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New York in Cinematic Imagination

New York in Cinematic Imagination is an interdisciplinary study into

urbanism and cinematic representations of the American metropolis in the
twentieth century. It contextualizes spatial transformations and discourse
about New York during the Great Depression and the Second World War,
examining both imaginary narratives and documentary images of the city
in flm.
The book argues that alternating endorsements and critiques of the 1920s
machine age city are replaced in flms of the 1930s and 1940s by a new criti-
cal theory of “agitated urban modernity” articulated against the backdrop
of turbulent economic and social settings and the initial practices of urban
renewal in the post-war period.
Written for postgraduates and researchers in the felds of flm, history
and urban studies, with 40 black and white illustrations to work alongside
the text, this book is an engaging study into cinematic representations of
New York City.

Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Columbia

University, and was a Paul E. Raether Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban and
Global Studies at Trinity College. She is a New York-based scholar whose
research focuses on cinema and urban space, immigrant incorporation, and
political activism in sanctuary cities.
Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design

Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design is a series of academic

monographs for scholars working in these disciplines and the overlaps
between them. Building on Routledge’s history of academic rigour and cut-
ting-edge research, the series contributes to the rapidly expanding literature
in all areas of planning and urban design.

Planning Australia’s Healthy Built Environments

Jennifer Kent and Susan Thompson

By-Right, By-Design
Housing Development versus Housing Design in Los Angeles
Liz Falletta

Rebuilding Afghanistan in Times of Crisis

A Global Response
Adenrele Awotona

American Colonisation and the City Beautiful

Filipinos and Planning in the Philippines, 1916–35
Ian Morley

Regeneration, Heritage and Sustainable Communities in Turkey

Challenges, Complexities and Potentials
Muge Akkar Ercan

Cultural Mega-Events
Opportunities and Risks for Heritage Cities
Zachary M. Jones

Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore

Rethinking the 21st Century Public School
Erkin Özay

New York in Cinematic Imagination

The Agitated City
Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes

For more information about this series, please visit: https://routledge.com/

Routledge-Research-in-Planning-and-Urban-Design/book-series/RRPUD
New York in Cinematic
Imagination
The Agitated City

Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes

First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2021 Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes
The right of Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes to be identifed as author of
this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cordes, Vojislava Filipcevic, author.
Title: New York in cinematic imagination: the agitated city /
Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes.
Description: London; New York: Routledge, 2020. |
Series: Routledge research in planning and urban design | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2020008945 (print) | LCCN 2020008946 (ebook)
| ISBN 9780367247560 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429284205 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: New York (N.Y.)–In motion pictures. | City and
town life in motion pictures. | City planning–New York (State)–
New York–History–20th century.
Classifcation: LCC PN1995.9.N49 C64 2020 (print) |
LCC PN1995.9.N49 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/627471–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008945
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008946
ISBN: 978-0-367-24756-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-28420-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
For Daniel

AND IN MEMORIAM
Ikonija Nata Knežević-Filipčević
Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction 1
1 New York’s agitated urban modernity 28
2 The city in motion 51
3 Urban planning and the spaces of democracy 83
4 In the streets of Harlem 113
5 The agitated city 144
6 Agitation implodes 175
Coda: Of urban remains 210

Bibliography 213
Index 235
Acknowledgments

I owe gratitude to colleagues and friends who have supported my research

and intellectual interests, encouraged my teaching, nourished my curiosity,
and endured my fascination with the study of New York and flm.
Sincere appreciation is in order frst to the editors at Routledge, in par-
ticular Grace Harrison, but also to Emily Collyer, Sophie Robinson, Julia
Pollacco, and Stephen Riordan, as well as to Nicole Solano of Rutgers
University Press who recommended the manuscript. Second, to journal
editors (and indeed, anonymous peer-reviewers) who have encouraged the
publication of the articles on which the book is based, and who have pro-
vided helpful recommendations for these revisions, including David Sterritt,
Ben Fraser, Gareth Millington, and Mark Noonan, among others.
Given that the manuscript grew out of a doctoral dissertation at
Columbia University, I must thank the members of the dissertation com-
mittee, Ira Katznelson, Andreas Huyssen, Elliott Sclar, Richard Peña, and
Robert Beauregard (who joined the committee following Susan Fainstein’s
departure from Columbia), as well as Herbert J. Gans, who have all pro-
vided invaluable advice on various aspects of my research, doctoral study,
and university life.
It was my privilege and intellectual pleasure to receive thoughtful com-
ments from scholars who have read selected chapters of the manuscript and
from conference audiences who have listened to my presentations. I hope that
my revisions have done justice to the perceptive remarks and editorial sug-
gestions of Marshall Berman, James Donald, Phillipa Gates, Stuart Klawans,
Paula Massood, Robert Sklar, Will Straw, Daniel Walkowitz, Joseph Entin,
Dana Polan, Laura Wittern-Keller, James Naremore, Noam Elcott, John
Mollenkopf, and Robert Beauregard, among others. Scholars who have fur-
ther encouraged my publications or research include Cindy Lucia, Lloyd
Michaels, Gilberto Perez, Charles Silver of MoMA Film Archives, Julia
Lesage, Chuck Kleinhans, Sam B. Girgus, Joseph Heathcott, as well as Jane
Gaines and the Columbia University Cinema and Interdisciplinary Studies
Seminar committee.
I am particularly thankful to professors who have supported my teaching
in interdisciplinary urban and/or cinema studies, Ira Katznelson, Herbert
 Acknowledgments ix
J. Gans, Nicole Marwell, Richard Peña, Annette Insdorf, Carol Wilder,
Owen Gutfreund, Greg Smithsimon, Michael Sobel, Mark Wigley, Richard
Plunz, Kenneth Sherrill, Radmila Gorup, Vangelis Calotychos, Cathy
Popkin, Ester Fuchs, Xiangming Chen, Tony Messina, John Mollenkopf,
Andy Beveridge, Dana Weinberg, David Green, Robert Garot, Richard
Ocejo, Erica Stein, Annika Hinze, Rosemary Wakeman, Sheila Foster,
Benjamin Barber, Mark Street, and David Storey. Carol Banks, Ellen Cohen,
Laura Pinsky, and Gordon Bardos have additionally made me feel a part of
the Columbia University community. My graduate study, interdisciplinary
research, and dissertation writing has been sustained by fellowships and
propelled by awards from the Columbia University Department of Urban
Planning, the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,
the Columbia University Institute for Social and Economic Research and
Policy (I am especially thankful to Kathy Neckerman, Bill McAllister, and
Peter Bearman), the Columbia University School of International and Public
Affairs, the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies, the American
Political Science Association Award (“Best Paper in Urban Politics”), the
Open Society Institute Global Fellowship Program, the Columbia University
Public Policy Consortium Fellowship, and the Lincoln Institute of Land
Policy Dissertation Award. Resources, professionalism, and dedication to
research at Columbia’s Butler, Lehman, Barnard, and Avery libraries and
media collections, have made this study possible. I am particularly thankful
to Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and
Empirics (INCITE) – Peter Bearman, Bill McAllister, and Michael Falco –
for Columbia library access.
I have also benefted from teaching and research assistantships with
Professors Peter Marcuse, Elliott Sclar, and David N. Dinkins, and from
discussions with the students enrolled in my courses on “The City in Film,”
“Graduate Seminar: Cinema and Urban Space,” “Sociology of Film,” and
“Urban Sociology: Cultures of the City” at Columbia University. At the
very beginning of my graduate study in New York, professors and senior
colleagues at Pratt Institute including Ron Shiffman, Tom Angotti, Ayse
Yonder, Bill Menking, Joan Byron, and Brian Sullivan, have been help-
ful, as were the residents of the New York neighborhoods of Greenpoint,
Norwood, and Washington Heights.
I remain grateful to my parents, Ikonija Nata Knežević-Filipčević and
Milovan Filipčević, who in their own different ways have made me come to
New York, and to Daniel and his family for their understanding and kind-
ness. The cherished memory of my grandparents Vida and Lazar Knežević
and empathy for their partisan struggles as well as for the darkness of my
grandfather Dobrivoje Filipčević’s imprisonment in Mauthausen, connect
me to the historical period in this study, about which a scholar can only
strive to learn further. My late uncle Božidar Knežević’s book of poetry
Cascades of Light (“Slapovi svetlosti,” Krusevac: Bagdala, 1969) discovered
x Acknowledgments
me at Columbia’s Butler library, where I did not expect it, as if to remind me
that words do not perish.
The transnational group of friends and fellow travelers who have shared
ideas, agitation, and joy, included Nataša, Sunčica, Tanja, Goran, Dragana,
Tamara, Milan, Lidija, Ivana, Simona, Graeme, Edi, Ben, Sam, Scott, Maria,
Leticia, Ebru, Simone, Luc, Ingrid, Milena, Tench, Susie, Raša, Milcho,
Mercedes, Devyani, Dario, Damjana, Biljana, Dzasa, Nesa, Elvira, Olja,
Donald, Taro, Vivian, and many others.
My advisor Ira Katznelson’s wisdom and generosity helped me over many
hurdles, including with a warning that even revised manuscripts are neces-
sarily imperfect documents, collections of research ideas to be developed
further. What remains as worth considering is dedicated to the memory of
my mother, to Daniel, and to our sons, Danilo and Francis.
Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes
New York, February 2020
Introduction

Walter Benjamin (Benjamin and Arendt 1988: 236) wrote,

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offces and furnished
rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have locked
us up hopelessly. Then came flm and burst this prison world asunder
by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of
its far-fung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.

This book proposes that Benjamin’s paradigm of the shattering of the spa-
tial constraint by cinematic travels fails to fully capture the stark transfor-
mation of cinematic urban spaces that occurred in 1930s and 1940s New
York flms. Filled with “far-fung ruins and debris,” critical New York
imaginaries reinforced spatial constraint and sharpened the trope of urban
ambivalence through a cinematic discourse of agitated urban modernity (see
also, Norris 2008).1 Mediating the shock effect of both flm (Benjamin and
Arendt 1988: 238) and the modern city (Crinson 2005: xvi–xix), spatial
tropes facilitated as well adventurous and escapist travel, but more acutely,
presented confictual social and aesthetic imaginaries of the metropolis and
the world in transformation.
This book examines the relationships between imaginaries, representa-
tions, and discourses about the American metropolis, urban transforma-
tions, and economic and political crises from the 1920s to the end of the
1950s. It explores these relationships through analyses of urban change and
changing visions of the American city in flm – “the modernist art of space
par excellence” (Anthony Vidler, cited in Balshaw 2000: 8). Cinema, along
with radio and the press, was the most signifcant media of mass communi-
cation in the period of study marked by the rise and decline of Hollywood’s
engagement with social reality. The study uncovers an ambiguous, tension-
wrought cultural discourse of simultaneous adulation and condemnation2
of the metropolis, referred to here as the agitated city.
This interdisciplinary inquiry concerns the making and the unmaking of
the American metropolis in the period just prior to the large-scale urban
renewal and mass suburbanization of the 1950s and 1960s that irrevocably
and radically altered urban space.3 The reconfguration of the metropolis
into the “megalopolis”4 after the frst postwar decade entailed not merely a
2 Introduction
radical material and social transformation but also a critical reevaluation of
the signifcance of the city in American culture. Discourses and imaginaries
in this period entailed projections of a critique of American society, fears of
the consequences of worldwide political and economic turmoil, and crises of
modernity and mass society, onto the urban landscape. Having abandoned
the endorsements of the machine age environment typical of the representa-
tions of urbanity of the 1920s, new images and imaginaries questioned the
city’s cultural and social signifcance. Discourses of hopeful technological
progress associated with the regional metropolis as presented in the 1939
New York World’s Fair exhibits of Democracity and Futurama, and the
“panorama of Manhattan produced by Consolidated Edison,” quickly
faded with the beginning of World War Two (Abu-Lughod 1999: 186). As
the metropolis became established as the center of economic and political
power, the most critical visions and discourses devalued it to such a degree
as to view it as the necropolis.5
Although histories of Western industrial cities in the second part of the
19th and early 20th centuries abound with anti-urban discourses (Beauregard
2003, Glass 1989, Lees 1985, Susman 2003, White and White 1962), the
return of the negative associations in the period of study proved particularly
salient and, further, problematic in two respects. The frst aspect concerns
actual urban transformations, while the second applies to urban discourses;
but it is the relationship between the two that is crucial.
Firstly, the decades of the 1930s and 1940s critically shaped the urban
transformations that followed. The processes of urban renewal and subur-
banization, caused by a complicated nexus of socio-economic and demo-
graphic factors as well as public policies, appeared to be further rooted as
well in the discourses and narratives that undermined urbanity.6 Perhaps
unsurprisingly, the most well-known critics of modernist planning took
post-war urban renewal to task for its apparently misconstrued vision7 of
urban life,8 in addition to its adverse socio-economic impact and its explicit
racial bias. “If in Chicago urban renewal became known as ‘Negro removal’
and in Los Angeles ‘Chicano removal,’ in New York the common phrase for
it was ‘Puerto Rican removal’” (Abu-Lughod 1999: 206). The racial bias
was also evident in urban discourses and news reports that tied the chang-
ing urban socio-economic to demographic conditions – that is, these sources
erroneously linked the depictions of urban decline and the processes of
inner-city decay to racial transition.9 The emphasis on the contrast between
the inner-city decline and the prosperity in suburbs in the popular press, and
to an extent urban planning discourses, after World War Two shrouded
numerous problems, from economic disparity to racial discrimination, from
the urban educational system to criminal justice, and from fscal policies to
political representation.
Secondly, the inquiry in the 1920s–1950s imaginaries and documentary
images of American cities in art is necessarily complicated by the contempo-
rary reevaluation of urban renewal. Thus, for example, images of pre-urban
 Introduction 3
renewal 1940s downtowns of American cities, including the same urban
images once associated with decline or blight, or the crises of mass society
and modernity, now form a nostalgic palimpsest of the collective urban
memories of the ruins and relics of American cities’ supposedly glorious
past.10 An examination of a range of urban imaginaries from the period –
cinematic as well as photographic and literary – suggests, however, layered
and still under-explored “landscapes of power”11 echoed throughout the
latter part of the 20th century. This visual landscape of power, this book
argues, shapes an ambiguous and tension-wrought discourse of agitated
urban modernity with its simultaneous enchantment with, and critique of,
the American metropolis.
The linkages between, on the one hand, visions, images, and discourses
of the American metropolis of the 1920s–1950s, and on the other, urban
transformations and world-wide crises, have for the most part not been
studied in depth in either the interdisciplinary humanities and cultural stud-
ies literatures, or in urban planning and sociological research. The study flls
a signifcant gap in the scholarship of the cinematic city of the period, which
examines the metropolis in flm for the most part solely through the lenses
of architecture or spatial theory. Additionally, urban studies and planning
literature has almost entirely neglected the relationships between discourses
in popular press, documentary images of the city, urban imaginaries, and
urban social change.12 This is all the more striking an omission given the sig-
nifcance of both the urban transformations, and the remarkably infuential
repertoire of city imaginaries in art of the period examined.

Spatial motifs in flm and social production of urban space

Film represents “a peculiarly spatial form of culture” (Shiel and Fitzmaurice
2001: 5) in at least two domains signifcant for this inquiry. Firstly, cinema
spectatorship is inalienable from the experience of travel (see also, Bruno
2002), as suggested by Benjamin, and secondly, as observed by Huyssen
and Batrick (1989: 13), literary, as well as cinematic, urban narratives con-
dense “experiences specifc to modern life.” Cinematic spaces may further
represent cultural and historical artifacts of the modern city – palimpsests
in the urban modern memory repertoire (Murray Pomerance’s [2007: 4]
“evanescent” and also “lingering” cinematic New Yorks [4]), that have the
potential to subvert nostalgic refections “with the pain taken out” (Crinson
2005: xi) but that can also facilitate the processes of spatial memory erasure
and decontextualization. Decoding spaces in flm enables, in reverse, the
understanding of both the processes of urban memory discourse constitu-
tion as well as erasure. Furthermore, this undertaking calls for the probing
of relationships between the content of urban imaginaries and their histori-
cally specifc socio-spatial and cultural contexts.
The study is situated at the crossroads of two academic felds thus far
not commonly connected: the history and theory of the urban planning of
4 Introduction
the growth and development of American cities, and the cinema and cul-
tural studies literature about symbols, narratives, imaginaries, and under-
standings of the city.13 Social transformations are always accompanied by
cultural processes through which individuals and groups make meanings,
create symbols, share sentiments, and envision alternatives, within the speci-
fcity of their environment, or habitus (Bourdieu 1990).14 Urban imaginar-
ies and representations are neither entirely delimited, nor single-mindedly
structured, by their environments, and they both can refect current, as well
as generate new, discourses and expressions. This especially applies to the
cinematic cities given that flms

appropriate and recycle discourses at large in the world outside cinema

and ideologies current in specifc societies … At the same time, the act of
flming any space is clearly an act of discourse production, prey to com-
plex elision, condensation and repression and dependent on previous
acts of discourse production as on relationships with the “real” world.
(McArthur 1997: 40)

Spatial imaginaries in flm represent complex mediations of narrative and

visual engagements with the city, further structured by production limita-
tions, complexities of the flms creators’ imaginaries, censorship norms, and
audience reception. Nevertheless, flm is an art form through which flm-
makers actively “shap[e] history into a heightened form of communication”
(Insdorf 2003: xviii). Urban imaginaries and documentary images of the
1930s and the 1940s lie at the core of this cinematic process of the height-
ened discursive shaping of historical circumstances.
As scholarship has reasserted, “urbanism privileges, even as it distorts,
vision and the visual;” further,

visual representation may be said to bring the city into focus: it frames
recognition of urban forms (architectural syntax, street signage); it
offers legibility through the reproduction of what is seen (in maps,
plans, guides and images); it unites aesthetic and spatial apprehension
of the urban scene (levels, planes, perspectives); it mediates scopophilic
and voyeuristic desires (to look, to be seen); it technologizes the act of
seeing (the fusion of the eye and the camera lens).
(Balshaw 2000: 7)

Thus, the city itself can be seen as “inseparable from its representations15
but it is neither identical with nor reducible to them -- and so it poses com-
plex questions about how representations traffc between physical and men-
tal space” (Balshaw 2000: 3).
Henri Lefebvre (1991) has offered a set of responses to this puzzle by
arguing that the social production of urban space is achieved through the
built environment as well as through representations and mass-mediated
 Introduction 5
infuences. The processes of the production of space unite the physical and
mental spaces that urbanity entails (Balshaw 2000: 2). This production is
accomplished through spatial practices (that encompass the material world
and the domain of everyday life), representations of space (that include nor-
mative theories and spatial representations in urban planning and architec-
ture), and representational spaces (that consist of imagined spaces and lived
experiences) (Lefebvre 1991: 38–39). But some scholars have stressed that,
following Lefebvre, the everyday is colonized as much as it is a site of resist-
ance (Fraser 2015: 195); others have noted that the impact of Lefebvre’s the-
ory is limited because “the crucial link between the construction of place in
representation and at the level of everyday experience has not been demon-
strated” (Michael Savage and Alan Warde, cited in Miles, Hall, and Borden
2004: 257), while others still have emphasized in more general terms the
danger that the real city simply becomes absorbed by the imaginary within
this fuid, layered scheme (Soja 1989).16 David Harvey (1989: 219) has con-
tested Lefebvre’s striking claim that “spaces of representation, therefore,
have the potential not only to affect representation of space but also to act
as a material productive force with respect to spatial practices,” given the
opaqueness of the dialectical, rather than causal, processes by which spatial
practices are supposedly produced by spaces of representation. Yet Harvey’s
mere discursive return to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as the critical medi-
ating link, has left the linkages between representation of space and social
practice equally unexplained.17
These ideas can be fruitfully applied to the study of spatial imaginaries in
flm and the signifcance of everyday imaginaries within them. Encompassing
multiple aspects of the production of urban space, cinematic visions form
representational spaces and imaginaries that are both reconstituting and
producing of the cultural discourse of the metropolis. The lack of a depth of
engagement with urban space in the cinematic city literature necessitates a
paradigm shift, to which this study contributes, to “make the urban a fun-
damental part of cinematic discourse and to raise flm to its proper status as
analytical tool of urban discourse” (AlSayyad 2006: 3–4).
The urban theory premises of this book argue frstly that flm art joins in
a unique manner Lefebvre’s three-part scheme of the experience (collective
popular art), the perception (spectatorship), and the imagination (narrative
and image) of space. Further, urban spaces in flm underscore important
aspects of the missing link in the socio-cultural production of urban space
between a) the representational spaces and spatial practices, and b) rep-
resentational spaces and spaces of representation, that flm as popular art
and communicative medium provided. The study departs, however, from
Lefebvre’s (1991: 97) estimate that visual form tends to “fetishize abstrac-
tion and imposes it as a norm.” Rather, discrete rules of montage, move-
ment and corporality of cinematic art, narrative patterns and visual styles,
collective viewing experience, and the particular position of flm as both art
and entertainment subject to censorship norms and industry requirements,
6 Introduction
render intricate spatial tropes within visual story-telling that actively par-
take in representational and discursive aspects of the production of space.
To extend, thus, the crucial metaphor of this study, via montage and move-
ment, flm agitates and places the cinematic viewer amidst the agitated city.
Secondly, the book delineates the relationships between urban change
and city imaginaries in a dual manner: 1) by studying urban development,
planning interventions, socio-economic processes, and discourses that have
led to the transformation from the metropolis to the megalopolis; and 2) by
examining both the independent and Hollywood cinematographies (made
in studios and on location), their social and political agendas, and cinematic
audiences.
The study considers the ways in which these two aspects have been shaped
by three spatial tropes that critically engage with the social, aesthetic, and
physical urban change of the period. The three spatial tropes include: a)
the changing symbolism of the New York City skyline, the slum, and the
street;18 b) the fading visions of the rural alternative to the metropolis; and
c) the divergent and related set of anxieties about suburban, in contrast to
inner-city, life in flms of the 1940s and the 1950s. The detailed analyses
of flms are, however, for the most part confned to the examination of the
spatial tropes of the skyline, the slum, and the street.

Hollywood and popular imagination in the 1930s

and the 1940s
The establishment of the Hollywood studio system and, importantly, the rise
and fall of Hollywood’s interest in social problem narratives characterize
the period of study. Further, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration
acted as an innovator of political communication increasingly characterized
by participatory rhetoric and, in the domains of flm and photographic art,
by realist and documentary representations (see Muscio 1996: 19, 33). This
historical institutional confuence during the Great Depression and World
War Two shaped economic and political interest in flm as the medium,
which, prior to the introduction of television, had a unique capacity to visu-
ally communicate with broad audiences.
Hollywood’s critical engagement with social issues emerged as a “result of
a political and esthetic negotiation [among] European anti-fascist refugees,
radical American urban intellectuals, and studio executives” (Giovacchini
2001: 1, 1–12; see also, Muscio 1996) and was, by the end of the 1940s,
restrained by political and censorship pressures. The uneasy alliance between
New Yorkers and European exiles was critically shaped by the anti-fascist
resistance, in particular the founding of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League
(HANL) that “provided a focus and an organizing structure for Hollywood
politics” (Giovacchini 2001: 73; see also, chapter 3 in Giovacchini 2001).
Although Soviet flmmakers had already demonstrated the political powers
of flm by the early 1930s, Hollywood had for the most part seen flm as
 Introduction 7
entertainment. European exiles and New Yorkers brought to Hollywood an
approach that did not perceive art and commerce as inherently opposed cat-
egories. Further, although the origins of the cinematic democratic impulses
can be traced to the early silent flms that targeted immigrant audiences,
the 1930s are marked by a critical awareness of flm as a democratic mass
medium. The concerted emphasis on democratic populism, however, did
not entail a shift away from commercial cinema toward an explicit socially
or class conscious narrative. Rather, in the 1930s, both forms of escapist
entertainment and also social engagement were present. Researchers have
cited relationships between the contexts of the Great Depression in the
case of, for example, musicals as well as gangster flms (Bergman 1992).
And indeed, the following decade ends with the House on Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) crackdown on the Hollywood left, starting
with the hearings in 1947.
Firstly, the relationship between the social and political imagination of
Hollywood exiles, or New Yorkers in Hollywood, and imaginaries of urban
space is rarely discussed, even though, as will be examined in the subse-
quent chapters, urban settings are critical for flms that engage with social
problems. Notwithstanding the fact that the two groups were the most
infuential in shaping urban flm noir of the 1940s, the specifcity of urban
spaces cannot, however, be simply attributed to exiles and New Yorkers in
Hollywood. The infuence of European exiles19 can further be seen in their
hybrid cinematic imagination, shaped by “the experience of emigration, anti-
Nazism, and the interaction with the American scene” (Giovacchini 2001:
28). Further, memory discourses related to Berlin of the Weimar Republic
are also notable in the imagination of Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau in
spite of their very different cinematic styles. Moreover, although the social
and spatial imagination of flms by Fritz Lang or Robert Siodmak often took
a hybrid European-American shape, in the case of directors such as Billy
Wilder or Otto Preminger, urban imaginaries seemed more strongly marked
by their encounter with the American environment. New York artists and
intellectuals20 moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s and perceived Hollywood
as “compatible with their intellectual and political commitments” as can be
seen in New York narratives of the late 1930s and the 1940s. Shaped by the
infuences of Hollywood New Yorkers, European exiles, Hollywood studios
and also, independent low-budget production companies, flms refected
their respective searches for cross-class audiences and radical social change,
democratic modernism and cultural pluralism, and, of course, proft. Within
not always a realist engagement of cinema, that according to some flmmak-
ers “was going to speak to America only insofar as it would equip itself to
speak about America” (Giovacchini 2001: 36), this book uncovers the ways
in which New York (and commonly, more narrowly, Manhattan) as the
American “metropolis” was at the core of this engagement.
Secondly, in the case of the cinema of classical continuity21 from which
most of the examples in the study are drawn, the cinematic city is shaped
8 Introduction
by the physical urban settings as delimited by production location require-
ments and the relationship of these settings with their narrative construct.22
But cinematic spaces rely as well upon recognition on the part of popular
audiences drawn from their everyday symbolic imaginaries or psychic map-
ping. Viewers thus might associate with urban and/or specifc social space
or with the attitudes formed in resonance with other media (in the 1940s in
particular, the infuence of the popular press), thus addressing, even if indi-
rectly, Lefebvre’s missing link between representational spaces and everyday
life. A common, albeit differently motivated, aim of European exiles, New
York artists and intellectuals, and studio executives in Hollywood, was the
creation of broad cross-class spectatorship. The interplay between the nar-
rative structure and the spatial environment, this study proposes, provided
an important link for this negotiation.
Thirdly, cinematic cities of the period of study were in dialogue with dis-
courses and practices of urban development, that is, with the second aspect
of the production of space in Lefebvre’s scheme. This is evident in flms,
documentary and fctional, that include narratives set in slums and blighted
areas or that treat neighborhood change. Film scholars have noted the prev-
alence of urban themes in flm,23 in particular made in the 1940s, as this
study argues, in resonance with the Great Depression and World War Two.
Although this predominance is not easily explained, cinematic cities are in
dialogue with the critical social imaginary of the two decades of study,24
during which the metropolis became the central arena for the projection,
mediation, and discursive recreation of critical views of American society.
The fourth point, importantly, represents this study’s repositioning of the
emphasis from a debate on urban spaces in flm, as exemplifed in Giuliana
Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion, to the relationships between spaces in flm and
social contexts of flm, in particular urban transformations and social crises.
Unlike, however, the scholarship by Edward Dimendberg, in Film Noir and
the Spaces of Modernity, this book is not confned to relationships between
the cinematic spaces of noir and modernist planning practices of the late
1940s. Indeed, one of the several critical differences between this study and
that of Dimendberg’s is the emphasis on spatial discourses, social anxieties,
and socio-political crises in shaping city imaginaries, which, along with gen-
der dynamics in flm noir, are neglected in Dimendberg’s work. A particular
emphasis here has thus also been placed on flm noir (because it exempli-
fes a critical and highly infuential tendency across a variety of media and
national cultures (Naremore 2019: 104)), and on space in noir, not as a
space of modernity per se, but rather, as a site of struggle (see Urry 2001:
11). Indeed, noir possesses subversive characteristics that can compel audi-
ences to undertake potentially transformative cognitive searches, including,
as Manthia Diawara fnds, by African American flmmakers in social justice
narratives (Flory 2002: 180 cited in ibid.).25 Further, Agitated City examines
New York cinematic spaces across genre, flm cycle, and visual styles, in
an examination that encompasses relationships between crises of the 1930s
 Introduction 9
and the 1940s and cinematic imaginaries, neglected in the cinema and urban
scholarship. Thus, this is a book that traces critical currents of the 1930s
and the 1940s urban cinema, further extending the period of study to also
include cinematic cities of the 1920s and the 1950s for the purposes of
comparison of how urban agitation emerges and then implodes and fades
from view.
Cinematic urban spaces present a set of discontinuities in the socio-cul-
tural production of space between representational spaces and social prac-
tices of the 1920s and those of the subsequent decades of study. Historical
evidence suggests that the contrast between the high modernist avant-garde
of the 1920s and the realism of the 1930s represents too simple a dichotomy
(as noted in Giovacchini 2001: 3), but a more narrow analytical focus on
urban spatial tropes highlights nevertheless differences between the 1920s
metropolitan imaginaries and documentary narratives, and American cin-
ematic cities of the subsequent decades. The shift from the “metropolitan
flms” of the 1920s and the urban social imaginaries of the 1930s, to noir
city narratives of the 1940s and 1950s, cannot be explained by either inter-
textual infuences alone or merely a study of the Hollywood flm indus-
try. This study argues that the cinematic city discourses of the 1930s and
the 1940s were shaped by projections of social anxieties onto metropolitan
imaginaries in resonance with socio-spatial transformations amidst world-
wide crises. The confuence of crises, spatial transformations, and social
anxieties projected onto the cinematic New York in particular, constructed
the critical palimpsest within American cultural discourses of the modernist
metropolis. The discourses of the cinematic metropolis of the 1930s and the
1940s entailed the projections of the perceived negative characteristics of
mass society – e.g., alienation, rationality, impersonality, anonymity, and
social disembedding – as well as the growing disillusionment with the mod-
ern world, economic uncertainty of the 1930s, World War Two traumas,
nuclear anxiety, and loss of faith in modern technologies.
Cultural discourses of acceptance and rejection of cities26 can be traced
to late 19th and, of particular relevance to this study, to the frst part of the
20th century American social thought. Insofar as the economic and politi-
cal crises of the 1930s and the 1940s represent an important infuence on
the cinematic urban imagination of the period, their impact is neverthe-
less ambiguous.27 Jay Winter has offered compelling arguments that suggest
strong connections between representations in Western art and social trans-
formations in times of crises or turmoil, as can be illustrated, for instance,
by the resurgence of apocalyptic motifs in European (especially German)
visual art during and after World War One.28 Sources of anti-urban bias
manifested in these discourses or visions often draw from a Biblical rep-
ertoire of narratives of urban decline and fall, but according to Winter’s
argument, the content and form that the discourses and visions took was
shaped by the resonances specifc to the period – in particular with reference
to The Great War. Winter’s, and also Paul Fussell’s, analyses of resonances
10 Introduction
with crises in visual art across a broad range of 18th and 19th century
examples, trace the nuanced variations of the projections of apocalyptic
motifs onto the urban landscape. Indeed, discourses critical of urbanity are
not limited to the period of study; neither are their linkages with economic
and political crises apparent or suffcient to explain the urban ambivalence.
Krutnik has pointed out that cinematic narratives are “often a little too
conveniently framed as a symptomatic response to the cultural and social
upheavals besetting the U.S. after the Second World War” (Krutnik 1997:
83). Projections of the motifs of decline on the metropolis or resonances
with social crises ought to be seen as an acceleration of earlier tendencies,
but the presence of predecessors would still not explain the predominance
of urban themes in such a broad range of examples.
Notwithstanding the signifcance of the literary and visual art urban
discourse in the frst part of the 20th century, the aesthetic identifcation
between the camera and the gazes at, as well as the motions through, the
city of an urban faneûr, represents an important precursor for the specif-
cally cinematic engagement with the city. Further, the metropolitan flms
of the 1920s signaled the adoption of urbanity as the narrative – the city
acts, as it were, as the main protagonist in a drama of its daily occurrences,
from dawn to after hours. Presenting discontinuities with the 1920s visual
cityscapes, cinematic cities of the 1930s and the 1940s coincide not only
with economic and political crises but also with the creation of the metropo-
lis, and the radical alteration of the physical and social environment of the
metropolis into the megalopolis. Films documented the spatial transforma-
tion but also actively mediated and also shaped discourses about the city.
Notwithstanding the importance of photography and flm as cultural arti-
facts, the cinematic cities of the decades of study are signifcant because of
their discursive, as well as urban discourse-producing, attributes. This new
critical discourse, the study argues by examining New York in flm, is that
of agitated urban modernity. The cinematic feld ranging from the 1920s
to the 1950s presents agitating tensions resonating with both the broader
cultural and planning discourses, (sub)urban transformations, and also the
deeper economic and political crises transposed, transmuted, reshaped, and
radically re-envisioned into an imaginative landscape of modernity.
The 1930s, in particular, were “a decade of considerable technological
innovation in industry … the triumph of the mass media, the Hollywood
movie industry, … [and] the modern rotogravure illustrated press”
(Hobsbawm 1996: 102). Newspaper circulation doubled between 1920 and
1950 in the U.S. and radio transformed the household in powerful ways,
bringing information to the illiterate and the house-bound and also, in
1938, spreading mass panic following Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds”
transmission. Cinema became the key international mass medium, and
also established the global dominance of the English language. The urban
environment functioned, amidst economic and political turmoil, as the cen-
tral arena for this popular culture transformation. A combination of the
 Introduction 11
conditions of unemployment of the 1930s, the need for escape from the
dreary reality of the Depression, the changing social mores of the 1920s,
and the technological innovation of the talking pictures, popularized movie
theaters as “dream palaces” in the already established urban entertainment
districts where classes and genders mixed. The cinematic revolution of the
sound motion pictures brought to broad popular audiences escapist images
along with narratives that related to their own lives in times of struggle.
Movie theaters and urban entertainment districts represented an important
aspect to the continuing appeal of the urban environment in the midst of the
hardest economic times.
Several important characteristics bear on the nature of cinema as both
art and entertainment. First, as Herbert J. Gans (1957) pointed out, flm as
a popular art that is a collective and costly endeavor is characterized by a
feedback process in which audience preferences and tastes impact the crea-
tion of a flm (selection of themes, scenes, actors, directors, setting), which
enables the flm’s economic sustainability but often limits or constrains cin-
ematic narratives. Film directors like Hitchcock and Welles, for example,
have indeed understood this process and its limitations, deliberately calcu-
lating the expectations of audiences within cinematic narratives. But to the
extent that cinematic experience is a social act, it needs to be emphasized
that the images and narratives of the period of study also greatly limited
or underestimated the range of this act for over one half of the audience of
a different gender and/or race (see Mulvey 1989, Shohat and Stam 1994,
Stam 2000). Within complex visual and narrative language that makes their
story-telling life-like and larger-than-life, many other cinematic experiences
that have been critical of such gendered or racial representations have also
entailed liberating acts. In this context, David Riesman’s (1961) note in The
Lonely Crowd of more than half a century ago bears repeating as much as
it also requires challenging, reinterpreting, and updating.

I believe that the movies, in many unexpected ways, are liberating

agents, and that they need defense against indiscriminate highbrow crit-
icism as well as against the ever-ready veto groups who want movies to
tutor their audiences in all the pious virtues that home and school have
failed to inculcate.29

By the time that Riesman was writing these words, however, Hollywood
was becoming signifcantly less democratic, pluralist, and ambiguous in its
imaginaries; further, Riesman did not fully theorize the possibility that the
same flm narratives could be interpreted differently by alternate ideological
constellations.
Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton of Columbia University’s Offce of
Radio Research had already noted in 1943 that radio audiences responded
to different messages based on their social origins, individual agendas, and
cultural backgrounds (Giovacchini 2001: 171). The promise of the media as
12 Introduction
a social unifer is at best suspect, but the democratic promise of cinema was
also different given its visual and narrative structure, and its mixture of art
and entertainment, a promise and mixture quite unlike that offered by the
radio or the press. The urban environment and socio-spatial imaginaries in
flms of the 1930s and the 1940s played a critical role in bridging the reac-
tions and responses of different audiences.
Secondly, as scholars have argued in the case of other forms of popu-
lar amusement, early 20th century audiences focked to theaters and penny
arcades seeking escape from the dreary reality of the long, exhausting
workday in the industrial economy or from the daily grind in the offce
(Lewis 2003, McDonnell and Allen 2002, Nasaw 1999). Andrew Bergman
(1992), writing about the cinema of the Great Depression, noted that if
audiences escaped from the harsh realities of unemployment and poverty
into the world of popular amusements, they nevertheless did not “escape”
into a world they could not relate to, thus suggesting a complicated rela-
tionship between the escapist and non-escapist aspects of the entertainment
of the 1930s. This relationship becomes even more intricate in the 1940s’
flms’ urban fctional worlds as well as in the increasingly semi-documentary
examples of on-location shooting. What did cinematic representations tell
popular audiences about the urban environments that they inhabited, or
alternatively, what alternate urban worlds did the flm narratives offer as an
escape or an imaginative voyage?
Socially conscious cinema of the 1930s tackled subjects such as urban
poverty within varied flm genres, including crime stories specifc to the gang-
ster cycle. The city in the latter case becomes a critical environment in which
the new cinematic hero – “the city boy” – emerges, whose frst metropolitan
embodiment and nationally-known urban male flm star is James Cagney
(Sklar 1992). Although for the most part the city represents a stage-set, it
nevertheless emerges as a central arena for the narrative engagement with a
range of social problems: the criminal justice system, low-income housing,
and unemployment during the Great Depression (Sklar 1992), among oth-
ers. In the flms of the 1940s, however, urban imaginaries assume a critical,
and also more complex, visual and narrative role. The 1940s period – the
middle of which, in 1946, is marked by “all-time-high Hollywood attend-
ance fgures” (Harris 2003: 5) – is also remembered for neorealist represen-
tations of social problems, praised by the flm theorist André Bazin (Bazin
and Gray 1967), who endorsed the abilities of the cinematic image to record
motion in time and to present the ambiguities of the real. The emphasis on
the capacity of the flm camera to record actual places and locations in the
1940s is, however, further complicated by the uses of photographic tech-
nologies developed during World War Two for military purposes (Virilio
1989).
The American cinematic metropolis of the 1930s and the 1940s also
featured “New York streets and neighborhoods” elaborately staged in
Hollywood studios to emulate the actual city (see Sanders 2001). While
 Introduction 13
Chicago was the setting for gangster genre narratives of the early 1930s,
most notably Little Caesar (d. Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) and Public Enemy
(d. William A. Wellman, 1931), the poor neighborhoods of New York in
flms of the same period were most commonly tenement slums, docks, or
waterfront areas. “Low-density working class districts in other cities were
less commonly portrayed and, a fortiori, the suburbs of New York and of
other cities stayed completely out of the picture,” with the exception of
the documentary flm The City (d. Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke,
1939) (Sutcliffe 1984: 163). New York slums were commonly constructed
in Hollywood studios, however. Further, as a cost-saving measure, the
Hollywood New York stage sets of the 1930s and the 1940s became vir-
tually the universal image of the American cinematic city of the period.
Yet possible truth claims invoked in many documentary-like flms entail, of
course, a complex staging of urban imaginary narratives, as in The Naked
City (d. Jules Dassin, 1948), while a sense of fakeness that might underlie
the slums created in a movie studio for the production of The Dead End (d.
William Wyler, 1937) resonated as “real” with popular audiences in a nar-
rative that pointed out the core human decency of many slum-dwellers who
“deserved a better chance in life” (Sutcliffe 1984: 163). Depictions such as
Wyler’s had, in addition, a socially-benefcial end-goal in prompting hous-
ing reform even if, of course, the urban renewal period that followed had
also in the subsequent decades negative effects in reinforcing the ghetto of
exclusion – precisely the opposite of what one of the chief protagonists, the
architect in Dead End, dreamed about. In another example, Samuel Fuller’s
Pickup on South Street (1953) similarly brought a sense of urban zest and
“authenticity” in a simulated New York waterfront staged in Hollywood.
Yet another example is Dark Corner (1946), which was shot in Hollywood
as well as on location in New York.30
Further, as was clear to Soviet and German cinematographers since the
1920s, flm could be a powerful instrument of propaganda, although as also
became apparent, flm could as well serve as a potentially subversive, never
fully controllable, medium. Critics concerned with the social meanings of the
medium saw in it a potential for enlightening popular audiences about the
profound horrors of their time (Kracauer and Quaresima 2004), although
they failed perhaps to conceptually engage with the relationships between
cinema as the art of visual montage (therefore, manipulation, deception)
and the art of motion pictures that captures movement in real time yet con-
denses temporality. Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, its historical distortions
aside (see Forgacs 2000b), prompted James Agee’s attempt to articulate the
nexus between the flm’s urban social discourse and its cinematic form. The
author noted in 1947 that he appreciated the flm not because of its use of
non-actors, its semi-documentary approach, or its “realistic” feel.

It is rather, that, [it] show[s] a livelier aesthetic and moral respect for
reality – which “realism” can as readily smother as liberate – than most
14 Introduction
fctional flms, commercial investments in professional reliability, ever
manage to. If they are helped to this – as they are – by their concern
for actual people and places, that is more than can be said for most
documentaries, which by average are as dismally hostile to reality as
most fction flms. The flms I most eagerly look forward to will not be
documentaries but works of pure fction, played against, and into, and
in collaboration with unrehearsed and uninvented reality.
(Agee 2000: 230)31

Notwithstanding Agee’s infuence on the important realist flmmakers in

this period,32 what is signifcant for this study is that the noted narrative
and visual playing into and, especially, against the then-established repre-
sentational visions, exposed urban tensions, conficts, anxieties, traumas,
and also possibilities, connections, and alternatives. In this manner too, flm
both acknowledged and questioned the transformation of metropolis to
megalopolis. These flms left us, in other words, with imagery that implic-
itly, although not always intentionally, contested the course of American
urban development. For even if some of the noir flms vilifed the urban
environment they did so by visualizing urban decay in a manner of an
explicit and implicit exposure of, in James Naremore’s estimate (1998), the
savagery of the capitalist system.33 And many of these cinematic narratives
flmed at future urban renewal areas portrayed these neighborhoods – the
Upper West Side neighborhoods that gave way to Lincoln Center, the Third
Avenue El, the pre-urban renewal East Harlem, the Bunker Hill district of
Los Angeles – as economically and ethnically diverse sites that also housed
artists and artisans. Further, given that in their critique of the brutality and
ruthlessness of the economic system they remain among the most critical
examples of American flm, these cinematic urban narratives might also
allow for a juxtaposition with the urban flms of the decades that followed
the HUAC hearings, although that project is beyond the scope of this study.

The nexus of spatial imaginaries and social transformations:

New York’s agitated urban modernity
The discontinuity in urban visions from the 1920s to the 1950s marks an
important departure from the ways in which the modern cinematic city was
conceived. The relationships between urban planning and the spatial tropes
of flm – the skyline, the urban-rural contrast, and the emerging suburbia –
are at once material and symbolic. The skyline, associated for the most part
with New York but also with Chicago as the frst skyscraper city, repre-
sents, frstly, a material manifestation of the economic and political forces
that reshaped the cityscape, and the emerging planning policies governing
physical space that included lot zoning regulations and building height (see
Revell 1992). New York’s vertical ascent was, as Kenneth Jackson (1984:
324) pointed out, prompted by the “specialization and differentiation of the
 Introduction 15
Manhattan business district” that led to “rising land costs;” thus, by 1930,
in most business hubs low-rise structures were quickly replaced by skyscrap-
ers. By 1950, Manhattan remained “the most intensely developed piece of
real estate in the United States” with a population density of 86,730 per
square mile (in contrast, LA’s density was 4,391 and Chicago’s 16,165 per
square mile) (Jackson 1984: 325).
The skyline can secondly be seen as an icon of New York’s landscape of
power, and after 11 September 2001, a site of national identifcation (Leach
2005: 182). From the early to the mid-20th century, the skyline became
America’s growing symbol of global dominance, New York’s insignia of
economic power and of its “modern” architectural triumph over European
cities, and a metaphor for the promise of social mobility for over a million
and half immigrants who settled in New York between 1880 and 1920. In
the 1920s imaginaries and documentary representations, the skyline suggests
not merely urban promise but also speed, movement, the propelling forces of
modernity, and the Fordist economy. In the decades that followed, the dissi-
pating associations of the urban promise with the skyline are strongly over-
shadowed by crises, in particular in the 1930s social narratives. The 1940s
and early 1950s noir skyline imaginaries hint at negative connotations of
class inequality, criminality, social corruption, anonymity, and alienation.
At the same time, the concealed, delimited, or suggestively revealed (Straw
1997) skyline tropes in the narratives of urban crime, corruption, or indi-
vidual disorientation of the same decade transmute the material domain of
the cityscape into ambiguous fgurations of both the exposure and erasure
of urban social anxieties. Insofar as the skyline becomes the symbol of the
metropolis, this identifcation is expanded to the city as a whole, not merely
limited to its downtown districts. The contrasting urban-rural and subur-
ban-urban tropes demonstrate more ambiguously the economic and cultural
triumph of the metropolis and convey, through cinematic lenses and the
points of view of the protagonists, a signifcant cultural unease and social
anxiety about the American city.
Critical skyline visions, which ought to be viewed beyond their possible
poles of the sublime and the uncanny or beyond their fgurations of instabil-
ity (contra Lindner 2015: 10), can also be symbolically tied to the devaluing
of the metropolis suggested by the anti-urban anxieties in the decades of
this study. Urban planning played a key role as a mediating force between
both the notion of valuing as well as of devaluing of the city. This can, for
instance, be seen in the manner in which planning discourses adopted and
at times enhanced social and racial biases, as a component of a specifc type
of urban renewal project, many of which undermined inner-city neighbor-
hoods in order to supposedly save them from the assumed “blight.” Amidst
the economic impoverishment and turmoil of the 1930s, New York City
completes its skyline and ameliorates its infrastructure, and becomes the site
for projected discourses that at once enhance and question the images and
understandings of the modern city.
16 Introduction
But rather than assembling evidence for a cultural, cinematic and urban
planning history of this historical period, this study proposes an interdisci-
plinary investigation of the cinematic New York of the 1930s and 1940s –
the site of the agitated metropolitan landscape of modernity. The agitated
city metaphor encompasses a) the ways in which the city was understood,
perceived, experienced, and represented, and b) direct and indirect relation-
ships between these imaginaries and the historical processes that led to cri-
ses and also urban transformations in the period of study.34 In the context
of city planning, this metaphor refers to the tension and collision between
different urban paradigms and the resulting interventions supported by eco-
nomic and state interests, a tension that was “resolved” by suburbanization,
urban renewal, and the later decline in public and redistributive investments
in American cities. As Abu-Lughod (1999: 182) points out, New Deal poli-
cies fostered an investment in cities but also decentralization; in New York,
Robert Moses, then parks commissioner, was able to utilize PWA workforces
to rebuild neighborhoods, parks, highways, bridges, and suburbs. While, as
Abu-Lughod noted, the public policies promulgated by Robert Moses did
not perceive a confict in this dual investment in the inner-city areas as well
as the region, the two represented different economic and political interests
and social alternatives. If the term “cultural structures”35 could apply in
this context, it might be used to suggest the contradictory poles underlying
these opposing discourses and tenets of urban development. The transfor-
mation from the metropolis into the megalopolis was thus shaped by eco-
nomic conditions, demographic changes, and public policies, but it further
entailed specifc symbols, narratives, and representations that upheld a dif-
ferent vision (in normative, representational, and imaginary senses) of the
city. To the extent that these visions signifed a devaluing of the metropo-
lis, they were marked by social and racial biases and misconceptions about
the urban environment, in particular concerning the inter-relations between
physical space and neighborhood life. Adopting a rational-comprehensive
approach to urban development, planning retreated into its technical role
with the commencement of urban renewal and suburban highways and sub-
divisions, thus neglecting and even dismissing broader cultural discourses
and social anxieties about city life, not to mention the deeper inequalities
masked within them. Ironically, planning’s very evasion of the interplay
between these anxieties, social conficts, demographic changes, and struc-
tural conditions, entailed the adoption of broader cultural and social biases
against the city and its diverse, working-class populations as the very moti-
vations for many urban renewal projects.
One approach to planning theory sees confict as a constitutive element of
social relations that carries a transformative potential, a “potential resource
for political emancipation and democratic transformation” (Gualini 2015:
3, 4). That indeed could be seen as one possible hope of planning. This
study wishes, on the other hand, to emphasize the dark side of planning, as
argued by Oren Yftachel (1998: 1), in which for elites, “urban and regional
 Introduction 17
planning provides an important mechanism of oppression and control.”
Witness for example the way that zoning was used for the purposes of sys-
tematic racial exclusion (Massey and Denton 1993, Hirt 2014). Yiftachel
highlights the amelioration drive captured by the conception of planning
as social betterment, which he terms idealistic and unrealistic. Citing David
Harvey, Yiftachel (1998: 5) argues that the modern capitalist state and its
planning apparatus facilitates the accumulation of capital and reproduces
class inequality; quoting Peter Marcuse, that the housing policies of the
urban renewal era in the U.S. used “spatial public policies to control, con-
tain and deprive the poor and shift material and political resources to the
wealthy.”
Of particular signifcance for the context discussed here is, furthermore,
the link between planning and, according to Yiftachel, the patriarchal order
which subordinates women. Dolores Hayden (1996 [1980]: 143–144) has
argued that neighborhoods are designed to emphasize that the woman’s
place is “at home,” constraining women economically and socially, not sim-
ply physically. Hayden (1996 [1980]: 153) advocates for a new paradigm of
home needed to support working women that would reshape the public and
private space division along feminist and socialist lines. In 1929 Christine
Fredrick published Selling Mrs. Consumer promoting homeownership,
access to consumer credit, and marketing advice to target female consum-
ers. Similarly, in 1935, General Electric sponsored a competition in which
architects designed houses for Mr. and Mrs. Bliss. The Hoover Commission
on Home Ownership and Home Building’s early 1930s goal of building
private single-family homes was postponed by the Great Depression and
World War Two and it was not until the late 1940s that the FHA- and
VA-backed mortgages boosted the construction of single family homes,
with Mrs. Consumers realizing spatial privacy and conformity in consump-
tion by the 1950s (Hayden 1996 [1980]: 144). Writing in 1980, Hayden
(145) describes conditions of domestic violence and charges that “the exist-
ing system of government services, intended to stabilize households and
neighborhoods by ensuring the minimum conditions for a decent home life
to all Americans, almost always assume[d] that the traditional household
with a male worker and an unpaid homemaker [was] the goal to be achieved
or simulated.” Hayden (1996 [1980]: 148) cites history of housing activism
and agitation to address the needs of women and proposes extending exist-
ing housing efforts in a feminist direction including helping battered women
and children, providing necessary services, including day care, food, laundry
facilities, etc (ibid., 150, 153).
The metaphor of agitated city resonates thus more broadly with urban
social transformations and the impact of the economic and political crises,
and their projections of the characteristics of mass society onto the urban
and suburban landscape.36 Linguistically, the word “agitated” recalls tur-
bulence, motion, and commotion, and has social, psychological, and politi-
cal resonances, that might capture the turmoil of the Great Depression
18 Introduction
and the anxieties and paranoias of the World War Two period. The use
of the word is symbolic in this sense and suggestive of an imaginary of
urban discourses. Indeed, American cities in the period of study did not
experience the overt confict and contention as during the earlier industrial
city era, although, as will be discussed, tenant unrest did occur in 1932,
and race riots took place in 1935 and 1943 in New York. In this manner,
the metaphor agitated urban modernity resonates with the socio-economic
crises and the social and physical transformations of the metropolis taking
place beyond the space of the cinematic frame. While exact parallels can-
not be made, the cinematic metaphor of agitated urban modernity captures
the friction between the established and solidifed metropolitan power and
its Janus-faced unsettled, tense, and even perturbed visual and narrative
urban discourses. The point of the study is not, however, to seek over-
laps and refections among visual discourses, crises, and physical urban
changes, but rather to examine their specifc points of intersection and
indeed contestation.
Dimendberg (2004) has established important linkages between urban
discourses and cinematic spaces in flm noir, and has also noted the contrast
between the cinematic cities of the 1920s and the 1940s.

No longer romanticized as a fantasy domain of speed, dynamism, and

new perspectives on quotidian realities, the post-1945 American city
increasingly appeared to many artists, social critics, and flmmakers as
a cold-hearted and treacherous mechanism more likely to provoke fear
than awe.
(Dimendberg 1997: 66)

Further, the metropolis of flm noir, Dimendberg (1997: 66) emphasized,

became “a highly rationalized and alienating system of exploitative drudg-
ery permitting few possibilities of escape.” Other scholars point even more
explicitly to the connection between the urban transformations and the
appalling metropolitan conditions represented in flms of the 1940s:

[N]oir depictions of Los Angeles in the forties resembled the grisly exag-
geration in urban planning documents of the same period: poor neigh-
borhoods breed hopeless blight. This led, therefore, to urban planning
of the ffties, and is unmistakably a kind of noir-master-planning as
anti-noir, a corrective designed to remove the unsanitary remnants of
the Great Depression, of the pre-war world too blighted for “good”
families.
(Klein 1998: 88)

These arguments, including the ways in which urban transformations and

planning discourses might be related to cinematic cities, are examined and
challenged in the chapters that follow in the context of the urban spatial
 Introduction 19
tropes. This study further contributes by complementing the scholarship on
the cinematic city (Bruno 2002, Clarke 1997, Fitzmaurice and Shiel 2003,
Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2001, Konstantarakos 2000, Krause and Petro 2003,
Sanders 2001, Pratt and San Juan 2014, among many others) with the focus
on the neglected escapist as well as non-escapist urban and rural imagery
from the 1930s. Namely, the study argues further that across a range of
the 1930s, and especially the 1940s, a metonymic contiguity, within which
urbanity at once triumphs and is undermined, can be traced not just through
physical urban tropes but also social imaginaries.
The metaphor of the agitated city thus evokes the crisis or turbulence of
the 1930s and the 1940s but also more subtle uncertainties and unease as
well as the unequivocal allure of the metropolis. It suggests as well a visual
and narrative exposure of specifc social pathologies, and racial and gender
anxieties of the period that became erroneously but inalienably linked to the
American metropolis. As Naremore (1998: chapter 1, especially 13, 11–27)
explains, these visual discourses are spatially mediated through narratives
whose action takes place in the supposedly “wrong” part of the city, often
a minority neighborhood. But this fascination cannot be simply reduced to
the metaphor of darkness that entails a biased form of othering. Many noir
narratives present spaces such as jazz clubs as settings of racial, and also
class, solidarity. And E. Ann Kaplan (1998) has noted as well the ambigu-
ity in the case of both the tremendous degree of agency given to the female
protagonists in flms of the 1940s and the recurrent theme of the narrative
punishment of women, even if, as Angela Martin (1998: 222) points out,
the women-turned-bad have done so because they “have ended up with
bad partners and/or are victims of male violence, perversity or authority.”
In the cinematic noir cities both minority and/or female protagonists are
often given a greater degree of expression although often to be quickly sub-
jugated; further, these protagonists’ eventual liberation from oppression or
suffering is often only achieved with the help of a white male. In many other
flms of the period, protagonists of both genders and all races are rarely
offered a positive narrative resolution of any sort or a promising urban
future, although this point is not unambiguous.
Discourses of agitated urban modernity, especially in the flms of the
1940s, conjure up thus the city of simultaneous allure and jeopardy, and
indeed often the allure of jeopardy37 that leaves few possibilities for exit
but does not necessarily undermine the city. This represents another aspect
of urban ambivalence that characterizes the cinematic discourse of agitated
urban modernity. While projecting urban anxieties, the critical target of
many of the 1940s narratives was not merely the city but, as noted, American
society. These narratives clashed with the American myths of social oppor-
tunity or mobility, and the cinematic capacities to uphold and enhance these
myths through larger-than-life protagonists and their narratives. In the cin-
ematic cities of the 1930s’ social mobility narratives, labor conditions, and
urban crime, and also of the 1940s’ dangerous urban pathways, in select
20 Introduction
cases subverted stereotypes38 and became an arena for social critique in flm
(see Naremore 1998).
The cinematic city mediated these social anxieties through powerful, col-
liding visions of, on the one hand, urban might and glory, and on the other,
decrepitude and decay, as can be seen in the trope of the New York skyline.
The agitated city metaphor unites the cinematic urbanity of the period of
study, although anxieties assume heightened or increasingly negative con-
notations in the latter decades of study, indeed evident in the cinema of
the 1950s and the early 1960s. Dimendberg (2004: 165) has argued that
“for countless buildings and neighborhoods of the postwar period, cine-
matic representation in noir augured the kiss of death.” A range of flms
considered in this study, however, challenges this view. Thus while tak-
ing into consideration Dimendberg’s and Bruno’s important standpoints for
interdisciplinary inquiry, this book focuses on an aspect that their research
did not address, examining the ways in which cinema actively partook in
the creation of the discourse of simultaneous adulation and critique of the
American metropolis amidst world-wide crises.
The scholars who point to the gradual erosion of the realist tradition of
the 1930s and the increasing sense of defeat and desolation of the 1940s
narratives seem to have overlooked the ambiguity of the cinematic socio-
spatial imaginary in the period. In the 1940s thrillers’ “intricate patterns of
double-cross and sexual mobility” (Alloway 1971: 50) cities are presented
unambiguously as environments in which violence is taken for granted,
where the unwanted or the oppressed are easily expendable, and where
there is a technique of framing that “convert[s] society into an unreliable
and malicious place in which guilt can be manipulated and assigned.” Yet,
narratives further subvert the possible arbitrariness of this scheme through
blurred lines of the hero’s innocence and guilt (Alloway 1971: 26). The
environments presented are not Kafkaesque, and violence is rarely shown
as systemic, even if it might be hidden from view;39 through this concealing,
as through the ways in which narratives locate violence within the spatial
domain beyond the constrictions of the frame, cinematic art interacts with
(and at times claims) the social and political sphere.
Scholars have argued that flms of the frst post-war decade resonated
with the paranoia following the witch-hunt on Hollywood progressives
(Polan 1986), refected in “the fear of narrative, and the particular social
representation it works to uphold, against all that threatens the unity of its
logical framework” (Polan, cited in Giovacchini 2001: 191). Yet what is
suppressed in these narratives is compensated for and acknowledged in the
flms’ spatial imagination. This is, the book suggests, precisely the purpose
of cameras’ spatial lingering in these narratives. Countering didacticism and
also by-passing existentialism, narratives pause (questioning the promise of
modern mobility of the 1920s “metropolitan flms”) to show the darkness
of the spaces that hide, and at times expose, the sources of social conten-
tion or violence, which becomes increasingly stylized and non-cathartic.40
 Introduction 21
The environment plays a critical role, as the city becomes an arena in which
representations of space interact with spatial practices and partake in the
social production of space. The space of the city is then often narratively
surrendered to the spatial practices of slum clearance and urban renewal41
or presented in such a manner that further narrative trajectories of pro-
tagonists within the metropolis are implausible, although, importantly, their
attempted escapes from the city also appear futile.
But the study of cinematic cities and urban transformations further
enables the questioning of Lefebvre’s scheme. If the imagery of the sky-
line, which often represents a stand-in for the metropolis, is contrasted
with rural, suburban, and extra-urban environments, cinematic narratives
present a more complex vision that entails the devaluing of the metropo-
lis as much as the aestheticization of its decay, but do not fully uphold
its transition to the megalopolis. The 1940s cinematic noir narratives of
suburbanization presented even more dangerously exploitative worlds,42
evidence that indirectly questions the emphasis on anti-urban discourses
in Klein’s and Dimendberg’s studies of noir. Aside from the criminal psy-
chopathologies featured in select urban noirs, the suburban noir often
presents distressing renditions of social isolation, oppressed femininity,
and murderous criminality,43 even if, of course, cities are more often pre-
sented as containing blighted areas or harboring criminal groups as forms
of collective social disengagement. Noir narratives of suburbanization or
small-scale community44 life of the 1940s remain signifcantly more critical
of these extra-urban environments than prominent planning discourses,
including those by Lewis Mumford, as will be discussed in Chapter 5.
Cinematic discourses of suburban noir worlds parted from both the
broader cultural discourses of the period and urban transformations, and
resonated more strongly with the noted gender anxieties and growing class
divisions. And in noir narratives where urbanity may be explicitly posited
against the rural environment (as in Huston’s Asphalt Jungle (1950) in
which a protagonist remarks, “if you want fresh air, don’t look for it in
this town”),45 rural worlds suggest the fruitlessness of America’s regener-
ating visions or a false redemptive aim rather than representing a rejection
of urbanization.
In summary, important parts of the study represent contributions to
planning and interdisciplinary urban studies literature. The focus is on
urban transformations, changing socio-economic conditions, and the role
of visions in planning, but the study places the emphasis on tangible changes
in the social, economic, and physical sense, and on the gradually altered
understanding (or underlying planning vision) of the city. By examining his-
torical and social conditions of urban change, the study notes the policies
that have led to the transformation from the metropolis to megalopolis,
resolved in a perilous way through urban renewal and suburbanization – a
resolution that involved inner-city disinvestment and the lack of social and
racial integration.
22 Introduction
Urban imaginaries in literature and flm have also undergone myriad
transformations in the postmodern era, yet the popular as well as high art
audiences’ fascination with the black and white cinematic and photographic
imagery of the pre-urban renewal New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and
San Francisco remains. These imaginaries within the urban memory pal-
impsest are uncritically tied in popular discourses to nostalgic visions of the
bygone era of the American urban past – noir visions of what were once pre-
dominantly white cities. While these narratives remain fascinating in their
exposure, and also creative reinterpretation, of the ambivalent, complex,
agitating tensions between the city’s splendor and its potential peril46 – their
more critical agitating qualities ought to be brought into the discursive core
of an interdisciplinary examination. In Lefebvre’s terms, the agitated city
discourse in flm underscores the missing link in the cultural production
of space between a) representational spaces and spaces of representation,
and b) representational spaces and spatial practices. In the frst case, criti-
cal cinematic cities of the 1930s and the 1940s suppress Benjamin’s notion
of adventurous travel through the urban ruins by heightening both anxi-
ety and thrill. The discourse of agitated urban modernity prompts further
journeys of unsettled, indeed hopefully itself agitated, spectatorship given
the surface evocations that decontextualize spaces or stylize violence and
misogyny within the neo noir narratives that have surfaced more recently.
But an alternate layer permeates the discourses as well – through a thriller
genre that still casts the city narrative as that of allure and unsettling yet
suspenseful thrill. This does not merely suggest the validation of Lefebvre’s
scheme via a cultural production of cinematic discourses across representa-
tional spaces, or in dialogue with the spaces of representation (maps, urban
planning documents, for example), as Dimendberg argues. Rather, the dis-
course of agitated urban modernity within cinematic cities of the 1930s and
the 1940s is shaped more critically by the intersections between the repre-
sentational spaces and spatial practices that resonated with the crises of the
Great Depression and World War Two – a linkage absent in the neo noir
imaginaries. The urban protagonists’ agency in the 1930s and the 1940s
narratives delineated both metropolitan enchantment and socio-spatial con-
straint, exposing class, racial, and gender patterning and social and political
tensions. This book demonstrates the pivotal role of the nexus between New
York cinematic imaginaries and socio-spatial transformations and crises in
shaping the critical discourse of agitated urban modernity.

Notes
1 This very notion is, ironically and with a different connotation, tackled by David
Norris in Belgrade: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination;
Oxford: Signal Books, 2008).
2 The notions of adulation and condemnation might suggest a focus on moral
judgments upon the city, but I wish instead to juxtapose the trope of the over-
bearing, and often unfulflled, promise of the metropolis with the notion of
 Introduction 23
“condemnation” not merely in a sense of critique of the city but also in the
manner in which the built environment can be condemned (as in “to condemn a
building” and to designate a lot for an alternate use.)
3 The term “metropolis” refers to large economic, political, and cultural cent-
ers, in particular to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, centers that Janet
Abu-Lughod has termed “America’s global cities,” although the scope of this
thesis is largely limited to the example of New York. The “making and unmak-
ing” of the metropolis concerns, frstly, altered physical space and changing
socio-economic conditions, and the impact of the world-wide economic crisis of
the Great Depression (1929–1933), and the political crises of World War Two
(1939–1945). See Abu-Lughod 1999.
4 By this I mean the processes of increased decentralization, suburbanization,
sprawl, and “metropolitan disintegration.” The term megalopolis was coined by
“the geographer Jean Guttman … [to refer] to a new form of urban development
in which cities spread continuously across hundreds of miles as one metropolis
merged with another” (Beauregard 2003: 93).
5 This can be seen in Lewis Mumford’s Cultures of the City, Weegee’s photo-
graphs of crime scenes in New York, and in many examples of flm noir, although
these interpretations or visions of urban life cannot be confated into a coherent
cultural discourse. Mumford, whose infuential unsparing critique was not the
predominant planning discourse, compared the beginning of a typical metro-
politan day as beginning with “descent into Hades” (the subway), and described
the stages of metropolitan decline to include “the standardization of blight,”
“the acceptance of depletion,” “the defacement of nature,” among other signs
of decline. Weegee photographed crime scenes in Manhattan with an uncanny
sense of their occurrence (for Weegee, writes William C. Sharpe (2008: 292),
“night was an exploitable frontier, the fertile soil from which he could harvest
a crop of corpses, evidence of his boldness and food for the sensation-hungry
urbanite”), while at the core of flms noir’s darkness lies a range of representa-
tions of urban decay, criminality, corruption, and a variety of other social prob-
lems. See Dimendberg 2004, Mumford 1981 [1938], Sharpe 2008.
6 This is indeed a complicated claim, since not all planners, urbanists, public intel-
lectuals, journalists, or writers who have published reports or articles about cit-
ies agree on either the evaluation of urban problems or the proposed solutions
for cities. Many planners, however, by 1952 conceded that “the decentralization
forces were too great to be reversed” (Beauregard 2003: 87), while popular press
announced in 1955 that “while suburbs have boomed, the businesses and resi-
dential hearts of cities have choked and decayed” (Beauregard 2003: 89). See
also, Beauregard 2003: 77–88.
7 As Krajina and Stevenson (2020: 2) remind us, “city spaces are imagined, in
some specifc way, before being constructed, and they are re-made through prac-
tical use after being built.” I use the notion of urban vision here to encompass
normative, conceptual, and empirical senses, although, of course, without blur-
ring these domains.
8 This included the neglect of intricate social dynamics, neighborhood diversity,
and variety and mixture of building types and architectural styles within commu-
nities perceived as “blighted.” See for instance, the well-known classics that also
differ in their accounts of urban renewal as much as they all call for appreciation
of American urban life, for example Berman (1982) and chapter V in Jacobs
(1961).
9 As Robert Beauregard (2003: 103) notes, “[in the] early postwar years, the
two most prominent urban problems to be solved were slums and blight.” In
the frst postwar decade, urban problems became problems of racial injustice
in America (Beauregard 2003: 127–149). The consequences of urban renewal
24 Introduction
and suburbanization, occurring during the time of economic restructuring and
impacting the poorest and minority inner-city residents, further contributed to
the deepening of urban crises of the post-1975 period.
10 For a discussion of urban collective memories and their contemporary evoca-
tions, see Boyer 1994.
11 This term comes from the New York cultural sociologist Sharon Zukin’s work.
I apply the term in the case of social meanings of select spatial motifs in flm, as
well be discussed. See Zukin 1991.
12 With the most signifcant exception of Robert Beauregard’s (2003) study that
focuses for the most part on the post World War Two period, although it also
includes a detailed account of “foundational urban debates” and both late 19th
century and early 20th century discourses of urban decline.
13 The study establishes this connection through common concerns for urban
visions and discourses within both arenas of inquiry. As emphasized at the
“Searching for the Just City” conference at Columbia University in April 2006,
visioning can take different forms in the planning process – it can serve as a prac-
tical consideration and a necessary part of the planning process, a component
of the deliberative democratic process, or as a deeper normative construct. The
conference was held on 29 April 2006 at Columbia University and included pres-
entations by Professors Diane Davis, Frank Fischer, and Susan Fainstein, among
others.
14 Urban images and imaginaries occupy a privileged position in literary, cinematic,
and photographic art discourses, but normative and conceptual visions of the
city – which necessarily draw from a broader repertoire of representations – rep-
resent as well an integral part of the planning process or urban discourse creation
process.
15 While this might not be the only possible analytic lens for urban inquiry, it is the
case within the approach that I adopt for this study.
16 David Harvey (1989: 219–222) has further updated Lefebvre’s scheme to pro-
pose an intersection between the three aspects and a suggested four-part grid of
a) accessibility and distanciation, b) appropriation and use of space, c) domina-
tion and control of space, and d) production of space.
17 Perhaps the latter are applicable in the case of postmodern spaces of spectacle –
theme parks and festival marketplaces.
18 By this I mean visions of both downtown and neighborhood streets in the flms.
As Mennel (2008: 7–8) points out, the street, a recurrent motif in early urban
cinema and commonly the locus of danger or sexual encounter, represents a site
for negotiations of protagonists’ subjectivities. Most of the flms discussed were
either shot in Manhattan or were studio productions in which art directors cre-
ated sets for a Manhattan “street” or a “neighborhood.” But since virtually all
flms include images of city streets, I have selected flms based on the prominence
of the skyline motif and thus examine for the most part the streets of the “sky-
line” flms. Finally, in addition to the skyline, the street (or the sidewalk), and
the slum, other spatial motifs, such as the grid and the subway, could also be
included (see Lindner 2015: 9). See also, Sanders 2001.
19 Prominent exiles included Billy Wilder, Edgar G. Ulmer, Ernst Lubitsch, Mauritz
Stiller, Victor Sjöström, Benjamin Chistensen, Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Emil
Jannings, Fred Zinneman, and Otto Preminger, although historians make a dis-
tinction between the artists who came in the 1920s like Lubitsch and Murnau
and those who escaped the rise of fascism, like Lang and Wilder. Hollywood
held a special appeal as “the very symbol of modernity” and “a counterpart of
the rigid German culture.” Wilder argued further that he “would have come to
Hollywood Hitler or no Hitler” (Giovacchini 2001: 29, 31; see also, Phillips
1998).
 Introduction 25
20 Prominent fgures included Ben Hecht, Herman Mankiewicz, Hy Kraft, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Ornitz, Robert Benchley, John Huston, John Wexley,
Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, Mark Connelly, Francis Faragoh, John Howard
Lawson, Allen Boretz, and Clifford Odets, among many others. See chapter 1 in
Giovacchini 2001.
21 The cinema of classical continuity is cinema that employs forms of narrative
transitivity and closure, spectator identifcation, transparency in the construction
of meaning, single diagesis, visual style of exposition and character development,
as well as stylistical fgures of ellipsis and fashback; this kind of cinema is typical
of the classical Hollywood period until 1960. It should be noted, however, that
flms noir include narrative shifts and breakdowns and illinear story telling and
differ signifcantly in cinematic form from the 1930s narratives.
22 In a narrow formal sense, this is the “space of the frame” – the space of the vis-
ible and implied city on the cinema screen.
23 For example, Clarke 1997, Krutnik 1991, Krutnik 1997, Lamster 2000, Sanders
2001, Silver and Ursini 1996.
24 This issue is, however, more complicated. As Bodnar (2003: 225, 222–223)
notes, “both conservative and radical forces in America worried about
the potential of the movies to weaken collective mentalities of any kind.”
Emphasizing ambivalent messages about working-class protagonists that
Hollywood movies included, Bodnar points out that these flms “did not tell
people something they already did not know. They were challenging because
they told them exactly what they did know to an extent that undermined the
assumptions of political and moral leaders that individuals could be regulated
and futures insured.”
25 Perhaps it is then not quite accurate as Eric Lott (1997: 551) would have it, that
noir represents “white-face dreamwork of social anxieties with explicitly racial
sources, condensed on flm into the criminal undertakings of abjected whites”
even if Blast of Silence (d. Allen Baron, 1961), for example, might allow for this
type of interpretation.
26 Beauregard (2003: 16–19) has termed these notions the discourses of “urban
ambivalence,” as will be discussed in the following chapter.
27 Linkages between crises, warfare, and artistic imagination have been tackled in
a number of studies, most famously in Fussell (1975).
28 See, especially, chapter 6 in Winter (1995).
29 While bearing in mind both the persisting and the diminishing liberating aspects
of movies (the latter especially in the face of contemporary digital media), it
should also be noted that the functions of celebrity identifcation of contem-
porary generations in particular and the role of peers in this process seems to
have changed signifcantly since Riesman’s pre-1960s evidence. That said, one
might still appreciate his examples, especially of the stars whose careers out-
lived generations and various peer-pressures, even if one might wonder about
the roles of those stars in emancipating audiences, as well the audiences’ hid-
den aims to impress, exceed, or ignore peers derived from those visions. But
Riesman’s examples of Humphrey Bogart or Katherine Hepburn become also
more problematic if compared to stars like Richard Widmark, Bette Davis,
Cary Grant, Marlene Dietrich, Gregory Peck, Greta Garbo, James Stewart,
or for instance, Merlyn Monroe and Dorothy Dandridge on opposite ends
of the white-black spectrum of stardom yet also, as far as gendered identities
are concerned, both casualties of Hollywood. See Reisman 1961; see also, for
instance, Rippy 2001.
30 Although I indicate of course the differences between the flms shot in Hollywood
studios and on locations, I focus especially on the narrative and visual func-
tions of the spatial leitmotifs, often used quite effectively in stylized and staged
26 Introduction
productions. To an extent, it could be argued, that there is a metonymic contigu-
ity of the cinematic city, in particular in the 1940s narratives that connects both
the studio productions and the flms shot on location.
31 James Agee’s flm reviews appeared in The Nation 1942–1948. The above quote
is drawn from an article entitled “Movies in 1946,” written on 25 January 1947.
32 Given Agee’s infuence, ramifcations of this statement for the Hollywood realist
school ought not be underestimated. Agee was certainly not the only prominent
fgure of the period to question the realist approaches in flm – others included
the increasingly vocal Mordecai Gorelik (interestingly, and perhaps unsurpris-
ingly, a former set designer), writer Budd Shulberg (On the Waterfront, one
of the ‘friendly’ witnesses for HUAC), and directors Ernst Lubitsch, Preston
Sturges, and Charlie Chaplin. See Giovacchini 2001: 137.
33 See chapter 1 in James Naremore (1998), More Than Night: Film Noir and Its
Contexts.
34 I thank Ira Katznelson for his insight and help in delineating these two meanings.
Ira Katznelson also noted the two ways in which the historian E.P. Thompson
used the term experience in The Making of the English Working Class (New
York: Vintage Books, 1963).
35 I have adopted this term cited in Michèle Lamont’s research on collective identi-
ties. I use it here to apply to planning visions. See Lamont 2001: 175.
36 See Gans’ critique of Wirth in Gans 1995.
37 As can be seen in the representations of femme fatale characters in the 1940s but
also of the city’s skyline that increasingly captures this “lure” and even “lurid-
ness,” thus transitioning as a cinematic trope from its associations of masculinity
and economic power of the 1920s, to femininity and at once fragility and solid-
ity of the landscape of the 1940s. Perhaps this distinction should not be seen as
strict since earlier examples of urban visual art from Weimar Germany suggest
that images of women were associated with the landscape of Berlin precisely in
the imagery of the 1920s where the woman becomes the metaphor for modernity
and the desirable “otherness” of the city. In the case of American flm, this gen-
der/spatial ambiguity seems to me to be more typical of the 1940s visions than
of the 1920s. See Petro 1989.
38 For a sociological critique of stereotypes in flm, see Perkins 2000.
39 For example in flms like The Killers (d. Robert Siodmak, 1946), D.O.A (d.
Rudolph Maté, 1949), The Lady from Shanghai (d. Orson Welles, 1947), and
Dark Corner (d. Henry Hathaway, 1946).
40 It should be noted, however, that many narratives of the 1940s focus on the
interplay between social and metaphysical violence.
41 In Criss Cross (d. Robert Siodmak, 1949), for example, in which the femme
fatale and the city might be seen as mutually constitutive (Mennel 2008: 54–55),
a narrative of individual defeat and social disconnect is merged with a vision of
spatial loss and neighborhood change. The setting in this case is L.A.’s Bunker
Hill neighborhood that, as Mike Davis (2001: 40) noted, is in this flm “shown
as a vibrant hard-working neighborhood” terrorized by local bullies and await-
ing urban renewal.
42 These suburbs were, however, different from the middle- and low-class suburbs
of the 1950s.
43 For instance in flms set in the suburban environment such as Double Indemnity
(d. Billy Wilder, 1944) or Mildred Pierce (d. Michael Curtiz, 1945).
44 For example, small-town environments in The Killers (d. Robert Siodmak,
1946), Fallen Angel (d. Otto Preminger, 1945), The Strange Love of Martha
Ivers (d. Lewis Milestone, 1946), Pitfall (d. André De Toth, 1948), Raw Deal (d.
Anthony Mann, 1948), and The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949).
 Introduction 27
45 Also, in for example, Out of The Past (d. Jacques Tourneur, 1947), They Live
by Night (d. Nicholas Ray, 1948), and On Dangerous Ground (d. Nicholas Ray
and Ida Lupino, 1951).
46 By “agitating tensions” I mean here the second sense of the term, referring to
ambiguities in the representations of the city – the kind of ambiguity in repre-
sentation that seems to me to be confned to the period of study. Although a
type of ambiguity may recur frequently in contemporary cinematic remakes, it
does seem to have lost a sense of aura as well as a sense of critical distance as
the American culture in general and movies as its subset, have become signif-
cantly more cynical and transparent. (And to perhaps illuminate this further, as
Benjamin has noted on a scrap of paper, “[a]ura is the appearance of distance
however close it might be.” Cited in Isenberg 2008: 36.)
1 New York’s agitated urban modernity

The historical period of this study is bounded by the economic crisis of

the Great Depression at the beginning and the political and military turbu-
lence of World War Two at the end; as Andreas Huyssen (2015: 13) points
out, following World War Two “metropolitan urbanity in the West has
invaded and saturated all social space … and has become all encompass-
ing.” The two decades of this study, which include economic stabilization,
the recovery programs, and comprehensive social and urban policies of the
New Deal, end with the Housing Act of 1949, whose Title I section permit-
ted slum clearance for urban renewal projects.1
While the study focuses both on urban social transformations and visual
discourses about the city, 1929 is adopted as the historical marker year that
introduces changes in both spheres, to the extent that historical parallels
are at all possible. As noted, the striking representational contrast of urban
imaginaries from the 1920s (the decade particularly signifcant because of
the prevalence of “metropolitan flms” or “city symphonies” in both Europe
and in the U.S.) as opposed to the 1930s (and in turn, from the 1940s as
opposed to the 1950s) is one of the subjects of this study; thus, the examples
from cinema of the 1920s and the 1950s bracket the historical period sev-
eral years back and forward in order to point to these shifts.
The construction of the Chrysler (1929–1930) and Empire State (1928–
1931) buildings as the key markers of the New York City skyline, the “cathe-
drals of commerce,” the symbols of the city’s economic might, commenced
at the very eve of the Great Depression and were completed during its frst
years (see Tafuri 1979). The example is suggestive of the linkages between
the transformation of the built environment, and the social and economic
processes infuencing urban change as well as metropolitan imaginaries. The
ending markers of the study were more ambiguous – one marker represents
the end of World War Two, or in the New York context, the VJ-Day celebra-
tion in Times Square, although to emphasize the signifcance of urban trans-
formations and examine the post-war years, the study concludes at the end
of the decade, with the adoption of the Housing Act which foreshadows the
following decade of large-scale urban renewal, discussed in the fnal chapter.
While the literature on the 1890–1940s New York “landscape of moder-
nity” (Ward and Zunz 1992) has contributed important historical insights,
 New York’s agitated urban modernity 29
the relationships between urban transformations and imaginaries, and the
changing role of popular art in the 1930s and the 1940s, have not been suff-
ciently examined. Thus, in urban planning and sociological terms, the perio-
dization from the 1920s to the 1950s tackles largely the frst phase of urban
restructuring discussed in Part Three of Janet Abu-Lughod’s (1999) study
of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In cinema studies terms, the intro-
duction of sound in 1927 with The Jazz Singer (1927, d. Alan Crosland)
produced by Warner Brothers, the Hays Code of 1930, and the House on
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) crackdown on the “Hollywood
left” in 1947 and 1950 represent the key historical markers. Given the polit-
ical persecution of flmmakers in this period, and an increasing sentiment of
paranoia, rarely do cinematic visions of the 1950s urbanity adopt a stance
as critical as the late 1940s noir narratives or the social problem flms of
the 1930s. The book, thus, examines the conceptual set of linkages termed
metaphorically agitated urban modernity through a dual focus on urban
transformations and imaginaries of the American city – applied to a period
slightly longer than the two decades, starting with the metropolitan flms of
the 1920s and ending just after the formal conclusion of flm noir by 1955
(Kiss Me Deadly, d. Robert Aldrich)/1958 (Touch of Evil, d. Orson Welles),2
or in urbanist terms, concluding with the publication of Jane Jacobs’ Death
and Life of Great American Cities (1961), tackled in Chapter 6.

American cities in transformation, 1929–1950

During the decades of gradual urbanization and stabilized population
growth between the 1920s and 1950s, thus preceding suburbanization,
racial transition, white fight, and the fnally fully apparent (although
already ongoing in the 1940s) industrial sector decline, the American cities
of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles solidifed as centers of economic,
political, and cultural power (Abu-Lughod 1999). At the same time, dur-
ing the period 1929–1945, wrought with deeper crises, beginning with the
Great Depression (1929–1933), and ending with the years after World War
Two, several American cities experienced labor unrest and racial riots but
also rising employment, and, as a result of New Deal policies, overall grow-
ing economic stability. The Great Depression inaugurated a set of events
with catastrophic consequences in Europe, and also the rise of two troubling
alternatives that ought not be equated – devastatingly, fascism in Germany,
and disturbing in its extremity, totalitarian state control in Soviet Russia.
In this context, cities emerge as centers of power, and arenas of leisure and
entertainment, and remain sites of racial and labor contestation. The urban
ascent or the establishment of the great American urban centers as seats
of political and economic power occurs following tremendous social and
demographic transformation and is accompanied by the expanded role of
planning in the period following the economic crisis.
As late as 1930, the U.S. was only partially urbanized; the dominance
of cities, their establishments as centers of power and control, is striking
30 New York’s agitated urban modernity
and contested up until the second decade of the period of study (see chap-
ter 1 in Kennedy 1999). As the greatest benefts of economic growth in
early 20th century occurred in urban areas, the cities also became sites
where the setback caused by the Depression was most strongly experienced,
whose greatest brunt was borne by the poorest neighborhoods and most
deprived residents, particularly minority populations. The impacts of the
economic crisis, however, cannot be generalized to all cities, as they were
affected differently based on their particular local economic structures,
urban governances, and social conditions (Abu-Lughod 1999). The con-
tinuing concessions to economic interests in this Fordist era contributed to
the expansion of economic opportunities, including benefts for the female
labor force (Kennedy 1999). With the limitations imposed on immigra-
tion by the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 (see chapter 1 in Foner
2000), cities became sites of ethnic integration and gradual incorporation
of white European ethnic groups,3 while at the same time racial boundaries
remained frmly maintained through institutional and social mechanisms in
the still largely segregated cities (Massey and Denton 1993).
The Northeast and the Midwest, and especially New York and its inter-
national markets, were particularly affected by the consequences of the
1929 stock market crash. As in the context of the industrial city, as much
as the period is remembered for its harsh economic conditions, it is also
remembered for government intervention, this time much broader in scope
and impact, in the form of the New Deal: poor relief, the Social Security Act
for widows, orphans, and dependent children, and the establishment of a
retirement system. The physical planning intervention included the building
of public facilities and large infrastructure projects. Thus, as the formerly
waning commitment to social reform of the Progressive Era evolved during
and after the Great Depression into the policies of the New Deal, the cities
in this period also emerged as arenas for the possible resolution of urban ills
through broad national redistributive policies and planning interventions.4
As Schuman and Sclar (1996: 434) noted, “only a national emergency …
permit[ed] a brief opportunity to expand the acceptable boundaries of
government control over development” beyond the mere regulation of the
market. The policies of the New Deal led to investment in public works,
facilities, and infrastructure in cities; the administration also importantly
supported rural rehabilitation, electrifcation, and development. By the end
of the 1940s and in the 1950s, the comprehensive planning interventions
diminished and resulted instead in the implementation of programs that,
while also providing needed housing or services, were in part misguided and
negatively affected many low-income areas.
Urban renewal and post World War Two suburbanization supported
by federal programs inaugurated a new urban era in America that was
marked by the decline of the inner city, ghettoization, and racial segrega-
tion. Suburbanization was further accelerated by “a national mania for the
motorcar and by federal policies favoring private transportation.” Jackson
(1984: 330) notes further, using the example of New York, that employment
 New York’s agitated urban modernity 31
patterns also refected this decentralization. For instance, in 1920 about
80% of jobs were in the four main boroughs of New York, in Newark or
in Jersey City, while in 1970, over half of the employment in the New York
Metropolitan Region was outside of the old urban core.
Moreover, former urbanites who later moved to the suburbs accepted
a different kind of “urban” life. Hurley (2001: 1–19) associates these new
socio-economic modes with the emphasis on commercial enticements, the
search for “middle majority” to partake in this popular luxury, visions of
good family life, and the new spatial arrangement based on the division
between a residential periphery and a production and consumption-oriented
downtown. In contrast, as noted, Hayden (1996 [1980]) has pointed out
that the new suburban paradigm heightened existing gender inequalities and
emphasized the sexual division of labor. Thus, even if discussions of postwar
suburbanization are commonly associated with the notion of “American
ways of life,” they are shaped by class, race, family, and work structures, as
well as in part by life-cycle preferences. An urban planning study uncovers
the emphasis on private over public land uses, and the inequitable conse-
quences of zoning policies, in many cases exclusionary in effect, whether
or not this intent could be legally established. In either case, even a sketchy
outline of the characteristics of this new social and spatial environment con-
trasts signifcantly with the urban, particularly inner-city, environment that
the new suburbanites left behind – so much so that it could be argued that
the new suburbs represented a rejection of the modern metropolis, even if
of course it cannot be argued that there are substantive differences between
suburban and urban ways of life absent the emphasis on class and life-cycle
stage (Gans 1995).
Although suburbanization was not a new phenomenon, the post World
War Two suburbs displayed strikingly different characteristics from the
earlier garden cities: located at the periphery, far from the inner city in
low-density, mass-produced, architecturally-uniform developments that
were characterized by “economic and racial homogeneity” (Jackson 1985:
238–241). The scale of the suburbanization phenomenon is also striking.
“By 1950 the national suburban growth rate was ten times that of central
cities, and in 1954 the editors of Fortune estimated that 9 million people
had moved to the suburbs in the previous decade” (Jackson 1985: 238).
In spite of suburbanization, American cities actually gained population in
the period 1945–1955 but did not grow as fast as suburbs; rather, the city
was “losing its metropolitan dominance” (Beauregard 2003: 79, 91). By
emphasizing these changes, the point is not to chart a simple well-known
narrative of the “decline” of the American city, critiquing federal policies
for encouraging suburbanization and urban disinvestment or the American
middle classes for abandoning the metropolis en masse. This has been done
in other studies. An analysis of urban planning and social policies of the
1930s and the 1940s can demonstrate how this gradual and partial “rejec-
tion” of the metropolis occurred by the end of the period, as well as point
to the fact that this change also entailed an abandonment of a set of social
32 New York’s agitated urban modernity
policies and political programs. In addition to the altered socio-economic
conditions and policies that promoted suburbanization and urban renewal,
the period of study marks a distinct, critical set of changes in the ways urban
life was envisioned, perceived, and culturally conceived.
Urban America of the 1930s and 1940s is marked by unresolved ten-
sions: the deep economic crisis that necessitated systems of social protec-
tion, the political crisis of World War Two and the beginning of the Cold
War, the expansive yet not always satisfactory redistributive programs, and
a lack of social polices for racial integration. The latter is particularly criti-
cal since the percentage of blacks migrating to northern cities more than
doubled in the period 1900–1940. The physical planning changes included
investment in cities – the continuation of the building of the skyscraper
city, the construction of low- and moderate-income housing construction,
public and infrastructure works, and the anticipation and active promotion
of post-war suburbanization – the management of regional growth, and the
infrastructure and transportation systems needed to accommodate increas-
ing traffc and car ownership. As the middle class abandoned cities for sub-
urbs and federal investment in cities declined, the metropolitan urbanism
of the 1930s and 1940s was undone by the constellation of broader forces
and city-specifc policies and conditions in the post World War Two era,
without the critical urban tensions that came to the foreground in these two
decades ever being fully addressed or resolved.
If, as Eric Hobsbawm (1996: 85–177) contends in The Age of Extremes,
the 20th century simply cannot be understood without knowing the period
1929–1945, so too the crises of the modern American urban world that fol-
lowed cannot be fathomed without a knowledge of urban conditions in the
decades of the 1930s and 1940s.

New York’s landscape of modernity

In the context of the 1930s and 1940s social, economic, and political trans-
formations, New York offers a privileged arena of observation. New York
epitomized urban extremes of wealth and inequality in the early 20th cen-
tury, and was also seen as an “un-American” exception (see Bender 2002)
because of its tremendous diversity, its particularly intense accumulation
of capital, and its pioneering role in social planning and housing policies.
Surpassing Boston, the city became America’s cultural capital – the home
of Broadway theaters, major radio and television networks, book and mag-
azine publishing, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan
Opera, and the New York City Ballet. “By 1940, with a city population
of more than seven million and a metropolitan population of more than
eleven million, New York had become the world’s largest and richest city”
(Jackson 1984: 323). New York City’s population was 7,454,995 in 1940
(an increase of almost half a million in comparison to 1930), and 7,891,984
in 1950 and declined only slightly in 1960 to 7,781,984; in the same period,
 New York’s agitated urban modernity 33
the non-Puerto Rican black population increased from 328,000 in 1930 to
1,060,000 in 1960 (Jackson 1995: 921).
But in the 1930s New York also emerged as a city in economic distress
torn by racial contestation (Harlem riots in 1935 and 1943), and tenant and
labor unrest. At the same time, under the helm of a liberal-reformist coali-
tion mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, the city instituted a set of reforms and redis-
tributive programs in the urban planning realm, notably, building the frst
public housing project in the nation, and developing a network of highways
and parks under the supervision of Robert Moses. The physical planning
of the period included the building of public facilities and large infrastruc-
ture projects, exemplifed in Moses’ early career as the parks commissioner
and executor of public infrastructure projects. In the same period, the mag-
nifcence of the skyscraper city epoch of “commerce and convenience” con-
tinued with the “completion” of the marvelous Manhattan skyline,5 not
only with the noted Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, but also with
Rockefeller Center (1931–1940) (see Stern et al. 1987, Stern et al. 1995).
The period termed metaphorically as the era of agitated urban modernity
resonates in this context with the powerfully manifested tensions between
the creation of the built environment, signaling New York’s metropolitan
dominance, amidst economic crises, racial tensions, and labor contention.
The contestation is often overlooked in discussions that point to the sta-
bility of the city, particularly in the 1940s. Tracing relationships between
socio-economic conditions, political alignments, and popular discontent,
and policies and planning projects, is particularly relevant for the examples
of popular discontent in the housing sector in New York. In July 1932, for
example, neighborhood groups prevented evictions of tenants in the Lower
East Side, with “crowds up to 1,000 neighbors stopping evictions;” fur-
ther, “grassroots resistance succeeded in restoring 77,000 evicted families to
their homes in New York City” (Abu-Lughod 1999: 179). Indeed, in part in
response to this agitation, by 1937 in New York there were 2,330 housing
units built.6 This marks New York’s pioneering role in public housing that
precedes the federal Housing Act of 1937. Janet Abu-Lughod (1999: 180)
emphasizes that “the building of Harlem Houses was undertaken in rapid
response to racial unrest,” although evidence also points to the political
power of the black leaders and LaGuardia’s policies. Also notable in this
context are the similarities with LaGuardia’s rejection of the riot investi-
gating commission report’s recommendations (that charged that extreme
poverty was the cause of the riot) with Lyndon Johnson’s later rejections
of the Kerner Report’s fndings. These examples highlight the tumultuous
aspects of a period remembered as a phase of stability preceding urban
renewal; the instances cited further indicate the kernels of the race problem
that exploded in urban America in the mid-1960s. Riots occurred in Harlem
again in 1943, although not to the same extent as in Detroit in the same
year. Further, this was a period of signifcant labor unrest as well as signif-
cant gains for unions in New York, manifested in the successful lobbying for
34 New York’s agitated urban modernity
the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. (Although, it should
be noted, in the case of these protests, that these tensions were present to
a much lesser degree than in the earlier periods of the city’s history – most
horrifcally as in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 that claimed the lives
of 146 workers, mostly young women).
In New York 1930, Robert A.M. Stern et al. (1987: 757) suggest that
the metropolis in the decade of the Great Depression was understood by
its economic, political, and cultural elite to be “an essential but unnatural
phenomenon.” Thus,

following World War II, New York changed rapidly from a clearly
defned and unifed metropolis to the principal but not exclusive focus
on an entity whose boundaries stretched far beyond those of a tradi-
tional city to constitute a vast, regional urbanism that has come to be
known as “megalopolis.”
(Stern et al. 1987: 757)7

While a trajectory of disinvestments, accompanied by a different set of

socio-economic conditions and public policies, can be clearly discerned as
the economic and racial composition of cities changed, the discourses and
perceptions of urban life8 from the period of study present a more complex,
more ambivalent picture of America.
This book thus combines historical, cultural, and social urban loci of
investigation. Even as an interdisciplinary urban studies inquiry ought to
deny forms of essentialism,9 any argument based on the contrast of a par-
ticular set of urban modes of life, even if inclusionary, might still dangerously
resemble a nostalgic or an arbitrary array of particular urban communities.
Scholars have also argued that the seemingly “organic” approaches to the
study of urban life have also neglected class differences or vestiges of racial
discrimination.10 The counterpoint example of New York’s heterogeneity
and class differences, its dynamism and also its social polarization, remains
an extraordinary pole of any comparison in any historical period.11 Studies
of New York have thus yielded critical analytical works about urban ine-
quality, especially in the post-1975 fscal crisis period, and also illustrative
examples of urban promise12 as well as scholarship about visions and senses
of the city in arts and literature.13 A fascination with the city has also marked
the feld: even in cases where a scholar would be cautious not to impose his
or her own sets of urban preferences over the object of study, the very writer
is typically a New Yorker by choice. Critical reevaluation of nostalgic dis-
courses of New York has, however, also taken place, in particular in the
cases of urban spaces that have changed dramatically, as is evident in the
scholarship on Times Square, for instance (see Berman 2006, Delany 1999,
Reichl 1999, Sagalyn 2001, Taylor 1991).14 Nevertheless, specifc periods
in the city’s history that might have offered opportunities for a more equi-
table and inclusive environment,15 or the political trajectories not pursued,
planning visions not realized, or creative cinematic imaginations curtailed16
 New York’s agitated urban modernity 35
rather than unfettered, have also marked the New York studies debate. The
trope of agitated urban modernity is signifcant in all three respects: it rec-
ognizes fascination with the city and its art; it recognizes and also challenges
the nostalgic emphasis on the urban imagery of the period, especially in the
case of flm noir; and it points to the critical infuence of urban social and
cultural discourses, marked by the period of crises.
It would be erroneous to claim that the late 1920s, the 1930s, and the
1940s were the golden age of the American metropolis. Kenneth Jackson
has used the notion, however, to refer to the broader historical period of
1890 to 1940 in the case of New York (Jackson 1984) – in the period of
study, rather, we can fnd evidence of both urban promise and predicament.
Understanding cultural discourses and visions of urbanity of this period,
including why it was perceived with such ambivalence by urban scholars,
planners, and public offcials, as well as by the broader public, and why and
how it was in part “rejected” or undermined, is critical for an understanding
of American urban 20th century transformations, as well as how we conceive
of cities today. This is the case for two reasons. First, in an urban planning
and sociological sense, socio-economic changes and unresolved political ten-
sions and processes resulted in urban renewal, suburbanization, and racial
exclusion, and thus defned in much-maligned terms post World War Two
urban America. Second, visions of 1940s urbanity are marked by an ambi-
guity characterized by the devaluing, as well as the enticement, of urbanity.
But select cinematic visions of the last decade of study also demonstrate
that the suburban alternative was not perhaps perceived as the unquestion-
able cultural ideal, a prototype of the “American dream.” Thus, although
discourses critical of urban life, or in worst cases overtly laden with anti-
urban biases, have older origins, urban visions from the 1920s to the 1950s
capture a specifc set of biases towards the American city that has marked
subsequent urban representations and that emerges behind an important
layer of contemporary memories of the “lost” American metropolis. In this
manner, this book examines cultural processes that have accompanied the
change from the metropolis to the megalopolis in the post World War Two
period; the changing narrative and visual imagination of urban life in flm
as popular art and mass medium in this period highlights a particularly sig-
nifcant aspect of the cultural discourses of urbanity in the period of study.17

New York skyline and the discourses of urban ambiguity

Before the establishment of the Hollywood studio system and until the intro-
duction of sound in 1927, New York was the very center of the American
flm industry. In 1929, one quarter of the national flm production was
still based in New York, where flms like The Musketeers of Pig Alley (d.
D. W. Griffth, 1912), starring Lillian Gish, were flmed on location (in
this case, the Lower East Side) and numerous dramas directed by Allan
Dwan, for instance, combined on-location sequences with studio shooting
in Astoria (Stern et al. 1987: 78–79; see also Muzzio 1996: 194). In addition
36 New York’s agitated urban modernity
to the Astoria studios established by the Famous Players-Lasky Company
(which changed the name into Paramount) in 1920, Fox built studios on
Tenth Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets the same year, and William
Randolph Hearst opened his Cosmopolitan Studio in Harlem on 127th
Street and Second Avenue in 1927 (Stern et al. 1987: 78–79).
In Down the Hudson (d. Frederick S. Armitage and A.E. Weed, 1903), the
camera captures natural and urbanized landscapes at a speed faster than boat
travel would permit, suggesting both the rapidity of industrialization and
memory-images of landscapes, rather than capturing an actual travel experi-
ence. Early 20th century cinematic New York is also more prosaic, however
– a site of titillating imagery in What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New
York City (d. George S. Fleming and Edwin S. Porter, 1901), a gallery of
colorful Brooklyn characters as in The Thieving Hand (d. J. Stuart Blackton,
1908), or a collection of popular amusement sights at Coney Island in the
eponymous flm Coney Island (d. Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, 1917), in which
Buster Keaton and the cross-dressing Fatty Arbuckle engage in variety of
mishaps. Keaton’s Cameraman (1928), which includes an insensitive yet pre-
dictably self-mocking scene in Chinatown appears to suggest that deceptions
can only be undone by “accidental” urban camera work. A class-divided
city of identity transformation fgures too, as in Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration
(1915), in which a former gang leader fnds “education and inspiration” in
the settlement house. (Walsh returned to New York themes in The Bowery
in 1933 to depict the 1890s city.) In Manhandled (d. Allan Dwan, 1924),
Gloria Swanson’s impoverished shop girl Tessie McGuire is roughed up
in the crowded subway, prefguring several forms of assault that she will
have to endure before her partner will see her as guiltless. The Saphead (d.
Herbert Blaché and Winchell Smith, 1920) will simply introduce Wall Street
in an intertitle as “a little street where money is everything and everything
is money,” while in Lights of New York (d. Bryan Foy, 1928), a small-town
protagonist from “the main street that is 45 minutes from Broadway but a
thousand miles apart,” is swindled by New York bootleggers into opening
up a money laundering barber shop on 46th street. Redeemed in the end, he
and his girlfriend (routinely assaulted by her gangster boss in the night club
where she works) are advised by a New York police offcer to return to the
country and “leave the roaring 40s.” Similarly, in Lonesome (d. Paul Fejos,
1928) the protagonists (who accidentally meet and separate in Coney Island)
daydream of a little white house with blue shingles in the country. That
flm, opening with a train zooming past New York tenements, is Simmelian
([1905] 2004) in its proclamation that loneliness is most diffcult in the
“whirlpool of modern life,” and in its transposition of a ticking clock over
the daily routine of a switchboard operator and a manufacturing worker. In
Rouben Mamoulian’s Applause (1929), an aging burlesque dancer’s grown
daughter is saved from harassment on the street by sailor with whom she
goes on to spend a night on the Brooklyn bridge observing the city. (“Even
Brooklyn looks pretty!”) In another sequence, gazing at the Woolworth
building from a rooftop, the sailor proposes, inviting her to leave the city
 New York’s agitated urban modernity 37
for Wisconsin. She fnally accepts his offer, in the concluding lines of the
flm, to go “away from this awful place.” But agitation and class difference
will come into sharper focus with the Great Depression. In Buster Keaton’s
agitated Sidewalks of New York (d. Zion Myers and Jules White, 1931),
“East Side kids” roaming free in the streets rescue from danger Keaton’s
philanthropist (who had built for them a gym in their neglected tenement
neighborhood). His uptown mansion was built “75 years ago,” boasts the
host, while Keaton’s romantic interest, an older sister of an East Side kid,
comments, “if it were in our neighborhood, 75 families would live here.”
In Central Park (d. John G. Adolf, 1932), which commences with an aerial
shot and skyline imagery, two unemployed strangers share a hot dog stolen
from a food stand by Joan Blondell’s Dot. “First meal I’ve had in days,”
responds Dot’s homeless, penniless future partner (Wallace Ford). The flm
features too a malnourished lion which breaks out of the Central Park Zoo;
prowling through the park, the lion reaches a banquet hall where the animal
terrifes frst the African-American caterers in white uniforms, then the affu-
ent black-tie white New Yorkers in their dining room and dance hall.
By 1934, more than half of the movies produced in the U.S. were set in
urban areas and “over a third were set in New York, with an additional
12 percent located in an unidentifed city that often resembled New York”
(Stern et al. 1987: 78–79). While early 20th century New York flms pre-
sented documentary glimpses of urban life (Sanders 2001: 26), flmmakers of
the subsequent decades realized that the city’s visual qualities could be pre-
sented to popular audiences as spectacles through sequences of staged chases
and stunts, as well as by shooting everyday “spectacular” occurrences – rush
hour crowds amidst the rising towers, the glittering lights of the metropolis
at night. The scale and visual dynamism of these images was unparalleled if
compared to other cities – New York’s spectacular qualities made it into at
once a unique cinematic metropolis and also a universal American big city.18
Further, physical reality is an important domain of urban flms of the
period albeit neither in a literal sense nor exactly in a manner envisioned by
contemporaneous flm theories of Andre Bazin or Siegfried Kracauer, as will
be discussed. Cinematic visions of the skyline can be seen as documentary
images to the extent that they frame the urban environment and record
the creation of the skyscraper city. In the case of flms set in New York,
these visions predominate up until the late 1920s and appear again in the
post World War Two period. However, in the 1930s and 1940s, prior to
the introduction of flm technologies that enhanced the ability of the flm
camera to record sights and sounds outdoors (as can be seen in post-World
War Two productions, in particular), the skyline visions were overwhelm-
ingly staged in Hollywood studios. This enabled a cost-effective mode of
production for several flms at once, many of which used the same sets with
slight modifcations. As James Sanders documented, art directors applied
several techniques in recreating the New York skyline in Hollywood stu-
dios: the standing sets that included the entire recreated New York streets,
painted two-dimensional “scenic backings” as seen through the windows,
38 New York’s agitated urban modernity
three-dimensional miniature constructions of skyscrapers, painted views
on glass sheets that enabled composite visions of both static sets and also
crowds in motion, and rear projections for scenes that required moving
backgrounds (Sanders 2001: 62–84). These examples suggest the manner of
recreating, staging, or faking the New York City skyline or neighborhood
streets in Hollywood studios but tell us little about the relatedness of sets
to flm narratives. Perhaps an infnite number of relationships between the
two could be charted. Researchers who focused on the physical aspects of
art design outlined several types of schemes adopted by studio set designers.
Set designs represent: a) minimalist denotative enclosures for protagonists;
b) expressive forms that de-familiarize ordinary environments by offering
metaphorical linkages to the narrative; c) embellishments that heighten the
spectacular aspects of flms; d) stylized artifces; and e) explicit narrative sig-
nifers, often in flms shot in one location (Affron and Affron 1995: 37–40)
(although the latter case could also apply to narratives focused on specifc
spatial environments – not necessarily shot on one location). All of these
types – and their elaborate variations – can be found in Hollywood produc-
tions that featured the New York skyline and streets.
But linkages between the actual and the staged visions of New York
in the 1930s and 1940s were also more elusive. Namely, art directors in
Hollywood created the skyline sets to deliberately simulate and approxi-
mate the real city. This applies to most flms set in New York except for the
musicals of the 1930s where the sets are deliberately embellished or styl-
ized, as for example in 42nd Street. As Sanders explains, Hollywood studios
maintained extensive photographic fles on New York views produced by
teams routinely sent to New York to document the city. This highlights the
emphasis on restaging the urban environment to closely mimic the actual
urban change. But in recreating the real New York, alterations in scale, size,
and even the position of buildings were also common on sets. Art directors
and set designers at times even included additional structures that looked,
as it were, of New York. New York created in Hollywood, a set designer
proclaimed, presented “a more subtle” even “poetic” reality for the flm; it
was “more real than real” (Sanders 2001: 66).
But a closer look at Hollywood flms presents a discrepancy between
the designers’ intentions and actual flms. Even if art directors strived to
create a slightly altered “impression of reality,” in Christian Metz’s (1974)
flm theory terms, many flm sets of the period appeared as embellishments
rather than expressive, much less poetic, renderings. A sense of the arti-
fciality of the re-creation becomes apparent in these productions in spite
of the elaborate attempts of make the city look “real.” In some cases, the
sets are stylized and deliberately artifcial but they also present a critique of
the artifce produced in Hollywood in a manner that masks deeper narra-
tive conficts or contradictions. This is perhaps the most critical difference
between Hollywood and independent productions – the settings of the cities
that the latter feature are radically different, presenting unglamorized, if not
explicitly realist, visions of protagonists and their lifeworlds.
 New York’s agitated urban modernity 39
In the case of Hollywood flms, however, the relationship between visions
of the New York environments staged in studios and narrative constructs
is also further complicated by the predominance of both European direc-
tors and also formerly New York-based writers in Hollywood. In these
accounts, New York visions emerge in part as exilic renderings of longing
for the lost city. This could be one dimension of the cinematic “homage to
possibility,” in Mary Ann Doane’s (2003) words, that might include social
and political connotations, genre interpretations, or homages to “loss” of a
particular place or neighborhood narrative that the writers who moved to
California during the Great Depression associated with New York. Perhaps
not paradoxically, the cinematic aspect of this very longing was also a part
of the glorious substance of the New York splendor so desired by studio
producers and directors. Herman Mankiewicz’s sighing remark, “oh to be
in Hollywood, wishing I was back in New York” (Cited in Sanders 2001:
60), recalls this aspect of the longing, iconic, mythical dimension of the
imagined metropolis replicated in a variety of skyline visions in Hollywood.
Thus, taking into account the fact that many flms with New York themes
produced in Hollywood studios were directed by European exiles based on
screenplays by New York writers, homages to various lost cities could also
be found in them. Naremore’s (1998) thesis that flm noir is a contempo-
rary idea projected onto the past, as well as Dimendberg’s (2004) argu-
ment that these flms refect traumas of unrecoverable space and time, could
then be reinterpreted as well in relation to the multiple exilic narratives in
Hollywood of the noir era. If we take into consideration the fact that many
New York writers moved to Hollywood during and because of The Great
Depression, and that many others were exiles evading fascism in Europe,
possible linkages between crises and staging particular visions of urban
environments begin to emerge in the earlier decade as well.
But replications of similar sets and imaginaries in a great number of flms
were in part also expected to meet Hollywood fscal criteria within specifc
production standards and to match as well genre constructs that audiences
were becoming accustomed to.19 As noted in the introduction, flm is criti-
cally marked by a feedback process in which audience preferences and tastes
impact flm themes; this applies not merely to narratives but also to the
relationships between the narratives and settings (Gans 1957). Thus visions
of a “lost Berlin” projected onto New York or the New York of the East
Coast writers’ imaginations were delimited by production requirements,
Hollywood settings, flm technologies of the period, genre requirements,
and audience expectations.
The New York skyline permeated photographic and visual art, in res-
onance with broader cultural discourses of urbanity. The relationship
between flm and other sources of popular discourse on the city is, however,
ambivalent. This relationship was further mediated by cinematographic
technologies, as well as visual styles and directorial approaches. Many crime
story flms were actually derived from tabloid journalism or garish pulp fc-
tion, but black and white cinematography, and especially that of New York,
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
bûtenbientsjes wêze wol. Hy joech him folle ôf mei wiersizzerij fen
waer en wyn, en do er dat in mannich kearen roaid hie, mienden de
skippers, det er de wyn yn de mouwe hie, en hja makken him Greva
fen stoarm en onwaer. Syn greatste ljeafhabberij hie er yn it
stjerresjitten, en dat kaem him skoan to stade; hwent waer en wyn
wolle noch al ’ris nei de moanne lústerje. Ek sizze se fen him, det hy
de gongen fen keningen en naesjes mei in loerjend each neigiet, en
det er dêr sa folle wrâldske wysheit fen opdien hat, det er frij goed
wit, hwet er swije ef sizze moat. It ien en oare kin men ek sa wol
hwet oan syn brief sjen, tinkt my. Der sit geleardheit genôch yn, ja,
ik scoe sizze, fiersten to folle.
Ik leau net det Eölus my goed fette hat: oars kin ik net bigripe, det
er my sa útheuvelt. Mar ik woe it ’er dochs net útlitte; hwent as myn
goede namme by jimme dat net útstean kin, den is er doch nin
botsen wirdich. Hy hat oars sa folle ongelyk net, mar it is in
bolderbast. Syn riddenaesjes oer pompen, waerglêzen en sok spil lit
ik ek for syn eigen rekkening. Ik leau egentlik net det er goed wit,
hwet ’er fen binnen yn it ierdryk omgiet. Mar dêr scil ik him noch
wol ’ris oer sprekke, as ik tiid hab. Bikôgje dit nou earst mar ’ris op
jimme gemak, Friezen, en as ’t jimme net to dreech yn de mage laeit,
scil ik om oare gerjochten tinke.
Wy litte nou Eölus mei syn wyn en steatkinde wêze. It foarjier
winket ús ta, en lit ús de earste lije loften rûke, dy de slomjende
natúr oan it oplibjen bringe. De kij kealje, en de boeren bringe ús
bjist for bjistpankoeken. De bûthúzen biginne to stymjen; de âlde kij
bâlte nei de farske mailoft. De hoanne kraeit, det it oer it hiele gea
klinkt; de hinnen keakelje en lizze peaske-aeijen. De famkes
toudounsje op it grien; de jonges komme mei toppen en hoepen, mei
bakkerts en knikkerts, mei rasket-boerden en prikken op strjitte; hja
ringje ef spylje hazze en houn; hja boartsje en kreauwe, hja geije,
hja kraeije it heldere foarjier út. De beamkers bigjinne mei
beammen, en heisters, en hagen; de gnjirkers mei iere en djûre
blommen op ’e merke to kommen. De boerinne stiet ’er mei hinne-
aeijen yn in braskoerke neist, en de boerefeint mei leep-aeijen yn in
netsje om de rânne fen de hoed hinne. De finnen bigjinne to
grienjen: de spjichtige flotgêrzen lizze lâns de iggen fen de sleat al
to driuwen op it wetter. In inkelde leep pipet ús yn ’e fierte to mjitte.
De boeresoan giet mei de pols op it skouder yn ’t fjild, en ljept sleat
út sleat yn, en rint rjucht op it steed fen de ikker ta, dêr de sy op it
nêst sit. De eilammen bletterje en hippelje om de moer hinne; hja
hoarte en stjitte mei de kopkes yn it jaer op, om it lêste dripke tate
los to meitsjen, en as se sûgje hipple-wipje se mei de wite stirtkes fen
nocht. De protters, de mosken en de douwen pearje; hja komme yn
ús tunen, en tôgje mei de prikken en striekes, om hjar nêst to
bouwen. Ha! hark my dêr bûten dy ljurk ’ris. Helder op, myn
feintsje! Kladderje yn de blauwe loft op, en snetterje ’t mei dyn
wyldsang oer it ierdryk út, det it foarjier oan it rissen is. Eölus
forstommet om nei dyn linte-liet to harkjen; der is mar in lyts
sigentsje oan de heldere loft. Hy kin allinne mar harkje; hy kin net
mear rekkenje, hwet keningen en folken dwaen moatte, en nin
minske scoe nou ek nei syn rekkeningen lústerje wolle. It wol alles
út de muffe huzen nei bûten ta. Hân oan hân kuijerje ik mei myn
famke, en mei Tsjalling troch de finnen. De berntsjes rôlje en djoeije
om my hinne; hja ploaitsje maiblommen, en riuwe se oan triedtsjes
ta krânsen, dy se om de holle slingerje. En Tsjalling en myn famke
njeurje it sankjen:

Maitiids earste blomke;

Ljeave fen de wei!
Ut Gods heilichdomme
Komstou, moaije, wei.

Berntsjes meije bliuwe,

As hjar heit hjar ropt,
Dou bist’ foarjiers boppe,
As dyn heit dy ropt.

Maitiids earste blomke,

Bliere fen de wei!
’k Lit my liede en sizze,
’k Gean dyn stappen nei.
 Nij-Fryslân op Spitsbergen, dizze 22ste fen Decimber-moanne,
1836.

Nommele Frjeone!

Der wier in goed man oan de pûster, net? En dêr bin ik al wer. Dyn
brief haw ik lêzen, en ik moat sizze detstou masteraftich de kinst fen
dyn gilde forstieste; ik mien de goudtriedlûkers-kinst, om in ding,
dat men op in kaerteblêd sette kin, ta in lange preek út to spinnen.
Wel, onwiten, hwet in brief! It docht my net nij ef de namme fen
Eölus is mar in spjelde west, dêrste al dyn nijs oan ophinge haste; sa
brûke jimme de teksten út de bibel ommers ek for de preken. Mar ik
bin hwet koarter fen styl, en ik forwachtsje, det dit bytsje dy noegje
scil, lyk as ik mei gedild dyn ivige epistel útlêzen hab. It skriuwen wol
hjir ek net bêst. It sit hjir yn in fjouwerkant hol, tsjien foet ûnder de
groun; boppe op it tek laeit wol saun foet snie; lykwol friest it hjir,
det it knypt. De fingers binne my knoffelich, en de inkethoarn moat
ik yn de gloede sette, om de inket ontteid to hâlden. Ik hie noch wol
hwet mear skreaun; mar wy hawwe niis in Sint Niklaes krige, dêr wy
allegearre fen forbauwerearre binne. Mei dy hichte fen snie kaem ’er
in wite iisbear boppe oan ús skoarstien to snuffeljen, en wylst wy
nearne om tochten, bruit sinjeur dêr hals oer kop troch hinne
midden ûnder ús del. Gelokkich wier myn âldste soan Boréas by my,
in dregen feint, dêr ik oerre-moarn mei nei jimmes op reis scil. Dy
hat folle yn dizze oarde forkeard, en kin dy rûge nachtbidders op in
hier; flink naem er in greate iisbile en sloech him de kop yn, det de
hersens tsjin de weach fen myn bêd sieten. Jimme kleije oer it
skoarstienjild, en det de skatters alle hoeken en hernen fen jimme
huzen trochsnuffelje om in hird to finen; mar de wite commizen op
Nij-Fryslân binne net nofliker; hwent dy tingje dadelik nei de lever,
en hâlde parate executie, net fen dyn húsrie, mar fen dyn flêsk en
bonken.
It steekje haw ik foun, dêrstou seiste. Hjir stjûr ik it nou werom, en
om dy to biwizen, det dy grap mei de bear de suvere wierheit is, haw
ik it beest strûpt en de boel yn syn fel biteard. For dyn collega haw ik
in kollekte dien by de Domenijs op Mercurius, en ik haw fjirtjintûzen
goune yn goud oproun, dat yn it steekje laeit. Aste de man it jild
jowste, moaste tsjin him sizze, det syn goeddoggers net hawwe wolle,
det dy it op in pompjirren souderke leit; hwent dêr koe it wol ’ris
krekt sa gau trochfalle as sy it joegen. Hja wolle det hy der in greid-
pleatske for keapet, en det er dy sels sa hwet biboerket; den hat er
mei ien hwet oanslach for in pear grouwe jonges. Hja wolle net, det
hy ’er oar pompier for keapet, as in planke fol púk-púk-bêste
Latynske, Grykske en Hebreauske boeken. Hwent de domenijs op
Mercurius sizze, det it smoarch for in predikant stiet, det er fen dy
dingen net folle mear wit as in Kattechisearmaster.
Om de greatste gekken scil ik by gelegenheit wol ’ris tinke. Mar as
ik in partij meinim, den geane se net nei de moanne, mar nei de
planeet Pallas. Dêr hawwe se hjar graech; hwent hja sizze, det er nin
nofliker folk yn de bihânlinge is as greatste gekken fen de ierde; as se
dy dêrre mar in goudpompjirke op de mouwe spjeldzje, den binne se
sa optein, det men der mei omslepe kin as in dweil.—Yn it
weromkommen haw ik in foech healûre op ’e moanne oanlein, en de
Noarger rún spritsen. Hy wier prot op Doktor Eeltsje, det dy syn
brief drukke litten hie. As hy Noarger rún bleaun wier, koe ’t him nin
drip skele; mar as men minister is, den wol men just foar de hiele
wrâld net witte det men foar de Kollumersweachster tsjiiswein roun
hat. Hy wier oars bêst to sprekken, en hy sei my, det er op ierde faek
winske hie, om yn jimme tsjinst to kommen; hwent hy hie noait
mirken, det jimme hynsteboalen wierne. En hy winske it noch wol;
hwent Jan-rap en syn maet toude him op de hûd, en as er de baes
klage, den sei dy: “Ja, dêr biste for, om bruijen to krijen. De koegels,
dy ik oars krije scoe, kinne aerdich yn dy smoare.”—Nei it bisnoeide
jild haw ik him frege. Hy loek de skouders op. Ik sei “Ja, jou
Excellintie; dat dogge se op Terra ek. Mar dat helpt hjar net folle.” Do
bigoun er my to forheljen, det er op de moanne mei it selde wetter
foar de dokter west hie. Earst hie er in publicatie jown: “Oan dy
datum ta ontfang ik op de lânskantoren alle gounen tsjin tweintich
stûren it stik; nei dy datum ontfang ik de bisnoeide gounen tsjin de
wearde, dy it silver hat, dat er yn sit.” Aenstons roun elts mei in lyts
skealjen yn de bûse om it jild to weagen; hwent nimmen wier sa gek
om in goune for it folle jild to nimmen, dy mei twa moanne mar
sechstjin stûren wirdich wier. Dy nin jild yn hûs hie wier bliid; mar
de kapitalisten en bankiers, dy tûzenen, ja hûndert-tûzenen yn hûs
hienen, forlearen yn ienen kapitalen fen tweintich en tritich tûzen
gounen. Dy wierne den ek pûrrazend west, en hienen de minister
troch in rêst kantoarrinners de ruten ynsmite litten, en it hie mar in
hierke skeeld, ef hja hienen him foar syn eigen doar yn ’e grêft
forsûpt. “Mar hwerom smelte jy it jild net om, lyk as Willem de
tredde yn Ingelân dien hat?” sei ik. “Dat tanket jo de blaxem! (Hy
flokt ougryslik; dat hat er noch fen de hynstetyskers oerhâlden.) Dat
tanket jo de blaxem! andere hy, It spant om sûnder halsbrekken fen
it iene budget oan it oare to kommen, en den noch tritich miljoenen
út to pûljen, om al it jild wer op syn wearde to krijen, dat is allehiel
ús foech net.” “Mar ha je den neat dien?” frege ik. Do forhelle er my
det er dy earste publicatie yntritsen hie, omdet er bang for numero
ien wier; mar det er do, om ’er sûnder kosten ôf to kommen, it nije
jild slaen litten hie op de standaert fen it âlde útslitene en bisnoeide
jild. Yn it âlde siet troch de bân sa hwet sechtsjin stûren silver yn in
goune; en dêr liet hy de nije ek op slaen; mar yn namme bleau it
tweintich. Do wier it allegearre gelyk, en men hie it ien jild net ljeaver
as it oare. Yn it earst hiene de ljue op ’e moanne der allehiel nin erch
yn; hwent yn hjar dommens seinen se: “In goune is in goune, as wy
him mar for in goune útjaen kinne, hwet kin it ús den skele, eft ’er in
byt silver mear ef minder ynsit.” Dat wier ek sa. Mar do se for in
poarsje ierdappels fjouwer-en-tweintich stûren jaen moasten, dat se
jister mei in goune bitellen; do alles yn ienen tweintich procint
djûrder waerd; do de crediteur tofreden wêze moast, det syn skildner
him in obligatie fen tûzen goune mei in specie bitelle, dy de wearde
fen acht-hûndert hie, do er in omkearinge yn de wearde fen alle
dingen kaem, en it krekt wier, eft de foundeminten fen de hele
maetskippij omrierd waerden, do waerd it oars. De forwarringe is ’er
nou sa great, det se de minister djipper as de hel forflokke, en it scoe
my hiel net nij dwaen, det wy de iene dei ef d’ oare hearre, det se him
de hals britsen hawwe. Dat hat men fen ljue, dy in bulte rie witte.
 In nije broek kin de Noarger rún net meitsje; mar der kin sa’n
mâlle skoer net ynkomme, ef hy wit der in lape for; op dy lape leit er
wer in twade; op dy twade wer in tredde lape, dy noch greater en
tsjepper is, as al de foarige, en dat dûrret sa lang, as se allegearre ta
gelyk losskoere. Den steane se yn de moanne mei ’t bleate gat. Jimme
moatte mei de nije feargesichten tydliks mar ’ris nei de moanne op
de útkyk lizze. Ik hear det se dêr al minsken mei wjukken sjoen
habbe, en det de wiiste domenijs by jimmes út dy ontdekkinge
preekje oer Gods almacht. Nou, as jimme wjukken fen earmen op de
moanne ûnderskiede, den kinne jimme alteas wol sjen, eft de ljue dêr
in broek oan hawwe ef net.
Dyn heale brief is wol fol fen al de skea, dy ik dien hab. Ja, der
sjogge jimme op, mar it kwea, dêr ik jimme for biwarre hab, dat
kinne jimme yn jimme blinens net sjen. Der wier mar kar twiske
stilte mei de pest, ef stoarm mei gesontheit. De cholera hie glûpsk de
hiele loft wer forpeste; jimme longen sûgden by ’t heljen fen eltse
sike swietkes ’t forgif al yn; it monster sels siet yn dampen boppe
jimme to kâldgnyskjen falsker as in njirre; mei koartens hope it
jimme krimpen en stjerren to sjen eft jimme rottekrûd ynjown wier.
Ik kin dy net sizze, ho inerlik my dat griisde. Fjirtjin dagen efterien
wier ik oan it rissen; hwent dit siz ik dy, it pestdier hie him mei syn
spoeken sa fêst nêstele, det ’er in raem om reitsen dien wirde moast,
scoe it wike. Eindelik haw ik myn wirk koart en bondich dien. Mei
dat forskouwen fen de hele loft moast de fyand ek foart; dy der yn
biskûl siet. Hy aksele al tsjin; mar ik hab him wol yn it Noarden
opkrongen, en dêr kin er nou om my syn kinsten dwaen op de bearen
en de robben. As ik ’er nou de njoggen-en-tweintichste net west hie,
den hiene jimme in bulte pannen bisparre, mar eangste, skrik en dea
wierne nou jimme bûrljue west, lyk as to Munchen en to Napels.
Jimme komme ’er ôf mei de Russiske pip (de gryp). Lykwol it moeit
my, det ik sa folle earme minsken skip en libben binimme moast om
de greate heap to bihâlden, en ik forwachtsje, det de gelokkigen, dy
der neat as sein fen hawn hawwe, it ungelok fen de lijers, dy it
ontjildzje moasten, hwet to mjitte komme scille. Ik haw sa min mûlk
stikken britsen. Yn 1825 haw ik jimme diken trochboarre, dat jimme
noch yn de pong klinkt, en nou myn raem folle fûleindiger wier en
wêze moast, is it troch myn folle mijen sa biteard, det jimme der mei
de skrik ôfkomd binne.
Ek is sa’n stoarm tsjienris learsommer as de bêste preek, dystou
dwaen kinste, en ik wird forstien fen heal Europa, wylst dyn stimme
op syn bêst in formoanje-fol minsken oerroppe kin. My tinkt, jimme
binne sa dimmen en ienfâldich net mear as jimme foarâlders; der is
in greatske poch- en pronkdivel yn jimme fearn; it minste jild ef
affysje dat jimme krije, dat kin men aenstons oan jimme gong en
fearren sjen. De âlde Friezen lieten hjar dat net blike, as se in
tweintich-tûzen goune wounen ef forlearen. Hja bleauwen deselde,
net forslein yn ’e tsjinspoeden, net bliid en boarstich, as ’t foar de
wyn gong. Nou bin ik ’ris komd om dit greatske skaei to learen hwa
hja egentlyk binne; plúskes en fearren, dy foar in wynpûst
weistouwe, neat mear. Hwet tocht dy wol, do ’k dêr to Dimter al dy
mûrren omsmiet? Forbyldzje dy, det alle pochers en Godfordommers
mei hjar grousomste flokken tsjin my ynbliesden; det alle rike ljue
mei hjar tûzenen fen boerepleatsen, lânskipsbrieven en folle
jildsekken; det alle prinsen, alle keningen en majesteiten fen it
ierdryk mei hjar legers en kanonnen tsjin my oer stienen, scoene se
dat hâlde kinne? Ik leau det se wizer binne; to minste dêr ik kaem,
hawwe se noch altiid romte makke. En egentlik witte se noch net
ienris hwet ik yn ’e bouten haw. Hja miene, det hjar kanonnen al sok
fornieljend ark is, as der komme kin. Mar dou haste oan dat sjitten
fen my mei glês yn in doar sjoen, det ik út koartswyl wol ’ris in
pûstke dwaen, dat nei in skot mei krûd swimet. En hwet is krûd, dat
ôfstekt, oars, as loft dy útset, ef in pûst wyn? As ik nou de wyn ’ris
mei sa’n boarstend gewelt foartbliesde, det de hiele loft fen boppen
nei ûnderen ta mar ien kanon wier, dat ik mar jimmer-wei ôfskeat,
scoe der wol ien stien op de oare bliuwe? Scoenen alle minsken en
dieren net to pletter slein wêze, en scoe der fen alles hwet op dizze
ierde groeit en ammet, wol eat as grús en polver oer wêze? En dat
kin, dat moat ik dwaen yn dit egenste eagenblik, as myn baes it my
hjit. Hwer binne jimme nou mei jimme parmantige stap? Leau my,
frjeon; Dêr hawwe jimme nin smoar nei, om sa’n heech boarst to
setten.
Twaris komt ’er yn dyn brief, det ik in Jacobyn bin. Dat liket dy
heech to lizzen. Jimme âlde frjeon Gabe.... (Ik leau det in Fryske
matroas, dy fen Lollum fen dinne wier, it my noch ’ris op Lipari
forhelle hat.) Nou, Gabe-skroar hat ’ris op in Ljouwerter merke yn ’e
Falk iten, dêr er neist in âld lân-domenij to sitten kaem. Under de
mieltiid kaem it sa to pas, det Gabe sei: “Ik leau alles hwet yn ’e bibel
stiet, bihalven det de faer âlder is as de soan.” De domenij frege him
eft er den in deïst wier. “Né,” sei Gabe, “ik bin nin deïst, mar in
dentist.” “Zo, sei Domenij, dan staat gy hier op zulk een karretje?”
“Né, sei Gabe, ik lûk nin kiezzen, mar ik yt ’er mei, lyk as je sjenne,
Domenij.” Dou fregeste my: Binn’ je in Jacobyn? en sa scoe ’k ek
sizze kinne: Né, ik bin nin Jacobyn, mar in kakebyn, omdet ik ’er
mei blies, en bliezen is myn fek.
Ik in Jacobyn? Dat is hwet nijs. In Jacobyn wol it gebou fen de
maetskippij ôfbrekke, en ik wol it bihâlde. Ik wol rottige steden yn
balken en mûrwirk weibrekke, om nij yn ’e pleats to setten. Ik wol de
flier oanfeije, en ’er net útfeije. De measte oproeren en omkearingen,
dêr wy yn de skiednis fen hearre, binne komd, omdet de minsken
fordrukt en útsûgd waerden, en mei in liiffol arbeidzjen amper hjar
bistean hienen. De misbrûken, dêr dy ellinde út foartkomt, wol ik
weinimme, en wolstou se fordedigje en bihâlde, den bistou de
oproermakker, feint! Dou meiste hjitte sa astou wolste, legitimist,
conservateur, prinseman, keningsfrjeon, mar dou komste mei de
Jacobyn op ien strjitte út, to witten, earst oproer en forwarring,
dêrnei it canaille op de troon, en ta eintsje-bislút in tiran. Egentlik
hiene jimme den ek beide de galge oan lân en kening fortsjinne.
Ik wit net eft ik wol in wird mear oer dit ding oan dy skriuwe wol.
It is my hwette to onfoech, mar as ik it sizze mei, dou biste sa dom as
in okse! Hwa wit, eftste wol in inkel wird bigrypste fen alles, hwet ik
dy hjir siz. Kou-dom biste, siz ik. Dou witste noch nin ienders
ûnderskie twiske oppositie en opstân. Oppositie is by dy opstân, en
opstân oppositie, en hja lykje krekt sa folle op eltsoar as in baerch op
in tange. De keallestirten allyk slingerste kjitte en pisse troch eltsoar.
Oppositie riedt en rigelt, stjûrt en biskirmt, past op de pong, hâldt en
keart om it skip út de wâl to stjûren; de opstân fiert op,
fordommenearret, stjûrt alles yn de war om yn troebel wetter to
fiskjen. Oppositie fordedigt en bifestigt de wet, en de opstân foracht
en forbrekt se. De oppositie hâldt de kening en eltse wettige macht
de hân boppe de holle; de opstân wrot yn de foundeminten fen de
troon, om folk en kening yn ’t ûngelok to bringen. Astou en dyn
gelikens dat ienfâldige ding net bigripe kinne, hwet haw ik hjir den
langer yn dit hol op Spitsbergen oan dy to skriuwen? Ik scoe de
bearen noch better in constitutie bitsjutte kinne as dy. Mar, hou! it
mocht noch ’ris lokke.... Kom, ik scil in kerltsje yn de meagere groun
fen dyn forstân weagje; wol it net opkomme, yn de goedichheit, den
is it wei.
Eltse macht op dizze ierde siket alles, hwet hjar yn de wei stiet,
foart to kringen, ef ûnder de foet to krijen, om allinne oerein to
bliuwen en allinne baes to wêzen. En dat net, omdet dy macht yn de
hânnen fen in kening, fen greate hearen ef fen it folk is, mar altyt yn
de hân fen in minske birêst. Dêrom fielde men de roede fen de
twingelandije krekt sa faek ûnder de onbipealle regearring fen it folk,
as fen ien allinne. Dit is it earste en it lêste leksom fen de hiele
minskelike skiedenis. Hearsksjochte is it boskrûd, dat foar de foetten
fen elts minske laeit; ien fonkje mar, en it fljocht op. Set om de
oppermacht mar sa folle regleminten hinne aste wolste om it
fordrukken to biletten, hja scil yn ’t ein oer al dy stekken en dammen
hinne springe, as der net altiten ien by stiet, dy it hjar bilet. Dêrom is
der net allinne in grounwet, in constitutie, dy de grinzen fen de
oppermacht bipeallet, mar dy constitutie jowt oan elts it rjucht om ta
to sjen, det hja noait bûten dy grinzen komt; hja, de constitutie, ropt
it folk op, om ljue oan to stellen, dy it heft yn hânnen hawwe om de
oppermacht to twingen, det hja op hjar hiem bliuwt. Dy dat dwane,
hjitte de tsjinkearende macht, de oppositie; hja keare tsjin, as de
oppermacht, nei hjar bigryp, it skip yn de wâl stjûrt.
Mar dat scil dyn lyts holke wol to tûk wêze, heite! Kom, ik scil ’t dy
ris oars bitsjutte. In ûrwirk, in klok kenste ommers wol, net? O ja,
dou biste fen Grou, it lân fen de klokkemakkers. Nou, dêr sit slinger
en gewichten yn, oars? Kom, litte wy dy klok ’ris opwine, en nimme
de slinger der út. Roets! dêr geane de gewichten mei in grousum
getier nei ûnderen ta, en dat hâldt net op, foar det se op de groun
binne. Pomp! de gewichten steane op de groun; de klok is ôfroun; it
ûrwirk stiet stil. Dêr haste it byld fen minskelike macht, dy allinne
oan hjar sels oerlitten wirdt. Hja is net yn rêst, foar det se alle oare
machten der ûnder en oan ’t swijen hat.—Alle ongerigeldheden, dy
yn geande klokken binne, hâlde nou yn sa’n ûrwirk op. It giet ’er mei
al dy redden yn de bêste oarder en stilte ta. Mar it is de ienlikheit en
de stilte fen de dea. Dêr haste de rêst ûnder de onbipealle
oppermacht. Alles yn rep en roer, moart en brân, ef de stilte fen de
dea.
Ho bifalt dy dat? My tochte, wy moasten de klok noch ’ris opwine,
en hingje de slinger der mar wer yn. Dêr is er wer op syn pleats. De
slinger giet hinne en wer, by eltse slingering lit er net mear as ien
takke fen it kroanrêd trochslûpe, en sa wit er de gewichten, dy mei
gewelt nei ûnderen wolle op to hâlden; hy lit se wol sakje, mar nei de
rigel. De slinger fordielt de macht, dy dellûkt, op sa’n wize, det
redden en gewichten yn gelike tiden allikenske romten trochrinne.
Dy slinger, myn frjeon, is de oppositie, de tsjinkearende macht. De
oppermacht is allike onmisbaer om it ûrwirk fen steat yn biweging to
bringen en oan de gong to hâlden, as de gewichten yn de klok, mar de
oppositie past as in slinger op, det dy nei de rigel arbeidet, en noait
gysten nei ûnderen fljocht, en hjar sels en oaren dea rint.—Nou wiist
de klok de ûren ek oan, dêr it egentlik om to dwaen is, en dat scil er
nammers to krekter dwaen, hwet de slinger better op syn mjitte is. Sa
is ’t ek yn it ryk. Hwet de oppositie better op hjar plicht past, hwet de
dingen fen ’t lân better geane, en hwet in naesje edelmoediger
(fierer), riker en machtiger wirdt, lyk aste dat sjen kinste oan
Ingelân. Mar soms, as de pit út in folk giet, is dy tsjinkearende macht
to lyts; den kin se neat útfiere. Dêr giet it krekt as yn in toersklok, dêr
se de slinger fen in keamersklokje yn hinge hawwe; sa’n pyst fen in
slingerke kin dy swiere toerskloksgewichten net yn balans hâlde.
Der binne ek tiden det de tsjinkearende macht, de oppositie, in
kwea steed yn ’e holle hat: det se it gat tsjin de krebbe set, en neat
jaen ef nimme wol. Den wol se neat, en makket alle regearring
onmûgelik. Hja is den as in slinger, dy steech is en stil stiet, en de
gewichten tsjinhâldt sûnder hjar sakje to litten om it ûrwirk yn
biweging to bringen. Den stiet de hiele boel stil. Mar dat is neat. De
constitutie jowt de kening rjucht om de dwersbongelers nei hûs to
stjûren, en oan ’t folk to sizzen: “Mei dit heapske kin ik neat wirde;
jimme moatte my oare ljue ta jimme committearden stjûre”: dat wol
sizze: “Jaen my in oar slinger yn de klok; dizze, dy ’k nou fen jimme
ha, wol net hinne en wer.” En dat scil ’t folk ek wol dwaen, as it mar
oertúgd is, det it dwersbongelers binne: hwent it folk hat nin oar
bilang as det ’er goedkeap regearre wirdt, det alles op syn tiid ôfrint,
en det alles krekt op syn ûre bitelle wirdt. In forljocht folk tinkt altyd
sa: “In braef committearde fen ús is net tsjin de oppermacht, mar
tsjin de dwalingen fen de oppermacht. Hy is for de oppermacht, as it
palladium fen ús bihâld, en opdet se dat bistindich bliuwe scil,
hawwe wy him stjûrd om to weitsen, det de oppermacht hjar mei hjar
eigen kniif net snije mei.”
Mar hwet jowt dat in gehaspel en in geïggewear! En hwet is ’t
dealeske djûr, om sa’n sechstich committearden op ’t foer to
hawwen! Dêr kinne wy ommers allegearre frij fen, as men de kening
allinne regearje lit. Ja, dat is sa. As in klok altiten giet, dat jowt in
ivich getik; den slite de redden ek mear; it wirk wirdt gauwer
smoarch, en om de twa jier mei it wol himmele wirde. Den boarst de
snaer fen de gewichten ek wol ’ris, ef springt de fear. Dat jowt troch ’e
tiid in bulte kosten; en den giet yn ’t holste fen de nacht de wekker
noch ek wol ’ris los, det men út eltsoar fljucht fen it getier. Mar
dêrfor hat men ’er syn geriif ek fen; de klok giet goed, en men kin ’er
grif op ôf. De ûre, dy’t er wiist, is ’t ek. Oan in klok, dy stil stiet, is nin
slytagie; kosten fen ûnderhâld binne ’er sa to sizzen net oan; mar nin
minske hat ’er hwet oan; fen de saunhûndert-en-tweintich minuten,
dy yn de toalf ûren binne, wiist sa’n klok krekt ien nei wierheit oan;
de oare saunhûndert-njoggentjin liigt er allegearre. It is in stomme
stân-yn-’e-wei, en yn it ein wirdt er noch folle smoarger as ien dy
giet. Meast nimt men sa’n klok den út inoar, en forkwanselt him for
âld koper; mar as men tinkt: Kom, hy kin noch wol wer gean; ik wol
him wer op oarder ha; den kostet er oan oplaepjen wol helte mear as
ien, dy altiten gien hat, en dêr de hân tydliks oan hâlden is. Jonge,
jonge! Wachtsje dy for sa’n ryk, dêr ien allinne baes west is. Dat liket
fen bûten nuvere moai en stil; mar it stjonkt ’er, siz ik dy, fen binnen,
en de iene dei ef d’ oare wol it ’er honje. Ljeave wirden nin gebrek, it
blinkt ’er fen goudene klean, en it liket eft alles foarút giet.
Undertwiske rekket de flier, dy noait oanfage wirdt, sa fol fûlnis, det
de foetten fen de baes sels der net mear trochwadzje kinne, en it
eintsje-bislút is de pong leech, en oproer! Hwent it mei biteare sa as
’t wol, op it ein wirdt it kwea sa great, det it him sels opfret. Altyd
komt ’er herstel, en komt it net fen boppen del, den komt it fen
ûnderen op. En den? Nou, ja, hwet den? Tsjin eltsoar fjochte as
earme helden, ta det er in bûzehappert fen bûten oankomt, dy seit:
“Kom, frjeonen, jimme bringe alles yn tremyn; dat is ús foech net”;
en dy de partijen mei ien de hânnen bynt, en seit: “Hjir is jimme
baes! hwent baes oer jimme sels to wêzen, dat kin net langer.” Ef as
de drift yn tiids noch bikoellet, en de partijen de boel wer bilizze, den
hawwe se eltsoar sa tatakele, det se noait wer op de rjuchte hael
komme. Bigrypste nou, hwet dy klok sizze wol sûnder slinger, dy net
giet, net folle kostet, ûnder it stôf bidobbe rekket, en op it lêst fen in
âld smous út eltsoar nomd wirdt? Ef as it bêst bislacht, op it lêst mei
in bulte kosten wer oan ’e gong komt, mar noait sa goe’ net, as ien
dêr de slinger altiten yn gien hat, en dy de ûrwirkmakker dêrom
tydliks neisjen moast? Hwet tinkt dy, is ’t net better, de oppositie yn
de steat, de slinger yn de klok, en dêr tydliks hwet getier, lêst en
kosten fen, as op it lêst de steat en de klok beide wei?
My tinkt, ik sjen, hwet eagen astou fen sok praet opskoerste? En
hwêrre hat Eölus al dy wysheit wei? Jonge, ik kom fierder as dou en
dyn gelikens. Dou bliuwste op dyn pôle sitten en dêr mienste as in
frosk, dy him fen greatskens opbliest, de wysheit yn pacht to habben.
Ik kom, ik waei oeral; mar ljeafst yn Ingelân. It A-bie fen de
constitutie, dat ik dy hjir opsei, hab ik dêr leard. In turfdrager tinkt
dêr klearder oer sokke dingen as dou, en dou hjitste den noch ek
preker? Dat kinste ommers wol forstean, net?
 Hwet se by jimmes fen my reutelje, dat tel ik dêrom ek nin bean. Ik
scil wol meitsje, det ik út de reek bliuw, en sizze ûnderwiles dêr it op
stiet. Ja, ik hab dy keapljue yn minskeflêsk forsûpt; ik hab dy helske
barners fen de onskild de laech jown, en dat scoe ik noch dwaen
hjoed de dei. Mar bin ik dêrom in Jacobyn, den is Willem de Iste ek
in Jacobyn, dy net allinne yn oppositie, mar ek yn opstân tsjin de
kening fen Spanjen, syn eigen baes, him forset hat. Den binne al dyn
âffaers ek Jacobynen west, dy as helden tsjin de bloedhoun fochten
hawwe. Wol, ja! dy greate prins en hja namen dat al sa nau, do se fen
Filips de twade fortrape en útrûpele ef mei it forgif en de kûgels fen
slûpmoardners drige waerden.
Dou ropste nou for Don Carlos; folle kranten hâlde syn partij; oan
dyn smeulske praetsjes op Christina en de Cortes hear ik klear, astou
hjar yn in kopke forsûpe koeste, detstou er nin amer-fol ta nimme
scoeste. Mar wiste wol, heite, hwa Don Carlos is? Bigryp my wol; de
man sels is in sloofke, en kin neat útfiere. It is in popke, mei in
kroane op de holle en in skepter yn ’e hân, dy de earmen en foetten
fen efteren mei triedtsjes yn biweging brocht wirde. De miterhearen
en grandes, dy oan dy triedtsjes lûke, dat binne de ljue egentlik;
dêrom, hwet ik fen Don Carlos siz, dat siz ik fen de partij, dy him
stjûrt. Nou den, dy Don Carlos is de erfgenamme fen al de bigripen
fen Filips de twade, dy achttjin-tûzen fen jimme foarâlders troch de
boal formoarde hat. Hy hat de inquisitie, de pynbank, de autodefé yn
’t hert; brûkt hy se nou net, dat komt det syn hearring dêr nou net
briedt, en dat wachtet mar, det er de foetten wer ûnder it liif hat. It is
in tiger, dy de tosken útbritsen, de neilen ôfknipt binne; mar it is in
tiger, en it bliuwt in tiger. Litte de neilen wer oanwoechsen, de
tosken wer opkomd wêze, en hy scil oan de jongen dwaen, hwet syn
oarreheit-en-hjarre oan de âlden diene. En dy man hat de winsken
fen dyn hert! Oan him scoeste graech dyn jild, dyn help jaen om de
mêst wer oerein to krijen, en in macht op de troon to hifkjen,
hwerfen it fnûkjen allinne de groun lein hat ta al de krêft en frijdom,
dy dyn lân sont twahûndert jier hawn hat, en ta dy glory fen Oranje,
dy útblonken hat boppe alle kroanen fen Europa. Haste den allehiel
forgetten fen hwet aeijen detstou set biste? Kinste it nêst net langer,
dêrste yn útbret biste? Man! dat nêst is woun yn de striid fen dyn
âffaers tsjin de bloedhoun, dêrste it jong nou fen kardeste; is it lein
yn ’t bloed, dat er hjar en dy onforgelikelike Willem fen Oranje ôftape
hat. O! as dy âlden de holle út de grêven lûkten, hja scoene sa’n
útskaeide soanne as dy net sykjen hearre meije. Mei forachtelike
eagen strieken se dy foarby, en as hjar skynsels in inkel wird for dy
oer hiene, it scoe hjar âld sprekwird wêze: “It is in smoarch fûgel, dy
syn eigen nêst biskyt.”
Dy ik west bin, dy bliuw ik. En ik bin it byld fen de wiffens, fen it
rimpene en foroarjende. Hy foroaret as de wyn; hy is de hoanne op ’e
toer allyk, dy mei alle winen omgiet, binne ommers sprekmanearen
by jimme. En ik bin noch stânheftiger as dou, dy yn ’t nêst fen de
frijheit útbret de tiranny foarsprekste. Dat scil dy net goed bikomme,
feint! De middenwei is de feilichste. Doch lyk as Eölus. Foar
twahûndert-fyftich jier hab ik de armade fen Filips de twade fornield,
en him de moedfearren sa wol roppe, det er sa nea wer nei jimme lân
ta flein is. Oaremoarn scil ik Don Carlos, de erfgenamme fen syn
plannen, yn syn eigen herne to fiter hawwe. Ik scil ’t waeije litte, det
it rikket en pipet; heil en snie scil ik se yn ’t gesicht jeije, en den
moatte wy ’ris sjen, eft ik, Espartero en Jek baes wêze scille, ef hy.
Bistou in Fries? Dou romste, detste mei it Ingelske folk fen ien laech
biste; is dat sa, kom oaremoarn to Bilbaö, en biwiis it ús; plantsje it
kanon mei de Ingelsken tsjin de âlde draek, sjit syn skânzen oan
eleminten, sjit det it tongert en davert om him út syn nêst to
forbaljen, en ik scil leauwe, det de âlde frijheit noch yn dyn hert
libbet, en det de tiranny, hwer se is, en ho se hjar foardocht, yn dy as
dyn foarâlders in ivige fyand fynt.
My tochte, heite, ik moast dy dit mar ’ris op de hûd hâlde; hwent
yn dyn lân sizze se it dy net. It moeit my, dou biste oars sa’n min
keardel net. As ik dy oansjen as in inkel man, yn dyn eigen bidriuw
for dy sels allinne, en njunke dyn wiif en bern, den kinste moai gnap
streek hâlde; mar as lid fen in folk biste net folle, omdetste net folle
bigrypste fen de rjuchten en plichten, fen de greate bilangen en de
algemiene bân fen in folk. As men in millioen-twa minsken fen dyn
skaei by eltsoar hie, dêr koe in goed beurs-fol keapljue ef in
herberch-fol fetweiders út groeije, mar in folk, dat scoe spanne.
Witste wol det in folk in bosk pilen is, dy troch de wet by-ien boun
binne, dêr de kening mei yn biknipe sit? Wêz slaef fen de wet, fen de
wet allinne, en dou scilste hear fen dines bliuwe. De Jacobyn ken wol
rjuchten, mar nin plichten; in slaef (ik scoe hast sizze, lyk as dou) ken
wol plichten, mar nin rjuchten; in folk hat plichten en rjuchten ta
gelyk; as it syn plicht dien hat, lit it him syn rjucht net ontwringe.—
Yn in folk stiet neat op him sels. Wirdt de oppermacht oanrande, den
kringt it folk as ien man om syn kening hinne, en hja fjuchte en
stjerre for de troon as for eigen wiif en bern. Dy ûnder in folk
onrjucht docht, heech ef leech, hat alle hânnen op ’e kop; dy onrjucht
lit, al is hy noch sa lyts en earm, dêr binne se by, om him to
biskirmjen, en sa folle to gauwer, hwet de man heger stiet, dy de
oanfaller is. De fyand sels biskirmt hjir syn fyand; hwent it is hjar net
om dy bysondere persoan, net om dat inkelde kwea to dwaen, mar
om ’t bigjinsel fen rjucht, dat yn him oantaest wirdt, en hja tinke, lyk
as dyn âffaers, de âlde Friezen: “Hjoed dy, moarn my! swij ’k stil, den
miene se, det ik it goedskou; mar dat scil ik hjar oars bitsjutte.” Ik wit
net eftstou dêr wol folle bigryp fen haste. Hwent as se dyn lânsman
útstrûpe, den stiestou der mei in biklaechlik wêzen by to sjen, en den
lûkste de skouders op. “Elts moat him sels rêdde,” tinkstou, yn pleats
fen de wei fen ’t rjucht op to gean, om it rjucht onskeind for dy sels to
biwarjen. De brân yn it hûs fen dyn bûrman giet dy net oan, howol er
eagenskynlik op dyn eigen tek oerslacht.—En aste mienste, detste
troch sa’n sloofachtich driuwen de kening in tsjinst dochste, den
biste de planke noch folle fierder mis. Der is nin ding op de wrâld,
dêr in kening mear bilang by hat, as det der lyk en rjucht yn syn ryk
dien wirdt. Hwent de lânssieten scille him as hjar eigen heit
ljeafhabbe en oanhingje, as hja ûnderfine, det hjar persoan, hjar
habben en hâlden, en hjar fortsjinste tsjin it útsûgjen feilich is, en det
se rjucht krije as se rjucht hawwe. En hwa ef hwet scoe in troon oan
it wriggeljen bringe kinne, dy troch de ljeafde en ’t bilang fen tankbre
lânssieten biskirme wirdt? Mar oan de oare kant, hwet se ûnder syn
skepter mear haetsje en forachtsje scille; hwent hwer it onrjucht ek
wei komt, yn it ein wirdt it allegearre op de baes sels forhelle. En
hwet fêstichheit scoe in troon hawwe, dy troch de stille haet en de
forachtinge fen syn eigen boargers ûndermine is, en allinne noch
troch de bajonetten fen soldaten ef de sabels fen dragonders oerein
hâlden wirdt? Mar kom, lit ik swije: it ding is to klear. En egentlyk as
egentlyk leau ik, det dy al myn geëamel oer folk, en rjucht, en
balansearjende machten neat oangiet. As dat sa is, den biste in
poletyk lyk, dêr yn ivichheit nin libben wer yn to krijen is.
Mar den siz ik dy ek, detste raer wekker wirde scilste. Tink op it ein
en it sizzen fen Eölus!
Ik scoe in ljeaf lyts letterke skriuwe; en it is al úttynd, wrychtich, ta
in great letter. Scoe de skriuwsjochte ek in jachte wêze lyk as de
Russiske pip? Mar dat kin my ek neat skele; al scil myn letter nou
noch langer wirde as dines, it scil der allegearre yn, hwet ik dy
tahawwe wol to witten. Ik forfeel my hjir oars dochs mar yn dit hoal:
mits der moatte my nin iisbearen op de hûd tommelje.
Dou haste my de reden frege fen sommige dingen yn de stoarm,
dêrste net by kinste; wol, my tinkt, dat is sa slim net om to fetsjen. Ik
miende detste in jier mannich by Profester van Swinden roun hieste
to Amsterdam; mar oan dyn freegjen scoe ’k it net sizze.—Mei it
oprôljen fen it lead giet it sa. As de reep lead yn ienen losliet, wier it
ondwaenlik; mar as ik in eintsje opwipt ha, en dêr tsjin oan waei, den
moat dat omkrolje, omdet it oare noch fêsthâldt; den meitsje ik al
wer in steed los, en dat bûgje ik wer om, en dat giet krekt sa lang, det
de hiele reep los is, en yn de gedaente fen in spoen nei ûnderen
fljucht. To Leiden haw ik mei it springen fen in krûdskip, in jier
mannich lyn, krekt it selde dien. Do de slach oer wier, laeinen alle
lange matten en ganglopers oprôlle foar de doar. Fen bûten wier alle
loft yn ienen troch de slach fen it krûd weistaet; dêr fleach aenstons
de loft út de gongen fen de huzen nei bûten, om dat idel oan to follen,
en do de loftstream de einen fen de matten opwipt hie, smiet er dy
eftersto bek nei de doar ta, en sa krolle dat yn in amerij foart, det de
boel as in rôlle by de foardoar laei.
Dou fregeste my ek nei de myldens yn de loft, dy in stoarm altiten
foarôfgiet. Dat kin ik dy gau yn ’t lyts bitsjutte mei in onwaer. Ut in
tongerboi komt meast altyt wyn; dat witste wol, net? Mar hwer komt
dy wyn fen dinne? De loft is in elastyk, in fearkrêftich ding. It set út
en yn nei det ’er perse op is. Is ’t hjir minder fearkrêftich as yn
Fryslân, den komt ’er loft út Fryslân om it britsen evenwicht oan to
follen, en it waeit út it Noardwesten. Nou hat waermte de krêft om de
loft út to setten en iler to meitsjen, wylst syn fearkrêft de selde
bliuwt; mar sa gau giet dy waermte net wei, ef dy ile loft falt yn, en
aenstons komt ’er út in tichter fearkrêftiger loft in stream, om dat
oan to follen; dat is to sizzen, it bigjint to waeijen nei de ile loft ta. Sa
giet it krekt yn de tongerboi. Tsjin de boi oan wirdt it near, smoar-
waerm; de loft set út en wirdt yl, mar hâldt de selde fearkrêft sa lang
as de waermte oanhâldt. Mar as de bliksem de stoffen út de loft lost
hat, den wirdt it yn ienen kâld: de tinne loft krimpt yn, en dêr de loft
tichter is komt in hirde pûst wyn wei om it evenwicht to herstellen.
Dêr haste yn it lyts, hwet de stoarm yn it great is. Hwet ik for in
doarp ef in stêd mei de tonger doch, dat doch ik mei de stoarm oer in
hiel wrâlddiel. Dagen efterien waermje ik de loft, en as er tinner-
nôch nei myn sin is, den lit ik him bikoelje; nou fljocht de stream út
fiere séen en lânnen op de ile romte ta, en rêst net foar det de
evenaer wer yn ’t húske is. Hwet de loft iler makke is, en de
bikoelling rimpener tagiet, hwet de stream fen wyn (dat is, de
stoarm) geweldiger is, dy it oanfolt. Nou scoeste ek noch wol witte
wolle, ho wy dy loft sa waerm krije? Ja, feint, dat kin ’k dy net
bitsjutte. Dêr hawwe wy in komfoar ta yn ’t ierdryk, dêr wy jimme
wol heal gear mei stove kinne.
Dou fregeste my noch al mear. Hwerom giet de kwik yn de
waerglêzen op en del, seiste, as der in stoarm is? In waerglês is in
glêzen piip fol fen kwik, boppe ticht en ûnder iepen; hâld it ûnderein
mei de finger ticht; stek it den yn in kopke mei kwik; lit de finger los;
nou rint de kwik ’er allegearre út yn ’t kopke, mienste? Né, man, dat
is krekt mis! De kwik bliuwt op in hichte sa hwet fen 28 tomme
hingjen. Dat liket nuver, mar aste yn ’t each hâldste, det ’er boppe de
kwik nin loft, en dos nin persinge is, en op de kwik yn it kopke de
swiere persinge fen de bûtenloft, den kinste wol bigripe, det dy
persinge de kwik yn de piip opstouwe moat. Wirdt dy persinge hwet
minder, den sakket de kwik yn de piip; wirdt de persinge sterker, den
riist de kwik yn de piip, en sa wiist de hichte fen de kwik al de
foroaringen oan, dy ’er yn de persinge fen de loft komme. Sa’n piip
neame se in barometer. De barometer wiist de persinge yn de loft
oan. (De thermometer, dat is in hiel oar ding, dy wiist de waermte
fen de loft oan.) Dyn fraech komt den hjir op del: Hwet is de reden,
det de kwik yn de barometer dounset, as ’er stoarm is? Wel, man, der
is neat dudeliker. As it dageliks waer is, den giet alle foroaringe yn de
drukking fen de loft mei fordrach en langsom yn syn wirk, en dêrom
riist en sakket de kwik den ek sa bidaerd, det men it net merke kin;
to minste it eagenblikje net, det men der bystiet. Mar as it stoarmt,
en der komme fen dy onwitene hoarten en rukken fen wyn, den
foroaret de persinge mei greate sprongen eltse amerij, en dy
sprongen wirde dadelik troch de kwik yn de glêzen piip folge.
Mindert de persinge, yn ienen sakket de kwik; komt ’er in fûleindige
twjirre, dy de persinge mei in ruk oanset, aenstons fljocht de kwik nei
boppen ta. Bigrypste nou, hwerom det de kwik by in stoarm yn de
waerglêzen dounsje moat?
Dou praetste ek noch fen de pompen. It wetter dounset net yn alle
pompen, heite, as it stoarmt. As it wetter yn in saed, lâns de iene wei
ef de oare, gemienskip mei oar wetter hat, dat ek oan ús dampkring
bleat stiet, den is ’er neat to dwaen; hwent deselde persinge, dy op it
wetter yn de saed drukt, is der ek op it bûtenwetter; dos is ’er
evenwicht, en it wetter kin net op en del gean, omdet ’er op it iene ein
nin mear deldrukkinge is as op it oare. Mar as it wetter yn de saed
gemienskip hat mei wetter, dat fier ûnder de groun sit en dêr ús
bûtenloft net op spylje kin, den giet it krekt as mei de kwik yn de
waerglêzen. As ’er in hoart fen persinge op sa’n saed komt, den moat
it wetter nei ûnderen ta, omdet de loft, dy by it oare útein fen it
wetter is, dy hoart net mei kriget. Mindert de persinge yn ienen op de
saed, den moat it wetter krekt sa gau nei boppen ta, omdet de loft, dy
op de oare ein fen it wetter ûnder de ierde drukt, dy minderinge net
kriget, mar allike sterk bliuwt. De beide úteinen fen it saedwetter
binne twa skealjen, dy yn evenwicht hingje; smytste in gewicht op de
iene skealje, hy giet nei ûnderen ta; nimste it der ôf, hy giet nei
boppen ta, en dochste it rêd, den liket de skealjen to dounsjen. As wy
it mei eltsoar bilibje en ik kom ’ris wer, den moaste ’ris mei dyn ear
tsjin sa’n saed oan lizzen gean; den scilste it kloarkjen en sieden fen
it wetter dudelik hearre. Dat kin in bern bigripe. Mar nou wol ik ek
’ris hwet freegje. De kwik giet yn de stoarm op en del; nim nou it
midden twiske dat heechste en leechste, en dou haste de hichte fen
de barometer. Hwet is nou de reden, feint, det mei sa’n ougryslike
pers fen wyn as yn in stoarm, de kwik yn de barometer folle leger
stiet as oars? Moast dy persinge fen de stoarmwyn him net yn ’e
hichte driuwe? Dat moast, as er mei dy pers fen boppen del op de
kwik yn it kopke kaem; mar dy pers fljocht lâns de kwik, lâns de
groun, mei kûgelsfeart foart, en dy by-de-flier-lânske feart is de
reden, det de loft nin tiid hat om syn pers op de flakte fen de kwik
fiele to litten. Dou kinste ommers wol reedride, net? En aste den foar
in swak steed komste, hwet dochste den? Gieste der sêft foetsje foar
foetsje oer hinne? Ja wol, den bruiste der troch. Dou nimste earst in
oanrin, en ’er sa as in reek oer, den lokt it. Understel it iis koe
hûndert poun hâlde, en dou weachste hûndert-fyftich; astou dyn
lichem mei sêft riden de tiid joechste om mei it folle gewicht op it iis
to persjen, scoe it dy net hâlde; mar fljochste der mei gewelt oer, den
minderste troch dyn feart foarút de perse nei ûnderen ta wol om in
tredde; dou makkeste dy fyftich poun lichter, en sa komste der
bihâlden oer. Sa is ’t krekt mei de loft. Waeit it in dagelikske koelte,
den hat de loft tiid om syn folle persinge op de kwik fiele to litten;
waeit it in orkaen, den glydt de loft to hird lâns de groun om syn folle
perse op de groun fiele to litten; hwet de perse foarút swierder is,
hwet de perse nei ûnderen lichter wirdt, en sa moat de kwik yn it
waerglês sakje, howol men sa foar de hân sizze scoe, det er by de
iselike oandrang fen in stoarmwyn rize moast.
Dou fregeste my, hwennear ik wer kom? Ik bin der al. Nim it my
net kwealk, ik fal sa mar mei de doar yn ’t hûs; egentlik moast ik
sizze, mei de bearehûd yn de glêzen. Dou moaste bigripe, as dy loft
mei sa’n gewelt oan it spielen is, den haw ik ’t net yn de macht om
him stil to hâlden as ik wol; dêrtroch fljocht er den folle mear loft nei
de ile oarden fen de dampkring as ’er for it evenwicht wêze moat, en
dat ’er to folle komd is, dat moat werom. Ut it súd-westen is de
stoarm fen de njoggen-en-tweintichste west; do is ’er to folle loft nei
it Noard-easten flein, en mei dy oermjitte kom ik nou werom. Ik
doch it krekt op Krystiid, omdet ik Don Carlos, lyk as ik dy sei, al
lang in krystwich tatocht hie. Ik hoopje, det ik ’t hjir mei ôf kin; de
feart, dêr ik nou mei út it Noard-easten kom, is sa great net, ef ik scil
it wol roaije om yn de oare herne net mear op to jeijen, as ’er heart.
Der mei noch in foech stoker út it[41] westen komme, om de evenaer
wer yn it húske to krijen, mar dat scil den ek alles wêze. It giet ’er
krekt mei as in slinger. Aste him oplichtste en litste him den los, den
fljucht er fierder as it midden; de slinger komt dos werom, en
slingert wer oer it midden hinne, mar sa fier net. By eltse slingering
wirdt de oerslingering lytser en lytser, en dit docht de slinger sa faek,
det er krekt yn ’t midden to lânne komt. Dêr just hinget er yn
evenwicht mei him sels, en kin er stil wêze. En sa, heite, stoarmt
Eölus ek sa lang hinne en wer, ta det hy evenwicht en stilte yn de loft
hat.—It sprekt fen sels, ik praet hjir fen stoarm; gewoane hirde wyn
is nin tel. Sa as ik op de 29ste by jimme west ha, kom ik by wolwêzen
net gau wer; it mocht nedich wêze, det ik mei in cholera ef pest-siikte
noch ’ris tige azem joech, mar dêr kin men net op rekkenje. Ik tink
det jimme yn de earste fiif-en-tweintich jier fen my ôf binne, en as ik
den kom, den kom ik noch gau. Hwent it wier nou al seis-en-tritich
lyn. De âlfde October 1800 haw ik neijer-nôch mei deselde iver oan
de pûster stien as de njoggen-en-tweintichste Novimber 1836.
It stie my skoan oan detste sa foldien oer it bihâld fen dyn Tsjalling
biste. Mar dou wiste ommers wol hwet jimme oarreheite-en-hjarre
seinen? “As ús ljeaven Hear de lytse bern net biwarret, den bliuwt
der net ien yn ’t libben. Syn Ingels moatte der op pasje.” Is nou it
lichem fen in bern troch ús sparre, sparje dou de geast fen it bern
den. Learen is goed; mar lear der de natúr net út. Aste mienste, det
de masters it ’er ynjitte scille, den biste mis. It sit ’er yn, en it is in
keardel, dy it ’er úthellet. Al hwet edel, al hwet forheven is sit yn de
wylde natúr: skaevje en polyste kinste it, mar net skeppe; en, wea dy!
aste sa lang skaefste, det al it edele en forhevene der út skaefd is. De
loft fen de biskavinge hat in smetstof yn him, dy it goddelike en
optiljende fen ús alderearste natúr stikket, en omdet it jammer wêze
scoe, det sa’n tsjeppe boi as dyn Tsjalling net mear as in skoalplant
en in kinstmachine yn de geastenwrâld wêze scoe, sa moaste syn
noas altomets hwet drippen fen de âlde wylde natúr rûke litte. Dat
scil by him de fetberheit oprekkenje for de heechste en edelste tinsen
fen in minske. En ho nedich is him dat yn in wrâld, dêr de opfieding
sels him dellûkt ta dingen dy leech, lyts, en binaud binne? Lit him by
foarbyld, as er frjemde talen leart, sokke stikjes ’ris fordútskje, as hjir
ien folget. It is bikender-nôch: ik nim it mar, omdet ik der by west
bin.
Yn de oarloch, dy Noard-Amerika om syn frijheit tsjin Ingelân
fierde, waerd in krychsbinde Ingelsken oer it mat fallen fen in trop
wylden, fen de stamme Abenaki. De Ingelsken, dy lang sa fluch net
op ’e lappen wierne as de neakene wylden, koene it net ontrinne. Hja
waerden ynhelle, en mei boalske wreedaerdichheit om hals brocht.
In jong Ingelsk officier roun noch al hwet er út de skinen sette koe
om de dead to ontkommen, wylst twa Abenakis him efternei sieten,
elts mei in strydbile yn ’e hannen, om him de hersenpanne to
forpletterjen. Op it lêst, do hy seach det se him ynwounen, kearde hy
him yn ienen om en stoe stôk-stil, om syn libben sa djûr to
forkeapjen, as it jilde koe. Yn dit selde eagenblik spande in grize
krychsheld fen de wylden syn bôge, mikte op de Ingelske officier om
him in pyl troch it hert to jeijen, mar yn ienen biloek syn troanje, en
de bôge sonk him út de hannen. Forheftich fleach er twiske de
jongeling en de twa wylden yn, dy op in wink fen him earbiedich
ôfdeinzen; en do op de jongeling tarinnende kniep er him sêftkes yn
’e hânnen, aeide syn moai krol hier, en woe him mei flaeijende
klanken bitsjutte, det er nin kwea mei him foarhie. Forfolgens naem
er de jonge Ingelskman mei nei syn klinte (hut) ta, dêr slavernij it
foarlân fen de gefangensman wier; mar hy waerd sa sêft en
meigeande bihandele, det dizze twa earder heit en bern, as hear en
slaef liken to wêzen. Krekt eft it syn soan wier learde de âlde oan de
Ingelskman al de lytse ambachten fen de wylden: sa as cano ef
boatsje meitsje, pyl en bôge snije, matten frisselje, bilen slypje, en sa
foart hinne. Lykwol hie de jonge Ingelskman it dochs net tige op him
bigrepen: hwent somtyds seach de âlde wylde him stiif yn de eagen,
en as dat sa minuten efterien dûrre hie, bigoun er eindeliken to
kriten.
Mei it limieren fen it foarjier makken de wylden wer tarissinge om
de Ingelsken op to siikjen en tsjin hjar to fjuchtsjen. De âlde wylde,
ho heech syn jierren wierne, fielde noch to folle krêft yn de bonken
om by de hird to bliuwen: hy naem de fjildtochte as in moedich
jongkeardel oan, en naem syn gefangensman mei. Wol twahûndert
ûren efterien gongen se troch dy âlde Amerikaenske wâlden, dêr
noch noait in hakker syn bile yn falle litten hie. Eindelyk en to lêsten
kamen se op in iepen fjild út, dêr in Ingelsk leger foar hjar eagen stie.
De grize krychsheld, dy witte woe ho er mei syn gefangensman stie,
wiisde him syn lânsljue. “Sjoch! sei er, dêr steane dyn broerren; hja
wachtsje ús op ta de striid. Hark ’ris, myn feint; it libben hab ik dy
sparre; ik hab dy leard om canos, pyl en bôge to meitsjen; ik hab dy
leard om de wylde bisten yn it bosk del to lizzen. Ik hab dy leard, ho
de strydbile to brûken, en dyn fyand it hier fen syn plasse to heljen.
Hwet wierste, do ik dy yn myn klinte brochte? Dyn hânnen wierne sa
swak as fen in bern; de kost koeste net opjeije, dyn libben net
fordedigje: tsjusternisse wier útspraet oer dyn siele. Alles haste my to
tankjen. Scoeste wol sa ontankber wêze kinne, detste dy mei dyn
broerren forienichste, en tsjin my de bôge spanste, dy ik dy yn
hânnen jown hab?” De jonge Ingelskman antwirdde, det er ljeaver
stjerre woe, as it bloed forjitte fen in Abenaki. Do laei de âlde held
syn beide hânnen op syn oansicht, en nei det er rju lang sa stien hie,
seach er syn Ingelskman oan, en frege him mei in britsene stimme,
dêr men út hearde, det him it moed fol wier: “Haste noch in heit?”
“Ja, sei de jongkeardel, hy libbe noch, do ik myn lân forliet.” “O, hwet
is dy ongelokkich! kriet de grize held it út. Ik wier ek heit.... Ik bin it
net mear.... Myn soan foel yn de striid, wylst er focht oan myn side.
Hy stoar as in man, as in held stoar hy; fen wounen trochboarre stoar
myn soan. Mar ik hab syn dea bitelle set.... Ik hab......” Dizze lêste
wirden spriek er út mei in neidruk, dêr al syn lea fen trillen en
skodden, en it wier eft er yn de swiere suchten stykjen bleau, dy er
smoarje woe. Wyld fleagen syn bliksemjende eagen yn ’t roun, mar
nin inkele trien woe der yn glinsterje. Njunkenlytsen bidarre de âlde
held, en syn eagen nei it Easten kearjende, dêr de sinne krekt út de
kimmen riisde, sei er tsjin syn gefangensman: “Sjochste dy kostelike
sinne wol? Sjochste ho er glânzet en fonkelt? Meiste him net graech
sjen?” “Ja, antwirdde de Ingelske officier, ik mei de sinne graech oan
de himel sjen.” “En ik net,” jammere de grize held, wylst him de
triennen út de eagen spatten. In eagenblik dêrnei wiisde er de jonge
Ingelskman in mangelbeam, dy yn folle bloei stie: “Sjochste dy
moaije beam? sei de grize held: hy bloeit as in lekken: biste dêr net
bliid oer?” “Ja, sei de jongfeint, ik bin bliid, det ik dy beam sjen mei.”
“Ik net!” sei de âlde krychsheld mei driftichheit, en yn ien sike liet hy
der op folgje: “Rep dy! Flean nei dyn lân, det dyn heit him noch oer
de opgeande sinne en de blommen fen it foarjier forbliidzje mei.”
Dou wolste wol leauwe, det dizze Abenaki net by Pestalossi ef
Prinsen op skoalle gien hie, om gesoun forstân op to dwaen, en
lykwol wier er sa wiis wol, det er syn gefangensman de frijheit net
tasei, foar det er him bilove liet, om de macht fen syn fyanden net to
sterkjen. Ik leau sels net det der ien skoalmaster by jimmes is, dy dat
finer ûnderlizze scoe as dy wylde Abenaki, dy nin A for in B koe. Hy
taestte de Ingelskman fen de kant fen de tankberheit oan, en hwer
griist in braef jong hert inerliker fen as fen ontankberheit?—Dou
leauste ek wol, det dy Abenaki by nin Domeny op de catechisatie gien
hie om syn plicht to learen; lykwol wier de greate plicht, om in oar to
dwaen hwet men winsket det yen sels dien wirdt, om it to dwaen sels
oan ús fyanden, fen natúre yn syn hert skreaun. En dêrút kinste den
ommers de moaiste gelegenheit fen de wrâld nimme, om dyn
Tsjalling to bitsjutten, det de plichten fen de wiere Godstsjinst sa
mar net troch willekar út de loft grypt binne, mar yn de earste en
âldste bigripen fen it minskelike hert, dy ek fen God binne, hjar
wearklank fine. De Abenaki hie syn ienichste soan forlern, en yn dy
soan de hiele wrâld; de natúr hie nin glâns, it libben nin wearde mear
for him. Sa scoe de faer fen dy Ingelske jongeling oan de oare kant
fen de oceaen ek krite om syn soan. Ho graech scoe de âlde Abenaki
syn soan út it ryk fen de deaden werom roppe! Ho minlike graech
scoe ek dy frjemde heit syn soan wersjen! En dy soan is yn syn
macht. Scil er it oarlochsrjucht tsjin him brûke, en slaen him de
hersens yn? Scil er dy wrede triumf nimme, dêr syn eigen hert ivich
oer bliede moat? Rin wei! seit de wylde, flean nei dyn lân, det dyn
heit, det myn fyand him noch bliid makket oer de opgeande sinne en
de bloeijende amandelbeam, dy for my mei rou bihinge binne!”—For
it alderlêste leauste ek wol, det dizze Abenaki noait net ien fen al
jimme dichters lêzen hat; mar hwet tinkt dy, is dy gedachte fen de
wylde net dichterlik? Edel en great is er stellich, en egentlik is er nin
dichterlike fljocht, dêr de edelste bigjinsels fen de deugd it hert net
optille kinne. Mar nou de bylden, dêr er dy hege tinze mei opklaeit?
Dy amandelbeam, dy syn ljeaflik bloeisel for dy ontfâldet; dy
opgeande sinne, dy it slomjende ierdryk ta wille en arbeid wekket;
dat hert fen him, dat fen rouwe taknypt, wylst de hiele natúr it blide
moarnliet sjongt; sprekt dat alles net ta dyn hert en forbyldinge
allyk? En is der yn Bilderdyk ef Vondel ien rigele, ien inkele rigele, siz
ik, dy dizze wirden fen de wylde Abenaki binei komme? Sa is der den
suver gesoun forstân yn de minskelike holle foar det ’er masters
binne, dy it slypje ef it bidjerre. Der is yn it minskelik hert bisef fen
de heechste en fynste plicht fen it minskelik geslacht, foar det ’er in
iepenbiering fen de himel kaem, dy ta dat bisef spriek. Der wier
dichtkinst, forhevene goddelike dichtkinst, foar de kinst fen lêzen en
skriuwen. Nou den, aste in goe’ rie hawwe wolste, laef dyn soantsje
fen tiid ta tiid oan dizze echte en onforfalske bornen fen it minskelik
hert; mar fei de rûchten en wyldernissen wei, dy om dy fonteine
hinne waechse. Mei dit wetter scilste syn natúr, dy oars yn skoalle en
boeken ontnatûrd wirdt en formuffet, forferskje, en dou scilste in
man fen him meitsje, dy it boarst frijer- en heger-nôch tilt om to
fielen as in frije wyldeman, wylst hy tinkt as in man fen de
biskavinge.—Yn de geastelike lyk as yn de stoffelike skeppinge, dy
dêr onbibouwe hinne laeit, is alles oarspronkelik en natûrlik, ef
forheven en ontsachlik. De oanlizzer fen bûtenpleatsen skept nin
stive leanen út syn holle, mar hy folget de natúr yn hjar wylde
kronkels, yn hjar forwarde heisters, yn hjar grillige hichten en
lichten, yn hjar grotten, streamen en poelen, en ho neijer syn oanliz
liket mei de hânnen fen natúr sels der hinne wijd to wêzen, sûnder
lykwol it onhurige ef it ientoanige mei op to nimmen, hwet hy mear
de priis fen de heechste kinst winne scil. Sa moastou ek dwaen mei
de oanliz fen it hert en de holle fen dyn soantsje. Natûr, natûr, man!
Liede, mar net twinge; snoeije, mar noait útroeije.
Nou hâld ik op. Goendei sizze oan wiif en bern, en dizze heiling fen
de âlde Abenaki for Tsjalling. Ik bin altiten dyn oprjuchte frjeone

EOLUS.

P. S. Dou nimste it my ommers net kwealk, det ik dy it leksom ’ris

opsein hab? Jimme habbe altyd gelyk, omdet jimme altyd allinne
prate; dou meiste ek wol ienris ongelyk habbe.
De bearehûd moaste loaije litte, en lizze him winters op ’e foetten.
Dat is waermer as tsjien wrinen. Dou biste ommers sa meager en
klomsk; en dêr komme hirde winters, dat wik ik dy.
Dou moaste oan de ljue fen de Walfiskriederij sizze, det se de
nearring yn dizze oarden noait net wer goed oan ’e gong krije, foar
det se hjir ef op Grienlân in kolony delsette, dy ’er it hiele jier troch
bliuwt. Hja miene mûlk, det it hjir to kâld is om to wenjen? De
minske kin oeral libje. De earste, dy kamen, scoene wol hwette rûpsk
wêze; mar de bern wierne al wend oan de fûle kjeld. Farre wol!

OAN AUK,
Mei in lapekoer.
Myn Auk is in famke
Sa sêft as in lamke,
En yn de eagen fen my
Ek sa kreas as in bij.
Al fljocht se hwet wyld,
Hja flaeit dochs ek myld,
En hjar each pluert sa blier,
Sa nuver en sa tier.
En den, hwet in swier,
As se lêst as se skriuwt
Ja, yn al hwet se driuwt
 O, hie ik sa’n famke,
As myn Auk, as myn lamke,
’k Bisloech se yn goud,
Dat swiet ljeave bout.

“Hou, hou! ’k bin nin bern mear.

“Hwet mient dy mynhear?
“Hy trapet me op ’t sear.
“Mei hwa hat er de spot?”
Sa praet Auk, en is prot.
“Miene jy, det wy stilstean,
“Mei poppen altyt omgean,
“En to Harns net djoeije,
“Net waechse en net groeije
“Yn in moanne seis, saun?
“Fyt! ik bin al in faen!”
Dêr haw ik ontditsen,
Det ’k my haw forspritsen.
O, noait wol ’k ’t wer dwaen,
En hjitte scil ’k dy faem,
En dame en mejuffer;
’k Scil prate as in bluffer,
Dy knibbelt om dyn minne.
Hwermei kin ’k dy dochs winne?
Dêr haste hwet lapkes,
Hwet sankjes, hwet grapkes.
Kom, sjong dy mar blij,
En, Auk, tink om my!

J. H. H.

Dimter dizze 27 fen Gêrsmoanne 1835.

 Oan myn frjeon
GERHARD VAN DER MEER,
do hy de heechste dichterlike earetreppen bikleau.

“Hwet darkert komt dêr oan?

“Dy moat ik wol ’ris praeije.
“Ei, ’t is ús masters soan;
“Dy is hjir komd to Maeije.
“Dêr haw ik al fen heard;
“Dat moat in knevel wêze,
“Yn ’t masterjen trochleard.
“Dy scil ús hjir genêze.
“Dei, dokter! dei myn frjeon!”
Sa komt men dy to mjitte.
Ik haw dat swiet ek preaun,
Mar ’t mei nin swiet mear hjitte.
Dyn eare is heech en great,
Dat wol ik hiel wol witte.
De pleagen fen dyn steat,
Myn frjeon, dy komme yette.
Men komt dêr den fen Grins
Allyk in banjer stappen;
Men libbet as in prins,
Forhellet fen syn grappen;
Ho men studearre het,
Ho folle tsjokke pongen
Men het op rinte set,
Ho dounse faek en sprongen.
Dou tinkst’: “Nou ha ’k it woun,”
En sjochst’ hast nei de moanne,
En stapst’ de bûrren roun
Allyk in nytlich hoanne.
In wike fjouwer, fiif,
Mei sa dyn wille dûrje,
Den scil in rabbich wiif
Dy oer oerdwealskens skoerje.
“Dou praetste heech en krom:
“Dou sjochste greatsk en skrillich;
“Dyn broek is hjar to rom,
“Dyn mûtse stiet to tillich!
“Dyn dranken binne djûr:
“Dou sjochste net nei ’t wetter.
“Dou hâldste hjar oan ’t snoer;
“In oar dy wit it better.
“Dou seiste hjar ek neat,
“Dou wolst’ hjar neat forklearje.
“Dou telste hjar nin eart.
“Dou wolste hjar rejerje.”
Dit komste yet al oer:
Dou litst’ de ljuwe seam’lje,
En smakket it hwet sûr,
Dou litste hjar hwet eam’lje.
Mar einling krigest’ wirk,
En ’t wol dy bjuster flotsje,
Stean fêst nou as in Turk!
Nou meist’ dyn kop wol hotsje.
It gûlt en reint om ’t hûs,
Dou laeiste swiet yn ’t sliepen
Bidobbe, yn ’e sûs,
Pomp! gau, de doar mar iepen.
“Och, man! ik bin sa kel.
“Us beppe, ús âlde beppe,
“Foel by de ljedde’ del;
“Toe, Dokter-heite, reppe!”
De dokter slûch en kel
Wirdt skrousk en kâld en poattrich,
Praet tsjin en bêddet del.
Hy moat, al is er noatlich.
Dêr laeit in rike kwast,
Dy hat him ris foriten.
Ombidich docht dy blast
Dy daelk dêr fen it witen.
Flean op nou mei in sprong!
Lit earme ljuwe stjerre!
Hy twingt dy mei de pong,
Dat lit er dy wol hearre.
Oars neamt dat folk dy loai,
Dy sels mar ite en stjerre.
Dat moaste hearre, boi!
Ja, opswolgje en fortêrre.
Jild krigeste einling ek,
Mar ’t kin dy neat formeitsje:
Dou bist’ lyk as de frek,
Dou meiste ’er net oan reitsje;
Hwent sa, frjeon, is dyn steat,
Mei ’t griizjen fen dyn hierren,
Wirdt ek dyn namme great,
It wirk dijt mei de jierren.
Is dat nou den de kroan
Fen al dat swiere bodzjen,
Nachts ta de iere moarn,
Dêr ’n oar yet laeit to dodzjen?
Dêrom dy jonge tiid
Yn ’t keamerstof forsitten?
De ljeave griene tiid,
En ’t romme fjild forjitten?
De dead, de grime dea,
Bigniist mei dealske tosken
De winner fen it brea,
Trochflimet him mei pleagen,
Dy moat dêr op it strie
Mei dead en sjochte kimpe.
It wyfke kryt om rie,
De gamm’le berntsjes krimpe.
Dêr, dêr is nou dyn fjild;
Dêr is it lean to heljen.
’t Is mei nin goud ef jild,
Ef eare to biteljen.
Help dêr! Wêz’ treast en steun!
En kinste dy genêze,
O, yn dyn hert, myn frjeon!
Dêr scil de himel wêze.

E. H.

Med. et Art, Obst. Doctor

GROUSTER WEAGEN.
Rôlje, rôlje, wetterweagen!
Rôlje en brûs om ’t âlde Grou.
Myriaden foar ús eagen
Fleagen, stauwen om ús Grou.
Rôlje, rôlje ús foarby!
Hirde Friezen bliuwe wy.

Rôlje, polskje, Fryske weagen!

Rôlje, rôlje, âlde Grou!
Brûs en wiggelje, âlde weagen!
Kroanje de âlde roune trou.
Rôlje, rôlje, âlde Grou,
Byld fen echte Fryske trou.

Heit en mem binn’ hjir biditsen,

Berntsjes, twiichjes fen myn hert.
Suchten binne hjir forbritsen,
Dy myn God allinne heart.
Grouster weagen, bliuw my by!
Rôlje, rôlje ús foarby!
Rôlje, rôlje, Grouster weagen!
Brûs en spiel yet om myn grêf;
Libjend koe ’k dy net bisjonge,
Spiel my deade wei as tsjêf.
Lit myn berntsjes ljeaf en frij
Roeije en djoeije den yn dy.

Rôlje, rôlje, wetterweagen!

Rôlje en brûs om ’t âlde Grou.
Myriaden foar ús eagen
Fleagen, stauwen om ús Grou.
Rôlje, rôlje ús foarby!
Hirde Friezen bliuwe wy.

E. H.

OAN PITER MULIER.

Mei de lapekoer.

Ik haw hjar kend, dy iens it libben!

o Stalke, fen dyn libben wier.
Ik seach hjar as de roazen bloeijen
Sa prûs, sa glimkjend, sa fol tier.
Ik seach hjar as de roazen kwinen,
Fen njirren stitsen yn it hert.
Hjar wrakseljen tsjin dea en pinen,
o Piter, dat forjit ik net.
Ik haw mei swakke en tankb’re klanken
Hjar gollens op in blêd[42] biskreaun,
En ’k wit, dou scilst it net forsmaedzje;
’t Is hertejefte fen in frjeon.
Dêr mei de Fries it noch hwet lêze,
En den scil ’t leaf, as wy, forgean;
 Mar, o, hjar blier, hjar skrander wêzen
Scil ivich foar ús sielen stean.

J. H. H.

Bolswert dizze âlfde fen Heamoanne 1836.

JOUNTIIDS WéMOED.
Oer de Elzen beamkes oan it mêr
Blonk sleaukes Hesperus lampe.
De lêste goudene sinne sonk wer
Yn dauwe en dampen,
En de Elzen oan it mêr
Dy slepten wer.

Ut dy dauwige skimering kamen

Alde bylden en nammen
Fol fen oantinsens nocht.
O skynsels fen frjeonen! O sjammen!
En de Elzen oan it mêr
Dy slepten wer.

“Hilligen! Ljeave! Bliuw yn jimme wrâld!

“Och, nin joun fen dizze wrâld
“Kin ús sielen forienigje......”
Hesperus wier útdien,
En de Elzen oan it mêr—
Dy slepten wer.

PRINS WILLEM DE IVde OP DE

FROSKEPôLE.
 It is al nuver, det de prinsen fen Nassau de earste prinsen wierne,
dy it mei de Friezen roaije koenen. Mar dat lit him noch al hearre, as
men bigrypt, det se mei eltsoar tsjin Spanjen libben om libben
fochten hiene; hwent it trochstean fen deselde gefaren makket wol
’ris frjeonen fen twa minsken dy eltsoar oars hiel net pasje scoene.
Dêrby hie Fryslân sokke condities mei dy prinsen makke, det se in
bulte goed en nin kwea dwaen koenen. Dêrtroch kaem it ek by, det
Fryslân bistindich yn de bêste ienichheit mei syn prinsen libbe hat,
en sont Lodewyk fen Nassau altiten ien fen syn neikommelingen ta
Steedhâlder hie, wylst de prinsen fen Oranje troch de oare provinsjes
den ’ris efterôfset en den wer ’ris hildige waerden. Twaris binne der
jierren en jierren forroun, det de Hollânners nin Steedhâlders
hienen, en twaris is it hûs fen Oranje nei in bulte oproer, plunderjen
en moardzjen der wer ynroppen.
In forieniging, dy yn nin 150 jier ea ôfbritsen west hie, lei in fâlde
yn it hert fen de Friezen, dy to lang sitten hie, om der suver wer út to
gean. De prinsen fen Nassau seagen klear, det se sûnder de Friezen
neat wierne; hwent as dy hjar loslieten, lyk as de Hollânners faek de
prinsen fen Oranje dienen, den skeat ’er for hjar neat oer, as hjar
lytse steatsjes yn Dútsklân wer op to siikjen en dêr hjar tiid mei
hertejeijen to fordriuwen. De Friezen oan hjar kant ûnderfounen, det
se yn frede en yn oarloch earlik en trou tsjinne waerden fen Prinsen,
dy sa folle bilang by hjar frjeonskip hienen. It bilang en de
tankberheit, forsterke noch troch de wente, dy út lange kunde oan
eltsoar foartkomt, makken det men eltsoar mei in fortrouwen en
forkleeftheit bihandele, dy by it folk ta in libbensbigjinsel oergong.
Dit dûrre oan 1748 ta, do Willem de IVde út de tsjinst fen Fryslân ta
de hearskippije fen al de saun provinsjes oergong, en Ljouwert
forliet. Sa binne de soannen fen Nassau yn de skirte fen Fryslân
bakere en biwarre, om earst algemiene Stedehâlders, en by einbislút
yn ús tiden keningen fen it hiele lân to wirden.
 DE HEGE GASTEN OP ’E FROSKEPÔLLE.

Dy lêste prins, Willem de IVde, de oarreheit fen ús kening[43],

forienige alles yn him om de ljeafde fen in folk as it Fryske ta it
heechste punt to fieren. Hy wier gol en deftich fen troanje, dimmen
en minsum yn syn praet. Seft fen aert, hie er in griis fen gewelt en
bloed. Fen natúre wier er net hird-dragende, en as in oprjucht
kristen koe er syn erchste fyanden forjaen. En dat sa folle by de
Nederlanners yn it algemien en de Friezen yn it bisûnder ôfdocht,
om in prins de herten fen it folk to winnen, hy wier gemiensum yn de
omgong. Lit in prins in held en in staetsman tagelyk wêze, as hy in
heech boarst set, kin er op dizze groun nin goed dwaen. Yn Ruslân en
Prusen mei dat; hjir is it de pest. As der hwet oan Willem de IVde
hapere, den wier er hast al to sêft for in prins; hwent hy wier bang
det er immen bisearje scoe, en bleau faek healwei stykjen, as er
trochtaeste moast. Troch syn sêftens en heale mjitterigels is folle fen
it goede, det er ús foarâlders tatocht hie, efterbleaun. Mei dat al
bliuwt it wierheit, sa lang as hy to Ljouwert wenne, is der nearne yn
nin steat fen Europa sa folle folksfrijheit mei sa folle earbied en
ljeafde for in prins forienige west as hjir yn dit ús Fryslân.
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