America on Film. Sean Griffin

of different racial and ethnic groups was common in the United States almost from the moment European settlers landed on the continent. On the Western frontier, white men often took up relations with Native American women. In the Eastern United States, many white slave owners regularly forced sex upon their female slaves. Even President Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his slave, Sally Hemings. A few romanticized and revisionist films about this situation do exist: the independent film Jefferson in Paris (1995) and the TV miniseries Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000). Even today, many Hollywood film and TV producers still consider interracial relationships to be a touchy and “controversial” topic.

      Struggles over the definition of whiteness were especially pronounced during the late 1800s and the early 1900s, when film was in its infancy. The idea of the American melting pot arose during this period. The metaphor expressed the way various immigrant cultures and traditions were to be forged or melted together into an overall sense of American identity. Obviously, the American melting pot most readily accepted those groups that could successfully blend into or assimilate into the ideals and assumptions of white patriarchal capitalism. Assimilation was (and is) easier for some groups than for others, and the reason for that was (and is) based on longstanding notions about racial difference. European immigrants, although from different national and ethnic cultures, were more readily assimilated into mainstream white American culture than were people of African, Asian, or Native American backgrounds. Partly this was because European immigrants had a certain amount of cultural, racial, and religious overlap with white Americans; people from other areas of the globe were (and still are) more likely to be considered as racially and culturally Other. Nonetheless, even European immigrants had to struggle for acceptance in the United States, and a history of those struggles can be found in that era’s cinematic record.

Assimilation remains a contested issue to this day. While many people (of all racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds) support the idea that Americans should strive to assimilate into the dominant (white) way of life, others find that proposition disturbing. Many people feel that racial and ethnic cultures should be celebrated and not phased out of existence, arguing that one of the basic strengths of America is its very diversity of cultures, and – hopefully – cinematic representations. Another controversial issue related to assimilation is the phenomenon of passing, wherein some people of color deny their racial or ethnic backgrounds in order to be accepted as white. People who pass are sometimes accused of “selling out” their racial or ethnic heritages. (The flip side of that is the far more rare example of white people passing for non‐white, as when civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal was revealed to be white after posing as an African American; she was subsequently reviled for this act, which many saw as the epitome of white people appropriating blackness for themselves.) However, people of color who can pass for white often choose to do so precisely because whites are still afforded more privilege and power in our national culture, and those who pass often want to share in those opportunities. It is this social reality that led many European immigrants to work toward assimilation and acceptance as being white. That process can be seen occurring in American films made throughout the twentieth century, especially in regard to changing representations of Irish, Italian, and Jewish Americans. In film and culture‐at‐large, the shift to whiteness occurred for these groups of people when they were no longer regarded as separate races, but rather as ethnicities or nationalities that could then be assimilated into the American concept of whiteness.

Bleaching the Green: The Irish in American Cinema

      Irish people first came to the “New World” long before the United States declared its independence from Great Britain. These first Irish Americans were predominantly middle‐class Protestants, and therefore somewhat similar to settlers from Great Britain, the majority of whom were also middle‐class and Protestant. However, the cultural makeup of Irish immigrants changed dramatically during the 1800s. The great potato famine of the 1840s drove hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens – mainly of poor Catholic background – across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. Facing their first significant wave of immigration, many Americans reacted with fear and hostility. Conveniently forgetting their own recent resettlement from Europe, a number of American citizens rallied around the new cause of Nativism: that “America should be for Americans” and not for foreigners. Laws were passed in various states restricting immigration, denying voting rights, and prohibiting Irish American citizens from holding elective office. Speeches, newspaper editorials, and political cartoons often described Irish Americans as barely human: they were represented as small, hairy, apelike creatures with a propensity for violence, drunkenness, and unchecked sexual impulses.

Similar descriptions were used for African Americans during these years, and comparisons were often made between the two groups. Irish Americans were commonly called “white niggers” while African Americans were sometimes referred to as “smoked Irish.” Such shared discrimination at times tied the two communities together. Some people saw that the groups had a shared struggle and linked the institutional slavery of African Americans to the “wage slavery” of Irish immigrants, many of whom worked as servants in white households. Yet, more often than not, Irish American communities responded to such comparisons by distancing themselves from African Americans, in some cases through violent race riots. By strenuously denying similarities to African Americans, Irish Americans strove to be regarded as white and not black. Similarly, conceptions of Irish whiteness were dramatized on stage via the conventions of blackface, a popular theatrical tradition of the 1800s that featured white performers darkening their faces with makeup in order to perform broad, comedic stereotypes of African Americans. Blackface was one way that popular culture distinguished between white and non‐white behaviors and identities. By leading the blackface trend, Irish American performers did acknowledge on some level how many people conflated the two groups. Yet, these performers positioned themselves as white people who needed to “black up” to play the parts, defining themselves against a racial Other of blackness. In so doing, Irish American performers promoted their own whiteness, in effect saying “you may consider us lesser, but at least we are not black.”

      Representations of Irish Americans in early American cinema drew upon already‐established stereotypes and misconceptions developed in other media such as literature, newspaper cartooning, and the theater. Alternatively referred to as “Paddy,” the “Boy‐o,” or the “Mick,” early films typically showed Irish Americans as small, fiery‐tempered, heavy‐drinking, working‐class men. Irish American women also appeared in many early films, typically as ill‐bred, unintelligent house servants, often named Bridget. The Finish of Bridget McKeen (1901) serves as a good example of these early cinematic representations: Bridget is a stout, slovenly scullery maid who tries to light an oven, and in her frustration stokes it with kerosene. When she lights a match, an explosion results, and the film dissolves to its supposedly uproarious punch line: a shot of Bridget’s gravestone. Yet these derogatory images of Irish Americans were short‐lived, for by the advent of early cinema, public perceptions about Irish Americans were shifting. Irish Americans had been assimilating into American whiteness for half a century, and by the early 1900s, new waves of immigrants from other countries began to inundate the United States. Many of these immigrants originated from Southern and Eastern Europe, and many Americans regarded these new immigrants as darker or swarthier (that is, less white) than immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. The Irish suddenly seemed more white in comparison.

      Irish Americans began to be positioned as exemplars of immigrant assimilation, a group upon whom other immigrants should attempt to model themselves. Increasingly, the Irish were regarded as an ethnicity and a nationality, whereas they had previously been considered a race. As a consequence, Irish Americans (and their cinematic representations) moved up the scale of whiteness. Images of drunken, boisterous Micks still occurred throughout the 1920s – on stage in the long‐running Abie’s Irish Rose, and on film in The Callahans and the Murphys (1927). However, the predominant image of the Irish American in 1920s film shifted to that of the Colleen. Replacing the slovenly, stupid Bridget, Colleen was a spunky, bright‐eyed young woman who was quickly welcomed into American life; films