Children of the City

by David Nasaw

  The children grew up understanding far better than their parents the place of entertainment in twentieth-century urban life. A good time—at the movies, at the amusement park, or shopping in the dime or department store and wearing your new finery—was more than the reward for work: it was the reason one worked. As Daniel Bell pointed out in his 1956 essay on “Work and Its Discontents,” twentieth-century Americans were driven to work not by physical hunger or the residual demands of the Protestant ethic but by a “new hunger,” the “desire for goods” and entertainment.1 The children had experienced this hunger—and the pleasure one derived in sating it—at the turn of the century. Their nickels had kept the nickelodeons in the black. The dollars they paid as adults would create and sustain a variety of new, multimillion-dollar entertainment industries.

  It was not simply their spending money but their attitude toward entertainment that would actuate the final stage in the transformation of American culture from the production orientation and work ethic of a Benjamin Franklin to the consumption ethos of Playboy magazine. Early American culture heroes had worked hard and saved their money for a rainy day. Their twentieth-century counterparts worked hard but then played harder, spending what they had, then borrowing a bit more and spending that too.

  The children had learned in childhood that there was always something else to see or buy, that the entertainment marketplace had more to offer than they could ever consume. There was a feverish quality about their search for fun. The pleasures of paid entertainment were ephemeral and addictive; yesterday’s good time could not satisfy today’s need for more. The new entertainment industries fed the hunger, but in such a way that it was constantly renewed. Few could ride all the rides at the amusement parks. There were new shows daily at the nickelodeons—two on Saturdays. There were more Oliver Optic adventures and Horatio Alger novels than a kid could read in a year.

  The children who had been pulled—or had jumped—onto the entertainment merry-go-round remained there as adults. The discontents of modern labor and living made entertainment a necessity; the commodification and mass production of leisure-time activities made its pursuit a serious undertaking. Like the children they had been, the adults were whirled round and round from the marketplace where they bought their fun to the workplace where they earned enough for more. They kept their balance without getting dizzy or evidencing any great desire to jump off.

  From their vantage point on the streets, the children observed the life of the city and joined in its work. Daily they left their working-class neighborhoods for the downtown business, shopping, and entertainment districts. Doing so, they could not but notice—and try to make sense of—the disparities between their parents’ poverty and the wealth they saw paraded on the downtown streets.

  In the movie theaters, on the newspaper pages, in school, and on the streets, the children observed that material success appeared to come to those who spoke without accents, who dressed properly, who knew their way around the city. Jerre Mangione understood as a child that though his Sicilian relatives looked down upon the Americans, their language, their morals, and their table manners, they admired and respected them at the same time. “After all, to be an ‘Americano’ [or a Sicilian who behaved like an ‘Americano’] was a sign that you were getting on in the world. The bosses were Americans. The police were Americans. In fact, nearly anyone who had plenty of money or a good steady job was either an American or was living like one.”2

  The children and their parents misconstrued the effect as the cause. Children were expected to succeed where their parents had failed because they were more American, spoke better English, and had been raised on the city’s streets and schooled in its classrooms. Those who were not handicapped by Old World accents and habits, those who had grown up in the city would, it was hoped and believed, find success here.

  The older generation, especially the recent immigrants, harbored an optimism born of suffering and the hope that that suffering would be redeemed in the next generation. Harry Golden wrote of the Lower East Side Jews that they “did anything for the children. They wanted the children to enter the American middle class. My son will be a doctor, they’d say, or a lawyer, maybe a teacher. I never heard anyone express lesser hopes for his child.”3 It is traditional to attribute such hopes to the Russian Jewish immigrants, but others felt precisely the same way about their children’s futures. Leonard Covello’s father, born and raised in Sicily, also expected his son to achieve the material success he, the father, had not attained. “ ‘Nardo,’ my father repeated again and again. ‘In me you see a dog’s life. Go to school. Even if it kills you. With the pen and with books you have the chance to live like a man and not like a beast of burden.’ ”4

  The children of the city absorbed their parents’ dreams for the future. No matter what that future would bring, it would not entirely erase the expectations formed in childhood. Using Freud to correct Marxists who, he claimed, had forgotten their own childhoods, Jean-Paul Sartre has reminded us that we were not conceived as adult wage earners.5 We live our lives moving forward to catch the possibilities we set out before us as children. We fashion and project our own personal opportunity structures from the experience of the world we lived in as children. The lessons the children learned on the street were not interred with their childhoods, but were cast forward to frame their perceptions of the society they would join as adults.

  The street bred a gritty self-reliance in its children. It was their frontier. In meeting its dangers and clearing a play and then a work space for themselves, they developed confidence in their strength of purpose and their powers to make their own way. The city held few mysteries for those who grew up with it. They would not—as adults—be shocked by its violence, bewildered by its diversity, overwhelmed by its congestion, or confused by its traffic patterns. Their early responsibilities would prepare them for future adult ones. “Little mothers” who had bargained with butchers and cared for infants would not be frightened by the tasks they would confront as wives and housekeepers. Little hustlers who had negotiated with hard-nosed circulation managers and suppliers would not enter the workplace as innocents ripe for exploitation.

  The children of the city would grow up to exert an influence on American culture far out of proportion to their numbers, their wealth, or their political and social power. Though there were among them children who would become United States senators (Jacob Javits), Supreme Court justices (William O. Douglas), heavyweight champions of the world (Jack Dempsey), corporate executives (David Sarnoff), philosophers (Morris Raphael Cohen), bestselling novelists (Meyer Levin), educators, critics, and journalists, in none of these fields would the former street children displace older, established elites. Only in the entertainment industries which grew up with the children would they achieve an influence that was both profound and predominant.

  This book is filled with the names of vaudeville stars, comedians, and Broadway and Hollywood directors, producers, writers, and actors. As we argued earlier, the children who achieved fortune and fame in show business were in many respects representative of their generation.6 Though their individual talents and ambitions and their ultimate success would mark them off from their contemporaries, they grew up in the same tenements, played on the same streets, attended the same schools, had the same sorts of fights with their parents, and hawked papers, shined shoes, and peddled gum just like the others. We can, in examining their adult lives and work, locate—in microcosm—the influence of the streets on their generation. We can also trace that generation’s contribution to the shaping of twentieth-century American culture. The entertainers were the vehicle through which the street children exerted their particular influence on American culture. Embedded in their songs, their comedy routines, and their movies were the lessons they had learned years before on the streets of the city.

  Though the movies, as Gilbert Seldes has written, came from America, they were made here by immigrants and their children.7 The nickelodeon owners wh
o moved to Hollywood to establish and then manage the first studios (Harry Cohn, William Fox, Samuel Goldwyn, Sam Katz, Louis B. Mayer, Spyros B. Skouras, Marcus Loew, and the Warner brothers) were children of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities who had played, worked, and grown up on the streets. In the decades between the wars, it was they who exerted the greatest influence on the shape of the image and the sound of the dialogue that reached the screen. Though the studio heads did not supervise every project from conception to script and screen, the men who worked under them were always alert to their probable reactions. The projects that were bought, shaped into scripts, produced, and distributed were those that appealed—or that the producers, directors, and screenwriters believed might appeal—to the moguls’ tastes.8

  The moguls were businessmen, who sought above all to maximize their profits by shaping their product to the market (and the market to their product). But they were also former street children who believed in the messages they projected on the screen. Edward G. Robinson, who on his arrival in Hollywood was amazed and a bit frightened by the personal attention and power the moguls focused on their films, saw at once that no matter what their habits, moralities, or life styles, the studio heads “imposed their childhood moralities on the screen.”9 They considered the studios their personal property. Anything that might offend them was barred from production, but projects they approved of were supported from beginning to end. The Andy Hardy films received star treatment from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer because Louis B. was captivated by the project. With his interest, support, and sometimes interference (he once had a scene rewritten because he was convinced that Andy was not praying the way he should), the series ran to fourteen films. Had Mickey Rooney not grown up and gone off to war, fourteen more might have been produced.10

  It was in the 1930s that the movies attained “the zenith of their popularity and influence,” with the introduction of sound temporarily postponing the impact of the Depression on box office receipts.11 Though the Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, was the first film to talk (or rather sing), it was the gangster films that made the most of the new technology. In the early 1930s the studios turned out one after another, with Warner Brothers leading the way.12 The first of the 1930s’ gangster films—and among the most successful commercially—was Little Caesar, bought by Jack Warner, a street kid from Youngstown, Ohio, produced by Hal Wallis, a street kid from Chicago, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, a former San Francisco newsie, and starred in by Edward G. Robinson from the Lower East Side. Each of these men had a special relationship to the film. In their autobiographies, Warner, Wallis, and LeRoy13 each claim to have initiated the project, and Robinson explains how he tried to convince producer Hal Wallis that the part of “Rico” was made for him. He, Robinson, and “Rico” (he could have added, Wallis, Warner, and LeRoy, as well) were ambitious men who fought to be “different, above, higher.” They came from the “humblest, the most dispossessed” of backgrounds. They feared that their ambitions to rise in the world would eventually lead to self-destruction.14

  The gangster films are films about the city. The gangster, as Robert Warshow has written, is “a man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring.…”15 The films present the street as a determinative influence in the lives of the adults who grew up on it. We are reminded again and again—sometimes, as in The Public Enemy, in the film’s opening scenes—that the gangster is a former child of the streets. So too, we learn, is his counterpart, the “good” or reformed brother or friend: Rico’s sidekick Joe Massera (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) in Little Caesar, Baby-Face Martin’s old playmate Dave Connell (Joel McCrea) in Dead End, Tom Powers’ (James Cagney’s) war hero brother in The Public Enemy. Gangsters and good guys have grown up with the same tough-skinned determination, strength of will, and ambition. They are urban frontiersmen who know what they want and possess the self-reliance, courage, and confidence to get it. What in the end distinguishes good guys from gangsters is luck (Dave, in the play from which the film Dead End was adapted, suggests that Baby-Face Martin was ruined not by the streets alone but by being sent to reform school for some minor prank16) and the gangsters’ inability to set limits to their ambition. There are, for the gangsters, no indecent, immoral, or evil means to their ends. They will do whatever they must to reach the top.

  The gangsters represent in exaggerated, almost mythologized form the children of the city. For one reason or another, neither home nor family, neither school nor church have tempered the streets’ influence on them. They are loyal to family, friends, and the gang, but beyond that are committed to nothing but their own personal success. The street is their strength and their undoing. It has given them the skills, the drive, the cunning they require, but also the unbounded ambition that must lead to their ultimate self-destruction.

  The gangster films enjoyed a brief ascendancy in Hollywood, but their gritty realism and unhappy endings were not as well suited to the Depression years as the charm, gaiety, and good times of the screwball comedies which succeeded them as the most popular film genre. There were many reasons why, as historian Robert Sklar has written, “Hollywood’s contribution to American culture [in the 1930s] was essentially one of affirmation.”17 The studio heads and their managers, producers, and directors did not want to reawaken the crusades against film that had kept them on the defensive through much of the industry’s early years. They also understood as well as anyone that, in an era of economic depression and political anxiety, audiences wanted to be amused and reassured, not challenged by what they saw and heard on the screen.

  Hollywood had no difficulty providing the audience with what it wanted. The former street children who reigned in the studios had grown up with a belief in America and its institutions. They were only too pleased to project this faith onto the screen. The screwball comedies that they produced in such abundance in the late 1930s presented a wonderfully optimistic vision of the social world. Rich and poor were separated by circumstance and misunderstanding, no more, no less. In the blockbuster of screwballs, It Happened One Night, written by Robert Riskin, a former New York street kid, and directed by Frank Capra, a former Los Angeles newsie, a poor working stiff and a rich girl meet, fall in love, and, in a succession of “screwball” acts prove to one another that they are more alike in personality than separated by class. What counts in the screwballs is spunk, confidence, and inner strength, not money or breeding. In Easy Living, a “Wall Streeter” takes delight in marrying his son to a “plain Jane working girl.”18 In It Happened One Night, Claudette Colbert’s grumpy millionaire father helps Clark Gable win his daughter’s hand in marriage because he admires his character.

  Frank Capra’s films were not as blissfully oblivious to social problems as most of the comedies and musicals of the 1930s, but they shared with them the “common assumption that America is the last, best hope of mankind, the country where the fate of the common man is of the utmost importance.”19 Even in his so-called “populist” films, where Capra describes a social and economic order despoiled by bankers, corrupt politicians, businessmen, and the misguided “masses,” the disorder is only temporary, never permanent. In the end, it is Mr. Deeds, John Doe, and Mr. Smith who set things right again. They, the common men, triumph—and with them, America and capitalism.

  While the Marx Brothers films are perhaps the most wildly satiric and subversive of the 1930s’ Hollywood productions, they resemble the others in their happy endings. The world, so artfully taken apart in the course of the film, is always put back together again in the end—with lovers united, sanitariums, circuses, and tenors rescued, and villains unmasked and humiliated. Class differences are not always bridged by love, but neither do they loom large in the fates of their characters. The world of the rich and powerful exists to provide the brothers with a source of amusement and funds. Like the street children arriving downtown to sell their wares, the brothers appear as aliens visiting a
social world they do not belong in: hotels, opera houses, country estates, ocean liners, and big stores. The comedy develops from the confrontation between the brothers and the established society they are thrown into. Harpo plays himself throughout: the cheerful cherub who converts his environment into a playground. But Chico and Groucho are presented, in different ways, as hustlers who must make their living from the rich. Chico is a street kid, hustling, peddling, hyping, wheeling and dealing. Groucho takes another approach. Like the street performers and newsies looking for a tip, he plays to his patron, Margaret Dumont, at once flattering, cajoling, and entertaining her. He is a rogue, a hustler, and will do nothing to hide it. This is his particular way of making a living, he declares through his actions and words, and it is no more or less corrupt than anyone else’s. There is so much money around, why not take what you can, when you can?

  From A Night at the Opera:

  “Dumont. Mr. Driftwood: three months ago you promised to put me into society. In all that time, you’ve done nothing but draw a very handsome salary.

  Groucho. You think that’s nothing, huh? How many men do you suppose are drawing a handsome salary nowadays? Why, you can count them on the fingers of one hand.…”20

  From The Coconuts:

  “Dumont. What in the world is the matter with you?

  Groucho. Oh, I … I’m not myself tonight. I don’t know who I am. One false move and I’m yours. I love you. I love you anyhow.