Moving Companies: Whiteness, Visuality, And Film At The National Cash Register Company, General Motors Corporation, And Jam Handy Organization, 1884-1960

This dissertation explores the visual modes of discourse that the interrelated companies of the National Cash Register Company (NCR), the General Motors Corporation (GM), and the sponsored and industrial film company the Jam Handy Organization (JHO) created from the turn of the twentieth century to the immediate post-World War II period. NCR, GM, and JHO built a “complex of visuality” that entrenched ideological frameworks of whiteness into labor relations, promotional practices, and forms of community and nation building. NCR created narratives and imagery of White uplift and affluence with ads, periodicals, illustrated lectures, motion pictures, register demonstrations, company ceremonies, industrial welfare labor practices, and community programs while segregating, and then banning, Black labor and barring Black residents from participating in the company’s civic outreach programs. GM and JHO sponsored and produced midcentury motion pictures that promoted auto-centric modes of life as part of building racially segregated labor, consumer, and community relations. GM-JHO films portrayed Black life as subservient subjects in syncretic narratives of White nation building.