This Day in Film History (NYC Mayor McClellan Revokes Theater Licenses)

December 24, 1908—Following a tempestuous public hearing, New York Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. revoked the license of all 550 movie theaters in the city—taking Progressivism in an unlikely new direction and prompting the motion-picture industry to make one of its early efforts to censor itself.

That name, McClellan—why does it sound so familiar? Yes, you’ve got it—he was the son of the “Young Napoleon” who was great at organizing but not so good at taking the measure of Robert E. Lee. McClellan Sr. ran against the President who had named him, then relieved him as commander of the Army of the Potomac, Abraham Lincoln. More than a decade after the Civil War, the former general found politics curiously congenial, serving as the governor of New Jersey.

McClellan Jr. inherited his father’s Democratic Party leanings—and, much, much more unfortunately, his high opinion of himself. What he really should have been all along was an academic, which would have allowed him to pontificate to his heart’s content while satisfying his vast interest in art and history. But he didn’t come to that until far later in his career, after he had found law a bore and politics not quite enough for someone of his talents. (But it seems as if no McClellan ever found a spot in life suitable for his estimation of his worth.)

After 14 years with Tammany Hall, young McClellan was tapped by the organization’s boss, Charlie Murphy, to run for mayor against Seth Low, the Republican incumbent, in 1903. (Low would be followed as Columbia University President by Nicholas Murray Butler, who would run for Vice-President, unsuccessfully, under William Howard Taft in the 1912 election. Hard as it might be to believe now, the GOP was not an endangered species on Morningside Heights in those years.)

After the 1905 election (when he campaigned against William Randolph Hearst, running as an independent), McClellan broke with Murphy—not unlike what a future governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, would do in a few years. McClellan’s luck was not as good as Wilson’s, however. By 1909, his break with Murphy had left him a spent force with no future in politics. He now fancied himself a reformer, and to that end he paid heed to something that he shouldn’t have even bothered with.

From high school, most of us remember some of the fruits of the Progressive movement—including conservation (under Theodore Roosevelt) and electoral measures such as direct election of senators, recall, referendums, and the like.

But, as Richard Hofstadter noted in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Reform, it was also dominated in the cities by a native-born middle class that was revolted by the waves of immigrants coming to the U.S. and quickly becoming part of political machines such as Tammany. They saw Prohibition, for instance, as a means of restraining Catholic immigrants, who, they claimed, in an outrageous application of eugenics, had smaller brains because of drinking from an early age.

The ostensible cause for Progressive wrath about theaters, as film historian and cultural commentator Neal Gabler has noted, was public health—i.e., these dirty, cramped movie spaces could spread disease and fires. But more lay beneath the surface.

Among the most devoted habitués of theaters were the city’s Jews. On Christmas, to alleviate some of the profound alienation they felt in an overwhelmingly predominant Protestant society that allowed them into the nation under sufferance, they thronged the more than 40 nicklelodeons then extant in the city.

Christian ministers were none too pleased about this, and lobbied hard against it. “These men who run these shows have no moral scruples whatever," argued Canon William Chase, a New York Episcopalian clergyman. "They are simply in the business for the money there is in it."

McClellan went along with these ministers as he issued this revocation order to the police. Not that it mattered, for the move would be rescinded before long. But it sure scared the Motion Picture Patents Co. enough to ally with the People’s Institute, a New York-based Progressive group, to form the National Board of Censorship (which later ditched that name for the much more user-friendly name of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures).

The National Board of Review in effect put the “good housekeeping” seal of approval on new films. If you watched movies from 1916 until the 1950s, you were likely to see “Passed by the National Board of Review” in a main title. It was an early industry effort to police itself—an effort that, in our time, has resulted in the much-disputed movie ratings system