The “Boston Plan” of Motion Picture Regulation

In 1909, Boston's License Bureau, housed in the mayor's office, began licensing all moving-picture theaters. The new ordinance required exhibitors to submit to the License Bureau a list of the films they planned to show in the coming week. Officials in the License Bureau then checked the exhibitors' lists against the NBR's bulletin of approved films, which it considered authoritative.Footnote ¹² Whenever an exhibitor's list contained a film that the NBR had passed “subject to elimination” (meaning that it called for certain scenes or title cards to be physically cut from the individual prints of the films prior to public exhibition), the exhibitor had to give the License Bureau “personal assurance that these changes ha[d] been properly made in the print which he intend[ed] to exhibit.”Footnote ¹³ According to the NBR, this system was the most effective because any exhibitor who showed a film “without the changes made or which ha[d] been condemned” would have his license revoked and would lose his livelihood.Footnote ¹⁴ The Boston Plan pleased most constituencies because it provided “reasonable” regulation of films yet prevented militant pro-censorship groups from continuing to push for censor boards.Footnote ¹⁵

In addition to working with city officials and exhibitors, the NBR enjoyed close relationships with motion picture producers and distributors. The NBR reviewed the studios' output and provided predistribution feedback, which it imagined obviated the need for legal censorship.Footnote ¹⁶ Producers found an economic incentive to cooperate with the NBR; if it approved their films, they were guaranteed an audience in cities that employed the Boston Plan.

Rather than permitting politicians or their appointees to assess a motion picture's quality (the method employed by legal censorship boards), the NBR used what it considered possible audience members for the prerelease review of films.Footnote ¹⁷ Volunteer reviewers, recruited from New York City's philanthropic, social work, academic, and social activist circles, comprised its Review Committee. These individuals screened films and issued recommendations and rejections, which were summarized in the NBR's publications (Photoplay Guide, Exceptional Photoplays, and the National Board of Review Magazine). The NBR distributed these nationwide, to municipal and state agencies that oversaw film exhibitions (usually housed in the mayor's office or police department), to parent–teacher associations, churches, women's clubs, and other community groups.Footnote ¹⁸ In addition, films recommended by the NBR bore its seal in the opening title cards. Therefore, the NBR argued, no need existed “in any community for a separate Board or Bureau of Censorship” because the work could be done through extant municipal offices or in cooperation with local private organizations employing NBR guidelines.Footnote ¹⁹

After screening a film, the NBR's staff worked with the film's producers to modify the content accordingly, based on reviewers' concerns or in response to feedback from officials in the field. For example, in March of 1917, Bridgeport, Connecticut police lieutenant George Fox notified the NBR that the film The Square Deal (produced by the World Film Corporation) had been exhibited recently with an objectionable title card in place. NBR membership secretary W. M. Covill immediately contacted World, explaining that the NBR had already requested predistribution elimination of the title card that read, “‘For it is a woman's beauty that appeals to men; not her brains.’” The World Film Corporation had simply substituted that card for one that read, “A woman must always be alluring.” Covill explained that the new title card was still too suggestive, and he instructed World to either eliminate the title entirely or “use one similar to … ‘You must do your best to catch him.’”Footnote ²⁰ The World Film Corporation complied, “and the title suggested … has been substituted, as per your request.”Footnote ²¹

Thus, in the midst of a nationwide movement for legal film censorship, the NBR redoubled its efforts to extend its system of voluntary regulation. It stepped up its efforts to organize cities to adopt the “Boston Plan,” arguing that it allowed for “local control.” In response to the common complaint that his organization might occasionally approve films that raised “local objection,” Executive Secretary McGuire explained that these cases “would have to be disposed of by local public opinion.”Footnote ²² Despite this nod to the local, McGuire and his colleagues neglected to plan for the fact that, sometimes, local public opinion would support censor boards.

Liberal and Cultured: Virginia's Approach to Film Censorship

In 1916, NBR executive secretary W. D. McGuire was confident that legal censorship could be easily defeated in Richmond – after all, the city already employed a version of the Boston Plan, with the Richmond Police Department receiving the NBR's publications and overseeing the exhibition of films. McGuire wrote to Richmond mayor George Ainslie to reassure him that he was “pursuing the right course in keeping the regulation of motion picture films within the power of some well-defined city department.” He emphasized that it was more efficient (in terms of time, money, and human resources) for Richmond to continue to rely on “the weekly bulletin of the Board” rather than to create a legal censorship board.Footnote ²³

The NBR had much at stake in Richmond, then the center of the second-largest exhibition circuit in the United States. However, it initially perceived, and reacted to, the situation in Virginia as if it were just another battle in the war against legal censorship. By the turn of the twentieth century, Richmond was the most densely populated southern city, with a population of 85,050 concentrated in just five square miles.Footnote ²⁴ Like New York City, Richmond was an industrial center and regional cultural capital. Building and development that catered to an emerging middle class was also taking place in Richmond. In 1899, amusement entrepreneur Jake Wells opened the Bijou Family Theater in the former Barton Opera House, home to a notoriously bawdy revue.Footnote ²⁵ Wells continued to buy and build theaters, and by the 1910s he was known locally as “Mr. Clean Entertainment” for bringing family-friendly, low-priced vaudeville and moving pictures to Richmond. His theater chain, which he ran with his half-brother Otto, included venues in Norfolk, Atlanta, and New Orleans. The Wells brothers operated one of the largest theater circuits in the nation, second only to New York City's.Footnote ²⁶ In 1907, Richmond's first nickelodeon, the Dixie Theater, opened on Broad Street and its success inspired many competitors to open nickelodeons nearby. In the 1920s, Richmond, like other cities in the nation, saw the opening of grand theaters and moving-picture palaces, most notably the Rex (1923), the Mosque (1927) and the Byrd (1928). By the early 1920s, the area around 8th and Broad streets came to be known as the Theater District. However, instead of being met with the cheers of city boosters, theater owners had to battle ministers, legislators, and clubwomen, all of whom expressed concern about the moral hazards allegedly posed by moving pictures.

Virginia's social activists shared many of their northern counterparts' concerns. Clubwomen and other activist women fought for, and against, the federal woman suffrage amendment, and became involved in campaigns to improve educational opportunities and health care for Richmond's poor residents. Some pushed for women to be allowed to attend the University of Virginia, whereas others devoted themselves to preserving Virginia's historic sites. The interest in film censorship was connected to other issues addressed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1916, which residents of the Commonwealth referred to as “The Great Moral Reform Session.” Legislators passed state prohibition, antigambling, anti-white slavery, and antiprostitution laws.Footnote ²⁷ Taken together, these laws can be understood as part of the Progressive impulse in Virginia, one that was increasingly interested in legislating moral issues.Footnote ²⁸

Virginia's activists also had concerns distinctive to their social and political environment.Footnote ²⁹ Through the 1920s, elite white Virginians pushed for legislation that would enhance racial control, which they understood as integral to maintaining social and moral control. Taken together, the Mapp Act of 1922, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (banning interracial marriages), and the Massenburg Public Assemblages Act of 1926 (prohibiting integrated groups in any public place, “even when that integration was fully voluntary”Footnote ³⁰) indicated an increased tendency toward what historian J. Douglas Smith termed “managed race relations” in Virginia.Footnote ³¹ This tendency was due to a perceived upheaval in race relations, to a fear that tradition was no longer doing its job in enforcing Jim Crow, and to a concern over popular culture infiltrating from elsewhere.Footnote ³²

The ongoing debate over the federal woman suffrage amendment in Virginia also had a significant impact on both legislative initiatives and social reform movements concerning film censorship. Many elite white Virginians, male and female, viewed woman suffrage as a distinctly northern and western concern, one not suited to the South. Some regarded woman suffrage as another attempt by African Americans to overturn white voter dominance, whereas others argued that Virginia needed white women voters in order to protect the status quo. Even those who favored woman suffrage disagreed as to whether a state or federal amendment was more appropriate for Virginia.Footnote ³³ Thomas Nelson Page spoke for many elite white Virginians when he wrote, “I cannot imagine how any one, man or woman, who is in the least familiar with the history of suffrage, in Virginia … could think for a moment of advocating placing the suffrage under the control of the National Government.” He went on to note that the South had “fought against … the question not only of the equality of the sexes, but the equality of the races.”Footnote ³⁴ For many of the Virginians involved in the debate over legal film censorship, these other political and social issues, and the relationships forged in this environment, influenced their stance on the Mapp Act. The NBR's Boston Plan, although flexible, did not suit many Virginians' vision for the state's moral course.

In July 1919, Virginia reappeared on the NBR's agenda when exhibitor C. F. Senning contacted the organization, explaining that a censorship bill would be introduced in the next legislative session (starting in January 1920).Footnote ³⁵ Senning noted that, in previous legislative sessions, exhibitors' cooperation with the NBR had “offset legalized censorship.”Footnote ³⁶ In the upcoming session, however, he calculated that exhibitors would also need to cultivate the support of local women's organizations. To that end, Harry Bernstein of the Virginia Motion Pictures Exhibitors' League (MPEL) asked the NBR to send a representative to address the local clubwomen.Footnote ³⁷ Bernstein reasoned that if the NBR lecturer could connect with “the ladies who are stirring up this censorship talk,” then the bill might be successfully delayed.Footnote ³⁸

The NBR selected Mary Gray Peck as its emissary to Richmond. The organization already employed her as a lecturer, touring New England and upstate New York, speaking to women's clubs and municipal agencies about the NBR.Footnote ³⁹ A former English professor at the University of Minnesota, Peck was prominent in the woman suffrage movement (she worked as Carrie Chapman Catt's secretary) and an active member of the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC). Peck believed that moving pictures, because of their low admission price, challenged the entertainment appeal of saloons. Legal censorship boards, Peck reasoned, would result in higher ticket prices. Therefore, if local communities implemented censorship boards, men would revert to spending their leisure time and discretionary income at the saloons, to the detriment of families and communities. The movies, however, educated the public and brought families together – something a beer could never do.

Given the affinity between the woman suffrage and anticensorship movements in the Northeast, NBR executive secretary McGuire assumed that Peck would share a worldview with Richmond's clubwomen. Peck assumed so, too. She noted that “most of the women interested in the subject” of censorship in Virginia were also “prominent suffragists” and, as it happened, she would be arriving “in Richmond on the same train with Mrs. Catt, who was due there for two speeches on the Ratification of the Federal Suffrage Amendment.” She thought that it would be easy to drum up support among Richmond's clubwomen.Footnote ⁴⁰

However, Peck quickly discovered that “the reform elements” in Virginia were also censorship's strongest supporters. Peck noted, “I could scarcely believe these [women] were reformers” as they stood in “interesting contrast to the reformers of Boston.”Footnote ⁴¹ For example, Adele Clark, the secretary of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, was pro-censorship.Footnote ⁴² Mrs. Georgia May Jobson, president of the Social Service Federation of Richmond, had worked tirelessly to unite several women's organizations in support of the censorship bill for three successive legislative sessions. Despite their difference of opinion, Jobson was open-minded toward Peck and invited her to speak at a conference of local women's organizations. In reports to the NBR, Peck maintained that she could still change the position of Richmond's women reformers. She believed they could work together toward a common goal – the voluntary regulation of motion pictures – even if they did not share her anti-legal-censorship stance.

Peck reported that the meeting of the local women's organizations in Richmond was “informal and extremely friendly.” However, it was not entirely without tension. State senator G. Walter Mapp, author of the censorship bill, repeatedly attempted to seize the floor. He may have worried that if Peck swayed the clubwomen, he would lose support for his bill. Peck informed him that if he wished to learn about the NBR's position, he needed to sit down and listen. “Being a Virginia Gentleman,” she noted, he complied.Footnote ⁴³ Peck then explained that the NBR opposed legal censorship “because it [was] non-representative and chaotic in essence.” Instead, the NBR supported “every sincere attempt to better conditions by means of co-operative censorship,” mainly by “furnishing weekly lists of its pre-reviews” to established municipal government agencies, local exhibitors, and local organizations, such as women's clubs.Footnote ⁴⁴ The NBR plan would create a power-sharing relationship between the clubwomen, the exhibitors, and the municipal government agency selected to oversee film regulation. Although this system worked well in cities like Boston and Bridgeport, Virginia's clergy and legislature rejected the proposal.

After the meeting, Peck declared, “the censorship problem for the present is solved in the state of Virginia.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Unfortunately, she misjudged her opposition. The clubwomen, though polite and receptive during the meeting, remained suspicious of the NBR. Some suspected that financial connections to the motion picture industry – and not a sincere interest in a cleaner screen – motivated the organization. After all, Peck was a paid employee of the NBR (and, in fact, D. W. Griffith funded many of her lectures).Footnote ⁴⁶ Some may have distrusted her connections to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which backed the federal woman suffrage amendment.Footnote ⁴⁷ Others remained highly attuned to the perils of regulation from “carpetbaggers,” and perceived the anti-censorship movement as an extension of Republican Party politics.Footnote ⁴⁸ Peck embodied the imposition of external, national standards onto local conditions. Virginia's pro-censorites continued to prefer a state censor board, which they understood as an important form of home rule.

Peck's visit to Richmond was not the first time that the Virginia Federation of Women's Clubs (VFWC) had considered the censorship question. Quite the opposite, in fact, as they had been involved in an ongoing conversation about the “deleterious effect that moving pictures were having on the young people”Footnote ⁴⁹ since 1911 – fourteen years before the General Federation of Women's Clubs created its permanent Motion Picture Commission in 1925.Footnote ⁵⁰ In May of 1911, the VFWC's department of Civic Reform passed a resolution condemning “uncensored moving pictures and urg[ing] each club to take some action.”Footnote ⁵¹

In 1920, the VFWC addressed the motion picture problem at its annual statewide meeting.Footnote ⁵² Mrs. J. Allison (Mary Gray) Hodges, chair of the Department of Motion Pictures, presented the issue to the membership. Although she had been corresponding with the NBR and personally preferred its method of “selection not censorship”, she did not reveal that to the clubwomen.Footnote ⁵³ She presented the issue, and the assembled voted to conduct a statewide survey of the movies before deciding on a plan for Virginia. In theory, the data generated would provide the VFWC with the information that would allow them to choose between legal censorship and voluntary regulation.Footnote ⁵⁴

To this end, the VFWC sent five hundred questionnaires to each club in the federation. Local clubs then appointed committees “to see every picture shown during that week.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The first section of the survey form was labeled “Concerning the Play and Plot,” and asked for the film's title and the name of the filmmaker. It also asked if the National Board of Review had approved the film, which would be indicated by the display of the NBR seal in the title cards. The form asked nineteen additional questions about the film's content, including whether it portrayed any “objectionable drinking or barroom scenes,” “prolonged objectionable love scenes,” or “anything likely to contribute to the delinquency of the younger element.” Clubwomen were also asked to weigh in on whether or not the film was “a proper one for immature youths or children.” Finally, the form asked, “Does the play as a whole appeal to you as good or bad?”Footnote ⁵⁶

The majority of the survey's questions targeted the moral character and content of the films (which allowed the clubwomen to stay, at least rhetorically, in women's appropriate public role, speaking on behalf of the vulnerable). The questionnaire did not directly address racial themes or characters in the films; this could have been due to the dearth of films featuring black characters defying the status quo. Perhaps the clubwomen remained confident that “tradition” would continue to enforce racial segregation, and therefore the issue did not need to be addressed directly. After all, racial dynamics were already strictly inscribed in the policies and practices surrounding southern moviegoing. De facto segregation ensured that African Americans in Virginia had limited access to movie theaters.Footnote ⁵⁷

When compiled, the VFWC data suggested that 90 percent of pictures being shown in Virginia that week were “satisfactory.” The remaining 10 percent “were not really bad, they [just] were not suitable for young people.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Based on this evidence, the clubwomen concluded that the moral condition of moving-picture shows in Virginia was not so serious as to require legal censorship. Instead, they recommended that the VFWC and exhibitors enter into a cooperative relationship, adopt voluntary review, and agree to be guided by NBR standards. Were the clubwomen converted to the NBR position, or did they come to this conclusion only after they realized how much political power they stood to gain from voluntary regulation?

Despite the VFWC's sanction and Virginia exhibitors' professed willingness to join forces with the NBR, state senator Mapp, his allies, and his constituents were not appeased by the plan. Mapp announced his intention to reintroduce his censorship bill in the 1922 legislative session.Footnote ⁵⁹ Although the NBR interpreted this as an indication of Peck's failure to win the clubwomen over, it did not view this new development as catastrophic. McGuire decided that, in order to defeat Mapp and his allies, the NBR just needed to employ someone with “Southern connections” who knew “Southern people thoroughly.”Footnote ⁶⁰ At this point in the campaign, the NBR had good local options. For example, Georgia May Jobson would have been a good choice. She was an influential and well-respected social activist, and she had changed her mind about legal censorship after hearing Peck's lecture. She wrote to McGuire, “The best thing to be done for Virginia is to have a small board or committee here in Richmond … in conjunction with the National Board of Review.” She even offered to sit on the NBR's National Advisory Committee and to hand select “liberal minded men and women” to serve on a Richmond-based committee. Jobson informed McGuire that even though “the state at large is clamoring for censorship,” she believed that this committee could prevent further calls for a state board.Footnote ⁶¹ Despite this amicable correspondence, McGuire did not make use of Jobson. Instead, he selected Mrs. Philip (Mary Mason) Speed of Charlottesville, Virginia.Footnote ⁶²

Mary Mason Speed had firsthand experience with film programs. In 1915 and 1916 she had worked in New York City, designing and implementing Saturday morning entertainment programs for young people. During World War I she worked for the Community Motion Picture Bureau of the YMCA, selecting the films that were exhibited in Army and Navy encampments. In addition, she was George Mason's great-great-granddaughter; of this connection, she wrote, “I sometimes feel that the Gods have decreed that [I] shall write a new Bill of Rights for this medium of expression that is understood by all the peoples of the earth.”Footnote ⁶³ Speed appeared to the NBR as the ideal organizer for Virginia: she had connections to, and experience with, New York City's reform community, but she was also a southerner.Footnote ⁶⁴

When Speed arrived in Richmond in February of 1922, Virginians remained largely in favor of legal film censorship. McGuire advised Speed to meet with exhibitor Jake Wells and the clubwomen as soon as possible (the same strategy employed by Peck, two years earlier).Footnote ⁶⁵ Unaware of the local politics and interests converging in the debate ofer legal censorship, McGuire was able to remain confident that censorship's supporters could be won over. Initially, Speed's status as a native Virginian did present opportunities that had not been available to Peck. For example, shortly after arriving in Richmond, she secured an invitation to a private gathering at the home of the Richmond News Leader's editor, John Stewart Bryan. She deemed his leadership key to defeating legal censorship because “the News Leader is read all over the State.”Footnote ⁶⁶ If Speed could have changed the opinion of those in attendance, they might have been able to turn the tide against state censorship.

Shortly after the meeting began, Lieutenant Governor Junius Edgar West declared, “Virginia propose[s] to have a very superior Board of Censors, both liberal and cultured.”Footnote ⁶⁷ West's pronouncement contained a veiled reference to Ohio and Pennsylvania's state censor boards, whose decisions regularly brought them into public conflict with their constituents and the motion picture industry – for both unduly harsh and lax censoring. Speed parried with the example of The Queen of Sheba. Written and directed by J. Gordon Edwards and released in 1921 by Fox Studios, The Queen of Sheba dramatized the biblical love affair between Solomon, king of Israel, and the Queen of Sheba. Sheba, played by actress Betty Blythe, wore skimpy costumes that revealed her breasts.Footnote ⁶⁸ Speed reported that the mere mention of this film “proved illuminating.” Instead of consensus among the gathering of “liberal and cultured” Virginians, dissension ensued. One of the ministers asked what the NBR might do about this “indecent, irreverent, inartistic and historically incorrect” film. In response, a clubwoman “exclaimed” that she thought The Queen of Sheba “a lovely thing,” which she “had enjoyed … from beginning to end.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Speed knew that The Queen of Sheba would serve as an instructive example among those who assumed that they shared morals and standards. These Virginians, from the same social and cultural milieu, presumed they were also homogeneous in thought and taste. They were surprised to learn that they disagreed with each other on this film, which suggested possible disagreement about others. Speed intended the example of The Queen of Sheba to demonstrate that a state censorship board would encounter similar problems.

Despite Speed's initial – albeit limited – success in Virginia, the NBR directed her to leave Richmond and head to Tennessee, where pro-censorship forces were quickly winning converts. Speed communicated to McGuire that she thought that this was a mistake. Permitted to stay in Richmond a bit longer, Speed explained, she intended to have “many conferences with individual Ministers” – especially since she had recently discovered that a coalition of clergy had sent out “an order to 1000 Ministers in the State for diligent effort in behalf of State Censorship.”Footnote ⁷⁰

This was the turning point for the National Board of Review's campaign in Virginia. Speed's assessment of the situation had been correct. On 27 February 1922, the General Laws Committee of the Virginia House of Delegates held a public hearing on the Mapp Act. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that Canon William Sheafe Chase of New York City, author of a federal censorship amendment, spoke in favor of Virginia's proposed censorship legislation, and novelist Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman (upon which the film The Birth of a Nation was based), argued against it. The article noted that “verbal clashes … marked the session, which closed without definite action being taken on the measure.” Nevertheless, the vote was still scheduled to take place later that day.Footnote ⁷¹

Mrs. Channing (Nadine) Ward, the film and arts reviewer for the News Leader, confirmed the gravity of the situation in a letter to McGuire. She explained that the NBR had grossly underestimated the power and influence of the clergy over elite white Virginians, who feared “social ostracism” if they strayed on “important issues,” such as censorship.Footnote ⁷² McGuire responded, “It is difficult to get people to take the position opposed to censorship when all the ministers are clamoring for it.”Footnote ⁷³ It is clear, though, that he did not fully understand the extent of power and influence held by the clergy in this instance – especially when he believed that “advocacy of … measures by clergymen” should not be understood as “truly interpretive of the public view.”Footnote ⁷⁴

After Speed left Richmond for Tennessee, Jake Wells (“Mr. Clean Entertainment”), was left to fight the pro-censorship forces on his own. Because he understood that the clergy still needed to be persuaded, he sent movie passes to a large group of ministers. Wells hoped that the ministers, after seeing that his theaters were clean, safe, and family-friendly, would abandon their censorship position. He noted to McGuire that most of those who had received complimentary tickets responded with thank-you letters, which he interpreted as an embrace of the voluntary film review movement. However, when the ministers remained “all for censorship,” Wells felt blindsided.Footnote ⁷⁵ Wells (and Speed, who was still working in Tennessee) were rightly concerned with the ministers' influence over state legislators and the public – a fact that NBR officers discounted, to the detriment of their project.

In early March of 1922, when the NBR finally acknowledged that the situation in Virginia was grim, McGuire instructed Speed to return. In an attempt to shore up the NBR position, she arranged to speak “at two gatherings of ministers, the Episcopal and the Baptist,” upon returning to Richmond.Footnote ⁷⁶ Much to her dismay, she found that the clergy's support for legal censorship remained strong. Rev. J. A. Crane of Norfolk persuasively argued that since the NBR “had no power to enforce [any of its] decisions,” it remained the weaker option when compared to a legal censorship board. He also claimed that the only reason the NBR had “lecturers working in the states where Censorship was agitated” was because producers and exhibitors financially backed the NBR, to which the audience responded positively.Footnote ⁷⁷

Despite the NBR's efforts, the Virginia House of Delegates passed the Mapp Act on 9 March 1922, bringing the creation of a state film censorship board closer to reality. According to the secretary of the Virginia Motion Picture Exhibitors' League, “a crowd of Clergymen and Welfare workers walked into the Hall” after midnight and “had the clock set back and had the bill passed.” This “well-planned, prearranged affair” had been designed to exclude exhibitors, theater owners, and their allies from presenting their point of view to the legislators.Footnote ⁷⁸ Despite being locked out of the discussion and process, the exhibitors still believed that the bill would die in the Senate.

By 10 March, the final day of the 1922 legislative session, the censorship bill had become a political football. Senator Robert F. Leedy, who opposed the Mapp Act, proposed that Virginia instead adopt voluntary regulation and create an NBR-backed committee instead of a legal censorship board. He even threatened to filibuster the Mapp Act.Footnote ⁷⁹ Had he made good on the threat, Leedy would have prevented approximately 150 other bills from being heard and voted on before the end of the session, including a $12 million highway bond issue, the biennial state appropriations bill (which contained “many pet measures,” such as a proposal for a new war memorialFootnote ⁸⁰), and a compulsory education bill.Footnote ⁸¹

Although Senator Mapp had sufficient votes to have the legislation passed, his opponents put up last-minute “parliamentary obstacles” (including threatening to invoke cloture and change Senate rules). This forced Mapp to spend the last hours of the session making concessions and striking deals.Footnote ⁸² Thus the censorship debate in Virginia came to its end as a hostage to party politics, and a powerful senator was forced to expend his political capital behind the scenes just to allow the censorship bill to come to the floor.Footnote ⁸³ It had evolved into a political game that no New Yorker could have entered, let alone influenced. On 15 March 1922, the Senate passed the Mapp Act.Footnote ⁸⁴ When it went into effect on 1 August 1922, Virginia became the sixth state to create a legal film censorship board.

Governor E. Lee Trinkle appointed the original three members to the Virginia Board of Censors, which was charged with preventing “the display of films that are ‘obscene, indecent, immoral, or inhuman,’” or that “would tend to corrupt morals or incite to crime.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The Bill empowered the board to approve films, make recommendations for cuts to them, or reject them. Films that proved “so objectionable … as seemingly to defy improvement, even after undergoing numerous eliminations or deletions,” would be rejected in toto.Footnote ⁸⁶ The law did not permit the board's members to “correct historical errors, or inaccuracies in literary form, however irritating such errors or inaccuracies may prove to sensitive souls.” Neither could the censors “condemn a picture merely on account of its poor photography or lack of entertaining features.”Footnote ⁸⁷

The standards that the Virginia State Board of Censors worked to uphold did not differ significantly from those followed by the NBR. However, the key difference was that the Virginia Board's recommendations carried the weight of the law. Any film that did not bear the Virginia license could not be exhibited in the Commonwealth. If a film were exhibited without a license, the board could slap fines on both the exhibitor and the filmmaker (typically twenty-five dollars for the first offense).Footnote ⁸⁸

Virginia's pro-censorship forces had not only held their ground against the encroachment of the National Board of Review and its alternative to legal censorship, but had also achieved victory on their own terms, in the form of a state board. This meant that moving pictures exhibited in Virginia would reflect the worldview of the elite white men (and occasionally women) appointed to the board.

The Virginia Board began its work in August 1922. Every two weeks, it published a bulletin that “contain[ed] a complete list of all the films licensed and of all of the eliminations made during the period covered by the report.” The board distributed its bulletin to theater managers and volunteer inspectors across the state.Footnote ⁸⁹ Through the passage of the bill, Virginians opted to increase the power and reach of their state government into leisure activities in the name of social and moral control.

Virginia's clubwomen quickly reconciled themselves to the fact of legal film censorship in their state. Rather than abandon the cause, they became directly involved. Emma Speed Sampson, one of the three original censors appointed by Governer Trinkle, was a writer by profession, a member of the VFWC, and, perhaps most significantly, Mary Mason Speed's sister-in-law.Footnote ⁹⁰ Upon joining the board, Sampson subscribed the Virginia Board of Censors to the NBR's publications and agreed to send the board's reports to the NBR.Footnote ⁹¹ In addition, she continued her work as the VFWC's chairman on moving pictures. In this capacity, she asked her fellow clubwomen to “see that all the films shown in their local theaters bear the Virginia State Seal and ‘passed by the Virginia Board of Censors' and the number.” She noted that while the board had raised “the standard of the pictures shown in the state … there is still room for improvement and we will welcome suggestions from the club women, as we know they have the interests of the youth of Virginia at heart.”Footnote ⁹² By continuing to represent the “vulnerable viewer,” Virginia's activist women found a way to remain involved in, and central to, this public, political movement.

Racial control was not explicitly written into the Mapp Act, and pro-censorship activists did not explicitly describe this movement in the language of increased racial control. However, after the Virginia State Board of Censors began its work, and as the concern for interracial mixing increased through the 1920s, white supremacists easily deployed the Mapp Act in service of their vision. For example, the Virginia State Board of Censors declared in its first annual report (covering the years 1924 and 1925) that the board took special care to censor films that contained scenes or subtitles “calculated to produce friction between the races.” The report stressed that the board's members “scrutinized with peculiar care all films which touch upon the relations existing between whites and blacks.”Footnote ⁹³ In 1916, when the NBR first became involved in Virginia, this approach to racial content was not a foregone conclusion. Once the Act went into effect, however, it became another tool for maintaining Virginia's racial status quo.

For example, black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux repeatedly ran into difficulties with Virginia's censor board because his films often explored controversial topics, such as interracial relationships and “passing.” In 1925, the board screened his film The House behind the Cedars, adapted from the Charles Chesnutt novel of the same title, which deals with interracial marriage. Although Micheaux agreed to the revisions and cuts recommended by the board, it decided that, since the film was so controversial, it needed to be screened a second time to an audience of influential private citizens and state officeholders before a final decision was made. As historian J. Douglas Smith noted, most of those in attendance “had gone on record as strict advocates of Virginia's Racial Integrity Act.”Footnote ⁹⁴ After the second screening, the board rejected the film in toto because it would “cause friction between the races and might therefore incite to crime.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Micheaux responded with a strongly worded letter, arguing that only “one picture incited the colored people to riot.” He was, of course, referring to The Birth of a Nation.Footnote ⁹⁶

Needless to say, Micheaux did not enjoy a good working relationship with the Virginia Board – and that relationship did not improve over time. In 1932, he attempted to secure a Virginia license to exhibit his film Veiled Aristocrats (an adaptation of his The House behind the Cedars).Footnote ⁹⁷Veiled Aristocrats followed the struggles of a light-skinned African American family in North Carolina. The son, John, was a lawyer and successfully passing as white. When he learned that his sister, Rena, was engaged to a dark-skinned black man named Frank, he returned to his hometown. White residents had witnessed Rena and her betrothed together in public and assumed they were an interracial couple. In order to protect her, John convinced Rena to move with him, and she, too, successfully passed as white; they even employed black servants. The film ends with Rena returning to Frank and marrying him.Footnote ⁹⁸ However, the state censors detected subversive content in Veiled Aristocrats: African Americans successfully passing as white, holding professional jobs, and enjoying the privileges usually only available to well-off white families, such as household servants. Perhaps the suggestion of white violence, targeting Rena and Frank, concerned the censors. Rena's marriage to Frank moved her back into her place in the racial hierarchy, resolving that problem. What did not change was the perception of Rena and Frank as an interracial couple, or the threat of violence that still loomed.

The board voted unanimously to reject the film in toto. R. C. L. Moncure, the director of the board, explained that Veiled Aristocrats would be “unsatisfactory to the Colored people of the State and … it is unfair to them.” Of course the board had not consulted with African Americans to ask if they considered the film unsatisfactory or unfair, nor did it acknowledge that this movie was likely to be shown exclusively to African American audiences. Moncure argued further that if “Negroes would try to associate with the Whites in Virginia [it] would incite to crime.”Footnote ⁹⁹ For the Virginia Board, the issue with Veiled Aristocrats in particular, and Micheaux's oeuvre in general, was that it depicted a version of the world in which the Racial Integrity Act and Massenburg Public Assemblages Act did not exist. Fearing that Veiled Aristocrats might inspire African Americans to cross boundaries of race and class, the board's members moved to protect both white and black residents of the Commonwealth from those possibilities by censoring content as part of the state's move toward increasingly managed race relations.

Despite the efforts of Peck, Speed, and the NBR's local allies, the organization fought a losing battle in Virginia. From 1922 until 1966, when the General Assembly discontinued funding to, and disbanded, the Division of Motion Picture Censorship, all motion pictures exhibited legally in Virginia had been mediated and censored by political appointees. Volunteer investigators (many of whom were clubwomen) helped maintain the system by inspecting theaters in remote regions of the state and reporting back to the board.

Progressive-era social activism succeeded when organizations cultivated local allies, built coalitions, and sustained that support over the long term.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When the NBR's work in Virginia is considered from this perspective, the extent to which its northern-as-national myopia obscured regional differences and downplayed the importance of “the local” in reform efforts becomes clear. While the NBR paid lip service to local concerns, power structures, and social contexts, it was unable to master Virginia's unique conditions. Although the NBR's connections to northern reformers initially allowed it entrée to Virginia's women's clubs, it continued to face obstacles because its executive board members did not understand the fractious nature of women's political participation in the state. This was compounded by the fact that the NBR's board members had entered Virginia in the midst of a political sea change, during which elite white Virginians increasingly relied on the law to shore up the weakening traditions that had once enforced morals.