From Regulation to Censorship: Film and Political Culture in New York in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

The struggle over censorship stood at the core of the relationship between the political culture of progressivism and early moving pictures. Called by contemporaries and historians alike a democratic art, the moving pictures invited audiences to participate in the new mass culture of the early twentieth-century. As some early film makers began to use the medium to tell stories, those sitting in small theaters in towns and cities across America saw before them a make-believe world that was nonetheless plausible commentary on the past, the present, and the future. What remained unresolved was how those who championed political reforms, ostensibly in the language of progressive and democratic politics, might harness the power of the medium in redefining American political and social life. How much power the moving pictures and its mass audience might assume energized men and women, particularly progressives in New York City, who sought a more democratic culture, politics, and social life. How much power the moving pictures and its mass audience might assume energized men and women, particularly progressives in New York City, who sought a more democratic culture, politics, and social life. They regarded the political potential of the moving pictures as essential to the empowerment of the masses in an age when social boundaries were in flux. At the same time, they tried and ultimately failed to extend to moving pictures the protection of the First Amendment. They did this because they believed in the political and artistic possibilities of the medium for a democratic culture. In creating a plan to elevate the moving pictures and their places of exhibition, they became locked in a confrontation with other reformers who feared the awesome power of the screen to hasten modernity and all that it implied.