| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Steven J. Ross. Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1998. Pp. xviii, 367. $29.95.

The argument of this book refutes its title, for "working-class Hollywood," Steven J. Ross has gone a long way to show, is an oxymoron. Writing against Frankfurt School and conservative critics of mass culture, for whom it is imposed from above on passive consumers, Ross has uncovered a lively scene of decentralized, diversified production in the early motion picture business. Petty immigrant entrepreneurs, themselves doing battle against the Motion Picture Patents Company monopoly and without any labor troubles of their own, as well as film makers associated with socialism and with working-class movements, produced thousands of movies that presented workers as the heroes of their own lives. Other cultural studies scholars, Ross argues, minimize the constraints now placed on audiences by the narrow range of films available to them. "One of the great power struggles in American history" (p. 10), it is his thesis, took place in the early decades of the twentieth century, "when the class character of the movies was still being formed" (p. xv). . . .

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