Race, War, Music and The Problem of One Tenth of Our Nation (1940)

As many film historians have observed, nonfiction filmmaking blossomed in the U.S. between 1930–1945, producing some of the most iconic American documentaries including The Plow That Broke The Plains (Pare Lorentz, 1936), The River (Lorentz, 1937), The City (Willard Van Dyke and Ralph Steiner, 1939) and Valley Town (Van Dyke, 1940). Until recently, our understanding of the films of this period has been fairly uniform, varying in scope and detail but not in general philosophical outlook. In their broader historical overviews, for instance, Richard M. Barsam and Erik Barnouw both describe most of the films made in this country before World War II as springing from a generally leftist political agenda. ¹ William Alexander and Russell Campbell describe that ideology as more specifically Marxist and radical at times, but their histories, while more narrowly focused and detailed in the number of films and filmmakers they consider, draw conclusions that are fundamentally the same and equally monolithic. ² According to these authors, early American documentary films were primarily political and primarily leftist.