Chaplin's America, The Essanay and Mutual Years: The Making of an Artist in the Progressive Era, 1915–1917

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Notes

¹ Jack S. Blocker, Jr., American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989): Chapter 4.

² Robinson, 154, 199.

1. Other examples include The Marx Brothers 1933 film Duck Soup (directed by Leo McCarey), Billy Wilder's 1957–1962 comedies (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, One Two Three), Richard Pryor's standup comedy work of the 1960s and 1970s, Monty Python's Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1983), Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's The Office BBC television series (2001–2004).

2. Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-Of-The-Century New York City, chapter 6; Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City, chapter 8; Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, chapters 1 and 2.

3. Kuriyama, “Chaplin's Impure Comedy: The Art of Survival,” in Film Quarterly, p. 29.

4. Many books document the rise and effects of Progressivism, and the Gilded Age/Victorian mentality it replaced, including Hofstadter, The Age of Reform; Muncy, Creating A Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935; and Wiebe, The Search For Order, 1877–1920. Wiebe's point about the two post—1905 paths of Progressives is on p. 176.

5. Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art, pp. 135–137.

6. Musser, “Work, Ideology and Chaplin's Tramp,” in Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History.

7. Kerr, The Silent Clowns, p. 85.

8. Chaplin, My Autobiography, p. 173.

9. For more on Chaplin's work habits during this period, see Robinson, pp. 197–200.

10. Robinson, p. 140.

11. Musser, p. 37.

12. Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1492–Present, pp. 326–328.

13. Robinson, p. 145.

14. Ibid.

15. Blocker, American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform.

16. For more on this phenomenon, see Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940; Cohen, Duke Ellington's America, pp. 54–59; Gioia, The History of Jazz, pp. 123–129; Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920, pp. 1–2, pp. 53–57, pp. 185–189; Peiss, pp. 6–9, chapters 4 and 7; Woodcock Tentler, Wage—Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900—1930, p. 112; Weimer, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820–1980, pp. 47–52.

17. For more on this topic, consult: Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House; Boris, Home To Work: Motherhood and The Politics of Industrial Housework in the U.S., chapters 1–3; Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the 20th Century, pp. 1–23; Orleck, Common Sense And A Little Fire, chapters 1–4; Peiss, 7–8, chapters 1–5; Zinn, People's History, pp. 342–347. One wonders if this relatively progressive portrayal of women, particularly the characters played by Edna Purviance, was linked to the fact that during the Essanay and Mutual years, Chaplin and Purviance were evidently a quite serious romantic couple.

18. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image, pp. 14–20.

19. For a sampling of the innovations and philosophies of these figures, consult: Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe; Milford, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay; Sanger, Women and the New Race; Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, pp. 225–241.

20. For more details, consult Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., pp. 468–471; Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America, pp.123–124; Jones, Carnegie Libraries Across America: A Public Legacy; Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, chapters 6–11; and Rosenzweig, Eight Hours, chapter 5. In earlier examples of his philanthropy, Rockefeller did support organizations such as the conservatively moral-minded Anti-Saloon League and Anthony Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, but later after the turn of the century tended to support more generalized causes with less judgmental moral underpinnings, especially in the health field, though his continued support of the Social Gospel movement and its goals in this period clung to, according to Chernow, “an old–fashioned aversion to gambling, prostitution, alcohol and other vices traditionally shunned by Baptists” (pp. 469–470).

21. Arnold, “Civilization in the United States,” in The Nineteenth Century, pp. 486–489, as reproduced by the University of Virginia Library's Electronic Text Center. Similar widely influential views about the proper role of culture were expressed by Arnold in his earlier books Essays In Criticism (1865) and Culture and Anarchy (1869).

22. See, for example: Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Chicago: Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1899); Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1895); Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York: Doubleday, 1900); Jacob Riis, How The Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Scribner's, 1890); Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Doubleday, Jabber & Co., 1906); W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903.

23. Chaplin, My Autobiography, pp. 172–173; Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p. 10, p. 11. For more on the Beatles' initial merchandising deals engineered by manager Brian Epstein that vastly undersold their commercial worth, as well as worldwide efforts to bootleg Beatles merchandise, see Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2005), pp. 464–468.

24. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, p.15; Stansell, American Moderns, pp. 147–165.

25. The quote and the figures are from Robinson, Chaplin, pp. 158–162; Chaplin, My Autobiography, pp. 177–179, pp. 187–189.

26. Robinson, Chaplin, p. 164.

27. Harvard University Open Collections Program. Aspiration, Acculturation and Impact: Immigration to the United States 1789–1930.

28. The most authoritative history of American nativism is Higham, Strangers In The Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925. Most of the material concerning the 1910s is in chapter 7.

29. Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or The Racial Basis of European History.

30. Robinson, Chaplin, p. 154, p. 199.

31. Randolph Bourne, “Trans—National America,” in Randolph Bourne, War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915–1919 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1999): Chapter 8. Quotes are from pp. 108–109.

32. For more details on these struggles, see Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of Organized Labor;. McCartin, Labor's Great War: The Struggle For Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations.

33. Chaplin, My Autobiography, p. 188; Robinson, Chaplin, p. 221.