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It is not precisely a coincidence that the U.S. emerged as a world power just as its movies began girding the globe. Pushing parables of fulfillment in brash editorial rhythms, these new "moving pictures" were missionaries of American energy, traveling salesmen for life in the New World. And the sales pitch worked. How many millions, dazzled by this vision, determined right then to pack their bags and book passage for the U.S.? How many millions more stayed put, but discovered and appropriated the American style? See us and be like us. And just about everybody did. The American century began with the American cinema.
There is a stimulating irony here: America was inventing itself onscreen, but many of the fabricators were foreign born. For both producer and consumer, this was education in the dark. Though many film entrepreneurs of the first generation were native born, they were soon replaced by a bazaar of movie merchants who had arrived in the U.S. barely before the masses they hoped to enlighten. The roll call of Jewish-immigrant moguls has since become its own Hollywood legend: Adolph Zukor, the Hungarian who had worked as janitor in a Manhattan fur store (president of Paramount Pictures); Carl Laemmle, the bookkeeper from Germany (founder, Universal Pictures); Samuel Goldwyn, the glove salesman from Warsaw (founder, Goldwyn Studios); Louis B. Mayer, the scrap-metal dealer from Minsk (vice president and general manager, Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer). By the 1930s Mayer was earning $1.25 million a year and was presiding over the all-American family of Andy Hardy.
Like most of the other immigrant moguls, Mayer achieved the American dream without becoming a homogenized American. By parading their unregenerate Yiddish accents and their careful malapropisms, the studio bosses were implying that their success came from street smarts acquired on the Lower East Side and further back, in the shtetls of Eastern Europe; it took a ragman to become a Hollywood rajah. "They had grown up," wrote Film Historian Carlos Clarens, "in a trade where samples could be smelled, fingered and felt; they recognized craft when they saw it, and they respected it; rather than hoodwink the customer, they aimed to please." The moguls did not see themselves as artists, or the movies as art. Their job was to keep the assembly line rolling, in a factory called Hollywood.
Within its first decade, the movie industry had recapitulated America's century-long trek westward. In 1900, before the picturemakers arrived, Los Angeles was a sleepy city of 102,000 -- the population of Memphis or Omaha. But the immigrants could get drunk on the possibilities of all that air, desert, sea; ambition had elbow room there. And soon after settling in the Los Angeles suburb of Hollywood, the industry discovered the last element it needed to achieve dominance among the popular arts: movie stars. Two of them, by turning stereotypes of Everyman and Pretty Girl into archetypes, would become the most recognizable people in the world, and among the wealthiest. The fairy tale needs one more twist: both Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford were immigrants.