Matthew Sherlock

Instructor John Abbot

4/15/2020

Inglorious Censorship: the Jewish, the “godless”, and the church in early Hollywood

Hollywood is a great many things. A place, a business, a dream, and other darker things.

It is where the power of the United States of America is most apparent. The sword of the US

military, the vast coffers of New York markets, the technological marvels of the Silicon Valley,

even the breadbasket of the Midwest pale in comparison. The USA is a nation of visions and

ideas as much as it is a physical entity. Manifest destiny, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps

capitalism, untrammeled consumerism, democracy, the American dream, and sundry other

visions have contributed powerfully to the American idea. With Hollywood and its film

industries, America culture gained worldwide influence, even hegemony. Hollywood became the

pen with which the pop culture of the globe was written in lightning. The state of California a

jewel in the crown of lady liberty. It has not always been smooth sailing though. In the early days

before Hollywood became the international player it is today. the studios were largely dependent

on the whims of the fickle American public, and anyone remotely familiar with early twentieth

century social trends know, that public could be fickle indeed. We shall be discussing Hollywood

censorship, and how it has been used as a bludgeon by the Christian majority against those they

felt did not belong, including the Jews.

Some historical context is required here. Early to mid-twentieth century America was a

very different place than now. The horse was still a common means of conveyance, the First

World War was still in living memory, and film was still a very new phenomenon. Before the
Hays code or the Motion Picture Association of America film rating system, the film industry

had great creative freedom, giving cultural misfits a chance to make themselves heard. The

studios of Hollywood were not all that progressive by modern standards, but they knew money.

“The money promised both escapism and controversy, and both of these created cash.”1 This did

not sit well with the American mainstream, especially with the religious right. The Catholic

clergy and Protestant pastors were aghast at the town of Hollywood, the sensationalist

newspapers of the time filling their pages with hedonistic scandals involving stars. The

truthfulness of these stories did not matter, they were everywhere. Something had to be done.

Exploitative content in film was as old as the medium. “In 1898, Turkish Dance, Ella

Lola, became a celebrated state-by-state censorship case when Ella Lola’s suggestive body

display was obscured, in some versions, by the insertion of an optically superimposed grid,

which covered the offending portions of her anatomy.”2 With the success of such films, a

marketing formula was born. As the age old saying goes, sex sells. Even in the time of

nickelodeons and kinetoscope parlors, the spectacle of violence and other appeals to base

instincts were major draws. The attitude of studio movie-making followed in those ignoble

footprints. It would not take much to set off the powder keg of social outrage, and in the 1920’s

scandals came one after another. In the year 1922 Director William Desmond Taylor was

murdered and love letters to two famous starlets were found. In the same year, Rosco “Fatty”

Arbuckle was accused of the murder of the young actress Virginia Rappe. Popular star Wallace

Reid died in 1923 as a result of morphine addiction and alcoholism.3 Censorship was going to

come sooner or later, so the studios decided that they had to self-police lest the public pressure

1
Wheeler Winston Dixon, Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American
Cinema Edited by Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance, and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, 54.
2
Wheeler Dixon, Hollywood’s Chosen People, 54.
3
Wheeler Winston Dixon, Hollywood’s Chosen People, 54.
the government into doing it for them. So late in the year 1922 was born the Motion Picture

producers and Distributors of American (MPPDA) or more informally known the Hays Office,

named for the first chairman of this organization was William Harrison Hays. It was decided that

the path of least resistance was the best option.

“Talkies” start to be made after 1927 and as stated by Father Daniel Lord, an influential

Jesuit while "silent smut had been bad, vocal smut cried to the censors for vengeance."4 This

reignited public interest in film content, and renewed calls for more stringent censorship. The

stock collapse 1929 and the expenses of switching to sound film they could ill afford to refuse,5

The studios inserted morality clauses in the contracts of their actors, policing the private lives of

their talent. In the 1930s came the Catholic layman censor Joseph Breen, contributor to several

Catholic journals.6 Breen came to Hollywood in 1931 at the request of Hays (the chief MPPDA

censor) to help with publicity. “Of all the pressure groups, the Roman Catholic Legion of

Decency had arguably kept up the most persistent drumbeat of criticism of the film capital”7.

Hays, who had no real interest in enforcing the Code, needed someone willing to enforce it.

Breen’s catholic connection and background were considered a good way of appeasing the

outraged Roman Catholic Legion of Decency. He was promoted to the office of chief censor on

July 15, 1934. He did his best to keep a low profile during and after his tenure as chairman, but

he had absolute power and wielded it like a crusader wielded a sword. Though the code had

existed for quite a few years at this point, it was Breen that gave it teeth. With the aid of Martin

4
David Espar, Culture Shock: The TV Series and Beyond: Hollywood Censored: The Production
Code. PBS. Public Broadcasting Service. Accessed April 24, 2020.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/beyond/hollywood.html.
5
David Espar, Culture Shock. PBS. Public Broadcasting Service. Accessed April 24, 2020.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/beyond/hollywood.html.
6
Denby, David. Hitler in Hollywood. The New Yorker. Accessed April 24, 2020.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/16/hitler-in-hollywood. Pg 4.
7
Wheeler Winston Dixon Hollywood’s Chosen People, 56
J. Quigley (editor and publisher of the Motion Picture Herald) and Reverend Daniel A. Lord,

S.J. (Catholic priest and prolific author) he rewrote the production code. Among his other

qualities, he was a rabid anti-semite. Breen wrote that Hollywood was populated by “people

whose daily morals would not be tolerated in the toilet of a pest household the good jobs out here

and wax fat on it. Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage.

They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth.”8

Joseph Ignatius Breen hated the Jewish people with a passion. In his own words “the fact

is that these damn Jew are a filthy, dirty lot. Their only standard is the standard of the box office.

To talk ethical value to them is time worse than wasted.”9 His hatred of Jews colored his view of

Hollywood, a town built in no small part by Jewish immigrants. The founders of Fox studios,

Warner Brothers, and Paramount were all Jewish. They kept their religions to themselves and did

their level best to keep their religion from their films to prevent accusations of bias. Not that

paranoid bigots cared about that, as shown by the following statement from Henry Ford’s

newspaper the Dearborn Independent, that Hollywood was “Jew-controlled… As soon as the

Jews gained control of the “movies”, we had a movie problem, the consequences of which are

not yet visible. It is the genius of that race to create problems of a moral character in whatever

business they achieve a majority.” 10 They saw Jewish involvement in the Hollywood system, not

as historical happenstance because of a strong presence in the financial sector caused by

longstanding bans on them having any other occupations, but as a kind of conspiracy. A way for

the former subjects of King David to corrupt the good and just Christian audience. the business

itself was less a business as a cult of debaucheries because the Jews were by their nature sinful.

8
Denby, David. Hitler in Hollywood. The New Yorker. Accessed April 24, 2020.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/16/hitler-in-hollywood. Pg 4.
9
Wheeler Winston Dixon Hollywood’s Chosen People, 58
10
Wheeler Winston Dixon Hollywood’s Chosen People, 65
They were incompatible with American culture, with values that are completely alien to it

(ironically echoing similar criticism against Catholics). “It is not that producer of Semitic origin

have deliberately set out to be bad according to their own standards…. Many of these producers

don’t know how filthy their stuff is—it is do natural to them.”11 In such a toxic environment as

this, it is little wonder that the Jewish filmmakers of the era did what they could to down play

their heritage.

Not all of Hollywood’s Jewry were intimidated by the antisemitism that surrounded

them. Rabbi Magnin openly read the Torah in the Wilshire Boulevard temple. Max Nussbaum,

the rabbi of the temple Israel (and rival to Magnin), continued his duties unafraid. Mendel

Silberberg (entertainment lawyer) formed the Community Relations Council, an organization to

build trust between the Hollywood Jewish population and Los Angeles at large. Still, their

Christian neighbors were suspicious, so they had to walk carefully with regard with the code.

“Among the codes many proscriptions were the warnings that ‘methods of crime shall not be

explicitly presented’; ’scenes of passion should not be introduced when not essential to the plot’;

‘excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embracing, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be

shown’ ; ‘miscegenation (sexual relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden’;

‘pointed profanity (this includes the words God, Lord, Jesus, Christ—unless used reverentially---

Hell S.O.B., damn, Gawd), or other profane or vulgar expressions, however used is forbidden’;

and that ‘ministers of religion. . .should not be used as comic characters or as villains.’”12 So the

studios caved, and submitted to the will of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of

American. There has been criticism of the willingness of the leading Jewish studio heads to

capitulate to Joseph Breen’s demands and their hiding their Jewish roots when possible. As much

11
Wheeler Winston Dixon Hollywood’s Chosen, 65
12
Wheeler Winston Dixon Hollywood’s Chosen People, 67
power as they had in Hollywood, and as much power that Hollywood had (and has), it was a

small part of one city that was predominantly Protestant. Which is even smaller when compared

to the size of the larger nation that that city sat within. They were a Jewish drop in the Christian

bucket of early twentieth century America. It is understandable that the studio executives may

have felt that it would be better to keep from raising the ire of the American people as much as

possible.

The pressures generated by the Hay’s Code and the Christian decency groups that helped

create, propagate, and prop it up, were felt not only Jewish studio heads. Because the Code

banned depictions of miscegenation, interracial relationships were nonexistent in film for a long

time. Even in the more recent past, after the code was replaced by the Motion Picture

Association of America rating system, it took decades for interracial couples to be commonly

depicted in American media. Race has a complicated history in American. Race as a concept is

less solid as a common perceived, and subject to change overtime. Jews had a long history in

Europe of being persecuted as an ethnic group, a history that America largely lacked. The lines

of nationhood and sectarian division were etched into the lands of Europe with blood and steel.

In America these lines were washed away by more pressing matters that required attention. The

slave system and the genocide of the native Americans, big undertakings that required

manpower. In the pursuit of wealth and power, it was in the landed gentry and mercantile houses

of early America best interest to organize along racial rather than religious or cultural lines.

When the Jews started to come to America, the old ways of seeing them did not follow. They

were not black, so they were white, at least at first. That began to change with new waves of

immigration from eastern and southern Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth

century. The penniless Jewish immigrants took jobs in industrial centers and the opinions of the
public shifted. Their shift from white to Jewish came with the return of harmful stereotypes, as

written by Mr. Breen to Reverend Wilfrid Parsons, “simply a rotten bunch of vile people with no

respect for anything beyond the making of money. . . Drunkenness and debauchery are

commonplace . . . Any number of our directors and stars are perverts…These Jews seem to think

of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence. The vilest kind of sin is a common

indulgence hereabouts and the men and women who engage in this sort of business are the men

and women who decide what the film fare of the nation is to be.”13

Mr. Breen and his cohorts ceased voicing bigoted attitudes as the 1930’s rolled on. The

reasons for this are obvious, Hitler had begun his reign of terror in Germany and started an

outcry of criticism and outrage in the States. Open antisemitism had lost favor with a lot of the

American public, but that does not mean that the movie business was willing to challenge that

prejudice openly right away. For all the anti-Nazi organizations and events that formed in the

States, the German film market was still very lucrative and the studios did not want to lose out

on all of that potential profit. An example of Hollywood timidity is the film “The Life of Emile

Zola,” starring Paul Muni. For those not aware, Emile Zola was one of the primary players in the

Dreyfus affair, a trial where a Jewish officer was accused of treason as a scapegoat for his

nation’s failures. It is a powerful film about injustice, a refutation of state sanction violence, and

war. It also did not say the word “Jew” out loud for the whole movie.14 Films about World War

One were recut by the request of the Nazi party (“The Lancer Spy”, “Captured!”, “The Road

Back,”etc.)15 Some of the studios even lent German companies money to regain assets frozen by

13
Wheeler Winston Dixon Hollywood’s Chosen People, 68
14
Denby, David. Hitler in Hollywood. The New Yorker. Accessed April 24, 2020.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/16/hitler-in-hollywood. Pg 1-2
15
Denby, David. Hitler in Hollywood. The New Yorker. Accessed April 24, 2020.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/16/hitler-in-hollywood. Pg 3
the Nazi state, funding the regime that they would be at war with a few years later.16 The decade

was nearly over by the time that a major film studio directly addressed the Nazi’s in the film

Confessions of a Nazi Spy, a film by Warner Bros about the dangers of the American Bund.

Joseph Breen even made public statements against racial bigotry (though with the depth of hatred

he has shown in earlier writing, it seems performative rather than sincere). Even with this new

sympathy for the Jewish condition, it was rare for Jews to be depicted in film, even rarer to be

depicted in a positive light. They were jokes, caricatures, or villains. It was not till after the war

was over for everyday American antisemitism to be addressed in the Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s

Agreement (produced by a Protestant) and Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire, and only indirectly at

that. The Main character of Gentleman’s Agreement was a journalist who was investigating

antisemitism, and not a Jew himself. It was a step in the right direction, but it was just a start.

The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and its code progressively lost

power over the next few decades as the society that helped to create the institutions changed. The

rules and prohibitions of the code were rigid and not meant to change. So, when tastes changed

and standards shifted, the business could not pivot fast enough to catch up. Joseph Breen left the

office of chairmen in 1954 and was replaced by Geoffrey Shurlock, who was much laxer in the

enforcing of the Hays code. When Geoffrey retired in 1966, he was replaced by Jack Valenti;

former press secretary to Lyndon B. Johnson. Jack Valenti then created the rating system, which

with a few changes, we still use to this day. Another nail in the code’s coffin was the “Miracle”

decision, which established the motion pictures as being protected by the First Amendment. The

case started by the release in New York of Roberto Rossellini’s Il Miracolo (The Miracle, 1948),

the story of a transient who had an affair with a mentally unbalanced woman. When the woman

16
Denby, David. Hitler in Hollywood. The New Yorker. Accessed April 24, 2020.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/16/hitler-in-hollywood. Pg 4
gives birth, she proclaims her child as the Messiah. The Catholic Church mounted a campaign

against the film. After it was released in New York in December 1950, the State Board of

Regents succeeded in banning it on the grounds that it was sacrilegious. But the film’s American

distributor took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1952 decided that the

Regents’ ruling had violated the separation of church and state.17 What was important about this

choice is that it confirmed that films qualified for freedom of speech and had the same

protections as any other medium.

The code was an antiquated system, the beatings it took in the 1950’s lead to its

dissolution in the 1960’s. The studios nearly went with it as the hippy counterculture rejected the

old-fashioned lens of code approved films, being more open to challenging material and craving

something new. Foreign films from Italy and Japan gained popularity, not being beholden to the

Hay’s code. Independent film became a viable prospect again, being able to fill a niche that the

big studios could not fill. The middle of the road comedies and dramas that Hollywood made

most of it’s money from the 30’s and 40’s was being beamed straight into the consumers’ homes

through the miracle of television. To compensate for lost revenue they made films bigger,

leading to bombs like Fox’s Cleopatra. Losing the millstone of the Hay’s code allowed the

studios (who saved themselves by hiring new promising talent, Spielberg, Lucas, etc.) greater

creative freedom in kinds of stories and broadened their appeal. With how societies define what

is acceptable changes, the code was never going to last. The risqué material of the pre-code films

is made tame in comparison of more modern works. Things that were acceptable in the thirties

horrify us today (blackface, yellow peril stereotypes, etc). With all of that said, why was the code

ever considered a necessary policy?

17
Wheeler Winston Dixon Hollywood’s Chosen People, 70
 We know what the code was said to be for. To keep children and the wider public from

overly sexualized and/or violent content. If that was the only purpose to the code though, why

ban miscegenation or prevent priests from being used as either villains or as comic relief? The

real purpose of the code is more insidious, power and control. As said earlier Hollywood is

where the power of the United States of America is most apparent. The place that our pop

mythology is made and adapted. The question is, to who does that mythology belong and to

whom does the power belong. Movies cannot change the world, but they can influence the way

that we think about it. To depict interracial relationships on celluloid would normalize those

relationships. In an America where segregation not only existed but was widely accepted. To

have priests be depicted as fools or villains would undermine the authority of those priests. They

wanted to create an America that was like that reflected in films under the Hay’s code. A world

were the things that they did not approve of simply did not exist. To create a world that has no

injustice that cannot be solved or criminals that go unpunished. A world that has no corrupt or

incompetent clergy. Where white Christian men in straight, monogamous relationships with

white straight Christian women is not just default but the natural order of things. The world, now

and then, is not like that. It has only gotten more so since the code collapsed under the weight of

its own prohibitions. When looking back to the age of the code and comparing it to the modern

way of making film, producer Janet Yang states, “My guidelines have to do with what feels true,

as opposed to what feels false, what feels authentic as opposed to what feels manipulative."18

It is fascinating that Jews managed to survive and thrive in the world with so much

hostility toward them on the part of their neighbors. They found or carved niches for themselves

in societies that resented their very existence. When things went wrong in medieval Spain, the

18
Culture Shock PBS. Public Broadcasting Service. Accessed April 24, 2020.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/beyond/hollywood.html.
Jews were blamed. When things went wrong in a post-World War I Germany, the Jews were

blamed. Even now there are some that believe that our problems are the fault of the Jews (or

lizard people, or the illuminati, or a dozen other conspiracies in a vain attempt to find some order

in our chaotic meaningless existence).

Religion in America has complicated history. For all our pronouncements of religious

freedom, it has often been a narrow view of such things. Natives and slaves forcibly converted to

Christian faiths, Islamophobia, and the use of government power for religious aims (anti-abortion

legislature comes to mind). Many think America should be a shining city on a hill, a concept that

dates to some of the original Puritan settlers. Those settlers wanted to build that city. The city

they wished to build had no room for dissent. They refused to allow for Catholics and other

protestant faiths in their little havens, those havens often splintering into other colonies. Even as

the concept of religious freedom broadened to include more faiths, it was Christian faiths that

were accepted. The reason that they got away with this double standard for centuries is that

Christianity was (and is) omnipresent in peoples lives and they probably only knew of other

strange and foreign faiths from the pulpit of the church in the sermon of the local parish priest.

Then this new and terrifying method of reaching people came along. Capable of reaching across

the entire nation, to more people than any church sermon could hope to reach. The Movies, and

what is worse is that it was not under unquestioned Christian control. Many of the men who were

now capable of speaking to millions at a time, were of the tribes of Israel. Jewish businessmen

that may not share your values. The papers seem to corroborate your suspicions of this

Hollywood place. It seemed a modern Babylon, a place of drugs, murder, and debauchery of all

kinds. Clearly these Jewish filmmakers could not be trusted with this power. So, they created a

code to bring them to heel using their significant influence among the faithful. When that code
failed, you inserted a man to pull on the leash that these wolves agreed to wear. A man that hated

these filmmakers as much as you did. For a time, it worked, the movies promoted your values.

The right values, the Christian values. As time went on though, the hate that burned in your soul

was no longer what your layman felt. They moved on from the fear and anger. They were now

willing to listen to another way of thinking. The Jews won as they have so many times before,

they outlived those that persecuted them.