In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled in the case Mutual Film Corporation versus Industrial Commission of Ohio that motion pictures were a business, not a form of expression. Therefore movies were not protected by First Amendment rights. Any state, any city, any sheriff in any town in America could legally close down the showing of any film in its precincts.
But in the teens and early twenties movies became more and more prominent in America’s cultural life. As they grew in popularity, they increasingly violated norms of decency, especially in the areas of violence and sex. As a consequence, the American public began organizing opposition to Hollywood under Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders.
Apprehending trouble, the studio heads unilaterally agreed to create what came to be known as The Hays Office. Headed by Will Hays, President Harding’s Postmaster General, past Chairman of the Republican Party, and a Deacon of the Presbyterian church, The Hays Office produced a Dos and Do-nots guideline. For a while, this ameliorated the alarm. But in 1927 as Hollywood began switching to the Talkies, dialogue and sound effects opened up opportunities for more sex and violence. New clamor arose, this time led by the Catholic Church and its Legion of Decency, which began declaring certain films immoral and sinful.
At this point in 1930, the studio heads commissioned a Jesuit priest, Father Daniel A. Lord, to propose a more comprehensive Code of Behavior. The written code looked good but was not rigorously followed by the studios. So much so that the period 1930-1934 came to be called “Pre-Code.” However, this changed abruptly in 1934 with the appearance of The New Deal’s National Recovery Act, a part of which gave the Federal government the right to censor the movies—which as we’ve seen had not first amendment protection.
This so alarmed the heads of studios—MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Twentieth-Century Fox, Universal, Columbia, RKO, United Artists—and such minors as Republic and Monogram–they quickly created the Production Code Administration to be headed by Joseph Breen, a well-known Catholic newspaperman.
The Code worked this way: No picture could go into production until the screenplay was affirmed sinfree by a Production Code Administration. The Code worked. Overnight, Mae West turned into Shirley Temple.
The result as some bright wit explained, Hollywood now consisted of Jews making Catholic films for Protestant audiences.
In 1952, the Supreme Court reversed its earliest decision and gave movies First Amendment rights.
From this point on, the power of the Production Code Administration withered until 1968 when it was abandoned altogether in favor of the rating system.
Two aspects of The Code.
First, the treatment of Blacks.
Among its many rules, The Production Code forbade the verbal or physical defamation of race, religion, and national origin.
Films like The Birth of a Nation which depicted Blacks as a race that is evil and threatening could no longer be permitted.
Such was the good work of The Production Code.
Unfortunately, The Code could not override the received opinions and prejudices of Jim Crow America.
Thus Hollywood came up with a more subtle form of racism.
Blacks were not threatening. Rather, they were comical figures. Happy in their inferior social roles. Black males typically were lazy or superstitious, best represented by Stepin Fetchit, allegedly the highest paid Black actor of the 1930s.
In other roles, Black men served as shoeshine “boys,” useful stable hands, or janitors. The best role—which was actually a social fact—was the Black railroad porter and dining car waiter who skillfully performed their roles sometimes rolling their eyes at their white superiors.
Black women typically were Aunt Jemima “Mammy” figures best represented by Hattie McDaniel, who, in 1939, won the first Oscar for a Black performer. As she has said to have remarked, “I’d rather play a servant than be one.”
Only in recent years after I had retired from teaching film did it occur to me that these stereotypes dwelt on the top of an even—it now seems to me—greater racism. Namely, Blacks did not suffer. The decade of the thirties was the decade of the Great Depression, “one-third of the nation unemployed.”* In the movies, only white people were unemployed. They stood in food lines. They were homeless. They became hobos. They starved. Yet I cannot recall a single movie in which Blacks appeared as anything but healthy, happy, and well-fed.
What lies.
This generalization concerns only 1930s’Blacks, not the rare films dealing directly with slavery, such as Slave Ship (1937).
As much as I admire Frank Capra—-famed for his populist films—yet I do not recall one Black face unemployed among the starving farmers who confronted Mr. Deeds in his newly acquired mansion, demanding work. Likewise, we see only one Black character in Meet John Doe—John Doe being a symbolic Everyman–a film about a national popular movement for the working man of America that seemed to consist only of white men.
I was born in 1930 and became an avid film goer in 1933 when I first saw The Three Little Pigs. I loved the films of my youth and still do.
But in reviewing my life having come of age in Florida and attending military school in Virginia, not until my mid-thirties did I realize that I had accepted Hollywood’s thirties’ vision of America’s blacks, much to my regret.
Second, moral values.
Both my parents came from long lines of Presbyterians. My father from the Scotch Irish of Northern Ireland; my mother from French Huguenots. Neither of them attended church. Nevertheless, from five or six they sent me to Sunday School at the Mount Airy Presbyterian Church. The Reverend Meek presided over the church and his red-haired daughter, Rebecca, was my life’s first love. The church was located on Germantown Avenue and up the street stood the Sedgwick Theater, part of the Stanley Warner Theater chain. So every Sunday I went to church; every Saturday I went to the Sedgwick—admission: one silver dime.
Reflecting upon my early life I have come to the conclusion that the Saturday fare at the Sedgwick (the serial, the short western, the animated cartoon, the newsreel, and especially the main feature) had more effect in the formation of my moral view of life than did the Sunday Biblical stories. A friend of mine once remarked that the Sedgwick was my alma mater.
These two schools did not oppose one another, it’s just that the movies were the more powerful of the two.
For all this, I thank The Production Code.
And what did it teach me?
It was not just that crime did not pay or that marriages could not be broken.
Sacrifice was the prime message.
The best thing one could do during any kind of strife—social or familial—was to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the other.
Think of Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas (1937) leading a legion of similar working-class mothers who gave up claims on their children so their children could have better lives.
Only villains were selfish.
From the thousand examples, let me provide another. This occurs in the second of the Dead-End Kids’ films, Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). Jimmy Cagney plays the role of a popular tough-guy gangster to whom the boys look up—much to the opposition of the local priest, played by the inevitable Pat O’Brien. Ever-defiant, Cagney has been sentenced to the electric chair. But on the way to the execution room, knowing that his behavior as he approaches death will be reported by the priest to the boys, he breaks down, crying, screaming, “Please! Don’t send me there!” in short the hero deliberately turns cowardly, destroying his image so the boys will no longer look up to him. It’s a very telling conclusion to one of the thirties’ best films.
I was eight years old when I saw this film and Cagney’s last moments have remained with me ever since.
Thank you, Father Lord…
*FDR