Thus America's most famous industrialist came to devise and distribute an investigative series about the threat “the international Jew” posed to American virtue, a campaign that took the form of a melodrama of sexual danger that entwined the postwar sex panic over the revolution in manners and morals with a race panic about the influence and visibility of Jewish movie producers. In doing so, it drew upon and inflamed broader cultural anxieties about miscegenation, in the unlovely language of the day, by offering a version of scientific racism for Americans who lacked the patience to parse popular scholarly accounts like Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race (1916). In Passing, Grant vividly pictured America's racial degeneration as “old stock” Americans were “literally driven off the streets” by “swarms” of immigrants aping Anglo-Saxon man's dress, imitating his language, and taking “his women.”30 An illustration of the theory of Anglo-Saxon “race suicide,” the book was successful enough to prompt two more printings after the war when Grant helped to give the new immigration restrictions the imprimatur of scientific legitimacy. The magazine's investigation of the “Jewish Question” began with a conclusion: innate racial characteristics compelled Jews toward world dominance. At every point, articles exhibited the same style of argument. The “question” was really an assertion that drew its power from the repetition of “facts” framed as common knowledge. Jews’ characteristics as a race—a “gift” for all things “commercial” rather than “productive or technical”—rendered them unable to create, explaining their parasitic positions as administrators of finance capitalism.31 Race also determined who played the hero and who the villain in these stories that pitted “two forces, Industry and Finance”—Gentile and Jew—against each other. Jewish racial solidarity clarified why all Jews, however different their interests or situation, aimed only to destroy the Gentile world.32 Race solidarity also justified the series’ attack on Jewish individuals whose accomplishments Americans like Ford typically equated with moral fitness. Jewish success was not “won by individual initiative; it was rather the extension of financial control across the sea.”33
The master plot that the Independent’s series revealed involved Jewish leaders’ resolve to use the nation's “cultural regions” to penetrate “the very heart of American life.”34 The paper claimed that Jewish immigrants already held sway over most of popular culture—including popular music, sports, and “the very news that people read”—making the United States “the center of Jewish power.”35 But the magazine called the stage and motion pictures the most important lairs from which Jews directed their struggle. These arenas lent themselves to Jews’ facility for exerting power from behind the scenes as they orchestrated the performances of others who enacted their “program for the guidance of public taste and the influencing of the public mind.” In this way, the “Jewish Theatrical Trust,” said to control the stage by 1900, ruined the theater's artistic standards. This move laid the groundwork for an even more ambitious plan, throwing “the empty theaters over to the ‘movies’ “ and thereby improving the industry's prestige as well as giving the Jewish race an inside track to dominance over the new business.36
Despite calling the movies “a Jewish enterprise from the start,” the Independent’s history lesson indicated the reverse. “Motion picture photography,” the magazine observed, “like most other useful things in the world, was of non-Jewish origin.”37 The subject of the movies’ origin raised the specter of the man commonly credited with its invention in America, the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” Thomas Edison. In the book Ford wrote about his lifelong mentor in 1930, he called Edison “the chief hero of my boyhood,” a “friend in manhood,” and “our greatest American.”38 The magazine's repeated rumblings that “the Jews did not invent the art of motion picture” betrayed the grudge Ford carried on Edison's behalf. Edison's so-called invention of motion pictures mostly consisted of directing a legal wrangle to control the industry through licensing and patenting his camera. After harassing virtually all the major producers into joining his Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), Edison formed the industry's original monopoly, ruled an illegal conspiracy in violation of the Sherman Anti-trust Act in 1915.39
But a group of innovative producers settling around Los Angeles had already rendered the Court's ruling unnecessary. Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, and Marcus Loew amassed enough capital to fight the MPPC in court by servicing thousands of unlicensed nickelodeons outside its interest. Their embrace of the star system and feature films enlarged movie audiences by retaining immigrants and working people while adding many more women and middle-class patrons. In this way, a group of upstart, un-American Jews wrested control of Edison's dominion out from under him. Beginning with Adolph Zukor, “conceded to be the leader of the fifth largest industry in the world,” the magazine described those who made “Jewish Supremacy in the Motion Picture World” complete. The Independent also stressed how Jewish dominance went far beyond “the official heads,” since even a “commonly supposed . . . non-Jewish concern” like United Artists was only a “Gentile Front.” The race of the industry's leaders created predictable results. “As soon as the Jew gained control of the ‘movies,’ we had a movie problem,” for it was “the genius of that race to create problems of a moral character in whatever business they achieve a majority.”40
Employing the race science of the day, the magazine placed Jews among a larger racial group whose “Oriental sensuality” challenged Anglo-Saxon sexual morality.41 The “Oriental ideal” was “essentially different from the Anglo-Saxon, the American view.”42 “American life is bare and meager to the Eastern mind. It is not sensuous enough. It is devoid of intrigue. Its women of the homes do not play continuously and hysterically on the sex motif.”43 In contrast to the “faith and quietness” of “American domesticity,” Orientalism took things “as far as you could go,” “gravitate[d] naturally to the flesh,” and lived “among the more sensual emotions” where “falsity, artificiality, criminality, and jazz” were the “keynotes.” Thus Jewish control resulted in “fleshy spectacles” characterized by “frivolity, sensuality, indecency, appalling illiteracy and endless platitudes.” Here lay the root of “the whole secret of ‘the movies’ moral failure”: their producers were “racially unqualified to reproduce the American atmosphere.”44 Thus genuine Americans need no longer “wonder where the ideas of the younger generation come from” if they were “Oriental in their voluptuous abandonment,” they had drunk the poison purveyed by the Jewish-controlled “stage and the movies.”45 Indeed, movie Orientalism's perversion of the nation's “Aryan complexion of mind and conscience” explained both Hollywood's popularity and the failure of a film censorship movement to take hold. The “filthy tide” of Orientalism that “all but engulf[ed]” “Gentile gullibles [sic]” accounted for why growing numbers of “real,” “plain” Anglo-Saxon Americans enjoyed Hollywood's detestable products.46
Thus the series attributed a racial origin to the feminization of American culture, describing the movies’ audience as a dangerously pliable, feminized crowd controlled by dark forces that threatened American culture's purity.47 Such fans “crowd[ed] through the doors of the movie house at all hours of the day and night, literally an unending line of human beings,” begging to have their minds filled with “ideas generated and directed by the suggestion of the screen.”48 The paper singled out “youths,” “working people,” and “shallow pated wives” as particularly susceptible to the “movie bug.” Without the powers of self-control ascribed to self-sufficient Aryan males, the movies turned these groups into addicts whose “appetites,” when “whetted and encouraged,” became “a mania” that “craved” “two or more pictures a day.” Influential Americans were either compromised in “Gentile fronts” or by the demands of “all sorts of causes,” like the war effort, that demanded cooperating with movie producers. Such trends left Jewish movie producers free to carry out the plan detailed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), the fraudulent text f
irst published in Russia that purported to uncover a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. “We have misled, stupefied and demoralized the youth of the Gentiles by means of education in principles and theories, patently false to us, but which we have inspired.” Here lay the goal of the “propaganda of the Jewish movie”—to inspire Anglo-Saxon Protestant youths to replace the faith of their fathers with Orientalism.49
Since only Gentile movie stars prevented Jewish producers’ total control, the series concluded by focusing on the latest trend within the industry: “the abolition of the ‘star’ system.” Despite the industry's having “reached its present importance because of the exaltation of the ‘star,’ “ producers now recognized that “the way to break the control which the public may exercise” was “to eliminate the stars.” Once producers succeeded in destroying the independence of stars, exhibitors and the public would “have no choice because there will be no choice; the business will be a standardized ‘industry.’ “ Then, as had happened with the theater, a “dark, Oriental atmosphere” would obliterate the “American feel” of the movies.50 Thus the Independent’s final accusation offered a critique of industrial standardization by no less than its prophet. Ford's success was built on production methods that clocked and regulated every aspect of human labor and choice in order to manufacture the ideal one-size-and-low-price-fits-all product, making the criticisms either a virtuoso exercise of irony, or sheer apostasy.
As might be expected, people took notice when the world's most prominent industrialist added virulently anti-Semitic attacks to his product line. Although “not a single paper or magazine of repute” had backed Ford's campaign, a reporter observed, “the movement still continues to excite nation-wide attention.”51 Frank Crane, the influential editor of Current Opinion, decried Ford's attack as spreading to America the kind of “Jew hating” that was of “constant quantity in Europe.”52 An open letter in the New York Times signed by “citizens of Gentile birth and Christian faith,” including Presidents Wilson and Taft, condemned the appearance “of an organized campaign of anti-Semitism, conducted in close conformity to and cooperation with similar campaigns in Europe.”53 Such reactions displayed how open anti-Semitism remained beyond the pale of polite conversation among most of the American educated elite. Jewish leaders and writers in the United States divided over the best response to Ford's attack and what significance to attribute to the Independent’s crusade.54 Most agreed it displayed a broader trend of “Jew-baiting” fueled by the war.55 New York congressman Fiorello LaGuardia summarily judged Ford's “wealth and ignorance” as making possible “a nefarious warfare against the Jews.”56
An editorial in Photoplay disputed the notion that Jewish producers controlled what appeared on screens. In a juxtaposition that Ford might have argued proved his point about the industry's Oriental sensibility, Photoplay’s editor, James Quirk, ran a piece called “Oh, Henry!” opposite an article exploring “vamps of all times.” The “magazine holds no brief for the family of Israel,” Quirk avowed. Yet he decried any “form of condemnation which denounces a whole people” as “a menace to civilization.” Quirk attributed different implications to similar Jewish stereotypes to upend the attack. “The Jew from time immemorial has been given to trade and barter and finance,” he wrote—“the man behind the artist—frequently to his own profit, but sometimes quite the reverse—for more than a hundred years.” Finally, Quirk offered the collaborative nature of making movies, and fans’ estimation of their own good taste, as the best evidence to dispute Ford's charges. Yet Quirk's assurance that Jews had absolutely no role in shaping what appeared on screens subtly supported the idea that such an occurrence would threaten fans.57
The second Ku Klux Klan, whose presence exploded after 1920, embraced Ford's ideas about the threat that Jewish-produced movies posed to American sexual morality and Gentile girls.58 Revering “the genuine Americanism” of the anti-Semitic Flivver King, Ford was one of the few industrialists to escape the KKK's attacks. Revived in Atlanta in 1915, the second Klan's membership languished at a few thousand in January 1920. One year later estimates placed it at over one million. The first Klan was a sectional body that aimed to restore white supremacy throughout the South and accepted any white man willing to terrorize black Americans to achieve this end. The second Klan was an Anglo-Saxon nationalist order that promised to restore influence to those who feared the destruction of American morality by “new immigrants,” New Negroes,” and New Women. A national social movement, the second Klan accepted only native-born white Protestant men and drew recruits mostly from the lower middle classes in urbanizing regions. Using wartime rhetoric, it preached white supremacy, Christianity, and “pure Americanism” to protect members from the threat posed by encroaching cosmopolitan influences from above and below. The 1920s’ Klan promised a moral realignment through vigilante actions that aimed to repair the corrosions associated with metropolitan modernity, including new Negroes, Jews, Catholics, monopolists, labor radicals, erring wives, itinerant husbands, “wild women” in short skirts, divorcées, commercial popular culture, and especially “degrading, depraving, or disgusting” movies.59
Yet even as the Klan lambasted the movies and their makers, its leaders masterfully deployed modern media to increase the organization's membership by inflaming anxieties about the industry's danger to the “social structure and racial purity” of America. The Klan hired two publicity agents in 1920 to sound such themes by seizing on the melodramas propagated by both the Independent and D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. Rereleased in December 1920, Griffith's film provided a touchstone, and central recruiting device, for the second Klan. Based on Thomas Dixon's best-selling novel, The Clansman—An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), Griffith's adaptation was one of the most powerful melodramas of sexual danger about a race panic ever made. Birth recounted how the Klan saved the South and reunited the nation by deposing dastardly mulatto politicians and lynching black male predators driven to rape white women. A technical masterpiece, Birth glorified the movement's heroism, strengthened members’ solidarity, and inflamed others to don the Klan's white robes.60
As members rallied in movie theaters across the country, Klan leaders also used Ford's prestige and the Independent’s campaign to support their story about the dangers posed by Jewish control over the culture industries. According to Klan spokesmen, the best example of the “Cosmopolitanism advocated by International Jewry” lay in how the “Jew-produced motion pictures industry and the Jew-monopolized jazz music submerge[d]” Gentile youths “in a sea of sensuality and sewage.” Here lay the inspiration for the “amatory and erotic tendencies” of young women. Believing that “all Protestant girls are common property and can be bought for a song,” Jewish employers underpaid working girls, seduced them with trinkets, and then discarded them like “an old worn-out coat.”
Such a charge carried significant implications about the assumedly Gentile girls streaming into Los Angeles. As Birth of a Nation did with black men, the Klan placed Jewish men atop their list of racial enemies because of the danger they posed to white women. According to the Klan, black men's bestial strength, vigor, and carnality excused Klan members’ violent restraints. The danger Jewish men presented was harder to address since their cunning allowed them to infiltrate economic structures and then manipulate women into degrading themselves. Thus, as Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans declared in 1921, only “strict censorship” would “keep the Jew controlled stage and movies within even gunshot of decency.”61
II
Open, virulent anti-Semitism distinguished the calls for film censorship made by the Ku Klux Klan and Ford's Independent from other censorship efforts after the war. Yet such extreme talk made subtler expressions of similar views sound reasonable by comparison. In making the case for federal regulation of films, leading activists like Ellis Oberholtzer, Reverend Wilbur Crafts and Canon William Chase expressed their anti-Semitism in more polite code. These reformers argued that only fede
ral oversight could stop the spread of a new type of “Sex Picture” purveyed by the “perverse,” “degenerate” “Hebrew” film producers who had seized control of the industry during the war. These more polite melodramas of sexual danger surfaced in the postwar censorship campaigns launched by the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC) and in New York, the film industry's financial hub and its most lucrative market. The GFWC and those who fought for state censorship in New York expressed similar concerns. They argued that the “un-American” morality glorified by postwar films and their stars celebrated the erasure of the sexual double standard, thereby perverting the minds of impressionable women and immigrants. For the GFWC's respectable, reform-minded members, ensuring that films conformed to traditional middle-class conventions offered a means to exert public influence. During the postwar panic over immigration and the future direction of women's rights, debates about regulating a “Hebrew trust selling sex pictures” offered evidence that the freedom of modern young girls had gone too far.
Moral custodians considered women's pursuit of “sex partisan politics”—including more liberal divorce laws, birth control, and the Equal Rights Amendment—the wrong way to exercise their new political rights. “Undoubtedly one of the most important national events that will have its effect on the moral standard of the country is the enfranchising of our women,” declared John Sumner in an article about the potential trouble caused by ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.62 Sumner, the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, warned that “two paths” lay before women in 1921. Women could either join “with the men to make better laws for herself and her children,” or join together “along lines of sex antagonism” that would “breakdown the moral fiber of the nation.” Sumner extolled motion picture regulation as a chance for women to take the right path. Yet he seemed more interested in speculating about the “sex warfare” that would result if women ignored his advice.63 As the headline of one story in this vein put it, “Will the Next War Be Women against Men?”64 According to Sumner, the goal of these “women who [were] openly antagonistic to men and ‘man made’ laws and conventions” duplicated Hollywood's aim to grant “modern woman still greater sex freedom” by promoting “a ‘single standard’: meaning the standard of moral laxity attributed to men.”65
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