Yet the Eagle’s campaign revealed that many of Janes's elders believed that such female protagonists also threatened the moral fiber of men. In this melodrama, the villains were movie-made female libertines who endangered the nation's innocent men. Mrs. Maude Canfield lectured in Brooklyn on this view. The “commissioner of the Brooklyn Girl Scouts” and member of the “New York Federation” of clubs, Canfield had gained her expertise on movie immorality by escorting “more than 42,000 sailors” to the movies for recruiting purposes during the war. “Most pictures dragged out to unlimited lengths the exploits of some immoral, young woman and would then end up having her marry a virtuous young man,” she charged. Such movies offered a “representation of life that [was] absolutely a false one.” “An immoral woman always pays,” she reminded listeners; teaching otherwise schooled “the untutored mind that immorality is almost a virtue.”105 A story entitled “Brooklyn Club Women Disapprove ‘Woman Pays Club’ Doctrine” suggested that many of her listeners shared the view.106 Brooklyn clubwomen opposed the ideas behind the “Woman Pays Club,” a “feminist organization” that included Louella Parsons and “artists, musicians, motion picture writers, authors, newspaper women and other professional members of the fair sex who” not only believed “in their independence” but also proved it by “earning their living” and keeping their “maiden” names regardless of marital status.107 An Eagle editorial congratulated clubwomen on their critique of the Woman Pays Club, declaring, “The sooner women get back to some of the old-fashioned ideas the happier we will be.”108 The campaign for the presidency of the New York City Federation of Women's Clubs pitted a “home woman” against one such “professional woman.” The victory of the “home woman” demonstrated that most clubwomen thought American ideals justified their leaving the home mostly to protect it, indicating why film censorship campaigns fit their needs.109
By March, Hollywood's much-reviled producers were making a tone-deaf response to these attacks.110 William Brady, president of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI), the trade association representing the largest producers, offered a plan for reform called the “Thirteen Points.” Brady then called for a meeting with leaders of the censorship movement, including Ella Boole, president of the WCTU in New York; Catherine Waterman, the clubwoman credited with swaying New York governor Miller to support censorship; and Reverend Wilbur F. Crafts, head of the International Reform Bureau in Washington, D.C.111 The Thirteen Points enumerated thirteen types of “salacious, obscene, and degrading” situations that producers pledged to exclude from films.112 Before the meeting on March 15, 1921, Brady assured the New York Times that NAMPI could easily implement the Thirteen Points since its members controlled “about 90 percent of the output of films.”113 Acting as the group's spokesman, Crafts told the reporter that it had agreed to allow producers the chance “to clean their own house.” Three days later, Wilbur Crafts announced plans to submit to Congress a revised bill for federal censorship. The new bill called for a set of “Exclusive Standards” that duplicated the Thirteen Points. It also created a staff of six commissioners, including at least two women, to enforce them. “Dr. Crafts virtually got the motion picture men to plead guilty by holding out a light sentence,” the New York Times editorialized, “and now he appeals to the full rigor of the law—with their confession as justification for his severity. The morality of this is no doubt apparent to reformers; among the worldly it excites wonder.”114 What the Times failed to note, however, was that Brady's boast about controlling 90 percent of films was also an admission that NAMPI's members acted as a cartel.
One of the industry's longest-standing critics, Reverend Wilbur Crafts, seized on the controversy created by Hampton's article to propagandize his cause.115 “A Methodist preacher, of Puritan stock,” Crafts founded the International Reform Bureau in 1895 and turned full-time reformer.116 Housed next to the Library of Congress, the bureau was “a permanent ‘Christian lobby’ “ that claimed the distinction of being “the first incorporated agency for promoting moral legislation.” Believing that too many had renounced the Protestant ethics that had made America great, Crafts sought to restore “the Puritanism of purity” through law. A book he wrote about his bureau's legislative efforts displayed how intertwined the enforcement of racial, religious, and sexual purity was to his vision of national defense. Crafts lobbied Congress to pass bills that prohibited gambling and divorce, enforced the Sunday Sabbath and temperance, and censored “impure literature and art.”117 The bureau also claimed a major share in the work of securing “ ‘bone dry’ prohibition.” Its magazine, 20th Century Quarterly, called the Sims Act—“the act that shut prize fight films out of the country”—the bureau's most “distinctive work.” Prizefight films had attracted little attention until Edison's MPPC released the Johnson-Jeffries Fight (1910), which displayed black heavyweight world champion Jack Johnson's easy win over the “Great White Hope,” Jim Jeffries. Most southern states and several northern cities banned the Johnson-Jeffries Fight, arguing that it implanted dangerous ideas of racial equality in children and the “childlike race” of “negroes.”118 In 1912, Congress passed the Sims Act to ensure that the federal government could prevent films showing the triumph of “an African biped beast” over “the old Saxon race.” The act defined fight films, and seemingly all movies, as commerce subject to federal regulation under the Constitution's interstate commerce clause.119
His success in using the government to preserve proper images of the racial order suggested to Crafts an even grander goal: a federal Motion Picture Commission that could purify all movies. Crafts first proposed the bill in 1914 amidst the controversy over white slave films. Like the Sims Act, it sought to use the interstate commerce clause to empower a presidential commission that would license all films intended for distribution across state lines. In testimony before the House Committee on Education, Crafts cited the Sims Act as an important legal precedent while using the continued circulation of “black and white” fight films to justify the demand for a stricter law.120 Craft was back at it in 1916. And, with Jack Johnson's recent conviction on spurious charges of white slavery, he again waved before Congress the threat that movies posed to the nation's racial and sexual order. “If only” he could “save the country from being flooded with pictures of a Negro indicted for white slavery and a white man voluntarily standing on the same brutal level,” he would die a happy man.121 What died that year was the bill. But after Prohibition's ratification in 1919, Crafts put “federal motion picture censorship” at the top of the Reform Bureau's agenda.122
Crafts's main ally in the quest for federal regulation was the prominent New York purity reformer William Sheafe Chase. An Episcopalian canon at Brooklyn's Christ Church, the founder of the Interdenominational Committee for the Suppression of Sunday Vaudeville, and the recent president of the New York Civic League, Chase focused his energy on the threat posed by picture producers in the postwar era.123 NAMPI's William Brady provided Chase with new fodder to support his charges against the movie trust. After telling the New York Times that NAMPI controlled “90 percent of the output of films,” Brady confided to a New Jersey senate committee considering film regulation, “You can't control this business, but I can. I am the President of the Producers’ Association and with two or three other men I control every foot of film shown in the United States. What we say goes.” Brady further declared that NAMPI's omnipotence arose from the fact that no exhibitor would “go against us. If they were to, we would withdraw our films from them and break them.”124 Chase put an ethnic spin on Brady's admissions. The “Movie Trust” was composed of “degrading, ignorant, greedy degenerates” who exerted “tyrannical control and influence” over screens. Thus he reasoned it was “no more unAmerican to have a small group of censors choose what picture the public shall see than it is to have a small group of producers do the choosing.”125
A pamphlet Chase wrote to instruct the faithful on how best to argue the case for fed
eral regulation made the anti-Semitism behind these comments explicit. Indeed, the central argument of Chase's “Catechism on Motion Pictures in Inter-state Commerce” involved the danger presented by the “despotic control” of “degrading, ignorant, greedy degenerate” producers—the “four or five Hebrews, such as Messrs. Lasky, Loew, Fox, Zukor and Laemmle.”126 Chase was rumored to be a member of the Klan, and his “Catechism” displayed anti-Semitism akin to the KKK's and Ford's.127 Chase even used the Dearborn Independent to make his case, quoting it as evidence of the charge that producers “had subtly seized” the industry from “the control of men like Mr. Edison” in order to “desecrate the American Sabbath to capture an extra day of the week for vampire films and prize fights.” “No true American,” he asserted, could afford to ignore the “race purpose” that motivated “the demoralizing effects of motion pictures.” According to Chase, the movies’ “evil leaders” used their “tyrannical control and influence” to “compel directors and actors to produce wicked scenes and play indecent parts.” These performances then infected stars with “the immoral code of ethics they are compelled to teach.” Producers particularly threatened young actresses—even “chaste” ones cast to play “a daughter of Puritan New England”—who “must regularly and as a matter of course part with [their] virtue.”128 Like many males in his cohort, Chase placed female virtue and erotic desire in total opposition, a stance that differed from many women reformers in the period. Called a “virtual reincarnation” of Anthony Comstock by one female activist, Chase also fought sex education and birth control, objecting that sex educators’ work was a “glorification of sexual pleasure, particularly women's supposed pleasure in sexual intercourse.” Chase called the idea of women's “physical enjoyment” of “the sex act” a dangerous untruth—“as my wife says, it is not to be mentioned on the same day with the joy of nursing one's own baby.”129
These melodramas of sexual danger about degenerate, Oriental movie moguls fomenting the destruction of the nation by morally corrupting its weak-willed women leaked into national news coverage, helping to explain why, amidst so much postwar unrest, the debate over regulating films became “one of the liveliest controversies that the country has seen in years.”130 Why did “nasty” producers insist on making pictures that “flaunted” “sex information” and “foreign ideas” that promoted worshipping of “continental smartness?” wondered one New Yorker.131 The industry's glamorous new cosmopolitan stars and “Oriental” products only worsened the country's “racial indigestion.” Others used the movie producers’ indulgence of passionate excess to explain the “many disastrous experiences, especially among women,” in Los Angeles. As the industry's new “moguls” attracted more and more of the blame, the general consensus placed “the responsibility for the ‘sex-stuff’ on the producers.” “It is said, the ‘perversity’ of the producers” compelled a Prohibition-like solution that explained the efforts of “religious leaders, upheld by lay organizations,” “to introduce censorship bills in forty-four State legislatures meeting this year.”132 In May 1921 the article “Nation-Wide Battle over Movie Purification” asserted: “There is no longer any dispute as to whether purification is necessary . . . the question is over how the reform will come.”133 The various individuals consulted included the GFWC's Mrs. O'Grady, Cannon Chase, and Benjamin Hampton. Despite the continued opposition of most newspapers to formal censorship, the Literary Digest made clear that all kinds of reformers agreed with Chase's claim that “as to the promise of the producers that if they are let alone they will purify the films, . . . we can only say they have been let alone and they haven't done it.” Finally, the president of the Motion Picture Theatre Owners of America declared “exaggerated sex appeal as a sin against the common decency of the American people must be laid at the door of the producer,” and approvingly noted New York exhibitors’ refusal to cooperate with them.134
By the summer of 1921, many industry insiders realized that subduing this fire required serious attention. At the national exhibitors’ convention in July, Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew attempted to convince independent exhibitors of their aligned interests, since most of the film regulation legislation called for Sunday closings and worse. Zukor and Loew proclaimed their intention to defeat such legislation by using movie screens “to enter politics” and wage a battle for public opinion.135 Much like the remark by NAMPI's president that five producers controlled “every foot of film shown in the United States,” these declarations demonstrated Hampton's point that the industry's true big shots failed to fully grasp the implications of the very traditional melodrama in which they starred. Together the claims of Brady, Zukor, and Loew provoked two new attacks on the film industry that August: a resolution by the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate the industry's “political activities,” and a complaint issued by the Federal Trade Commission that Zukor's Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Corporation represented “a combination and conspiracy to secure control and monopolization of the motion picture industry.”136 That same month, three censors in New York began deliberations over what the nation's largest market could watch on screens.137
CHAPTER 5
A Star Is Born
Rereading the “Fatty” Arbuckle Scandal
Years before the press used bohemian extra-girls and perverse movie producers to capture the appealing threat the industry posed, the Chicago American seized on another unconventional working girl to advertise the windy city's charms. “CHICAGO BEST CITY FOR GIRLS,” announced a headline in 1913, the same year Louella Parsons moved to the city on her own. A piece of shameless civic boosterism, the article interviewed a young model named Virginia Rappe to celebrate the unparalleled opportunities Chicago offered women. A large picture of “The Lonely Girl” sat beside the article. Its caption read “Be Original, Girls, and Grow Rich.” “They call Miss Rappe the ‘all aloney girl’ because she has had to make her way all alone in the world,” it explained. Being thrust onto her own devices at the age of sixteen had served Rappe well, by fostering the “courage and initiative” necessary to achieve her dreams. Indeed, just two years later, Rappe commanded a salary of “$4,000 a year” working “as a model in commercial lines.” Having traveled “all over the United States and a great part of Europe” before returning home, Rappe could attest to what made the city unique. “Chicago affords greater opportunity than any other town in the universe for the working girl,” she pronounced. The American ordered “aspiring neophytes” who feared competing with the city's “40,000 working sisters” to “now give heed” and “hearken to the voice of experience” by listening to what the “all aloney girl” had to say.1
According to Rappe's “philosophy” about how to get ahead, a working girl's imagination determined her chances in Chicago for success. “Every girl can't be a model, but every girl can be original,” she declared. Originality demanded rejecting the typical low-paying jobs prescribed for women. “Chicago has too many stenographers and office women,” she warned. Instead of “standing in lines for $6 a week jobs that are heart-breaking and demoralizing,” Rappe advised finding a means to take “part of the money all these business men and salaried workers take home with them and leave with their wives.” Such a task involved cultivating a flair for modern “feminine” passions, including shopping, socializing, fashion, and interior decorating—as had one friend who had turned “a dilettante devotion to art” into an $ 8,000-a-year career as “a flat-fixer” [interior decorator]. “If I were marked by smallpox to-morrow I'd turn ‘fixer’ for flat wives,” she assured readers. The invention of new professions, like personal shopper or party planner, by so many women in the “independent brigade” meant “we girls are in a far better position than the men are if only we could realize it.” Rappe justified her optimism by touting how Chicago nurtured “boldness” in working girls, making them “the last word in up-to-date femininity . . . superior in intelligence, adaptability and personal attractiveness.”2
Rappe's avowals about
Chicago echoed a developing orthodoxy about the locus of opportunity for ambitious migrants. By the 1913 interview, many placed the best chance for class mobility and self-invention along cities’ anonymous, teeming streets. Here, proclaimed writers, civic boosters, and the letters of countless migrants, the least fortunate could deal themselves a better hand. What surprised about “CHICAGO BEST CITY FOR GIRLS” was its unabashed enthusiasm about the ability of this city's “utterly independent” working girls to play this game alone. Scholarship often recounts the darker, more fearful responses provoked by young white women's attempts to win “independence and happiness” during this era when their participation in wage labor soared and their migration to western cities outpaced the boys’. Yet the interview with Rappe celebrated the adventures of a single young white woman who beat the odds alone. Indeed, the interview betrayed her already successful steps toward self-reinvention as this working girl changed “Rapp” to the bolder, Frenchified “Rappe,” signaling her claim of the kind of cultural capital that could help her get ahead.3
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