Motor City Movie Culture, 1916–1925

By Richard Abel

A study of how the film industry came to flourish in Detroit in the early years as locals were lured into the new picture theaters.
 
Motor City Movie Culture, 1916–1925 is a broad textured look at Hollywood coming of age in a city with a burgeoning population and complex demographics. Richard Abel investigates the role of local Detroit organizations in producing, distributing, exhibiting, and publicizing films in an effort to make moviegoing part of everyday life.
 
Tapping a wealth of primary source material—from newspapers, spatiotemporal maps, and city directories to rare trade journals, theater programs, and local newsreels—Abel shows how entrepreneurs worked to lure moviegoers from Detroit’s diverse ethnic neighborhoods into the theaters. Covering topics such as distribution, programming practices, nonfiction film, and movie coverage in local newspapers, with entr’actes that dive deeper into the roles of key individuals and organizations, this book examines how efforts in regional metropolitan cities like Detroit worked alongside California studios and New York head offices to bolster a mass culture of moviegoing in the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9780253046499

Richard Abel

Richard Abel is National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of English at Drake University. His books include French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 (1984), winner of the Theatre Library Association Award, and French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907-1939 (1988), winner of the Jay Leyda Prize in Cinema Studies.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Michigan is in the midst of the greatest period of industrial expansion in its history.

Made in Detroit USA, Detroit Free Press (November 5, 1917)

MOTOR C ITY M OVIE C ULTURES MAY SEEM TO NARROW my prior research on early twentieth-century American cinema, yet it also expands the subject of that research considerably. On the one hand, this book contributes to the study of local/regional cinema history by charting several paths through a specific historical site, a single city and its environs, Detroit, Michigan—with the caveat that what defines the uniqueness of any place is by no means all included within that place itself [and] includes relations that stretch beyond. ¹ Why Detroit? Although the fourth largest metropolis, according to the 1920 census, and the most rapidly industrializing city in the country, it was relatively unique in being dominated by a single heavy industry dependent on a new mass of foreign-born, largely unskilled workers. ² To date, the city has received almost no attention from cinema historians. I should add that acting as a devoted caregiver for six years put limits on the scope of my research that soon led to this project, which never failed to fascinate and provoked unexpected lines of inquiry. On the other hand, the book extends the temporal range of my research beyond 1916 to the years through early 1925. Why 1916–1925? Detroit’s major newspapers did not begin devoting regular pages and columns to motion pictures until the fall of 1915 (somewhat later than many other cities), and smaller neighborhood papers carried only limited coverage until the period of 1922–1925. Moreover, most of the rare primary sources consulted do not run beyond 1925. Partly due to the Great War and its disastrous impact on Europe, this decade takes on added importance because, arguably, these were the initial boom years of Hollywood. In short, the book aims to become the first in-depth historical study of Detroit, primarily as a revealing example of the rich variety of American movie culture then emerging and secondarily as an important center of early twentieth-century motion picture distribution and exhibition and a more than minor site of production.

Among its objectives as a cultural history, then, Motor City Movie Culture argues for the significance of movieland culture in an unexamined metropolis during this crucial period of American cinema history. To that end, it offers thick descriptions and critical analyses of the defining features of that culture: the circulation of features as well as nonfiction films, the programming practices of palace cinemas as well as neighborhood theaters, and the moviegoing patterns of fans of all kinds. Rather than do a case study of Detroit’s movie business (mainly restricted to chap. 1), it aims to construct a detailed understanding of the cultural network defined largely in terms of relations among rental exchanges, exhibitors, nonfiction producers, newspaper writers, and movie fans. To a degree, this cultural history aligns with Robert Allen’s call for analyzing the experience of cinema and, more specifically, with Jeffrey Klenotic’s focus on the fixed-site experience for audiences.³ The book also offers a model of how to deploy new primary sources—within the limits of their perspective lenses—to compile databases and create maps in order to analyze that cultural network. Those databases and maps highlight changes in space and time, especially in the context of demographics, transportation systems, commercial centers, and factory locations. That context sometimes plays an important role in studying the area’s exhibition venues, and not only downtown palace cinemas but also theaters near ethnic/racial communities—that is, Polish, Italian, Jewish, Hungarian, and African American. Given the city’s rapidly expanding population, due to a huge influx of immigrants and migrants (many of them actually refugees of one kind or another) drawn chiefly to the new automobile industry, the book argues that class, ethnic/racial, gender, and religious differences had particular pertinence in the development of Detroit’s movie culture. A crucial arena for analyzing that development is the discourse—in newspapers, trade journals, theater programs, and spectator responses—devoted to the promotion and reception of motion pictures in the area. Finally, the book seeks, at least tentatively, to stretch beyond Detroit and compare its movie culture with existing studies of other cities and, ultimately, its implications for the broader conditions of American movie culture as a whole during this decade-long period.

Previous scholarship on local/regional cinema history in early twentieth-century America has tended to focus on metropolises such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, or Pittsburgh—for example, Ben Singer, Giorgio Bertellini, Doug Gomery, Moya Luckett, J. A. Lindstrom, Joel Frykholm, Michael Aronson—and on smaller cities and towns, including Los Angeles—for example, Jan Olsson, Greg Waller, Robert C. Allen, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Roy Rosenzweig. With the exception of the works by Gomery and Waller, those studies have not gone beyond the mid-1910s, when the Hollywood movie industry began its rise to dominance. My own prior work collected research on film distribution, exhibition, newspaper writing, and moviegoing in a wide range of specific cities, but closed off in the mid-1910s: (1) essays on Des Moines and Pawtucket; and (2) books on early American cinema encompassing Cleveland, Toledo, Youngstown, and Canton; Pittsburgh; Buffalo and Rochester; Boston, Lynn, Lowell, and Lawrence; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Atlanta; New Orleans; Chicago; St. Louis; Minneapolis, St. Paul; Salt Lake City; Seattle; and Portland, Oregon. Yet little of that involved Detroit, despite its proximity to my current location in Ann Arbor.

Motor City Movie Culture draws on original research material collected from a range of primary sources, most of which have never been examined by cinema historians. Those include

•pages, columns, ads, and stories in the city’s major newspapers (Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, Detroit Journal, Detroit Times)⁴ as well as neighborhood and ethnic/foreign language papers (e.g., Hamtramck News, Highland Parker, Detroit Jewish Chronicle, Dearborn Press, Ferndale News, Brightmoor Journal, Dziennik Polski, and Tribuna Italiana d’America);

•a rare surviving regional trade journal, the Michigan Film Review (1917–1918), held in the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan;

•rare copies (more than fifty held by a private collector) of the Weekly Film News (1916–1919), a house organ of sixteen to twenty pages, given to its customers by the John Kunsky theater chain, the largest in Detroit and Southeast Michigan. Also, scattered programs of other large theaters (1917–1921), half a dozen copies of Kunsky’s Photoplay News (1924–1925), and daily ads for seventy theaters in the Detroit Times (1922–1925);

•hundreds of digitized discrete film stories from a local newsreel, the Detroit News Pictorial, accessible on Wayne State University Library’s website;

•spatiotemporal maps of Detroit, including ethnic Detroit; and

•city directories.

In order to better frame its analyses of the city’s movie culture, the book also draws on existing scholarship on early American cinema history; early twentieth-century American urban history; and, specifically, early twentieth-century Detroit history—see the Bibliography. Why, then, is constructing that frame especially relevant?

In late 1917, the Detroit Free Press printed a column headlined Made in Detroit USA that congratulated the city for leading Michigan into its greatest era of industrial activity.⁵ Among the leading industries mentioned were railroads and factories producing industrial goods of all kinds.⁶ The Detroit Terminal, for instance, encircled the city as far north as the middle of Highland Park; the Grand Trunk, Michigan Central, and Detroit Grand & Milwaukee intersected at Lake Shore Junction just southwest of Hamtramck. While many factories were located along the Detroit River, others clustered near Lake Shore Junction or in Hamtramck and near the intersection of the Michigan Central and Pere Marquette thirty blocks west of downtown. Yet automobile firms arguably constituted the most important industry. Lincoln had 1,500 men building a new plant for making motors on the city’s west side along the Pere Marquette line; and Packard Motor, on East Grand Boulevard along the Michigan Terminal line southeast of Hamtramck, was testing and assembling airplanes as part of the war effort. Topping them all was the Ford Motor Company. A few years earlier, Albert Kahn had designed Ford’s three-story, 50,000-square-foot Crystal Palace factory for manufacturing the Model T in Highland Park next to the Detroit Terminal;⁷ now the company was building even larger facilities at River Rouge (along another Pere Marquette branch line on the city’s southwest edge) that eventually were expected to turn out 1,000,000 tractors annually, along with car bodies and rubber tires.⁸ The Michigan State Labor Department reported in 1919 that an overwhelming 45 percent of the 308,520 industrial employees . . . were in automobile and automobile accessory manufacturing.⁹ Among the others were thousands of mostly Polish women in the city’s fourth largest industry, making 5¢ cigars.¹⁰ This industrial activity formed a favorable environment for entrepreneurs like John Kunsky, bent on developing the city’s new motion picture industry. Yet that environment also was based on many other factors, all of which created a productive, yet complicated context shaping the Detroit area’s film distribution, exhibition venues, and moviegoing practices from 1916 to 1925.

Fig. 0.1. Detroit USA column logo, Detroit Free Press (January 13, 1919): 12.

First of all, analyzing a city, Olivier Zunz writes, consists of understanding the spatial distribution of the population,¹¹ and Detroit’s spatial landscape changed considerably over the course of that decade. To accommodate its population of 993,678 by 1920—a stunning increase of 528,000 during the 1910s—the city systematically annexed new territory on its periphery until it had nearly tripled in size, reaching 79.6 square miles.¹² In the 1880s and 1890s, initial annexations had extended out from the central hub located around lower Third Street (where the new Union Depot was built near the Old City Hall),¹³ west and east along the river (the latter, to the edge of Grosse Pointe Park), and north along Woodward Avenue (the crucial north–south artery)¹⁴ to the adjacent areas of Hamtramck and Highland Park.¹⁵ Between 1905 and 1917, an even larger land grab engulfed the mostly rural townships between the northwest (along Grand River Avenue), the north beyond Hamtramck and Highland Park, and the northeast along Gratiot Avenue (both major arteries radiating from the city’s hub).¹⁶ In the 1920s, further annexations added a swath of land in the northwest, another large area in the northeast, and a small section in the southwest next to Dearborn and River Rouge. In 1922, Henry Ford and the Dodge Brothers (the latter’s auto factory was located on Hamtramck’s southern border)¹⁷ pressured elected officials in Highland Park and Hamtramck to rebuff annexation efforts and to incorporate as separate municipalities.¹⁸ The result was that their factories escaped taxation from Detroit, and similar pressure from Ford kept the River Rouge facilities just outside the city. By then, Detroit’s boundaries had reached their farthest extent. This huge land mass, not unlike Los Angeles, was sustainable until the late 1940s and early 1950s, when people (largely white) increasingly moved out into the suburbs;¹⁹ by the late twentieth century, however, as the city’s population declined precipitously and its property tax base shrank, those boundaries became a disastrous liability.

Fig. 0.2. 1917 Detroit map of neighborhoods.

Among the city’s burgeoning population during the 1910s, according to Olivier Zunz, 412,00 were migrants.²⁰ Most differed from those who had come to Detroit in earlier years—when foreign-born German, British, and Canadian residents dominated—but now resided on the city’s west side (divided by Woodward), from close to downtown north to Highland Park, or on the east side, beyond any recent immigrant communities, and as far out as the residential suburbs of Grosse Pointe.²¹ According to a 1914 Collier’s article, their elite citizens formed two fairly distinct social groups: old families in Grosse Pointe and a newer North Woodward group tagged the Gasoline Aristocracy.²² As the former immigrant population fell in proportional numbers, others increased: namely, Poles, Italians, Hungarians, Slavs, and Russian Jews.²³ By 1920, 25.1 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born, and another 3 percent were black migrants from the South.²⁴ Within five years, the foreign-born constituted about one-half of Detroit’s total population, swelled by nearly 245,000 new immigrants.²⁵ These later immigrants and migrants (or refugees) tended to congregate in already established ethnic/racial neighborhoods. The black community, for instance, was restricted to a ghetto area called Black Bottom slightly east and north of downtown,²⁶ on the Jewish ghetto’s southern edge; a more prominent Jewish community then developed in the North End near Central High School.²⁷ Slightly east of the initial Jewish ghetto was an Italian community and then a much larger Polish neighborhood known as Lower Poletown that stretched farther south and north.²⁸ Hungarians resided in Del Ray on the city’s southwest edge, with small Polish, Italian, and Slavic neighborhoods nearby.²⁹ Generally, these immigrants were restricted to those areas not through zoning ordinances, which were declared unconstitutional in 1917, but through private real estate covenants.³⁰ The Polish were an exception, as many Lower Poletown residents and recent immigrants moved to a west side neighborhood along Michigan between 20th Street and 30th Street (near the railroad intersection) but mostly north to the east of Lake Shore Junction and especially into Hamtramck.³¹

Hamtramck and Highland Park, as independent cities within Detroit, were important for several reasons. Hamtramck had grown from a population of 3,559 in 1910 to 48,625 in 1920 and, when it was incorporated in 1922, had the largest concentration of Polish people outside Warsaw.³² Consequently, it was a working-class community dominated by one ethnic group whose religious affiliation, like that of the Italians, was Catholic, and most Poles were employed as unskilled or semiskilled factory workers at either the Dodge Brothers plant (covering seventy-two acres) or other nearby companies, manufacturing automobiles or parts—for example, Packard Motor, Cadillac Motor, American Car, American Motor Castings, Detroit Steel Products, and Russell Wheel Foundry.³³ Similarly, Highland Park had grown from a few thousand people in 1910 to 46,615 in 1920.³⁴ Its demographic, however, was different. While native white Americans (a census category) were the primary residents, especially in the southwestern area near the wealthy Boston-Edison community, they were divided spatially into two classes: white-collar workers and skilled or semiskilled factory workers. Foreign immigrants tended to live either close to Ford’s Crystal Palace, as did a small Syrian Muslim community,³⁵ or in the northern part of the city. Whatever their ethnicity, most were employed at the Ford plant; others, at Maxwell Motor.³⁶ Young, single men dominated the working class and resided as boarders relatively near the auto factories, so that in 1920 the ratio of men to women was unusually high: 133.1 to 100.³⁷

As in many other American cities, recent immigrants and black migrants often found themselves the objects of prejudice and fear.³⁸ In 1912, the founder of Cadillac, Henry Leland, had set up the Detroit Citizens League, an elite group of white Protestants aligned with the Republican Party’s anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and temperance factions.³⁹ After a new charter was enacted in 1918 to mandate citywide elections for mayor and a smaller council, the league was chagrined to have the first mayor’s election won by someone once considered a friend: James Couzens, a Ford Motor vice president who actually managed the company until he had a fallout with Henry Ford in early 1914.⁴⁰ The former police commissioner, Couzens campaigned on a platform of Progressive clean government. Despite his efforts to reduce crime and corruption and to fund public works, a variety of conditions, including his own blunt style in working with other officials, conspired against him as one whom the Saturday Evening Post later called a scab millionaire.⁴¹ Among those conditions were insufficient tax monies; the Red Scare of 1919 that targeted foreign workers;⁴² the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had thirty-two thousand members in Detroit by late 1924;⁴³ the Eighteenth Amendment, which turned the city into a wide-open booze town and a center for bootlegging;⁴⁴ and a severe housing crisis, exacerbated by the 1920–1921 economic depression, that chiefly affected ethnic communities and the black ghetto⁴⁵ and was slow to gain the attention of city officials.⁴⁶ One of Couzens’s pet projects (supported by only the Detroit News) was to convince city officials to purchase the often criticized private street car company; after years of fruitless negotiations, the purchase finally became a reality in early 1922.⁴⁷

The auto industry developed its own plans to manage the flood of immigrants and migrants. After the first boom and bust cycle,⁴⁸ in 1915 the Detroit Board of Commerce⁴⁹ had begun to institute a paternalistic policy of dealing with fears of unrest among foreign workers. The policy, supported by the national Committee for Immigrants in America, was modeled on efforts by Ford and the YMCA to indoctrinate and transform immigrants.⁵⁰ This was the Americanization movement—led by Ford’s Sociological department and a volunteer Committee on Education—which urged workers (and their families) to attend night classes in English and US citizenship, with the underlying aim of producing a more stable, efficient labor force by replacing ethnic ties with school ties . . . sanctioned by the industrial order.⁵¹ A Ford English School graduation ceremony in February 1916 staged a symbolic spectacle of that transformation for an audience that included prominent business leaders: against the backdrop of an ocean steamship, men dressed in foreign costumes and bearing signs naming their origin countries slowly descended a gangway into a huge Ford English School Melting Pot center stage and soon emerged dressed in American clothes and carrying small American flags, under a banner proclaiming E Pluribus Unum.⁵² In conjunction with this policy, Ford introduced the $5-a-day profit-sharing plan, but only for workers whose thriftiness, good habits, good home conditions, and six-month residency in the country made them eligible.⁵³ Unless they succeeded in Americanization classes, most foreign workers were excluded. The lack of strong unions in the city also allowed Ford and other companies to control their labor force more easily.⁵⁴ This was partly the result of the Employers’ Association of Detroit (EAD), founded in 1902 to attract unskilled workers for the auto industry;⁵⁵ general manager Chester M. Culver (involved in the Americanization movement) made it perhaps the most powerful political force in the city.⁵⁶

At least one feature of the city’s contextual landscape remains relevant: the range of available newspapers. Four dailies dominated the region during this period. The Evening News had long been one of James Scripps’s working-class papers, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Common People.⁵⁷ A member of the Scripps-McRae chain in the Midwest, the News became part of the United Press wire service in 1907.⁵⁸ A progressive, independent paper that by the early 1910s—under publisher George G. Booth and managing editor Edwin G. Pipp—began to target a mass rather than a class readership,⁵⁹ the News, like other Scripps papers, remained often critical of industrialization, supported the city’s 1918 charter reform,⁶⁰ and was a strong advocate of municipal ownership (such as the street railway system) and public service.⁶¹ Following the construction of an imposing new office-factory, celebrated in Editor & Publisher,⁶² the News had the largest circulation in the city, with a daily edition of 218,500 copies in 1919⁶³ and a Sunday edition that exceeded 300,000 copies by 1925.⁶⁴ The next largest paper in circulation was the more conservative, upscale Free Press, a morning paper and, consequently, a member of the Associated Press wire service.⁶⁵ The publisher was Edward Douglas Stair, a major real estate owner and theater entrepreneur; Phil J. Reid was the managing editor.⁶⁶ The Free Press was closely aligned with the city’s business interests, as evidenced, in March 1918, by other Made in Detroit USA stories and by scores of Michigan Manufacturers filling large block ads.⁶⁷ Four years later, the paper boasted of more financial advertising than all other papers combined.⁶⁸ In 1925, its offices moved into a new 14-story Albert Kahn designed building; its daily circulation was close to 200,000 copies, the Sunday edition 275,000.⁶⁹

The more important of the other two dailies was the Detroit Times, another evening paper, whose publisher James Schermerhorn, in 1919, tried to make the paper over into the voice of a virile city—clean, complete, concise, constructive, conservative.⁷⁰ Despite his efforts, the Times’s circulation remained low until William Randolph Hearst, on a buying spree, made it part of his media empire in October 1921.⁷¹ Within six months, its daily print run rose from a meager 26,000 to 100,000; by late 1923, the circulation of both the daily and Sunday editions reached 200,000; and its editorial positions hewed closer to Hearst’s own oxymoronic promotion of an unremitting fight for progressive Americanism.⁷² Last was the Detroit Journal, an afternoon paper that Stair was publishing before investing in the Free Press in 1906.⁷³ The editorial policy of the Journal, not surprisingly, paralleled that of the Free Press, as in its opposition to any proposal for the city to purchase and renovate the streetcar system.⁷⁴ It claimed to offer a remarkable daily double magazine page for women, with subjects—from club news and society notes to menu ideas and shopping hints—appealing to women of a certain class.⁷⁵ By 1922, the Journal’s circulation had reached 120,000; at that point, however, the paper was sold to its competitor, the News, which quickly closed it down.⁷⁶

While there were a dozen or more neighborhood and foreign-language newspapers (with much smaller readerships), very few have survived. Fortunately for this study, the daily Hamtramck News and Highland Parker do—the Hamtramck News from the time the two cities were incorporated in 1922—as does the Detroit Jewish Chronicle.⁷⁷ Scattered copies of several weeklies on Detroit’s western and northwestern outskirts also still exist: the Dearborn Press, the Brightmoor Journal, and the Ferndale News. Limited to just a few pages for each copy, the weekly Tribune Italiana and daily Dziennik Polski targeted readers restricted to, respectively, many first- and second-generation Italian and Polish immigrants.⁷⁸ Finally, among all the different trade magazines published in the city was the Michigan Film Review, one of only a few regional weeklies in the country devoted exclusively to the motion picture industry. Although this is unconfirmed, it may have had close ties with the Free Press and its business interests: each one’s editorial office could be found in the same downtown building.

At various points, one or more elements of this framing summary inform this historical study of Detroit movie culture, which divides into four chapters and six entr’actes and concludes with an afterword.

Chapter 1 defines that culture from the perspective of film circulation, largely that of feature fiction films, and describes and analyzes the interrelations of distribution and exhibition over space and time. Although sketching the infrastructure of the city’s movie business, it largely explores a complex nexus of circulation, especially attentive to the inclusion and exclusion of different ethnic neighborhoods, and it situates that nexus at points within one or more larger cultural, social, and/or economic contexts. Its analysis focuses on changes in film circulation, especially in terms of demographics, factory locations, transportation systems, and commercial centers. The chapter draws particularly on the following documents: surviving issues of the Michigan Film Review, Detroit’s four main newspapers, extant issues of Kunsky’s weekly house organs, the national trade press, and other local sources.

Chapter 2 looks at that culture from the perspective of programming practices: what the city’s moviegoers would expect to find in their picture theaters. Although stars and their features usually were prominent on most programs, nearly all theaters essentially mounted variety shows, in which, as Richard Koszarski puts it, features were but one part of an evening’s entertainment.⁷⁹ Within those variety shows, moreover, live performances and short films could be as attractive as features in luring customers to theaters. The chapter includes information that would have interested those establishing routines of attending certain theaters, on certain days, and at certain times: program starting times, seat ticket costs, promotions of upcoming films. The analysis of weekly and daily programs in individual theaters and categories of theaters in Chapter 2 draws on the following documents: Kunsky’s Weekly Film News and Photoplay Weekly, several other rare theater programs, and the city’s four main newspapers—specifically, ads from a wide range of neighborhood theaters as well as palace cinemas.

Chapter 3 focuses on the circulation of short nonfiction films. That circulation includes weekly newsreels, screen magazines, travelogues and scenics, popular science films, and Hollywood snapshots of the stars, all from major producers or distributors. Yet its main concern is with Detroit-Made films, not only produced locally but also exhibited as local program attractions. One set of these films, produced by the Ford Motor Company, is relatively well known, but the others are not: the local newsreels produced by the Metropolitan Film Company in conjunction with the city’s two main newspapers—the Detroit Free Press Film Edition (1918–1923) and the Detroit News Pictorial (1923–1925). The chapter examines these newsreels in particular for their choice of subjects, the implication of those choices, and their mode of representation (specifically in the surviving discrete stories of the Pictorial), as well as the range and extent of their exhibition.

Chapter 4 aims to analyze the movie pages and columns in the city’s four main newspapers: the Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, Detroit Journal, and Detroit Times. Most generally, it addresses the question of how they shaped, often implicitly, their readers’ sense of the movies as a more or less routine part of daily life. More specifically, if that shaping involved a regular diet of information and gossip that could change over time, whom did the newspapers assume their moviegoing readers to be, and how did their often quite different choices of menu items seem to address different kinds of movie fans? Finally, the chapter analyzes the interactive forums of selected responses from movie fans evidenced in a variety of newspaper contests as well as in material cut out of many Weekly Film News issues, likely for a scrapbook no longer extant.

Five of this volume’s six Entr’Actes offer brief contextual profiles of the Michigan Film Review; major industry figures John Kunsky and George Trendle and their Weekly Film News; local film producers the Metropolitan Film Company and Detroit-Made Film Company; and the Detroit News-Tribune’s unique image of a star-gazing movie fan. To assist readers of chapters 1 and 2, the second Entr’Acte lists the names, addresses, and seating capacities of Detroit area theaters during this decade.

The afterword takes up several of the issues that arise in writing such a cultural history. Some of those issues depend on which sources are consulted in a region uniquely defined as an emerging hub for manufacturing automobiles and automotive parts, with an unusually large, predominantly male immigrant population. It also sketches several trajectories of further research suggested by this introduction that might recover primary sources that either have been difficult to locate or require much more time to find and access. Those include not only the career of John Kunsky, his enterprises in Detroit, and his relationship with Hollywood, but also the impact on the city’s movie culture—brought about (1) by labor issues, particularly involving the automobile industry and not only the movie business; (2) by Detroit’s unique ethnic and racial diversity, especially that of black migrants; and (3) by who actually were the fans who inhabited and played a crucial role in that culture.

A brief personal postscript: Although no one in my family ever had close connections to Detroit during this time, my father was a committed owner of Ford automobiles throughout his life. And I learned to drive by handling a 1951 Ford two-door coupe that enclosed me in the heavy metal shell that felt like a tank. I also recall a family vacation in the 1950s when my parents took all seven of us children on a tour of Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, the ersatz village that, in 1929, Henry Ford had constructed as a nostalgic reincarnation of turn-of-the-last-century America, with its huge collection of early automobiles and imported buildings such as his friend Thomas Edison’s laboratory and adjacent boardinghouse from Menlo Park, New Jersey. Perhaps it’s appropriate for such controversial pioneers of major twentieth-century industries as Ford and Edison to front this far-from-nostalgic reimagining of early movie culture in Detroit.

Notes

1. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 5.

2. Melvin G. Holli, ed., Detroit (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), 123; and Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigration in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 5. See also Made in Detroit USA: Detroit Is Shown Fastest Growing City in America, DFP (January 13, 1919): 12.

3. Robert C. Allen, Getting to ‘Going to the Show,’ and Jeffrey Klenotic, Space, Place, and the Female Film Exhibitor, in Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place, ed. Julia Hallam and Les Roberts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 33 and 54, respectively.

4. Both the News and Free Press survive in nearly complete runs during this period: the News on microfilm (and just recently in digital form); the Free Press in digital files on the current newspaper’s website. Although the Journal and Times survive on microfilm, neither is complete: the first is missing issues near the end of its existence in 1922; the second has scattered missing weeks from August 1923 through March 1924.

5. Made in Detroit USA, DFP (November 5, 1917): 16. This column, embedded within dozens of ads, was centered in an Industrial Doings page that appeared on Mondays, from January 1917 at least through 1919.

6. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 298–303. These 1920 maps were drawn from G. William Baist, Real Estate Atlas of Surveys of Detroit and Suburbs, vols. 1–2 (Philadelphia: G. William Baist, 1918); C. M. Burton, The City of Detroit, Michigan, 1701–1922 (Detroit: Clark Publishing, 1922); and R. L. Polk and Co., Detroit City Directory, 1920.

7. The name Crystal Palace aligned Ford’s production site with an earlier icon of imperialist technology, London’s famous 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry in All Nations.

8. By 1926, the River Rouge facilities covered 1,115 acres and employed 7,500 people—David L. Lewis, The Public Image of Henry Ford: An American Folk Hero and His Company (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), 161.

9. Holli, Detroit, 119. Those accessory companies included manufacturers of steel and aluminum parts; African American men made up from 25 percent to 50 percent of the companies’ work force, a higher percentage than in the automobile companies, despite the thousands employed by Ford.

10. Most cigar factories were nonunion, were located in or near Polish communities, and employed mainly young women. Patricia A. Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 191–192. The 1910 US Census listed tobacco manufacturing as the fourth largest industry in Detroit—summarized in Sister Mary Remigia Napolska, The Polish Immigrant in Detroit to 1914: Annuals of the Polish R.C. Union Archives and Museums, vol. 10, 1945–1946 (Chicago: Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, 1946), 33.

11. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 9.

12. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 286–287.

13. Don Lochbiler, Detroit’s Coming of Age, 1873–1973 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 69.

14. The lumber baron David Whitney predicted the city’s growth along Woodward, and his son erected a medical center in his honor at Grand Circus Park. See Lochbiler, Detroit’s Coming of Age, 232–235.

15. Robert Conot, American Odyssey (New York: Morrow, 1974), frontispiece.

16. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 290.

17. For more information on the Dodge Brothers, see Charles K. Hyde, The Dodge Brothers: The Automobile Industry, and Detroit Society in the Early Twentieth Century, Michigan Historical Review 22, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 49–82. For a 1915 layout of Dodge Main’s assembly line design, see Hyde, ‘Dodge Main’ and Detroit’s Automobile Industry, 1910–1980, Detroit in Perspective 6, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 7.

18. Conot, American Odyssey, 213.

19. See, for instance, Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

20. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 287.

21. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 291.

22. Julian Street, Detroit the Dynamic, Collier’s (July 4, 1914): 9.

23. Along with those from the Balkans, many Slavs came to the city’s factories from copper mines and lumber camps in the Upper Peninsula or coalmines in Pennsylvania and New York—see Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 25.

24. Clarence Hooker, Life in the Shadows of the Crystal Palace, 1910–1927: Ford Workers in the Model T Era (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1997), 44, 51; Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 104, 287.

25. Holli, Detroit, 121.

26. Bounding the Black Bottom ghetto area were Beaubien and Hastings, respectively, on the west and east, and Brewster and Napoleon on the north and south. Hooker, Life in the Shadows of the Crystal Palace, 95; Elaine Latzman Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes: An Oral History of Detroit’s African-American Community, 1918–1967 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 37; and Kevin Boyle and Victoria Getis, eds., Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons: Images of Working-Class Detroit, 1900–1930 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 16. The first wave of 25,000–35,000 black migrants came in 1916–1917; these workers were lured by the labor shortages resulting from the United States’ entry into World War I—see Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It, 26–27. Especially important to this crowded black ghetto were not only churches (there were thirty-nine by 1919) and the Columbia Community Center set up by the Detroit Urban League, but also the saloons of Paradise Valley—see Henri Florette, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920 (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975), 115; Boyle and Getis, 18; and Thomas, 69.

27. Bounding the initial Jewish ghetto were Watson and Monroe, respectively, on the north and south, and Brush and Orleans on the west and east. Central High School was located at Warren and Cass, and this later Jewish area stretched north of there and east for half a dozen blocks along Woodward up to Highland Park. Ernest Goodman recalled a bloody battle in the early 1920s between the WASP students who politically ran the school and the roughhouse Jewish guys who later joined the Purple Gang. Christopher H. Johnson, Maurice Sugar: Law, Labor, and the Left in Detroit, 1912–1950 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 35. See also Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes, 61; and Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 345.

28. The Italian and Polish neighborhoods inhabited the area along Orleans and St. Aubin from Gratiot on the south almost to Forest on the north. See Parker, 191; and Zunz, 345. In 1914 the Polish population of Detroit numbered between 110,000 and 120,000, nearly one-quarter of the total population—Sister Mary Remigia Napolska, The Polish Immigrant in Detroit to 1914, 20.

29. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 327.

30. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 374. In 1924, the Detroit Real Estate Board codified these zoning restrictions—Beth Tompkins Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 105.

31. Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker, 191.

32. Greg Kowalski, Hamtramck: The Driven City (Chicago: Arcadia, 2002), 31; and Frank Serafino, West of Warsaw (Hamtramck, MI: Hamtramck Avenue Publishing, 1983), 39–40.

33. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 354.

34. Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 291.

35. In the 1920s, the Syrian Muslim population in Highland Park ranged from 7,000 to 16,000. In 1921, the first mosque in the United States was constructed one block from the Crystal Palace. Sally Howell, Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 34, 39, 44–50.

36. Hooker, Life in the Shadow of the Crystal Palace, 58; Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 354.

37. Hooker, Life in the Shadow of the Crystal Palace, 60; and Kevin Boyle and Victoria Getis, eds., Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons: Images of Working-Class Detroit, 1900–1930 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 15.

38. Under the mistaken assumption that immigrants disproportionately were responsible for increases in urban crime across the country, Congress in 1907 had formed a commission to investigate the problems of immigration. Despite four years of data (collected in forty volumes), which unexpectedly failed to support that belief, the commission nonetheless issued a report that completely contradicted its findings—see Conot, American Odyssey, 221–222.

39. Conot, American Odyssey, 186; Raymond R. Fragnolli, The Transformation of Reform: Progressivism in Detroit—And After, 1912–1933 (New York: Garland, 1982), 24–117. During its first year, this organization was called the Detroit Citizens Uplift League.

40. Harry Barnard, Independent Man: The Life of Senator James Couzens (New York: Charles Scribner, 1958), 117–125. See also David Allan Levine, Internal Combustion: The Races in Detroit, 1915–1926