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

Song Lyric of the Day (Irving Berlin and the Melancholy of “White Christmas”)

“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know…”—Irving Berlin, “White Christmas,” originally composed for the 1942 film Holiday Inn, later the centerpiece for White Christmas (1954)

(Yesterday, “The Leonard Lopate Show” on the local public radio station, WNYC-FM, featured Kerry O’Malley and Stephen Bogardus, co-stars of the musical adaptation of the Berlin film that’s now playing on Broadway. What made Berlin’s songs so special? Lopate asked.

Ms. O’Malley answered that they were so “emotional,” pointing to the vein of melancholy that ran through his songs as well as his life.

Melancholy? Berlin, the composer of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Doing What Comes Nat’rally,” “God Bless America,” and other uptempo tunes too numerous to mention? I wouldn’t have believed it about his most famous song, “White Christmas,” especially if I’d been listening to the version I heard while passing through the Port Authority Bus Station this morning—Darlene Love’s rendition, from A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector --which had its 45th anniversary this year, incidentally.

But then I looked at the lyrics to “White Christmas.” And you know what? Ms. O’Malley is right.

To start with, “White Christmas” is not about present reality. It evokes “the ones I used to know.” It’s an exercise in nostalgia by an adult remembering a world of innocence he or she can never recapture. The speaker may wish for that childlike innocence, that whiteness, but such a vision is, at best, achieved through the eyes of the young.

Even the first line of the song is indicative. The speaker is “dreaming” of a white Christmas—it is not reality. The song had its premiere in WWII, as did “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” the Buck Ram-Kim Gannon-Walter Kent song which, you might remember, saved its best line for last: “if only in my dreams.”

For American service personnel in a titanic conflict, the Currier & Ives scenes brought to mind by both these songs held a simple but powerful resonance, even if it was far removed from the bloody scenes they were witnessing day by day.)

Quotes of the Day (“A Visit From St. Nicholas”—and A Small But Significant Variation)

"'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”—“A Visit From St. Nicholas,” published anonymously in the Troy (N.Y.) Sentinel on December 23, 1823, later attributed to the Rev. Clement Clark Moore

“'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring... nothin'... no action... dullsville!” —The soused Mrs. Margie MacDougall (played by Hope Holiday), speaking to a similarly polluted C.C. Baxter (played by Jack Lemmon), two lonely souls in a bar on Christmas Eve, in The Apartment (1960), written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, directed by Wilder

“A Visit From St. Nicholas” has, of course, become one of the most beloved traditions of the holiday season. With Moore being a fellow Columbia College grad and all--and his father even being the President of the school--I’d love to think of this wonderfully imaginative poem as coming from his hand. But it just doesn’t sound a lot like the work he did through much of his life.

One version of the poem’s conception is that it came to him while out sleigh-riding with his children in 1822; another, that he was inspired by Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History.

But think of it—Moore, a professor of Oriental and Greek literature at Columbia who also compiled a two-volume Hebrew dictionary, was not known for his sense of playfulness. 

In fact, if you subtract his productivity and his children, he sounds like a soulmate of the Rev. Edward Casaubon, the stodgy scholar of George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

In recent years, a more likely candidate has risen. Don Foster of Vassar College has proposed as the author Henry Livingston Jr., a gentleman-poet of Dutch descent. That sounds more like it, if you ask me.

In addition to popularizing a number of notions about St. Nicholas, "A Visit From St. Nicholas" has also inspired countless parodies. My favorite short one is what I just quoted above, from Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning The Apartment. 

The center of its plot—the willingness of businessmen to fool around with female underlings in the office—would now invite sexual harassment lawsuits. But the film’s abundant wit and heart haven’t aged one iota.

If you’re tiring of It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, or holiday films that pour on the sentimentality far more egregiously and far less skillfully, watch Wilder’s classic.

Quote of the Day (Burt Ross, on the Mafia and Bernard Madoff)

"’The Mafia guy was carrying a gun," Mr. [Burt] Ross says of the 1974 incident, which led to several convictions. With Mr. Madoff, ‘it was something very different. But I have more respect for the Mafia. At least they didn't pretend to be anything more than what they are.’" – Former Fort Lee (N.J.) Mayor Burt Ross, on being bilked by New York financier Bernard Madoff, quoted by Susan Pulliam, “Former Mayor, Millions Lost, Describes How He Was Lulled,” The Wall Street Journal, December 20-21, 2008 (Behind WSJ firewall)

(Ross became briefly famous in the 1970s when, as mayor of Fort Lee, he rejected a $500,000 bribe from a group linked to organized crime, then risked his life to expose it. Now, as this article discusses, the bulk of his net worth has been put at risk by Madoff.

It would take a Dickens or a Trollope—or, perhaps nowadays, Tom Wolfe—to invent a Madoff. Even that surname—it rhymes, don’t you know, with “made off”—has a Dickensian flavor. What this particular article does well, however, is keep in focus what’s really important about his sordid life of crime: his victims—not just the wealthy ones such as Mets owner Fred Wilpon or film director Steven Spielberg, but those like Ross and his wife Joan who are far closer to the likes of you and me—and, it turns out, far more financially vulnerable to the fallout from his machinations.

My questions are these: How many more Madoffs are out there right now? How many—many more—victims of these charlatans are there? How many more such outrages will have to be endured before we act, as America did in the Great Depression, to put obstacles in the way of such massive, heartrending crimes?)

This Day in Sports History (Hobey Baker, Beau Ideal of Athletes and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Killed in Accident)

December 21, 1918—Hobey Baker, a legendary collegiate football and hockey star of the early 20th century who was celebrated for his personal and athletic grace by F. Scott Fitzgerald and other writers, died test-flying a plane in France, on the same day that he received orders to return home from his WWI squadron.

Faithful reader, I must confess: If a month, even a fortnight, elapses without my mentioning Fitzgerald, I fear that something is…missing…in this blog. Baker figured at most tangentially in the life of the great writer, but he loomed with extraordinary power in his imagination. Indeed, nobody who saw this athlete-pilot could ever forget his natural charisma.

How strongly did Baker figure in Fitzgerald’s consciousness? Well, consider this: Fitzgerald paid tribute to Baker not in one, but two characters in his first novel, This Side of Paradise. The surname of the protagonist of this academic bildungsroman, Amory Blaine, derives from Baker’s full name: Hobart Amory Hare Baker.

Fitzgerald depicted him in even greater detail as a character named Allenby, “the football captain, slim and defiant, as if aware that this year the hopes of the college rested on him, that his hundred-and-sixty pounds were expected to dodge to victory through the heavy blue and crimson lines."

Football obsessed Fitzgerald. He preserved a ticket stub from the 1911 Yale-Princeton game in his scrapbook; he tried out for the Princeton squad as a freshman but was cut within a week; and in the midcareer short story, “Basil and Cleopatra,” his male fictional alter ego stars in the Yale-Princeton game. It’s not surprising that he would so admire Baker, any more than that he would feel the same toward Irving Thalberg, the Hollywood studio head who inspired his last unfinished work, The Last Tycoon.

Fitzgerald and Baker lived in probably the first American generation that could view football as something other than a crunching death sport. (College football had enacted new rules in 1906, after President Theodore Roosevelt had invited representatives of the three most important school powers at the time—Harvard, Yale and Princeton—and jawboned them into eliminating much of the foul play and brutality that had hitherto marked the sport.)

But when you read the physical descriptions of Baker and Fitzgerald (or, come to think of it, look at the picture accompanying this post), it’s hard not to think that the nonpareil novelist saw in the nonpareil athlete—whom he’d met briefly when the two attended Princeton University--the fulfillment of what he longed to be but couldn’t. Both were not considered tall in their own time, let alone ours; both were blondes; and both were regarded as exceedingly attractive, with soft eyes that concealed considerable melancholy.

You can almost see the wheels of Fitzgerald’s mind move on this point: God, if I were only five feet nine like Hobey and weighed as much as he does, I’d be the toast of Princeton. Every woman would want to sleep with me, and every man want to drink with me. What a cruel world!

(Incidentally, Baker was not the only athlete-pilot transformed into an indelible Fitzgerald character. The other, Tommy Hitchcock, a star polo player, inspired the creation of Tommy Barban, the lover of Nicole Diver, in Tender Is the Night, and, even more memorably, Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Ironically enough, Hitchcock, like Baker, was a former member of the World War I squadron, the Lafayette Escadrille, who died while test-flying a plane.)

Though Fitzgerald was the most significant writer to remember Baker in his work, he was by no means the only one. Mark Goodman wrote of the athlete as a symbol of his time in the 1985 novel, Hurrah for the Next Man Who Dies. Geoffrey Wolff briefly summed up his impact in the 1990 novel, The Final Club. I doubt very much if he’s in much demand with young male readers, but as a pup I sought out such midcentury juvenile athletic novels by John R. Tunis as The Kid From Tompkinsville and Highpockets. Well, wouldn’t you know that the figure who inspired his clean-cut athletes was Baker?

Aside from Fitzgerald, though, the most memorable description of Baker might have been provided by Boston Globe columnist George Frazier, who recalled the athlete—in terms redolent, of course, of Fitzgerald—as the epitome of a world where “all of a sudden you see the gallantry of a world long since gone—a world of all the sad young men, a world in which handsome young officers spent their leaves tea-dancing at the Plaza to the strains of the season; a world in which poets sang of their rendezvous with death when spring came round with rusting shade and apple blossoms filled the air."

Among Baker’s athletic accomplishments at Princeton University were:

* He played baseball, football and hockey.
* He led Princeton to one national championship in football in 1911 and two in hockey (1912 and 1914).
( He became the only athlete elected to both the College Football Hall of Fame and the Hockey Hall of Fame—and, in the latter, was the first American-born player inducted.
* Collegiate hockey’s equivalent of the Heisman Trophy is named in his honor.

That list, however, gives only the faintest of ideas of why Baker came to be associated with a quality that Frazier styled duende—i.e., the ability to attract others through spellbinding personal magnetism.

Baker set the standard for a code of behavior on the athletic field that couldn’t seem more foreign to our current world of big-bucks glory, trash-talking, and taunting opponents. He adhered to the rules; acted modesty in victory, crediting teammates for his achievements; and drew no attention to himself by conduct or appearance. He was penalized only once during his entire hockey career at Princeton. If you want the essence of this code, think of the advice of the great football coach Paul Brown to his players on displays in the end zone after scoring a touchdown: “Act like you’ve been there before.”

It seems to me that there’s a kind of WASP reserve to this behavior. Perhaps it’s one that Baker learned at St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, N.H., which, according to New Yorker writer Ben McGrath, is “the cradle of American hockey,” since many credit the school as the site of the first U.S. hockey game back in 1883. (Though, come to think of it, a later hockey-playing product of that school, former Presidential candidate—and recent shameless Cabinet post-seeker—John Kerry strikes me far more as the type to hog the puck.)

After graduating from Princeton, Baker briefly worked at J. P. Morgan, but his heart wasn’t in it. It was with something like relief that he jumped at the chance to prove his mettle in a new arena: as a pilot in World War I. Another part of Baker’s full name, “Hare,” could apply to the lightning-fast reflexes he brought to both athletics and aviation.

During the war, he served with the Lafayette Escadrille, where he was credited with three confirmed kills to his name. (His Spad XIII was painted orange and black in honor of Princeton.)

Recent writers, such as Sports Illustrated’s Rom Fimrite and biographer Emil Salvini, have suggested a disappointment and restlessness at the war’s conclusion that led Baker to go up in the plane one last, completely unnecessary time. How else to explain why he would do so:

* after receiving orders to return home;

* after disregarding the vociferous protests of his own men, who feared that Baker’s stated rationale—that he would take “one last flight in the old Spad”—would prove to be exactly that;

* after being told that the carburetor of the plane he would test had failed in flight only a few days before;

* or why, instead of conducting a crash landing—something the plane could easily have handled—Baker tried to maneuver the stalled plane back to the air base.

The world of Baker, like that of the Jazz Age that Fitzgerald was fortunate enough to live and chronicle in his short life, is gone now. You can recover something of Fitzgerald’s world from reading his magical prose. The essence of Baker, however, remains far more quicksilver, like the man himself—a faint, darting shadow who lived before the rise of newsreels or TV, now only recalled from memorial plaques and awards for sports whose spirit has departed drastically from the gentleman’s sportsman image conveyed so powerfully by the Princeton legend.

Quote of the Day (Cackie Upchurch, on the Bible as Source of Comfort, Courage—And More)

“It should also disturb us. It should also stir us into action. And if it’s not doing those things, and if it’s just in our heads, then I do not think we’re doing justice to the living Word of God.... If you read this stuff and really believe it, you might have to change how you live.”—Cackie Upchurch, director of the Little Rock Scripture Study (LRSS), quoted in David Gibson, “A Literate Church: The State of Catholic Bible Study Today,” America, Dec. 8, 2008

(With considerable historical perspective and contemporary insight, Gibson’s article examines how the old stereotype about how Roman Catholics “don’t read the Bible” has been changing—both at the grass-roots level, where groups such as LRSS have been making a difference in the close readings offered in small-group study, and at the highest level, where, like Catholic social teaching, Gibson reports, some are wondering whether the Scriptural scholarship might be “becoming one of the Church’s best-kept secrets.”)

This Day in CIA History (U.S. Misses Out on Chance to Eliminate bin Laden)

December 20, 1998—In the second of three documented chances from May 1998 to February 1999, U.S. intelligence reported that it had positively identified the whereabouts of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and that the terrorist mastermind could be killed if authorities acted quickly. President Bill Clinton, however, decided to pass, fearful of “collateral damage” – i.e., the number of innocent bystanders who might be killed or wounded--to a nearby mosque.

Following 9/11, the question of responsibility for the disaster became a political football. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats wanted to be tagged as the party responsible for the nearly 3,000 lives lost in the suicide attacks.

But, as Noel Sheppard has noted in the blog “American Thinker”, the 9/11 Commission produced “a purely political report that tap-danced around specifics to protect both presidential Administrations involved from embarrassment. As a result, we ended up with more questions than answers, wasting a lot of time and taxpayer money in the process.”

The Bush administration has rightly come in for criticism for failing to pursue the threat posed by al Qaeda both in the nine months leading up to 9/11 and especially in the 30 last urgent days before the attacks. Hillary Clinton noted that if her husband had received a classified report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States,” he would have paid it far more urgent attention than the Bush administration did.

One problem, though: Bill Clinton had received an urgent warning in his Presidential Daily Brief on December 4, 1998, entitled: “Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” That report, as well as the Aug. 7, 1998 al Qaeda truck bombings against U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 247 people and wounded 5,000 more, formed the backdrop to the events of December 20.

One of the principals involved in the planning of the December 20 operation on bin Laden was Michael Scheuer, a 22-year-veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who headed up the bin Laden unit of the Counterterrorism Center from 1996 through 1999. As soon as he received the report that bin Laden would be spending the night at the Haji Habash House, part of the governor’s residence in Kandahar, Afghanistan, he relayed the message to CIA Director George Tenet and his deputy, John Gordon.

A teleconference was immediately arranged to consider the feasibility of a cruise missile strike to take out bin Laden. The principal question that came before the principals in the teleconference was the potential for collateral damage.

A sharp division of opinion developed over this. General Anthony Zinni, who had been busy that month organizing air strikes against Iraq to degrade its weapons of mass destruction program, insisted that collateral damage could amount to more than 200 people, as well as the mosque.

A senior intelligence officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought the mosque wouldn’t be touched and that collateral damage would amount to no more than 100 people. By the end of the meeting, the parties involved agreed to recommend to President Clinton that he not order a strike on this occasion.

Conservative critics of Clinton have seized on the results of this meeting to claim that the President missed a golden opportunity to take out bin Laden. They found some support in Scheuer himself (who, it happens, is a stringent critic of George W. Bush as well as Bill Clinton), who claimed afterward that he could not sleep after the decision.

I don’t think that claim is quite the “slam-dunk” it appears. With the hindsight of 20/20, it may seem obvious that we shouldn’t have passed up the chance to seize the terrorist who was fast becoming a mortal enemy of the U.S. But seven years after the U.S. struck back against the Taliban in Afghanistan, collateral damage remains a controversial issue in the country. General Zinni was rightly worried about the disastrous effect this could have on public opinion in that country.

Passing up three occasions to strike against bin Laden in a nine-month period, however, is excessive. It is, in fact, illustrative of a larger pattern of the past 40 years.

As I argued in a prior post, American authorities had been blind for more than 30 years, dating back to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan, to the grave threat to America posed by Islamic extremism. With each passing year, that threat came closer and closer.

Both parties were distracted in fighting it, their minds consumed by more immediate threats (in the Reagan years, as suicide bombing manifested itself as a serious threat in Lebanon, the Republicans were obsessed by Soviet relations; in December 1998, Clinton and the Democrats were not only juggling bin Laden and the attacks on Iraq, but the impeachment of Clinton—the President had declared his intention to fight his ouster only the day before the urgent teleconference on bin Laden).