TY - JOUR
AU - Hefner, Brooks, E
AB - Abstract Although film critics were declaring the end of the Western in the early 1920s, the transition of the genre into epic modes in The Covered Wagon (Robert Cruze, 1923) and The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924) reinvigorated the Western with a focus on large-scale entertainment and grand narratives about nation building. Both films debuted during an extreme period of US nativism, when politicians like Albert Johnson ushered in new legislation to the stop the ‘foreign-born flood’ that threatened to undermine ‘the institutions which have made and preserved American liberties’. In this essay I argue that these Westerns – produced as the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 was being debated and, ultimately, passed – respond to nativist, anti-immigrant ideology in radically different ways. In so doing, each of these two films works to mould the Western genre itself around new epic forms, layering melodramatic individual narratives over broader national history. The oscillation between narrative foreground and background is mirrored by a system of visual information that reinforces the films’ notion of American history and identity. In both cases, contemporary reviewers and audiences latched onto the complex politics of these pioneering Western epics. While The Covered Wagon emphasized a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon ‘blood of the pioneers’, The Iron Horse presented a multiethnic vision of American labour in service of national reconstruction. Rooted in contemporaneous 1920s debates about American identity, American labour, nativist politics, and immigration, these competing perspectives demonstrate both the flexibility of the Western genre and its ability to offer forms of cultural resistance. Audiences of the early 1920s might easily have imagined that the Western genre was about to disappear from their screens forever. This was not the first time that critics had proclaimed the genre had run out of ideas – that had happened around 1911, when trade papers like The Nickelodeon and the Motion Picture World touted ‘The passing of the Western subject’ or ‘The overproduction of “Western pictures”’.1 During the rest of the 1910s, however, the genre gained steam, first through the success of ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson’s two-reelers and then largely on the appeal of the features of William S. Hart, whose moralistic tales of the ‘good bad man’, the outlaw reformed by the power of a good Christian woman, dominated Western cinema in the latter part of the decade.2 As the popularity of Hart’s typically conservative films began to wane at the beginning of the 1920s, the genre started to move away from big-budget pictures and became associated with ‘rural and small-town audiences’, as it migrated to the juvenile market with frenetic B-picture stars like Tom Mix, Buck Jones and Hoot Gibson.3 Despite this shift it would take until the early 1930s for the serious, A-picture Western to disappear – however briefly – from the big-budget Hollywood studio system. In the early 1920s the genre found a kind of rebirth through the confluence of two elements, one formal and the other ideological. The genre’s formal transformation derived from an infusion of epic cinematic techniques, and in this sense it became bigger in scope and vision, telling stories not about individual outlaws facing moral crises but about national history and identity. At the same time it intervened in new and interesting ways in contemporaneous debates about the very definition of American national identity at a moment of extreme xenophobia and nativism. The epic cycle of the silent Western, beginning with James Cruze’s wildly popular The Covered Wagon (1923), dominated the cinema in the mid 1920s. John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924) nearly matched the success of Cruze’s film, and a number of imitators followed into the beginning of the sound era, each film seizing on a particular moment of historical importance or crisis of American identity.4 After years of Westerns geared towards small-town audiences and celebrating cowboy stunts, these films brought a new seriousness and significance to the genre, mining the history of the American West for stories that could rival the grandeur and spectacle of Hollywood epics like D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and international sensations like Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914). Despite their importance in the history of the Western and the history of film – they were among the most successful films of the 1920s – silent Western epics have received scant critical attention. The first two films of this cycle, The Covered Wagon and The Iron Horse, were undoubtedly the most celebrated and influential Westerns of the 1920s, becoming the standard by which Westerns were measured for at least a decade following their release.5 These films also provided a model for how the genre might engage in an epic mode of cinema, drawing on the narrative traditions of the epic poem and the visual sublime of nineteenth-century landscape painting. As epic films with the ambition to tell national stories, both Cruze’s and Ford’s films offer different modes of thinking about American history and identity. They use a number of narrative and ideological techniques to do so, wrestling with the complexities of epic narrative form while engaging with early 1920s discourse around immigration and national identity. At the time these films were produced and released, debates raged in the popular press and the halls of the US Congress over issues of immigration, race and the definition of the term ‘American’. After four decades of an increase in what historians have called ‘new immigration’ (largely from southern and eastern Europe), conservative Americans fought back with increasingly strict immigration policies and nativist movements such as the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, which espoused ‘100 per cent Americanism’.6 Against this nativist backdrop The Covered Wagon and The Iron Horse present two radically different conceptions of American history through their epic/generic lenses. Both represent key moments in Western history and American ‘nation building’ (the Oregon Trail, the transcontinental railroad) that have been taken up by other Westerns, but they do so in ways heavily informed by early 1920s political rhetoric.7The Covered Wagon, with its antebellum context, establishes a baseline for conservative American political discourse of the period, emphasizing the importance of national and racial homogeneity to American identity. At the heart of this unity are two crucial conceptions: the aesthetic beauty of the West and what the opening title card calls ‘the blood of pioneers’. Although the sublime Western model established by The Covered Wagon became a standard for ambitious Westerns, it is more productively understood, for the purposes of this essay, as a foil for Ford’s followup. A richer and more complex alternative to The Covered Wagon, The Iron Horse confronts xenophobic nativism directly and suggests ways that the Western genre itself might escape its troubling ideological underpinnings. Ford’s film presents a far messier and more complicated world associated with the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the late 1860s.8 While both films foreground a melodramatic love story, The Iron Horse supplements this with extended sequences of multi-ethnic labour, showing Irish foremen working alongside Italian and Chinese railroad workers. Premiering just months after the US Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, this representation of immigrants as central to the reconstruction of the nation in the wake of the Civil War represents a radical critique of anti-immigrant nativism in its depiction of a multi-ethnic and decidedly heterogeneous USA. As epic films both The Covered Wagon and The Iron Horse confront particular narrative challenges in their efforts to tell both national and individual stories. This union of individual story and national metanarrative is at the heart of epic storytelling, and Westerns present no exception. Such an interplay between individual and national story manifests in a number of ways: in the distinction between plot and subplot; in the oscillation between foreground and background narrative; in the use of alternating aesthetic choices, such as the shift between closeups and extreme long shots. In certain cases this offers a story, fictionalized to a greater or lesser degree, of a historical figure, set against a detailed historical background. In other cases the epic offers fictionalized and iconic protagonists interacting with real historical figures and events in a detailed background. In either case, as Derek Ellery has argued, ‘The chief feature of the historical epic film is not imitation [of history] but reinterpretation’.9 Following well-established conventions in the silent film epic, both The Covered Wagon and The Iron Horse utilize fictional protagonists and a melodramatic central plot as a foreground to their meticulous and celebrated historical recreations. The ways in which each film defines its foreground/background dichotomy, however, will prove useful for disentangling their narrative and ideological presentation of US history and social conflict. Contrasting their melodramatic plots with differing backgrounds, these films offer wildly divergent visions of US history.10 Even contemporary critics of the films highlighted the important disparity between foreground and background in these two films, emphasizing the ways that the melodramatic foreground was overshadowed by the films’ realistic and compelling backgrounds. Oscillation between an epic foreground dedicated to melodrama and an epic background devoted to national history also structures the films’ systems of visual representation. This includes the choices associated with framing and the scale of images within the frame. In one notable example, the climactic battle of The Iron Horse, the hero Davy Brandon (George O’Brien) fights the film’s villain Deroux (Fred Kohler) – a landowner who has instigated Native American resistance to the railroad construction, and who killed Davy’s father while still a boy. When Davy kills Deroux he resolves one dimension of the film’s melodramatic foreground narrative. The film sets Davy and Deroux’s hand-to-hand combat in a shelter, with the fight presented through tightly framed long shots of both figures and closeups of individual blows. In the background of the frame, however, an opening gives a view to a battle raging between the Native Americans and the forces of the railroad (figure 1). This open doorway (one of the earliest manifestations of a shot that would become characteristic of Ford’s aesthetic in films such as The Searchers [1956]) quite explicitly structures the visual separation between foreground and background, with melodrama in the foreground and epic national ‘history’ visible beyond the doorway. This distinction is also accomplished in both films through more conventional visual cues. The melodramatic foregrounds rely almost exclusively on closeups and medium shots to convey emotion and personal relationships. The epic historical backgrounds, however, depend on sequences of extreme long shots emphasizing the open space and pictorial beauty of the West, often with multiple figures in the frame, sometimes shot from so far away that individuals are indistinguishable from one another. Such distinctions operate as a general rule for the films’ visual patterns, though it is through the exceptions to these patterns that the films’ engagement with contemporary political discourses becomes evident. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide An early manifestation of John Ford’s ‘open doorway’ shot, in The Iron Horse (1924). Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide An early manifestation of John Ford’s ‘open doorway’ shot, in The Iron Horse (1924). In certain surprising respects these films feature almost identical narrative and visual ‘foregrounds’. Consider these brief plot summaries. Against the background of a wagon train headed for the Oregon Territory, The Covered Wagon’s young Will Banion (J. Warren Kerrigan), veteran of the Mexican–American War, falls for Molly Wingate (Lois Wilson); she reciprocates but is unfortunately engaged to Sam Woodhull (Alan Hale). Woodhull antagonizes Banion, spreading rumours about him that lead to a confrontation. Believing these rumours, Molly decides she never wants to see Will again, so he finally splits off with the part of the caravan heading for the California gold rush. At the end of the film, Will’s crusty old companion (Tully Marshall) kills the evil Woodhull, and Will is reunited with Molly in the Oregon Territory. In The Iron Horse, young Davy Brandon, a Pony Express rider, joins the crew building the transcontinental railroad. He falls for Miriam Marsh (Madge Bellamy), daughter of the man overseeing the construction of the Union Pacific (Will Walling); she reciprocates but is unfortunately engaged to Jesson (Cyril Chadwick), her father’s engineer. Inspired by the evil Deroux, Jesson attempts to kill Davy and fails; when Davy fights Jesson despite promising Miriam otherwise, she decides she never wants to see him again. After killing Deroux during an attack on the construction crew, Davy ultimately leaves to join the Central Pacific rail construction, and he and Miriam are reunited at Promontory Point at the film’s conclusion. From a purely structural standpoint the narrative ‘foregrounds’ of these two films (the conflict between the virtuous young man and the corrupted older man over the hand of a young woman) are near-identical; they share all the hallmarks of the traditional theatrical melodrama, a vitally important influence on early narrative film and especially on early epic cinema. Early critics of the films, despite their generally positive reviews, found these melodramatic plots rather stale. Indeed, despite its long and influential history as a narrative mode, melodrama is among the most formulaic and sentimental of genres, with its roots deep in nineteenth-century theatre. Formalist critics have noted that melodramatic structures depend on a number of repetitive narrative formulas: excessive emotion (among both performers and audience members); flat characters who serve, in the words of one critic, as ‘spokesmen for the emotional ideology of melodrama and as points of attachment for the springs of the plot’; and a host of sentimental plot cliches, such as ‘unexpected twists’ and the ‘dynamic use of a secret’.11 Both films were reviewed by Bruce Bliven in The New Republic; impressed by many elements of the films, he saved his most critical comments for their romantic melodrama. In The Covered Wagon, Bliven finds aspects of the romance plot unbelievable: We have a hero who, having been dismissed from the army for cattle stealing, submits to a tongue lashing from his lady love and never even tries to tell her that he took the cattle only to keep his troop from starving to death in the desert [the melodramatic ‘secret’]. We have, again, the heroine herself, under no sort of compulsion from her doddering parents, about to marry a villain whom she does not love – an act without a shadow of reason unless we are to infer a congenital preference in the buxom miss for the worst of marriages as against the best of spinsterhoods.12 Although he describes these as ‘minutiae’ in the grand scheme of the film’s success, his lack of patience with melodramatic conventions is evident. His patience wears even thinner in his review of The Iron Horse, titled ‘History plus hokum’. Here he faults Ford’s film for the same kind of tired storytelling, despite the film’s terrific success in representing the historical realities of the construction of the transcontinental railroad: the producers have felt it necessary to drag in a highly sentimental romantic melodrama – the usual rivals for the girl, one of them as pure as Crisco, the other black as Pittsburgh […] the misunderstanding between the lovers; the reconciliation; the conventional tear and smile, turned on at standard intervals.13 For Bliven this story formula is epidemic in Hollywood, ‘no worse and no better than dozens and dozens of others manufactured by the linear mile every year; but against the fine reality of railroad building it stands out, painfully trivial and insincere’.14 If I dwell at length on Bliven’s reviews of these two films, it is because they seem to map a way of understanding the films’ structures as epic Westerns. His dichotomy of ‘history’ and ‘hokum’ is actually useful for understanding these structures, particularly in The Covered Wagon and The Iron Horse. In the narrative and visual foreground of these films we find melodramatic romance plots, virtually identical, built on a long generic tradition of flat characterization and predictable plotting, highlighted by the requisite closeups and medium shots that serve to tug at the heartstrings of the audience.15 Ford was in fact driven to complain that the producers of The Iron Horse added unnecessary closeups of the female lead after filming was complete: they ‘put her up against a wall, and she simpered. It had nothing to do with the picture – the lighting didn’t match, not even the costume matched.’16 In other words this melodramatic foreground is what Bliven calls ‘hokum’. It is in the background of the films that ‘history’ resides – the subplots, settings and atmosphere that are all ancillary to the resolution of the melodramatic plot. Indeed the similarities in these two foreground plots demonstrate that such melodramatic forms can be grafted onto virtually any historical background. In yoking their melodramatic foregrounds to key moments in US history, these films seek a particular kind of what Roland Barthes would call the ‘reality effect’.17 In a cinematic context, however, the connection and distinction between the ‘hokum’ foreground and ‘history’ background manifest at both the narrative and the visual level. The Covered Wagon generates its own epic ‘reality effect’ in dramatic fashion, through the vast, pictorial landscapes that constitute the film’s visual background (figure 2). Contemporary critics and reviewers gushed over the visual aesthetics of the landscape in Cruze’s film. For these audiences, the film’s epic achievements were embodied by the intersection of national history and the aesthetic beauty of the Western landscape. Victor Freeburg’s 1923 Pictorial Beauty on the Screen, for example, was one of the first studies of cinema as visual art. Published shortly after the release of the film, Freeburg’s book is dedicated to Cruze, ‘Because the Various Types of Pictorial Beauty Described in this Book May Be Seen Richly Blended with Epic Narrative and Stirring Drama in “The Covered Wagon”, a Cinema Composition That Will Live’.18 In focusing on the ‘pictorial beauty’ of the film, Freeburg and other contemporary reviewers saw The Covered Wagon as inaugurating a new kind of modern filmmaking that drew on a painterly quality and emphasized the visual possibilities of serious filmmaking as an art form. In his 1929 book Box Office, John Anderson claimed that Such fascinating productions as Variety, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and such visual poems as Grass and The Covered Wagon were leading definitely toward the achievement which is the rightful goal of motion pictures if they are to be pictures, and not plays. They were optical operas whose aesthetic appeal was directly and exclusively to the eye without the artifice and elaborate plotting which drama entails when it appeals to more than one of the senses.19 Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide The epic ‘reality effect’ of The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1923). Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide The epic ‘reality effect’ of The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1923). Anderson’s curious use of ‘visual poems’ (and ‘optical operas’) suggests a link between traditional epic forms (the poem) and the epic quality of the visual sublime. Anderson also echoes the foreground/background distinctions of these films by dismissing the dramatic elements of these films as mere ‘plays’ (seen as inferior to ‘pictures’, ‘the rightful goal of motion pictures’), and associating plot itself with ‘artifice’. The painterly qualities emphasized by Freeburg and Anderson situate Cruze’s film in a genealogy that includes such purveyors of Western myth and imagery as Frederic Remington, whose work – including many paintings of wagons and wagon trains – sought to aestheticize the imperial expansion of the USA.20 At least one critic made such a link explicit, calling one scene in The Covered Wagon ‘an animated Remington’.21 Such an emphasis on cinematic visual elements at the expense of narrative (Anderson’s ‘pictures, and not plays’) is a common thread in contemporary responses to The Covered Wagon. Bliven’s review praised the film’s epic grandeur and background details, noting that As a whole this motion picture must certainly rank among the four or five best ever produced, and as a wholly admirable attempt at the task to which the powers of the camera best lend themselves – the recording of an epic story, where the struggle is all on the surface, and with man’s first and last enemy, Mother Earth herself.22 The epic form was built to emphasize the grand narratives, and in these larger themes and powerful images reviewers like Bliven saw an unqualified success that transcended the love story of Will and Molly. ‘No one’, he writes, who has pondered the meaning of the frontier in the development of American institutions, or who has, like the writer, lived through a prairie boyhood long enough ago to have seen the last members of the Great Trek jolting westward, always westward, in the rutted roads between fenced fields, can fail to feel a clutch at the hearts as the ‘prairie schooners’ go bobbing and struggling, up and down the long slow slopes.23 Grand visual compositions in The Covered Wagon transform the film frame into a symbolic and epic painting, one that utilizes the almost endless lines of white covered wagons as allegorical emblems of Manifest Destiny itself. Throughout the film the cinematography tends to objectify the figures, turning history into painting through the use of extreme long shots in which individuals are reduced to tiny specks in the larger march of civilization. Cruze maximizes aesthetic effect by creating striking geometric patterns and designs with the white canvas covering the wagons; in shots like these (see figure 2), even the violent attack at the centre is overshadowed by the structural and figural beauty of mise-en-scene. As a result the epic visual language of The Covered Wagon becomes a ‘visual poem’ documenting the movement of whiteness into the Oregon Territory. In The Iron Horse, by contrast, these frames are filled not with abstracted painterly compositions or sublime images of the Western landscape, but with images of active labour. Bliven’s review suggests that The Covered Wagon more than made up for the weaknesses in its hackneyed melodramatic romance with its grand, sweeping vistas of the American West and the grand national metanarratives that accompanied such aestheticized and painterly images. The Iron Horse, however, approached this foreground/background dichotomy with a decidedly different ideological orientation. Certainly Ford’s film also highlights the aesthetic beauty of the West, with key scenes filmed at Beale’s Cut in Newhall, California, a location to which Ford later returned for Stagecoach. The Iron Horse, however, primarily features not Remingtonesque visual compositions but instead fills the frame with medium and long shots of ethnic labourers (figure 3). The centrality of labour to The Iron Horse’s visual aesthetic occupies a role analogous to the pictorial beauty of The Covered Wagon; it comprises the film’s epic background, its historical ‘reality effect’. Like the earlier film, The Iron Horse fills its foreground with an individual story, embedded within a national one – once again, a romantic melodrama. But the romance in this film was even more strongly dismissed by critics, including Bliven. Seeing in Ford’s film the possibility of ‘history minus hokum’, Bliven notes that: A whole comment on the spiritual state of the movies might be deduced from the things Messrs. Fox and Ford have felt themselves compelled to put into this picture. They have plastered it with comic relief, in the persons of three Irish ex-soldiers, track-layers, friends of the hero and always, by a series of happy miracles, on the spot when interesting things are going on.24 Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide The centrality of labour to the visual aesthetic of The Iron Horse. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide The centrality of labour to the visual aesthetic of The Iron Horse. Comic relief – and especially Irish comic relief – was a staple of Ford’s filmmaking throughout his career, and Bliven’s emphasis on the interconnection between ethnic identity, humour and labour is absolutely crucial to understanding The Iron Horse. It is, for virtually every critic of the film, the principal reason to see the film: Bliven calls this one of ‘the true parts’ of the film (‘history’), as opposed to the sentimental melodrama that constituted the epic’s foreground (‘hokum’). As in The Covered Wagon, the epic background – the real source of the film’s sense of American history and identity – comes to dominate the ‘hokum’ of the formulaic romance presented in the foreground. Other critics agreed with Bliven that the images and stories of the ethnic labourers in the film took precedence over the film’s romance. A critic from Film Daily noted that ‘J. Farrell MacDonald practically steals the picture as Corporal Casey’, the Irish foreman.25 C. S. Sewell, writing in Moving Picture World, claimed that ‘the individual hit of the picture was scored by J. Farrell MacDonald in the comedy role of Corporal Casey, the leader of a trio of ex-soldiers known as the “Three Buskateers”’.26 And Variety praised Ford for touching these characters ‘with just a bit of pathos in the end that made them stand out as real humans and not as out-and-out buffoons just created for a laugh’.27 Throughout his career Ford often used ethnic humour that bordered on stereotype, but critics of The Iron Horse emphasized that these characters, despite some stereotyping, were more complexly drawn than the flat melodramatic protagonists.28 The humanization of these labourers and their popularity among the critics highlight the film’s complex epic structure of foreground and background. Even more important, however, is the intersection between labour and immigration as highlighted by these Irish characters and the other immigrant labourers who fill out the film’s labour-oriented background. By using humour to make these ethnic and immigrant types appear ‘as real humans’, The Iron Horse addresses one of the more contentious topics of early 1920s America, namely the anxieties surrounding the so-called New Immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and concerns over the very definition of American identity.Wrestling with the meaning of immigration in these films requires some historical context; this was, after all, one of the most xenophobic moments in American history and it featured some of the most intense anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislation of the modern era. In his foreword to the 1927 volume Immigration Restriction, the congressional representative from the state of Washington and architect of the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, Albert Johnson, articulated the danger he hoped his anti-immigration work would address: Today, instead of a nation descended from generations of freemen bred to a knowledge of the principles and practices of self-government, of liberty under law, we have a heterogeneous population no small proportion of which is sprung from races that, throughout the centuries, have known no liberty at all, and no law save the decrees of overlords and princes. In other words, our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed.29 Johnson’s concerns about what he termed the ‘foreign-born flood’30 were part of what historian John Higham has called ‘the tribal twenties’.31 Language like this could be found in a variety of popular venues in the early 1920s, including the Saturday Evening Post (the most read magazine in America at the time) which ‘began to quote and urgently commend the doctrines of Madison Grant’, one of the more notorious nativist writers of the period.32 Grant and other more popular writers, such as Lothrop Stoddard, fomented anti-immigrant sentiment in books with ominous titles such as The Passing of the Great Race (1916), The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) and The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (1922). For nativists like Johnson, Grant and Stoddard, the most crucial difference between native-born American citizens and recent arrivals in what historians call ‘new immigration’ was fundamentally racial, and rooted in blood. And although anti-nativist anthropologists mocked what Franz Boas termed this ‘Nordic nonsense’, nativists held firm to a belief in an Anglo-Saxon, Nordic exceptionalism that defined the USA.33 In Johnson’s words this world was rapidly becoming ‘diluted by a stream of alien blood’ from races that were far from desirable; these foreign races were essentially unable to assimilate into an American culture of self-government. The language of blood and miscegenation should come as no surprise to the student of US silent film, in both its Western and epic incarnations. For example, William S. Hart’s most popular Westerns of the late 1910s often featured the central threat of miscegenation; while these racialized sexual threats remain more or less implicit in films like Hell’s Hinges (1916), they are made quite explicit in The Aryan (1916).34 Additionally, D. W. Griffith’s path-breaking epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) is all but defined by its fear of racial mixing. In a sense, the US epic cinema of the silent era had miscegenation at its core. Griffith’s film, which premiered in 1915, one year before the publication of Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, in part inspired the reformation of the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist and anti-immigrant group that saw its peak in membership in 1923, the year that Cruze’s The Covered Wagon was released. If The Birth of a Nation was clearly pro-Klan propaganda, the ideological underpinnings of The Covered Wagon were both more complex and more subtle. Cruze would in fact go on to direct The Mating Call, an anti-Klan film that presented the organization as preying on veterans, just five years after the release of The Covered Wagon. Nevertheless, The Covered Wagon demonstrates an implicit nativism – common to many Westerns and pervasive in the early 1920s – through the construction of the West as a space of racial binaries, organized around now well-worn terms like ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’. In one of the only extended considerations of The Covered Wagon, Heidi Kenaga details how the production and distribution of the film contributed to its identity as a ‘nativist document’.35 Even beyond the contexts Kenaga explores, through its emphasis on homogenous whiteness, families and reproduction, and a shared goal of reaching a promised land, the film moves far beyond the basic civilization/savagery binary that defines so many Westerns. Although the film appears to represent the Oregon Trail and a key plot point involves the discovery of gold in California, there is little hard information on the specifics of the journey. As George Fenin and William Everson note in one of the few serious critical considerations of the film, ‘We are never told just why the trek is taking place, or exactly what is to come of it’.36 This lack of specificity enhances the epic and ‘universal’ theme of the film, but also provides a 1920s audience with its own ideologically charged fantasy. To escape from the East to the ‘unpopulated’ promised land that would become Oregon and Washington (Johnson’s home state) may have resonated with nativists eager to leave the confines of the crowded and ethnically polyglot cities of the East coast. Such a fantasy certainly echoes the broad fantasies associated with Western film more generally.37 Cruze’s initial title card evokes these concerns while simultaneously echoing the language of nativist writers. This text, preceded only by the film’s opening titles, foregrounds the notion of blood as central to the construction of American identity: ‘The blood of America is the blood of pioneers – the blood of lion-hearted men and women who carved a splendid civilization out of an uncharted wilderness’. Here the film amplifies the importance of blood to American identity; indeed, it collapses the concepts of ‘the blood of America’ and ‘the blood of pioneers’, fixing the genetic identity of US citizenship to the period before the closing of the frontier and, if The Covered Wagon is to be taken as the focal point of this pioneer identity, before the American Civil War. If this emphasis on the film’s use of ‘blood’ as a term of ideological organization seems overstated, it might be instructive to consider similar language present in the work of the more prominent nativist writers of the period. Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race echoes the emphasis on ‘the blood of pioneers’ present in the opening title card of The Covered Wagon. Comparing the ‘Nordic element’ to more recent trends in immigration, Grant exposes the nativist ideology that underwrites The Covered Wagon’s celebration of this ‘blood’: This same Nordic element, everywhere the type of the sailor, the soldier, the adventurer and the pioneer, was ever the type to migrate to new countries, until the ease of transportation and the desire to escape military service in the last forty years reversed the immigrant tide. In consequence of this change our immigrants now largely represent lowly refugees from ‘persecution’, and other social discards.  In most cases the blood of pioneers has been lost to their race.38 For Grant, as for The Covered Wagon, the heroic past is filled with the adventures and discoveries wrought by ‘the blood of pioneers’; for Grant, too, this blood is explicitly Nordic. He continues by linking the American migration of the 1840s explicitly with the ‘Nordic element’: This was also true in the early days of our Western frontiersmen, who individually were a far finer type than the settlers who followed them. In fact, it is said that practically every one of the Forty-Niners in California was of Nordic type.39 The wagon train splits near the conclusion of The Covered Wagon, with one group heading to California after news of a gold strike at Sutter’s Mill while the other continues to the original destination. For Grant the characters portrayed in The Covered Wagon would have been indisputably Nordic, and the period depicted in the film would most likely have presented a kind of Nordic idyll, well before the ‘immigration tide’ effectively polluted the American bloodstream. This also resonates with The Covered Wagon’s insistent featuring of children and families in the frame, something largely absent from The Iron Horse (figure 4). While these figures do not really serve the melodramatic narrative, other than to demonstrate Banion’s generous good nature, they do fill out the background in a way that places an important emphasis on family generations and continental conquest. From the banjo-playing boy who appears just after the opening title card (figure 5) to the young girl whose baby doll Banion repairs (figure 6), concerns of family and descent for these pioneers are critical, and their presentation in closeup and medium closeup shots puts them on an equivalent level of visual importance to the foregrounded melodrama. As one pioneer puts it, ‘More important to get these babies across than it is the grown folks – they’ll be the real Empire builders’. This emphasis on empire-building, through Anglo-Saxon familial generations preserving the ‘blood of pioneers’, draws quite explicitly on the fears of the increasing heterogeneity of the US public. Figs 4, 5 and 6. View largeDownload slide The Covered Wagon places an emphasis on families and children. Figs 4, 5 and 6. View largeDownload slide The Covered Wagon places an emphasis on families and children. Indeed critics at the time drew explicit links between The Covered Wagon and debates about the ‘immigration tide’ threatening American identity. Shortly after the film’s premiere in New York, Paramount Pictures took out a full-page advertisement in Variety highlighting newspaper reviews of the film. Many of these reviews emphasized the film’s Americanizing powers. A quote from the New York Journal called the film ‘the best lesson in Americanization that the screen has produced since the Great War’, and H. Z. Torres of the New York Commercial aligned himself with anti-immigrant activists like Johnson in his assessment: ‘The Covered Wagon’ is not only an epochal American film; it is an enduring record of the greatness of our American heritage. It should be shown to every citizen of this Republic, that all may see the sufferings with which our forefathers colonized this land – the land which is now become the happy hunting ground for foreign-born agitators and destructionists.40 For Torres The Covered Wagon, with its emphasis on ‘the blood of pioneers’, spoke directly to concerns about the rise in immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In effect, the film’s aestheticization of American history through its picturesque visuals, along with its emphasis on blood and family generations, allows for an uncomplicated and homogenous notion of ‘the greatness of our American heritage’. In contrast to The Covered Wagon’s implicit nativism and homogenous narrative, The Iron Horse challenges nativist ideology through its prominent use of three different immigrant groups of labourers: the Irish (largely foremen), the Italians and the Chinese. While the film touches on interethnic strife at a number of moments, these conflicts are diminished in the face of Ford’s final celebration of community and collaboration. At times the film seems to work at ideological cross-purposes, utilizing popular stereotypes in its characterization of all three groups but ultimately making them into sympathetic figures. The most important move Ford makes in this film, however, is to feature these immigrant figures prominently in a film about the rebuilding of the country in the aftermath of the Civil War. These figures may represent part of the epic ‘background’ that gives the film historical depth and its ‘reality effect’, but they also stand out in memorable subplots that draw viewers away from the melodramatic ‘hokum’ of the main narrative. With the disembodied floating head of Abraham Lincoln seen at its start and close, the film implicitly connects Lincoln’s vision of a reunited Union with an endorsement of a multi-ethnic American labour force uniting East and West. Although critics seized on the Irish foreman Corporal Casey and his ‘Three Busketeers’, the film’s most curious immigrant group is that of the Italian labourers, forcefully represented by the swarthy Tony (Collin Chase) (figure 7). While the use of Chinese labourers on the construction of the Central Pacific and of Irish labourers on that of the Union Pacific is historically accurate, Ford appears to have rewritten history in his representation of the Italian labour force. In the 1860 census fewer than 12,000 Italians appeared on the rolls, while no history of the transcontinental railroad construction mentions Italian workers in any significant number. So in a film that boasts of being ‘accurate and faithful in every particular’ (as an early title card asserts), the prominence of an Italian in The Iron Horse raises some important questions about Ford’s epic ‘reinterpretation’ of history.41 Fig. 7. View largeDownload slide The figure of the Italian labourer in The Iron Horse. Fig. 7. View largeDownload slide The figure of the Italian labourer in The Iron Horse. Tony’s brief presence in the film as a prominent Italian worker and a hot-headed (though manageable) labour leader operates as a wilful anachronism with a specific ideological function in The Iron Horse. Tony stands as a representative of the new immigration, a phenomenon that clearly postdates the construction of the railroad. These immigrants, who arrived in great numbers from southern and eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920, were explicitly targeted by Johnson’s Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924. Indeed these were the ‘streams of alien blood’ of which Johnson complained. Additionally, Tony’s identity as a labour agitator links him, however implicitly, to one of the more prominent liberal causes of the 1920s: the case of Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, convicted of robbery and murder in a notoriously prejudicial trial in Massachusetts in 1920. The trope of the anarchist bomb-thrower had been part of American consciousness since the late nineteenth century, but in the twentieth century the new generation of immigrants, particularly Italians and Eastern European Jews, were increasingly associated with labour organization and political dissent. These new immigrants were part of what Michael Miller Topp has described as ‘the immigrant strike wave that began in 1909 and lasted until 1922’.42 For nativists, the introduction of ‘alien blood’ into the USA has the potential to overturn power relations, particularly those of the capitalist economic order. The Italian worker Tony’s ‘alien blood’ at first seems as if it might pose a significant threat to American progress. His character is introduced as central to an emergent labour conflict over the men not being paid; he suddenly becomes the representative of a legitimate challenge to the progress of railroad construction. In a typical title card, marked with dialect, he tells Corporal Casey, ‘All work – no pay – snow an’ chilblains – buffalo meat mak’ us seek – Indians shoot like hell – everything no good – we quit!’ This assertion is met with violence as Casey and his fellow foremen first try to restrain him, then swing at him with shovels and picks (figure 8). When Tony escapes and rallies the labour force around him, Casey is puzzled; his labour containment techniques have not succeeded. He tells Thomas Marsh, who is overseeing the construction, ‘Say, boss, there’s no gettin’ on with these furriners – I knocked five of thim down – an’ even then they wouldn’t work’. Fig. 8. View largeDownload slide A labour conflict is met with force from the foremen, in The Iron Horse. Fig. 8. View largeDownload slide A labour conflict is met with force from the foremen, in The Iron Horse. Casey’s use of language (the derogatory ‘furriners’) and strategy of violent strikebreaking references the long history of opposition to immigrant labour organization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ironically, however, it was often the Irish who were targeted for this kind of violence in the period during and after the transcontinental railroad’s construction. In the 1920s, after ‘the Irish became white’, in Noel Ignatiev’s phrase, other immigrant groups, such as Italians, took their place, and Irish whiteness was often predicated on the violent acts against other groups in the name of white supremacy, such as the 1863 New York City draft riots and countless other race riots documented by Ignatiev.43 In The Iron Horse, however, both the Irish and Italian workers are clearly differentiated – through appearance, performance and language –from the Anglo-Saxon figures foregrounded in the melodramatic romance plot. If Tony enters the narrative as a labour agitator – a potential Sacco or Vanzetti – his fiery disposition is soon moderated by the pleas of protagonist Miriam Marsh, whom he calls ‘the beautiful signorina’. Heedless of Casey’s injunction that ‘They don’t understand ye, miss! Ye got to swear at ’em’, Miriam makes an appeal to the immigrant labourers in terms of a shared nationality: ‘Men, this great work depends on you – for the sake of your country, I ask you to finish it – make the whole Nation proud of you!’ Miriam’s language makes explicit the links between the project of the transcontinental railroad and the healing of the nation after the Civil War, tying the labour of these immigrants to national reunification and progress. The ideological move inherent in Miriam’s appeal is double-edged. On the one hand her appeal (and her beauty, it is suggested) diffuses the legitimate complaints of the workers and sends them back to work in service of the word ‘Nation’, implying a shared community that is clearly not an economic reality in the film (the men have still not been paid). On the other hand, in spite of her invocation of national unity to hold off labour unrest, this move also makes the radical suggestion that immigrant labour is central to the rebuilding of the nation. ‘For the sake of your country’, Miriam pleads, including the Italian Tony and the other immigrant workers in her definition of ‘American’. Her sense of the nation is radically different than that of prominent nativists and anti-immigrant activists of the early 1920s. The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, passed just months before the release of The Iron Horse, drastically limited immigration from places like Italy, keeping as many ‘Tonys’ as possible from ever reaching US shores. Far from being part of Johnson’s ‘stream of alien blood’, threatening the nation’s institutions, in The Iron Horse Tony and his fellow workers, Irish and Chinese, are not merely part of the nation but are represented as central to reconstructing and healing it. Although labour troubles, still tied to the figure of Tony, are still apparent in the film through its climactic battle with Native Americans, the film’s visual and narrative evidence ultimately resolves this curious contradiction and humanizes Tony and the other immigrant groups. While differences among these various groups still generate a great deal of the humour throughout the film, the use of two- and three-shots (alongside grander images of labour) in sequences with the workers stresses equality and friendship. Whether Corporal Casey is sharing tobacco with a Chinese labourer (figure 9), or former enemies Casey and Tony are embracing as friends at the film’s conclusion, Ford’s film emphasizes collaboration, pluralism and parity among these groups. When Tony and Casey are reunited (after Casey has left the Union Pacific to follow Will and work with the Central Pacific), Tony exclaims ‘Me, I Irish now, too – I marry Nora Hogan!’ (figure 10). Embraced by Casey as a countryman, Tony’s metaphorical transition from Italian to ‘Irish’ demonstrates the constructedness of national and ethnic difference, as well as his move towards ‘American’ (which, given Miriam’s speech, has already been accomplished through labour). Tony and Casey’s embrace echoes the romantic reunion of Will and Miriam (the resolution of the foregrounded melodrama) and recalls their earlier physical altercation, but this time Tony is no ‘furriner’ agitating for better wages but a newly found countryman. As such, in a mode typical of Ford’s work as a whole, the romantic couple of the central romantic foreground is dismissed from the screen and the narrative to make way for one final comic moment, in which Corporal Casey and Tony lament the destruction of a good bottle of champagne, smashed against one of the rail engines in celebration (figure 11). Figs 9, 10 and 11. View largeDownload slide Stressing equality, friendship and collaboration among the workers, in The Iron Horse. Figs 9, 10 and 11. View largeDownload slide Stressing equality, friendship and collaboration among the workers, in The Iron Horse. Although The Iron Horse resonates with the potential to challenge the pervasive nativist depictions of immigrants and ultimately to foreground their role in the reconstruction and identity of the nation, it does so on the back of stereotypical representations of bloodthirsty Native American ‘savages’, which complicates the film’s politics further. Led by Deroux (or ‘Two-Fingers’ as he is also known, due to his physical deformity), a monstrous ‘half-breed’ who attempts to sabotage the building of the railroad through an elaborate financial scheme, the Native Americans in The Iron Horse are almost universally hostile, the so-called ‘bad Indian’ of longstanding Eurocentric discourse. The only exceptions here are the Pawnee scouts, who contribute labour towards the railroad effort but are nevertheless excluded from the national tableau that concludes the film. The Covered Wagon equally presents its share of ‘bad Indians’ (usually attacking the wagons in an epic panorama), but it also contains a handful of vanishing ‘good Indians’, well aware that their time has passed and willing to let the Anglo-Saxon wagon train continue on its journey towards Manifest Destiny.44 Such representations are of a piece with The Covered Wagon’s celebration of an American history infused with ‘the blood of the pioneers’. While the early silent era, as Scott Simmon has demonstrated, featured a blurring of the boundaries between the Western and the Indian drama, sympathetic and complex portrayals of Native Americans had largely disappeared by the 1920s; the wedding of the Western to epic history seems to have flattened out native representations and transformed the genre.45 Only the late 1920s social problem films featuring Richard Dix – including The Vanishing American and Redskin (Victor Schertzinger, 1929) – offered anything but the standard images of what Robert Berkhofer famously called the ‘white man’s Indian’.46 However, The Iron Horse’s complex politics make such representations far more unstable, and suggest that in the 1920s, at least, the Western still had severe limits on its ability to challenge racism and nativism. If anything, The Iron Horse stands as the first exploration of the contradiction that defines many of Ford’s later Westerns. Charles Ramírez Berg has wrestled with the complexities of Ford’s representations of ethnic and racial difference in his later films, arguing that these narratives ‘emanate from the position of the oppressed ethnic minority’, while deploying Native Americans as a true racial ‘other’, what ethnics ‘can’t become – another race’.47 The film’s vision of a multi-ethnic American society, then, appears only at the expense of the ‘vanishing’ race of Native Americans. Certain additional hierarchies, however, do remain. Interestingly, while the film concludes with the celebration of the completed transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, and features all the film’s immigrant groups, including Chinese labourers, only the ‘white ethnics’ celebrate together over a bottle of champagne. So the film’s challenge to the nativism of The Covered Wagon remains tempered by deep-seated concerns about racial mixing. Nevertheless, The Iron Horse’s sympathetic representation of a diverse array of immigrant Americans at a moment when these groups were under a broad political attack suggests that the epic Western, even in the silent era, could confront and redefine prevailing notions of American history and identity. While The Covered Wagon’s natural beauty and painterly compositions (lauded by critics of the time) serve a homogenous narrative rooted in ideas of ‘blood’ citizenship, The Iron Horse presents a far messier yet more joyful vision of the USA, a polyglot world in which working together for a common cause makes one a compatriot, and in which US citizenship is tied not to blood or race but to collective labour and common goals. The Iron Horse, then, demonstrates the possibility that the epic Western could offer ‘history’ instead of ‘hokum’, not only by overshadowing its melodramatic hokum with humanized representations of labour, but also by countering nativist notions of American history and identity – commonly associated with the Western genre – with a profound and multi-ethnic vision of America. Footnotes 1 Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 5. 2 Hart starred in eight features in 1916, eight in 1917, ten in 1918 and six in 1919. 3 Andrew Brodie Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture and the Birth of Hollywood (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado), p. 177. 4 Others in this cycle include North of 36 (Irvin Willat, 1924), Tumbleweeds (King Baggot, 1925), The Pony Express (James Cruze, 1925), The Thundering Herd (William Howard, 1925), The Vanishing American (George B. Seitz, 1925), The Virginian (Victor Fleming, 1929), The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh, 1930), Billy the Kid (King Vidor, 1930), Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles, 1931) and The Squaw Man (Cecil B. DeMille, 1931). 5 Richard Koszarski cites an unpublished study by James Mark Purcell that names The Covered Wagon and The Iron Horse as ‘the most popular attractions’ of 1923 and 1924, respectively, in An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1994), p. 33. 6 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York, NY: Atheneum, 1978), p. 204. 7 These particular nation-building narratives continue to interest filmmakers, as demonstrated by the recent film Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichart, 2010) and the television series Hell on Wheels (American Movie Classics, 2011–16), both of which seek to undercut the epic heroism of nation-building narratives. 8 In this essay I am concerned with the 149-minute US theatrical release of The Iron Horse rather than the 133-minute international release of the film. Scenes under discussion here, however, are largely identical in the two versions. 9 Derek Ellery, The Epic Film: Myth and History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 1. 10 In the case of The Iron Horse, Stuart Byron calls it ‘a primitive epic, meaning that historical details are presented in scenes detached or semi-detached from the main narrative’, in ‘Film favorites: Stuart Byron on The Iron Horse’, Film Comment, vol. 8, no. 4 (1972), p. 58. 11 Daniel Gerould, ‘Russian formalist theories of melodrama’, Journal of American Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 (1978), pp. 158, 160. 12 Bruce Bliven, ‘Californy or bust’, The New Republic, 24 April 1923, p. 244. 13 Bruce Bliven, ‘History plus hokum’, The New Republic, 26 November 1924, pp. 19–20. 14 Ibid. 15 These elements hew quite close to Gerould’s description of melodramatic structural formulas. 16 Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford, rev. edn (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1978), p. 44. 17 Roland Barthes, ‘The reality effect’, in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 141–48. 18 Victor Freeburg, Pictorial Beauty on the Screen (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1923), p. v. 19 John Anderson, Box Office (New York, NY: Cape and Smith, 1929), pp. 88–89. 20 On Remington and imperial imagery, see Alexander Nemerov, ‘Doing the Old America’, in William H. Truettner (ed.), The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 285–318, and Alexander Nemerov, Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 21 Laurence Reid, ‘“The Covered Wagon” – an epic of screen’, Motion Picture News, 31 March 1923, p. 1541. See also Laurence Reid, ‘The celluloid critic’, Motion Picture Classic, June 1923, p. 45. One of Paramount’s attempts to repeat the success of The Covered Wagon was Howard’s The Thundering Herd. Promotional material for The Thundering Herd featured quotes comparing it both to The Covered Wagon and to Remington. See the Paramount Pictures advertisement, ‘The reviewers haven’t raved like this since “The Covered Wagon”!’, Film Daily, 4 March 1925, p. 7. 22 Bliven, ‘Californy or bust’, p. 244. 23 Ibid. 24 Bliven, ‘History plus hokum’, pp. 19, 20. 25 Unsigned review of The Iron Horse, The Film Daily, 7 September 1924, p. 5. 26 C. S. Sewell, Review of The Iron Horse, Moving Picture World, 13 September 1924, p. 157. 27 Red, Review of The Iron Horse, Variety, 3 September 1924, p. 23. 28 Charles Ramírez Berg argues that understanding the representation of ‘ethnic exuberance’ as stereotyping is dependent on a ‘Mainstream point of view’, when this is in fact ‘an oppositional carnival of ethnicity meant to disrupt Mainstream sensibilities’. See Berg, ‘The margin as center: the multicultral dynamics of John Ford’s Westerns’, in Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein (eds), John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 83. 29 Albert Johnson, ‘Foreword’, in Roy L. Garis, Immigration Restriction (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1927), p. vii. 30 Ibid., p. viii. 31 Higham, Strangers in the Land, pp. 264–99. 32 Ibid., p. 265. The Saturday Evening Post also serialized Emerson Hough’s novel The Covered Wagon, the basis for Cruze’s film, in 1922. Hough was, coincidentally, a virulant nativist himself. On his bigotry and his relationship with George Horace Lorimer, see Jan Cohn, Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), p. 147. 33 Franz Boas, ‘This Nordic nonsense’, The Forum, October 1925, pp. 501–11. 34 On the racial politics of Hart’s films, see Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians, pp. 157–85. 35 Heidi Kenaga, ‘“The West before the cinema invaded it”: Famous Players-Lasky’s “epic” Westerns, 1923–25’ (Dissertation: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999), pp. 95–176. Kenaga’s unpublished dissertation also charts the nativist threads running through other Western epics of the period, including North of ’36, The Pony Express and The Vanishing American. 36 George N. Fenin and William K. Everson, The Western: From Silents to the Seventies (New York, NY: Grossman, 1973), p. 133. 37 See, for example, Jane Tompkins’s discussion of ‘big sky country’ in West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 4ff. 38 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York, NY: Scribner, 1916), p. 67. 39 Ibid. 40 All these quotes from the Paramount Pictures advertisement, ‘Broadcasted to the world: what the New York newspapers said about “The Covered Wagon”’, Variety, 29 March 1923, p. 31. 41 Accuracy is, of course, a gross overstatement here: while the film’s title cards claimed that the original engines were used to recreate the scene at Promontory Point, it is clear that this was not the case. Nevertheless, both The Covered Wagon and The Iron Horse stress historical accuracy as a central component of their epic ambitions. 42 Michael Miller Topp, ‘The Italian-American left: transnationalism and the quest for unity’, in Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (eds), The Immigrant Left in the United States (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 122. See also David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 91–112. For a survey of images of Italians in silent film prior to the epic Westerns under consideration here, see Ilaria Serra, The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United States between 1890 and 1924 (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), pp. 96–130. 43 Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995). See also David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, NY: Verso, 1991), and Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York, NY: Verso, 1990). 44 On the legacy of these images, see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, NY: Vintage, 1970), esp. pp. 3–31. 45 Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film, pp. 3–97. 46 See Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian. 47 Berg, ‘The margin as center’, pp. 73, 80–81. See also Brian Henderson, ‘The Searchers: an American dilemma’, Film Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 2 (1980–81), pp. 9–23. Henderson’s influential argument would support the idea that the more limited ethnic mixing represented by Ford in The Iron Horse recurs with more dramatic force with the arrival of the Civil Rights movement. I would like to thank Bethany Hurley, Sue Matheson, Erin Lee Mock and John Ott for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - ‘Gettin’ on with these furriners’: silent Western epics and American identity
JF - Screen
DO - 10.1093/screen/hjy046
DA - 2018-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/gettin-on-with-these-furriners-silent-western-epics-and-american-aOSeE0IShb
SP - 463
VL - 59
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -