Intolerant Alliance

Reason, March, 2001 by Jesse Walker

Where did the Production Code Administration come from? The familiar historical account stresses the role of the National Legion of Decency and the Catholic Church, traditional conservatives opposed to cinematic sin. But Thomas Doherty's excellent Pre-Code Hollywood (1999) notes that the new censorship had two more sources.

One was the Motion Picture Research Council, which conducted a five-year sociological study--financed by the liberal Payne Fund--of movies' effects on the young. In adopting the mantle of science, the Research Council study harkened back to the librarians' crusade against dime novels and Huck Finn; it also harkened forward to today's lab studies purporting to show the ill effects of pornography or violent TV. Writes Doherty: "Couched in the jargon of white-coated researchers who had monitored sleeping children with a device called the 'hypnograph' (a 'sleep recorder' placed under the mattress to measure nocturnal jitters after exposure to horror movies) and ladled throughout with statistical precision...the Payne Fund studies seemed to quantify what the matrons and clerics knew in their hearts. To editorial writers and city councilors for whom Catholic theology was but hearsay evidence, the authority of social science clinched the case."

The studios also had to contend with the National Recovery Administration, the New Deal's super-cartel, which would eventually be ruled unconstitutional in 1935. The NRA had its own code for the picture industry, one concerned mostly with business practices but with rules for content as well--and if the latter regulations were vaguer than the Production Code's, that only increased the uncertainty under which filmmakers had to work. (In those days, the courts held that First Amendment protections did not apply to the movies.) Among the NRA's Hollywood administrators was A. Lawrence Lowell, president of the hypnograph-wielding Motion Picture Research Council. Meanwhile, several bipartisan censorship bills were pending in Congress.

It was these threats of government regulation that prompted the studios to give their Production Code Administration some teeth. The new authority was private, not public, but there's little doubt as to whether it would have been created if the feds hadn't been likely to impose even stricter rules from without. And who sat atop the PCA, ruling which film scenes could or could not be released? Joseph I. Breen, a prominent Catholic conservative. Left met right, and censorship was assured.

Comic Tragedy

The Motion Picture Code crippled a young art, but it didn't destroy it. Many movies were wrecked by Breen's bowdlerizations, but others were inadvertently improved: By forcing writers, actors, and directors to sneak in their more subversive images and ideas, the new boundaries fostered a certain measure of subtlety. This hardly justifies its existence, but at least it offers a silver lining. It's harder to make such claims for the Comics Code, imposed in 1954.

Like dime novels, comic books faced attacks from both professional librarians and religious conservatives, with the former claiming that comics discouraged children from "real" reading and the latter adding that the medium led kids to crime and vice. The librarians weren't the only professional group weighing in on the issue: The National Education Association endorsed anticomics legislation in 1948, along with laws against offensive films and radio shows. At the same time, the National Office of Decent Literature, a conservative Catholic group, kept lists of comics it considered "objectionable." In theory, the lists were merely an advisory gesture, not a call for legal repression. In fact, as Amy Kiste Nyberg notes in Seal of Approval, her 1998 history of the Comics Code, several police forces used the lists "to clear newsstands of objectionable material, even if such material was not found to be obscene under state law. In nearly all cases, a request by the police department did not need to be followed up by legal action."