In 1915 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that movies “were a business pure and simple.” Meaning: the new medium was not covered by the definition of the free press and was left unprotected by the First Amendment. The argument didn’t end there; decades later, the Supreme Court reversed itself. Meanwhile, the movie industry proactively tried to short circuit the prospect of government censorship by instituting its own mechanisms of self-censorship.
In Monitoring the Movies (University of Texas Press), Jennifer Fronc focuses on personalities and organizations crucial in the debate over film censorship from the 1900s through the early 1920s. Not unlike Facebook, the nascent movie industry resisted regulation; it fought back with self-imposed guidelines aided by the rhetoric of civil libertarians. Ranged against the studios were Puritans and Progressives, a coalition of moralizers, women’s groups concerned with the effect of movies on children and culture warriors who linked movies with the medium’s lowlife origins as burlesque sideshow attractions.
By instituting its own watchdog organizations, the industry succeeded in staving off federal censorship but was forced to coexist with state and local censors who banned and edited movies according to personal prejudice and local standards. A history professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and scholar of the Progressive Era, Fronc has written an engaging and balanced account of questions whose debating points remain relevant today.
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