iii Looking at Labor-Capital Films

Liberal Films

The greatest number of labor-capital films adopted a liberal perspective that critiqued irresponsible capitalists, decried the exploitation of innocent workers, called for cooperation between employers and employees, and advocated reform (not radicalism) as the best method of solving the industrial ills that beset the nation's wage earners.

Yet, liberalism was not a uniform ideology. Even within this essentially reformist view of the world, there were a number of important variations in the ways filmmakers approached their subjects. Some made movies that were staunchly pro-union, while others remained sympathetic to the collective plight of workers, but not to collective action.

Among the former were films that offered positive depictions of the organized struggles of working men and women (fig. 33). Peaceful strikes and moderate labor organizations like the AFL were depicted as reasonable and legitimate responses to the unwarranted exploitation of workers by uncaring employers. The Struggle (1913) is a stark tale of how workers suffer at the hands of a brutal foreman who abuses them on a daily basis and an absentee steel magnate who take profits and cares nothing about his employees (fig. 34).

fig 34:The Struggle (1919)

When the men finally resort to a strike, it is portrayed, as one reviewer remarks, "as the only alternative to continued ill-treatment by a man unworthy of holding in his hand authority over others."

The Blacklist (1916), based on the Ludlow massacre of 1914, reveals how coal mine owners create "a state of practical slavery" by blacklisting complaining workers and enforcing their rule through the use of armed mined guards who, as an intertitle notes, "hold themselves accountable to a law higher than the will of their employer, and are backed by a political pull powerful enough to protect the owner" (fig. 35). William DeMille, who wrote and directed the movie--and was son-in-law of radical political economist Henry George--delivers these messages with scenes of innocent strikers being shot to death and their tent colonies burned down by company thugs (fig. 36).

It is only after these horrid deaths that the miners and the anarchist Red Brotherhood consider resorting to violence (fig. 37). DeMille also used casting to reverse conservative imagery. The lovely Blanche Sweet stars as the daughter of an anarchist miner who leads the quest for revenge, while the scowling Ernest Joy plays the evil superintendent (fig. 35).