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Abstract
The institutional creation of the Bureau of Motion Pictures and Exhibits, a division of the Industrial Department of the International Committee of the YMCA, is examined to assess why the YMCA turned to film as a mode of public address in its social welfare programs. The archival history supports the claim that the “attraction effect” of film transformed it into a cultural technology for shaping the conduct of industrial workers. The essay concludes by arguing how film contributed to liberalism's modernization of pastoral power by coupling immigrant workers with the pedagogical voice of the YMCA secretary.
Notes
Ronald Walter Greene is associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Correspondence to: Ronald Walter Greene, Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota, 225 Ford Hall, 224 Church St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0427, USA. [email protected]. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Conjunctures Cultural Studies Working Group in October 2002, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) in March 2003 and the National Communication Association in November of 2003. The author thanks the whole Conjunctures group, but in particular, Charles Acland whose guidance was extraordinary. At SCMS, Heidi Kenaga and Richard Abel offered important insights. Dagmar Getz provided invaluable assistance at the Kautz Family YMCA Archives at the University of Minnesota. Moreover, the author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Robert Ivie for their care and patience. Finally, the paper's production was made possible by the research assistance of Chani Marchiselli, Zornitsa Keremidchieva and Abraham Khan.
[1] The Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program: In and Out of the Association Building (New York: Industrial Department, International Committee YMCA, Bureau of Motion Pictures, 1920), 2, Box 10, Industrial Records, Motion Picture Pamphlets. Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University Libraries, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
[2] Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Washington, DC: Regenery Publishing, 1992).
[3] The first reported film exhibition was at a local Brooklyn YMCA in 1907. Five years later, the Y commissioned the Edison Company to prepare “a series of reels bearing on the work of the … Association in its outreach to working men and boys.” Moving Pictures and Working Men (New York: Industrial Department International Committee of the YMCA, 1912), 24, Box 10 Industrial Records, Motion Picture Pamphlets. Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University Libraries, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
[4] The Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 14–15.
[5] Diane Waldman, “‘Towards a Harmony of Interests’: Rockefeller, the YMCA, and the Company Movie Theatre,” Wide Angle 8, no. 1 (1986): 49. Social historians refer to corporate and charity efforts to improve the moral and economic welfare of workers as welfare capitalism.
[6] This paper works from a Foucauldian perspective on liberalism. As such, it imagines liberalism not as a political ideology but as a governing rationality capable of harnessing specific techniques for the shaping of conduct, the purpose of which is to create the conditions promoting individual freedom. See the essays in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, ed., Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). In cultural studies, the discussion of governmentality often takes place under the sign of cultural policy studies. See Tony Bennett, Culture: A Reformer's Science (London: Sage, 1998) and Toby Miller, Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998). For a recent assessment of the concept of governmentality in cultural studies, see the essays in Jack Z. Bratich, Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy, ed., Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003).
[7] Critical understanding of the spatial and temporal dimensions of communication owe much to the foundational work of Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951) and Empire and Communications (1950; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). More recently, Lawrence Grossberg has described a critical emphasis on spatial and temporal coordinates of everyday life as a “spatial materialism.” See his “Cultural Studies in/and New Worlds” in Bringing It all Back Home: Essays in Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 343–73. One might also add the following to how cultural forms, practices and technologies produce space and time: Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2003); May Joseph, Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2001), Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
[8] Jeremy Packer, “Mobile Communications and Governing the Mobile: CBs and Truckers,” The Communication Review 5 (2002): 43.
[9] One critical direction for a Foucauldian emphasis on governance is to avoid the hermeneutics of suspicion associated with the ideological criticism of a text in order to map the articulation of human technologies in the assemblage of a dispositif; see Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21–41; Malthusian Worlds: US Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 3–10; “Rhetorical Pedagogy as a Postal System: Circulating Subjects Through Michael Warner's ‘Publics and Counterpublics,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 434–43. The importance of the diagram as critical concept is made possible by Deleuze's uptake of Foucault's work. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 34–37 and Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 100–106. The substitution of the diagram for the text as the object of critical analysis was recently defended by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli “Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition” Public Culture 15 (2003): 391.
[10] For the Deluzian inspired approach to articulation theory that guides this paper, see Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, 37–69.
[11] Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt, “Introduction,” in Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City, ed. Nina Mjagkij and Margeret Spratt (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 1–22. See also Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–21.
[12] Winter, Making Men, Making Class, 4.
[13] It is important to note the shifts in the emphasis of welfare capitalism between the 1870s and the end of the 1920s. Two such shifts include: (1) a move away from outsourcing employee programs toward the establishment and rationalization of in-house personnel management departments and (2) a move away from “character-building” programs to financial incentives like stock ownership, group insurance, and pensions. According to Thomas Winter, as the Great Depression approached, both shifts made the YMCA increasingly less important in the history of welfare capitalism. Regarding the history of welfare capitalism, see Sanford Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 192–99. The close relationship between the YMCA and welfare capitalism is documented by Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class, 28–46.
[14] In September of 1913, employees of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in Ludlow, Colorado went on strike. In response, Rockefeller evicted strikers from company-owned houses. The strikers, in turn, built a “tent village.” The Ludlow massacre describes the killing of 24 men, women and children by company agents.
[15] Waldman, “Towards,” 42.
[16] Waldman, “Towards,” 44.
[17] Waldman, “Towards,” 47.
[18] Waldman, “Towards,” 47.
[19] Winter, Making Men, Making Class, 136.
[20] Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); “The Revolt of the Audience: Reconsidering Audiences and Reception During the Silent Era,” in American Movie Audience: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: BFI, 1999), 92–111.
[21] Ross, “The Revolt of the Audience,” 97.
[22] Ross, Working Class Hollywood, 212–39.
[23] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 12.
[24] Ross, Working Class Hollywood, 224.
[25] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 2.
[26] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 8.
[27] Richard Abel and Rick Altman, “Introduction” in The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel and Rick Altman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), xii.
[28] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; Athens: Swallow Press, Ohio University Press, 1954), 218–19.
[29] Kevin Deluca and Jennifer Peeples, “From the Public Sphere to the Public Screen: Democracy, Activism and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 126.
[30] The constitution of this interpersonal sphere as a series of communicative practices may be one of the most important effects of the YMCA's social welfare programs; see Zornitsa D. Keremidchieva, “Making Citizens From Scratch: Americanization, Communication and the YMCA” (paper presented at the Department of Communication Studies, Wednesday Noon Research, University of Minnesota, 15 October 2003), 8–9.
[31] Charles Acland, “Mapping the Serious and the Dangerous: Film and the National Council of Education,” Cinémas: Revue D'Études Cinématographiques 6 (1995): 101–18.
[32] Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951).
[33] Judith Mayne, “Immigrants and Spectators,” Wide Angle 5, no. 2 (1983): 33.
[34] Mayne, “Immigrants and Spectators,” 33.
[35] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 10.
[36] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 10.
[37] Russell Merrit cited in Mayne, “Immigrants and Spectators,” 33.
[38] Russell Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theatres 1905–1914: Building an Audience for the Movies,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 63–81.
[39] Mayne, “Immigrants and Spectators,” 36.
[40] Winter, Making Men, Making Class, 131–33.
[41] Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 194–95.
[42] “Moving Pictures,” Association Men 37 (1912): 237.
[43] Motion Pictures and Working Men, np.
[44] Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114–33.
[45] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Programs, 6.
[46] Moving Pictures and Working Men, 19.
[47] R. W. Reynolds, “Explanatory Note” in Motion Pictures and Motion-Picture Equipment: A General Handbook. Department of the Interior. Bureau of Education Bulletin, No. 82. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1920), 4.
[48] Charles Acland, “Patterns of Cultural Authority: The National Film Society of Canada and the Institutionalization of Film Education, 1938–1941,“ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 10, no. 1 (2001): 2-27.
[49] Among Industrial Workers (Ways and Means): A Handbook for Associations in Industrial Fields (New York: Industrial Department, International Committee YMCA, 1916), 48, Immigration History Research Center, University Libraries, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
[50] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 4.
[51] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 13.
[52] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 20.
[53] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Programs, 7.
[54] Motion Pictures and Working Men, 23.
[55] Calvin Pryluck, “The Itinerant Movie Show and the Development of the Film Industry,” Journal of the University Film and Video Association 35 (1983): 11–22; Mark E. Schwartz, “Motion Picture on the Move,” Journal of American Culture 4 (1987): 1–7.
[56] Acland, “Mapping the Serious and the Dangerous,” 105.
[57] John Hartley, “Invisible Fictions: Television, Audiences, Paedocracy, Pleasure” Textual Practice 1 (1987): 127.
[58] Michel Foucault, “Afterward: The Subject and Power,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 214–15.
[59] See Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979) for a discussion of how the interface and conflict between philanthropic reform organizations, the professionalization of medicine and the state helped to invent the “social” as a sphere of governance.
[60] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures, 3.
[61] Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 129–40.
[62] Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 182.
[63] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 184.
[64] Ten Suggestions to College Students Engaged in Industrial Service (YMCA File: Industrial Work/Immigration Work, 1908–1915), 2, Box 10, Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University Libraries, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
[65] Andrew Barry, “Lines of Communication and Spaces of Rule,” in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government, 123–43.
[66] See James Carey, Communication as Culture (Boston: Irwin Hyman, 1989) and John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
[67] For a discussion of the competing visions of “welfare capitalism” and “welfare statism,” see David Stoesz, “Ideological Nostalgia, Intellectual Narcosis” in The Professionalization of Poverty: Social Work and the Poor, ed. Gary Lowe and P. Nelson Reid (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1999), 142–47.
[68] For a first-class book on the ideological mystifications of the market rhetoric underwriting the neo-conservative cultural critique of the welfare state, see James Aune, Selling the Free Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness (New York: Guilford, 2001).
[69] For a discussion of postmodernism as a shift from the formal to the real subsumption of social life to the logics of capital, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). The “post-modernization of pastoral power” is my concept; it is a corollary to what they refer to as the material ontology of bio-political production.
[70] Stoesz, “Ideological Nostalgia, Intellectual Narcosis,” 144.
[71] Miriam Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 147–49; Will Straw, “Proliferating Screens,” Screen 41, no. 1 (2000): 115–19.