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From Regulation to Censorship: Film and Political Culture in New York in the Early Twentieth Century1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Nancy J. Rosenbloom
Affiliation:
Canisius College

Extract

The struggle over censorship stood at the core of the relationship between the political culture of progressivism and early moving pictures. Called by contemporaries and historians alike a democratic art, the moving pictures invited audiences to participate in the new mass culture of the early twentieth-century. As some early film makers began to use the medium to tell stories, those sitting in small theaters in towns and cities across America saw before them a make-believe world that was nonetheless plausible commentary on the past, the present, and the future. What remained unresolved was how those who championed political reforms, ostensibly in the language of progressive and democratic politics, might harness the power of the medium in redefining American political and social life. How much power the moving pictures and its mass audience might assume energized men and women, particularly progressives in New York City, who sought a more democratic culture, politics, and social life. How much power the moving pictures and its mass audience might assume energized men and women, particularly progressives in New York City, who sought a more democratic culture, politics, and social life. They regarded the political potential of the moving pictures as essential to the empowerment of the masses in an age when social boundaries were in flux. At the same time, they tried and ultimately failed to extend to moving pictures the protection of the First Amendment. They did this because they believed in the political and artistic possibilities of the medium for a democratic culture. In creating a plan to elevate the moving pictures and their places of exhibition, they became locked in a confrontation with other reformers who feared the awesome power of the screen to hasten modernity and all that it implied.

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2004

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References

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97 Gabriel Hess testimony, ibid., 25.

98 See the Memorandum on Resolutions Adopted by National Association, n.d. National Board of Review Records, Box 9. See also “Report to the General Committee of the National Board of Review, May-June, 1919, Box 120.

99 Lathrop, Motion Picture Problem.

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105 Report of the Motion Picture Commission of the Year 1921, 1–2. Press Notice, Typescript, New York State Archives.

106 “Lulu Bert,” November 23, 1921, Motion Picture Commission of the State of New York Register of Films, New York State Archives.

107 Entry 1072, Motion Picture Commission of the State of New York Register of Films, New York State Archives.

108 Entry 1347, “Foolish Wives,” Motion Picture Commission of the State of New York Register of Films, New York State Archives.

109 Two films that offended a commissioner on the ground of inciting to crime because of sacrilegious portraits were This Dollar Balry, Metro Pictures Corporation, and While Satan Sleeps, Famous Players Lasky. See entry 2817 and 2967 in Register of Films, and Any Ole Rags, Rastus Chases Chickens, and Holding His Own, April 26 and 28–29, 1922, Motion Picture Commission of the State of New York Register of Films.

110 Repor of the Motion Picture Commission of the Year 1921, Press Notice, 1–2.

111 Ibid., 7.

112 Ibid., 6.

113 Senate Resolution 142, Attached to “Proposed Investigation of the Motion Picture Industry,” Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate, 67th Congress, 2nd session (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1922).

114 “Chase Wants Films Investigated,” entry in the Chaney Digest of Scrapbooks, January 25, 1922, 373, Will Hays Manuscript Collection.

115 “Mr. Hays and the Pictures,” Dearborn Independent, in the Chaney Digest, February 11, 1922, 389, Will Hays Manuscript Collection.

116 Statement by the President [Harding], January 14, 1922, and Statement of producers and distributors, January 16, 1922, Will Hays Manuscript Collection, Box 15.

117 “Mr. Hays and the Pictures.”