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PALGRAVE ANIMATION

New York’s
Animation Culture
Advertising, Art, Design
and Film, 1939–1940

Kristian Moen
 Palgrave Animation

Series Editors
Caroline Ruddell
Brunel University London
Uxbridge, UK

Paul Ward
Arts University Bournemouth
Poole, UK
This book series explores animation and conceptual/theoretical issues in
an approachable way. The focus is twofold: on core concepts, theories
and debates in animation that have yet to be dealt with in book-length
format; and on new and innovative research and interdisciplinary work
relating to animation as a field. The purpose of the series is to consoli-
date animation research and provide the ‘go to’ monographs and anthol-
ogies for current and future scholars.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15948
 Kristian Moen

New York’s Animation

Culture
Advertising, Art, Design and Film, 1939–1940
Kristian Moen
Department of Film and Television
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK

ISSN 2523-8086 ISSN 2523-8094 (electronic)

Palgrave Animation
ISBN 978-3-030-27930-1 ISBN 978-3-030-27931-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27931-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2019
The image is: Consolidated Edison—City of Light Diorama—Artist painting model, 1940.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Image credit: Margaret Bourke-White/Contributor

Cover credit: New York World’s Fair 1939–1940 records, Manuscripts and Archives
Division, The New York Public Library

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

It is a great pleasure to be able to thank some of the many people who

have helped in the research and writing of this book. The project ben-
efitted enormously from the assiduous eye for detail and extraordinary
research skills of Vicky Jackson. It was a great pleasure to work with
Vicky on the “Idea of Animation” project, funded by the European
Research Council. The research leading to these results has received
funding from the European Research Council under the European
Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant
agreement n° 338110. Research for the book was undertaken at a num-
ber of archives and libraries, including the British Film Institute, the
Margaret Herrick Library, Yale University Library, the Harry Ransom
Center, the Guggenheim Archives, the New York Public Library, the
Archives and Special Collections at the University of Stirling, the New-
York Historical Society, the Archives of American Art and the Rockefeller
Archive Center. I would like to thank the many skilled archivists, librar-
ians and assistants who helped make this archival research such a fasci-
nating and rewarding experience. The publishing process has been a
real pleasure thanks to the editors of the Palgrave Animation series,
Paul Ward and Caroline Ruddell, and Lina Aboujieb, Ellie Freedman
and Carolyn Zhang at Palgrave. The anonymous readers offered many
insightful suggestions and ideas. Although I was not able to incorporate
all of their comments, I hugely appreciate their input.
I am very lucky indeed to be able to work with such great colleagues
in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Bristol,

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

including Katie Mack, Alex Clayton, Sarah Street, Angela Piccini, Helen
Piper, Peter Milner, Chris Barnett, Chris Jones, Jacqueline Maingard,
Kate Withers, Deborah Gibbs, Pete Falconer, Nariman Massoumi and
Jimmy Hay. I would also like to thank the wonderful students who have
helped so much during many discussions and conversations, in class and
out of class. Outside of Bristol, I have enjoyed a wealth of support from
friends and colleagues. Gareth Evans has been a crucial help at many
points during the writing of this book, keeping me on track when I
needed it most and opening my eyes to new ways of seeing film, art and
politics. I am tremendously grateful to Carole Zucker and Mario Falsetto
for teaching me so much and for their kindness over the years. Sherry
Kelley, Jonathan Tooke and Marguerite Valentine have been wonderful
friends to exchange ideas with. Peter Krämer has been a source of con-
stant support throughout the writing process, always ready to challenge
assumptions and always ready to give warm-hearted encouragement.
Many thanks also to Martin, Sookyung, Alan and Peter for introducing
me to so much of New York.
Much of this book was written during trips to Alberta. I would like to
thank the staff at the Medicine Hat College for giving me space to work,
and especially Michael MacKenzie for our many delightful conversations.
Concordia University of Edmonton was also a terrific place to work, par-
ticularly its welcoming and brilliantly run library. Thank you to Jasmina
Odor for helping me to try and better understand the art of writing. Dan
Mirau has been very important throughout the writing of this book, and
I thank him profoundly for his insights and support. Finally, I would like
to thank my mother, Carol, whose passion for art is a constant source
of inspiration, and Paul Thibault, who is always there for me and always
ready to share his wisdom.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
“New York Is Not America” 5
Themes of Animation 11
Expanded and Micro Histories 13
References 21

2 The City 23
Fifth Avenue’s Animated Shop Windows 25
Artistic Motion and Commercial Motion 31
Douglas Leigh on Broadway 38
Animation, Art and Memory Value 47
Rockefeller Center and the Hall of Motion 52
References 62

3 The World’s Fair 67

Walter Dorwin Teague and the Cycle of Production 73
Rhythm and Design 80
Norman Bel Geddes and Futurama 87
Animating Design 94
The Art of Motion at the Fair 99
References 110

vii
viii CONTENTS

4 The Gallery 113

Norman McLaren and Motion Itself 119
Dwinell Grant: Composing Animation 128
Movement Between Media 137
Mary Ellen Bute and Kinetic Space 144
References 165

5 The Cinema 169

Pinocchio in New York 173
Fantasia as a New Form of Cinema 180
Animated Film at the Fair 187
References 202

6 Conclusion 207
References 214

Index 215
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Detail from Ernest Dudley Chase, “A pictorial map

of that portion of New York City known as Manhattan,”
1939. David Rumsey Historical Map Collection 7
Fig. 2.1 Lord & Taylor’s animated shop window. Display
Animation, 1938: The Year Book of Motion Displays, 25 26
Fig. 2.2 Motion display for Bigelow-Sanford Carpet Company.
Display Animation, 1938: The Year Book of Motion Displays, 171 33
Fig. 2.3 Detail from James Gosling Jr., “Advertising Device.”
Patent 2,273,259, filed October 30, 1940 36
Fig. 2.4 Wilson Whiskey sign at night. Popular Science (1940).
Framepool 38
Fig. 2.5 Central Epok panel for the Wilson Whiskey sign.
Popular Science (1940). Framepool 40
Fig. 2.6 Daytime view of the Wilson Whiskey sign. “No Better
Whiskey in Any Bottle Wilson ‘That’s All,’” November 18,
1941, R. C. Maxwell Company Records. Duke University
Libraries 43
Fig. 3.1 Detail from Tony Sarg, “New York 1939 Official
World’s Fair Pictorial Map.” Tony Sarg Publications,
1939. David Rumsey Historical Map Collection 68
Fig. 3.2 “150-Ton Turntable at Ford Exposition, New York World’s
Fair, 1939.” From the Collections of The Henry Ford.
Gift of Ford Motor Company 76
Fig. 3.3 “Copper Display, Ford Exposition, New York World’s Fair,
1939.” From the Collections of The Henry Ford. Gift
of Ford Motor Company 78

ix
x LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.4 “Men at Tung Trees Display, ‘Ford Cycle of Production,’

Ford Exposition, New York World’s Fair, 1939.” From the
Collections of The Henry Ford. Gift of Ford Motor Company 82
Fig. 3.5 “Consolidated Edison—City of Light Diorama—Model.”
The New York Public Library 87
Fig. 3.6 “General Motors—Futurama—Models of High-Rise
Buildings.” The New York Public Library 90
Fig. 3.7 “General Motors—Futurama—Model of Highways
Intersecting.” The New York Public Library 91
Fig. 3.8 “Industrial Mural at Ford’s Exhibit Hall, New York World’s
Fair, 1939.” From the Collections of The Henry Ford.
Gift of Ford Motor Company 100
Fig. 3.9 “Chassis Fountain, Ford Exposition Garden Court,
New York World’s Fair, 1939.” From the Collections
of The Henry Ford. Gift of Ford Motor Company 102
Fig. 4.1 Spook Sport (1940) 122
Fig. 4.2 Scherzo (1939) 124
Fig. 4.3 Loops (1941) 127
Fig. 4.4 Themis (1940) 129
Fig. 4.5 Themis (1940) 130
Fig. 4.6 Tarantella (1940) 152
Fig. 5.1 Symphony in F (1940) 191
Fig. 5.2 Pete-Roleum and His Cousins (1939) 193
Fig. 5.3 Pete-Roleum and His Cousins (1939) 193
Fig. 6.1 New York Lightboard Record (1961) 212
Fig. 6.2 New York Lightboard Record (1961) 213
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, New York City showcased an extraordi-
nary panorama of animation. Walking through the city and ducking into a
cinema, you were bound to catch a short animated film as part of the pro-
gram, perhaps one featuring a major star such as Mickey Mouse or Popeye.
But you could also settle in to watch one of the feature-length animated
films which had begun to appear after the success of Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs (1937), with Gulliver’s Travels (1939), Pinocchio (1940) and
Fantasia (1940) playing in cinemas around Broadway. Along your walk,
if you had timed it right, you might also watch animated films at a gallery
such as the Museum of Modern Art, which was screening works rang-
ing from contemporary Disney cartoons to the earliest animated films of
Emile Cohl. If, like millions of others, you also wanted to take in the sights
of the New York World’s Fair, which ran from 1939 to 1940, a plethora
of short advertising and educational films were on display—including a
Mickey Mouse film advertising the National Biscuit Company’s products,
an animated three-dimensional film advertisement for Chrysler and an ani-
mated puppet film extolling the wonders of petroleum.
Animation had also spilled out from cinema screens to a wider visual cul-
ture, enlivening spectacles and displays. In a short stroll from Fifth Avenue
to Times Square, you could gawk at the animated displays in the shop win-
dows of the most prestigious stores, marvel at the scientific motion exhibits
in the Hall of Motion at Rockefeller Center and gaze up at the animated

© The Author(s) 2019 1

K. Moen, New York’s Animation Culture, Palgrave Animation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27931-8_1
2 K. MOEN

signs lighting up Broadway. The World’s Fair offered another vivid land-
scape of motion, with the editor for Display Animation, I. L. Cochrane,
excitedly explaining:

The great majority of all exhibits … will be made more fascinating and more
impressive by means of motion and mobile light – and each will tell in drama-
tized simplicity the story of an industry or a product! That is real achievement
for all those who have striven for better sales expression through artistic Ani-
mation. Approximately twenty percent of exhibits were animated in the great
[Century of Progress] Chicago Fair of five years ago – and in those of next
year ninety percent will be animated! 1

Exhibits were awash with motion, yoking kineticism to the Fair’s theme
of “The World of Tomorrow.” If you were to visit the exhibit for the
Ford Motor Company, for example, you could see an enormous animated
mural depicting industrial machinery and science, an animated film play-
fully detailing the process of car manufacturing and a huge rotating display,
entitled the “Cycle of Production,” that slowly revolved to show dozens
of animated models engaged in various activities of production and labor.
Amazed by such variety, a British visitor’s account began with the obser-
vation, “A book could be written about the exhibit of the Ford Motor
Company at the World’s Fair.”2 Writing in the journal Display, the visitor
was astonished by the extraordinary scope of motion: “This Ford exhibit
would suggest that these are really the days of animation.”
This book is about these days of animation in New York City. Focusing
on the period from 1939 to 1940, I trace the diverse routes that animation
took during this dynamic period in its history. I explore “animation” in a
broad sense, common at the time, as a word that refers to giving motion
or the impression of motion to images and objects that would otherwise
remain static. Vivifying advertising and educational displays, creating new
forms of art, extending the boundaries of cinema and expressing the vitality
of modernity, animation was transformative. Whether using modes of pro-
ducing animated films that had been in place for decades or experiment-
ing with new technologies of mechanical movement, photoelectric cells
and hand-painted film, animators were opening up new vistas of motion.
Animation’s expansive possibilities were evident across different exhibi-
tion contexts—projected in cinemas, displayed in galleries and department
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

stores and promoted in industrial exhibits. Not surprisingly, a vibrant con-

versation was taking place around these uses of animation, with the popu-
lar press joining artists, designers, advertisers, filmmakers and theorists in
attempting to understand and explain animation’s potentials.
Rather than approaching these disparate strands of animation as separate,
I examine how they were interwoven in a distinctive animation culture. I
use the phrase “animation culture” to refer to the ways in which animation
is understood, created and used in a specific time and place. My focus on
animation culture relates closely to established ways of understanding other
cultural practices. The notion of film culture, for example, indicates how
cinema is something more than a collection of individual films, made up of
exhibition practices, theoretical explorations, audience experiences and a
host of other facets. Instead of something that naturally developed around
cinema, film culture has taken on different shapes in different contexts.
For example, Malte Hagener argues that film culture’s network of “film
criticism and film theory, festivals and prizes, archives and repertoire cine-
mas, film schools and museums” emerges at a specific historical moment,
in the 1920s and 1930s, shaped by a network of national contexts, insti-
tutional bodies and the efforts of an artistic avant-garde.3 And there have
been countless variations and permutations of film culture across the world
throughout the last century, each situating film within their own distinct
circumstances. Animation cultures can be similarly diverse, engaging with
different uses, values and possibilities of animated motion in a myriad of
ways. While sometimes related to film culture, an animation culture can
also follow its own path, separate from a wider cinematic context.
Exploring an animation culture invites us to pay close attention to the
ideas that circulate around animation, from theoretical discussions or artist
statements to a broader cultural reception. These ideas of animation both
reflect and stimulate creative practices. Such practices can involve the use of
established production methods, but they can also engage with new tech-
nologies, innovative techniques or aesthetic experimentation. This mul-
tiplicity extends also to how animation is used in culture; for example,
animation has been a delightful children’s entertainment, a visionary form
of art, a powerful means of advertising, an effective tool for education or
a combination of these and other purposes. These uses of animation are
inflected by the specific ways that animation is shown, whether in a cin-
ema as a feature or a short film, or in other exhibition sites that have also
played a significant role in animation cultures, such as galleries or displays.
Tracing the ideas, creative practices and modes of exhibition that shape an
4 K. MOEN

animation culture—and seeing how they interrelate with one another—can

reveal the multiple factors that determine animation’s place in culture.
In his introduction to The Culture of Print, Roger Chartier discusses
a “dual definition of print culture” that can help illuminate how an idea
of animation culture might be understood, despite the obvious historical
and material differences between a visual culture of the twentieth century
and a print culture emerging after Gutenberg. Chartier first describes print
culture, in what he terms its “classic definition,” as “the profound transfor-
mations that the discovery and then the extended use of the new technique
for the reproduction of texts brought to all domains of life, public and
private, spiritual and material.” With cheaper printing costs and a greater
portability, “such new means of communication… modified practices of
devotion, of entertainment, of information, and of knowledge, and they
redefined men’s and women’s relations with the sacred, with power, and
with their community.”4 By foregrounding the transformations of exist-
ing practices that print culture generated, Chartier offers a dynamic sense
of how a wider culture is responsive and open to change. While anima-
tion cultures do not have quite such far-reaching implications, they can
nevertheless offer a similarly rich diversity of effects. As well as taking on
different forms in different places and times, animation cultures—and the
ways that they become attached to changing experiences and values—are
multifaceted.
One way that this can become obscured is by focusing on facets of ani-
mation culture that resonate with a contemporary sense of animation or
that relate mainly to well-documented areas of its history. Chartier identi-
fies a similar problem in his description of print culture. He writes, “All too
long this culture has been reduced to reading alone, and to a form of read-
ing that is common today or was practiced by the scholars in medieval and
early modern culture.”5 Rather than relating print culture to these prac-
tices, Chartier argues for an expansion of its meanings to include “festive,
ritual, cultic, civic, and pedagogic uses” (1). Chartier’s approach to print
culture brings to light aspects of historical experience that might seem, at
first glance, to be marginal but which were still deeply significant. This
approach is instructive in its attention to multiplicity rather than empha-
sizing singular forms or effects. The richness of animation history and the
cultures that formed around motion’s aesthetic expressions, within and
beyond the cinema, call for a similar attentiveness to multiplicity.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

There have been many different animation cultures, each with their own
ways of understanding, creating and using animation. Every animation cul-
ture has different emphases, with certain features standing out as particu-
larly prominent or characteristic. The Fleischer Studios in the 1930s, for
example, had a distinctive animation culture which not only foregrounded
the production of popular animated entertainment but also included exhi-
bition strategies, an in-house newsletter, technological experimentation
and extensions of animated characters into other media. Animation cul-
tures also take shape in certain locations, such as the vivid entwinement of
animation, art and advertising in Germany during the Weimar Republic,
explored in Michael Cowan’s work.6 While animation cultures can be seen
as part of a larger history of animation, as well as other fields including
film, art and advertising, examining the particularities of different anima-
tion cultures can offer new perspectives on the diverse artistic, social and
expressive potentials of animation itself.

“New York Is Not America”

In New York in the late 1930s and early 1940s, a particularly vibrant ani-
mation culture had emerged. This was, in many respects, enabled by New
York’s place not only as an enormous urban center, but also as a complex
web of commerce, art, industry and entertainment with a vitalizing inter-
nationalism. While New York’s animation culture was by no means isolated,
it was hardly a typical or representative example of larger trends. Instead,
New York offered an intensified and expansive animation culture. This was
partly due to the city’s distinctive qualities, a topic that was well recog-
nized at the time. For example, an article in the trade journal Department
Store Buyer stated bluntly in its title: “New York Is Not America.”7 The
article warned retailers not to copy the shop windows that were appearing
in New York as they relied upon conditions that were specific to a massive
metropolitan area. Examples of this included the animated shop windows
at Lord & Taylor’s department store (discussed in Chapter 2), which were a
major success partly due to the steady stream of pedestrians strolling along
Fifth Avenue.
The admonition about New York not being representative of the United
States was, of course, true far beyond the specific example of eye-catching
advertising displays. In 1939, New York City was one of the largest cities
in the world, with a population of over seven million spread across its five
boroughs: Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, Richmond (named Staten Island
6 K. MOEN

since 1975) and Manhattan.8 It was both “America’s greatest commer-

cial center” and its “major industrial city.”9 New York also faced extraor-
dinary levels of poverty. In the late 1930s, almost ten percent of New
York’s residential areas were made up “of slums or blighted districts,” with
more than half of these “condemned as unfit for human habitation” (424).
Accounts from the time highlighted the disproportionate impact that the
Depression had upon certain communities within New York; the situa-
tion in Harlem was particularly distressing, with the newly created Federal
Emergency Relief Administration finding “a majority of Harlem’s popu-
lation on the verge of starvation, as a result of the depression and of an
intensified discrimination” that was deeply damaging to employment and
educational opportunities (142). The Depression had hit New York hard,
and by 1933, almost half of its factory workers had lost their jobs.10 Recov-
ery was sluggish and the 1937 recession “reversed four years of slow but
steady improvements in the economy” (58). The effects of the difficult
economic situation would last for years: “Despite gradual improvements in
the economy after 1938, unemployment remained a heavy burden in the
early 1940s” (60).
These economic hardships did not diminish New York’s status as a glob-
ally recognized center of retail, culture and entertainment. The city’s retail
trade was by far the largest in the United States. Much of this activity took
place in “the shopping mecca of the entire metropolitan district”: the retail
area of midtown Manhattan situated between Third and Eighth Avenue
(Fig. 1.1).11 The significance of this area was partly because it was a trans-
portation hub, both for those who lived in the greater New York area and
for the masses of tourists arriving at Penn Station or Grand Central Station.
This part of Manhattan contained sites such as Fifth Avenue, Times Square
and the Museum of Modern Art, offering a densely packed assemblage of
venues for shopping, entertainment and art. It is hardly surprising that the
dynamic expressions of New York’s animation culture, dependent as they
were upon commercial and artistic activities, were largely centered around
this area of New York.
Just as “New York Is Not America,” Manhattan—and particularly the
retail center in midtown Manhattan—was hardly representative of New
York more widely. The distinctive qualities of the area had become even
more pronounced with the construction of the Rockefeller Center com-
plex in the 1930s: “Covering twelve land acres in the fashionable mid-town
shopping district, the project includes a vast skyscraper office center, a shop-
ping center, an exhibition center, and a radio and amusement center.”12
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Fig. 1.1 Detail from Ernest Dudley Chase, “A pictorial map of that portion of
New York City known as Manhattan,” 1939. David Rumsey Historical Map Col-
lection
8 K. MOEN

Described at the time as “expressive of New York,” Rockefeller Center

was “an organization of amazing complexity, a city in miniature, where
a tenant need not leave the premises in order to see the latest first-run
movies, or buy a complete outfit of clothing, or study the newest manifes-
tations of art and science, or engage passage to foreign countries with visas
to match.”13 A number of the figures who were central to New York’s
animation culture had offices in Rockefeller Center, including the most
prominent designer of animated signs, Douglas Leigh, the person running
the marketing and advertising of Disney’s tie-ins, Kay Kamen, and Ameri-
ca’s most well-known industrial designer, Norman Bel Geddes. Rockefeller
Center also contained two of New York’s largest exhibition spaces, Radio
City Music Hall (seating 6200) and the Center Theatre (seating 3700);
their regular screenings of films included the first two features produced
by Disney, Snow White and Pinocchio. With its grand status as a meeting
point for business, entertainment and culture, Rockefeller Center was a
microcosm of the area surrounding it in midtown Manhattan.
The concentrated world of commerce and entertainment in Rockefeller
Center would be joined by an even more elaborate site when the New
York World’s Fair opened its gates in Flushing Meadows, Queens. The
Fair was another miniature world of commerce, entertainment, culture and
art within New York. The Fair was distinctive in many ways, as Chapter 3
explores, and one of its characteristic features was the promotion of massive
corporate exhibits that displayed new technologies and machine age spec-
tacles. Terry Smith writes that “unlike previous fairs, no pride of place was
given to foreign exhibits, their pavilions clustering in the far-flung precincts
of the Federal Building.”14 Instead, “like no fair before or since,” the New
York World’s Fair was “the province of a new breed of industrial design-
ers.” This included Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague, Henry
Dreyfuss, Donald Deskey and Egmont Arens, who designed exhibits for
large corporations and major exhibitors. These designers used animation
extensively in their exhibits, creating a dynamic vision of modern life that
resonated with the fantasies of the Fair’s sponsors and its corporate backers.
While the Fair, Rockefeller Center and the retail area of midtown Man-
hattan were all distinctive in many respects, one quality that they shared
with the wider New York area was internationalism. In Cue magazine’s
1940 guide to New York, George W. Seaton rather bluntly described the
city’s diverse population: “The most common complaint against New York,
that it is not an ‘American’ city, is very true from the point of view of the
visitor from other parts of the United States. But this is what gives the
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

city its peculiar quality. You can take a trip abroad without ever leaving
the three-hundred-odd square miles of the metropolis.”15 Institutional
and commercial forces in New York embraced a sense of international-
ism, though one that was carefully targeted to specific groups of people.
For example, the “sort-of-success” that Rockefeller Center’s La Maison
Française and British Empire Building had with attracting European busi-
nesses as tenants influenced the construction of the International Building,
which aimed to draw in “international trading firms.”16 A similar mixture
of an international outlook mingled with commercial interests shaped the
planning of the World’s Fair. Reflecting this outward-looking quality, most
of the key figures in New York’s animation culture at this time had arrived
from Europe and other parts of the United States, drawn to the city’s cul-
tural and commercial opportunities.
Manhattan was a beacon for entertainment and culture, with the WPA
Guide to New York City reporting that in the late 1930s, there were “40
to 50 legitimate theaters,” “73 art galleries,” “29 museums” and “218
motion-picture houses.”17 In these cinemas, New Yorkers and tourists
would have had the chance to choose from an array of Hollywood pro-
ductions, from prestige pictures and star vehicles to genre films such as the
musical and the Western. As Susan Ohmer writes, “In popular memory,
1939 stands as a banner year in Hollywood. The last year of the decade
marked the release of such enduring films as Gone with the Wind, The Wiz-
ard of Oz, Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Ninotchka. The year is so
celebrated that the U.S. post office has issued a series of commemorative
stamps to recognize its importance.”18 Although Hollywood was produc-
ing artistically and commercially successful films, the industry was also fac-
ing significant challenges: “Financially, however, the year was anything but
stellar, and 1940 was even worse. Antitrust investigations in Washington, a
sharp drop in domestic box office receipts, and the loss of foreign markets
due to the war in Europe all combined to put financial pressure on the
studios.”
Within New York, there were burgeoning alternatives to Hollywood’s
dominance. New York Panorama, a guidebook produced by the Federal
Writers’ Project, noted that “The comparatively discriminating tastes of
New York fans have led to a marginal revolt against Hollywood on the
adjacent fronts of exhibition and production.”19 Experimental and doc-
umentary films were having an impact, and New York was also a “mecca
10 K. MOEN

of the serious film student” with institutions such as the New York Public
Library and the Museum of Modern Art offering educational resources
for the study of cinema (288). In addition to the raft of Hollywood pro-
ductions being shown in cinemas, foreign films such as The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari (1920) and Battleship Potemkin (1925) were being screened in
venues associated with “the little cinema movement,” which also provided
a place where “esthetes rediscovered Charlie Chaplin, canonized Krazy Kat
and well-nigh deified Mickey Mouse” (287).
In the wider context of mainstream cinema, animated films were thriving
in popular appeal and critical estimation. Outside of the few feature-length
animated films produced during this time, animated films were almost
exclusively shown as supporting acts on film programs that included fea-
tures and newsreels. Animated films exhibited in this manner were sold to
exhibitors as part of packages set up by the major studios. Referring to
an article about the state of the animated film industry in 1938, written
by Bosley Crowther for the New York Times, Ohmer describes how “Each
major served as exclusive distributor for one cartoon producer’s output,
and these films both enhanced the distributor’s prestige with exhibitors and
gained attention for its live-action releases.”20 Elaborating on the scale of
production for animated films, Crowther explained that although Disney
was the most well-known studio, “at least five other studios are regularly
turning out as many, if not more, releases per year as the Disney organi-
zation.”21 Among these releases, Popeye and Betty Boop were being pro-
duced by the Fleischer brothers for Paramount, Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny
were appearing in Leon Schlesinger’s Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes
series for Warner Bros., and other studios including Universal, MGM and
Columbia were producing a steady stream of animated shorts. Summing up
the industry, Crowther writes “In all (and in short), somewhere between
175 and 200 animated cartoons are produced in the business in a year, and
there is hardly a theater in the country which doesn’t carry at least one on
every bill. Contrary to reasonable supposition, this type of subject is quite
as popular with grown-ups as it is with kids.”
In this period, animation studios were facing financial pressures like the
major Hollywood studios, with the added problems of labor disputes and
uncertain distribution deals.22 Nevertheless, there had been some aston-
ishing successes. In particular, Snow White’s enormous popular and criti-
cal appeal had reverberated throughout the industry, with Crowther not-
ing that that the “film industry” was now “regarding the lowly animated
cartoon not only as a medium possessing vast artistic potentialities but
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

(much more important!) as a mine of comparatively lightly worked ore.”23

The marvelous studio-produced animated films were part of a particu-
larly vibrant period in the history of animated film, contributing to a cul-
tural sensibility that valued animation’s commercial and artistic possibilities.
However, New York’s most prominent animations often existed outside of
the cinema, tied in with the life of the city in shop windows, billboards,
exhibits and galleries. And even within the space of the cinema, animated
films were going beyond their role as supporting elements within a film pro-
gram—they were being exhibited as features and main attractions, becom-
ing entwined with new exhibition practices. The liveliness of New York’s
animation culture drew upon the growing stature of animated film and
animation beyond the cinema, further buttressed by New York’s economic
and retail power, its internationalism and its prominence in entertainment
and culture.

Themes of Animation
There was not a unified vision underlying the ideas and forms of animation
that were circulating in New York at this time. Instead, a set of recurring and
often interconnected themes were central to New York’s animation culture:
animation’s capacity to transform existing media and arts by investing them
with motion; explorations of the aesthetic potentials of movement; and
attempts to understand “the inherent value of Motion” for different artistic
and cultural contexts.24 While these three themes are explored throughout
the book, I want to first offer a brief outline of some of the ways they were
taken up in New York’s animation culture.
The first theme of how animation was used to transform arts and media
was evident through the work of filmmakers, artists, designers and educa-
tors who experimented with the effects of animating static forms such as
paintings, sculptures, displays and objects. This became a source of creative
inspiration across different cultural fields, with articles and commentaries in
the popular press marveling at the new arts and media that were being gen-
erated by animated motion. Gallery directors, shop owners and exhibitors
joined the chorus that was celebrating motion; they began to encourage
the creation of new kinds of animation. Partly because these activities of
animation crossed between cultural fields, there was also a sense that ani-
mation was entwining different artistic and media forms. For example, as
Chapter 2 explores, new technologies could create visual spectacles of ani-
mated advertising that combined aspects of cinema, theater, television and
12 K. MOEN

radio. These effects of animation were intermedial, a term which refers

to “those phenomena that (as indicated by the prefix inter) in some way
take place between media.”25 Intermediality could be generated by the dis-
ruptive or transformative potentials of animation, breaking down borders
between established media or creating hybrid forms.
One example of motion’s transformative power in this period was dis-
cussed in Vogue, which recounted Salvador Dalí’s prophecy of “the first
mobile jewels for evening – jewels that breathe, that become convulsed,
that creep like ancient lizards; that are scintillating, terribly sensual, and
swollen with sleep.”26 In order to achieve these wondrous effects, Dalí
described how the jewels “will be fitted with an adequate mechanism”
and “wound up like a watch.” The article included an editor’s note and
annotations to Dalí’s sketches in an apparent effort to help clear up any
confusion caused by his “Delphic language,” but some readers remained
understandably suspicious of the whole idea. Geoffrey T. Hellman, writing
in the New Yorker, noted that his “first instinct was to dismiss the entire
article as part of the surrealist movement and as having no bearing on life,”
but “after seeing the Editor’s Note… I began to suspect that Vogue really
means that jewels ought to wriggle.”27 While this was both an extension of
Surrealism’s long-standing interest in animism and Dalí’s engagement with
commercial art in New York at this time—which included designing both a
department store window and the “Dream of Venus” exhibit at the World’s
Fair—the prophecy was also an example of a wider interest in animation’s
transformative possibilities.28 Dalí described the impact of motion, writing
in all capital letters: “Mobile jewels will be to immobile jewels just what
talkies are to the silent cinema.”29 Like the ruptures and changes caused
by the introduction of sound in cinema, introducing movement to pieces
of jewelry could significantly alter their identity. Although these mobile
jewels were more imaginary than real, many other objects and forms were
actually being transformed through motion.
The second theme noted earlier, regarding the exploration of anima-
tion’s distinctive aesthetic and expressive potentials, was similarly vital to
New York’s animation culture. Different uses of animation—beyond its
established associations with storytelling, humor or fantasy—were being
explored. Giving animated life to non-human “characters,” from cartoon
animals to geometric shapes to industrial machinery, was one key effect
of animation aesthetics, used to create dramatic expression with objects
and things performing as if they were actors. More subtle effects of anima-
tion were also being developed and discussed. This included relationships
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

between animation and other arts; for example, the temporal unfolding
of music or the composition of paintings could provide models for ani-
mators to follow. Animation’s capacity to show mutability was explored as
well, from the metamorphosis of figures to fluid changes in color to visions
of the dynamic flux of modernity. This scope of animation aesthetics had
been developing over the course of decades, and New York witnessed a
vivid extension of the manifold uses of animation aesthetics both on and
beyond the cinema screen.
At the root of all this, there was, of course, animation itself. The third
theme—how animation was understood at the time—was extraordinarily
diverse. Offering an array of different effects and values, animation could
accentuate entertainment or spectacle, it could be used as a tool for instruc-
tion or demonstration, or it could become a form of artistic or spiritually
uplifting expression. No single principle underpinned these uses of ani-
mation. This may be partly due to the range of animation’s applications
that come to light by focusing on a specific milieu rather than the more
cohesive framework of a particular animator or production company. But
animation’s diversity also has to do with the multifaceted quality of motion
itself: animation can be animistic or automated, free-flowing or carefully
composed, dramatic or mathematical, realistic or spectacular. The ways that
these and other qualities could be found within animation—or even com-
bined together—became a topic of considerable intellectual, creative and
cultural interest. The conversations that circulated around animation were
rich and varied; mainstream newspapers and magazines joined theoreti-
cians and artists in discussions of animation’s possibilities. Moreover, the
wide-ranging uses of the term “animation” to characterize different kinds
of moving images—sometimes in surprising ways—indicate the extent to
which an idea of animation could appear in seemingly unlikely places.

Expanded and Micro Histories

Among those who were making animated films in New York, there was a
burgeoning sense that new possibilities for animation were emerging. Mary
Ellen Bute, whose work will be explored in more detail in Chapter 4, was an
exemplary artist in this regard. Working with the cinematographer and pro-
ducer Ted Nemeth in New York, she had established Expanding Cinema,
“a production company doing research, experimental and creative work
in cinematography.”30 In articles, interviews and publicity, Bute would
14 K. MOEN

highlight how her animated films—which she began producing in 1934—

synchronized motion with light, sound and form to create an expanding
sense of cinema’s potentials. Bute’s early films had been shown in differ-
ent kinds of exhibition venues, including Radio City Music Hall and New
York University’s School of Architecture. Seeking further avenues to show
(and support) her work, she engaged with New York’s multifaceted cul-
ture of animation, approaching the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
in 1937, writing to the director of the motion picture division of the New
York World’s Fair in 1938 and meeting with the director of programming
for CBS television in 1940.31 While these various approaches were largely
dead ends, it is telling that the possible sites for supporting or exhibit-
ing her films were all engaged in novel ventures themselves: in 1939, the
Guggenheim Foundation would open a new gallery in midtown Manhat-
tan, the World’s Fair would open its gates, and the CBS television station
would begin broadcasting from the Chrysler Building. While “Expanding
Cinema” referred to Bute’s approach to film aesthetics, it also resonated
with an expanding place for animation within a changing visual culture.
Animation continues to be expansive. Digitally animated films have been
enormously successful in the last few decades, regularly topping box office
tallies and end of year “best film” lists. And digital animation is ubiquitous
in mainstream cinema, with computer-generated imagery creating spec-
tacular effects for the most popular contemporary films. Beyond cinema,
digital animation plays a major role in the wider context of contempo-
rary visual culture, including video games, phone screens, television adver-
tisements and scientific visualizations. Animation is, as Suzanne Buchan
writes, “pervasive in contemporary moving image culture.”32 This has led
to novel forms and uses of animation which are, Buchan continues, “im-
plemented in many ways in many disciplines and on multiple platforms…
artists increasingly incorporate animation in installations and exhibitions,
and it has myriad applications across a wide band of creative, scientific and
professional practice and industrial implementation.” While digital tech-
nologies have opened up new spaces and uses of animation, the expansive
potentials of animated motion are not new. In the nineteenth century, mov-
ing image technologies were refiguring culture. Spectacles such as the mov-
ing panorama, optical devices such as the zoetrope and visual technologies
such as cinema were just a few of the many instances where motion offered
new ways of showing and seeing the world. One effect of this was that estab-
lished notions of art became immersed in a vitalized landscape, as Lynda
Nead explains: “By 1900 art was part of a highly developed commercial
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

entertainment world, organised around the logic of motion. The move-

ment machines that often originated as amusements and spectacles within
mass culture could also move across into the art gallery, transforming what
looking at art meant and the concept of an aesthetic experience.”33 The
impact of animation at different times indicates its adaptability in different
contexts and its capacity to alter established media.
The early twentieth century and the contemporary moment are just two
of many historical periods in which animation plays a significant role. While
more limited in scale, animation had a similarly powerful impact in New
York from 1939 to 1940. Focusing on this site of animation, I draw on the
methods and implications of microhistory, a genre of history writing that
foregrounds specific cultural events or formations as a way of drawing out
their distinctive qualities and complexities. David A. Bell explains that one
of microhistory’s most important contributions is to “put the problem of
scale itself at the heart of the historical enterprise, making historians aware
that they cannot take their organizing frameworks for granted but need to
adjust their scale of observation to the problem at hand.”34 In order to
understand the multiple factors at play in an animation culture, a limited
historical scope is often necessary. Of course, an animation culture does
not exist in a bubble, and throughout this book l discuss other facets of
animation’s history. Rigidly adhering to the limits of a single place in a brief
historical period can distort our understanding, and this is something that I
take into account in my aim to balance specificity with a wider perspective.
That said, by concentrating on a specific cultural environment, I hope to
illuminate the diverse potentials of animation that can be found within a
seemingly narrow purview.
A limited scope allows for a greater attention to examples and implica-
tions that might escape notice in a more expansive history. John Brewer
uses the trope of “refuge history” to explain this key aim of microhistory:

refuge history is close-up and on the small scale. Its emphasis is on a singular
place rather than space, the careful delineation of particularities and details, a
degree of enclosure. It depends upon the recognition that our understanding
of what is seen depends on the incorporation of many points of view rather
than the use of a single dominant perspective.35

My examination of New York’s animation culture offers a similarly sus-

tained view on details and multiple perspectives. Paying close attention to
a specific place and time also brings to light the productive possibilities that
16 K. MOEN

are created by what Brewer describes as “dynamic interconnections” (97).

While Brewer is referring mainly to the interconnections between people,
New York’s animation culture was largely shaped by the interconnections
between ideas, forms, places and creative practices. Rather than approach-
ing this animation culture as something carefully planned, like a cultivated
landscape, I approach it from the ground up—as a place of generative inter-
actions and unpredictable liveliness. Instead of drawing sharp distinctions
between different kinds of animation, such as art and advertising or dis-
plays and films, I explore how certain practices, ideas and values spanned
this animation culture, generating a hive of activity that connected sep-
arate spheres—from corporate exhibits to abstract art—through a shared
fascination with animation. My emphasis on these interconnections illus-
trates how animation is open to different formations and able to fluidly
cross between different contexts. Rather than notions of a single identity
or place for animation, this microhistory shows how animation’s unfixed
identity was productive for those who were developing, investigating and
championing its potentials.
My emphasis on animation culture and my use of microhistory address
the distinctive ways that animation history has unfolded. Esther Leslie
writes,

Animation is too obviously manifold to set out upon a single line of develop-
ment. It begins with shadow play or with thumb cinemas, with zoetropes or
magic lanterns, with lightning sketches or cel animation, with hidden wheels
and pulleys or with stop-motion photography. It starts and stops in many
places. It is at one and the same time a beginning and a culmination.36

Drawing on Leslie’s insight, we can see that the significance of a moment

in animation’s history need not be absorbed by a large-scale or all-
encompassing historical trajectory. Often, the most important or intrigu-
ing aspects of animation history are seemingly marginal practices. Rather
than insignificant detours in a grand tour of animation, such practices can
widen our understanding of animation’s possibilities or reveal underlying
aesthetic potentials of motion. Setting aside wider perspectives—such as
the dominance of a particular studio—can help reveal the dynamic variety
that operates in the substratum of animation history.
Microhistory can also provide a productive alternative to historical nar-
ratives that privilege large-scale trends. Brad S. Gregory writes that this
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

mode of historical writing can “suggest that developments such as indus-

trialization and bureaucratization should be rethought as contingent and
uneven.”37 By focusing on “human interaction on the micro-scale,” micro-
history “suggests hope for an undetermined future insofar as it finds con-
tingency in the past.” This important value of microhistory informs my
focus on the period between 1939 and 1940. By selecting these two years
as the focal point of this book, I purposefully avoid other historical frame-
works. For example, America’s entry into the Second World War would
be one logical end point if my emphasis were the relation between anima-
tion culture and American history. Similarly, if my concerns were focused
on major trends in the production of animated films, the timeframe could
begin with the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 and
end with the Disney strike in 1941. While facets of American sociocultural
history and the animation industry inform the discussion that follows, I
do not approach these contexts as determining factors in New York’s ani-
mation culture. Instead, I trace diverse forms of animation taken from a
range of cultural fields, often with seemingly quite different interests and
concerns. It is no coincidence, though, that these years coincide with the
two seasons of the New York World’s Fair. Not only did the Fair exhibit a
staggering array of animation, it was also a major event within New York.
As such, it offers a particularly useful timeframe, taken from the life of the
city itself, from which to begin to explore New York’s wider animation
culture.
In order to illuminate the multifaceted scope of this animation culture,
I investigate four central sites of animation: the city, the fair, the gallery
and the cinema. Each site adapted animation to its own set of concerns and
values. And, as we shall see, these concerns and values also crossed between
places, establishing the larger network of animation culture in New York.
I begin with a chapter, “The City,” which explores how a wave of ani-
mated activity was creating vivid forms of dramatic and artistic advertising
in two of the most prominent areas of New York’s commercial culture: the
shopping district on Fifth Avenue and the entertainment district around
Times Square and Broadway. In these locations, advertising designers were
embracing a new art of motion display, situating animation within the fab-
ric of metropolitan life and exploring the impact of animated advertising.
From debates over the acceptable use of motion in Fifth Avenue shop
windows to publicity which heralded the intermedial qualities of animated
billboards in Times Square, animated advertisements and displays became
a major topic of creative and cultural interest.
18 K. MOEN

Turning from the second chapter’s focus on advertising and animation,

the third chapter, “The Fair,” examines the relationship between design and
animation. New techniques of mechanized motion and automated display
were astonishing spectators in animated exhibits at the New York World’s
Fair, from a massive diorama that depicted New York City in action to ani-
mated murals and sculptures created by major contemporary artists. Such
exhibits engaged with the broader aims of the Fair, which celebrated indus-
try, technology, progress and dynamism. The two most popular exhibits,
designed by Teague for Ford and Bel Geddes for General Motors, exem-
plified the turn toward motion as an exhibition technique—using intricate
and complex devices to create animated spectacles of labor and transporta-
tion, their exhibits seized on animation to visualize a modern age of move-
ment. Developing their interests in how design could incorporate a sense
of motion, from streamlined products to dynamic architecture, exhibits
offered an opportunity to expand their creative practice into new animated
contexts. Situating Teague’s and Bel Geddes’s exhibits alongside other ani-
mated exhibits at the Fair, this chapter explores how animation became
a vital means for imaginatively promoting and designing the “World of
Tomorrow.”
A much different approach to the potentials of animation was evident in
the art institutions of New York’s animation culture. Animation and other
arts of motion were appearing in New York galleries in the late 1930s,
with the recently founded Museum of Non-Objective Painting screening
and collecting abstract animated films. The fourth chapter, “The Gallery,”
explores how animators in New York who were working outside of nar-
rative and commercial filmmaking—including Norman McLaren, Dwinell
Grant and Mary Ellen Bute—engaged with this institutional context for
animated art. Many of the films that they produced at this time, including
Scherzo (1939), Spook Sport (1940) and Themis (1940), were funded or
exhibited by the director of the Museum, Hilla Rebay, who saw them as
relating to her vision of non-objective art. This kind of institutional back-
ing allowed animation to take on an unprecedented artistic value in New
York’s animation culture. At the same time, these animators also resisted
or diverged from established artistic contexts, aiming to develop new arts
of motion. This chapter explores the shared concerns among these anima-
tors—in their creative practice and their theoretical writings—regarding
the relationship between animation and other artistic forms, the aesthetic
potentials of animated motion and animation’s ability to offer new expres-
sions and sensations that were distinct from existing arts.
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 CHAPTER VIII
AT THE FRONT

When Americans endeavor to estimate the value of their work on

the lines of battle they are bound to see and should be glad in justice
to admit that our actual fighting effort was small indeed compared
with the vast and bloody and appalling struggles in which our war
associates had almost exhausted themselves. They are bound to
see that its importance in the final decision was incommensurate
with the amount of what they actually did on the fighting lines,
although not, perhaps, with the extent of the nation’s preparation. It
fell to America to add the deciding strength after years of battle in
which the combatants had been so nearly equal that their armies on
the Western front had swayed back and forth over a zone only a few
miles in width.
Nevertheless, no just summing up of the last year of the war can
fail to award to America the credit of having been the final deciding
factor, a credit that belongs alike to the valor and size of her armies,
the ability of their officers and the overwhelming might and zeal with
which the whole nation had gathered itself up for the delivery of the
heaviest blows in its power to give. The rapidly growing evidence of
how powerful those blows would be, as shown by our enormous
preparations in France and the war spirit and war activities in the
United States, had convinced the enemy that unless he won decisive
results by the autumn of 1918 there was no possibility of his final
victory. And therefore he put forth his supreme efforts during the
spring and summer of that year. The enormous scale upon which
this country entered upon and carried through its preparations for
war both at home and in France sent to high figures the money cost
of the war to the United States, but it made immeasurable savings in
human life, for anything less would have meant more months of war,
even more bloody than the preceding years.
The enemy’s determination to win a decisive victory in the spring
or summer of 1918 before, he believed, it would be possible for the
American Army to make itself felt at the front forced England and
France and Italy to make what would have been, without our help,
their last stand. They had reached the limit of what they could do and
were fighting “with their backs to the wall.” Exhausted by nearly four
years of bitter struggle they were almost but not quite strong enough
to withstand the final, determined, desperate rush of the foe for
which he was gathering together all his powers. And American
forces gave the aid that was needed to drive him back.
Of high importance among the things that America did to help
bring about decision between the battle lines was her share in the
final agreement upon unified control of the associated armies in
France. It was the voice of the United States Government through its
representation in the Supreme War Council that carried the day for
this measure and led to the appointment in March, 1918, of Marshal
Foch as Generalissimo of the Allied and Associated Armies, an
action which military authorities are agreed should have been taken
long before and which, when finally brought about, was fruitful of the
best results.
The aim of the War Department, as carried out by General
Pershing, Commander in Chief of the American Expeditionary
Forces, was to make the American Army in France an integral force,
able to take the offensive and to carry on its own operations, and
with that end in view he shaped its training and planned for its use at
the front after its arrival in France. While he offered and furnished
whatever troops Marshal Foch desired for use at any part of the
battle line, General Pershing refused to distribute all his forces,
insisted upon building them up as they became ready for the front
into a distinctive American Army—at the signing of the armistice the
First, Second and Third American Armies had been thus created—
and by the time the American forces had begun to make themselves
felt at the front he had substituted American methods of training,
finding them better adapted to his men than the European, and in his
last battle, the decisive action in the Meuse-Argonne region, his staff
work was all American.
The plan of training carried out, except in the later months when
the demand for troops at the front was immediate and urgent,
allowed each division after its arrival in France one month for
instruction in small units, a second month of experience by battalions
in the more quiet trench sectors and a third month of training as
complete divisions. When the great German offensive began in
Picardy in March, 1918, General Pershing had four divisions ready
for the front and offered to Marshal Foch whatever America had in
men or materials that he could use. None of the Allied commanders
believed that men so recently from civilian life could be used
effectively in battle and it was only General Pershing’s knowledge of
the character of his men, his insistent faith that they would make
good under any trial of their mettle and his willingness to pledge his
honor for their behavior under fire that induced Marshal Foch to
accept his offer.
Brilliantly did these men justify their commander’s faith in them in
this and in all the later battles in which they took part. In all,
1,390,000 were in action against the enemy. Less than two years
before they had been clerks, farmers, brokers, tailors, authors,
lawyers, teachers, small shop keepers, dishwashers, newspaper
men, artists, waiters, barbers, laborers, with no thought of ever being
soldiers. Their education, thoughts, environment, whole life, had
been aloof from military affairs. They had been trained at high speed,
in the shortest possible time, four or five months, and sometimes
less, having taken the place of the year or more formerly thought
necessary. But it was American troops that stopped the enemy at
Chateau-Thierry and at Belleau Wood in June, when the Germans
were making a determined drive for Paris and had reached their
nearest approach to the French capital. They fought the enemy’s
best guard troops, drove them back, took many prisoners and held
the captured positions. Because of their valor and success the Wood
of Belleau will be known hereafter and to history as “the Wood of the
American Marines,” although other American troops fought with the
Marines in that brilliant action. In the pushing back of the Marne
salient in July, into which General Pershing, with absolute faith in the
dependability of his men, threw all of his troops who had had any
sort of training, American soldiers shared the place of honor at the
front of the advance with seasoned French troops. Through two
weeks of stubborn fighting the French and the Americans advanced
shoulder to shoulder and steadily drove the enemy, who until that
time had been just as steadily advancing, back to the Vesle and
completed the object of reducing the salient.
Early in August the First American Army was organized under
General Pershing’s personal command and took charge of a distinct
American sector which stretched at first from Port sur Seille to a
point opposite Verdun and was afterwards extended across the
Meuse to the Argonne Forest. For the operation planned against the
formidable enemy forces in front of him General Pershing assembled
and molded together troops and material, all the elements of a great
modern army, transporting the 600,000 troops mostly by night. The
battle of St. Mihiel, for which he had thus prepared, began on
September 12th, and this first offensive of the American First Army
was a signal success. The Germans were driven steadily backward,
with more than twice the losses of our own troops and the loss of
much war material, and the American lines were established in a
position to threaten Metz.
Two American divisions operating with the British forces at the end
of September and early in October held the place of honor in the
offensive that smashed the Hindenburg line, which had been
considered impregnable, at the village of St. Vendhuile. In the face of
the fiercest artillery and machine gun fire these troops, supported by
the British, broke through, held on and carried forward the advance,
capturing many prisoners. Two other divisions, assisting the French
at Rheims in October, one of them under fire for the first time,
conquered complicated defense works, repulsed heavy counter
attacks, swept back the enemy’s persistent defense, took positions
the Germans had held since 1914 and drove them behind the Aisne
river.
The battle of St. Mihiel was a prelude to the Meuse-Argonne
offensive and was undertaken in order to free the American right
flank from danger. Its success enabled General Pershing to begin
preparations at once for the famous movement that, more than any
other single factor, brought the war to its sudden end. No military
forces had ever before tackled the Argonne Forest. French officers
did not believe it could be taken. With the exception of St. Mihiel, the
German front line, from Switzerland to a point a little east of Rheims,
was still intact. The purpose of the American offensive was to cut the
enemy’s lines of communication by the railroads passing through
Mézières and Sedan and thus strangle his armies. The attack began
on September 26 and continued through three phases until the
signing of the armistice. Twenty-one American divisions were
engaged in it, of which two had never before been under fire and
three others had barely been in touch with the front, but of these
their commander said that they quickly became as good as the best.
Eight of the divisions were returned to the front for second
participation, after only a few days rest at the rear. In all, forty
German divisions were used against the American advance, among
them being many picked regiments, the best the German army
contained, seasoned fighters who had been in the war from the start.
They brought to the defense of their important stronghold an
enormous accumulation of artillery and machine guns and the
knowledge that they must repulse the offensive and save their
communications or give up their entire purpose and confess
themselves beaten. German troops did no more desperate and
determined fighting in the war than in this engagement.
Mobile Kitchen Back of the Front Lines
 An American Big Gun in France
Day after day the American troops moved slowly forward, over
rugged, difficult ground, broken by ravines and steep hills, through
dense underbrush, in the face of deadly fire from artillery and nests
of machine guns hidden in every vantage point, through incessant
rain and mud and fog and penetrating cold, pushing the enemy
steadily back, until they reached Sedan, cut the German Army’s
most important line of communication, and so brought the end of the
war in sight. For a few days later came the German request for an
armistice and terms of peace.
Aiding the fighting men at the front were non-combatant troops
who by their courage and zeal helped greatly and won high honor.
Regiments of engineers worked with the lines at the front, keeping
the roads open, building railways, repairing bridges in front of the
advancing lines to enable them to pour across in pursuit of the
fleeing enemy, and, in the earlier months, mining and tunneling
under the enemy’s lines and constructing trenches. Much of the time
they worked under fire and it sometimes happened that, suddenly
attacked, they seized rifles from the dead and wounded around them
and fought back the assaulting party. The camoufleurs worked close
behind and sometimes at the front, disguising roadways, ammunition
dumps, artillery and machine gun positions, concealing the advance
of troops, most of the time in the shelled areas and often under fire.
Immediately behind the front lines during the St. Mihiel and Meuse-
Argonne offensives and under the protection of camouflage the map
makers and printers of the American Army had big rotary presses on
trucks and turned out the necessary maps at once as they were
needed. British and French lithographers had told them it could not
be done, but their mobile map-making trains kept in touch with the
army, turning out a million maps during the Argonne drive.
The Signal Corps gave services of such inestimable value that
without them the successes of the combatant troops would have
been impossible. The war enlarged the personnel of the Corps from
1,500 to 205,000, of whom 33,500 were in France, where they
strung 126,000 miles of wire lines alone, of which 39,000 miles were
on the fighting fronts. Their duties were varied and highly specialized
and demanded the greatest skill and efficiency. Regardless of
danger the personnel of the Corps carried on their work with the front
lines, went over the top with the infantry, and even established their
outposts or radio stations in advance of the troops. A non-combatant
body, it lost in killed, wounded and missing, 1,300, a higher
percentage than any other arm of the service except the infantry. Its
photographers made over seventy miles of war moving picture films
and more than 24,000 still negatives, much of both within the fighting
areas.
The enemy captured 4,500 prisoners from the American forces
and lost to them almost 50,000, so that the Americans took ten for
each one they lost. The American Army captured also in the
neighborhood of 1,500 guns. There were 32,800 Americans killed in
action and 207,000 were wounded, of whom over 13,500 died of
their wounds, while the missing numbered almost 3,000. The total
casualties of all kinds, exclusive of prisoners returned, for the Army
amounted to 288,500, while those for the Marine Corps totaled over
6,000 additional. The battle death rate for the expeditionary forces
was 57 per thousand.
In recognition of their exceptionally courageous and self-forgetful
deeds on the battle field nearly 10,000 members of the American
Expeditionary Forces received decorations from the French, British,
Belgian and Italian Governments. Our own rarely bestowed and
much coveted Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest
recognition for valor the Government can give, was won by 47
heroes, while Distinguished Service Medals were awarded to several
hundred individuals and to a goodly number of fighting units.
Those of their own officers who had had a lifetime of military
training and experience marveled at the spirit of these civilian
soldiers and their feeling was voiced by one of them who said, “They
have taken our West Point tradition of implicit obedience and run
away with it, as they have with every other soldierly quality.”
Field Marshal Haig complimented the American divisions who had
fought under him upon “their gallant and efficient service,” and “the
dash and energy of their attacks,” said that their deeds “will rank with
the highest achievements of the war” and told them, “I am proud to
have had you in my command.”
Marshal Foch said that “the American soldiers are superb” and
told how, when General Pershing wished to concentrate his army in
the Meuse-Argonne sector, notwithstanding its many obstacles and
forbidding terrain, he consented, saying to the American general,
“Your men have the devil’s own punch. They will get away with all
that.”
Other British and French officers on many occasions praised the
“gallantry” and “the high soldierly qualities” of these civilian troops,
their “energy, courage and determination,” their “discipline,
smartness and physique,” said they were “splendid fighters with
marked initiative,” and one French general commanding an
American division that was in battle for the first time declared that
their “combative spirit and tenacity” rivaled that of “the old and valiant
French regiments” with which they were brigaded. German
documents captured not long after our men had begun to take an
important part showed that the foe already had a good opinion of the
American soldier, for they spoke of his expertness with weapons, his
courage, his determination, his fighting qualities and—curious
soldierly quality for a German to recognize—his honor in battle.
Many observers of our own and other nations bore witness to the
fine character of the American soldiers back of the fighting lines,
among their fellow soldiers of the other armies and the civilian
population. Their cheerfulness, high spirits, good nature and simple,
human helpfulness gave new heart to the soldiers of the Allies with
whom they fraternized and made warm friends of the people in the
cities, towns, villages and countrysides with whom they came in
contact. The Secretary of War, after several weeks of intimate study
of our army in France, said that it was “living in France like the house
guests of trusting friends.” And the Chairman of the Commissions on
Training Camp Activities, after two months of investigation in all the
American camps in France declared, as the result of this long and
intimate association, that the question Americans should consider
was not “whether our troops overseas were worthy of us and our
traditions but whether we were worthy of our army.”
PART ONE: SECTION II. BY SEA
 CHAPTER IX
EXPANSION IN THE NAVY

Our entrance into the war found the Navy ready for immediate
service. The almost universal popular sentiment against an army of
large size that had been growing in strength for a generation or more
had not been manifest against the support of a navy comparable
with the navies of other nations. Recognition of the necessity of a
better defense for the long coast line of the United States had led
Congress in 1916 to sanction the strongly urged plans of the
Secretary of the Navy and authorize one of the largest ship-building
programs ever undertaken by any nation. This Act of Congress with
the ample appropriation that accompanied it laid the basis for a
program of naval preparedness and enabled the Department of the
Navy to make itself ready to meet the state of war which was
threatened by unfolding events. For it not only authorized the
building of 156 ships, including ten super-dreadnaughts and six
battle cruisers, but by authorizing the enlargement of the Navy
personnel and the creation of a big Naval Reserve and a Flying
Corps and providing machinery for the expanding of the service as
desired it made possible the putting of the Navy upon a tentative war
basis during the months immediately preceding our declaration of
war. By the first of April, 1917, its plans had been drafted and its
preparations made and it was ready for action. Indeed, its work had
already begun, for in the previous month it had provided guns and
gun crews for the arming of American merchantmen under the order
of President Wilson, made in response to Germany’s notice of
unrestricted submarine warfare.
Upon the declaration of war on April 6th, the fleet was at once
mobilized and a flotilla of destroyers was equipped for foreign
service and sent overseas, where the first contingent arrived at a
British port on May 4th, 1917. The second reached Queenstown on
May 13th, and before the end of the month both were engaged in the
work of hunting submarines in coöperation with the British and
French navies. Early in June units of the naval aeronautical corps
landed upon French shores and inside another month the vanguard
of the American Expeditionary Forces, convoyed by the Navy,
arrived in France. Battleships and cruisers quickly followed the
destroyers across the ocean and took their places with the British
Grand Fleet, on watch for the appearance of the German navy from
behind its defenses at Heligoland.
While it was thus quickly making itself felt in the prosecution of the
war, the Navy Department at once entered upon a great program of
development, expansion and training. It had in commission when
war was declared 197 vessels. When the armistice was signed there
were 2,000 ships in its service. In the same time its personnel had
expanded from 65,777 to a total of 497,000. In addition to the
cruisers and battleships on the ways, 800 smaller craft were built or
put under construction during our nineteen months of war. Formerly
the building of a destroyer required about two years. But the great
importance of that type of vessel and the urgent need for more of
them speeded production to the fastest possible pace and at the end
of the war destroyers were being built in eight months and in some
cases in even less time. In one instance a destroyer, the Ward, at the
Mare Island Navy Yard, was launched in seventeen and one-half
days from the laying of its keel and within seventy days was in
commission. The end of the war found the American Navy with more
destroyers in service or under construction than the navies of any
two nations had possessed before the outbreak of the war in 1914.
In the first nine months of 1918 there were launched 83 destroyers,
as against 62 during the entire nine preceding years.
The submarine menace made necessary the concentration of
effort upon types of vessels fitted to deal with it and therefore
construction of destroyers and submarine chasers was rushed and
every vessel that could be effectively used was put into that service.
Submarine chasers to the number of 355 were built for our own use
together with fifty for another nation. A new design, the Eagle, was
worked out in the Navy Department and preparations were made to
produce it in quantity. The manufacturing plant had to be built from
the foundation. Work upon the plant was begun in February, 1918,
and the first boat was launched the following July. Its tests were
successful and two had been put in commission when the armistice
was signed while work was being speeded upon over a hundred
more, of which part were for one of our co-belligerents. After the
destroyer, the Eagle boat was believed by naval officers of our own
and other nations the best weapon for the extermination of the
submarine.
Privately owned vessels of many kinds, to the number of nearly a
thousand, were taken over and converted to naval uses and many
new small craft were built in order to provide the hundreds of boats
needed for patrol service and as tugs, mine sweepers, mine layers
and other auxiliaries. Two battleships and twenty-eight submarines
built by the navy were completed and put into service during the war.
Along with this big increase in ship production went a similar
expansion in naval ship-building plants and in production of
implements of warfare for the navy. Before we entered the war the
Navy’s ship-building capacity amounted to ways for two battleships,
two destroyers, two auxiliaries and one gun-boat. At once was begun
a work of expansion which within a little more than a year added five
ways and, when completed, would provide facilities for the
simultaneous construction of sixteen war vessels, of which seven
could be battleships. Three large naval docks, which can handle the
largest ships in the world, were built. Camps were constructed for
the training of 200,000 men. A naval aircraft factory was built which
turned out its first flying machine seven months after work started
upon the factory. A little later it was producing a machine a day.
Naval aviation schools were established and production was
speeded in private plants of sea planes, flying boats and navy
dirigibles and balloons.
The navy’s bureau of construction and repair undertook the work
of making seaworthy again the hundred and more German ships in
our harbors when war was declared which had been seriously
injured by their crews, under orders from the German government.
So much damage had been done, especially to the cylinders, that
the enemy had thought, according to memoranda left behind, it
probably could not be repaired at all and certainly not within a year
and a half. Officers of the navy, in the face of opposition by engine
builders and marine insurance companies, determined to make the
repairs by means of electric welding, the use of which on such an
extensive scale was unprecedented. The experiment was successful
and these great ships were in service within six months, the navy’s
engineering feat having thus saved a year of time and provided
means for the transportation of half a million troops to France.
The naval gun factory at Washington was enlarged to double its
output. The navy powder factory and the Newport torpedo station
had their capacity greatly increased and a large new mine-loading
plant was constructed. A big projectile factory was begun in the
summer of 1917, and the buildings were finished, the machinery
installed and the plant in operation in less than a year.
Within a year and a half the work of the ordnance bureau of the
navy increased by 2,000 per cent, its expansion including the gun,
powder and projectile factories mentioned above. Plants for various
purposes taken over by the bureau from private industry increased
their output at once by large percentages, in one case, in which the
product was steel forgings, 300 per cent. The depth bomb proved
one of the most efficient means of fighting the submarine. It contains
an explosive charge fitted with a mechanism which causes explosion
at a predetermined depth under the water. An American type was
developed and within a few weeks was being manufactured in large
quantities, while manufacture of the British type was continued for
their navy. A new gun, called the “Y” gun, was devised and built
especially for firing depth charges. It made possible the throwing of
these bombs on all sides of the attacking vessel, thus laying down a
barrage around it. A star shell was developed which, fired in the
vicinity of an enemy fleet, made its ships visible, our own remaining
in darkness. Anti-submarine activities made necessary an enormous
increase in the manufacture of torpedoes and torpedo tubes, which
grew by several hundred per cent and far surpassed what had been
thought the possibility of production.
The ordnance bureau of the navy developed a new type of mobile
mount for heavy guns which, by the use of caterpillar belts, made
them as mobile as field artillery although the weight and muzzle
velocity of the huge projectile rendered impossible the use of a
wheeled gun carriage. The entire gun and mount, weighing 38 tons,
can be readily transported by this means over any kind of ground.
Immense naval guns, originally intended for use on battle cruisers,
were sent to France with railway mounts especially built for them by
the navy. Their important and successful operations overseas are
described in the chapter on “The Navy on Land.”
Smoke producing apparatus, to enable a ship to conceal herself in
a cloud of smoke, was evolved of several kinds, for use by different
types of vessels. A shell that would not ricochet on striking the water,
when fired at a submarine, and so glance harmlessly away in
another direction, was an immediate necessity, brought about by the
conditions of sea warfare. After many experiments a shell was
devised that on striking would cleave the water, to the menace of the
submarine’s hull, and, equipped with a depth charge, was soon in
quantity production. A heavy aeroplane bomb which united the
qualities of a bomb with those of a depth charge and did not explode
on striking the water was another development of the navy ordnance
bureau, which also devised a nonrecoil aircraft gun which, after
much experiment, was installed on our seaplanes and put into
quantity production. Its success meant the passing of an important
milestone in aircraft armament. An American device for detecting the
sounds made by a submarine gave highly important aid to that
phase of the war. The Navy Department equipped our own
submarines, destroyers and chasers with them and furnished them
in large numbers to the British navy.
Not only was there need for an immense production of mines and
depth charges for ordinary uses, but the decision by the British to
carry out the American Navy Department’s plans for a mine barrage
across the North Sea, whose story is told in more detail in the
chapter on “Working with the Allied Navies,” made necessary the
production in enormous quantities of a new type of mine.
Combination of the best types already in use and experiment with
new features resulted in a satisfactory product of which large
quantities were made and shipped abroad. All this need for high
explosives caused a critical shortage and the supply of TNT, the
standard charge for mines, aerial bombs and depth charges, was
almost exhausted, because of the scarcity of toluol, its principal
ingredient. In this menacing situation the navy’s bureau of ordnance
began making exhaustive experiments which finally proved that
xylol, the near chemical relative of toluol, could be used in its place.
The resulting high explosive, to which was given the name TNX,
proved to be the equal in every way of TNT and the building was
ordered of a plant for the distillation of xylol which would make
possible the production for the following year of 30,000,000 pounds
of high explosives.
Armament had to be furnished for merchant ships, 2,500 of them,
equipment for destroyers and submarine chasers, and all the
multitude of requirements for ships on distant service and for the
repair ships that accompanied them. All this increase in ships and
plants and personnel called for an enormous increase in the amount
of materials and stores it was necessary to provide for them. The
greatest total of supplies bought for the Navy in any one pre-war
year amounted to $27,000,000. But the greatest total for a single day
during the war amounted to $30,000,000.
Among the giant tasks which the Navy undertook during the war
was the building of an enormous structure in Washington for the
housing of the Navy Department, of several immense storehouses,
of which one in Brooklyn is said to be one of the largest storehouses
in the world, the installation at Annapolis of the greatest high-power
radio station yet erected, and the completion of the powerful radio
plant at Pearl Harbor.
The Medical Department of the Navy increased under war
conditions from 327 doctors to 3,074, dentists from 30 to 485,
women nurses from 160 to 1,400, and Hospital Corps members from
1,585 to 14,718. Three hospital ships were added to its equipment, it
had numerous hospitals and dispensaries scattered through Great
Britain and France and its hospital service at home was enlarged
from 3,000 to 17,000 beds.
The inventive ingenuity of the American people was apparently
much attracted towards the problems of sea warfare in this conflict,
for they began to send ideas, suggestions and devices to the Navy
Department even before the United States became a belligerent.
After that date the Consulting Board of the Navy, which has charge
of such matters, was almost snowed under by these suggestions.
During our participation in the war the Board examined and acted
upon 110,000 letters, of which many included detailed plans or were
accompanied by models of the contrivances which their writers
hoped to have adopted. Most of them were either worthless or
already known, but a comparatively small number were found
valuable.
At the beginning of our war activities our naval roster listed over
65,000 officers and men, with 14,000 more in the Marine Corps. A
year and a half later the Marines numbered 70,000 and in the Navy
there were a little more than 497,000 men and women, for a goodly
number of patriotic women had enlisted in order to undertake the
duties of yeomen and so release able bodied men for active service.
The total permanent personnel of the Navy, officers and men, had
grown to 212,000. This rapid expansion had made necessary
intensive training for both men and officers that was carried on with
never ceasing activity at training stations on shore and on ships at
sea in both home and foreign waters. In small-arms training alone a
force of 5,000 expert instructors was built up who trained an average
of 30,000 men per month.
How all this immense expansion in ships, men, stores, facilities
and production measures against the previous history of the Navy
appears in this fact: In the almost century and quarter since the Navy
was established in 1794 until and including 1916 its expenditures
totaled, in round numbers, $3,367,000,000, an amount which
exceeded its expenditures in the next two years alone by only
$34,000,000.
Convoy of Troop Ships Entering the Harbor of Brest
 CHAPTER X
OPERATING AN OCEAN FERRY

The United States had to carry on its share in the war from a base
three thousand miles distant from the battle zone and to transport
troops, munitions, supplies across an ocean infested by submarines
intent upon sinking as many of them as possible. It was a task so
unprecedented and so difficult that before it was attempted it would
have been thought, in the dimensions it finally assumed, utterly
impossible. The enemy was so sure it was impossible that he staked
all his hopes and plans upon its failure.
In this stupendous enterprise the British Government gave much
invaluable assistance. Without its help the task could not have been
discharged with such brilliant success, for this country did not have
enough ships—no one country had enough—for such an immense
program of transportation. But the two nations combined their
resources of shipping and naval escort and with some help from the
French and Italian Governments the plan was carried through with
triumphant success.
With the incessant call from Britain and France of “Hurry, hurry,
send men, and more and more men, and hurry, hurry” speeding our
preparations, the need for transport facilities for men, munitions and
supplies was urgent. And those facilities were meager indeed. When
war was declared we had two naval transports, of which one was not
quite completed and the other proved unseaworthy. There was no
organization for transport service, because none had ever been
needed. For the first transport fleet, that sailed in eight weeks after
the war declaration, the Government chartered four cargo vessels,
nine coast liners and a transatlantic passenger ship and at once
began to prepare them for their new uses and to engage and alter
other ships for the transport service. They had to be overhauled and
made seaworthy, staterooms had to be ripped out and in their place
tiers of bunks built in, big mess halls made ready, radio equipment,
communication systems, naval guns and other defensive facilities