Jan-Christoph Prüfer
Hardboiled Hollywood
Traces of American Heroism and Cultural Change in the Portrayals of the Detective Hero
in the Maltese Falcon and the Big Sleep
ISBN: 978-3-8366-0271-6
Druck Diplomica® Verlag GmbH, Hamburg, 2007
Zugl. Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Deutschland, Magisterarbeit, 2006
Dieses Werk ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Die dadurch begründeten Rechte,
insbesondere die der Übersetzung, des Nachdrucks, des Vortrags, der Entnahme von
Abbildungen und Tabellen, der Funksendung, der Mikroverfilmung oder der
Vervielfältigung auf anderen Wegen und der Speicherung in Datenverarbeitungsanlagen,
bleiben, auch bei nur auszugsweiser Verwertung, vorbehalten. Eine Vervielfältigung
dieses Werkes oder von Teilen dieses Werkes ist auch im Einzelfall nur in den Grenzen
der gesetzlichen Bestimmungen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland in der jeweils geltenden Fassung zulässig. Sie ist grundsätzlich
vergütungspflichtig. Zuwiderhandlungen unterliegen den Strafbestimmungen des
Urheberrechtes.
Die Wiedergabe von Gebrauchsnamen, Handelsnamen, Warenbezeichnungen usw. in
diesem Werk berechtigt auch ohne besondere Kennzeichnung nicht zu der Annahme,
dass solche Namen im Sinne der Warenzeichen- und Markenschutz-Gesetzgebung als frei
zu betrachten wären und daher von jedermann benutzt werden dürften.
Die Informationen in diesem Werk wurden mit Sorgfalt erarbeitet. Dennoch können
Fehler nicht vollständig ausgeschlossen werden, und die Diplomarbeiten Agentur, die
Autoren oder Übersetzer übernehmen keine juristische Verantwortung oder irgendeine
Haftung für evtl. verbliebene fehlerhafte Angaben und deren Folgen.
© Diplomica Verlag GmbH
http://www.diplom.de, Hamburg 2007
Printed in Germany
Contents
Introduction 1
Methodology 2
1. American Mythology
1.1. The Frontier and the Individualist Ethic 4
1.2. The Heroes of American Mythology 8
2. Historical Context The United States from 1900 to World War II
2.1. Unrestricted Capitalism and the Progressive Movement 12
2.2. World War I 14
2.3. The Enhancement of Women's Situation in American Society 15
2.4. The Economic Boom of the 1920s 15
2.5. The Great Depression and the New Deal 16
2.6. World War II 18
3. The Hardboiled School
3.1. Pulp Fiction: Gunslingers and PIs 20
3.2. Literary Traditions and the Hardboiled Genre 22
3.3. The Hardboilers in their Historical and Cultural Context 24
3.4. The Authors 25
4. Hollywood
4.1 The Myth Factory as Societal Mirror 30
4.2. Hollywood Genre Cinema and Hollywood Authorship 34
4.3. The Hollywood Industry 36
4.4. Taming Hollywood Cause and Effect of the Production Code 38
5. Film Noir
5.1. Origins 41
5.2. Style 44
5.3. Film Noir An un-American Genre? 46
6. Film-Analysis The Maltese Falcon
6.1. Synopsis 49
6.2. Adaptation Changes 51
6.3. The Maltese Falcon as Film Noir 57
6.4. Sam Spade as a Frontier Hero 60
6.5. Bogart's Spade as a Hero of his Times 61
7. Film Analysis The Big Sleep
7.1. Synopsis 65
7.2. Adaptation Changes 67
7.3. The Big Sleep as Film Noir 76
7.4. Philip Marlowe as a Frontier Hero 77
7.5. Bogart's Marlowe as a Hero of his Times 80
Conclusion 81
1
Introduction
I have chosen the two films that will be subjected to examination in this work
because they have a lot in common at first glance. Their scripts are based on
crime novels of the so called "hardboiled school," a stream in American popular
literature that developed after the First World War. They were both filmed in the
1940s and produced by the Warner Brothers studio. No scholarly or critical
discussion of the Hollywood genre of film noir is complete without them, and
they both feature Humphrey Bogart as the main actor in the role of the private
eye.
What I hope to show this thesis is not only that these films, despite the
similarities outlined above, are far from being basically the same movies, but
additionally to give convincing reasons why this is the case. One of these
reasons will be the evaluation of the fact that the literary private eyes that the
heroes of John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Howard Hawks' The
Big Sleep (1946) are based on already differ in their character concept, and that
these differences correspondingly found their way to the screen in the
adaptations.
A further decisive point for measuring the differences between the films is
that I will assume that these movies were financial successes because they
reflected the times that they were made in and thus gave movie audiences what
they wanted to see. That movies are products of their time is a fact as blatant
as it is true, yet one that has repeatedly been called into question in the past.
The Hollywood genre system, the directors, the financial interests of the movie-
making industry have all been pointed out as shaping a movie and its content
rather than some mysterious connection between a film and the popular mind,
the convictions, dreams and anxieties of the masses commonly referred to as a
people's culture.
But although I do not doubt the significance of the factors mentioned above, I
agree with Albert Quart and Leonard Auster who pointed out that filmmakers
are human beings and parts of their societies, and that, consequently, they "are
touched by the same tensions and fantasies . . . and their profits are usually
dependent on their ability to guess . . . popular feelings" (Quart/Auster 2-3).
Will Wright similarly argued that the popular success of a movie can be
considered as evidence that it struck a nerve with contemporary audiences, as
2
stars and promotion campaigns promising action-filled escapist fantasies alone
have frequently turned out to be insufficient to ensure financial gain (cf. Wright
13-14).
Using this as my basic assumption, I hope to illustrate that the two pictures of
detectives differ from each other not only because they are based on novels by
different authors, but also more decisively because they were filmed against
different cultural backgrounds, at times when history had changed audience
expectations concerning heroes. The historical "milestone" lying between The
Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep is World War II. The former was filmed in
1941, the latter in 1944 and released in 1946. Thus, what separates the screen
incarnations of Sam Spade in Huston's film and Philip Marlowe in Hawks' film is
the historical experience of ten years of economic depression that unmistakably
revealed the flaws of capitalism on the one hand and the economic recovery
and relative optimism of the war years on the other.
It will be argued that, while both of these heroes maintained certain
traditional American virtues, primarily the myths of rugged individualism and
tough masculinity as manifested in American frontier-mythology, they
simultaneously modified these traditional convictions according to the
contemporary cultural surroundings. To accomplish this the methodology
outlined below will be applied.
Methodology
I will commence by explaining the assumed connotation of terms repeatedly
used throughout my work. The difference between "movie" and "film," often
regarded as the difference between the movie as entertainment/product
manufactured in Hollywood and the art/avant-garde cinema of Europe will be
ignored in this work. It is a difference that is of no importance for this
discussion. Consequently, movie and film will be used interchangeably.
Culture then, as has already been indicated, is taken to be a people's
convictions and a society's assumptions about life, which are, as Will Wright
saw it, communicated to a civilization through its myths (cf. Wright 16). The
carriers of myths again are the stories told among the members of a society
and as altogether are a people's or a nation's mythology.
3
As I am dealing with filmic manifestations of an American mythological hero
of a particular era, namely the hardboiled detective, my first chapter will give a
broad overview of other, earlier heroes that Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe
were derived from. Through this, I can evaluate the continuities woven between
them and the frontier heroes, the hunters, the cowboys and the gunslingers.
As historical events might bring cultural change that is reflected in the
movies to be discussed, a historical and a cultural background of the United
States from the 1920s to the end of World War II will be provided, as these are
the decades to which our heroes were born, first on the written page and then
on the screen. The hardboiled school as a literary stream and genuinely
American form of popular fiction will be discussed as the scripts of the films to
be analyzed are based on two outputs of this school. Emphasis in this chapter
will be put on the authors responsible for the source texts of "our" movies, i.e.
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Studying American movies would be incomplete without a discussion of
Hollywood, a term that for many has become synonymous with American film.
To be discussed in my chapter on Hollywood are the dream factory's
significance as an American "mythmaker," as James Spatz called it, the genre
system, studio practices, and the consequences of the Production Code for the
The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. Additionally, in this chapter the reason
will be examined why Hollywood films, not in spite of but precisely because they
are commercial products aimed at mass audiences, are worthy to be examined
by scholars.
Strictly speaking, this is not a work on film theory. Lighting, cutting and scene
composition will be taken into consideration, as images and sound are the
factors that distinguish the way in which a film tells a story different from how
literary fiction works. It would be awkward to choose film as the matter of
research and then ignore what makes it a distinct medium. But for my
purposes, it would not lead us too far if I restricted my work to the technical
aspects of film and the mechanical conventions of the "Imaginary Signifier" as
Christian Metz proposed (cf. Metz 3-81). In Metz' words, my work will not be
"basically cinematic," as I will concentrate my analysis not so much on the
"cinema but rather a story that happens to have been told by it" (Metz 34).
4
Nevertheless, film noir as a cinematic style and a genre that goes against
Hollywood conventions and Americanisms like happy endings, optimism and
the conservative belief in a world divided into good and evil will be discussed in
chapter five. Both films to be examined are commonly held to be archetypal
films noirs, but we are about to see that one of them portrays a much bleaker,
more faithless vision of America and masculine heroism due to the different
historical and cultural contexts of the movies, as I am going to argue.
The patterns of analysis will be the same for both films. They will begin with a
discussion of the changes that Hollywood imposed on the novels. This measure
will, especially in the case of The Big Sleep, demonstrate how the Production
Code among other factors supported the modification to more Hollywoodesque
and consequently "more American," positive and further from reality versions of
the rather pessimistic source texts. This assessment will be followed by a
discussion of the movies as films noirs, a relatively subversive genre that in the
case of the Chandler-adaptation lost a lot of its rebellious potential and
exchanged the crisis-ridden masculinity of the novel's Marlowe for a more
traditional, everything-under-control kind of hero.
The third step in our analysis will examine traces of traditional concepts of
American heroism already evident in both detective heroes in the novels. These
are traits that mainly originate from ideas connected with the frontier-mythology
and align both Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, regardless of some of their
rather anti-heroic qualities, with Leatherstocking and similar characters of
American fiction. Concluding the discussions will be a reading of the films as
reflectors of contemporary anxieties and hopes in American society, that in both
cases we will mainly find in the heroes' motivation to go against the "bad guys"
and the heroes' relation to the opposite gender.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz saw art, and consequently film, as one of
"the symbolic dimensions of social action" (Geertz 30), i.e., a blueprint for
certain aspects of a society's culture. Using the analytical steps described
above, we will be able to read the implications of cultural continuity and change
from the depictions of the detective heroes in The Maltese Falcon and The Big
Sleep.
5
1. American Mythology
1.1. The Frontier and the Individualist Ethic
In ancient Greece, stories about Zeus and his fellow gods and demigods, Greek
mythology, made sense of the world and society, and things that people did not
understand or were not able to articulate right away. An observable fact like the
weather was not understood as a factor under the rule of atmospheric physics
as people did not yet know enough about physics; thus, a rough sea was not a
meteorological phenomenon but rather the god Poseidon raging.
For a long time anthropologists examined the divine mythology of archaic
people with the aim to understand these particular cultures' "conception of the
relationship of man to the universe . . . , historical and moral theory, and self-
concept" (Slotkin, "Regeneration" 3). Soon, it was understood that it was not
just the peoples sometimes described as "primitive" that have their myths
communicating what it means to be a member of a particular society, but that
even nations, presenting the most recent and "civilized" form of living together,
also start telling stories to define what they "are about." As Richard Slotkin put it
in Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, "the
mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask of that enigma called the `national
character'" (3). To Will Wright, "a myth is a communication from a society to its
members: the social concepts and attitudes determined by the history and
institutions of a society are communicated to its members through its myths"
(16). The mythologies of nations often deal with a country's past. Stories about
how things used to be are utilized to correspond to listeners who they are
today. National myths are among the favorite targets of historians, as it lies
within myth's nature to give a highly selective view of the past.
When politicians in France today talk about the heritage of the French
revolution, they most likely mean the mythical version that excludes the
senseless bloodshed that it was accompanied by. German national
conservatives occasionally still insist that the majority of the electorate in 1933
did not vote the NSDAP and conveniently overlook that it was the votes for the
Deutschnationale Volkspartei, a bourgeois version of Hitler's party for the upper
middle class, that gave the German ultra-right the majority in the parliament of
Weimar. The American civil war of 1861-65 is often remembered as a battle
6
between good-hearted humanists and devilish slave owners in which the
powers of freedom finally prevailed. Objectively, the system of slavery was
opposed because it was incompatible both with the industrial capitalist society
emerging in the north and the small farm scheme in the west alike. That brings
us to American mythology.
The term central to the mythology of the United States is that of the frontier,
an expression whose historical facts and legend have mixed since the end of
the 19
th
century to such a degree that they have become indistinguishable from
each other. Neutrally put, the frontier signifies the three hundred years
spanning the settlement of the west, the movement from the harbors of the
north, where the immigrants arrived, to what would finally be Oregon and
California when the frontier was officially declared closed in 1890 (cf. Dippel 66-
67).
As early as 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner affirmed the frontier
to have been more than just the claiming of land. In his groundbreaking work
The Significance of the Frontier in American History, he argued that the
situation of the settlers, confronted by an uncivilized wilderness and forced to
rely on nobody but themselves, had been the key experience to what had
formed the American national character. Turner saw the brutalizing effect of the
primitive frontier environment as the reason why the United States, though
founded mainly by Europeans, had not become just another Europe but a class
of its own. Under the point Intellectual Traits, Turner's thesis summed up what
he had identified as the essential character traits of the American people:
. . . to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That
coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that
practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp
of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that
restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and
for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom
- these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of
the existence of the frontier. (227)
7
Later historians utilized Turner's thesis to explain cultural differences and
misunderstandings between Europe and the United States
1
on account of the
lack of a frontier experience in the former one. As one of the most productive
writers on the subject, Ray Allan Billington argued that the traits which visitors
from abroad encounter as uniquely American are precisely those that Turner
had identified as having sprung from the frontier tradition. Billington summed up
these not solely flattering qualities as the following:
To the visitors . . . Americans . . . are arrogantly nationalistic, and so blindly
worshipful of democratic principles that they can recognize virtue in no other
governmental system. They demand more economic freedom for the
individual than is allotted in most urban-industrial countries. Whatever their
wealth or social status, they refuse to recognize the existence of class lines
or, if they do, proudly proclaim themselves in the middle class. They are
forever moving about, exhibiting none of the attachment to place that lends
stability to more mature societies. . . . of the many forces helping to create a
distinct American culture, none was more important than the existence of a
frontier during the three hundred years needed to settle the continent. ("Frontiers"
75-76)
Of particular interest for our concern is what the scholar here indicates when he
talks about the "freedom of the individual." In one of his earlier works, Billington
put this individualist ethic to the point by arguing that "Americans are an
individualist people, intensely disliking any intrusion in their affairs by
government or society" ("Tradition" 17). The assumption that more than
anything else, Americans like to be left alone, occasionally leads to provocative
conclusions: The author David Skal has once argued that the American media
and the public's fascination with serial-killers lies in the fact that "in a very
exaggerated way, they embody the qualities of freedom and individuality that
are supposed to be at the heart of the American character. They break all the
rules. We admire them for that."
2
1
Obviously, people from outside Europe are likely to recognize American cultural particularities as well,
but the reactions of Europeans are probably the most interesting as it is them that were and often still are
perplexed to find a country so different although founded by their ancestors.
2
In a documentary directed by Michelle Palmierro: Ed Gein: The Ghoul of Plainfield, (New
Line/Automat Pictures, 2004).
8
It has often been stated that the American individualism and the mistrust of
any kind of control from the outside is the reason why America's states have
more political freedom than their cousins in European federal systems. A dark
side of this freedom is of course, as social critics all over the world and in the
US itself have pointed out, that many Americans oppose state or collective help
for people in need, as an institution like welfare signifies government
interference in an individual's life. As I am concerned about the stories that
communicate a cultural value like dominant individualism to a society, I will now
provide a short catalog of quintessential, mythical American heroes, a
genealogical tree for Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.
1.2. The Heroes of American Mythology
In The American Adam, R.W.B. Lewis differentiates between an American myth
and American mythology, arguing that the latter is the canon of stories about
the American experience and the former the quintessential elements of these
stories. The author claims that:
The American myth, unlike the Roman, was not fashioned by a single man of
genius. It was and it has remained a collective affair; it must be pieced
together out of an assortment of essays, orations, poems, stories, histories,
and sermons. We have not produced a Virgil, not even Walt Whitman being
adequate to that function. (4)
Lewis analyzes the works of American writers and poets from 1820 to 1860, a
period in which he sees the "beginnings and the first tentative outlines of a
native American mythology." He concludes from his findings that "the image
contrived to embody the most fruitful contemporary ideas was that of the
authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities,
poised at the start of a new history" (1).
The stories out of which the American myth arose from started circulating in
the New World before 1820. America's heroes were frontier heroes, paving the
way for civilization in the untamed wilderness, fighting Indians, wild animals,
and beautiful but merciless mother nature herself. Paul Bunyan is such a
character of American folklore which became a literary hero at the beginning of
the twentieth century but apparently had been around before (cf. Dorson 220).
9
A giant lumberjack accompanied by a colossal blue ox, Paul Bunyan is a
mythical man of hard, practical work. In this there is something about the
quintessential American hero that becomes obvious and was described by
Richard M. Dorson as following:
Several elements link the various types of American folk and mass heroes,
whether comic demigods, Münchhausens, Robin Hood outlaws, or noble
toilers. All exalt physical virtues, and perform or boast about prodigious feats
of strength, endurance, violence and daring. . . , the popular hero on every
level of American life glorifies brawn and muscle in contrast to mind and
intellect: Clark Gable in the movies, Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey in sports,
Ernest Hemingway and his he-men in highbrow literature, Tarzan of the Apes
in lowbrow literature, Paul Bunyan and his ilk in folklore, Superman in the
comic-books. America's idols all rise from the ranks of the common man and
exhibit the traits of unwashed democracy, spitting, bragging, brawling, talking
slang, ridiculing the dandy, and naively trumpeting their own merits. (201)
3
A dandy is a suit and glasses wearing bureaucrat or somehow educated man
usually from the East of the country whose stiff, learned manner is completely
out of place on the frontier. This character belongs to the standard row of
clichéd protagonists in western dime novels as well as western films.
The frontier heroes, and these are the ones that I assume to be the
ideological cradle of later heroes of American mythology, are not un-intelligent
but anti-intellectual. Their aptitude is of a rather material and practical sort that
could be necessary to survive in the wilderness on the frontier. As Billington
suggested:
To the pioneer, any man who wasted his time in abstract thought or by creating
beauty was a traitor to society; utilitarianism was the test of any activity. The folk
heroes elevated by the West were men of accomplishment rather than
contemplation; Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone were venerated there, not Dr.
Daniel Drake. . . . Andrew Jackson was the idol of the pioneers not because he was
a capable lawyer and a successful diplomat, but because he was an Indian fighter
3
For what I am getting at here, consider the fact that the comic-character Superman mentioned by
Dorson chooses the intellectual image of a bespectacled journalist as his secret identity, obviously
counting on the readers ` understanding that nobody would ever suspect a four-eye to be a super-hero.
10
and a champion of the `true-grit West'. ("Heritage" 91)
Another typical quality besides this suspicion of well-read and far too analytical
people is that America's mythological founding heroes are often stuck and
more specifically in the gray zone between the wilderness of the yet
unconquered West and the civilization that encroaches from the East. James
Fenimore Cooper's creation Natty Bumppo moves on the line between the
Indians, personifying barbarism and the brutal laws of nature and the settlers,
who stand for order and Christianity. When told by a fellow traveler about the
Christian code of forgiving one's enemies, Natty himself, in Cooper's probably
best remembered work The Last of the Mohicans, puts it as follows:
"There is principle in that," he said, "different from the law of the woods; and
yet it is fair and noble to reflect upon." . . . "It is what I would wish to practice
myself, as one without a cross of blood, though it is not always easy to deal
with an Indian as you would with a fellow Christian." (325)
Natty thus admits the brutalizing effect the frontier has had on him and
simultaneously articulates his understanding that the law of civilization, which is
to the early settlers the same as the law of god, is superior to the
commandments that the wilderness lives by. This placement of the hero
between two worlds is a constant in frontier literature after the Leatherstocking
novels and can be located in the western dime novels of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, as well as in the Hollywood genre of the western films
which many of these books were adapted into. The hero always recognizes the
need for civilization to finally triumph over the wilderness. But only he, as one
who at the same time understands that "it is not always easy to deal" with the
wilderness and knows how to fight fire with fire, can overcome brutality and
lawlessness by unleashing the violent part of his own soul. Ironically, it is this
very part of his soul that concurrently separates him from civilized society, as it
is incompatible with a system governed by the forces of law and order:
westerns such as Shane (1952) or The Searchers (1956) end with the hero re-
embracing loneliness after having slain the dragon bloodthirsty Indians,
greedy ranchers, Jack Palance on behalf of the settlers, farmers, etc.
11
As already indicated in the quoted lines by Dorson, certain elements of this
scheme of masculine bravery have been repeated to wavering degrees in tales
of American heroism until this very day. Hardboiled fiction, emerging against
the post-industrial background of twentieth century United States culture, varied
the wilderness/civilization dichotomy and turned it into one of
underworld/legality, as we will see in the subsequent discussion. But before I
advance to this argument, it is necessary to evaluate the role of women in
American mythology, as this role, and subsequently some of the hero's merits,
changed perceptibly in stories from frontiersmen to tough big city PIs.
Before hardboiled fiction, women had traditionally played the role of either a
victim in early frontier literature or the civilizing influence that enabled the
lawless gunslinger to enter society in western novels and films. The last of the
Mohicans is an example of the former. So called captivity narratives, in which
settlers and pioneers get kidnapped by Indians and thus gain a status of
repressed believers among "un-civilized" heathens are a crucial element of the
frontier mythology. The captives' situation was seen by early Americans of
European descent as analogous to that of Israel in Babylon. As there were
cases in which Europeans actually got taken away by Indians, these tales soon
became part of the myth that justified the "divine mission" of European,
Christian settlers to conquer America and rob the native inhabitants of their
land:
From the viewpoint of New England, then, Indian captivity was almost certain
to result in spiritual and physical catastrophe. The captives either vanished
forever into the woods, or returned half-Indianized . . . , or married some
"Indian slut," or went totally savage. In any of these tales, the captive was a
soul utterly lost to the tents of the English Israel. (Slotkin, "Regeneration" 98)
In Cooper's novel, the scout Hawkeye, accompanied by the Mohicans
Chingachgook and Uncas (The good Indians), rescues Cora and Alice Munroe
from the hands of the Huron Magua (The bad Indian, a common dichotomy to
classify native Americans in frontier literature). Cora and Alice thereby
symbolize the civilized, Christian values brought to the frontier and there
12
threatened with desecration.
4
Being innocence personified and unable to
defend themselves, the women have to rely on the rough and untamed
masculinity of Hawkeye, who in his condition as mediator between wilderness
and civilization discussed above becomes the keeper of the women although
Indianized himself in many ways.
The other archetypal woman of frontier literature is the one who brings good
manners and culture to the Wild West like Miss Mary Stark Wood of
Bennington, Vermont in Owen Wister's The Virginian. When this teacher from
the East, another standard formula character of later western films, finally
marries the cowboy and gunslinger (cf. 285-289), it is a union of the best values
of civilization (her) and wilderness (him), and in that a uniquely American
couple.
Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe have to deal with a different breed of women
altogether. Before I proceed to an evaluation of the literary school which these
post-industrial fictional heroes and their surroundings sprang from, I will first
assess the historical and cultural background against which their adventures
were first written and then filmed. This will lead to conclusions about
possibilities on why, next to other contextual changes, women are seldom
victims or subordinated educators in hardboiled fiction and its adaptations.
2. Historical Context The United States from 1900 to World War II
2.1. Unrestricted Capitalism and the Progressive Movement
The first two decades of the twentieth century saw the rise of the Progressive
Movement as a loose bundle of ideas of social reforms articulated by
businessmen, journalists, politicians, scientists and intellectuals alike. It was
inspired by the revelations of the so-called muckrakers about the injustices
committed by the web between politics and business interests and the
excesses of laissez-faire capitalism. The quintessential muckraker work was
probably Upton Sinclair's The Jungle with its harrowing description of the
inhuman working and living conditions of immigrant laborers in the Chicago
meat-packing industry. Aims of the Progressive movement however did not
include fundamental structural change of a revolutionary kind: It was rather the
4
In the metaphor of Magua's demand that Cora becomes his squaw.
13
plan to restrict the worst consequences of capitalism such as the concentration
of economic power in the hands of a few, and to bring the one-hand-washes-
the-other relationships between corporate America and certain politicians to an
end (cf. Dippel 77-78).
As Louis Galambos' research on the historical changes of the American
public's attitude towards big business has revealed, "the traditional emphasis
on individualism and competition began to wane" (Galambos 153) during the
Progressive Era. Revelations about the nature of unrestricted market laws and
how they affected society led to a cultural climate in which businessmen, who
had almost exclusively been regarded as American folk heroes up to then, were
now observed in a more critical and distrustful manner. Nevertheless, the anti-
business attitude soon diminished during the era of the Progressive Movement,
according to Galambos due to promising attempts at social reform. The scholar
has demonstrated this change by pointing out the kind of language and terms
the American public used to refer to corporate America:
In the 1880s and 1890s, middle-class Americans had frequently expressed their
ideas about big business in emotion-laden, affective language. . . . The midwestern
farmer claimed the trusts were "oppressive" . . . and "tyrannical". The laborer
condemned . . . the businessman as a "modern savage" and a "robber baron" . . . .
Between 1899 and 1913, . . . the basic mode of talking and thinking about large-
scale organizations shifted as affective language gave way before a new and more
neutral style of discourse. . . . While Americans dreaded the "octopus" and hated the
"robber baron," they were inclined to be less intense even when they expressed
disfavor about the corporation and the corporate executive. (153-154)
To Woodrow Wilson, Democrat and elected as president in 1912, the growing
corporations and their increasing influence on politics were un-American. He
accused big business of swallowing up the individuality of its workers and thus
indirectly condemned it for running counter to the individualist ethic (cf. Wilson
154). His presidency was marked by progressive action such as governmental
control of corporate America and support for farmers and labor laws (cf. Dippel
78). He seized the sixteenth amendment to establish an income tax of one per
cent for individuals and corporations with more than $4,000 income and six per
cent for those with more than half a million dollars. Wilson's campaign promises
14
had included the general obliteration of business monopolies, and in October
1914 he signed the Clayton Antitrust Act that among other things forbid fusions
of large companies (cf. Ross 285-286).
2.2. World War I
Wilson's fear that America's entry into WWI might "undermine the prospects for
moderate reformism" (Mayer 286) turned out to be justified. America's neutrality
had been proven to be unendurable not least due to the high rates of British
investment in the USA (cf. Ross 289). The result was America's declaration of
war on Germany and its partners on April 6, 1917 (cf. Ross 292). The various
agitators of the American Socialist movement had argued against the war and
would have preferred the solution of an international alliance among workers,
which they hoped would subsequently bring peace. The proponents of leftist
ideas in general were an easily blamed scapegoat for America's "patriots." As
Arno J. Mayer saw it:
. . . , the syndical and political segments of the American labor movement . . .
became the special target of federal sabotage and sedition acts, subject to
prosecution not only for strike activities but also for the expression of unpopular
opinions about the war and the established order. . . . in addition to being weakened
by the standard schism between the pro- and antiwar factions, because its
membership was so overwhelmingly foreign-born and non-English-speaking, the
American socialist movement, notably its antiwar wing, became an easy target for
Superpatriots. (286)
The end of the war brought a three-year recession to the United States. The
subsequent renewal and strengthening of pro-labor ideas was countered by
ultra right wing forces which assumed a conspiracy directed by Lenin was at
work in the United States. They had exchanged the wartime anti-German
polemics with an agenda of anti-Bolshevism (cf. Ross 304). Before I turn to the
discussion of the moderate economic boom of the 1920s that led to a furthering
of the "outmoded" stance of left-winged ideas in the US, it is necessary to
discuss a contemporary cultural matter of similar importance to my aim besides
the tensions between haves and have-nots.
15
2.3. The Enhancement of Women's Situation in American Society
A demand for woman's suffrage was first introduced in the congress in 1878.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had founded the National
Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, which beyond the right to vote had
"worked for a broad agenda of reforms, including changes in property,
marriage, and family laws that had virtually eliminated women from official
standing in the society and economy" (Ross 306). After Stanton's and
Anthony's death in 1902 respectively 1906, a new organization named the
National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) continued their
work, this time with, in many regards, more moderate positions and under the
leadership of Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt. This group was
able to gain conservative support "with the idea that middle class, educated
women voters would balance the growing power of recent immigrants" (Ross
302). A further movement for women's rights was the Congressional Union led
by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who in contrast to the NAWSA gave a platform to
more radical ideas about the improvement of women's position in American
society. Pressure from these groups finally led to "Wilson's unenthusiastic
backing" (Ross 307) of the amendment for woman's suffrage passing Congress
in 1919 and being ratified in 1920.
Prior to this institutional and official enhancement of woman's situation in
society, the growing urbanization of the United States and the emergence of a
new middle class had led to a cultural change perceptible especially in the big
cities. A growth in white collar workers and women entering the work place was
witnessed. That the traditional patterns of gender roles were about to change
was mirrored in the fact that in 1900 one out of twelve marriages ended in
divorce, wheras in 1920, it was already one out of nine (cf. Dippel 80).
2.4. The Economic Boom of the 1920s
The 1920s were a decade of economic boom mainly on account of the
electricity and petroleum industries. Electricity became prolific due to its
increasing use in mass production, where machines running on electric power
replaced the obsolete belts run by steam systems. The invention of the internal
combustion vehicle and its employment as a means of private and public
16
transport, as well as industrial service led to the enormous growth of the
petroleum industry. Ross summarizes the abundance of the golden twenties:
. . . , the proliferation of electricity and the automobile led to and
accompanied an economic boom and the rapid transformation in the daily
lives of the American middle class. Nearly every sector of the economy was
better off in 1928-29 than it had been before the war. . . . , . . . in general it
seems that the consumer side of the economy grew between 25 percent and
50 percent. Americans' standard of living and purchasing power became much
better. (310)
Thus, as Dippel argues, it was consumerism and the new mass culture way of
life that manifested itself in supermarkets and the new media (radio, cinema,
mass/yellow press) which principally shaped American society in the 1920s.
They were the influences which primarily molded the redefined social values
and norms of the era (cf. Dippel 87). Though general income disparities
lessened during the 1920s, the economic boom did not include all segments of
the American people. The situation hardly improved for the workers in the coal
and textile industries, the agricultural sector especially in the south and the
Midwest never really recovered from price slumps in 1920/1921. Coolidge's
government failed to support the improvement of the farmers' situation. This
was partially responsible for the strengthening of American rural conservatism
and Christian fundamentalism as counter concept to the liberal Christianity in
the big cities and the urban elites for which it stood, and by whom rural America
felt it had been betrayed (cf. Ross 336-338).
2.5. The Great Depression and the New Deal
However, the industrial as well as the agrarian sector increasingly produced
surpluses and demanded more and more credit in such a way that the gap
between the goods produced and consumer demand dangerously widened.
The consequential price fluctuations climaxed in the Wall Street crash of
October 29
th
, 1929, or Black Monday as it was called later (cf. Dippel 87). The
crisis of the American economy would last for more than ten years and caused
a decennial average unemployment rate of 18% (cf. Bernstein 21). It was a
setback to the United States' self-confidence which, as Fortune Magazine
17
wrote, "did something that no foreign enemy, national disaster, or old fashioned
`panic' had ever done: it paralyzed, for years, America's growth" (qtd. in
Leuchtenburg 299). The contemporary British historian Frank Thistlethwaite
argued that "the very foundation of the American way of life, might be at an
end" (qtd. in Leuchtenburg 299). William E. Leuchtenburg sums up the cultural
impact of the Great Depression:
Unaccustomed to prolonged adversity, Americans experienced the
depression as much more of a shock than did countries which had not
enjoyed the economic boom of the 1920's. . . . The depression dealt a mean
blow to America's confidence in the uniqueness of its civilization. It was hard
to draw a contrast between America's good fortune and the misery of Europe
when the United States had so many of the social ills it had long believed
were endemic in the old world. . . . The United States, which had long prided
itself on being a "young" nation, now appeared to have aged suddenly and to
have become as unadventurous as the Old World. . . . As far back as 1893,
Frederick Jackson Turner had pointed out that the frontier had disappeared;
now men feared that the United States was finally paying the price. (297-298)
In 1932, American voters elected the Democratic candidate Franklin D.
Roosevelt as president. He had promised "a New Deal for the American
people" to overcome the depression. The first measurements included the
Agricultural Adjustment Act to counter American farmers' over-production and
the recognition of labor unions on a national basis. Nevertheless, just as with
the ideas of the Progressive movement, the general assumption behind New
Deal politics was the improvement of the existing system through certain
regulatory measures, not a re-thinking of capitalist structures as such.
Conservatives denounced some measures of the New Deal as
unconstitutional. To rebut these critics was one of the motives behind what has
become known as the second New Deal. It included a decisive improvement for
the rights of workers under the National Labor Relations Act, the introduction of
diverse insurances after the role model of the British and German Sozialstaat
and an increase of the tax on higher incomes. Although America's situation
bettered under the measures of Roosevelt's undertakings, it was no sooner
Ende der Leseprobe aus 96 Seiten
- nach oben
Details
- Arbeit zitieren
- , 2006, Hardboiled Hollywood, Hamburg, Bedey Media GmbH, https://www.diplom.de/document/225248
Ähnliche Arbeiten
Deutschlands größter Sharing Community
Jetzt Zusammenfassungen, Skripte und Klausuren kostenlos downloaden!
Uniturm.de
Ihre Vorteile als Autor
Geld verdienen Für jedes verkaufte Exemplar erhalten Sie Autorenhonorar - bis zu 40%.Kostenlose Buchveröffentlichung
Als eBook-Studie im Original und / oder auf Wunsch zusätzlich als hochwertiges Fachbuch in unserem renommierten Buchverlag.
Renommee als Fachbuchautor
Präsentieren Sie sich als Fachfrau oder Fachmann in Ihrem Fachgebiet und machen Sie sich bekannt.
Persönliche Betreuung
Unser Lektorat wird Sie persönlich betreuen und ist auch telefonisch unter 040-655992-14 erreichbar.
Weltweit im Buchhandel
Ihr Buch ist weltweit im Buchhandel und Online-Buchhandel wie z.B. amazon erhältlich.
Jetzt Autor werden!
Kommentare