Immigration and American Popular Culture

An Introduction

Rachel Lee Rubin, Jeffrey Melnick

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780814775530
• eBook ISBN: 9780814776896
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

A unique study that hones in on the cross-section and interdependency of immigration and American cultural production

How does a 'national' popular culture form and grow over time in a nation comprised of immigrants? How have immigrants used popular culture in America, and how has it used them?

Immigration and American Popular Culture looks at the relationship between American immigrants and the popular culture industry in the twentieth century. Through a series of case studies, Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick uncover how specific trends in popular culture—such as portrayals of European immigrants as gangsters in 1930s cinema, the zoot suits of the 1940s, the influence of Jamaican Americans on rap in the 1970s, and cyberpunk and Asian American zines in the1990s—have their roots in the complex socio-political nature of immigration in America.

Supplemented by a timeline of key events and extensive suggestions for further reading, Immigration and American Popular Culture offers at once a unique history of twentieth century U.S. immigration and an essential introduction to the major approaches to the study of popular culture. Melnick and Rubin go further to demonstrate how completely and complexly the processes of immigration and cultural production have been intertwined, and how we cannot understand one without the other.

CHAPTER 1
Hollywood, 1930

Jewish Gangster Masquerade

Toward the end of the 1935 gangster movie Let ’Em Have It, a brutal gangster is running from agents of the newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation. He knows his chances of eluding the agents are getting slimmer and slimmer, so he conceives of an innovative plan for escape. The gangster and his henchmen capture a plastic surgeon and threaten to kill him unless he surgically alters the gangster’s features so that he won’t be recognized by the law.

The surgeon has no choice but to perform the operation. When it is over, the gangster—not so surprisingly—murders him anyway, because, of course, he knows too much. But the climactic moment occurs when the gangster is finally able to take off the bandages the surgeon has used to wrap his face. Facing a mirror, the gangster discovers that the surgeon, who had better sense than to trust a gangster and who knew he would be killed no matter what, has carved the gangsters’ initials into his cheeks—thereby permanently identifying him for the FBI agents in pursuit of him.

Let ’Em Have It, with its shocking visuals, its ostentatiously up-to-date portrayal of the criminal justice system, and its moody, menacing gangster-characters, is a typical enough (if largely forgotten—it still has not been released on DVD) example of the gangster genre that dominated the moviegoing experience as the United States entered the 1930s. We open with this movie—one of literally hundreds—because it so clearly lays out the questions of masking and identity that we will argue in this chapter make up an important part of the cultural “work” of gangster movies during the 1930s (and beyond). (Indeed, the U.K. release of the film used the title False Faces.) Just a decade after Jewish performer Fanny Brice had her famous plastic surgery to reduce her distinctively Jewish nose, inspiring Dorothy Parker to remark, “She cut off her nose to spite her race,” Let ’Em Have It challenges plastic surgery as an adequate hiding place and claims that as much as the gangster might try to hide—no matter what mask he hides behind—his face and his name will ultimately reveal themselves.

By the time Let ’Em Have It played in movie theaters in 1935, American movie audiences had been well trained in the customs and pleasures of gangster flicks. The first major gangster movie was released in 1930 and was immediately followed by dozens of others: it is here we begin our inquiry. Although the figure of the gangster became common in pulp novels, plays, and newspaper and magazine articles as well, it was in these genre movies that the conventions of fictional gangster-dom were established—conventions that would remain in place, manipulated carefully not only throughout what became known as the “classic” era of the 1930s but for the entire span of the 20th century (and into the 21st). Perhaps even more important for our purposes, it was in the movies of the 1930s where the gangster became recognizably marked as “ethnic” (as opposed to earlier, less particularized representations of slum toughs).

The dubious claim is often advanced that during the 1930s—the Great Depression, after all—people went to movies for largely escapist reasons. The early generation of gangster films, though, was very pointedly marketed as “realist.” Warner Brothers, for instance, which produced the most gangster movies of all the studios, declared dramatically that their films were “Snatched from Today’s Headlines!” and then set about to prove it (Clarens 53). This case was made in many ways. The films showcased up-to-the-minute technology, with criminals relying on telephones and automobiles and explosives in exciting and fresh ways. When the main character of The Public Enemy (1931) is attacked by a rival gang, for example, the studio boasted that the shots (which missed their target but fractured a wall) were fired from real machine guns, by marksmen hired by the studio.

In addition to showcasing new technologies, the gangster movies themselves made profitable use of the new sound technologies, with many critics claiming that the genre was the first place “talkies” really succeeded. Gangster movies were made using newly portable sound equipment that allowed the streets to operate as central settings, whereas in earlier films, heavy microphone equipment had limited settings to a couple of rooms. These movies employed current slang that efficiently and colorfully identified the characters as urban, as criminals, as the children of immigrants, and as hailing from working-class families. Some of this slang—“gat” (gun), “beef” (quarrel), “clip” (kill), “the joint” (prison)—found its way through the movies into the American vernacular, where it is still audible today.

The movies’ aural economy conveyed a sense of immediacy, as did their urban-gritty visual punch. Interestingly, one way that filmmakers conveyed this immediacy was by calling attention to the importance of an older medium—the newspaper—to contemporary urban life. Viewers who saw a lot of gangster movies became accustomed to the newspaper figuring centrally in one way or another—sometimes through a character who is a journalist, sometimes through close-up shots of a front-page headline, sometimes through the swift and thrilling sight of papers coming off the press. Meanwhile, outside of the theater, actual journalists, whose plentiful coverage of the organized criminal world regularly included such titillating details as the amount of money spent on flowers for a gangster funeral, were busily blurring the line from their end between news reporting and the stuff of entertainment.

This blurring of the line between news and entertainment—endowing the movies and the literature of gangsters with a function that would be named some half a century later as “infotainment”—added to the impression that gangster movies were somehow “real.” It is true that by spotlighting mob activity the films were depicting a current phenomenon. (Film historian Carlos Clarens has even claimed that they served a civic purpose by acquainting viewers with relevant details of current criminal law [103].) Ethnic criminal gangs were not new, as Herbert Asbury’s colorful books about the historical Gangs of New York (1927) and Gangs of Chicago (1940) showed. However, bootlegging opportunities under Prohibition (which lasted from 1919 to 1933), coupled with expanded immigration from Europe from the 1880s to the 1920s, did markedly “grow” both Jewish and Italian mob activity in the 1920s. The Jewish underworld flourished in ghettos such as New York’s Lower East Side, Chicago’s West Side, and those in Detroit, Boston, Baltimore, and other places. During this time Jews contributed such notorious gangsters as Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, Bugsy Siegel, Gyp the Blood, and scores more of the United States’ foremost bootleggers, racketeers, panderers, and professional killers, culminating most famously in the Jewish-Italian criminal syndicate dubbed “Murder, Inc.” by contemporary journalists.

Jews and Italians achieved prominence in organized crime after the so-called new immigration of the late 1890s and early 1900s. Before 1880, the majority of immigrants to New York came from England, Germany, and Ireland. After 1880, and particularly after 1900, the majority of migrants began arriving from southern and eastern Europe, and between 1881 and 1924, 2.4 million European Jews immigrated to the United States. After the assassination of his father Alexander II in 1881, the Russian czar Alexander III began passing anti-Semitic decrees (the May Laws), which, along with a spate of government-sanctioned pogroms, caused many Russian Jews to flee the country. Meanwhile, in the Austro-Hungarian empire thousands of peasants were forced to leave their land due to consolidation in the agriculture industry. Two million Jews left Europe for America after 1880, three-quarters of them Russian; a similar proportion of that total settled in New York City, and by 1910, Russian Jews were New York’s largest immigrant group. (Without getting into the complexities of European political history, it should be noted here that “Russian” and “Jewish” are complicated categories, given the frequently shifting national boundaries of European nations and the practice of the United States census of tracking immigrants only by country of origin, but not by nationality or religion.) Living close together in poor ghetto neighborhoods in big cities like New York, Chicago, and Detroit, Jewish boys joined gangs “as a matter of course,” as historian Albert Fried put it (37).

As campaigns developed to limit immigration in the first decades of the 20th century, a spotlight was turned on crime statistics as a way to find “proof” that immigrants and their children were dangerous to Americans. From several quarters came authoritative declarations that Jewish immigrants were contributing to the corruption of American morals through a disproportionate involvement in pimping, prostitution, robbery, and assault. A special panic developed around the idea that Jewish men were largely responsible for the business of “white slavery” (a name for enforced prostitution), for which Scribner’s writer Edwin Grant Conklin claimed Jews were innately temperamentally suited (Ruth 13–14). Perhaps most infamously, in 1908, Theodore Bingham, police commissioner of New York, declared in a report that Jews were responsible for 50 percent of the city’s crime (383–394).

The Jewish press in the United States reacted with bewilderment to increasing evidence that Jews were centrally involved in illegitimate activities: how could such a thing be reconciled with a moral code that supposedly made violent crime impossible? Jews had acquired a reputation for being peaceful and law abiding since they first began to arrive in North America in the mid-seventeenth century, and popular commentators, such as Century magazine, tended to single them out for praise: “Proof of the high moral standing of Hebrews is that only two murderers have sprung from their ranks in two hundred and fifty years” (quoted in Joselit 27). As Jewish gang historian Jenna Joselit has shown, not only Jews themselves, but also most Americans, seemed to believe in Jewish exceptionalism in this regard.

The presence of immigrant Jews (and their children) in all manner of criminal endeavors was real: but it also opened up social space for wide-ranging discussions about immigration, commercialization, and modernization in general. These issues were being furiously debated by a wide range of cultural critics, public officials, social workers, racial anthropologists, and educators. This chapter will explore some of the ways in which gangster movies joined this urgent conversation, at a moment when a variety of media institutions—newspapers, the Motion Picture Academy, and so on—acknowledged that these movies were a central force in American cultural life.

But despite their carefully rendered trappings of immigrant realism —and important role in providing a way to respond to the presence of immigrants in cities—the gangster movies have also been examples of what W. T. Lhamon has called a “wink and a dodge” and what Laura Browder names “slippery characters” (in other contexts) all along, a fact about which they reminded viewers over and over again. (Lhamon discusses the subversive strategies of blackface minstrelsy, and Browder refers to ethnic impersonation by authors.) The “slippery” quality of the gangster figure is, in fact, one thing that allowed the trope of the double agent, where layered identities pile up and no one is quite who he seems to be, to flourish as it has.

Fred Gardaphe usefully uses recent scholarship of minstrelsy to “explain” the first generation of imagined Italian gangsters (6). He is taking “minstrelsy” to mean demeaning performative mimicry of one group, carried out by people outside that group: whites who put on blackface are the originators, and Gardaphe wants to make a case for how the concept can also be applied to non-Italian writers who draw wildly stereotypical Italian gangsters. It is possible to deploy here an even broader idea of “minstrelsy”—or masquerade—one that encompasses deliberate hiding, masking, and dodging on the part of those who consider themselves insiders. This wider application of the idea of masquerade can help us better understand those Jews who were most concerned with watching and creating ethnic movie gangsters. This chapter focuses on some of those Hollywood dodges. Jews were particularly well placed as a result of a decades-long process of consolidating their power in the entertainment industries to use film as a forum for articulating (and sometimes masking) group concerns with their public image. What did turning the mobster into a ritual (through the morbid but stylish conventions of what came to be called “film noir”) accomplish? Why were the dodges necessary in the first place, and how did people understand them? What “secrets” did the gangster movies keep through their masquerade, and what secrets did they tell? Finally, what is the evolving meaning of the gangster mask for Jews and non-Jews and what is the meaning behind the mask?

This chapter is also intended to demonstrate the usefulness of privileging genre as an analytic category. Organizing this chapter around genre (“gangster movies”) allows us to take an entire system of cultural activity into account and to notice how that system changes over time. The focus on genre demands that at least some attention be paid to those who made the movies, those who watched them, those who advertised and reviewed them, those who objected to them, those who made money from them, and so forth. This chapter intends to probe gangster movies from many positions of what Stuart Hall called encoding and decoding of meaning (“Encoding/Decoding” 130)—in short, paying close attention to arguments being constructed by those who participated in making the films and also arguments being constructed by how audiences chose to understand them. In the case of the “classic” gangster movies, the levels of meaning overlap from the start: Americans whose background included the “classic” story of immigration from Europe to the United States were found in the audience, onscreen, and in the production companies.

The Gangster Hits the Movies

The 1930s have become known, in historical cliché, as the “golden” or “classic” age of gangster movies. This is certainly true from the point of view of quantity: especially during the first three or so years of that decade, the studios kept grinding them out, hoping to repeat each box office success story. Most major male actors of the period played a gangster at some point during their careers. In 1931, roughly twenty-five gangster movies were released; in 1932, there were about forty (Clarens 60).

Hewing largely to a fairly transparent “rise and fall” formula, these gangster movies flooded the country with story after story about immigrants and their children, with the result that they presented these populations as a sort of puzzle that had to be figured out. In one realm, though, barely more than a half-decade earlier the “puzzle” had been solved already by the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 (also known as the Johnson-Reed Act). This law severely limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country (to 2 percent of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890). The law was intended to curtail the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans, and it was successful: from 1900 to 1910, for instance, about 200,000 Italians were permitted to enter the United States every year, but after 1924, only 4,000 were permitted to enter yearly. Thus, the peak moment of gangster movies can be located as marking the end of the great waves of Italian and Jewish immigration—and offering commentary upon what those great waves were going to mean, now that they were a fait accompli. Gangster movies also concerned themselves with the new anxieties resulting from the mobility—or potential mobility—of immigrant families, some of whom were starting to move out of the ethnic ghettos where they had first settled.

These films, with their depictions of Italian, Irish, and Jewish gangsters who struggle to achieve class mobility through crime and violence, were capacious enough to accommodate more than one perspective on the new immigrant Americans. On one hand, as David Ruth in particular has made amply clear, the movies expressed to some viewers a xenophobic dread about what these immigrants (and their children) would do to American society. From this position, the gangsters’ capacity for violence is ethnically determined, and their “outsider” status is brought about by their own cultural deficiencies.

But this interpretation cannot account for all segments of the audience; as Robert Sklar has pointed out, movie reviewers in the 1930s were frequently startled to find that audiences “took to” the gangsters (32) and that the movies attracted a “devoted following of urban ethnics” (43) who cheered them openly in the theaters. Indeed, as Michael Denning and others have acknowledged, the gangster became the “first ‘ethnic’ hero in American popular culture” (Cultural Front 254).

With the perspective brought by the distance of time, it is easy to see how particular gangster movies could invite such contradictory interpretations. The three movies that are generally considered to be the triumvirate of the “best” gangster movies (certainly the ones of the era that have continued to wield cultural power)—Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932)—illustrate, taken together and separately, an availability to bluntly divergent readings even as they all embrace the major rules and motifs of the gangster genre.

The gangster “hero” of Little Caesar, Rico, is Italian American. He is a minor thug who, for a short time, manages to rise on the crime ladder because he is driven to succeed in his chosen path, not because he is particularly smart or strong. What is most interesting about Rico is that his drive is not primarily to acquire wealth as such; very early in the movie, in fact, he tells an associate, “Money’s all right, but it ain’t everything.” What Rico lusts after is the social standing he sees more “polished” types enjoy, and it is easy to sympathize with his desire for inclusion. Rico does achieve this status for a while—he is never more triumphant than when a fancy dinner is held in his honor—but in the long run, he appears as a fish out of water: too uncouth, too rude, and too short and dark to fit into the sleek, glamorous world he so admires. The end of the film finds Rico lying prone under a billboard, dead and alone—suffering the fate of virtually all film gangsters.

Figure 1.1. Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar (1930): his ultimate achievement of status comes at a “society” dinner in his honor

Released less than a year later, The Public Enemy is also very interested in the question of how “ethnics” will fit into cherished American institutions. Here, the gangsters are the children of Irish immigrants who eventually team up with a Jewish mob. Tom Powers has surveyed the ways available to him for prospering, and landed upon crime as the most likely prospect; as a foil for his choices, the movie includes the character of Tom’s brother, Mike, who follows the “straight” path of night school, a modest job, and enlistment in the military. Strikingly, although Mike speaks in a recognizably “positive” rhetoric about serving one’s country when it needs you, he mostly comes across as a flunky, while Tom, through criminal enterprises that grow from petty burglary to bootlegging and racketeering, is able to leave the crowded ethnic neighborhood where both boys grew up. He moves across town into a fancy hotel, acquires a worldly blond girlfriend, and purchases fashionable new clothes and a showy car. But at the height of this material success, a fight breaks out between Tom’s gang and a bootlegging rival. Tom is shot and badly wounded, and, swaddled in bandages in the hospital, is filled with regret for his choices and swears to give up crime. It’s too late, though: the next day, he is kidnapped from the hospital and killed, and in a f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Aliens, Inc.
• 1. Hollywood, 1930: Jewish Gangster Masquerade
• 2. Los Angeles, 1943: Zoot Suit Style, Immigrant Politics
• 3. Broadway, 1957: West Side Story and the Nuyorican Blues
• 4. Monterey, 1967: The Hippies Meet Ravi Shankar
• 5. South Bronx, 1977: Jamaican Migrants, Born Jamericans, and Global Music
• 6. Cyberspace, Y2K: Giant Robots, Asian Punks
• Afterword: Chelsea, 2006: Wandering Popular Culture
• Appendix: Timeline
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Authors