The struggle over censorship stood at the core of the relationship between the political culture of progressivism and early moving pictures. Called by contemporaries and historians alike a democratic art, the moving pictures invited audiences to participate in the new mass culture of the early twentieth-century.² As some early film makers began to use the medium to tell stories, those sitting in small theaters in towns and cities across America saw before them a make-believe world that was nonetheless plausible commentary on the past, the present, and the future. What remained unresolved was how those who championed political reforms, ostensibly in the language of progressive and democratic politics, might harness the power of the medium in redefining American political and social life. How much power the moving pictures and its mass audience might assume energized men and women, particularly progressives in New York City, who sought a more democratic culture, politics, and social life. They regarded the political potential of the moving pictures as essential to the empowerment of the masses in an age when social boundaries were in flux.³ At the same time, they tried and ultimately failed to extend to moving pictures the protection of the First Amendment. They did this because they believed in the political and artistic possibilities of the medium for a democratic culture. In creating a plan to elevate the moving pictures and their places of exhibition, they became locked in a confrontation with other reformers who feared the awesome power of the screen to hasten modernity and all that it implied.⁴

     Much of the dialogue over how to control the medium took place among middle-class reformers with dissimilar views about the role and purpose of government in regulating social and political life. In ways similar to the battles over temperance and women's suffrage, the debate over moving picture censorship unfolded at the local, state, and national levels. In searching for the proper role of government in regulating public and private life, reformers could not agree on how to define moving pictures as art or business, speech or commerce. Nowhere is the relationship between progressive politics and moving picture censorship more challenging to understand than in New York, the sixth and last state to create a state censorship board and home to the largest, most dynamic and heterogeneous city in America. New York City is significant for what it tells us about how moving picture regulation developed in the context of an urban cultural politics that encompassed the broader world of commercial entertainment, predated the moving pictures, and reflected the city's class and ethnic tensions.⁵ Equally important, New York City served as a magnet for a vibrant group of progressive activists including Frederic Howe, John Collier, Sonya Levien, and George Creel. Dedicated to providing municipal services, helping foreign-born, working-class families acculturate to their new environment, and expanding the social roles and political responsibilities of women, they also helped to formulate a defense of moving pictures in a period when the medium was under attack from social and moral conservatives. In a decade when Greenwich Village represented an artistic Bohemia and the anti-vice crusades of men like New York's Episcopal Canon William S. Chase claimed the moral high ground, the struggle over moving pictures censorship revealed how progressive thinkers delineated what was art and what was leisure, what was business and what was speech, and where regulation should start and stop. Howe, Collier, and Levien in particular championed free speech for the moving pictures based on ideas intellectually consistent with their beliefs in individual liberties and a socially responsible municipal government.