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Y Movies: Film and the Modernization of Pastoral Power

Ronald Walter Greene
Published online: 07 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Ronald Walter Greene (2005) Y Movies: Film and the Modernization of Pastoral Power, Communication and
Critical/Cultural Studies, 2:1, 20-36, DOI: 10.1080/1479142042000332125

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 Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
Vol. 2, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 20–36

Y Movies: Film and the Modernization

of Pastoral Power
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Ronald Walter Greene

The institutional creation of the Bureau of Motion Pictures and Exhibits, a division of the
Industrial Department of the International Committee of the YMCA, is examined to
assess why the YMCA turned to film as a mode of public address in its social welfare
programs. The archival history supports the claim that the “attraction effect” of film
transformed it into a cultural technology for shaping the conduct of industrial workers.
The essay concludes by arguing how film contributed to liberalism’s modernization of
pastoral power by coupling immigrant workers with the pedagogical voice of the YMCA
secretary.

Keywords: YMCA; Film; Liberalism; Pastoral Power; Cultural Technology

In the first few years of the twentieth century, the International Committee of the
Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) established an Industrial Department to
co-ordinate partnerships with corporate clients to care for the welfare of workers. By
the early 1920s, the Y boasted that it had 500 secretaries working in their industrial
programs. They had built 158 buildings devoted to special industries such as railroads,
textile mills, and mining. They had established industrial extension work in over 143
cities throughout the United States; 125 secretaries were dedicated to full-time work in

Ronald Walter Greene is associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin
Cities. Correspondence to: Ronald Walter Greene, Department of Communication Studies, University of
Minnesota, 225 Ford Hall, 224 Church St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0427, USA. E-mail: green179@umn.edu.
Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Conjunctures Cultural Studies Working Group in October
2002, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) in March 2003 and the National Communication
Association in November of 2003. The author thanks the whole Conjunctures group, but in particular,
Charles Acland whose guidance was extraordinary. At SCMS, Heidi Kenaga and Richard Abel offered important
insights. Dagmar Getz provided invaluable assistance at the Kautz Family YMCA Archives at the University of
Minnesota. Moreover, the author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Robert Ivie for their care and
patience. Finally, the paper’s production was made possible by the research assistance of Chani Marchiselli,
Zornitsa Keremidchieva and Abraham Khan.

ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) q 2005 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/1479142042000332125
 Y Movies 21

the area of Americanization, and the Association’s programs reached 4 million

industrial workers—both men and boys.1 It is the scope of the YMCA’s pre-New Deal
welfare programs that buttresses the claims of today’s “compassionate conservatives”
that faith-based organizations can successfully replace state actors in the
administration of welfare services.2
As an arm of its recreational, educational, industrial, and civic programs, the
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Industrial Department formed the Bureau of Motion Pictures and Exhibits (BMPE).3
In 1919, the Bureau distributed over 12,000 reels to 185 cities in 31 states for a total of
5,280 exhibitions with an attendance of 1,888,000.4 By the end of the 1920s, the YMCA
claimed to be the premier distributor of industrial and educational films in the United
States, and it retained that status until it sold the Bureau of Motion Pictures (renamed
Association Films) after the Second World War. In response to the YMCA’s exhibition
of film at Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in the late 1920s, Diane
Waldman writes that the “legacy of welfare capitalism” makes this conjuncture “more
than a matter of parochial regional concern or mere historical curiosity.”5 The YMCA’s
investment in film to educate and entertain large numbers of industrial workers offers
an opportunity to explore the relationship between communication technologies and
the logics of social welfare. Since the Industrial Department of the YMCA built a
national film distribution network and a host of educational, economic, and moral
welfare services, the Industrial Department will serve as the institutional locus of this
study. However, unlike institutional approaches that foreground the political economy
of film and critical traditions that focus on the film text as an object of ideological
representation, this paper locates the YMCA’s film program within a cultural
problematic of liberal governance: namely, how communication technologies shape
conduct.6 As others have argued, the particular importance of communication
technologies and practices for governance, in general, and liberalism, in particular, is
the ability of communication to transform the spatial and temporal coordinates of
everyday life.7 For example, Jeremy Packer argues that communication technologies
are “a means for organizing the movement of bodies.”8 The YMCA used film to move
Y secretaries and working class men and boys closer together.
For the YMCA, the value of film was located in its ability to attract large numbers of
urban working class immigrants. It will be argued that the YMCA relied on film as a
technology of attraction to pull the working class toward the buildings and programs
of the YMCA and push the Y secretary into the workplaces, parks, homes and churches
of the working class. From the perspective of the YMCA, film was transformed from a
contingent medium of public address to a necessary cultural technology for
supplementing the voice of Y secretaries in providing pedagogical guidance to the
immigrant working class. The critical point of the essay is to diagram a history of
liberalism by highlighting the contingent role of film in assembling what Foucault calls
“a block of capacity-communication-power” to promote the welfare of a state’s
population.9
The paper unfolds in four steps. The first addresses the YMCA’s film program in
relationship to the threat of class war and the challenge of “nationalizing”
unprecedented numbers of immigrants. What emerges as common to the multiple
 22 R. W. Greene
ideological purposes associated with film is film’s use as a visual aid to present the
YMCA to potentially new members. Second, the paper describes the emergence of the
working class/immigrant movie audience. The constitution of the immigrant working
class as a film audience provided the YMCA with reason to believe that film was able to
attract the attention of their desired clientele. Third, the archival record of the YMCA’s
Bureau of Motion Pictures and Exhibits supports the claim that film’s function as an
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attraction effect transformed it into a cultural technology for shaping conduct. The
last step describes how the modernization of pastoral power performs a double
articulation creating the YMCA-film-worker block and attaching this block to the
liberal state.10

Social Problems and Film Solutions

The YMCA actively engaged a series of social problems associated with urbanization,
industrialization, immigration and working class welfare.11 According to Thomas
Winter, alongside a shifting network of urban reform organizations in the Progressive
Era, “the YMCA benefited from employers’ concern with labor strife and interest in
new ways of handling their workers and shaping their behavior on and off the job.”12
As industrialists established company welfare policies to mitigate worker radicalism,
the YMCA often administered such programs and/or explicitly aligned their local and
specialized Y’s with the interests and goals of “welfare capitalism.”13 At times, the
YMCA’s administration of a company’s welfare programs included the exhibition of
film. For example, in the aftermath of the Ludlow Massacre, John Rockefeller
instituted an “employee representation plan” that included a “Joint Committee on
Recreation and Education,” including a YMCA-sponsored movie theatre.14
Diane Waldman analyzes the YMCA’s film work at Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and
Iron Company (CFI). Waldman argues that, at the end of the silent era, the Y’s film
work was “part of an overall strategy to diffuse worker discontent, to discourage union
activity and to exert corporate influence over areas of employees’ lives outside the
workplace itself.”15 She supports this claim in two steps. First, she makes visible the
close relationship between the YMCA and their corporate benefactors. The reliance on
corporate sponsorship leads Waldman to report that “secretaries were usually willing
to go along with the policy orientation of their corporate-dominated boards of
directors even when they themselves held more liberal social and political views.”16
This first point is unique not to film but to the organizational structure of the YMCA
at this time. The second reason Waldman offers for the YMCA’s complicity with
capital was based on the narrative content of the films exhibited at CFI. For Waldman,
“the narrative strategies by which the films deal with class conflict dovetail with the
more intentional corporate discourses.”17 The movies the Y exhibited represented a
vast cross-section of Hollywood genres. In total, over 220 movies were shown between
1927 and 1929, and the pattern Waldman discovered was that “class differences
are both acknowledged and then dismissed as ultimately unimportant or
surmountable.”18
 Y Movies 23

Winter confirms Waldman’s thesis by arguing that the YMCA imagined its work to
be in direct competition with radical labor unions, in particular, the IWW.19 Especially
in urban areas, the YMCA identified the problem of new immigrant labor as uniquely
vulnerable to the appeals of radical labor. Waldman’s findings are important, since
they demonstrate the YMCA’s systematic bias toward Hollywood narratives that
privilege capital. But when assessing theatrical films in the class struggle, it is
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important to recall what Steven J. Ross calls the “revolt of the audience.”20 Ross
uncovers a submerged history of “worker film-makers” who “produced features and
newsreels that challenged the dominant political and economic order by offering
alternative ways of understanding and resolving the harsh battles between employers
and employees.”21 By the end of the silent era, conservative pressures of anti-labor
movie censors, the establishment of vertical and horizontal monopolies in the film
market, and the failure of the American Federation of Labor to support labor film-
makers or the establishment of labor-owned movie theaters squeezed out working
class film-makers and more labor friendly narratives.22 Waldman, too, recognizes the
“revolt of the audiences” at Colorado’s Fuel and Iron Company, when she describes
workers walking away from YMCA-sponsored leisure activities because they
recognized the Y’s class sympathies as capitalist and discovered the alternative
pleasures provided by the local town.
One should not be too quick to privilege the “entertainment-ideological” element
of the Y’s film program. The largest part of the Industrial Department’s movie
program was the distribution of educational, industrial, civic, and heath films. Like the
theatricals, these films were also harnessed to the needs of capital. Charles Southard,
the Vocational Advisor for the YMCA Re-employment Bureau after World War I,
reported to the Bureau of Motion Pictures and Exhibits in 1920:
I have had the good fortune to use your service in connection with the
educational work which the YMCA is carrying on in this city [New York] with
soldiers and marines. After presenting the reel on welfare work in one of the big
steel mills, at least a dozen young men came to me afterward and expressed a
great desire to undertake some useful trade. This result was directly due to their
sensing the care of big men in corporations as to the welfare of their employees.
This is of importance just at this time when there is so much unrest between
labor and capital.23

For Mr. Southard, the mundane genres of film often produced by corporations,
state actors, and reform organizations promoted less confrontational relationships
between capital and labor by illustrating the motive of care underwriting the programs
of welfare capitalism. As Ross writes, “The companies most active in crushing
unions . . . were also the most aggressive in producing nontheatricals” and they often
“arranged to have films shown at local YMCAs.”24 As Ross demonstrates, specific
narratives (theatrical and nontheatrical) were needed to combat labor unrest, but one
should also register how film provided an opportunity for the YMCA to introduce Y
secretaries and their programs to potential workers.
The Y’s belief in the ability of industrial movies to manage class conflict does not
exhaust the role of the YMCA’s movie enterprise. Moreover, an over-emphasis on class
 24 R. W. Greene
conflict tends to privilege one ideological purpose for showing movies over other
purposes. Finally, while the desire to manage class conflict was at the heart of the Y’s
industrial programs (the stated purpose was the achievement of mutuality between
management and workers), it was not a reason why film was used as a medium of
public address. In other words, the use of film was contingent rather than a
necessary medium of public address. Since managing class conflict was not the only
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reason why films were exhibited, other social problems offered themselves to a
cinematic solution.
The YMCA’s Industrial Department’s Bureau of Motion Pictures and Exhibits
(BMPE) was the primary advocate and distributor of film at local and specialized
YMCAs. It imagined itself as providing “a service to YMCAs in industrial fields”
providing films rent-free on “industrial, educational, scenic, welfare and safety first
subjects.”25 The social work of the Y was supported by a multimedia campaign
including poster art, lectures, magic lantern shows, stereopticons, and silent film—all
presentation forms offered by the BMPE. However, the BMPE nurtured the use of
film. To explore the reason, it is useful to register film’s role in the Y’s Americanization
programs. The BMPE relates the following story:
At one Sunday meeting of 250 non-English speaking men, representing nine
nationalities, the picture used was a melodrama—the story of a moon shiner, the
United States revenue officer and, of course, a pretty mountain lass. For one hour
the secretary talked with the picture, reading the titles in very simple English,
composing short sentences from the picture action: such as, “the door opens,” “the
man comes out,” “he looks around,” “he hears a noise,” “he grabs the gun,” “he
shoots the man,” “he is a bad man,” “he breaks the law,” “he is not a good citizen,” “a
good citizen will not break the law.” Those men went home that afternoon with
higher ideals of citizenship, and best of all, they had been helped to think in
English.26

The first important thing to notice is the “talking secretary” beside the “silent film.”
The secretary’s voice was one of the “many sounds of early cinema.”27 Moreover, the Y
often sent a talking secretary to commercial movie houses for the purpose of
introducing the Y’s programs and encouraging movie patrons to visit the local YMCA.
From the standpoint of the exhibition context in the above passage, the use of silent
cinema by the Y to express norms of good citizenship (speak English, be law abiding)
addressed audiences in ways other than the narrative structure of the film. In this case,
it would be a mistake to argue that the “eye” was being privileged at the expense of the
ear.28 As the example illustrates, the secretary was providing the moral and linguistic
soundtrack for the audience. The visual and narrative elements of the film may offer
important clues to the ideological content of the narrative, but the role of the talking
secretary does not support the suggestion that the “public screen” was replacing face-
to-face interactions.29 Or better yet, the YMCA used the screen in hopes of creating
interpersonal encounters between the Y Secretaries and working class audiences.30
To over-emphasize either the narrative or visual elements of the film-text displaces
the YMCA’s institutional work to transform the abstract film-audience (spectator)
encounter into a concrete Y secretary-worker relationship (intimate).
 Y Movies 25

The second lesson of the Sunday morning melodrama concerns the content of the
secretary’s talk. He wants to use the film to impart moral lessons and English language
competence. There was nothing ideologically neutral about the content, but the point
to stress is the process by which film was being transformed into an educational tool;
more specifically, it was a visual aid to help Y secretaries teach English and moral
character. In this particular case, these films were also efficient, since they
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accomplished two goals (English and moral character) at the same time. The critical
recognition of film as a visual aid, as a pedagogical supplement to the voice of the Y
secretary, gets us closer to why the Y used film as a cultural technology rather than do
broad narratives about class interest and nationalist self-fashioning (as true in spirit as
they are). As Charles Acland comments, film was often used for educational purposes
during the 1920s and the lecturer standing beside the film helped to register any given
film event as educational as opposed to mere entertainment.31 My question, then, can
be re-written as: What did the Y think was the “media bias” of film that contributed to
its use as a visual aid?32 The answer to this question requires a closer investigation into
the making of the movie audience.

The Immigrant Audience of Early Film

To better appreciate how the contingent use of film became a necessary cultural
technology requires a closer look at the film-immigrant couple. In standard histories,
the success of the nickelodeon and other cheap movie houses turned urban immigrant
workers into movie audiences. In these narratives, as Judith Mayne argues, “the
immigrant’s film going is often mythologized in accounts of early movie history.”33
For example, Mayne reports that historians believe that (Hollywood) movies
socialized new immigrants by revealing “the manners and customs” or “social
topography” of the United States. Moreover, film historians have accounted for how
silent films aided new immigrants in learning English.34 While we should avoid
mythologizing, the Y did witness a synergy between immigrants’ enjoyment of movies
and their desire to learn English. As Claude Peake, an Industrial secretary for the
Niagara Falls YMCA, reported, “The desire to be able to read the [movie] titles is
bringing men into English classes.”35 In one month, Mr. Peake boasted, he had shown
“twenty-one [movie] exhibitions . . . to a total attendance of 2,475 people.”36
However, by de-mythologizing the socializing effect of the film-text, we can focus
on the “the act of going to the movies.”37 For Russell Merritt, what explains the
immigrant experience with movies is co-presence, the changing nature of one’s social
experience that occurs as one comes to recognize how one shares space with others.38
Recall the exhibition of the melodrama discussed in the previous section. How might
we address those “250 non-English speaking men, representing nine nationalities”
gathered together to watch a melodrama as the Y secretary speaks the titles in English
and offers a moral lesson in citizenship? The success, if any, of the Y’s Americanizing
project may have had less to do with the narrative content of the films shown, or even
the lessons narrated, and more with bringing together those nine nationalities to share
space together. Following Merritt, we might hypothesize that what made Y movies
 26 R. W. Greene
work as a “cultural technology” useful for Americanization was their ability to bring
different “nationalities” into proximity with one another as an audience, a situation
that allowed the Y secretary to re-name them as “American.” Whether the actual
audience imagined themselves as “Americans,” “Christians,” or “Italians” this paper
does not attempt to answer. What the established research does suggest is that film
pulled “ethnically” distinct individuals together to share time and space, and what I
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am arguing is that the YMCA took advantage of this “attraction effect” to address the
many nationalities as one (American). Perhaps, the most immediate media bias of film
resided in its uptake in the immigrant working class population as a form of popular
culture.
Judith Mayne’s pioneering work on immigrant audiences holds an important clue
to the material consequences of film.39 Mayne argues that the shift toward the
consumption of commercial culture re-organized the relationship between private (or
domestic) and public spheres creating new lines of mobility for immigrant women,
even as these new lines were formed to increase consumption. According to Thomas
Winter, the YMCA played its part by transforming codes of masculinity and class to
support the demands of consumption.40 At the same time, while the YMCA provided
a vast array of leisure activities—movies, athletic leagues, gymnastics—it was often in
competition with other places like the nickelodeon, the amusement park, or the saloon
that provided forms of capitalist consumption to colonize leisure time.41 The
proliferation of film as commercial popular culture provided the YMCA with the idea
to re-deploy this new communication technology to influence where a man might
spend his time in the company of others. Film had grabbed the attention of the YMCA
because it attracted the populations they desired to mould.

(WH)Y Film
My argument at this point is that the Y distributed and exhibited films because they
were visual aids presenting the programs of the YMCA to industrial workers.
Furthermore, the constitution of immigrant workers as “movie audiences” provided
the possibility of bringing together different ethnic sections of the immigrant working
class to be addressed as one. The film-immigrant/worker coupling gave the Bureau of
Motion Pictures and Exhibit the opportunity to assign film a competitive advantage in
relationship to other forms of public address. To explore how this competitive
advantage was assigned is to highlight how film’s “attraction effect” made possible its
transformation into a cultural technology for shaping conduct. Three lines of
reasoning take center stage: film’s popularity, efficiency as a visual aid, and portability.
The popularity of film cannot be underestimated. It was the sheer numbers (the
magnitude) of people attending movies that convinced the Y that the movie was an
untapped educational resource. Association Men reported, “The audience of the
moving picture theatres is about 2,500,000. The realization of an increasing number of
Associations . . . that in the moving picture we have today one of the greatest unused
educational forces of civilization is causing a rapid installation of machines.”42 The
existence and magnitude of a large movie audience moved film from the realm of
 Y Movies 27

a contingent medium of public address to a necessary cultural technology. In the

“Foreword” to the pamphlet Moving Pictures and Working Men, the Y noted:
All classes of people enjoy moving pictures. None more so than the industrial
worker. In fact, the extraordinary growth to the motion picture business has in a
large measure been made possible through the enormous patronage on the part of
machine and hand workers. A few visits to motion picture theaters made by an
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observant secretary will impress him with the fact that it is the operatives of mills,
factories, shops, mines and foundries who are pouring the largest and steadiest
stream of dimes and nickels into the coffers of this latest form of commercialized
recreation. The mental and emotional impressions made nightly upon thousands
and thousands of working people throughout the United States through witnessing
these pictures in an educational and socializing factor [are] not to be lightly regarded
by the Association. In the broader program being carried out by many of our
Associations located in industrial centers the motion picture is coming in for a
degree of attention commensurate with its importance.43
The popularity of film provided the opportunity to use film as a cultural technology to
create encounters between the YMCA secretary and the immigrant/working class.
The second reason is less quantitative and more qualitative: the visual element of
film. The “mental and emotional impressions made nightly” projected by moving
pictures convinced the Y that film would be useful in their welfare work. As pointed
out in the first section, the Y used film as a visual aid to supplement the voice of the
secretary. One should not assume that the Y thought the visual dimension of film was
so radically new that the working class audiences were simply mesmerized by the
images flickering in front of them. As Tom Gunning argues, even the earliest audiences
of motion pictures were not naı̈ve; they were, in fact, very sophisticated visual
consumers due to the vast array of visual entertainments available at the time.44
It was the combination of movement and temporality that morphed film into a
cultural technology to shape conduct. Specifically, film was an efficient educational
tool. According to the BMPE, “From fifteen minutes of motion pictures a class will
learn more about Yellowstone Park, geysers and hot springs than by reading a hundred
pages of descriptive material.”45 Due to its presumed efficiency, “visual instruction”
was taking its place in the field of modern education. Moreover, the visual was
considered particularly useful for negotiating problems of literacy. As Ira Shaw
reported, “The moving picture machine is a powerful agent for good in an industrial
community. . . . In some of the coal mining fields not half of the residents can read
and write, thus things taken in through the eye in a pictorial way can be made to have
a powerful educational value.”46 It is worth remembering, however, that the YMCA
did not imagine the visual element as a substitute, but as a supplement to oral
communication.
The educational purpose of film cannot be completely subsumed under the
narratives of welfare capitalism, Americanization, or shifts in the value of
consumption and masculinity. The presumed efficiency of visual education is a
subtler and more parsimonious reason for why the YMCA turned to film. Moreover,
film presents the YMCA as a “modern” organization capable of handling its
responsibilities. The YMCA was not alone in recognizing how film modernized
 28 R. W. Greene
education. For example, R. W. Reynolds justified the need for the US Bureau of
Education to provide a handbook on how to use motion picture equipment with the
claim that “the day of motion pictures for the purpose of education has arrived.”47 As
Charles Acland reports, during the first half of the twentieth century, cultural
authorities often signaled their “modernity” by shifting resources in the direction of
film.48 For the YMCA, an organization that claimed to be reaching 4 million working
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class men and boys a year and hoped to expand, film became a modern necessity in
order to deliver instruction faster to more people.
The third reason to harness the contingent power of film was that it pushed the
YMCA into the community. Film’s popularity worked hand-in-hand with film’s
portability. The portability of film carried the Y secretary into new and diverse sites. In
other words, film was capable of pulling working-class men toward the Y, and pushing
the Y secretary into the daily life of its target population. The Industrial Department
recognized that “if the Association is to make itself a community factor of importance,
it will have to project itself into the home, work, and recreational life of the largest class
of men and boys (the industrial workers) that make up the community.”49 The Bureau
of Motion Pictures and Exhibits specifically remarked on the ability of motion pictures
to establish Association programs in “plants, parks, street meetings and other
points.”50 C. W. Baldwin, a Community Secretary of the YMCA in Geneva, New York
reported to the BMPE:
Previous to the time of our promoting moving pictures in industry it was almost
impossible for the YMCA to get an opportunity to have a hearing for any of its plans
which it had regarding the promotion for industries. It was through the co-
operation of the Industrial Department, and its Bureau of Motion Pictures and
Exhibits that we were able to get our first entry into the industries of the city, and
since then have been able to carry out other parts of our industrial program. I
certainly believe that the moving pictures are one of the grandest things we have as a
means to an end.51
Film’s popularity and portability combined to move the Y secretary throughout the
social body.
In writing about its social hygiene films, the BMPE commented that “unlimited
possibilities for the Association programs lie in the parks, playgrounds, and vacant lots
during spring, summer and fall.”52 While the YMCA hoped to target working-class
men and boys, its decision to exhibit films increased its ability to attract the whole
family. As the promotional material of the Bureau of Motion Pictures and Exhibits
states, “Hospitals, institutions and homes appreciate the Association program of
religion, music and entertainment.”53 The portability of film was highlighted as early
as 1912 in the following YMCA advertisement for Edison’s Kinetoscope
We are glad to call attention to the “Edison Home Kinetoscope” that promises to be
particularly useful for showing moving pictures at shop meetings and at small
assemblies in or out of the Association building. The machine weighs but twenty
pounds in the convenient carrying case and can be used with the electric current
from an ordinary incandescent light socket and set up for use in less than five
minutes.54
 Y Movies 29

The portability of film helped the Y secretary travel to new locations. As film
historians have remarked, movies were often exhibited "on the move" at fairgrounds,
parks and tent shows throughout the United States.55 The Y took advantage of this
portability to connect the Y secretary to places frequented by industrial workers. It
was, as Charles Acland argues, the mobility of modern life that contributed to the
dispersion of educational sites and the effort of cultural authorities to attempt to
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organize this chaotic slice of daily life.56 Since other forms of public address are
portable as well (traveling preachers and theatre companies, for example) portability
requires the rhetorical contextualization offered by the Y’s recognition of its popularity
and modernity.
It was the constellation of popularity, efficiency and portability that established the
value of film as a cultural technology. The distribution and exhibition of films allowed
the YMCA to perform that most rhetorical of strategies, the bait and switch. In an
effort to address a specific population, the YMCA contributed to the invention and
constitution of movie audiences with the hope that these movie audiences would then
turn around and become members of the YMCA. As John Hartley comments, critical
recognition of the role institutions play in representing audiences reveals a “desire to
enter into relations with them . . . that serves . . . institutional needs and purposes.”57
The Y’s desire was to create a pedagogical relationship between the Y and the working
class. Not surprisingly, this desire required moving the immigrant/working class closer
to the voice of the YMCA secretary. Film was just the ticket.

The Liberal State and the Modernization of Pastoral Power

For the YMCA, the service provided by the Bureau of Motion Pictures and Exhibits
had Christian roots in the spiritual guidance provided by a pastor. For Foucault, a
pastor “designates a special form of power.” Pastoral power aims to “assure individual
salvation in the next world.” It is “prepared to sacrifice itself for the life and salvation of
the flock.” It “does not just look after just the whole community, but each individual in
particular, during his [sic] entire life.” Finally, pastoral power “implies a knowledge of
the [individual’s] conscience and an ability to direct it.” For Foucault, the
modernization of pastoral power resulted in (1) “no longer . . . leading people to their
salvation in the next world, but rather ensuring it in this world,” (2) an increase in the
number and kinds of “officials of pastoral power” including state and non-state actors,
and (3) “the development of knowledge . . . around two roles: one . . . concerning
the population; the other . . . concerning the individual.”58 The model by which the
liberal State would increasingly take responsibility for the welfare of its own
population was first accomplished by philanthropic and Christian organizations, such
as the YMCA, providing health, education and economic assistance. Moreover, the
classical liberal State relied on these organizations to limit its intervention in social
life.59 The critical point about the emergence of the Y secretary-film-immigrant/wor-
ker block is how the modernization of pastoral power limits the overt reach of the state
but nonetheless allows the state to care for its population.
 30 R. W. Greene
For the YMCA, the desire to serve its population was not designed to produce
substitutable bits of raw material for the industrial machine of modern capitalism.
Rather it was an attempt to form capacities (speak English, clean house, forge steal)
under the (moral) guidance of the Y secretary. As the BMPE commented, “In the
industrial movies . . . [workers] realize the importance of their contribution to the
progress of the world, civilization, and humanity. Jobs become service and their trade
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an art of which they have the right to be proud.”60 The Y secretary-film-worker block
was a node in the circulation of service as a norm of interaction that required the
pastoral guidance of the Y secretary for the worker to unleash their artistic capacity.
For the YMCA, the norm of service had the potential of transforming class conflict
into pastoral relationships of mutual care.
In the nineteenth century, the political threat of the working class required
liberalism to educate the working class for their roles as citizens and increasingly
pushed the state to create more administrative functions to enhance the security of its
population.61 The result was the slow and uneven development of modern liberalism
that, in the United States, would result in a thin layer of social democracy associated
with the New Deal. During the progressive era, the relationship between the cultural
spheres of citizenship witnessed interventions into the everyday lives of immigrants at
the same time as the political level (most vividly demonstrated by the right to vote)
witnessed the “purification of citizenship” whereby literacy, health and immigration
status were all used to deny people the franchise.62 While literacy, health and
immigration status limited formal political participation, they also became objectives
pursued by the Y secretary in creating pedagogical relationships of pastoral guidance.
During the Progressive Era, John Dewey declared that “inquiry” and the “art of
communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and
circulation and breathe life into it” if the media revolution hoped to solve the modern
problems of fragmentation and alienation.63 The Y secretary desired to be the divine
spark that turned the machinery of film into a pedagogical relationship to save the
immigrant working classes from the social problems of urban living. To harness this
pedagogical relationship to the modernization of pastoral power necessitated the Y
secretary to “know your group individually. The rind of the orange is sour—you must
go inside for the juice. Sit with the men and learn their problem, and you’ll be
surprised how sweet it is to help the man lower down.”64 Pastoral power required
knowledge of the conscience of the individual to better guide it toward new capacities.
Film attracted and educated “foreign” industrial workers, but its primary purpose was
to supplement a pastoral relationship whereby the Y secretary turned the bitter reality
of “foreignness” into the sweet intimacy of brotherly care.
As for the articulation between the Y secretary-film-worker block to the liberal state,
the telegraph provides a point of comparison. According to Andrew Barry, the value
of the telegraph allowed the liberal state to keep its distance from social life by
providing the temporally sensitive information to judge how and when to intervene.65
Film was not capable, at this time, of providing instantaneous real-time information
from far away places. Yet, the YMCA’s social work allowed the liberal state to keep its
distance. The large increase in immigration and the potential of class war generated
 Y Movies 31

a governing crisis in the wake of the US federal government’s historic resistance to

interfere directly in such areas as health, education and welfare. While the state often
resorted to repression and violence to stop immediate short-term threats, it preferred
to govern at a distance. To do so, it needed organizations like the YMCA to develop
more intimate relationships of governance. The YMCA’s institutional use of film
connected the working class to the Y secretary while allowing the YMCA to stand in for
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the liberal state. In the early twentieth century, the unique of film to produce an
“attraction effect” secured it a starring role in the modernization of pastoral power.
In so doing, the spatial coordinates of liberal governance were experiencing a double
articulation as the Y’s film program connected its secretaries to industrial workers in
pastoral service while the YMCA and the liberal state were being stitched together by
the modernization of pastoral power.

Conclusion
By 1920, the Industrial Department of the YMCA had established a complex network
of local and specialized Ys with the task of caring for the social welfare, education,
recreation and moral uplift of working class men and boys, many of whom were new
immigrants. It also established a Bureau of Motion Pictures and Exhibits to coordinate
the distribution and exhibition of industrial and educational film. For the YMCA, film
was assigned a competitive advantage as a “technology of attraction” that re-coded it
as a cultural technology capable of shaping conduct. Thus, film went from a
contingent means of public address to a necessary element in the Y’s public pedagogy.
Critically, a diagram emerges articulating the concrete block Y secretary-film-working
class to the changing history of liberalism as an abstract block of capacity-
communication-power. What makes possible the movement between the concrete and
the abstract is the circulation of pastoral power that allows the liberal state to govern at
a distance by instilling intimate pedagogical relationships between spiritual guides
(experts) and a population. The dispersion of pastoral power throughout the social
body explains the institutional role of the YMCA in social welfare and the articulation
of film to these programs as a prosthetic supplement to the secretary’s voice and touch.
Liberalism’s incorporation of pastoral power necessitated the circulation of expert
knowledge and the delivery of bodies to those forms of expertise so that populations
might govern themselves with limited state intervention. While some communication
scholars find it necessary to advocate a balance between the temporal and dialogic
dimensions of oral culture with the spatial dissemination of mass media, the media
history of the YMCA demonstrates how such a balance is implicated in the
modernization of pastoral power.66
The Industrial Department disappeared after the 1920s, taking away many of its
welfare services. Organizational disputes and duplication between local city YMCAs
and the Industrial Department’s special programs and buildings, shifts in the
corporate programs associated with welfare capitalism, and the massive increase in
federal responsibilities for social and economic security due to the Great Depression
were all factors in the decline of the Industrial Department and the slow evacuation of
 32 R. W. Greene
the YMCA as a major provider of welfare programs. The conservative memory of the
progressive era recalls the YMCA as an example of a successful faith-based welfare
service to argue that their re-birth can replace the legacy of modern liberalism’s
reliance on “welfare-statism.”67 Today, a neo-liberal state is replacing a modern one by
deploying faith-based organizations to generate new pastoral relationships free from
market and cultural distortions blamed on the welfare state.68 What we are witnessing
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in the USA is the post-modernization of pastoral power—the subsuming of social

welfare to the market logics of neo-liberalism as a governing rationality.69 Bemoaning
the lack of entrepreneurial spirit in social work, David Stoesz writes:
As the human service sector of postindustrial society unfolds, what had once been
public utilities during the industrial era are being converted into social markets.
Firms now control substantial portions of markets in hospital management, HMOs,
home health care, child day care, even corrections . . . [I]t is the rare social worker,
indeed, who has the vision and gumption to set up a human service corporation.70

Today, proliferating screens, digital cameras, and editing equipment entail a new era
of film-making, exhibition, distribution and spectatorship. For some, this situation is
more akin to the early cinema of working-class film-makers than the classical
Hollywood system.71 As this paper has demonstrated, the YMCA’s early twentieth-
century uptake of film as a cultural technology facilitated the modernization of
pastoral power within the governing logics of the liberal state. Today, the arrival of
digital media alongside neo-liberalism calls for an assessment of media forms and
communication practices in the post-modernization of pastoral power and, perhaps,
the possibility of a future revolt of the audience.

Notes
[1] The Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program: In and
Out of the Association Building (New York: Industrial Department, International Committee
YMCA, Bureau of Motion Pictures, 1920), 2, Box 10, Industrial Records, Motion Picture
Pamphlets. Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University Libraries, University of Minnesota, Twin
Cities.
[2] Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Washington, DC: Regenery Publishing,
1992).
[3] The first reported film exhibition was at a local Brooklyn YMCA in 1907. Five years later, the Y
commissioned the Edison Company to prepare “a series of reels bearing on the work of the . . .
Association in its outreach to working men and boys.” Moving Pictures and Working Men (New
York: Industrial Department International Committee of the YMCA, 1912), 24, Box 10
Industrial Records, Motion Picture Pamphlets. Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University
Libraries, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
[4] The Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 14– 15.
[5] Diane Waldman, “‘Towards a Harmony of Interests’: Rockefeller, the YMCA, and the Company
Movie Theatre,” Wide Angle 8, no. 1 (1986): 49. Social historians refer to corporate and charity
efforts to improve the moral and economic welfare of workers as welfare capitalism.
[6] This paper works from a Foucauldian perspective on liberalism. As such, it imagines liberalism
not as a political ideology but as a governing rationality capable of harnessing specific
techniques for the shaping of conduct, the purpose of which is to create the conditions
promoting individual freedom. See the essays in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and
 Y Movies 33

Nikolas Rose, ed., Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of
Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). In cultural studies, the discussion of
governmentality often takes place under the sign of cultural policy studies. See Tony Bennett,
Culture: A Reformer’s Science (London: Sage, 1998) and Toby Miller, Technologies of Truth:
Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998). For
a recent assessment of the concept of governmentality in cultural studies, see the essays in Jack
Z. Bratich, Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy, ed., Foucault, Cultural Studies, and
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Governmentality (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003).

[7] Critical understanding of the spatial and temporal dimensions of communication owe much to
the foundational work of Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1951) and Empire and Communications (1950; Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1972). More recently, Lawrence Grossberg has described a critical emphasis on spatial
and temporal coordinates of everyday life as a “spatial materialism.” See his “Cultural Studies
in/and New Worlds” in Bringing It all Back Home: Essays in Cultural Studies (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997), 343 –73. One might also add the following to how cultural forms,
practices and technologies produce space and time: Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies,
Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2003); May Joseph,
Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999); Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard
Maxwell, Global Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2001), Lynn Spigel, Make Room for
TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), and Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
[8] Jeremy Packer, “Mobile Communications and Governing the Mobile: CBs and Truckers,” The
Communication Review 5 (2002): 43.
[9] One critical direction for a Foucauldian emphasis on governance is to avoid the hermeneutics
of suspicion associated with the ideological criticism of a text in order to map the articulation
of human technologies in the assemblage of a dispositif; see Ronald Walter Greene, “Another
Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21 –41; Malthusian
Worlds: US Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1999), 3 – 10; “Rhetorical Pedagogy as a Postal System: Circulating Subjects Through Michael
Warner’s ‘Publics and Counterpublics,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 434– 43. The
importance of the diagram as critical concept is made possible by Deleuze’s uptake of
Foucault’s work. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988), 34– 37 and Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism
and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 100– 106. The substitution of the
diagram for the text as the object of critical analysis was recently defended by Dilip
Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli “Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation,
Transfiguration, Recognition” Public Culture 15 (2003): 391.
[10] For the Deluzian inspired approach to articulation theory that guides this paper, see Grossberg,
We Gotta Get Out of This Place, 37 – 69.
[11] Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt, “Introduction,” in Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and
the YWCA in the City, ed. Nina Mjagkij and Margeret Spratt (New York: New York University
Press, 1997), 1– 22. See also Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and
Workingmen, 1877 – 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1– 21.
[12] Winter, Making Men, Making Class, 4.
[13] It is important to note the shifts in the emphasis of welfare capitalism between the 1870s and
the end of the 1920s. Two such shifts include: (1) a move away from outsourcing employee
programs toward the establishment and rationalization of in-house personnel management
departments and (2) a move away from “character-building” programs to financial incentives
 34 R. W. Greene
like stock ownership, group insurance, and pensions. According to Thomas Winter, as the
Great Depression approached, both shifts made the YMCA increasingly less important in the
history of welfare capitalism. Regarding the history of welfare capitalism, see Sanford Jacoby,
Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American
Industry, 1900 –1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 192 –99. The close
relationship between the YMCA and welfare capitalism is documented by Thomas Winter,
Making Men, Making Class, 28– 46.
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[14] In September of 1913, employees of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in Ludlow, Colorado
went on strike. In response, Rockefeller evicted strikers from company-owned houses. The
strikers, in turn, built a “tent village.” The Ludlow massacre describes the killing of 24 men,
women and children by company agents.
[15] Waldman, “Towards,” 42.
[16] Waldman, “Towards,” 44.
[17] Waldman, “Towards,” 47.
[18] Waldman, “Towards,” 47.
[19] Winter, Making Men, Making Class, 136.
[20] Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); “The Revolt of the Audience: Reconsidering
Audiences and Reception During the Silent Era,” in American Movie Audience: From the Turn of
the Century to the Early Sound Era, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: BFI, 1999),
92– 111.
[21] Ross, “The Revolt of the Audience,” 97.
[22] Ross, Working Class Hollywood, 212– 39.
[23] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 12.
[24] Ross, Working Class Hollywood, 224.
[25] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 2.
[26] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 8.
[27] Richard Abel and Rick Altman, “Introduction” in The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel
and Rick Altman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), xii.
[28] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; Athens: Swallow Press, Ohio University Press,
1954), 218– 19.
[29] Kevin Deluca and Jennifer Peeples, “From the Public Sphere to the Public Screen:
Democracy, Activism and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication
19 (2002): 126.
[30] The constitution of this interpersonal sphere as a series of communicative practices may be one
of the most important effects of the YMCA’s social welfare programs; see Zornitsa
D. Keremidchieva, “Making Citizens From Scratch: Americanization, Communication and the
YMCA” (paper presented at the Department of Communication Studies, Wednesday Noon
Research, University of Minnesota, 15 October 2003), 8– 9.
[31] Charles Acland, “Mapping the Serious and the Dangerous: Film and the National Council of
Education,” Cinémas: Revue D’Études Cinématographiques 6 (1995): 101 –18.
[32] Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951).
[33] Judith Mayne, “Immigrants and Spectators,” Wide Angle 5, no. 2 (1983): 33.
[34] Mayne, “Immigrants and Spectators,” 33.
[35] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 10.
[36] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 10.
[37] Russell Merrit cited in Mayne, “Immigrants and Spectators,” 33.
[38] Russell Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theatres 1905 – 1914: Building an Audience for the Movies,” in
The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976),
63– 81.
[39] Mayne, “Immigrants and Spectators,” 36.
 Y Movies 35

[40] Winter, Making Men, Making Class, 131– 33.

[41] Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City,
1870 – 1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 194– 95.
[42] “Moving Pictures,” Association Men 37 (1912): 237.
[43] Motion Pictures and Working Men, np.
[44] Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator,” in
Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
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Press, 1995), 114– 33.

[45] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Programs, 6.
[46] Moving Pictures and Working Men, 19.
[47] R. W. Reynolds, “Explanatory Note” in Motion Pictures and Motion-Picture Equipment: A
General Handbook. Department of the Interior. Bureau of Education Bulletin, No. 82.
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1920), 4.
[48] Charles Acland, “Patterns of Cultural Authority: The National Film Society of Canada and the
Institutionalization of Film Education, 1938 – 1941,“ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 10, no. 1
(2001): 2-27.
[49] Among Industrial Workers (Ways and Means): A Handbook for Associations in Industrial Fields
(New York: Industrial Department, International Committee YMCA, 1916), 48, Immigration
History Research Center, University Libraries, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
[50] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 4.
[51] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 13.
[52] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Program, 20.
[53] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures in the YMCA Practical Programs, 7.
[54] Motion Pictures and Working Men, 23.
[55] Calvin Pryluck, “The Itinerant Movie Show and the Development of the Film Industry,”
Journal of the University Film and Video Association 35 (1983): 11– 22; Mark E. Schwartz,
“Motion Picture on the Move,” Journal of American Culture 4 (1987): 1– 7.
[56] Acland, “Mapping the Serious and the Dangerous,” 105.
[57] John Hartley, “Invisible Fictions: Television, Audiences, Paedocracy, Pleasure” Textual Practice
1 (1987): 127.
[58] Michel Foucault, “Afterward: The Subject and Power,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983), 214– 15.
[59] See Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1979) for a discussion of how the interface and conflict between philanthropic reform
organizations, the professionalization of medicine and the state helped to invent the “social” as
a sphere of governance.
[60] Use of Industrial and Educational Motion Pictures, 3.
[61] Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 129– 40.
[62] Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: The Free
Press, 1998), 182.
[63] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 184.
[64] Ten Suggestions to College Students Engaged in Industrial Service (YMCA File: Industrial
Work/Immigration Work, 1908 – 1915), 2, Box 10, Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University
Libraries, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
[65] Andrew Barry, “Lines of Communication and Spaces of Rule,” in Foucault and Political Reason:
Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government, 123– 43.
[66] See James Carey, Communication as Culture (Boston: Irwin Hyman, 1989) and John Durham
Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999).
 36 R. W. Greene
[67] For a discussion of the competing visions of “welfare capitalism” and “welfare statism,” see
David Stoesz, “Ideological Nostalgia, Intellectual Narcosis” in The Professionalization of
Poverty: Social Work and the Poor, ed. Gary Lowe and P. Nelson Reid (New York: Aldine De
Gruyter, 1999), 142– 47.
[68] For a first-class book on the ideological mystifications of the market rhetoric underwriting the
neo-conservative cultural critique of the welfare state, see James Aune, Selling the Free Market:
The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness (New York: Guilford, 2001).
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[69] For a discussion of postmodernism as a shift from the formal to the real subsumption of social
life to the logics of capital, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000). The “post-modernization of pastoral power” is my concept; it is a
corollary to what they refer to as the material ontology of bio-political production.
[70] Stoesz, “Ideological Nostalgia, Intellectual Narcosis,” 144.
[71] Miriam Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed.
Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 147– 49; Will Straw,
“Proliferating Screens,” Screen 41, no. 1 (2000): 115– 19.