Escaping into Culture or Persecuting Others' Culture?

The management of culture vis-à-vis the status of immigrants is an important issue for Levine in his third chapter. The time period that Levine’s discussing (the second half of the 19^th century) is a very modern-sounding one, characterized as it is by urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. How does culture play into this situation? Levine explains that many highbrow Americans during this period used culture as a way of distancing themselves from the new and suspect immigrants. He cites Henry James and explains that “For him and for many others there was [. . .] an escape into Culture, which became one of the mechanisms that made it possible to identify, distinguish, and order this new universe of strangers. As long as these strangers stayed within their own precincts and retained their own peculiar ways, they remained containable and could be dealt with” (177).

This idea that culture could segregate “real” Americans from immigrants during this period is what I’m interested in here, and I want to compare Levine’s account on the subject to that of David Nasaw, who also discusses the issue in a chapter that I teach in my Interp class that comes from his book Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. This chapter, entitled “The Pernicious ‘Moving Picture’ Abomination,” discusses the early cinema houses during the 1900-1915 period. Nasaw’s account suggests two things of import here: first, that these nickelodeons and movie houses were predominantly the haunts of the poor, immigrant, and young, and second, that as a result of this, they were subject to a great deal of community scrutiny and controversy. Apparently, escaping into culture wasn’t enough for some—they wanted instead to actively persecute the immigrants’ cinema culture.

Audience is important to Nasaw’s treatment of cinema controversy: he argues that “What made the discourse on the moving pictures cataclysmic in tone was the changed nature of the audience. Vaudeville and live theater had deadened the taste, moral sensibilities, and intellectual capacities of relatively prosperous, English-speaking audiences; moving picture ‘demoralized’ working people, immigrants, and children who lacked the intellectual, educational, and cultural resources to resist or counterbalance their effects” (175). Community attacks on the nickelodeons targeted not only the content of the films shown there (people worried, for instance, that immigrants watching crime films would learn that crime “paid handsomely and required much less toil than labor in factory, mine, or mill” [175]), but also the physical conditions of the theaters (insufficient lighting, fire hazards, crowding, disease contraction, etc.).

Here’s my point: while Levine argues that culture in this period should not be imagined as “a mechanism for social control” (206), Nasaw’s account of the cinema houses suggests otherwise in that it posits cinemas and their culture as being subject to power precisely because of the immigrant and poor audiences found there. True, it’s not as if film was deployed to control immigrants while opera (or what have you) was maintained to enrich elites, but Nasaw makes it clear that because cinema houses were oriented to immigrant populations, concerns about culture and concerns about immigrants were conflated in the nickelodeon controversy.

This wasn’t lost on the public of the time, either, as Nasaw explains. He quotes a letter to the New York Times that begs the moral crusaders of the time to lighten up a bit so that immigrants may be able to enjoy their accessible, cheap culture without being persecuted themselves or having their movie houses shut down: “There is no other form of amusement at prices sufficiently low which meets the amusement needs of the workingman’s or immigrant’s entire family. The possibility of cheap, wholesome, dramatic amusement for the people is involved in the moving picture problem. Let us remember this in our efforts at reform” (179).

Henry James may have “escaped into culture” in order to escape immigrants, but other American fuddy-duddies, Nasaw suggests, went even further, targeting the immigrants’ cinema culture precisely because it was theirs.