June 24, 2025: Sound in Film: Al Jolson

[100 years ago this week, the brothers Harry and Sam Warner struck a deal with Bell Labs to use their innovative Vitaphone technology in the production of the first sound films for Warner Brothers. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for talking pictures!]

On two contradictory yet interconnected AmericanStudies layers to an iconic “talkie.”

About seventeen and a half minutes into The Jazz Singer (1927), the popular singer and vaudevillian Al Jolson, having just performed a live-recorded version of the song “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face,” speaks directly to the audience (the folks listening to him perform in the film’s nightclub setting; but also, clearly, the audience watching the film in theaters) the first recorded words of dialogue in an American film: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” As yesterday’s post hopefully made clear, the development of sound technology in film was a multi-stage process, and it’s important not to over-emphasize a single moment or film (at least not at the expense of a nuanced sense of how such things evolve over time). But nonetheless, it’s difficult to overstate how much of an impact this audible line of dialogue (part of about two minutes’ worth of recorded dialogue across The Jazz Singer) would have made on film audience used to reading dialogue on caption cards inserted amidst filmed scenes (a technique which Jazz Singer still uses for much of its dialogue).

In this February 2019 Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on the history and influence of Blackface, I noted that for much of The Jazz Singer, including its triumphant finale, Jolson’s character Jack Robin (the stage name of Jacob Rabinowitz) performs in Blackface. While he isn’t in Blackface for that iconic line of recorded dialogue, Blackface minstrelsy overall is a defining feature of the film and its legacies in American culture and society. So I’d ask you to check out that column if you would and then come on back for a second AmericanStudying layer.

Welcome back! If as I argue in that column one significant feature of much of 20^th century American popular culture (from Vaudeville to film to cartoons to TV variety shows and more) was thus Blackface performance, another was the striking number of Jewish American artists who helped shape that culture. High on that list was Al Jolson, who had been born Asa Yoelson in Lithuania and who would become one of the first openly Jewish performers to become stars in the United States. And to my mind it's no coincidence that the film role which truly cemented Jolson’s cultural significance was that of Jacob Rabinowitz, a character who is destined to take over his father’s role as cantor in a Lower East Side synagogue before he rebels, runs away from home, and finds his way instead to the titular role of jazz singer. I love the fact that it’s a Jewish American performer who speaks the first recorded words of dialogue in an American film—exactly as much as I loathe how much of that film said performer spends in Blackface.

Next film sound studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Examples of sound in film you’d highlight?

June 23, 2025: Sound in Film: Vitaphone’s Anniversary

[100 years ago this week, the brothers Harry and Sam Warner struck a deal with Bell Labs to use their innovative Vitaphone technology in the production of the first sound films for Warner Brothers. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for talking pictures!]

On three other historic moments that help contextualize the one we’re commemorating this week.

1)      De Forest’s Alternative: I first learned about the groundbreaking scientist and inventor Lee de Forest when I made him the Memory Day Nominee for August 26^th (his birthday, in 1873). De Forest’s inventions (and one in particular, the audion) helped shape virtually every significant 20^th century communications and media technology, from the telephone to radio to television to, yes, sound films. But while the audion did play an important role in the development of Vitaphone, over those same years de Forest would also create his own sound-on-film system, Phonofilm, which he debuted in April 1923. Unfortunately for him, its sound quality was apparently not the greatest, and so the brothers Warner decided to make their June 1925 deal with Western Electric’s Bell Laboratories instead.

2)      Don Juan (1926): Just over a year after they signed that deal, Warner Brothers formally introduced the new technology with the August 5^th, 1926 premiere of their silent film Don Juan, starring John Barrymore as the Latin lothario. There was no spoken dialogue (that would come about a year later, with the famous moment I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post), but the film did feature both a symphonic score and sound effects. Perhaps even more important as a demonstration of the technology were the series of shorts that preceded the film, most of which featured live-recorded music and one of which also qualified as a “talkie,” as it included an “Introduction of Vitaphone Sound Pictures” from studio spokesperson Will Hays. Don Juan made a substantial haul at the box office (nearly $1.7 million), yet not enough to recoup the new technology’s costs—both telling details, I’d say.

3)      Carnival Night in Paris (1927): For the first year (and beyond), both shorts and feature film scores utilizing Vitaphone were filmed in New York City, where the technology had been invented and where a sizeable number of musicians and recording studios could be found. But it was inevitable that the technology, like every aspect of the film industry in the 1920s, would migrate to Hollywood, and Vitaphone did so first with the 1927 short Carnival Night in Paris. Filmed in Hollywood and featuring the Henry Halstead Orchestra and hundreds of background dancers, this short was on its own terms eminently inconsequential—yet, as with every significant moment in the development of this technology, it helped change everything for film and America in the years to come.

Next film sound studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Examples of sound in film you’d highlight?

June 21-22, 2025: American Nazis: Project Paperclip and Hunters

[In the summer of 1945, Nazi scientists began arriving in the United States, recruited to work in the US government and eventually its space program as part of Operation Paperclip. But they weren’t the first nor the only American Nazis by any means, and this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of others, leading up to this weekend post on an interesting and fraught recent cultural representation of Paperclip.]

[NB. Serious SPOILERS for the first season of Amazon Prime’s Hunters in this post’s final paragraph; I haven’t seen season two.]

On a more historical and a more fictional side to a recent TV show’s depiction of Nazis in America.

Like all the histories about which I’ve written in this week’s series, the US government’s Project Paperclip program needs a great deal more of a place in our collective memories. The program’s very name reflects the idea that the Nazi pasts of the scientists brought to the United States in the months after the war’s end would be excised from their files, these personal and collective histories elided so that the US could advance its Cold War and (eventually) Space Race goals and deny the Soviet Union the same opportunities. We can debate whether bringing the scientists over and employing them was the right or wrong decision (I’d side with “wrong,” but I understand the other arguments), but to my mind the purposeful erasure of their Nazi histories was unequivocally wrong, and frankly an implicit recognition that there was a shameful side to this program that was always intended to be withheld from the American people. So any means by which we can better remember Paperclip and those fraught decisions and questions is a very good thing indeed.

One such means, and I’ll freely admit the one through which I initially learned about Project Paperclip (I had already written in this space about von Braun, but I don’t think I had known about that overall/official frame for the operation until watching the show earlier this year), is Amazon Prime’s controversial alternate history show Hunters. I understand and largely agree with that hyperlinked article’s critiques of the show’s depiction of the Holocaust, but would say that when it comes to the histories of Paperclip and Nazis in America, Hunters get a couple of seemingly contradictory, equally accurate things impressively right. On the one hand, the show depicts the ways in which the majority of the ex-Nazis disappeared into everyday American life, many of them in Huntsville, Alabama (site of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center). And at the same time, the show recognizes that some ex-Nazis (like von Braun) ended up instead in far more prominent public positions—while the show’s choice to make the first ex-Nazi we meet the US Secretary of State is as exaggerated as everything else about Hunters, I’d argue that exaggeration (and perhaps especially the fact that his Nazi past has been kept secret) is not all that far from the truth of von Braun’s influence on the US government for decades.

The last ex-Nazi we meet in Season 1 of Hunters is also a prominent figure who has been hiding his Nazi past—but in this case, I would argue that in service of a “twist” the show does a significant injustice to its historical subjects. [Again, SPOILERS from here on out.] Throughout the show’s arc, Al Pacino’s Meyer Offerman serves as a mentor and father-figure to Logan Lerman’s Jonah Heidelbaum, bringing Jonah into the team of Nazi hunters who are tracking down these hidden figures and delivering vigilante justice to them. But in the final episode’s final minutes, Jonah learns that Meyer is himself an ex-Nazi, none other than “The Wolf” who terrorized Jonah’s grandparents during their time in a concentration camp. The revelation allows Jonah the chance to make his own final decision about vigilante justice and murder (something he’s been struggling with throughout the show), but it doesn’t quite work within the show’s plot—and much more importantly, to my mind it doesn’t work at all within the show’s historical and cultural themes. After all, this twist literally collapses the distinctions between Nazis and Jews, Holocaust perpetrators and victims/survivors—and that’s an injustice not only to the Holocaust itself, but also to better remembering the histories of those Nazis who found their way to the United States in the decades after committing those horrors.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

June 20, 2025: American Nazis: Neo-Nazis and Charlottesville

[In the summer of 1945, Nazi scientists began arriving in the United States, recruited to work in the US government and eventually its space program as part of Operation Paperclip. But they weren’t the first nor the only American Nazis by any means, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of others, leading up to a weekend post on an interesting and fraught recent cultural representation of Paperclip.]

On how to respond to a resurgent neo-Nazi movement. [NOTE: I originally shared this post a few years back; let’s just it hasn’t become less relevant since.]

The American neo-Nazi movement has been present for more than half a century—in the same mid-1960s years that Tom Lehrer was releasing “Wernher von Braun,” a dishonorably discharged Navy veteran named George Lincoln Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party (ANP), and the organization has been active in American politics ever since (despite Rockwell’s August 1967 murder by disgruntled former ANP member John Patler). Over those decades it has also spawned competing organizations such as Matthias Koehl’s New Order, a monthly magazine (The Stormtrooper), and a briefly active 1970s youth organization (the National Socialist Liberation Front, or NSLF). Reading all the info in those hyperlinked posts (none of which, to be clear, are from the organizations themselves) makes me want to take a shower, but it’s important not to look away from the fact that American Nazis have been a vocal political force (if of course a minority one) for more than 50 years.

In August 2017, however, almost exactly 50 years after Rockwell’s murder, neo-Nazis enjoyed their moment of greatest national visibility: the August 11-12 white supremacist “Unite the Right” rallies in my hometown of Charlottesville. The single most famous neo-Nazi participant in those hateful rallies was James Fields, the domestic terrorist who drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing Heather Heyer. But while neo-Nazis might want to disavow Fields’ blatantly illegal action, I’m sure they were much happier with the Friday evening march and rally on the University of Virginia grounds, at which neo-Nazis sporting swastikas and offering Hitler salutes chanted slogans such as “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us!” By emphasizing the presence of neo-Nazis at the rallies, I don’t mean to downplay the many other white supremacist forces there, nor quite frankly the centrality of these communities to mainstream 2010s right-wing American politics (there’s a reason why President Trump argued for “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville). But while white supremacist rhetoric and violence has been a common thread in Charlottesville and American history, the overt embrace of Nazism in this moment felt distinctly new and even more threatening still.

So how do we respond to that resurgent neo-Nazi movement (other than by punching Nazis, which I’m fine with but isn’t sufficient by itself as a collective response)? It will come as something less than a surprise to know that a main answer of mine is that we need to better engage with our histories, including those about which I’ve written in this week’s series. But we really do, for lots of reasons but especially this one: despite our understandable desire to define it as something entirely outside of and opposed to our national identity, Nazism is indeed as American as, well, the Ford Mustang. Or, y’know, the moon landing. But so too is fighting Nazis, not just on the battlefields of Europe but in communities and conversations here at home. Which is to say, the original Antifa wasn’t just all those WWII soldiers—it was also, and I would argue especially, someone like Isadore Greenbaum. As always, learning the horrific histories of American Nazism also means learning the inspiring histories of figures like Greenbaum (and the 100K New York protesters with whom he shared that 1939 activism). There are no more important lessons than those for our renewed fight here in 2020.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

June 19, 2025: American Nazis: Wernher von Braun

[In the summer of 1945, Nazi scientists began arriving in the United States, recruited to work in the US government and eventually its space program as part of Operation Paperclip. But they weren’t the first American Nazis by any means, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of others, leading up to a weekend post on an interesting and fraught recent cultural representation of Paperclip.]

On three striking lines from Tom Lehrer’s satirical song about the Nazi-turned-American scientist.

1)      “Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown/‘Ha, Nazi, Schmazi,’ says Wernher von Braun”: As I’ll discuss at greater length in the weekend post, what was perhaps most striking about Operation Paperclip wasn’t that it brought Nazi scientists to America, but that it did so so quickly and openly. Von Braun, the scientist single-handedly responsible for the V2 rocket that killed a great many Londoners in the final year of the Blitz (among other work he did for Hitler’s Nazi regime), was among those initial arrivals in the United States in late September 1945, less than 5 months after V-E Day. He would go on to be a prominent public spokesperson as well as scientist for NASA and the Space Program, appearing for example on three Walt Disney Man in Space TV shows. Clearly von Braun was able to immediately and consistently laugh away his service to Nazi Germany, and so, it seems was the US government.

2)      “Like the widows and cripples in old London town/Who owe their large pension to Wernher von Braun”: But not all Americans were as willing or able to laugh that history away, as Lehrer’s early 1960s song illustrates. There’s no shortage of contenders for the song’s most biting couplet, but I would have to go with this one, especially as it follows “But some think our attitude/Should be one of gratitude.” Obviously those who have been permanently and fatally affected by von Braun’s rockets would show him no gratitude—and Lehrer here links “us” and “our attitude” to those London casualties. The first line in this verse, “Some have harsh words for this man of renown,” really drives home the point—after all, in 1945 what von Braun was renowned for was designing killing machines, and it was then that the US decided to not just spare him from post-war trials and punishments, but to bring him to America and make him an integral, acclaimed part of our own Cold War efforts.

3)      “Good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!”: All of this adds a great deal more to Lehrer’s spoken introduction to the song, which asks “what is it” that helped America advanced in both the nuclear and space races. “Well,” Lehrer replies, “it was good old American know how, that’s what, as provided by good old Americans like” von Braun. While of course immigrants to the US are indeed American, von Braun’s immigration took place, again, just a few months after he was employed by and making weapons for the US’s wartime adversary. Yet while on that level Lehrer’s description of him as a “good old American” could be read as ridiculous, I would say that the true satire lies deeper—that our willingness to abandon morality or ethics in pursuit of scientific and Cold War “victories” was and is, indeed, all too defining and foundational of an American trait.

Last NaziStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

June 18, 2025: American Nazis: The Plot Against America

[In the summer of 1945, Nazi scientists began arriving in the United States, recruited to work in the US government and eventually its space program as part of Operation Paperclip. But they weren’t the first American Nazis by any means, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of others, leading up to a weekend post on an interesting and fraught recent cultural representation of Paperclip.]

[NB. As of my drafting of this post, I haven’t had a chance to watch David Simon and Ed Burns’ HBO miniseries adaptation of Roth’s novel, so my thoughts here will focus on the book. I hope to get to that at some point and will add an update here if and when I do!]

On three telling & compelling layers to Philip Roth’s 2004 alternate historical fiction.

One of the consistent pleasures of reading alternate histories (as with historical fiction in general, of course) is seeing how they incorporate actual historical figures into (and refigure them within) their imagined histories. Roth’s novel includes dozens of such figures in both important and minor roles, but three of the most central are ones I’ve featured or referenced in prior posts this week: in Roth’s central premise, Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940 and aligns the US with Nazi Germany; he appoints Henry Ford as his Secretary of the Interior; and one of Lindbergh’s most consistent adversaries in the novel is New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (who in real life pushed back on the 1939 Madison Square Garden Nazi rally, among many other anti-Nazi and pro-Jewish efforts during his tenure as mayor). These historical figures make Roth’s novel a juicier read for any student of American history, but they also reflect a profound understanding of how the actual course of 1930s and 40s American history already intersected with Nazi Germany in many different ways. That is, this may be an alternate history, but it’s a potently realistic one.

Roth’s novel does also include Father Coughlin, but in a briefer and more minor role, perhaps because one of Roth’s central fictional characters is a religious leader in his own right: Newark’s Conservative Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, who becomes a prominent Lindbergh supporter and who later marries the narrator Philip’s Aunt Evelyn. As far as I’ve been able to learn, no prominent Jewish American figures or leaders supported movements like the German American Bund or the America First Committee (which I wrote about in Monday and Tuesday’s posts, respectively), which makes sense given their overt and defining antisemitism. But it’s also the case that no one linked to those movements ran for president, nor gained the widespread popular support of a frontrunner for that highest office; both of which are true of Roth’s Lindbergh by the time that Bengelsdorf endorses him. So it certainly seems plausible that a conservative Jewish figure like Bengelsdorf would under those circumstances hitch his wagon to Lindbergh’s star—but it is even more plausible that doing so does not spare Bengelsdorf from the rising tide of Nazism and antisemitism, as he is later arrested when widespread white supremacist riots target Jewish Americans throughout the nation.

To my mind the novel’s most compelling characters are its younger generation Jewish Americans, however, a group that includes not only the narrator Philip, but also and most complicatedly his older brother Sandy (among others). Sandy is selected by the Office of American Absorption (OAA) for its “Just Folks” program, which places Jewish boys with Southern and Midwestern families in order to “Americanize” them; Sandy is sent to a farm in Kentucky and returns home highly critical of his family (calling them “ghetto Jews”). This complex and fraught plotline echoes the experiences of young Native Americans sent to the late 19^th and early 20^th century boarding schools, as well as the broader “Americanization” movement of that same period. But it also allows Roth to explore an uncomfortable truth likewise revealed by the Washington’s birthday 1939 New York rally—that American Nazis could, and did, make the case that their beliefs and movement aligned with foundational elements of American identity. One more historical echo of this profoundly, painfully historical (and, yes, frustratingly salient) alternate history novel.

Next NaziStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

June 17, 2025: American Nazis: Ford, Lindbergh, and Coughlin

[In the summer of 1945, Nazi scientists began arriving in the United States, recruited to work in the US government and eventually its space program as part of Operation Paperclip. But they weren’t the first nor the only American Nazis by any means, and this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of others, leading up to a weekend post on an interesting and fraught recent cultural representation of Paperclip.]

On three famous figures who reflect the breadth and depth of American support for Nazis.

1)      Henry Ford: The automobile inventor and entrepreneur wasn’t just an American Nazi supporter—he was apparently an influence on Adolf Hitler himself. Between 1920 and 1927, Ford and his aide Ernest G. Liebold published The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper that they used principally to expound antisemitic views and conspiracy theories; many of Ford’s writings in that paper were published in Germany as a four-volume collection entitled The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem (1920-1922). Heinrich Himmler wrote in 1924 that Ford was “one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters,” and Hitler went further: in Mein Kampf (1925) he called Ford “a single great man” who “maintains full independence” from America’s Jewish “masters”; and in a 1931 Detroit News interview, Hitler called Ford an “inspiration.” In 1938, Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, one of Nazi Germany’s highest civilian honors.

2)      Charles Lindbergh: As I mentioned in this post on Lindbergh, the aviation pioneer likewise received a Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, this one from German air chief Hermann Goering himself. Over the next two years, Lindbergh’s public opposition to American conflict with Nazi Germany deepened, and despite subsequent attempts to recuperate that opposition as fear over Soviet Russia’s influence, Lindbergh’s views depended entirely on antisemitic conspiracy theories that equaled Ford’s. In a September 1939 nationwide radio address, for example, Lindbergh argued, “We must ask who owns and influences the newspaper, the news picture, and the radio station, ... If our people know the truth, our country is not likely to enter the war.” Seen in this light, Lindbergh’s role as spokesman for the America First Committee makes clear that that organization’s non-interventionist philosophies could not and cannot be separated from the antisemitism and Nazi sympathies of Lindbergh, Ford, and all those who took part in the 1939 Madison Square Garden rally.

3)      Father Coughlin: As the tens of thousands of attendees at that rally illustrate, American Nazism was much more than just a perspective held by elite anti-Semites—it was very much a movement. And like so many problematic social movements, it featured a demagogic voice to help spread its alternative realities—in this case, the Catholic priest turned radio host Charles Edward Coughlin. Like any media figure who worked for many years, Coughlin said different things at different times; after the 1939 rally, for example, he sought to distance himself, arguing in his weekly address, “Nothing can be gained by linking ourselves with any organization which is engaged in agitating racial animosities or propagating racial hatreds.” But by that time, Coughlin had been publicly supporting both Nazi Germany and antisemitic conspiracy theories for years; his weekly magazine, Social Justice, ran for much of 1938 excerpts from the deeply antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion (as that link illustrates, a text that contributed directly to the Holocaust). Both Social Justice and Coughlin’s radio show were hugely popular, illustrating that American Nazism and antisemitism were in the 1930s (as they frustratingly seem to be today) widespread views.

Next NaziStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?