Previous articles are archived on our blog site at: The Great American History Blog The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Rudolph Valentino The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was Valentino’s breakthrough movie.  The film, aimed at capturing a mass audience, which it successfully did, and in the process helped propel Valentino to stardom.  The film reveals much about the moral revolution that was going on in the 1920’s that we could not fully appreciate without having the film as a source. The 1920’s was a new age of modernity challenging the old culture of the Protestant work ethic and rigid Victorian morality.  Women were becoming liberated both politically and socially.  As Sklar notes, the new age challenged sexual mores that were linked to preserving the old social order (Sklar, Robert.  Movie-Made America, New York: 1994, Page116). In the film, Valentino plays Julio, a youthful libertine.  Valentino establishes his “bad boy” persona as a sexual predator in a “tango hell” in Buenos Aires as he aggressively pushes aside a voluptuous dancer’s partner, subdues her protests, and engages her in an intimate tango, making her his.  It is unthinkable that an Anglo-Saxon type could have done this.   As Skalr points out, passion was an alternative to traditional American behavior.  Foreigners were passionate, not white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans (Sklar, 100). Julio’s family moves to Paris before World War I.  Julio becomes a gentleman artist in Montmarte by day, painting scantily clad women (the models are dressed in diaphanous robes and breasts/nipples are clearly visible…pretty shocking stuff for a Victorian…the movie was made (1921) before the Hays Commission went into full swing). By night Julio rides the crest of the tango craze that is sweeping France.  He meets Marguerite, the wife of one of his father’s friends, who is married to an older husband.  The movie sets up the conflict between duty and desire that was extant in the broader society of America in the 1920’s.  Title cards with dialogue such as, “Her heart yearns for youthful companionship and fun”, are evocative of the dilemma of post World War I American society torn between duty and desire.  Marguerite allows Julio to romance her.  Marguerite says, “It does not seem wrong for me to come here (Julio’s studio in Montmarte) now.  It does not seem right when he (the husband) kisses me.  My parents arranged the marriage.  I do not love him.”   Here, the woman clearly longs to reject the old order and follow new sexual horizons.  Julio responds, “You do not belong to him, you belong to me”, and places his hand directly upon her breast (daring even by modern movie standards). Now comes the retrenchment.  With the coming of the war comes the call of duty.  Marguerite becomes a nurse.  By a chance of fate, she ends up nursing her estranged hero husband who has been blinded at the front.  She tells the now distraught Julio, “You are a man; you could never understand a woman’s desire for atonement”.  The old values, the woman as protector of the home, the spirit of moral uplift, reasserts itself.   Julio joins the army himself and finds moral redemption.  He is not the old selfish, self-absorbed Julio of old.  Marguerite, while nursing her blind husband, has a moment of weakness and contemplates leaving her blind husband because she still loves Julio.  The dead Julio’s phantom appears to her and shows her the path of duty. Thus, although the film has challenged the morals of the status quo and shown other ways of behaving, in the end, the film moves back to the center, reaffirming duty/morality…or as a Victorian poem ran, “I dreamt that life was youth and beauty, but when I awoke I found that it was duty.”  The film stands as a cultural artifact, showing America in the 1920’s as an ambivalent society caught between declining and emerging value systems. Romancing the Folk by Benjamin Filene In Romancing the Folk,  Benjamin Filene traces the development of the folk music movement since 1900.  His primary focus is the cultural “middlemen”, who discovered folk musicians and promoted them as exemplars of America’s musical roots.  These individuals made judgments about what constituted America’s true musical traditions, helped shape what “mainstream” audiences recognized as authentic, and inevitably, transformed the music that the folk performers offered. (Filene, 5) What is fascinating about these cultural brokers is how their endeavors reflect one of the ongoing themes in American history, the dichotomy between the vision of man in society versus the vision of the noble savage, the individual in a simpler more natural time.  The earliest folklorists were bent on cataloging and preserving original songs.  These early catalogers saw the propagation of folk culture as a means of knitting society back together and restoring it to a simpler era.  John and Alan Lomax went farther, recording the sounds of authentic performers and introducing authentic performers to the public.   Industrial development in America increasingly diminished the autonomy of the individual in favor of the demands of industrial discipline. Technology forced the worker into what the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.)  called, “a common servitude of all workers to the machines which they tend”. Disillusioned with bourgeois culture’s corrupt materialism and constraining standards of propriety folklorists depicted roots musicians as the embodiments of an anti-modern ethos.  The appeal of folk performers to the public was their non- middleclass “otherness”.  In his public persona Huddie Ledbetter (aka “Lead Belly”), an ex-convict singer John and Alan Lomax brought to public attention, was cast as an archetypal ancestor, pre-modern, emotive, non-commercial. The “outsider” was the persona expected of the folk performer, even though many of the performers themselves, including “Lead Belly” and “Muddy Waters” ( McKinley Morganfield) were both willing and anxious to adapt their music to be more commercially viable. During the great national crises of the Depression and the Second World War, the folk music movement was officially embraced by the government as a method of enhancing national pride and cohesion.  Folk songs were identified with Americanism.  The ruling elite used a cultural tool to energize crowds to identify with the prevailing ideology of the elite.   After the war, the official embrace of folk music faded and folk music resumed its role as an activity of “otherness”. One of the primary forces in the folk movement in the post-war years was Pete Seeger.  Pete Seeger and his followers, constituted an early wave of the 1960s counterculture, pushing against the empty homogeneity of bourgeois life.   Interestingly the two most influential figures in the folk movement, Seeger and Bob Dylan were not, in fact, of the working class.  Seeger was the son of privilege, the product of elite eastern prep schools, and Harvard.  Dylan (Robert Zimmerman)was the product of a conventional middle class family from Minnesota. Both donned working class clothes and developed an ersatz working class lifestyle, despite background and income, rejecting even bathing and hygiene in a quest for “authenticity”. In many ways both Seeger, Dylan, and the folk movement can be seen as part of the tradition of the nineteenth century utopianism, hankering after a simpler and nobler American community.   Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald The sub-title of Elijah Wald’s book is Robert Johnson and the invention of the blues.  Wald suggests that it is the audience that gives meaning to music, and that to understand music as a cultural artifact, you must understand what broader purpose the music serves for a specific audience.  The blues meant something entirely different to its original black audience than to white aficionados of the 1960s, 1970s, and thereafter who reshaped blues to meet their own tastes.   The blues originated in the black community with “songs improvised to match a life of hard labor and constant troubles” (screening: Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues).  Vaudevillian Ma Rainey opened up a new future for the blues by taking songs from the field to the stage.  Mamie Smith started a blues craze when she recorded “Crazy Blues” in 1920.  A host of female singers dominated the blues being performed throughout the 1920s.  Blues was seen as an entertaining pop style, not a vehicle for transmitting black culture.  Blacks were not nostalgic for the past.  Wald points out, for its original black audiences , “Blues was the music of the present and future, not the oppressive plantation past” (Wald, 80).  The performance of blues was dominated by big name female stars, and the market as long as the audiences were predominantly black, according to record executive Marshall Chess, was a “women’s market”. Wald’s central thesis is that the observer gives meaning to what is being observed.  The observer provides the meta- narrative.  The career of Robert Johnson exemplifies the thesis.  Johnson was a talented musician who produced a small body of work and died dramatically at an early age.  In his lifetime, Johnson vied for popularity and was an example of someone holding his own “with the pop stars up north, rather than being stuck forever playing in run down country shacks” (Wald, 127).  Johnson was all but forgotten until crowned “King of the Delta” in the 1960s by white middle class blues aficionados embracing the vision of a romanticized black culture of the past which reflected an “otherness” in opposition to white middle class norms.  In the years between Johnson’s death in 1938 and his recognition as “King of the Delta”, blues music had been redefined.  It was first redefined by Alan Lomax and John Hammond, as decisive musical opinion makers for a small bubble of New York liberal society which embraced the blues as a badge of otherness.  Blues had left the realm of its original black audience.  Obscurity had become a virtue.  “The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958” (Wald, 241).   The second re-definition came with the British musical invasion of the 1960s.  “Slashing guitar and wailing harmonica” spoke to English musicians, who re-educated Americans on the meaning of the blues.  White audiences were now seeking emotional release, raw, direct passion found lacking in white styles (Wald, 257).  Johnson’s persona, as much as his music, propelled his rise to blues icon.  As a person, he was seen as mysterious, dangerous and otherworldly…with the added benefit of having died young before his full potential could be realized.  Johnson exemplified “the lifestyle that white listeners (associated) with the music: a homeless wanderer, alone in the world, haunted by demons, destroyed by violence” (Wald, 263).  The blues image for white, predominantly male audiences, was that of hard bitten machismo.  Paradoxically, while his white fans drank straight whiskey to get in the blues mood, an authentic master performer of the blues, Muddy Waters, drank only French champagne (Wald, 258). 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