BY HANK REICHMAN

Confined to home by the COVID-19 pandemic, my wife and I last night were looking for entertainment and stumbled upon a 1921 silent film classic, The Blot, on Turner Classic Movies.  Almost totally by chance we watched a few moments of TCM’s intro and soon were hooked.  The Blot was directed by Lois Weber, a pioneer writer-director, who has been called “the most important female director the American film industry has known” and among “the most important and prolific film directors in the era of silent films.”  By 1920, Weber was considered the “premier woman director of the screen and author and producer of the biggest money making features in the history of the film business.”  Her work was rediscovered in the 1970s by feminists and film historians, but I confess to never having heard of her before this.  (Weber has a lengthy and informative Wikipedia entry and has been the subject of two biographies, one in 1996 by Anthony Slide and the other in 2015 by Shelley Stamp.)

Weber began as an evangelist and her films often took on controversial social issues, employing movies as a moral tool.  She also mentored many prominent women actors of the time and her films frequently highlighted female characters and the challenges they faced.  The Blot, considered by some to be her masterpiece, certainly illustrates these characteristics.  Weber decided to make the film after reading two articles in the April 30, 1921 issue of The Literary Digest, an influential journal of opinion at the time.  “Impoverished College Teaching” and “‘Boycotting’ the Ministry” bemoaned the inadequate salaries of college teachers and church ministers, respectively.  Both articles are quoted in the film’s title cards.  The first one notes how “Student attendance is greater than ever, but . . . most institutions of higher education . . . are grievously hampered through lack of funds to pay adequate salaries.”  It goes on to quote from the New York Tribune:

To obtain funds, tuition and other fees have been lifted, but they bring in but 87.5 per cent of the salary-roll in the men’s and coeducational colleges.  And higher fees would keep many of the most desirable students from college.  America does not want higher education to become a class privilege (emphasis added). . . .  [C]ampaigns for larger endowments are still in full progress and are meeting with success.  But the funds so contributed are not immediately available, and meanwhile the teacher is little better off.

The second piece bemoans how clergymen were “taking up outside work,” but asks “what else are ministers to do if they are to save themselves from absolute poverty and if the pulpit is not to be abandoned altogether?”  (I was able to find both articles online and include screen shots at the end of this post, although these are difficult to read.)

The film dramatizes this situation, increasingly familiar to us today, by presenting the family of senior professor Andrew Griggs, whose long-suffering wife is a central character, as is his beautiful daughter, Amelia, who works as a librarian.  The movie opens with Griggs attempting, with limited success, to control a rowdy class of clearly privileged young men.  Among these is Phil West, the seemingly arrogant son of a college trustee.  West has a crush on Griggs’s daughter and in pursuit of her confronts and is horrified by her family’s genteel poverty.  In several scenes the garish luxury of West’s aristocratic coterie is contrasted with both the hardship of the Griggs family and the modest prosperity of the newly “arrived” immigrant shoemaker’s family next door.  The professor’s friend, the Reverend Gates, is another admirer of the daughter (as is the son of the next-door family), but his situation too is greatly strained.  The relative class positions of the characters is often illustrated with shots of their shoes, shiny and fancy for West and his friends (and for the shoemaker’s family), but scuffed with holes in the soles for the Griggs family and the minister.

Phil West (Louis Calhern) and Amelia Griggs (Clair Windsor) in The Blot

Shocked by the condition of the professor’s life, the young West writes his father, the college trustee, to complain that paying less to those who work with their minds than those who work with their hands is “a blot on the present-day civilization” (hence the film’s title).  The father agrees, but it is not clear what will be done, other than young Phil dragooning his rich ne’er-do-well pals into attending study sessions after hours with the professor in order to help supplement his salary.  In an ambiguous ending it is left to the viewer to decide whether the daughter chooses the hand of her wealthy suitor or that of the still-impoverished Reverend Gates.

There are several sub-plots and much of the film will strike contemporary viewers as a bit maudlin (and with respect to the immigrant family a tad nativist).  Still, these assessments recorded by Wikipedia seem right to me:

The film “rejects the values of capitalist America that measures the value of people in wealth and property” by depicting the compromises and choices impoverished women are forced to make to achieve social mobility and financial security.^[205] It “condemns capitalistic materialism and linked consumerism with sexual exploitation”,^[151] and addresses class, money, and ethnicity.^[206] “Weber’s basically Christian ethos shines clearly through this plot: the text disapproves of both the new consumerist immigrant class, and the old aristocratic one”.^[198] Despite xenophobic assumptions,^[207] Weber advocates learning, asceticism, and service to the needy.^[198]

What interests me, however, — and what should interest readers of this blog — is the sympathetic portrayal of the  professoriate at the time.  It’s unclear what Professor Griggs’s status was, but given the relative rarity of tenure at the time he was probably in a position equivalent to one of today’s contingent scholars.  Watching this film, despite its Victorian conventions and now-antiquated medium, I saw a portrayal of much of what we in the AAUP are fighting against today.

It is no accident that this film was made just six years after the AAUP’s founding.  The 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure acknowledged that one of the “ends to be accomplished” by means of tenure was “to render the profession more attractive to men of high ability and strong personality by insuring the dignity, the independence, and the reasonable security of tenure.”  Although the AAUP would not embrace collective bargaining and trade unionism until the 1970s, as I argue in The Future of Academic Freedom, even in these early years it was not of one mind on the topic.  Indeed,

Sentiment for collective bargaining could be found even among faculty members at the sorts of elite institutions most associated with the AAUP in those years.  For instance, a faculty member at the University of Chicago declared, “The average milk driver is paid more than any assistant professor in the University of Chicago.  A janitor gets more than a school principal.  Plumbers get more than teachers. That is because milk drivers and plumbers and janitors have unions.”

The 1920s, when The Blot was released, can be considered a high point in the extremes of income and wealth inequality in the U.S., which is why many compare those years to our own time.  It is, of course, tempting to watch this movie and conclude, “well, some things never change.”  But it should also remind us that there are powerful artists like Weber who will tell our stories and that we can successfully reverse things and win real gains for our profession, for our students, and for the common good.  It’s just that the struggle never ends.

The Blot is available on DVD but I could not find a service that streams it.  The two articles from The Literary Digest are available online.  Here they are (but in a format not so easy to read; they are much more legible at the site linked to in the previous sentence):