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THE MARCH of TIME and the AMERICAN CENTURY Jonathan

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THE MARCH of TIME and the AMERICAN CENTURY Jonathan ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: THE MARCH OF TIME AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY Jonathan Stuart Setliff, Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Dissertation directed by: Professor James B. Gilbert Department of History The March of Time and the American Century examines the content and ideological orientation of The March of Time, a documentary film series produced by Time Incorporated between 1935 and 1951. The March of Time dealt with a vast array of topics during its production, with nearly half of its 208 films examining foreign affairs and the American role in the world. In its analysis of American domestic life and society, The March of Time proved to be moderately reformist, favoring some parts of the New Deal, while maintaining a generally conservative view, middle class view of the nature of American life. In its presentation of American life, The March of Time engaged in a roiling, passionate ideological debate concerning the definition of America. The 1930s in particular saw deep divisions between left and right in the United States, resulting in a continual effort by the politically committed to appropriate historical symbols, past events, and to use modernist techniques to define a vision of America, both to control interpretations of the past and to orient the American future. THE MARCH OF TIME AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY by Jonathan Stuart Setliff Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2007 Advisory Committee: Professor James B. Gilbert, Chair Professor Erve Chambers Professor Keith W. Olson Doctor David Sicilia Doctor Saverio Giovacchini Table of Contents Introduction pg.1 Chapter One: The Luce Empire and Visual Modernity pg.25 Chapter Two: The March of Time pg. 63 Chapter Three: Technique and Criticism pg. 108 Chapter Four: Mr. Luce’s Century pg. 148 Chapter Five: The American Century at Home pg. 205 Conclusion pg. 261 Appendix pg. 274 Bibliography pg. 287 ii The March of Time and the American Century This dissertation will examine the content and message of The March of Time, a newsreel series produced by Time Incorporated between 1935 and 1951. The years of production of The March of Time coincided with the period of highest movie viewership in the history of the United States. The newsreel was seen by millions of Americans a month, and was distributed in Europe as well. During its life, The March of Time examined a number of controversial issues; including American entry into World War II, life inside Nazi Germany, the New Deal, and a variety of topics dealing with American domestic politics. One of the main questions to be addressed is how The March of Time reflected the ideology of “The American Century.” This term refers to an essay by Time publisher Henry R. Luce in which Luce stated the rationale for American entry into World War II and issued a clarion call for internationalism. In this essay, Luce called for the United States to assert its responsibilities and power around the globe. Quite controversial at the time, the “American Century” ideal served as a blueprint for U.S. policy during the Cold War. In addition, the “American Century” had deep and serious implications for domestic politics and culture. Luce’s American Century idea was disseminated through all of his publications, including The March of Time. The construction of this idea and how it was presented to the American public is a critically important question. Another vital question centering on The March of Time concerns the intellectual and cultural milieu in which it operated. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 1 saw an increasing association of photography and cinema with modernism and a belief that the camera could represent or document reality in ways previously unattainable.1 How did The March of Time fit into this movement, and how did the technique and content of The March of Time influence reflect these ideas about representing reality? If one accepts that a critical element of modernism is the destruction of older aesthetics and forms, then The March of Time made a critical contribution to American modernism in the twentieth century. Luce’s intention was to create a new form of pictorial journalism, a radical experiment in communication. The March of Time planned to combine documentary techniques, including reenactment, with journalism to give audiences a heightened sense of reality. The March of Time’s producers and editors anticipated giving the viewer a more in-depth, comprehensive understanding of the news by literally taking him or her there, to the event, to the real, by use of cinematic techniques. The March of Time also engaged modernist debates regarding the mechanical reproduction of reality via the photograph and the cinema. The technique of reenactment, central to The March of Time’s production, represented a modernist advance in the mechanical reproduction of reality. With the advent of the photograph, the public gained a sense that graphic representations of reality could be more “real” than actuality. The March of Time, using the techniques of the cinema to reproduce actual events, 1John Tagg, Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 2 represented a modernist step forward in graphic communication. It is possible to see The March of Time as a product of what Theodor Adorno called the “culture industry,” produced by a large media corporation and then distributed by massive Hollywood studios who controlled their own theater chains. The March of Time used and was a product of the techniques of industrial, mechanized production, and had access to audiences because of its association with other components of a mass economy. Indeed, given the particularistic, even propgandisitic viewpoint of much of The March of Time’s films, it is reasonable to posit that the series represented a logical step forward in the mechanization of the spread of ideology and information. Luce’s great journalistic innovation was the systematization and synthesis of information through his publications, particularly Time. This method of distilling critical information and presenting it to the reader was a modernist invention, one that rejected traditional notions of journalism. Luce, through his publications, was then able to present a coherent ideological viewpoint, reproduced on a mass scale, for dissemination to readers and viewers, while maintaining that his offerings served older notions of journalistic objectivity. One of the more intriguing episodes during The March of Time’s history was its production of a feature film, The Ramparts We Watch, released in 1940. The filming of The Ramparts We Watch was an extraordinary event. An enormous media and press empire decided that one of its component pieces, The March of Time, should release nationally through another huge media enterprise, RKO Pictures, a feature film that took a decisive stand on the most important political issue of the day, American intervention in 3 Europe. The idea of journalistic objectivity, so cherished by Luce, has been turned on its head. Not only does the film take a particular viewpoint, it does so while employing the techniques of a modern feature film. In the case of The Ramparts We Watch, The March of Time, defining itself as a news organization, has taken a political stance and used its journalistic credibility to spread that message through a form that this is several steps away from traditional journalism. Also, the 1930s saw a roiling, passionate and raucous debate over the very definition of America itself. How America was defined (and what America believed about itself), how that definition was created, and who constructed that definition were vitally important questions, and The March of Time, through its spread of Luce’s ideas, was at the center of those conflicts. A close analysis of the content of The March of Time reveals that the series was overwhelmingly political in its analysis; virtually every subject taken up by The March of Time was dealt with through a political prism. What began to emerge early in The March of Time’s releases was a point of view which, although muddled in its early years, cohered by the late 1930s. The March of Time defined America as overwhelmingly middle-class, suspicious of unions but generally favorable to business, technological innovation and respectful of authority. The March of Time, at variance with Luce’s other publications, on occasion praised what they deemed worthy New Deal programs. By the late 1930s, The March of Time, always pro-military, had become a leading advocate for greater American involvement in world affairs, particularly in Asia.. With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, The March of Time advocated aid to European democracies, vastly increased military spending, and 4 articulated the view that American entry into the war was increasingly likely. The threat of and subsequent onset of war and ensuing “Great Debate” about American entry caused the political and ideological message of The March of Time to solidify. From 1938 on, an emerging theme in the series was cultural and political unity, a necessity in the face of overseas threats. A number of March of Time releases, culminating in the 1940 feature film The Ramparts We Watch, emphasized the importance of national unity, centered around the values of the American middle class, in preserving democracy. It was this vision of a middle-class America that The March of Time stressed in its analyses of immigration, cultural assimilation, the economy, political discourse and ultimately the projection of American values overseas, a recurring theme in Luce’s American Century.
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