In Reforming Hollywood, William D. Romanowski defends mainline Protestants from the charge that they acted like bluenose censors during the movie controversies of the twentieth century. In fact, he claims, they consistently supported free expression even as they fought to make Hollywood acknowledge and give scope to moral values beyond the profit motive. Unlike these mainline Protestant “structuralists,” who sought to morally elevate the broader society, both Catholics in the earlier part of the century and evangelicals in the latter took a “pietistic” approach that emphasized individual morality and sought to censor obscenity, blasphemy, and ideological unorthodoxy in film. While structuralists (whom the author often simply identifies as liberals) wanted to cooperate with Hollywood in campaigns of “movie betterment,” pietists (conservatives) wanted to rein in the moviemakers and cleanse the screen of “unwholesome” content.

Lauren Rabinowitz casts a wider net in Electric Dreamland, arguing that amusement parks and movies in the early twentieth century created an “electric dreamland” that “convinced Americans they could literally adapt themselves to the hyperstimulation, nervous energies, and mechanical rhythms associated with urban modernity” (22) and thereby created a “modern national collective identity” (2). She asserts that two technologies—railroads and electricity—played an indispensable role in facilitating the formation of that national identity, connecting entertainment and audience and spreading urban culture into the heartland. She ends by claiming that Disneyland recast the elements of the older entertainment culture into a new suburbanized national identity for a Cold War and, later, “post-Cold War, corporate society” that emphasized “passive conformity, homogeneity, and instant gratification” (174).

Romanowski meticulously combed through records of the Federal (later National) Council of Churches and many other Protestant and Catholic organizations, the National Board of Censorship (later Review), the Production Code Administration and other industry archives, and a large number of Protestant (and a few Catholic) periodicals. Occasionally labored and repetitious, his book nevertheless makes important contributions to the history of movie censorship. One of those contributions is to correct a recurrent strain of Catholic scholarship charging that Protestant support for free speech, separation of church and state, and other liberal principles serves simply as a cover for anti-Catholicism.Footnote ¹ Romanowski's book leaves little doubt that mainline Protestants were principled liberals when it came to defending free speech, not because of but in spite of lingering anti-Catholicism (and anti-Semitism) within their ranks. In fact, truly vigorous anti-Catholicism could be found only among conservative evangelicals, especially fundamentalists, who, ironically, joined with Catholics in threatening formal and informal censorship of Hollywood.

While Romanowski's achievements are narrow but solid, Rabinowitz's are broader but shakier. Her primary research includes a deep acquaintance with comic films of the silent era and an impressive survey of postcards that feature scenes of amusement parks. She has also read extensively in the history of movies, amusement parks, postcards, and popular culture more generally, as well as in cultural theory. In the end, her book seems more a series of suggestive essays than the sort of theory-enriched and unified interpretive essay she seems to hope for. The parts (including many fine illustrations) are much more compelling than the interpretative frame she thinks they converge upon. Perhaps not surprisingly, when she makes theoretical pronouncements, her prose, usually crisp and effective, becomes awkward (for example, at 36 she writes, “Movies offered up spectacle while preserving haptic knowledge grounded in the body of the spectator, of being an observer in an architectonic space or environment of darkness that itself often admitted physical self-awareness and opportunities to transgress appropriate social behavior”). In the end, she fails to convince this reader that a single “nationalizing” dynamic unites disparate forms of popular culture in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. Happily, however, the book has several real accomplishments.

First, it gives concrete support to two lines of argument long accepted by cultural historians. To begin with, following Kathy Peiss's Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986), Rabinowitz makes clear that mass culture's assault on Victorian decorum and sexual norms was decidedly physical. Bodily disorientation helped make the amusement park a site of liberation from tight clothing and tighter decorum. Moreover, laughter liberated bodies from the self-scrutiny and rigid composure that characterized Victorian public culture. Both at the parks and in the movie theaters—in viewing slapstick comedies, including the large cycle of movies about amusement park visits—spectators did more than smile or titter. They “belly-laughed,” “guffawed,” “laugh[ed] themselves sick” (140—41). Literally—and collectively—convulsed by what they experienced, these audiences underwent an emotional release that, if not unprecedented, nonetheless occupied several hours, often more than once a week, and repeatedly over months and years. The hundreds of amusement parks that dotted the American landscape, usually at the edge of industrial cities, along with the movies that represented and recast them for secondary consumption, certainly contributed to what Rabinowitz describes sometimes as a liberation from, more often as an accommodation to, the experience of subordination to industrial machines and, more broadly, to industrial capitalism (64, 93–4). In the electric dreamland, rather than imposing painful productive discipline, machines served as sources of “carnal” pleasure (138, 139–54, passim).

Second, Rabinowitz shows that both amusement park and movie spectacle often gave kinesthetic and visual (and, to a degree, aural) form to racial and imperial hierarchies. Citing the work of Fatimah Tobing Rony (The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (1996), which for some reason she does not include in her bibliography), Rabinowitz shows the debt that amusement parks owed to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century world's fairs and expositions, which always included displays of “primitive” peoples in “authentic” settings. She includes two rich chapters on Hales Tours, those paleo-cinematic versions of IMAX, in which customers boarded a mock railway car that swayed and rocked as projected scenes played on screens alongside and in front of them. She argues that these shows, like fairs, amusement parks, and filmed travelogues, claimed for their consumers the right not just to see the world, but also to own it. That sense of ownership came, in no small part, from the consumers’ embodied experience of motion through the simulated landscape and from the sense that they commanded the power of locomotives and electric dynamos to achieve that experience.

One problem with this line of argument is that it subverts the larger claim she makes about the nationalizing effect of movies and amusement parks on specifically American identity. As she acknowledges, fairs, amusement parks, and movies were international phenomena. She even asks “how a specifically American modernist perception and ideology could be internationalized” (63), but then moves on without an answer. I wish she had engaged this question and thereby brought some critical scrutiny to theories of cultural imperialism and cultural hegemony that seem to underlie her analysis.Footnote ² Perhaps she means that American popular culture served as a stalking horse for US imperial penetration of other societies and cultures. Perhaps she might concede that the “modernist” part of the argument looms larger than the “American,” that a transnational capitalist dynamic remakes the identities of all of its modern subjects. But she never says.

In any case, her text assembles ample evidence not of a unitary cultural dynamic, but rather of the plural effects of amusement parks, movies, and other elements of mass culture. It is hard to know what effects these had on the inner lives of spectators, especially their “identities.” So much else goes into the process of identity formation—family influences, religious training and practice, class consciousness and shop-floor solidarities, local and regional ties, racial and ethnic loyalties, not to mention the nationalizing effects of war and appeals to patriotism—that the prospect of independently gauging the efficacy of movies and amusement parks seems small. Moreover, all consumers of mass culture mediate what they take, sifting, embracing, resisting, toying with, and admixing myriad and disconnected pieces. Furthermore, all cultures are less zero-sum games than messy archives. New elements almost never kill off older ones. Rather, elements reshuffle, once-prominent features receding into corners, others returning; new elements sometimes vanish quickly or, alternatively, anchor themselves in a prominent place for a while. If, therefore, both culture and individual consciousness are so protean and unpredictable, it is unlikely that one can isolate the effect of movies and amusement parks in the way Rabinowitz tries to do.

Still, skepticism about the author's grander claims need not obviate her more commonplace, but nonetheless important, findings: first that movies and amusement parks reflected and possibly reinforced feelings, thoughts, and behaviors issuing from broad, deep, and long-term social forces that created more modern citizens; and second that these popular-culture forms played a part in educating (and miseducating) Americans and other modern peoples about the world and its inhabitants; and also that they especially fascinated those who could never travel to exotic locales but who felt power and pleasure—indeed, imperial power and pleasure—by vicariously going where gunboats and international traders and bankers had already paved the way.

Although very different books with very different foci, Electric Dreamland and Reforming Hollywood share one not-so-obvious concern. Both take seriously the potential of mass cultural phenomena to turn citizens into passive objects of market manipulation. The languages of anticorporate critique and Protestant moralism often similarly figure the consumer as victim of the “Captains of Consciousness.”Footnote ³ In regard to the effort to regulate Hollywood, Romanowski shows that, ironically, mainline Protestants, who shared with fundamentalists the seemingly conservative critique of “low standards” and “spectatoritis,”Footnote ⁴ ended up insisting on the freedom of the screen, relying on moral suasion to bring the moviemakers into greater compliance with middle-class Protestant values. On the other hand, the apparently leftist anticorporate critique, both in its earlier Progressive and more recent postmodernist and feminist guises,Footnote ⁵ sometimes veered into the terrain of outright censorship. But both worried continuously about the power of mediated words and images to disorient, seduce, and finally capture their consumers, transforming them into mere subjects or, worse, antisocial, even criminal, deviants.

Romanowski properly credits his subjects with possessing a fairly coherent set of political and moral principles, while noting enough inconsistency and hypocrisy to make them seem human. The Protestant insistence on “freedom of conscience,” although much abused since the time of Luther, underlay the mainline churches’ reluctance to recruit the state into a campaign of censorship. On the other hand, for much of the nineteenth century, Protestants’ easy conflation of their own values with those of the citizenry often led them to rely on an unspoken “moral establishment”Footnote ⁶ that seemed natural to them but which many other Americans—Catholics, Mormons, Spiritualists, Jews, freethinkers, etc.—found coercive and oppressive. As a number of historians of religion and law have shown in recent years,Footnote ⁷ throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, members of the legal and judicial elite, recruited almost exclusively from the mainline churches, insisted that the First Amendment did not protect blasphemous, obscene, and otherwise “indecent” speech; governments, especially at the local and state level, had an obligation to maintain public order, which required the reinforcement of public morality, which in turn was based on Protestant moral understandings. Thus laws protecting the Sabbath; or punishing those who “insulted” Christianity; or criminalizing obscenity, gambling, and drinking did not violate separation of church and state, even when promoted in explicitly Protestant terms, because such laws favored no particular religion. Rather, they preserved public order and the welfare of an overwhelmingly Christian citizenry.

This “Christian nationalism” was eroded by the early twentieth century and then collapsed with the failure of Prohibition. Protestant politicians increasingly followed Democratic ones in adopting a rough-and-ready pluralism that made possible electoral success in cities, counties, and states in which growing numbers of non-Protestants, especially immigrants and their children, resided. One of the virtues of Romanowski's book is that it shows quite clearly that Protestants in the mainline churches and in the National Council of Churches truly evolved into pluralists, accepting the decentering of their role as moral custodians and embracing an ecumenical and liberal understanding of their society. But that embrace did not mean that they believed that the advancement of justice and the general welfare had ceased to require the vigorous promotion of Christian, or more generally religious, values. And so, when it came to Hollywood, Protestants continually worked to moralize the movies.

Romanowski insists that that work of movie betterment has been obscured because historians have focused on Catholic involvement in movie censorship, most famously through the Legion of Decency and the internal censoring of Hollywood films by Joseph Breen, the Catholic layman who headed the Production Code Administration. The literature on Catholics and the movies is certainly voluminous.Footnote ⁸ Because Catholics were more hierarchically organized and more dedicated to prior censorship through the PCA, their campaign was more visible to contemporaries and to historians. The records of the Legion of Decency and a handful of other national Catholic organizations have provided historians with a clear empirical basis for a relatively coherent story. Conversely, Protestants lacked unity of purpose and a central archive. Abjuring censorship, mainline Protestants urged Hollywood to make films that promoted humane values, while opposing the efforts of Catholics and more pietistic Protestants to obsess over “dirty words” and discrete instances of sexual display and violence. However, internal divisions among denominations and within the National Council reduced their influence.

On the other hand, most Protestant leaders did support efforts to dismember the Hollywood oligopoly through legislation outlawing block booking and blind selling. The studios used these marketing practices to guarantee that their product would be shown in their chain theaters, sight unseen, leaving exhibitors powerless to choose movies they thought would please local viewers, or at least avoid protest. Because exhibitors complained that the system “foisted improper pictures on them,” non-censorious Protestant critics could render their critiques in terms of the local community's democratic right to keep out “rotten” and “unwholesome” films (18–20). One problem with this strategy was that local communities displayed little unanimity about what was acceptable; Mae West was just as popular in Baraboo, Wisconsin and Fresno, California as she was in Chicago and Los Angeles.

Still, oligopoly or no, the Protestant mainline elite remained true to its principled refusal to turn moral qualms about Hollywood movies into moral certainty about what should be banned. Indeed, by the 1970s, after the Hollywood oligopoly had been dissolved but when international media conglomerates such as Viacom and Time Warner were fashioning an even stronger version of industry concentration, the National Council's Broadcasting and Film Commission was proclaiming that citizens had a right to be “morally indignant”—not about indecency on the screen, nor about market concentration, but about “censorship” (187).

Although Hollywood would have preferred to follow the liberal Protestant line—abjure censorship and concentrate on movie betterment—the Catholic insistence that only an internal censorship governed by the church's natural-law teaching could prevent both boycotts and legal regulation convinced Hollywood to empower the Production Code Administration. Some mainline Protestants, especially those in the West Coast office of the National Council, wanted to imitate the Legion of Decency in rating movies, and for a while did so; but most established Protestant leaders abjured boycotts and any form of censorship. Ironically, then, they were of very little use to Will Hays and the studio bosses, or to latter-day CEOs of media conglomerates, who wanted nothing so much as to convey the impression that they were knuckling under to righteous moral regulation. Since the industry “had little to fear from Protestants who were devoted to the First Amendment” (189), but rather more to fear from conservative Catholics and evangelicals, it paid more attention to its sharpest critics than to its reluctant allies. In the end, Romanowski's book confers a somewhat melancholy luster on those Protestant allies of free speech.

In conclusion, each of these books explores something important about twentieth-century American culture. One reveals just how persistent is the grassroots urge to censor the “dream machine,” and yet how both corporate power and principled defenses of free speech limit the consequences of that urge. The other shows how the “electric dreamland” helped usher millions, kicking and screaming (with laughter!), into the modern era of industry and empire, simultaneously liberating them from some kinds of discipline, while reinforcing others. Both books belong in libraries and on the shelves of scholars.