to call for the ousting of professional reformers from the censorship debate, and this writer probably directed his or ho- argument directly at Chase. The writer encouraged reformers to stay away from the movies and called upon Virginians to vote out o f office those Assembly members who favored the censorship bill at the next election. In an ironic twist, the letter writer urged that one specific out-of-state reformer, presumably Chase, should be denied the right to speak publicly in Virginia. While arguing against the censorship bill, the writer simultaneously called for this reformer to be censored. Apparently his or her disdain for State censorship did not correlate into an all-encompassing freedom of speech for each individual. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 5 March 1922.
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overturn the whole board of censors.”63 While Dixon’s statement suggests no overt blackmail, censorship was a decidedly political issue, and Chase’s recognition that pressure groups and a powerful movie industry lobby could affect the passage of the bill were well taken. Before the Supreme Court struck down the vertical integration of the movie industry in 1948, forcing the major studios to divest their theater chains, a handful of movie production studios controlled most aspects of the movie industry. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled on the case US v. Paramount Pictures. They found that the major movie studios were guilty o f violating anti-trust laws, thus bringing the so-called “studio era” to an end. By controlling first-run theaters, the Court declared these major studios held a position o f monopoly over the entire exhibition system. While the ruling sought to break up the movie industry’s vertical integration, it focused on movie exhibition, and the decision did not significantly affect the major companies’ control of production and distribution of the movies.64
Historian Linda Gordon posits that anxiety about family life “usually expressed conservative fears about the increasing power and autonomy o f women and children.”65 In the case of the censorship debates, the desire to regulate film stemmed from fear of the increasing power o f several groups in society but focused heavily on women and African Americans. These ideas, coupled with the Progressives’ belief that the family was weakening led pro-censorship activists to call upon the State to control those that the family potentially could not.66 According to Lary May, Progressive-era reformers sought
63 Richmond News-Leader, 27 February 1922.
^Michael Putnam, Silent Screens: The Decline and Transformation o f the American Movie Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), ix.
65 Linda Gordon, Heroes o f their Own Lives: The Politics and History o f Family Violence (New York: Penguin, 1988), 3.
66 Gordon, 117. Gordon argues that child neglect was “discovered” during the Progressive era and that an emphasis on neglect explicitly linked good parenting with a healthy citizenry.
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to unify disparate groups around “vice” in an effort to assure that the “good” family controlled society. These reformers eventually constructed the State as a “good parent” capable o f not only regulating society but humanizing it as well.67 With the call for governmental censorship, regulatory responsibility shifted away from parents to the state, creating a symbiotic relationship between the state and the family for the supposed good of everyone.
Pro-censorship ministers, state leaders, and reformers characterized children and often adults of color, working-class adults, and women as “vulnerable” segments of the population. By constructing certain citizens as vulnerable, they justified their own
intrusion into the regulation of popular culture.68 “Vulnerable” people could not think for themselves and could not “properly” interpret popular culture mediums like the movies. Instead, they consumed movies uncritically and might replicate any “immoral” act viewed on-screen. If state authorities could persuade others, or be persuaded themselves, that certain people might recreate scenarios from the movies, then state lawmakers could justify their own claims to power on behalf of a “vulnerable” populace. If Virginians were all rational, thinking people who could distinguish screen fantasy from real life, then the commonwealth could not validate its regulation over cinema. Yet in reality, state officials were the vulnerable ones. As white, middle-class men, they had the most to lose from any change in the social, political, or economic status quo. The theater became a location where its patrons could venture outside of the purview of figures who typically operated as authorities in their lives. For example, women watched movies
67 Laiy May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth o f Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1980), 151.
68 This protectionist ideology constructing the idea of the “vulnerable” was especially important in terms of adults because it articulated a rationale as to why adults o f legal age should face restrictions on their liberties.
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without men, African Americans viewed movies outside of white eyes, and children went to the movies without their parents. While a trip to the movies was hardly revolutionary, it did afford a certain escape from reality (or possibly a view of a potential alternate reality), including in moviegoers a separation from “protective guardian” figures. If white, middle-class men could not control what everyone saw on the movie screen, then perhaps films would be exhibited which might prompt audience members to question their power.