Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  VC Fan scrapbooks compiled by Edna G. Vercoe, MHL

  PROLOGUE I. LANDSCAPES

  1. In 1920, the U.S. Census revealed that more than half of Americans lived in cities, defined as settlements with more than 2,500 people. It also revealed the nation contained sixty-eight cities of 100,000 persons or more. See Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 189. The inflow of “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe peaked in 1907, then hovered above 650,000 until World War I. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 159. See David Ward, Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 56. On the migration of black southerners, see James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995). Cities include the country’s largest: New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. See the federal census tables in Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 75–83.

  2. William Hays, “The Organization of Country Life,” in Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Session of the Farmers’ National Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), 140. On the rural problem, see Katherine Hempstead, “Agricultural Change and the Rural Problem” (Ph.D. diss. University of Pennsylvania, 1992); William L. Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America, 1900–1920 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1974). In 1926, the American Country Life president conceded that “agricultural movements have been distinctively masculine”; quoted in Janet Galligani Casey, “ ‘This Is Your Magazine’: Domesticity, Agrarianism, and the Farmer’s Wife,” American Periodicals 14.2 (2004): 179. See also Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis, 78–79; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 158–160. On the constitution of whiteness, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  3. Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Pastoral, 1769–1848 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1888), 360. According to the 1910 census, LA’s population of 319,198 was augmented by approximately 150,000 tourists. Cited in Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 159. On the early myth-making of Southern California, I am especially indebted to Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 54–74, 75–98; Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York: Sloan and Pierce, 1946), 113–164; David Fine, Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000). On boosting, see also Denise McKenna, “The City That Made the Pictures Move: Gender, Labor, and the Film Industry in Los Angeles, 1908–1917” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2008), ch. 1; William Issel, “Citizens outside of the Government: Business and Urban Policy in San Francisco and Los Angeles, 1890–1932,” Pacific Historical Review 62.2 (May 1988): 117–139. On Ramona, see Dydia DeLyser, Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). On the rivalry between Northern and Southern California, see Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910–1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1–22. On how LA celebrated a Spanish rather than Mexican history, see William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

  4. Lummis quoted in Starr, Inventing the Dream, 89, 45. On the creation of the city’s racialized imaginary, see also George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican America; Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1910–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Alexander McClung, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). On single-family homes, see Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 142–152; on “Spanish” architecture, see Starr, Inventing the Dream, 41–42, 65–68, 78. Between 1900 and 1920, 60% of migrants were between the ages of 25 and 44; by 1920 the largest nativity group in California was native-born migrants of mid-American origin; see Warren S. Thompson, Growth and Changes in California’s Population, (Los Angeles: Haynes Foundation, 1955), 16–17, 47–51, 53–65; Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 69.

  5. When addressed, Hollywood’s influence is reduced to assessing admittedly important founding fathers, including D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, Adolph Zukor, the Warner brothers, and Thomas Ince. See Starr, Inventing the Dream, chs. 8–9; Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Doubleday, 1988); David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), ch. 1.

  6. Willard Huntington Wright, “Los Angeles—The Chemically Pure,” in Burton Rascoe and Groff Conklin, eds., The Smart Set Anthology (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934 [1913]), 90–102. Both “movie” and “flicker” were early terms that lost favor during the late teens. See Jesse Lasky, with Don Weldon, “The Flickers Become Respectable,” in I Blow My Own Horn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), 112–120; Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture through 1925 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954 [1926]), 550–552; Lillian Gish, Dorothy and Lillian Gish (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), 60.

  7. “A Visit to Movieland, the Film Capital of the World—Los Angeles,” The Forum 63 (Jan. 1920): 17–29 (available at American Periodical Series Online, via ProQuest [hereinafter, APS]).

  8. Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 18, 22–26, 151–155. Months after beginning publishing in 1907, Moving Picture World, the first periodical devoted entirely to the business of pictures, estimated that between 2,500 and 3,000 nickelodeons existed; a year later an Oakland newspaper put the total at 8,000. See, ibid., 4. For one “conservative” estimate of a 26 million weekly in attendance in 1910, see Russell Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theatres, 1905–14,” in Tino Balio, ed., The American Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 86. On the role that audience demand played, see Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). On how the new director-centered mode of production arose in part as a means to rationalize production to satisfy this demand, see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 121–122. On the industry’s shift to fictional “story” films, see Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 53–55; and Robert C. Allen, Vaudeville and Film, 1895–1915 (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 127–128, 212–213. Allen’s analysis of copyrighted titles found a dramatic shift to fictional narratives from 1907 to 1908. Copyrighted titles of sport, travel, and documentary shorts along with news-reels comprised 86.9% of production before 1906; by 1908 the production of dramatic story films had risen from 17% to 66%.

  9. “A Visit to Movieland,” 17–29. Early producers describe the lure of cheap land, weather, and scenery; see Adolph Zukor, with Dale Kramer, The Public Is Never Wrong (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1953), 100–103; Lasky, I Blow My Own Horn, 94–96, 122; Cecil B. DeMille, The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille, ed. Donald Hayne (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959), 77–81; Mack Sennett, with Cameron Shipp, King of Comedy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), 63–64. Moving Picture World quoted in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 122. Selig quoted in Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 122. On Selig’s early trip, see Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 532–542; Kenneth MacGowan, Behind the Screen (New York: Dell, 1965), 138–139; Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (New
York: Vintage, 1976), 67.

  10. On LA’s transportation system, see Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 85–94. On the city’s reputation as a bastion of the open shop, see Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes: The Unionization of Hollywood (New York: AMS Press, 1967 [1942]); Louis B. Perry and Richard S. Perry, A History of the Los Angeles Labor Movement, 1911–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 16–21, 23, 30, 37–38, 73–75; Laurie Pintar, “Behind the Scenes,” in Tom Sitton and William Deverell, eds., Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 319–324. On the industry’s growth, see Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Picture Feature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 17–19, 102–104.

  11. On the industry’s economic relationship to Los Angeles and California, see Starr, Material Dreams, 98. To live in “health and decency” in 1923, a family of five had to earn between $1,500 and $1,700. More than half of American families failed to earn this amount in the 1920s; see Winifred Wandersee, Women’s Work and Family Values, 1920–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 10–11. In the 1920s the average annual wage of female clerical workers was less than $1,200, and saleswomen earned between $688 and $1,085; see Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), 115–116. The claim that the film industry had become the fourth or fifth largest was common by the early twenties. See Exhibitors Herald (Oct. 22, 1921): 41; “The ‘Movie’ as an Industry,” Literary Digest (Oct. 16, 1917): 55; “The Jazzy, Money-Mad Spot Where Movies Are Made,” Literary Digest (Mar. 6, 1921): 71–72, 75; “Film-Making Means Millions to Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 1, 1916; “Real Estate Conditions in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 2, 1921, p. 16; “Cinema Factor in City’s Wealth,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 17, 1921, pt. II, p. 11. (All Los Angeles Times articles cited in this note were accessed through ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Unless otherwise noted, all other newspapers and periodicals were viewed on microfilm or in bound volumes.) Recent work suggests these claims were inflated; see Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 91–94. Others argue they are true when capital investment in theaters and the American industry’s virtual domination of European markets after the war are included; see Richard Maltby and Ian Craven, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 60; Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 14–15.

  12. “In the Capital of Movie-Land,” Literary Digest (Nov. 10, 1917): 82–89. “El Dorado”: in “Confessions of a Motion Picture Press Agent,” The Independent, Aug. 24, 1918 (APS); “Chameleon City of the Cinema,” from Strand Magazine, Washington Post, June 20, 1915 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers). Rufus Steele, “In the Sun Spot,” Sunset (April 1915): 699; “The Romance of Making the ‘Movies,’ ” Literary Digest (Oct. 23, 1915): 90–93; “The ‘Movie’ as an Industry,” Literary Digest (Oct. 16, 1917): 55–62; John Bruce Mitchell, “A ‘Close-Up’ of California,” The Forum (April–May 1920) 474 (APS).

  13. “For men,” in Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 6. For those who argue that audiences were primarily working-class men, see Joseph H. North, The Early Development of the Motion Picture, 1887–1909 (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 239; Sklar, Movie-Made America, 3, 14–20, Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Ben Singer, “Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors,” Cinema Journal 35.3 (1996): 3–35; Ben Singer, “Manhattan Melodrama,” Cinema Journal 36.4 (1997): 107–112; David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 174–178. For revisionists who challenge this class orientation, see Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theatres,” 59–79; Robert C. Allen, “Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan, 1906–12,” Cinema Journal 18.2 (1979): 2–15; Robert C. Allen, “Manhattan Myopia; or Oh! Iowa!” Cinema Journal 35.3 (1996): 75–103; Sumiko Higashi, “Dialogue: Manhattan Nickelodeons,” Cinema Journal 35.3 (1996): 72–73; Judith Thissen, “Oy, Myopia!” Cinema Journal 36.4 (1997): 107–117. For the most recent, and possibly romantic, view of American film as a medium that betrayed its early working-class orientation, see Steven Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). An interesting exception that attempts to balance the impact of ethnic, class, and gender conflicts and social change is Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 21; Barry quoted at 26.

  14. Iris Barry quoted in Antonia Lant, with Ingrid Periz, eds., Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema (London: Verso, 2006), 26. On the audience for westerns, see Andrew Brodie Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Westerns, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood (Denver: University of Colorado Press, 2004). The definitive survey of the silent era argues that adults deserted the Western en masse after 1915, leading it to become a cheap “B” category of films that were so degraded by the 1920s that they “were the only genre segregated from the balance of studio’s production.” See Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment, 182–183, 288–290. For a contemporary’s view, see Randolph Bartlett, “Where Do We Ride from Here?” Photoplay (February 1919): 36–37, 109. On the not fully realized attempts of slapstick to shed its association as vulgar working-class entertainment aimed at children and men, see Rob King, The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 174–177. On the limitations imposed on women by Griffith’s insistence on traditional melodramas, see for instance Mary Pickford’s view of Griffith in Kevin Brownlow, Mary Pickford Rediscovered (New York: Abrams, 1999), 67. Here I have in mind the idea that “the social imaginary . . . is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of society” Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14 (Winter 2002): 90.

  15. “The Close-up,” New York Times, Dec. 29, 1918, p. 61. Margaret Turnbull, The Close-Up (New York, 1918), 1, 35, 64, 80, 222. On Margaret Turnbull, see “Notes Written on the Screen,” New York Times, Jan. 24, 1915, p. 8; “The Marriage Problem,” Atlanta Constitution, March 10, 1927, p. 9; and “Miss M. Turnbull, Author, Scenarist,” New York Times, June 13, 1942, p. 15. From 1910 through 1930, women wrote between a quarter and half of all screenplays. See Lizzie Francke, Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 1994), ch. 1. On the culture of screen-writing, see Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Wendy Holliday, “Hollywood's Modern Women: Screenwriting, Work Culture, and Feminism, 1910–1940” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1995). “The Romance of Making the ‘Movies,’”. On “brains,” see for instance the caption under Norma Talmadge's photograph, “In and Out of Focus: Norma Talmadge,” Feb. 2, 1919, Louella Parsons Scrapbook no. 3, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills (hereinafter Parsons Scrapbook no. 3, MHL). These professionally compiled press books contain the majority of what she wrote; I read those from 1915 to 1922. Novels in which ambitious women flourished in the movie industry were written by some of the most popular authors of the day, including B.M. Bower, The Quirt (Boston, 1920); Henry Kitchell Webster, Real Life: Into Which Miss Leda Swan of Hollywood Makes an Adventurous Excursion (Indianapolis, 1921); Rupert Hughes, Souls for Sale (New York, 1922); Louis Joseph Vance, Linda Lee Inc. (New York, 1922); and Harry Leon Wilson, Merton of the Movies (New York, 1922). Negative tales include Nina Putnam, Laughter Limited (New York, 1923), and Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Girl from Hollywood (New York, 1923).

  16. Horace Greeley quoted in Thomas Fuller, “'Go West, young man!'�
��An Elusive Slogan,” Indiana Magazine of History 100 (2004): 238. Coy F. Cross, Go West, Young Man! Horace Greeley's Vision for America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); William Deverell, “To Loosen the Safety Valve: Eastern Workers in Western Lands,” Western Historical Quarterly 19 (1988), 269–285. On population imbalance, see Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), ch. 2. On the reversal of western migration patterns, see Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 418. On the defeminization of the Midwest, see Bengt Ankarloo, “Agriculture and Women's Work: Directions of Change in the West, 1700–1900,” Journal of Family History 4 (Summer 1979): 111–120; Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 8–14; and Joan Jensen, “I'd Rather Be Dancing: Wisconsin Women Moving On,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22.1 (2001): 1–20. On the West's relationship to modern manhood, see G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), chs. 10–11; Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau-Hagen, Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–24. For a focus on the iconicity of western women, see Renee M. Laegreid, Riding Pretty: Rodeo Royalty and the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).

  17. On New Women see, Lois Rudnick, “The New Woman,” in Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick, eds., 1915, the Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 68–91; Estelle Freedman, “The New Woman,” Journal of American History 61 (1974): 372–393; Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Susan Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000). Much has been written on Victorian middle-class sexual ideology; here I follow Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 2 (1966), 151–174; Nancy Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology,” Signs 21 (1978), 219–236; Ellen Carol DuBois and Linda Gordon, “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century Feminist Thought,” Feminist Studies (Spring 1983): 7–25. On the shift in women's wage-earning in the early twentieth century, see Alice Kessler-Harris, Out To Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford, 1982), ch.5; Meyerowitz, Women Adrift, ch.1; On how the city's commercial entertainment industries transformed the pleasure-seeking habits of young women at the turn of the century, see Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will, 197–198, 202; Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985), 208–224; Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the- Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 105–177; Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 60–126.