Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

260 // THOMAS CRIPPS
character is measured only by his fealty to his former mistress, and in his The
Romance of a Jewess (1908), in which a "mixed" marriage is seen as morally
advanced over the grumpy particularism of Jewish and Irish parents.
Gradually, beginning at the onset of the Great War, as Jews began to penetrate
the oligopoly of old-stock patentholders (who had formed a patents "trust"),
the Black image on the screen changed only in various marginal ways. Early on,
Jews and Blacks alike had been hazed with unseemly ardor in the two-reel movies
that were popular on the eve of Hollywood's birth. In The Fights of Nations (1907),
for example, Blacks in "Sunny Africa, Eighth Avenue" fought with razors and
danced preternaturally well, while the Jews vied with each other in fevered bouts
of verbal duelling that broke off only when a gentile—an Irish cop, for example—
drew the Jews together in cunning conspiracy. 8 As to moviemaking itself,
William Selig's A Night in the Jungle (1915), like almost any jungle yarn of its day,
placed its Blacks on the edge of the action with scant investment in the outcome
of the plot. And, like Sam Lubin's How Rastus Got His Pork Chops (1910), many
movies drew upon the hoariest of Southern racial lore, none of which could be
traced back to Jewish cultural sources.
But with the onset of World War I, many liberal Jews stood against Griffith's
The Birth of a Nation (1915) either by joining Rabbi Stephen Wise and the
NAACP in the raucous demonstrations in the office of the Mayor of New York,
or by joining with Rosenwald in backing some sort of cinematic challenge to
Griffith such as The Birth of a Race.
Seemingly mere randomness rather than Jewishness set the racial agendas of
moviemakers. In this connection the career of William Selig is instructive. Early
on, like many figures in show business, he had managed "a genuine fast Black
show" that played the Southern theatrical circuits. Later, he carried the experience
into moviemaking in the form of such two-reelers as Interrupted Crap Game in
which "darkies" break off from their gambling in order to pursue a plump chicken.
Yet, paradoxically, Selig's Polyscope firm joined Rosenwald in the quest to
make The Birth of a Race, a project also taken up in first-draft form by the German
Jewish financier, Jacob Schiff, and one of the first studios to move westward to
Hollywood, Carl Laemmle's IMP firm, which eventually formed the core of a real
estate venture and movie company called Universal Pictures. 9 Clearly, as in all situational
politics, the setting and the stakes, rather than ethnicity, set the agenda
and the ideology. 10
If the Jewish presence in this pre-Hollywood era seemed ambivalent, it must
be seen that African Americans were shrewd enough to respond to both its
aspects. On the one hand, Jews seemed magisterial in their knowledge of business
practice; on the other, Blacks feared Jewish entrepreneurs would swamp struggling
Black infant industries, "I have always been leery of the man with the thing
[film cans] under his arm [as shoestring Black hookers were obliged to do}," wrote
the Black critic, Tony Langston, to George P. Johnson, a cofounder of the Black
Lincoln Motion Picture Company. "I learned this along with the Jews, and you