3
The Recruiting Stations of Vice

In my opinion, nothing is of greater importance to the success of the motion picture interests than films of good moral tone.

—Thomas Edison, Moving Picture World, 21 December 1907

In 1909, summarizing the history of the Motion Picture Patents Company in the first six months of its existence, the Moving Picture World indicated that "for three or four years prior to December last the moving picture business occupied in public esteem a position so offensive, so contemptible, and in many respects so degrading, that respectable people hesitated to have their names associated with it." A few months earlier, the World claimed that "many men…apologized for their business in their social life."¹

A similar picture was given by Albert J. Gillingham, an exchange manager in Michigan who testified for the defense in the Motion Picture Patents Company case. When he entered the business in 1906 or 1907, he declared:

I am frank in stating that when you told a man you were in the motion picture business, if you would happen to meet a gentleman on the train or anywhere, he would naturally look, and ask what it was. It was looked on with disfavor, as all store shows previously had been shows of an undesirable character. Mostly fake shows. Shows that were showing monstrosities, or had displays outside with a hand organ or a sick monkey. Something of that order (US v. MPPC 4:2214 [December 1913]).

His comment suggests an additional source for the nickelodeon's poor reputation: perhaps it can not be altogether blamed on the moving-picture show itself, but carries over from an earlier kind of cheap amusement.

It must, of course, be acknowledged that the nickelodeon's notoriety was not a problem everywhere. Frank J. Marion of Kalem, for example, reporting on a tour of the Northwest, said that exhibitors there were men of higher standing in their communities, and patrons included the best class of people in town. Nevertheless, throughout the whole period, the moving picture suffered attacks from the pulpit and from the yellow press. Opportunists found it a way to get public attention, and juvenile delinquents discovered it was useful to claim that they got the idea for wrongdoing from having seen it in a movie. Dr. Anna Shaw, a feminist reformer, was quoted as saying: "There should be a police woman at the entrance of every moving picture show and another inside. These places are the recruiting stations of vice." Magistrate Frederick B. House declared that "95% of the moving picture places in New York are dens of iniquity … more young women and girls are led astray in these places than any other way." The feverish nature of these statements may be credited in part to the fear that young women were becoming too independent and free of restraints in post-Victorian society.²

One of the avowed goals of the newly organized industry was to clean it up. In Progressive America, people believed that all kinds of improvement were possible and inevitable. They were dedicated to winning the battles for women's suffrage, prohibition, organized labor, and world peace, and the battles against child labor, tuberculosis, and the household fly. With confidence and sincerity, the Motion Picture Patents Company's licensed producers assumed their mission to improve the motion-picture industry and its customers at the same time. To uplift, ennoble, and purify was good business too. Progressive idealism did not conflict with their ideas of how to expand the market. To broaden the base of the audience, to bring in the middle class, to make the movies a respectable place of entertainment for women and children, as Tony Pastor had done for vaudeville a decade or two earlier, it would be useful to educate and uplift the immigrant masses and urban poor, who had made movies successful in the first place. The raw and ignorant could be pushed aside, of course, but that would not only violate the sense of responsibility of the privileged to the less fortunate, it would also limit the market in the other direction. As the New York Motion Picture Company advertised: "Our productions please rich and poor alike, / Whether it be a Reginald or just an ordinary Mike."³

The exhibitors, or at least the urban ones, were more likely to have come from the same class as their audiences, and their motives for uplift sometimes included the goal of their own social improvement. For that reason, once successful with a store show, they often opened their new, improved theaters in the better neighborhoods, deserting the public that helped make them rich in the first place. The "descriptive talker" of the Auditorium Theater in Dayton, Ohio, bragged, "We cater to the better classes—just as many diamonds to be seen in our audience as at any other theater."⁴

Social workers believed that the motion-picture shows could be a useful influence on the poor and working class, but the places had to be looked after. In the early summer of 1908, the Kansas City Franklin Institute assigned a settlement worker to investigate the films being shown in the nickelodeons. As a result, charges were brought against one house and complaints made on specific films elsewhere. The Institute's spokesperson explained that "it is not the object … to suppress the motion picture shows, for these are the amusement places of the poorer classes." Jane Addams of the famous Hull House in Chicago undertook to show moving pictures in the settlement house in the belief that they could attract and elevate the poor. In 1908 the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, where John D. Rockefeller was a prominent member, supported the Armitage Chapel at 745 Tenth Avenue in New York City, which ran a moving-picture entertainment every Tuesday evening. The admission fee was one cent; the average attendance was about 250 children, and the goal was to provide a counterattraction to the many nickelodeons in the neighborhood. Charles Musser has shown how Lyman Howe cleverly enlisted the church people on his side by getting them to sponsor his "high-class moving picture shows" in their towns in order to raise funds for some worthy local cause. One of the key rules of the Edison group of licensed producers during 1908 was that films could be supplied only to exchanges that were members of the Film Service Association. But this policy could be abrogated in the name of uplift: religious subjects were available to any renter or exhibitor who wanted them, whether licensed or not. Seidel, "the Socialist Mayor," told the Milwaukee Ministerial Association that instead of complaining that children were being debased by nickelodeons, they should compete with them by arranging educational and moral motion-picture shows in the schools.⁵

Optimists imagined that a new audience for the legitimate theater was being created—a comforting thought for theatrical entrepreneurs whose business was suffering from the loss of the audience for the cheap seats. The People's Institute in New York ran a Children's Theatre, "educating new generations to an appreciation of the drama that will make for broader minds and more desirable citizenship," and the New York Dramatic Mirror called for a five-cent theater for a working-class audience, in order to educate the masses. The Dramatic Mirror was speaking of the legitimate theater, not movies. But impresario Al H. Woods announced that in the 1908—1909 season all of his fifteen theatrical companies would carry a motion-picture outfit: "I am going to give them the whole thing, melodrama, vaudeville and moving pictures," he promised. Joseph Medill Patterson, meanwhile, declared, "The nickelodeon is … developing into theatergoers a section of population that formerly knew and cared little about the drama as a fact of life."⁶

One of the most immediate and practical ways to change the atmosphere of the nickelodeon was the lighted theater. Uplifters didn't like to imagine what might be going on in those dark holes. It was decreed that the light should be sufficient to read a newspaper while the movie was going on. Unfortunately, there was a lack of knowledge of lighting techniques, and many projections were ruined by light reflecting on the screen: on the other hand, reputations were saved. There was a suggestion that the popular open-air theaters of summertime brought in a higher class of people, those who had hesitated to visit the darkened nickelodeons. The descriptions of new moving-picture theaters in those years nearly always mentioned the brightness and quality of the lighting. In Chicago lighted theaters were required by city ordinance, and in New York the License Bureau advised exhibitors that they must keep theaters lighted "so that persons in the audience are at all times visible. " In September 1910 a World reporter visiting the Comet at Third Avenue near Twelfth Street in New York's Lower East Side tenement district approved the lighting conditions there. He wrote that there was enough diffused light to read by, yet the screen was bright. Men, women, and children filled the hall. He also approved the ventilating system and reported that an usher wandered the aisles spraying a sweet-smelling liquid. (Advertisements for these deodorizing sprays can be found in the pages of the trade periodicals.) Unfortunately, he added, they ran "junk" films—a Vitagraph and a Selig missing their titles, recognized by their trademarks on the sets and believed to be a year old.⁷

Among the other methods of upgrading the milieu of the moving-picture show were the addition of restrooms, nurseries for babies, ushers, refreshments, luxurious decorations, and furnishings, as well as the elimination of the garish posters and the noisy barker and blaring music outside.

Another goal was the elimination of the vulgar vaudeville act. As already noted in chapter 1, the producers of motion pictures urged its total removal from the movie houses, ostensibly for the improvement of the show, but their motives must have included the desire to expand the market for their own product as well. An act that was heavily billed all over the Keith and Proctor circuit in the spring of 1911 gave the uplifters a burning example of the kind of vulgar vaudeville they wanted to get rid of. This popular vaudeville act reflected the public's avid interest in the new flying machines: the house lights were all turned out and a girl sang a song about a flying machine while seated on an airplane outlined with electric lights, suspended on a long crane over the audience, dangling her legs and screaming playfully when someone grabbed her feet or stole a garter.⁸

At the same time, however, many exhibitors found that vaudeville attracted the much-desired patronage of the middle class at a higher admission price. There were cases where exhibitors complained they could not get enough high-class films and needed vaudeville if they were to keep their public. The problem was that the nickelodeons could normally employ only small-time acts and had no real stage. At certain times and in some places competition was so keen that if some theaters persisted in offering both vaudeville and pictures at five cents admission, the other theaters had to do the same to survive.

In October 1909, with the reform movement of the Patents Company well under way, the World admonished exhibitors that "the moving picture is just at that stage of its career when the support of the better classes is gradually being extended to it. Their support will come surely and largely enough in due time if repellent influences are sternly suppressed." Sternly suppressed they must be, and the licensed producers would undertake the work of suppressing the exhibitors if they did not take care of it themselves.⁹

It was not only the physical conditions of the nickelodeons that upset the reformers. It was the moving picture itself. The films being shown in the little store shows and in the high-class vaudeville theaters of 1907-1908 were for the most part the same. Although the Edison Company had made some social-interest films and there were still a great number of travel and actuality films to be seen, many reflected the entertaining and amoral spirit of the pre-reform era. They seemed to be acceptable as long as people saw them in the vaudeville house. Now, with moving pictures becoming extraordinarily popular almost overnight, these amusing little films were somehow deemed not suitable for the great masses of people who filled the nickelodeons.

What was so objectionable? For one thing, the domination of French films. "The foremost French makers," declared the Moving Picture World in 1908, "maintain a fine standard of excellence, but they owe it to American taste to eliminate some features. The frank way in which marital infidelities are carried on in Paris though a lame moral is sometimes worked in at the end, the eating of rats and cats, the brutal handling of helpless infants, do not appeal to the American sense of humor." Variety's reviews of French films reflect a similar prejudice: At the Seashore was acted "with an abandon of manner and dress not found on this side"; Avenged by the Sea was "simply morbid and gruesome, one of a kind which should never be taken, let alone placed on the market"; and as for The Night Watchman, "Europe may like that sort of thing, we don't—and don't want to." Looking back from the vantage point of December 1913, an exhibitor testified that foreign films "four or five years ago" were "horrible, immoral." He indicated he had given an order not to show any foreign pictures in any of his theaters. In 1910, the World printed a letter from Washington, D.C., criticizing the Pathé film Scenes of Convict Life (Au Bagne,

1907, directed by Ferdinand Zecca) as unsuitable for family audiences. Almost any slapstick comedy film, French or not, if three or more years old, would have risked being found unsuitable after uplift set in.¹⁰

One 1907 film that belongs in spirit to the earlier decade is Biograph's The Model's Ma (April 1907). The model's mother gives instructions to the artist that her daughter may not pose unclothed. The artist pushes the mother out of the studio, and the girl poses clothed as instructed, but the artist paints her as nude, arousing the ire of the mother when she returns. What is actually shown on the screen was not objectionable even then (there is not, in fact, any nudity in this film), but of course it was a naughty joke, fit for music halls or smokers. Vitagraph's The Boy, the Bust, and the Bath (July 1907) shows a mischievous boy who sets up a plaster bust of a woman in the boardinghouse bath, fooling a whole series of would-be voyeurs, including a minister. It is great fun but a little improper. Such films rapidly disappeared from the production of the Patents Company licensees, or at least from their catalogues.

By the beginning of 1909, the Moving Picture World would propose the following as subjects to be barred from the screen: the inside of prisons, convicts, and police stations, considered to be too morbid; contemporary sensational crime; anything to offend any religion; lingering over murders and executions; piling horrors on horrors; comedies that depended on the degradation of people or their defects.¹¹

Lubin's The Unwritten Law, released in 1907, was already being suppressed various cities by summer 1908. The film was made while the sensational case of Harry K. Thaw's shooting of the noted architect Stanford H. White was filling the daily press with lurid stories of the dissolute life of the rich and famous. The first trial for murder either was still in process or had ended a hung jury when The Unwritten Law was first released. A second trial in 1908 resulted in an acquittal for Thaw on the grounds of insanity. The film, however, showed the acquittal more or less on the grounds of justifiable homicide. In it, Thaw is supposed to have been driven temporarily insane because his wife, the beautiful ex-chorus girl, told him that White had seduced her some years before their marriage. There was nothing very lurid about The Unwritten Law, but it gained notoriety from the continued attention of the yellow press to the case. In fact, the film itself quickly became old-fashioned, owing to the rapidly changing cinematic styles of the period, but films linked to current events were always guaranteed a big audience, and this particular event continued to be in the public eye for a long time, thanks to the shenanigans of Harry K. Thaw, his very wealthy mother, and his wife. As a result, the film remained in circulation for several years in those places where reform did not have such a strong hand. In addition, Thaw's wife and son both enjoyed film careers a few years later on the basis of her notoriety.¹²

"What excuse can be offered for showing such subjects as the 'Gunness Murder Farm' and the exploits of notorious robbers, outlaws and murderers?" was the rhetorical question posed in the Moving Picture World in August 1908, during the time that the Motion Picture Patents Company was being organized. A year later, the showing of a film about the murder of the missionary Elsie Sigel by a Chinese was banned in Bayonne, New Jersey, but this film was still going strong elsewhere in 1911. No matter how much reform, there was always a nickelodeon struggling to survive in the kind of neighborhood that found sensational subjects an attraction.¹³

Films based on acknowledged cultural masterpieces in other media were positive proof that producers and exhibitors were uplifting and educating the audience, providing that an audience could follow them. As we noted in the first chapter, and will discuss in more detail in the next, a crisis in film narrative had presented itself by 1907-1908, when longer and more complex stories were being attempted with methods that often could not make them clear to the audience without someone to explain the meaning of the scenes. The reviewer for the World, who considered the Pathé Film d'Art production La Mort du Duc de Guise to be superb, nevertheless admitted that the audience at the Orpheum in Harlem, where he saw it, could not seem to follow it and received it somewhat coldly. On the other hand, such films were thought to attract the "better classes" to the theater. They might be bored once they got there, but they need not be ashamed to say they went.¹⁴

France's cultural-uplift program for the moving picture was exemplified in the Film d'Art productions, but the United States, too, could reach for high art by turning to classics of stage, poetry, and literature. Some attempted Shakespeare: Kalem made As You Like It in 1908; Vitagraph did Julius Caesar, Richard III, Rromeo and Juliet, and Macbeth in 1908 and King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1909; and Selig filmed The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1910. Thanhouser, an independent company, made its share of Shakespearian productions and many other classics, then tackled Ibsen: The Lady from the Sea, Pillars of Society, and A Doll's House in 1911. Vitagraph produced The Bride of Lammermoor, from Sir Walter Scott, in 1909, and Edison did Faust in the same year. Essanay's version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol was in time for the holiday season in 1908; Edison's version came in 1910.

Dickens, Jules Verne, Leo Tolstoy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Browning—nothing was beyond the reach of aspiring producers of the silent, one-reel film. And if there was much out of reach of the film forms the producers knew, and much out of reach of the mass audiences, that was to change. Meanwhile producers and exhibitors could demonstrate that the motion-picture show was an appropriate place for children and that they were bringing high culture to the masses. Many an enterprising exhibitor arranged with a teacher to have children study the subject of a film in the classroom in advance of its coming to the theater. At least those children would know what the film was about, even though its narrative systems were unable to make the story clear.

The trade periodicals, in support of the industry's uplift movement, had much to say about the use of educational films in the theaters. Beginning with the issue of 12 March 1910, the World offered a weekly column called "Education, Science and Art and the Moving Picture." Later, the concept was narrowed to include only educational films, as we understand the term today, but in the beginning there were scarcely enough of these to occupy a weekly column. The first topic was The Housewife and the Fly, an educational film about the diseases spread by the common fly. An English production distributed by Kleine, this film was widely shown. Similar films dealing with the prevention of tuberculosis, popularly known as consumption or the white plague, which was the leading killer of the day, and the dangers of unpasteurized

milk and flies in the household were shown in conjunction with educational campaigns by local organizations, and this greatly helped the reputation of the exhibitor as a responsible citizen in his or her town. Process films—pictures showing steel manufacture or textile weaving or any modern manufacturing process—were frequently produced in this period, too, and were admired as highly educational, although I don't know whether they were as widely seen. There was a tradition of audience interest in the manufacturing processes that predates the movies, as illustrated by the model coal mine and breaker with which Lyman Howe toured in the nineteenth century.¹⁵

In 1910 travel lecturer Burton Holmes could draw a crowd of "fashionable people" to Carnegie Hall at prices of $2 and $2.50 ($1 in the gallery), with only scenics and one or two Pathé comedies, but no melodramas. A nickelodeon exhibitor complained because Holmes was showing the very same pictures that he, the exhibitor, had shown earlier at five cents, yet the nickelodeon exhibitor could not get his exchange to stock the scenic pictures anymore. The educational film, like the high-culture film, created an air of respectability and gave a satisfying feeling of improvement. Nonetheless, this does not mean that audiences enjoyed them, and finally, they rejected them. The testimony of exhibitors and exchange men in the suit of the government versus the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1913-1914 gave ample evidence of that rejection. Exchanges kept a small supply of such films on hand for schools, churches, and prisons, but the owners were unanimous in saying that these films were not wanted by the theater audiences. Despite this lack of interest, George

Kleine chose to specialize in distributing the educational film. He evidently found enough profit in it, or was sufficiently determined to uplift his audiences, to publish a series of distribution catalogues, beginning in 1909, dedicated to the educational film. Since there weren't enough scenics and actualities and documentaries available to satisfy him, he included dramas of a specially refined nature, those based on literary classics, and even comedies, to make it possible for a high-class theater, a church, or a school to fill a regular program without fear of offending members of the audience.¹⁶

Meanwhile, determined producers bent on uplift learned to sugar-coat the educational pill by enclosing the lesson in a drama with a moral. The Edison studio made a regular practice of producing films in cooperation with various welfare organizations and institutions, such as The Red Cross Seal (December 1910), one of the films made each year in cooperation with the American Red Cross campaign; The Awakening of John Bond (December 1911), on slumlords and tuberculosis; The Convict's Parole (May 1912), suggested by legislation sponsored by the governor of Oregon; The Crime of Carelessness (1913), in cooperation with the Children's Motion Picture League of Greater New York, on the subject of factory safety; and Suffer Little Children … For of Such Is the Kingdom of Laror (August 1909) and Children Who Labor (February 1912). Thanhouser added to these films about child labor with The Cry of the Children (April 1912), which was based on a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and gained the endorsement of Theodore Roosevelt. Biograph made such melodramas as FOR HIS SON (January 1912), on the evils of using cocaine in soft drinks, and Thou Shalt Not (April 1910), on the white plague, in which a couple break their engagement rather than risk passing on the dread disease. Such films disguised their educational purpose in little dramas or melodramas just like the others being shown in the nickelodeons, and thus would be more easily accepted by an audience.¹⁷

"I heard a minister say, as he left the theater here after seeing [The Salvation Arm Lass, Biograph, 1909], that's a better sermon that I could ever preach," reported the World reviewer.¹⁸ The popular melodrama, or everyday drama, preaching a moral, became the most successful genre of film for satisfying the needs of uplift. The more it became expressive, the more it could draw on the emotions of the audience, the more successfully it could fulfill the function of a teacher or a preacher. The desire for uplift gave a strong impetus to this genre in 1909, while the slapstick comedies of the earlier period were suppressed. The cheerful vulgarity and amorality of these films were no longer suitable. For those such as David Wark Griffith, with experience in the touring companies that played live melodrama from one end of the country to another, the time was ripe.

"This is culture, this is refining, this is educational," a reviewer wrote about Griffith's A Wreath of Orange Blossoms in 1911. By 1913 two towns that had forbidden the establishment of moving-picture theaters in their exclusive neighborhoods, Montclair, New Jersey, and Wilmette, Illinois, gave in and withdrew their objections.¹⁹

Further evidence of the uplift movement can be found in the increasing number of women as exhibitors. In a time when few females could be found in managerial positions, women managing moving-picture theaters were welcomed because it was felt that they brought with them a refining influence (female ushers in the theaters performed a similar function). Mrs. Clement, manager of B. F. Keith's Bijou in

Boston, told the World in 1910 that her show appealed to a cultured audience. Since, in her opinion, the films alone had not reached a high enough artistic standard, she continued to believe in including lantern-slide lectures, one-act plays, and music. She also approved of high-class vaudeville. She objected to not being able to select films on the open market and thus not being able to stimulate, by her selection, the production of better films.²⁰

Although no statistical study of women in exhibition is yet available, it is easy to find the names of female managers just by looking at random in the pages of the World at the end of 1912 and again at the end of 1913. Miss Flo Peddycord, for example, owned the Bell Theater in Buchanan, Michigan. She had filled, in her seven or eight years in the business, all the roles of work around the theater, including projectionist. Mrs. Mary McNamara was an exhibitor in Milwaukee. Mrs. Anna M. Mozart ran the Mozart Theater in Los Angeles, a high-class place charging ten to twenty-five cents and running special features for a week, with music supplied by the mechanical Photo-Player Orchestra (she played operatic concerts on it). Miss Jean Oster, manager of the Princess in Cleveland, Ohio, alas for the cause of female uplift, got swept up in Mayor Baker's crusade and arrested for showing an uncensored film, Aurora Floyd (Thanhouser, December 1912). Mrs. E. J. Streiving of the Crystal Theater in Decatur, Illinois, and Mrs. Musa Reese of the Aereo Theater in Charleston, Illinois, were among the exhibitors attending a Peoria convention. Others included Mrs. R. L. Beck of Dunlap, Iowa, and Mrs. S. J. Brown of the Phoenix Theater in Neola, Iowa. Women exhibitors were apparently more common in the Midwest than elsewhere.²¹

However, uplifting an audience was not an easy task. At the 1913 Motion Picture Patents Company trial, Fred Jeffreys, an exhibitor, explained:

In lower Jersey City, there is a class of people there who like things that are, well, savoring of great excitement and action. They like cowboy pictures, and hold-ups, and bandits, and things of that kind…. They have heard of someone named Napoleon. … They know he was a Frenchman, but they would not want to know anything more about him. Then, there are people who like things classy, so to speak. They like to see the Fall of Troy, or Romeo and Juliet, or Richard the Third. … Not these pikers where I am now. They want something of every-day life, something not too deep for them.

"Every-day life out West, you mean?" asked his examiner. Jeffreys responded:

Yes, and right down East, too. This "Mother" gag goes a long way with them. If they can get that stuff, there is a little cry in between. The scrubwomen sit down, and they have a very fine evening's entertainment out of the modern prodigal's return homeward again, and all that stuff. The exhibitors know that, the exchange men know it, the producers know it (US v. MPPC 3:1832 [November 1913]).

Then there was the threat of censorship. On Christmas Eve 1908, Mayor McClellan closed all the nickelodeons in New York City, and the reverberations were heard across the land. With legal help, the exhibitors obtained an injunction and quickly reopened, but they were "in fear and trembling and all taking special pains to set their house in order and present programs that would not be out of place at a Sunday school entertainment." The official reason given for the closing was poor safety conditions, but it was well understood that the real impetus was the supposedly poor moral condition of the darkened rooms and the kinds of films shown in them.²²

The court injunction that immediately reopened New York's nickelodeons was obtained from the liberal-minded Judge Gaynor, who was a candidate for mayor in the next election. His action gained him the votes of all motion-picture men and he continued to be a friend to the industry during his terms in office, encouraging city ordinances that were helpful to the business. The leader of the protesting exhibitors, the one who gathered them together to fight Mayor McClellan's actions, was William Fox, who, a year later, could be found fighting all alone against the takeover of the exchanges by the General Film Company.²³

At the end of January, following the attempt to close the nickelodeons, there was a meeting of clergymen at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York to organize the fight to obtain Sunday closing laws for the city. They asked the Jews to help them, but it is not recorded whether any did so. Sunday-closing laws were a topic of warm interest throughout the period. Such laws were local and varied all over the country. Where Sunday movie showings were permitted, exhibitors took pains to show particularly educational films and hired lecturers for that showing even if they could not afford them the rest of the week. While some of the clergy made a reputation by denouncing the immorality of moving pictures, others, more truly capturing the spirit of their times, saw the potential for uplift and took to showing films inside their churches. Here, they were only following a tradition established by Lyman Howe's "High-Class Moving Pictures" in the previous decade. Such showings increased church attendance, and the producers tried to make suitable films for the purpose. In fact, the showing of films inside churches became too successful in some towns, and the local exhibitors complained. Most churches did not have to follow the same rigorous building codes and fire protection laws as moving-picture theaters did.

When the People's Institute in New York City announced its plans in March 1909 to establish a board of censorship, the trade periodical Moving Picture World was caught off guard. In rather abrupt language, it editorialized, "Let the People's Institute mind its own business." This was a bit hasty. The Institute included a very distinguished body of people with a concern for the city's welfare, people whose views were the very epitome of the Progressive attitude. Among the members of the Institute's board were some of the most important society figures, along with bigname reformers, and even such a literary light as Mark Twain. As for the new Board of Censorship, members included Charles Sprague Smith of the People's Institute, the Reverend Walter Laidlaw of the Federation of Churches, Thomas L. McClintock of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, Gustave Straubemiller and Miss Evangeline Whitney of the Board of Education, Mrs. Joseph Price of the Public Education Association, Miss M. Serena Townsend of the Women's Municipal League, the Rev. G. W. Knox of the Ethical Social League, Howard Bradstreet of the Neighborhood Workers' Association, Mrs. Josephine Bedding, John Collier, and Albert Shields.²⁴

The organized film industry had decided, not for the last time, to work for self-censorship in order to avoid the hard realities of legal censorship. They had always maintained that a legal censorship would open the way for political corruption, and they now announced a plan to work hand-in-hand with the People's Institute. In fact, the Motion Picture Patents Company even gave the new Board of Censorship some small financial support, which later had to be withdrawn to avoid any appearance of self-interest. They agreed to submit all their films to the board and to not release any films unless approved by it. The independents were also invited to participate in the self-censorship, although, not being in the "club," they were likely to join in more slowly. If their headquarters were far from New York City, then the decision to submit their films for "censorship" was a cost factor. When all of the Patents Company producers had agreed to submit to the self-censorship, the name of the new institution was changed to the National Board of Censorship.

To avoid local censorship, the title "Approved by the National Board of Censorship" could be attached to a film. Some examples of this approval may be found on surviving copies of films such as Lubin's The Almighty Dollar (July 1910), Uncle Pet's Ruse (IMP, October 1911), and The Rival Brother's Patriotism (Pathé American, May 1911), and as late as Tess of the Storm Country (Famous Players, April 1914), although the Board had lost much of its power by then. More commonly, one finds, after June 1912, the Pennsylvania censor's certificate.

The Board of Censorship met at their offices at 80 Fifth Avenue for the first time on 25 March 1909 and sat through 18,000 feet of film, an undertaking of six hours during which sections were ordered cut out of several films. The Motion Picture Patents Company established its own Board of Censorship to sit with them. I don't know how long they kept up this dual board, which may have been intended as window dressing to show its independence from the National Board, but since references to a separate Patents Company board soon disappear, I think they must have given it up as unnecessary duplication of effort. Among other films at that first marathon session, they saw D. W. Griffith's moral melodrama The Drunkard's Reformation. I assume they found it satisfactory.²⁵

Sometime that summer the Board of Censorship rejected one of Griffith's films completely, and it was never released. Called The Heart of an Outlaw, it still survives in the Museum of Modern Art film collections in the form of the original negative, which the Biograph Company retained even though the film was not to be released. The Heart of an Outlaw does not seem much different from many others of its time. It includes infidelity and a rather high number of shootings, and toys with the notion of incest. But these awful events are not shown in an exploitative fashion, and the film has a moral resolution of sorts. The plot problems that writers faced in turning out these one-reel melodramas one after another could never have been resolved without a generous use of such motifs, and the decisions of the Board did not make them disappear.²⁶

On the other hand, the Board apparently approved a Vitagraph production released in November of that same year, From Cabin2 Boy to King, which shows a prolonged torture scene that seems a little shocking even today. Pirates who have shanghaied a newsboy to serve as cabin boy brand him with a skull on his chest. During the execution of this deed, the boy's head hangs down from the table backward, facing the camera, and he registers extreme pain. One can be fairly sure that this film was also submitted to censorship, because all the Patents Company members were pledged not to release any films without Board approval.

Most of the comments on films in that period criticized excessive violence and lawlessness. Sexual excesses were seldom noted, and films against the establishment were very rarely criticized, although the latter tended to be the sole reason for censorship in European countries. Pathé Frères and other foreign producers were quick to observe American tastes and morals, and as the American market was the biggest (for the foreign producers who were allowed to distribute in the United States), the films sent here would be those that they knew to be acceptable. At an April 1909 session, the Board looked at 25,000 feet of film produced by Pathé, which represented for that company a month's supply. No subject was rejected. On other occasions, after this promising beginning, Pathé subjects were censored. Either the Board became stricter or Pathé less vigilant in what it imported.

Different times and different individual judgments make it clear why people oppose censorship. The National Board of Censorship (which has been known as the National Board of Review since 1915) claims that the organization was never really in favor of censorship. But the truth is that the socially conscious liberals of that day saw nothing wrong with the National Board of Censorship name until the group was no longer able to serve its original purpose. They were good Progressives, and they were serious in their wish to clean up the movies. Censorship was not a dirty word until it became official. The National Board established a fine reputation for reasoned and intelligent censorship, while local police in various cities made general fools of themselves. But after a trial of a few years, exhibitors, who had to face the sometimes unreasonable forces of respectable society in their towns, found the National Board of Censorship to be powerless, and some of the exhibitors even led the movement for legal censorship.

By June 1914, censorship was considered the crucial issue for the National Exhibitors' Convention held in New York City. "A year ago, " it was noted, "local censorship, by the police of various towns and cities, was the only form of regulation the exhibitor had to meet. " Major Funkhouser, of the Chicago police, responsible for censorship in that city, had gained a certain fame by such actions as banning a film demonstrating the hesitation waltz, the turkey trot, and the tango. It wasn't so much the dances, he said, as that young people would be led to go to dance halls where liquor was sold, to try them out. Major Funkhouser's censorship was decidedly erratic. An advertisement of that time claimed that another film had been accepted by him: "This film teaches a deep moral lesson. Passed by the Chicago Board of Censors." The film was Henry Spencer's Confession, made with the cooperation of Henry Spencer himself, who was the slayer of Mrs. Mildred Rexroat and nineteen other victims. I don't know this film, but surely the notorious The Unwritten Law was considerably milder.²⁷

By June 1914, laws for state censorship existed in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kansas, while Massachusetts and Connecticut had already taken some action toward similar legislation. The ability of the National Board of Censorship to handle the problems had been challenged by the state legislators. Many importers and distributors of foreign feature films were simply ignoring the National Board, and their more sensational features had aroused the nation to the need for some kind of censorship. Since the National Board of Censorship had no legal powers, some saw it as useless. Nor was it only foreign films that gave trouble. In late 1913 a World editorial called the six-reel The Stranglers of Paris a "Powerful Argument for Censorship," "reeking with the depiction of crime." The film, based on a Belasco stage production, was "well-made " by the Motion Drama Company of New York, but the World urged that "the producer should destroy the negative and swallow the cost."²⁸

Pennsylvania had been the first state to have censorship laws, in 1912; Ohio and Kansas followed in 1913. Censorship in Ohio was achieved at the urging of M. A. Neff, who was president of the Ohio Exhibitors' League at the time and the first president of the Exhibitors' League of America. Over the loud protests of many other exhibitors, he managed to get the Ohio law on the books, for what he argued were reasons of self-defense. Many local censor boards were springing up or threatening to, and certainly one board was easier to deal with than many. He soon came to regret that move openly, however. After two months of censoring, Ohio was under injunction to stop, because of a lawsuit begun by the Mutual Film Corporation, and when Mutual lost that case, the producers promptly took it to the U.S. Supreme Court. Nevertheless, these local efforts to stop legal censorship failed, and censorship laws continued to spread to other states.²⁹

The majority of exhibitors were still in favor of the National Board of Censorship, and where local censorship existed in reasonably intelligent form, as they felt it did in New Haven, Detroit, Kansas City, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Nashville, they wanted to "let well enough alone." If any legal censorship was truly inevitable, they preferred it to be federal, and there was a bill before Congress for a Federal Board of Censors.

The National Board of Censorship tried to strengthen its position by tightening its rules. To clarify the Board's position on films dealing with vice and crime, Dr. Orrin G. Cocks explained that there should be no glorification of the evildoer or attempt to affect public opinion on a matter before the courts; no portrayal of insanity where it appeals to "the morbid, harrowing or gruesome"; no drug-traffic scenes except when "dramatically necessary to point the moral." Producers should not show easy methods of obtaining drugs. The Board wanted to discourage scenes that weakened religious faith or committed sacrilege, portrayed drinking and drunkenness, or showed scantily dressed persons or women almost wholly dressed but displaying a lavish amount of lingerie. Women's smoking was to be discouraged. The Board condemned the showing of opium dens, gambling, dance halls, vulgar flirtations, and underworld scenes, if produced merely for entertainment. "Unwritten law" themes and "frontier justice" were frowned on, as were train-wrecking, arson, and suicide scenes, since these were thought to be a bad influence on young people. (As it happens, these themes were also very popular means of resolving plot lines, and they did not disappear.) The Board was also forward-looking about the evils of prejudice: "It declares against films which feature sectional, national and race prejudice."³⁰

The National Board of Censorship began as an intelligent body of broad-minded citizens, able to look at each film as a whole, who aimed to purify films and thereby actually avoid official censorship. Instead, they were ending up with the literalminded strictures of the real censor. Powerless to halt the movement toward legal censorship, they finally changed the emphasis of their mission to an effort to encourage the best in film quality, becoming, in 1915, the National Board of Review.