they “appealed to and excited,” McKenna declared.30
Increasingly, reformers argued that the movies’ cultural ascendancy had unleashed a flood of “indecent,” “sexually immoral” images that had made the number of “problem girls” soar. “Problem girl” was a catchall label given by social workers to young, wage-earning women whose appearance and independent participation in consumer culture created novel difficulties with policing their sexuality. Historians Joanne Meyerowitz, Kathy Peiss, Regina Kunzel, and others have skillfully evoked how such women’s new purchase on public spaces generated anxieties as many recently rural women poured into cities to work and play nationwide. These young women’s bold attempts to refashion themselves according to their own design also led them to experiment with cosmetics, products previously reserved for actresses and prostitutes. Thus, like many of the first movie stars, their behavior disrupted visual conventions that had long allowed observers to separate the good girls from the bad. “The way the women dress today they all look like prostitutes,” a waiter reported to one of the many Progressive reformers who cruised dance halls looking for the prostitutes such environments were thought to breed. What these young women may have experienced as “vistas of autonomy, romance, and pleasure,” according to Kunzel, many others judged to be “promiscuous sexuality and inappropriate delinquent behavior.” The result: for the first time, state authorities deemed sizable numbers of women criminals who required rehabilitation in the new juvenile courts and homes that went up in cities across the country.31
The popularity of, and outrage provoked by, a series of so-called white slave pictures in the early 1910s was an early indication of the trend that made “immorality” and “obscenity” the “keywords” that captured the concerns of censorship boards by 1920. Although judged a moral panic by most historians today, concern about white slavery—the belief that large numbers of young white women, often fresh from the countryside, were being forced into sexual slavery—tracked women’s movement into the workplace and onto the city streets after 1900. Muckraker George Kibbe Turner’s “The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities” first galvanized Progressive reformers into action on the subject. Turner’s exposé described a chain that connected the liquor trade to immigrants, and the latter to a white slave market run mostly by Jewish immigrants from Russia. The racial identities of the villain and victim in these tales also revealed how the white slavery scare reflected the era’s heightened fears about the racial degeneration of Anglo-Saxons in cities through racial “mongrelization,” in the language of the day. Films like Inside the White Slave Traffic (1913) became some of the first feature-length blockbusters. At six reels long, white slave films played for over an hour, cost patrons twenty-five cents to view at the first motion pictures palaces in New York, and attracted audiences notably composed of young women. Critics from the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly accused the films of inciting the era’s “Repeal of Reticence” about sex, of teaching white slaving techniques to men of “the impressionable classes,” and of generally pouring “oil upon the flames of vice” before “the promiscuous audiences of the motion picture theaters.” They also lamented that so many female fans watched scenes of their imperilment with delight, laughing at the generic conventions and gendered stereotypes employed by these traditional melodramas about the danger the city posed to women’s virtue.32
In the volatile postwar climate, the fact that so many movie publicists had turned such traditional dark tales about young women’s experience of urban modernity—of countrified naïfs brought to ruin in the city—on their head now counted as evidence of the danger presented by the industry’s growth in Los Angeles. Having breezily described the City of Angels as an urban El Dorado for intrepid female migrants, these brighter stories’ success in drawing women into movie theaters and to Los Angeles reflected the hunger many felt about exploring where their gathering freedoms might lead. But the industry’s efforts may have succeeded too well by the early 1920s. Reports announcing that more than ten thousand girls went to Los Angeles each year to work in the movies generated mounting anxiety about the dangers that awaited them in an industry controlled by “morally degenerate,” “un-American” Jews.33 After the Great War, with anti-Semitism and nativism on the rise, fears about Hollywood’s impact spread along multiple fronts. A wave of more risqué films, featuring daring, decidedly non-Anglo stars like Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson, and Rudolph Valentino, made headlines. Growing numbers came to believe that protecting the nation from what one activist called, “The Movie Menace” demanded controlling the movie industry itself.
The event that produced the industry’s first so-called canonical scandal illustrated these tensions. “S.F. BOOZE PARTY KILLS YOUNG ACTRESS; GIRL STRICKEN AFTER AFFAIR AT S.F. HOTEL; Virginia Rappe Dies after Being Guest at Party Given Here by ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle; Film Comedian,” wailed the headlines that framed the event. The scandal erupted following a party hosted by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, a slapstick star second only to Charlie Chaplin in popularity. Arbuckle held the party at the St. Francis Hotel on Labor Day, 1921. An actress named Virginia Rappe and two other Angelenos, Maude Delmont and Al Semnacher, were among the first to arrive, around noon. Still wearing pajamas, Arbuckle greeted the trio with a pitcher of bootleg gin and orange juice. Within the hour, the comedian requested a phonograph be brought in to entertain the dozen or so guests who crowded the suite’s reception room. Happy revelers later recalled in court a “royal good time, dancing and kidding and drinking,” with Arbuckle “at the center” of the “clowning.” Rappe and Arbuckle ended up alone in one of the suite’s bedrooms for an undetermined length of time. Late in the afternoon, guests discovered the actress there in great pain, tearing at her clothes. Thinking her drunk, some female guests tried to revive her with a cold bath; Arbuckle placed a piece of ice between her legs for the same reason. Around 5 P.M., Arbuckle called the management to have Rappe moved to a separate room, and the party ended. Dr. Beardslee, the hotel staff physician at the St. Francis, administered morphine to relieve Rappe’s pain, later testifying at Arbuckle’s first trial that “any evidence of alcoholism” “was very slight” and “overshadowed” by her “intense pain.” Arbuckle returned to Los Angeles on Tuesday for the premiere of his latest film, Gasoline Gus (1921). That same day the hotel’s doctor diagnosed Rappe as suffering from a ruptured bladder, recommended Delmont take her to a hospital, and left on a hunting trip. Rappe languished for three days at the St. Francis, mostly unconscious and in pain so severe that only continuous injections of morphine, supplied by a new doctor Delmont hired, provided relief. Late on Thursday Delmont moved Rappe to a private sanitarium where she died the next morning of peritonitis resulting from a ruptured bladder. Delmont immediately told the police that Rappe blamed Arbuckle for her death. The San Francisco district attorney accused the comedian of murder. A media frenzy erupted in which even typically staid papers like the New York Times ran headlines based on hearsay that shrieked, “ARBUCKLE DRAGGED RAPPE GIRL TO ROOM, WOMAN TESTIFIES.”34
That much, and little more, can be said with certainty about the circumstances from which the “ ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle Scandal” arose. What happened after Rappe’s death has interested many for decades, creating a powerful origins text about Hollywood that journalists, novelists, television writers, and popular historians alike return to again and again to convey how the movie colony’s licentious spirit combined with the venality of its producers to create its unrivaled moral hypocrisy. After the first jury deadlocked, the largest picture producers banded together in a new industry group, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA, or Hays Office) and hired William Hays as president. Will Hays was everything that the mostly immigrant, Jewish producers in the MPPDA were not: a native Midwesterner, a Presbyterian elder, and a leading Republican and Washington insider who became postmaster general after orchestrating Warren Harding’s successful 1920 presidential bid.35 Arbuckle’s second jury also deadlocked. The third jury acquitted the star, issuing an apology to Arbuckle in the press. Nonetheless, in his first public act, Hays shelved all of Arbuckle’s films and banned him from the screen. Scholars have mostly located the scandal’s significance in the way Hays’s act symbolized the rise of an internal system of regulation that controlled the images made by and about Hollywood.
