deadline. After this discovery, she gets more involved in the union, joining its negotiating committee and even flying to Washington for a meeting with the national union. The national representatives assign her to dig up documented evidence of this malpractice, which they could share with a New York Times reporter for an exposé. She also begins keeping a notebook of employee mistreatment. 

Yet her work for the collective good is overpowered by forces in the film that single her out. Her coworkers (including her boyfriend Drew and close friend Dolly), with whom she shared a harmonious relationship in the beginning, grow increasingly hostile towards her due to her union work. They treat her coldly and occasionally confront her directly. Dolly calls the national union representative an “outside agitator.” Another coworker accuses her of failing to scan herself for radiation, angrily shouting, “I hope you write it down in your little notebook every time you don’t [monitor yourself]. Along with the stuff about the rest of us!” It is as though she were the workers’ adversary, not their advocate. Others jibe at her trip to Washington, implying that she has taken on her activism out of vanity, thinking herself better than everyone else. 

All of these accusations grant Karen an opportunity to justify herself, to respond that she wants to work for the collective good. Yet she never does. Besides a private conversation with her boyfriend (whom she asks, “You don’t give a shit if everyone in the plant is being poisoned?”),  Karen never explicitly connects her union work with a desire to achieve communal wellbeing. Her activism continues to set her apart, to individuate her. The effect is amplified by the fact that the movie’s subject matter is not so much Karen’s activism, but Karen herself (consider the movie’s name). It presents her as a lone, embattled figure opposing ominous forces bigger than herself. In this sense, she shares similarities with Rocky: hers is an underdog story, but without the happy ending. The film makes her out to be a charmingly naive idealist, and the many unanswered arguments made against her seem to prevail in the end.

One review perceptively called Silkwood a “tissue” of “contradictory implications.” How do we explain these contradictions? The reviewer attributes it to the movie’s basis on a true story whose details were surrounded by controversy and multiple court cases: “rarely has the desperation to square inspirational myth with provable, nonlibelous reportage been more apparent.” 

In addition to these pressures, I would argue that the answer lies in the film’s intended audience. As noted above, by 1978 Silkwood had already been made into an icon by anti-nuclear groups and some women’s rights activists (both largely represented by the middle-class). This association was not lost on one angry male reviewer, who cavalierly derided Silkwood for what he called “prefab antinuke, profeminist rhetoric.” Though aimed at a broader audience, the film was certainly made with these publics in mind, particularly the growing antinuclear crowd. This perhaps helps to explain Silkwood’s emphasis on an individual’s story over communal values, as well as its emphasis on the dangers of nuclear energy over the evils of class-based exploitation. Moreover, the movie’s release (1984) came at a time of falling union membership and rising anti-union sentiment. It came three years after President Reagan famously crushed the PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) strike of over twelve thousand federal employees. Just as unions were losing strength and popularity, the anti-nuclear movement never managed to garner much support from organized labor. All of this serves to suggest why the film’s producers were more concerned with reproducing Silkwood as an iconic, martyred individual than as a participant in class struggle. 

Wall Street

Wall Street goes further than Silkwood, delivering a scathing critique of unbridled economic individualism. The film centers on Bud Fox, an aspiring stockbroker taken under the wing of Wall Street veteran Gordon Gekko. Bud’s gradual seduction into Gekko’s shady exploits contrasts with the ideals of another figure in his life–his father Carl Fox, a laborer and union leader at Blue Star Airlines. Gekko and Fox represent two contrasting worldviews: ruthless individualism and loyal collectivism. These two characters provide the thematic center of the movie, and the narrative arc traces Bud’s rise as a protege under Gekko, his disillusionment to Gekko’s evil nature, his conversion to his father’s position, and an attempt at redemption.  

The film hit theaters in 1987, towards the end of Reagan’s presidency. The 1980s had witnessed the “takeover movement” on Wall Street, where “corporate raiders” would buy up a company’s stock (typically with borrowed money) and liquidate the company to pay off these debts, effectively destroying the company while turning a profit. This development on Wall Street went hand in hand with a flurry of scandals and provoked some negative reactions in the press. The takeover movement reflected Reaganist economic individualism at its worst, and Gordon Gekko, Wall Street’s villain, embodies this spirit. In fact, screenwriter Stanley Weiser largely modeled Gekko’s character on Ivan Boesky and Carl Icahn, two of the most notorious corporate raiders of the time.

Before his unmasking as a villain, Bud admires Gekko as a hero. Like Bud (and like Rocky) he came from humble beginnings: his father was an electrician. He is an outsider of sorts in the Wall Street world, as an eccentric self-made man. Gekko despises the “Harvard MBA types” who represent Wall Street’s majority: they come from ‘old money,’ and as such don’t have to earn their wealth like Gekko did. He thus presents a nuanced position on the idea of money meritocracy: while the economy doesn’t naturally distribute wealth according to individual merit, it still allows the upwardly-mobile individual to prove his merit through the accumulation of wealth. 

Gekko elaborates his vision of work and society in a series of conversations with Bud. His philosophy abounds with contradictions, a result of his cynicism and self-justification. Take again the idea of money meritocracy. He seems to discredit the idea during a limo ride with Bud, for he rejects the idea that hard work alone brings monetary success (WATCH 0:11-0:54). He illustrates the point with the example of his working-class father. Yet Gekko then goes on to assert that you are either a multimillionaire “player, or nothing.” Looking out the window, he points towards a businessman and a homeless man, saying, “Are you gonna tell me the difference between this guy and that guy is luck?” (WATCH 1:05-1:13). If Gekko doesn’t believe all the rich deserve their wealth, he does blame the poor for their poverty. As in the case of Rocky, the businessman’s wealth sets him apart from the “bum” on the street. Gekko’s massive fortune–which he invites Bud to emulate–reflects his absolute superiority: a player, or nothing. 

Wall Street attacks this ideology, and it does so implicitly (most famously in Gekko’s “Greed is Good” speech) before Bud comes to his senses. Until then, Bud drinks it up. Meanwhile, Bud’s father represents an alternative, collectivist viewpoint. It is with this position that the film’s sympathies lie. Leader of his airline company’s maintenance workers’ union, he devotes himself to his men, with whom he identifies and sympathizes. His communal, class-based sympathies shine through when he tells his son: “Fare wars are killing us. Management’s gonna lay off five of my men this week. There’s nothing I can do about it.” Carl feels a moral duty to defend the welfare of his fellow workers, and he consistently connects this ideal to his union work, unlike Karen Silkwood.

These philosophies clash when Bud uses his dad’s connections at Blue Star Airlines to organize a meeting with its three union leaders (including his father), Gekko, and himself. Pointing out Blue Star’s ongoing losses and claiming that these will lead to bankruptcy, Bud and Gekko propose a deal: Gekko will buy up the company’s stock and install Bud as president, so that he can improve the company’s financial performance and avoid the destruction of unions that would come with bankruptcy. To make it profitable for Gekko in return, the unions would have to slash workers’ wages, which would be restored once the company began generating net profits. Unlike Bud, Carl Fox sees through Gekko, and says as much in accusation (WATCH). Carl identifies Gekko as a member of the ruling class whose riches derive from exploitation of the poor. He rejects the deal and leaves.

Humiliated, Bud runs out to apprehend his father. Though Bud conceived the deal with good intentions, Carl points out that Gekko is using him for profit. The ensuing argument reveals the father’s unswerving collectivism and the son’s arrogant economic individualism. 

Bud: What I see is a jealous old machinist who can’t stand the fact that his son’s become more successful than he has!

Carl: What you see is a guy who never measured a man’s success by the size of his wallet!

Bud: That’s because you never had the guts to go out in the world and stake your own claim!

Bud continues to press his dad to agree, who continues to resist out of responsibility to his men. “Your f****** men! All my life, your men have been able to count on you! Why is it you’ve never been there for me, huh?” In fact, Bud’s father has been there for him. But this accusation successfully guilts Carl into budging. He lets the union membership decide, and they opt for the deal.

But Carl was right: Bud soon learns that Gekko plans to liquidate Blue Star. When Bud confronts him, Gordon’s bottomless cynicism comes fully to light (WATCH 2:11-3:15). He disdainfully mocks the idea that capitalism and equality are compatible: “You’re not naive enough to think we’re livin’ in a democracy, are you buddy? It’s the free market, and you’re part of it.” In the end, Bud manages to save Blue Star through a complicated stock-market scheme. He goes to prison for insider trading, but he has redeemed himself. The film’s final comment comes from Carl, who advises Bud that the purpose of work is in giving, not gaining: “Stop going for the easy buck and produce something with your life. Create instead of living off the buying and selling of others.”

Conclusion

Rocky III, Silkwood, and Wall Street each represent a particular form of individualism and of collectivism. Considered chronologically, they show a progression from an endorsement of individualism and rejection of collectivism, to the opposite. Yet, it would be wrong to draw the conclusion that a similar shift in outlook took place within American public opinion at large. Instead, all three (in their own ways) attest to the immense appeal of individualism throughout the Reagan presidency. 

Rocky III straightforwardly affirms this ethos. In the case of Silkwood, a struggle against worker exploitation, carried out through a collective body, reduces to a celebration of a lone hero’s bravery and idealism. Indeed, the story of Karen Silkwood had been given this meaning in the public sphere–in the papers and in memorials and protests–before the movie entered production. And Wall Street, despite its scathing critique of economic individualism, has had a paradoxical effect on audiences. The movie’s screenwriter regretfully reflected on this in a 2008 article, entitled “Repeat After Me: Greed is Not Good.” Over the years, young adults would tell him that the movie inspired them, and that they wanted to be like Gekko. Although Gekko stopped being a hero for Bud Fox, he remains one for many to this day. This enduring audience reaction leads us to conclude that Wall Street’s case for collectivism ultimately succumbs to the allure of heroic individualism as embodied by Gekko and the ambitious Bud Fox.

It is primarily through their impact on and reception by audiences that films shape the societies from which they emerge. Yet audiences are not blank slates: to their engagement with a movie, viewers bring a whole cache of ideas, beliefs, and past experiences. Inasmuch as these are acquired and modified through life, they are conditioned to some extent by a particular historical context, in which any given life is situated. Americans came together with the movies reviewed above during the pivotal presidency of Ronald Reagan. At this time, economic well-being was increasingly seen as the burden of the individual. As noted in the introduction, Reagan himself promoted this perception, in direct opposition to the tradition of state activism for the alleviation of poverty. This fading paradigm, established by FDR, rested on an acknowledgement of social responsibility for poverty, utilizing government channels to fulfill that duty. The individualism on display in Rocky III, Silkwood, and Wall Street reflected and reinforced a trend towards denial of that responsibility. Rocky, perhaps, captured this attitude best, when he said, “Nobody owes nobody nothing. You owe yourself.”

Bibliography

Avildsen, John G, dir. Rocky. 1976; Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2004. DVD.

Berlin, Isaiah, Henry Hardy, and Ian Harris. Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Farber, Henry and Bruce Western. “Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Declining Union Organization.” British Journal of Industrial Relations 40, no. 3 (September 2002): 385-401.

Ho, Karen. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

Immerwahr, Daniel. “Growth vs. the Climate” Dissent, Spring 2015.

Jordan, Chris. Movies and the Reagan Presidency: Success and Ethics. Westport: Praeger, 2003.

Joppke, Christian. Mobilizing Against Nuclear Energy: A Comparison of Germany and the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

McCartin, Joseph.  Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Aircraft Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Nichols, Mike, dir. Silkwood. 1984; Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD.

Orleck, Annelise and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, eds. The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Reagan, Ronald. “First Inaugural Address.” Speech, Washington DC, January 20, 1981. The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/reagan1.asp

Richards, Lawrence. “Union Free and Proud: America’s Anti-Union Culture and the Decline of Organized Labor.” Dissertation. University of Virginia. 2004.

Stallone, Sylvester, dir. Rocky III. 1982; Santa Monica, CA: MGM.

Stone, Oliver, dir. Wall Street. 1987; New York, NY: Twentieth Century Fox. 

Tompkins, Jane P. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Wilentz, Sean. The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. 

Categories
Media, Wealth, & Poverty in Post-War America

Film Portrayals of Wealth and Poverty in Undocumented Immigration

Jared Brooks

Films produced in both Mexico and the United States have explored the concept of traveling to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant from both economic and social perspectives. The themes they addressed, similar to academic works on the history of undocumented migration, focused predominantly on community, economic opportunities, and the ways in which immigrant communities adjust to ideas about the American dream. Movies serve as one of the few means of diffusing key issues on wealth and poverty in undocumented immigration to transnational audiences. Films made through collaborations between production companies in the U.S. and Mexico such as Ya No Estoy Aquí (2019) and Sin Nombre (2009) have been provided to audiences via paid subscription streamers such as Netflix and Amazon. These films were then dubbed or subtitled in a variety of languages in attempts to make them accessible to wide audiences. Spanish-language films produced in the U.S. on undocumented immigration, such as El Norte (1983), also portrayed similar economic ideas about success which are interwoven with individuals in the films fleeing violence, poverty, and political strife. The films El Norte, Sin Nombre, and Ya No Estoy Aquí all swirl around the struggles of impoverished undocumented immigrants to make it in the United States. Each relies upon a rigid characterization of undocumented migrants as devoted to their hometowns, patiently absorbing economic exploitation, and attempting to reconcile economic exploitation with an unobtainable American dream.

Released to American Audiences in 1984, El Norte portrays a brother and sister traveling from Guatemala together to the United States. For many U.S. viewers, it was their first experience with a story of undocumented immigration from the perspective of those migrating. The plot of El Norte begins with Rosa and Enrique Xuncax, siblings in a Guatemalan Mayan family who encounter political violence in their village. The film focused specifically on tensions between the military government of Guatemala and laborers. Their father speaks to Enrique about the wealthy coming to Guatemala (though not specifying from where) and taking advantage of the land by exploiting the workers, who are treated as “just a pair of arms.” A military raid on the village leaves their father dead and mother arrested, and Rosa and Enrique, fearing for their own lives, decide they must flee Guatemala. Part two of the film focuses specifically on their travels through Mexico, encountering both helpful strangers and individuals critical of their Mayan heritage. Their economic situation also becomes harsher as they struggle to find the money for someone to smuggle them across the border. The third and final section of the film delves into the complexities that Enrique and Rosa discover as undocumented migrants in the United States, including issues of healthcare, employment, and the cost of living. In addition to its vivid cinematography, the enduring popularity of El Norte emerged from the pertinence of Rosa and Enrique’s experiences to every generation of undocumented communities. Both El Norte and Sin Nombre demonstrate the challenges to survive as an undocumented immigrant. Rosa, for example, dies from an infection she contracted after being afraid to go to a hospital and risk being deported to Guatemala. She works as long as she is able to, recalling the words of her mother: “they told us that in the north you could make a lot of money, but they never told us you had to spend so much.” The images of an idealized suburban home her neighbor described to her start to fade with the reality of wealth and poverty she begins to experience. 

The release of Sin Nombre by director Cary Fukunaga introduced American audiences to a unique hybrid of documentary and storyline on the relationship between a former gang member named Willy and a migrant woman from Honduras named Sayra. The interconnected themes between El Norte and Sin Nombre have been noted by Yajaira M. Padilla, demonstrating how both films address the issue of “Central American Non-belonging” experienced by immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to the United States. Director Fukunaga took a different approach towards Sin Nombre by following firsthand a train from southern Mexico towards the U.S. border, aptly nicknamed “the beast” by migrants who travel on it. Fukunaga intertwined his narrative of Willy and Sayra with the experiences of the migrants on the train and demonstrated a clear binary of wealth and poverty to U.S. audiences. The plot of Willie focuses on him fleeing from the gang he is involved in, Mara Salvatrucha, colloquially referred to as MS-13, a notorious gang with roots in both Los Angeles, California, and El Salvador. Sayra, on the same train, is leaving Honduras with several of her family members while she comes to befriend Willie. The fictional narrative of Sayra and Willie, filled with gang violence, robbery, a lack of food and water, and an economically unsustainable situation was complemented by the real experiences of both migrants and Mexican residents who live along the path of the beast; some of the residents ostracized the ‘poorer’ migrants from Central America, while others offered whatever wealth and resources they had to those traveling on the beast. The experiences of migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are portrayed in films as a synthesis of staying financially afloat while being subjected to a new transnational identity in Mexico, in which the entire nation becomes “an extended border zone.” 

For U.S. audiences, films such as El Norte and Sin Nombre were made by their writers and directors to challenge rhetoric towards migrant communities deemed as either unworthy of economic success or the creators of their own poverty. These films also attempted to dispel a certain trope; the idea that “America is upheld as a nation to be loved and coveted by immigrants, who, if good to America, will be loved in return.” Ultimately, “the road and the final destination are the very sites of the continuous re-inscription of hegemonic norms and not a liberation from them.”  The experiences of economic exploitation are not applicable solely to Central American migrants. Why then, was the film focus predominantly on undocumented immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala? Certain authors have provided insights into how these communities in the U.S. shape associations with wealth and poverty. The storylines from Central American migrants touched on the transnational significance of that journey when migrants arrive in the United States. At the time Sin Nombre was released to American audiences, 68% of Honduran immigrants living in the U.S. were undocumented. Beginning in the early 1990s, many migrants from El Salvador arrived as either undocumented immigrants or as refugees. With the influx of Salvadoran migrants to Los Angeles, California, much of the U.S. media rhetoric on both refugees and undocumented migrants associated these communities only with deportations, gang violence, and poverty. As Elana Zilberg argues, the rhetoric that intertwined undocumented migrants with deportation and poverty “treated poverty as an individual pathology rather than as a consequence of the socioeconomic exclusion immanent in the economic system itself.” Films such as Sin Nombre shifted the focus away from individual poverty pathology towards larger socioeconomic structures. In Sin Nombre, it was neither Sayra nor Willy who were responsible for their own poverty, but nor was it the person robbing them either. For U.S. audiences, the issue of who to blame for poverty became a complicated issue. What was certain was that, in each of these films, the individual was not to blame for situations that were portrayed as inevitable. Main characters had to, instead, undergo a shift in their own identities to adjust to surviving the American dream. Films like Sin Nombre displayed the relationship between wealth, poverty, and the development of “this new transnational identity” produced by the clashing of a triple-border crossing with what was supposed to be an American promise for economic opportunity. The transnational dynamics of migrants on ‘the beast’ force a renegotiation of identity as well, in which the least poor are the most powerful while instances of solidarity between various migrants on top of the train sharing food, praying, and talking with each other are occasional opportunities to bridge national and class divisions. 

The overview of wealth and poverty in the United States amongst undocumented immigrant communities normally did not include the physical crossing of the border itself. Of these three films, El Norte is the only film in which the actual crossing is a significant act. While the storyline of Sin Nombre focuses predominantly on the dynamics of wealth and poverty relative to both the travels of migrants and their arrival in the United States, Ya No Estoy Aquí delves into the life of a teenager from northern Mexico living undocumented in Queens, New York City. The film, made in Mexico by director Fernando Frías de la Parra and released to American audiences under the name “I’m No Longer Here,” provides a more immediate and direct context of what wealth and poverty look like for a teenager making attempts to reconcile his new life alone with his memories, hobbies, and family of his home in Monterrey. The story is about a seventeen-year-old named Ulises, who has to flee Monterrey after being caught in the middle of a violent misunderstanding between two rival gangs and putting his entire family at risk. He arrives in the United States, more secure of his physical safety but unsure of his ability to find work and be economically secure. The portrayals of Ulises, who attempts to bridge his economic challenges with his desire to return home, are expressed through his interactions with other Mexican and Colombian immigrants who offer words of advice. One of them, acknowledging his challenges, states “but in this country, you’re not the first nor the last.” Similar to instances from El Norte and Sin Nombre, this single phrase is interconnected with Yajaira M. Padilla’s description of being “subsumed within the ranks of an exploitable and invisible labor force” and Zilberg’s refutation of individual poverty pathology. 

For each main character in the films, they must ultimately choose between economic security and physical safety. Enrique, in El Norte, must decide between taking a well-paying job in Chicago or being with his sister in Los Angeles while she is gravely ill. Sayra contacts distant acquaintances in New Jersey to establish herself in the United States, but loses all of her company on the beast, including her friend Willie. Ulises, unable to achieve economic security and feeling isolated while living alone in Queens, ultimately returns to Monterrey despite the physical danger it puts him in. Not all undocumented immigration experiences involve this rigid dichotomy between physical and economical security. However, these films did attempt to make a clear argument to their audiences; economic exploitation and uncertainty could be as intimidating as instances of physical violence. The threats of economic instability are absorbed by characters such as Rosa, who has her view of well-kept lawns with sprinklers, waxed cars in a driveway, and the Good Housekeeping magazines of her godmother more gradually shattered while, simultaneously, the nostalgia of her hometown erodes away when she accepts she cannot return home as an accused political dissident. Ultimately, these characters are portrayed as either having to bend under the economic exploitation they endure or return to the hometowns they fled. The lived experiences of undocumented immigrants cannot always be reduced to that ultimatum. These films did portray how a lack of citizenship created fewer opportunities for economic security. They attempted to dispel the myth of individual poverty pathology that was projected onto undocumented immigrants, heavily popularized in the 1990s that blamed each individual migrant for their own economic problems. 

Bibliography:  

Ettinger, Patrick. Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882-1930. University of Texas Press: Austin, Texas (2009) 

Frías de la Parra, Fernando, dir. Ya No Estoy Aquí, 2019. Panorama Global, PPW Films, distributed through Netflix (2019). 

Fukunaga, Cary, dir. Sin Nombre, 2009; Mexico City, Mexico: Focus Features LLC.  

González, JesusÁngel. “New Frontiers for Post-Western Cinema: Frozen River, Sin Nombre, Winter’s Bone.” Western American Literature: A Journal of Literary, Cultural, and Place Studies. The University of Nebraska Press: Volume 50, Number 1, (Spring, 2015) 

Maciel, David. El Norte: The U.S.-Mexican Border in Contemporary Cinema. Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias. San Diego State University: San Diego, California (1990) 

Nava, Gregory, dir. El Norte. 1983; Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California, USA: PBS American Playhouse. Archived edition (2017) 

Oliviero, Katie E. “Sensational Nation and the Minutemen: Gendered Citizenship and Moral Vulnerabilities” Signs, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 679-706. The University of Chicago Press (2011) 

Padilla, Yajaira M. “Central American Non-belonging: Reading ‘El Norte’ in Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre. The Latin American Road Movie: Edited by Verónica Garibotto and Jorge Pérez. Palgrave Macmillan US (2016) 

Padilla, Yajaira M. “The Central American Transnational Imaginary: Defining the Transnational and Gendered Contours of Central American Immigrant Experience.” Latino Studies 11.2: pp.150-66 (2013) 

Zilberg, Elana. Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis Between Los Angeles and San Salvador. Duke University Press: Durham (2011) 

Select articles from The New York Times and The Washington Post attached below:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/movies/dreamers-undocumented-immigrants-hollywood.html

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/15/how-immigrants-come-to-be-seen-as-americans/tv-and-film-have-mixed-portrayals-of-immigrants

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/26/AR2006052600393.html

Categories
Media, Wealth, & Poverty in Post-War America

Race, Culture, and Dependency: American Media Portrayal of Israelis and Arabs in 1967

Cierra S. Bakhsh 

 When we see conversations about the Middle East on the news or in articles, the discussions are usually riddled with violence, terrorism, and fear. However, when we see Israel mentioned in the same broadcast content, we usually see positive reports, like business developments or diplomatic relations. Israel is at the heart of the Middle East, but why is its media attention and portrayal different than that of the rest of the Arab world? 

This juxtaposition is illuminated in the American media during the Six-Day War, fought between Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Major American newspaper outlets, like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post glorified Israel for winning. While American viewers saw the new, powerful role of Israel as a champion of the Middle East, the Palestinians and Arabs in the surrounding area were not portrayed as strong and successful, rather, they were portrayed as poor refugees who would come to be dependent on Israel. How do we explain this phenomenon? 

To do so, we must analyze how the American media portrayed Arabs and examine how these portrayals were possible. To do so, I will conduct a brief case study of articles from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. I will analyze two newspaper articles from each outlet written between June 8, 1967 to June 15, 1967, and illuminate how each article “others” the Arab. Discussion of the “other” is crucial here because it allows us to further understand the complexity of the varying portrayals. The type of “othering” that I will refer to will be one of racial and cultural differences as produced by poverty knowledge, and Edward Said’s theory on orientalism. Focusing on how Arabs were framed as “others” indicates that in the face of global wealth and poverty, American media sides with the global force that is aligned with itself.

Historical Background

Although the Arab region surrounding British-mandate Palestine was rocked with instability, its shakiness intensified in 1948 when Israel was officially declared and recognized as a state. As a result, the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts emerged. The conflicts have manifested into three major wars: the War of Independence, also known as the Nakba (1948), the Six-Day War (1967), and the Yom Kippur War (1973). Of these three wars, the Six-Day War was the most detrimental for the conflict – especially in regards to Palestinians and the surrounding Arab countries. In a military feat, Israel managed to annex the Golan Heights, West Bank, and Sinai Desert, thus expanding the Jewish state while disrupting the Arab states. This expansion and disruption was heavily reported in American print media, but the way that the Israelis and Arabs were portrayed were massively different. For example, the Israeli Defense Forces did not win the war through military triumph, but won through a U.N.-mandated ceasefire, requiring all sides to stop the violence. Since the Arab army was well-trained and responded well to Israeli attacks, this Arab strength was not portrayed in American print media, rather, they were portrayed as weak, poor, and dependent.

Poverty Knowledge and Orientalism

The differing depictions of Israelis and Arabs in the American media are attributed through the phenomenon of the “other”, where this Arab “othering” can be explained through poverty knowledge and orientalism.

Coined by historian Alice O’Connor, poverty knowledge is an academic concept where characteristics and behavior of impoverished groups are measured, which became “a project of twentieth-century liberalism, dating from the 1960s and the Great Society, but more deeply rooted in the rise of the new liberalism that enveloped European-American political culture”.  This “new liberalism” here refers to individual rights, such as free speech and religion, but the newest right here is: welfare. Studying the characteristics and behavior of the impoverished led poverty knowledge scientists to determine that welfare status was crucial in deciding what poverty was and how it could be measured. So when poverty scientists analyzed the groups that were on welfare and receiving assistance, they found that black Americans were the most dependent, giving poverty knowledge a racial component. O’Connor tells us that the “‘race problem’ within the black and white paradigm traced roots of racial inequality to a wide range of social and cultural disadvantages rooted in white prejudices, and embraced integration and assimilation as desirable social goals” – meaning that blacks were encouraged to assimilate into white society, but were unable to due to white cultural prejudices. Therefore, poverty knowledge is the study of poverty, but this study emphasizes that racial “others” are prone to being poor and dependent. 

What is the connection between the American study of poverty knowledge and Israeli-Arab media portrayals? First, the American black experience is not comparable to the Arab experience in American media, as the two groups are completely different and endure their own types of biases and prejudices. However, what connects the two groups – especially in the American sense – is that they are labeled as the “other”. In her book, Epic Encounters, historian Melani McAlister indicates that the Arab and black “othering” is quite similar. She tells us that when the Middle East was being discussed more in American media, many reporters and Americans struggled to define what an Arab is. Were Arabs considered white? Were Arabs considered black due the Middle East being geographically in Africa? Could Americans associate black Muslims with Arab Muslims?  Here, McAlister emphasizes the important yet ambiguous racial distinctions amongst Arabs and blacks, and that the struggle to effectively label Arabs made it easy for the American media to coin Arabs as another “other”, where the Arabs were a threat to Israeli wealth and success while blacks were a threat to American wealth and success. Therefore, McAlister emphasizes that the racial component of the “other” further allows for negative disparities to be made. 

The “other” is almost always portrayed negatively by American media because they do not align with what an American is supposed to be – they are not how an American looks, acts, and works. Although blacks and Arabs do not fit the American image, Israelis do. It is crucial to note though that not all Israelis are Jews, and many Jews are also considered as “others”. The difference between the othering of Jews and Arabs is that Jews are consistently portrayed with the rich, business-domineering stereotype, while Arabs came to be portrayed with a poor, degenerate stereotype. The American media seemed to have associated  Israeli identity with the common, yet misconstrued stereotype that Jews are rich and successful, and the media did so by latching on to Israeli cultural familiarity. American media felt comfortable reporting on Israel because Israeli culture and politics provided a sense of familiarity, while Arab politics and culture were completely foreign and “other”. Many Israelis spoke English, making it easier for Americans to report on Israeli news and politics, while the surrounding Arabs spoke Arabic, making it difficult for an English-speaking American reporter. Many Israelis even looked familiar to Americans – most of them have European heritage and look like a large component of Americans, while Arabs look different, with darker skin and hair, and features. Here, the racial component kicks in because not only are Arabs “others” for some Israelis, they are “others” for Americans.

The key term here is “familiarity”. Since Israelis were portrayed as familiar to Americans, it was easy to “other” the Arabs, but we can understand this lack of familiarity through Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said’s theory on orientalism states that orientalism is a way of seeing that distorts how the West understands and portrays the East, also known as the Orient. The east consists of the Middle East and Asia, and western cultures associate Oriental peoples as being exotic, backwards, and uncivilized, where this view has a long tradition of being the lens that the Middle East is seen through. Therefore, the common representation of Arabs was that although they looked and acted in a certain spectacular, exotic way, their looks and attitudes were attributed to their backwardness. This “backwards” association with Arabs immediately “others”  them from the modern Israeli. Western cultures, like Israeli and American, associate backwardness with barbarity and dependency, and this dependency further emphasizes the racial and cultural differences between Arabs and Israelis. The unfamiliar, “other” Arab came to be dependent on the modern, innovative Israeli, thus depending on Israel to become more progressive. Essentially, orientalism confirms the view that since Arabs were seen as backwards, they were also seen as poor and dependent. 

Therefore, this backwards association with Arabs – in conjunction with the understanding of poverty knowledge – allows us to see how simple it was for the American media to designate Arabs as poor and dependent. Arabs were historically viewed as uncivilized and backwards, and with the familiarity of Israeli culture to Americans, it was essentially easy for the American media to further push and adopt this portrayal, and we see this portrayal in newspaper articles from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. 

The “Other” Arab in American Newspaper Outlets

For this brief case study, I will demonstrate how these six articles, two each from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post respectively, display how Arabs were depicted as the “other” through poverty knowledge and orientalism. Of the two articles each from the three newspaper outlets, one article discusses the refugee problem caused by the Six-Day War and the other discusses how the Arabs lost the war. The articles discussing the refugee problem are a direct application of how poverty knowledge creates the poor, dependent, racially different Arab, and the articles discussing the Arab military loss exemplify orientalism’s contention of the backwards Arab.

The three articles dealing with the refugee problem are the NYT’s Arab Refugees Moving into Jordan by Dana Schmidt, the LAT’s Arab Refugees Stream into a Reluctant Jordan by Ray Moseley and Joseph Grigg, and the WP’s Refugee Relief. All three articles focus on the same problem, which is that Palestinians displaced from their homes amidst the Six-Day War have become refugees, where they moved quickly into Jordan. Each article indicates that Jordan was reluctant to accept these refugees, but each differs in how they describe aid to the refugees. In Schmidt’s NYT article, she indicates that although Jordanians were reluctant to accept refugees, the Israeli Defense Forces supplied buses to transport thousands of refugees into neighboring Jordan, or else they would have no other mode of transportation there. Therefore, Schmidt indicates that the refugees have become dependent on the IDF for movement – something that should be done freely, but the refugees were so poor and so lost that they needed external assistance.

Moseley and Grigg’s LAT article mirrors the same concern as Schmidt where Jordanians were reluctant to accept refugees, but the two indicate that the IDF have been air-lifting food and water to Palestinian refugees and surrounding Arab communities affected by the war. The two also emphasize that “Uncle Sam will pay most of the bills since the Arab refugee relief work is handled by the U.S.-financed U.N. Relief and Works Agency”, telling us that not only do these Arab refugees depend on the IDF for necessities, they depend on the U.S. and U.N. funding to cover their costs – insinuating a type of welfare-based relationship.

The welfare-based relationship between the U.S. and the refugees is also discussed in the WP’s Refugee Relief. The unnamed author states that “The immediate welfare of the refugees is a problem of a quite different magnitude from their eventual settlement” and that “Washington must treat its relief contributions as a temporary palliative and not a permanent role”. Here, the author tells us that although Washington must provide welfare to Arab refugees, this welfare must not be a permanent endeavor, as permanent welfare could encourage further dependency.

In each of these articles, the theme of the dependent Arab is prevalent. In the NYT piece, we are told that the refugees depended on the IDF for buses to travel to Jordan, in the LAT piece, we see that the U.S. is obligated to support the refugees, and in the WP piece, American welfare to the refugees is required but must not be extended. All three articles highlight the trope of the poor, dependent Arab who needed external forces like the IDF and the U.S. to function. It is significant to note that in each article, the refugees are referred to as Arab refugees although they are clear Palestinian refugees. The journalists in each of these pieces did not differentiate between Palestinian and Arab, and compiled the various Palestinian refugees into one general Arab refugee group. This simplifying of the refugees generalizes the wider Arab refugee group, which comprises Syrians, Egyptians, and Jordanians, and associates the wider group with being poor and dependent, thus expanding the portrayal of the poor, dependent Arab. Therefore, not only are Palestinian refugees viewed as dependent, the wider Arab refugee group is viewed the same way. Here, poverty knowledge’s welfare and racial component is evident and cooperative because Arab refugees, racially different than IDF soldiers and American aid providers, were dependent on these groups.

In the remaining articles, orientalist attitudes are apparent. These articles are NYT’s Why Israel Prevailed: Her Spirit and Modern Organization are Contrasted with Arab Feudalism by Hanson Baldwin, LAT’s Israel Insists She Will Win the War, and the WP’s Israel to Hold Sinai Until It’s Assured of No Blockades. These three articles discuss Israel’s military feat in the Six-Day War while emphasizing that their military prowess overpowered the backwards, old-fashioned Arab armies. In each article, we not only see poverty knowledge’s making of the poor, dependent Arab but we see orientalism’s confirmation of the backwards Arab. In Baldwin’s NYT article, he outlines the military triumph of the Israeli army over the Arab army. He explains that the Israeli army is modern and well-organized, which led to their win, while the Arab army was stuck on feudalism and disorganization. He makes the effort to explain that when the Egyptian army was British-trained in the 1940’s, it was strong and powerful, but when Nasser claimed presidency in the 1950’s and instituted socialism, the Egyptian military went downhill, thus giving the Israeli military the upper hand. Here, Baldwin demonstrates that the aggressor is the Egyptian military which was stuck on “feudalism”. Feudalism is a system of land ownership where a king, or in this case, Nasser, controlled all of the land, but dispersed it to those who fought for him, a.k.a., the Egyptian military. Baldwin’s referral to Nasser’s Egyptian army as feudalistic degrades the Egyptian army, pushing it back into the middle ages while the Israeli army soared as a modern archetype. Here, orientalism is evident because the Egyptians and wider Arab army are spoken about as backwards and weak, and dependent on the Israeli military as a new model.

The LAT article reflects the same idea of the backwards Arab. In this article, by an unnamed author, it is emphasized that the Six-Day War was strictly for Israelis to claim and enforce their new rule in the Middle East. The article states that the war was fought so that the surrounding Arabs could “…recognize Israel’s permanent existence…[and enforce] security against the Arab guerilla raids that helped bring about the war”. Here, the article illuminates the Arab refusal to accept Israel as a new state, assuming that Arabs needed to attack and wage a war to fight against this new, emerging power. Although it is not as overt as the previous article, traces of orientalism are present here because the article contends that Arabs cannot fight against or accept the new direction that the Middle East is headed in terms of Israeli politics and culture. Since Arabs cannot accept this move forward, they are stuck in the past – fighting a war to ensure their place in the past is untouched.

The WP’s Israel to Hold Sinai Until It’s Assured of No Blockades combines the concerns of the NYT and LAT articles while managing to uphold the trope of the backwards Arab. In this article, with an unnamed author, Arab military actions are highlighted. In regards to the Arab military, the article makes sure to emphasize that during the war, members of the Syrian army shelled down Palestinian villages in the West Bank, where the Syrian army was ruthless enough to attack their own fellow Arabs – emphasizing the uncivil Arab. The article tells us that some Arabs donated blood and raised funds for the IDF, while the IDF ensured that all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, holding refugee status or not, was being supplied well with aid and proper food – also emphasizing the backwards Arab because these Palestinians were so out of touch with the new reality, that they depended on the IDF and UN aid for help, which also emphasizes poverty knowledge’s dependency creation. This article’s two contentions of the backwards Arab, whether we look at how the Syrian army attacked Palestinian villages or how Palestinian refugees and non-refugees accepted western aid, displays how easily Arabs are framed as backwards and un-modern.

Clearly, each of these articles accentuates how Arabs were portrayed as backwards and uncivil. Baldwin’s NYT article blatantly calls the Egyptian army “feudal”, indicating that they were so backwards that their military strategies were medieval, the LAT article emphasizes how Arabs were reluctant to accept the new direction of the Middle East, and the WP article affirms the Arab army’s uncivil belligerency and dependence on Israelis and other western aid. It is crucial to note that in each of these articles, the IDF or Israelis were never to blame for the war. Each article confirms the Arab as the violent aggressor while the IDF fought back to maintain their country’s safety, although Israel’s national agenda was to expand. Essentially, it was easy for the American media to pin the Arab as the aggressor because since they were already traditionally viewed as backwards, uncivil, and sometimes barbaric, it was impossible to portray the modern, American-associated Israeli as the aggressor.

Conclusion

This phenomenon of the Arab “other” in American media did not end with the Six-Day War though, rather – the negative portrayals just began. The decades after the Six-Day War marked turmoil in the Middle East, with the Yom Kippur War (1973), Gulf War (1990), and most recently, the War on Terror (2001). With continued unrest in the Middle East, American media, such as news broadcasts and popular media, like television shows and movies, continued to propagate twisted views of Arabs. For example, when Saudi Arabia was developing its oil refineries and establishing itself as one of the richest countries in the world, documentaries were premiered that showcased Saudis, especially Saudi women, as poor, veiled, and oppressed – instilling feelings of fear about Saudi Arabia to lessen its appeal to Americans. Instilling fear in American audiences continued with television shows, like Looney Tunes’ Ali Baba Bunny, where Bugs Bunny escapes from a barrel of boiling oil owned by an Arab sultan. This cartoon short indicates that oil-money Arabs are vile, doing whatever it takes for one to not steal their riches. Essentially, the negative news media allowed popular media to adopt the same trope of the “other”, and now violent Arab, and popular media reached a far wider audience, further perpetuating this view. Therefore, this continued cynical portrayal of Arabs tells us that in relation to wealth and poverty, the American media will degrade other national identities and their strengths in order to uphold America’s image as the world’s richest, most powerful nation – although that may not be the case.

Through O’Connor’s poverty knowledge and applying Said’s theory of orientalism, we see how Arabs were designated as the “other” through racial, cultural, and historical lenses, and these lenses indicate that American media portrayals usually have complex racial elements. Race in American media is used as a separator and distinguisher, and when race is combined with cultural and economic facets, the three help perpetuate the victimized, “other” aggressor. 

Ultimately, from 1967 onward, the American media’s juxtaposed portrayal of Israelis and Arabs was detrimental. Israel’s achievements were always highlighted, while Arab achievements like military development and developing oil refineries, were pushed under the rug. It seems as if the American media sought to ensure to Americans that Arabs were backwards and not aligned with America’s forward, modern mentality. Therefore, American media’s sharp distinction between Israeli and Arab portrayals succeeded through “othering” the Arab. The concept of the “other” is a complicated, complex one, but for the purposes of this blog, it is crucial to analyze and understand how racial and cultural components work together to convey a sense of otherness in order to maintain a public image. 

Bibliography

Ashcroft, William. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Routledge, 1994.

McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945. University of California Press, 2007. 

Ghareeb, Edmund, Peter Jennings, Ronald Koven, James McCartney, Lee Eggerstrom, and Marilyn Robinson. “The American Media and the Palestine Problem.” Journal of Palestine Studies 5, no. 1/2 (1975): 127-49. Accessed January 3, 2021. doi:10.2307/2535687.

GOODMAN, MICAH. CATCH-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-day War. YALE UNIVERSITY Press, 2019.

Ibrahim, Dina. “The Middle East in American Media: A 20th-Century Overview.” International Communication Gazette 71, no. 6 (October 2009): 511–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048509339793.

O’Connor, Alice. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History. Princeton University Press, 2009.

Shaheen, Jack G. “Media Coverage of the Middle East: Perception and Foreign Policy.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 482 (1985): 160-75. Accessed January 3, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1046388.

Categories
Golden Age Hollywood

Representations of Wealth & Poverty in Depression-Era Hollywood

By Nora Thomas

For this podcast, I spoke with Dr. Jacqueline Reich, a Communications professor at Fordham University specializing in Film History, Star Studies, and Italian and Italian-American Cinema. My survey of Depression-Era films included:

The Public Enemy (1931)

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

She Done Him Wrong (1933)

It Happened One Night (1934)

My Man Godfrey (1936)

Modern Times (1936)

Stella Dallas (1937)

Holiday (1938)

Depression-Era-FilmDownload

Works Cited:

Bergman, Andrew. We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films. New York: New York University Press, 1971.

Cohen, Harvey G. Who’s in the Money? : The Great Depression Musicals and Hollywood’s New Deal. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.

Horak, Laura. “Modernity, Sexuality, Cinema: Early Twentieth Century Transformations,” in Modernities and Moderization in North America, ed. by Ilka Brasch and Ruth Mayer. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019.

Sharot, Stephen. “Social class in female star personas and the cross-class romance formula in Depression-era America.” Screen. 2015, Vol. 56, No. 2., pp. 172-194.

Sharot, Stephen. “Wealth and/or Love: Class and Gender in the Cross-class Romance Films of the Great Depression.” Journal of American Studies. February 2013, Vol. 47, No. 1., pp. 89-108.

Shurlock, Geoffrey. “The Motion Picture Production Code,” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Vol. 254, 1947. pp. 140-146.

Verba, Sidney and Kay Lehman Schlozman. “Unemployment, Class Consciousness, and Radical Politics: What Didn’t Happen in the Thirties.” The Journal of Politics. May 1977, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 291-323.

Jacqueline Reich. Interview with the author. December 10th, 2020.

Categories
Contemporary Television

Depictions of the Working Class

By Morgan Williams

Description:

In this video, I take a look at three post 2000’s shows that depict working class families and individuals. The shows analyzed include: The Middle which centers on a nuclear lower middle-class family that lives in a small suburb in Indiana, Shameless which centers on a family trying to survive in the Southside of Chicago with neither of their parents around, and The Chi which centers on multiple characters and families in the Southside of Chicago just trying to get by and make something of themselves. In this video, I discuss the overarching theme that these shows tell their viewers which is that the working class struggles hard but also works hard to get out from behind. With the use of clips from the shows and interviews, I support my argument about what TV tells us about the working class.

References:

DeAnn Heline – a TV writer of Roseanne and writer/creator of The Middle 

Jim Jennewein – a TV/Film writer and professor at Fordham UniversityKendall, Diana Elizabeth. Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America. Rowman & Littlefield, 2011.

css.php