The Porter Family
Edwin S. Porter was born on April 21, 1870, to Thomas Richard and Mary (Clark) Porter. His namesake was Edwin M. Stanton, a Democratic politician from Ohio who served as Abraham Lincoln's secretary of war. This name was Porter's own, somewhat later choice, for his parents called him Edward; and as a short chubby boy, he went by the nickname of "Betty."[3] The youngest member of his family for ten years, Ed ultimately became the fourth of seven children, the others being Charles W. (born 1864), Frank (1867), Mary (1868), Ada (1880), John (1883), and Everett Melbourne (1889). His father, Thomas Porter, was one of at least seven brothers who grew up in nearby Perryopolis. Their father, Edward's grandfather, was a stone cutter.[4] After the Civil War, several brothers moved to Connellsville, which was expanding with the growing coke trade. In the 1870s Thomas's older brother Henry, also a stone cutter, became Connellsville's postmaster, a much-sought-after position, which kept his children employed as postal clerks. Through combined financing and partnerships, the Porter clan established or invested in several local enterprises.
Porter's father was a small businessman often dependent on his more successful siblings. When Edward was born, Thomas Porter was working as a cabinetmaker. By the following year he was running Porter & Brother, a furniture store and undertaking establishment owned by his older brothers. The only funeral service in town for the next seven years, Porter & Brother rented furniture for these and other occasions. As Connellsville expanded rapidly in population, the firm began to sell factory-made furniture, for which it also enjoyed a local monopoly. By late 1877 the business was jointly owned by Thomas and John Porter, with John's son Everett Melbourne acting as co-manager. Four years later, John Porter was reportedly worth $50,000, while "Thomas Porter, the managing partner, has very little outside of his investment in firm but is economic, industrious and temperate."[5]
Thomas Porter assumed control of the undertaking business in 1888 when Everett Melbourne, who had been increasingly ill with consumption, died in February, a month after his father. Edward's oldest brother, Charles W. Porter, was soon brought into the family business, renamed Thomas Porter & Co. The local newspaper glowingly described the firm shortly after Thomas had taken full charge:
. . . Of this house it is only fair to say that they have probably done as much toward accelerating the commercial activity of the town by their enterprise as any other concern within its limits. They occupy part of the three-story building of Soisson's Block on Main Street. Their room is of spacious dimensions, being 20 × 70 feet in extent, with a large manufacturing room and other necessary outbuildings in the rear. They unquestionably carry as large a stock as any to be found in the country, including dining-room, reception and drawing room, parlor, library and bedroom suites of every description. In their undertaking department they are equally well equipped, carrying
caskets, coffins, etc. of all grades and sizes. They own two fine hearses, one for children and one for adults, besides a large and beautiful funeral car. Mr. Thomas Porter is especially fitted by nature and practical experience for the delicate duties devolving upon him of the embalming of the dead.
The house was established eighteen years ago under the style of Porter and Brother. This was in a small way, but by diligence in business and energy, fair and honorable dealing, this house now represents the very best class of houses in Western Pennsylvania in the line of fine furniture and funeral directors.[6]
By the early 1890s Charles Porter and his father may have had a falling out: the son set up his own company, eventually forcing Thomas Porter into retirement.[7]
Thomas Porter's success was more modest than his brothers'. Shortly after Edward was born, Samuel, John, and Henry Porter formed a partnership with three other Connellsville men to conduct a general foundry and plow manufactory. The firm added a new branch in 1873 for forgings and machine work. By 1880 some of the partners were bought out and the firm became known as Boyts, Porter & Company. Its most successful product, the Yough pump, captured a substantial market among mining companies across the country. The business flourished and became one of the two major manufacturing establishments in Connellsville during the 1880s.[8]
Edward Porter had other relatives living in Connellsville. His cousin William Porter had a large family and carried on the family trade as a stone cutter.[9] His mother's family was also from the borough. His uncle William Clark sometimes served as justice of the peace, and a great great grandfather, Abraham Clark, had signed the Declaration of Independence. With several aunts likewise living in the area, Edward was related to a significant portion of the population.[10]
Family life was of central importance to the Porters and other Connellsville residents. The disintegration of a family through death or separation was the worst tragedy a person could suffer, according to the Keystone Courier , which often featured such incidents on its front page.[11] When Henry Porter learned of his eldest son's death, he suffered a stroke, from which he never fully recovered, dying less than two years later.[12] After Everett Melbourne's death, Thomas Porter named his next child after this deceased nephew. Thomas Porter's role as funeral director meant that death and loss of family constantly impinged on the Porter household. No doubt this left a strong impression on young Edward, most likely shaping his development from an early age. Moreover, loss was something that Porter experienced very directly later in his life, when attempts to start a family would be repeatedly frustrated as his wife suffered a dozen miscarriages.[13] In reaction, the filmmaker became preoccupied with the family unit. Although family-centered dramas were common in early-twentieth-century popular culture, Porter drew on such narratives with remarkable frequency. From Life of an American Fireman (1903) to Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1908), it is the saving of the parents' only child (or in the case of Lost in the
Alps [1907], their two children) that dominates and brings relief. This perpetually happy conclusion stands in stark contrast to Porter's own life. He was not so fortunate, and his inability to have children contributed to his growing reclusiveness and eccentricity in later years.[14]
While Porter's family was part of Connellsville's community of small businessmen and shopkeepers, the town's merchants are of additional interest in that four of its members eventually purchased the rights to "Edison's Vitascope" in 1896.[15] J. R. Balsley was a prominent builder with a lumber mill. F. E. Markell owned drugstores in Connellsville, neighboring New Haven, and East Pittsburgh. R. S. Paine ran a shoe store and had some additional capital invested in other ventures, including a Florida orange grove. Cyrus Echard worked in the coal trade. These local merchants were a closely knit group. They served together on committees, celebrated each other's birthdays, and hired each other's children to clerk their stores. J. R. Balsley's son, Charles H. Balsley, was Ed Porter's best friend. In 1890-91, both worked for the slightly older J. F. Norcross, who had inherited his father's tailoring establishment. The three bachelors formed a youthful triumvirate, not only at work but in their occasional pursuit of adventure. Work and leisure were interwoven in a single, all-male environment. Their work life, with its informality and equality, was in marked contrast to the coke industry's regimentation and hierarchy. After Norcross married and moved west in the fall of 1892, Porter opened his own business as a merchant tailor.[16]
The coke industry impinged on every aspect of daily life in Connellsville, expanding from 5,000 ovens in 1880 to more than 17,000 by 1893.[17] In 1880 a visitor found his entrance into town "lit up by the lurid glare of coke ovens, while the stars were obscured by the murky smoke."[18] With crowded streets, Connellsville was a "business town where everyone seemed to have an object in view," he observed. "Here and there a drunken man reeled along, and from various drinking houses came the noise of revellers." As he passed along the borough's main thoroughfare he saw "the reflected light of the Pittsburg and Connellsville Gas, Coal and Coke Company's ovens. The ovens number 250, the longest continuous line of ovens in the region." The fumes destroyed nearby vegetation and damaged crops and fruit trees. Industry triumphed over agriculture, and when farmers sought redress through the courts, the justice system finally ruled in favor of the coke operators.[19] Coal mining, tending coke ovens, and running the trains was dangerous work. While the large number of industrial accidents and deaths owing to "consumption" and bad air contributed to the prosperity of the Porter undertaking establishment, the fumes also affected the Porters' health. As a child, Edward suffered bouts of pneumonia aggravated by the bad air.[20]
Although Connellsville's merchants prospered when the coke industry did well and suffered when it did badly, those who owned the industry and those
who worked in and around it were removed from many aspects of small-town life. Cokers lived in company housing and bought most necessities from company stores. Their alienation from the local community increased after 1879 when "foreign," that is, Eastern European, labor was brought into the region.[21] The formerly strong kinship and ethnic ties between the cokers and the townspeople began to break down as a result. By 1889 Henry Frick controlled the region's coke trade, and the coke works were owned by distant corporations that had little direct interest in the local communities.[22] For local small businessmen—members of the old middle class—the fundamental opposition was between themselves and mammoth corporate entities represented by the coke industry, not between labor and capital. To a significant extent, these men worked outside the labor-capital dialectic and saw it as a foreign and undesirable intrusion.
Dependent on the coke works for their general welfare, the small-town merchants often felt helpless. Their anxiety increased whenever tension erupted into class warfare. Strikes occurred throughout Porter's youth: in 1877, 1879, 1880, 1883, 1886, 1887, 1889, and 1891.[23] The strikes of 1886 and 1891 were particularly brutal and protracted. The owners sought to break these actions by importing scab labor, thereby forcing strikers to resort to violence to keep the mines closed. The coal operators in turn hired ex-policemen and Pinkertons to protect their interests. In the strike of 1891, cokers were killed and the National Guard was called in. Porter observed a mounting pattern of violence as the coke industry expanded and Frick consolidated his position within it.
The difficult relationship existing between Connellsville's old middle class and the coke industry was apparent in the Democratic Keystone Courier , which spoke primarily for the town's small businessmen, its principal advertisers. Its pages contained editorials preaching against strikes—opposing the operators who provoked them as much as the miners who undertook them. The Courier constantly called for arbitration and the avoidance of conflicts that disrupted business, not only the coke business but the merchants'. It saw itself as an impartial judge in such situations and felt free to lecture both sides on their responsibilities. The paper and the old middle class saw themselves as representing public opinion and providing a moral weight that should be decisive. In the midst of "the most general strike ever inaugurated here," the Courier asserted that "unbiased observers unite in the opinion that if the latter [the workers] return to work, public feeling will compel the former [the operators] to grant the advance asked and remedy the abuses complained of—abuses that even the operators admit do exist."[24] Imbued with this attitude since childhood, Porter later expressed similar desires for the reconciliation of labor and capital. This moral judgment claiming to operate objectively above the conflict is apparent in a number of his films, including The Ex-Convict (1904).
Despite being caught in the middle of the labor-capital conflict, Con-
nellsville's merchants generally favored the miners, who were their real or potential customers—and often relations or members of the same church. Certainly it was in their self-interest, for when the coke workers were fully employed and well paid, local business prospered too. During the strike of January and February 1886, a temporary alliance was forged between the miners and many of the merchants. The store owners donated food and clothing, while the miners demanded an end to the "pluck-me's"—company stores that advanced credit to their employees, making money by inflating prices and depriving local merchants of revenues they might otherwise have expected. Significantly, the strike was won by the workers, although the company-store issue was not resolved.[25]
There were limitations and contradictions in the Courier's support for the working class. To retain the paper's support, the coke workers had to stay within the law even if operators brought in scab labor. Attempts by workers to meet these threats with violence or the destruction of company property were strongly condemned. Socialists and other radical elements were anathema. Old-middle-class support for the working class therefore functioned within a limited framework. Within similar limits, Porter's sympathies for the working class are evident in films such as The Kleptomaniac (1905).
Growing up in Connellsville, Porter apparently adopted the strong prejudices that his family and friends held against many immigrant groups. During the 1880s the town's native white population developed a deep-seated antipathy for Eastern European immigrants. The first explosion of hostility came in February 1883, when an open letter accused the "Hated Hun" of barbaric acts. "One of the most degrading influences brought to bear on our community is the indiscriminate importation of Hungarian serfs and their employment on public works, in preference to good located citizens who are willing and can perform more and better labor for the same pay," this "Appeal to the Christian Public" claimed.[26] The Courier , at first appalled by the vituperative attacks, soon adopted the same terminology. Such hostility focused on the "not overly clean habits and queer customs" of the "Hated Huns." Native workers were disturbed by a common sight: "their women in a state of semi-nudity at work in the . . . blinding dust of a coke yard forking the product of the ovens."[27] By 1886, 25 percent of the cokers were Poles, Hungarians, and Bohemians, while another 10 percent were Germans and Prussians.[28] These workers were initially seen as the tools of the operators who brought them to their mines. During the strike of 1886, however, they proved to be more militant and radical than their domestic counterparts. When they rioted to maintain the effectiveness of the strike, the "Hated Huns" were characterized as lawbreakers and dangerous radicals.
Porter was almost certainly a member of the nativist Order of United Mechanics, which sprang up to challenge the disruptions caused by the protracted, violent strike of 1891. A member of this secret beneficial association had to be a native-born American, of good moral character, believe in a supreme being,
favor the public school system, oppose the union of church and state, and be capable of earning a living.[29] Edward Porter's friend and employer, J. F. Norcross, and his best friend's father, J. R. Balsley, sat on the order's financial committee, which organized a parade of its membership in Connellsville on July 4, 1891. The Courier announced, "The Biggest Fourth in the History of the Town Promised by American Mechanics, The Red Flag of the Socialists Recently Displayed in the Coke Regions Stirs the Blood of the UAM's. . . . They are anxious to show the foreign rabble who rally under it how well American labor loves the American flag."[30] J. R. Balsley, one of the order's most active members, gave a Memorial Day speech denouncing the troublemakers.
We are sorry that there is in our land today an element of discontent, but when we know that this class is made up of the scum of foreign nations and a few weak minded of our own land, there need be little [to] fear from this quarter. These men would not be satisfied with any laws that human skill could enact. If it was possible for them to enter heaven, they would at once want to change the ruling of the divine master.[31]
The ethnic stereotypes in Porter's The Finish of Bridget McKeen (1901), Cohen's Fire Sale (1907), and Laughing Gas (1907) were consistent with the attitudes Porter developed in the western Pennsylvania coke region. They had many counterparts in popular culture and reflected the general ethnic and racial prejudices of most native-born whites.