¹ Plot outline from “March of Life,” 21 10 1926Google Scholar (an early title for The Crowd) located in the MGM collection on “The Crowd” in the Doheny Library, University of Southern California.

² Vardic, Nicholas, From Stage to Screen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), 139Google Scholar; Toll, Robert C., The Entertainment Machine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 13Google Scholar. See the playbills for “Anarchy; or Paul Kauvar,” in the Billy Rose Theater Collection at Lincoln Center, New York. One performance, given on 5 May 1888, was for the benefit of the Statue of Washington that was donated to France. The audience included President Cleveland and numerous Washington officials. See also Brasmer, William, “The Wild West Exhibition and the Drama of Civilization,” in Mayer, David and Richards, Kenneth, Western Popular Theater (New York: Methuen, 1977), 133–56Google Scholar. Couvares, Francis, “The Triumph of Commerce: Class Culture and Mass Culture in Pittsburgh,” in Walkowitz, Daniel and Frisch, Michael (eds.), Working Class America (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Rosensweig, Roy, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Higham, John, Strangers in the Land (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 248Google Scholar; Davol, Ralph, American Pageantry (Taunton, Mass.: Davol Publishing Co., 1914), Chs. 4–6Google Scholar; Constance Mackay, D'Arcy, Patriotic Drama in Your Town: A Manual of Suggestions (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1918), 3Google Scholar; Dickinson, Thomas H., The Case of American Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1915), 146–51, 162–79Google Scholar. For recent analysis of the civic pageant movement see Glassberg, David, “History and the Public: Legacies of the Progressive Era,” Journal of American History, 73 (03, 1987), 957–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Public Ritual and Cultural Hierarchy: Philadelphia's Civic Celebrations at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 107 (1983), 423–48Google Scholar. See also Kasson, John, Rudeness and Civility (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), Ch. 5Google Scholar; McConachie, Bruce, “Pacifying American Theatrical Audiences, 1820–1900,” in Butsch, Richard (ed.), For Fun and Profit (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 47–70Google Scholar; Bush, Gregory, “Heroes and the ‘Dead Line’; Against Riots: The Romantic Nationalist Conception of Crowd Behavior, 1840–1914,” Hayes Historical Journal, 8 (Summer, 1989), 34–57Google Scholar. Kirby, Lynne's “The Urban Spectator and the Crowd in Early American Train Films,” Iris, II (1990) remains unavailable to me at the time of publication.Google Scholar

³ Buckley, James M., “Fanaticism in the United States,” Century, 67 (12, 1903), 196–206Google Scholar; Patrick, G. T. W., “The Psychology of Crazes,” Popular Science Monthly, 57 (1900), 285–94Google Scholar; LeBon, Gustave, The Crowd (1896, rpt. New York: Viking Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Addams, Jane, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1910, rpt. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 87Google Scholar; Huneker, James, The New Cosmopolis (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1915), 96Google Scholar. See also Addams, 's article “Recreation as a Public Function in Urban Communities,” American Journal of Sociology, 17 (03, 1912), 615–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edwards, Richard Henry, Popular Amusements (New York: Association Press, 1915)Google Scholar, Ch. VII and Christianity and Amusements (New York: Association Press, 1919)Google Scholar, Ch VI; Graebner, William, The Engineering of Consent (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Roy Rosenzweig, op. cit. Ch. 8; Czitrom, Daniel, “The Redemption of Leisure: The National Board of Censorship and the Rise of Motion Pictures in New York City, 1900–1920,” a paper delivered at the American Studies Convention, 4 11 1983Google Scholar. For optimistic views of the role of moving pictures see Holliday, Carl, “The Motion Picture Teacher,” World's Work, 26 (05, 1913), 39–49Google Scholar; Johnston, William Allen, “The Moving-Picture Show, the New Form of Drama for the Million,” Munsey's Magazine, 41 (1909), 633–40Google Scholar. Lee, Gerald Stanley, “The Machine-Trainers,” Atlantic Monthly (02, 1913), 198–207Google Scholar. For a revealing attempt to enlist William J. Bryan's use of moving pictures see the comments of President Quinn of American Standard Motion Picture Company to WJB 7 December 1916, WJB Collection, Library of Congress.

⁴ May, Lary, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 70Google Scholar. On changing labor costs see Mast, Gerald (ed.), The Movies in Our Midst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 222–28.Google Scholar

⁵ Lindsay, Vachel, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915, rpt. New York: Liveright, 1922)Google Scholar. Jowett, Garth, in Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little Brown, 1976)Google Scholar writes that Lindsay produced “the most eloquent praise of the film as the ‘democratic art’…” 98. See also Monaco, James, How to Read a Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 312Google Scholar; Susman, Warren, “Personality and the Making of Twentieth Century Culture,” in Higham, John and Conkin, Paul, New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 222Google Scholar. On Lindsay's influence on the civic drama movement, for example, see Mackay, Constance, Patriotic Drama in Your Town…, 112Google Scholar. Griffith, of course, had tried his luck as a theatrical playwright before joining Biograph. See Henderson, Robert, D. W. Griffith, His Life and Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), Chs. 1–5 for a discussion of Griffith's early career.Google Scholar

⁶ Lindsay, , op. cit., 67, 77Google Scholar; New York Times, 4 03 1915Google Scholar. See also Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Form and the Film Sense (New York: Meridan Books, 1957), 195–255Google Scholar for an examination of the influence of Dickens on Griffith. For the earlier influence of Dickens see “Dickens' Description of the Riots,” Chicago Times, 29 07 1877Google Scholar. Michael Rogin strains to find implications of Griffith, in “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation,” Representations, 9 (Winter, 1985), 150–95.Google Scholar

⁷ Lindsay, , op. cit., 93Google Scholar. On reaction to “The Birth of a Nation” see Franklin, John Hope, “Birth of a Nation – Propaganda as History,” The Massachusetts Review, 20 (Autumn, 1979). 417–33.Google Scholar

⁸ Gish, Lillian, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall 1969) 167Google Scholar. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” for example, Whitman described his feelings of being fulfilled as part of a crowd of passengers. “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt; just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd…” He felt able to melt into the souls of other people and function as the spokesman for their inner lives. This point was not lost on many intellectuals during the early twentieth century. Philosopher William James noted that the poet had “felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb one's mind in which would be business sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious man.” The literary critic Van Wyck Brooks spoke for many of his generation when he wrote of Whitman in 1915 that: “all those things that had been separate, self-sufficient, incoordinate-action, theory, idealism, business – he cast into a crucible; and they emerged, harmonious and molten, in a fresh democratic soul ideal, based upon the whole personality.” Whitman, Walt, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” as quoted in McDermott, John (ed.), The Writings of William James (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 657Google Scholar. Brooks, Van Wyck, America's Coming of Age (1915, rpt. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1948), 62Google Scholar. See also Ziff, Larzer, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 241–42Google Scholar; Ziff, Larzer, “Whitman and the Crowd,” Critical Inquiry, 10 (06 1984), 570–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carney, Raymond, American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Forcey, Charles, Crossroads of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 201Google Scholar; Dewey, John, The Public and its Problems (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1927), 184.Google Scholar

⁹ Griffith is quoted in Talbot, Daniel (ed.), Films: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 525Google Scholar. Spitzer, Leo, “Explication de Texte Applied to Walt Whitman's Poem ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’” in Hatcher, Anna (ed.) Essays on English and American Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), 14–36Google Scholar; Hansen, Miriam, “The Hieroglyph and the Whore: D. W. Griffith's Intolerance,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (Spring, 1989), 361–92Google Scholar. Drew, William, Griffith's Intolerance: Its Genesis and Its Vision (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1986), 32–34Google Scholar; Schilling, Edward (ed.), Oral History of King Vidor, interviewed by Nancy DowdGoogle Scholar; UCLA Theater Arts collection, 14Google Scholar; New York Times, 5 09 1916Google Scholar as quoted in Henderson, Robert, D. W. Griffith: his Life and Work, 175.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Lindsay, , op. cit., 23, 243, 95, 78Google Scholar. See also Roy Rosensweig, op cit., ch 8; Lary May, op. cit., ch. 4; Sklar, Robert, Movie Made America (New York: Vintage, 1975), Chs. 2, 8Google Scholar; Addams, Jane, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, Ch. 4.Google Scholar

¹¹ Carlyle's three-volume History of the French Revolution was widely read by many young American intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. Sociologist Edward Ross read it six times before he wrote his article on “The Mob Mind” in the 1890s and recalled that Carlyle's Sartor Resartus “rang in my heart like Cathedral bells,” Ross, Edward, Seventy Years of It (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 21Google Scholar. See also Weinberg, Julius, Edward Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 14, 37, 238Google Scholar; other evidence about Carlyle's significance can be found in Rosenberg, Philip, The Seventh Hero: a Study in the Social and Political Thought of Thomas Carlyle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Addams, Jane, Democracy and Social Ethics (Scott, Ann F. ed.) (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1964), xxiCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dorn, Jacob, Washington Gladden: Prophet of the Social Gospel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1967), 184Google Scholar; The Autobiography of William Allen White (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 153, 217.Google Scholar

¹² Niver, Kemp, D. W. Griffith: His Biograph Films in Perspective (n.p. 1974), 146.Google Scholar

¹³ Gish, , op. cit., 242Google Scholar. Gish's memoirs should be consulted for a more complete study of Griffith's treatment of crowds. See 50–51, Chs. 11–13. Everson, , op. cit., 183Google Scholar. See also MacMahon, Henry, “Thomas Carlyle in the Movies,” New York Times, 1 01 1922Google Scholar; Lee, Gerald, The Lost Art of Reading (New York: Putnam's 1903), 372.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Lounsbury, Myron, The Origins of American Film Criticism, 1909–1939 (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 80 and Ch. 11Google Scholar; Hoopes, James, Van Wyck Brooks: In Search of American Culture (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 183–4Google Scholar. See also Higham, Charles, Cecil B. De Mille (New York: Dell, 1973), Chs. 4 and 5.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Higham, Charles, Looking Forward: Mass Education Through Publicity (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1920), 126Google Scholar; Lipsky, Abram, Man The Puppet (New York: Frank-Maurice Inc., 1925), 98–99Google Scholar; Esty, William, “General Talk on Copy,” 30 09 1930Google Scholar, J. Walter Thompson Papers, R.G.-20, Box 3, located in the Perkins Library, Duke University. See also Lippmann, Walter, Public Opinion (1922, rpt. New York: Free Press, 1965)Google Scholar and The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1925)Google Scholar; Bernays, Edward, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921)Google Scholar; Schudson, Michael, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978), ch. 4Google Scholar; Lee, Ivy, Human Nature and Railroads (Philadelphia: E. S. Nash and Co., 1916), especially 13–16Google Scholar. Bent, Silas, Ballyhoo: The Voice of the Press (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927)Google Scholar. One early and significant study of propaganda in America's past that anticipated the avalanche of later historiography on the subject of “extremism” and manipulation of public opinion, was Scrugham's, Mary, The Peaceable Americans of 1860–1861 A Study in Public Opinion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1921)Google Scholar. See Pressly, Thomas, Americans Interpret Their Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1962), 291–93.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Everson, William A., American Silent Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 214–15Google Scholar. Lary May, op. cit. ch. 8; Umphlett, Wiley Lee, The Movies Go to College; Hollywood and the World of the College-Life Film (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), Ch. 1Google Scholar; McCaffrey, Donald, Three Classic Silent Screen Comedies Starring Harold yoLloyd (Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1976), 198Google Scholar; Blesh, Rudi, Keaton (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 198–203Google Scholar. On the studio system, see Gomery, Douglas, The Hollywood Studio System (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet and Thompson, Kristen, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A revealing perspective on the movie audience is Anne McCormick O'Hare's series of articles in the New York Times in late 1931. See especially “The Vastest Audience Ever Assembled,” 13 12 1931Google Scholar. On DeMille and Niblo see Vardic, Nicholas, From Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method From Garrick to Griffith, 230–31Google Scholar. Interestingly, ad man Barton, Bruce, author of the book The Man Nobody Knows (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925)Google Scholar, that pictured Jesus as a crowd psychologist, worked briefly as a consultant on DeMille's film “King of Kings.” See the filmscript in his papers, Box 45, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

¹⁷ Sinclair, Upton, They Call Me Carpenter (Pasadena, 1922), 196–99Google Scholar. See also Nathan, George Jean, “Nathan Views the Movie Public,” Reader's Digest (11, 1928), 413–14Google Scholar; Karnes, David, “The Glamorous Crowd: Hollywood Movie Premieres Between the Wars,” American Quarterly, 38 (Fall, 1986), 553–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems, 10, 18Google Scholar. On consumer resistance see Cohen, Lizbeth, “Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s,” American Quarterly, 41 (03 1989), 6–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Purcell, Edward, The Crisis of Democratic Theory (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973), Chs. 6, 10Google Scholar; Leach, Eugene, “Mastering the Crowd: Collective Behavior and Mass Society in American Social Thought 1917–1930,” Journal of American Culture (1986), 99–114Google Scholar; Notch, Frank K., King Mob (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1930).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Durgnat, Raymond & Simmon, Scott, King Vidor, American (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 26, 28Google Scholar. See Chs. 3, 4. The influence of German expressionists was also of significance in Vidor's work. Ernest Lubitsch, for example, directed “Madame DuBarry” (retitled “Passion” in the United States), an artistic triumph set during the French Revolution. He consciously emulated an army general while directing thousands of extras in his pictures, telling an interviewer of frequently getting down from his director's heights and acting with his massive number of extras. “I wave my arms, I scowl, I rage, and do everything that is needed. I am a mob in myself, and then go back again as director… One must understand the heart of the people before he can make the people into a mob which thinks as one and acts as one.” His interest in mass psychology reinforced the notion that disciplining actors (seen as mobs) was an element of spectacle crucial to the success of his films. Combined with the expressionistic sets, his films in the 1920s included captivating images of frivolous crowds or horrifying and destructive mobs. Quoted in Harington, John Walker, “Lubitsch, Master of Mobs,” New York Times, 8 01 1922Google Scholar. On “Madame Dubarry” and consideration of German film in American critical discourse, see Allen, Robert C. and Gomery, Douglas, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 95Google Scholar; Rhode, Eric, A History of the Cinema (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976), 162–63Google Scholar. On American's reaction to Mussolini, see Diggins, John, “Mussolini and America: Hero-Worship, Charisma, and the ‘Vulgar Tenth’,” The Historian, 28 (08, 1966), 559–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

Lang's, Fritz “Metropolis,” (1927)Google Scholar probably a model for Vidor as well, used surrealistic images of skyscrapers and gargantuan machines, tyrannical corporate behemoths, and insensitive, efficiency-obsessed executives to explain the drone-like condition of exploited laborers in his city of the future. The chasm between the classes seemed to hold little hope for improvement. The final message, though, was tame – and notably romantic as well: there could be “no understanding between the brain and the hand unless the heart acts as a mediator.” Thus, even seeing the future city as frightening and driven by corporate enslavement of factory workers, Lang's film, like so many others, provides little understanding of emerging cultural complexity involving problems of middle-class office workers or the diverse historical circumstances of social life. On Fritz Lang see Jensen, Paul, The Cinema of Fritz Lang (Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1969).Google Scholar

²⁰ Vidor, King, A Tree is a Tree (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1953), 143Google Scholar. For analysis of The Big Parade, see Isenberg, Michael T., “The Great War Viewed from the Twenties: The Big Parade,” in O'Connor, John E., American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Images (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1979), 17–38.Google Scholar

²¹ Vidor, King, A Tree is a Tree, 145–58Google Scholar. Vidor reveals fascinating details about casting the film in which he picked the lead actor, James Murray, a Hollywood extra, from a passing group of people in the street (147). After completing work on The Crowd, Murray again slipped into obscurity. Vidor later learned that he was found dead, “floating in the Hudson River…” (149). See also Baxter, John, King Vidor (New York: Monarch Press, 1976).Google Scholar

²² Treatment entitled “The Clerk Story,” by Weaver, John, 18 05 1926Google Scholar, document located in “The Crowd” file in the Doheny Library, University of Southern California Film Archives.

²³ On Coney Island see Kasson, John, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978)Google Scholar; Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), Ch. 5.Google Scholar

²⁴ On suggestion in advertising see Lears, Jackson, “Some Versions of Fantasy: Toward a Cultural History of American Advertising, 1880–1930,” Prospects, 8 (1984)Google Scholar; Marchand, Roland, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar and Bush, Gregory, Lord of Attention: Gerald Stanley Lee and the Crowd Metaphor in Industrializing America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), Ch. 6.Google Scholar

²⁵ Vidor, King, A Tree is a Tree, 153Google Scholar. “The Crowd” was produced by MGM and premiered in New York on 3 March 1928. Vidor relates that “the critics greeted The Crowd with enthusiastic acclaim and high praise, but because it didn't jam the aisles of the gigantic movie emporiums it was referred to in some Hollywood circles as an ‘artistic flop.’ At the box office it grossed well over a million dollars, which was twice its cost,” Vidor, , op. cit., 153.Google Scholar

²⁶ On filmic techniques used see both Vidor's biography cited above and Vidor, King, King Victor on Film Making (New York: McKay, 1972), 70–71.Google Scholar

²⁷ “Résumé of Suggestions for Expansion of the Mob-Idea for Atmosphere”, 8 06 1926, by Mr Weaver, located in the MGM file on The Crowd, Doheny Library, UCLA.Google Scholar

²⁸ Ibid. See also the suggested treatment of “The Crowd,” dictated by Stromberg, Hunt, 28 10 1927, USC Film Archives.Google Scholar

²⁹ For an interesting comparison see Barsam, Richard M., “Leni Riefenstahl: Artifice and Truth in a World Apart,” in his book Nonfiction Film and Film Criticism (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1976), 250–62Google Scholar. See also Taylor, Richard, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1979), Ch. 13.Google Scholar

³⁰ West, Nathaniel, The Day of the Locust (1939, rpt. New York: New Directions Paperbook, 1969)Google Scholar; for a rather loosely conceived attempt to conceptualize this problem for the 1930s, see Melling, P. H., “The Mind of the Mob: Hollywood and the Popular Culture in the 1930's,” in Davies, Philip and Neve, Brian (eds.), Cinema, Politics and Society in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), 19–41Google Scholar. Vidor's own later films “Hallelujah!” (1929)Google Scholar and “Our Daily Bread” (1934) should also be consulted for later comparisons.Google Scholar

³¹ I am referring specifically to Capr's, Frank “Meet John Doe,” (1941)Google Scholar; Kazan's, Elia “The Face in the Crowd,” (1957)Google ScholarChayevsky's, Paddy “Network” (1976)Google Scholar and Allen's, Woody “Zelig” (1983).Google Scholar