Go West, Young Women!

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Go West, Young Women! Page 21

by Hilary Hallett


  The new focus of the nation's most powerful state censorship board also illustrated the broader sex war.66 Created in 1915, the Pennsylvania State Board of Censors set the pattern followed by the three other state movie censor boards in existence.67 A provision requiring that a woman serve as its vice-president displayed the importance of using respectable women to reestablish proper moral standards.68 Indeed, the commission's stated objective was to protect “the family in its present form.” Twenty-four “standards” specified violations of this goal. Two-thirds proscribed materials that would be “disapproved” because of sexual impropriety and clustered around three aspects of its expression.69 The first group censored sexual acts committed by men against women: women seduced, assaulted, betrayed, or forced into “white slavery” (prostitution). The second cluster censored women whose modern behavior signaled their moral corruption: drunk women, smoking women, “sensual kissing and lovemaking,” nude or “unduly exposed” bodies, and “lewd and immodest dancing.” The final group involved conduct resulting from actions between women and men who were judged to imperil the nation's moral hygiene, including divorce, adultery, “birth control,” abortion, and “race suicide.” The commission also censored pictures “showing the modus operandi of criminals.” But the concentration on moral issues revealed that its primary aim was inculcating fans with genteel middle-class sexual standards and gender roles. The Pennsylvania Censorship Commission's chairman, Ellis Oberholtzer, Ph.D., offered testimony before the Chicago Motion Picture Commission in 1919 that indicated why his critics argued that the process was hopelessly subjective. “Looking at pictures you judge them instinctively,” Oberholtzer explained. “You know whether such a thing is permissible or not; you feel it somehow or other . . . then you look to the standard and try to find a reason for it afterwards.”70

  Oberholtzer's admission also suggested why he became a lightning rod for the controversy surrounding censorship. A historian, Oberholtzer claimed to have reluctantly relinquished the quiet of a library and his work on the multivolume History of the United States since the Civil War to answer Pennsylvania governor William Cameron Sproul's call to serve as the commission's first chairman.71 The commission's decision in 1918 to condemn outright Old Wives for New—the first of the “salacious divorce and sex plays” directed by Cecil B. DeMille— prompted heated debate over the anti-democratic implications of letting five people determine what hundreds of thousands could watch.72 The next year Oberholtzer declared the fight a matter of “us versus them” and took to the lecture circuit to propagandize the growing necessity of film censorship.73 After mounting controversy surrounding his activities caused the Pennsylvania governor to remove him from office, Oberholtzer became a full-time activist for film censorship. Between 1920 and 1921, he traveled continually to speak about the need for federal regulation, wrote pamphlets and articles in reform periodicals, and published The Morals of the Movie (1922).74 “Sex,” the chapter “Sex Pictures” began, was the “one potently dominant idea in the minds of the men who are gambling in the public taste.” Written to convince readers that this new emphasis had made the “morals of the movie” dramatically decline, the book explained why only federal oversight could neutralize “the magnitude of the evil” represented by films. While Oberholtzer conceded that the industry's “physical sense” had improved with “truly astonishing rapidity,” he argued that the “ ‘dramatic’ in the movies” had “gone back.” This deterioration required regulators of his “class” and “moral opinions” to protect ordinary fans from the displays of murder, incest, and seduction that once only a select few had watched on stage. “We shall have a care for what costs three dollars on Broadway,” he admitted, “but infinitely more concern for what is simultaneously shown for a few cents in a thousand places, in hamlet and crossway in all parts of the land.” Oberholtzer also emphasized the international nature of the crisis, declaring, “The standards of production established by the manufacturers of the United States” were now “the standards of the world.”75

  Like the Independent and the Klan, Oberholtzer held film producers entirely responsible for the escalation of what he called “sex rot” and “motion pictures infected with diseases of the erotic imagination.” Their new movie “trust” replaced the “liquor business” as “the most corrupt of the forces now active in the debauchery of the public conscience.” Movie producers pretended to “revile ‘politics’ and yet enter it with their riches to pollute and corrupt [its] sources” and to exploit their “wares without holiness or grace.” Although Oberholtzer stopped short of outright naming the Jewishness of producers as creating the sex problem, his mingling of moral pollution, economic power, and godlessness indicated that such was the case. Oberholtzer also accused producers of fooling the public by “disseminat[ing] the impression” that the “so-called National Board” in New York already censored film content. Working in cooperation with producers and funded by them, the National Board of Review (NBR) aired “the dirty linen of New York City” before the country, tempting fans with “wickedness that they have heard about but have never seen.” According to Oberholtzer, the NBR was “a mere blind, a ruse to beguile film reformers, particularly organizations of women, who have so real and steadfast an interest in the character of picture exhibitions for the sake of their children.” Like Hampton, Oberholtzer emphasized clubwomen's critical role in reforming the “morals of the movie.” Detailing their efforts throughout the book, he declared them natural allies to stem the social chaos he associated with the “Bolshevia” created by “producers” who “cover[ed] the country with immoral pictures” to fill “their money sacks.” Oberholtzer dedicated his book to the Pennsylvania commission's vice-president, “Katherine A. Niver, my comrade in arms in the thin red line.”76 Women like Niver mobilized conventions about respectable womanhood—which linked middle-class white women's place within the domestic sphere to their innate spiritual and moral superiority—to distinguish their class from those above and below. The tact helped to legitimize their efforts at what reformer Jane Addams called “city housekeeping.”77 Women's ability to transform domestic prerogatives into public authority proved most successful in matters that involved using their maternal authority to lobby the state to protect their so-called dependents, including children, youths, single mothers, and the poor.78

  The General Federation of Women's Clubs was the largest women's organization to benefit from mobilizing such conventions. Created in 1890 as a national association for society women's literary clubs, the GFWC reoriented its mission from “an old-fashioned culture club” to a clearinghouse that directed the reform activities of nearly two million women in myriad local organizations. “We prefer Doing to Dante,” declared one member in 1906; “today nothing but an orgy of philanthropy will satisfy us.” By the 1920s, the membership of the GFWC remained largely unchanged despite its new orientation, admitting mostly upper- and middle-class women from “the Anglo-Saxon race.”79 Gender, class, and ethnic conventions all positioned the GFWC's members as the ideal regulators of an entertainment that appealed to children, immigrants, youths, and, increasingly, their own daughters. A contemporary historian of legislation affecting motion pictures expressed the class and racial biases behind the clubwomen's authority. “Since the membership in the clubs is representative of the middle and upper strata of our population,” the historian noted, it “must be considered as having social standards which are largely in accord with those of the general public.”80

  As late as 1918, the GFWC viewed the movie industry as no threat to public morals. An opponent of legal censorship, the organization had been an important ally of the NBR.81 The Women's Municipal League in New York had helped to create the NBR in 1909 after conducting a survey of films that judged them “wholesome” entertainment.82 The NBR provided a forum for producers, exhibitors, and the general public to reach a consensus about what constituted acceptable motion picture content. Clubwomen were the NBR's unpaid reviewers, screening the vast majo
rity of films, recommending changes to producers, and distributing a weekly bulletin listing approved films. Mary Grey Peck, of the GFWC's Motion Picture Committee, toured the country with the NBR to criticize the rise of local censorship boards. Peck lectured about the superiority of voluntary efforts to improve movies and praised the movies as wholesome, cheap entertainment that made the industry a “more serious foe” of vice “than the W.C.T.U. [Woman's Christian Temperance Union] or any anti-saloon or anti-cigarette league.”83

  But later that same year, the GFWC broke with the NBR and endorsed legal motion picture censorship on the state level, triggering a permanent reversal in perceptions about the NBR's effectiveness.84 The GFWC's decision followed two years of study and debate after a 1916 report judged the majority of films approved by the NBR as “bad” or “not worthwhile.”85 The results, gathered by the Chicago Political Equality League, prompted the national federation to ask state branches to carry out similar studies. All the reports indicated a serious decline in the moral content of films. The results were presented at the GFWC's national convention in May 1918, along with a pro-censorship talk by Oberholtzer that included a reel of film scenes he had censored while working in Pennsylvania. After three days of heated debate, the GFWC passed a resolution that condemned voluntary efforts like the NBR, pledged to work for state censorship, and appointed Florence Butler Blanchard to direct the effort. A 1919 pamphlet on the need for “censorship of motion pictures,” which Blanchard edited, shot a damning accusation at its former ally. Blanchard charged that any “person of average intelligence” could see that the NBR acted as “camouflage” for the industry by furnishing “well-intentioned, reform-bent ladies with ‘harmless busy work’ “ that “befogged the thinking, befuddled, delayed, diverted, emasculated and perverted the activities of many club women honestly interested in a crusade for better motion pictures.”86 In short, these ladies would no longer act the patsy for corrupt men.

  Despite the GFWC's putative call for “a single moral standard” for women and men, the sexual double standard explained why many assumed that the movies produced more female delinquents than male.87 Like many postwar critics, the GFWC held sex films responsible for the perceived jump in delinquency among both male and female “youths,” the age stretching from adolescence through the early twenties. But both critical commentary and the cuts made to film content revealed that censors focused more on protecting girls from scenes of sexual immorality than boys from crime.88 “Two thirds of girls who appear before the court, charged with immorality,” claimed one Ohioan, “owe their misfortune to influences derived directly from the movie, either from the pictures themselves or in the ‘picking up’ of male acquaintances at the theater.”89 The gendering of sexual misbehavior testified to how the sexual double standard rendered moral vice a girl problem: “Who has ever heard of a ‘fallen boy'?” asked one social worker.90 Thus clubwomen set their virtuous womanhood against the libertine men running the salacious picture business.

  A “campaign against unclean movies” launched by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle also relied on clubwomen to create a state censorship board in New York.91 The creation of a state board in the industry's financial hub would send a powerful message about the business's declining morality. One of Brooklyn's most respected papers, the Eagle typically offered its native-born, middle-class readers progressive editorial stances. “We have organized to fight disease germs that kill the body. Why not organize to fight the disease germs that eat into the very heart of public morals?” demanded the series’ investigative reporter.92 So-called campaign updates ran weekly in the Sunday section “Music, Art, Theaters and Women”—the part of the paper that functioned as the women's pages by reporting news and reviews of cultural performances, society events, and clubwomen's activities. The section's organization indicated the broader presumption about women's authority over cultural and reform matters and revealed the Eagle’s desire to enlist clubwomen, warning those who wanted “to rear red-blooded and clean-cut Americans” to “get into action.” Indeed, these women led the charge. Catherine Waterman, head of the City Federation of Women's Clubs’ Committee on Moving Pictures, convinced New York's governor, Nathan Miller, that “the sex interest is being made more and more paramount by producers until it is a menace to the youth.”93 Others swayed New York's mayor to join the “fight to bar exhibition of indecent movies.”94

  The campaign reflected clubwomen's concerns by declaring that the NBR's “un-American” moral standards made its protection of womanhood “a farce.”95 The opinions of clubwoman Mrs. O'Grady, whom the Eagle cited more than any person, offered a powerful reminder that the campaign shared the front page with debates over immigration restriction. After having worked for twenty years as a probation officer with delinquent youths, O'Grady achieved local notoriety when the police department refused to endorse a 1919 letter she released to the press accusing producers of feeding “immoral and suggestive pictures” to immigrant fans. In protest, she quit her job and turned full-time film censorship activist. O'Grady slightly modified her message by 1921, blaming movies shown on the immigrant East Side “for the horrible increase in juvenile delinquency,” particularly among immigrant girls. Hoping to act “like American girls,” they imitated the behavior of stars and went “astray,” making the movies an Americanization project gone terribly awry. Her clarion cry summoned women to use their new political rights: “Women, we've got big work to do ... if men in office don't enforce our laws, let's put women in office who will enforce them.”96

  To flesh out what constituted un-American sexuality, the Eagle described the “lascivious and suggestive situations” in two high profile “immoral, unmoral, unAmerican” films passed by the NBR: The Penalty and Passion. Passion, of course, showcased the Polish film star Pola Negri's startlingly direct expression of a playful female sexuality. The NBR called Passion “a masterpiece,” “a work of true photodramatic art.”97 The Penalty’s heroine, Rose, also challenged acceptable middle-class sexual codes. The film introduces Rose, a New Woman-styled protagonist, as the “most daring operative” on the police force.98 To trap Blizzard, the film's antihero, Rose goes undercover among the “dance hall girls” employed in his “sweatshops.” When warned that “a woman who enters [Blizzard's] den risks worse than death,” Rose coolly replies on an exhalation of cigarette smoke, “That's all in a day's work.” After scoffing at threats to her virtue, Rose proceeds to chain-smoke her way through a dangerous job that involves making love to, then falling in love with, a villain who transforms into a hero only at the very end. In a metaphor that suggested how such films perpetrated the public's rape, the Eagle called the two movies representative of the “conglomerations of vulgarity and filth” that the NBR “continually thrust before the eyes of the public without let or hindrance” and then protected under the “Temple of Art.”99

  The discussion in the Eagle also displayed how those determined to resolve the censorship debate—Brooklyn's and, presumably, the nation's storied middle class—disagreed over what constituted suitably American sexual expressions. A group of religious leaders agreed that watching slapstick comedian Fatty Arbuckle get “smacked in the face with a custard pie” was good clean fun. But the “salacious divorce and sex plays” in which Gloria Swanson starred were called dangerously “un-American.”100 The Council of Men's Clubs elaborated on the “ideas of Americanism” these films promoted: “All American men are money chasers by day and cabaret chasers at night, and that marriage is a temporary arrangement.”101 Yet the NBR's explanation of its decision to pass Passion indicated that some in the middle class had different ideas. The “crowded houses” in which Passion played, “day after day and night after night,” gave “a fair indication that public opinion is on the side of The National Board,” its secretary declared.102 A letter pointed to how one person's sexual satire was another's smut. An “aghast” “Brooklyn Woman” reported that a “large and seemingly refined audience at one of our best moving picture theaters .
. . expressed amusement only” at a film she thought “indecent in the extreme.” The interrogations of several proper, middle-class reviewers who passed the “sensuous kissing scenes” in Passion and The Penalty also exposed the variety of attitudes toward the display of female desire. When the reviewers denied that the scenes were immoral, the Eagle’s reporter demanded: “Have you a daughter?” and “Would you care to have your daughter see this picture?” Their replies—“Oh, I've seen worse kissing than that in the movies” and “If I possessed the same type of mind as you, I would not”—emerged from a different worldview.103

  The one “representative daughter” whose voice entered the debate described how young women might view these heroines in a distinctive light. “Surely,” a letter signed “G.Y. Janes” opened, her age of twenty “entitles me to class myself under the heading of ‘our young people.’ “ Regarding The Penalty, Janes claimed to have “forgotten the lasciviousness upon which so much stress was made. But this is what I do recollect: There was a woman in the play who possessed a fine mind, enough so to be considered one of the most valuable assets of the detective force,” she began. “I saw the mind of that woman realizing and almost worshipping the powerful mental force of the unfortunate incarnate fiend,” she continued. “I saw a most wonderful and uncommon bond drawing them together—their intense love of music.” The passionate expression of “that love to me was not lascivious,” she asserted. Janes also defended Passion, declaring the “New York critic” who believed “nothing has been produced in this country to equal” the movie got it right, and adding, “the immoral side—how delicately it was handled.” Janes argued that these heroines’ unsanctified sensuality had to be placed in the context of the whole film. That a newspaper known “first and foremost” for “broadmindedness” offered such “one-sided criticisms . . . in the present pursuit of the ‘censorship question of the movies’ “ caused her “bitter disappointment.”104

 

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