1913 Page 24
… companies of shadow-soldiers are assembled and drilled; parades of a dozen kinds trail their blurred length across the curtain; foreign cities flash out glimpses of their characteristic scenes; ships are launched, cornerstones are laid, medals are presented, and laboratory experiments demonstrating some feature of popular science are painstakingly performed.
Storylines, if there were any, tended to be intellectually undemanding. ‘An altercation, a practical joke’ in one film; ‘a chase of anything by anybody’ in another. As each individual film was short – as little as one or two reels – there was no time for character development. Roles had to be easily grasped by the audience, and plots straightforward:
… disputes between an impossible mistress and an unnatural servant in which the maid tumultuously triumphs; or farcical interruptions of the love-making of an ill-suited couple; or rowdy street scenes in which people tumble over each other and somebody gets beaten for an offense he didn’t commit, while the culprit leers from a neighboring corner.
‘Reasonably good eyesight’, Dunbar concluded, was the only requisite for the movie-goer.
In 1913, the centre of the national entertainment industry was still New York, driven by the business model of smash-hit theatre productions which could then be replicated nationally. But unlike theatre, film could be made in places far distant from key markets. And, as a place to make movies, California had distinct advantages. Consistent weather and sunlight increased the number of hours and days available to film – though the same applied to Cuba, Texas or Florida, and as much to San Francisco, a more established and only slightly smaller city, as to Los Angeles. Diverse landscapes – desert, forests, mountains – meant different kinds of film could be shot relatively nearby. An army of cheap labour, for as little as $1 a day, provided all the extras one could wish for.21 Finally, and perhaps crucially, Los Angeles was distant from the litigious Motion Picture Patents Company – the trust which controlled patents associated with movie-making – and it was only a hundred miles to Mexico, which provided a convenient bolt-hole if representatives of the trust got too close. Distance from the establishment meant more innovation, and as the patents of the trust eroded and the public’s tastes evolved towards longer films with stronger storylines, the California independents started to steal a march on their eastern rivals.
Still, at this time the movies were a peripheral economic activity, not a core business for Los Angeles. When the Los Angeles Times imagined in 1913 how the city would look and feel in 1938 – by which time film and Hollywood would be synonymous – the movies did not crop up once. Though the Chamber of Commerce was supportive of filming taking place in Los Angeles, a booklet produced touting the city’s economic prospects in 1913 did not mention it. In September the Times produced a seven-part guide to ‘Writing a Movie Play’, but there was nothing to suggest that the city was crawling with budding screenwriters. Only at the very end of 1913 did filming begin on Hollywood’s first feature-length movie – The Squaw Man – just as Charlie Chaplin was signing his first contract with Keystone Pictures in Los Angeles.
For an industry that prided itself on its modernity, and for a state that prided itself on its future, it was perhaps ironic that the first films shot entirely in Hollywood – In Old California and Ramona, both from 1910 – were romanticisations of California’s recent past, set in the years shortly after America’s victory over the Mexicans in the war of 1848 and the incorporation of California into the United States in 1850. (Historical dramatisations became something of a speciality for D. W. Griffith, who later directed The Birth of a Nation.) Ramona, starring Mary Pickford in the title role, was only seventeen minutes long. But its story, lightly adapted, was familiar. The book Ramona, written by easterner Helen Hunt Jackson and published in 1884, had intoxicated a generation of readers with its description of the beauties of the land and its dramatisation of Mexican life in the young state of California.
Part love story, part tragedy, the novel opens at sheep-shearing time on a rancho somewhere in southern California, with Spanish Señora Moreno ‘amiable and indolent, like her race’ struggling to maintain her ranch in the face of the encroachments and requirements of American rule:
It was a picturesque life, with more of sentiment and gaiety in it, more also that was truly dramatic, more romance, than will ever be seen again on those sunny shores. The aroma of it all lingers there still; industries and inventions have not yet slain it; it will last out its century – in fact, it can never be quite lost, so long as there is standing one such house as the Señora Moreno’s.22
Brought to the rancho by the Señora’s sister is Ramona: beautiful, kind, good. She falls in love with Alessandro, a Mexican Indian farm worker. At the same time Ramona is admired by Moreno’s handsome son, Felipe. When he puts on his father’s ceremonial clothes, Felipe appears the spitting image of his father, General Moreno. ‘Wear them’, Señora Moreno tells her son, ‘and let the American hounds see what a Mexican officer and gentleman looked like before they had set their base usurping feet on our necks!’ The Señora tries and fails to stop Ramona’s love for Alessandro, both when she appeals to Ramona’s faith and her supposed Spanish heritage – placing her far above the status of an Indian – and when she reveals Ramona’s true parentage, born of a Scotsman and a Californian Indian. Finally imprisoned by her mistress, Ramona manages to escape with Alessandro, fleeing to an Indian village. But life is hard. They lose their first child; Alessandro loses his mind. Ultimately, he is shot dead by an American who falsely thinks him a horse thief. In the film version, Felipe turns up as Ramona is mourning her husband’s death and the film ends. In the novel, Felipe and Ramona return to the rancho, Señora Moreno now passed away. But they are forced to leave. They travel to Mexico City and finally they marry in its cathedral.
However sympathetically Ramona and Alessandro were portrayed, and however unsympathetic the Americans were in the book, and however much Ramona was enjoyed as entertainment, there was no desire on the part of white Angelenos to return to the life of the ranchos. This was the past from which, in the Anglo-Saxon vision of the city, Los Angeles had escaped: from the nineteenth-century Catholic obscurantism of the pueblo to the pleasures and riches of a twentieth-century metropolis. Yet the very recentness of this past – within the living memory of the state’s Spanish-speaking elders – underscored Los Angeles’ progress, and emphasised its headlong trajectory into the future.
Meanwhile, it provided both romance and tourist revenues. Southern California had, after all, its fair share of Spanish names, from its own abbreviation of Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles, the original Spanish settlement founded in 1781, to Santa Monica, or the state’s presidios. California’s Catholic missions, once active with monks and priests attempting to spread the word, in Spanish, amongst the indigenous population, had now fallen silent except for the snap of tourists’ photographic shutters. The picturesque Spanish-Mexican culture was partially revived, but as a quaint memory rather than a political project. In the 1890s the Fiesta de las Flores became an annual, week-long celebration – though later Americanised in preparation for a visit by US President McKinley in 1901.23 Ramona had already fostered an active tourist trade: visitors seeking out where Ramona was married and where she lived, happily mixing real places with Jackson’s fictional creations.24 El Camino Real, the coastal road running from one Mexican-era mission to another, was sold as a tourist destination.
Where the monks had left, the mission ruins of the California of just sixty years ago were treated by many as a civilisation as ancient as the Aztecs or the Incas: a Mexican past left behind by history, surpassed by modernity. Yet that past was not quite effaced from the architectural record or erased from Californian culture. Nor, as Californians looked anxiously south into Mexico itself, was it entirely irrelevant to the present.
MEXICO CITY
Monroe’s Bequest
The tourist trail of the El Camino Real went as far as San Diego. But for the adventuro
us it was possible to drive further south – deeper into California’s past, and further into Mexico’s tumultuous present. This was the oldest part of the Old New World. It was where the contradictions of American power and principle reached their climax in 1913.
Where exactly America ended and where Mexico began was hard to say. In principle, the boundary between the two countries was defined by a line on a map: gently east from California, then skirting the southern limits of Arizona and New Mexico, fully-fledged states for less than a year, and then following the twists and turns of the Rio Grande down to the Gulf of Mexico. But lines on maps do not always correspond to the realities on the ground. How different, really, was San Antonio, Texas, from Monterrey, Mexico?
The line on the map was, in any case, perhaps temporary. In his novel Philip Dru, Woodrow Wilson’s Texan adviser Colonel House had fantasised about a future where Mexico was incorporated into the United States. This did not seem so far-fetched. To many Americans, it would be the natural continuation of manifest destiny which had gathered Texas and California into the American fold, and which had made America responsible for the fates of the former Spanish colonies of Cuba and the Philippines. But even if the line would not be redrawn, would it not fade away over time as Mexico and America were welded together in the common fires of economic development? If Mexico was California’s past, was California not Mexico’s future? Even in 1913, as Mexico was falling apart in the fires of civil conflict, Wilson’s personal representative, holed up in Veracruz because the capital was too dangerous, contemplated that American civilisation was percolating south over the border, unstoppably:
… we must not overlook the contact of the Mexican peon with our civilization along the National boundary, in our schools, and along the lines of the National railways for upwards a quarter century. Many have tasted the sweets of personal independence and security and of a higher plane of living … They are breathing the atmosphere of the twentieth century in rarefied form. A middle class is in the making. They have become democrats by contact with democracy and force of circumstance … and in the degree that the Mexican of the North becomes a democrat his hatred grows against the social and economic conditions of the South and against the old 16th century regime …1
In the first years of the twentieth century, American companies were already the largest investors in Mexico, well ahead of the Mexicans themselves (and ahead of the British, French or Germans). American mines had American foremen, American engineers, American accountants and American doctors. Edward L. Doheny, the man who had first struck oil in Los Angeles, was also the first to produce oil in Mexico, at El Ebano, near Tampico on the Gulf of Mexico. His Mexican Petroleum Company, controlling 600,000 acres of Mexican land, was incorporated in Los Angeles.2 Although Mexico’s foreign-built railway system had now come under Mexican control its official language was still English, and its principal railway lines still ran north. A strike of workers at the American-owned Cananea Copper Company in 1906 was put down with the help of Arizona rangers from across the border in Bisbee, though the local Mexican governor softened the blow to national pride by insisting the Americans be temporarily sworn in as soldiers of the Mexican border state of Sonora.
At the same time, Mexican political leaders often found refuge on the north side of the Rio Grande when things were not going well for them on the south side. From the revolution of 1911 onwards, Mexican oppositionists frequently launched their campaigns against whatever government was in charge in Mexico City from American soil. In February 1911 the teetotal spiritualist landowner Francisco Madero entered Mexico with 130 men, crossing at the border post at El Paso on his way to overthrow Porfirio Díaz, Mexico’s President since 1876. In March 1913, Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa, the peanut-brittle-eating revolutionary, crossed the same border to wage war against Madero’s successor, General Victoriano Huerta. ‘Poor Mexico’, Díaz was said to have once remarked, ‘so far from God, and so close to the United States’.3
Mexico’s capital city bore its ancestry proudly. The Zócalo, the city’s huge central plaza and stage for the most dramatic episodes of the nation’s history, lay on the same site as the main square of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. The first stone of the city’s ornate Catholic cathedral – in which Felipe and Ramona are married in Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel – was laid by Spanish missionaries fifty years before the Mayflower made landfall in North America at Plymouth, Massachusetts. In the national museum one could compare the gilded state coach of Mexico’s last Emperor, the Vienna-born Maximilian, with the ‘severely simple, well-worn, eminently republican vehicle of Benito Juárez’, the restorer of the republic in 1867.4 In the Academy of San Carlos one could contemplate, besides the Rubens and the Titians, Felix Parra’s painting of Bartolomé de las Casas, the sixteenth-century bishop credited with protecting the Indians against the depredations of the Spanish conquerors. On a hill to the west of the city itself lay Chapultepec castle, started the year before the American Declaration of Independence – and overrun by American troops in 1847. Now the castle served as a military school and the residence of the President of Mexico: Porfirio Díaz before the revolution, and Francisco Madero after it. On Sundays, the good and great of Mexico City would take their carriages up to the park around Chapultepec – to be seen and, at dusk, to admire the view back towards their city on the plain below.
The best time to see the Zócalo, assured Charles Macomb Flandrau, the Minnesota-born essayist, was between five and six in the morning:
Beyond a few laborers straggling to work, and the men who are making the toilet of the Alameda with large, green bushes attached to the end of sticks, the city appeared to be blandly slumbering, and just as the face of someone we know will, while asleep, surprise us by a rare and unsuspected expression, the great, unfinished, unsympathetic capital smiled, wisely and a trifle wearily, in its dreams. It is at this hour, before the mongrel population has begun to swarm, that one should walk through the Alameda, in the first freshness of wet roses and lilies, the gardenias and pansies and heliotrope in the flower market, and, undisturbed among the trees in front of the majestic cathedral, listen to the echoed sob of history.
But the city was changing, too. A new theatre was under construction in the Alameda park, with elaborate glass stage curtains designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany of New York – the same man commissioned to design Estelle Doheny’s ballroom in Los Angeles. In the very centre of town, a nest of streets built in the old Spanish and Mexican styles was slowly being transformed with more modern buildings. The effect, Flandrau remarked, was that of a ‘small city in a large town’. The architecture was suggestive of Europe, but ‘the multitude of American signs, of American products, and American residents, by which one is on all sides confronted, makes it impossible to decide where’.
Before the revolution of 1911 a traveller from the north might almost have felt at home, or at least not very far abroad in Mexico City, reading the English-language, American-owned Mexican Herald while sipping morning coffee in a downtown café. He or she would be likely to quickly recognise compatriots, whether visitors or residents:
Mexico City, emerging market capital, early twentieth century.
Though it may have been two or three weeks since you landed in Vera Cruz, probably the tall American with the long nose or some equally remembered fellow-passenger will be sitting within reach of a nod; and there will also be some of last nights ‘arrivals’ who will tell you, if you ask, that they were just four days coming from Buffalo or three from St. Louis, with Pullman and dinner car service all the way.5
Cosseted in the centre of Mexico City it was easy to misjudge the potential for revolution in the first years of the twentieth century. Sporadic strikes and local unrest did not challenge the central assumptions of President Porfirio Díaz, his technocratic supporters – collectively, the científicos – or his international backers. For them, the last thirty-odd years, known as the porfiriato, had been ones of the steady march of progress: rationalisation, indu
strialisation, education. International investment, the construction of the railways and now oilfields were all symbols of Mexico’s advance towards modernity. The process was incomplete, but the course had been set. And as Porfirio Díaz celebrated his eightieth birthday at Chapultepec castle in September 1910 the regime hardly seemed to be on its last legs. At the celebrations of the centenary of Mexico’s independence from Spain, falling in the same month as Díaz’s birthday, some 100,000 Mexicans came to the Zócalo, which was lit up in green, white and red lights.6 ‘1810: Libertad’, read a neon sign at the base of one of the cathedral towers; ‘1910: Progreso’, read the other.
Conscious of the projection of Mexico’s international image, the Díaz regime invited foreign journalists to cover the celebrations, ordered the indigenous locals of Mexico City to swap sandals for shoes so as not to show up the proximity of poverty to wealth around the Zócalo and showered official international delegations with generosity. This paid off. The leader of the American delegation, Special Ambassador Curtis Guild, Jr, former Governor of Massachusetts, called Díaz ‘the greatest living American’.7
As it turned out, this was not the crowning glory of the regime but its swansong. Some were already sceptical. John Kenneth Turner, an American investigative journalist who had first come across Mexican revolutionaries in a Los Angeles jail, wrote a searing indictment of the porfiriato for an American audience in 1910. He disabused his American readers of characterisations of Mexico as ‘Our Sister Republic’, a place they mistakenly believed to be ‘much like our own, inhabited by people a little different in temperament, a little poorer, and a little less advanced, but still enjoying the protection of republican laws’.8 He challenged the vision of the country as seen ‘through a car window’ or through speculation in Mexican mining stocks. He described a country poor, corrupt and unfree. In the Yucatan he uncovered debt slavery and, worse, Americans complicit in it. ‘After freeing his black slaves’, Turner wrote, ‘Uncle Sam has gone to slave-driving in a foreign country’. Above all, he found assumptions of the unassailability of Díaz’s rule to be baseless: