Cinema and Community: Progressivism, Exhibition, and Film Culture in Chicago, 1907-1917

5. Oversight and Regulation: Film Censorship, Local Government, and Social Reform

five Oversight and Regulation Film Censorship, Local Government, and Social Reform As cinema became more respectable, it made the remarkable jump from a cheap amusement, based on thrills and sensations, to a potentially powerful source of cultural influence and authority. This more reputable guise ironically posed a greater threat to traditional sources of authority, including some reformers, politicians, and press barons. While conventional wisdom suggests that the movies’ efforts at uplift and moral authority would offset calls for censorship, this would not be the case in Chicago. Although the city implemented its first forms of censorship in 1907—before neighborhood theaters and the adoption of more morally charged narrative discourses—its most punitive and oppressive regime came as the medium attained greater cultural and artistic acclaim in the early to mid-1910s. While far cheaper and more “viceladen ” amusements escaped such clampdowns because they knew their place, the movies’ overt middle-class aspirations allowed them to cross class lines and reach deep into community life, factors that enraged Chicago’s strict film censors. Cinema’s artistic aspirations—as seen the 1913–16 trend toward epics and literary adaptations—and its efforts to speak on matters of political and international significance, like World War I, aggravated Chicago’s most rigorous censorship advocates more than the earliest cheap films. Indeed, the censors’ biggest battles were chapter 5 170 not over tawdry sensational films but major and high-minded titles that aspired to both art and speech, like Traffic in Souls, The Birth of a Nation, and The Little American (Cecil B. DeMille, Mary Pickford Company– Paramount, 1917). While similar battles occurred nationwide, Chicago’s censors were unusual in fighting these battles for so long and with such acrimony. As Lee Grieveson has shown, the question of cinema’s authority and its right to speak on matters of public interest played out over this period until the medium was redefined as “harmless entertainment,” a process that culminated with the verdict of Mutual v. Ohio (1915): Legal decisions, combined with those internal to the mainstream film industry in this period, gradually established a consensus that mainstream cinema should principally offer harmless and culturally affirmative entertainment and not pretend to the loftier purposes of the press or to the purpose of cultural negation that post-romantic cultural theory accorded the category of “art.”1 The question of cinema’s authority to speak on such matters was central to the period’s censorship debates, along with more obvious issues like the medium’s quality and its effects on audiences and society. While some reformers and cultural custodians wanted cinema not to speak on such matters, others hoped the movies would take a more interventionist role, addressing topics like temperance and morality, educating audiences, and improving society.2 These more progressive reformers advocated cinema as an alternative to the saloon, providing the films were of sufficient cultural and artistic merit.3 Other leading reformers such as the Reverend Allan Hoben, theology professor at the University of Chicago and field secretary of the Juvenile Protective Association (JPA) (1910–13), wanted a more punitive censorship regime, even calling for total abolition of the movies, seeing them as beyond redemption.4 Censorship battles were not black and white. The film industry was not uniformly and unilaterally opposed to it, as shown in its own informal efforts at self-regulation through the National Board, as well as its initial acceptance of Chicago’s first censorship regime. As censorship could be linked to respectability, accountability, and uplift—as well Oversight and Regulation 171 as pointing to an out-of-control industry—it could help the industry police itself and improve its reputation. Similarly, the press, local politicians , and reformers were not entirely unified in their opposition to cinema. Chicago’s Herald, a popular, middlebrow newspaper, courted cinema, although it was the city’s sole such title until 1914–15. Politicians like Mayor Fred Busse and William Hale Thompson were not unsympathetic to cinema, and some reformers, like Jane Addams, believed the medium could be used for the greater good, revealing clearly marked political and ideological differences within all these groups. Still, the vocal antimovie sentiment voiced in papers like the Chicago Tribune, the city’s paper of record with strong links to social reformers, and the lowbrow Evening American influenced local politicians’ actions, and both were linked to the formation of Chicago’s censorship board, the nation’s first.5...