LAUSR

Virginia were pushing to join Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, and several major cities, and create their own censorship boards, and other Southern states were expected to join the cause. With industry backing, the Board backed an extensive campaign throughout the South, with Board representatives pushing for local organizations to form Better Films Committees, which would work with exhibitors to advocate for the production of quality motion pictures. Women lecturers successfully infiltrated GFWC chapters, turning discussions of censorship into plans to induce demand for quality motion pictures. While Virginia passed a state censorship law in 1922, it was the only Southern state to do so. By the mid-1920s, the censorship question had been settled in the United States. Six states, and a handful of cities, retained their own censor boards, with the rest willing to comply with voluntary systems. While later organizations were arguably more effective in the regulation of film—particularly the industry’s own Production Code Administration (1934), and the Catholic-influenced National Legion of Decency (1933)—they did not press for state censorship of motion pictures. The Supreme Court overturned its 1915 Mutual decision in 1952, leading to the demise of state censorship board by the early 1960s. While there is a temptation to understand these various film censorship efforts as part of a unified rearguard action against the cinema, Fronc’s careful historical work reminds us that even among people who shared political sentiments—Progressive reformers, labor organizers, animal rights activists, and clubwomen—there was considerable disagreement about whether and how society should regulate motion pictures. For this reason, Monitoring the Movies is as much a book about early efforts to censor motion pictures as it is one about why people were so invested in understanding them in the first place.