In Davenport, Iowa, a public screening of The Beast of Berlin was interrupted when a man yelled and rushed down the aisle of the theater with a gun, firing two shots at the screen. The anti-Kaiser propaganda apparently did its job well. The studio scored additional propaganda points by releasing Rupert Julian’s The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin (1918) and a satire, The Geezer of Berlin (1918). Immediately after President Wilson declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, Universal announced Universal Preparedness Productions, whose offerings included serials, shorts and features with such titles as Uncle Sam at Work, The War Waif, The Birth of Patriotism and Uncle Sam’s Gun Shops. In June 1916, the studio held a preparedness parade and in September of that year distributed the Lon Chaney-Dorothy Phillips war feature If My Country Should Call. When Wilson stressed preparedness, Universal offered the xenophobic 40-reel serial Liberty. When neutrality was Wilson’s position in the autumn of 1914, Universal issued the two-reeler Be Neutral. Laemmle moved quickly to distance himself from any German alliances by taking his lead from the Wilson administration. For the German Carl Laemmle, president of Universal Film Manufacturing Company (later Universal Pictures), these fears were justified in the fall of 1915 after several British newspapers accused Hollywood films of being backed by German capital. In fairness, many of the studio chiefs felt vulnerable because they were immigrants. In any event, the contact between industry leaders and their chief executive gave legitimacy to the youthful US motion picture trade. Stuart Blackton of Vitagraph spoke of the need for military preparation to protect US territories and recited a pro-war poem whose final words were “So fire your forges and dam the bills/For the wings of peace must have iron quills.” When Wilson addressed the audience that night, he kept his remarks limited to vague statements about truth in film storytelling. The guest list included such industry luminaries as Kodak’s George Eastman, Paramount’s Adolph Zukor and Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn). The first significant alliance between the US movie business and Washington, DC occurred on 27 January 1916 in New York City when President Wilson greeted a Motion Picture Board of Trade banquet audience of nearly 1,000 people. Lasky, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn, Cecil B. The end result was a triumph for US (and Hollywood) capitalism and a tragedy for humanity, as 320,000 American casualties were added to millions of fresh corpses around the globe.ġ916 publicity photo for the takeover of Paramount Pictures. What occurred during 1917-1918 (the period of US intervention) was an aggressive pro-war, film-driven public relations campaign unlike any yet undertaken. Most conveniently for Wilson, the country had in place a ready-made propaganda machine: the American film industry. The tremendous wealth, resources and economic potential still possessed by American capitalism made it possible for Wilson’s Democratic administration to preach magnanimity towards those suffering overseas. Īsserting the most pious and democratic motives for its military intervention was the only way the US government could garner public support for the war. In his 1938 affidavit for the Dies Committee (later the House Committee on Un-American Activities), for example, socialist author Upton Sinclair (producer of Sergei Eisenstein’s uncompleted ¡Que Viva Mexico!) stated he resigned from the Socialist Party in 1917 in order to declare his support for the government’s entry into World War I. But the war ultimately divided American socialists just as it did European socialists. As historian Howard Zinn has noted, widespread popular hostility to the military action proved momentarily beneficial to left-wing elements in the socialist movement in the US who staged well-attended anti-war rallies and achieved some successes in municipal elections as a result of their opposition. The challenge facing the Woodrow Wilson administration was selling its imperialist agenda to the general public.
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