Introducing American Silent Film Comedy: Clowns, Conformity, Consumerism

Abstract

The US’s great spree of the 1920s, seen by many at the time as a cultural surrender to indulgence and excess, was overseen by a succession of rather dull, earnest, Republican presidents, of whom by far the most sober and earnest was Calvin Coolidge, the erstwhile ‘Silent Cal’, noted for his dour, prudent, almost obsessively sensible and parsimonious personality. Worried that the public’s perception of him as a humourless bookkeeper was damaging to the party, Coolidge’s advisors hired Edward Bernays, show-business impresario, godfather of the new black art of Public Relations and Sigmund Freud’s nephew, to add lustre to his presidential image. Bernays’s first response was to photograph Coolidge posing alongside several of his movie-star clients; but, if anything, this stunt only succeeded in making the president appear even more stiff and awkward. Undeterred, Bernays dressed Coolidge first in full cowboy gear, then in Indian headdress, before finally shooting him milking cows on his family farm, none of which succeeded in linking Coolidge’s air of propriety to the US’s mythic past. Finally, however, Bernays’s agency hit upon a plan: they installed in the White House a mechanical horse, which was electrically operated and capable of high speeds, and they filmed Coolidge proudly mounted atop it, dressed in a Stetson hat and (apparently) whooping and hollering.