MICHAEL ROGIN

“Democracy and Burnt Cork”: The End of Blackface, the Beginning of Civil Rights

Representations 46 (Spring 1994)

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Transformative motion pictures such as Gone with the Wind and The Jazz Singer cannot be subsumed under standard genre categories; instead, they synthesize genres that separate before and after them. The first talking picture unites the subgenre of the social problem film that it climaxed, focusing on generational conflict, intermarriage, and passing, with the genre it originated, the musical. More particularly, The Jazz Singer inaugurates the self-reflexive movie musical about making musicals or making music, which thus encompasses at its foundation the blackface musical.

As Jim Kitses insists about the western, film presents itself as history—even within established genres with their own formal rules, building blocks, and symbolic structures. The social problem and musical genres may seem to offer opposed historical visions of tragedy and comedy, realism and escape, narrative and spectacle. But when escapist entertainment puts on the mask of the oppressed it exposes, in itself, the social problem. Moreover, the mixture of the two genres in the first talking picture—the use of musical blackface to encapsulate and solve the social, generational problem by Americanizing the immigrant son—supports Robin Wood and Vivian Sobchack’s suggestion that placing apparently opposed genres together illuminates ideological work less visible in a single genre. From one perspective, the racially inflected social problem film supplies the reality escaped from in blackface musical utopia. Not only do blackface stereotypes carry over into race-relations movies, however; the blackface celebration of performance infects the social problem film as well, since role-playing and identity transformation organize both genres. Both offer Hollywood methods for crossing the racial/ethnic divide.

The two genres separated again after The Jazz Singer, as the generational-conflict social problem film went into decline and was supplanted by the blackface musical. The Jewish novelist and screenwriter Fanny Hurst supplied the major examples of the generational-conflict film, The Younger Generation (1928) and Symphony of Six Million (1932), on Jewish assimilation, and Imitation of Life (1934), on black passing. Blackface had kept black actors off the screen in social problem silent films and other genres of narrative cinema. Talking pictures, a large step toward narrative realism, ended the era in which whites played blacks in dramatic roles, but sound’s ability to capture the singing voice revived blackface minstrelsy. Serving music in the Vitaphone shorts and The Jazz Singer, synchronized sound originally called attention to performance rather than supporting illusionistic, realist cinema. Musicals continued this spectacle side of sound. If The Jazz Singer ended the use of blackface as unself-conscious method of impersonating African-Americans (as in Birth of a Nation), it introduced to feature films blackface as conscious film subject. White minstrels had put on burnt cork in self-reflexive celebrations of American entertainment itself. Beginning with The Jazz Singer, blackface musicals established Hollywood’s roots in this first and most popular (before Hollywood) American mass-entertainment form.

There were some roles for blacks as entertainers in the 1930s, usually combined with the narrativized minstrel roles of mammy, tom, and coon, particularly in the genre that Gone with the Wind climaxes, the southern (exemplified by the Shirley Temple/ Bojangles Robinson series, John Ford’s Judge Priest [1934], and Jezebel [1938]). Blackface musicals, however, sustained the tradition of whites playing black as spectacle. In the classic period of Hollywood narrative realism, with its claims to verisimilitude and its focus on individual, interiorized character development, the musical in general and the blackface musical in particular retained the gestural, theatrical, self-reflexive, nonrealistic, utopian side of silent film.

As a family melodrama, The Jazz Singer used music to evoke conflict and loss, and in the first years of talking pictures other musicals followed its example. By the mid 1930s the genre had transformed itself, according to Rick Altman, as music became associated more with pleasure than with pain; the blackface musical is an instance. Most musicals using blackface in the 1930s and 1940s fall into two subcategories, both derived from The Jazz Singer: either backstage musicals about putting on a show or biographies of the central figures in the history of American popular music. The first group includes such unsuccessful Jolson vehicles as Mammy (1930) and The Singing Kid (1936), Fred Astaire’s Swingtime (1936), Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland’s Babes in Arms (1939) and Babes on Broadway (1942), Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby’s Holiday Inn (1942; the film that introduced what was for half a century the best-selling song in history, Irving Ber1in’s ‘White Christmas”), and This is the Army (1943; starring Ronald Reagan). The second group comprises retrospective, nostalgic films that, from 1939 to 1949, took blackface from its antebellum origins to post–World War II America, recounting the lives of Stephen Foster (Swanee River, 1939; the movie also features the blackface minstrel, E. P. Christy, played by Jolson); Dan Emmett (with Christy, the most popular early minstrel; Dixie, 1943); George Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue, 1945; Jolson, whose blackface rendition of “Swanee” made Gershwin famous and helped launch the Jazz Age, repeats that performance); and Jolson himself (The Jolson Story, 1946; and Jolson Sings Again, 1949). The Eddie Cantor Story and the Danny Thomas Jazz Singer remake (both 1953), critical and box office failures, bring the subgenre to an end, though it comes back from the dead in Neil Diamond’s Jazz Singer (1981).

As grounded in The Jazz Singer and Gone with the Wind, and culminating in the immense postwar popularity of The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again, the blackface musical was among the most important genres of New Deal cinema. The Jolson Story was one of two films to monopolize the 1946 Academy Awards nominations and, coming at the apex of Hollywood’s wartime boom, one of three to follow Birth and Gone with the Wind as Hollywood’s all-time money-makers (before the 1960s blockbusters). Jolson Sings Again, similarly, led all films of 1949 in box office receipts. But the other 1946 movie that combined Academy Awards with box office success, apparently at the opposite pole from The Jolson Story’s celebration of entertainment, was Best Years of Our Lives, a social problem film about returning World War II veterans. The film second to Jolson Sings Again in 1949 box office receipts was likewise a racial social problem film, Pinky. Home of the Brave, which combined Best Years of Our Lives’ war subject with Pinky’s racial theme, was also among the top thirty grossers of the year, remarkable for a low-budget, independent production. The racial/ethnic social problem film, both in its original generational-conflict and later racial-prejudice forms, thus appears as the underside of the blackface musical. That the social problem and musical genres are split halves of a common Ur-film is suggested not only by their common Jazz Singer roots but also by the simultaneous success of Jolson Story and Best Years, Jolson Sings Again and Pinky.

Between 1947 and 1949, when the Popular Front overlapped with early Civil Rights, Cold War liberalism, Hollywood produced six films exposing racial prejudice. The industry’s first two movies about anti-Semitism—Crossfire (1947) and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)—were followed in 1949, in a literal transfer, by four movies on anti-black racism: Pinky, Lost Boundaries, Home of the Brave, and Intruder in the Dust.

These Civil Rights movies are the stepchildren of the generational-conflict films. Unwilling to show nativist hostility to immigrants, the earlier motion pictures displaced anti-Semitism in the wider society onto generational conflict within the Jewish family; in The Jazz Singer, resistance to the Jew becoming American comes from the Jewish father, not from gentiles. The end of mass immigration to the United States and the destruction of European Jewry produced nostalgia for a lost Jewish world instead of the fear of Old World figures blocking the path to Americanization. This shift takes place visibly in the blackface musical, where The Jazz Singer patriarch metamorphoses into the adorable, supportive, old-people dolls—Stepin Fetchits, a later critic would call them—of the Jolson biopics. Outside Hollywood as well, the portrayals of family conflict and crisis in Yiddish cinema and Jewish publications of the first part of the century would be buried by retrospective celebrations of the Jewish family as the source of Jewish-American success. In, for example, Beyond the Melting Pot, imaginary Jewish family cohesion is juxtaposed to black family pathology in order to explain Jewish success and black failure.

However sentimentalized the postwar depiction of Jews, the Holocaust nonetheless turned Hollywood attention to anti-Semitism. The extermination of European Jews also called attention to the racial oppression of African-Americans. Racism and anti-Semitism, the unacknowledged condition for blackface musicals and generational-conflict films from The Jazz Singer to Jolson Sings Again, are made visible on the screen in the Civil Rights movies. But these films also expose the underside of Jewish/black identification in their use of blackface stereotypes and their portrayal of relative Jewish privilege.

These doubled postwar genre films—Jolson biopics and racial social problem pictures—straddle the fissures in the New Deal coalition that would ultimately shatter it. One could foresee that political coming-apart by identifying Jolson films as Dixiecrat for their Southern nostalgia, social problem films such as Crossfire (whose director, producer, and writers would soon fall victim to the House Un-American Activities Committee) as aligned with (Henry) Wallaceite politics. Not only do the Jolson biopics hold together the Southern/Jewish alliance, however, but the social problem films are defined by it as well. The continuation of the New Deal coalition for two decades after the war, in spite of pressures from white supremacists on the right, Civil Rights and anti–Cold War movements on the left, shows up in the way the two late l940s genres are not polarized but interrelated. The racial social problem film, although it poses itself against the blackface musical, is actually an inheritance from it.

What, then, is the genre of the blackface musical? There is an ideology of its content, what l will call “organic nationalism,” and an ideology of its form, involving self-making, performance, and artifice. In content, the blackface musical offers regression as national integration. “Mammy” is its foundation, evoking both childhood and the South to support the ease of transfer from white to black and back again—whether as Judge Priest doing Stepin Fetchit’s black voice, or Dan Emmett performing a blackface “Dixie,” or Bing Crosby and Marjorie Reynolds celebrating Lincoln’s birthday in blackface in Holiday Inn. The wide open, maternal or infantile, blackface mouth—Jolson’s as he sings “My Mammy,” Larry Parks’s in closeups in the Jolson biopics—is, as in Dixie, the stage entrance from which blacks make everything available to whites (see fig. l). In the vision of interracial harmony to which these nostalgic films return, the Civil War, not race relations, is the source of division in American life. Blackface heals that division in allowing whites playfully to expropriate blacks under conditions of hierarchical, interracial harmony. Southern domestic repose supports Northern acquisitive self-making; the Southern parvenu and redneck replace the black beast; and Warm Springs, Georgia (Roosevelt’s summer home), joins with Tammany Hall to perpetuate the Democratic Party politics out of which blackface had originally sprung, Martin Van Buren’s alliance between the planters of the South and the plain republicans of the North.

The entertainment business, from blackface to Hollywood, was itself the vehicle for national integration in the blackface musical. Blackface becomes the new world religion in The Jazz Singer; it makes America “God’s Country” in Babes in Arms; and it serves the war effort in Jolson’s comeback to entertain the troops and help the Jews in Jolson Sings Again. Thanks to the latter film and The Jolson Story, when Jolson performed for Korean War soldiers he was once again a national icon. Lt. Gen. Walton Walker regretfully declined viewing the show, he wrote Jolson, because “I have a show of my own.” If war was theater, theater was mobilized for war. Named 1949 Personality of the Year by the Washington. D.C., Variety Club, Jolson received the award from the Undersecretary of Defense. He visited the White House, where President Truman remembered seeing him in minstrel shows in his youth. The performer “died in action,” as Columbia Pictures’ Harry Cohn put it, suffering a heart attack after his trip to Korea. “A casualty of war just as much as any soldier who died on the battlef1eld,” he received, posthumously, the Pentagon Order of Merit. Obituaries marked his ascent from his role as “part of a mob scene in a Yiddish play” (Children of the Ghetto), through blackface, to inauguration by the mass audience as “king,” “the greatest single entertainer of our time.”

Like his biopics, Jolson’s obituaries made blackface serve the melting pot, shifting its Americanizing role from marking generational conflict to incorporating Jews of all generations. As it united immigrant parents and children, so it connected the national present to the past. Babes in Arms and the biopics of the 1940s gave Hollywood blackface roots and made the entertainment business the vehicle for making Americans. When the New Yorker reviewed Dixie alongside the war movie Pilot Number 5, its “Democracy and Burnt Cork” title implied blackface’s contribution to the war effort.

In defining Americanness as entertainment, however, blackface musicals slid from content to form, presenting American identity in terms of performance and self-making. Calling attention to their nostalgia, blackface musicals are self-reflexive at the core. They self-consciously make not the world they represent but themselves as performances the basis for American patriotism. Synecdochical for Hollywood, blackface gives America its meaning—self-making through role-playing—in Holiday Inn, Swanee River, and Dixie.

“Fifteen nights a year Cinderella steps into a coach and becomes queen of Holiday Inn,” says Marjorie Reynolds as she applies burnt cork to her face. The cinders transform her into royalty. Although blackface was often justified as disguise, as in the Holiday Inn scene, that was itself a ruse, for the audience was always in on the secret. Dirt was the magical, transforming substance in blackface carnivalesque (particularly transgressive for the blackface Jew, since the term ham actor originated from the use of ham fat to wipe off burnt cork). On the one hand the filthy mask (“Dirty hands, dirty face,” sings young Jakie Rabinowitz) brought the performer down to the earthy substrate, the ape he aped. But on the other, the masquerade identified him not with the mammy but with the trickster. Orality in its performed form was less the sucking mouth of nurture and more the signifying mouth of changing identity. Black mimicry, black performance, the black mask, the technique by which the subjugated group kept its distance from and mocked its oppressor, was itself expropriated and made into a blackface performance for whites.