iv. When Workers and Radicals Made Movies

Beginning in 1907, workers, radicals, unions, socialists, and communists in Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and around the nation began making movies and newsreels that challenged anti-labor, antileft images and presented collective action--generally in the form of unionism or socialist politics--as the solution to contemporary problems (fig. 59). The people who led this movement were not filmmakers who happened to be radicals, but members of labor and radical organizations who understood the manipulative powers of film and used them to reach millions of men and women who would not ordinarily listen to their messages.

Between 1911 and 1929, the worker film movement produced feature films--from A Martyr to His Cause (1911) to The Gastonia Textile Strike (1929)--that depicted a unified working class using strikes, unionism, and socialism to transform a nation. Federal Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover considered these class-conscious films so dangerous that he sent agents to spy of worker filmmakers.

In order to reach a mass audience and not just the already converted, worker filmmakers produced films that were both political and entertaining. They did this by making love stories and melodramas that adopted popular cinematic styles but gave them a radical twist.

Worker films often began with a standard melodramatic plot line: boy meets girl, they fall in love, their love is threatened by some perfidious character, but in the end, they overcome the villain and achieve happiness. Yet while following a standard love story format, worker filmmakers turned the individualist ideology of melodrama on its head. In these films, boy and girl were unionists or socialists or both, and the villain was a capitalist employer. Unlike most melodramas where boy defeats the villain through individual initiative, in worker films love and justice were achieved through collective action (fig. 60, 61).

In addition to entertaining audiences, these films also offered them a vision for changing the world. From Dusk to Dawn (1913), produced by Los Angeles socialist Frank E. Wolfe, featured a cast of 10,000 people and provided viewers with a blueprint for action that took them from workplace protests to unionization to workers seizing control of the government by electing a Socialist candidate to be governor of California.

At same time they advocated their own messages, worker filmmakers used the screen to counter negative conservative images of unionism and socialism. The mob scene, as opposed to a crowd scene, was one of the most typical stereotypes employed by conservative and liberal filmmakers. Large gatherings of workers--be they union meetings, rallies, or strikes--were repeatedly portrayed as disorderly and threatening mobs rather than simply as large crowds (fig. 62). Directors conveyed their ideological messages by costuming workers in shabby dark clothes and choreographing mob scenes so that workers were placed into tightly clustered indistinguishable sheep-like masses. When radical or union leaders spoke they did so in a frenzied fashion full of wild gesticulations, while their listeners punched the air with fists or with threatening clubs (fig. 63). These scenes were intended to make viewers believe that unionism, socialism, and all "isms' (save capitalism) were lawless affairs promoted by lawless men.

Frank Wolfe used From Dusk to Dawn to counter these images and show that workers could gather without violence or disorder. In a scene that was taken at a real socialist rally, Wolfe had the crowd participate in his movie.