Making Americans: Spectacular Nationalism, Americanization, and Silent Film

Abstract

Examining archival footage and documents about the cultural work of silent film during the 1910s and 1920s, this essay reveals the complicity of film with the work of organized Americanization at both federal and industrial levels. Specifically, it argues that early American cinema is complicit with and critical of Americanization, as it negotiates multiple new immigrant concerns. Joining the recent work of film and immigration historians, it argues that just as Americanization did not produce compliant citizens overnight, silent film as a new and powerful medium of persuasion could influence the new American viewers’ transformation only in part. Of particular interest is the use of film in industrial and educational contexts – which sometimes overlapped – purporting to both “educate” and Americanize the new immigrants to the US. It asks, what cultural work did silent film do for Americanization, the active and sometimes coercive campaign aiming to make new immigrants into good Americans? The films I read as case studies later in this essay – industrial, educational, and nontheatrical films such as An American in the Making (1913), The Making of an American (1920), and others – illustrate the potential of silent film both as mimesis (or representation of ideology) and as ideology.