Labor Vs. Capital in the Age of Silent Film:
Visual images can often be far more powerful than words. Back in late 1800s, when New York City’s infamous Boss Tweed was asked why he had offered cartoonist Thomas Nast $500,000 to stop drawing caricatures of him and his cronies, Tweed replied: “I don’t care so much what the papers write about me–my constituents can’t read; but they can understand pictures.”
The same is true today. Movies and mass media most impact us in the areas we know the least about.
