D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

We open on cropland. A farmer is running his hands through a bag of seed as his wife and daughter look on. Sowing season has come: it is time to plant this year’s wheat. He and an old man (his father?) walk slowly through a field, followed by a horse-driven plough. A cut: in a cushy office, a businessman — the “Wheat King”, surrounded by his lackeys — ponders the best way to get rich. The next scene, in the stock market, is announced by a card: “IN THE WHEAT PIT / THE FINAL THRESHING HAS ARRIVED.” What is getting beaten, however, is not the wheat itself but the king’s opponents. He has cornered the market, allowing him to set the commodity’s price: we next see a bakery, where the cost of bread has jumped from 5 cents to 10, and children are going hungry.

The simultaneous action of this 1909 short film helped forge the reputation of a young D. W. Griffith. Reportedly inspired in part by Charles Dickens’ narrative techniques, the director had developed a technique of parallel editing, allowing him to juxtapose different narratives to moral as well as dramatic ends. Intercut with the Wheat King’s feasting is the crushing poverty of the farm and the breadline. A somewhat heavy-handed message — some hamminess among the misérables doesn’t help — but one that probably bore repeating as the Gilded Age came to a close.

The film, produced for the Biograph Company, was based on the writings of the Progressive journalist and novelist Frank Norris, particularly his short story “A Deal in Wheat” (1903). But the narrative was given additional piquancy by an eerily similar scheme put in place by the Chicago businessman James A. Patten a few months earlier, which — as in the film — saw bread prices double.

In A Corner in Wheat, the Wheat King takes his family for a tour of the grain elevators where their ill-gotten wealth is stored. As they set off, he gets held behind, as his assistant hands him a letter from his accountant. We get to read it too: “Dear Sir:– You have control of the entire market of the world. Yesterday added $4,000,000 to your fortune.” Griffith actually underestimated what Patten’s profits would be: when the scheme finally collapsed in May 1909, the financier had made around $5,000,000 from his efforts — about $185,000,000 in today’s money.

However, while Patten emerged unscathed from his dealings, the Wheat King meets his punishment, this one taken from an earlier novel by Norris, The Octopus (1901). Jumping in joy at his new wealth, the Wheat King accidentally stumbles into a pit of threshed wheat, getting buried alive in the commodity that enriched him. He gets his comeuppance; but those who could not buy bread are still hungry, some killed by police during a riot. The last shot of the film reproduces the second: the farmer is walking in his field, sowing. But this time he is on his own. Maybe his father is dead; he certainly can no longer afford to hire a plough.

Norris died at thirty-two, leaving his planned Epic of the Wheat trilogy still unfinished. (His later reputation was tarnished by his virulent anti-Semitism; Griffith’s would, of course, be defined by the racism of The Birth of a Nation.) A Progressive, Norris hoped his writing would help awaken the working classes to their oppression. At the end of “A Deal in Wheat”, his financiers are perfectly well-off, but his farmer is not resigned:

Dimly he began to see the significance of things. Caught once in the cogs and wheels of a great and terrible engine, he had seen — none better — its workings. . . . The farmer — he who raised the wheat — was ruined upon one hand; the working-man — he who consumed it — was ruined upon the other. But between the two, the great operators, who never saw the wheat they traded in, bought and sold the world's food, gambled in the nourishment of entire nations, practised their tricks, their chicanery and oblique shifty “deals,” were reconciled in their differences, and went on through their appointed way, jovial, contented, enthroned, and unassailable.

Griffith was perhaps no less didactic. Parallel editing allowed his viewer, like the farmer, to see finance from the inside and the outside, from top and bottom — a new perspective gained at the cost of a 7 cent movie ticket.