A Code Is Born

How Catholic crusaders and New Deal regulators created the most intrusive censorship regime in Hollywood history

Thomas Doherty from the January 2008 issue

Pre-Code Hollywood is the marquee name for a brief period in motion picture history, a privileged zone of relative screen freedom, dating from (roughly) 1930 to (precisely) July 15, 1934. The phrase evokes a time when trigger-happy gangsters, wisecracking dames, and subversive rebels, male and female, ran wild through the lawless territory of American cinema. To survey the titles is to register the temperature of the times: Red Headed Woman (1932) and Baby Face (1933), where predatory trollops went horizontal for upward mobility; Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932), where charismatic killers murdered with seditious relish; I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932) and Heroes for Sale (1933), where legal authority warrants only contempt; Skyscraper Souls (1932) and Employees Entrance (1933), where ruthless capitalists violated business ethics and female chastity at will.

To a grand alliance of moral guardians, the trademark transgressions of pre-Code Hollywood—the coarse wisecracks, the mercenary trollops, the chronic cynicism and snide contempt for stuffed shirts and lawful authority, all ballyhooed by lurid posters and drooling tag lines—were no mere Hollywood high jinks but a grave threat to the moral fiber of the nation. More than in 1922, when the moguls formed the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) to put their best face forward, and more than in 1930, when the MPPDA adopted a Production Code but left it toothless, Hollywood in 1934 incited a withering barrage of righteous anger and moral opprobrium. The product line was damned from the pulpit, condemned by editorialists, and denounced by politicians.

After more than three years of unholy and unwholesome screen fare, Catholics formed an organization to beat back the plague. Its official name was the National Legion of Decency—morally upright Protestants and Jews might enlist as well—but the group was known as the Legion of Decency or, more ominously, simply “the Legion.”

A notion that had percolated in Catholic circles for years, the Legion took formal shape in October to November 1933, after Archbishop Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, speaking at the National Conference of Catholic Charities in New York on the authority of Pope Pius XI, denounced “the incalculable influence for evil” exerted by the motion picture screen. “Catholics are called by God, the Pope, the bishops, and the priests to a united front and vigorous campaign for the purification of the cinema, which has become a deadly menace to morals,” said the bishop. Within a matter of weeks, the Legion of Decency congealed into the most feared of all the private protest groups bedeviling Hollywood.

Backed by a coordinated network of Catholic weeklies whose front-page headlines, editorial broadsides, and scare-mongering cartoons fueled parishioner outrage, the Legion lanced Hollywood’s hide with pitiless zeal. It had numbers, focus, energy—and a blunt instrument. “Worn out by promises, tricked by pledges, deceived by codes, and dismayed by filth, the Church has finally decided to take action in the one way left for it—boycott,” warned Chicago’s Catholic weekly, the New World.

The Legion was as good as its word, and it put its word into writing with a brilliant tactical device, the Legion pledge. A prayer-like pact, the Legion pledge was a contractual avowal signed by parishioners and recited in unison at Sunday masses, Knights of Columbus meetings, Ladies Sodalities gatherings, and parochial school assemblies. “I condemn absolutely those debauching motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land,” affirmed the pledger. “Considering these evils, I hereby promise to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality.”

Copies of the Legion pledge were distributed wherever Catholics congregated: Sunday masses, parochial schools, and, to the horror of exhibitors, in front of motion picture theaters to patrons queuing in line. One copy of the signed pledge went to the parish priest; the other was kept by the pledger. The exact number of pledgers was hard to calculate, and the percentage of signers who kept faith with the contract impossible to monitor, but as the campaign gained momentum Variety warned that “fully half of the U.S. Catholic population of 20,000,000 can be counted upon as enlisted crusaders.” In the choice between faith and film, enough Catholic moviegoers refused to gamble their salvation to deplete box office revenues from Boston to Los Angeles.

While the Legion of Decency marshaled the religious opposition, two like-minded forces attacked Hollywood along different fronts: the federal government and the learned professions. The more serious threat came from a re-energized federal government poised to enact legislation to tether Hollywood to Washington, D.C.

In March 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt hit the ground running with a New Deal to combat the Great Depression, initiating a massive migration of power toward Washington. Among the dozens of agencies and initiatives FDR promulgated in his dizzying First Hundred Days was a new shooting script for Hollywood. Like industry and agriculture, the amusement trades were to be regulated under the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Besides fear itself, Hollywood feared that government control would lead to the creation of a federal censorship bureau dictating motion picture content. Heeding the hue and cry from constituents, a broad bipartisan coalition in Congress was considering legislation to do just that. Under FDR’s activist New Deal and a Supreme Court that still considered the motion picture medium “a business pure and simple,” federal censorship was a distinct and looming possibility.

The canny Catholics abetted Hollywood’s fears. In September 1933, while accompanying MPPDA chief Will H. Hays on business in New York, Joseph I. Breen caught the scent of New Deal intervention and spread the news. Breen was a Catholic journalist and publicist who had worked with the MPPDA since the original Code was adopted in 1930; he had also helped write Archbishop Cicognani’s speech unleashing the Legion of Decency. “An extraordinary situation has developed here in connection with attempt to formulate NIRA Industrial Code for our industry,” Breen excitedly wired Bishop John J. Cantwell of Los Angeles. “There is more than a fighting chance to have Roosevelt assert himself and his power under NIRA along lines certain to win your approval.”

At the same time, at this worst possible moment, another of Hollywood’s vulnerable flanks was attacked by a group of social scientists working under the banner of the Motion Picture Research Council. With financial support from a philanthropic outfit called the Payne Fund, the council conducted an extensive investigation into the impact of motion pictures on children. Between 1929 and 1932, educators and social scientists quizzed, measured, and probed young moviegoers to gauge how celluloid imagery warped malleable minds. The Payne Fund Studies resulted in a 12-volume chronicle, buttressed with graphs, figures, and jargon.

In 1933 an accessible synopsis of the Payne Fund Studies by journalist Henry James Forman was published under the bracing title Our Movie Made Children. The project marshaled the full weight of lab-coated social science to confirm the gut-level suspicion that the movies burrowed like termites into impressionable juvenile minds: girls took to rouge and tobacco, boys to back talk and violence, and all to disrespect and deviance. Likening the flood of images to a poisonous reservoir, Foreman told readers to think of Hollywood as a toxic water source that, if unregulated and unfiltered, “is extremely likely to create a haphazard, promiscuous, and undesirable national consciousness.” The title of Our Movie Made Children summed up the threat: Movies were making and thus remaking young Americans, supplanting the traditional character builders of church, home, and school.

Reading the danger signs from three directions, Variety sent up a front-page flare. “Producers have reduced the Hays Production Code to sieve-like proportions and are deliberately outsmarting their own document,” it warned. “No longer is the industry up against bluenose factions. Responsible people, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals are resenting the screen and lettering by the bushel about it.”

Of all the forces bearing down on Hollywood, the Catholic Church alone was rallying millions of potential moviegoers to forswear cinema or else risk their immortal souls. If the churchmen could be placated, the other threats might recede, maybe disappear.

Enter Joseph I. Breen, not so much waiting in the wings as orchestrating the action from off stage. On one side, the moguls of the Hollywood studios; on the other, the prelates of the Roman Catholic Church; and poised between the two—himself.

Comments

|12.4.07 @ 10:06AM|#

Not having seen any of the films from that four year golden era, I have to wonder exactly how risqué these films actually were, and whether there were any films that were both "dirty" and *good*.

ObLibertarian: Censorship bad! But Boycotts are a good and right way for consumers to tell businesses what to do. So confused!

|12.4.07 @ 10:14AM|#

I knew it: the Catholics run hollywood!

|12.4.07 @ 10:55AM|#

ObLibertarian: Censorship bad! But Boycotts are a good and right way for consumers to tell businesses what to do. So confused!

Nothing to be confused about. You said it succinctly from the get go.

|12.4.07 @ 11:01AM|#

I am somewhat surpised that the artilcle mananged to avoid mentioning the queen of the anti-prudes, Mae West. The woman aws constantly at war with the censors, bigots and homophobes of her day. I propose inducting her in the Libertarian Hall of Fame.

|12.4.07 @ 11:37AM|#

"Considering these evils, I hereby promise to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality."

I don't have any problem with people exercising their Freedom to (not) Assemble but why do they forever have to tell me about it? Can't you just sterilize yourself to save the planet without running your yap? Can't you just drive the hybrid and leave off the "look at me I'm special" bumpersticker? It seems to me that if you know what you're doing is the right thing to do then you don't need affirmation from the masses. Or, do you only do the right thing if the right thing is the easy thing to do?

Decide how you should be living your life and leave me out of it. I can, and do, make my own decisions.

Jesse Walker|12.4.07 @ 11:47AM|#

I am somewhat surpised that the artilcle mananged to avoid mentioning the queen of the anti-prudes, Mae West.

She's in the book from which the article was excerpted.

|12.4.07 @ 11:55AM|#

I am somewhat surpised that the artilcle mananged to avoid mentioning the queen of the anti-prudes, Mae West. The woman aws constantly at war with the censors, bigots and homophobes of her day. I propose inducting her in the Libertarian Hall of Fame.

I second the motion. Mae West had it going on.

|12.4.07 @ 11:57AM|#

Not for nothing, but I wish Reason would hold back on putting the print articles online. I just got my copy yesterday.

|12.4.07 @ 11:59AM|#

I knew it: the Catholics run hollywood!

So does this mean Catholics are the new Jews?

|12.4.07 @ 12:00PM|#

She's in the book from which the article was excerpted.

Thanks, do I have to read it now? ;-)

Shannon Love|12.4.07 @ 12:37PM|#

I suppose its taboo to point out that changes that the moral conservatives in the article warned about did in fact take place, that the harms they warned against did actually manifest and that entertainment media in all forms appears to have been one of drivers of that change?

Only our advancing technology has blunted the ill effects of these cultural changes. In the 1930's, syphilis remained a major disease. A one night stand could lead to ones death while screaming insane a decade or more later. Birth control was ineffective by modern standards. It wasn't intellectually indefensible to argue that anything that fostered promiscuity presented a danger to the general society. Indeed, it is only by fluke that AIDS did not spread easily by heterosexual sex and thereby create a plague that could have killed millions. If that had happened, the old fogies who opposed the sexual revolution wouldn't look so stupid today.

I think that moralism represents a poorly studied behavior. We conventionally write it off as a mere power grab but I think it arises from an attempt to suppress behaviors that (1) cause no individual-->individual harm (2) don't cause harm if a small percentage of the population engages in them but (3) does cause significant harm if a critical mass of the population engages in it.

If my suspicion proves true then moralism represents a major stumbling block for the wide acceptance of libertarianism. People will revert to the use of state power to suppress behaviors they intuit will cause widespread harm if allowed to spread.

ed|12.4.07 @ 12:58PM|#

Not for nothing, but I wish Reason would hold back on putting the print articles online.
I just got my copy yesterday.

Does that make you feel like a sucker for subscribing, Warren? See today's post about making South Park and The Daily Show and others freely available online to all at no cost.

|12.4.07 @ 2:20PM|#

Does that make you feel like a sucker for subscribing, Warren?

Hey, I recently sprung for a subscription, knowing full well that every article in it would be posted online. Figured it was time to reward Reason for running this awesome website.

Plus, I get to enjoy the pained look on my non-libertarian wife's face when she sees the magazine each month.

|12.4.07 @ 2:21PM|#

Not to mention the cognitive dissonence from having subscriptions to both Reason and Ensign magazines ...

LarryA|12.4.07 @ 6:24PM|#

We conventionally write it off as a mere power grab but I think it arises from an attempt to suppress behaviors that (1) cause no individual-->individual harm (2) don't cause harm if a small percentage of the population engages in them but (3) does cause significant harm if a critical mass of the population engages in it.

Actually most moralists act because they find a behavior icky, however they define that, and want to prohibit for everyone what they won't do themselves.

People will revert to the use of state power to suppress behaviors they intuit will cause widespread harm if allowed to spread.

You've stumbled on the heart of the problem. "Intuit." Like gun ban advocates who think firearms are icky and ignore widespread evidence that bans don't work. Like drug warriors who find chemical mood enhancement icky despite obvious evidence that the WoD causes far more problems than it solves. Like the B.M.I. nazis who fail to notice that icky "overweight" people live longer than those of "normal" weight.

Personally, such folks belong in the middle of the "intelligent design" crowd. No reason required.

Mad Max|12.4.07 @ 9:12PM|#

"The NRA divisional administrator appointed to regulate the motion picture industry was a loyal New Dealer named Sol A. Rosenblatt, a man whose mogul-like name belied any sympathy with the studios."

What do you mean, "mogul-like name?" What are you suggesting?

". . . establishing a censorship regime that ceded dominion of Hollywood cinema to Irish-Catholic theology for the next 20 years."

I'm a sucker for happy endings!

"Only our advancing technology has blunted the ill effects of these cultural changes. In the 1930's, syphilis remained a major disease. A one night stand could lead to ones death while screaming insane a decade or more later."

Fortunately, nowadays you can no longer get deadly diseases from sexual activity.

"Birth control was ineffective by modern standards."

Yeah, the illegitimacy rate was incredibly high back then, in contrast to today. In our enlightened era, while illegitimate births occur, it's not the norm in any segment of society, and . . . wait a minute, I've got my eras reversed.

"It wasn't intellectually indefensible to argue that anything that fostered promiscuity presented a danger to the general society."

Today, we know that fostering promiscuity is perfectly safe.

|12.4.07 @ 10:16PM|#

The spirit of the Decency League is alive and well: the Catholic League, i.e. Bill Donohoe and his hard-core followers (all seven of them) have called for a boycott of the new film The Golden Compass due to perceived anti-Catholic themes in the source novels.

Now, I have never read The Golden Compass, nor had I intended to see the movie - until I heard about the attack by the League. I don't care if they're both complete crap; I'll buy the book for all my friends and enemies, see the movie, and when the DVD comes out, I fully intend to link it to my blog. Fuck you, Donohoe...

MJ|12.4.07 @ 10:58PM|#

The anti-Catholic themes are not merely "perceived", the author has said that he wrote the story as an attack on Catholicism and Christianity in general. If you don't like Donohoe and his group, that's one thing, but they are not wrong about this. Sometimes when someone ocmplains of bias in a work the claim us legitimate.

|12.5.07 @ 9:24PM|#

...the author has said that he wrote the story as an attack on Catholicism and Christianity in general.

Not all of us think that's a bad thing...

Fuck Donahoe anyway.