Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  A retort published in the Los Angeles Times displayed how Hollywood Bohemia's extra-girl threatened the industry's economic interests. In “Defends Manners of Hollywood,” Jane Fredrickson took “violent exception” on behalf of the “90,000 citizens of Hollywood.”151 Fredrickson called on the president of the Hollywood Board of Trade to dispute this portrait of the extra-girl, but she admitted that the influx of flickers into the suburb had changed perceptions about its manners and morals. Many worried that “the movies had spoiled” the recently bucolic town, and jokes like “'Are you married?’ ‘No, I live in Hollywood'” showed how assumptions about residents’ looser morals already creaked with cliché. A cartoon atop the article emphasized the influence of reformers like Fredrickson. Below a depiction of a movie theater door nailed shut with a sign reading “Blue Laws,” the caption announced: “Hollywood As It Might Be.” Readers knew the cartoon was no joke. Earlier that year a group of citizens had attempted to pass laws mandating Sunday closings, regulating where studios could build, and enforcing a censorship law on the books but not yet used. One petition to the Los Angeles city council captured the broader charge: motion pictures promoted “licentiousness and crime” and were to blame for the “mysterious disappearance” of “over six hundred young women” in the last year.152

  Other accounts in the mainstream press emphasized two things about the colony's social scene: Hollywood's “money-mad” character and the risks it encouraged ordinary young women to take with the grave business of life. “Money-mad” meant spending serious amounts of cash on frivolous fancies. Such madness was endemic, visible in the shelling out of “$5000 just to get one scene right” and in stars “simply throwing away their money on motors, clothes, and jewelry.” Despite the notorious excesses of corporate elites since the Gilded Age, such critics blamed these habits on the working-class origins of most of the industry's employees. The “ex-bartenders, milk-wagon drivers, telephone girls, manicurists, and stenographers” who had invented the colony simply did not take a “business like” attitude toward work that appreciated the value of “real money.” The extras “swarming” the studio streets illustrated the second problem. And, again, extra-girls dominated the scene: “girls—tall girls and short girls, curly-haired girls and girls with their hair drawn sleekly back over their brows, girls who suggest mignonettes and girls who suggest tuberoses; girls in aprons and girls in evening gowns—girls by the score, their faces all grease paint, waiting in little chattering groups for their big moment of the day.” What disturbed the reporter was how these extras knowingly pursued a course that depended on “luck and opportunity,” rather than on “the long and more or less bitter struggle” that most rewarding endeavors required. Yet instead of worrying about their uncertain fates, such folks were out on “Saturday nights” “jazzing” among the stars, so “gay and carefree and careless, as to make the puritanical heart cease in its beat.”153

  Other reporting in mainstream periodicals worried that such promotions encouraged women to follow their romantic daydreams in dangerous directions. “In the old days the small boy” used to decamp in search of adventure, “but fashions change with the changing years and now it is girls who run away to emulate their favorites of the screen.”154 Not only girls, but “wives” who “deserted husbands and babies” “and even gray-haired mothers” frequently made “the long trip west” “in hope of gratifying in their latter years a secret dream.” These were not savvy bohemian extra-girls jazzing it up, but “gullible girls,” fleeced of their money by fake casting directors and photographers, “who have gone the way of oblivion or worse.” On the defensive, some industry insiders argued that the moral character of migrants determined their fate. An article on “do's and don'ts” for screen hopefuls written by independent producer Benjamin Hampton blamed the unjustifiably “bad reputation of movie-players” on the fact that the “nice girl” was “almost invariably discouraged” from heading west.155 According to Hampton, too many “colorful stories” in newspapers and magazines sent “an army of girls to Los Angeles every year.” Hampton warned that those with “'Bohemian’ bacillus” in their system “reached the end of their journey” in “a store,” “a restaurant,” or the “morgue.” “The movies need the nice girl. They need the girl that comes from a good family with education and tradition in back of her,” Hampton implored. But, he concluded, “when you do go, take your mother or auntie with you—and live with her.”

  Such articles assumed that any girl alone was either in danger or dangerous. They also indicated the growing tendency to hold Hollywood's bohemian appeal responsible not just for the trouble with middle-class flappers but also for the rise in sexual delinquency among working-class young women. A Photoplay article entitled “The Girl Problem and the Pictures” rebutted critics who made this charge. The article interviewed Reverend Eva Ludgate, who defended motion pictures for displaying “lovely women, charming men, and beautiful homes to many a child who has worked most of her life in a factory—who has lived, for countless years, in a slum.” But the article also admitted that early Hollywood's stars and stories fostered young women's romantic expectations and then sent them off, alone, to follow their hearts down unexpected paths. “It has raised her ideals,” Reverend Ludgate asserted, “has set her groping after newer, more wonderful vistas. But—it has stopped there. It has not tried to direct her groping.”156

  CHAPTER 4

  The Movie Menace

  In February of 1921, independent film producer Benjamin Hampton wrote an article purporting to explain the movie industry's descent into sexual immorality after the war. Hampton's “Too Much Sex-Stuff in the Movies? Whose Fault Is It?” appeared in Pictorial Review, a fiction, news, and fashion magazine with a progressive slant aimed at middle-class women. According to the Los Angeles Times, the article sparked “a hot war” in the “SEX WAR ON IN FILMS.”1 The man who later voiced concern over the “'Bohemian’ bacillus” infecting female migrants in Los Angeles argued that American women were responsible for the industry's postwar turn to more risqué storylines and stars.2 Since women best understood each other's preferences, they both created and consumed the “present preponderance of sex-plays,” Hampton explained. Producers “cannot sell hob-nailed boots to the dancing slipper trade,” which “hunger[ed] for sex stuff” and “exotic” stars. Female scenarists composed most of these stories since they best understood other women's tastes. Stories written by men needed a “woman writer ... to jazz it up. She jazzes it and when the male person reads her revised version he realizes that his effusion was about as naughty as one of Little Rollo's adventures.” Such feminine predilections also accounted for ambitious actresses’ embrace of “sex-appealing” to get ahead. “Beulah La Belle from Birmingham, Alabama,” had once triumphed playing “nothing but sad, tearful parts” in traditional melodramas. But now La Belle was “no longer weeping for a living. She is now sex appealing.” Hampton also declared women responsible for fixing the sex problem created by their sex, calling on the General Federation of Women's Clubs to use its “tremendous power” to rally support for good, clean films.3

  A decade later, Hampton claimed he wrote “Too Much Sex-Stuff” to challenge the perception of “professional reformers and agitators” that movie producers, alone, drove the industry's passionate postwar turn. B.A. MacKinnon, Pictorial Review’s editor in New York, pressed his friend to write the “sex and censorship” piece, arguing that outrage building over the industry's moral decline meant that unless producers, who “were too busy with the day's work,” took notice of the agitation and cleaned house, there would “not be much house left when reformers finished the job.”4 Calling Hampton “the spokesman for the industry,” the press left the impression that a powerful producer had confessed to the movies’ sins (even if he argued that women were to blame).5

  In reality, Hampton was merely a little fish in a big pond. A former tobacco executive in New York who had failed to orchestrate the purchase of Paramount, Hampton quit his j
ob and moved to Los Angeles, where he produced, wrote, and directed fifteen films between 1917 and 1922. To Hampton, the response generated by “Too Much Sex-Stuff?” displayed how “the movies had permeated every section of society.” As “thousands of letters and newspaper clippings” poured into his study, “the deep hold” Hollywood had “on the classes as well as the masses” became clear. By April 1921, the Ladies’ Home Journal, the nation's largest monthly, asserted that women were responsible for “the enormous new industry's . . . choice of themes and their execution.”6 By the year's end, the movies’ sex problem was on the mind of anyone worried about the nation's health.

  Ironically, awareness of the good accomplished by the movies during the war contributed to fears about the industry's power to do evil after its conclusion. The biggest producers, represented in the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI), worked closely with President Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information (CPI) to manage the propaganda campaign designed to stir the support of the public that had re-elected Wilson in 1916 on the platform “He Kept Us Out of War.” Directed by the former scenario writer and adman George Creel, the CPI put stars like Mary Pickford to work selling Liberty Bonds and rousing public support.7 NAMPI also worked with the CPI to transform movie theaters into patriotic centers with the pre-show performances of “Four Minute Men.” The CPI's success raised fears about the relationship between the media and the creation of something that social scientists and public intellectuals started to call public opinion (the title of Walter Lippmann's seminal 1922 book).8 “It has been discovered by individuals, by associations, and by governments,” wrote a political scientist in 1920, “that a certain kind of advertising can be used to mold public opinion and control democratic majorities.” That same year the Chicago Motion Picture Commission initiated the first “scientific” study about the effect of movies on the morality of youth.9

  The spiraling anxieties about movie morality took shape within the context of the broad panic over social regulation after the war, helping to explain why so many held the industry's Oriental Trust (in the ethnic terminology of the day)—rather than ordinary American women—accountable for the corruption of native values. Other inflammatory targets first absorbed and inflamed the public's attention, including a wave of often immigrant-led strikes, the first nationwide race riots outside the South, and the revival of immigration itself. But by 1920, the dramatic rise in both proposed movie censorship legislation and public debate over movie morality displayed the new focus on the threat the movies posed to native virtue.10 The development of Hollywood's free-spirited, bohemian social imaginary fueled such fears. Reformers with once disparate views now agreed that only respectable American moral regulators could prevent the industry's spread of “immoral, unmoral, unAmerican” social conventions and sexual behavior among the masses.11 New critics created powerful melodramas of sexual danger about the racial degeneration posed by Jews’ influence over the most powerful culture industry ever seen. Funded by Henry Ford, these critics charged that a “Hebrew Trust” enticed white womanhood, the fount of America's racial purity, into degrading themselves. All the stories told by Hollywood's critics entwined panics over sexuality and race into a melodrama in which Hollywood's “un-American,” immoral sex pictures, social environment, and leaders threatened the nation's health. These melodramas of sexual danger played the flipside of Hollywood Bohemia, spinning stories about Orientalist movie “moguls” who despoiled a Gentile nation by corrupting its women with poolside tango parties and the passionate tales of “a million and one nights.”12

  I

  Much like debates over Hollywood's influence, discussions about the need for new immigration restrictions after the war reflected symbolic fears more than reasoned objections, “MUST STOP ALIEN INFLUX: Ellis Island Commissioner Avers Flow of Immigrant Labor Dangerous,” screamed a Los Angeles Daily Times headline. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle cautioned, “GROWING U.S. MUST CHOOSE JAP, JEW OR ITALIAN CITIZENS.”13 Both headlines conveyed the shrill tenor of a discussion in which metaphors of natural disaster abounded. “The struggle with Germany, called forth the most strenuous nationalism and the most pervasive nativism the United States had ever known,” argues historian John Higham in explaining the passage of new immigration restrictions based on ethnic quotas in 1921. The crusade for “100 percent Americanism” that continued after the war revealed the conflict over immigration as “a major turning point in American nativism.”14 Faith in so-called Americanization efforts designed “to hasten the assimilative process, to heat and stir the melting pot,” collapsed.15 In 1920 the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration, Albert Johnson, proposed “a genuine 100% American immigration law” that halted immigration entirely for two years and then established ethnic quotas that excluded Asians and all but ended immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Only such a dam could prevent the “flood of undesirable aliens” from launching “the toboggan slide” of “the white race” toward destruction.16

  The postwar furor over the influence of the movies and immigrants on native American culture revealed the new tendency to view Jews as a special threat. One popular editor called anti-Semitism “one of the most curious specimens” of “all the dirty spawn germinated in the refuse left by the Great War.”17 A postwar congressional report justifying the ethnic-origins quota act claimed that Jewish immigrants dominated the stream, characterizing them as “abnormally twisted,” “unassimilable,” and “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits.”18 The report grossly inflated the potential number of Jewish immigrants, predicting that “five million Polish Jews would attempt to immigrate to America during the next three years.” A bemused Nation reporter noted the estimate was “50% above the total number of the Jews in Poland.”19 The Senate defeated Johnson's all-out ban. But just as Hampton's article in Pictorial Review hit newsstands, the quota measure created by Congress “to check the flow from southern and eastern Europe without hindering the movement from northern and western Europe” easily won approval.20 The news coverage of these developments, Higham argues, led many in the United States to conclude that “the chief purpose of the immigration law of 1921 was to keep out the Jews.”21

  Indeed, Current Opinion called “the strength and intensity of the new movement of anti-Semitism one of the unexpected results of the war.”22 “The after-the-war imagination plays busily about the Jew,” The Nation concurred. “Books, magazine articles, newspaper editorials, the talk of the man on the street, figure him as a sort of Mephistopheles of the peoples.”23 Both magazines also registered the novelty of viewing Jewish immigrants as a special threat. During the mid-nineteenth century, the tiny number of German Jewish immigrants who traveled among the larger wave of their compatriots drew little attention, as some managed to earn a share of the clout wielded by the Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite.24 Some historians argue that German Jews encountered increasing social discrimination as the century wore on, but without a doubt, the massive arrival of new-immigrant Jews after 1890 complicated their reception. New-immigrant Jews fled mounting persecution, rising oppression, and mass murder in all parts of Eastern and Central Europe. Often Yiddish speaking, much poorer than their predecessors, and from orthodox religious backgrounds, their folkways, dress, and concentrated settlement in the poorest urban neighborhoods marked them as outsiders much more visibly. The postwar idea that Jews posed a particular sexual threat twisted engrained European stereotypes—about Jews as permanent foreigners who possessed a taste for despoiling Gentile women and wielding power from behind the scenes—to fit current American circumstances.25

  The most nightmarish melodrama about the cultural power of the predatory Jew emerged from an attack campaign in the Midwest that both shaped and strengthened perceptions about the danger Hollywood posed to American values. The revelation of a secret Jewish plot to control what people thought and bought the world over was the purpose of an ongoing series published in the Dearborn Independent, a general magazin
e operated and distributed by the “Flivver King,” Henry Ford. Indisputably a folk hero by the time he launched an investigation of “The Jewish Question,” Ford's newspaper detailed the threat “the international Jew, the world's foremost problem,” posed to “all that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization.”26 A farmer's son with little formal education, Ford derived success from his command of the qualities that many Americans most prized: a bent for mechanical tinkering that produced technological innovation, a genius for efficiency, and a will to conquer space by harnessing speed. Estimated as one of America's richest men by 1920, Ford grew so concerned about the modern world's direction that he entered politics. His first major foray involved funding a 1915 “Peace Ship” to Europe to stop a war he thought “money lenders and munitions makers” had engineered. The endeavor drew ridicule in much of the press, and its abject failure seems to have precipitated Ford's repudiation of any venture that whiffed of cosmopolitanism.27 After narrowly losing Michigan's 1918 Democratic senatorial race, Ford bought the Dearborn Independent, christened it the “Chronicler of Neglected Truth,” and set out to educate “plain Americans” about the dangers encroaching on their country.28 He hired a former New York World reporter to improve the Independent’s anemic sales. The journalist advised a melodramatic solution to the magazine's poor circulation, instructing Ford to “find an evil to attack, go after it, and stay after it.”29