INTRODUCTION

The Hollywood Question was clearly more than just itself. It functioned as both a site and a discursive route in its own right. Remarkably versatile, it could channel other discourses, redirecting and reinvigorating these ideas and statements in ways that responded in powerful fashion to the changing face of America. The movies were but one feature of this evolving face of modernity, but as the enormous popularity of storefront nickelodeons had demonstrated, its mass-mediated visage was a feature of modernity with which to reckon. As historians John Kasson, Robert Sklar, and Garth Jowett have noted, the popularity of the movies marked a decided shift in the ideological control of culture. Just as Gutenberg's printing press wrenched literacy from the sole domains of nobility and the church, so the movies echoed this process of democratization for mass culture. Movies, however, only represented one facet of this shift. Compulsory education also helped to facilitate greater literacy. The mass press, and in particular the explosion of the multilingual ethnic press, created a new textual bridge to a new culture. Once out of the hands of Protestant elites, mass culture in America became increasingly accessible to greater numbers of people – and ultimately more threatening to those who advocated greater control over it. As the movies grew more popular, the desire to exert some level of ideological control over them assumed heightened urgency. Concerns over the moral influence of motion pictures on the country, particularly its youth, became a powerful vehicle to exert this control.

This moral indignation had already been well rehearsed within a variety of contexts.