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Imitation of Life: Corporate Order and Racial Identity in the Great Depression

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Imitation of Life: Corporate Order and Racial Identity in the Great Depression Journal X Volume 8 Number 1 Autumn 2003 Article 4 2020 Imitation of Life: Corporate Order and Racial Identity in the Great Depression Philip Hanson University of San Francisco Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jx Part of the Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons Recommended Citation Hanson, Philip (2020) "Imitation of Life: Corporate Order and Racial Identity in the Great Depression," Journal X: Vol. 8 : No. 1 , Article 4. Available at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jx/vol8/iss1/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal X by an authorized editor of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Hanson: Imitation of Life: Corporate Order and Racial Identity in the Gre Imitation of Life: Corporate Order and Racial Identity in the Great Depression Philip Hanson Philip Hanson is By the socioeconomic lights of the 1934 film, Imi­ Assistant Professor tation of Life, something is visually unnatural of Interdisciplinary about African-American Delilah (Louise Studies at the Uni­ Beavers) standing at the back door of a house, versity of San Fran­ while the white "Miss" Bea (Claudette Colbert), cisco. His work has a single mother, struggles to bathe her child and been published in The Cambridge get ready for work. The scene's unnaturalness Quarterly, Gestos, arises not from Delilah standing at the back Clio, and the South door, in terms of 1934 racial dynamics the right Central Review; he place, but from a perfectly good black servant is completing a book­ being wasted while the white lady has to care length study of for her own child. Of course Bea doesn't see American film in the that; she's too distracted. But Delilah recognizes 1930s. the natural solution to her own problem, finding domestic work where she can bring her own child along, would be to serve Bea. While Bea is upstairs attending to her daughter, Jesse, Delilah, though she has known Bea for about two minutes, takes it upon herself to lay out breakfast for Bea and Jesse. Typical of the flat­ tering self image the film takes of white-black relations, Delilah's conversation concerns only Bea's problems, in spite of Delilah's having no job and a child of her own. Had the film explored Delilah's problems in more detail, her circumstance would have revealed the nurturing kindly face at the back door to have been partly a survival strategy. For the already difficult situation of black workers in the U.S. during the period was disproportion­ ately worsened by the onset of the Depression. The New York State Department found that dur­ Published by eGrove, 2020 1 Journal X, Vol. 8 [2020], No. 1, Art. 4 44 Journal x ing the Depression "a woman worker living at home with her family" had to earn "$1,056 a year, or over $20 a week, in order to achieve a min­ imum 'adequate living budget.'" This figure assumed income from a spouse. If the woman was alone, she would need to earn $1,193 per year. A Mrs. Johnson, an African-American "thirty three year old day domestic, earned between $4 and $ 6 a week" (Greenberg 80). Delilah appears at Bea's back door homeless and with a dependent child. Con­ ditions for domestic workers in New York in the 1930s illustrate the hardness of life for such a woman: "a 'slave market' for domestic work­ ers developed in which black women stood on street corners in the Bronx and Brooklyn while white women auctioned for their services" (Arnott and Matthaei 170; Gray). And Delilah is hired for room and board only. Nevertheless, in a short time she has a place in the "family," for she is quickly known as "Aunt" Delilah, a southern servant's familial role that has migrated north, along with large post-World War I out-migrations of Blacks from the South. Regarding this oddity — a New York white woman in the 1930s adopting a familial address for an African-American woman which had its origins in the apologist arguments of pro slavery ideo­ logues — Eric Sundquist notes, the landmark Supreme Court decision in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases extended "racial dualism" for African Amer­ icans and turned back equal access to "accommodations, public con­ veyances, restaurants, theaters, and the like." The "reunion of North and South necessitated political and legal separations that turned the 'Negro problem' over to the South . using the South to further what were in reality national inclinations.... There was throughout the North not only acquiescence among the white population in the 'Southern Way' of solving the race problem but a tendency to imitate it in practice" - hence, an unintended imitation of life for the 1934 film (238, 241). For African-Americans in white families Hollywood had construct­ ed an appropriate family identity from the beginnings of the film indus­ try. The Mammy of Birth of a Nation (played in black-face by a white actress) internalizes the emotions of her white family, even as family members ride out in Ku Klux Klan robes to prevent, among other things, the threat of ex-slaves soiling white women by rape. Michael Rogin argues that Birth of a Nation brought together three Southerners with an interest in keeping nineteenth-century social order: Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner to be elected president since the Civil War (he seg­ regated the previously integrated U.S. Post Office when he came into office); Thomas Dixon, who wrote The Klansmen, the source for Birth; and D.W. Griffith. At a time when immigrant influx was breaking down traditional class barriers and, in Griffith's words, "reform was sweeping the country," reformers needed an ally and "Griffith looked like the man" (Rogin 352). In Birth, the myth of the bestial Black invading Amer­ ican government exists in an African-American election victory that leads to drunken riot. Perhaps it is a testimony to the success of Birth in disseminating its message to a mass audience that in a later films such https://egrove.olemiss.edu/jx/vol8/iss1/4 2 Hanson: Imitation of Life: Corporate Order and Racial Identity in the Gre Philip Hanson 45 as Imitation, "Aunt" Delilah is guilty of no such behavior. Yet by the early 1930s and throughout Depression era America conditions threat­ ened to upset the racial order Wilson had envisioned when he praised Birth of a Nation, whose title also refers to a vision of a national racial order enforced by the Klan. The potential for getting help from com­ munists or unions led some African-Americans, for example, into the communist party or into trying to make common cause with white unions. The uniting of black causes with other agendas recurs through­ out the 1930s. For example, the 1936 National Negro Congress was organized by, among others, "trade unionists, socialists, and Commu­ nists to promote economic change" (Greenberg 81). The fight against any racial and class reconfigurations of America occurred not just in the streets, but from corporate offices as well. At stake was African-Ameri­ can public identity. Joanne Nagel articulates the logic, "Ethnic identity is closely associated with the issue of boundaries. Debates over the placement of ethnic boundaries and the social worth of ethnic groups are central mechanisms in ethnic construction" (239). A mass entrance into the communist party on the part of African-Americans during the 1930s never materialized, but the view of status quo corporate America toward such a potential, coupled with the potential for African-Ameri­ cans to make common causes with unions, contributed to a general stay- in-your-place response that was reflected throughout American society, a circumstance requiring a "second reconstruction" in the 1960s to address it. In the 1930s, America had just gotten over what Frederick Lewis Allen calls "the big red scare" of the 1920s. He writes, "Those were the days when column after column of the front pages of the news­ papers shouted the news of strikes and anti-Bolshevik riots; when radi­ cals shot down Armistice day paraders in the streets" (38). Imitation of Life's importance to mass market public writing of African-American social identity in its time goes beyond its depiction of just another mammy. Film historians have demonstrated how Holly­ wood, the domain of immigrants and outsiders, was brought into the accepted fold of middle class capitalist social standards. The logic of Jane Addams's 1909 remark took on urgency in the Depression: "Because we failed to organize leisure [and leisure entertainment] as we organized production . city youth was exposed to violent tempta­ tions" (qtd Rogin 351). "The solution," Rogin notes, "was to reform movies, not abolish them, so that the motion picture could operate like a 'grand social worker'" (351-2). As the Depression created unrest and sent specters of the communist Russian Revolution to haunt the imagi­ nations of establishment men, the need to enforce social stability inten­ sified. In 1933, newspaperwoman Lorena Hickock wrote, "vast numbers of the unemployed in Pennsylvania are 'right on the edge'... It would­ n't take much to make communists out of them" (qtd Brier 345). Robert Sklar points out, "The high priority the nation's leaders placed on rec­ ommending the foundations of public morale was not lost on those pro­ ducers and directors whose goal was enhanced prestige, respectability, Published by eGrove, 2020 3 Journal X, Vol. 8 [2020], No. 1, Art. 4 46 Journal x and cultural power" (196); one of those directors, the producer of Imita­ tion of Life, was Carl Laemmle, an immigrant.
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