Course Introduction / Americanism and Mass Cultural Emergence

I. Introduction

A. Discussion of requirements, course format, online syllabus

B. Basic overview of course topics, themes, and readings

1. Paper syllabus is a draft

2. Please always refer to online syllabus for up-to-date course information

II. Americanism and Mass Cultural Emergence

A. Today: D.W. Griffith, the film industry, and backward-looking perspectives on Americanism

B. Wed: African-Americans, Americanism, and the Harlem Renaissance

III. Contests over American Identity in the Early Twentieth Century

A. Rapid change produces uncertainty about American identity

B. Conflicts emerge

1. nativists promote expulsion or assimilation

2. ethnic groups elaborate their own subcultures in dialogue with established American traditions

C. Conflicts pronounced in 1910s

1. significance of World War I

a. heightens nationalist sentiment of certain ethnic groups

b. raises question of American loyalty and pride

2. concepts of "Americanism" and "un-Americanism" come into popular use

D. Debate over the meaning of "Americanism"

1. Should American identity look backward to a coherent, Anglo-Saxon past?

2. Or should it look forward to a future made partly by African Americans, new immigrants, and other racial groups?

E. Effort to enforce assimilationist model of American identity is evident in a variety of cultural contexts, including popular film

IV. Motion Picture Industry

A. Early movies reflected tastes and experiences of immigrants

B. Motion picture reform inspired partly by desire to reshape immigrant, working-class life

C. Also inspired by desire to make movies marketable to a national, middle-class market

D. Resulting changes in the motion picture industry

1. censorship

2. shift from nickel-dumps to respectable downtown theaters

3. shift from movie shorts centering on immigrant themes to feature-length films centering on middle-class themes

E. Reformers see changing context and content of motion pictures as a way of reforming immigrant, working-class life

V. D.W. Griffith and Motion Picture Reform

A. Griffith's vision of American identity is distinctly backward-looking

B. Biographical context

1. from the South

2. father a former slaveholder, mother religiously devout

C. Griffith: cinematic genius and moral crusader

1. combined various cinematic innovations to produce Birth of a Nation

2. saw motion pictures as powerful medium for enforcing white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant values

D. Birth of a Nation controversial

1. breakthrough in reaching white, middle-class audience

2. film's popularity reflects complexity of American identity

V. Conclusion: Think about the racial accents of Griffith's representation of American nationhood as you read The New Negro this week.

Passages
The motion picture is a tremendous uplifting force whose power is not yet measured. Shall we be challenged when we assert that it is the language of democracy which reaches all strata of the population and welds them together? Can it not be made to bring all degrees of people into a coordinated organism, working in harmony for the greater things of the world? -Comment in praise of Griffith's work (1910s)

Stronger and stronger came to me the traditions I had learned as a child, all that my father had told me. That sword I told you about became a flashing vision. Gradually came back to my memory the stories one Thurston Griffith had told me of the Ku Klux Klan and the regional impulse that comes to men from the earth where they had their beings stirred. It had all the decisive emotionalism of the highest patriotic sentiment. -D.W. Griffith, on Birth of a Nation