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Book Review
| Gerald R. Butters, Jr., Banned in Kansas: Motion Picture Censorship, 1915–1966, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. Pp. vxi + 348. $44.95 (ISBN 978-0-8262-1749-3).
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| Six states in the U.S. instituted and maintained film censorship boards between 1911 and 1981, and to date none has received a full monograph-length scholarly study, despite an abundance of historical investigations into various aspects of censorship. Thus Gerald Butters's Banned in Kansas acquires automatic significance, finally delivering an institutional history running from the 1896 debut of cinema in Kansas to the 1966 demise of the Kansas Board of Review. An impressive but flawed book, Banned in Kansas deserves attention for breaking new ground, even as it disappoints on some fronts. |
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Butters begins with a jarring misstep, mistakenly claiming Kansas "had a censorship apparatus that functioned longer than any other state's" (xi). In fact, Maryland's state censorship board persisted until 1981 (as discussed in Laura Wittern-Keller's recent Freedom of the Screen, a national survey of state censorship that complements Butters's work well); while some errors are inevitable in every book, such a glaring one on the very first page of text does the author no favors. |
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Fortunately, Butters recovers nicely, offering an interesting overview of early film distribution and exhibition in Kansas that departs from better-known, urban-centered accounts to show how rural residential patterns and even a frequent lack of electricity affected screening patterns. By the 1910s, as film exhibition settled into familiar theatrical formats, Progressive reformers saw these movies as a threat to children, prohibition, and public morals, establishing the Board of Censors (later Review), a state body that would vigorously clip, trim, and ban films until its overdue termination in 1966. |
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One of Butters's strengths is his depiction of legislative convolutions. The bill creating the censor board in 1913 passed in March and mandated commencement in April, without any apparent thought given to the concrete mechanics of implementation; the state superintendent of public instruction, for instance, was to carry out the screening and evaluation of all films before their public debuts, but the state legislature made no provisions for additional staff or resources to accommodate this massive new workload. Because of this and other flaws in the legislative design, censorship did not actually begin until April 1915. As Butters frames it, such seeming carelessness fit into a larger pattern of ad hoc Progressive lawmaking. |
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Writing about this and later legislative developments, Butters displays clarity and effective attention to detail. His discussion of case law, however, satisfies a bit less. While Banned in Kansas gives us some sense of the delicate dialectic between the Supreme Court and state censor boards in the 1950s, as concepts of censorship, obscenity, and prior restraint were talked around as often as they were directly addressed, Butters keeps the discussion somewhat general; general readers may appreciate this, but legal historians will hunger for a more adventurous plunge into the arcane aspects of state-level free-speech doctrine. |
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A less obscure shortcoming is Butters's treatment of race. This might be surprising, since one of the book's best chapters examines the political calculations surrounding the censoring of D. W. Griffith's notorious Birth of a Nation, which was banned upon its 1915 release by a Republican-appointed censor board. Democratic newspapers decried this as political pandering to African-American voters, and when Democratic governor Jonathon Davis took office in 1923 the overtly white-supremacist film was passed, under seeming Ku Klux Klan pressure. Butters unweaves the various vectors of influence skillfully, showing how the battles over Birth of a Nation transformed the censor board into "a political and sociological tool of the governors" across three administrations (99). |
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Unfortunately, the racial dynamics of censorship receive little more than passing glances for the rest of the book. We learn that Klan influence facilitated the censoring of independent black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux's works in the 1920s, and later that the board "was restrictive in its examination of race films during the war years"; each topic merits a mere paragraph of discussion (229). In a book loaded—perhaps oversaturated—with close case studies of censored films, to gloss so rapidly over this major aspect of Kansan censorship is a true opportunity missed. |
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The slow decline of censorship in the 1950s provides more fertile ground for Butters, as he shows the board's calculated decisions to rescind cuts in the face of legal challenges—not out of conviction, nor even legal pragmatism, but rather for fear of incurring expenses and giving the legislature an excuse to abolish the board. Only when the national tide had definitively turned against censorship in the mid-60s was the board finally terminated, after losing a case that essentially eliminated its enforcement powers. Butters strives to provide social context for these developments, to varying effect, mentioning the rise of the John Birch Society and anti-Supreme Court sentiment at the start of one chapter, but not meaningfully connecting this to the trajectory of censorship decisions. Nonetheless, Banned in Kansas is a book long overdue, and Butters deserves gratitude for finally writing it. |
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| Whitney Strub
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| Temple University |
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