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Beyond the Movie Theater

Sites, Sponsors, Uses, Audiences

Gregory A. Waller

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2023 by Gregory A. Waller

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses.

Suggested citation: Waller, G. A. Beyond the Movie Theater: Sites, Sponsors, Uses, Audiences. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.149

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Waller, Gregory A. (Gregory Albert), 1950– author.

Title: Beyond the movie theater : sites, sponsors, uses, audiences / Gregory A. Waller.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022035678 (print) | LCCN 2022035679 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520391505 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520391512 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—United States—History—20th century. | Sponsored films—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U6 W284 2023 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.U6 (ebook) | DDC 791.43097309/04—dc23/eng/20220818

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035678

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035679

Manufactured in the United States of America

32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Brenda and Jake

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Sponsors and Sponsorship

2. Multi-purpose Cinema

3. Multi-sited Cinema

4. Targeted Audiences

5. Event Cinema: Land Shows and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition

Afterword

Notes

ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1. Undated real photo postcard

0.2. Ad for Twilight Sleep, 1917

0.3. Ad for Modern Motherhood League, 1916

0.4. Postcard and Lumina ad, 1917

0.5. Moving Picture Health Car, 1916

0.6. Cartoon, Motion Picture Story Magazine, 1914

0.7. Cartoons, Motion Picture Story Magazine, 1912

0.8. Cartoon, Motion Picture Story Magazine, 1912

0.9. Cartoon, Motion Picture Story Magazine, 1915

0.10. Cartoon, Motion Picture Story Magazine, 1914

0.11. Cartoon, Motion Picture Story Magazine, 1914

1.1. Ad for Your Girl and Mine, 1914

1.2. Ad for Your Girl and Mine, 1914

1.3. Local sponsorship of Your Girl and Mine, 1915

1.4. Poro College ad, 1918

2.1. DIY plans for motion-picture cameras, 1910–1912

2.2. Cover, Scientific American, 1913

2.3. Covers, Scientific American, 1914

2.4. Cover, Popular Electricity and the World’s Advance, 1914; ad, Scientific American, 1915

2.5. Cover, Scientific American, 1919

2.6. Illustrations, Scientific American Supplement, 1914

2.7. Moving-picture advertising apparatus, Motography, 1910

2.8. Ads for The Making of a Shoe, 1914

2.9. Ads for Gossard Corsets, 1915–1916

3.1. Dwight L. Elmendorf Programme for 1913–1914 season

3.2. Kimball Show postcard

3.3. First Methodist Episcopal

3.4. Ads for portable projection booths, 1913–1914

3.5. “Moving pictures aboard a battleship” postcard

3.6. Power ads, 1914–1915

3.7. Power ad, 1914

3.8. Power ad, 1915

3.9. Power ad, 1915

3.10. Suitcase projectors, Moving Picture World, 1913; Machinery, 1914

3.11. Ads for the Phantoscope, Optigraph, and Victor Animatograph, 1914–1917

3.12. Ad for the Pathéscope, 1915

3.13. Ads for the Pathéscope, 1915–1916

3.14. Ads for the Pathéscope, 1920

3.15. Photographs, Education by Visualization, 1920

4.1. Railway car as screening site, 1915

4.2. Announcement for Union Photoplay Theatre, 1915

4.3. The Workman’s Lesson, NAM pamphlet, 1913

4.4. Industrial Betterment Activities of the National Association of Manufacturers, 1913

4.5. NAM national convention, American Industries, 1913

4.6. General and targeted advertising, 1911–1916

5.1. Omaha Cement Show, 1915

5.2. Lectures at the Land Show, 1909

5.3. Postcard for National Cash Register, Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition, 1905

5.4. Ad for Land Show, 1911

5.5. Floor plan of Land Show, 1912

5.6. Ad for Great Northern Railway, 1912

5.7. Ad and postcard invitation for Great Northern Exhibit Car, 1913

5.8. Filming in Glacier National Park, 1913–1915

5.9. Sunset Theatre and layout of Southern Pacific building

5.10. Passenger car moving-picture theater, 1915

5.11. Postcard, Rainier Beer exhibit

5.12. Postcard, schedule for Washington Building lectures

5.13. New York Moving Picture Pavilion

5.14. Illinois and Pennsylvania theaters at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition

A.1. Traveling movie palace, ca. 1925

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a long time coming. For twenty years or so I have been searching and re-searching online the motion picture trade press, newspapers, and all manner of periodicals, keeping daily tabs on eBay listings, filling hard drives, and stuffing filing cabinets with material related to the history of non-theatrical cinema. (Kudos especially to the Internet Archive, Media History Digital Library, and the Hathi Trust Digital Library.) It turns out this field proved to be almost as rich, varied, and continuously surprising as the thousands of CDs that provided the soundtrack for all those hours of screen time in my home office. (Truth be told, in the big scheme of things, few bits of digitized information measure up to another version of “Misterioso” or “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” or to a track by John Prine or Bill Frisell, Gillian Welch or Ry Cooder, the Everly Brothers or Los Lobos.) For a good while I was more than satisfied to publish articles and book chapters and offer presentations on particular aspects of the history of non-theatrical cinema: films from Encyclopedia Britannica, the US Department of Agriculture, tractor companies, and the Oil Industry Information Committee, marketing campaigns for 16mm projectors, itinerant exhibition and traveling lecturers, advertising films, church screenings, educational organizations. Thanks to all the editors with whom I have worked and the many interlocutors at the Chicago Film Seminar, Orphan Film Symposiums, and Commonwealth Fund Conferences; at meetings of Domitor: The International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies; and at symposia sponsored by Stockholm University, Concordia University, Duke University, and the Australian Research Council Cultural Research Network.

I figured I could cobble these pieces together into a (big) volume. But Beyond the Movie Theater turned out to be a more focused and more ambitious undertaking that only draws indirectly here and there from these earlier publications, notably:

“Locating Early Non-theatrical Audiences,” in Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception, ed. Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 81–95.

“Search and Re-search: Digital Print Archives and the History of Multi-sited Cinema,” in The Arclight Guide to Media History and the Digital Humanities, ed. Eric Hoyt and Charles R. Acland (Brighton, UK: REFRAME Books, 2016), 55–72.

“The New Non-theatrical Cinema History?,” in Routledge Companion to New Cinema History, ed. Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers (New York: Routledge, 2019), 55–63.

The process of creating Beyond the Movie Theater has been equally challenging and rewarding, helped significantly by the encouragement and the clear-eyed advice of Brenda Weber, who I am lucky enough to have as an in-house reader (and much, much more), and Raina Polivka, a friend from Indiana who became my editor at the University of California Press. In different ways, Brenda and Raina helped me to reimagine what this book might be and do. And once the manuscript had taken shape, Patrick Vonderau and Haidee Wasson generously provided precisely the sort of on-the-mark, deeply informed, eminently useful readings that I needed.

More generally, Beyond the Movie Theater is the product of my years at Indiana University, which has been a great place to work, in no small measure because of a staff cohort that included Amy Cornell and Sabrina Walker and colleagues in film studies like Jim Naremore, Alex Doty, Barbara Klinger, Joan Hawkins, Josh Malitsky, Stephanie De Boer, Cara Caddoo, Ryan Powell, and Terri Francis. I’ve been energized by having had the deeply rewarding opportunity to work with a series of terrific graduate students: Julide Etem, Noelle Griffis, I-Lin Liu, Katherine Johnson, Andrea Kelley, Amanda Keeler, Saul Kutnicki, Julie Lavelle, Maria Fernanda Arias Osorio, James Paasche, Landon Palmer, Javier Ramirez, Natasha Ritsma, Jasmine Trice, Travis Vogan, Andy Uhrich, and Zeynep Yasar. Many of these folks also served as research assistants (some of them back in the days of scrolling microfilm). Julie also did a stint as managing editor of Film History: An International Journal, as did David Church, James Paasche, and Anthony Silvestri, who all contributed much more than keeping the quarterly train running on time. Editing this journal with their help has been for me an ongoing education in historiography and in film history, influencing Beyond the Movie Theater.

Taking on the editorship of Film History would have been impossible without the support I have received from the College of Arts & Science and the Media School at IU. I have also benefitted from funding from the College of Arts & Science’s Arts and Humanities Institute and from the Indiana University Arts & Humanities Council, which provided a TOME grant that has allowed this book to be available via open access. Doing administrative work can be a thankless undertaking, so let me acknowledge the host of administrators at IU from Kumble R. Subbaswamy and Jean Robinson through the current leadership of the Media School (Radhika Parameswaran and Walter Gantz) and Cinema and Media Studies (Raiford Guins) who have helped make it possible for me to continue doing research while teaching, directing dissertations, editing a journal, and chairing a department.

I have been exceedingly fortunate to be at IU when this public university (led by President Michael McRobbie) provided an unprecedented level of support for cinema and media studies, undertaking a massive audiovisual digitization effort and creating the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive, the world-class IU Cinema, and a new Media School. Rachael Stoeltje, who directs the archive, continues to be a valued collaborator, as does the founding director of the IU Cinema, Jon Vickers, who is simply one of the most dedicated and decent people I have ever met.

It is still surprising and gratifying that what for me is the solitary, sequestered, sometimes obsessive practice of scholarly research somehow has connected me with a broader community that I would otherwise never have encountered, leading to abiding if strangely intermittent friendships with faraway colleagues—Scott Curtis, Jake Smith, Lee Grieveson, Dan Streible, Richard Maltby, Patrick Vonderau, Charles Acland, and Haidee Wasson. Thanks to them and to so many others along the way, including Richard Abel, Robert Allen, Don Crafton, Marina Dahlquist, Marsha Gordon, Eric Hoyt, Jane Gaines, Alison Griffiths, Jeff Klenotic, Jon Lewis, Chuck Maland, Mike Mashon, Ross Melnick, Paul Moore, Charles Musser, Jan Olsson, Dana Polan, Eric Smoodin, Peter Stanfield, and Jacqueline Stewart.

Last but hardly least, I am sending my love and gratitude to my terrific sisters, Andi and Beth, who carry on what I loved most about my parents; to my older sons, Moby and Graham, and to their partners, Terri and Carolyn, and to the smart, funny, irrepressible new batch of Wallers in Kentucky—Poppy, Isaac, and Scarlett. Meanwhile, in Bloomington (somewhere in the outer reaches of Kentuckiana), my youngest son, Jake, has reinvigorated my life in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible, and my partner, Brenda, has been, in ways that I couldn’t then have imagined, the good thing in my life that Patty Larkin sung about twenty-five years ago.

Introduction

In the beginning were movie theaters. Well, not quite. But by the early 1910s, thousands and thousands of venues whose primary business was exhibiting movies had become an established and probably unavoidable fixture of daily life in villages, small towns, cities, and metropolitan areas across all regions of the US. Entrepreneurial and unabashedly commercial, these enterprises sought to profit by regularly offering nationally available screen entertainment (the movies) while remaining in many ways localized and individualized. In terms of profit margins and cultural prominence, the commercial American film industry was as much about theaters as it was about studios, stars, and scandals. Moreover, these accessible venues for inexpensive popular amusement often functioned, directly and indirectly, as key public sites where racial segregation, class relations, and identities related to gender, sex, and age were enacted, enforced, and negotiated. Without taking movie theaters into account, there is no explaining the cultural backlash against the movies or what is often understood as the increasing consolidation, rationalization, and corporatization of American cinema as a mass entertainment business of unprecedented scale. Understandably, movie theaters, the activity of moviegoing, and the business of theatrical exhibition have been the object of valuable research by historians of silent cinema, who have paid particular attention to the flourishing of nickelodeons, the composition of movie audiences, and the changes in programming strategies with the rise of feature films and spectacular serials.[1]

However, looking away from the glimmer of the theatrical screen and stepping outside the light of the marquee reveals that during the 1910s, there were a host of other sites and occasions for screening moving pictures, a surprisingly varied range of audiences, and widespread recognition of film’s potential to serve different functions and purposes. I’ll refer to this vast territory as non-theatrical cinema, with the obvious caveat that on certain occasions theaters became sites for screening events that were not the movies and movie-like programs were shown at sites that could not be mistaken for conventional theaters. The use of moving pictures beyond the movie theater and the much-noted promise of film as a non-commercial medium and a tool during the second decade of the twentieth century are the overarching concerns of this book. In focusing on these topics I aim not to displace mass entertainment, Hollywood, and the movie theater in favor of some other radically different, adamantly non-commercial version of film production and circulation. There is no displacing the movies, nor should there be. Rather, I argue that we need to extend, enrich, and complicate the history of American cinema by attending not only to the movies and the movie theater but also to the full panoply of historically specific non-theatrical practices and possibilities, which in many ways constituted an Other Cinema.[2]

Some years ago I somewhat unknowingly began working toward this end by posing what seemed to me a fairly straightforward question: Where and how were moving pictures in 1915 used in ways different than the typical exhibition policies and strategies of movie theaters in the United States? In other words, what was non-theatrical cinema in 1915? This was a decidedly high-profile year for the American film industry, marked by the release of The Birth of a Nation and the protests it generated, the unprecedented celebrity status of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, the opening of Universal City, and the Supreme Court’s ruling that motion pictures as a “business pure and simple” did not warrant the protection of the First Amendment when faced with state and local censorship ordinances. With access to searchable digital archives of American newspapers and all manner of periodicals, including—thanks to the invaluable Media History Digital Library—the motion picture and commercial entertainment industry trade press, I was able to find much evidence of cinema beyond the movie theater. Following up on these findings by, for example, tracking over several years advertising campaigns that relied on moving pictures and identifying the widespread availability of lectures illustrated with moving pictures, quickly led me well beyond 1915—a research process, again, greatly facilitated by the use of digital archives.[3] Discovering and amassing this material prompted a revision of my initial research question, as follows: during a decade when the nickelodeon boom—fueled by widely distributed, inexpensively priced, readily accessible moving pictures—turned into the extraordinary economic and cultural phenomenon known as the movies, how was non-theatrical cinema imagined, described, promoted, and practiced in the US?[4]

Looking for traces of moving pictures that were put to use outside of commercial venues also underscored for me early in this project that the distinction between theatrical and non-theatrical cinema, rather than being clear-cut and categorical, was relational, variable, and historically grounded—a point that I will return to throughout this book. Perhaps paradoxically, researching non-theatrical cinema requires taking into account theatrical exhibition and various screening sites that operated like and were designated as theaters. In fact, I begin my study by examining in some detail the exhibition in November 1917 of a film entitled Twilight Sleep at the Grand Theater, a moving picture show in Wilmington, North Carolina. Using this particular screening as my curtain-raiser reflects my abiding fascination with historical research undertaken from a local perspective. But the central subject of this book is not the Grand Theater or Twilight Sleep, nor is it Wilmington or the year the United States entered World War I.

Foregoing a chronological approach, Beyond the Movie Theater ranges over the 1910s (give or take a year or two), with examples drawn from across the US, most often concerning localities nowhere near the centers of the commercial film industry. Although this decade saw the preliminary attempts to market portable 35mm projectors and the limited availability in the US of inflammable “safety” film, the term non-theatrical had not yet come into common use in and out of the film industry. In addition, it would not be until at least the mid-1930s that 16mm (introduced in 1923) became the default format for educators, government agencies, and businesses. Yet the 1910s constitute an important formative period in the history of non-theatrical cinema, a decade in which possibilities were explored and practices established and the significance of moving pictures in and for America far exceeded the influential reach of the commercial film industry.

In exploring this decade, I rely on ephemeral bits and pieces of the past like postcards, pamphlets, and official reports, but even more on information culled from contemporary print sources: daily and weekly newspapers, the motion picture trade press, fan magazines, and a wide array of other periodicals, from prominent weeklies like Scientific American and Saturday Evening Post to specialized publications like Presbyterian of the South, American Industries: The Manufacturers’ Magazine, School Board Journal, and Judicious Advertising. The digital archives containing these invaluable documents are frequently—perhaps inevitably—incomplete and selective, and the information in digitized print sources is often fragmentary and unverifiable, more suggestive than conclusive. Yet the mass of heretofore largely ignored or unexamined articles, editorials, news items, announcements, and advertisements that reference the use of moving pictures apart from profit-based theatrical exhibition articulate, from sometimes distinctly different vantage points, how non-theatrical cinema was understood and put to use. This piecemeal and evocative evidence points toward an expansive and variegated history of American cinema during the early twentieth century.

Beyond the Movie Theater is fully grounded in the surprisingly vast and disparate material concerning non-theatrical cinema gathered from this voluminous print discourse. I do not marshal this information in the service of a chronological narrative, encyclopedic enumeration, or systematic genre-by-genre or company-by-company survey. Instead, I will examine cinema outside the movie theater by offering a diverse series of detailed, sharply focused discussions of certain screenings, films, periodicals, organizations, advertising campaigns, court cases, public events, and localities.

By adopting this approach to non-theatrical cinema, my project loosely resembles microhistory, less in terms of the models that influential figures like Giovanni Levi and Carlo Ginzburg offer, and more in line with Siegfried Kracauer’s discussion of microhistory in History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969), a posthumous volume published several years after his Theory of Film (1960).[5] “The photographic media,” Kracauer proposes, “make it much easier for us to incorporate the transient phenomena of the outer world, thereby redeeming them from oblivion. Something of this kind will also have to be said of history.”[6] Indeed, the most obvious instance of “transient phenomena” related to non-theatrical cinema during the 1910s that I have found is an undated and unmailed real-photo postcard of a screening in what appears to be some sort of Quonset hut (fig. 0.1). The projectionist stands near the back of the room operating a small hand-cranked machine; posters on the walls that may refer to films point to both religious (The Passion Play, Life of Mary [?]) and secular (Red Riding Hood, The Black Mutes Daughter [?]) subjects, though the actual screen is outside the photograph’s frame. The rows of seats, all on the same level, are filled with intermingled children and well-dressed men and women, a white audience of various ages, similar perhaps to a church congregation. A handwritten message signed “mother” on the back of the postcard asks: “do you know any of these.” No, we don’t and we most likely can’t. I am not sure if incorporating this postcard “redeems” this instant and these long-ago spectators from oblivion, but as striking, evocative evidence of a “transient” practice, this bit of ephemera stands for me as an invitation to explore America’s other cinema.

FIGURE 0.1. Undated real photo postcard.

To borrow certain of Kracauer’s terms: Beyond the Movie Theater unapologetically reflects a “devotion to minutiae” and hopefully serves to “vindicate the figure of the [historian as] collector,” a role I have long embraced.[7] In working on this project I have been committed to offering a “fact-oriented historical account” grounded in the “particular” and “events . . . in their concreteness,” while being fully aware that every stage in the process entails choices about selection, perspective, and arrangement.[8] Covering a full decade and facing a “heterogeneous” historical terrain that is “full of intrinsic contingencies . . . virtually endless . . . and indeterminate as to meaning,” I offer here not one but an array of what might be termed micro-histories, beginning with an examination of Twilight Sleep, and also including, to mention only a few, close looks at sponsored public events in Little Rock, Arkansas; the use of motion pictures by a church in Bakersfield, California; the marketing of the Pathéscope projector; the activities of the Business Men’s League in St. Louis, Missouri; screenings arranged by railroad corporations promoting the American West; and representations of the movie theater in Motion Picture Story Magazine.[9] Unlike in the many examples of microhistory surveyed by Siguròur Gylfil Magnússon and István M. Szijártó in What is Microhistory?, individual people only occasionally take center stage in this book.[10] Rather, to get a sense of how non-theatrical cinema in the 1910s was imagined and realized, I reference a variety of sites, uses, films, programs, campaigns, screenings, and audiences, almost all drawn from “the world of small events,” though not always from the “local” in a strictly geographical sense.[11]

Like most commentators on this historiographical approach, Kracauer does not simply validate “micro investigations” as an end in themselves, unrelated to some broader generalizations.[12] “The micro-macro link” might well seem, as Zoltán Boldizsár Simon declares, to be “the most puzzling and mysterious issue” for microhistorical work.[13] But that depends, I would suggest, on what would qualify as sufficiently macro. “Microhistory claims,” the editors of Small Worlds: Method, Meaning, and Narrative in Microhistory propose, “explicitly or implicitly illuminate more general truths, wider patterns, or at least draw some analogy to other cases.”[14] Referencing Theory of Film, Kracauer uses the analogy of the movement between close-ups and long shots in cinematic narratives to argue that “the historian must be in a position freely to move between the macro and micro dimensions.”[15] At its most extreme distance from the “world of small events,” Kracauer writes, “high altitude” macro history offers “speculative syntheses” and traffics in abstractions, evoking “universal historical laws” and the “total historical process.”[16] But there are, he insists, multiple “higher levels of generality” and certain “uniformities,” and the historian should aim toward an “interpenetration of macro and micro history.”[17]

The heterogeneous, fragmentary, and rich field of non-theatrical cinema in the US during the 1910s does not “illuminate” and cannot be explained in terms of a master narrative concerning origin or institutionalization, progress or decline. The evidence points to a different “level of historical generality,” more in the nature of a heuristic definition: the non-theatrical cinema at this particular historical juncture (and perhaps up to World War II) was multi-purposable in its uses and multi-sited in where it could be shown, targeted at particular audiences and in some manner sponsored. And this formulation, in turn, generates the historical questions that inform this book: How was this potential utility, functionality, and ubiquity imagined and realized? How did sponsorship actually operate? What audiences were targeted? What extended and what limited the reach and the range of non-theatrical cinema in the US? The level of specificity and particularity I rely on in exploring these questions is not intended as a means of filling gaps in or correcting the historical record, but as a way of plumbing the breadth and depth, tracking the regularity as well as the variety of non-theatrical cinema, as evidenced in certain locations and applications, certain agendas and audiences, and certain events and occasions during the 1910s.

TWILIGHT SLEEP COMES TO WILMINGTON

Before the Grand Theater in Wilmington, North Carolina, opened for its matinee show on Wednesday, November 21, 1917, a select group gathered at this movie theater for what was a decidedly atypical screening event: a “private exhibition” of the film scheduled to be shown that day. Since Wilmington—then the second-largest city in the state with a population of over twenty-five thousand—did not have a local censorship board, three prominent clubwomen joined four men, including the mayor, the city attorney, and a state legislator to make up an ad hoc committee tasked with passing judgment on Twilight Sleep (1915), a two-reel motion picture quite unlike the standard fare at the Grand.[18] Owned and operated by the locally based Howard-Wells Amusement Company, this theater was in 1917 a venue for whites only, as were all of Wilmington’s downtown theaters (two “colored” theaters then served the large African American population in this strictly segregated city).[19] The Grand was open every day except for Sunday and specialized exclusively in big-name feature films from companies like Paramount and Universal, with five changes of bill each week.[20] Only a few times during 1917 did newspaper advertisements for the Grand specifically mention any shorts or live performers. Notable exceptions were when locally produced footage of the city was offered as an “extra attraction” and when the theater booked the British War Office’s timely docu-propaganda piece, The Battle of the Somme, pitched as a “vivid picture of history in the making” that ran once weekly in two-reel episodes during November and December.[21] On November 21, the second installment of The Battle of the Somme preceded the screening of Twilight Sleep, and no other films were scheduled.

What now seem like decidedly strange combinations happened all the time in movie theaters during the 1910s—action-packed serial episodes could run back- to-back with picturesque travelogues, slapstick comedy with earnest social-problem dramas. But pairing The Battle of the Somme and Twilight Sleep at the Grand made for a particularly striking juxtaposition of two quite different versions of topical, (purportedly) non-fiction film in the service of persuasion. While The Battle of the Somme pictured the conditions American soldiers faced in the trenches now that the US was fully engaged in the Great War, Twilight Sleep’s message was more directed toward women, as it made the case for “the latest method of painless childbirth” (fig. 0.2). Dämmerschlaf, translated as “twilight sleep,” was developed in Germany and introduced to the US in 1907, though it only became widely publicized and more available in the mid-1910s. This procedure relied on a trained physician administering morphine and scopolamine to a carefully sequestered woman who had begun labor, so that, in the words of an influential early account in McClure’s Magazine, “although she may receive certain reflex impressions of pain [the woman undergoing this procedure] does not consciously perceive them, and immediately forgets them.” The goal was “both painlessness and forgetfulness.”[22]

FIGURE 0.2. Ad for Twilight Sleep, Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, November 21, 1917.

Larger-than-usual ads in Wilmington newspapers claimed with the hyperbolic fervor of a carnival barker that Twilight Sleep was “the only motion picture clinic ever produced. Positively the most unique production ever produced. Never before seen by human eye.” Yet, at the same time, the producers guaranteed that “this film has been arranged in a most refined manner and there is nothing in it to offend anyone of either sex.”[23] This sensational, revelatory, educational, inoffensive film arrived in Wilmington not from one of the studios turning out new product every week but thanks to an organization called the Modern Motherhood League.

There could well have been different films or variant films circulating between 1915 and 1918 under the title Twilight Sleep, and a print of this film has yet to be discovered. But descriptions in newspapers and the trade press consistently indicate that Twilight Sleep moved chronologically from a woman in labor, being prepared and given injections, through her “painless” and safe delivery, to her quick recovery and healthy newborn infant, with the twilight sleep procedure presented as being carefully monitored and entirely beneficial. Direct contrasts between the “peaceful” experience of birth using twilight sleep and the “suffering experienced” during “natural” childbirth underscored the superiority of the new procedure.[24] Billboard noted in its review of the film in 1915 that “a very thorough and complete description of this method for painless childbirth is depicted,” and “plenty of titles . . . describe the situations and scenes in detail.”[25] Variety called it “more or less of a scientific work in pictures,” while also noting that “of course the pictures were staged and produced.”[26] Promotional material for the screening at the Grand (and elsewhere) insisted that “the films [sic] were taken during an actual operation and show fully and clearly how womankind is emancipated from her ordeal and how the curse of Eve is removed from mankind.”[27] An intertitle could have announced this miraculous emancipation from an age-old biological/biblical curse thanks to science. But it is impossible to tell precisely how “fully and clearly” the print of Twilight Sleep screened in Wilmington presented its scenes of natural and assisted childbirth—or even what a “clear” and “full” moving image account of childbirth might have entailed in 1917.

What we can reasonably surmise is that anyone attending a screening of Twilight Sleep at the Grand would very likely have had at least a passing familiarity with this method of childbirth, since twilight sleep became a cause célèbre and subject of impassioned public debate from 1914 through 1916, when it had, according to a recent study, “a wide, faddish popularity among middle- and upper-class White women.”[28] Historians like Margarete Sandelowski have convincingly examined the far-reaching significance of twilight sleep and the controversy it generated in terms of changing attitudes toward midwifery and hospitalization, women’s “lay activism” in the name of greater self-determination, the racial and class basis of eugenics, and the professionalization of obstetrics.[29] “Relatively few women experienced twilight sleep directly during its heyday,” Jacqueline H. Wolf writes, “yet the treatment changed everything about how American physicians perceived and treated birth and how American women anticipated and experienced it.”[30]

Wolf notes that the “twilight sleep movement vanished from the public scene within two years of its appearance.”[31] While this timeline seems generally accurate in terms of magazine and journal articles, Twilight Sleep the motion picture continued to be exhibited into 1918, traveling far beyond the urban areas where this procedure had actually been practiced. Wilmington, it turns out, was only one of many bookings in North Carolina and across the South, which was the last region to see Twilight Sleep. The wide circulation of Twilight Sleep attests to the cultural visibility of this approach to childbirth, pain, and the “emancipation” of a certain class of white women, while also pointing toward a notable use of cinema distinct from the commercial strategies common in the mid-1910s.

The initial reliance on moving pictures to explain and promote this approach to childbirth followed on the activities of the National Twilight Sleep Association, which was founded in January 1915 by deeply committed women in New York City.[32] This organization focused its efforts on cities in the Northeast, historian Laurence G. Miller notes, sponsoring lectures in department stores and other sites, circulating pamphlets, and garnering widespread press coverage.[33] On March 21, 1915, a presentation on twilight sleep featuring motion pictures was delivered at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, to an audience of physicians and journalists.[34] This was the first of several “private,” non-ticketed screenings to restricted audiences, though most often—as in Wilmington—these screenings were arranged to determine whether the film could be publicly exhibited in a particular locality.[35] In New Orleans, for example, the mayor called on “five leading club women” to report on Twilight Sleep, after the Orleans Parish Medical Society, flexing its professional muscles, demanded that the mayor prohibit the exhibition of Twilight Sleep since the screening “would create a demand for a treatment which was not always practicable to administer and which had not as yet become a matter of general practice.”[36] The mayor instead followed the lay committee’s advice and allowed the film to be screened.

From the outset, the aim was to exhibit Twilight Sleep as a ticketed attraction in movie theaters as well as multi-purpose venues like the Belasco, self-proclaimed as “Washington’s Playhouse Beautiful.” Directly after the National Press Club preview, the Belasco advertised a lecture on “the real truth” of twilight sleep, “illustrated with moving pictures.”[37] The film’s distributor was the Motherhood Educational Society, which unsuccessfully challenged the banning of Twilight Sleep in Chicago, then ran advertisements in Moving Picture World and Motion Picture News offering state rights for Twilight Sleep—marketed to potential buyers as a feature-length attraction, comprised of a lecture “which can be delivered by any one possessing fair education and a reasonable amount of intelligence,” and two reels of motion pictures, “making a show about an one hour and a half.”[38] As Maureen Rogers explains, state rights was a “flexible” system in which the owner of a film licensed to “sub-distributors” the right to exhibit the film in whatever manner they chose in a particular territory (usually a state or region) for a certain period of time.[39] The licensees of Twilight Sleep typically rented a theater for a limited engagement, most often for one or two days.

The Motherhood Educational Society apparently managed to sell certain territories, since screenings began, for example, in Texas in July 1915. But on November 24, 1915, this venture declared bankruptcy, citing liabilities of $14,000 and declaring that its limited assets, including the Twilight Sleep films, were of little value.[40] In name, at least, the Motherhood Educational Society lived on, however. Through 1916 and 1917, promotional material used for a host of bookings in the Midwest and the West identified Twilight Sleep as being presented “under the auspices” of the Motherhood Educational Society (or the Western Motherhood Educational Society).[41] This claim was still being made when the same Twilight Sleep program was exhibited as late as 1921 in a small town in Missouri.[42]

In April 1916, another distributor entered the field, when the Modern Motherhood League—incorporated “to distribute literature and medical theories of all kinds”—began advertising the availability of state rights for Twilight Sleep, with its “scenes of realism that stagger the imagination (fig. 0.3).[43] This company asserted in Motion Picture News that it was offering a “new series of Twilight Sleep pictures,” 3,000 feet in length and entirely different from previous releases under this title, though nothing in subsequent press coverage supports this claim.[44] It was through the Modern Motherhood League that Twilight Sleep eventually arrived in Wilmington in November 1917, after the rights for North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama had been purchased by the newly formed Wilmington Film and Supply Company.[45]

FIGURE 0.3. Ad for the Modern Motherhood League, Motion Picture News, April 22, 1916.

It is worth underscoring that the Modern Motherhood League, like the Motherhood Educational Society, was a commercial enterprise that had nothing to do with “motherhood” beyond seeking to profit from a controversial and highly topical film that was about childbirth. Neither of these distributors were connected with the efforts of activist women who drove the twilight sleep movement in 1914 and 1915. Yet the names chosen for these business ventures obviously mattered, for they appeared prominently in much of the promotional material related to Twilight Sleep, no doubt because they gave the impression that a legitimate, non-commercial, progressive organization in some way authorized or was responsible for this special attraction, which warranted higher than normal ticket prices. At the Grand, for instance, tickets were twenty-five cents for all screenings of Twilight Sleep, whereas typical prices were five to ten cents for matinees and fifteen cents for evening shows.

This promotional strategy was clearly evident in Wilmington. For the Grand screenings, Twilight Sleep was advertised not only as being authentic in that it was “produced . . . under the personal direction of Dr. Kurt E. Schlossnik [sic], personal associate of Doctors Gause and Kronig, who are the original inventors of the wonderful method of painless childbirth known as ‘Twilight Sleep,’ ” but also that it arrived in Wilmington “under the auspices of the Modern Motherhood League.” This explicit acknowledgement of what I will call sponsorship is one significant way that Twilight Sleep differed from the standard programs offered by the Grand. This difference mattered even though the acknowledgement of sponsorship would appear to have been in this case purely a marketing strategy. “Under the auspices” signified value added and testified to legitimacy.

A second, even more telling difference is that separate screenings of Twilight Sleep at the Grand were designated for women (at 1:45. 3:15, 4:45, and 6:15 p.m.) and for men (at 8:00 and 9:15 p.m.), with children prohibited from attending any screenings. Other theaters booking the film enacted different prohibitions and provisions: no screenings at all for men, certain designated screenings for both men and women, no one under sixteen admitted, no one under eighteen admitted except wives, no unmarried men at the screening for men, all theater personnel at the screenings had to be female, and so on.[46] These varied restrictions were designed to prevent censors from banning the film, while also boosting attendance. There is some evidence that the strategy worked. For example, when the Strand Theatre in Raleigh, North Carolina, reserved one evening screening of Twilight Sleep for men only, a newspaper in the city reported that “several hundred men fought desperately last night for places at the ticket window,” and more than a thousand men packed the theater expecting “something risqué,” which the “very proper” show didn’t deliver.[47]

Delimiting the potential attendance and explicitly targeting a segment of the audience did not occur with any other playdate at the Grand in 1917. Neither did any other film of the more than two hundred screened at the Grand that year arrive with its own lecturer. “Twilight Sleep in motion pictures and lecture by Dr. Arthur H. Rollnick” is what advertising promised, helping to sell the screening as an eye-opening “clinic” covering “science’s greatest triumph.” By the time Rollnick appeared in Wilmington, he was a well-traveled performer, having promoted and presented Twilight Sleep for over a year in Kentucky, West Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina. Identified as a distinguished “professor” who had first-hand knowledge of the German originators of twilight sleep, Rollnick was initially identified as German then described as being from Belgium or South Africa (both suitably foreign and preferable to Germany once the US had entered the war).[48] Rollnick would on occasion claim to “own” Twilight Sleep and to be responsible for renting the theaters where it was booked.[49]

From the first screenings of motion pictures depicting twilight sleep in 1915, the presence of a lecturer was an essential part of the event. Initially, this role was usually filled by Dr. Kurt E. Schlossingk, the man most associated with the procedure in the US. Schlossingk had trained at the Freiburg clinic, had overseen the use of this technique at the Jewish Maternity and Lebanon Hospitals in New York City, and (according to promotional material) was actually featured in the footage that had been shot for Twilight Sleep in a Brooklyn hospital.[50] Schlossingk lectured with Twilight Sleep in Connecticut and Texas, but as the film began to circulate more widely in 1916, different women presented the lecture that Schlossingk had authored.[51] In Buffalo, New York, for example, advertisements for the Teck Theater claimed that the film would be “described by Mrs. Charlotte M. La Rue in a Lecture compiled from authentic utterances by Dr. Kurt E. Schlossingk.”[52] In St. Louis, where the film was booked with “Charlie Chaplin’s latest comedy release as an additional attraction,” a newspaper editorial, entitled “Don’t Frighten Young Wives,” complained that the “woman lecturer” “dwells too much on the dangers that beset young mothers without the use of anesthetics such as are used in Twilight Sleep.”[53] These screenings sometimes added another live, more interactive component: an “open discussion” or a question-and-answer session after the film led by the lecturer.[54]

Not surprisingly, as Rollnick traveled the South with Twilight Sleep, he claimed to have a direct connection to Schlossingk and the painless childbirth movement. Rollnick’s approach to the role he played with Twilight Sleep is suggested by his subsequent project. In 1919 and 1920 he lectured and promoted another readily exploitable state rights film, Are You Fit to Marry? (1919), which was billed as “a great moral lesson showing the results of unclean living. Scenes of realism that stagger the imagination, never before seen by the human eye!”[55] Are You Fit to Marry? was the new title given to The Black Stork (1917), a sort of docudrama about a surgeon who allows a child born with severe birth defects to die rather than operate, based on the notorious case of Henry Haiselden, champion of euthanasia in the service of eugenics. Rollnick’s connection to the development of the exploitation film as a commercially driven niche genre and a mode of exhibition is paralleled by the afterlife of Twilight Sleep, as Eric Schaefer notes in his history of this genre.[56] Cut loose from any connection to the movement for painless childbirth, footage identified as “Twilight Sleep” surfaced as one more short in a multi-film show;[57] by 1932 “a Twilight Sleep birth” had become part of William Charles Bettis’s “thrilling, smashing, dramatic”—and “educational”—illustrated lectures on “social hygiene” that played movie theaters.[58]

As this account suggests, the history of Twilight Sleep opens onto broader questions concerning the operation of local censorship, the commercial market for non-fiction film and exploitation programs, and the ways that “twilight sleep” as a childbirth procedure and as a means of furthering women’s “emancipation” moved through a certain sector of American public life. For my purposes, the exhibition of this film at the Grand in Wilmington and many other movie theaters across the US also points to a certain degree of flexibility in the operation of these venues, offering evidence of presentational strategies and uses of moving pictures beyond familiar movie exhibition practices. As became apparent as soon as the Motherhood Educational Society and the Modern Motherhood League offered to sell state rights for Twilight Sleep, the aim in distributing and exhibiting this heavily promoted combination of moving pictures and lecture was to turn a profit—the same as any standard feature film released by the commercial motion picture industry. But the presence of a lecturer, the insistence that the program arrived “under the auspices” of a sponsor, and the strictly delimited attendance policy all marked the theatrical exhibition of Twilight Sleep as an appreciably different event than the usual night-at-the-movies at a theater like the Grand.

Some flexibility in scheduling was also apparent in the operation of other movie theaters in Wilmington. The Bijou, for instance, slotted into its regular bill over four days in December 1917 a four-part promotional film about the Curtis Publishing Company (whose magazines then included the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal), with each “chapter” in this account of the “miracles of modern business” presented by a representative of this company.[59] More fully divorced from the regular movie schedule was a public service screening presented by the State Insurance Department of North Carolina at 10:00 a.m. before the Bijou opened for regular business. As part of an “Electrical and Firemen’s Institute,” the “free movies” offered on this occasion were intended “to illustrate the dangers of fire,” with all “the people of the city, and especially the children of the schools” invited to the theater.[60] For a special screening in January 1917 at the Victoria theater, the audience was much more strictly limited. Physicians and surgeons attending the semiannual convention of the Third District Medical Society of North Carolina heard from an expert from the Red Cross who showed and discussed motion pictures—like Extraction of a Shrapnel Ball from the Regions of the Heart—that detailed surgical procedures being carried out on the wounded in French hospitals.[61] Wilmington was one of several stops for these films, which were screened during 1916 and 1917 to groups of surgeons and physicians across the US, including events held at a country club in Munster, Indiana, and a hotel in El Paso, Texas.[62]

On occasion during 1917, then, Wilmington’s moving picture theaters scheduled sponsored films with a lecturer or provided a screening site for “free” films hosted by professional or state organizations. Conversely, sites that were not theaters in any conventional sense could offer programs clearly modeled on theatrical shows. For example, the Red Cross set up a motion picture show in a tent during the Fifth Annual Corn Show and Poultry Exhibit held in Wilmington in November 1917, with films provided free of charge by the company that owned the local theaters. Volunteers collected the ten-cent admission fee, which went to supporting the Red Cross.[63] Screenings at Lumina, a popular resort at nearby Wrightsville Beach, were not aimed at fundraising or generating profits but served as an added attraction for visitors who came to dance in the pavilion or enjoy the beach. For years, Lumina had offered a multi-reel film program at 8:15 every evening except Sunday, advertising “free motion pictures over the ocean waves”—a quite literal promise, since the screen was mounted in the ocean and people watched from the sand, the surf, and the hotel’s veranda (fig. 0.4).[64] By 1917, this version of summertime open-air moviegoing was an established tradition, and like the venues in downtown Wilmington, Lumina announced in newspaper ads its daily changing program.

FIGURE 0.4. Postcard (top), “Surf Bathing in Front of Lumina,” ca. 1917; Lumina ad (bottom), Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, July 15, 1917.

Beyond Lumina’s screen in the surf and the Red Cross tent at the Corn Show, Wilmington’s newspapers provide other evidence of cinema outside the confines of the city’s movie theaters in 1917. It is somewhat surprising given national trends that the local press has no mention of motion pictures being used by the YMCA or any of the city’s churches and social clubs. There is coverage, however, of the introduction of “free” motion picture screenings elsewhere in the state—shows for prisoners as part of reform efforts at the state penitentiary as well as the University of North Carolina’s newly established “educational film service,” a state-wide initiative to distribute for only shipping costs “industrial, educational, and scenic” films to “schools, boards of trade, YMCA’s and other organizations.”[65] Likewise, Wilmington newspapers saw something newsworthy in the “moving picture health car” that traveled with a projectionist and a lecturer through rural areas of the state on behalf of the North Carolina State Board of Health (fig. 0.5). Syndicated articles noted the high demand for this free service, which consisted of “modern, scientific health films . . . interspersed with comedies and romances furnishing a program that is interesting, instructive and at the same time highly entertaining”—not least of all because the lecturer offers “a varied program of jokes, local interest stories and lectures.”[66]

FIGURE 0.5. Moving Picture Health Car, Health Bulletin, May 1916.

Within Wilmington proper, the one non-theatrical site that garnered the attention of the local press was Hemenway School, the city’s white high school, opened in 1915, complete with a “moving picture room,” which purportedly made it “the first school in the state to utilize motion pictures in connection with nature study, geography, history, etc.”[67] Newspapers do not mention any day-to-day instructional uses of film at Hemenway, but two special events held at the school’s auditorium during 1917 were covered. This site served as something of a multi-purpose space available for community use, including musical recitals, a presentation about the YWCA’s war work, a series of lectures on the Bible, and training institutes for public school teachers.[68] The Wilmington Chamber of Commerce sponsored the appearance at Hemenway of the National Cash Register Company’s touring program devoted to “community betterment,” featuring a four-reel film and a lecturer. The Chamber of Commerce invited “sales people and others employed in the stores of the city” to attend; the school arranged an additional screening for students.[69]

The local press paid more attention to a patriotic benefit arranged by the Colonial Dames (an organization composed of descendants of settlers in America before 1776) for the American Field Ambulance Service. The attraction in this case was an “official” motion picture—Our American Boys in the European War—showing these volunteers in action, “rescuing the wounded from the first line trench at Verdun.” “The pictures will be presented under very pleasing circumstances,” the Wilmington Morning Star announced, with the hall decorated in “French and American colors,” “young Wilmington society women” dressed as Red Cross nurses serving as ushers, and a group singing of “America” and the “Star-Spangled Banner.”[70] As with all of these screenings, Jim Crow conditions meant that even public events open to young and old, male and female, were limited by race.

The public screening of Our American Boys in the European War at Hemenway School under the auspices of the Wilmington chapter of the Colonial Dames, the footage of surgical procedures projected in a movie theater for attendees at a local medical society convention, the presentation of Twilight Sleep first to an ad-hoc censorship committee, then complete with lecturer (and two reels of The Battle of the Somme) at the Grand Theater separately to men and women—these screening sites, exhibition practices, and uses of moving pictures were each in significant ways distinct from what the city’s well-established movie theaters regularly offered on a daily basis. In this variety, Wilmington was not at all unique, though my specific examples would have differed had I taken as my starting point another city in North Carolina, a small town in Texas, or a northern metropolis.

Based on the information about film exhibition that made it into the city’s two daily newspapers during 1917, the availability and deployment of moving pictures in Wilmington offers evidence of a basic claim that informs this book: well before the widespread adoption of 16mm, even the residents of a small North Carolina city could learn of and perhaps experience a version of cinema that was sponsored in some manner or other, multi-sited in where and how it was exhibited, multi-purposed in the uses to which it was put, and targeted in terms of its audiences.[71]

CINEMA ACCORDING TO MOTION PICTURE STORY MAGAZINE

As the examples from Wilmington suggest, putting film to use apart from the movie theater in the 1910s did not necessarily (or always) mean intentionally copying, challenging, circumventing, or collaborating with the American commercial film industry. However, these efforts were inevitably framed (and largely overshadowed) by the burgeoning business of film exhibition, the social experience of cinemagoing, and the cultural resonance of Hollywood’s made-for-profit, regularly delivered entertainment. Facts and figures purportedly testifying to the unprecedented popularity of theatrical cinema regularly surfaced in newspapers as well as the motion picture trade press. For example, The Nickelodeon reported in 1910 that “in St. Louis, it is estimated that 175,000 persons visit the motion picture houses each day, or about one-fourth of the population,” while in Cincinnati, “249,000 people or one in every fourteen persons in the city daily attend these shows.”[72] There is no way to verify these figures, but the number of people viewing motion pictures outside of theaters surely paled in comparison to these “devotees.” Given the inescapable presence of the commercial industry—projected on screens, visible on public thoroughfares, and generating countless columns of print—it is notable that non-theatrical cinema garnered the attention it did in trade periodicals like The Nickelodeon and Moving Picture World and even in the pages of Motion Picture Story Magazine (hereafter, MPSM), the first successful American magazine aimed at fans rather than exhibitors and producers.[73]

From its introduction in February 1911 and continuing after its name change to Motion Picture Magazine in March 1914, MPSM sought to capture a profitable share of what it called the “great Motion Picture public” by offering short stories or “novelettes” based on current releases (illustrated with photographs drawn from these films) as well as photographs, caricatures, articles, interviews, and news updates concerning filmdom’s “leading players.”[74] Columns devoted to answering inquiries from readers and contests soliciting votes and opinions further encouraged the development of a fan culture, as did the frequent publication of poems, at least some of which seem to have been submitted by readers.

Fan magazines of the 1930s and 1940s would pay little attention to how and where movies were screened, much less to the business of film exhibition. But for Motion Picture Story Magazine in the early 1910s, the screening site was the all-important interface between the film industry and society. MPSM defended and celebrated the enthusiasm of fans and the popularity of moviegoing by insisting that the ubiquitous and well-established motion picture theater was as safe as it was commercially successful. Moreover, for only a nickel or a dime, these theaters—then still under attack as ground-zero for the “menace” posed by the movies—provided an experience that was, according to MPSM, both entertaining and educational and therefore beneficial to individuals of all ages and to society at large.

The often hackneyed poetry that appeared in every issue of Motion Picture Story Magazine was largely epistles to picture personalities, but certain poems testified to the deeply rewarding pleasures of moviegoing and celebrated the industry’s success in delivering entertainment to a mass audience as “Into the portals, aglitter with light / Stream crowds of devotees, night after / night.”[75] What these fans find in the moving picture theater is nothing less than “the cure” for the “friendlessness and bitterness” of a “deadly commonplace” life “devoid of tint or grace.”[76] No wonder, then, in the words of a poem from 1912, that

The fascination of the films

Is growing every day

A source of recreation which

Has surely come to stay;

The class of entertainment

To which everybody goes—

The educating, captivating,

Moving Picture shows![77]

The millions of satisfied patrons daily filling theaters nationwide attested to the remarkable reach and the powerful effects of this commercial juggernaut, as “Their Audience” from the May 1912 issue rhapsodically exclaimed:

Have the pictures come to stay?

See their patrons millions.

Are they growing every day?

Ask the sixteen millions

Of their patrons, what a host!

Found in every town almost.

Reaching out from coast to coast

Are their patron millions.

What a power they must hold,

Daily viewed by millions!

Think what character they mold

In those sixteen millions!

Bringing cheer to hearts each day,

Luring clouds of gloom away.

Thus they exercise their sway

Over sixteen millions![78]

Complementing poems like these were cartoons in the style of editorial cartoons in newspapers that highlighted the role of moving picture theaters across the twentieth-century American landscape. In a cartoon from April 1914, for instance, a show perched high atop a precarious peak still attracts customers ready to brave the daunting ascent or arrive by airship, proving that theaters can and will do business anywhere (fig. 0.6).

FIGURE 0.6. Cartoon, Motion Picture Story Magazine, April 1914.

Conversely, “the only village in the United States that has no motion picture theaters,” according to a cartoon from January 1915, is Sleepyville, Illinois, a run-down, overgrown ghost town, which might be deserted precisely because it has no place where crowds could watch a movie. Other cartoons insist that the thriving moving picture theater stands as a signifier of and a spur to progress in the modern American urban environment. Two examples from the September 1912 issue credit the theater with bolstering middle-class family ties by providing the right sort of leisure-time activity: in one, John Smith and his family approach a busy theater, which stands in stark contrast to the saloon next door gathering cobwebs; in the second, the same family heads for the box office of a bustling moving picture show, which offers an affordable outing that supplants the pricier live theater venue this patriarch formerly attended alone (fig. 0.7). The implied change in male patronage makes the moving picture show “a practical solution to the liquor question.” Given MPSM’s investment in a fan’s-eye view of motion pictures that valued new photoplays and picture personalities, it is notable that in these cartoons there is no specific information about what is playing when John Smith and family go to the movies—that they can confidently attend together as a family is reason enough to value the moving picture theater.

FIGURE 0.7. Cartoons, Motion Picture Story Magazine, September 1912.

A more panoramic, high-angle view from another cartoon in the same issue of MPSM situates the moving picture show among the buildings and institutions that define and shape modern urban America: church, office, factory, and school (and perhaps store, which is identified by name but without boldface emphasis) (fig. 0.8). The design suggests that the theater is dwarfed by these more established sites of authority and influence, all of which would become the sites for non-theatrical screenings. The cartoon’s caption, however, declares that “the moving picture show is as important to the development of the generation as the other surrounding factors.” And, again, the defining feature of the theater is that it opens directly onto the street, is affordably priced, and attracts men and women, adults and children, which perhaps accounts for its important social role, particularly in relation to developing the next generation of Americans.

FIGURE 0.8. Cartoon, Motion Picture Story Magazine, September 1912.

Other MPSM cartoons put more emphasis on what the moving picture show delivers, not so much by affording escape and relief from the ills of modernity, as avowed in the poems quoted earlier, but rather by functioning as a sort of modern classroom. The “Epochs in Education,” pictured in the panels of a cartoon from January 1915, progress through Western civilization over centuries, from a book in the hands of a single monk to newspapers being read by a few men in the early nineteenth century to a classroom of students being given instruction by a single teacher to a movie theater whose posters advertise a battery of ostensibly “educational”—not to mention “moral,” “wholesome,” and “authentic” fare that (again) draws children as well as adults (fig. 0.9).

FIGURE 0.9. Cartoon, Motion Picture Story Magazine, January 1915.

Inside the movie theater, according to a cartoon from the August 1914 issue (which would have been on sale the same month that saw the beginning of the war in Europe), the message is clear (fig. 0.10). People fill every seat, ushers stand at attention, and the projected film announces itself as “The Modern Educator.” While this cartoon could be read as ominous given the perspective it assumes—looking down on an audience rendered a faceless and uniform mass, poised to receive instruction, all heads directed toward the giant screen—for Motion Picture Story Magazine, the theater as “The Modern Educator” is an affirmation of progressive media at work, of useful cinema.

FIGURE 0.10. Cartoon, Motion Picture Story Magazine, August 1914.

In accord with how the poems and cartoons in MPSM characterize and celebrate the moving picture theater, this magazine saw the prospects for cinema’s non-theatrical utility not as competition to the theatrical experience but as more evidence of the power of the medium to fuel progress. In 1911, for example, MPSM reprinted an abridged version of Herbert A. Jump’s “The Religious Possibilities of the Motion Picture,” one of the first calls for Protestant churches to take advantage of motion pictures as a means of illustrating sermons, enlivening Sunday school lessons, and promoting missionary work.[79] Later articles noted the novel use of moving pictures for entertaining the crews on Navy ships, teaching immigrant girls about the dangers of white slavery, and improving safety conditions for railroad workers.[80] Though MPSM offered no specific example of motion pictures used in the classroom, a cartoon from September 1914 envisioned a suitably twentieth-century pedagogic tableau: students seem attentive but not really surprised now that the haloed goddess of motion pictures in flowing robes has arrived in the classroom to take her place as the “new teacher” (fig. 0.11).

FIGURE 0.11. Cartoon, Motion Picture Story Magazine, September 1914.

As in this cartoon, classrooms were often imagined to be prime non-theatrical screening sites in the 1910s. Yet the actual term, non-theatrical, did not appear in Motion Picture Magazine until an article in the July 1920 issue claimed that “the non-theatrical movie field today is a cardinal factor in the youngest of America’s big industries.” That churches, the US military, manufacturers, and retailers were employing motion pictures as the new decade began constituted proof for Motion Picture Magazine that “more and more universal becomes the movie in its appeal.”[81] Two general points are worth noting here, both bearing on the relationship between commercial exhibition in the movie theater and the options for cinema beyond the theater: (1) examples in this fan magazine of motion pictures screened in different sites predate the identification of the non-theatrical as a recognizable “field”; and (2) the non-theatrical, unproblematically, is understood to be a “cardinal” field—that is, fundamental and important—and a factor within the motion picture industry, the same industry whose stars, new releases, and studio activity filled the pages of Motion Picture Magazine each month.

NON-THEATRICAL/THEATRICAL

A defining feature of American cinema—and maybe all cinemas—is that it has always been in practice multi-sited; that is, film has been screened in a variety of different spaces.[82] Beginning in what Charles Musser calls the “novelty year” of 1896–97, moving pictures in the United States were exhibited in tent shows and churches, Chautauqua assemblies and vaudeville theaters, amusement parks and arcades, fairs and opera houses, and in all manner of public halls and auditoria.[83] Even though films continued to be exhibited at sites like these at least through the 1920s, my assumption is that there was no non-theatrical cinema in the United States until the remarkable spread of nickelodeons (roughly from 1906 to 1912) helped usher in a more regularized commercial film exhibition business.[84]

From 1908 on, the motion picture trade press is filled with reports of theater openings, often accompanied by photographs of facades and interiors.[85] Well beyond the theaters featured in this coverage, America’s many movie theaters continued to vary widely in size, architecture, and design, ranging from modified storefronts, small and large structures purpose-built for screening movies, repurposed auditoria and churches, and seasonally operating roofless sites (airdomes), to the first-generation of larger and more luxurious picture “palaces.”[86] But what precisely made a screening site a moving picture theater? In a court case concerning an ordinance to ban the twenty-seven tent shows then regularly exhibiting moving picture programs to paying customers in St. Louis, the jury decided that “a tent is not a building” and so faced different requirements than a movie theater.[87] At the Lumina Pavilion in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, the free programs of current one- and two-reel pictures were projected onto a screen mounted in the surf rather than in a building with rows of seats. Did moving picture shows operated for workers in company towns run by the likes of the Harlan [KY] Coal Company and the Low Moore [VA] Iron Company count as theaters regardless of what was screened or how many days each week or months of the year the show was open?[88] What about the countless multi-use public halls, local opera houses, and grand metropolitan venues, which were not (or had not yet become) movie theaters, per se, but did on occasion serve as sites for commercial film exhibition, along with various other uses—illustrated lectures, benefits, rallies, concerts, touring productions? Picture shows in regular operation as attractions in large or small amusement parks located on street or interurban railway lines pose other questions. “The possibilities of the moving picture as an adjunct to the street railway park are limitless,” declared Street Railway Journal in 1908, “the shows can be made to fit any purse or suit any taste.”[89] It seems unlikely that once moving picture theaters became fixtures on Main Street, “adjunct” shows of this sort would qualify as movie theaters.

For David S. Hulfish, author of the three-hundred-page Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work (1914), film exhibition was exclusively a profit-driven enterprise relying on different types of what he calls “motion-picture theaters,”[90] which in the United States numbered fourteen thousand in 1914, according to the Motion Picture Patents Company.[91] But in the early 1910s, as we will see, newspapers and periodicals also paid considerable attention to the uses of film outside of these theaters. For example, in 1913, the editor of the newly launched Exhibitors’ Times, by way of demonstrating that his trade publication “is absolutely independent of any outside influence or control,” explicitly announced that he understood film exhibition to include non-theatrical as well as theatrical cinema: “By ‘Exhibitors,’ we mean not merely people who conduct theatres, but clergymen, school authorities, church and chapel authorities, public lecturers, and many others who use the picture for the purposes of entertainment. It is this large class which the ‘Exhibitors’ Times’ represents.”[92]

It would be several years, however, before the term non-theatrical gained some currency. One of the earliest references I have found occurs in a review of the Model 2 Victor Animatograph projector in the November 24, 1917, issue of another trade journal, Motion Picture News. Pitched at “an entirely separate field, that of light exhibition,” the forty-pound Animatograph, Motion Picture News approvingly noted, “will well serve the non-theatrical user of motion picture film,” since Victor designed this machine for “traveling exhibitions, private exhibitions, and all education and religious institutions work in both small and large rooms.”[93] Non-theatrical here covers a wide compass, indeed: institutionally authorized deployment of moving pictures, different sized physical spaces, itinerant (likely including for-profit) practices, and screenings outside the public sphere, with “private” likely referring to the home or to a narrowly restricted audience.

Over the next several years, the non-theatrical was increasingly—and explicitly—understood in print sources as an identifiable, important, and potentially lucrative zone of cinema.[94] (To what extent this promise of profit ever materialized during the silent era is a different question.) For example, “comprehensive plans for the production and distribution of non-theatrical pictures to schools, colleges, churches, social centers and other public institutions,” by the top-tier Hollywood studio, Famous Players-Lasky, garnered national attention in 1919.[95] That year also saw the roll-out of Educational Film Magazine, promoted as “the only high class publication . . . covering the serious, non-theatrical use of motion pictures and slides.” In 1920 Moving Picture World renamed its educational film column “Education and Non-theatrical News,” and the first edition of 1001 Films: A Reference Book for Non-theatrical Film Users was published, compiled by Moving Picture Age, a magazine that billed itself as being wholly committed to “the advancement of the non-theatrical use of moving pictures.”[96] It is well worth noting, however, that for Moving Picture Age this “advancement of the non-theatrical” was in no way incompatible with the fact that the category of “Entertainment” in its reference guide comprised 254 titles that all had had theatrical runs. Even more telling, the listing of non-theatrical film distributors in 1001 Films notably included the film exchanges operated by Famous Players-Lasky, Goldwyn, Fox, Vitagraph, Universal, and Metro, whose primary business was servicing the theatrical market.

By the early 1920s, non-theatrical was being used in relation to motion pictures in periodicals as diverse as the Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Religious Education, County Agent and Farm Bureau, and American Motorist.[97] Variety would in 1922 call Pennsylvania’s state regulations “affecting the exhibition of educational movies in churches, school houses and auditoriums” a “non-theatrical film code.”[98] Educational Screen, then the sole journal specifically devoted to covering “the multitudinous thoughts, plans and activities in the world-wide visual field,” had come by 1925 to define non-theatrical cinema largely in terms of schools and, to a lesser extent, churches. Yet Educational Screen continued to offer regular monthly sections devoted to what it called “the Movie Industry” and the “theatrical field,” providing readers with production news from the major studios, reviews of feature films in theatrical release as well as commercial shorts marketed for school use, and recommendations from the Film Councils of America identifying studio-produced titles that qualified as “wholesome recreation.”[99] That same year, for Exhibitors Herald, a publication aimed at and editorially siding with exhibitors, the battle lines couldn’t have been clearer. In May 1925, this trade magazine reported on beleaguered theater owners forced to declare “open war” against “the non-theatrical evil,” which unfairly threatened their profits by drawing moviegoers to “free” shows at churches and schools.[100] Such bellicose conditions were much less evident in volume 8 of Harvard Business Reports (1930), entitled Cases on the Motion Picture Industry, where the distinction between theatrical and non-theatrical figured in reports on the University Film Foundation, the YMCA Motion Picture Bureau, Pathé (deemed “the largest American distributor of films of educational value to the non-theatrical market”), and the Universal Picture Corporation (said to be interested in “increasing sales to non-theatrical exhibitors”).[101]

These assorted examples underscore that non-theatrical constituted an identifiable category that mattered, but they don’t all tell the same or the whole story—and that variation is precisely the point. I take the relation between theatrical and non-theatrical cinema to be historically significant because this distinction figured in contemporary discourse and practice and because it was not a simple binary opposition neatly marked by a dividing line.[102] These categories were contingent, permeable, overlapping, subject to redefinition and contestation, and variable according to time and place. Of particular relevance for my purposes, then, is how the distance and difference between the role, the use, and the value of moving pictures inside and outside the movie theater was understood, articulated, and enacted. The availability of films and projectors was crucial in this regard, but the relationship between theatrical and non-theatrical cinema also depended on shifting exhibition strategies, entrepreneurial efforts, market conditions, industry priorities, state initiatives, institutional policies, racial relations, and municipal laws.

One significant difference between theatrical and non-theatrical cinema did, however, remain constant through the 1910s. During this period, the commercial film industry increasingly took shape as a relatively stable national system with hubs in Hollywood and New York. This system aimed to guarantee profits by methodically routing a regularly delivered supply of distinctively branded and well-advertised new (but familiar) product through established film exchanges out to thousands of hierarchically ordered theater chains and independent exhibitors (including the many “colored” theaters then in operation), who competed for customers and sought a regular clientele.[103] In contrast to theatrical cinema, non-theatrical cinema during the 1910s (and possibly until the United States entered World War II) had no comparable historical arc—no center, no governing economic logic, no chartable patterns of growth, no graphable timeline of major events, no identifiable trajectory, no through line. While acknowledging the boost given by the US government’s deployment of moving pictures for propaganda, training, and troop entertainment during World War I, I would still argue that non-theatrical cinema developed unsystematically, in fits and starts, encouraged by the promise of myriad uses for moving pictures and by an almost unlimited range of possible screening sites.[104] The commercial film industry sought to rest on a solid foundation, figured as a stable geography: theaters linked to regionally located exchanges linked to faraway New York City and Hollywood. With little by way of a functional infrastructure, non-theatrical cinema can’t readily be tracked according to the commercial logic of interconnected production, distribution, and exhibition. Driven by the aims, initiatives, and funding of sponsors, championed for different reasons and mobilized to different ends, promoted at one time or another by state agencies, non-profit organizations, commercial firms, and individual entrepreneurs, non-theatrical cinema in the United States through the first decades of the twentieth century was unevenly, irregularly dispersed in the vast terrain outside the movie theater.

How, then, to make sense of a historical period during which moving pictures began to be put in the service of innumerable exhibition strategies, sponsors, and practical applications? Recent scholarship examining the technologies, state initiatives, institutional aims, and manifold deployments of what Haidee Wasson and Charles Acland call “useful cinema” across the twentieth century offers a number of productive lines of inquiry.[105] To examine the 1910s, we could, for example, undertake research organized according to specific genres (e.g., the missionary film, the industrial, the safety film, the advertising film), sites (e.g., school, church, YMCA, public hall), fields (e.g., religion, science, agriculture), or sponsors (e.g., chamber of commerce, government agency, foundation, corporation).[106] I have chosen to range across these possibilities and also across American localities, organizing this historical study in terms of what I take to be the four definitive features of—and opportunities afforded by—non-theatrical cinema: sponsorship, multi-purposed use, multi-sited exhibition, and targeted audiences.

Chapters 1 to 4 each take up one of these four features, testing their utility and situating them historically. My primary examples in these chapters are intentionally varied. They include the circulation of Your Girl and Mine (1914), a film sponsored by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the extensive marketing efforts undertaken for the Nicholas Power Company’s Cameragraph projector, the concerted effort to offer free summertime screenings in St. Louis parks and playgrounds, and the coverage of motion pictures in Scientific American, as well as a nationwide advertising campaign for corsets, a one-off screening in a church hall aimed at the Portuguese community in San Leandro, California, and the prime role played by moving pictures in efforts for “industrial betterment” mounted by the National Association of Manufacturers. Chapter 5 revisits the four features of non-theatrical cinema by examining certain ambitious, large-scale public events of the 1910s that relied on moving pictures, notably Land Shows designed to promote the West to tourists and homesteaders, and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), the decade’s preeminent national event, which was filled with onsite screening facilities offering decidedly useful fare.

Focusing throughout these chapters on the specific ways that non-theatrical cinema was imagined, funded, promoted, constrained, mobilized, and practiced encourages, I will argue, a recalibration of the history of cinema in America during a notably formative decade. More broadly, attending to this other cinema provides a revealing perspective on how utility was defined, social life organized, and diversity configured by and for Americans, and on the role that moving pictures played in public relations, advertising, educational outreach, corporate publicity, government mediamaking, and civic activism as the United States moved into the twentieth century.

1

Sponsors and Sponsorship

A basic distinction when it came to the production, distribution, and exhibition of moving pictures in the United States in the 1910s (and beyond) was between unsponsored and sponsored film. On the one hand were the films that appeared day after day in permanent movie theaters from companies like Paramount and Keystone, whose taken-for-granted, regularized delivery of product might have seemed like the operation of a public utility. On the other hand, certain films, like the screening of Extraction of a Shrapnel Ball from the Regions of the Heart for physicians and surgeons attending the semiannual convention of the Third District Medical Society of North Carolina, arrived and were exhibited locally in various sites, often only once or twice, under the auspices of a particular group or organization with no direct connection to the film industry.

As was the case with other manufacturers of mass-marketed products designed to be readily available in familiar retail outlets, the companies engaged in the production, distribution, and exhibition of theatrical motion pictures were businesses operating for profit, catering to cinemagoers who purchased tickets fully expecting to see new (or not-yet-seen) movies. In this competitive commercial marketplace, theaters depended on advertising and promotional ballyhoo for product differentiation and keeping customers up to date on the constantly changing schedule of attractions. Exhibitors, like studios, often aimed to foster a recognizable, marketable identity, even something that resembled a brand. While it would have been readily apparent that movies were created by far-distant studios and presented by locally situated theaters, neither theaters nor studios could be said to have “sponsored” the steady stream of titles theatrically distributed.

Sponsorship, as I will be using the concept, covers much more than what we might associate with the familiar figure of the sponsor in the history of American broadcasting—that is, with what Erik Barnouw pilloried as the “modern potentate,” who flexed his influence and power in purchasing blocks of airtime for advertisements, making decisions about (even creating) programming, or underwriting programs as a form of public service and corporate public relations.[1] During the 1910s, sponsors that made use of moving pictures included businesses and corporations, but also government agencies, churches, and trade associations, as well as any number of other groups, from the Knights of Pythias, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Daughters of the Confederacy to the Woman’s Franchise League. Screening events could be sponsored for the purposes of fundraising, outreach, advertising, mobilization, instruction, uplift, Americanization, recruitment, community well-being, group solidarity, and/or entertainment. And the prerogatives of the sponsor could vary considerably, well beyond providing funding and having direct involvement with production.[2] Sponsorship could entail, for example, dictating certain terms and conditions of distribution, taking responsibility for advertising, hosting a screening, making available a screening site and projector, targeting a particular audience, providing a speaker to introduce or “lecture” with the film, and/or stipulating certain programming strategies.

The parameters of sponsorship thus bring to the fore not only the varieties of non-theatrical practices but also the role of agency, authority, and access in this period of American cinema. These factors became increasingly important as cinema expanded beyond the standard procedures of the commercial film industry—pointing, in fact, to issues that return again and again with media in the twentieth century. This chapter explores and historically situates sponsorship from three quite different vantage points: a single screening in San Leandro, California; the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s involvement with the widely circulated feature film Your Girl or Mine (1914); and the sponsorship of non-theatrical cinema through the 1910s in America’s fourth-largest city, St. Louis, Missouri.

UNDER THE AUSPICES OF

Here’s an admittedly unremarkable example of a sponsored screening, described in a brief, likely self-reported item, entitled “Azores Views Shown,” that ran on January 1, 1915, in the Oakland [CA] Tribune. This notice was grouped with other information concerning the city of San Leandro (population about 4,600 in 1915) on a page devoted to the “Latest News of Oakland’s Neighbors”: “Moving picture and stereopticon views of the Azores Island were the attraction at an entertainment in St. Joseph’s hall this week given under the auspices of members of the Portuguese community. The object of the gathering was to gain more members for a hospital association. The views were exhibited by M. J. Cavreira of Melrose.”[3]

Presented by one person who came from a nearby neighborhood in Oakland, this “entertainment” had a straightforward objective that had nothing to do with turning a profit from ticket sales. It aimed rather to recruit new members willing to pay one dollar per month for medical and hospital coverage from a group like the North American Hospital Association, then headquartered in Oakland and in the midst of a membership drive.[4] Combining moving pictures and slides that offered images of islands controlled by Portugal, this screening targeted the large number of Portuguese immigrants who resided in and around San Leandro. “Given under the auspices of members of the Portuguese community,” this event was likely also sponsored in some manner by the hospital association seeking members, and was at least indirectly authorized by local authorities of the Catholic church, since St. Joseph’s hall was adjacent to St. Mary’s Convent (a school run by the Dominican Sisters) and was under the jurisdiction of the San Leandro parish. I have found no evidence that motion pictures had previously been screened at St. Joseph’s, but this seven-hundred-seat hall was regularly used for a variety of events, including musical performances by students and commencement exercises at the convent school; recitals, amateur theatricals, dances, and other fundraisers for Catholic churches or organizations in the city; and large meetings of groups like the Portuguese Union, which drew its members from across central California.[5]

Unlike the films booked into the Best Theater in San Leandro or ten miles away in one of the many theaters in downtown Oakland, the moving picture and stereopticon entertainment offered at a church-run hall in San Leandro was one of countless events, performances, meetings, and activities in this period that were presented under the auspices of a specific group or organization and were publicly noted as such in newspapers. This type of sponsorship reflects a familiar means by which social life outside the home and workplace was organized, enhanced, and directed. Under the auspices of covered a range of situations, organizations, and aims, as the following handful of items culled from metropolitan and small-town newspapers on January 1, 1915, begins to suggest:

• “Under the auspices of the Social Service Commission, a meeting in the interest of the Church Temperance Society will be held in Trinity Church” (Boston, Massachusetts)

• “Mr. R. W. Lovett of Boston will be here January 9 and probably January 10 for the purpose of giving advice in cases of infantile paralysis. He comes here under the auspices of the State Board of Health” (Montpelier, Vermont)

• “The feature of today’s observance among the colored people of the city will be the emancipation celebration this afternoon at 2 o’clock at Bethel A M E Church, under the auspices of the Pastors’ Council” (Indianapolis, Indiana)

• “William A. McKeever, of the department of child welfare at Kansas University, will give an address at Central High School in Kansas City . . . this is the first of a series of eleven lectures that he will give there on Monday afternoons under the auspices of the Kansas City School of Social Service” (Lawrence, Kansas)

• “The stereopticon views and illustrated lecture [on the British Isles] by Rev. Preston, [was] given under the auspices of the Plymouth club at the Congregational church last night . . . a reading by Miss Susan Casterline, vocal solo by Miss Ruth Brant and a cornet solo by C. C. Wolsey were part of the first-class program” (Petaluma, California).[6]

What was entailed and what was signified in situations like these when a screening, lecture, musical recital, celebration, meeting, or entertainment took place under the auspices of a group or organization? Today, under the auspices of is a phrase most often associated with administrative oversight, institutional support, and the validation of a recognized academic, political, or religious authority. (A peace conference held under the auspices of the UN, for example.)[7] A century ago the phrase had much wider currency. Sponsorship, as exemplified by the newspaper items listed earlier, was so ubiquitous as to be almost a given, indicative of a world where various affiliations—beyond family ties and political party membership—and a host of formal and informal groups, secular as well as religious, played or sought to play a role in filling and shaping leisure activities, disseminating information, advocating for certain values, and contributing to the public life of a community and even to the nation at large. The Emergency War Tax passed by the US Congress in October 1914 gave due weight to the significance of sponsored events by drawing a basic distinction between “theatres, museums, and concert halls,” which were taxed, and “Lecture lyceums, Chautauquas, agricultural or industrial fairs or exhibitions under the auspices of religious or charitable associations,” which were excluded from this new tax.[8]

The Emergency War Tax was especially telling for Protestant churches, since illustrated lectures, screenings, training sessions, social get-togethers, lyceum series, musical performances, and reports about missionary work were often held under the auspices of various clubs or groups within individual Protestant congregations—including African American congregations responsible for the many “church-sponsored film exhibitions” that Cara Caddoo has identified in her study of this period.[9] This strategy was equally essential for the YMCA, as part of its non-sectarian commitment to fostering a certain form of citizenship, as well as for the outreach efforts of museums and educational institutions.[10] On occasion, commercial theaters could devote an afternoon or evening to benefit amateur shows or lectures conducted under the auspices of local groups, ranging from the Socialist Party in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Ithaca, New York.[11]

While sponsorship frequently was undertaken in the name of public service, it could have any number of short- and long-term goals: attracting new recruits or converts, bolstering the commitment of believers, creating or reaffirming a sense of community, raising funds, advancing progressivist (or anti-progressivist) claims, selling products and services, encouraging best practices, and passing on useful information. Or the investment in sponsoring events could be aimed toward generating business and good public relations, as when chambers of commerce, merchant organizations, and commercial clubs sought to attract both local residents and non-resident visitors by sponsoring events like traveling street carnivals, special free screenings, and holiday festivities. Sponsored events were also a basic outreach strategy employed by public health and safety campaigns, relief committees, and unions. Local 755 of the United Mine Workers of America, for example, actually owned and operated a commercial theater in Staunton, Illinois—the eight-hundred-seat Labor Temple. In March 1915, “under the auspices of the Illinois Miners and Mechanics Institute” (an initiative created and funded by the state of Illinois), the Labor Temple hosted a free screening of safety films from the US Bureau of Mines. In this instance, a single screening could be said to have had three sponsors: a federal agency, a state institute, and a labor union.[12]

Given the widespread practice of sponsoring lectures, recitals, and various types of entertainment, it is noteworthy—though perhaps not surprising—that, at best, a very small percentage of films in the 1910s arrived in local theaters under the auspices of specific groups or organizations. Consider in this respect, Little Rock, the capital and largest city in Arkansas, then with a population of about fifty-five thousand, one-third of whom were African American. The city’s two daily newspapers paid scant attention to the social and civic activities organized within the African American community, which unfortunately means that the following information covers only sponsored events aimed at white residents.[13]

During 1915, Little Rock’s most active sponsor of public events for the white community was the Musical Coterie, a women’s group formed in 1893 that had long held up the mantle of high culture and was in 1915 hosting concerts by touring musicians and staging free Sunday afternoon recitals.[14] In addition, six times that year theaters in Little Rock were made available for amateur events, including a show involving a host of local performers arranged by the Chamber of Commerce to raise money for “flood sufferers” in nearby Newport, Arkansas, and a “society vaudeville” performance under the auspices of the City Federation of Women’s Clubs “for the benefit of the unemployed.”[15] The problem of unemployment was likewise the focus of a meeting arranged by Little Rock’s Civic Forum, a self-styled “nonpolitical, nonreligious club” that had been created the year before with the aim of offering “free educational programs,” usually in the form of Sunday afternoon lectures in one of the city’s theaters.[16] There is little evidence that state or federal agencies sponsored events in Little Rock during 1915, but explicitly political public lectures were presented under the auspices of organizations with ties well beyond the city, including the Arkansas Anti-Saloon League, the Socialist Club, the Anti-Capital Punishment Society, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the German-American Federation of Arkansas.[17] No comparable aims at uplift, political action, or civic engagement drove the Young Men’s Democratic Club to sponsor boxing matches at Moose Hall or the Central Trades and Labor Council to bring under its auspices a traveling carnival company to Little Rock—attractions that pushed on the limits of what was then deemed to be acceptable amusement.[18] Sponsorship in all these cases provided an occasion for people to gather in one place, and it enabled an organization, institution, or club to announce or underscore its presence in the city by advocating for a position and/or by making available events not provided by churches, schools, or state agencies.

Of the many sponsored performances and activities that helped to constitute white public life in 1915, Little Rock’s newspapers paid most attention to the production and exhibition of The History of David O. Dodd, a five-reel film made under the auspices of the Little Rock chapter of the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy.[19] Shot in and around the city and directed by a local resident, this production featured a cast drawn largely from Little Rock’s elite, who were costumed in period clothes borrowed from local closets. The History of David O. Dodd fully embraced the mythology of the “Lost Cause” as it dramatized the story of the “boy martyr of the Confederacy,” who was captured and hanged by the Federal troops occupying Little Rock in 1864.[20] It played for three days at the Royal Theater in November 1915 (eight weeks before The Birth of Nation premiered in the city), with the proceeds earmarked for the David O. Dodd Memorial fund, and would return for one day in June 1917 after screening in a few other Arkansas cities.

Beyond the anomalous case of The History of David O. Dodd, exhibitors in Little Rock very rarely pitched their offerings as arriving “under auspices.” With five movie theaters in operation six days a week (and some beginning to experiment with Sunday openings) and two multi-purpose theaters that regularly booked films, there was a constant stream of features, short films, and serial episodes cycling through the city usually for one- or two-day runs. During 1915, for example, only a handful of productions exhibited in Little Rock were identified as sponsored films: notably, Inside of the White Slave Traffic, which was described as being “endorsed and presented under the auspices of the Sociological Fund of the Medical Review of Reviews,” an affiliation likely intended to legitimate the screening while foregrounding its sensational and potentially controversial subject matter;[21] and the Selig Polyscope Company’s Your Girl and Mine, advertised as a “dramatic feature photoplay in six acts” that was “[p]resented under the auspices of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association by the World Film Corporation.”[22]

YOUR GIRL AND MINE

Shelley Stamp, Amy Shore, and other scholars have convincingly established the historical significance and ideological resonance of Your Girl and Mine in the context of the suffrage movement.[23] I am interested here in determining how this impassioned, melodramatic call to give women the right to vote was identified, distributed, marketed, and exhibited as a sponsored film. Bearing the imprimatur of the widely known and well-established National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) likely signified for potential moviegoers the overt political orientation, timely relevance, and self-described “propagandistic” intent of Your Girl and Mine, but sponsorship in this case went well beyond NAWSA’s stamp of approval.

Photoplay Magazine declared that Your Girl and Mine “makes our conviction all the more firm—the usefulness of the movies is practically limitless,” yet this film clearly had nothing to do with what Yvonne Zimmermann calls the “industrial film as utility film,” a mainstay of corporate sponsored cinema, especially in Europe.[24] In fact, Your Girl and Mine was a fiction film performed by professional actors, produced at William Selig’s Chicago studio, and written by the author of Selig’s highly successful 1913 serial, The Adventures of Kathryn. It was distributed by Louis J. Selznick’s World Film Corporation to theaters across the United States where it was typically programmed like any other feature film. Beyond the claim in newspaper advertisements that Your Girl and Mine was “[p]resented under the auspices of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association,” what did the involvement of this organization entail and how was the sponsorship of this film designated and made manifest to audiences?

FIGURE 1.1. Ad for Your Girl and Mine, Arkansas [Little Rock] Democrat, December 31, 1914.

Your Girl and Mine was first screened on October 14, 1914, in Chicago before a commercial run that began on December 28, 1914, and continued into 1918. Syndicated newspaper feature articles in October 1914 emphasized the role of Mrs. Medill McCormick who, in her capacity as chair of NAWSA’s Congressional Committee, conceived of, initiated, and co-funded Your Girl and Mine, convincing Selig to produce the film. “Suffragettes Use Movies to Boost Cause” announced the Arizona Daily Star, quoting McCormick on the plan to create a “good smashing melodrama” that will spread the word far and wide, until “there will not be a spot in this country, from the mining camps of Alaska to the everglades of Florida, which will not understand, vividly, what women mean when they talk about ‘the right to vote.’ ”[25] McCormick herself authored (or at least put her name to) a newspaper article that provided a detailed plot summary as proof that Your Girl and Mine was designed to be “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the suffrage movement.”[26] (Since a print of the film has yet to be discovered, it is impossible to tell if the role of McCormick and NAWSA was actually referenced in the film’s titles or intertitles.) In describing the film and her role vis-à-vis Selig, McCormick affirmed her authorship of this project and justified later claims that Your Girl and Mine was produced under the auspices of the NAWSA. A Washington Times advertisement, for instance, declared that the film “owes its inception to Mrs. Medill McCormick and it has the support and indorsement” of NAWSA.[27]

Sponsorship in the case of Your Girl and Mine extended to the conditions of distribution as well as the process of production. It was McCormick, for example, who defended the integrity of the film by challenging the National Board of Censor’s call for certain cuts to Your Girl and Mine.[28] And the arrangement she struck with Selznick’s World Film Corporation likewise underscored the continuing role of NAWSA: one account had Selznick paying $50,000 for rights to the film and agreeing to a “profit-sharing plan” with 25 percent of the “receipts of the show in every showhouse in the country” to “be turned back” to the organization’s National Committee.[29] McCormick explained in another syndicated article that in practice the profit-sharing arrangement meant that local suffragists would sell coupon booklets (each with two five-cent tickets and four ten-cent tickets) for the film, with 20 percent of the take earmarked for state suffrage associations and 5 percent for the national office of NAWSA.[30] I have found no evidence detailing how well this profit-sharing plan ended up working. But other financial arrangements were possible. In Bloomington, Indiana, for example, the sponsorship of Your Girl and Mine generated a profit of $125 for the city’s Women’s Franchise League, which rented a movie theater for a single matinee and evening screening and paid the cost of the film ($64.10) as well as for tickets and advertising ($18.77).[31]

FIGURE 1.2. World Film Corporation ad for Your Girl and Mine, Motion Picture News, November 14, 1914.

While Your Girl and Mine likely was not shown everywhere between the Everglades and Alaska, it did circulate widely across all regions of the continental United States and was still being exhibited in October 1917, when it was booked for the Idle Hour theater in the village of Paw Paw, Michigan (then with a population of about 1,500), with proceeds going in part to help cover the tax bill of a local women’s group.[32] Aside from special non-theatrical screenings at events like NAWSA’s 1914 annual convention and state suffrage conventions in Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Alabama during 1915, Your Girl and Mine was exhibited in commercial theaters, beginning with the Casino Theatre in New York City on December 14, 1914.[33] For many of these theatrical bookings, NAWSA’s connection to Your Girl and Mine was directly referenced in newspaper advertising: the Alamo Theater in Louisville, Kentucky, for example, identified Your Girl and Mine as being “[i]ndorsed [sic] by the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association,” while the Rolfe Theater in Albany, Oregon, billed the screening as “for the BENEFIT” of NAWSA.[34] Other advertisements for theatrical screenings of Your Girl and Mine claimed a more local connection, suggesting the flexibility of exhibitors in using sponsorship to help market the film as well as reflecting certain variations in how the suffrage campaign was conducted from place to place. In El Paso, Texas, Your Girl and Mine was offered “under the auspice and direction of the equal franchise league of El Paso”; in Muncie, Indiana, “[u]nder the Auspices of the Woman’s Franchise League of Muncie”; in Santa Fe, New Mexico, under “Auspices [of the] Woman’s Club.”[35] According to the distribution strategy touted by McCormick, members of these organizations would have been encouraged to sell tickets as a way of raising funds for the cause.

Indorsed by, for the benefit of, under the auspices and direction of—while not synonymous, all these phrases from newspaper advertisements indicate a direct relationship between Your Girl and Mine and NAWSA and/or a local organization, clearly setting the film apart from the programs typically offered at American movie theaters. Perhaps most significant in this regard, the screening event itself could have underscored and made manifest sponsorship. In Louisville, “a committee of local suffragists was stationed in the lobby, distributing suffrage badges and literature,” and “suffragists cheered at the skillful ways in which ‘Votes for Women’ was worked into the plot and related to every phase of woman’s life.”[36] At a theater in Buffalo, the local Woman’s Suffrage Association en masse attended Your Girl and Mine at a theater “draped in suffrage colors” for what was billed as “Suffrage Night,” featuring the film and a “special musical program.”[37]

One common strategy was for local supporters to address the audience between the reels of the film, offering in Richmond, Virginia, for example, “short and to-the-point suffrage speeches.”[38] The Camden [NJ] Daily Courier estimated that more than one thousand people saw Your Girl and Mine, which appeared “under the auspices of the Camden Suffrage League,” at the recently opened Grand Theatre. For this screening, League members “wearing votes for women sashes and buttons . . . sold tickets on the street and gave out literature and answered questions.” Both the matinee and evening shows included speeches on suffrage that “won the hearts of the audience.”[39]

FIGURE 1.3. Local sponsorship of Your Girl and Mine, ads in El Paso [TX] Times, April 28, 1915; Daily Illinois State Register [Springfield], August 15 1915.

Washington, DC, not surprisingly, saw the most elaborate effort along these lines. Your Girl and Mine was booked for a week at the city’s Colonial Theater in February 1915, with a different local suffrage group taking responsibility for each day, including having members serve as ushers and ticket-takers. In addition to five-minute speeches between reels, slides provided information about the cause, and, according to a syndicated newspaper account, “two able lawyers were on hand to answer any questions concerning the legal points suggested” by the film. When the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage took over the Colonial on its appointed day, the theater’s interior was “elaborately decorated with banners and streamers of gold, purple, and white bunting, the colors of the union, and the costumes of the ushers carried out the same color scheme.”[40] As these examples suggest, the sponsorship of Your Girl and Mine by suffrage organizations, highlighted in promotional material and newspaper coverage, could also be directly signaled at the screening event.

Your Girl and Mine’s press coverage and extensive theatrical distribution was matched by very few sponsored films of the period. NAWSA’s investment in and continuing affiliation with this film was linked to the expectation of certain benefits, notably, votes for suffrage, fundraising through ticket sales, and support for the cause as this organization defined it. Sponsorship in this case had parallels with what Pamela Walker Laird, in her history of print advertising and consumer marketing from 1870 to 1920, calls the “five basic steps” of “the advertising process”: “deciding to advertise, conceiving the message, producing it, distributing it, and paying for it.”[41] But as the circulation of Your Girl and Mine demonstrates, sponsors could also wield some measure of control over screenings, even when the site was an established moving picture theater. And when it came to the actual exhibition of any film (unlike, say, the placement of a print ad or a billboard), there was always a host of variables potentially in play, because each screening constituted a unique event. The sponsor’s influence could extend not only to the choice of films to be screened, the arrangement of the program, and the use of certain speakers, but also to the physical preparation of the site and the presence of its representatives at the event.

The essential questions that Thomas Elsaesser identified as worth asking of any non-fiction “utility film” are equally relevant for all examples of sponsored cinema: “who commissioned the film . . . what was the occasion for which it was made . . . to what use was it put or to whom was it addressed?”[42] Yet tracking the role of NAWSA in the production and distribution of Your Girl and Mine and the activities undertaken by local suffrage organizations in the exhibition of this film suggests that we should expand and reformulate Elsaesser’s questions to address sponsorship more directly, as follows:

To what extent did the sponsor of a given film or screening event have some degree of involvement in and influence over

• the conception, commissioning, planning, and funding of the project?

• the production process?

• the strategies for distributing the film and allocating any income that it might generate?

• the promotion, including the prerogative to speak publicly for and about the film?

• the actual exhibition of the film, including decisions about programming, the role of commentary and speeches, and any live performances?

• the audience targeted?

These questions underscore that in making use of cinema, sponsors had various options for asserting control over the product and the process. In practice, the means and degree of control varied significantly—even from screening to screening of Your Girl and Mine—as did the aims of sponsors who sought to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by moving pictures.

That Your Girl and Mine appeared under the auspices of the Camden, New Jersey Suffrage League; the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in Washington, DC; the Woman’s Franchise League in Bloomington, Indiana; and a bevy of other local organizations seems in keeping with what historian Elisabeth S. Clemens calls the “new forms of social solidarity” and the “massive diversification and diffusion of organizational structures, methods, and tactics” that characterized the “interest group politics” that had emerged in late nineteenth-century America.[43] Highly visible in this public arena were, as Maureen A. Flanagan puts it in her study of Progressive era political action, “myriad new organizations and institutions through which millions of Americans participated in reform movements.”[44] Designed to generate public support, votes, legislation, and contributions, Your Girl and Mine offers a textbook example of how the circulation of a sponsored film could serve the purposes of social solidarity and participatory reform politics.

But the aims and the political implications were different when it came to the screening of moving pictures of the Azores to Portuguese immigrants in San Leandro or when The History of David O. Dodd appeared under the auspices of the Little Rock chapter of the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy. Particularly if we take exhibition—including the screening site—as well as production into account, the opportunities for sponsored cinema in the US during the first decades of the twentieth century look to have been wide open for countless different groups, organizations, businesses, institutions, state agencies, and religious denominations. The rest of this chapter looks well beyond Your Girl and Mine to consider screenings arranged by municipalities and to track how sponsored cinema was put into practice over the 1910s in one major metropolitan area: St. Louis. These examples attest to the variety and extent of sponsorship while also making clear that access to the resources necessary for using moving pictures outside of theaters—funding, films, projectors, and screening spaces—was by no means readily and equally available.

MUNICIPAL MOVIES

Designed to encourage tourism, display prosperity, tout opportunity, market locally produced goods, attract manufacturers, and encourage growth, what were sometimes called “municipal movies” offered a different model of sponsorship than Your Girl and Mine.[45] Funded and utilized by government agencies, real estate interests, and business associations like the chamber of commerce, these straightforward booster films were often paired with lantern slides and presented by a professional lecturer in non-theatrical sites with no admission charge. This type of sponsored cinema would figure prominently at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, as we will see in chapter 5.

But in the 1910s, municipal movies also referred to an exhibition practice in which screenings were made available to the public thanks to the efforts and resources of a local government body. This version of sponsorship prompted a significant court case when Toledo, Ohio (then with a population of approximately 175,000), enacted in November 1912 an ordinance to transfer $1,000 in the city’s general funds to the Department of Public Service “for the purposes of establishing a municipal moving-picture theater.” After the plan was halted when the city auditor refused to transfer the funds, the city began legal proceedings. The case reached the Ohio Supreme Court, which announced in May 1913 that Toledo’s ordinance constituted an “unauthorized use of public money” and so was not allowable.[46]

In large measure the court’s decision was based on the specifics of Ohio laws concerning municipalities. But the quite detailed majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions offered by the judges address a number of highly charged issues concerning the purview of local self-government, the threat posed to free enterprise by municipalities expanding their activities and jurisdiction, the public service obligations of cities and villages, and the status of what the court called the “exhibitions of moving pictures for popular entertainment.” By attempting to create a municipal moving picture theater, Toledo was unintentionally testing the limits of government sponsorship and potentially blurring or realigning the distinction between theatrical and non-theatrical film exhibition as understood and deployed by the commercial motion picture industry in the early 1910s.

The court’s majority opinion held that operating a moving picture theater was a job for “impresarios,” not government officials: even if “the kinetoscope [sic] may be used at some time and in some way . . . for the public weal” and even if such “exhibitions might be made educational,” that is not their “natural object,” which is to be run as a “business for profit.”[47] Further, the municipal expenditure was not warranted as the exhibition of moving pictures did not constitute some sort of “public utility”—put bluntly, “theaters are not ‘utilities.’ ”[48] In fact, a municipally operated moving picture theater (even, presumably, a non-profit theater) could not be justified as contributing to “the public health, morals and well-being,” and, furthermore, it potentially threatened to “destroy the business of private owners of picture shows.”[49] One of the judges went so far as to declare that Toledo’s overreaching ordinance raised the specter of “a change of the essential nature of government from the free American plan of individualism toward foreign cults of communism and paternalism.”[50] No doubt the Motion Picture Patents Company, then the subject of anti-trust action by the Department of Justice, would have been pleased to see the nickelodeon held out as a bulwark of American free enterprise capitalism.

One of the concurring opinions in this case conceded that “it is difficult, perhaps almost impossible, to prescribe a limit where governmental functions end and private enterprise begins,” citing the right of municipalities to provide and fund band concerts, public libraries, bathhouses, parks, and recreation centers.[51] The problem with Toledo’s ordinance from this perspective was that it did not spell out the “public purpose” of the proposed municipal moving picture theater, leaving open the possibility that a non-profit theater run by the city that was not in competition with commercial shows would have been acceptable.[52] (Exhibitors, it should be noted, felt as much if not more economically threatened by “free” shows as by non-theatrical sites that charged admission.) R. M. Wanamaker, the dissenting judge in this case, rhetorically asked: “What is a public use and who may determine whether or not a given project is a public use?” He concluded, on the basis of the broadest understanding of the prerogatives of local self-government, that Toledo, as a “modern-day municipality,” was fully within its rights in this case.[53] The fact that at issue was the creation of a municipal moving picture theater was, for Wanamaker, completely irrelevant, while for the court’s majority, one obvious problem with the ordinance was precisely that Toledo had erroneously assumed that such a theater would in some way serve the public interest. In effect, none of the judges argued that the municipal sponsorship of moving pictures could be construed as public service.

The Ohio Supreme Court’s decision in the Toledo case drew attention from trade periodicals like Public Service and American Municipalities as well as being covered in a nationally syndicated newspaper item—perhaps contributing to derailing similar initiatives.[54] In at least a few other localities, however, proposals for city-sponsored moving pictures hinged on the idea that a municipal moving picture theater relying in some manner on representatives of organizations like the Playground Association and the PTA could be self-supporting through ticket sales while providing an “educational” alternative to commercial theater fare.[55] The handful of successful municipal theaters that drew attention beyond the local press were likely to be fully commercial venues set up in small, theater-less towns, like Haven, Kansas, which had fewer than one thousand residents.[56]

But self-styled moving picture shows that were not, strictly speaking, movie theaters, were found all over the US by the mid-1910s, particularly in privately run amusement sites located outside central business districts. Riverside Park in Phoenix, Arizona, and Chilowee Park in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for example, regularly offered moving picture shows as one among many attractions.[57] “Municipal movies,” in contrast, were free, outdoor, fair-weather screenings in public parks and playgrounds within metropolitan areas. Unlike in Toledo, these events were justified (and funded) as another service and benefit provided by the city, along with swing sets and swimming pools, organized athletic competitions and band concerts.

In Cincinnati, for example, city councilman Michael Mullen, a key player in the machine that dominated local politics, in 1909 provided a moving picture projector and arranged for Sunday evening screenings at Lytle Park, a downtown playground that he had helped create in the ward he represented. During the inaugural season, the Cincinnati Enquirer actually listed the films scheduled for what it called “Mullen’s free nickelodeon,” which included a mix of titles, predominately comedies, that had been commercially released that year.[58] Mullen pitched this plan to the city council, claiming that attendance at his free shows “easily numbered 3,000 a performance,” including adults as well as children.[59] In 1910, the Cincinnati Park Commission accepted the donation of Mullen’s projector and agreed to be responsible for its use.[60]

A Cincinnati newspaper put the attendance at a Lytle Park screening in August 1911, “under the auspices of the Associated Charities,” at two thousand children and one to two thousand adults,[61] with the actual costs for this and other screenings “provided through the generosity of a well-known citizen” (most likely Mullen).[62] Although the screenings were halted in August 1913 by the building commissioner until “better arrangements have been made to take care of the spectators,”[63] by 1914, the Annual Report of the Park Commission indicated that the city was providing $218 to cover the costs of fifteen such screenings at Lytle Park and another eight at a different playground.[64] So far as I have been able to determine, Cincinnati’s modest foray into municipal sponsorship of free moving picture exhibition did not face the legal challenge encountered by the Toledo plan. While the Moving Picture World reported that the “free pictures” exhibited “under the auspices of the city” in Cincinnati were “naturally somewhat distasteful to local exhibitors,” theater owners mounted no organized protests, unlike, for instance, in Pittsburgh where the Motion Picture Exhibitors’ Protective Association in 1914 filed a complaint with the city council that resulted in the suspension of free moving picture shows in local parks.[65]

Limited in scope and not widely publicized, Cincinnati’s effort at sponsoring free films at select city parks paled in comparison with the ambitious effort in St. Louis, which drew national attention and offered a possible blueprint for how progressives might put moving pictures to civic use in metropolitan areas that were facing the strains of rapid growth, crowded tenement districts, and radically changing demographics.[66] Thanks to the efforts of Park Commissioner Dwight Davis, who saw this initiative as being in line with the aims of the Playground and Recreation Association of America,[67] a city ordinance was approved in 1914 that invited bids to “furnish first-class moving picture machines, furnish an operator therefor, and provide the necessary films in such number and of such character as the commissioner of parks and recreation may designate,” with the aim of providing “moving pictures of an educational, historical, or instructive nature, in the public parks, playgrounds and recreation buildings.”[68] Beyond providing funding and access to public sites, the sponsor’s role in this arrangement is quite specifically to wield control over the “character” and “nature” of the titles to be screened.

Davis’s plan was part of an attempt to significantly expand what he called the “social utility” of St. Louis’s park and playground space, an effort praised by the Globe-Democrat in a Sunday feature article as a successful strategy for the “making of good citizens” by offering the children of immigrant Jews and Italians an alternative to the “filth of the street and the squalor of a narrow home.”[69] With a population well over seven hundred thousand, including large German, Italian, Jewish, and African American communities by the mid-1910s, St. Louis “should be taken out of the list of backward cities in recreation facilities,” declared an editorial in the Post-Dispatch. “The fourth city in population should be far above the twenty-first in recreation provisions.”[70]

To fulfill its civic obligations and raise its status as a major metropolis, the municipal government organized amateur athletic leagues, public dances, and holiday festivities, operated swimming pools, and even staged a four-day “Pageant and Masque” depicting the history of the city, with seven thousand citizens taking part, an event which supposedly managed, “miraculously, almost over night” to transform St. Louis, the Park Commission claimed, “from a sleeping city made up of hostile, discordant and suspicious groups and elements into an active, progressive community.”[71] Budgeted at $2,000, the self-styled “municipal movies” were a low-cost but well-publicized feature of the city’s effort to deliver “the maximum social service to the community,” adults as well as children.[72] To run the shows the city contracted with the St. Louis Motion Picture Company, whose primary business was producing local films and a limited number of theatrical releases.[73]

St. Louis newspapers and the Division of Parks and Recreation’s official report extolled the success of these screenings, the first of which, projected on a ten-by-fifteen-foot screen at the Columbus Square playground, located downtown “in the heart of the Ghetto,” drew “a crowd of about 3,000 mothers and babies, fathers and small boys, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Jews, Irish, Germans and two-generation Americans.”[74] Notably missing from this celebratory account of the city’s immigrant masses gathered together for this free public event were St. Louis’s monied classes and other “native” citizens, including its African American community. Officials insisted that the screenings had an “educational” as well as an amusement purpose and were intended to be in “no way in competition with the usual commercial exhibition.” Programs occasionally included “safety first” films and footage shot in St. Louis, but typically the park shows opened with a news weekly, followed by a film showing “some well-known process of manufacture or industry,” a “Wild West” film (“as a concession to the small boy” in the audience), an “animal film,” and a scenic.[75]

Adhering to the St. Louis ordinance that required “every picture machine installed, maintained, or operated in the city of St. Louis shall be inclosed in a booth,” the park screenings relied on a zinc-covered operator’s booth. Mounted on a horse-drawn wagon, the projector booth was easily transported—along with a portable screen and one thousand folding chairs—to fourteen other parks and playgrounds for biweekly screenings.[76] By the end of the season, the city’s total expenditure in 1914 for the municipal movies was $2,050—about one-eighth of the salary of the band musicians who performed at the same parks. The fifty-six screenings attracted 304,000 people (while the 145 band concerts drew 570,590).[77] Moving Picture World likely stoked the anxiety of wary exhibitors when it reported that a single one of St. Louis’s free shows could draw as many as ten thousand people.[78]

Reporting on the success of the 1914 season, the Division of Parks and Recreation took the progressive high ground, insisting “the educational purpose was always kept in mind” when putting together film programs for the parks. Municipal movies, from this sponsor’s perspective, were not movies at all, but a non-theatrical experiment in social utility that validated the uplifting promise of the medium. The official report concluded that “the comparative popularity of the more serious subjects indicated that the public taste is decidedly better than most commercial picture-show proprietors believe. The success of this initial experiment showed the great educational possibility of this use of the moving picture and this feature of the work will be enlarged and improved during the coming summer.”[79]

“It always pays to do something new and of a progressive character,” declared an editorial in the Globe-Democrat, noting the “agreeable advertising” generated by St. Louis’s successful first season of municipal movies.[80] The initiative drew considerable national attention, with widely reprinted syndicated news items, articles in Moving Picture World and trade periodicals like Municipal Journal and City Record,[81] and editorials, notably one that ran in Hearst papers, which judged that “St. Louis’ trial of ‘Municipal Movies’ bids fair to become an object lesson to all cities where the entertainment, education and safety of a great army of children has become a problem that must be solved . . . there, in the open spaces throughout the more densely populated sections, moving pictures are displayed on stated nights to serve as a diversion, as well as an uplift, to the throbbing minds of the little ones and thus rob the summer heat of some of its terrors.”[82]

Summer heat was indeed an inescapable factor. High temperatures, humidity, and lack of cool nights in summertime St. Louis directly affected the city’s film exhibition business. During the 1910s, airdomes—roofless movie theaters, sometimes directly attached to hardtop theaters—occupied vacant lots in commercial districts and residential neighborhoods in mid-American cities like Kansas City and Louisville. But this type of theater was most prominent in St. Louis, making summertime attendance into a valued source of box-office revenue. “Have you an airdome on your nearest vacant lot?” asked the Star and Times in 1910. “If not, your neighborhood is neither chic nor up-to-date. Every neighborhood is getting an airdome, some are getting six or seven.”[83] A sales rep for a projector manufacturer reported that “St. Louis is going crazy over open air shows,” with 112 license applications in 1910 for “Airdomes” (the term still novel enough at this date to warrant quotation marks).[84] When the four-thousand-seat Hamilton Skydome opened in 1912, it was billed as the largest airdome in the country, equal in size to the open-sided theater that sometimes offered moving pictures at Forest Park, the city’s showcase recreation site.[85]

In the summer of 1915, when there were, according to Motion Picture News, 100 airdomes operating in St. Louis, municipally sponsored movies continued to draw large crowds at public parks. It seemed to make no difference that the independently wealthy Davis had bowed out as park commissioner after the city failed to increase appropriations for “public recreation.”[86] Nelson Cunliff, chief construction engineer for the parks, was named the new commissioner and promised to carry on Davis’s “broad vision of the utility of the parks for the health and pleasure of all the people, rich and poor, young and old.”[87] Cunliff’s schedule for 1915 featured 140 concerts, regular “neighborhood dances,” and two evenings of moving pictures at fourteen different playgrounds and small parks.[88]

As in 1914, the first screening of municipal movies in 1915 took place at Columbus Square, with an overflow crowd of eight thousand people. The social, civic, and political import of the occasion clearly registered for a Post-Dispatch reporter, who described the peaceful, fully engaged, mixed-age audience as composed of “black and white persons of many nationalities,” all “joined by the invisible bonds of pleasure seeking”—clapping during a newsreel, laughing at a comedy, marveling at a “nature film.” And when a two-reel title about Joan of Arc (likely a Pathé film released earlier in 1914) began, “the audience, representing nearly every race upon the globe, was silent. Many on the edges of the crowd pushed farther in. Negroes stood near Russians; Sicilians were grouped with Greeks. Poles stood with Rumanians . . . the clicking of the picture machine could be heard a hundred feet away. The only other sounds were those of the deep-toned chimes in the church across the way at intervals, the rumble of a street car or the honking of a faraway automobile. Even the ice cream and peanut vendors were silent.”[89] The reporter’s insistence on the aural qualities of this event—the presence of ambient sound, the noise of the projector, and the absence of any musical accompaniment—accentuates its distance from theatrical exhibition.

This celebratory account is of a piece with contemporary paeans to cinemagoing as an inexpensive, inclusive, distinctly twentieth-century experience of particular power and relevance for a polyglot, diverse, multi-“raced,” urbanized America. Yet unlike the offerings at a neighborhood nickelodeon or center-city movie palace, this screening at the Columbus Square playground was municipally sponsored, out-of-doors, free, unsegregated, and readily accessible for thousands of people. If the owners of hard-top theaters and airdomes in St. Louis were not on the alert because of the Post-Dispatch’s utopian glimpse of what cinema could be and do as a civic tool, then the well-publicized numbers likely caught their attention: the eighty-four municipal movie events in 1915 attracted 438,000 people, a more than 20 percent increase over 1914.[90] Even before the season had ended, a delegation from the Theatre Managers and Motion Picture Exhibitors Protective Association of St. Louis urged the mayor to discontinue the municipal movies since these free screenings constituted unfair competition and cut into theater patronage, no matter how “educational” the programs purported to be.[91] It also seems possible that publicly funding evening shows that allowed for or even encouraged the mingling of “black and white” spectators could have been deemed unacceptable in a city increasingly marked by Jim Crow policies.

The Motion Picture News reported that Cunliff promised exhibitors that the park screenings “would be held only in the really congested sections of the city, where there are few motion picture theatres, and where the people are too poor to go to the movies.”[92] His stopgap concession did not mollify the exhibitors, who had been increasingly assertive in furthering their interests so far as municipal legislation was concerned, particularly when it came to the struggle over local censorship of moving pictures.[93] The Public Morals Committee of the St. Louis branch of the American Federation of Catholic Societies spearheaded the campaign for local censorship. Cunliff introduced a bill in October 1915 that would have made the park commissioner the head of the city’s censorship board, with exhibitors charged a modest annual fee and distributors paying fifty cents per one-thousand-foot reel for each film reviewed.[94] Vesting such power in the park commissioner, an editorial in the Post-Dispatch declared, would make this appointed administrator “our mental and moral dictator.”[95] Exhibitors, supported by the city’s Business Men’s League, turned out in force to argue against the bill, which was not passed.

Exhibitors registered another victory in May, 1916 when the St. Louis Board of Estimates and Appropriations eliminated funding for moving picture screenings in the parks. Motion Picture News called this an end to the “municipal competition” faced by “exhibitors with theatres and airdomes near the parks and playgrounds where free motion pictures were shown last summer.”[96] In his official statement, Cunliff attributed the decision directly to “protests from the owners of moving picture shows throughout the City of St. Louis.” He described the defunding of municipal movies as the failure to support a successful, progressive initiative of important “educational value” that had served “the great many people who would otherwise be unable to see moving pictures.”[97] At issue, again, was determining the legitimate scope of municipal action and the status of non-theatrical cinema, which could be understood as being in competition with, as an alternative to, or as simply distinct from the workaday business of operating airdomes and movie theaters.

Cutting the city’s appropriation abruptly ended St. Louis’s municipal movies. The City Plan Commission’s official 1917 report, Recreation in St. Louis, covering the record of community centers, playgrounds, and parks in the city, contained no mention of what had been the quite successful, widely heralded sponsorship of municipal movies.[98] When St. Louis created that same year what it called a “municipal open-air theater” seating 9250 in Forest Park, spacious site of the 1904 World’s Fair and still the city’s showcase park, located some distance from the “ghetto,” the Board of Aldermen prohibited any screenings that might pose competition with “regular and legitimate entertainment enterprises which pay a license fee.” Cunliff, who was in charge of granting permits for the new civic venue, flatly declared: “the aim will be to keep the entertainment standard of the theater high”: rather than offering “commonplace things,” this municipal theater would privilege concerts or operas involving community talent.[99] Economic priorities were thus translated into cultural priorities, adding another set of criteria that could limit or at least influence the municipal sponsorship of non-theatrical cinema. Not surprisingly, one instance when moving pictures were deemed appropriate for the theater in Forest Park was as part of a spectacular, patriotic “naval pageant” on July 4, 1917, three months after the US had entered World War I.[100]

The fate of St. Louis’s municipal movies demonstrated the collective power of the city’s exhibitors, underscoring that sponsorship could, when push came to shove, be enmeshed in the dynamics of local politics as well as being a straightforward matter of dollars and cents. To present municipal movies, the St. Louis Park Commission required an appropriation from the city to pay for equipment, operator, and films. Once this funding was in place, the practical work of the Park Commission could begin: authorizing the necessary access to certain parks and playgrounds and selecting, scheduling, publicizing, and screening moving pictures as part of an ambitious, multifarious agenda designed to increase the “social utility” of these spaces. While the Park Commission was not directly involved with the production or distribution of films, it had an investment in offering diverse programs it could characterize at least in part as “educational.” It measured the success of this use of city funds in terms of attendance figures and less quantifiable benefits to audiences.

Tracking the experiment with municipal movies in St. Louis makes evident certain variables in play when it came to municipal, state, and federal government sponsorship of non-theatrical cinema. How much autonomy did the particular civil authorities have in spending appropriations, providing access to screening sites, and making decisions about programming and exhibition practices? Were moving pictures deployed as part of a more expansive civic initiative? How was the utility of supposedly useful cinema to be measured? These variables were not inconsequential. They underscore what I take to be an important basic point about the history of American cinema during the 1910s and beyond: except, perhaps, during World War I and World War II, the public deployment of moving pictures by a wide range of governmental agencies in the US was by no means a uniform practice, much less the result of centralized, systematically administered state policy.

Even in the case of screenings in municipal parks and playgrounds, the aims and the logistics of sponsorship could vary considerably from locality to locality. For example, screenings could be authorized when directly related to a public service health and safety campaign, as in Buffalo, where the park commissioner provided fifteen “motion picture lectures” at eleven different parks warning of the “ravages of tuberculosis.”[101] Or a city could lease or assign the rights for park screenings to a commercial firm. The “free movies” at a city park in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for example, came with no pretense of progressive uplift, since they were exhibited “by a Main street picture show man who had worked out a scheme to have the advertising slides shown between the pictures. It was stated that the pictures would be interesting photographs and that travelogue stuff and the so-called educational pictures dealing with manufacture of this and that would be barred.”[102] In Joplin, Missouri, the city commission saw a more direct way to profit from free movies by striking “a deal with a firm that is to put on a free picture show in the park every night and have all concession privileges in the park, giving the commission a small percentage of its receipts.”[103]

SPONSORED CINEMA IN THE METROPOLIS

In St. Louis, as in Buffalo or Chattanooga, the exhibition of sponsored moving pictures extended well beyond screenings in parks and playgrounds. This activity was likely facilitated in St. Louis because projectors and operators for hire were available from Erker’s, a well-established equipment retailer, and the city served as a hub for commercial film exchanges, which allowed for ready access to certain titles.[104] Given that these screenings were not regularly advertised and were rarely mentioned in the motion picture trade press, any information is likely to come from announcements or brief accounts in local newspapers. Fortunately, three of the city’s major dailies, as well as the Jewish Voice and issues of the African American St. Louis Argus between 1915 and 1919, are available in digital archives. From these sources, while decidedly selective in their coverage, we can piece together an overview of how sponsored cinema was put into practice across the 1910s in what was then the fourth-largest American city, whose population grew over the decade from 687,000 to 772,000, with the number of African Americans increasing from 6 to 9 percent, while what the census called “foreign-born whites” declined from 18 to 13 percent.[105]

St. Louis newspapers abound with references to screenings that took place under the auspices of sponsors other than the Park Commission. To note only a few of the more idiosyncratic instances, indicative of the range of this practice: “motion pictures of food conservation” shown at the St. Louis Patriotic Food Show in 1918, under the auspices of the Women’s Central Committee on Food Preservation; the St. Louis Art League’s presentation of a film about artists in Taos, New Mexico, as part of a gallery exhibit in 1919; the 1911 summer picnic of the Socialist Party, which featured a “free moving picture show,” along with dancing, a band concert, and speeches; an advertising film produced by the Maxwell Motor Company projected in 1915 from the second floor of an automobile retailer across the street to an outdoor screen; and “bulletins” announcing 1912 election returns projected outdoors by various churches, political clubs, newspapers, department stores, and business associations, almost always as part of public events that also included moving pictures and sometimes band concerts.[106] There is no record of theater owners lodging complaints about any of these events. Nor was there protest when St. Louis department stores screened free films for shoppers or when projectors were installed at public or private institutional sites with captive audiences: the city’s Insane Asylum (1909); Poor House (1910); Infirmary (1911); the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Health parish school (1913); the Missouri Penitentiary (1913); the city Workhouse (1915); and the Jewish Home for Chronic Invalids (1916).[107] The St. Louis YWCA branch (with more than seven thousand members) also faced no organized opposition in 1911 after it acquired a projector donated by a local bank, offered Saturday evening screenings, and during the summer of 1912 featured moving pictures at a “roof garden” atop what was billed as its new, fully “modern” building.[108] What is not evident from the print record is how frequently and for how long projectors remained in use at the YWCA, city-run institutions, or large department stores, sponsors that may have had trouble procuring what they deemed to be suitable films or may have concluded that arranging screenings was not worth the trouble.

Similar questions arise for the many churches and the Jewish organizations in St. Louis that made use of moving pictures during the 1910s. For example, various churches between 1910 and 1912 hosted events that relied on moving pictures: outdoor fundraisers, presentations of the Passion Play, appearances by visiting missionaries and evangelists, and lecture “tours” of the Panama Canal, the Holy Land, and Ireland.[109] After Fountain Park Congregational Church began incorporating “the moving picture as an adjunct to Sunday school work,” a 1912 editorial in the Star and Times observed that the “marvel is that churches have so long neglected this great educational aid and permitted it to be made an agent of wrong education, instead of right.”[110] Any such neglect did not last long. By 1913, First Christian Church, the Methodist Kingdom House Mission Church, and the Presbyterian Markham Institutional Church, all serving high-density downtown neighborhoods, were making more regular use of moving pictures as part of religious services and community outreach.[111] Church-sponsored—and, therefore, church-authorized—screenings were still fairly common at the end of the decade, with Union Methodist Episcopal, for example, scheduling Sunday evening lectures on non-religious topics illustrated with moving pictures, St. Paul’s Episcopal beginning to screen what they billed as “censored movies” on Fridays, St. Rose’s Catholic church booking The Victim (a film “Catholic in thought, execution and purpose”), and Memorial Congregational offering moving pictures three times during the week as well as after Sunday evening services, a policy that “increased attendance and virtually paid off the congregation’s debts.”[112]

Events sponsored by Jewish organizations garnered regular coverage from the Jewish press, which noted, for example, the use of projectors at Temple Israel and at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association.[113] The most sustained use of moving pictures highlighted in the Jewish Voice was by the Jewish Educational Alliance, which had been formed in 1905 and offered a night school, nursery, technical training, legal aid service, and social club activities aimed specifically at first-generation immigrants.[114] In 1908, the Alliance introduced free moving pictures as another means of reaching out to and drawing in this community. Initially emphasizing “elevating” programs that included scenics and literary adaptations, “obtained through the courtesy” of a local firm, these screenings were designed as an alternative to neighborhood nickelodeons.[115] Attendance reached 450 weekly by 1909, with regularly scheduled moving picture programs on Saturday evening (7:00 to 8:00 p.m.) before lectures and for the Sabbath school students on Sunday afternoon.[116] These continued into the early 1910s, with programs shifting to Wednesday evenings, but the Jewish Voice does not mention screenings after 1913, perhaps indicating a change in the neighborhood demographics or a reorientation of the group’s priorities.

If the scheduling of weekly, open-to-the-public films by the Jewish Educational Alliance and certain churches look to have been attempts to compete in some fashion with commercial picture shows, sponsors in St. Louis by and large adopted a different strategy, presenting screenings aimed at a more narrowly defined—and often restricted—audience. In effect, how sponsored cinema was put into practice in St. Louis reflects and underscores the social contours of an urban America in which formally organized, voluntarily joined groups had a prominent role—reflecting affiliations and shared interests that reached well beyond the family, the church, the neighborhood, or the workplace. Thus the 1914 annual business meeting of the Jewish Charitable and Educational Union, held for all donors at a posh private club, screened films “showing the work done by Jewish organizations in other cities” to supplement its standard committee reports.[117] Here, as in many cases through the decade, moving pictures were readily incorporated into a planned, sanctioned event—a business meeting, special holiday party, banquet, or social gathering arranged specifically for the members of an organization. This degree of customization would have been unprofitable (and logistically impossible) as a regular policy for a theater that daily offered shows from afternoon through evening, week-in and week-out.

Apart from local branches of major commercial firms like Goodyear Tires, International Mack [truck], Oldsmobile, and Western Electric, which screened what most often were productions the parent company had commissioned,[118] sponsors in St. Louis that relied on film as a means of delivering relevant information, reinforcing shared values, and/or providing entertainment rarely had any involvement in financing or producing the moving pictures they screened.[119] This was true for the St. Louis Medical Society and lodges like the Knights of Columbus, as well as for lineage-based patriotic organizations, such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Society of Colonial Wars, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which all drew on available historical films.[120] The Automobile Club screened films that reflected its members’ common interests, as did the Aero Club, the United Irish Societies of St. Louis, and the Missouri Fish and Game League, which collaborated with the St. Louis Aquarium Society to offer a moving picture program on “the life of trout, salmon, and Alaskan seals.”[121] Profession- and occupation-based organizations composed of bankers, dentists, lumbermen, sales managers, railway employees, chemists, advertisers, architects, and electricians likewise all held meetings that featured moving pictures.[122]

The Engineers’ Club of St. Louis was a particularly active sponsor, scheduling films to be shown in the auditorium of its permanent quarters, which also included a library and reading room. Rather than draw from its regular budget, this club raised $225 from individual members to purchase a projector in September 1915. The Club’s 1916 annual report claims that “the ‘movies’ have come to stay,” and are “of immense value to the Club” by helping to boost attendance at meetings and social events. Typically, these screenings relied on films produced by manufacturers, usually with a representative of the firm on hand. In December 1916, for example, a joint meeting with the Associated Engineering Societies of St. Louis “under auspices of the [Engineers’] Club” drew 126 engineers to hear the Commissioner of Safety for the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, “who read a paper on ‘Railroad Trespassing: Its Prevention a Public Duty,’ supplemented by a two-reel railroad safety-first photoplay entitled, ‘The House that Jack Built.’ This was followed by a three-reel film furnished by the General Electric Co. entitled, ‘King of the Rails,’ showing the evolution of transportation and the electrification of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad.” Having a projector permanently installed on the premises also meant that the Engineers’ Club could offer “comic motion pictures” as part of the “entertainment” for social occasions and conclude its annual business meeting with “scenic motion pictures of Bermuda.”[123]

Like the Engineer’s Club or the Sales Managers’ Association, the city’s large Business Men’s League (BML)—formed, historian Eric Sandweiss notes, “not specifically to transact business, but to look after the general concerns” of its members and the larger “business community”—occasionally hosted members-only social events that included screenings.[124] But the BML more often relied on moving pictures to reach audiences well beyond its own membership. In 1913, it funded Seeing St. Louis, a “publicity” film intended to “stimulate civic pride” and “advertise St. Louis as a city of big things” “all over the nation.”[125] (In 1921, it announced plans for an even more elaborate film campaign to boost the city “from an industrial and recreational standpoint.”)[126] While the BML actively supported theater owners (some of whom were members) in their resistance to proposed censorship ordinances,[127] this organization also agreed in 1915 to serve as the Missouri non-theatrical “distribution bureau” for sponsored industrial titles from the Bureau of Commercial Economics.[128] As Sean Savage explains, the non-profit Bureau of Commercial Economics was founded in Philadelphia in 1913 and soon relocated permanently to Washington, DC. Its name notwithstanding, the Bureau of Commercial Economics was not a federal government agency. With 260 films available as of 1915, its aim was to deliver what it called “a thorough industrial education by the graphic method of motion pictures” by distributing sponsored industrial motion pictures for free screenings, while promising not to circulate titles related to liquor or cigarettes as well any films deemed to be “untruthful or misleading” or—interestingly enough—any films that “awaken hope of opportunity where none exists.”[129] Acting as a film distributor, the BML provided “industrial subjects” for weekly programs at the city workhouse as well as for groups like the Motor Accessory Trade Association and for screenings in other Missouri locations.[130]

This arrangement with the Bureau of Commercial Economics continued after the BML had become the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce (CC) in 1917. The strategy was apparently quite cost-effective, since the CC’s annual report for 1917 noted that film distribution comprised less than 1 percent of the organization’s $130,000 budget, and the same was true for 1918.[131] The affiliation meant that the CC was able to set up in 1919 a series of free shows across the city by one of the bureau’s traveling trucks, which arrived complete with a lecturer, projectors and a collapsible screen, floodlights capable of illuminating a ten-acre field, and a graphophone to attract crowds.[132]

As it began to undertake more efforts in the name of public service, the CC found other ways to deploy moving pictures beyond working with the Bureau of Commercial Economics, including establishing a “Safety First Committee” that arranged for illustrated lectures in schools and for five “safety conferences” in different sections of the city, using moving pictures that it had also screened to three hundred of its members at a hotel banquet.[133] Looking to enhance business conditions after World War I, the CC launched an ambitious plan to support what was called the “farm and city get-together movement” by sending speakers and moving pictures across Missouri to create “through lectures, pictures and publicity an increased enthusiasm among the people of the State” for greater economic cooperation and development.[134] Even more extensive was its wartime commitment to collaborate with “schools, labor unions, churches, civic and commercial organizations” in an Americanization campaign aimed at the city’s “foreign elements.”[135] To this patriotic end, the CC marshalled one hundred speakers to spread the word and sponsored evening meetings in factories that included “special motion pictures dealing with patriotic subjects.”[136] The projector became a particularly important tool for the Junior Chamber of Commerce, which delivered the “message of Americanization” by presenting “moving picture shows in the public schools.”[137] During the war, these efforts ran parallel to military recruitment drives, which also could use moving pictures, such as when the Navy, a month after the US entered the war, took advantage of its access to public spaces and, in one of the most unique public non-theatrical gestures seen in the city, sent through downtown St. Louis a truck “equipped . . . to look like a battleship,” with a mounted screen on which were projected “scenes from navy life.”[138]

The Navy’s roving truck/battleship/mobile projection apparatus is a notable example of how varied sponsored cinema was in St. Louis during the 1910s. By 1919 moving pictures continued to be put to quite different uses by, among other groups, the Children’s Aid Society and the Women’s Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, the Armenian and Syrian Relief Committee and the United States Grain Corporation (in collaboration with the US Department of Agriculture).[139] These examples attest to an ongoing belief in the utility of moving pictures, to a still-open array of possibilities, and to a range of sponsors. But particularly after the city’s decision to defund the summertime screenings in parks and playgrounds, the Business Men’s League/Chamber of Commerce was surely the most well publicized and likely the most active among the many groups that sponsored the non-commercial exhibition of moving pictures in St. Louis. This is not surprising given the size of this organization and its commitment to boosting the city and undertaking business-friendly public service in the form of safety and Americanization campaigns. In a 1916 editorial praising the BML’s “widened scope of vision” and “broadened field of activity,” the Post-Dispatch declared: “progress in democracies is accomplished mainly by organization. This is the democratic mode of getting things done by government. The organization informs and crystallizes public opinion and the government registers it.”[140] If crystallizing public opinion was the goal, then sponsored cinema was potentially a valuable tool for groups engaged in this version of “democratic” praxis. Earlier in the 1910s, the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association clearly thought as much when it invested in and promoted Your Girl and Mine, as did the St. Louis Women’s Suffrage League, when it offered screenings across the city in its 1912 and 1913 campaigns.[141] The Central Trades and Labor Union likewise put on in 1912 “a free moving picture show, exhibiting conditions in factories and workshops throughout the country” as part of its organizing efforts in St. Louis.[142] But in terms of the public use of moving pictures, one clear shift by the end of the 1910s was the local prominence of the Chamber of Commerce, which had access to films, equipment, and a range of different sites—schools, halls, hotel banquet rooms, private clubs, churches, factories, and theaters.

Finding ways to extend its presence in wartime America and fully embracing what the Post-Dispatch called the “democratic mode of getting things done,” the BML/CC was primed to aggressively take advantage of the utility of moving pictures, well beyond providing screen entertainment and informational content for its own membership. Yet even the most systematic and ambitious moving picture initiatives by this organization had obvious limits, some self-determined. There is little evidence, for instance, that the public screenings sponsored by the BML/CC—unlike the Park Commission—reached (or even intended to reach) the city’s African American residents, who were daily facing, in historian Joseph Heathcott’s words, a “continuous encounter with white supremacy, an ongoing struggle over the terms of life” in St. Louis, including access to commercial and non-commercial entertainment.[143]

“Colored” theaters and airdomes provided African American moviegoers in the city with an alternative to the segregated, second-class seating conditions in certain of the city’s white theaters. A fully separate, community-aimed non-theatrical cinema potentially offered an important additional option. As Julie Lavelle ably demonstrates in her study of “movie culture” in St. Louis during the 1910s, the Argus, an African American weekly newspaper, through its advertisements, editorials, and reporting had a central role “both in building an audience for the movies and in defining what moviegoing meant” for this community.[144] The Argus vigorously—and unsuccessfully—opposed the exhibition of The Birth of a Nation in St. Louis, supported the efforts of the Park Commission to expand the playground system, and devoted regular coverage to the 513-seat Booker T. Washington, the city’s first vaudeville and moving picture theater owned and operated by an African American, built in 1913 by Charles Turpin on the site of a former airdome that he had been operating.[145] The Booker T. Washington primarily booked live performers and commercially produced films (often serials), but Turpin was able to expand and tailor his programming by including moving pictures featuring local events and personages, including what was billed as “authentic” footage of the “East St. Louis Riot” and a one-reel “remarkably clear” record of the African American community’s largest public event, the Knights of Pythias military parade.[146] During the war Turpin was credited with “supervising” films of “Negro life in St. Louis,” including churches, businesses, and fraternal orders, and of African American “soldier boys” at a nearby camp, which were screened at the Booker T. Washington.[147] In 1919, he was still occasionally including moving pictures shot in St. Louis—for example, of the parade honoring returning soldiers.[148] Theatrically screening these highly topical, locally produced moving pictures was at once a civic-minded gesture and a smart business decision that distinguished Turpin’s theater from other “colored” venues in a competitive marketplace.

Even more active than Turpin in producing and exhibiting “scenes of interest to the Colored people of St. Louis” was Charles Allmon, whose multi-faceted efforts were aimed largely at providing moving pictures for various sponsors at non-theatrical sites. His activities in the later 1910s suggest what it took to make a living as an independent African American “movie man” even in a large metropolitan area. Allmon worked as a projector operator for churches, lodges, and the “colored” YWCA; presented screenings in towns in the surrounding area; opened the Royal Palm Airdome that promised to specialize in “Original Negro Movies” and welcome “all patrons, churches, lodges, clubs and societies”; and co-founded in 1916 the Allmon-Hudlin Film Company, which filmed schools, churches, a celebration at the St. Louis Colored Orphan Home, and a Masonic parade, and announced plans to film a baseball game involving the St. Louis Giants.[149] During June and July of 1916, this company screened at local churches a typical example of what we might call a race-booster film: “a beautiful pageant of picturesque scenes of Negro life in St. Louis in moving pictures,” highlighting homes, churches, and schools “occupied and owned by Negroes” in the city.[150] It is likely that this footage also figured in the moving pictures “depicting the progress of the Negro race in the middle west” that Allmon projected at a high school in East St. Louis before embarking on what he described as an extensive tour of Missouri and Illinois.[151] In 1917, he advertised the availability of the “only complete moving pictures” of the Knights of Pythias biennial encampment, a major national event held in St. Louis during August 1917, and he began to operate a five-day, weekly film series scheduled in churches, a high school, and a lodge hall in and around St. Louis with subsequent plans to take his “race pictures” on an extended tour of the South.[152]

Given the increasing hardening of Jim Crow policies, marked by the passage in St. Louis of a residential segregation law in 1916, and, especially, the devastating African American loss of life and property in the 1917 white-led race riot across the river in East St. Louis, Illinois, it is not surprising that Allmon specialized in moving pictures celebrating Negro progress. Similarly, the screenings sponsored by prominent Baptist and Methodist Episcopal “colored” churches in St. Louis during 1915 were almost always examples of what Allyson Nadia Field calls “uplift cinema.”[153] For example, programs celebrating the achievements of the Hampton Institute in Virginia and the Lincoln Institute in Kentucky blended spoken commentary, slides, and moving pictures, and St. Paul’s scheduled “an illustrated lecture, with motion pictures, on ‘Race Progress’ ” as part of its the week-long Harvest Home Festival.[154] In 1916, memorials to Booker T. Washington (who had died in November 1915), featuring moving pictures of his life and funeral, were held at three different AME churches, as well at Lane Tabernacle and Pleasant Green Baptist.[155]

Equally prominent, according to information in the Argus, were screenings directly connected with prominent entrepreneurs and philanthropists, supporting Cara Caddoo’s contention that “black cinema culture . . . had roots in two sacred areas of black life: enterprise and religion.”[156] Madam C. J. Walker, whose extraordinarily successful cosmetics and haircare business was based in Indianapolis, presented her “stereopticon lecture and moving pictures” in the chapel at St. Paul’s AME in February 1918. (She had delivered a “stereopticon lecture” at this church in 1915, but notices in the Argus made no mention of moving pictures.)[157] In so doing, Walker, who had lived in St. Louis when she migrated North as a young woman, was entering the home territory of her former employer and now major competitor, Annie M. Pope Turnbo-Malone, another exemplum of African American business success. Aided by her husband, A. E. Malone, Turnbo-Malone earned a fortune selling Poro Hair and Toilet Preparation products. In December 1918 the company opened Poro College, its new $250,000 headquarters, with private apartments as well as facilities to train sales agents and to manufacture and ship products (fig. 1.4). This building, acclaimed the black press, was a “monument to Negro thrift and enterprise.”[158] Lester A. Walton, managing editor of the New York Age, went so far as to call it the “most imposing business structure ever owned by Negroes and operated in the interest of Negroes.” “What Tuskegee Institute is to Negro education,” Walton declared, “the Poro College is to Negro business.”[159]

FIGURE 1.4. Poro College ad, Topeka [KS] Plaindealer, November 18, 1918.

The opening of Poro College drew African American newspaper editors from across the country, who watched on the final night of the week-long festivities in the building’s 500-seat auditorium, “a moving picture exhibition . . . showing the progress of Poro and some interesting things racial.”[160] A later Poro publicity pamphlet emphasized that the auditorium played a significant role in the public life of St. Louis’s established African American community, as it was “frequently used by religious, fraternal, civic, and social organizations for meetings, entertainments, lectures, and recitals.”[161] Well before the grand opening of the new building, Poro had acquired a projector, which by 1915 was being used in the company’s original location for Friday and Monday evening “amusements” for visitors and trainees that included “humorous” moving pictures and stereopticon views of the life of Lincoln.[162] Poro soon became more actively engaged in film exhibition, conducting its own screenings at different St. Louis churches and the “colored” high school in East St. Louis. A Southern tour by Turnbo-Malone to Memphis, Birmingham, and Atlanta featured screenings in churches of 2,000 feet of what were called the “Poro movies,” which seem to have been expanded and perhaps reedited to both promote the company and also document the achievements of the race. A report from Atlanta noted that in addition to offering images of the College, the Poro movies included new footage of St. Louis events as well as “many interesting scenes of the activities of our race throughout the country.”[163] In February 1917, another tour took the Poro films to New Orleans and Jacksonville, Florida, as well as to the Tuskegee Institute.[164]

CONCLUSION

The elaborate dedication ceremony for a new $150,000 addition to Poro College that opened in 1920 did not include a screening, and there’s no evidence in the Argus and other African American newspapers that new iterations of the Poro movies appeared after 1918.[165] When and why did this prominent enterprise stop using moving pictures? This is just one of a host of open questions concerning sponsored cinema in St. Louis. For instance, how long were projectors in operation at the YWCA, the Engineer’s Club, or the Jewish Educational Alliance? How regularly were films scheduled by authorities at the Workhouse or the Insane Asylum? How often did sponsored screenings cater to private, well-heeled audiences at country clubs, hotel ballrooms, or art galleries? These are not simply rhetorical questions, but an acknowledgement that there is much basic information that we don’t and likely can’t know about the history of non-theatrical cinema in St. Louis—many more gaps, blindspots, and absences than one would encounter in researching the history of this city’s movie theaters, film exchanges, and debates over censorship.[166]

However, what the available evidence from St. Louis newspapers does show is the widespread interest by a notably diverse range of groups and organizations in making use of moving pictures to entertain, inform, teach, convert, and/or inspire differently configured audiences, public and private. Looking backward, this city’s non-theatrical playing field might seem to have been wide open, but it was never level. The fate of the Park Commission’s municipal movies, the prominence of the Business Men’s League/Chamber of Commerce, and the activities of Poro College indicate that the purview, presence, and power of sponsors in St. Louis varied considerably. Unequal access to resources, spaces, and opportunities meant that screening events were far more likely to be sponsored by management rather than employees, by nationally marketed brands rather than local products, by well-established churches rather than smaller congregations, by nativist rather than immigrant organizations, by groups of doctors, engineers, and advertisers rather than clerks, laborers, and service workers.

Yet even with this unbalance, sponsorship was not always directly undertaken in the service of maintaining the racial and class status quo, advancing progressive causes, fostering Americanization, training citizen-workers, or encouraging consumerism—all overarching imperatives promoted by powerful constituencies in early twentieth-century America. But in screening after screening, sponsored cinema did make tangible what Lee Grieveson calls the period’s widespread interest in the “social functioning of cinema,” that is, “how cinema should function in society, about the uses to which it might be put, and thus, effectively, about what it could or would be.”[167] In a world where events, programs, campaigns, meetings, and performances so often took place “under auspices,” sponsored cinema constituted an ongoing demonstration of the social functioning of cinema, which extended well beyond the aims of and the experiences afforded audiences by the commercial film industry.

2

Multi-purpose Cinema

As the 1910s progressed, the programming at American moving picture theaters offered a richly varied and profitable menu week after week—comedies and travelogues, serial episodes and romances, Westerns and literary adaptations, newsreels and historical melodramas. But for producers, distributors, and exhibitors, these formally and even ideologically diverse films were all marketed and delivered as “entertainment.” And they all had one overriding purpose: to be seen by paying customers in theaters and thereby generate revenue for the commercial film industry. In contrast, as the previous chapter demonstrated, the opportunities afforded by sponsorship allowed for and encouraged putting moving pictures to a host of other uses, depending on the particular capacities of the apparatus and film as a medium as well as on the resources, available options, and objectives of sponsors. Sponsored cinema was, in practice, multi-purpose cinema—not because an individual film could be redeployed for different ends (though that happened), but because the possibilities for how moving pictures could be put to use extended well beyond the commercially successful, culturally central model driving the theatrical film industry.[1] In St. Louis, for example, moving pictures directly suited for the occasion were called on to help sell Texas real estate, Americanize immigrants, promote good dental hygiene, advocate for the creation of a city zoo, celebrate African American accomplishments, encourage missionary activity, document the construction of a new golf course, inform union members about factory conditions across the US, and warn bankers about check forgery.[2] These were all instances of what has increasingly been called “useful cinema,” a formulation introduced by Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson to describe “film’s role as a functional device and range of practices” that constituted a veritable “other cinema.” Identifying instances of this other cinema is the necessary historiographical work at the heart of my project. But it bears keeping in mind that “the concept of useful cinema,” for Acland and Wasson, “does not so much name a mode of production, a genre, or an exhibition venue as it identifies a disposition, an outlook, and an approach toward a medium on the part of institutions and institutional agents.”[3]

Extending well beyond the purview of established institutions, this concept/ approach/outlook has been articulated in print discourse since the earliest days of projected moving pictures, and it flourished in the 1910s. Introducing a regular section called “The Moving Picture Educator,” an editorial from December 1911 in Moving Picture World, then the industry’s premiere trade magazine, waxed euphoric in asserting the unlimited usefulness of cinema: “The cinematograph is not only ornamental, beautiful, pleasing and entertaining; it is also useful. More than this, its practical value has made such bounds that it has now become an actual necessity; indeed, it is almost a question if its utilitarian value is not greater than its pleasure giving has proven to be . . . it is now fulfilling its mission as one of the greatest servants of humanity . . . as a necessity the cinematograph finds its place everywhere the human eye needs either to be taught or pleased.”[4]

Moving Picture World’s particular word choice here begs a number of questions. How to gauge the practical value of useful cinema? What constitutes its mission? What might render it a necessity—or an important utilitarian tool? What place does it occupy in the modern world? Who or what does it serve? These are the questions driving the period discourse that looked beyond the commercial film industry’s undeniable success in delivering the pleasures of commercial entertainment to a massive audience gathered in theaters across the US. This discourse envisioned the vast prospects for a form of cinema that took advantage of the range of subjects that could be shot with a motion picture camera, the special capacities of cinematography (e.g., time-lapse, slow motion, underwater filming), and, especially, the ends to which moving pictures might be deployed.

In this chapter I focus first on two print sources that from quite different perspectives documented, celebrated, and encouraged the multiple functionality of cinema: the film industry trade press, notably Moving Picture World; and Scientific American, a widely circulated and well respected weekly magazine that surveyed notable achievements and innovative advances in technology and applied science. These periodicals offer both speculative claims about the potential utility of moving pictures and also much information (often in bits and pieces) concerning the varied, mundane, predictable, specialized, novel, haphazard, and/or well-orchestrated ways that cinema was being utilized by, among others, educators, political activists, medical societies, researchers, explorers, lecturers, and state-run institutions.

As the essays in Patrick Vonderau and Vinzenz Hediger’s influential anthology, Films that Work, attest, the capacities of multi-purpose cinema were particularly attractive for corporations, manufacturers, and retailers.[5] Here was a medium with great potential, claimed articles from the 1910s in System: The Magazine for Business, for training employees, boosting efficiency, overseeing workers, improving public relations, creating brand identity, and increasing sales.[6] This chapter concludes with a case study of the Gossard Corset Company’s success in what Business: A Magazine for Office, Store and Factory in 1914 called “commercializing the motion picture.”[7] Like National Cash Register, 20-Mule Team Borax, the Maxwell Automobile Company, International Harvester, and General Electric, Gossard utilized moving pictures in an ambitious marketing campaign that relied on access to movie theaters.[8]

THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY TRADE PRESS: HERALDING THE “EXTENSIVE USEFULNESS” OF CINEMA

In England, France, Germany, and the United States, motion pictures in the service of scientific and medical research and pedagogy quickly emerged as legitimating proof of cinema’s utility. By 1912, British author Leonard Donaldson would declare that “in a comparatively short space of time the cinematograph has become a potential and revolutionising factor in the world of Science.”[9] One highly visible iteration of this important application of useful cinema was what Oliver Gaycken calls “popular-science films.”[10] Titles like Kinemacolor’s time-lapse From Bud to Blossom (1911)—featured on the cover of an issue of Popular Mechanics in June 1911 and billed in its theatrical run as “the most scientific botanical picture ever produced”—serve as a reminder that in practice the heterogeneity of cinema was not always reducible to an easily discerned distinction between theatrical or non-theatrical exhibition and entertainment or educational objectives.[11]

As Gaycken and Luke McKernan detail, Charles Urban proved to be a central figure in the development of popular-science film in the United States, in part by promoting his version of cinema’s calling in a series of five articles on “The Cinematograph in Science and Education,” published in Moving Picture World during 1907, this magazine’s first year of publication.[12] Microcinematography, time-lapse films, and records of surgical operations received particular attention from Urban, but he argues in these Moving Picture World articles that “the extensive usefulness” of moving pictures potentially reaches much further, since the cinema can show audiences “the whole world of industries,” military and zoological subjects, “present-day events,” and countries and peoples “from Peru to China.”[13] Taking full advantage of the medium’s utility, Urban insists, requires making the moving picture apparatus a “vital necessity in every barracks, ship, college, school, institute, hospital, laboratory, academy and museum.”[14] While a book like Frederick Talbot’s Practical Cinematography and its Applications (1913) highlights the profitable opportunities for “the amateur or independent” filmmaker in the “vast, fertile and promising” commercial market for “practical cinematography,” Urban’s articles forecast nothing less than the edifying, enlightening prospect of a world documented and revealed in new ways by the motion picture camera and then screened for a broad array of audiences including but not at all limited to the crowds frequenting nickelodeons.[15]

It is not surprising that Moving Picture World would publish Urban’s clarion call for the promise of multi-purpose cinema. This trade journal was on the lookout for signs of cinema’s social and cultural legitimacy in the wake of criticism leveled at dangerous nickelodeons, sensationalistic screen offerings, and children’s habitual moviegoing. Earlier in 1907 Moving Picture World had reported favorably on what it billed as “novel uses of the medium,” including motion pictures serving as a means of studying the behavior of epileptics and as an aid for coaches of football and rowing, as well as the deployment of film by the US government to train soldiers, promote military recruitment, and record for posterity the “daily life of many tribes of Indians” and vanishing wild animals in the West.[16] Subsequent Moving Picture World articles in 1907 described successful attempts to film lightning flashes and a beating human heart, novel achievements unrelated to the practices of the commercial entertainment industry.[17]

As the 1910s began, Moving Picture World advised American film studios to take full advantage of the “boundless” opportunities afforded by the “usefulness of moving pictures.”[18] Although the unquestionable priority of this magazine and competitors like Motography and Film Index was to cover the business of film production and theatrical exhibition, the motion picture trade press continued to note and to encourage alternate applications of the medium that were more likely to generate cultural capital and social benefits than nickels and dimes at the box office. Scattered through the pages of Moving Picture World during the early and mid-1910s are brief items evincing what a 1912 editorial claimed to be “the countless benefits which the Cinematograph has conferred upon the human race,” not only because of its deployment in church-related activities, public health campaigns, and formal educational settings, but also because moving pictures were being put in the service of time and motion studies, civic boosterism, microcinematography, improved agricultural practices, the training of surgeons, and the safe handling of explosives.[19]

The first issue of Motography (April 1911) followed suit, promising that its coverage would address, in addition to exhibitors, a varied mix of subscribers, including “advertising managers of large manufacturing and industrial concerns; school boards and superintendents of education”; “ministers of the gospel who are beginning to see the wonderful possibilities for the visualizing of biblical events”; and “superintendents of penal institutions and insane hospitals, who are interested in the ‘motographic cure’ for criminalism and mental diseases.”[20] To this end, Motography (and its forerunner, The Nickelodeon) offered information, for example, on various Protestant churches that were taking advantage of motion pictures to present “the gospel in more vivid form,” “lure indifferent passer-bys,” and “punctuate” sermons.[21] “The motion picture,” declared a commentator in Motography in 1911, “has actually become a part of the equipment of the up-to-date church. It is almost as necessary as a janitor, an organ or the heavy and depressing looking pews of oak.”[22] This periodical also took particular note of what it claimed was the “latest and best cure for insanity”: regularly screening motion pictures (usually comedies and scenics) to patients at institutions like the St. Louis Insane Asylum and the Central Kentucky Asylum for the Insane.[23] Likewise, Moving Picture News reported on the “ever increasing number of ways the animated picture may be used,” noting in one article the parks where the New York City Department of Health would be screening its “tuberculosis pictures.”[24] Even the preeminent fan magazines, Photoplay and Motion Picture Story Magazine, would on occasion single out novel applications of the medium—for example, to train recruits in marksmanship and instruct railroad workers in the operation of signal apparatus.[25]

In highlighting these practical, beneficial, diverse uses, the trade press encouraged the development and the utilization of film as a multi-purposable medium. “In the advancement of the human race,” announced Margaret J. MacDonald in Moving Picture News, “the motion picture shall surely have a high and honored place . . . the day is rapidly approaching when moving pictures will be used on [sic] instances we never dreamed of: in colleges, asylums, hospitals, and in various other unthought-of uses for the advancement of humanity.”[26] This high-minded vision of cinema’s boundless, utilitarian promise in the service of progress, productivity, applied science, and modernization stands as a corollary to the period’s celebration of film as a “universal language” and a “democratic art,” claims that, as Miriam Hansen analyzes in Babel and Babylon, carried “connotations of egalitarianism, internationalism, and the progress of civilization through technology.”[27] Yet the utopian promise of multi-purpose cinema did not speak to the possibility of a shared, accessible experience for all, transcending difference and distance, but rather to the prospect of countless applications serving a host of different functions across the breadth of society, potentially creating new revenue streams in the process.

According to Moving Picture World, the grand, manifold promise of useful cinema was being further realized every day. Thus, W. Stephen Bush, one of the magazine’s primary contributors, deemed the preliminary efforts of the United States Department of Agriculture to provide films specifically intended for farmers as “another practical instance of the ever-widening sphere of kinematographic usefulness.”[28] The “profitable results” generated by motion pictures “used as a means of increasing efficiency” and “vocational perfection,” Moving Picture World noted in 1913, “is only another credit to the kinematograph, the list of which is daily increasing. Universal in its powers, unlimited in its applications, it seems destined to become as great a help to the artisan, as to the scholar, artist or scientist.”[29]

“Ever-widening” possibilities notwithstanding, on the pages of Moving Picture World and other trade magazines, multi-purpose cinema was largely conflated with or collapsed into the “educational picture.” This label typically referred to scenics (like A Trip to Saxony [1910]), animated weeklies (like Pathé Weekly [1910]), industrials (like The Crab Industry [1910]), and topicals (like President Taft in San Francisco [1910]) all produced for inclusion in regular nickelodeon programming by mainstay commercial studios like Pathé, Lubin, and Gaumont.[30] In addition to running editorials lauding the pedagogic capability of the medium, Moving Picture World in March 1910 introduced a dedicated page entitled “Education, Science and Art and the Moving Picture,” which became “In the Educational Field” and then was renamed the “Moving Picture Educator.” Devoted to the field (or subfield) of “educational cinematography,”[31] this regular column documented and validated the claim that “all over America, in colleges, schools, training institutions, settlement houses, hospitals and prisons, the good work of the moving pictures as an educator is one constant theme.”[32] The Moving Picture Educator was largely taken up with praising select new releases and noting individual schools and churches that were acquiring projectors, thereby joining what was heralded as a veritable “educational movement.” From the perspective of Moving Picture World, the “educational field” bridged theatrical and non-theatrical film exhibition, which both could (and should) screen the same selection of films—thus articles like “How an Educational Picture Can Save a Bad Program” (February 1913) and “The Place and Value of the Educational Picture in the Moving Picture Business” (September 1913), as well as a three-part field-defining filmography presented by W. Stephen Bush in 1913.[33] In compiling its extensive “Catalogue of Educational Releases for 1914,” Moving Picture World drew entirely from titles originally intended for theatrical release, including newsreel segments as well as feature films and screen adaptations of stage plays.[34] These filmographies functioned as a way to encourage rental of so-called “educational” titles by sponsors and enlightened exhibitors, while giving due public relations credit to the industry for its already substantial contributions in this field.

Moving Picture News, competing for the same market as Moving Picture World, editorialized even more stridently during the early teens in support of what it called “cinematography as an educational agent” in and out of the theater.[35] In March 1914, not long after Moving Picture News became Motion Picture News, it added to its regular coverage a new column entitled “In the Educational Field.” This addition was deemed warranted because “new fields for the application of the motion picture to education are opened so rapidly that it is not surprising that the possibilities of this new development should seem almost limitless.”[36] Yet in Motion Picture News’s account of the warp-speed progress of educational cinema, certain fairly well-established possibilities predominated. A column in June 1914, for example, mentioned plans to “employ motion pictures” in the New Orleans public schools, an effort by a Parent Teachers Association in Minneapolis to screen selected films for children at a local theater, the experimental use of comedy and travel pictures to help with the “restoration of lost human minds” at a state hospital for the insane in Ohio, and the planned filming of wildlife in the northern Minnesota woods by a university instructor who intended the footage for classroom instruction.[37]

Judging from the regular columns devoted to “educational” pictures in Motion Picture News and other American motion picture trade periodicals, the “unlimited” prospects for multi-purpose cinema seemed in practice to be a matter of narrowly aimed applications largely relying on commercially produced films. It is worth noting, then, that one other important non-theatrical use of moving pictures acknowledged by the trade press was to deliver “entertainment.” Thus, a report in Moving Picture World claimed that “motion pictures are becoming a fixed part of every entertainment of any sort around Cincinnati, especially in meetings of business men. At the recent ‘Sommernachstfest,’ held by the Business Men’s Club on the roof of the Ohio Mechanics’ Institute, which was attended by about 600 persons, a highly appreciated part of the entertainment was that afforded by a selection of several reels showing the recent activities of the club and other Cincinnati business organizations, as well as some comedy reels.”[38]

Incorporating local views (probably made-to-order) and what were likely slapstick comedies rented from one of Cincinnati’s commercial film exchanges, this event sponsored by the Business Men’s Club made no pretense at being “educational” and was, according to Moving Picture World, indicative of a broader trend when it came to entertainment gatherings in the city. This example of non-theatrical cinema constitutes another piece of evidence testifying to the ever-increasing presence of moving pictures in American public life—at least when seen from the partisan perspective of the motion picture trade press, which remained on the lookout for proof that cinema was fulfilling its multi-purposed potential in sites far removed from the moving picture theater, without in any way threatening the American film industry’s bottom line.[39]

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: MOVING PICTURES AND THE EXPANDING SPHERE OF USEFULNESS

The print discourse related to the utilitarian value of motion pictures extended well beyond articles, editorials, and advertisements in the motion picture trade press and the coverage in American newspapers. Relevant material appeared in a range of periodicals, all far afield of the film industry. Robert Grau claimed in The Theatre of Science: A Volume of Progress and Achievement in the Motion Picture Industry (1914) that “one of the first, if not indeed the first, class of publications to recognize the significance of the motion picture from various angles was the scientific and mechanical magazines.”[40] Most prominent in this class was the widely circulated weekly Scientific American, and its somewhat more “abstruse” and “specialized” monthly companion publication Scientific American Supplement, which regularly reprinted material from American sources and articles from French and British journals.[41] (Unless noted, I will refer to both publications collectively as Scientific American.) Given its orientation toward science, technology, innovation, and utility, Scientific American affords a prime vantage point outside the film industry from which to sample the broader discourse concerning the promise and the emerging practice of multi-purpose cinema.

Identifying itself in 1896 as “A Weekly Journal of Practical Information, Art, Science, Mechanics, Chemistry, and Manufactures,” Scientific American by 1914 had become “The Weekly Journal of Practical Information.” Practicality was its watchword, and this meant, in addition to publishing articles by scientists and engineers and following relevant professional activities, Scientific American was dedicated to keeping up with the latest in applied science and mechanics, including innovations in communication and recording technologies. With much space devoted to reporting on new inventions and notable products, projects, processes, and personalities, it is not surprising to find Scientific American cover stories in 1896 explaining the workings of a moving picture projector (identified as the “kinetoscope stereopticon”) and a year later heralding the emergence of a new industry by describing in detail the technology and labor that goes into the complicated process of creating motion pictures to be projected using Biograph machines or made available to an individual viewer via the hand-cranked Mutoscope.[42] These copiously illustrated articles emphasize film’s potential as a medium for commercial entertainment, and progress along these lines remained of passing interest to Scientific American, particularly when it came to the production of ingenious “fantastic effects” for the screen.[43]

American Mutoscope & Biograph’s introduction in 1901 of the “Commercial Mutoscope,” an invention designed to “have a wide field of usefulness,” indicated for Scientific American that motion pictures had possible functions well beyond serving as a “mere instrument of entertainment.”[44] Always attentive to evidence of the utility and practicality of modern technology, Scientific American reported in 1902 on the possibilities of the kinetoscope for “scientific investigation” in the classroom as well as the laboratory, noting in particular innovations in microcinematography and ultra-slow-motion filming.[45] Perhaps one model for multi-purpose cinema was the automobile, which was, Scientific American announced in 1902, already being put to “varied modern uses” and so was contributing to an ever-expanding “sphere of usefulness.”[46] The Philadelphia Telegraph offered a similar analogy in reporting on the “usefulness” of moving pictures for teaching surgery: “often before have devices intended as toys become permanently useful. The steam engine was little more at first and automobiles were playthings of the rich. Moving pictures it seems are to become valuable in almost every field of science.”[47] Utility value will out, as it were.

The instrumental value of photography—including lantern slides—was similarly touted in Scientific American, which claimed that by the beginning of the twentieth century, photography had proven to be “useful both for scientific and industrial purposes,” extremely valuable for “purely military purposes” as much as for providing images of “the interior of the eye.”[48] A 1908 article in the Supplement pressed this point even further, asserting that “photography has been developed, its methods improved, its scope extended, and its field of usefulness enlarged, until to-day it enters into every branch of scientific research, popular education, commercial activity, legal investigation, manufacturing achievement, military and naval warfare, pathological and surgical work, and into the exposition and consequent improvement of local conditions in every section of the civilized world.”[49] It is precisely the apparently unlimited, versatile functionality of photography that is praised here. With no irony or qualification, Scientific American heralds a modernizing world in which ever-improving, multi-purposable media— including motion pictures—can and should serve the needs of warfare as well as surgery, education, and commerce, thereby contributing in manifold ways to the progress of civilization.

As nickelodeons spread nationwide and moving pictures became a ubiquitous, lucrative, and more systematized form of affordable mass entertainment—that is, became the movies—Scientific American continued to pay attention to the burgeoning commercial film industry as well as to developments in sound and color motion pictures. Articles covered the opening of Universal City, for example, and also explained the creation of special cinematic effects that enabled “playing tricks with time.”[50] Yet it was the novel contributions of motion picture technology to the wider “sphere of usefulness” that registered most strongly for Scientific American. “We are constantly learning of new uses for moving pictures,” an article announced in 1912.[51] Scientific American detailed these uses in articles on, for example, a “kinematograph target apparatus” for “training sharpshooters” and ingenious British “natural history films” that have “shaken to their foundations many staunchly rooted beliefs concerning animal, bird, and insect life.”[52] This magazine also reported on motion pictures produced for United States government agencies and departments, like the Reclamation Service and Forest Service, whose films picturing major engineering and irrigation projects across the West were shown at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.[53] Predictably, coverage often focused on what Scientific American called the “scientific use of moving pictures,” which could refer to filming the effect of a hydraulic press on metal, moving pictures made with an X-ray machine, time-lapse “motion picture records” of a major construction project or of plant growth, slow-motion footage of “projectiles and their effect on armor plate,” and the role of moving pictures in Frank Gilbreth’s “efficiency engineering” studies of “micro-motion.”[54]

These applications of the medium often depended on the ingenious modification or radical redesigning of the motion picture apparatus, particularly the camera. For Scientific American, as for heavily illustrated, mass-market magazines like Popular Mechanics, technological innovation and practical utility went hand in hand, whether that meant new achievements in aerial cinematography or in “kinematographing tissue growth.”[55] As something of a corollary to its vision of the motion picture apparatus as modifiable and improvable, Scientific American also offered instructions for building a motion-picture projector and camera.[56] Popular Mechanics, even more geared toward the do-it-yourselfer, featured similar plans as early as 1911, reflective of a hands-on approach to technology that encouraged the development of what would become amateur cinema and home film exhibition.[57]

FIGURE 2.1. DIY plans and modifications for motion-picture cameras: Popular Mechanics, June 1911 (top); Popular Mechanics, August 1912 (bottom left); Scientific American, December 17, 1910 (bottom right).

Complementing its interest in the invention and modification of motion picture cameras and projectors (and other communication and media apparatuses) were the many covers of Scientific American issues by the mid-1910s that rendered technology in more dramatic terms, testifying both to the unprecedented achievements and also the potential dangers of technologically enabled modernity. In 1913 and 1914, for example, covers featured major construction projects and engineering feats like the Panama Canal, massive pieces of machinery, microscopes and other scientific instruments, and, quite frequently, topical material directly related to the European war and American military preparedness. Perhaps the most striking aspect of these covers is how they repeatedly depict utility, technology, and progress in terms of fearless and fully capable white men in action, building skyscrapers, stoking huge furnaces, and, often, using some type of media: sending surveillance information by wireless from an airplane (January 10, 1914), intently examining an X-ray (April 11, 1914), peering into a telescope (April 4, 1914), or handling a complicated switchboard (June 6, 1914).

Clearly, for Scientific American the opportunities and challenges of the present moment put a premium on dedicated and resourceful masculinity, as represented by images of skilled white men performing specialized and sometimes dangerous work that necessarily involved technology. This point was also emphasized in the two Scientific American covers in 1913 and 1914 that highlighted novel uses of motion pictures. In both cases, the subject was not film utilized in the service of laboratory experiments, greater efficiency on the factory floor, or promoting government programs, but rather the groundbreaking efforts of entrepreneurial inventors and intrepid camera operators who had successfully captured moving images of spectacular natural environments otherwise inaccessible to public view.

The cover of the June 21, 1913, issue pictures a group of four men trekking in Antarctica, dwarfed by an active volcano and a looming iceberg, with no trace of modern technology in sight (fig. 2.2). But the caption reads: “One of a Series of Moving Pictures of the Scott Antarctic Expedition.” The accompanying article, “To the South Pole With the Cinematograph,” is illustrated with twenty-four photographs of “artistic and popular interest” and “no inconsiderable scientific value,” identified as “part of the Gaumont moving picture film record” of the British Antarctic Expedition headed by Robert Falcon Scott, who died with the four men accompanying him in an unsuccessful attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole. Along with showing penguins and other creatures of the frozen landscape, these illustrations provide glimpses of the members of the expedition at work. The article’s quite extensive text, however, is almost exclusively concerned with the experiences of Herbert Ponting, who describes at length the challenges and dangers he faced as the expedition’s photographer and cinematographer.[58]

FIGURE 2.2. Cover of Scientific American, June 21, 1913.

Scientific American took a similar tact the following year when it covered the successful effort by J. E. Williamson (assisted by his brother George) to develop a means of taking motion pictures of the ocean’s depths. This “remarkable photographic feat” warranted placement on the cover of the July 11, 1914, issue of Scientific American, with the caption: “Moving Pictures Under Water.” A different image detailing Williamson’s accomplishment appeared on the cover of the August 8, 1914, issue of the Supplement, with the caption: “Photograph of a Fight with a Shark Taken Under Water with the Williamson Apparatus” (fig. 2.3).[59] “Now the riddle of the deep is about to be solved,” declared an article in the Supplement that explained in detail the design and operation of the “new apparatus” that had successfully been used to acquire “scientific motion picture film” of the “actual conditions on the bottom of the sea.” This undersea footage included a “hand-to-hand conflict” between a man and a shark (a fight that had been arranged for the camera).[60] Williamson himself authored an account for Scientific American that explained how he and his brother refined their father’s invention, hired the experienced commercial cameraman Carl L. Gregory, and “accomplished the conquest of the deep, with aid of a novel submarine tube and of the photographic camera.”[61]

FIGURE 2.3. Covers of Scientific American, July 11, 1914 (left) and Scientific American Supplement, August 8, 1914 (right).

It was the individual efforts of Ponting and the apparatus developed by the Williamsons that most drew the attention of Scientific American, which noted in both cases that the unique footage had not been acquired with an eye toward screenings at museums or other non-theatrical sites. In fact, these cinematographic endeavors—praised by Scientific American as innovative, scientific, remarkable—resulted not only in striking new images of hidden or far-distant natural environments, but also in feature films that were released theatrically. Gaumont’s ad in Moving Picture News for its two-reel Capt. Scott’s South Pole Expedition (1912) promised an attraction-filled, authoritatively non-fictional, box-office winner: “positively the biggest feature film ever put on the market. Wonderful pictures of the Terra Nova breaking the ice-pack, the great ice barrier, life in the Antarctic, the Midnight Sun in all its splendor, immense flocks of penguins, sports on the ice that never melts, sleighing expeditions—a perfect record of a wonderful expedition.”[62] The film was booked during 1913 and 1914 across the United States, including theaters in New York City, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and Chicago (sometimes with the “noted Shakespearean” actor Charles B. Hanford providing an accompanying lecture) as well as smaller cities and towns like Stevens Point, Wisconsin, and Coshocton, Ohio.[63] In January 1914, Gaumont released a 6,700-foot film that combined motion pictures of the Scott expedition (billed under the title, The Undying Story of Captain Scott) with what it called Animal Life in the Antarctic, which toured the US for over a year, again prominently featuring Hanford as the lecturer.[64]

The Williamson undersea moving pictures fared even better as a theatrical attraction. After well-publicized screenings at the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Natural History, Williamson’s footage was marketed by the Submarine Film Corporation as a six-reel feature film, under the title Thirty Leagues Under the Sea. In January 1914, Universal began distributing Williamson’s film—again, accompanied by a lecturer. Accurate box office records for films in the period are difficult to come by, but newspaper and trade paper accounts suggest that Thirty Leagues Under the Sea became one of the most widely circulated non-fiction features of the 1910s.[65] Opening in September 1914, it played at the Broadway Rose Garden in New York City for six weeks. Universal would claim in an advertisement from April 1915 that the film was seen by two hundred and fifty thousand people in an eight-week run at the Fine Arts Theater in Chicago and set a record with over twenty-five thousand admissions during the seven days it played in Denver.[66] The footage was likely also used in The Williamson Submarine Expedition Pictures, which Motography called in October 1916 a “phenomenal success” “now being shown in nearly every corner of the universe.”[67] The ad for Williamson Submarine Pictures in the 1920 edition of Wid’s Year Book—the industry’s essential reference book—still highlighted the coverage Williamson had received six years before in Scientific American.[68]

It had not been box-office potential that led Scientific American to devote a cover story to the spectacular non-fiction motion pictures shot by Williamson—or by Ponting. Rather, this footage constituted proof positive of the beneficial, scientific utility of motion picture technology in the hands of forward-thinking, daring practitioners. Given its coverage of photography, telephony, and wireless telegraphy, it should come as no surprise that Scientific American devoted space to cinema, paying particular attention to the novel, innovative, extra-ordinary ways that motion pictures had proven their value in the service of scientific research and workplace efficiency, training medical students and soldiers, and adding to the body of empirical data available to botanists and zoologists. If the expanded utility of automobiles and photographs were any indication, there was for Scientific American potentially no end to the uses to which motion pictures might be put.

In its estimation of cinema as a multi-purpose technology, Scientific American was by no means unique. A 1914 handbook covering all manner of “optic projection” devices, for example, claimed that “[m]oving pictures are the offspring of science through some of the finest minds that the world has known. It is simply for the finest art, the best science and the highest aspirations of mankind to take this powerful agent—their offspring—and put it to the real service of humanity. Let it do what it is so capable of doing in the church, in general and technical schools of all grades; in scientific, educational and philanthropic societies; in the theater, in the club, and finally in the home.”[69]

FIGURE 2.4. Cover of Popular Electricity and the World’s Advance, May 1914 (left); ad for The World’s Advance, Scientific American, June 19, 1915 (right).

By pointing to a range of uses, Scientific American encouraged the instrumentalization of and promoted the manifold utility of cinema, which it approached from a vantage point not only outside the commercial film business but apart from any one profession, industry, or academic discipline. In its commitment to celebrating scientific progress, keeping abreast of technological innovation, and providing practical information, Scientific American in an ad hoc way articulated issue after issue the parameters of multi-purpose cinema in the early 1910s—as was also frequently the case for more heavily illustrated, mass market-aimed magazines like Technical World and The World’s Advance, which celebrated an industrialized, ever-progressing, and technology-driven version of American modernity.

By the end of the decade, during and immediately after World War I, Scientific American was still noting novel uses for moving pictures, often made possible by improvements in the apparatus—for example, a “suitcase motion-picture laboratory” likely to be valuable for the itinerant filmmaker and a machine gun with an attached camera that used motion picture film.[70] Carl Akeley’s development of a camera for location filming of rapidly moving objects drew particular attention, including the only Scientific American cover devoted to motion pictures during 1919, which depicted a man using an Akeley camera to capture footage of “a Record Breaking Motorboat” (fig. 2.5).[71] More revelatory and scientifically valuable was the use of the medium to record the reflection and refraction of light rays passing through a lens, demonstrating, in the words of an account from October 1919, that “the motion picture has again revealed to us that which before was too swift for the human eye to discern.”[72]

FIGURE 2.5. Cover of Scientific American, March 29, 1919.

An article published in September 1919 on C. Francis Jenkins, who had patented in 1895 a mechanism that allowed film to run intermittently through a projector, made even grander claims for the far-reaching significance of cinema. This installment in the Scientific American‘s series of articles on the “Romance of Invention” contends that the creation of a workable projector enabled the development of the enormous, global “motion-picture industry,” which—unique among the “institutions in the world”—“is at once an amusement, a news distributor, a means of education and a tool of the laboratory.”[73] As this article makes clear, by the end of the decade multi-purpose cinema was an established fact for Scientific American—evidenced as well in the attention this magazine paid to the “safety films” sponsored by the US Steel Corporation; the massive outdoor screen erected for the Methodist Centenary celebration in Columbus, Ohio; the miles of motion pictures shot by the Signal Corps during World War I; and even the transformation of a fancy dining room into a “motion-picture theater and recreation hall” when the ocean liner Vaterland was repurposed into a huge troop transport ship.[74]

Yet in the later 1910s Scientific American actually paid more attention to the commercial film industry than to non-theatrical cinema, most notably by publishing three lengthy articles in 1917 on the production of feature films, authored by Austin C. Lescarboura, a regular contributor who served as the magazine’s managing editor.[75] Lescarboura focused not on movie stars or popular genres, but on the individual skill, coordinated labor, organizational logic, and specialized technology that made commercial filmmaking in the US a profitable, modern, grand-scale, technologically sophisticated undertaking. Hollywood filmmaking by the likes of D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille was, for Lescarboura, more akin to bridge building or planning battlefield strategy than capturing light rays on film or documenting an Antarctic expedition.[76] The illustrated covers that accompanied Lescarboura’s articles picture, in familiar Scientific American style, film directors in the midst of complex location shooting or show professionals working with the huge machines needed to develop 35mm film.[77]

Lescarboura’s detailed articles became the basis of his 1919 book Behind the Motion-Picture Screen, published by the Scientific American Publishing Company. Filled with more than two hundred photographs covering aspects of the production process in and out of the studio, Behind the Motion-Picture Screen stands as perhaps the most wide-ranging and thorough account in this period of the practice of commercial filmmaking. In keeping with the larger preoccupations of Scientific American, Lescarboura spends much less time discussing marketing, distribution, and exhibition than in describing the workings of various motion picture projectors and cameras (including the Akeley camera), explaining trick shots and color processes, detailing the efforts of newsreel cameramen, and surveying the vast resources of the “modern motion-picture studio.” But Lescarboura also looks beyond the movie theater to what he calls “motion pictures in strange fields”—that is, several uses of cinema that had been discussed in Scientific American earlier in the 1910s: amateur filmmaking and home projectors; microcinematography; and film put in the service of military training, testing metals, and observing marine life.[78]

MOVING PICTURES IN THE SERVICE OF ADVERTISING

For Lescarboura, one rich opportunity that was largely unrealized as of 1919 was the potential of what he called “the motion-picture salesman”—that is, film in the service of advertising and publicity.[79] Treated in only a few pages at the end of Behind the Motion-Picture Screen, this field took center stage in his follow-up volume The Cinema Handbook (1922), also published by the Scientific American Publishing Company. The subtitle of The Cinema Handbook makes clear its scope: “A guide to practical motion picture work of the nontheatrical order, particularly as applied to the reporting of news, to industrial and educational purposes, to advertising, selling and general publicity, to the production of amateur photoplays, and to entertainment in the school, church, club, community center and home.” Underscoring the manifold, everyday possibilities for moving pictures beyond the theater, The Cinema Handbook describes available cameras, projectors, screens, and accessories and offers guidance for a range of potential users—“the naturalist, traveler, explorer, microscopic worker, teacher, engineer, and others.” Above all, Lescarboura addresses “the nontheatrical worker” who “wishes to make use of motion pictures for pleasure or for profit,” meaning primarily the novice interested in creating “private cinema” and “amateur photoplays” (what would later come to be known as home movies and amateur cinema) and the freelancer looking to earn money with a camera.[80]

Lescarboura advises that shooting topics suitable for newsreels and news “magazines” provides the best opportunities for enterprising would-be filmmakers, since the market for this type of footage already exists within the theatrical film business. “Motion picture advertising” also offers “tremendous possibilities,” yet he cautions that too often sponsors are preoccupied with slotting their advertising films into the programming of “regular picture houses,” ignoring the many non-theatrical sites available, including conventions, schools, club meetings, factories, and retail stores.[81] Traveling salespeople armed with portable projectors extend the range of sites even further, underscoring the vast non-theatrical prospects for motion-picture advertising.

The account of screen advertising in The Cinema Handbook hearkens back to reports in Scientific American and the motion picture trade press a decade earlier concerning moving pictures whose form and function were dictated by the needs of a sponsoring corporation, manufacturer, wholesaler, or retailer. Made for the sometimes overlapping purposes of employee training, marketing, sales, and public relations, such films share much with what would become the long tradition of corporate-sponsored motion pictures in Europe.[82] For example, Scientific American Supplement in 1914 reprinted an article from the trade magazine Machinery on the benefits of moving pictures produced for machine tool manufacturers (fig. 2.6). These films were designed to serve both as a graphic demonstration of how to assemble, operate, and repair intricate machines and also as an “aid to salesmen” who will be able to “show the prospective customer just what the advantages of the machine in operation are.”[83]

FIGURE 2.6. Illustrations from “The Moving Picture in the Machine Tool Business,” Scientific American Supplement, February 14, 1914.

But films made exclusively for the purposes of advertising and branding were a different matter. Unlike almost all the other uses of moving pictures described in Scientific American, putting moving pictures in the service of advertising could not be justified in terms of social, pedagogical, scientific, or civic utility. Advertising films were unquestionably commercial products intended to generate income for the filmmaker and profit in the short or long term for the sponsor. A 1912 article in Scientific American by Watterson R. Rothacker, a producer of industrials and advertising films (and tireless self-promoter), made this cash nexus abundantly clear. Rothacker trumpeted the value of “industrial uses of the moving picture,” by which he meant films intended “to advertise and standardize a name, enliven a trade mark, explain a manufacturing process, demonstrate machinery, exploit a territory and recreation resorts, attract attention to a city or place.”[84] (In articles for The Nickelodeon, Moving Picture World, Printer’s Ink, Judicious Advertising, Motography, and the Paint, Oil and Drug Review, among other periodicals, Rothacker reiterated this pitch.)[85] Among the most successful of these “industrial uses,” for Rothacker, was the DuPont Company’s widely circulated Farming with Dynamite (probably 1911), which, he hyperbolically claimed, had reached “millions of people who have, each one, been impressed with the name of the company thus advertising.”[86] A 1914 article in the prominent advertising journal, Printer’s Ink, found Farming with Dynamite to be evidence of “so wide and growing a demand for the educational industrial film that it is not to be wondered at that so many national advertisers are getting out moving-picture films of their plants or processes to show the public what it would see if it could visit the manufacturing center and see the plant in operation.”[87]

In ways that Rothacker could not have imagined, the multi-media screening practices of the 1939 New York World’s Fair would be evidence, in Haidee Wasson’s words, of “cinema less as an apparatus for entertaining or narrating or educating and more as a complex, multiply articulated machine that sells” (emphasis in original).[88] According to Patrick Vonderau, we can track this actualization of “cinema’s utility” decades earlier, since “moving pictures have been inextricably linked to advertising ever since both gained social momentum in the late nineteenth century.”[89] Examples of this linkage are to be found not only in the films shot in the Edison Company’s Black Maria, as Charles Musser has shown, but in a range of exhibition practices.[90] A 1908 handbook for projectionists, for instance, claims that

[a]lmost every city now has an advertising stand employing motion pictures wholly or in part as their attraction. The methods in vogue are but simple modifications of ordinary lantern advertisements, Usually there are two lanterns, one to project moving picture advertising films, while the other lantern is employed to fill in the gap with single-slide advertising pictures or pictures of a purely entertaining character. Quite frequently a slide is used in the secondary lantern which projects above and below the moving picture the name of the article together with the address, etc. of the manufacturers. The moving picture is thrown upon the prearranged black blank on the screen.[91]

This projection apparatus suggests one way that “moving picture advertising films” might have been deployed in urban public space. As attractions in a mediated environment that included window displays, electric signage, posters, and billboards, advertising films could also have been projected on exterior walls and other improvised outdoor screens as well as in store windows, as suggested by a 1910 photograph that appeared in Motography (fig. 2.7).

FIGURE 2.7. Moving-picture advertising apparatus, Motography, March 1, 1910.

But for Rothacker and most boosters of this branch of useful cinema in the 1910s, unlike Lescarboura writing in 1922, the real promise of “ad. films” lay in the possibility of slotting a short film sponsored by a manufacturer or other business concern into the regular flow of theatrical programming.[92] “A goodly number of these houses,” Rothacker confidently told readers of Motion Picture News in 1914, “can be induced to give ad. films splendid and far-reaching circulation if the subject is properly produced and presented.”[93] The “vast purchasing power” represented by the “millions of men, women, and children who attend movie theaters”—all supposedly fully receptive to any moving images that unrolled before their eyes—made the rewards for this strategy potentially enormous, claimed the 1915 article “ ‘Movies’ That Find Customers,” in System: A Magazine for Business.[94] What these recommendations don’t emphasize is the likely cost of purchasing screening time, a potential disincentive for sponsors looking to theaters as a prime venue for their films. As early as 1911, this problem was broached in Moving Picture World by Horatio F. Stoll, who had been involved with the production of a film promoting the California wine industry. Stoll marveled at the “many uses to which the moving picture can be put,” but explained to would-be investors that while “good industrial films are welcomed at conventions, fairs and public meetings,” theatrical exhibition was another matter entirely. Stoll pointed to a distribution company in California, for example, that charged by the month (with a six-month minimum purchase) to have a sponsored film shown from three to six days at theaters throughout the state. The sliding fee scale for this service was based, Stoll explained, on the relative explicitness of the promotional or sales pitch: “story film, in which your industry or business is casually introduced in a story, which has a distinct plot, $25 per month; industrial film, treated broadly and devoted entirely to the workings of a large manufacturing plant, or the life and resources of a particular section or community, $50 per month; pure advertising film, where you come out boldly and make your announcement so plain that all who run may read [sic], $75 per month.”[95]

Even with this likely added expense, aiming toward theatrical screenings remained a strategy adopted for at least some sponsored films. For example, The Making of a Shoe (1912), produced and circulated by the Publicity Department of the United Shoe Machinery Company, appeared on the bill as part of regular programming at moving picture theaters, like the Empress in Huntington, Indiana, where in October 1914 it was paired with a “corking good two reel comedy” and a four-reel feature film (fig. 2.8).[96] However, reports in Shoe and Leather Facts, Hide and Leather, and Shoe and Leather Reporter, trade magazines for the American shoe industry, indicate that the long-term success of The Making of a Shoe largely depended on non-theatrical exhibition, with screenings at state fairs and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition’s Palace of Education and Social Economy as well as at club meetings, churches, and gatherings of retailers, such as Boston’s Shoe and Leather Fair. This film was even included as part of vocational instruction courses.[97] For a sponsored film like The Making of a Shoe, usefulness and cost-effectiveness was measured by the extent of its exhibition in and out of theaters over several years.

FIGURE 2.8. Ads for screening of The Making of a Shoe, in Hide and Leather [Boston MA], July 4, 1914 (left), and Huntington [IN] Herald, October 19, 1914 (right).

HOW MARJORIE WON A CAREER

The circulation of How Marjorie Won a Career (1914), sponsored by the Gossard Corset Company, a leading manufacturer in this field, offers a good illustration of how moving picture advertising was successfully deployed as one prominent version of useful cinema in the 1910s. Gossard’s film complicates any categorical distinction between theatrical and non-theatrical cinema, but in a way different than The Making of a Shoe. A typical booking for How Marjorie Won a Career occurred on Thursday, December 17, 1914, at 2:00 p.m. at the Grand Theatre, a picture show in Lawrence, Kansas. Tickets for this free screening were available only from a local business; in this case Lawrence’s most well-established department store, which carried the Gossard line of corsets. Unlike Your Girl or Mine, pitched toward women but welcoming all potential viewers, the Gossard program was reserved “for ladies only” (fig. 2.9). No doubt this restriction will cause a “great disappointment” for “male patrons,” predicted the Lawrence Daily Journal-World, which also observed that “there is no telling what one will see next at the movies. That they are exercising a wonderful education of influence in many lines no one can deny.”[98]

FIGURE 2.9. Ads for Gossard Corsets: Lavering Theatre, Twin Falls [ID] Times, February 8, 1916 (left); Columbia Theatre, Warren [PA] Evening Times, January 25, 1915 (top right); complimentary pass, Daily Tribune [Fort Scott KS], March 25, 1915 (bottom right).

Whatever publicity might have been generated by screening footage showing corset fitting to only female audiences, Gossard had other reasons for relying on motion pictures for its advertising campaign. The company was invested in training the saleswomen who worked for its dealers as a way to boost the sales of higher-priced corsets. To this end, Gossard published a house-organ for retailers, employed expert traveling saleswomen who conducted “demonstration sales,” and operated a school for “corsetieres” at the company’s headquarters in Chicago.[99] Since it presented “the actual fitting [of] Gossard corsets on living figures,” How Marjorie Won a Career was designed to be doubly useful, simultaneously offering instruction for the dealer’s sales staff and encouragement for potential customers.[100] By sponsoring this screening, the local Gossard dealer could claim that it was providing a much-needed service for its clientele.

Not surprisingly, Gossard’s free screening included more than footage of corset fitting. Newspaper advertisements provided to local dealers by the company identified How Marjorie Won a Career as a production of the Essanay Film Company, which in 1914 still had a studio in Chicago and would soon shake up the industry by hiring Charlie Chaplin away from Keystone.[101] (How Marjorie Won a Career is apparently not extant, leaving open, among other questions, whether both Gossard and Essanay were identified by name and logo in the film’s opening title.) Essanay’s Chicago studio was in fact featured in How Marjorie Won a Career, which offered audiences the chance to watch in a familiar hometown theater a motion picture that was (1) produced by a well-known film company and yet was (2) presented under the auspices of a local merchant; a film that (3) included glimpses inside the Essanay movie studio, yet (4) unambiguously presented itself as an advertisement for Gossard corsets; and (5) provided instruction on corset fitting.

A newspaper in Hutchinson, Kansas, offered a particularly detailed summary of the film that makes clear the promotional and generic logic of How Marjorie Won a Career, a story not of a movie-made girl but a girl-made movie:

Marjorie Brown, living in Chicago, receives a letter from her mother, telling her that the mortgage on her old home is to be foreclosed. On entering The H. W. Gossard Company’s office where she is employed, she notices a sign of $1,000 for the best advertising idea. On her way home that evening she stops in front of a motion picture studio. She gets the idea of telling the story of Gossard Corsets in motion pictures. She submits a letter covering her idea, which is accepted. She is commissioned to make the moving picture. You then see her in the motion picture studio—you see the actual fitting of the corsets, her final reward of $1,000 and her return home just in time to save her mother’s home. The story is of real heart interest and of tremendous importance to every woman.[102]

An advertising film driven by an uplifting narrative, How Marjorie Won a Career pictured an independent working woman preserving hearth and home through her own efforts, after being provided with an opportunity by the Gossard Company.[103] Marjorie’s tribulation and triumph notwithstanding, Gossard’s publicity material and various accounts of screenings in local newspapers emphasize that the educational/promotional centerpiece of the film was its footage of the “actual fitting of corsets.” According to an article in Printers’ Ink, which was always on the lookout for successful advertising campaigns, Gossard made How Marjorie Won a Career available to its dealers for a one-day engagement. The retailer was responsible for purchasing space for the newspaper advertising provided by Gossard and for making arrangements to have the film screened in the afternoon or morning at a local movie theater, either by renting the theater (at $10 or $15) or by purchasing five hundred tickets (for approximately $12.50). The exhibitor could substitute How Marjorie Won a Career for one of the pictures on the bill or screen it on its own. Standard practice was to run the film more than once; the Orpheum Theater in South Bend, Indiana, for example, offered five consecutive half-hour shows, beginning at 10:00 a.m.[104] Gossard advised dealers to “have your corsetiere announce before the film is shown that every corset shown in the film can be had at your store”—a performative gesture that would have underscored what Yvonne Zimmermann describes as “the embedding of moving images in a marketing event.”[105] Though How Marjorie Won a Career did not travel with a company-trained lecturer, an emphasis on Gossard’s product line and its trained corsetieres would have been underscored by the very occasion of a screening event specially sponsored by a Gossard dealer, the newspaper ads leading up to the screening, the presence at the event of a representative of the local merchant or the Gossard Company, and perhaps even—as we saw with Your Girl and Mine—the décor inside the theater.[106]

Gossard began to circulate How Marjorie Won a Career in August 1914, and the film was heavily booked over the next year, with theatrical screenings continuing sporadically until May 1917.[107] In all instances, the audience was restricted to “ladies only,” leading Moving Picture World to report that in Sedalia, Missouri, “it was only with great difficulty that the men were prevented from breaking the doors of the theatre and entering.”[108] In addition to apparently inflaming male desire, this policy could well have encouraged a more homosocial experience for the women in attendance, who—given the scheduled time of the screening, the ticketing procedure, and the nature of the product being advertised—were limited by class as well as sex and, of course, by race. As was the case with Twilight Sleep, Gossard’s successful handling of How Marjorie Won a Career exemplifies two strategies associated with the screening of useful cinema in the 1910s, in and out of movie theaters: film exhibition understood to be a matter of idiosyncratic, limited-run screenings designated as “special” rather than the continuous, regular delivery of new entertainment product; and—as I will examine more fully in chapter 4—the explicit targeting of a specific group of viewers rather than an ostensibly inclusive mass audience.

These strategies worked well enough with How Marjorie Won a Career that Gossard had Essanay produce another one-reel film, The Social Key, that was circulated and exhibited from August 1916 until at least September 1917 in much the same way as How Marjorie Won a Career.[109] “It’s an ad, of course,” wrote the Charlotte [NC] Observer, “but an awfully enjoyable one—especially when you get it along with the regular theater program.”[110] The Social Key’s requisite corset-fitting sequence relied on optical effects to simultaneously show a series of “living models” corseted and uncorseted to vividly present the “nine different types of [female] figures.” This typology was a much ballyhooed Gossard innovation also being promoted in a print campaign that included a series of full-page ads featuring Triangle Film Studio’s “Stars of Filmland,” who “derive much of their charm from Gossard corsets.”[111] Another Gossard campaign at the same time that ran in Photoplay featured testimonials from individual stars, like Mabel Normand.

As with How Marjorie Won a Career, the corset-fitting sequence in The Social Key was embedded in what advertisements called “a very clever little story.” Unlike Marjorie, who discovers a talent—though likely not a career path—in motion picture advertising, the four daughters and their parents who inherit a “large fortune” in The Social Key must learn an invaluable life lesson about the importance of correctly fitted corsets. Only after they are appropriately corseted in Gossard’s finest (like the stars of Filmland) can the women in the family be accepted into the ranks of “high society” that had previously snubbed them.[112] Not surprisingly, Gossard’s nouveau riche family succeed against considerable odds by using the right product, underscoring a consumerist logic that would become a mainstay in American advertising.

CONCLUSION

For Gossard’s ambitious marketing campaigns, access to movie theaters was essential. If these advertising films were to justify their cost and realize their potential utility, there needed to be some measure of flexibility on the part of theater owners and operators: at a minimum, this included leeway in determining how a theater was used and individual programs were constituted, and a willingness to profit, directly or indirectly, from sponsored screenings and other events distinct from standard day-by-day offerings. Even if purposefully built, operated to make money by exhibiting movies, and immediately recognizable and advertised as picture shows, the many movie theaters across America in the 1910s that hosted advertising events—and screenings of sponsored films like Your Girl or Mine—were at least occasionally open to other types of motion pictures, other programs, other admission policies, other uses of cinema. These opportunities could include not only making room for sponsored films but also for what the St. Louis Chief of Police in 1909 denounced as the “filthy private,” “midnight exhibitions of disgusting orgies” purportedly being screened regularly at more than one hundred of the city’s nickelodeons.[113] When, where, and to what extent certain exhibitors made available their venues for other uses beyond showing the nationally available output of the commercial film industry is one key indicator of the varied and flexible relation between theatrical and non-theatrical cinema.[114]

Newspaper reports and advertisements indicate that How Marjorie Won a Career and The Social Key were quite often booked at theaters in towns like Clovis, New Mexico, and Hutchinson, Kansas, where the movies were commonplace but other uses of cinema were perhaps not. Tracking this circulation points to broader questions about the social and geographical dispersion of multi-purpose cinema during the 1910s. This circulation likely varied considerably depending on region and population as well as on local factors, including the activities of merchants and agricultural organizations (like the American Farm Bureau), the availability of university extension services and state-funded mobile exhibitors, and even the policies of individual churches and schools.

Another type of circulation is also relevant as we piece together the history of multi-purpose cinema in and out of the movie theater. While Gossard’s use of film drew the attention of Printers’ Ink: A Journal for Advertisers, How Marjorie Won a Career and The Social Key were never mentioned in Scientific American and garnered only a few brief references in Moving Picture World.[115] That Gossard was selling corsets was no doubt a factor, particularly for Scientific American. But this lack of coverage reflects a basic point about expanded American cinema during the 1910s: as largely gauged by information culled from newspapers (and, to a lesser extent, from official annual reports), the actual uses of moving pictures for purposes beyond generating box office receipts did not always or necessarily correlate with how the possibilities and parameters of multi-purpose cinema were articulated and imagined in print sources like Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, Moving Picture World, and Motography. This distinction does not mean that we should privilege practice over discourse (or the reverse) but, rather, that this history requires taking both into account, a strategy that has become much more feasible with the increased availability of digital archives.

As we have seen, the discourse concerning multi-purpose cinema unsurprisingly highlighted what Scientific American in 1912 called “new uses for moving pictures” and valued ways that the medium could be enlisted in the service of acquiring scientific knowledge, disseminating information, improving teaching methods, and ameliorating social ills.[116] The category of “new uses” presupposed that there was, by way of contrast, an “old”—established, customary, familiar—use. Multi-purpose cinema was understood, implicitly or explicitly, in relation to mono-purpose cinema—that is, it was seen as something other than the movies, the major form of commercial entertainment in the US. That the film industry (increasingly based in Hollywood and New York City) by providing pleasure to audiences gathered daily in thousands of theaters was both generating profit nationwide and also provoking strident criticism helps explain the fascination with—and perhaps the endorsement of—moving pictures put to other, non-commercial purposes. Particularly in what the author of American Ideals (1915) dubbed “a land where the word utility is ubiquitous,” acknowledging cinema beyond the movie theater could itself serve certain broadly useful ends: fostering alternatives to what the movies had to offer, encouraging potential users and investors, and raising the status of the medium by insisting on its usefulness.[117]

Highlighting the manifold applications and the practical benefits of multi-purpose moving pictures tapped into a broader set of values. Multi-purpose as a positive descriptor had begun to appear in print by the mid-1910s (and even more regularly by the 1920s), most often in advertisements for supposedly cost-effective, practical, and innovative products like the New Way Motor Company’s “multi-purpose engine” that could serve a “multitude of purposes” in the home and on the farm or E-Z Flour, “a multi-purpose flour—perfectly adapted to every kind of domestic baking.”[118] I have found no evidence in the period of multi-purpose being directly applied to moving picture cameras or projectors or to film as a medium. An article in Scientific American describing how scientific management expert Frank Gilbreth was using motion pictures to increase the efficiency of the “human machine,” flatly declares that “man is a multi-purpose machine,” but this article does not say the same of the film apparatus.[119]

The terms that were regularly associated with multi-purpose cinema in the motion picture trade press through the 1910s were already present in the 1911 Moving Picture World editorial with which I began this chapter: useful, practical, and utilitarian. When referring to a certain type of cinema, utilitarian had nothing to do with utilitarianism as formulated by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and pilloried by Charles Dickens in the nineteenth century. Nor was it associated with a kind of bare-bones austerity or merely serviceable functionality that was the opposite of, say, artistic or aesthetic or ornamental. When applied to the production and exhibition of moving pictures, utilitarian was instead a positive attribute connoting a sort of purposeful, practical usefulness, which could appear all the more efficacious and desirable in contrast to perceptions of Hollywood as the realm of luxury, excess, and extravagance. Evidence of utilitarian intent was worth drawing attention to and encouraging, as when Moving Picture News declared that the “innovative” screening of an industrial film at the banquet of the American Iron and Steel Institute in 1912 demonstrated the “utilitarian value of the ‘movies.’ ”[120]

Not surprisingly, this value was most directly championed in columns like “Moving Picture Educator” in Moving Picture World, which deemed utilitarian cinema to be fully in sync with the practical proclivities and progressive energy of the modern age. “We are now living in times when every new invention or discovery must lose its first interest and replace it with proofs of its utilitarian and educational nature,” “Moving Picture Educator” announced in 1914, and “along these lines we cannot have too many pictures.”[121] By April 1917—a month after the US entered World War I—the success of the moving picture in “encouraging progress” by serving as “the social leader, entertainer and educator of the masses” was unquestionably apparent to the Reverend W. H. Jackson, the longtime editor of the education column in Moving Picture World: “Higher and higher rises the occasion for usefulness of the moving picture,” Jackson affirmed. “Riding upon the crest of popular utilitarianism it has met every advance of national importance.”[122]

The popularity of “patriotic pictures” shown by the “high minded [theatrical] exhibitor” in New York City and thus having already found a worthy calling and a home in metropolitan movie theaters is what prompted Jackson’s enthusiasm. Jackson was surely not alone in looking for evidence of how the utility of moving pictures could be maximized to deliver the most benefits. From his perspective, with the nation beckoning, the ever-rising future for useful cinema looked bright indeed. But the fact that “the usefulness of the moving picture” was not bound up with the standard exhibition strategies of the movie theater vastly increased its utilitarian possibilities. And precisely because cinema was multi-purposable there was always more than one “occasion for usefulness” and inevitably other missions for moving pictures beyond inspiring patriotic fervor or facilitating scientific research—or selling corsets.

3

Multi-sited Cinema

Multi-purpose cinema hinged on the assumption that the practical functionality and open-ended utility of moving pictures made the medium eminently suitable for a host of uses, from promoting the cause of suffrage and educating waves of new immigrants to selling high-priced corsets, revealing the mysteries of microscopic life, and documenting expeditions to the polar south. Realizing these possibilities entailed showing films at locations including but never limited to the many theaters where moving pictures were the prime attraction. The transportability of reels and projectors opened up a myriad of places where cinema could happen. Tents, railroad cars, and open-air spaces were sites for film screenings, as were all manner of buildings—small storefronts and private offices, massive factories and metropolitan convention halls. Small wonder that grand visions of the ubiquitous dispersion of cinema flourished, such as when Motion Picture News optimistically predicted in December 1914 the emergence of a “much greater market” for the “ever-elastic picture” with the continuing exploitation of the “educational field,” comprising “several hundred thousand schools, churches and colleges.”[1]

In fact, from its inception, American cinema has been flexibly, ambitiously, and irregularly multi-sited. One significant and often overlooked through line in the history of this cinema is the emplacement of moving pictures in the localities, regions, geographies, socially constructed spaces, and value-laden places of America. Thus I would argue that the basic historical query, What was cinema?, necessarily involves asking, Where was cinema? This is a question as much about opportunity, ambition, and innovation as it is about uneven diffusion, limited access, and established networks. Exploring the locations of American cinema beyond the movie theater during the 1910s entails—as with the notion of multi-purpose cinema—examining how multi-sited cinema was practiced and how it was framed, promoted, challenged, and celebrated in period discourse. In this exploration, I am indebted to a wave of excellent scholarship focusing on the United States during the silent era that examines the role that film exhibition played in various prominent sites, from public libraries, churches, social centers, YMCAs, and department stores to museums, prisons, and military installations.[2]

FIGURE 3.1. Dwight L. Elmendorf Programme for 1913–1914 season.

In utilizing multi-sited I am not suggesting that my historical study of American cinema has affinities with or borrows methodologically from multi-sited ethnography, most obviously because I offer no findings based on participant-observer fieldwork. Ethnographic research is multi-sited, according to Mark-Anthony Falzon, to the extent that it “proceeds by a series of juxtapositions in which the global is collapsed into and made an integral part of parallel, related local situations, rather than something external to them.” Thus, this methodology “involves a spatially dispersed field through which the ethnographer moves,” “follow[ing] people, connections, associations, and relationships across space.”[3] Well before the popularization of 16mm (and then 8mm) film equipment in the 1930s, the “field” of American cinema was “spatially dispersed” widely and unevenly, though it was not necessarily interconnected. I call this cinema multi-sited to emphasize the promise and the practice of screening motion pictures at various different locations—in addition to moving picture theaters, which themseves were by no means uniform and interchangeable, especially during the silent era, and were at times open to screening “free shows” like the Gossard Corset Company’s advertising films.[4]

In one sense, this multi-sited potential was most visibly realized through the activities of government employees delivering information about agriculture and health to rural residents, professional lecturers, and entreprenurial traveling showmen, who all made use of moving pictures as they journeyed from place to place. Particularly prominent were Burton Holmes, Dwight L. Elmendorf, and other established headliners who delivered feature-length travelogues illustrated with hand-colored slides and unique motion picture footage. These lecturers followed seasonal itineraries (similar to touring stage productions) and were booked for reserved-seat engagements of a week or more in opera houses, metropolitan auditoriums, and multi-use commercial theaters across the US.[5] Government-sponsored mobile exhibitors typically covered less territory but often handled more stops along the way. The North Carolina State Board of Health “moving picture health car” that I mentioned in the introduction, for example, screened its programs during one week in 1917 at twelve different towns and villages.[6] More difficult to identify and track were itinerant exhibitors, who were not likely to catch the attention of or to run ads in newspapers. These included, for example, the operators of the “Big Show” pictured on this postcard (fig. 3.2) and what Motion Picture News in 1914 described as the “half dozen tent shows” bringing old films to the “hill-billies” in “little, far-from-the-railroad towns” in the Ozarks.[7] But multi-sited cinema made use of possibilities well beyond the ambit of these disparate versions of traveling exhibition.

FIGURE 3.2. Kimball Show postcard.

Whether screening events were novel or commonplace, intermittent or frequent, exhibiting motion pictures always entailed more than aiming a projector toward a flat, reflective surface. Where, when, and by whom was the potential expansion and dispersion of cinema articulated and put into practice? How did this practice situate film exhibition in certain social as well as physical spaces, reaffirming or expanding the presence of cinema in America and, in the process, modifying or redefining the significance and the role not only of the medium but also of the spaces that served as sites for cinema? In this chapter I will take up these questions from quite different perspectives, examining a church that with considerable fanfare installed a motion picture projector, various state and local ordinances that limited and enabled non-theatrical screenings, and advertising campaigns for the Nicholas Power Company’s industry-leading Cameragraph projector and for a range of portable projectors, notably, the Pathéscope—ambitious marketing efforts that articulated a grand vision for the future of multi-sited cinema in twentieth-century America.

INSTANTIATING MULTI-SITED CINEMA

Reel and Slide Magazine, the first trade journal devoted to making “the screen a greater power in education and business,” insisted in 1919 that given the motion picture’s calling “as a world enlightener,” “no narrow conception of film utility will do”—and, therefore, “outside of the theater” was an “open” field, potentially taking in the “school room, factory, church, club, lodge, home, [and] office.”[8] As countless passing references in newspapers and the motion picture trade press suggest, multi-purpose cinema was from the first understood as multi-sited cinema, but the spread of motion pictures beyond the theater was not in every case deemed a sign of progress, uplift, or public service. For example, Moving Picture News in 1912 railed against a “stag party” featuring the screening of “immoral films” and lantern slides that drew a thousand men to New York City’s Lennox Casino, where “on the stage, or platform had been hung a large white screen upon which the pictures were to be thrown. At the rear of the hall a small elevated platform was erected upon which was mounted an ordinary looking moving-picture machine.” The screening was evidence, according to the New York Times, of “a secret traffic in indecent films.”[9]

As this event suggests, the aim and the audience targeted could necessitate or encourage the use of a particular location, which might vary widely. Searches of digitized newspapers reveal that during February 1915, for instance, films were screened at a host of locations across different regions, including the University of Minnesota School of Agriculture in St. Paul, Minnesota; the Madison Square Garden Poultry Show in New York City; the House of Representatives Hall in Columbus, Ohio; the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club in Baltimore, Maryland; the high school auditorium in Neosha, Missouri; the Minnesota State Penitentiary at Stillwater; the Raleigh Hotel in Washington, DC; and the convention of the Southern Presbyterian Church’s Laymen’s Missionary Movement in Charlotte, North Carolina.[10] And the list could go on and on.

Information about these non-theatrical screenings was provided by newspapers in the form of an advertisement, a heads-up to potential attendees, a report on local events, a brief syndicated news item, or a bit of novel filler. Rarer were those occasions when the use of moving pictures outside the movie theater merited more attention, such as when Kentucky’s three Asylums for the Insane installed projectors and began regular screenings in 1911. The Paducah Sun-Democrat and other newspapers throughout the state (and across the border into Ohio) reported on the implementation of this plan, applauded the state’s investment in this “innovation in the modern methods of caring for the insane,” and described the initial screenings, which were said to evoke “uproarious laughter and vociferous applause” from the patients.[11]

FIRST METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH (BAKERSFIELD, CALIFORNIA)

As might be expected, the first installation of a projector at a church or school in a town or small city was often deemed significant enough to warrant coverage from the local press. Both newspapers in Bakersfield, California, for instance, reported in detail on the introduction of moving pictures in 1915 at First Methodist Episcopal Church, the largest of the seventeen Protestant congregations in the city, which then had a population of around fifteen thousand and was in the midst of a significant oil-driven economic boom.[12] (At this date, Bakersfield had four commercial venues: two specializing in moving pictures, one offering “high class vaudeville and master photoplays,” and a multi-use opera house that largely booked touring shows.) After taking over this pulpit in late 1913, the Reverend Charles R. Wentworth quickly became a leader in the city’s anti-saloon and anti-vice campaigns, making the most of publicity opportunities by, for example, preaching a sermon entitled “Blundering, Belligerent, Blasphemous Bakersfield” while standing surrounded by confiscated barrels of whiskey and cases of wine, brandy, gin, and beer.[13] As part of his efforts, Wentworth formed a Men’s Brotherhood League at his church dedicated to promoting wholesome “recreation and social entertainment” for men and boys as a means of fostering what a laudatory newspaper editorial called “a public atmosphere favorable for the social, civic, industrial and moral betterment of the city.”[14] Moving pictures figured not as a target of Wentworth’s sermons but as a key element of his stalwart efforts at “betterment.” After transforming the church’s basement into a gymnasium, complete with showers and a reading room, the Men’s Brotherhood, with Wentworth’s blessing, decided in November 1914 to raise funds to purchase a moving picture machine. As plans progressed, this group invited church members and non-members alike to a public discussion of the “moving picture show” they had in mind for First Methodist Episcopal.[15]

Beyond funding and support from the congregation and the pastor, to make this site usable for film screenings meant deciding what particular space in the church was appropriate and where the projector was to be stationed. From a defunct theater, the Men’s Brotherhood acquired a “steel cage” for a projection booth, which was attached to the outside of the church building, meaning that the Powers 6a Cameragraph projector they purchased would be positioned to project images through a window into the four-hundred-seat Sunday school assembly hall, sometimes referred to as an auditorium.[16] (Installing the projector in this unusual manner was likely intended to waylay any anxieties about fire hazards.) Viewing moving pictures in the auditorium made obvious sense, not only because of the dimensions and seating capacity of this room. Since at least 1904, this part of the church had been used for stereopticon lectures covering a range of topics, including presentations on Ben Hur, Salvation Army work in New Zealand, and the white slave trade in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast.[17] And beginning with the 1909–10 season, First Methodist Episcopal hosted in its auditorium the Bakersfield Lecture and Entertainment Course, an annual lyceum series featuring touring orators and musical groups.

FIGURE 3.3. First Methodist Episcopal.

In effect, this assembly hall functioned in part as a social and cultural center. When the church booked an African American musical ensemble, the Eastern Jubilee Singers, in November 1915 for two free concerts, it billed these performances as “an offering of the church to furnish clean and wholesome entertainment in the city.”[18] The auditorium served also as a civic center, home to speeches and illustrated lectures promoting the temperance campaign being led by Bakersfield’s chapter of the Anti-Saloon League. Thus, for First Methodist Episcopal, the installation of a motion picture projector was in keeping with ongoing efforts to reach an audience beyond its congregation and play a prominent role in the city at large.

The film booked for the premiere screening at the church on February 1 was a hand-colored four-reel version of The Passion Play that formed the centerpiece of what the Bakersfield Californian called a “grand moving picture concert,” with eight choral, solo, and instrumental performances by church members interspersed with single reels of the film.[19] Tickets cost twenty-five cents and the event was open to the public. After three hymns and a dedicatory prayer and directly before the first moving images were projected, someone (presumably Wentworth) explained the “purpose, plan and future policy” concerning the “moving picture machine,” now installed at First Methodist Episcopal. Given the novelty of the situation and likely also the still problematic status of moving pictures for certain members of the audience, a public explanation for the church’s investment in the new machine and its de facto endorsement of moving pictures was no doubt warranted.

During the rest of 1915, First Methodist Episcopal screened films on weekdays, beginning with a Friday afternoon and an evening showing of David Copperfield (1913), “said to be one of the best educational moving pictures ever made.”[20] There is no indication in the local press that the Friday “entertainments” at First Methodist Episcopal—which typically paired a newsreel and short along with a feature film—included spoken commentaries or overtly religious components, like benedictions, hymns, or sermons.[21] In addition, once the Cameragraph was in place, the Sunday school sessions regularly began with one reel of moving pictures having a Biblical theme, utilizing well-traveled titles available from commercial producers, like Thanhouser’s The Star of Bethlehem (1912) and Pathé’s Abraham’s Sacrifice (1912).[22] Screenings at this site reflected market conditions in the mid-1910s, when churches largely relied on moving pictures that were produced by companies whose primary customer was the movie theater.[23]

REGULATING NON-THEATRICAL SITES

An available multi-use space and a commitment by the pastor and the Men’s Brotherhood were necessary if moving pictures were to be exhibited at First Methodist Episcopal, just as state funding and official authorization were obligatory before screenings could take place at Kentucky’s Asylums for the Insane. In other words, to turn a suitable space into a screening site required more than a projector, reel of film, power source, and screen.[24] Access to the site was a factor, as was—at a minimum—a tacit acknowledgement that it was appropriate to show moving pictures in the space. So was cost. A 1915 ad offered the Portoscope, “A Practical Portable Projector,” without any other equipment and accessories, for $125 (more than $3,400 in 2022 dollars); a full-size, professional-quality Power Cameragraph projector went for at least twice that amount.[25]

Local ordinances, regulatory agencies, and state laws also played a significant role in limiting—or encouraging—cinema’s multi-sited possibilities. The chapter on “Typical Ordinances and Specifications Governing Motion Picture Theaters” in John B. Rathbun’s Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting (1914) highlights censorship as a mechanism for government oversight. But Rathbun also notes that a proposed censorship ordinance in Milwaukee specifically excludes “pictures shown for purely educational, charitable or religious purposes by fraternal, charitable, educational and religious associations, or by libraries, museums and schools.”[26] The Rules and Standards of the Pennsylvania State Board of Censors of Motion Pictures (passed on May 15, 1915) was equally explicit, stipulating that “this act does not apply to any exhibition of or use of films, reels, or views for purely educational, charitable, fraternal, or religious purposes by any religious association, fraternal society, library, museum, public school or private school, institution of learning, or by any corporation of the first class.”[27] As with these ordinances, local censorship initiatives clearly targeted screenings in movie theaters. For example, Nashville, Tennessee’s Board of Censorship, established by ordinance in 1914, covered “all public places of amusement to which admission is charged,” but was tasked in particular with preventing the exhibition of films that are “immoral, obscene or otherwise criminal, moving or stationary” in moving picture shows.[28]

It is not clear if itinerant exhibitors charging admission were also monitored by Nashville’s Board of Censorship, but this type of film exhibition could face the same costly license fees and physical restrictions that covered touring street carnivals and tent shows. Moving Picture World‘s survey of “Motion Picture Laws” in 1914 noted that Florida state law, for example, mandated that “traveling Moving Picture Shows in buildings or tents” pay a twenty-five-dollar daily license fee in cities with a population of ten thousand or more and fifteen-dollar daily fee in smaller cities, while the annual license for a permanently installed moving picture theater in places with fewer than five thousand residents cost ten dollars, with fees scaling up to a maximum of two hundred dollars for cities with populations over twenty thousand.[29] State law in this case decidedly favored “permanently installed” as opposed to “traveling” shows, though the legal distinction could also be drawn between public and non-public exhibition, as in Detroit, where a special permit allowed the city’s Board of Commerce in 1914 to show films in its own building since the screening was limited to members of the group and therefore was deemed to be “not a public gathering.”[30]

Safety regulations mandated by states and localities figured as prominently as license fees and censorship boards. These regulations were hardly uniform when it came to non-theatrical exhibition. An ordinance in Miami, Florida, for example, insisted on a number of (likely costly) structural requirements as well as the ready availability of fire extinguishing equipment in any “theater, opera house, moving picture theater, public hall or other building used as a moving picture theater.”[31] Connecticut law likewise stipulated extensive measures to control the risk of fire in theaters, but noted that “a certificate of approval may be granted for single exhibitions of Moving Pictures in School Houses, Churches, Lodge Rooms, Club Rooms, Hotels, etc. with the use of an asbestos booth.”[32] Similarly, the Indiana State Fire Marshall’s elaborately detailed regulations covering the operation of moving picture machines included a section outlining the type of portable projection booth required “for temporary one-night exhibition of motion pictures in places of assemblage, such as halls belonging to commercial organizations, churches, schools, etc.”[33] Recourse to etc. in these public pronouncements acknowledges that there was no way to enumerate the many possible sites for screenings outside the movie theater.

Regulations in Connecticut and Indiana were in line with the recommendations that the National Board of Censors had first circulated in 1913. This influential organization’s “model ordinance for regulating motion picture theaters” was meant to serve as a prototype for state and local “framers of motion picture laws,” who “should be careful not to forbid, wittingly or unwittingly, the use of motion pictures in public institutions. The law regulating booths should explicitly permit the use of portable booths, which could be used in churches, schools, family restaurants, etc.”[34] Information about and advertisements for these specialized pieces of equipment appeared in film trade magazines from 1913 through the rest of the decade.[35] The Sharlow Brothers Company, for example, offered “portable, asbestos and sheet metal motion picture booths,” including a model “made for safety in the Theatre, Church or Lecture Rooms where the Motion Picture Machine is used where it is necessary to take the booth apart or set it up quickly.”[36] And the Johns-Manville Company, with branches coast to coast, began a concerted effort in 1913 to sell its “absolutely fireproof” “transite asbestos wood booths,” which were “available in portable and permanent types” (fig. 3.4).[37]

FIGURE 3.4. Ads for portable projection booths, Moving Picture World, January 3, 1914 (left); Motion Picture News, June 23, 1914 (bottom right); assembling a booth, Insurance Engineering, January 1913 (top right).

Utilizing fireproof portable booths was one way to render spaces suitable for screenings. The introduction by Pathé in 1911 of what came to be known as “safety film” (inflammable cellulose acetate as opposed to flammable nitrate film) opened further possibilities.[38] In Michigan, for example, a bill was passed by the legislature in 1915 exempting from existing requirements “moving picture theaters for religious, educational or scientific purposes when non-inflammable films are used in special machines.”[39] (Note here the fluidity of “theater” as a classification.) Maine’s new law, passed that same year, maintained regulatory control over for-profit, traveling shows while allowing safety film screenings that had either no admission charge or were conducted by “social, fraternal, charitable, religious and educational organizations, where the machine so used is owned by said organization and used in the city or town where said organization is located, and the proceeds of such admission fees are to be devoted to the uses of said organization.”[40] In these cases, regulations concerning the sites of exhibition protected and encouraged certain ostensibly high-minded uses of moving pictures and certain local (and likely well-established) sponsors.

Concerns about safety were evident in some of the earliest examples of purpose-built non-theatrical screening facilities, when school boards and architects in the mid-1910s began to incorporate permanent projection booths into their plans for state-of-the-art public schools. Such schools were presented as model facilities in School Board Journal, a periodical devoted less to pedagogy than to the equipment, supplies, and building design that would best guarantee efficient, safe, cost-effective public education. Leading up to this endorsement, School Board Journal’s shift in attitude toward moving pictures took a fairly common route. This journal in 1906 had editorialized against the menace posed by moving picture shows, and by 1912 could only see limited benefits to using film for instructional purposes.[41] But over the next three years it published several articles that covered in some detail the technology and varied uses of motion pictures and encouraged schools to take advantage of this medium, which it deemed “the unique educational tool of the twentieth century.”[42] At the same time, ads from projector manufacturers, which first appeared in School Board Journal in 1912, had become commonplace by 1914.

Thus, it is not surprising that this trade journal singled out in 1915 a newly constructed high school in Logansport, Indiana, which had been designed to “embrace the educational, social, and physical life of the community.” This facility had a swimming pool open to the public and a one-thousand-seat auditorium that was available for the use of “church conventions, lecture courses, concerts, [and] political gatherings.” Aiming toward broader community outreach, the auditorium was equipped with a full stage and an enclosed booth housing a stereopticon and a film projector.[43] W. Blanchard Moore’s “Great Lecture on Siberia, Russia and Count Tolstoi”—complete with “200 colored stereopticon views smuggled out of ‘Darkest Russia’ ” and 2,500 feet of moving pictures—was one of the first public events in this space.[44] Atlantic City, New Jersey’s new four-floor grade school, reported School Board Journal, went a step further, installing “apparatus for motion-picture exhibitions . . . on each floor and in the auditorium gallery for use in classrooms and for public lectures in the building.”[45]

School Board Journal was not on the lookout for examples of multi-sited cinema, but rather for exemplars of the modern school plant, which, in the case of Atlantic City and Logansport, happened to incorporate facilities for projecting motion pictures.[46] I have found scant evidence regarding how many school districts during the 1910s followed the advice of this trade journal and invested in a permanently installed projection booth or even purchased and maintained a projector. Newspapers, as we have seen, provide invaluable information about sponsored screenings, but there is little reason to assume that the daily press in a metropolitan area would note the availability of motion picture equipment in a high school—or a YMCA or Elks Lodge. And once the novelty had worn off, a small town or small city newspaper might not have paid attention to the acquisition of a projector by a local school, church, college, or state institution.

The motion picture trade press, as part of its coverage of the burgeoning industry and its boosting of the medium’s social and cultural legitimacy, offered scattered references to the installation of projectors in non-theatrical sites, though these brief items garnered only a fraction of the copy devoted to new theater construction. “A little while ago we recorded the occasional installation of moving picture equipments [sic] in this school or that church, or a certain institution,” explained Moving Picture World in 1914. “This can no longer be done, for their number now is almost legion. The day has come when wherever there is anything educational there also is the moving picture machine, no longer as a luxury, but as an imperative necessity.”[47] Billboard would announce the following year that “schools, colleges and sanitariums all over the country are installing projecting machines.”[48]

Hyperbolic claims aside, how many installations make up a legion? Or, put more literally, how many motion picture projectors were acquired for non-theatrical sites during the 1910s? Sometimes specific information is available. For example, the War Department’s Annual Report for 1913 mentions, with no additional information, “the purchase of moving-picture machines, films, etc. for amusement purposes for enlisted men at various posts.”[49] It was likely this acquisition that the Army & Navy Register was referencing in January 1914 when it reported that the War Department had purchased sixty-six Simplex projectors, each comprising one part of a larger media package that included a phonograph, fifty records, “necessary slides and films,” a forty-by-eighty-foot tent, and 250 folding chairs—enabling Army chaplains to supervise delivery of “the proper sort of entertainment” to enlisted men at Army posts.[50]

Newspapers and the trade press typically offered information about specific screening locations like a YMCA in Detroit; the Kansas State Manual Training Normal School; an ice cream parlor in Lincoln, Illinois; or the West End Methodist Church in Nashville.[51] There are hundreds of examples like these in the print record, indicating the broadening dissemination of multi-sited cinema in the 1910s. But extrapolating more general trends based on these individual instances is difficult at best. For example, identifying certain YMCAs equipped to screen films can’t tell us how widespread this practice was among the more than two thousand YMCAs then operating in North America.[52] The listing of these branches in the 1914–15 Yearbook and Official Roster of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of Canada and the United States of America indicates the number of lectures, pool tables, and “professed conversions” at each YMCA but offers no statistics regarding moving picture projectors.[53] The sheer mass of churches across the US puts this gap into much greater relief, even if we only take into account a denomination like the Methodist Episcopal Church, sectors of which welcomed the use of moving pictures.[54] There is no telling, for example, whether Bakersfield’s First Methodist Episcopal was at all representative of what the 1916 census of Religious Bodies identified as this denomination’s twenty-eight thousand churches.[55]

For schools, there is more concrete data, thanks to the efforts of the United States Bureau of Education, a relatively small unit in the Department of the Interior, which gathered information about the “motion picture projection machines in use for purely educational purposes in the United States.” The self-reported results of the bureau’s survey, issued in the form of a pamphlet in 1919, identified only 1,129 “educational institutions equipped with motion-picture projection machines,” a very small number given the more than thirty-eight thousand institutions queried for the survey.[56] Expand the potential screening sites beyond schools and colleges to include churches, YMCAs, conventions, trade shows, hotels, penitentiaries, asylums, public halls, lodges, and even battleships (as the postcard in fig. 3.5 indicates), and it readily becomes apparent that there is no way to estimate the number of projectors in operation during the 1910s—much less to know precisely when and where these machines were installed, how frequently they were deployed, how long they remained in operation, and whether they were eventually recycled as part of the market for used equipment.[57]

FIGURE 3.5. “Moving pictures aboard a battleship” postcard.

ADVERTISING THE CAMERAGRAPH

A different, but no less revealing, attempt to gauge—and to envision—the extent of multi-sited cinema during the 1910s was offered by projector manufacturers, who had much to gain from the spread of screening possibilities beyond the movie theater. The promotion of portable projectors is especially significant in this regard, most notably the marketing of Pathé’s Pathéscope projector in the United States from 1914 through the rest of the decade. A more unexpected source are the ambitious advertising campaigns mounted for the Nicholas Power Company, whose Cameragraph projector was designed, wrote Nickelodeon in 1910, with “the needs of the theater owner, the operator and the patron of the moving picture theater . . . constantly held in view.”[58] Yet even by this early date, company founder Nicholas Power had already begun to look toward other opportunities, and he would insist in a 1914 Moving Picture World article that “in the beginning, you know, pictures were shown much outside of theaters. . . . We are getting back that point. Today the United States Government is equipping its warships and army posts with projection machines. So, too, installations are being made in churches, schools, colleges and clubs, and also in insane asylums and prisons. They are being placed everywhere.”[59]

With an investment in advertising that far exceeded anything attempted by its competitors, Power through the first half of the 1910s increasingly looked “everywhere” beyond the theater to what its ads pictured as a diverse array of screening sites across an America that was primed to take full advantage of motion pictures as the nation faced the challenges and opportunities of the twentieth century.[60] A photograph of Nicholas Power (1854–1921) graced the title page of Motion Picture News for October 11, 1913, accompanying a celebratory profile by editor Thomas Bedding that praised the Nicholas Power Company’s Cameragraph 6A projector as “wonderfully ingenious . . . well made, efficient, and good to handle,” all-in-all, a machine whose performance “helps to popularize motion pictures.”[61] The special attention afforded Power in Motion Picture News was perhaps to be expected since ads for the Cameragraph 6A ran in virtually every issue of this weekly trade magazine for the rest of 1913 and through the following year. These ads often included copy claiming that Power’s “perfect moving picture machine” satisfies exhibitors, operators, and the public and accounts for “over 65% of the American business.”[62] This “business” stretched well beyond America’s “picture houses,” declared a December 1913 piece that appeared under Power’s byline in Motion Picture News and was subsequently reprinted as a syndicated newspaper article. “The one feature that assures a future for the motion picture,” Power confidently affirms,

is their versatility, as there is hardly a line of endeavor in which they have not become a dominant factor. One may very well wonder what comes of the vast number of motion picture machines which constitute our daily output, and yet if you consider the many fields in which this industry has become a part, it ceases to be a mystery. Our machine is used by nearly all the prominent lecturers, churches, schools, Y.M.C.A.’s and other religious institutions; in commercial houses and factories where they are used to exploit their wares, in medical colleges to illustrate surgical operations, and in all branches of the arts. Their value as an exponent of education is already recognized, and I thoroughly believe that time is bound to render the motion picture more and more indispensable.[63]

What Power’s advertising manager called the “versatility of the motion picture” became a centerpiece of the marketing campaign for the Cameragraph, as evidenced not only by advertisements but also by a host of “news” items—likely press releases—that appeared in Motion Picture News during 1914 attesting to Power’s burgeoning business.[64] Other projector manufacturers, like Motiograph, Edison, and Pathé, at times relied on a similar promotional strategy.[65] While a few of the updates concerning the Nicholas Power Company in Motion Picture News noted the sale of Cameragraphs to theaters, like the Fox Airdome in Atlantic City and a number of notable Broadway houses, the rest of these items tracked the installation and use of the company’s projectors in other sites. These regular reports pointed to the existence of a potentially huge market for projectors, once prospective buyers embraced the versatility and “indispensability”—to use Power’s word—of motion pictures. Significantly, some of the same information about Cameragraph installations subsequently appeared in Photoplays and Photoplayers (sometimes titled News of Photoplays and Photoplayers), a newspaper page devoted to moving pictures that frequently included an ad for the Cameragraph. Thanks to the broad circulation of this syndicated feature, information about the expanding scope of multi-sited cinema reached readers across the country via newspapers like the Jaspar [IN] Weekly Courier and the Ogden [UT] Standard.[66]

A particularly eclectic example of this promotional material appeared in Motion Picture News in October 1914 under the title, “The Powers that Be.” This brief item matter-of-factly noted “only a few of recent installations of Power’s machines”—at a West Virginia coal company; a YMCA in New Haven, Connecticut; a school in Flushing, New York; the New York Eastern Reformatory; and on the USS Utah.[67] Each week during 1914, updates from Power published in Motion Picture News (and syndicated nationwide in newspapers) offered further evidence that cinema’s potential was being realized across a varied array of sites, including the homes of the wealthy (like Mrs. William Randolph Hearst), railroads (like the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad), industrial concerns (like the Adirondack Electric Power Company), and social clubs (like the United Odd Fellows in Illion, New York).[68] Most frequently, Cameragraphs were touted as being put into service at churches of various denominations, public and private schools, YMCAs, Army camps, Navy battleships, and state-run prisons, reformatories, orphanages, and asylums.[69]

More prominent than this steady stream of publicity about the non-theatrical installation of new Cameragraphs were Power’s advertisements, which began to appear in the trade press even before the Nicholas Power Company was officially formed on August 1, 1907, taking over from the business that Power had created in 1898.[70] Initially, these ads focused on theatrical exhibition, for example, by pitching the Cameragraph to readers of the New York Clipper and Billboard in 1906 as fireproof, flickerless, durable, and reliable.[71] These claims were underscored in a two-page spread in the Handbook for Motion Picture and Stereopticon Operators (1908), which enumerated the various features that made the Cameragraph “the modern motion picture machine” par excellence.[72] The same selling points were emphasized in Power’s marketing efforts over the next several years, including advertisements in Nickelodeon, Film Index, Moving Picture World, and Billboard in 1910, which advised theater owners that purchasing a Cameragraph was the surest way “to please your patrons.” These ads attested to Power’s status by citing the company’s “conquest” of the European and the Australian markets, providing testimonials from exhibitors and projectionists across the United States, and avowing that the Cameragraph was “used by the best and largest moving picture theatres everywhere.”[73]

With these ads Power sought to capitalize on a thriving, competitive theatrical market, in which upgrading to new, improved projectors could provide what one ad called “real, hard, practical advantages for the exhibitor.”[74] At the same time, when Power’s new factory opened in 1912 and its total sales had passed seven thousand projectors, the company’s advertising was already looking beyond the movie theater, seeking to enhance the prestige of and to find new customers for the Cameragraph.[75] For example, an ad that year in School Board Journal tried to boost sales to public school systems by noting that the non-theatrical field was already well established, with Power machines being used by “Industrial Corporations” like National Cash Register, International Harvester, and American Laundry Machine, as well as “many branches of the Y.M.C.A., the Catholic Church, Protestant Churches, Salvation Army, schools and colleges.”[76]

Power ads that ran in the motion picture trade press in 1912 focused less on schools, corporations, and religious organizations, than on the use of Cameragraphs by high-end touring attractions, particularly “prominent lecturers” like “Burton Holmes, Dwight Elmendorf, Fred Niblo, [and] Lyman H. Howe,” whose performances relied on the superior quality of their unique still and moving images.[77] One such ad featured a testimonial from the projectionist for Elmendorf’s lecture tours, paired with a photograph of the transportable (if not portable) Power equipment he used.[78] Other Power ads in 1912 pointed out that Cameragraphs were the projectors of choice for “the two newest and biggest moving picture shows in New York City,” Paul Rainey’s African Hunt and The Carnegie Alaska-Siberia Expedition, “shows” not initially slotted into the regular programming at moving picture houses but instead booked for extended runs at multi-use theaters.[79] Sharing little, if anything, with what was then standard nickelodeon fare, these free-standing, feature-length expedition films—like the illustrated lectures of Holmes and Elmendorf—typically required projection equipment that was moveable from one venue to the next. According to its 1910 catalogue, Power sold trunks and carrying cases specially designed to hold a Cameragraph, films, and accessories, including a removable stereopticon for projecting slides.[80] The company’s 1913 catalogue announced that these cases had been improved to help serve the needs of what it called “a great many traveling exhibitors.”[81]

Highlighting its connection to the likes of Burton Holmes and a Carnegie Museum-sponsored expedition was another way for Power to reaffirm what a later ad stated directly: “Uplift Is always a part of Our Business Creed.”[82] Along with “Prominent Lecturers” and “Big Feature Shows”—now including the road companies of Paul Rainey’s African Hunt—Power’s advertising in 1913 also emphasized that the “U.S. Government” was a committed buyer of its projectors, with “over 30 installations at various posts and aboard battleships,” as well as the Naval Academy and West Point.[83] After the war in Europe had begun, Power would even more explicitly spotlight its connection to the US military. Ads pictured battleships speeding “off to the front!” and lists of the many ships in the US fleet equipped with Power’s projectors—testaments to the company’s patriotism as well as the quality and utility of its machines (fig. 3.6).[84]

FIGURE 3.6. Power ads, Moving Picture World, May 23, 1914; The Navy, November 1915.

Lecturers and battleships continued to figure in the increasingly extensive marketing efforts Power mounted in 1914–15, which relied on but also reached well beyond the motion picture and commercial entertainment trade press to periodicals aimed at other specialized markets, like American Exporter: A Monthly Journal of Foreign Trade; The Navy: An Illustrated Monthly Devoted to the Interests of the United States Navy; School Board Journal; Christian Work; and The Churchman (the organ for the Protestant Episcopal Church).[85] In a variety of large format ads, Power’s campaign for the Cameragraph 6A utilized different graphic designs and selling points, in addition to the claim that “thousands of motion picture theaters use” the company’s “perfect motion picture projection machine.”[86] One particularly striking design, first appearing in March 1914, directly addressed the realized promise of a versatile, widely deployed cinema by featuring a circular layout with a projector at the center, connected to sixteen radiating lines, each leading to a different type of user and/or screening site (fig. 3.7). “Exhibitors”—representing all motion picture theaters—are but one spoke in this wheel, for here Power depicts the motion picture “trade” as encompassing a surprisingly wide range of possibilities.[87] A variation of this graphic design pictured the projector as the sun spreading its rays “everywhere,” including, but well beyond, the theater (fig. 3.8).[88]

FIGURE 3.7. Power ad, Motion Picture News, March 21, 1914.

FIGURE 3.8. Power ad, Motion Picture Magazine, June 1915.

Advertisements like these are not evidence of actual installations and screenings in the mid-1910s. Their significance lies, rather, in how they articulate, predict, and imagine an expanded, well-established field of multi-sited cinema. With enough Cameragraphs in service, these ads claim, motion pictures could be put to use by the US Government as well as by lecturers and “commercial houses,” screened everywhere from private homes and clubs to prisons, Army posts, and hospitals, on steamships and battleships, in colleges, public schools, YMCAs, film studios, and churches. Identifying and thereby encouraging the use of these many sites is the point. These ads do not acknowledge that a diverse array of spaces might require a range of sometimes radically different approaches to producing, programming, and sponsoring moving pictures. Not surprisingly, Power never considers, in other words, the political, social, and cultural import of multi-sited cinema as a means of redefining cinema and space alike.

Viewed from the perspective of an industry-leading projector manufacturer as it surveyed the territory beyond the theater, the potential of moving pictures seemed almost boundless. Realizing the promise of multi-sited cinema required only the ever-increasing availability of safe, reliable, durable, and professionally engineered projectors, “designed,” Power claimed, “to give entire satisfaction under any and all conditions.”[89] This versatility and mechanical sophistication made the Cameragraph, according to another memorable advertisement from 1915, not simply useful but “prominent among the most important factors of progress,” on a par with the automobile, locomotive, steam shovel, and giant printing press—the machines powering twentieth-century America (fig. 3.9).[90] By 1921, addressing readers of Visual Education: A Magazine Devoted to the Cause of American Education, it sufficed for Power to rely on its track record over the 1910s by enumerating in a full-page ad “a few of the hundreds of leading schools, colleges, churches, industrial organizations and public institutions” that had installed its projectors—implying that the promise of multi-sited cinema was well on its way to being realized.[91]

FIGURE 3.9. Power ad, Factors of progress, Our Navy, June 1915.

PORTABILITY AND THE “RAPID SPREAD OF MOTION PICTURES”

If packed in the right trunks and carrying cases, Power’s Cameragraph was transportable, yet it hardly qualified as a portable projector. This company’s advertising campaign conjures up a vast world of uses and sites that are not dependent on access to a reasonably priced projector, easy to set up and take down, simple to operate, and capable of being carried by hand. “Nimble, adaptable, mobile machines”—to use Haidee Wasson’s phrase—would in the United States become a hallmark of 8mm and 16mm cinema from the 1930s on.[92] Well before this small-gauge equipment had made significant inroads into the American market, the 1910s saw the promotion of a number of portable—sometimes called “amateur”—projectors. A two-line filler that appeared in newspapers across the US noted in 1914 that “a portable motion picture projector which weighs but 25 pounds and can be carried in a case twice the size of an ordinary suitcase has been invented.”[93] That same year Motography would announce that “the rapid spread of motion pictures, outside the theater, for religious, commercial and educational purposes, has been doubled and trebled since various styles of small portable projectors came into being.”[94]

This field included machines designed for home use that relied on non-standard gauge film, like Edison’s Home Projecting Kinetoscope (the Home P. K.), which was introduced in 1912.[95] Edison’s marketing for the Home P. K. hinged on turning the “parlor” into a screening site for the family and guests, with department stores serving as prime retail outlets for the machine and entertainment films (that the company also released theatrically) distributed by mail to individual users.[96] However, as Ben Singer points out, “the managers for the Edison firm conceived the Home P. K. as a projector to meet the needs of a variety of users—family, church, school, club, business.”[97] Despite the widespread publicity generated by Edison for the broader “educational” uses of his portable projector and the company’s ads in periodicals like School Journal, it failed to make headway with the American public school market before the Home P. K. enterprise ceased in 1914.

The early 1910s also witnessed the first iterations of what would later be called the “suitcase” projector, that is, a machine (with handled carrying case) specially designed for sales presentations and capable of turning “any room” into a screening site (fig. 3.10). So claimed the Knickerbocker Film Company, when it introduced its new machine, which was supposed to be capable of pausing “indefinitely” on any single frame, thereby rendering a stereopticon superfluous.[98] A similar “salesman’s portable projecting machine,” complete with “neat, compact, leatherette traveling case,” was highlighted in Machinery (January 1914) and advertised as a way to “take your plant—your machine—to your prospects.”[99] Suitcase projectors promised to provide a quite different capacity for mobility than other moveable screening options like the railway car refashioned as a mini-theater or the automobile or truck modified to serve as a self-contained traveling motion picture projection system, complete with screen as well as projector, lantern slides, and reels of film.[100]

FIGURE 3.10. Suitcase projectors, Moving Picture World, November 29, 1913 (left); Machinery, January 1914 (right).

Even without taking auto-mobility into account, Motion Picture News by June 1914 could flatly declare that “motion picture exhibitors are no longer confined to the theatre. With the improvement of projection apparatus there has come the portable machine specially designed for use in the home, schools, small halls, churches, and other places where elaborate outfits are out of the question.”[101] Variations on this theme were echoed elsewhere in the trade press. Billboard touted the Cameoscope portable projector as a “highly efficient apparatus that has a wide field of endeavor for the showman, the traveling lecturer, or for use in schools, churches and homes” and “is particularly practical for the traveling showman who either covers a fixed circuit of towns or follows carnivals, circuses or other show routes.”[102] Éclair billed its portable Kineclair as “the perfect projection machine” not only for use in homes, churches, and schools, but also in factories, kindergartens, lodges, and clubs, with particular value for “scientific lecturers” and traveling salesmen.[103] “Small portable projecting machines” were likewise a key element of a plan to create an “educational film exchange” based in Kansas City that would serve “schools, colleges, medical societies, mercantile houses, homes, Chautauquas, Sunday schools, churches and special gatherings” across Kansas.[104] Even as they point out—and regularize or even delimit—possibilities, such inventories of potential screening spaces celebrate the imminent realization of an expanded, pervasive, dispersed, multi-sited cinema powered by the transformative utility of the portable projector.

There is little evidence that portable projectors actually fulfilled this grand destiny during the 1910s, but it was not for lack of initiative by manufacturers. A typical issue of Moving Picture World in July 1914 contained advertisements for no less than four different portable machines that used standard 35mm film: the Phantoscope, the Optigraph Home Projector, Bing’s Home Entertainer, and the Animatograph. All were supposedly designed to suit the needs of a wide range of users, occasions, and sites, including but never limited to the private exhibition space of the middle- and upper-class home.[105] Most prominent, and likely most successful in the marketplace, were the Phantoscope and the Animatograph.

Developed by industry pioneer, C. Francis Jenkins, the Phantoscope was introduced in September 1913. Weighing twenty pounds and initially priced at one hundred dollars (complete with stereopticon, allowing for the uninterrupted shift from film to slides), with a motor-driven model selling for $125, Jenkins’s machine was heralded as perfectly safe, “simple as it is practicable,” able to project an eight-foot picture, and easily operated by an “intelligent boy” and “even a lady.”[106] An optional “gas generator” (for an extra twenty-five dollars) allowed the Phantoscope to be used in “rural districts or elsewhere where current is not available.”[107] Moving Picture News saw the Phantoscope as fulfilling a “clear need for a portable motion picture projector, something you can readily pack up in a small box, set up easily in the parlor, a small schoolroom, or a room in a hotel” to serve the needs of “the home circle; the small schools, traveling men and others.”[108] An extensive advertising campaign in the trade press during 1914 underscored the even more expansive multi-sited opportunities for this projector, emphasizing its suitability for churches, colleges, YWCAs, lodges, clubs, and Army and Navy posts.[109] An ad from July 1914, for instance, listed more than eighty firms and institutions that had purchased Phantoscopes, ranging from the American Tobacco Company and the Battle Creek Sanitarium to the University of Wyoming and the Virginia Experimental Agricultural Station.[110] This apparent success was short-lived, however. The Phantoscope Company looks to have stopped production of its portable projector in October 1915 after increasing its capitalization and resurfacing as the Graphoscope Company, offering a projector designed for theaters.[111]

Advertised by the Victor Animatograph Company as “the First Professional Portable Motion Picture Machine,” the Animatograph was described as being “easily carried about from place to place, set and put to work, it is said, in less than three minutes’ time, and producing an image of professional brilliancy and size.” The first model of the Animatograph in 1914 weighed forty pounds and came complete with a stereopticon.[112] Victor introduced the Animatograph Model 2 in 1917, aiming toward the “entirely separate field” of what it called “light-exhibition.” Model 2 was “intended and guaranteed for traveling exhibitions, and all educational and religious work in both large and small rooms” by the “non-theatrical user of motion pictures.”[113] Through the late-1910s, Victor continued to promote the Animatograph in the trade press as well as other periodicals like School Board Journal and Catholic Educational Review.[114] In 1922, the year before Victor introduced its “Sixteen Millimeter Camera and Projector,” the company announced the Model 3 Victor Animatograph, designed specifically for the home.[115]

FIGURE 3.11. Ads for Phantoscope, Moving Picture World, July 25, 1914 (top left); Optigraph, Moving Picture World, July 18, 1914 (bottom left); Victor Animatograph, Motion Picture News, December 1, 1917 (right).

The most ambitious and likely the most successful attempt to market a portable projector in the 1910s was mounted by Pathé, then the major company in the French film industry, which introduced its Pathéscope to the US market in 1913, promising to bring “motion pictures to [the] home” as a “companion to the Talking Machine.”[116] The company’s larger aim, as archivist Anke Mebold explains, was to create a “comprehensive service strategy for non-theatrical clientele.”[117] Not just portability but safe operation was a prime selling point of this novel projector, since the Pathéscope did not use the 35mm film stock that was the industry standard and relied, instead, on the 28mm non-inflammable alternative that had been introduced by Pathé. The use of 28mm film also meant that purchasers of the Pathéscope had to screen either moving pictures they themselves had shot (using a Pathé camera) or titles acquired from a Pathé-licensed rental library.

The holdings of these rental libraries give some indication of Pathé’s proprietary strategy for circulating moving pictures beyond the theater. The 1918 edition of the Descriptive Catalogue of Pathéscope Films, compiled by the Pathéscope Company of America, lists 935 available titles, “an abundant supply to suit every taste, every mood, any ages and all occasions.”[118] The majority of these films were reduction prints from 35mm theatrical releases produced by Pathé, including serial episodes, travelogues, industrials, and films covering “popular science” and current events. More than 350 of the titles available were identified as comedies and dramas, again largely produced by Pathé, with certain films from other major studios like Thanhouser, Vitagraph, and Biograph. While Pathé’s 28mm camera no doubt encouraged amateur filmmaking, the success of its Pathéscope and licensed rental libraries was clearly predicated on treating the home as an ancillary market for the theatrical film industry (fig. 3.12).[119]

FIGURE 3.12. Pathéscope ad, Saturday Evening Post, April 3, 1915.

As prominently as the home figured in the marketing of the Pathéscope in national mass-circulation magazines like Saturday Evening Post, Literary Digest, Scribner’s Magazine, and Collier’s, the authorized dealers for the Pathéscope in the US did not ignore the potentially much wider utility of this projector.[120] For example, at Philadelphia’s Industrial Exposition in March 1914, the city’s Pathéscope Exchange promoted the projector as being readily “adapted to industrial, domestic, and educational uses.”[121] The Pathéscope Company of New England informed readers of Congregationalist and Christian World that “the Pathéscope is bringing new life to hundreds of churches, Sunday Schools, Y.M.C.A.’s and institutions which before were losing their hold, owing to motion picture shows.”[122] Encouragement also came from Moving Picture World’s resident expert on projection, who concluded that in addition to “the homes of wealthy people,” Pathé’s “remarkable” machine is “unquestionably destined to have a large sale . . . in business offices and factories,” not least of all because “the amateur, be it the child, or the mother or father in the home, or the traveling salesman, or office man, can get just as good illustration of the picture as can the most experienced operator. All there is to do is turn on the switch . . . and watch the picture.”[123] In effect, the Pathéscope promised to do away not just with the projection booth and the dangers of 35mm nitrate film but also with the trained, professional projectionist.

While the Nicholas Power Company’s marketing highlighted installations of the Cameragraph as a permanent fixture in a host of non-theatrical sites and as the projector of choice for prominent touring lecturers, the portability of the Pathéscope allowed for more diverse screening opportunities. Thus newspapers in Springfield, Massachusetts, reported that the Pathéscope Company of New England during 1915–16 put on “demonstrations” or “entertainments” at private homes, churches, a country club, the YWCA, the city’s largest retail store, the Armory, the Boy’s Club, and a session of the Western Massachusetts Christian Endeavor Societies convention.[124] Other sponsored Pathéscope screenings took place, for example, at the Woman’s Club House in Butte, Montana (as part of a “practical demonstration regarding child’s welfare”); the Presbyterian church in Cherryvale, Kansas (which hosted a traveling evangelist who brought six reels to screen); the Worth Hotel in Fort Worth, Texas (where the featured program was “The Pathéscope as an Advertising Medium”); the outdoor Fourth of July celebration in the village of Grantham, Maryland (attended by two hundred townspeople and “little ones from the Messiah Orphanage”); and the Dairy Show held at the Armory in Kalamazoo, Michigan (with “educational” films on the production of condensed milk and the operation of milking machines).[125]

The public visibility of Pathé’s portable machine (and of non-theatrical cinema more generally) was also heightened by the many Pathéscope screenings in prominent department stores in cities across the US, including Butte, Montana, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, as well as Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh.[126] For example, beginning in December 1915 and continuing well into the following year, the regular full-page newspaper ads for Meier and Frank in Portland, Oregon, noted that free Saturday matinee Pathéscope screenings would be held in this store’s sixth-floor auditorium, a space also used for concerts and lectures.[127] Aimed specifically at children (who had to be accompanied by an adult), Meier and Frank’s hour-long Pathéscope programs featured at least one educational reel (like On Board the Flagship, Wyoming, or Tuberculosis, the Scourge), along with comedies, dramas, animated cartoons, and trick films.[128] The Wanamaker stores in New York City, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn, in addition to arranging free Pathéscope screenings, set up demonstrations of the projector in an in-house Toy Store, Camera Shop, or special “Pathéscope salon” furnished like a cozy parlor.[129]

In Washington, D.C., Pathéscope programs were screened in the six-hundred-seat auditorium located on the eighth floor of Woodward and Lothrop, one of the city’s preeminent department stores, as part of an ambitious marketing campaign aimed at getting Pathéscopes into public and private Washington-area schools.[130] In January 1915, the Washington Post began a two-month-long contest with the ten winning schools to receive a Pathéscope. To generate interest and waylay any doubts about the pedagogical utility of motion pictures, the Post set up demonstrations at schools to display the projector and to screen travel pictures, microscopic views, and other “educational motion pictures” from the Pathéscope library that were suitable for classroom use. From the first ads announcing the contest, the Post’s campaign trumpeted this projector as a safe, small, portable, economical, readily powered, and easy-to-operate machine benefitting the student, the community, and the nation, since the Pathéscope will “help our youth to become better and more successful citizens” while “making our schools as efficient and up-to-date as possible.”[131] Reports in the Post of enthused students and testimonials from educators, city officials, and representatives of civic groups like the Parents Association and the Federation of Women’s Clubs attested to the value of the Pathéscope and educational film more broadly.[132] In addition, the community at large also stood to benefit from this progressive pedagogical initiative, since, as one advertisement claimed, “a Pathéscope in your school means that the building will become more of a social center”—that is, become another multi-use site like the church assembly room and the YMCA.[133]

The Post offered almost daily coverage of its Pathéscope giveaway. The same was true in the many other cities where newspapers sponsored comparable competitions, including New York City, Buffalo, Louisville, and St. Louis, but also much smaller places like Chillicothe, Missouri. Variations of this contest, with projectors given to community groups or churches, took place in Los Angeles, Tacoma, Washington, and Salt Lake City.[134] In other areas of the country, the promotion of the Pathéscope was aimed at the vast rural market that was not a primary target for manufacturers of 35mm projectors like Power’s Cameragraph. Farm, Stock and Home magazine, for example, promised to give a Pathéscope to “any Farmers Club, Woman’s Club, Consolidated or District School, Church, Sunday School or Lodge” that delivered a certain number of new subscriptions.[135] In Kansas, sales agents set up demonstrations in small towns across the state, while in New Mexico, the Department of Public Instruction issued a license to the Pathéscope company, “which will try to place an outfit in each district in the state if the consent of the county superintendent can be secured for a demonstration to the rural school directors.”[136] Under this plan, the Santa Fe Board of Education, for example, purchased a Pathéscope.[137]

FIGURE 3.13. Pathéscope ads, Washington Post, February 7, 1915 (top); Farm, Stock & Home, February 1, 1916 (bottom).

As the marketing of the Pathéscope indicates, the limited success of Edison’s Home Projecting Kinetoscope, the Phantoscope, and other attempts to make the moving picture projector a regular household appliance and to open up screening sites outside the movie theater did not put an end to the dream of profiting from portability. Like the Victor Company—which would gain its greatest success in the development and commercial roll-out of 16mm equipment—Pathé continued to see the future of non-theatrical cinema in projectors that used “slow-burning,” aka safety film. By the end of the 1910s, the Pathéscope Company of America had introduced a new model of its 28mm projector, the Premier Pathéscope, redesigned to offer greater illumination and steadier images, with the added capability of being able to be “slowed down on speed without injury to the quality of projection”—a feature clearly designed to enhance classroom instruction and sales demonstrations.[138] Not surprisingly, the pamphlet introducing this product claimed it to be the “crowning triumph” in the development of the motion picture as “the universal educator and the universal amusement.”[139]

For home use, the twenty-three-pound Premier Pathéscope could be housed in an oak or mahogany cabinet that was designed to be a “companion entertainer to the better grades of talking machines or player pianos.” Yet this projector could also be easily transported either in a specially designed suit case or a metal carrying case.[140] Its adaptability and mobility were enhanced because the Premier Pathéscope was able to run off standard automobile batteries as well as 110 or 220 volts, alternating or direct current. It could even be powered, Pathé insisted, by hand-cranked or foot-driven electric generators, enabling the Premier Pathéscope to be put into service in sites far from American parlors and classrooms. Here was a machine usable “in the interior of China, South America, the Arctic and the South Sea Islands,” presumably making the Pathéscope a valuable resource for missionaries and manufacturers alike.[141]

The extensive advertising campaign for the Premier Pathéscope cast a wide net. As might be expected, ads running in magazines like House and Garden, Vanity Fair, Art and Decoration, and Country Life pitched this projector to well-to-do consumers looking for “a Christmas Gift for the whole family for a life-time.”[142] Even in these periodicals, however, advertisements referenced not only the upper-class “discriminating purchasers” of the projector like Mrs. Alfred G. Vanderbilt, Vincent Astor, and “four of the Du Ponts,” but also eminently respectable users of the Pathéscope outside of the home, including “the Y.M.C.A., Boy Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, Christian Endeavor Society, Epworth League, Social Settlement Workers, Parents Associations, Industrial Welfare Societies, Orphan Asylums, Convalescents’ Homes, Sanitariums.” With this track record, the advertising affirmed, the Premier Pathéscope was in the vanguard of multi-sited cinema, ready to be deployed “everywhere that life can be made better worth living by the safe use of wholesome motion pictures.”[143]

FIGURE 3.14. Pathéscope ads, System, April 1920 (left); Industrial Management, August 1920 (right).

Everywhere likewise included the territory covered by traveling sales agents who could arrange a private exhibition for one prospective customer, a tableau pictured in an advertisement in Industrial Management.[144] Ads aimed at this market listed the precise number of Pathéscopes sold to specific firms, including five to American Bank Note, eleven to Barber Asphalt, ten to Hershey Chocolate, and twenty to National Cash Register.[145] Ads in Associated Advertising and Printers’ Ink explained that the Pathéscope Company of America could produce new advertising and sales films and create 28mm prints of “any industrial film,” further enhancing the utility of its portable projector.[146]

Coinciding with the introduction of the Premier Pathéscope came the fifth edition of Pathé’s pamphlet, Education by Visualization: The Royal Road to Learning Lies along the Film Highway (first published in 1914), which identified the “prominent users” of Pathé projectors as “Institutions, Schools, Churches, Clubs and Camps, Hotels, and Industrial Firms.” As had been the case since the introduction of this projector, schools remained a highly prized market. Education by Visualization was careful to point out the dual utility afforded by Pathéscope’s portability, as demonstrated in photographs of both a classroom with students attentively watching a teacher pointing to a Pathéscope projected image and also an “Assembly Room” with students seated in rows “reviewing” Les Miserables (1917; see fig. 3.15).[147] Readers of Visual Education, a new journal affiliated with the Society for Visual Education, were informed that when it came to selecting a motion picture machine for school use, portability was essential, and since the Premier Pathéscope was easy to “carry from class room to class room,” “the machine goes to the pupils—not the pupils to the machine.”[148] That 115 New York public schools had chosen Pathéscopes was offered as dramatic proof that this projector was indeed “the most efficient aid to visual education.”[149]

FIGURE 3.15. Photographs, Education by Visualization: The Royal Road to Learning Lies along the Film Highway (5th ed., ca. 1920).

CONCLUSION

The marketing of the Premier Pathéscope as a machine that “can be used without danger by anyone, anytime, anywhere” capped a host of attempts during the 1910s to profit from portability.[150] The aim was to make inroads into what was envisioned as a vast domain apart from the nation’s fifteen to twenty thousand movie theaters, a potentially lucrative territory filled with schools and single-family homes, along with churches, public institutions, and offices. As a writer in Reel & Slide put it in 1918, “the increased value and possibilities for usefulness of the motion picture through the invention of the portable projector cannot be overestimated.”[151] These dreams or schemes to market the handy, easy-to-operate portable projector as a useful household device and to foster the proliferation of screening sites were a corollary to the Nicholas Power Company’s grand vision of its theater-quality Cameragraphs anchoring a modern, projector-illuminated America in peace and war.

Needless to say, possibilities did not directly or necessarily translate into practice. One estimate of conditions on the ground offered an appreciably less sanguine assessment than did projector advertisements: the 1919 US Bureau of Education survey I mentioned earlier indicated that of the 1,129 schools with moving picture projectors only about 20 percent had portable machines, half of which were Pathéscopes.[152] As much as the (limited) findings of this report, the fact that this agency saw the need for such a survey in the first place is significant, underscoring the extent to which the school was a privileged site. If the idea of cinema as multi-sited evoked in the 1910s a myriad—even unlimited—array of potential options, the fragmentary historical record clearly suggests that for proselytizers and marketers alike certain kinds of places (apart from the home) predominated, most notably, schools, churches, YMCAs, and state-run institutions. The installation of projectors and screenings at these already well-established, easily identifiable sites were also likely to be referenced on the pages of newspapers and periodicals, which might take note of screenings by traveling representatives of agricultural extension services and state health agencies, but paid scant attention to the mobile itineraries of roadshowmen or to sales agents armed with suitcase projectors.

As the discussion of St. Louis in the previous chapter made evident, however, projectors in the 1910s were actually deployed in scores of sites besides schools and churches. Nevertheless, the promise of cinema “anywhere” did not materialize into the presence of cinema everywhere; expansion beyond the movie theater was partial, uneven, irregular, unsystematic. In a general sense, putting multi-sited cinema into practice during the first decades of the twentieth century was no doubt influenced by commercial film industry practices, progressive educational theories, modern advertising strategies, and attitudes toward the cultural, social, and religious status of motion pictures.[153] A host of other more concrete factors were also in play. The costs involved and even the access to requisite films could determine where moving pictures were screened. The regulatory actions of municipal and state authorities could directly limit, shape, or facilitate the implementation of multi-sited cinema from locality to locality.

Realizing the much-vaunted pedagogical, ameliorative, utilitarian, and/or commercially lucrative potential of cinema “anywhere” was dependent on more than the vagaries of local ordinances and the availability of prints. Conducting a screening outside the movie theater required owning, renting, or having authorized access to a suitable projector and to a usable physical space. This was as true for the showing of “indecent films” to an all-male audience at Lennox Casino as it was for an exhibition in Kentucky’s Asylums for the Insane, Bakersfield’s First Methodist Episcopal Church, and Meier and Frank’s department store in Portland—and likely even for itinerant showmen traveling the Ozarks. Ownership, authorization, access—these important variables all underscore that exhibiting moving pictures “anywhere” beyond the movie theater was a sanctioned, contingent, sponsored practice, which unquestionably privileged certain kinds of screenings, restricted the sites where moving pictures might be shown, and limited the uses to which moving pictures might be put. But however formidable and consequential, this control was never close to being airtight, concerted, and uniform. Every projector sold for use outside a movie theater potentially raised anew the prospect of moving pictures, in Nicholas Power’s words, “being placed everywhere.”[154]

4

Targeted Audiences

A photograph from Photoplay, printed in an issue from September 1915 that was otherwise entirely devoted to the movies, shows a striking instance of multi-sited cinema: a train car designed and outfitted by the Pennsylvania Railroad for the purposes of screening moving pictures. A similar “moving picture car” drew the attention of Scientific American (August 1915), but here the seats are filled with “railroad men” watching “motion pictures illustrating unsafe practices” (fig. 4.1).[1] Conducted in a repurposed space, this screening brought together a readily identifiable, homogenous audience composed of New York Central Railway employees, whose attendance was no doubt compulsory. It was, in other words, a targeted screening, aimed at a specific audience rather than at any and all theatergoing customers willing, able, and allowed to purchase a ticket. Not surprisingly, given the vast number of sponsors, sites, and uses of cinema, non-theatrical screenings ran the gamut in this regard, arranged for members of a chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, affiliates of an engineer society, and leaders of the national African American community, as well as for attendees at a regional medical conference, workers at a particular factory, female residents of small towns interested in corset fitting, legislators in formal session, and on and on.

FIGURE 4.1. Railway car as screening site: Photoplay, September 1915 (top), and Scientific American, August 1915 (bottom).

Sponsored cinema, put to a variety of purposes and utilizing a range of screening sites, aimed in almost all cases at reaching discrete, circumscribed audiences—also a goal of at least some early twentieth-century advertisers and magazine publishers, not to mention a host of mediamakers through the rest of the century and beyond. In contrast, during the 1910s, the movies in the US were commonly associated with what was imagined or believed to be—for better or worse—an enormous, inclusive, national audience cycling daily through thousands of theaters. This vision of a public numbering in the millions regularly attending the movies figured in claims about the status of the film business as one of America’s leading industries and in concerns about the menace that it posed. The supposedly mass popularity and patronage of the movies has long remained central in popular accounts of Hollywood’s rise and decline.

In this chapter I examine the distinction between these two ways of addressing, constituting, and configuring audiences, as articulated in arguments concerning the censorship of moving pictures and as played out on the ground in specific exhibition practices. Rather than catalogue or categorize the many audiences of sponsored, multi-sited cinema, I will examine the parameters and broader implications of this widespread practice during the 1910s by focusing on several examples, including the theatrical and non-theatrical screening of the most profitable, highly publicized, and actively resisted film from the period, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). My major case study will be the extensive efforts of the National Association of Manufacturers to reach various audiences with its “industrial betterment” campaign. Using moving pictures to address, constitute, reaffirm, and capitalize on a plurality of differently configured, delimited, distinctive audiences reflected and helped create in the 1910s a particular version of America as diverse and divisible—quite unlike the purportedly homogenizing effect of the movies as mass entertainment.

THE MOVIES ARE IN THE REACH OF ALL

In November 1915, an article in Photoplay announced what by this date might have seemed to be a truism about the miraculous but entirely explicable popularity of the movies in America:

A few years ago we classed motion picture ventures along with circuses and side-shows. Few of us would have for a moment dreamed that in 1915 there would be over 20,000 motion picture theaters in our country alone, amusing millions of fans every day. This phenomenal development has come about, not so much because of the judgment of the men in the game and their careful planning, but because the business is basic . . . movies supply a natural demand and give value at a low price . . . the Movies are in the reach of all. Any business that is founded on dimes and nickels and a natural demand for play is bound to succeed.[2]

This ostensibly airtight connection between personal demand and marketplace supply meant that “all” Americans could elect to go to a moving picture theater and buy an inexpensive ticket that afforded them an hour or two of access to the individual and social experience of moviegoing. The result, reasoned the “photoplay philosopher” in Motion Picture Story Magazine in 1912, was an unprecedented “intermingling” that under other circumstances might have seemed a threat to social stability: “Usually, every amusement attracts a single class of patrons, and we do not find bootblacks intermingling with bankers, and millionaires with paupers; but the photoplay seems to be equally interesting to rich and poor, intellectual and unintellectual, black and white, young and old. Not only this, so fascinating is the Motion Picture that the rich and the educated are willing to rub elbows with the very lowliest in order to enjoy themselves at this wonderful place—the photoshow.”[3]

This vision—more utopic than dystopic—of the movie theater as a unique space that attracted and brought together Americans across class, race, education, and occupational differences was in part grounded in the mundane, regularized policies driving theatrical film exhibition, whether in an urban neighborhood or in a small college town, like Bloomington, Indiana, whose population in the mid-1910s was around ten thousand. During 1915, two moving picture theaters with the same ownership were situated right off Bloomington’s town square: the Princess (opened in 1913 and seating 913) and the Harris-Grand Opera House (opened in 1907 and seating 1,210). Both venues advertised daily changing, multi-film programs, frequently offered serials, and increasingly booked feature films. The Harris-Grand also regularly included a vaudeville act on its bill and sometimes hosted a touring stage production.

The competition for these theaters came from Bloomington’s other, much more atypical picture show, the Union Theater (sometimes called the Union Photo Play Theater), housed inside the student union building on the campus of Indiana University (which then enrolled approximately 1,500 students).[4] An editorial in the Indiana Daily Student boasted—and may have been correct in claiming—that “this movie theater is the only one of its kind in the country. There is no other college or university that has established a moving picture show on the campus which is used purely for purposes of entertainment.”[5] Scheduling screenings on Wednesday and Friday evenings, the Union Theater highlighted its feature film offerings from Paramount and George Kleine, presented with musical accompaniment by a three-piece “orchestra” (piano-violin-flute or piano-saxophone-drums). While definitely aimed at students and operated with the approval of and on the grounds of Indiana University, the Union Theater (like the Princess and the Harris-Grand) also regularly advertised its programs in local newspapers as it sought broader patronage from the community at large (fig. 4.2). I have found no evidence that any screenings in 1915 at this on-campus site were offered solely for students or otherwise explicitly restricted to certain patrons.

FIGURE 4.2. Announcement for Union Photoplay Theatre, 1915.

In fact, only once during 1915 did any of Bloomington’s movie theaters explicitly restrict attendance and thereby target a particular group of spectators. In line with the national advertising campaign I discussed in chapter 2, the local shop that sold Gossard corsets rented the Princess Theater and arranged a special ticketed but free 2:00 p.m. screening “for ladies only.”[6] While the widespread implementation of Gossard’s marketing strategy points to the potential for movie theaters to serve as multi-use venues, the ladies-only matinee staged in Bloomington also stands as an exception that proves a more general rule: profit-minded film exhibitors sought to fill the seats of their theaters, day-in and day-out by not restricting attendance, thereby inviting everyone and anyone to buy a ticket of admission and take a seat with other moviegoers. In practice, this industry-wide business policy might conceivably have allowed for the sort of “intermingled” audience described in Motion Picture Story Magazine, but it was much more likely to result in audiences whose makeup varied in certain ways from show to show, theater to theater, and locality to locality in terms of a host of variables, including age, sex, race, class, education, religion, ethnicity, regionality, and occupation.[7]

At the same time, there is no question that direct or indirect practices of racial segregation deeply qualified if not fully undercut the egalitarian and communitarian potential of what historian Michael McGerr refers to as the “democratic mingling” resulting from this purportedly open, inviting access to movie theaters.[8] One result, as the research of Jacqueline Stewart, Allyson Nadia Field, and Cara Caddoo has convincingly demonstrated and as we saw in the discussion of St. Louis in chapter 1, was the emergence of film exhibition in and out of theaters aimed specifically at African Americans living under Jim Crow conditions.[9] In addition, while hailing “everyone,” the commercial film industry had a considerable investment in what Shelley Stamp has called “cultivating cinema’s female audience,” as evidenced in a range of promotional strategies as well as film production cycles.[10] Exhibitors also cultivated, at various times and in various ways, other segments of the audience, including children, the well-to-do, and people with “refined” tastes.[11] Such aims co-existed with policies and pronouncements that beckoned to and boasted of an inclusive, broad, vast, and purportedly unrestricted nationwide cohort of moviegoers that was quite different than the targeted audiences sought and served by cinema outside the movie theater. This distinction also informed the discourse concerning censorship of motion pictures, which often hinged on the role of moving pictures and moviegoing in relation to an emerging mass public and to the type of diversity that mattered in America.

CENSORSHIP AND THE CONGLOMERATED AUDIENCE

In framing its “model ordinance for regulating motion picture theatres” the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures in 1913 took as a premise that “all motion pictures at present are made for the entire American public, young and old, cultured and ignorant, and while this condition lasts every motion picture performance must be a compromise between the demands of children and adults.”[12] Hence the absolute need, this organization concluded, for laws governing the licensing and “scientific regulation” of theaters.[13] Rendering moving picture shows safe remained a major concern in 1915, according to the National Board of Censorship’s statement of “Policy and Standards,” because “the fact that the same picture goes to all audiences gives rise to some of the greatest problems of the national board. These audiences are composed of a conglomeration of people, ranging from 3 to 80 years of age, and representing social traditions and educational influences, some modern and some antiquated, some native and some foreign.” Bearing in mind what it called the “diversified public” for moving pictures meant that the board “can not judge films exclusively from the standpoint of children or delicate women or the emotionally morbid or neurasthenic or of any one class of audience.”[14] According to this line of argument, a form of “compromised” commercial entertainment based on attracting a “conglomeration of people” totaling millions weekly puts already vulnerable children and women at risk, as well as vastly limiting the prospects for what the moving picture might be and do.

A few months later, the indefatigable advocate for federal censorship and critic of the National Board of Censorship, Wilbur F. Crafts, put the matter even more concisely when testifying before the House of Representatives Committee on Education concerning a proposed Federal Motion Picture Commission: “theatrical conditions are such that at present every film goes to the whole American audience—men, women, and children.”[15] “Whole” presumably signified for Crafts not only the presence of male and female viewers of all ages but also the widespread availability of motion pictures geographically and demographically across the United States—that is, the “theatrical” audience understood in terms of an aggregate plurality.

The way these declarations about movie audiences frame American diversity is striking, factoring in age, impressionability, gender, and sex, as well as a broad array of “traditions” and “influences” bespeaking educational level, immigrant status, and even the degree of “modernity”—and, notably, leaving race and religion out of the equation, perhaps because they were so obvious as to be taken for granted.[16] According to the National Board of Censorship and its arch-enemy Crafts, a defining condition of the solidly ensconced motion picture industry was that it made readily available films marketed to and intended to be consumed by “the whole American audience,” an audience not understood as an undifferentiated mass or an imagined nation but rather as a “conglomeration of people,” a “diversified public.” This business strategy was deemed to be a dangerous problem meriting immediate correction because every ticket-buying American was subjected to the same images and stories created by an industry seeking to maximize profits, while not all films were fit for all members of the heterogenous moviegoing public.[17] Perhaps not surprisingly, Crafts does not mention that this “whole” American audience for mainstream theatrical cinema excluded the indigent, those who had no ready access to movie theaters, and in many cases African Americans and other people of color.

A similar understanding of the moviegoing audience informed the most significant legal case involving film in the 1910s: the US Supreme Court’s far-reaching decision in Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915), which refused to grant First Amendment rights to the motion picture and thereby allowed censorship of films at the state level to proceed. While acknowledging that “motion pictures may be used to amuse and instruct in other places than theaters—in churches, for instance, and in Sunday schools and public schools,” the court insisted that state censorship was constitutional and necessary in part because the potentially “insidious” danger motion pictures posed as “spectacle” and as a “business” venture was rooted in the “audiences they [films] assemble, not of women alone nor of men alone, but together, not of adults only, but of children.”[18] According to the court, by the mid-1910s two incommensurate types of cinema were found in the US: on one hand, theatrical moving pictures indiscriminately drawing adults and children as well as men and women, and, on the other hand, the noncommercial use of the medium in “other places than theaters” that presumably served more narrowly constituted audiences, but warranted little more than an aside as the justices deliberated on the case at hand.

According to the statute upheld by the Supreme Court, Ohio’s state censorship board was tasked with passing judgment on “all motion picture films to be publicly exhibited and displayed in the state of Ohio,” which perhaps assumed a distinction between screenings that were public and those that were not.[19] The ordinance did not specify what might count as non-public exhibition—screenings in a private residence? an office? an asylum? a members-only club? Laws in other states were somewhat more explicit. The statute creating a mechanism for film censorship in Kansas indicated that “films used in institutions of learning are exempt from the provisions of the act.”[20] In Pennsylvania, state censorship was legally required for “any place where films, reels, or views are exhibited,” with the notable exception of “exhibition of or use of films, reels or views for purely educational, charitable, fraternal, or religious purpose, by any religious association, fraternal society, library, museum, public school, or private school, institution of learning, or any corporation of the first class.”[21] These laws codify distinctions based on sponsorship and use, privileging certain purposes and non-theatrical sites. Schools and religious associations and the other specified locations were not required to submit prints and pay fees to the Pennsylvania censorship board, but still had to comply with the state’s criteria for what constituted permissible films.

Like these state censorship boards and the Supreme Court, Crafts and the National Board of Censorship raised the possibility of alternate modes of exhibition. Both assume that the film industry’s approach to its audience is a product of current “theatrical conditions,” a phrase I take to mean how films were then being produced for, distributed to, and exhibited in America’s ubiquitous, commercially run movie theaters. The National Board of Censorship posited that different arrangements were conceivable based on delimiting audiences, notably by creating venues restricted to only adult spectators or arranging screenings explicitly designated for children.[22] (On rare occasions—when, for example, scheduling children’s matinees and programs like Twilight Sleep—certain theaters did limit audiences in these ways.) Crafts broached another, more ambitious option: a nationally available non-theatrical cinema. Regular screenings in YMCA-style “evening schools” as well as a “nation-wide series of one-night-a-week recreational films in churches and welfare societies” would, Crafts argued, provide Americans with a much-needed alternative to the thousands of storefront nickelodeons, repurposed live-entertainment theaters, or purpose-built picture palaces that offered moving pictures as their primary fare—sites that constituted the cornerstone of the increasingly consolidated and, for him, ideologically suspect American commercial film industry.[23] In effect, Crafts was calling for a cinema fully independent of Hollywood, comprised of a network of non-profit, safe, institutionally overseen, familiar sites committed to responsibly and regularly providing mass entertainment as well as instructional moving pictures suitable for the diverse population of the United States. This model of cinema, Crafts suggests, would offer audiences an opportunity to opt out of the dangerously homogenizing experience of moviegoing promoted by the film industry and join a more healthy but equally national, mass audience gathered to view films in churches and YMCAs.

In practice, however, non-theatrical cinema during the 1910s rarely addressed an aggregate audience, a diversified but still conglomerate public such as Crafts described when he testified to Congress. A free screening of entertainment or “recreational” films open to all comers at a community social center or in the auditorium of a metropolitan department store or hosted by merchants in the square of a small Midwestern town might seek to attract a mix of spectators somewhat akin to a nearby moving picture show. “Everybody welcome! Everything free!” declared an advertisement for a YMCA screening of motion pictures about fire and fire prevention in Scranton, Pennsylvania.[24]

But the desideratum for multi-sited cinema was much likelier to be a more narrowly defined, more homogeneous audience, linked by one or more variables, including sex and age, but also occupation, race, religion, educational level, social class, place of birth, current residence, union or club membership, leisure-time interests, consumer habits, political affiliation, and so on. If not unlimited, the possibilities for how particular audiences could be envisioned and hailed were extraordinarily broad—and at the same time historically specific. Strategies to achieve this end varied. The makeup and the size of the audience could, for instance, be delimited by the location, size, access to, and availability of the site itself—a “ghetto” playground, for example, or a convention hall, classroom, or business office. Admission could be restricted to members and invited guests; even “free” events might require tickets, usually available from a local sponsor. Certain groups could be encouraged, requested, or required to attend.

The purchase of a projector for home use could also be understood as a way to escape the conglomerated theatrical audience. Advertising assured readers of the Saturday Evening Post that a Premiere Pathéscope and titles drawn from the Pathéscope rental library offered owner/projectionists the flexibility to satisfy “every taste, every mood, any age and all occasions.” Just as important, this investment made it possible for small invited audiences to enjoy “private” screenings of individualized programming at home in “absolute safety and comfort,” suggesting that theatrical screenings provided nowhere near enough comfort or safety.[25]

THE BIRTH OF A NATION IN AND OUT OF THE THEATER

Beyond the home, the prospects for targeting particular audiences were vast. Consider the perhaps unlikely example of The Birth of a Nation during 1915 and 1916, when it was the most widely seen film in theatrical release.[26] Griffith’s melodramatic paean to white supremacy generated protest from African Americans in city after city, while local newspapers reported favorably on smashed box office records and wildly enthusiastic audiences. The circulation of The Birth of a Nation in Indiana was typical. Strident public efforts by community groups and African American leaders to prevent the screening of the film in South Bend, for example, went for naught.[27] When The Birth of a Nation was booked for a week’s run in South Bend’s multi-use Oliver Theater, tiered ticket prices were comparable to major touring stage productions, ranging from twenty-five cents for the gallery to two dollars for prime main floor seats—in line with what advertisements insisted were the “highest class theaters” across the state.[28] While this pricing suggests that audiences who could afford these tickets were highly stratified by social class, the extensive newspaper coverage and advertising for The Birth of a Nation offers no indication that any theater in Indiana explicitly restricted attendance by age or by additional racist efforts beyond the Jim Crow practices already in place. Indeed, a newspaper account from South Bend specifically noted that the “aggregation of spectators” “from pit to dome” became one “audience,” as the film unrolled and “waves of applause swept” the theater.[29] Nothing prevented white children from attending, as evidenced in a letter-to-the-editor published in the Indianapolis News that took Griffith to task for the historical inaccuracies of The Birth of a Nation. The Civil War veteran who voiced this concern argued that the real danger of the film was its effect on the “good sprinkling of children of school age” in the audience when he saw the film in Anderson, Indiana.[30] Children might even be actively encouraged to see The Birth of a Nation, as was the case in Elwood, Indiana, where, “at the request of parents,” the superintendent of schools announced that he would excuse students who were attending matinee screenings of the film at the city’s opera house.[31] Restrictions based on race could have been implemented in the Midwest more informally, site-by-site, as had been the case in New York City, according to the New York Age. This African American newspaper reported that the management of the Liberty Theatre (where the film would have a record-setting engagement) “fearing that irresponsible colored citizens will show their resentment against the exhibition of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ by resorting to violence . . . has adopted a policy of excluding as many colored people as possible. Only a few have been able to secure admittance, and several of them were taken for white.”[32]

Advertisements in 1916 claimed that The Birth of a Nation had attracted “millions” of spectators in its theatrical engagements, but this film also garnered attention because of a highly restricted, narrowly targeted non-theatrical screening, when The Birth of a Nation was projected on the white wood-paneled wall in the East Room of the White House on February 18, 1915. Described in a syndicated newspaper account as having been “arranged” by President Woodrow Wilson’s daughters “for the benefit of their [recently widowed] father and several members of the Cabinet,” this “private moving picture exhibition” was “presented as a possible means of diverting the President for one evening from the cares of his office.”[33] Griffith and Thomas Dixon (author of The Clansman, the source novel for Griffith’s film) were also likely present at this screening, suggesting their stake in facilitating the event.[34]

The following day Griffith and Dixon attended a second invitation-only exhibition of the film in the nation’s capital, this time under the auspices of the National Press Club, whose membership was limited only to select white male journalists. This organization, which a year earlier had heard Woodrow Wilson deliver a much publicized talk about his experiences as president, had since 1914 occasionally arranged for its members special non-fiction moving picture programs.[35] The Press Club screened at its assembly room the Williamson submarine films, Kinemacolor’s With the Fighting Forces in Europe (1914), the non-fiction feature Uncle Sam at Work (1915), and even what was described as newly shot footage demonstrating “Twilight Sleep,” billed here as the “painless” childbirth method.[36] Six months after viewing The Birth of a Nation, members of the Press Club, joined by invited Army and Navy officers, would watch a special private screening of Vitagraph’s The Battle Cry of Peace (1915), designed to wake up America from its misguided pacificism.[37]

For The Birth of a Nation screening, the Press Club used the spacious Banquet Room on the top floor of the Raleigh Hotel, where some five hundred attendees, including journalists, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the secretary of the Navy, more than thirty senators, and approximately fifty members of the House of Representatives, were reported to have “cheered and applauded throughout the three hours” required to show the “gigantic picture.”[38] For newspapers across the country in February 1915, these two non-theatrical Washington screenings of The Birth of a Nation were definitely newsworthy, likely because of where they occurred and who comprised the audience. In hindsight, these invitation-only events appear even more significant, for they indicate the opinion leaders in government and the media that Griffith successfully sought to reach, and they bear witness to the political and racial climate in the United States that proved to be so welcoming to the film despite the protests of African Americans.

There is no telling how many other times The Birth of a Nation was screened non-theatrically by the end of 1910s, well before it was subsequently exhibited outside of commercial movie theaters for quite different purposes by, most notably, the KKK and the Museum of Modern Art.[39] One additional noteworthy example of what the New York Sun called the film’s “private exhibition” occurred in October 1915. While The Birth of a Nation continued its Broadway engagement, Grace Methodist Episcopal church in Manhattan hosted “through the courtesy of D. W. Griffith” a special screening of the film for “a vast audience of Methodist ministers from all over the State.” The New York Times reported that “the picture was shown” at this landmark church “in every detail as at the Liberty Theatre, with orchestral accompaniment.”[40] Which aspect of this event, then, might have most strongly registered as a signifier of non-theatrical difference? That the site was a prominent church with a recent history of screening moving pictures? That the screening was presented thanks to Griffith and under the auspices of the Reverend Christian Reisner, the headline-grabbing minister of Grace Methodist Episcopal and author of Church Publicity: The Modern Way to Compel Them to Come In (1913)? That the “vast” audience was “private” and composed of Methodist clergymen?[41] In this case, as in a great many instances of film exhibition beyond the movie theater, there was a marked correlation between site, sponsor, and targeted audience. Box office revenue was surely not the immediate goal, though there was the good possibility that ministers who watched The Birth of a Nation at Grace Methodist Episcopal might go on to promote the film directly or indirectly among their parishioners.

THE VARIETIES OF NON-THEATRICAL PRACTICE

Significantly, the private showing of The Birth of a Nation at the White House was in this period among the most widely noted and perhaps the most impactful example of a non-theatrical screening aimed a quite specific audience, not least of all because it was referenced by Griffith and defenders of the film, like the attorney who successfully argued that The Birth of a Nation should be shown in Boston despite NAACP protests.[42] This targeted screening was, however, no more typical than any of the other examples introduced throughout this book. The audiences targeted in this period were just as varied as the sites of cinema outside the movie theater, and this variety is essential, I propose, for thinking about how non-theatrical cinema was historically put into practice. The following examples drawn from newspaper and trade press accounts begin to suggest the range of audiences gathered in specific sites, on particular occasions, under certain auspices:

• At Footguard Hall, the armory in Hartford, Connecticut, moving pictures shot at the Aetna Life Insurance Company’s home office (in Hartford) were shown as part of the annual social meeting of the Aetna Life Club, “composed of the clerks, officers, and agents” of the company.[43]

• The annual dinner for employees of the Dover Press, an event hosted by the company at its offices in Fall River, Massachusetts, included “grand opera and tango music” on a phonograph during the meal; after dinner, “an hour and a half was then devoted to four reels of motion pictures describing the process of paper making from the winter lumbering in Maine to the completed stock in the store room at the factory.”[44]

• In Charlotte, North Carolina, the local chapter of the Patriotic Order of Sons of America at its hall watched “four reels of moving pictures representing ‘Washington at Valley Forge.’ ” Produced for commercial release by Universal in 1914, this film was described in a notice that ran in a Charlotte newspaper as being “in full keeping with the principles of the Order, helping to inculcate into the minds of those present the one great principle that the Order stands for, that is, patriotism. These pictures were enjoyed to the fullest by all present.”[45]

• In an attempt to “increase [student] interest in the Corn, Pig, Canning, and Poultry Clubs,” the Junior Extension and Home Economics Department of Louisiana State University sent its “automobile motion picture machine” during three days in November 1915 to eight public schools in Monroe, Louisiana, where students saw moving pictures as part of a program that included stereopticon slides, a lecture, and a demonstration of up-to-date canning methods.[46]

• At the David Rankin School of Mechanical Trades in St. Louis, Missouri, the annual meeting of the city’s Foundrymen’s Club featured a screening of From Mine to Molder, a film that was produced in Indianapolis and sponsored by the iron and steel company, Roger, Brown & Co. A representative of this company provided a “lecture on the pictures.”[47]

• “Nearly 100 bankers, brokers and selling agents” from New York City and Boston touring the Bigelow-Hartford Carpet Company headquarters in Thompsonville, Connecticut watched at one of the company’s mills a “special film of the help at work.”[48]

• The Silent Plea (1915), a three-reel Vitagraph film dramatizing the tribulations of a widow whose two young children suffer dire consequences after they are taken from her and deposited in an orphan asylum, was screened at the conclusion of hearings concerning “widowed mothers’ pensions” being held by the New York State Senate Judiciary Committee and Assembly Social Welfare Committee in Albany, New York. The audience included legislators and “representatives of many charitable, reform, church and settlement organizations.” “Not a few legislators and spectators were moved to tears,” reported the New York Sun. Vitagraph promoted this film as having been produced “in co-operation” with a representative of the New York State Commission for the Relief of Widowed Mothers. Moving Picture World called this screening of The Silent Plea “an event we had earnestly hoped for”—delivering to this influential audience an impassioned “plea for widowed mothers” that was, in addition, a demonstration of the “screen’s possibilities for good.”[49]

• In Cincinnati, at the Monday night meeting of the Ben Franklin Club, composed of the city’s printers, club members watched moving pictures detailing “the process of paper making, from the cutting of the logs to the operations at the pulp mill, and thence through the mills to the completion of various grades of paper. The pictures were supplied by one of the larger paper concerns near Cincinnati.”[50]

• H. L. Brownell, the Safety Inspector of the Chicago Railways Company, screened thirty to forty slides and three reels of motion pictures depicting “almost every kind of street car and automobile accident” as part of his presentation to experts attending two sessions, on “Education” and on “Fire Prevention,” of the Second Safety Congress at the National Conference for Industrial Safety held at New York City’s Hotel McAlpin in conjunction with a meeting of the Association of Iron and Steel Electrical Engineers. Moving pictures were also used by other speakers discussing, for example, the design and utility of fire escapes.[51]

• The program at the widely publicized conventions of the Laymen’s Missionary Movement of the Southern Presbyterian Church held in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Dallas, Texas, in February 1916 featured a “demonstration in moving pictures of missionary education in the Orient.” This footage was shot during an official tour of Asia by the general chairman of this organization and included what the Montgomery [AL] Advertiser called “a wonderful display of stirring scenes in China, Japan, and Korea, the first moving-picture of missionaries at work. . . . Doctors in hospitals operating, athletes in action, and the ‘Burden Bearers’ of the East in vivid and real pictures.” The convention also scheduled a presentation by the secretary of the Missionary Education Movement, entitled, “The Possibility of Moving Pictures in Missionary Education.” Attendance of committed Presbyterian men purportedly topped two thousand at each of the conventions.[52]

Beyond pointing to the varieties of non-theatrical cinema, these examples indicate that how and why certain audiences were targeted could depend on the aims of sponsors, follow directly from the uses to which moving pictures were being put, and/or be a consequence of where films were screened. Drawing from this admittedly small sample we can formulate a number of questions that open up broader lines of inquiry concerning the practice of targeted screenings, particularly in contrast to theatrical exhibition:

• Who attended? The number of spectators at non-theatrical events could vary considerably, and audiences could be constituted according to a host of different criteria, including economic or political status, place of employment, trade or occupation, and/or shared values (like nativist patriotism or a commitment to Protestant missionary efforts). Did contemporary accounts of the screenings offer information about the size and the makeup of the audience? To what extent did the site and occasion dictate the constitution of the audience? To what degree and by what means was attendance restricted?

• Why did audiences attend? Was attendance mandatory, required, expected, or optional? Did attendance signify commitment, affiliation, allegiance, obligation? Was attendance a condition of employment or an opportunity for developing greater expertise? Were people gathered solely or primarily to see moving pictures? The answers to these questions would differ for a convention as compared with an event featuring moving pictures organized by an employer, like the Dover Press or the New York Central Railroad, or compared with the screening of a sponsored industrial film during a regularly scheduled meeting of a group like the Ben Franklin Club.[53]

• If the reason for exhibiting films was not to generate box office revenue, then what motivated targeted screenings? What were the professed or implied aims of the sponsor in these screenings, particularly when the events were unrelated to the marketing of products like corsets, automobiles, or cash registers to potential consumers? Providing useful, relevant, and/or simply interesting information was a common rationale that could in practice subtend quite different goals, such as when The Silent Plea was screened in an attempt to influence legislators debating the social issue that was dramatized in this film or when Washington at Valley Forge was screened as a way of “inculcating” the values of the Patriotic Order of Sons of America.

• Was the screening part of a broader campaign? Singular events that included moving pictures were quite different than orchestrated campaigns aiming to reach audiences across a number of different sites. For example, newspapers reported that the statewide tour by Louisiana State University Extension Service’s mobile moving picture car in 1915 “visited 89 schools in twelve parishes and rendered programs with the auto-stereopticon and moving picture machine to an estimated attendance of 15,550 school children, school patrons and farmers.”[54] The moving pictures screened at the conventions of the Laymen’s Missionary Movement of the Southern Presbyterian Church were planned to be widely distributed as self-styled “propaganda,” with the goal of reaching “straight down into the normal work and life of every congregation,” beginning with 3,000 Presbyterian churches in the South and expanding to “all [Protestant] denominations.”[55] The moving pictures and slides Brownell screened at the Second Safety Congress had already been used, he declared, for “twelve exhibitions in the city parks of Chicago” that reached “at least fifty thousand people,” with plans to “give these exhibitions in the three hundred schools in the city of Chicago, as fast as we can give them.”[56]

• Were films shown to a particular non-theatrical audience repurposable for differently configured audiences? The moving pictures screened at the company-sponsored social event for employees of the Aetna Life Insurance Company—and perhaps also the “film of the help at work” shown to the representatives of financial institutions as part of their tour of the Bigelow-Hartford factory—were most likely not intended to have broader utility. Certain of the other titles mentioned above circulated much more widely, in and out of the moving picture theater. Washington at Valley Forge, for instance, was produced by Universal in 1914, exhibited in theaters nationwide, and subsequently screened non-theatrically for audiences at high schools and YMCAs as well as the Charlotte, North Carolina, chapter of the Patriotic Order of Sons of America.[57] An industrial like From Mine to Molder was designed to have a long non-theatrical shelf-life during which it eventually reached a range of audiences, from attendees at the American Foundrymen’s Association’s 1912 national convention to the Engineer’s Club of Plainview, New Jersey, and public school pupils in Buffalo, New York in 1924.[58]

THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF MANUFACTURERS: MOTION PICTURES FOR INDUSTRIAL BETTERMENT

The extensive, well-publicized deployment of film by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) offers a notable example of how a sponsor sought to maximize the utility of its moving pictures by targeting a range of specific audiences. Founded in 1895, this trade association “became known,” in historian Jennifer A. Delton’s words, “for its staunch, often extreme conservatism” as it lobbied to promote the interests of “industrial capitalism” and used its periodical, American Industries: The Manufacturers’ Magazine, to attack organized labor and oppose all manner of government “interference” with business.[59] At the same time, indicative of what Delton claims were the association’s “progressive, modernizing” reform efforts, NAM positioned itself as the champion of state-funded vocational education and greater safety in the workplace—keys to achieving what it called “industrial betterment.” Offered as a generous public service, NAM’s initiatives in the name of this “common cause” exemplify the increasing role in American politics of special interest groups,[60] while also constituting a well-orchestrated public relations effort, undertaken in part to demonstrate the association’s concern for the worker and his/her family, even as NAM’s spokesmen attacked unionization, demonized labor leaders, and railed against the minimum wage.[61]

Beginning in 1912, visual media played an important role in NAM’s efforts on behalf of industrial betterment, through the stereopticon slides it circulated and its sponsorship of three films made “in co-operation” with the Edison Company: The Workman’s Lesson (released July 5, 1912), The Crime of Carelessness (released December 30, 1912), and The Man He Might Have Been (released January 20, 1913).[62] NAM also promoted and distributed the Thanhouser production, An American in the Making (released April 22, 1913), a paean to the successful Americanization of an immigrant peasant thanks in part to well-devised industrial safety practices.[63] An intertitle identifies An American in the Making as having been “Produced under the direction of the Committee of Safety of the United States Steel Corporation”; NAM’s promotional material claims that US Steel had “prepared” this film for NAM.[64]

NAM’s involvement was directly acknowledged as well in the films that Edison produced for the organization. The title card of The Workman’s Lesson, for example, identifies this one-reel “drama” as having been “Produced in Co-operation with the National Association of Manufacturers.” This connection was consistently noted in Edison’s trade magazine copy and in newspaper ads run by exhibitors, as if the involvement of NAM somehow increased the credibility, topicality, and value of The Workman’s Lesson as a timely film both dramatic and informative. Promotional material for The Workman’s Lesson appearing in newspapers like the Times-Democrat [New Orleans] claimed that “besides being an interesting feature story, the picture shows how thousands of lives and limbs can be saved by the intelligent use of safety appliances in manufacturing plants and it is to help along the good work that the great Edison film has been made.”[65] The story that (melo)dramatizes this instruction focuses on a small family unit—a perky stay-at-home daughter and her elderly father, a factory worker who helps a young man get hired at the factory and encourages him to disregard the “new-fangled safety devices” that the foreman demonstrates on the shop floor. After he is betrothed to the daughter, an accident almost costs the young man his arm and the distraught older worker must face the consequences of not relying on modern safeguards and ignoring management’s advice when it comes to industrial safety. The unambiguous message of The Workman’s Lesson was entirely consistent with the information provided by NAM concerning “Accident Prevention and Industrial Insurance” in each issue of American Industries.

FIGURE 4.3. The Workman’s Lesson, NAM pamphlet, 1913.

NAM regularly boasted that The Workman’s Lesson had been shown in “fully 7,500 motion picture theaters all over the country”—a claim impossible to verify, though newspaper advertisements indicate this film was widely screened in theaters as part of standard multi-film programs through December 1912, and it continued to appear sporadically in theaters well into 1914.[66] Non-theatrical screenings for more delimited (though often quite large) audiences began only a few months after Edison released The Workman’s Lesson in July 1912. This film was exhibited in October 1912, for example, at the Union Safety First meeting at Convention Hall in Kansas City, Missouri, with attendance restricted to only “employees of thirteen railroad lines centering in Kansas City, who are residents in the Kansas City district, together with their families.” The Wall Street Journal claimed the meeting drew twelve thousand “railroad men, including shop workers, switchmen, firemen, engineers, general managers, vice-presidents and presidents.”[67] Shown during the Saturday evening time slot, The Workman’s Lesson and an instructional reel entitled Right and Wrong Way to Do Train and Shop Work were part of a program that included a stereopticon lecture and talks by representatives of all the participating railroads.[68] The following year the general safety committee of Carnegie Steel sponsored some twenty-five programs for its employees in Pennsylvania and Ohio that included musical performances as well as The Workmen’s Lesson and stereopticon lectures detailing “dangerous” practices and safety measures initiated by the company. Held at public venues like the opera house in New Castle and Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh, these events could be tailored to the individual locality. In New Castle, for example, lectures and screenings on safety were paired with performances by an Irish dialect comedian and a “colored quintette.” In Pittsburgh, “scenes in the mills in the Pittsburgh district, which are noted for their orderliness, brought applause from the workers, as did pictures of many Carnegie Steel Company veterans.”[69] A more narrowly constituted audience was present when The Worker’s Lesson was shown in November 1912—along with a stereopticon lecture by a “safety engineer” from NAM—to more than five hundred employees of the Underwood Typewriter Company at a specially arranged evening meeting held in the dining room of the company’s factory in Hartford, Connecticut.[70]

Perhaps encouraged by the distribution of The Workman’s Lesson, NAM “co-operated” with (or simply hired) Edison to produce two additional films: The Crime of Carelessness, in which a fire caused by human error destroys a factory and almost wrecks the lives of a betrothed couple who work there because the husband-to-be disregards no-smoking rules and the factory owner fails to maintain open fire exits (and perhaps also because a safety inspector doesn’t sufficiently take the owner to task for violations);[71] and The Man He Might Have Been, in which—according to the synopsis circulated by Edison and NAM—a boy “with a longing for knowledge and the better things of life which industrial education brings” is prevented by his father from pursuing this dream and set on the downward path to a “fruitless life” in which “hopelessness” leads to ill-fated “recklessness.”[72]

Like The Workmen’s Lesson, The Man He Might Have Been and, particularly, The Crime of Carelessness were distributed as part of Edison’s regular theatrical output and slotted into a variety of multi-reel programs.[73] Thus during its first months in distribution during 1913, The Crime of Carelessness, bearing the imprimatur of NAM and sometimes promoted as an “educational picture everyone should see,” was booked for one or two days at movie theaters, where it was paired with, for example, three comedies and “plenty of new music” (in Wilmington, North Carolina) or with a comic bicycle act, the first episode of Pathé Weekly, and a one-reel action melodrama set on the Mexican border (in Hinton, West Virginia).[74] While advertisements indicate that The Crime of Carelessness continued to be exhibited theatrically as late as February 1915,[75] NAM also aimed for wide circulation of the film to targeted audiences outside of moving picture theaters, a practice begun six weeks after its theatrical release, when The Crime of Carelessness was shown at a hotel in Indianapolis as part of the annual dinner of the Manufacturers’ Bureau of Indiana.[76]

For NAM, “industrial advancement through motion pictures” that “spread the gospel of industrial conservatism” would benefit employees and employers alike by “wakening the public conscience and the public intelligence.”[77] Plans outlined in American Industries initially called for NAM to serve as a “clearing house for expert advice” and to “accumulate a circulating educational library of motion picture films and machines for the benefit of our members” or to create a special train that would carry photographs and displays and be equipped with a “motion picture car” capable of seating one hundred.[78] In fact, at a meeting in July 1912, NAM’s board of directors approved a motion to create the “Industrial Betterment Special”—a “train of six cars . . . devoted to moving pictures and exhibits of safety appliances, industrial education, fire prevention and export trade.”[79] Newspapers carried the story of this novel “Industrial Gospel train,” repeating information provided by American Industries, but I have found no evidence that this plan was actually put into practice.[80]

FIGURE 4.4. Industrial Betterment Activities of the National Association of Manufacturers, 1913.

A 1913 pamphlet entitled Industrial Betterment Activities laid out the strategy that NAM ultimately adopted for its campaign, which hinged on making available certain resources “freely and without cost beyond incidental expense . . . to organizations of employers and workmen alike, to boards of trade, chamber of commerce, etc. for the better understanding of industrial conditions, for the saving of life and energy and for the improvement of the welfare of the nation.”[81] Interested parties could contact any of the qualified speakers—members of safety committees, corporate officers, and state officials—whom NAM had identified and listed in the pamphlet. Also available was a library of 516 Accident Prevention Lantern Slides that were designed to be used with illustrated lectures (as well as other slide sets from International Harvester and Kodak), and a portable photograph exhibit covering safety devices.[82] Central to NAM’s efforts were The Crime of Carelessness, The Workman’s Lesson, The Man He Might Have Been, and An American in the Making, which were frequently packaged together, as when they were screened at the 1913 meeting of the American Pulp and Paper Association at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City or at a special “Industrial Betterment Conference” that attracted “several hundred employees of Detroit manufactories.”[83]

At its annual gathering the following year, NAM’s president boasted that

[b]y means of lectures, pamphlets, addresses; by means of moving pictures depicting the consequences of carelessness in mechanical industry, the dangers of negligence in the matter of fire prevention, the value of industrial education, and other subjects, we have been able to spread the gospel of industrial responsibility resting upon both employer and employee. We have been able to reach tens of thousands of young men and young women in all parts of the United States, and we have impressed them by the remarkable effects of moving pictures with the fundamental principles of self-protection and protection to others, and the results of a higher, individual citizenship. This work we have dedicated to the American people.[84]

NAM’s sponsorship of moving pictures, declared its 1914 annual report, had yielded “extremely satisfactory” results—both in terms of the “lessons” delivered to “thousands of people” and also the “wide publicity of a very desirable kind” generated for the organization.[85]

FIGURE 4.5. NAM national convention, American Industries, June 1913.

Industrial Betterment Activities quotes testimonials lauding the effectiveness of NAM’s films in venues ranging from schools and churches to YMCAs, municipal social centers, and factories. The pamphlet references screenings attended by, for example: workers from one factory together with their families in Middleton, Ohio; boys and girls at a social center in Des Moines, Iowa; folks living in South Carolina cotton and lumber mill communities; and—in separate screenings—businessmen, male factory workers, and the wives and children of factory workers in Racine, Wisconsin.[86] The regular reports in American Industries trumpeting the demonstrable usefulness of motion pictures in the service of “industrial advancement” indicate that NAM measured the success of its program in terms of the various sites and occasions where its films were exhibited and the different audiences reached, thus encouraging potential local sponsors (including but not limited to individual manufacturers and trade associations) to conceive of screenings as targeted events.

One very common strategy was for a business like the Dupont Powder Company in Hannibal, Missouri, or the Inland Steel Company in Crosby, Minnesota, to arrange private on-site exhibition of NAM films for its employees.[87] On other occasions, screenings were part of more ambitious events, such as when “between 600 and 700 foremen, superintendents, and owners of factories” gathered for an “industrial betterment meeting,” given under the auspices of the Bridgeport [Connecticut] Manufacturers’ Association with the full involvement of NAM personnel.[88] NAM films reached what were likely more diverse audiences when screened as part of public campaigns like the “Safety First Congress” in Columbus, Ohio, conducted by the State Industrial Commission or when shown at a special event held under the auspices of the Nevada Industrial Safety Association at the premier theater in Reno, Nevada.[89]

An even broader audience had the opportunity to watch NAM’s films at what was billed as the first International Exposition of Safety and Sanitation in the US, held in December 1913 under the auspices of the American Museum of Safety in the Grand Central Palace, a major site for exhibitions in midtown Manhattan. Open to the public at large, though catering to people whose work required an up-to-date awareness of sanitation and safety concerns, this exposition attracted, according to American Industries, an average daily attendance of 11,300 (2,800 of whom were children), including a “a fair proportion of manufacturers, safety engineers, works superintendents and foremen, and public health officials from various states.” Among the prime attractions were “model factories” from Switzerland and Holland, live demonstrations by NYC firemen, and a self-styled “theater” operated by NAM with its motion pictures regularly scheduled four times a day (along with a film from the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company). American Industries claimed this theater “was crowded continuously, the average daily attendance being 1,750.”[90]

Apart from being made available for events focused directly on “industrial betterment” and workplace safety, NAM’s films also were screened during meetings of, for example, the National Exposition of Chemical Industries, the Lehigh Valley [PA] Medical Society, and the Child Welfare League in New York City.[91] This wider circulation increased when these films began to be distributed by the National Safety Council, the YMCA and extension programs of state universities in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Kansas.[92] (In fact, the director of the YMCA’s Industrial Motion Picture Bureau would later explain that the work of this important non-theatrical distributor began in earnest in 1914 when, “through the courtesy of the National Association of Manufacturers a nucleus of three films was secured.”)[93] However local sponsors might have accessed prints, the broad circulation of the NAM films means the association’s Industrial Betterment campaign reached a large number of spectators in a variety of sites that served quite different audiences. Or so it appeared from regular reports in American Industries, which noted, for instance, that between January and March 1915, NAM films were screened by Berea College in rural Kentucky, Sing Sing penitentiary, Park Presbyterian church in Newark, New Jersey, Commonwealth Edison Company in Chicago, the Massachusetts Employees Insurance Association, and the Chamber of Commerce in South Bend, Indiana.[94]

While NAM initially sought to orchestrate events showcasing Industrial Betterment by making available prepared slide sets, motion pictures, and a list of endorsed speakers, local sponsors could have considerable leeway in arranging screenings and addressing specific audiences. For example, when the men’s club of the Congregational Church in St. Joseph, Michigan (population around 6,500) in March 1915 screened The Workman’s Lesson as part of a program procured through the National Safety Council, this NAM title was paired with The Hazards of Trainmen (a film produced by the Rock Island Railroad company). A Victrola provided musical accompaniment and local speakers offered introductory remarks and described the activities of the National Safety Council. With a vote on prohibition fast approaching in St. Joseph, the men’s club took advantage of the opportunity to project “a number of ‘dry’ [pro-prohibition] slides.” The audience for this event was limited to men and boys (no doubt only white males—this did not need to be specified in announcements), with “men employed in the industries of the city specially invited” and seating in the balcony of the church auditorium set aside for forty “newsboys.” The total attendance was 162.[95]

Arranged as a form of outreach and public service (and perhaps membership recruitment) by the men’s club at the Congregational church in St. Joseph, this event well illustrates some of the factors involved when targeted cinema was put into practice in the 1910s. As was almost always the case with this type of screening, unfortunately, newspaper accounts do not mention the reception of the films by the 162 spectators seated in the pews. But there is much we can know about this multiple-media event that combined moving pictures with slides, recorded music, and live speeches, starting with the basic point that neither The Workman’s Lesson nor The Hazards of Trainmen was produced directly or exclusively for use in Congregational churches or for screening to newsboys or to working-class men in a mid-sized American city. NAM’s film was made to be widely exhibited, and two years after Edison initially released The Workman’s Lesson for theaters, the film was still readily accessible for use by a church group in a small city in the upper Midwest. Further, the exhibition of these two films in St. Joseph required that this particular congregation was willing and capable of hosting a screening, allowing for a site-specific event that was multiply sponsored—by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Rock Island Railroad, by the National Safety Council, and by the men’s club of St. Joseph’s Congregational Church. The intended audience for this event was quite specifically demarcated, explicitly restricted to men and boys (and no doubt limited de facto by race), identified by occupation and class, invited to attend, and upon arrival segregated by age. Further, we can assume that the Men’s Club judged that the people it gathered at the church would benefit from the messages the program offered about workplace safety, responsible employee behavior, and the need to support prohibition. Beyond the fact that there was a projector casting moving pictures onto some sort of reflective surface, this event at St. Joseph’s Congregational Church shared nothing significant with film exhibition as understood and daily practiced at any movie theater in the vicinity.

CONCLUSION

That film exhibition beyond the theater very rarely aimed at reaching the movies’ mass public but instead targeted a diverse range of distinct audiences—linked by any number of variables—may call to mind the niche marketing and narrowcasting associated with post-network television and digital media many decades later.[96] A more contemporary analogy to targeted non-theatrical cinema is magazine publishing in the early twentieth century, though non-theatrical screening events were quite different than magazines, most obviously in that the individual, self-paced, private experience of reading a magazine contrasted to the social experience of screenings arranged for people together in one space. Yet this comparison is worth examining, I would argue, especially if we look beyond the handful of high-circulation, nationally available general-interest magazines that have garnered much attention by Richard Ohmann and other scholars as key sources in the history of gender, consumer culture, and corporate capitalism in America.[97] For unlike Collier’s and major news weeklies and advertising-driven “magazines for the millions” such as the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal, scores of periodicals in the period were aimed at more narrowly focused readerships. The University of Illinois’s digital “Farm, Field, and Fireside Collection,” for example, contains twelve “historically significant” US farm weeklies published in the mid-1910s and that hardly covers all the relevant titles that might fall under this category.[98] Specialized periodicals such as I have referenced thus far—from Motion Picture Story Magazine and Exhibitors’ Times through American Motorist, Shoe and Leather Facts, American Industries, School Board Journal, and System: A Magazine for Business—each required a well-defined readership, drawn from an American population that was divisible well beyond the categories deployed in the census.[99]

“Magazines provided an ideal venue for advertisers by offering segmented, self-selected audiences, communities constituted by status-defined tastes and interests,” writes Susan L. Mizruchi, who sees this market logic as indicative of what she terms “American multiculturalism” and the “exceptional diversity of American society.”[100] While Mizruchi gauges diversity in terms of ethnicity and race, Janice A. Radway and Carl F. Kaestle take a broader view, demonstrating in their contribution to the multi-volume History of the Book in America that in “the expansion of publishing and reading in the United States” during the late nineteenth into the early decades of the twentieth century, “what emerged in addition to the mass-market newspapers, magazines, and books . . . was a variety of specialized networks for printing, publishing, and circulating material that often were quite focused and had more narrow audiences.”[101] Print culture, according to Radway and Kaestle, developed in and responded to a society “pushed and pulled by contradictory pressures that, on the one hand, led to greater centralization and intensified nationalism and, on the other, produced differentiation, specialization, and alternative forms of identification.”[102] We can see some evidence of a similar “contradictory” pull toward centralization and differentiation in the history of American cinema, evident in the localized business of theatrical film exhibition and, even more, in the many audiences that were gathered and addressed in non-theatrical screenings through the resources and on-the-ground efforts of sponsors.

“Long before the recent attention to demographics,” Rick Altman observes in Film/Genre, “the national audience was being carved into a series of overlapping populations, defined not by their ‘primary’ identity as citizens, but by temporary and shared interests or characteristics.” Print media was central to this process as it became “possible for every club, political group and trade union to have its own publication.”[103] In this increasingly fragmented (and mediated) America, members of the national moviegoing audience, particularly fans, who were not actually co-present at screenings were, Altman argues, able to participate in a self-selected “constellated community” linked by and through commercial film genres. Focusing on audience differentiation based on the “invisible bonds among fans of the same genre,” Altman’s approach overlaps with the argument that Hollywood actively recognized and addressed discrete, identifiable segments of the moviegoing public through production and marketing strategies as well as through distribution practices.[104] Lea Jacobs and Andrea Comiskey, for example, track the circulation of several films through small and large US cities to demonstrate that “the hypothesis of a newly formed ‘mass audience’ for the movies in the 1920s is not tenable. Indeed, the distribution system that took hold in this period was predicated on refined and far-reaching differentiations of the audience.”[105] That Hollywood paid increasing attention to the different sectors of national market and that fan communities (imagined or otherwise) thrived is not incommensurate with claims that movie theaters were billed as being open to everyone and anyone and that in the 1910s the movies attracted and profited from an aggregate, conglomerated audience.

Top-down “differentiations” of the audience such as Jacobs and Comiskey describe in relation to Hollywood were also evident in the decisions by newspaper publishers to craft, in Julia Guarneri’s phrase, “features that explicitly invited women, immigrants, teenagers, and children into their reading audience.”[106] Advertisers encouraged this way of delivering content and therefore capturing certain sectors of the reading public, an approach to audiences at the heart of what has been called “focus” advertising and “market segmentation.” A key statement for this strategy appeared in the Journal of Marketing in 1956, but directing advertising toward circumscribed, homogeneous groups of consumers can be traced back to the turn of the century.[107] Pamela Walker Laird, in her history of American advertising and consumer marketing, convincingly argues that forward-thinking advertising agencies saw in magazines the opportunity to “reach people according to their demographics and interests,” as well as by factors such as “geography, ethnicity, or occupation.”[108] Advertising on street cars might hold out the promise of cost-effectively grabbing the attention of “all classes, all the people, all the time,” but certain textbooks and practitioners in the 1910s insisted on the importance of market segmentation, even while touting branding and trademarks as a way of reaching a general (or mass or national) market (fig. 4.6). John Lee Mahlin, for example, based his 1914 textbook on the notion that “advertising is selling the group,” a task made easier since “we are all fortunate in being members of so many social groups.”[109] The president of the Advertising Men’s League of New York City was more explicit, telling a meeting of the Efficiency Society in 1912 that “the entire public may be separated off in various divisions in different headings. For instance: age—some things are for old people some are for young; sex—some things are for women and not for men; education, wealth, nationality and those other divisions into which we can segregate our public, determine available markets, and then we can definitely approach them by selecting the most directing advertising mediums and get to the seat to be captured.”[110]

FIGURE 4.6. General and targeted advertising, Judicious Advertising, December 1911, February 1915, December 1916.

Like the proliferation of specialized periodicals, advertising grounded in the idea of market segmentation offers an analogy (and perhaps a model) for the differentiation of the American populace into any number of more “narrow” and more reachable non-theatrical audiences.[111] Yet as we have seen, “selling the group” was only one of many uses to which multi-purpose cinema was put. That moving pictures were deployed for varied ends at a wide array of sites in an attempt to reach a host of differently constituted audiences reflects (1) the diversity of a rapidly increasing American population in the early twentieth century, understood in terms not only of race, class, age, and sex, but also occupation, religion, region, taste, avocation, income level, and group affiliation; and (2) sponsors who saw the production, distribution, and/or exhibition of moving pictures as a viable and effective means of identifying, creating, reaffirming, enlarging, serving, influencing, and communicating with the many differently configured audiences in America—schoolchildren visiting a steel plant in Joliet, Illinois, or “poor Jewish immigrant” adults at the Educational Alliance in New York City; professionals gathered at meetings of advertisers or architects or engineers in Louisville, Kentucky; members of the National Mouth Hygiene Association or the Illinois State Medical Society; the “most untidy and demented patients” at the state hospital for the insane in Kankakee, Illinois; or the well-to-do seeking rejuvenation at the Battle Creek [MI] Sanitarium, and on and on.[112] Non-theatrical cinema outside the theater operated in and reflected a diverse and divisible America.

As we have seen, certain legal, technological, political, and financial factors limited the scope and scale of this other cinema. Yet the range of purposes well beyond direct advertising or corporate public relations to which film might be put, the varied role of sponsors, and the innumerable potential screening sites and occasions all encouraged efforts to deliver moving pictures to a wide array of distinctive, specifiable, delimited audiences. So did the relative lack in the US of centralized church or state mechanisms wielding strong regulatory (and financial) control over the use of moving pictures outside the movie theater. The prospects for deploying moving pictures to reach discrete, identifiable audiences must have looked promising, indeed, if one could conceive of individual spectators not as part of the mass audience, the general public, or the conglomerated crowd, but as combinable and recombinable into recognizable cohorts constituted through recruitment or enticement, obligation or mandatory attendance, shared aspirations or casual circumstance, personal investment or acknowledged commonality.

Targeting these many specific audiences was not predominantly undertaken in the service of imposing governance from afar and above, promoting class solidarity, furthering progressive causes, or contributing to what historian Charles F. McGovern argues was a concerted effort to foster “mass consumption” and “unite a nation in a citizenship based on purchasing, entertainment, and display.”[113] Notwithstanding the activity of prominent, powerful sponsors like the National Association of Manufacturers, the American military, and university extension services, the practice of putting useful cinema to use in the 1910s was almost always intermittent and irregular. Once we take into account idiosyncratic events like the church screening for workers and newsboys at the Congregational church in St. Joseph, Michigan, then targeted cinema as a whole looks much more varied, unsystematic, and haphazard than anything that might pass as rigorous, systematic segmentation of the mass audience. Such events cumulatively expanded the range and the presence of moving pictures in the United States without, however, constituting a coherent, recognizable alternative to institutionalized commercial cinema and to the shared, national culture of the movies.[114]

5

Event Cinema

Land Shows and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition

“Today the motion picture is a world power in the fullest sense,” Motography categorically announced on April 24, 1915. That’s quite a claim, different from but as equally grand as calling film a universal language or a democratic art. Proof of this claim for Motography was not the release earlier that month of Chaplin’s The Tramp or the unprecedented capacity of the motion picture camera to record for posterity an event on the magnitude of the European war. It was the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE)—“representing all of modern civilization . . . in a few acres of ground”—that this trade journal considered “a living example of the fact that the motion picture is an absolute necessity in our modern complex life.” At the PPIE, Motography reported, “approximately one hundred and fifty thousand feet of film” were being screened in “moving picture shows” found in virtually all the state buildings, foreign pavilions, and exhibit palaces. The sheer quantity of footage and screening sites mattered, but so did the stature of the sponsors, including, Motography noted, a major transcontinental railway line like Great Northern, offering “a film which shows the Glacier National Park and other views of interest.”[1] In fact, Great Northern offered each afternoon at the exposition’s Palace of Machinery not just a single film but four lectures illustrated with slides and moving pictures highlighting the northwest territory covered by its line.[2]

It is not at all surprising that Great Northern and other exhibitors at the PPIE recognized the utility of moving pictures. By 1911, an editorial in the Laredo [TX] Weekly Times could confidently announce: “The East is moving West, and the moving picture is proving to be an important factor in the transformation of the land.”[3] Key to this reshaping of the nation were railroads like Great Northern and Southern Pacific, which, a syndicated newspaper article in 1913 declared, “have put their seal of approval upon moving pictures as a means to encourage travel and induce tourists, home seekers and investors to settle along their lines.”[4] In practice, moving pictures served as a means of publicizing—a promotional strategy encompassing attracting, directing, and maintaining the attention of audiences through the media, as well as promoting goods, services, organizations, policies, ideas, and values. In the early twentieth century, publicity was understood as both a product (like a moving picture or an exhibit) and a goal (like garnering coverage in newspapers, magazines, or theatrically screened newsreels).

This chapter draws on my discussion of the screening sites, exhibition practices, sponsors, and audiences of cinema beyond the theater, though the focus here will not be on specific advertising campaigns, unique screening occasions, local practices, narrowly targeted audiences, or the circulation of individual films. I will examine instead the use of moving pictures at conventions and, particularly, at large, carefully organized, extra-ordinary public events, including, most notably, “Land Shows” designed to promote the western United States and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. At these high-profile events, regularly scheduled screenings sponsored by US federal and state government agencies, major railroad corporations, and booster organizations constituted a particularly prominent and potentially influential model for how multi-sited, multi-purpose cinema could be put into practice.

CONVENTIONS AS SCREENING SITES

During the 1910s, conventions and conferences were potentially prime non-theatrical occasions—and gaining access to suitable films, a projector, and an operator apparently did not pose much of a problem. Packing public halls, opera houses, or hotel ballrooms, these gatherings could provide sponsors and lecturers with a well-defined audience brought together under the aegis of a common occupation, business, product, field of research, or set of beliefs. For example, at the 1911 convention of the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association (held at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC), the presidential address by Rudolph Matas was “a lecture illustrated by moving pictures of ultramicroscopic life in the blood and tissues, and of surgical operations.” Matas surveyed for his colleagues the scientific applications of film, which, he claimed, “has become one of the most astounding and prodigious forces in the social organization of the twentieth century, in diffusing, imparting and disseminating knowledge, as well as in providing diversion, recreation, and amusement to the countless multitudes of the civilized world.”[5] Matas’s lecture reached a broader audience when it was published in the Southern Medical Journal, illustrated with images of strips of celluloid. Distinct from the “countless multitudes” seeking amusement were, Matas implied, the surgeons and gynecologists comprising his audience—one of many professional groups primed to benefit from knowledge disseminated via moving pictures.

Across the spectrum of what Matas calls the “social organization of the twentieth century,” countless multi-day conventions, large and small, relied on film screenings during the 1910s. These events offered what amounted to an ongoing demonstration of the medium’s valuable utility as well as a testament to the increasing ubiquity of cinema outside the movie theater. In St. Louis, for example, moving pictures were on the program for meetings held by an array of state, regional, and national organizations, including the National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations (1912), Missouri Retail Hardware Dealers Association (1914), American Physical Association (1914), Missouri State Poultry Show (1914), Motor Accessory Trade Association (1916), and Associated Advertising Clubs of the World (1917). These events had become even more common in the city by the end of the decade, with films screened in 1919 for the American Zinc Institute, National Shoe Retailers’ Association, American Mining Congress, Motion Picture Exhibitors of America, Missouri State Social Hygiene Society, Association of Military Surgeons of the United States, and Women’s Presbyterian Board of Home Missions.

Whether organized to serve a profession, industry, or social mission, these conventions arranged programs tailored for their own membership, though on occasion organizers opened certain activities to St. Louis residents as a form of outreach and strategic public relations. Thus the American Mining Congress, held during 1919’s bitterly contentious coal strike by the United Mine Workers, included free screenings open to the public of The Story of Coal (from the US Bureau of Mines) and The Story of Petroleum (from Standard Oil)—films that highlighted extractable natural resources, corporate investment in expertise and technology, and industrially driven progress rather than any issues related to wages, profits, and unionization.[6]

Moving pictures also served as attractions in other big events—most often referred to as shows or expositions—that actively courted the public and typically charged an admission fee, while functioning as advertising for goods and services or encouraging participation in a cause. For example, the Coliseum, St. Louis’s largest indoor space, capable of holding ten thousand people, was in 1912 the site for the St. Louis Pure Food Show (with “beautiful slides and Kinemacolor motion pictures”) and the Western National Business Show (with “lectures on the connection between business and civic betterment, illustrated with colored moving pictures”).[7] Among the most ambitious in scope and widely attended of such events was Chicago’s Cement Show, a three-ring testament to the advantages of cement as a building material for everything from bridges and offices to houses and boats. Along with eight hundred exhibitors, the 1910 iteration of this show featured “a lecture room” where the secretary of the American Portland Cement Association presented moving pictures and stereopticon views to “illustrate the progress of cement building and the allied industries.”[8]

Following Chicago’s lead, cement shows were held annually in New York City, Kansas City, and smaller localities.[9] With the full backing of the Universal Portland Cement Company (a subsidiary of US Steel), these shows aimed to “weld the contractor, architect and engineer into a Cement Fraternity,” while drawing a broader audience of potential consumers.[10] To this end the five-day Mid-Western Cement Show in Omaha, Nebraska (1915), for example, offered “as a special feature” “moving pictures and slides of cement, showing its uses in various lines of construction,” promising further that “the reels and slides are new, and have never been shown in this part of the United States before.” Also on the program was A Concrete Romance (1915), billed as a two-reel “industrial romance about the use of cement on modern farms,” shot by Essanay for the Universal Portland Cement Company and also screened theatrically as a sponsored film.[11]

FIGURE 5.1. Omaha Cement Show, Omaha Daily News, June 10, 1915; Dunn County News [Menominee WI], June 10, 1915.

THE UNITED STATES LAND AND IRRIGATION EXPOSITION (1909)

The practical utility and inspiring romance of cement notwithstanding, Cement Shows were but one of many heavily promoted themed events making use of moving pictures: Electrical Shows, Travel Shows, Safety Expositions, Automobile Shows, Poultry Shows, and, most notably, what came simply to be known as Land Shows, arguably the most prominent type of large-scale public expositions in the US during the early 1910s. By the turn of the twentieth century, state and county fairs were an established American tradition, joined by a host of relatively small-scale congresses, institutes, and conventions focused on specialized agricultural topics, but the Land Show only emerged as a national phenomenon in the wake of the United States Land and Irrigation Exposition, sponsored by the Chicago Tribune in 1909. Quite unlike the National Irrigation Congress and other trade shows, the Land and Irrigation Exposition (generally called the Land Show) was designed and advertised as a major public event. It ran from November 20 through December 4 at the Coliseum in Chicago, a venue large enough to hold indoor college football games, the Barnum and Bailey Circus, and the Republican National Convention.[12] Of the major events at the Coliseum in 1909, only the Land Show featured lectures illustrated by slides and moving pictures, delivered in a five-hundred-seat space designated as the “lecture room.”

“Are you hungry for land” and wondering “how to get big profits out of land?” asked one of the many Tribune advertisements for this ambitious event.[13] The professed aim was to encourage city dwellers to “establish American homes upon small farms,” for—as a newspaper in rural Iowa categorically put it—“the best place for an American family is in a home of its own, and that home on a tract of land large enough to maintain the family in an emergency.”[14] The Land Show no doubt drew people who also frequented Chicago’s amusement parks and nickelodeons, but this event was a celebration of America beyond the metropolis. It was constructed to highlight the nation’s glorious natural resources and its vast acreage rendered more fertile and more profitable through reclamation projects, the “magic wand of irrigation,” and the principles of “scientific farming.” A giant mural of the Grand Canyon and a panorama of Yosemite Valley overlooked booths covered with grapevine trellises strung with incandescent lights and filled with eye-catching produce and other evidence of the rich plenitude of American agriculture from Louisiana to Utah, and Minnesota to Washington.[15]

FIGURE 5.2. Lectures at the Land Show, Chicago Tribune, November 8, 1909.

With tickets priced at fifty cents for adults and twenty-five cents for children, the Land Show cost considerably more to attend than a neighborhood picture show, but its array of “interesting features” supposedly far outpaced quotidian entertainment. Thanks to the Santa Fe Railroad, complementing the photographs, transparencies, and paintings picturing the West, Navajo jewelry makers and weavers (residing during the show with their children in an adobe hut) served as exoticized reminders that the West had not always been a field of opportunity waiting to be plowed by white would-be yeoman to form a vast patchwork of family farms.[16] Probably more than the Arizona-bred ostriches on display or the concerts by the uniformed Mexican National Band, the moving pictures scheduled daily between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. aimed to be distinctly informative and educational. The lecture room, wrote the Tribune, overflowed with spectators.[17]

ILLUSTRATED LECTURES FROM UNCLE SAM

“Uncle Sam Will Lecture at the Land Show” promised one advertisement, suggesting quite accurately the prime role that the US government played in sponsoring lectures illustrated with moving pictures and slides as part of its extensive exhibit, which highlighted the transformative activities of the Forestry Service, Reclamation Service, Patent Office, Geological Survey, and Department of Agriculture, as well as “the great development of Alaska and Hawaii under American government.”[18] A promotional notice on opening day promised attendees that “travelogues through Yellowstone park and the Yosemite valleys with moving pictures will give variety” to a lecture schedule largely concerned with the “more serious problems of irrigation and conservation.”[19] In addition, James C. Boykin, representing the Department of the Interior, provided films of volcanoes and other sights in Hawaii, including the novel phenomena of “surf riding.” This footage, like most of the government exhibit, had also been used at an even more ambitious event held directly before the Tribune’s Land Show, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, which ran June through October 1909.[20]

Before arriving at the Land Show, Boykin (1866–1929) had played a central role through the first decade of the century in the federal government’s earliest efforts at deploying moving pictures to publicize its initiatives and accomplishments. Born and educated in Alabama, Boykin had been a civil servant since 1887, when he was hired by the Bureau of Education, where he became the resident expert on expositions. He prepared this bureau’s exhibit at and authored the official report on the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta (1895), the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition in Knoxville (1896), and the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha (1898).[21] By 1901, Boykin had begun to take an active role in the production of government-sponsored media designed specifically for use in major public events. As “Chief Special Agent in charge of the Interior Department Exhibit” at the Pan-American Exposition (1901), he oversaw the making and exhibition of what looks to have been an innovative program that detailed the achievements of the public schools in Washington, DC, the US military academies, and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (all of these were under the control of the Bureau of Education). Presented in the Government Building, Boykin’s multiple-media exhibit combined phonograph recordings of student recitations, photographic slides of these students, and brief motion picture scenes, including footage of vocational education in Washington (with boys working lathes and learning blacksmithing and girls cooking and learning dressmaking) and of Carlisle students performing gymnastics and playing basketball.[22]

Newspaper accounts in 1903 describe Boykin (and a camera operator from the American Biograph & Mutoscope Company) filming mail trains in Missouri then heading to the Southwest to gather footage for screening at the St. Louis World’s Fair (1904). These moving pictures documented the Interior Department’s irrigation initiatives and its “Albuquerque Indian School,” while also effectively “advertising” the Arizona Territory as a destination for settlers and tourists—or so claimed the Arizona Republic, a Phoenix newspaper.[23] Sketches and photographs from Boykin’s travels in the West served as the basis for working models of Arizona irrigation projects and panoramic representations of the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone that were displayed at the Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland (June–October 1905).

Moving pictures played an increasingly prominent role at the Portland event. The National Cash Register Company presented daily in its “auditorium” a lecture with slides and motion pictures, entitled A Trip to the N.C.R. (fig. 5.3), and the Navy Department attracted would-be recruits to a two-hundred-seat screening area in its exhibit for a rotating series of sixty “biograph motion picture scenes” projected in “groups of ten or twelve” at regularly scheduled times.[24] Boykin was put in charge of what the Interior Department referred to as the “biograph room” at this exposition, “where actual photographs, some of them moving pictures, will be thrown on canvas every day during the fair.” Promotional material promised that forty “biograph pictures” (including footage of Native Americans) and 350 stereopticon views (predominantly of national parks) would be screened—all “described” by “competent” lecturers.[25]

FIGURE 5.3. Postcard for National Cash Register, Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition, 1905.

By 1909, when plans were being made for yet another major exposition, to be held in Seattle to promote the opportunities of the American Northwest as a gateway to Alaska and the Pacific, it had become standard practice for the US government’s exhibit to include a space designed and equipped specifically for lectures illustrated by moving pictures and lantern slides. At the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the federally funded Hawaii Building housed what officials called a “biograph” section, a dedicated lecture room seating five hundred, with a fireproof projection booth and a twenty-by-twenty-eight-foot “plaster” screen. Five thousand dollars had been allocated out of the total $200,000 federal appropriation to cover preparing and equipping this room and paying salaries for lecturers, operators, and other staff. Boykin was in charge of the biograph section, and in his official report to Congress on the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, he indicated that ten thirty-minute lectures were presented in this space daily, each typically using “about 60 slides and five or six motion scenes.” These presentations covered Hawaii and, to a lesser extent, Alaska, as well as the US military, national parks, and the work of the Public Health Service, the Reclamation Service, the Forestry Service, and the Bureau of Printing and Engraving.[26]

For Theodore T. Kling, writing in The Nickelodeon, the government’s “moving picture show” that was “attracting 4,000 patrons a day” at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition was irrefutable evidence of cinema’s utility.[27] (Kling doesn’t consider how attendance at lectures may have been affected by the other attractions in the Hawaii Building, which included an aquarium and a “native” orchestra.) He deemed the pictures screened at this exposition to be “the best that money and talent can buy,” perfectly paired with the compelling and convincing performances of government-employed lecturers, “experts who have gained their knowledge at first hand and whose heart is in their work”—like E. C. Culver, a Civil War veteran whose experiences at Yellowstone dated back to the 1880s, or M. O. Eldridge, from the US Office of Public Roads, who could turn “even the most phlegmatic of men” into “missionaries in the cause of good roads.”[28] These presentations all quite likely espoused a common, highly optimistic outlook toward the role of the state, the nation’s remarkable resources, and the promise of twentieth-century America.

What Kling called “motography in the government service” shared little, if anything, with the programming of nickelodeons, which were then typically providing one-reel or half-reel films of different genres, with some sort of musical accompaniment, often interspersed with illustrated songs or other live performances, and sometimes with advertising or announcement slides added to the mix. At the Seattle exposition, in contrast, moving pictures—usually but not always combined with colored slides—were incorporated into what had become a stable, readily identifiable format: the professionally created, self-contained, thirty-minute illustrated lecture.[29] This format allowed for (and often depended on) the inclusion of visual spectacle and novel sights, yet each individual lecture was unified by the performance of an experienced lecturer as well as by the non-fiction subject at hand (e.g., the process of producing currency, the life of a soldier, saving the forests). With fifteen-minute breaks separating Picturesque Hawaii from The Life of a Soldier from Our Friends in Latin-America from A Trip through Alaska, each lecture was in effect a discrete half-hour event. The fixed daily schedule of these repeating performances afforded fair goers with a distinct (if still limited) menu of options. Basically, the same format would be deployed in the 1909 Chicago Land Show’s “lecture room” and subsequently at a host of large-scale public shows in the early 1910s, leading to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.[30]

But unlike the self-styled “international” expositions in St. Louis, Portland, and Seattle, the Chicago Land Show was more narrowly concerned with particular regions of the continental US. Its program of illustrated lectures focused principally on the efforts of and the opportunities afforded by the US Reclamation Service, created by Congress in 1902 and soon responsible for a number of major water projects in Arizona, Montana, and other Western locations.[31] Historian Donald J. Pisani argues that “the triumph of publicity—not the conquest of science, engineering or administrative efficiency—best defined the Reclamation Service in its early years,” for this federal agency “fed the public an endless stream of stories about the construction of hydraulic works, the retreat of the desert, and the transformation of nature.”[32] This promotional effort was designed not only to tout government achievements, but also to encourage settlers to lay claim to reclaimed land. To this end, C. R. Blanchard, then head of what was called the “Information Section” of the Reclamation Service, had been prominently billed among the speakers at the Yukon-Pacific-Alaska Exposition. A syndicated feature article from 1908 praised Blanchard as a tirelessly active “fluent talker and writer” who uses the “most up-to-date methods” in “advertising the government’s new land enterprise,” illustrating his many lectures with moving pictures and “the finest of photographic views” produced by the Reclamation Service.[33] Not surprisingly, Moving Picture World fully endorsed the “useful and important part” that the moving picture was playing in bringing “the possibilities of irrigated lands and recently reclaimed districts . . . to the attention of the prospective settler.”[34]

RAILROADS AND LAND SHOWS

When the Chicago Tribune sponsored its second Land and Irrigation Show, which ran November 19 through December 4, 1910, hoping to attract half a million people, two one-thousand-seat lecture halls were prominently placed in the Coliseum, and “graphophones declaimed for states and sections. ‘Barkers’ invited attendance to free lectures.”[35] The US Government’s exhibit and moving picture lectures highlighted the military and the USDA, as well as the Reclamation and Irrigation Service.[36] But almost all of the other exhibits—funded and staffed by state immigration bureaus, railroads, and land companies—were commercially driven efforts devoted to championing the benefits of particular places, not only throughout the West and the upper Midwest, but also across the South from Florida to Texas.[37] The Southern Louisiana Association, for example, arranged “free moving picture exhibits daily and free lectures” to advertise drained swamp lands ready to become productive cornfields.[38]

The most prominent sponsors at the 1910 Land Show were Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, and their affiliated railroad lines. This vast transcontinental railway system offered “moving picture lectures” daily from 1:00 to 10:00 p.m. covering sites and investment opportunities throughout “Union Southern Pacific Country,” which stretched from the Gulf Coast across the Southwest and California to the Pacific Northwest. By the end of the exposition, these railroads claimed to have attracted seventy-seven thousand people to their lectures.[39] Union Pacific–Southern Pacific enlarged and improved its screening facilities for the 1911 Land Show, as part of what Judicious Advertising described as a $1,250,000 annual campaign in the US and Europe to “advertise for settlers.”[40] This effort, wrote Printer’s Ink, relied heavily on newspaper and magazine advertising that “is complemented by almost every type of promotion, including moving picture shows and lectures. The whole gamut of appeal is covered. The public appetite, whetted by local and general publicity, is transformed into a craving by an almost inexhaustible stream of books and booklets, filled with pictures and descriptions of the wonders of the western land.”[41]

A widely syndicated article marveled at the “fortune” that Union Pacific– Southern Pacific invested in erecting two self-styled “moving picture palaces,” purpose-built venues meant only for use during the three-week duration of the 1911 Land Show (see fig. 5.4). Audiences entered these non-theatrical theaters through doorways “brilliantly lighted with electric signs” that led to a fully carpeted foyer and auditorium with 1,500 “comfortable wide armed opera chairs.” The interior walls were covered with paintings of “western scenes”—farms, “immense irrigation projects, and a number of the scenic wonders of the world.” All was designed to provide a refined environment for a high-quality theatrical experience: “The ‘cages’ for the moving picture operators were fireproof . . . the ceilings of the two halls were beamed and paneled and the interior decorations were equal to those of any theater in Chicago. In front of each room was the platform on which the lecturers stood, and to the left of this was the screen, on which the pictures were thrown. This was one huge sheet without seam to mark or mar it, and the reflections were cast as clear as it was possible to make them.”[42]

FIGURE 5.4. Ad for Land Show, Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1911.

Over the course of the Land Show, these two theaters hosted 506 separate presentations, with “moving picture lectures” (some of which were also referred to as “travelogues”) offered every thirty minutes, interspersed with musical performances. “Beautifully colored stereopticon pictures” were paired with moving pictures to display farming methods, cities, and “scenic splendors” found along Union Pacific–Southern Pacific’s western routes. There were 155,000 people who purportedly attended these presentations, and, according to the Tribune, during the 1911 Land Show “practically the same number” filled the seats for lectures from other sponsors at two additional theaters that had been constructed on the balcony level of the Coliseum.[43]

After the 1911 exposition in Chicago, Southern Pacific–Union Pacific appears not to have invested in erecting temporary “moving picture palaces” for other events, but its lecture hall at the Los Angeles Land Show in 1912 followed the same programming format, with twenty-five rotating speakers offering “copiously illustrated” “half-hourly turns explaining the conditions, advantages and attractions” of different Western destinations.[44] At the 1912 Chicago Land Show, the Great Northern Railway became the largest exhibitor, and moving pictures played an even greater role than in previous years.[45] Ads promised “100 Moving Picture and Stereopticon Shows Every Day,” and the layout of exhibition space (see fig. 5.5) indicates the prominent place of the three “Moving Picture Lecture Rooms” constructed for this event.[46]

FIGURE 5.5. Floor plan of Land Show, Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1912.

However, even when sequestered in special rooms, moving pictures at attraction-filled events like land shows were very likely deployed as part of variegated promotional efforts that could rely as well on freely distributed print material and souvenirs, barkers working the crowds, and agents interacting with potential customers. Consider, for example, the exhibit mounted at the 1911 Chicago Land Show by the Rumely Tractor Company, a prominent manufacturer of farm machinery. Described at length in an article that ran in Threshermen’s Review and other trade journals, Rumely’s “wonderfully handsome exhibit” exemplifies the adage that when it comes to pulling in potential customers and highlighting a brand, the more “mediums” the better—to use the advertising parlance of the period. Featuring a tractor set up to show the engine in operation, displayed against the backdrop of an “immense scenic painting” of Rumely equipment at work in a western field, this exhibit also included: more than a dozen “large colored photos” of tractors in operation; electric signs over the entrances to the booth with the “Rumely trademark set off by twinkling lights”; and a continuously running countertop “automatic stereopticon with fifty colored photographic slides . . . telling the Oil Pull story” to a “crowded aisle full of people.” In the balcony lecture room, company representatives gave “moving picture lectures on power farming.”[47] Like its even more prominent competitor, the International Harvester Corporation, Rumely incorporated moving picture lectures into a multi-faceted sales and publicity strategy that relied on an array of media—a particularly clear example of Medienverbund, which Thomas Elsaesser defines as “mutually interdependent and complementary media, or media practices, focused on a specific location.”[48] This is not at all surprising, since expositions and large-scale shows, where scores of attractions and exhibitors were vying for attention, encouraged multiple-media promotional strategies (and audience experiences) that had little if anything in common with the theatrical presentation of moving pictures accompanied by live music.

THE GREAT NORTHERN RAILWAY: SELLING THE NORTHWEST

With buy-in from firms like Rumely, booster organizations, and government agencies, land shows quickly proliferated, staged at large public auditoriums in Pittsburgh (1910), St. Louis (1910), New York City (1911), Omaha (1911), St. Paul (1911), Kansas City (1912), Los Angeles (1912), Portland (1912), San Francisco (1913), and Denver (1915).[49] American railroads continued to play a central role at these events, as part of what Railway Age Gazette praised as the “efforts that are being made by the railways of the entire country to develop an interest in agriculture along their lines; to introduce better methods of farming; and to help in the work of taking the immigrant out of the congested, unhealthy city and distributing him where he can do the most good.”[50] Judging from promotional material, moving picture lectures presented in a designated and dedicated space remained a major draw at land shows.[51] These sponsored performances were, the Chicago Examiner declared, compelling proof that moving pictures are “an aid to empire builders.”[52] Nowhere was this ambitious aim more evident than in the activities of the Great Northern Railway, the northernmost transcontinental line, which ran from St. Paul to Seattle, with connections over the Great Lakes to Buffalo, New York, and onto New York City.[53]

In Highways of Progress (1910), James L. Hill, Great Northern’s founder and self-proclaimed “empire builder,” credited the “modern transportation system” with contributing most to “the development of the American Northwest,” where “immigration and industry have transformed a wilderness in half a century into the home of plenty.”[54] Historian Claire Strom finds that in practice Hill’s “vision of a settled, agrarian Eden on the northern tier of states,” translated not surprisingly into “a program to settle the land and promote types of agriculture that would result in maximum railroad use.”[55] Richard White offers a more pointedly critical assessment in Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011), arguing that Great Northern and the other major railroads that drove the development of the West engaged in “vast promotions unlike anything seen until that time.” “Like so many carnival barkers,” White concludes, “railroad publicity bureaus promoted the virtues of the West and cajoled potential settlers to seize the opportunity that the railroads offered” very much at the expense of indigenous peoples, the land, and the many homesteaders who proved to be unprepared for the demands of a new life in the supposed promised land.[56]

Great Northern’s efforts to encourage settlement, investment, and tourism along its Western routes ramped up appreciably after Hill’s son Louis W. (1872–1948) became president of the railway in 1907. Louis’s efforts were crucial in lobbying for and developing the tourist accommodations at Glacier National Park, which was designated as such in 1910. By the time he was named chairman of the Great Northern board in 1912, a Saturday Evening Post profile would dub Louis Hill the real “inventor” of the Northwest, a new, triumphantly American land of boundless opportunity for hardy white settlers and sublime experiences for well-to-do white tourists. This forty-year-old is the “booster” supreme, the Post marveled, a modern captain of industry fit for the new century, whose “real occupation, diversion, vocation, avocation and passion is publicity.”[57] Hill’s tireless boosterism, I would argue, extended not only to the Northwest states and Glacier National Park, but also—perhaps inadvertently or indirectly—to a certain form of sponsored, useful cinema. His publicity campaigns for Great Northern demonstrated to Christian Science Monitor, for example, that “the motion picture record of human activity is a form of chronicle as varied in possibilities as it is modern in method . . . each week records a new type of its employment, another discovery as to its utility.” Moving Picture News quoted this endorsement, then specifically singled out Hill’s role: “in this quick seizure of a popular and effective new form of publicity, President Hill has shown characteristic enterprise . . . there are many things about railroading, home-seeking, home-making, mining, forestry and all the multitudinous activities of a region like the American Northwest that no wizard with a pen or typewriter can depict on the printed page, but which a camera can record graphically and faithfully.”[58]

Likely drawing on Great Northern promotional material, newspapers gave Louis Hill much credit for authorizing the filming of scenes of “farming and commercial activity along the country traveled by” this railway, an undertaking purportedly costing ten thousand dollars and requiring 20,000 feet of film—numbers intended to underscore the magnitude of Hill’s commitment to generating publicity.[59] Central to this plan was Edward F. Seavolt, a “veteran moving picture artist,” hired by Great Northern in 1911 to film in Montana, Oregon, and Washington. With a representative of the railway’s advertising department, Seavolt traveled the region in a specially equipped coach that included a film developing “laboratory” and a projector. Thus he was able, after filming local motorists and a speeding train passing through Prickly Pear Canyon near Helena, Montana, to screen the footage on a “stretched sheet” in front of a Helena hotel.[60] Boosters could have “industrial scenes or pictures of their collective resources taken” by Seavolt for “the wholesale cost of the films only, and at a nominal cost can have all the reproductions they want for local use.”[61] By this strategy Great Northern could access additional footage and encourage localities and states to ramp up their own promotional efforts.

Footage that Seavolt shot during his seven-thousand-mile film-gathering excursion was probably incorporated into The Homeseeker’s Claim, a narrative moving picture sponsored by Great Northern and screened at the 1911 Chicago Land Show. With the transparent logic and ideological purity of an inspirational parable, this film, as described in newspaper accounts,

starts with the receipt of advertising matter and literature from northwestern commercial organizations and railroads by a resident of an eastern city. The recipient becomes convinced that he had better follow Greeley’s advice. He kisses his wife and three children goodbye and starts west on a colonist train. He arrives in Montana and takes up a 320-acre homestead. The next scene shows him cultivating it. Then comes the harvest scene, the homesteader smiling as he reaps his bountiful crop. Thus, having prospered, he sends for his family. In all these successive stages the hero of the story is presented in advancing conditions of prosperity and happiness, the climax being reached when the homesteader is reunited with his family in the little farm house that he has built in the center of his land, which he brought to a splendid state of productiveness entirely through his own efforts.[62]

The footage shot by Seavolt was regularly described as being intended to serve in a “gigantic educational campaign to make the Northwest known all over Europe among those who may come here to settle and among the higher classes who come to America on pleasure trips.”[63] This footage would likely have also been used in Great Northern’s exhibits at land shows from 1911 through 1913. These shows included a full schedule of moving picture lectures focusing on Glacier National Park and the “opportunities for homeseekers and investors” in the Northwest “Zone of Plenty,” as this ad from the Northwestern Products Exposition (1912) in Minneapolis indicates (fig. 5.6).

FIGURE 5.6. Ad for Great Northern Railway at Northwestern Products Exposition, Minneapolis Tribune, November 25, 1912.

Great Northern’s use of moving pictures extended to various other non- theatrical sites and occasions as part of Hill’s commitment to “spare no expense” in “shining the searchlights of publicity” on the Northwest.[64] Most notably, Great Northern relied on a well-established strategy that had proved popular for railroads, state colleges of agriculture, and booster organizations: using railroad coaches as traveling “exhibit cars,” transporting displays and lecturers from site to site, as with the “State Corn Show on Wheels” and the “special dairy exhibit cars” co-sponsored by the Missouri Pacific railway and the State Agricultural College that widely circulated through Kansas in 1907.[65]

In 1909 and 1910, Great Northern sent through the Midwest three specially equipped cars—each a veritable “state fair on wheels,” filled with photographic displays, print material, and agricultural products from Oregon, Washington, and Montana.[66] After considerable advance bill posting and advertising, the exhibit car would be left on a sidetrack near the town’s station for a day or two and opened to the public, often with schoolchildren specially invited. In the evening at a hall or a room in the courthouse, a free illustrated lecture would be given, featuring 150 or 175 “of the most beautiful views of the scenic Cascade and Rocky Mountain scenery, the ranges, the northwest stock and grain farms, fruit ranches, timber scenes, and others (fig. 5.7).”[67]

FIGURE 5.7. Ad for Great Northern Exhibit Car, Sullivan [IN] Union, January 8, 1913 (left); postcard invitation for Exhibit Car (right).

By February 1912, Great Northern had added moving pictures to the free lectures that accompanied the exhibit cars. The company claimed in May 1912 that “in the state of Indiana alone, 100,000 people have attended the Great Northern’s moving picture shows and as many visited the two exhibit cars during the last few months.”[68] Advertisements indicate that this “Free Stereopticon and Moving Picture Lecture” continued to be presented into 1914, always with the claim that Great Northern was in no way making a “land sale” pitch, but instead providing valuable information to rural communities.[69] The moving pictures screened were intended to “open wide the ‘other eye’ of the dubious farmers,” wrote a Montana newspaper: “They flash upon him scenes entirely different than those he had pictured in his own mind. Thus he gets his first true conception of the new Northwest. Imagine the surprise, when, instead of the western farmer plowing with a rifle nearby to protect himself from Indians, the film runs off a modern traction plow turning over eight furrows at the rate of 40 acres per day. . . . Railway enterprise and the motion picture film are doing great missionary work in this direction.”[70]

While Great Northern’s publicity efforts were clearly designed to demonstrate the agricultural productivity of the Northwest in order to encourage would-be homesteaders, the exhibit cars traveling through rural Indiana also pictured the region as a destination for tourists. In particular, the footage (and colored slides) of Glacier National Park that Great Northern prominently featured in its traveling exhibits and land show programming complemented a vast advertising campaign that included schedules, guidebooks, postcards, pamphlets, billboards, and posters.[71] Louis Hill did not originate the idea of “See America First,” but he appropriated the phrase in promoting Great Northern’s passenger service, with Glacier National Park—home to resort facilities built by the railway—as the prime, distinctively American attraction on its transcontinental route. In her study of “tourism and national identity,” historian Marguerite S. Shaffer provides a detailed account of Great Northern’s development and promotion of what was then the newest national park. Hill’s plans and policies, Shaffer argues, sold a version of the West that hinged on racial, gender, and class inequity and inequality.[72]

Great Northern’s elaborate “Western exhibit” at the Second Annual Travel and Vacation Show at Grand Central Palace in New York City, from March 20 to 29, 1913, is a case in point. A glowing report (offered as a newspaper article but very likely a press release) praised Great Northern for providing the “largest and most attractive exhibit at the show comprising electrical effects, transparencies, oil paintings, relief maps, eight scenic booths showing scenes of Glacier National park, and surmounted by heads of elk, moose, and mountain sheep.” In addition to this array of attractions—another example of Medienverbund—“Great Northern lecturers give moving picture illustrated lectures afternoon and evening in the lecture-hall annex, depicting the beauties of Glacier National Park and the Northwest for tourist tours.”[73] Judging by the press coverage, Hill’s most successful publicity stunt for the Travel and Vacation Show was transporting ten members of the Blackfoot Nation to Manhattan, where they pitched teepees atop the twenty-four-floor McAlpin Hotel. Tribal members also appeared under Great Northern auspices at land shows in New York and Chicago, where they appeared as literal and symbolic tokens of Glacier National Park, represented as a natural outpost within the sublime American wilderness, far removed from urban modernity yet accessible by Great Northern trains. This promotional strategy, which would also be central at the PPIE, is all the more disturbing because Great Northern’s branding of Glacier National Park took place during a period of ongoing efforts to reject tribal land claims and the right to continue to hunt within the park.[74]

Thanks to the “clever press agents of the Great Northern,” wrote the Pioneer Press of Cut Bank, Montana, “Glacier Park is certainly the best advertised resort in America today.”[75] Given Great Northern’s investment in this vacation site and Hill’s role as what a 1915 profile in Sunset Magazine called “a drummer of trade for Uncle Sam’s newest sideshow,” it is not surprising that Hill took advantage of the opportunity for generating publicity through moving picture theaters as well as land shows and exhibit cars.[76] Significantly, he gained access to theatrical audiences without relying on advertising films, industrials, or promotional slides. Before Glacier National Park officially opened for tourist business, the visit of President William Taft’s son and daughter was filmed as one of the seven segments for the most prominent of early newsreels, Pathé Weekly (no. 37, released September 15, 1912). The segment featured members of the Blackfoot Nation at the park performing “tribal dances, which an Indian-surfeited public may appreciate, knowing they are the genuine article.”[77] In addition, Pathé produced and distributed three non-fiction scenics as part of its “See America First” series: Glacier National Park (released September 26, 1912), Blazing a New Trail in Glacier National Park (released September 25, 1913), and Glacier National Park in Winter (released June 22, 1914).[78] All were split-reel films that ran from five to ten minutes and were released as part of Pathé’s regular weekly schedule (fig. 5.8).

FIGURE 5.8. Filming in Glacier National Park, East Oregonian [Pendleton OR], December 2, 1913 (left); Sunset Magazine, March 1915 (right).

Ralph Radnor Earle, who shot the Glacier National Park films for Pathé, told local newspapers in the Northwest that the company released five hundred prints of each scenic, ultimately reaching millions of viewers worldwide. I have not been able to verify these numbers, but theater advertising indicates that Glacier National Park, for example, was screened theatrically in the US for nine months.[79] The publicity value of the three Pathé films about the park was amplified by press coverage and promotional material concerning the work of intrepid cameraman Earle, who described the territory he covered for Pathé as everything west of Colorado stretching from Mexico to Canada. Earle was especially active in the Northwest, where his filming was encouraged and supported by Great Northern and Louis Hill, in particular. While shooting Blazing a New Trail in Glacier National Park, Earle accompanied a representative of the railway’s advertising department, which likely outfitted and set the itinerary for this “expedition.”[80] But even outside the park, Earle was working with, if not directly for, Great Northern. “It was through the efforts of Mr. Hill,” wrote the Butte [MT] Miner, that Earle in 1912 “made the long jump from Seattle to Montana for harvest scenes,” and Hill deserves credit “for recommending to the Pathe man Montana as a state overflowing with motion picture subjects of national importance.”[81] Earle explained in an interview with an Oregon newspaper that “[c]ooperation is one of the greatest aids to the motion picture photographer . . . and in no section of the country do I have finer cooperation than in the northwest. In securing industrial, educational and scenic subjects, commercial club secretaries, secretaries of chambers of commerce, railroad men and others identified with the development of a state along broad lines are absolutely invaluable to the camera man. It is largely through the cooperation of such men that I have been enabled to recently photograph some of the wonderful and interesting things of the Pacific northwest.”[82]

It is difficult not to regard the “wonderful and interesting things” that Earle “secured” in his wide-ranging travels as all representative of one type of media production: publicity. His account straightforwardly endorses sponsorship understood as the informal but essential “cooperation” between, in this case, Great Northern, civic boosters, and Pathé’s cameraman. The result was sponsored footage appearing on theater screens as the “genuine article.”

With a rapidly increasing population driven by significant immigration, a spectacular new national park, and the territory from Minnesota to the Pacific coast ready to be packaged and developed as the twentieth-century American agricultural frontier, Great Northern Railway saw immense opportunities for growing its passenger and freight business and for asserting its public prominence as an engine of American progress. In “promoting and packaging” the West’s national parks, Marguerite Shaffer concludes, Great Northern and the other transcontinental railway corporations “worked to boost their public images as nation builders while forging a national clientele.”[83] For Louis Hill, one prime means toward these ends was generating publicity through all available media, including relying on moving pictures screened in self-styled theaters at metropolitan land shows, at public sites in towns visited by exhibit railway cars, in movie theaters that booked Pathé films, and in Great Northern’s building at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where this railway was awarded a gold medal for “Best Display of Scenic, Agricultural, and Industrial Resources.”[84]

Except for the newsreel segments and short subjects about Glacier National Park released by Pathé, Great Northern always embedded moving pictures within a broader Medienverbund, supplied lecturers for all performances, and advertised these “realistic picture tours” as informative, free entertainment, with “everybody welcome”—provided that they were already attending a land show or living close to a small midwestern town visited by an exhibit car. This was by no means a unique or innovative appropriation of film’s utilitarian or multi-sited possibilities. But thanks to the resources Great Northern had at its disposal, its exploitation of moving pictures was ambitious, visible, and successful—at the very least in attracting a substantial audience, generating publicity, and also demonstrating, without necessarily aiming to, how moving pictures could best be utilized to serve corporate and purportedly national interests.

A DEVICE EXACTLY SUITED TO EXPOSITION PURPOSES

Although Great Northern did not have a line that reached San Francisco, it operated steamship service from Seattle to the PPIE (and further down the coast to San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition, which ran in 1915 and 1916). At the exposition, this railroad had constructed a free-standing building on the marina, half devoted to Glacier National Park and half to agricultural products and opportunities along its route from Minnesota to Washington and Oregon. As it had done at land shows, Great Northern filled the building with displays, photographs, oil paintings, maps, models, and more than one hundred color transparencies (even adding an aquarium).[85] Every afternoon free presentations illustrated with slides and moving pictures were offered at the building’s theater, whose daily schedule drew on familiar promotional fare. The amount of film footage varied from lecture to lecture:

1:30 Oregon (1000 feet, approximately 10–15 minutes of screen time)

2:30 Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana (800 feet)

3:30 Glacier National Park and Blackfeet Indians (1750 feet)

4:30 Washington (925 feet)[86]

It was not the films but the actual presence of “a band of Blackfeet Indians” that again attracted the most publicity for Great Northern, particularly on the PPIE’s Glacier National Park Day (June 15) when ten aged chiefs and other members of the tribe performed what was billed as a “Medicine Lodge” ceremony and “genuine Pow-Wow.”[87] This supposedly authentic performance of tribal rituals was one of several ways that the exposition simultaneously celebrated, exoticized, and eulogized now-archaic Native Americans including, most prominently, in photographs and daily lectures with moving pictures at the Rodman Wanamaker exhibit and with the widely praised and re-presented statue, The End of the Trail, which depicted a (broken, defeated, dying?) solitary brave slumped atop a horse on its last legs, signifying for one contemporary commentator “the hopelessness of the Red Man’s battle against civilization.”[88]

As a public event intended to generate publicity, the powwow sponsored by Great Northern was matched a month later, when the PPIE celebrated Metro Moving Picture Day on July 15, scheduled to coincide with the Fifth Annual Convention of the Motion Picture Exhibitors’ League, then meeting in San Francisco.[89] At 2:00 p.m. a parade of “Stars, Producers, and Moving Picture Delegates,” accompanied by a military band, entered the grounds and proceeded to the Court of the Universe, described in guidebooks as “the grand radiating center for the Exposition.” Here, surrounded by the PPIE’s allegorical, imposing, ornate exhibition “palaces” and overseen by the glass-stone-festooned 435-foot Tower of Jewels, commemorative bronze medals were presented to Metro Pictures’ recent signee, Francis X. Bushman, then ranked among the leading male movie stars; the Exposition Players Corporation, which had the rights for filming on the grounds; and a representative of the Hearst-Selig News Service, who touted the newsreel as a “new and vital educative force in the modern civilized community.”[90] Motography reported that twenty thousand fairgoers witnessed the ceremony.[91]

Perhaps because of the size of the crowd, Bushman and his Metro co-star, Marguerite Snow, did not, as planned, enact a scene from their latest feature film. But the rest of the festivities went according to schedule, with Hearst-Selig filming the crowds for its newsreel and four young women chosen to appear in a film to be shot at the Filmland concession in Joy Land, the exposition’s amusement zone, where fairgoers could watch Universal pictures and visit what was billed as “a live motion picture studio in operation.”[92] Moving Picture Day concluded with Art Smith, the daredevil “boy aviator,” “etching the word ‘Metro’ in letters of fire on the heavens” and being presented with a medal by Bushman.[93]

The entertainment trade press duly celebrated the event. “Without a doubt,” Metro Moving Picture Day “constitutes the most important recognition of motion pictures and motion picture stars,” declared Billboard, Moving Picture World, and Motography (likely all drawing from the same press release).[94] For the New York Dramatic Mirror, this “signal honor” bestowed by the PPIE stood as a “surprising tribute to the advancement that motion pictures have made, when one remembers that at the most recent of other World’s Fairs the screen drama was little more than the other cheap attractions of the tent show section.”[95] While this tribute did put the commercial film industry at the exposition’s center stage, it is worth keeping in mind that specially designated days were a basic promotional strategy for the PPIE. In addition to being Metro Moving Picture Day, July 15 was also designated National Lumber Exporters’ Association Day and Non-Smokers Protective League of America Day, while the rest of this mid-July week saw twelve other days, recognizing, for instance, wine, the Federal Suffrage Association of the United States, and New Haven, Connecticut.[96] And Art Smith performed his thrilling aerial maneuvers not just on Metro Moving Picture Day, but nightly.

Nonetheless, the appearance on Metro Day of Francis X. Bushman (who had purportedly posed for statues on display at the exposition), the public acknowledgment of the Hearst-Selig newsreel service, METRO emblazoned on the night sky, and even the presence of souvenir booths selling photographs of movie stars all attest to the visibility of the movies at the PPIE.[97] In addition to newsreel segments, other films that had been shot at the exposition reached theatrical audiences, including Keystone’s April 1915 release Fatty and Mabel Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco, featuring its comic stars Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand. A month later, the Miller Bros. 101 Ranch, which operated a wild west concession in Joy Land, announced that it had purchased 50 percent of Filmland and would use its “cowboys and Indians” for in-house productions, beginning with The Exposition’s First Romance, which was booked at theaters sporadically through the rest of the year.[98] However, neither Filmland nor the 101 Ranch attraction stayed in business past June.[99]

Regardless of visits by movie stars or the skywriting skills of Art Smith, the prominence, presence, and status of motion pictures at the exposition finally had little if anything to do with Filmland or Metro Moving Picture Day, with the projectors on display in the Palace of Liberal Arts, or even with the appearance of Thomas Edison at a day in his honor in October.[100] What registered, practically and symbolically, were the vast number of regularly scheduled, free screenings of non-fiction film in self-styled motion picture theaters that were permanently housed in the PPIE’s exhibition palaces and in many of the state and national buildings erected on the grounds. With a few notable exceptions, venues like the theater in Great Northern’s building were utilitarian sites not designed to be spectacular attractions in themselves. And motion pictures were most definitely not considered to be equivalent in any way to the fine art that filled the galleries and formal gardens, nor did they rank with grand-scale, postcard-worthy attractions like the “Electric Color Scintillator” (responsible for dazzling evening light shows), the Remington Company’s fourteen-ton working typewriter, or with what William Lipsky calls the exposition’s highlighted “manifestations of progress,” like the first exhibit of a periscope and a million-volt electric transformer.[101] The films screened at the PPIE did not warrant a special celebratory day, for they were woven into the daily fabric throughout the exposition.[102]

For Frank Morton Todd, author of the four-hundred-page “official history” of the PPIE, the use of moving pictures at more than sixty sites on the grounds “was one of the educational wonders of the Exposition.”[103] Todd devoted a chapter in his book to surveying the prominent role of film exhibition because “the development of the motion picture gave the Panama-Pacific International Exposition a singular advantage over its predecessors. The exhibits showed the products of different lands, but the films showed the countries themselves; their topography, their harbors, mines, transportation facilities, their life and industries, how some of the exhibits they sent had been produced, and the conditions under which their people worked. The device was exactly adapted to exposition purposes.”[104]

A similar note was sounded by the PPIE’s Division of Exploitation, which was able to place its promotional copy in countless magazines and, by one estimate, more than twenty-one thousand newspapers in the US and Canada.[105] “There is no department in the Exposition, and scarcely a state building or foreign pavilion, which does not make use of the motion picture as a feature of instruction,” declared a Sunday supplement article in the Portland Oregonian.[106] The same claim appeared verbatim in newspapers from Bountiful, Utah, to Memphis, Tennessee.[107] Trade publications followed suit. In an article otherwise devoted to exhibits about coal mining, Coal Age pointed out that “one of the most striking advances to be noted in the Panama-Pacific Exposition is the extensive use of moving pictures, mainly as an educational feature, with the advertising feature absent or only very incidental.”[108] The entertainment trade press likewise drew attention to what Billboard called “the omnipresent motion picture screen with the machine busily grinding out what the exposition exhibitor most desires to present to the public.”[109]

“Even a casual observer cannot help but notice,” wrote Moving Picture World, that moving pictures “are everywhere, no matter where you turn. You cannot go into a building without seeing them.”[110] The omnipresence of film exhibition at the PPIE meant that “the motion picture [is] strengthening its already firm hold upon its willing captive, the dear public,” concluded the New York Dramatic Mirror,[111] while Moving Picture World took the screening of moving pictures across the exposition as a testament to the maturation and unlimited promise of film as “a progressive growing industry, which is bound to increase and will eventually influence and become a part of every activity whether industrial or educational.”[112] Hyperbole aside, such claims frame multi-sited, multi-purpose cinema less as competition than as an opportunity for the motion-picture industry still on the rise in 1915.

RIDING THE RAILS

In a guidebook dedicated largely to the architecture, lighting, and fine art at the PPIE, Ben Macomber acknowledged that “a striking feature of all the palaces, and one that differentiates this Exposition from its great predecessors of a decade or more ago, is the common use of the moving-picture machine as the fastest and most vivid method of displaying human activities and scenery. Everywhere it is showing industrial processes.” In building after building were found what Macomber calls the “seventy-seven free moving picture halls” or “motion-picture theaters” that were not operated as and could not have been confused with movie theaters.[113] This difference was particularly evident in the programming strategies, design, and location of the three fairly discrete kinds of non-theatrical theaters at the PPIE: the screening facilities operated by railroads, drawing from their experiences with land shows; those housed in state buildings and foreign pavilions; and those operated by the US government and other sponsors in the exposition’s palaces devoted to machinery, the liberal arts, and education and social economy.

Given the role that transcontinental railroads played at land shows, it is not surprising that their exhibit spaces at the PPIE almost always incorporated some sort of screening facility. The lectures with moving pictures presented in the Canadian Pacific building, for example, covered recreational activities and locales from Quebec to British Columbia, while films like Home Making in Western Canada aimed to encourage investors and homesteaders as well as tourists.[114] Southern Pacific, with a well-established route to San Francisco, mounted a particularly ambitious effort, displaying locomotives and other equipment in the Palace of Transportation and erecting one of the largest single-exhibit buildings on the grounds, complete with ticket offices, public restrooms, and a first-aid station—all planned, according to its souvenir postcard, “for the service, convenience, pleasure, and entertainment of the Exposition’s guests” (fig. 5.9). This building housed the 350-seat Sunset Theatre, which was said to be modeled on a venue in midtown Manhattan.[115] Every day from 10:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., the Sunset Theatre featured seven half-hour “travel talks,” illustrated by newly shot motion pictures and colored slides displaying the “marvelous scenic features and industrial resources of the states traversed” by this railway system through the West. Organ recitals filled the time between travel talks. Among the experienced speakers employed was John P. Clum, former Indian agent, friend of Wyatt Earp, and newspaper editor in Tombstone, Arizona, who had been lecturing on the “golden west” for Southern Pacific since 1911.[116]

FIGURE 5.9. Sunset Theatre and layout of Southern Pacific building.

To attend one of Clum’s lectures, fairgoers passed from a massive foyer via a doorway through a “big tree” to enter “the Glade,” an indoor walkway and “miniature woodland” replete with dioramas of memorable sights along this railway’s lines, creating a reimagined geography of the West in which the Alamo on the Mexican border was adjacent to an irrigation project in northern Nevada.[117] Beyond the Glade and accessible only through the Southern Pacific ticket office stood the Sunset Theatre, where illustrated travel talks continued the visitor’s journey. The moving pictures shown in the Sunset Theatre were thus embedded in a sponsored, constructed, multi-mediated environment that testified to Southern Pacific’s largesse and transcontinental reach as well as its capacity for planning and organization.

The Pennsylvania Railroad’s self-styled “educational” exhibit in the Palace of Transportation reflected a different, more cartographic strategy, featuring a twenty-six-by-forty-two-foot topographical map of the territory covered by this railroad across the Midwest to the East Coast, along with models of Penn Station in New York City and Union Station in Washington, DC. Another topographical map complete with small electrical lights depicted an aerial view of New York City, as it “would appear to Zeppelin invaders”—a hardly subtle reminder of the war then underway in Europe. Complementing the scaled models and maps were twenty-seven reels of moving pictures covering Pennsylvania Railroad’s major routes between Chicago and New York City, supposedly all shot by the Edison Company from a camera mounted on the front of a moving train and screened in order over a three-day period. Individual reels focused on cities as well as sights along the way.[118] Todd singled out these moving pictures as collectively constituting “one of the longest and most real travel pictures ever exhibited.”[119]

But the main attraction in this exhibit was most likely the unique “Passenger Car Moving Picture Theatre” that the Pennsylvania Railroad constructed at considerable cost specially for the PPIE (fig. 5.10). Consisting of two steel first-class passenger coaches connected side-by-side with the inner walls removed, this theater had seating for 112 with standing room for thirty-eight additional spectators.[120] An article in Railway Age Gazette estimated that in its first seven months of operation, the Passenger Car Moving Picture Theatre, offering eight shows daily, drew seventy-four thousand spectators, who turned over their (free) tickets to a uniformed attendant, climbed aboard, and took a train “journey by cinematograph,” guided by lecturers dressed as conductors.[121] This “novel” theater caught the eye of Popular Mechanics as well as Scientific American (fig. 5.10).[122] In fact, this was the only mention of moving pictures at the PPIE in Scientific American, which was more inclined to focus on the exposition’s complex lighting systems and the ten-thousand-horsepower water turbine on display.

FIGURE 5.10. Passenger car moving-picture theater, Popular Mechanics, November 1915.

The Passenger Car Moving Picture Theatre hearkens back to earlier versions of simulated travel that also relied on footage shot from a moving train. Most notably, Hale’s Tours, introduced at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, had some commercial success as a novelty attraction, with spectators experiencing scenic moving pictures with sound effects while seated inside a facsimile of a railway car capable of a rocking motion.[123] Aside from Pennsylvania Railroad’s theater, virtual travel at the PPIE was to be found among the commercial attractions in the Joy Zone, where paying customers could visit the Grand Canyon (sponsored by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway), ride a special observation car for a trip to Yellowstone National Park (sponsored by Union Pacific railroad), or survey the Panama Canal from a moving platform equipped with headphones so that each passenger could listen to a recorded lecture. These concessions did not involve moving pictures. Aside from the Passenger Car Moving Picture Theatre, only a handful of screening facilities at the PPIE were novel enough to qualify as attractions in their own right. For example, the California Viticulture exhibit constructed its theater “in the semblance of a wine-keg,” at the San Joaquin Valley exhibit, “a hollow, snow-crested mountain . . . contained a movie theater,” and rear-projection moving pictures appeared “on the ground-glass top of a beer barrel” at the exhibit for Rainier Beer (fig. 5.11).[124] As attractions, these screening sites were nowhere near as spectacular as the mine explosion and rescue staged by the US Bureau of Mines, the operational on-site factories run by Ford and Levi-Strauss, or even AT&T’s “Transcontinental Telephone Theater” in the Palace of Liberal Arts.

FIGURE 5.11. Postcard, Rainier Beer exhibit.

Five times daily (with private evening shows) in a two-hundred-seat, elegantly comfortable “theater de luxe,” AT&T offered fairgoers a “comprehensive program” with dissolving lantern slides and moving pictures that covered the “growth and development of the telephone business” and the “construction of the transcontinental line” westward across the United States, an accomplishment this corporation deemed “the highest achievement of practical science up to to-day . . . gigantic—and it is entirely American.”[125] Dramatically capping this illustrated account of AT&T’s bridging of the US, the presentation concluded with a live demonstration. Telephone receivers attached to each seat in the theater afforded spectators the opportunity to participate in an otherwise expensive and restricted telephonic experience. Earphones in place, they listened to the day’s newspaper headlines being read in New York and a recording of popular music “wafted over the line from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” To “complete” “the realistic effect,” moving pictures of the eastern seashore were projected on screen while via a transcontinental telephone connection spectators heard the roar of the surf at New York’s Far Rockaway beach.[126]

Beyond these few notable exceptions, the many theaters at the exposition were functional, safe, unadorned, practical sites. This was as true for the West Virginia state building as for United States Steel Corporation’s massive exhibit in the Palace of Mines and Metallurgy, which offered a “fixed daily program” of six hours of film that moved from the discovery of iron ore to the manufacture of wire, pipe, cement, and sheet metal in a “motion picture theatre” with walls, chairs, operating room, and equipment, all supposedly constructed entirely of steel.[127]

PROMOTING STATES AND NATIONS

Theaters were incorporated into more than half of the free-standing, individual buildings (sometimes called pavilions) constructed at the exposition by twenty foreign nations and twenty-eight US states and territories, which saw moving pictures as a means of encouraging tourism and investment by providing evidence of prosperity and “advancement” that celebrated distinctive resources and achievements. In other words, the non-theatrical theaters in these buildings largely offered a steady diet of shot-to-order, self-promotional films that reflected the aims and assumptions of sponsors and boosters.

This strategy was readily apparent in Illinois’s participation in the PPIE. The Illinois Building, whose main attraction was a memorial room dedicated to Abraham Lincoln, featured a “motion-picture theatre” on the first floor with daily screenings that highlighted what an official description identified as “the parks and boulevards of Illinois; the educational, charitable and penal institutions; the roads; the agricultural and live-stock interests; and views of the principal large cities of the state.” Lest there might be some confusion or worries about sullying Illinois’s reputation, the pamphlet went on to insist that “the pictures of the various state institutions are intended, primarily, to show the great advancement along the lines of humanity and mercy that has been made in very recent years in the conduct and management of these institutions.”[128] Illinois’s moving pictures, reported a PPIE visitor to the folks back home in Belleville, portray the “greatness and advancement of our state,”[129] evidenced in footage of the Illinois State Fair, Joliet Prison, coal mines, the Chicago park system, the production of farm machinery, and the University of Illinois.[130] In fact, part of the target audience for all state buildings at the exposition was current and former residents ready to take pride in their home state.

FIGURE 5.12. Postcard, schedule for Washington Building lectures.

In planning its exhibit, Illinois’s state-appointed PPIE Commission had offered the “business interests of the state” in early 1914 the opportunity to have motion pictures produced for regular screening at the exposition.[131] It is probably impossible to determine precisely who commissioned, planned, shot, edited, and paid for all the film used in the Illinois Building, though some of it was produced, according to Billboard, by Watterson Rothacker’s Industrial Moving Picture Company, and Farm Implements magazine noted that in addition to its extensive display of machinery and miniature model farms in the Palace of Agriculture, the International Harvester Corporation also provided a “series of motion pictures showing not only the modern methods of farm work, but a comparison of the old and the new” to be screened in Illinois’s theater.[132] The final report on Illinois’s participation in the PPIE itemized the $5,779 spent on operating the theater, including $4,100 for the production of the films screened (but with no line item for lecturers or accompanists). In return for its investment, “perhaps, the state received a great deal of the most desirable kind of advertising,” the report concluded.[133]

There was some variation from theater to theater in the state buildings (fig. 5.11). Oregon’s films depicted the Columbia River Highway, logging camps, quartz mines, apple orchards, and native “bird and fish life,”[134] while West Virginia’s featured “mountain and valley scenery, the larger cities, glass plants, steel and iron mills, and the great Pocahontas coal field.”[135] The California Building was particularly ambitious, with five theaters promoting different areas of the state. The Sacramento Valley exhibit, for example, scheduled in its theater nine illustrated lectures daily that captured what organizers called “the many beautiful situations, as well as the marvelous productiveness of this favored part of California,” including footage of mines in operation and the eruption of Mt. Lassen.[136] According to an official report, 185,844 people attended these lectures over the course of the exposition. Massachusetts took a slightly different tact, commissioning from the Edison Company Paul Revere’s Ride and five other one-reel historical reenactments to go along with more than 20,000 feet of film focusing on sights and public activities in Boston as well as 10,000 feet supplied by manufacturers throughout the state.[137] The Massachusetts PPIE commission’s professed aim was to promote the state “as a place favorable for business, home or recreation”—a goal it shared with all the states that mounted exhibits at the exposition.[138]

The same type of informational/promotional films offered in the various state buildings were also regularly screened in the pavilions constructed by Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Denmark, Guatemala, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Siam, and Sweden. These nations utilized moving pictures as one component in a larger exhibition strategy to assert modern nationhood, boost international prestige, and attract tourists, trade, and investment, often while addressing both former residents and potential immigrants. To these ends, the films usually foregrounded resources, industries, and urban progress as well as scenic beauty, unique folkways, and even indigenous peoples. For example, Sweden’s 37,000 feet of film, according to Todd, included “logging and lumbering and iron and steel manufacturing, and skating and the national dances. Hydro-electric plants and electric locomotives, nomad Lapps and their reindeer herds all appeared with perfect realism.”[139] Among the sights that registered most strongly for Laura Ingalls Wilder (later to gain fame as author of the Little House on the Prairie books) when she visited the PPIE were the moving pictures shown in the New Zealand building—particularly, scenes of harvesting, sheep herding, hot springs, geysers, surf riding, and “native islanders.”[140] Screenings like these fit comfortably within a consistent ideological pattern at the exposition that juxtaposed modern “advancement” with evidence of the premodern as archaic, picturesque, and “native.”

MOVING PICTURE LESSONS IN THE PALACE OF EDUCATION AND SOCIAL ECONOMY

The promotional aims driving film exhibition at the state buildings and national pavilions were similar to what informed railroad investment in staging large exhibits at land shows and the PPIE. But other versions of sponsored cinema also played a prominent role at the exposition thanks to what Billboard called the “omnipresent motion picture screen with the machine busily grinding out what the exposition exhibitor most desires to present to the public.”[141] Almost all the major buildings at the PPIE hosted screenings, even the Palace of Food Products (in exhibits for the Heinz 57 company and the California wine industry) and Live Stock Congress Hall, which on a given day could show up to nine films, ranging from titles supplied by International Harvester to Cheese Making in Wisconsin and Harvesting and Farm Life, Oklahoma.[142]

Moving pictures were particularly central in the Palace of Education and Social Economy, the sector of the PPIE dedicated, wrote Todd, “to improve the art of living, to teach the public the scientific value of life and time and human values.”[143] This palace featured displays covering pedagogical methods and educational institutions in, for example, Argentina, China, Missouri, and Gary, Indiana, as well as exhibits mounted by Progressive Era advocacy organizations, ranging from the Race Betterment Foundation and the Social Hygiene Association to the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and the Children’s Bureau of the US Department of Labor.[144] Here, fairgoers could learn about home and foreign missionary efforts from the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America as well as about the Montessori method—with Maria Montessori herself in attendance, overseeing the Casa dei Bambini, a demonstration classroom with seating for spectators behind a glass wall.[145]

While visitors could witness the Montessori method in action or look down from a public gallery onto students in an actual classroom being taught penmanship, shorthand, and other business skills, exhibitors in the Palace of Education and Social Economy most often relied on an arsenal of media tools to achieve and promote what would come to be known in the following decades as “visual education”: “lectures, moving pictures, transparencies, stereomotorgraphs, charts, pamphlets, personal instruction, models, topographical maps, every conceivable sort of visual representation.”[146] Stereomotorgraphs, automatic projectors capable of holding up to fifty-two lantern slides, were put into service throughout the exposition, though these machines attracted nowhere near the same level of attention from the press as did the reliance on moving pictures. It was “by means of moving pictures,” declared a syndicated newspaper article, that the Palace of Education and Social Economy provided “adults as well as children . . . daily lessons in geography, social hygiene, physiology, chemistry, agriculture, horticulture and school system.”[147] Similarly, in his account of the PPIE for the US Bureau of Education, W. Carson Ryan reported that “motion picture theatres assumed unprecedented importance at this exposition” particularly in the “education building,” where more than 90,000 feet of film were projected in two theaters built for general use and at dedicated screening sites within the multi-media exhibits of New York, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and California.[148]

The Medal of Honor–winning Massachusetts exhibit, for instance, showed off the state’s commitment to vocational education and its care for the blind, crippled, and “feeble-minded” in daily screenings of 2,000 feet of film, as well as twenty-six sets of slides for two stereomotorgraphs, 180 charts, various display cases, models with moving parts and electric lights, and seventy-two framed transparencies.[149] (On the second floor of the Massachusetts exhibit, lecturers for the United Shoe Machinery Company, based near Boston, screened The Making of a Shoe in a 250-seat theater.)[150] A different sort of betterment was on display at an exhibit detailing efforts to eradicate hookworm by the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Commission. In this case, motion pictures were paired with photographs, charts, lantern slides, and more than twenty elaborate “lifelike” models of magnified hookworms and children afflicted with this parasite.[151] Exhibits like these led Todd to dub this building “the Palace of the New Knowledge”—exemplar of modern, practical pedagogy that relied on “every conceivable sort of visual representation,” including, prominently, motion pictures.[152]

By dedicating space for two general-purpose motion picture theaters, the Palace of Education and Social Economy encouraged exhibitors to make use of film.[153] These theaters offered a varied, rotating schedule of events, which could include, on a given day, a poetry reading, a lecture on “race betterment,” and a film on schoolchildren in the Philippines (June 18) or films on the lead and gypsum industries and lectures on oral hygiene, child labor, and the Ford Motor Company’s profit-sharing plan (September 11).[154] Special events and holidays warranted more thematically unified programming. Labor Day, for example, saw a number of lecturers covering labor-related topics, including “Work of the Consumers’ League,” “The Relation of the International Harvester Company to Its Employees,” and “What the Government is Doing for Labor,” though it is not clear whether any of these lectures were illustrated with moving pictures.[155] For Thomas Edison Day at the PPIE, the Palace of Education and Social Economy screened a full program devoted to Edison with films of “electrical and scientific experiments being conducted in the Edison laboratory,” including “a motion picture demonstration of Edison’s Bessemer converter, turning molten iron into steel” (but apparently no theatrical releases from the Edison Company were shown).[156]

It was also in these theaters that members of the American Library Association watched motion pictures sponsored by the California Library Association, and popular lecturer Burton Holmes presented his travelogue on the Philippines. (Holmes subsequently returned to his profitable theatrical touring with a new illustrated lecture on the PPIE.)[157] The Palace of Education and Social Economy’s theaters likewise hosted offerings as diverse as the Remington Typewriter Company’s The Story of the Typewriter and The Evolution of the Stenographer, Ford’s Making of an American, and a US government program that paired films about “the education of the negro and of the Indian and of agricultural education” with a live performance of “plantation melodies” by the Hampton Singers.[158]

In addition to the two general-purpose theaters, California and New York relied heavily on moving pictures in the exhibits they mounted in the Palace of Education and Social Economy. From 11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily, California screened a variety of films, all documenting successful “public educational activities” in “certain progressive California communities,” including a reel on the agricultural courses taught at the high schools of Imperial County and seven reels covering the Los Angeles school district from kindergarten to junior college, which won a PPIE Grand Prize.[159] Addressing visitors to the National Education Association annual convention held that year in conjunction with the PPIE, the head of California’s Exposition Committee touted the state’s films for showing “from a scientific standpoint how we are teaching the child to be ready to fight life’s battles.”[160] Todd concurred, calling the California educational exhibit: “a remarkable demonstration of what can be done by the cinema film to depict the development of such a constantly growing institution as a great educational system,” enabling visitors “to inspect the whole school system of California from their opera chairs.”[161]

New York’s extensive exhibit focused more on social economy than education. From early on in its planning process, New York’s Panama-Pacific Exposition Committee emphasized the need to create exhibits that would “arrest and impress the vision” of fairgoers as a means of promoting the “commercial, educational, industrial, artistic, military, naval and other interests of the state and its citizens.” To this end the committee insisted that “moving picture and stereo-motograph views should be used to the greatest possible extent” as part of New York’s exhibits in the Palaces of Agriculture and the Liberal Arts—and most prominently in the Palace of Education and Social Economy, where New York would build a “Moving Picture Pavilion” (fig. 5.13). This “theatre of impressive dimensions and architecture” ended up resembling a sort of mausoleum or bunker with the façade of a courthouse or bank.[162]

FIGURE 5.13. New York Moving Picture Pavilion.

During the PPIE, “20,000 feet of views of the State and its institutions” were “in constant use,” with New York’s exhibit in the Palace of Education and Social Economy attracting almost five hundred thousand visitors, and the Moving Picture Pavilion drawing an average daily attendance estimated to be “not less than two thousand persons.”[163] This theater offered daily screenings and lectures that extolled the state’s varied contributions to progressive social economy. For example, “State Care of the Insane” was the subject of 2,500 feet of moving pictures, screened to complement the show cases, photographs, scale model hospital, stereomotorgraph, “multiplex” charts, and actual working hydrotherapy “appliances” on display. Each day in the Moving Picture Pavilion a doctor from one of the state hospitals delivered an illustrated lecture on “The Care and Treatment of the Insane” that began with slides, followed by moving pictures of the buildings and grounds, outdoor and indoor work, and recreational activities for the patients, including trolley rides. Other screenings in the theater highlighted the state’s campaign to reduce infant mortality, the need for sanitary conditions on farms, and the work of health officers safeguarding the port of New York, as well as “motion pictures that mirrored the daily life of the inmates” in the state prison system.[164]

At the same time, New York was also offering lectures and screening Every Day Farming in the Empire State, The Origins of Asphalt, New York State Improved Highways, and various other one-reelers in a moving picture theater it had erected as part of its exhibit in the Palace of Agriculture.[165] In the Palace of Liberal Arts, yet another New York screening site figured prominently as a component of one of the PPIE’s most popular attractions, an exhibit on the New York State Barge Canal, a massive public works project then nearing completion. Large working models and oil paintings (one that measured ten by thirty feet in size) dominated this ambitious exhibit, which also featured colored lantern slides projected from a stereomotorgraph concealed inside a wall and motion pictures presenting excavation equipment and the construction and operation of the canal’s locks. These films were shown within a space designed to replicate the lower entrance of a canal lock, one of the PPIE’s most novel screening sites.[166]

In some respects the US government’s reliance on moving pictures at the exposition was similar to the strategy adopted by New York, with a “Government Motion Picture Room” located in both the Palace of Mines and Metallurgy and in the Palace of Machinery, which housed the extensive Navy and War Department exhibits. On a typical day, each of these theaters offered a separate program of screenings from 10:00 or 10:30 a.m. through late afternoon that included titles like A Day in Baby’s Life and American Sardine Industry and films covering the work of the federal agencies responsible for the post office, “Indian schools,” dam projects, naval training, and road construction. In addition, the government operated its main “lecture room” as part of its extensive exhibit in the Palace of Liberal Arts, with a focus on illustrated lectures, many of which were of a piece with the presentations at Land Shows and previous world’s fairs, covering the Forest Service, reclamation projects, and road building.[167]

NON-THEATRICAL THEATERS

Projecting moving pictures inside a facsimile of a canal lock, or two joined railway coaches, or a room decorated to look like a mountain were exceptions to the general rule at the PPIE, where the theaters almost always looked like theaters—of a quite specific design. Showing sponsored, free, regularly scheduled, publicly announced, informational moving picture programs that often included slides and relied on lecturers (but not on musical accompaniment or theatrically released films), these theaters were modest, safe, utilitarian spaces well-suited for delivering useful moving pictures at a large-scale public event. Found in virtually all the PPIE’s buildings, these independently operated venues competed daily for patrons, without the need or the opportunity to cultivate regular customers and turn a profit and without the requirement of providing a change of program every day or every week (fig. 5.14).

FIGURE 5.14. Illinois and Pennsylvania theaters at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

Early in the planning process, the organizers of the exposition had recommended that states and foreign nations incorporate a purpose-built screening facility in their buildings and subsequently had carefully regulated how and where these pictures would be shown. When state PPIE commissions in Montana, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Illinois found it difficult to convince legislators to appropriate funds for a state building, the exposition staff suggested using moving pictures to generate interest and revenue. As George Hugh Perry, the director of the PPIE’s Division of Exploitation, explained to an Illinois state senator in March 1914:

We have recently evolved a plan here which I think you might find useful. It is working like a charm in other states. Briefly it consists of taking two or three hundred feet each of moving picture films of big factories, stores, scenic points, hotels, resorts, fine residences, etc., and combine such scenes in an “Illinois State Reel.” This reel is exhibited three or five times a day in a moving picture theatre provided in your state building.

This plan solves two or three problems at once. In the first place it attracts a large number of people to your building (the show being given free). Second, it enables a great many interests and industries to get the benefit of advertising before large audiences. There are hundreds of men with fine homes. There are hundreds of hotels, great factories, big plants, etc., who would be very glad, either as a matter of pride or as a matter of advertising, to have such things exhibited.

The beauty of it is that we can take these pictures for you (or you can take them yourself) at a price approximately $1.00 a foot which will cover all expenses. You can sell them to the advertiser at from $8.00 to $10.00 a foot. The excess money goes to your commission for the building fund.

I think you will see the merits of this plan at a glance. It has the advantage of combining every argument for state pride and patriotism with commercial benefits to the attraction of personal pride.[168]

The Division of Exploitation did have some experience in this regard, having sent lecturers on tour with its own slides and moving pictures to drum up interest and help create the sense of the exposition as what Sabine Haenni calls a “media event.”[169] According to Perry’s plan, utilizing moving pictures in this quite formulaic manner makes perfect sense: they can generate significant upfront revenue, attract fairgoers to state buildings, and boost state pride while catering to the egos of prominent citizens. I have found no evidence, however, that officials actually monitored the motion pictures shown at the exposition, in stark contrast to the projectionists and screening sites, which were the subject of vigilant attention.

The most obvious concern was with the safety of the many theaters and the threat of fire. The PPIE’s formal Rules and Regulations regarding the construction of “one story theaters and moving picture shows” adhered to the National Board of Fire Underwriters’ code concerning clearly marked exits, prescribed aisle width, required lobby space, and the installation of automatic sprinkler systems.[170] The Engineer of Fire Protection continued to monitor the theaters once the exposition had opened, demanding at one point that Oregon, for example, provide in its booth a “fireproof rewind” set-up, buckets of sand and water, and “suitable film storage,” and that Pennsylvania replace an operator who had twice failed a required examination.[171] According to the New York Dramatic Mirror, this concern paid off: “each of the sixty theaters can justly claim the descriptive word ‘model.’ Projection, seating, ventilation, and the condition of the film itself, each is of high standard.”[172] Moving Picture World was probably correct in noting that in addition to the appeal of whatever appeared on screen, “a seat in a well-ventilated, comfortable auditorium” offered “pleasant relief” for folks roaming the exposition grounds and working their way through immense palaces.[173]

Conforming to these safety codes and usually kept well under three hundred seats, the reasonably comfortable “model” moving picture theaters at the exposition were functional, one-floor, narrow, rectangular venues with few added decorative frills—closer to the interior of a respectable nickelodeon than to the more ornate multi-tiered theaters that had increasingly become showplaces for the movies by the mid-1910s. These utilitarian theaters occupied a quite different public space than the movie theaters found on small-town main streets or the commercial centers and residential neighborhoods of American cities. To reach the moving pictures screened by Oregon or Argentina, spectators entered distinctive, readily identifiable, free-standing buildings, which, like the films and lectures they provided daily, served to announce, evoke, and celebrate the sponsoring state or nation. Virtually all of the national pavilions and most of the state buildings were refined, monumental, and pretentious showpieces, decorated with carefully selected, symbolically rich representations of the homeland (in the form of paintings, dioramas, displays, craftwork, furniture, etc.). In addition, they often provided restaurants, restrooms, reception rooms, libraries, and museum-style galleries to beckon visitors.

Bolivia’s relatively small pavilion, to cite one striking example, was constructed in the style of a Spanish colonial church, to which were added reproductions of Incan monoliths flanking the entrance. A massive doorway opened onto a large landscaped open-air patio (modeled on a building at the famed Mint of Potosi), around which were located a motion picture theater and rooms displaying the nine hundred varieties of Bolivian wood, this nation’s agricultural resources, craftwork by the “aboriginal population,” and the skins of llama, alpaca, jaguar, and other indigenous animals. (Bolivia also had an exhibit in the Palace of Mines and Metallurgy.) Within the theater, films highlighted “Indian scenes” and “majestic ruins” as well as a “fine military review,” modern architecture in La Paz, the nation’s railroads, and its mining industry. A commentator in the Bulletin of the Pan American Union observed that the displays and the overall design of the Bolivian pavilion are “vividly brought to mind as one steps into the salon and watches the motion pictures.”[174] States likely also aimed to evoke a sense of continuity between the building, the exhibits, and the films screened. With appreciably less flair than Bolivia, Massachusetts, for example, placed its theater in a space that included a Publicity Room designed to be a “clearing house of information” regarding the state’s industries, display cases filled with historic artifacts, a reception room with facsimiles of prerevolutionary furniture, and portraits, busts, and photographs of former governors, state dignitaries, and famed Massachusetts citizens like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Paul Revere.[175]

While scholarship on the history of film exhibition has understandably focused on the technology, architecture, seating, amenities, and décor of the theater—the non-theatrical theaters at the PPIE point to another feature, what we might call the location of the screening site, which refers not to an identifiable address but to what filled the immediately adjacent and wider surrounding space and to how the theater was accessed. I am not assuming that all spectators took the same route to a given theater, but rather that in all cases, a route was taken and space traversed and experienced. The precise placement of the Sunset Theatre in the Southern Pacific building, which I described earlier, reflects the significance of location, and so too does the placement of the small moving picture theater in Guatemala’s building, where it was dwarfed by a four-hundred-seat hall that drew large crowds for marimba concerts.[176] Beyond what was proximate, the exposition’s various screening sites were each situated in multiple spatial contexts. New York’s Motion Picture Pavilion, for example, was part of a cluster of exhibits related to Social Economy, all arrayed within the themed environment of the Palace of Education and Social Economy, which was placed (safely) outside the exposition’s Joy Zone, as were all the palaces, which were, in turn, all situated within the PPIE as an encompassing space with a distinctive physical design, certain rules of operation, and governing assumptions concerning progress, nationalism, international trade, technology, efficiency, and uplift. Location is an important, historically specific, variable when it comes to how moving pictures were actually put to use at the PPIE and other world’s fairs. It is also equally relevant, I propose, for thinking about the role and significance of screening sites in conventions and large-scale shows in the 1910s—and, subsequently, in museums, shopping malls, and theme parks.

CONCLUSION

Useful cinema put into practice at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition was a prime example of what we can call event cinema, that is, the screening of moving pictures as part of a large, planned, organized, multi-faceted, short-term (or at least finite) public occasion. Beyond the significant scholarship on the presence of film at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, the world’s fairs in Chicago (1933) and New York (1939), and later international expositions,[177] the history of event cinema through the twentieth century remains to be written, particularly if we take into account instances like the 1915 Alabama Equal Suffrage Convention where Your Girl and Mine was screened, the 1914 Cement Show held in Omaha, Nebraska, that featured motion pictures promoting the PPIE, and the Methodist Centenary celebration in 1919, for which was erected what was billed as the “world’s largest motion picture screen.”[178] While the function and relative prominence of moving pictures could vary considerably from event to event in the 1910s, the inclusion of screenings at these gatherings—and definitely at the PPIE—was at the very least a tacit acknowledgement of the value and the feasibility of moving pictures put to practical ends, a demonstration of cinema made useful.

This is not to say that the PPIE was innovative in its use of moving pictures. Event cinema predated San Francisco’s international exposition, which shared less in this regard with other world’s fairs staged in the US than with the Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition (1905), the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (1909), and land shows, events at which railroads and government agencies invested in dedicated screening sites, relied on the illustrated lecture as a presentational format, put a premium on publicity, and embraced an ethos of enlightened boosterism. The sponsors utilizing moving pictures at the PPIE relied on a similar strategy, which changed little if at all over the ten months that the exposition remained open.

Yet judging from the extensive press coverage and positive publicity generated (largely thanks to the exposition’s Division of Exploitation)—as well as the sheer size of this event and the crowds it drew—multi-purpose, sponsored cinema in the US seemed to have crossed a threshold at the PPIE. Hundreds of thousands of feet of film screened in free, regularly scheduled, daily programs at fifty or seventy dedicated moving picture theaters erected within the exposition’s palaces and many of its other buildings strikingly testified to the viability, visibility, and the status of cinema put to utilitarian rather than commercial entertainment purposes. It was the number of screens and the utility of the screenings at this monumental, high-prestige public event that registered for commentators, not any remarkably innovative or technologically sophisticated use of the medium. With very few exceptions, the many non-theatrical theaters at the exposition were as mundane as they were ubiquitous. That these theaters and the films they showed rarely qualified as spectacular attractions reinforced the sense that “educational” moving pictures (particularly when screened as part of a lecture) belonged among the palaces and government-sponsored buildings rather than the amusement concessions at the PPIE.

It could well have seemed that in the theaters operated by transcontinental railroads and those housed in state buildings and national pavilions, non-commercial cinema had found its calling and demonstrated its value as an alternative to or expansion of the American commercial film industry. For these non-theatrical theaters, the prime use of multi-purpose moving pictures was as a means of recording and delivering non-fiction information that told of economic progress, civic responsibility, natural wonders, and ostensibly enduring values, with the aim of generating for sponsors positive publicity and, perhaps, investment and profit. But apart from the theaters funded and operated by states, nations, and railroads, moving pictures at the PPIE were put to other uses—for example, as a means of corporate self-presentation and public relations by the likes of AT&T, US Steel, Ford, and US Gypsum. And judging from the available evidence, the theaters in the Palace of Education and Social Economy welcomed lectures with moving pictures that were socially engaged, advocated for change, and espoused progressive values—though the goal was as likely to be race betterment as improved institutional care for the “insane,” all within the broader mandate of bettering the lives of individuals, disadvantaged populations, and society at large. Thus, while the much acclaimed omnipresence of moving pictures at the PPIE did unquestionably reflect the predominance of a relatively small range of powerful corporate and government sponsors, the exposition also provided evidence of other possibilities open to multi-purpose cinema in the 1910s and beyond, including various forms of civic, social, religious, or even explicitly political activism.

Moving pictures may have proven to be, in Frank Morton Todd’s phrase, “a device exactly adapted to exposition purposes.”[179] But even with all the publicity and high praise it received, the PPIE’s version of event cinema, which depended on particular exhibition and programming practices, did not somehow dictate or direct the future of cinema outside the movie theater. As we have seen, moving pictures remained adaptable for other purposes, at other sites, by other sponsors aiming to reach much smaller, more targeted audiences than the largely well-off fairgoers moving from exhibit to exhibit at the exposition or the crowds curious about the opportunities of the Northwest.

Afterword

Charting the history of theatrical cinema in any American locality likely begins with identifying theaters. Once the industry had stabilized in the early 1910s, movie theaters had names and addresses; they opened and closed, were refurbished and changed ownership, and likely advertised in newspapers. However much they may otherwise have varied, theaters were all businesses rely on screening movies to turn a profit. While moving pictures were an optional added attraction or supplemental tool for churches, social clubs, department stores, and asylums, if theaters stopped regularly exhibiting movies then they stopped being theaters.

Exploring the history of non-theatrical cinema, in contrast, begins with identifying and examining how, why, where, when, and by whom moving pictures were put to use in ways unlike regular theatrical exhibition. Searchable archives of digitized print material are an indispensable resource for tracking down this basic information by providing access to the range of documents I have relied on throughout this book: advertising material, records of court cases and legislation, government and institutional reports, and, most extensively, a wide spectrum of newspapers and periodicals.

Using these digital resources is easier said than done, given that the sponsors of and sites for using moving pictures non-theatrically were virtually unlimited, and non-theatrical was not in the 1910s an all-purpose or default descriptor for cinema beyond the movie theater. My process began with searching digital newspaper archives (like www.newspapers.com and Chronicling America from the Library of Congress) for a particular time period, using moving picture, film, and motion picture as general search terms. Sifting through the thousands of search results for moving picture in January 1915, for example, uncovered much relevant material, including a syndicated article by popular poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox on “The Value of Moving Pictures in Prison” and a brief notice about a “moving picture exhibition” on missionary activity presented by the Reverend Leslie Wolfe at the University Church of Christ in Des Moines, Iowa. The next step was following these leads, using a wider range of digital newspaper archives and other online sources, most notably the Media History Digital Library and the Hathi Trust Digital Library.[1] Additional searches indicated that this particular church had in fact presented moving pictures since 1912, when it offered From the Manger to the Cross, and in 1915 it would host a screening of films about Negro industrial education at the Hampton Institute, complete with a performance of the Hampton singers, the same program that would be featured at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.[2] Reverend Wolfe, it turns out, presented his illustrated lecture on missionary work in the Philippines, China, and Japan at “some fifteen churches” in Iowa as well as churches in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Indiana during 1914 and 1915, before returning to his mission in the Philippines.[3]

FIGURE A.1. Traveling movie palace, ca. 1925.

Wolfe’s presentation on missionary work to church audiences that were likely already familiar with such endeavors was a quite different version of non-theatrical cinema than the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Passenger Car Moving Picture Theatre open daily with free illustrated lectures during the ten-month run of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition or the St. Louis Park Commission’s summertime municipal movies or the screening of The Birth of a Nation for select audiences at the White House and New York City’s Grace Methodist Episcopal church. Non-theatrical practices in the 1910s were nothing if not remarkably diverse. The potential problem with accruing instances from the ground up is getting lost or stuck in the bottomland of a territory that is not fully discernible or bounded. Faced with the wide breadth, occasional regularities, and strange byways of cinema beyond the movie theater in the 1910s, my solution has not been to proceed year-by-year, to highlight stellar accomplishments, to analyze a series of representative films, or to subdivide this field according to genres—though chronologies, individual films, and certain genres all figure in this book. I have instead focused on four basic aspects or potentialities of non-theatrical cinema as it was deployed across the US and as it was discursively constructed in a varied array of print sources: this cinema was in some fashion sponsored, likely targeted at a particular audience, multi-purposable, and able to be screened in countless different sites. This way of conceptualizing what was in the 1910s a still inchoate yet strikingly variegated field offers a framework for examining the shifting priorities, fortunes, and articulations of non-theatrical cinema not only for the opening decades but through much of the twentieth century, as sponsors, sites, uses, and audiences changed over time and from place to place.

Each of the four aspects of non-theatrical cinema during the 1910s is best understood as a historically specific range of variables within certain parameters, and each prompts broader social and cultural considerations with import well beyond film studies. In other words, the ways that non-theatrical cinema was put into practice offers a valuable optic for viewing the United States in the 1910s. For example, the discourse concerning multi-purpose cinema and the range of uses to which moving pictures were put points toward a more general affirmation of utility and functionality (sometimes called utilitarianism) as prime values, particularly when it came to media and other technologies in the service of “social economy,” scientific research, ever-advancing modernization, and innovative pedagogy. At the same time, the widespread dispersion and even vaster imagined prospects for screening moving pictures across a range of sites point to the increasing presence—for good or ill—of media in everyday life, highlighting issues related, for example, to the control over and utilization of social and physical space. Examining the role and purview of sponsorship raises questions not just about uneven access to media tools, but also about agency, authority, and oversight—in effect, about power and how it was deployed by groups, organizations, and institutions. Sponsors most often aimed to reach, serve, and/or create particular audiences configured according to any number of criteria, including, but not limited to, age, class, occupation, sex, race, religion, and political affiliation. Like certain advertisers and magazine publishers, sponsors of non-theatrical exhibition saw opportunity not in the supposedly conglomerated, mass audience addressed by the movies but rather in the heterogeneity of twentieth-century America. This heterogeneity figured less as an end in itself than as an opportunity. What mattered for sponsors was that America’s diverse population was divisible into countless, distinctive, targeted audiences, large and small.

For the purposes of analysis and as a way to open up lines of inquiry, I have treated sponsors, uses, sites, and audiences in separate chapters, though any single non-theatrical screening, like the showing of moving pictures of the Azores in a San Leandro church hall, can be understood as a particular configuration of these features. So can, as my final chapter makes clear, large-scale, high-profile events like land shows and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which cast a bright, national spotlight on certain articulations of useful cinema and certain prominent sponsors. Moving across the San Francisco Bay from a one-night event in San Leandro to the daily operation of theaters inside the PPIE over ten months typifies my strategy throughout of considering non-theatrical cinema from a variety of perspectives and locations. Thus, I have looked for evidence of this other cinema in advertising campaigns for a corset manufacturer and a transcontinental railroad, in the marketing of projectors and the pages of Scientific American, in a Bakersfield church and the Ohio supreme court, in municipal movies and industrial “betterment” strategies, in screenings in the service of missionary activity and under the auspices of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

These varied examples can’t be incorporated into an overarching, explanatory narrative of the development and significance of non-theatrical cinema through the 1910s. But this decade did have certain distinguishing features: for example, the repeated (and largely unsuccessful) attempts to market portable projectors, the high visibility of event cinema, the prominence of the illustrated lecture as a presentational format, the commitment by certain US government agencies to deploy moving pictures, the discourse of universal access and unlimited utility, and the emergence of a non-theatrical trade press with Reel and Slide (1918). Many of these features would remain central into the 1920s. In 1919, Reel and Slide was folded into Moving Picture Age, which was absorbed by Educational Screen in 1925. A year later, the first issue of Amateur Movie Makers appeared, announcing the formation of the Amateur Cinema League. A new batch of manufacturers joined Victor and Pathé in marketing portable projectors, with the DeVry company boasting that it had sold twelve thousand of its portable 35mm machines by 1926.[4] Popular Mechanics reported in 1925 that “there is hardly a government department that does not make use of the motion picture for spreading progressive propaganda,”[5] often relying on illustrated lectures, which remained a flexible, familiar format throughout the 1920s, utilized in the service of public relations, advocacy, boosterism, instruction, fundraising, inspirational uplift, sales, and informative entertainment.[6]

Other developments in the 1920s highlight what looks to have been a distinct shift in priorities from the previous decade. Judging from the trade press and in keeping with the orientation of guidebooks like Showing Movies for Profit in School and Church (1919), churches constituted a decidedly more prominent sector of the non-theatrical market, surpassed only by classrooms as prime sites where moving pictures might be put to optimum use. More striking was the increasingly visible role—thanks to the trade press—of distributors in enabling, fostering, and constituting what increasingly was referred to as the “non-theatrical field.” The January 1922 issue of Moving Picture Age, for example, contains advertisements and other references to a number of film sources apart from the commercial exchanges operated by Hollywood studios: the USDA and the Bureau of Mines distributed films, as did various companies like the Reliable Educational Film Company, which specialized in supplying appropriate films to churches and schools. Other firms, notably Ford, advertised prints for sale, thereby encouraging a school to build its own “film library.”[7] Classified ads addressed film libraries and itinerant exhibitors alike by offering “for sale at all times for the non-theatrical field” what the Apollo Film Company of Newark, New Jersey, identified as “Scenic, Educational, Historical, Biblical features, clean and wholesome comedies, etc.”[8]

Even as the possibilities of non-theatrical distribution (and sales) in the 1920s attracted entrepreneurial, specialized companies, a counter move toward centralizing and systematizing—in a word, institutionalizing—the field was also underway, again offering a striking contrast with the previous decade. This process took various forms, notably including the increasing prominence after World War I of film rental libraries operated by the extension departments of large state universities. By 1922, the US Bureau of Education had approved forty-four “Qualifying State [film] Distribution Centers,” covering forty-two different states, paralleling the efforts of national organizations like the National Academy for Visual Instruction, founded in 1921, to bring academic leadership to the field.[9] At the same time, the commercial film industry took a greater interest in non-theatrical exhibition as potential competition (for exhibitors) and opportunity (for distributors). Supporting certain uses and sites for moving pictures beyond the theater became a go-to public relations strategy for Hollywood, marking a significant permutation in the relation between theatrical and non-theatrical cinema in the US.

Soon after being named head of the newly formed Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), Will Hays delivered a much-publicized speech at the 1922 convention of the National Education Association (NEA), touting the industry’s endorsement of “strictly educational and informative films in schools or religious films in churches” and calling for a joint NEA/MPPDA committee to study the demand for and supply of “pedagogic pictures.”[10] Without ever advocating anything that might be construed as competition to theaters, the MPPDA through the rest of 1920s strategically endorsed certain non-theatrical initiatives, including the development of instructional films by the American College of Surgeons and Eastman-Kodak’s ambitious 16mm pedagogical project, Eastman Classroom Films. When he addressed the Motion Picture Trade Conference held under the auspices of the Federal Trade Commission in 1927, Hays recounted the industry’s record of providing theatrically released films (for free or a nominal fee) to “literally hundreds of institutions for the aged, orphaned, imprisoned and the sick” across the US—in effect, bestowing on isolated, captive audiences what was presented as an invaluable, socially beneficial opportunity to join the movie’s mass public.

Hays noted as well one additional example of the MPPDA’s well-publicized generosity: arranging for “more than 750,000 feet of [well-worn] film” to be delivered with the assistance of the Navy to “leper colonies” maintained by the US government, notably at Culion Island in the Philippines.[11] This colonialist, paternalistic—and apparently much appreciated—gesture underscored the supposedly universal worth and global appeal of the movies, transportable far beyond American movie theaters. It exemplified the MPPDA’s strategic exploitation of non-theatrical possibilities for the purposes of public service and public relations. Given the focus of this book, the American motion picture industry’s “film gift” to a remote island in the Philippines opens up a new set of questions concerning the politics and practice of sponsored, useful, targeted, non-commercial cinema once it finds its way or is dispatched to sites outside the US.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. See, for example, Gregory A. Waller, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1895–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Kathleen Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); Jan Olsson, Los Angeles Before Hollywood: Journalism and American Film Culture, 1905 to 1915 (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2008); Michael Aronson, Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905–1929 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); William Paul, When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

2. By casting as broad a net as possible, I seek to counter what Martin Johnson calls “the tendency to flag all things nontheatrical into a single descriptor,” thereby underplaying the “ongoing, and complex, relationship” of the non-theatrical to “commercial cinema, civic institutions, and society” (introduction to the pamphlet, “Motion Pictures: A Problem to Be Co-operatively Solved,” Film History 29, no. 4 [2017]: 157).

3. I discuss this process in more detail in “Search and Re-search: Digital Print Archives and the History of Multi-sited Cinema,” The Arclight Guide to Media History and the Digital Humanities, ed. Eric Hoyt and Charles R. Acland (Brighton, UK: REFRAME Books 2016), 55–72.

4. Do the 1910s constitute a historical “period”? Perhaps, but I tend to agree with Siegfried Kracauer that “if a period is a unit at all, it is a diffuse, fluid, and essentially intangible unit” (History: The Last Things Before the Last [New York: Oxford University Press, 1969; rpt. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2014], 67). On the American motion picture industry, production trends, moviegoing practices, and film culture more generally during the 1910s, see, in addition to the research cited in note 1: Robert C. Allen, Vaudeville and Film, 1895–1915: A Study in Media Interaction (New York: Arno Press, 1980); David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (New York: Scribner, 1990); Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (New York: Scribner, 1990); Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); Stephen J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp, eds., Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and ‘Movie-Mad’ Audiences: 1910–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Rob King, The Fun Factory: The Keystone Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Charlie Keil and Ben Singer, eds., American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Mark Garrett Cooper, Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Jennifer M. Bean, Laura Horak, and Anupama Kapse, eds., Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Moya Luckett, Cinema and Community: Progressivism, Exhibition, and Film Culture in Chicago, 1907–1917 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014); Eric Hoyt, Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Richard Abel, Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913–1916 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Maggie Hennefeld, Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Much valuable research on the period has been delivered at and published in the proceedings of the biennial conferences of Domitor: International Society for the Study of Early Cinema (https://domitor.org).

5. See Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd ed., ed. Peter Burke (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 97–119. Siguròur Gylfil Magnússon and István M. Szijártó, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2013) surveys the field and discusses Kracauer briefly in the context of Italian versions of microhistory. Small Worlds: Method, Meaning, and Narrative in Microhistory, ed. James F. Brooks, Christopher R. N. DeCorse, and John Walton (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008) features essays reflecting the range of research that qualifies as microhistory.

6. Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 192.

7. Ibid., 106, 136.

8. Ibid., 56, 101, 43.

9. Ibid., 45.

10. Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory? My essay on the traveling exhibitor, Robert Southard, looks to me in retrospect as an example of microhistory that approaches the broader history of itinerant film exhibition from the archival record left by a single individual; see “Robert Southard and the History of Itinerant Film Exhibition,” Film Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2004): 2–14.

11. Kracauer, History, 120.

12. Ibid., 120.

13. Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, “Microhistory: In General,” Journal of Social History 49, no. 1 (2015): 237.

14. Introduction, Small Worlds, 10. Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?, 5, claim that microhistory “has an objective that is much more far-reaching than that of a case study: microhistorians always look for answers for ‘great historical questions’ . . . when studying small objects.”

15. Kracauer, History, 122.

16. Ibid., 42, 48, 35, 17.

17. Ibid., 120, 44, 121.

18. I have found no references to a local censorship board in Wilmington newspapers and there is no discussion of North Carolina in Laura Wittern-Keller’s Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008). Censorship in this city seems to have been left in the hands of the exhibitor. An ad for The Supreme Temptation (Wilmington [NC] Dispatch, April 22, 1916, 2) declares that the management of the Royal cancelled a screening of Souls in Bondage, “exercising their policy of personal censorship of pictures to be presented to their patrons.” See also an article on a “censorship” audience for a local production promoting the city (“Picture was Viewed,” Wilmington [NC] Dispatch, August 27, 1915, 5). One time the government did step in was in passing a racially motivated ordinance in 1910 that prohibited “motion pictures of prize fights, boxing and wrestling matches within the city limits or within a mile of the city limits” (Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, July 21, 1910, 5). A separate point raised by the history of Twilight Sleep is the wide variety across localities in terms of precisely who served as censor. In Raleigh, North Carolina, for instance, the “special committee” deciding on the fate of Twilight Sleep was comprised of the mayor, the superintendent of public schools, a professor, a representative of the “historical department,” and “several other prominent citizens” (“Twilight Sleep Films,” News and Observer [Raleigh NC], January 8, 1917, 6).

19. See the timeline of Wilmington’s theaters in the invaluable online resource, Going to the Show, which documents the theaters and other aspects of moviegoing in North Carolina during the silent era (http://gtts.oasis.unc.edu/learn/timeline.html). See also the description of Wilmington theaters in 1917 by Frank Richardson, columnist and projection expert for the Moving Picture World (“Richardson Received with Enthusiasm,” Moving Picture World 31, no. 13 [March 31, 1917]: 2079–80). For background on Wilmington in this period, particularly in terms of the insurrection of 1898, which had seen the elected biracial government overthrown by white supremacists in a campaign of terror and violence that set out to destroy the established Black community, see, for example, Margaret M. Mulrooney, Race, Place, and Memory: Deep Currents in Wilmington, North Carolina (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018), 111–73.

20. The Howard-Wells Amusement Company also owned and operated all five of the white-only theaters in Wilmington. Each of this company’s venues relied on a different programming strategy, and the Grand looks to have been the city’s prestige theater, apart from the multi-purpose Academy of Music, which brought in touring theater companies. In December 1917, the Howard-Wells company added a truck equipped with a portable motion picture outfit with the aim of exhibiting movies once a week to a circuit of six small towns in a nearby county (“Portable Movies,” Wilmington [NC] Dispatch, December 18, 1917, 5).

21. Ad for Arrival of Engineer Troops in Wilmington Last Tuesday, “produced in Wilmington by the Carolina Film Producing Company,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, April 2, 1917, 3; ad for local film, “Baby Parade,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, May 3, 1917, 7; ad for Wilmington on the Screen, a “production of home talent,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, May 13, 1917, 16; ad for The Battle of the Somme, Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, November 7, 1917, 8.

22. Marguerite Tracy and Constance Leupp, “Painless Childbirth,” McClure’s Magazine 43, no. 2 (June 1914): 31. Leupp coauthored an equally detailed follow-up article: Constance Leupp and Burton J. Hendrick, “Twilight Sleep in America,” McClure’s Magazine 44, no. 6 (April 1915): 25–37, 162–80. The contemporary coverage and commentary on Twilight Sleep is vast—well beyond many articles in specialized medical journals. See, for example, A. Smith, Twilight Sleep in America: The truth about painless childbirth (New York: Victor Publishing, 1916); and Marguerite Tracy and Mary Boyd, Painless Childbirth: A General Survey of All Painless Methods with Special Stress on ‘Twilight Sleep’ and Its Extension to America (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1915).

23. Ad for Twilight Sleep, Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, November 21, 1917, 7. Similar claims appear in most advertising for the film across the US.

24. These terms appear in “Advantages of Twilight Sleep Shown in Films,” Motion Picture News 11, no. 23 (June 12, 1915): 73. See, in particular, the summary of the film listed in the ad for Liberty Theatre, Salt Lake [UT] Telegram, June 8, 1916, 9. It is worth noting that an account of one of the first screenings—in Norwich, Connecticut—mentioned footage of “the only negro baby whose mother had taken the twilight sleep method,” likely to underscore the broad value of the procedure beyond the women leading the movement for twilight sleep (“American Women are Hypersensitive,” Norwich [CN] Bulletin, May 11, 1915, 7).

One of the promotional items for Twilight Sleep offers a shot-by-shot description of the film up through the successful birth, but also promises that “these scenes are followed by three-score of other extraordinary views of interest to women—things that women hear about but seldom see. This is the age of enlightenment. Seeing is believing and you owe it to yourself, your daughters and your sons to see—and understand.” The item includes no other information about this additional footage (“What you will see in Twilight Sleep Pictures,” Star-Gazette [Elmira NY], June 17, 1916, 4).

25. Review of Twilight Sleep, Billboard, November 6, 1915, 61.

26. Review of The Twilight Sleep, Variety 39, no. 13 (August 27, 1915): 20. A later review in Variety dismissed the film simply as “bunk” designed to attract the “morbidly curious” (Review of Twilight Sleep, Variety 40, no. 10 [November 5, 1915]: 23).

27. “Famous Twilight Sleep Coming,” Wilmington [NC] Dispatch, November 18, 1917, 10. The same promotional preview appears in, for example, the Montgomery [AL] Advertiser, February 28, 1917, 6; Arkansas [Little Rock AR] Democrat, May 17, 1917, 8; and Pine Bluff [AR] Daily Graphic, May 23, 1917, 10. “Advantages of Twilight Sleep Shown in Films,” Motion Picture News 11, no. 23 (June 12, 1915): 73, notes that the film was shot in a Brooklyn hospital.

28. Bethany Johnson and Margaret M. Quinlan, “Technical Versus Public Spheres: A Feminist Analysis of Women’s Rhetoric in the Twilight Sleep Debates of 1914–1916,” Health Communication 30, no. 11 (2015): 1078.

29. See Margarete Sandelowski, Pain, Pleasure, and American Childbirth: From the Twilight Sleep to the Read Method, 1914–1960 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 3–26; Judith Walzer Leavitt, “Birthing and Anesthesia: The Debate over Twilight Sleep,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6 (Autumn 1980): 147–67; Laurence G. Miller, “Pain, Parturition, and the Profession: Twilight Sleep in America,” in Health Care in America: Essays in Social History, ed. Susan Reverby and David Rosner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 19–44; Amy H. Hairston, “The Debate over Twilight Sleep,” Journal of Women’s Health 5, no. 5. (1996): 489–99; and Jacqueline H. Wolf, Deliver Me from Pain: Anesthesia and Birth in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). On the rhetoric used in this controversy, see Johnson and Quinlan, “Technical Versus Public Spheres”; and Bethany Johnson and Margaret M. Quinlan, “High-Society Framing: The Brooklyn Eagle and the Popularity of Twilight Sleep in Brooklyn,” Health Communication 32, no. 1 (2017): 60–71.

30. Wolf, Deliver Me from Pain, 47.

31. Ibid., 69.

32. “Ready to Campaign for Twilight Sleep,” Brooklyn [NY] Daily Eagle, February 8, 1915, 2; ad for lecture at West End Theatre, Morning Herald [Uniontown PA], February 24, 1915, 4.

33. Miller, “Pain, Parturition, and the Profession,” 31–32; Leavitt, “Birthing and Anesthesia,” 154. Note that episode 2 of the serial, The Exploits of Elaine (1915), was entitled The Twilight Sleep. In this episode, the master criminal steals the drugs used for twilight sleep and administers them for his own nefarious ends. Note also that Mutual Weekly no. 97 (released on November 19, 1914) includes footage of “A Bunch of ‘Twilight Sleep’ Babies Born at the Massachusetts Homeopathic Hospital in Boston” (ad for Mutual Weekly, Reel Life 5, no. 8 [November 7, 1914]: 21).

34. “Twilight Sleep Method Illustrated by Films,” Evening Star [Washington DC], March 22, 1915, 16.

35. See, for example, “Jurist Scores Movie Censor,” San Francisco Examiner, June 15, 1916, 8; “Tower and Dahnken Fight Censorship Methods of Sacramento, California—Battle Started over ‘Twilight Sleep,’ ” Motion Picture News 14, no. 10 (September 9, 1916): 1553; “ ‘Twilight Sleep’ Rejected by Nashville Census [sic] Board,” Motion Picture News 14, no. 11 (September 16, 1916): 1711; “Police Decline to Allow Twilight Sleep Pictures,” Times Dispatch [Richmond VA], July 18 1917, 10. In Sacramento, California, police stopped the screening when the theater owner tried to show the film in defiance of local censors (“Sacramento Censors Win Fight,” Moving Picture World [September 23, 1916]: 2011). The film that played in Wilmington and other North Carolina cities was barred in Durham, North Carolina, by a committee composed of the police commissioner, an alderman, and two women (one the wife of the president of Trinity College) (“ ‘Twilight Sleep’ Barred,” Greensboro [NC] Daily News, January 13, 1917, 5). A much different sort of private screening of Twilight Sleep was arranged at English’s Theater in Indianapolis for members of the American Association of Obstetricians, who were then attending their annual meeting in the city (“Twilight Sleep Speaker Will Talk Here This Week,” Indianapolis [IN] Star, September 24, 1916, 45).

36. “Doctors Wanted ‘Twilight Sleep’ Film Barred,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 5 (July 31, 1915): 859.

37. Ad for Belasco, Washington Post, March 19, 1915, 4; ad for the Nelson Theatre, Logansport [IN] Pharos-Reporter, April 21, 1915, 4.

38. Motherhood Educational Society advertisements, Moving Picture World 24, no. 11 (June 12, 1915): 1845; Moving Picture World 25, no. 6 (August 7, 1915): 1071; Motion Picture News 11, no. 23 (June 12, 1915): 106.

39. Maureen Rogers, “ ‘Territory Going Fast!’ State Rights Distribution and the Early Multi-reel Feature Film,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 37, no. 4 (2017): 600–601.

40. “ ‘Twilight Sleep’ Bankrupt,” New York Times, November 24, 1915, 13.

41. Ad for Bes-Mar Theater, Austin [TX] American-Statesman, July 2, 1915, 10; ad for Queen Theater, Waco [TX] Morning News, July 3, 1915, 3; ad for Phillips Egypt Theater, Fort Worth [TX] Star-Telegram, July 9, 1915, 7. Publicity material credited the Motherhood Educational Society with arranging for and “preparing” Twilight Sleep, including contracting with Kirk E. Schlossingk to oversee the actual filming at a Brooklyn hospital (“German Physician Explains Mystery of Twilight Sleep,” Austin [TX] American-Statesman, July 6, 1915, 15).

Among the many subsequent screenings, see, for example, “Twilight Sleep Pictures Coming,” Wisconsin State Journal [Madison WI], April 2, 1916, 16; ad for Strand Theatre, Journal Times [Racine WI], April 21, 1916, 12; ad for Burtis Theatre, Quad City Times [Davenport IA], June 2, 1916, 3; ad for Liberty Theatre, Salt Lake [UT] Telegram, June 8, 1916, 9; “Movies to Show Twilight Sleep,” Oakland [CA] Tribune, August 12, 1916, 3.

42. See ad for American Theatre, Chariton Courier [Keytesville MO], October 28, 1921, 5.

43. “Charters Filed in State Capital,” Morning News [Wilmington DE], April 13, 1916, 3. This notice indicated that the incorporators were William O. Kefe, George G. Steigler, and E. E. Wright, all of Wilmington, Delaware. The Modern Motherhood League was also listed as being incorporated in April 1916 in Maine “with a capital of $100,000 in shares of $30 each. Directors: R. S. Buzzell, President; L. J. Coleman, Treasurer, and C. L. Andrews, Clerk, all of Augusta, Me,” (Standard Corporation Service 7 [April–June 1916]: 271).

The copyright for Twilight Sleep (with Carl Gauss and Paul Kronig listed as authors) was registered by Ben Ross on February 12, 1916, with thirty-seven prints of the film registered on March 22, 1916 (Catalogue of Copyright Entries, Motion Pictures, 1912–1939 [Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1951], 888). Ross was not identified in descriptions of either of the distribution companies for Twilight Sleep, though he would subsequently be involved in various capacities with the film distribution business, for example, by acquiring the Kansas and Missouri state rights for distribution for It Could Be Your Daughter (1916), produced by the “Moral Uplift Society of America” (“Rights on ‘It May Be Your Daughter,’ ” Motography 16, no. 22 [November 16, 1916]: 1180).

44. “New Series of Twilight Sleep Pictures Ready,” Motion Picture News 13, no. 16 (April 22, 1916): 2357. Modern Motherhood League ads, Motion Picture News 13, no. 16 (April 22, 1916): 2304–5; Moving Picture World 28, no. 5 (April 29, 1916): 771; Moving Picture World 29, no. 8 (August 19, 1916): 1297. These ads often boast of extraordinary box-office returns when Twilight Sleep played in cities like Minneapolis, Louisville, and Madison. The “new” version of Twilight Sleep could possibly have included instructional material such as was described in a screening of the film in September 1916, as footage “demonstrating proper and improper maternity clothes, and the proper way to bathe and dress small babies” (“Twilight Sleep,” Fort Wayne [IN] Daily News, September 8, 1916, 4).

45. “Wilmington News Letter,” Moving Picture World 35, no. 2 (January 12, 1918): 259. See also “Guy West Booking ‘Twilight Sleep,’ ” Moving Picture World 35, no. 8 (February 23, 1918): 1126.

46. See, for example, “At the Teck,” Buffalo [NY] Morning Express, April 30, 1916, 50; “Nurses Have Their ‘Handsfull’ While Mothers Hear ‘Twilight Sleep Lecture,” Salt Lake Telegram, June 14, 1916, 10; “Twilight Sleep,” The Republic [Columbus IN], October 3, 1916, 5; “Men in Near-Riot at ‘Twilight Sleep’ Films,” Detroit [MI] Free Press, July 30, 1916, 9. When Twilight Sleep was booked at the Auditorium in Spokane, Washington, the management assured the patrons that during the women-only screenings local women would serve as employees, and “there will be women stage hands, women ushers and a woman to check wraps and umbrellas” (Spokesman-Review [Spokane WA], May 21, 1916, 39).

47. “Men Fight for Tickets to See Twilight Sleep,” News and Observer [Raleigh NC], January 10, 1917, 3.

48. Before the US entered the war the German origins of the procedure were much more likely to be highlighted in promotional material. For a screening in May 1916 at the Garrick theater in St. Louis, for example, the program was identified as featuring “original German films . . . brought from Berlin” and accompanied by a German lecturer (“Southern Theater News,” Motography 15, no. 22 [May 27, 1916]: 1233).

49. See, for example, “ ‘Twilight Sleep’ Rejected by Nashville Census [sic] Board,” Motion Picture News 14, no. 11 (September 16, 1916): 1711.

50. “Urges Twilight Sleep at Doctors’ Conference,” Herald Statesman [Yonkers NY], September 19, 1914, 5.

51. “Twilight Sleep Method Illustrated by Films,” Evening Star [Washington DC], March 22, 1915, 16. On the National Press Club lecture, see “ ‘Twilight Sleep’ to be Shown in Movies,” Washington Herald, March 20, 1915, 6; syndicated photo identifying Schlossingk as “Twilight Sleep Authority,” Morning Herald [Durham NC], March 27, 1915, 1; “ ‘Twilight Sleep Movie to Be Shown Here,” Star Tribune [Minneapolis MN], January 16, 1916, 35.

52. Ad for Teck Theater, Buffalo [NY] Times, April 30, 1916, 43.

53. “Don’t Frighten Young Wives,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 12, 1916, 14.

54. See ad for Columbia Theater Sunday Star [Muncie IN], November 19, 1916, 4. In his presentations, Schlossingk would respond to questions supposedly submitted by the audience before the screening (“Defends Twilight Method,” Evening Star [Washington DC], March 24, 1915, 20).

55. Ad for Are You Fit to Marry?, Ogden [UT] Standard, September 1, 1919, 4. See also ad for Are You Fit to Marry? at the Schubert-Belasco Theater, Washington Times, June 6, 1920, 18.

56. Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True”: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1950 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 125–26, points in particular to the role of the lecturer with Twilight Sleep.

57. For example, the Royal Theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which screened motion pictures continuously from 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., included Twilight Sleep along with a Western, a feature film, cartoon, newsreel, and a comedy (ad for Royal Theater, Morning Tulsa [OK] Daily World, May 5, 1920, 13).

58. See earlier ads for Bettis’s traveling shows, The Times [Munster IN], June 13, 1921, 6. “A Twilight Sleep birth” is advertised as part of Bettis’s program; see ad for Belvedere, Pomona [CA] Progress Bulletin, February 24, 1932, 9. One possible explanation for the subsequent uses of Twilight Sleep footage is that prints became available on the used-film market. A classified ad offering a three-reel print of Twilight Sleep for sale from the Queen City Feature Film Company, based in Cincinnati, appeared in Moving Picture World 40, no. 1 (April 5, 1919): 131.

59. Ad for the Bijou, Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, December 5, 1917, 3. A hand-colored two-reel “educational” film on the silk industry produced by the silk manufacturing firm, Belding Bros. & Company, was presented at the Royal Theatre as part of the program on April 6, 1915 (“Belding Bros.’ Exhibit,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, April 6, 1917, 7).

60. “Free Movies Today an Hour at Bijou,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, September 19, 1917, 5; “Much Interest Was Taken in Meeting in Wilmington,” Hickory [NC] Daily Record, October 16, 1917, 4.

61. “Physicians to Meet in Wilmington Today,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, January 3, 1917, 5; “Medical Society Meets Tomorrow,” Wilmington [NC] Dispatch, January 2, 1917, 6.

62. “Doctors to See War Reels,” The Times [Munster IN], November 22, 1916, 1; “Southwest Medicos Will Meet in El Paso; Movie Program Set,” El Paso [TX] Herald, December 5, 1916, 5.

63. “Red Cross Movies,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, November 6, 1917, 5.

64. See Lumina ad, Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, July 15, 1917, 10.

65. “Collie Puts in Prison Reform,” Wilmington [NC] Dispatch, November 12, 1917, 6. A follow-up note on this screening indicates that the governor and his wife were guests at the first prison screening, which was “seen by about 75 blacks and 50 whites” (Wilmington [NC] Dispatch, November 18, 1917, 9). On the extension service, see “University of N. Carolina to Handle Picture Films,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, July 14, 1917, 4; “Educational Film Service,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, November 2, 1917, 8.

66. “Health Movies in Lee,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, May 9, 1917, 10. See also, for example, S. R. Winters, “The Picture of Health,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, March 11, 1917, 3, 7; “Health ‘Movies’ in Demand,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, March 20, 1917, 4. For a description of this service, see Health Bulletin [North Carolina State Board of Health] 31, no. 2 (May 1916): cover, 20–23.

67. “Lecture on European Roads,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, March 26, 1915, 5.

68. See, for example, “Great Work by the Army Y.W.C.A. Ably Presented,” Wilmington [NC] Dispatch, November 20, 1915, 5; ad for “Two Recitals,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, December 1, 1917, 10.

69. “Community Betterment Films to be Shown in Wilmington,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, March 6, 1917, 6; “Feature Moving Pictures for Merchants and Clerks,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, March 25, 1917, 5.

70. “To Show Scenes at Verdun,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, January 14, 1917, 5; “How the Frenchmen Regard Field Ambulance Service,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, January 19, 1917, 5; “All Arrangements Made for Showing War Films,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, January 21, 1917, 5; “Ambulance Corps Pictures Have Aroused Enthusiasm,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, January 22, 1917, 6; ad for Ambulance Films, Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, January 23, 1917, 5; “Notable War Films Have Arrived in Wilmington,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, January 28, 1917, 8; “Pictures of Ambulance Corps Today and Tomorrow,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, January 31, 1917, 6; “Crowd Pleased with Pictures,” Wilmington [NC] Dispatch, February 1, 1917, 5. For a description of this film, which was distributed by Triangle Films, see “Review of Our American Boys in the European War,” Moving Picture World 29, no. 4 (July 22, 1916): 648.

71. Though my focus is on the United States, I am indebted to the significant body of scholarship on the circulation and varied uses of film in other national contexts, including research under the banner of the New Cinema History, particularly the essays in Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers, eds., Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers, eds., Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History (Abington, UK: Routledge, 2012); and Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, Philippe Meers, eds., Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (New York: Routledge, 2019).

72. “M.P. Statistics of the Cities,” Nickelodeon 4, no. 12 (December 15, 1910): 337.

73. See Andrew Shail, “The Motion Picture Story Magazine and the Origins of Popular British Film Culture,” Film History 20, no. 2 (2008): 181–97; and Anthony Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 11–27. Motion Picture Story Magazine’s ad in Judicious Advertising 10, no. 8 (July 1912): 11, boasted that it “goes to 290,000 homes a month.”

74. “Musings of Photoplay Philosopher,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 6, no. 9 (October 1913): 106.

75. Harvey Peake, “The People’s Playhouse,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 4, no. 1 (August 1912): 31.

76. Lilla B. N. Weston, “The Song of a Hungry Soul,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 4, no. 11 (November 1912): 99.

77. Richard Wright, “The Call of the ‘Movies,’ ” Motion Picture Story Magazine 5, no. 3 (April 1912): 62.

78. George B. Staff, “Their Audience,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 5, no. 4 (May 1912): 89.

79. Herbert A. Jump, “The Religious Possibilities of the Motion Picture,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 2, no. 7 (August 1911): 93–94. See also H. F. Evers, “The Motion Picture as a Crusader,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 2, no. 11 (December 1911): 85–86. Jump’s essay had first appeared as a privately printed pamphlet in 1910, which is reprinted in Terry Lindvall, The Silents of God: Selected Issues and Documents in Silent American Film and Religion, 1908–1925 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001).

80. See John S. Gray, “Moving Pictures as an Educational Force,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 1, no. 5 (June 1911): 95–96; “Pictures for Uncle Sam,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 2, no. 7 (August 1911): 79; “The Onward March,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 3, no. 3 (April 1912): 141–42; Albert Marple, “For Public Safety,” Motion Picture Magazine 8, no. 7 (August 1914): 93–95; Geraldine Ames, “Saving Immigrant Girls with ‘Movies,’ ” Motion Picture Story Magazine 8, no. 11 (December 1914): 88–94; Jacob Fasnacht, “ ‘Movies’ in the Navy,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 9, no. 4 (May 1915): 81–84.

81. J. A. Chapman, “They Aren’t All on Broadway,” Motion Picture Magazine 19, no. 6 (July 1920): 76–77, 113.

82. Here I differ significantly from a more common argument that the changes since the late twentieth century in “platforms” and new types of screens have reconstituted cinema as multi-sited. Phillipe Gauthier, for instance, argues that “the proliferation of sites” are “a product for the most part of the arrival of new technologies (new media),” “The Movie Theater as an Institutional Space and Framework of Significance: Hale’s Tours and Film Historiography,” Film History 21, no. 4 (2009): 332.

83. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner 1990), 109–32. I consider the wide range of exhibition sites during the silent era in one small city in Main Street Amusements. In Europe there was a much more fully developed system of itinerant exhibition that set up outside of permanent theaters in “festivals, markets and fairs,” but, according to Joseph Garncarz, these shows usually relied on “solid buildings made of wood, which could accommodate up to 700 patrons” (“Perceptual Environments for Films: The Development of Cinema in Germany, 1895–1914,” in Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, ed. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier [New Barnet, UK: John Libbey, 2009], 141).

84. On the first page of his never-completed chronicle of the production and distribution (rather than the exhibition) of non-theatrical motion pictures, which ran for fifty-eight installments in Educational Screen (September 1938–June 1944), Arthur Edwin Krows acknowledges the “subordination of non-theatrical films to the theatrical sort,” though, as he puts it: “in the beginning . . . there were just motion pictures. There weren’t church, school or industrial pictures” (“Motion Pictures—Not for Theaters,” Educational Screen 17, no. 7 [September 1938]: 211).

85. “Moving Pictures in the Parlor,” The Show World 1, no. 4 (July 20, 1907): 16, claims that there are “5,000 moving picture theaters in successful operation throughout the country and that number is increasing the rate of fifty a day.” Moving Picture World had from its first issue in 1907 covered all aspects of the film exhibition business, ran advertisements for and articles about projectors and other theater equipment, editorialized about public issues concerning motion pictures, and mentioned individual theaters, but it was not until the June 2, 1908, issue that it regularly began to list the plans for and note the openings and closings of theaters in a column sometimes called “Trade Notes” or “Notes of the Trade” and, later, “Among the Exhibitors.” More extended profiles of individual theaters, complete with photographs, began to appear by the end of 1910 (see “Farragut Hall, A Popular Brooklyn Theatre,” Moving Picture World 7, no. 23 [December 10, 1910]: 1364). The Nickelodeon from its introduction in 1909 had profiled individual theaters, as in Charles F. Morris’s article on the Swanson Theatre in Chicago (“A Beautiful Picture Theater,” Nickelodeon 1, no. 3 [March 1909]: 65–67). The comparable column in Motion Picture News was called “Directory of New Theatres” (see, for example, Motion Picture News 10, no. 14 [October 10, 1914]: 33).

86. An editorial by W. Stephen Bush locates one significant proof of the progress of the motion picture industry in the fact that “the building of modern theaters specially devoted to motion pictures has become a distinct branch of architecture . . . all indications point to solidity and permanency” (“New Theatres—New Exhibitors,” Moving Picture World 22, no. 8 [November 21, 1914]: 1049).

87. “Jury Decides Tent Is Not a Building,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 7, 1913, 28.

88. The Coxton Amusement Company took over operation of this venue in the Harlan Coal Company’s town near Harlan, Kentucky, in 1915 (“Takes Over Company’s Theater,” Moving Picture World 22, no. 10 [November 27, 1915]: 1696). On the screenings offered by the Low Moor Iron Company in Low Moor, Virginia, in a house that “was previously used as a school” and turned into “quite a motion picture theater,” see “Picture Shows Help Iron Company,” Moving Picture World 26, no. 8 (November 20, 1915): 1519. From 1915 alone, Moving Picture World noted theaters operated by the following companies: Walton [KY] Coal Company (Moving Picture World 24, no. 1 [April 3, 1915]: 93; Honaker [VA] Lumber Company, Moving Picture World 24, no. 9 [May 29 1915]: 1462; Dayton [PA] Lumber Company, Moving Picture World 25, no. 6 [August 7, 1915]: 1040; United Zinc and Mining Company in Mohawk, Tennessee, Moving Picture World 25, no. 9 (August 28, 1915): 1524; Loyal Hanna Coal & Coke Company in Cainbrook, Pennsylvania, Moving Picture World 26, no. 11 (December 4, 1915): 1867.

89. “The Moving Picture and Its Possibilities,” Street Railway Journal 31, no. 9 (February 29, 1908): 325. See, in particular, Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998) and Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). I discuss the use of moving picture exhibition at Blue Grass Park, operated by the street railway company in Lexington, Kentucky, in Main Street Amusements.

90. David S. Hulfish, Cyclopedia of Motion-Picture Work (Chicago: American Technical Society, 1914), 165–212.

91. Cited by Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 6. The same number appears in Robert Grau, The Theatre of Science: A Volume of Progress and Achievement in the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Broadway Publishing Company, 1914), 116, where it is attributed to the former president of the General Film Company.

92. “The Exhibitors’ Times in Its New Home: A Restatement of Policy and Personnel,” Exhibitors’ Times 1, no. 12 (August 9, 1913): 2.

93. “The Model 2 Victor Animatograph,” Motion Picture News 16, no. 21 (November 24, 1917): 3685. The earliest reference I have found to non-theatrical cinema is in an April 1915 report from the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis announcing the coming release of a new four-reel film produced in cooperation with the Universal Film Company, which “will be shown in all of the theatres controlled by the Universal Film Company, which aggregate about half of those in the country. It will also be available for use of State departments of health, anti-tuberculosis associations and other groups, particularly for non-theatrical exhibitions.” National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, Report of the Executive Office for the Year Ending April 30, 1915 (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1915), 31. Clearly, this report assumes a reader already familiar with the term.

94. As Ross Melnick explains, because the motion picture industry would come to classify as non-theatrical any type of film exhibition that did not take place in a recognized movie theater (regardless of the film screened or the venue), the massive distribution and exhibition system run by the US Army’s Pictorial Service from the 1930s onward could be deemed non-theatrical, even though admission was charged and certain buildings were designed as and designated as theaters, which screened Hollywood product on Army bases around the world. See “An Army of Theaters: Military, Technological, and Industrial Change in US Army Motion-Picture Exhibition,” in Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, ed. Haidee Wasson and Lee Grieveson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 75–92.

95. See, for example, Marjorie Daw, “Churches and Colleges Now to Use Films,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 2, 1919, 12; “Plays in the Making,” Harrisburg [PA] Telegraph, August 30, 1919, 16.

96. Ad for Education Film Magazine, Educational Film Magazine 1, no. 5 (May 1919), 1; 1001 Films: A Reference Book for Non-theatrical Film Users (Chicago: Moving Picture Age, 1920), 146.

97. See, for example, L. E. Davidson, “Building a Non-theatrical Film Library,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 12 (1921): 139–43; Harold A Larrabee, “The Formation of Public Opinion Through Motion Pictures,” Religious Education 15, no. 3 (June 1920): 144–54; “Getting More Good Films,” County Agent and Farm Bureau 10, no. 9 (September 1922): 20; Walter F. Eberhardt, “What Happened to the Lions?” American Motorist 12, no. 9 (September 1920): 7–9, 50.

98. “Pa. Non-theatrical Film Code Agreed On,” Variety 56, no. 6 (March 31, 1922): 44.

99. “Our Third Birthday,” Educational Screen 4, no. 1 (January 1925): 5. See, for example, in Educational Screen 4, no. 4 (April 1925): “The Movie Industry Speaks for Itself” (197); “Theatrical Film Reviews for April” (229); “Film Council Recommendations for April”(233–34); “Theatrical Productions Desirable for the Non-theatrical Screen” (244–46); “School Film Reviews for April” (197, 256–58).

100. “Milwaukee Owners Open War on Non-theatricals,” Exhibitors Herald 21, no. 9 (May 23, 1925): 45. This was hardly a new refrain. In 1915 the newly elected president of the Motion Picture Exhibitors’ League of America declared, after traveling around the country, that more than censorship, the “evils” facing exhibitors were “the showing of motion pictures in cafes and saloons” and “motion pictures in department stores” (Moving Picture World 25, no. 10 [September 4, 1915]: 1676).

101. Harvard Business Reports 8, compiled by and published for the Graduate School of Business Administration (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1930), reference to Universal (341); reference to Pathé (364).

102. In its most reductive form, this binary opposes theatrical cinema, which offers fictional feature films aimed at providing entertainment and turning a profit, to non-theatrical cinema, which relies on non-fiction films not of feature length aimed at providing education rather than generating profit. According to the structural logic of this binary, whatever type of cinema is to be found outside of the fixed site movie theater exists in a kind of negative space, defined largely by what it lacks or what it abjures and therefore by its distance from the much more prominent and dominant practices of the commercial film industry. This opposition is easily troubled by counter-evidence. Well before the advent of home video, feature films could be available for screening outside of theaters; “used” film originally exhibited in theaters could remain in circulation, becoming available for deployment in a variety of sites; movie theaters could serve as multi-use venues, hosting a range of events and gatherings; partly instructional or advertising moving pictures could be screened in theaters, even incorporated into standard programming formats.

103. Considerable variation from theater to theater in day-to-day operation was still possible—in booking musicians and other performers, for example, and in allowing the venue to be used for other purposes. Yet whatever else the movie theater might offer—talent shows, benefits, political rallies, illustrated lectures, advertising campaigns—it remained a site whose raison d’être was showing movies, whereas those social halls, YMCAs, churches, and schools that had actually installed projectors only on certain well-designated occasions became spaces for non-theatrical cinema. And this distinction between theatrical and non-theatrical sites was even more pronounced when it came to locations that occasionally relied on a portable projector and a makeshift screen.

Studies that emphasize the variation to be found in local exhibition practices during the 1910s, include, for example: the essays collected in Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley, ed., Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Waller, Main Street Amusements; Luckett, Cinema and Community; Fuller, At the Picture Show; Stewart, Migrating to the Movies; Aronson, Nickelodeon City; Olsson, Los Angeles Before Hollywood; Ben Singer, “Feature Films, Variety Programs, and the Crisis of the Small Exhibitor,” in American Cinema’s Transitional Era, 76–100; J. A. Lindstrom, “Where Development Has Just Begun: Nickelodeon Location, Moving Picture Audiences, and Neighborhood Development in Chicago,” in American Cinema’s Transitional Era, 217–38; Jeffrey Klenotic, “Space, Place, and the Female Film Exhibitor,” in Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place, ed. Julia Hallam and Les Roberts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 52–53.

104. Lee Grieveson in Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System (Berkeley: University of California, 2018) offers by far the most carefully argued case for considering non-theatrical cinema during the first half of the twentieth century—indeed, all cinema in the United States and England during this period—as being the direct product of and vehicle for “powerful and economic institutions . . . part of an expansive liberal praxis, driven by political and economic elites” (2). As compelling as this explanation is for thinking about media during World War I and the motion picture programs of the Ford Motor Company, I think it fails to take into account (or undervalues) the varied practices, sites, and sponsors of multi-sited cinema in the US.

105. See Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds., Useful Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, eds., Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, eds., Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009); Bo Florin, Nico de Klerk, and Patrick Vonderau, eds., Films that Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising (London: BFI, 2016); Marta Braun, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier, eds., Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2012).

106. See, for example, Anthony Slide, Before Video: A History of the Non-theatrical Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992).

1. SPONSORS AND SPONSORSHIP

1. Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). See the discussion of “advertising control of programming” in Cynthia B. Meyer, “The Problems with Sponsorship in US Broadcasting in 1930s–1950s: Perspectives from the Advertising Industry,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 31, no. 3 (September 2011): 355–72. In A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising and the Golden Age of Radio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), Meyer emphasizes the role of advertising agencies as crucial in the history of this version of sponsorship.

2. The approach to sponsorship I am proposing differs significantly from the criteria that informs Daniel J. Perkins, “The Sponsored Film: A New Dimension in American Film Research?,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 2, no. 2 (1982): 133–40, and Rick Prelinger’s invaluable Field Guide to Sponsored Cinema (San Francisco: National Film Preservation Foundation, 2006). Sponsored films, for Prelinger, are titles that (1) were produced with “direct institutional support, generally through funding” and (2) present “information from a particular corporate or institutional perspective” (Field Guide to Sponsored Film, vi). A broader view of sponsorship that takes into account a sponsor’s relative degree of involvement and control over distribution and/or (particularly) exhibition as well as production is, I argue, particularly appropriate for the history of American cinema during the 1910s. For a notably well-documented account of sponsorship in this decade, see Frederick S. Harrad’s study of the US Navy’s varied uses of motion pictures before World War I for the purposes of recruitment, training, and public relations (“War, Media, Politics, Violence: Managing the Medium: The Navy and Motion Pictures before World War I,” Velvet Light Trap 31 [Spring 1993]: 48–58). For an excellent study of sponsored cinema well after the 1910s, see Kit Hughes, “Developing the Student-Citizen of Finance: Sponsored Film at The New York Stock Exchange, 1947–1973,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 40, no. 2 (2020): 325–48.

3. “Azores Views Shown,” Oakland [CA] Tribune, January 1, 1915, 4.

4. See Joseph Eugene Baker, Past and Present of Alameda County, California (1914), 2:157–58. Ad for the North American Hospital Association of Oakland’s membership drive, Oakland [CA] Tribune, October 29, 1914, 18.

5. “Portuguese Union to Hold Big Meeting,” Oakland [CA] Tribune, July 29, 1905, 17. Six months after Cavriera’s screening, San Leander parish announced plans to purchase a projector, which would be used to offer a “moving picture show” on Sunday evenings at St. Joseph’s hall and to “explain Biblical and educational topics” at the school run by St. Mary’s convent (“St. Leander’s to Display Movies,” Oakland Tribune, July 22, 1915, 14).

6. “Church Temperance Society Meeting,” Boston Globe, January 1, 1915, 2; “Noted Specialist,” Montpelier [VT] Evening Argus, January 1, 1915, 4; “Observe Emancipation Day,” Indianapolis Star, January 1, 1915, 14; “A Lecture by W. A. McKeever,” Lawrence [KS] Daily Journal-World, January 1, 1915, 1; “Entertainment by Plymouth Club,” Petaluma [CA] Daily Courier, January 1, 1915, 8.

7. See Michael Sosin, “Auspices and the Types of Social Problems Covered by Private Agencies: An Application of Niche Theory,” Institute for Research on Poverty, Discussion Paper 741–84 (January 1984).

8. “The New War Taxes,” Democrat-Opinion [McPherson KS], January 1, 1915, 4; “A Licensing Absurdity,” Fairhope [AL] Courier, January 1, 1915, 4.

9. Cara Cadoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 57.

10. The role of sponsorship is one way that classroom screenings of films for instructional ends (still a rare practice in the 1910s) differed from public programs involving moving pictures offered at school auditoriums, such as when the local chapter of the Colonial Dames arranged for Our American Boys in the European War to be shown at Hemenway high school in Wilmington.

11. Ad for “Free Lecture on Christian Science,” at the Lyceum Theatre, Ithaca [NY] Journal, October 1, 1915, 2; “Chicago Socialist Here,” Pittsburgh [PA] Post-Gazette, January 17, 1915, 15.

12. Moving Picture World 23, no. 11 (March 13, 1915): 1634. In Green Bay, Wisconsin safety films were screened at the local vaudeville theater “under the auspices of the commercial club and manufacturers of this city” and “explained by one of the [city] commissioners” (“Big Crowd Views Moving Pictures of Safety Devices,” Green Bay [WI] Press-Gazette, January 13, 1915, 9). Consider the multiple sponsors when From Molten Steel to Automobile (a promotional film produced by the Maxwell Motor Company) was screened at the Baptist Church in Santa Clara, California, under the auspices of the Visual Education Association of California (San Jose Mercury News, February 27, 1915, 4).

13. No doubt events were sponsored by local churches and community groups, since Little Rock was headquarters of the Mosaic Templars of America, an African American lodge whose building featured a six-hundred-seat theater. An article that ran in different African American newspapers highlights the growth of the “organized” and well-established community in Little Rock, as evidenced by the city’s business, churches, and schools (Ralph W. Tyler, “Wonderful Progress Being Made by Negroes of Little Rock,” Washington Bee, February 7, 1914, 6).

14. See, for example, “American Composer to Play Tonight,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, January 21, 1915, 4; “Schildkret’s Hungarian Orchestra,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, February 7, 1915, 29; ad for First Christian Church/Christian Temple series of three major concerts under auspices of Musical Coterie, Daily Arkansas Gazette, October 22, 1915, 3.

15. “Benefit Unemployment Fund,” Arkansas Democrat, March 6, 1915, 5; ad for benefit for “Flood Sufferers” at the Majestic Theater, under auspices of Chamber of Commerce, Daily Arkansas Gazette, September 2, 1915, 4.

16. “The Question of the Unemployed,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, January 13, 1915; Sunday afternoon lecture on “The Social Evil” under auspices of Civic Forum, at the Savoy Theater (Arkansas Democrat, February 25, 1915, 9).

17. “Prohibitionist to Lecture,” Arkansas Democrat, January 15, 1915, 8; lecture under the auspices of German-American Federation of Arkansas, at the high school auditorium, with proceeds going to Red Cross (“Red Cross Fund,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, December 5, 1915, 46); “Will Speak at Crescent,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, January 17, 1915, 10; lecture at Marion Hotel for David O. Dodd Memorial Benefit Fund under auspices of United Daughters of the Confederacy, Daily Arkansas Gazette, November 7, 1915, 37; lecturer at city park under auspices of Socialist Club, Daily Arkansas Gazette, 10.

18. “Boxing Bouts Will Help Little Rock’s Poor Kids,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, December 16, 1915, 12; “Free Acts at Carnival,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, September 10, 1915, 5.

19. Information on The History of David O. Dodd comes from the following articles: “Need Costumes of ’60 for Local Photoplay,” Arkansas Democrat, September 14, 1915, 6; “Working on Historic Film,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, September 22, 1915, 7; “Hundreds See Dodd ‘Movie’ Being Enacted,” Arkansas Democrat, September 23, 1915, 4; “Big Movie Battle is Film Today,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, October 4, 1915, 1; “Little Rock Taken by Federal Troops!,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, October 6, 1915, 1; “Preliminary Work Finished,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, October 19, 1915, 12; “Show David Dodd Film Next Week,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, November 2, 1915, 7; “Dodd Films Given Final Trial Run,” Daily Arkansas Gazette, November 8, 1915, 5; ad for Royal Theater, Daily Arkansas Gazette, November 7, 1915, 36; ad for Majestic Theatre, for screening, Arkansas Democrat, June 17, 1916, 10.

20. Earlier that year, The Call, a two-reel film also shot in Little Rock, was billed as a “local photoplay” when it was exhibited in the city but was not marketed as a sponsored film. See “Strong a Realist as ‘Movie’ Heavy,” Arkansas Democrat, July 21, 1915, 10; ad for The Call, Arkansas Democrat, August 9, 1915, 3.

21. Ad for Inside of the White Slave Traffic, Arkansas Democrat, January 1, 1915, 2. On Inside of the White Slave Traffic, see also “Film Crusade against Social Evil,” Motion Picture News 8, no. 24 (December 20, 1913): 31. Another sponsored screening was Motion Pictures of the European War (Arkansas Democrat, January 20, 1915, 16).

22. Ad for Your Girl and Mine, Arkansas Democrat, January 1, 1915, 2.

23. See Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 177–94; Emily Scarborough, “ ‘Fine Dignity, Picturesque Beauty, and Serious Purpose’: The Reorientation of Suffrage Media in the Twentieth Century” (master’s thesis, Eastern Illinois University, 2015); Kay Sloan, “Sexual Warfare in the Silent Cinema: Comedies and Melodramas of Woman Suffragism,” American Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Autumn 1981): 412–36; Amy Shore, Suffrage and the Silver Screen (New York: Peter Lang, 2014).

24. C. W. Garrison, “Propaganda Pictures,” Photoplay Magazine 7, no. 1 (December 1914): 122; Yvonne Zimmermann, “ ‘What Hollywood Is to America, the Corporate Film Is to Switzerland’: Remarks on Industrial Film as Utility Film,” in Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 101–17.

25. “Suffragettes Use Movies to Boost Cause,” Arizona [Tucson] Daily Star, October 4, 1914, 3. See also “Film to Spread Suffrage View,” Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1914, 7; “Suffragists Enter the Moving Picture World,” Indianapolis News, October 5, 1914, 7; “The Great Moving Picture Suffrage Play,” Burlington [VT] Daily News, October 5, 1914, 5; Eleanor Booth Simmons, “Suffrage Enlists a New Ally-Melodrama,” New York Tribune, October 25, 1914, 25.

26. Mrs. Medill McCormick, “To Win Woman Suffrage Through Motion Pictures,” Times-Dispatch [Richmond VA], October 25, 1914, 49.

27. Ad for Your Girl or Mine, Washington Times, January 31, 1915, 13.

28. “Defends Film Battle: Mrs. McCormick Refuses to Halt Fight Scene,” New York Tribune, December 11, 1914, 9.

29. “Movies to Aid Suffrage Cause Campaign to be Opened Here,” Star Tribune [Minneapolis MN], November 1, 1914, 24.

30. Mrs. Medill McCormick, “ ‘Your Girl or Mine,’ ” Buffalo [NY] Sunday Morning News, December 13, 1914, 23.

31. “Suffrage Reel Will Be Given,” Bloomington [IN] Evening World, January 8, 1915, 1; “Franchise League Report,” Bloomington [IN] Evening World, January 21, 1915, 1.

32. “Special Feature at the Idle Hour, Monday Oct. 1,” True Northerner [Paw Paw MI], September 28, 1917, 2. Newspaper advertising makes clear that Your Girl or Mine was widely exhibited, though Andrew A. Erish, Col. William N. Selig, the Man Who Invented Hollywood (University of Texas Press, 2012), 204, claims that the film was “an expensive flop” for Selig that “failed to attract an audience.”

33. Ad for Casino Theatre, New York Times, December 14, 1914, 16; on the screenings at suffrage conventions, see Omaha [NE] Daily Bee, November 23, 1914, 5; Green Bay [WI] Gazette, December 1, 1914, 3; Tuscaloosa [AL] News, February 2, 1915, 5.

34. Ad for Alamo Theater, Courier-Journal [Louisville KY], January 24, 1915, 40; ad for Rolfe theater, Albany [OR] Daily Democrat, March 6, 1915, 4.

35. Ad for Alhambra theater, El Paso [TX] Times, April 28, 1915, 6; ad for New Columbia Theater, Star Press [Muncie IN], February 22, 1915, 4; ad for Kays Theatre, here listed as “Auspices Woman’s Club,” Santa Fe New Mexican, February 15, 1915, 8.

36. “Suffrage Film is Big Success in Louisville,” Lexington [KY] Herald, February 7, 1915, 6.

37. Buffalo [NY] Courier, January 11, 1915, 5.

38. “Curtain Speeches,” Times Dispatch [Richmond VA], March 2, 1915, 9. See also Weekly Town Talk [Alexandria LA], January 23, 1915, 7; “Suffrage Movie to be Given Here,” The Tennessean [Nashville TN], January 24, 1915, 29.

39. “Suffrage Movie Attracts Crowd,” Camden [NJ] Daily Courier, April 16, 1915, 3; “Hundreds See Suffrage Movie,” Morning Post [Camden NJ], April 16, 1915, 16.

40. “Women in Full Regalia at Suffragists’ Movies,” Washington Times, February 3, 1915, 6. Billboard (February 20, 1915), 55, noted that for one screening at the Colonial Theater, fund raisers bought five hundred tickets and distributed them free, “for propaganda purposes.”

41. Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 39.

42. Thomas Elsaessar, “Archives and Archaeologies: The Place of Non-fiction Film in Contemporary Media,” in Films that Work, 23.

43. Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 36–37.

44. Maureen A. Flanagan, American Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), vii.

45. See, for example, “Boosters’ Comment,” St. Louis Star, April 12, 1910, 6, in which a representative of Missouri Manufacturer’s Association calls for “exploiting St. Louis and St. Louis-made products by means of moving pictures.” But note that “civic motion pictures” were something else entirely, at least according to Ina Clement, who compiled in 1918 for the New York Public Library, “Teaching Citizenship Via the Movies: A Survey of Civic Motion Pictures Available for Use by Municipalities,” which covered films produced and used by municipalities for “enlightening the public regarding civic matters,” like health, fire safety, child welfare, and Americanization (4).

46. “The State, ex. rel. City of Toledo v. Lynch, Auditor,” Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Ohio, n.s. 88 (Cincinnati: Robert Clark, 1913).

47. Ibid., 97, 104.

48. Ibid., 97, 105.

49. Ibid., 102.

50. Ibid., 104.

51. Ibid., 117–18.

52. Ibid., 123–25.

53. Ibid., 142–45.

54. “Power of City to Establish Moving Picture Shows,” American Municipalities 26, no. 5 (February 1914): 154. The same account appeared in Public Service 16, no. 3 (March 1914): 104. In 1915, the subject of municipally owned and operated movie theaters again surfaced in American newspapers in reports of the Norwegian government’s plan to “take over moving picture theaters.” See, for instance, “Municipal Movies,” Pittsburgh [PA] Post-Gazette, June 1, 1915, 4.

55. “Plan Suggested for City ‘Movie’ Show,” Daily Capital Journal [Salem OR], May 19, 1914, 8. The School Journal 80, no. 5 (March 1914): viii, noted that Saginaw, Michigan, “has a municipally owned theatre in which they exhibit free pictures to school children. This is almost as good as having moving pictures in the schoolhouses, and perhaps more convenient.”

56. See the syndicated article, “Municipal ‘Movies,’ ” Washburn [ND] Leader, March 14, 1913, 2; “Hayward Plans Municipal Movies,” Oakland [CA] Tribune, January 29, 1913, 9.

57. Advertisements for Chilhowee Park in Knoxville, Tennessee (Journal and Tribune [Knoxville TN], September 12, 1915, 21); Riverside Park in Phoenix, Arizona (“High School at Riverside,” Arizona Republic, May 28, 1915, 10); Capitol Beach Park in Lincoln, Nebraska (Lincoln [NE] Star, August 4, 1915, 2); Forest Hill Park in Richmond, Virginia (Times Dispatch [Richmond VA], June 10, 1916, 4); Robison Park in Fort Wayne, Indiana (Fort Wayne [IN] Journal-Gazette, June 14, 1916, 14); Wallace Park in Paducah, Kentucky (Paducah [KY] Sun-Democrat, September 2, 1916, 6). Organizers also included free moving picture shows in high-profile events to mark July 4 and Labor Day and in one-of-a-kind, place-based celebrations, like the annual Old Settlers and Woodmen Reunion and Picnic at Comanche, Texas (Comanche [TX] Chef, August 13, 1915, 5) and the Horse Thief Picnic, in Cummings, Kansas (Nortonville [KS] News, August 18, 1916, 1).

58. “Mullen’s Free Nickelodeon,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 22, 1909, 16; “Mullen’s Picture Show,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 21, 1909, 9; “Mullen’s Free Show,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 29, 1909, 15; “Mullen’s Show,” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 19, 1909, 25; “Mullen’s Picture Show,” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 26, 1909, 31.

59. “Pictures to Be Shown in Parks,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 1, 1910, 14; Report of the Board of Park Commissioners of the City of Cincinnati, December 10, 1908–December 10, 1910 (Cincinnati: Roessler Bros., 1911), 31.

60. “Pictures for City Parks,” Film Index 6, no. 1 (July 2, 1910): 7.

61. “Many Watch A. C. Pictures,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, August 14, 1911, 5.

62. “Free Picture Show,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, June 16, 1912, 7.

63. “Stops Park Pictures,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 19, 1913, 15.

64. “Lytle Park Concerts Warmly Received,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, June 15, 1914, 5; Annual Report of the Board of Park Commissioners of the City of Cincinnati, 1914 (1915), 42.

65. “Free Pictures in Cincinnati,” Moving Picture World 25, no. 2 (July 19, 1915): 355; “Free Shows by City Hurt Regular Exhibitor,” Washington Times, August 5, 1914, 8.

66. “Municipal Movies in Boston,” Salina [KS] Daily Union, August 20, 1915, 6, claims that that this practice was popular in Boston and Cleveland, and that Omaha “has had municipal movies several years.” See “Free ‘Movies’ in Parks,” Boston Globe, June 28, 1915, 6.

67. “Davis Plans Free Moving Pictures in Public Parks,” St. Louis Star and Times, January 20, 1914, 5; “Advance of the Movies,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, February 1, 1914, 32.

68. Division of Parks and Recreation, article LXVIII, section 1904. “Movies in Public Parks,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 23, 1914, 1. For the broader background on “civic improvement and city planning ideals” in St. Louis, see Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

69. “Making of Good Citizens: How the Playgrounds of St. Louis are Working for Uplift, Youthful Energy Turned into Good Channels, Gang Boss Now Ball Leader, Work of Park Commission,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 26, 1914, 47. The year before he initiated screenings in the parks, Davis had unsuccessfully requested a $5 million bond issue to expand the park system, particularly in areas with a high “degree of crime” and “density of population” (“Parks as Crime Preventives to Be Bond Argument,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 17, 1913, 3).

70. “Park and Playground Needs,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 3, 1914, 14.

71. Annual Report of the Division of Parks and Recreation, City of St. Louis, in Annual Report of the Department of Public Welfare for the Fiscal Year Ending April 12, 1915 (St. Louis: Curran Printing Company, 1915), 5.

72. Revised code of St. Louis, 1914 (general ordinances) (St. Louis: Von Hoffmann Press), 1306. “House Passes ‘Movie’ Bill,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 20, 1914, 5; “Free Movies in Parks,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 4, 1914, 3 “Movies for Playgrounds,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 3, 1914, 16.

73. “Municipal Movies to Be Shown Tomorrow Night,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 16, 1914, 16. On the St. Louis Motion Picture Company, which produced commercial releases under the labels Shamrock and Frontier, and also was available for “industrial and special work,” see “A New Film Manufacturing Company,” Moving Picture News 4, no. 35 (September 2, 1911): 23; “Moving Films of St. Louis U Game,” St. Louis Star and Times, November 3, 1910, 10; ad, Moving Picture World 17, no. 2 (July 12, 1913): 262.

74. Annual Report of the Division of Parks and Recreation, 13. Reference to the “Ghetto” in “ ‘Movies’ in Parks to Start To-night,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 17, 1919, 3. Ruth Crawford provides a quite detailed contemporary account of the city’s immigrant population in The Immigrant in St. Louis (St. Louis: St. Louis School of Social Economics, 1916), which does not, unfortunately, cover public recreation and commercial amusements.

75. This information is drawn from: “Kiel Signs Movie Bill,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 11, 1914, 14; “First Municipal Movie Show Wednesday,” St. Louis Star and Times, July 11, 1914, 5; “Municipal Movies to Be Shown Tomorrow Night,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 16, 1914, 16; “ ‘Movies’ in Parks to Start To-night,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 17, 1914, 3; “First Free Municipal Movies Show Tonight,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 17, 1914, 1; “Free Movies Please Big Columbus Square Crowd,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 18, 1914, 2.

76. Revised code of St. Louis, 1914, 1589; Annual Report of the Division of Parks and Recreation, 12.

77. Annual Report of the Division of Parks and Recreation, 56; “Movies Show Park Scenes,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 20, 1914, 6; “Mayor Sees Free Movies with Kids and Likes Them,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 28, 1914, 14.

78. “Municipal Exhibitions,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 8 (August 22, 1914): 1105.

79. Annual Report of the Division of Parks and Recreation, 6–7. See also editorial comment, St. Louis Star and Times, August 11, 1914, 12.

80. “Free Movies for Children,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 20, 1914, 8. See also “St. Louis Is Leader in Municipal Fun,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, February 7, 1915, 4.

81. See “Municipal Moving Pictures,” City Record [Boston MA] 6, no. 36 (September 5, 1914): 836; “Municipal ‘Movies’ Great Success,” Municipal Journal 37, no. 6 (August 6, 1914): 180; “Municipal Movies,” Trenton [NJ] Evening Times, October 27, 1914, 10; “Free Municipal ‘Movies,’ ” Boston Globe, July 17, 1914, 10; “Free Municipal ‘Movies,’ ” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 17, 1914, 16; “City Movies Big Success,” Lawrence [KS] Daily Journal-World, July 23, 1914, 2; “St. Louis Hopes for Municipal ‘Movies,’ ” San Francisco Examiner, July 3, 1914, 2. “Municipal Exhibitions,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 8 (August 22, 1914): 1105.

82. “Object Lesson for Cities,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, July 15, 1914, 6, rpt. from New York American.

83. “Airdome or No Airdome Wherever There is a Vacant Lot,” St. Louis Star and Times, May 29, 1910, 13. This article also notes that in St. Louis, approval from the mayor’s office for a new airdome required a signed petition from people in the immediate neighborhood.

84. “Back from a Long Chase,” Film Index 6, no. 10 (September 3, 1910): 6.

85. Moving Picture World 12, no. 11 (June 15, 1912): 1050.

86. “Airdomes to Be Found Attached to Most Theatres in St. Louis,” Motion Picture News 11, no. 22 (June 5, 1915): 117; “Park Commissioner Davis Won’t Accept Reappointment,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 26, 1915, 1; “The Park Commissionership,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 2, 1915, 12.

87. The quotation comes from an untitled editorial in St. Louis Star and Times, April 10, 1915, 12. See also “Nelson Cunliff Made New Park Commissioner,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 9, 1915, 8; “Cunliff Wants to Make Parks Play Ground for Adults,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 10, 1915, 2; “New Park Commissioner,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 10, 1915, 8.

88. “Recreation Season at Parks Will Begin with Concert Next Sunday,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 30, 1915, 27.

89. “Thousands See Free Movies in Columbus Square,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 16, 1915, 11. See also “ ‘Muny Amusies’ Present a Triple-Header: 8,000 Persons Attend Free Movie Show,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 16, 1915, 5; “8,000 See First Free Movie Show of Season,” St. Louis Star and Times, June 16, 1915, 4.

90. “5,085,165 Persons Visited Attractions at City’s Parks,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 24, 1915, 1.

91. “St. Louis Managers Protest against Free Pictures,” Motion Picture News 12, no. 5 (August 7, 1915): 57. Not surprisingly, exhibitors mounted no protest in 1918 when “moving pictures and entertainment” were offered at Columbia Square and other playgrounds as part of a special wartime “Safety Week” initiative (see ad for Safety Week, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 15, 1918, 8).

92. “Free Pictures in St. Louis Will Not Compete with Exhibitors,” Motion Picture News 12, no. 6 (August 14, 1915): 66. Note that theaters in the city throughout the 1910s were still occasionally rented out or donated for sponsored events that included moving pictures and charged no admission, like a Jewish holiday celebration at the New Grand Central Theater, presided over by a rabbi and featuring “motion pictures of Palestine” (“Shvuoth to be Observed,” St. Louis Star and Times, May 17, 1918, 6) or what was called the “first moving picture political meeting ever held” in St. Louis, a Republican party event at an airdome targeting “near-suffragettes,” with speeches and interspersed moving pictures (“Politicians Draw Women by Pictures,” St. Louis Star, July 22, 1910, 2).

93. Another long-running struggle was over attempts to prohibit the use of moving pictures by tent shows. See, for example, “Picture Ordinance Hits at Tent Shows,” Show World, May 22, 1909, 9; “Picture Tent Shows Legal,” Nickelodeon 2, no. 1 (July 1909): 24; “Pictures Can Be Shown in Tents in St. Louis,” Motion Picture News 11, no. 15 (April 17, 1915): 57; “Bill to Discriminate Against Tent Shows,” Motion Picture News 11, no. 25 (June 26, 1915): 56.

94. “Cunliff to Have Movie Censorship Bill Introduced,” St. Louis Star and Times, October 28, 1915, 4; “Public Approves Criticized Films, Theater Men Say,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 28, 1915, 4. “St. Louis Exhibitors Will Fight Censorship,” Motion Picture News 12, no. 18 (November 6, 1915): 66; “Public Hearing at St. Louis on Censorship,” Motion Picture News 12, no. 20 (November 20, 1915): 70.

95. “A Mental and Moral Dictator,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 4, 1915, 16.

96. “No Municipal Competition for Exhibitors to Meet in St. Louis,” Motion Picture News 13, no. 13 (April 1, 1916): 1886.

97. “You Can’t Swim with ‘Her’ in City Pools This Year,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 14, 1916, 26.

98. Saint Louis (Mo.) City Plan Commission, and Harland Bartholomew, Recreation In St. Louis (St. Louis: Nixon-Jones Printing, 1917).

99. “City’s Theater to Be Used Only for High-Class Events,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 17, 1917, 19.

100. “48 Gun Salute to Open St. Louis Program on 4th,” St. Louis Star and Times, July 2, 1917, 2; “Naval Pageant in Forest Park Tomorrow Night,” St. Louis Star and Times, July 3, 1917, 4. Not surprisingly, the Chamber of Commerce wholeheartedly endorsed the use of the Municipal Open Air Theatre at Forest Park for a season of “municipal opera . . . a venture in pleasurable and educative entertainment” relying on local talent and supposedly attracting a “citywide clientele” (“Communal Entertainment Where the Arts Augment the Play Spirit of the People,” Greater St. Louis 1, no. 10 [June 1920]: 8). Similarly, no official complaints were raised by exhibitors when there were “community moving pictures shown in the downtown playgrounds and public parks” as part of a wartime safety campaign (“ ‘Safety Week’ Here Opened by Pastors in Churches Today,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 19, 1918, 36).

101. “Tuberculosis Films Shown in Parks,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 9 (September 5, 1914): 40.

102. “Tennessee “Free Movies Start Tonight,” Chattanooga [TN] Daily Times, June 2, 1916, 6.

103. “Commission Arranges Many Attractions at Schifferdecker Park,” Joplin [MO] Globe, July 9, 1915, 7. See also, for example, “Municipal Movies Grow,” The State [Columbia SC], August 27, 1916, 4, a syndicated article on the practice in four Kansas towns.

104. Erker’s ads declared that “we rent complete equipment (machine, operator, slides and films) for private or public moving picture entertainments” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 5, 1914, 17). See also ad for Amusement Supply Company (“Moving Picture Entertainment furnished for the Home, School, Church or Lodge”) in Modern View, April 3, 1914, 3; and classified ad offering “moving picture shows for entertainments at homes, churches, schools, conventions, etc., furnished at reasonable prices” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 10, 1918, 10).

105. US Census Bureau, 1920, Missouri, 53.

106. “Jane Addams to Represent U.S. at Food Show Here,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 27, 1918, 10; “Taos Exhibition Tea,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 11, 1919, 10; “Socialists to Picnic,” St. Louis Star and Times, June 20, 1911, 6; “Maxwell Movies Are Drawing Big Crowds,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 7, 1915, 11; “Merchants’ Exchange to Get Election Returns,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 26, 1912, 5; “Election Returns and U.S. Marine Band at Coliseum,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 28, 1912, 1; “Markham to Give Election Returns,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 22, 1912, 3: “Women Invited to Phone Neusteter’s For the Returns,” St. Louis Star and Times, November 5, 1912, 5.

107. On screenings in department stores, see ad for “6-reel film entertainment” at Trorlickt-Duncker, St. Louis Star and Times, March 10, 1917, 5; ad for The Silk Industry at Famous-Barr Company, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 5, 1917, 10; “Pictures to Show Glacier Park,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, January 23, 1918, 2.

On film exhibition at the Infirmary, see Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the St. Louis Infirmary for the Fiscal Year 1913–1914, in Mayor’s Message, with Accompanying Documents to the Municipal Assembly of the City of St. Louis (St. Louis: Sam Myerson Printing Company, 1914), 143; at the Asylum, see Mayor’s Message: With Accompanying Documents to the Municipal Assembly of the City of St. Louis (St. Louis: Buxton and Skinner, 1909), 204; at the Poorhouse, see “Annual Report of the Health Commissioner, St. Louis Department of Public Welfare, 1910–1911,” 47; at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Health, see “Parish School to Study with Movies,” St. Louis Star and Times, October 31, 1913, 5; at the penitentiary, see “Missouri Convicts to Eat Pork, not Turkey,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 26, 1913, 4 and “Missouri Convicts See Movies To-Day,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 27, 1913, 3; at the Workhouse, see “Workhouse Prisoners to See Movies Weekly,” St. Louis Star and Times, December 2, 1915, 67; at the Jewish Home for Chronic Invalids, see Modern View, October 27, 1916, 2. Given these institutional uses, it is noteworthy that the superintendent of St. Louis public schools announced in 1916 that no funds were available for purchasing projectors for schools (“Blewitt Says Schools Can’t Afford Motion Pictures,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 23, 1916, 50); but the next year the Board of Education sought bids for a projector (St. Louis Star and Times, 25 April 1917, 12).

108. “Y.W.C.A. Using Pictures,” Nickelodeon 5, no. 5 (February 4, 1911): 130; “Y.W.C.A. Finds Photoplay Valuable,” Moving Picture World 8, no. 4 (January 28, 1911): 182; “Y.W.C.A. Building Plans Ready,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, January 24, 1911, 16; “Y.W.C.A. Roof Garden Events,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 21, 1912, 35. The new YWCA Building that opened in April 1914 included what it called a “club theater” (“Y.W.C.A. Will Be Opened April 19,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 17, 1912, 7; “St. Louis Y.W.C.A. First,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 28, 1912, 11.

109. “Moving Pictures at Church,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, January 9, 1910, 16; “Kentucky Lecturer Here,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 10, 1910, 15; “Views on Ireland Tour at Our Holy Redeemer Church,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 11, 1910, 5; “Union Church Entertainment,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, February 22, 1910, 5; “Holy Land on Films,” St. Louis Star and Times, September 21, 1911, 5; “Fete at Visitation Parish,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 1, 1911, 16; “Church Notes,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 21, 1911, 4; “O. E. Scott to Talk on Canal,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, December 3, 1912, 4; “Church to Give Film Show,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 19, 1912, 16; “Moving Pictures of Crucifixion to be Shown to St. Louis Sunday School,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 13, 1912, 59; Passion Play, “illustrated with motion pictures” at Markham Institutional Church, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 30, 1912, 4. In 1914, Lutheran clergy announced plans to “establish moving picture shows for the Evangelical Lutherans of St. Louis” (“Lutheran Clergy to Open ‘Movie’ Shows in St. Louis,” St. Louis Star and Times, February 24, 1914, 5).

110. St. Louis Star and Times, August 7, 1912, 6.

111. See “Film Show Church Adjunct,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, January 25, 1913, 4; “Films and Cartoons in Church,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 4, 1912, 18; “Church Will Bulletin Returns,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 3, 1912, 38. “Held as Church Thief,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 27, 1912, 3, reports that a man arrested for stealing from the Kingdom House Church a moving picture machine “used for entertainments and for illustrating lectures by the pastor.”

112. See “motion pictures of the capture of Jerusalem and address on Gen. Allenby” at the Union M.E. Church (St. Louis Star and Times, February 22, 1919, 12); “post-war address, ‘The Story of Clemenceau,’ with moving pictures of a Burton Holmes film, ‘Glorious Versailles’ ” (“Dr. Crissman to Give Talk on Reconstruction,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 15, 1918, 6); illustrated lecture on “A Trip to South America” (St. Louis Star and Times, November 22, 1919, 12); “Movies Under Auspices of St. Peter’s Guild,” St. Louis Globe- Democrat, May 2, 1919, 7; “Movies at Parish Home Today,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 9, 1919, 4; “Catholic Film to Be Shown,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 30, 1919, 20; “Memorial Church Pastor Quits His Charge Suddenly,” St. Louis Star and Times, November 20, 1918, 3.

113. “Temple Israel,” Modern View, April 17, 1914, 13; “Y.M.H.A. Activities,” Jewish Voice, October 27, 1916, 3.

114. See “Educational Alliance Report,” Jewish Voice, January 6, 1906, 3; Philip L. Seman, “Superintendent’s Report,” Jewish Voice, January 5, 1906, 5.

115. “Lectures and Concerts,” Jewish Voice, November 13, 1908, 7; “Allianceodeon,” Jewish Voice, November 20, 1908, 7; “Moving Pictures,” Jewish Voice, January 22, 1909, 8.

116. See “Alliance Notes,” Jewish Voice, December 15, 1911, 6; “Moving Pictures,” Jewish Voice, December 27, 1912, 10; “Alliance Activities,” Jewish Voice, March 14, 1913, 7.

117. “Moving Pictures at Charity Meeting,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 4, 1914, 16; “The Twelfth Annual Meeting,” Modern View, January 9, 1914, 8–9.

118. Announcement, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 18, 1919, 14: at dinner (at the American Annex) by the De Luxe Automobile Co for its dealers, the general sales manager of Oldsmobile will show “1,800 feet of film of the factory in operation”; “Will Show Free Movies,” St. Louis Star and Times, March 19, 1919, 4: Western Electric Company offers free tickets for “pictures showing some of the new inventions of the company and methods of developing these inventions” screened in “the auditorium, top floor of their building”; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 23, 1919, 27: screening at Mack offices that included Pathé’s The Triumph of Transportation, “and another long film featuring the climbing of Mount Wilson by a Mack truck, also a number of other films showing the successful use of this truck in many countries”; “Truck Caravan Moving Pictures to Be Shown,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 18, 1919, 43.

119. Some notable exceptions: a “stag dinner” at the exclusive Sunset Country Club included a “battle royale” with “colored” fighters along with moving pictures “showing the progress of the work on the magnificent new links of the club” and the “prize winning Bevo ponies owned by A. Busch” (“Nine Holes Will Soon Be Ready at Sunset Club,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 17, 1916, 11); “What the Monkeys See,” “a three-thousand foot film taken at the Zoo recently” shown “before the St. Louis Zoological Society and the Fellowship Club of the Kingshighway Presbyterian Church” (“Zoo Film to Be Shown,” St. Louis Star and Times, March 27, 1919, 8).

There were various examples of local filming intended primarily for theatrical exhibition, including a newsreel and an industrial produced by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (“17 Theaters to Show Globe-Democrat Film,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 18, 1915, 5; “Motion Pictures of Whole Globe-Democrat Will Be Shown Feb. 8,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, February 1, 1916, 11); and a fictional five-reel film produced and starring “society folk” (“Society Movies to Be Presented for the First Time Tonight,” St. Louis Star and Times, November 19, 1915, 6).

120. The St. Louis Medical Society regularly used its auditorium for illustrated lectures (occasionally with moving pictures) on public health and hygiene issues as well as more specialized medical and surgical topics. Dr. W. C. G. Kirchner’s lecture to this group on “The Cinematograph in the Service of Medical Education” was promoted in the Weekly Bulletin of the St. Louis Medical Society 6, no. 24 (June 13, 1912): 290, as “illustrating an entirely new phase of medical education.” See also “Picture Lessons,” St. Louis Star and Times, August 3, 1913, 34; “Motion Pictures Begin War Against Drug Habit,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 16, 1914, 5. For information on the other sponsors listed here, see “K. C. Outing at Delmar Thursday,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, August 7, 1912, 16; “Real War Film To Be Seen at Lodge Meeting,” St. Louis Star and Times, September 25, 1914, 7; “Pictorial Celebration of Colonial and Patriotic Films with Music,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 10, 1912, 7; “Colonial Films Will Be Shown,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 17, 1912, 4; “Wars Society Election,” St. Louis Star and Times, November 21, 1918, 6; “Dinner Commemorates Ticonderoga,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 15, 1912, 6; “Sons of the Revolution Stag,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 12, 1919, 17; “Confederate Veterans to Honor Lee,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, January 17, 1912, 18.

121. “Inventor of Knight Engine to Address Automobile Club,” St. Louis Star and Times, January 21, 1912, 11; “Aero Club Annual Smoker,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 31, 1911, 20; “Irish Societies Will Celebrate,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 23, 1913, 17; “Film Shows Wild Birds and Refuge,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 26, 1917, 4; “Movies of Game to Be Shown,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 1, 1917, 22; notice for Missouri Fish and Game League screening at Northside YMCA, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 4, 1917, 18.

122. See, for example, on Advertising Men’s League (“Gildersleeve to Ad Men Wednesday,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 29, 1912, 9; “To Show How Paper Is Made,” St. Louis Star and Times, November 10, 1912, 3; “Advertising Club Told of Big Printing Plant,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, February 7, 1917, 5); American Chemical Society (“To Discuss Glassmaking Monday,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 12, 1912, 44); St. Louis Architectural Club (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 22, 1918, 5); Electrical Board of Trade (“Double Header Program for Electrical Board,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 26, 1919, 10); Railway Club (“Railway Club at Maplecrest,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 12, 1912, 13); Sales Managers’ Association (“Sales Managers Dine and Discuss Parcels Post Law,” St. Louis Star and Times, October 20, 1912, 46); Bankers (“Bankers at Speechless Dinner,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 22, 1915, 3); Lumbermen’s Exchange (“Lumbermen to Oppose Corporation Tax Bill,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 31, 1917, 3).

123. The annual reports and descriptions of screenings cited here are included in the Journal of the Engineers’ Club of St. Louis 2, no. 1 (January–February 1917): 76–77, 83–84, 96. See also F. G. Jonah, “The Functions of a Club, as Illustrated by the Engineers’ Club of St. Louis,” Journal of the Engineers’ Club of St. Louis 2, no. 2 (March–April 1917): 112–15.

124. Sandweiss, St. Louis, 186. Lecture on Beautiful Scenic Norway with motion pictures under auspices of Norwegian Government presented at BML luncheon at Planters’ Hotel (“Lecture on Norway to be Given,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 7, 1916, 3); “Movies at B.M.L. Meet Tomorrow,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 23, 1915, 4. The head of the BML actually had a home theater where he would host screenings (“Howard Is Host to 100 Members of B.M.L. at Home,” St. Louis Star and Times, March 1, 1916, 4).

125. “Motion Picture Display,” Forward St. Louis 1, no. 18 (October 20, 1913): 2; “Motion Pictures to Exploit City,” Forward St. Louis 1, no. 20 (November 17, 1913): 8; “Many Millions Attend Movies,” Forward St. Louis 1, no. 21 (December 1, 1913): 1–2; “St. Louis Scenes in Motion Films,” Forward St. Louis 2, no. 3 (June 1, 1914): 2.

126. “C. of C. to Film Industrial Views of St. Louis,” Greater St. Louis 2, no. 7 (March 1921): 21.

127. See “Many Millions Attend Movies,” Forward St. Louis 1, no. 21 (December 1, 1913): 1–2; “Public Approves Criticized Films, Theater Men Say,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 28, 1915, 4

128. “B.M.L. to Handle Films,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 2, 1915, 3.

129. Sean Savage, “The Eye Beholds: Silent Era Industrial Film and The Bureau of Commercial Economics” (master’s thesis, New York University, 2006). In the words of its charter, the Bureau of Commercial Economics was intended to “engage in disseminating industrial and vocational information by the graphic method of motion pictures showing how things in common use are made or produced.” (BCE 1914 pamphlet quoted in Savage, 16). See the pamphlet The Eye Beholds: Bureau of Commercial Economics Department of Public Instruction (Washington, DC: Bureau of Commercial Economics, 1915) for its listing of titles.

130. “Workhouse Prisoners to See Movies Weekly,” St. Louis Star and Times, December 2, 1915, 67; “Movies and Cabaret for Accessory Men,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 11, 1917, 31; “Get-Together Meeting,” Wentzville [MO] Union, May 26, 1916, 1.

131. Out of the CC’s total budget of $130,176, the annual expenses for film distribution was $310 in 1917 (Chamber of Commerce Annual Report, January 1, 1918, 72) and $384 out of the total budget of $153,000 in 1918 (Chamber of Commerce Annual Report, January 1, 1919, 90).

132. “Government to Show Educational Film to St. Louis Audiences,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 3, 1919, 4.

133. “Chicago Engineer Will Talk Safety to Children,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 21, 1916, 18; “ ‘Safety First’ Movies at Banquet,” St. Louis Star and Times, September 29, 1916, 2; “4 Safety First Conferences Here During the Week,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 12, 1916, 21.

134. “ ‘Introducing the Business Man to His Meal Ticket,’ ” Greater St. Louis 1, no. 1 (September 1919): 9, 35.

135. “C. of C. Committee Aims to Americanize Aliens,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 14, 1917, 11. See also “Program of Americanization Committee Formally Approved,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 15, 1917, 31; “100 Americanization Speakers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 22, 1917, 24; “Making American Citizens,” St. Louis Star and Times, May 22, 1917, 8.

136. “C. of C. To Hold War Meetings in Factories,” St. Louis Star and Times, May 3, 1918, 1.

137. “Work among Foreign Elements,” Greater St. Louis 1, no. 3 (November 1919): 64.

138. “Navy Will Use Moving Picture Show,” St. Louis Star and Times, May 7, 1917, 5. See also “Naval Pageant in Forest Park Tomorrow Night,” St. Louis Star and Times, July 3, 1917, 4.

139. On the Children’s Aid Society, see “Moving Pictures of Panama Canal to Help Charity,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 6, 1912, 14; “ ‘Movie’ Luncheon by Aid Society Women,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 13, 1919, 8; on the Women’s Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, see “Churchwomen in Business Meetings Discuss Missions,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 17, 1919, 4; on the USDA, see “Free Movie of Grain Blast to Be Shown Here,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 5, 1919, 6; on the Armenian and Syrian Relief Committee, see “Motion Pictures Shown of Conditions in Armenia,” St. Louis Star, June 10, 1919, 5.

140. “Expanding the B.M.L.,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 4, 1916, 16. See also “Popularizing the B.M.L.,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 5, 1916, 12; “A Real Chamber of Commerce,” St. Louis Star and Times, January 19, 1917, 10.

141. “Franklin Fair This Week,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 29, 1912, 12; “Suffragists Will Parade on Franklin,” St. Louis Star and Times, September 20, 1912, 5; “St. Louis Center of Missouri-Wide Suffrage Fight,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 20, 1912, 40; “Suffrage Rally Plans,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 14, 1912, 16; “Jewish Educational Alliance Notes,” Jewish Voice, November 15, 1912, 6; “Suffragists Open Week’s Campaign with Free Show,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 30, 1913, 13.

142. “To Picture Factory Conditions,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 9, 1912, 9. Later in the decade, during the war, this labor group was calling for greater cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce and screening films critical of the IWW (“Central Trades Union Gives ‘Glad Hand’ to Chamber of Commerce,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 10, 1917, 4).

143. Joseph Heathcote, “Black Archipelago: Politics and Civic Life in the Jim Crow City,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 719. Heathcott convincingly details the resilience of the African American community in St. Louis during the Jim Crow years, emphasizing the “dense networks of civil and religious institutions, political alignments, and cultural practices” (719). For a period view, see William August Crossland’s extensive statistical study, Industrial Conditions Among Negroes in St. Louis (St. Louis: Mendle Printing Company, 1914), 51.

144. Julie Lavelle, “Serial Mobility: Tracing the Circulation of Silent Serial Films” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2020), 152.

145. “Booker T. Washington Theater is Completed,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 13, 1913, 47.

146. “Moving Pictures of Race Riot,” St. Louis Argus, July 27, 1917, 1; “Motion Pictures of the Pythian Military Parade,” St. Louis Argus, August 24, 1917, 8; “Pythian Parade Pictures a Real Triumph of Ingenuity,” St. Louis Argus, August 31, 1917, 8. In 1915 moving pictures of the Knights of Pythian National Encampment, along with an Elks street parade in Chicago, were presented at Pythian Hall, another site available for non-theatrical screenings (“Moving Pictures,” St. Louis Argus, November 19, 1915, 1).

147. Ads for Booker Washington: “Pictures of Our St. Louis Soldier Boys Next Week,” St. Louis Argus, January 25, 1918, 1; moving pictures of Pythian Parade, St. Louis Argus, February 8, 1918, 8; “Turpin Showered with Thanks from Boys at Funston,” St. Louis Argus, March 1, 1918, 1; “Motion Pictures of OUR St. Louis Churches, St. Louis Argus, March 8, 1918, 8; “Motion Pictures of Business and Fraternal Orders,” St. Louis Argus, March 15, 1918, 8; “Motion Pictures of Colored Troops at Camp Sherman,” St. Louis Argus, May 31, 1918, 8.

148. Ad for Booker Washington, St. Louis Argus, May 2, 1919, 4.

149. “Royal Palm Airdome Will Open July 24,” St. Louis Argus, July 21, 1916, 1; “The Negro in the Movies,” St. Louis Argus, June 23, 1916, 1; “Motion Picture Entertainment,” St. Louis Argus, September 29, 1916, 1.

150. “Moving Pictures of Negro Life,” St. Louis Argus, June 30, 1916, 1.

151. “Negro Movies Attract Crowd,” St. Louis Argus, May 4, 1917, 1.

152. “Allmon’s Motion Pictures of the Pythian Parade,” St. Louis Argus, October 5, 1917, 8; “A Series of Moving Pictures, St. Louis Argus, March 2, 1917, 8; “St. Louisan Will Soon Leave on a Moving Picture Tour,” St. Louis Argus, April 26, 1918, 8. It is difficult to tell how well any of these efforts succeeded, but by 1919 Allmon was still active as a traveling exhibitor. The Kansas City [MO] Sun, July 12, 1919, 5, notes that Allmon is “giving moving picture exhibitions through the west.”

153. See Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

154. “Hampton Institute Educational Mass Meeting,” St. Louis Argus, March 12, 1915, 1; “Lincoln Institute,” St. Louis Argus, April 16, 1915, 1; “Harvest Home Festival at St. Paul Church,” St. Louis Argus, September 24, 1915, 1.

155. “Booker T. Washington Memorial,” St. Louis Argus, February 4, 1916, 1; “Two Evenings with Booker T. Washington,” St. Louis Argus, February 18, 1916, 1; notices for program at Pleasant Green Baptist Church (St. Louis Argus, March 10, 1916, 4) and St. Paul AME (St. Louis Argus, May 12 1916, 13). The month before, St. Paul had screened to an “approving” audience the Fox release The Nigger, which had been the object of African American protest in other communities (“Audience Approves Photo Play,” St. Louis Argus, January 7, 1916, 1).

156. Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom, 107.

157. “Mme. C. J. Walker Coming in July,” St. Louis Argus, June 18, 1915, 1.

158. Topeka Plaindealer, November 15, 1918, 3.

159. Lester A. Walton, “Malones Put St. Louis on Business Map,” New York Age, December 7, 1918, 1.

160. “Dedication and Christening of the Race’s Greatest Commercial Building,” Kansas City [KS] Advocate, December 6, 1918, 1, 4.

161. Poro Hair and Beauty Culture pamphlet (1922), 14.

162. “The St. Louis ‘Poro’ College Force,” Indianapolis Freeman, July 17, 1915, 8.

163. “Poro Boosters in Atlanta,” St. Louis Argus, June 30, 1916, 1; “Poro College,” St. Louis Argus, April 21, 1916, 1; Ad for Poro ‘Movies,’ St. Louis Argus, March 24, 1916, 4.

164. “Poro College Executive Force Visits Tuskegee,” St. Louis Argus, February 2, 1917, 1; “Jacksonville, Florida,” Kansas City [MO] Sun, February 10, 1917, 2.

165. See “The Twentieth Anniversary of Poro College and Opening of Poro Annex,” Broad Ax [Chicago IL], 26, no. 12 (December 11, 1920): 2–3.

166. See, for instance, newspaper articles on the local movie business, like “St. Louisans Spend a Million Dollars a Summer to See Moving Picture Dramas in Local Show Houses,” St. Louis Star and Times, Sunday feature, August 21, 1910, 5; “St. Louis’ New White Ways,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 24, 1910, 47; Charlotte Rumbold, “What is Happening to the Movies?,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 13, 1916, 6.

167. Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4.

2. MULTI-PURPOSE CINEMA

1. Ernest A. Dench, “Advertising Automobiles and Accessories by Means of Motion Pictures,” Judicious Advertising 13, no. 7 (July 1915): 87–88, singles out an industrial made for the Reo Motor Car Company, which was notable for being able to “serve three useful purposes instead of one”: as an instructional reel for employees, a part of “sales demonstrations,” and—“with some changes”—a moving picture for the “general public.”

2. Examples of these uses include: “Motion Pictures of Texas Farms,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, January 7, 1912, 25; “C. of C. To Hold War Meetings in Factories,” St. Louis Star and Times, May 3, 1918, 1; “School Children, Brush Your Teeth,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 1, 1912, 58; “Society is Formed to Get Zoo for St. Louis,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 16, 1910, 2; “Moving Pictures of Negro Life,” St. Louis Argus, June 30, 1916, 1; “Movies of Church Workers,” St. Louis Star and Times, September 12, 1918, 4; “Presbyterians Begin Home Mission Week,” St. Louis Star and Times, November 17, 1919, 4; “Nine Holes Will Soon Be Ready at Sunset Club,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 17, 1916, 11; “To Picture Factory Conditions,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 9, 1912, 9; “Bankers to See Check Raising Movie,” St. Louis Star and Times, March 27, 1917, 8; “Bankers To Give Movies Show Featuring Forgery,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 27, 1915, 18.

3. Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds., Useful Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 13, 4, 2. A key institution for Wasson was the US military, whose “institutional imperatives” during World War II fully powered (and exploited) the manifold utility of the cinema, which under this pressure demonstrated “its agility and flexibility in responding to institutional needs” (“Experimental Viewing Protocols: Film Projection and the American Military,” in Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, ed. Haidee Wasson and Lee Grieveson [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018], 29, 39).

While research on useful cinema has understandably tended to focus on the period after 16mm became widely adopted, certain uses of moving pictures for various non-theatrical ends during the first decades of the twentieth century have garnered significant attention from film and media historians. This scholarship underscores that the “heterogeneity of early cinema” is evidenced in not only the “many types of films available” but also in the “varied venues, audiences, and uses of the medium,” to borrow Scott Curtis’s formulation (Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany [New York: Columbia University Press, 2015], 2). In The Shape of Spectatorship, Curtis examines the ways that motion picture technology during the early twentieth century was understood and appropriated in Germany by quite distinct communities in science, medicine, and aesthetics, which each brought to film certain “problem-solving patterns,” “investigatory methods,” and “ideological assumptions” (Curtis, Shape of Spectatorship, 23). Alison Griffiths’s invaluable history of ethnographic cinema, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), situates particular films, filmmakers, and exhibition strategies in the context of a broad set of practices encompassing the fields of anthropology and “natural history.”

4. “The Moving Picture as a Necessity,” Moving Picture World 10, no. 11 (December 16, 1911): 882. This statement introduced the first appearance of the “Motion Picture Educator” as a regular section of Moving Picture World.

5. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, eds., Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009).

6. I consider the coverage of moving pictures in this magazine in “Putting Films to Work: System, The Magazine for Business,” in Films that Work Harder, ed. Yvonne Zimmermann, Vincenz Hediger, and Florian Hoof (forthcoming).

7. “Commercializing the Motion Picture,” Business: A Magazine for Office, Store and Factory 32, no. 5 (May 1914): 242.

8. See, for instance, Clarence B. Greene, “Screen Proves Its Selling Power for National Cash Register Co,” Reel and Slide 1 (April 1918): 27–28; “Motion Pictures Valuable as New Business Stimulators,” Public Service 12, no. 12 (June 1912): 16, 18; John Liston, “General Electric Lecture Service,” General Electric Review 19, no. 3 (March 1916): 236–40; “National Moving Picture Campaign for ‘20-Mule Team’ Borax,” Printers’ Ink 68, no. 12 (September 22, 1909): 27. I discuss the extensive use of film by the International Harvester Corporation in “International Harvester, Business Screen and the History of Advertising Film,” in Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, ed. Bo Florin, Nico de Klerk, and Patrick Vonderau (London: Palgrave, 2016), 40–53; and “Advertising with Moving Pictures: International Harvester’s The Romance of the Reaper (1910–1913),” in The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material, ed. Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, Tom Gunning, and Joshua Yumibe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 194–202.

9. Leonard Donaldson, The Cinematograph and Natural Science: The Achievements and Possibilities of Cinematography as an Aid to Scientific Research (London: Ganes, Limited, 1912), 3.

10. Oliver Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also, for example, Hannah Landecker, “Microcinematography and the History of Science and Film,” Isis 97 (2006): 122–23; Virgilio Tosi, Cinema before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography, trans. Sergio Angelini (London: British Universities Film & Video Council, 2005).

11. “From Bud to Blossom in Colored Motion Pictures,” Popular Mechanics 15, no. 6 (June 1911): cover; “Daly’s Theatre,” Moving Picture News 4, no. 37 (September 16, 1911): 15.

12. Charles Urban, “The Cinematograph in Science and Education,” Moving Picture World 1, no. 21 (July 27, 1907): 324; 1, no. 22 (August 3, 1907): 341–42; 1, no. 23 (August 10, 1907): 356–57; 1, no. 24 (August 17, 1907): 372–73; 1, no. 25 (August 24, 1907): 388–89. See Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity, 15–46; Luke McKernan, Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2013); and Ian Christie, “A Scientific Instrument? Animated Photography among Other New Imagining Technologies,” in The Image in Early Cinema, 185–93. On Kleine’s role in developing the “market opportunities” for exhibiting moving pictures as part of the 1910 public health campaign against the “fly pest,” see Bill Marsh, “Visual Education in the United States and the ‘Fly Pest’ Campaign of 1910,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 30, no. 1 (March 2010): 21–36.

13. Urban, “The Cinematograph in Science and Education,” 341–42.

14. Ibid., 389.

15. Frederick A. Talbot, Practical Cinematography and its Applications (London: William Heinemann, 1913), 1, 7.

16. “Novel Uses for Moving Pictures,” Moving Picture World 1, no. 3 (March 23, 1907): 39–40; “unjust attacks” is from Moving Picture World 1, no. 7 (April 20, 1907): 100.

17. “Man’s Heart in Motion on the Screen,” Moving Picture World 1, no. 6 (April 13, 1907): 91; “Moving Camera Takes Flash,” Moving Picture World 1, no. 17 (June 29, 1907): 266.

18. “Usefulness of Moving Pictures,” Moving Picture World 7, no. 6 (February 19, 1910): 247.

19. “The Microscope and the Cinematograph,” Moving Picture World 12, no. 2 (April 13, 1912): 138. See, for example: “A Study of Micro-Motion,” Moving Picture World 15, no. 9 (March 1, 1913): 897; “The Cinematograph in Surgery,” Moving Picture World 14, no. 12 (December 21, 1912): 1178; “Moving Pictures Teach R. R. Employees How to Handle Explosives,” Moving Picture World 17, no. 10 (September 6, 1913): 1050; “Boosting a City with Moving Pictures,” Moving Picture World 13, no. 12 (September 21, 1912): 1178; “Amimalculae Found in Stagnant Water Microscopically Revealed,” Moving Picture World 16, no. 3 (April 19, 1913): 281; W. Stephen Bush, “Films for Farmers,” Moving Picture World 17, no. 9 (August 30, 1913): 939.

20. “Motography’s Salutatory,” Motography 5, no. 4 (April 1911): 3.

21. See, for example, “Moving Pictures in Churches,” Nickelodeon 3, no. 2 (1910): 32; “Sunday School Installations,” Nickelodeon 5, no. 2 (1911): 42; “Minister Will Give Free Shows,” Motography 5, no. 5 (1911): 78; “Another Kind of Minister,” Nickelodeon 5, no. 5 (February 4, 1911): 125–26; “Church to Give Illustrated Songs and Sermons,” Motography 5, no. 4 (April 1911): 13; “The Favor of the Clergy,” Motography 6, no. 6 (December 1911): 255–56; “Another Church to Use Films,” Motography 6, no. 6 (December 1911): 277.

22. K. S. Hover, “Motography as an Arm of the Church,” Motography 5, no. 5 (May 1911): 84.

23. See, for example, Charles Gibson, “Moving Pictures Curing Insanity,” Nickelodeon 4, no. 9 (November 1, 1910): 253–54. See also “Moving Pictures in State Institutions,” Nickelodeon 1, no. 1 (January 1909): 20; “Insane See Moving Pictures,” Nickelodeon 2, no. 1 (January 1, 1910): 25; “Insane Hospitals Buying Machines,” Nickelodeon 4, no. 12 (1910): 332; “Christmas Treat for Insane,” Nickelodeon 5, no. 2 (January 14, 1911): 45; “Pictures for Elgin Hospital,” Nickelodeon 5, no. 3 (January 21, 1911): 80; “Asylum Patients See Films,” Nickelodeon 5, no. 11 (March 18, 1911): 296; “Another Asylum Gets Into Line,” Motography 5, no. 4 (April 1911): 19; “Motion Pictures Good for Insane,” Motography 5, no. 4 (April 1911): 31; “Films Soothe Insane Patients,” Motography 6, no. 2 (August 1911): 89; “Pictures Greatest Aid to Insane,” Motography 7, no. 5 (May 1912): 224. Moving Picture World made similar claims; see, for example, “The Picture in the Insane Asylum,” Moving Picture World 10, no. 9 (December 2, 1911): 710; “Motion Pictures in Oregon Asylum,” Moving Picture World 19, no. 7 (February 14, 1914): 528.

24. “Moving Picture Uses,” Moving Picture News 5, no. 20 (May 18, 1912): 9; “Tuberculosis Pictures to be Shown in Parks,” Moving Picture News 6, no. 1 (July 6, 1912): 19.

25. “Training Recruits with Motion Pictures,” Photoplay 7, no. 3 (February 1915): 42; photograph of Moving Picture Car of Penn Railroad, Photoplay 8, no. 4 (September 1915): 37.

26. Margaret I. MacDonald, “Innovations in the Use of the Moving Picture: Educational and Curative,” Moving Picture News 4, no. 2 (January 14, 1911): 7.

27. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 77.

28. Bush, “Films for Farmers,” 939. On Bush’s writing for Moving Picture World, see Richard L. Stromgren, “The Moving Picture World of W. Stephen Bush,” Film History 2, no. 1 (1988): 13–22.

29. “A Study of Micro-Motion,” Moving Picture World 15, no. 9 (March 1, 1913): 897. For an example of the same utopian discourse in more general-interest magazines, see Charles B. Brewer, “The Widening Field of the Moving Picture: Its Commercial, Educational and Artistic Value,” Century Magazine 86, no. 1 (May 1913): 66–78, who declares “though the work of the cinematograph is only in its infancy, the range of its possibilities seems almost boundless” (71). See also the enumeration of significant uses of the medium in Pierce J. Fleming, “Moving Pictures as a Factor in Education,” Pedagogical Seminary 18, no. 3 (September 1911): 336–52.

30. See, for example, W. Stephen Bush, “A Survey of the Educational Field,” Moving Picture World 17, no. 6 (August 9, 1913): 614–15; and “The Evolution of the Educational Picture,” Moving Picture World 18, no. 12 (December 20, 1913): 1398. As early as 1910 Nickelodeon voiced dissatisfaction with this terminology: “We wish someone brighter than we would discover or coin a more expressive and euphonious term by which to classify scenic, scientific, and industrial subjects,” “Picture Psychology,” Nickelodeon 4, no. 9 (November 1, 1910): 245.

31. “In the Educational Field,” Moving Picture World 8, no. 4 (January 28, 1911): 181–82. Preceding the “Moving Picture Educator” was a column that appeared first in 1910 with the title, “Education, Science and Art and the Moving Picture,” (March 12, 1910). This magazine also offered during 1912–13 a column focusing on churches (“Picture in the Pulpit”), which subsequently was folded into the “Moving Picture Educator.”

32. Moving Picture World 24, no. 3 (April 17, 1915): 381.

33. “Pictures in School,” Motography 7, no. 2 (1912): 100–101, made explicit a common assumption in the trade press that seems to underplay if not erase the difference between theatrical and non-theatrical sites: “the educational application of motion pictures depends wholly on the sort of pictures shown, and not on where they are shown. A correctly costumed historical subject, or a study of contemporaneous life in foreign countries, is as fitting an adjunct for school work as is Jones’ History of England or Smith’s Geography of the World. But those subjects would be equally educational shown in a picture theater” (101).

34. W. Stephen Bush, “Educational Catalogues I,” Moving Picture World 18, no. 4 (October 25, 1913): 357; “Educational Catalogues II,” Moving Picture World 18, no. 6 (November 13, 1913): 589; “Educational Catalogues III,” Moving Picture World 18, no. 7 (November 20, 1913): 713; “Catalogue of Educational Releases for 1914,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 6 (February 6 1915): 815–16; and 23, no. 7 (February 13, 1915): 971–74.

35. See, for example, “Educational Pictures,” Moving Picture News 4, no. 48 (December 2, 1911): 1–2; “Educational Films,” Moving Picture News 6, no. 16 (October 19, 1912): 7–8; “Cinematography as an Educational Agent,” Moving Picture News 6, no. 19 (November 9, 1912): 7–8; “Educational Films,” Moving Picture News 6, no. 22 (November 30, 1912): 7–8. Exhibitors’ Times also had a comparable regular feature, entitled “Educational Pictures.” See, for example, “Educational Pictures,” Exhibitors’ Times 1, no. 7 (July 5, 1913): 37, where it is paired with “Motion Picture and the Church.” For a sense of the broader discourse beyond the trade press, see the bibliography compiled by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Education, List of References of Moving Pictures in Education (June 1914).

36. “In the Educational Field,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 10 (March 14, 1914): 35.

37. “In the Educational Field,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 25 (June 27, 1914): 41.

38. Moving Picture World 21, no. 7 (August 15, 1914): 980.

39. The treatment of non-theatrical cinema through the 1920s and 1930s in the film industry trade press increasingly reflected different priorities and concerns: the push for 16mm as a cheaper (and safer) alternative to 35mm, the emergence of the classroom film as a distinct genre, and the high-profile initiatives by Will Hays and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America regarding the “educational” uses of film, initiatives that aimed to improve the industry’s public image and to secure a potential market. See, for example, “MPPDA, Educators Offer Plan for School Films,” Motion Picture Herald 128, no. 1 (July 3, 1937): 12–13; “Industry Interest in 16 mm. Field Follows Technical Improvement,” Motion Picture Herald 128, no. 10 (September 4, 1937): 33–34; “Trend toward Classroom Films Recognized by 30 States,” Motion Picture Herald 129, no. 8 (November 20, 1937): 73. I discuss Hollywood’s relation with 16mm during the 1920s and 1930s in “16mm Hollywood,” Oxford Handbook of American Film History, ed. Jon Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

40. Robert Grau, The Theatre of Science: A Volume of Progress and Achievement in the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Broadway Publishing, 1914), 233. Grau singled out Scientific American, which he praised for “reveal[ing] to the layman persistently almost every development, illustrating the articles appropriately and presenting the text in non-technical language.” Another valuable print source are specialized, professionally oriented scientific and medical publications of the period, like the Maryland Medical Journal, which detailed the “the great field of usefulness” of moving pictures “as an aid to medical education and research” (“The Kinematograph in Relation to Medical Instruction,” Maryland Medical Journal 40, no. 12 [December 1916]: 310–11). See also, for example, Rudolph Matas, “The Cinematograph as an Aid to Medical Education and Research,” New York Medical Journal 96, no. 6 (August 31, 1912): 409–13; 96, no. 10 (September 7, 1912): 483–88.

41. “The Scientific American and the Supplement,” Scientific American 89 (November 14, 1903): 350, described the Supplement as an “overflow journal” offering material “which, in its very nature, was too abstruse or too special for a large class of our readers.”

42. “The Kinetoscope Stereopticon,” Scientific American 75 (October 31, 1896): 324, 331; “The Art of Moving Photography,” Scientific American 76 (April 17, 1897): 248–50. See also “The Lumiere Cinematograph Camera,” Scientific American 76 (June 26, 1897): 405. Other new or newly improved media or communication devices garnering attention from Scientific American around the turn of the century included the phonograph, with the gramophone pictured on the cover of Scientific American’s May 16, 1896, issue; and, particularly, wireless telegraphy. See, for example, William Fawcett, “The Latest Advance in Wireless Telephony,” Scientific American 86 (May 24, 1902): 363; A. Frederick Collins, “Some New Directions for Wireless Telegraphy,” Scientific American 87 (October 4, 1902): 200–201; “The De Forest System of Wireless Telegraphy,” Scientific American 87 (August 16, 1902): 102–3; and “The Braun-Siemens-Halske System of Wireless Telegraphy,” the cover story in Scientific American Supplement 54 (July 5, 1902): 22160–61.

43. See Gustave Babin, “The Making of Moving Pictures I—How Their Fantastic Effects are Obtained,” Scientific American Supplement 66 (July 11, 1908): 24–26; “The Making of Moving Pictures II—How Their Fantastic Effects are Obtained,” Scientific American Supplement 66 (July 18, 1908): 40–42; “Some Tricks of the Moving Picture Maker,” Scientific American 100 (June 26, 1909): 476–77, 487.

44. “The Mutoscope and Machinery in Motion,” Scientific American 84 (March 30, 1901): 196–97. See also the ad for Commercial Mutoscope, Scientific American 84 (April 6, 1901): 224.

45. “The Kinetoscope for Scientific Investigation,” Scientific American Supplement 53 (June 28, 1902): 22147. Related material included: “The Life of the Infinitely Small,” Scientific American 101 (November 27, 1909): 390; R. Villers, “Moving Pictures of Microbes: The Chronophotography of the Invisibly Small,” Scientific American Supplement 69 (January 1, 1910): 12; “Motion Pictures of the Flight of Insects,” Scientific American 103 (July 30, 1910): 84–85; C. V. Boys, “The Ultra-Rapid Cinematograph,” Scientific American Supplement 70 (November 12, 1910): 310.

46. “Varied Modern Uses of the Automobile,” Scientific American 87 (August 9, 1902): 91–92.

47. “Therapeutic Movies,” St. Louis [MO] Post-Dispatch, August 17, 1914, 14. This brief article is identified as having been reprinted from the Philadelphia Telegraph.

48. “Military Photography,” Scientific American 87 (August 16, 1902): 101; L. Ramakers, “Photography of the Interior of the Eye,” Scientific American 91 (December 17, 1904): 435. See also A. Gradenwite, “The ‘Telephot,’ A Novel Apparatus for Photographing at Great Distances,” Scientific American 88 (June 27, 1903): 486; “New Method of Photographing the Effect of the N-Rays,” Scientific American Supplement 58 (August 13, 1904): 23923–24.

49. W. L. Scandlin, “Photography in World Progress: Its Value to Science,” Scientific American Supplement 66 (October 24, 1908): 262–63.

50. On Universal City: “The Strangest City in the World: A Town Given over to the Motion Pictures,” Scientific American 112 (April 17, 1915): 365. On projection: Joseph R. Baker, “Eliminating the Flicker from the Moving Picture: A New System of Motion Picture Projection,” Scientific American 110 (February 14, 1914): 146, 151–52; Arthur J. Lang, “Safe Moving Pictures: The Inventions of Nicholas Power,” Scientific American 110 (April 11, 1914): 314, 320; “Arc-light Controller for Motion Picture Projection Apparatus,” Scientific American 112 (March 20, 1915): 272; “An Important Moving-picture Decision,” Scientific American 112 (April 17, 1915): 370; W. B. Morton, “A Stop Motion for Moving Picture Machines: An Ingenious and Radical Improvement,” Scientific American Supplement 79 (June 19, 1915): 396–97. On special effects and trick shots: C. H. Claudy, “Motion Picture Magic: Playing Tricks on Time,” Scientific American 112 (May 15, 1915): 454–55; C. H. Claudy, “Motion Picture Magic: What We See and What We Think We See,” Scientific American Supplement 80 (September 15, 1915): 184–85.

On sound and color: “Moving and Talking Pictures,” Scientific American 108 (January 18, 1913): 64, 78–80; “Exhibition of Improved Talking Pictures and Moving Pictures in Natural Colors,” Scientific American 108 (June 14, 1913): 539; “Motion Pictures in Color: Various Methods by Which the Problem Has Been Attempted,” Scientific American Supplement 78 (December 19, 1914): 386–87; Albert Marple, “Combining the Phonograph and the Camera,” Scientific American 111 (September 12, 1914): 208, 219; “Kinematographics,” Scientific American Supplement 80 (October 16, 1915): 251.

Other articles concerning theatrical, commercial cinema included: Moritz A. Jagendorf, “The Hope-Jones Unit Orchestra,” Scientific American 110 (February 14, 1914): 137, 150–51; Robert H Moulton, “Training Wild Animals for Moving Pictures,” Scientific American 110 (May 30, 1914): 443; “Elaborate Moving-picture Scenery,” Scientific American 110 (June 18, 1914): 489; “Real Perils of a Reel Hero,” Scientific American 111 (September 12, 1914): 215; “An Important Moving-picture Decision,” Scientific American 112 (April 17, 1915): 370; C. Francis Jenkins, “The Romance of Motion Pictures: A Scientific Toy that has Grown to be a Great Commercial Factor,” Scientific American Supplement 79 (May 22, 1915): 323; “First Moving Picture Studio in the United States,” Scientific American 113 (July 24, 1915): 83.

51. “Utilizing Moving Pictures in Target Practice,” Scientific American 107 (October 26, 1912): 352.

52. “Training Marksmen by the Kinematograph,” Scientific American 110 (May 23, 1914): 423, 436; “Stalking Game with the Kinematograph: How the Film Has Educated Zoologists,” Scientific American 110 (April 25, 1914): 342.

53. C. J. Blanchard, “The Government Uses Motion Pictures,” Scientific American Supplement 80 (August 22, 1915): 120–22, which is actually a reprint of Blanchard’s “Uncle Sam in the Movies,” American Forestry 21, no. 4 (April 1915): 532–40.

54. “Scientific Use of Moving Pictures,” Scientific American 106 (May 4, 1912): 39; “The Industrial Coach: How the Efficiency Engineer Studies the Human Machine,” Scientific American 113 (November 6, 1915): 402–3; “X-ray Moving Pictures,” Scientific American 109 (July 12, 1913): 27; Herbert T. Wade, “X-Ray Moving Pictures of the Digestive Tract: A New Way of Studying Diseases of the Stomach,” Scientific American 110 (May 9, 1914): 395–96; “Motion Picture Records of a Building in Construction,” Scientific American Supplement 76 (July 26, 1913): 52; “The Kinematograph in Research,” Scientific American Supplement 77 (June 13, 1914): 371; “Micro-Motion Study,” Scientific American 108 (January 25, 1913): 84.

On Gilbreth’s use of motion pictures, see, particularly, Florian Roof, “Between Recognition and Abstraction: Early Vocational Training Films,” in The Image in Early Cinema, 111–19; Scott Curtis, “Science Lessons,” Film History 51, nos. 1–2 (2013): 45–54; and Scott Curtis, “Images of Efficiency: The Films of Frank B. Gilbreth,” in Films that Work, 85–99.

55. See, for example, “A Motion-Picture Camera for Aeroplanes,” Popular Mechanics 18, no. 2 (August 1912): 242; “X-Ray Moving Pictures of the Digestive Tract,” 395; “How the Kinematograph Facilitates the Study of Tissues,” Scientific American 110 (March 23, 1914): 269, 273; “Stalking Game with the Kinematograph,” 342.

56. C. G. Harcourt, “How to Make a Moving-Picture Camera,” Scientific American 103 (December 17, 1910): 483; “Moving Pictures at Home,” Scientific American 108 (June 14, 1913): 544. See also “Motion-Picture Camera for Aeroplanes,” 241–42.

57. Charles Frank, “Home-Made Motion-Picture Camera and Projector, Part I” Popular Mechanics 15, no. 6 (June 1911): 912–14; “Home-Made Motion-Picture Camera and Projector, Part II,” Popular Mechanics 16, no. 1 (July 1911): 142–43; “Home-Made Motion-Picture Camera and Projector, Part III,” Popular Mechanics 16, no. 2 (August 1911): 296–97.

58. “To the South Pole with the Cinematograph,” Scientific American 108 (June 21, 1913): 560–61, 568–69. See also “Kinematographing the Matterhorn,” Scientific American 110 (March 21, 1914): 250–51, 254–56. On Ponting, see Dennis Lynch, “The Worst Location in the World: Herbert G. Ponting in the Antarctic, 1910–1912,” Film History 3, no. 4 (1989): 291–306.

59. “Moving Pictures Under Water,” Scientific American 111 (July 11, 1914): cover; “Photograph of a Fight with A Shark Taken Under Water with the Williamson Apparatus,” Scientific American Supplement 78 (August 8, 1914): cover. See also “Taking Movies at the Bottom of the Sea,” Popular Mechanics 22, no. 1 (July 1914): 6–9; and “Submarine Cameras,” Popular Mechanics 22, no. 1 (July 1914): 29.

60. Keville Glennan, “Moving Pictures Under Water: A New Apparatus for Making Sub-Marine Investigations,” Scientific American Supplement 78 (August 8, 1914): 88–89.

61. J. E. Williamson, “Taking Moving Pictures at the Bottom of the Ocean: A Remarkable Photographic Feat and How It Was Accomplished,” Scientific American 111 (July 11, 1914): 25.

62. Ads for Capt. Scott’s South Pole Expedition, Moving Picture News 5, no. 11 (March 16, 1912): 3; Moving Picture World 11, no. 12 (March 23, 1912): 1031.

63. Ad for Capt. Scott’s South Pole Expedition, Moving Picture News 5, no. 14 (April 6, 1912): 3. Ads for theaters screening the film: ad for Lyric Theater, New York Times, July 20, 1913, 61; ad for Hamburger’s Majestic Theater, Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1913, 21; ad for Ziegfield, Chicago Tribune, October 14, 1913, 12; ad for Salt Lake Theater, Salt Lake [UT] Tribune, February 7, 1914, 13; ad for Mystic Theater, The Tribune [Coshocton, OH], July 18, 1912, 5; ad for Grand Opera House, Stevens Point [WI] Journal, August 12, 1914, 4. In The Theatre of Science, Grau claimed that “the pictures of Captain Scott’s unfortunate expedition to the South Pole illustrate as nothing else can the possibilities of a heaven-born new art” (104).

64. “Capt. Scott South Pole Pictures and Lecture, Tremont Temple Boston, Jan. 26,” New York Clipper 61, no. 49 (January 17, 1914): 15. See the ads for Macdonough Theater, Oakland [CA] Tribune, January 23, 1915, 3; Grand Theater, Topeka [KS] State Journal, May 4, 1915, 5.

65. “Submarine Pictures Shown,” Motography 12, no. 9 (August 29, 1914): 298; “Taking Pictures Under Water,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 2 (July 11, 1914): 226; Theodore Franklin, “Show Submarine Films at Smithsonian,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 4 (August 1, 1914): 46; Peter Milne, “Review of Thirty Leagues Under the Sea,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 12 (September 26, 1914): 60; “Universal Takes Over Submarine Pictures,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 4 (January 23, 1915): 494; mention of Luman C. Mann as the lecturer with this film, “Chicago Film Brevities,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 12 (March 20, 1915): 1749. See ads for Armory Theater, Press and Sun-Bulletin [Binghamton NY], November 17, 1914, 8; Academy, Times Dispatch [Richmond VA], November 19, 1914, 4; Columbia Theater, Evening Star [Washington DC], December 6, 1914, 27; Fine Arts, Chicago Tribune, December 22, 1914, 15.

66. Ad for Broadway Rose Gardens, New York Sun, September 14, 1914, 16. Universal ad, Motion Picture News 2, no. 16 (April 24, 1915): 96–97.

67. “Inventors of Under-Sea Photography,” Motography 16, no. 17 (October 21, 1916): 934.

68. Ad for Williamson Submarine Pictures, Wid’s Year Book (1920), 58–59.

69. Simon Henry Gage and Henry Phelps Gage, Optic Projection: Principles, Installation and Use of the Magic Lantern, Projection Microscope, Reflecting Lantern, Moving Picture Machine (Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing Company, 1914), 395.

70. “A Suitcase Motion-Picture Laboratory,” Scientific American 120 (May 24, 1919): 543; C. H. Claudy, “Photographing the War,” Scientific American 120 (May 24, 1900): 544–55.

71. “Filming a Record Breaking Motorboat,” Scientific American 120 (March 29, 1919): cover; “A Camera for Filming Rapidly-Moving Objects,” Scientific American 120 (March 29, 1919): 315. Two covers around the same time featured wireless radio, including the June 28, 1919, issue, showing two earnest young men “listening to European Wireless Stations in American Attic,” as Scientific American began a “special series on the broad subject of amateur telegraphy and telephony” and “every important phase of post-bellum amateur radio” (“Amateurs in Name Only,” Scientific American 120 [June 28, 1919]: 688).

72. Carl S. Propson, “Filming a Lens in Action,” Scientific American 121 (October 11, 1919): 359.

73. C. H. Claudy, “The Romance of Invention II—Sixteen Per Second,” Scientific American 121 (September 13, 1919): 252, 266, 268.

74. “Moving Pictures and the Safety Movement,” Scientific American 121 (July 29, 1919): 53; “Multiplying the Average Motion-Picture Screen by Six,” Scientific American 121 (August 16, 1919): 159; Claudy, “Photographing the War,” 544–45; “How the Palatial Passenger Liner ‘Vaterland’ Was Transformed into the Huge Transport ‘Leviathan,’ Fitted to Carry 12,000 Men,” Scientific American 120 (April 26, 1919): 434–35.

75. Austin C. Lescarboura, “Generals of Shadowland Warfare,” Scientific American 116 (May 5, 1917): 446–47, 456–57, 459–60; “Shooting the Photoplay: An Introduction to the Motion-Picture Camera-Man and His Art,” Scientific American 117 (September 15, 1917): 192–93, 199–200; “From the Camera to the Screen,” Scientific American 117 (December 8, 1917): 440–41. When Moving Picture Age in 1922 hired Lescarboura to “conduct” a “department devoted to discussions on the important mechanical equipment of visual instruction,” it identified him as Managing Editor of Scientific American (“Editorials,” Moving Picture Age 5, no. 2 [February 1922]: 6).

76. Lescarboura, “Generals of Shadowland Warfare,” 446–47, 456–57, 459–60.

77. See the Scientific American covers for May 5, September 15, and December 8, 1917.

78. Austin C. Lescarboura, Behind the Motion-Picture Screen (New York: Scientific American Publishing Company, 1919), 414.

79. Lescarboura, Behind the Motion-Picture Screen, 414–16.

80. Austin C. Lescarboura, The Cinema Handbook (New York: Scientific American Publishing Company, 1922) xi.

81. Lescarboura, The Cinema Handbook, 378–80.

82. See, for example, the essays in Films that Work and Films that Sell. Another widely noted version of the utility film were “accident prevention” motion pictures sponsored by railroads. A speaker at the 1915 Congress of the National Safety Council, for example, affirmed that moving pictures are “the most effective medium for making a real and lasting impression upon the average working man”—as evidenced by the success of the sponsored film, Steven Hill’s Awakening (1914), screened in a railway car and seen by “nearly 10,000 employees” of the Norfolk and Western Railroad (“Fourth Annual Congress of National Safety Council,” Railway World 59, no. 10 [October 1915]: 733).

83. Chester L. Lucas, “The Moving Picture in the Machine Tool Business,” Scientific American Supplement 77 (February 14, 1914): 103–5, rpt. from Machinery 20 (January 1914): 345–48.

84. Watterson R. Rothacker, “Industrial Uses of the Moving Picture: How and Why Moving Pictures Educate and Advertise,” Scientific American 106 (June 15, 1912): 536. On Rothacker, see Martin L. Johnson, “An ‘Advertising Punch’ in Every Frame: Image-Making in Early Advertising Films,” in The Image in Early Cinema, 276–85; and Richard Abel, “Rothacker Film: ‘Largest and Best Laboratory in America’?” Film History 33, no. 4 (2021): 1–28.

85. A sample of Rothacker’s very similar publications include: “Municipal Publicity and Motion Pictures,” Nickelodeon 5, no. 8 (February 25, 1911): 219–20; “How Moving Pictures Stimulate Sales,” Nickelodeon, 5, no. 10 (March 11, 1911): 273–74, which originally appeared in Judicious Advertising 9, no. 4 (March 1911): 118–19; “Moving Ad Pictures Attract Notice,” Paint, Oil and Drug Review 51, no. 14 (April 5, 1911): 39; “Putting Advertising Films to Use,” Motography 6, no. 3 (September 1911): 139, rpt. from Printer’s Ink; “Facts about Motion Picture Advertising,” Motography 8, no. 11 (November 23, 1912): 409–10, rpt. from Advertising and Selling; “Developing Advertising Power in Motion Pictures,” Exhibitors’ Times 1, no. 18 (September 27, 1913): 5, 24; “New Facts in Moving Picture Advertising,” Judicious Advertising 11, no. 9 (September 1913): 93–95. See also “A Visit to the Industrial Moving Picture Company,” Judicious Advertising 13, no. 4 (April 1915): 87–89.

86. Rothacker, “Industrial Uses of the Moving Picture,” 536. See Rothacker’s “Teaching the Farmer to Use Dynamite,” Motography 6, no. 2 (August 1911): 65–67, where he notes that “it is an inspiring sight to see a group of stumps blown simultaneously out of the ground and so uprooted as to be carried away” (65); and a very similar account in his “Where Moving Pictures Fit into the Campaign,” Judicious Advertising 9, no. 10 (September 1911): 96–99. By 1915 Judicious Advertising was still pointing to this film as one of the premiere examples of film in the service of advertising (“A Visit to the Industrial Moving Picture Company,” 88).

87. “Moving Pictures in Educational Work,” Printers’ Ink 89, no. 1 (July 2, 1914): 78. Well before this date, the Nicholas Power Company had advertised its Cameragraph projector in Advertising & Selling 21, no. 9 (February 1912): 141, with the tagline: “you will eventually use moving pictures to advertise your business”—following the lead of prominent “users” like International Harvester and National Cash Register.

88. Haidee Wasson, “Selling Machines: Film and its Technologies at the New York World’s Fair,” in Films that Sell, 55. Bo Florin, Patrick Vonderau, and Yvonne Zimmerman, Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), offers a particularly rich approach to the broad history of screen advertisements.

89. Patrick Vonderau, “Introduction: On Advertising’s Relation to Moving Pictures,” in Films that Sell, 4.

90. Charles Musser, “Early Advertising and Promotional Films, 1893–1900: Edison’s Motion Pictures as a Case Study,” in Films that Sell, 83–90.

91. C. Francis Jenkins and Oscar B. DePue, Handbook for Motion Picture and Stereopticon Operators (Washington, DC: Knega Company, 1908), 95–96.

92. But note that even Rothacker was still insisting to the readers of Judicious Advertising in 1914 that moving picture advertising by “prominent companies” was exhibited in a range of non-theatrical sites: for example, Farming with Dynamite at “land shows, at farmers’ institutes, [and] at state and county fairs; a film from the Phoenix Horse Shoe Company at farriers’ conventions; moving pictures from the Peabody Coal Company at Yale University (Watterson R. Rothacker, “Advertising with Moving Pictures,” Judicious Advertising 12, no. 6 [June 1914]: 79–81).

Jeremy W. Groskopf, “Profit Margins: The American Silent Cinema and the Marginalization of Advertising,” PhD diss., Georgia State University, 2013, charts how the promise of deploying “direct advertising” in movie theaters was in practice largely unrealized during the silent era. The incorporation of “advertising pictures” into theatrical film exhibition was much more common in Europe from the 1920s on. See, for example, Yvonne Zimmermann, “ ‘What Hollywood Is to America, the Corporate Film Is to Switzerland’: Remarks on Industrial Film as Utility Film,” in Films that Work, 101–17; and Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttman and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-garde, Advertising, Modernity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014).

93. Watterson R. Rothacker, “The Modern Magic of Screen Advertising,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 9 (November 14, 1914): 23.

94. David Lay, “ ‘Movies’ that Find Customers,” System: A Magazine for Business 28, no. 2 (August 1915): 190–94.

95. Horatio F. Stoll, “Value of the Moving Pictures for Advertising,” Moving Picture World 10, no. 8 (March 11, 1911): 519–20.

96. Ad for Huntington Motion Picture Co., Huntington [IN] Herald, October 19, 1914, 5.

97. On The Making of a Shoe, see: “Important Moving Pictures,” Shoe and Leather Facts 33, no. 10 (October 1912): 25; “Boston Electrical Show,” Shoe and Leather Facts 32, no. 12 (December 1912): 12; “Convention ‘Panther’ Night,” Shoe and Leather Facts 33, no. 8 (August 1913): 12; “Moving Picture Lecture on Footwear,” Shoe and Leather Facts 34, no. 4 (April 1914): 21; “ ‘Movies’ Show Shoe Construction,” Shoe and Leather Facts 35, no. 1 (January 1915): 15–17; “The Exposition Exhibit,” Shoe and Leather Facts 35, no. 3 (March 1915): 65–66; “ ‘The Making of a Shoe,’ ” Shoe and Leather Reporter 120, no. 11 (December 16, 1915): 61; “Pioneer in Moving Picture Lecture,” Shoe and Leather Facts 36, no. 3 (March 1916): 37; “Instructive Moving Pictures,” Shoe and Leather Facts 36, no. 6 (June 1916): 50. In 1918, the publicity director for the United Shoe Company was still insisting on the continuing broad circulation of this film to “shoe men” and the “general public” (“Films and ‘Commercial Extension,’ ” Reel and Slide 1, no. 9 [November 1918], 15). See also Ernest A. Dench, “Selling Shoes Through Motion Pictures,” Judicious Advertising 14, no. 6 (June 1916): 91–92.

The Making of a Shoe was one of what seems to have been a considerable number of films sponsored by manufacturers and businesses in the mid-1910s, including, for example, the E. P Taylor distillery (see references in Moving Picture World 21, no. 5 [August 1, 1914]: 719, and Moving Picture World 22, no. 1 [October 3, 1914]: 81); National Tube Company (“Tube Company Uses Film,” Judicious Advertising 12, no. 6 [June 1914]: 107); Holeproof Hosiery (Moving Picture World 24, no. 10 [June 5, 1915]: 1637); American Coal Products (Moving Picture World 26, no. 4 [October 23, 1915]: 645); St. Louis Dry Goods Company (Moving Picture World 23, no. 12 [September 18, 1915]: 2024); Bigelow-Hartford Carpet Company (Springfield [MA] Daily News, January 30, 1915, 3); Page-Detroit Motor Company (Moving Picture World 23, no. 6 [February 6, 1915]: 854; and Kewanee Boiler Company (“Kewanee Boiler Company ‘Movie,’ ” Judicious Advertising 14, no. 7 [July 1916]: 40).

98. Lawrence Daily Journal-World, December 16, 1914, 5.

99. See the lengthy comments from the company’s president, H. W. Gossard, “Retailer as an Educator of Retailer’s Salespeople,” Printers’ Ink 86, no. 5 (January 29, 1914): 3–4, 6, 8, 10–12, rpt. in Paul Terry Cherington, The Advertising Book 1916 (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1916), 134–42. On Gossard’s advertising plans in general, see “A Corset Innovation and an ‘Interlocking’ Selling Campaign,” Printers’ Ink 71, no. 6 (May 11, 1910): 40–41.

100. James A. McClelland, “The Valuable Work a ‘Good Will’ Man Can Do,” Printers’ Ink 93, no. 7 (November 18, 1915): 113–16, includes a discussion of the use of motion pictures as part of Gossard’s “campaign of education to dealers . . . with the object of improving conditions in corset departments, teaching proper methods of fitting corsets and improvement in sales-work by retail saleswomen.”

101. Among Essanay’s other productions in 1915 was the two-reel Power of the Penny for the Wisconsin Anti-Tuberculosis Association of Milwaukee: “the plot furnishes an interesting romance as well as a technically instructive story . . . a staff of Essanay players take the leads in the drama” (New York Dramatic Mirror 73 [November 13, 1915]: 26); see also Motography 14, no. 21 (November 20, 1915): 1060. The year before, Charles Stark of Essanay had produced a one-reel film at the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World convention that was offered for free to local clubs in the US (“Toronto Convention in Movies,” Judicious Advertising 12, no. 8 [August 1914]: 100).

102. Hutchinson [KS] News, December 29, 1914, 5. A quite different strategy for motion picture advertising was Does it Pay to Advertise?, produced for the Fort Worth [TX] Record, which was shot in and screened in Fort Worth, featuring footage of local citizens (“Novel Movie Experiment,” Judicious Advertising 12, no. 9 [September 1914]: 70).

103. Gossard’s strategy was hardly unique. A “consumer-education” one-reel film produced for the Kewanee Boiler Company in 1916, for example, was praised in Judicious Advertising for how it “combines comedy, fiction and fact” and “manages to bring out the advantages of the improved boiler without sacrificing human interest”(“Kewanee Boiler Company ‘Movie,’ ” 40). Other advertising/public relations films that incorporated a fictional narrative included the Chicago Telephone Company’s The Modern Seven League Boots, described in Bell Telephone News 5, no. 5 (December 1915): 20–21.

104. South Bend [IN] News-Times, November 11, 1914, 7.

105. “Dealers Hire ‘Movies’ for Corset Story,” Printers’ Ink 89, no. 13 (December 24, 1914): 62–63. Yvonne Zimmermann, “Advertising and Film: A Topological Approach,” in Films that Sell, 34.

106. At a screening of Gossard’s follow-up film, The Social Key, in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, for example, “the stage was decorated with a splendid display of the new fall models in Gossard corsets and brassieres, surrounded by handsome bouquets of white and yellow chrysanthemums” (“A Novel Entertainment,” Wellsboro [PA] Gazette, November 1, 1916, 8).

107. “Manufacturers’ Motion Pictures Continue Popular,” Printers’ Ink 93, no. 4 (October 28, 1915): 28. For later screenings, see, for instance, Waco [TX] Morning News, May 16, 1916, 3; Janesville [WI] Daily Gazette, May 2, 1917, 3.

108. Moving Picture World 23, no. 2 (January 9, 1915): 234.

109. Advertisements for The Social Key include Tucumari [NM] News, September 14, 1916 8; Ogden [UT] Standard, October 30, 1916, 10; Arizona Republican [Phoenix], January 26, 1917, 5; North Platte [NE] Semi-Weekly Tribune, March 6, 1917, 5; Clovis [NM] News, July 5, 1917, 5; New Ulm [MN] Review, September 19, 1917, 8. “Corset Advertising News,” The Corset and Underwear Review 7, no. 6 (March 1917): 73, notes that the film is eighteen minutes long and also mentions that Gossard presented its “nine ideal figures” in posters and slides for use in motion picture theaters. See also for general information about Gossard, Frank Leroy Blanchard, “How Gossard Reduced Selling Cost and Helped the Retailer,” Printers’ Ink 97, no. 2 (October 12, 1916): 100, 102, 105–6, 109–10, 113–14, 117.

110. Charlotte [NC] Observer, April 2, 1917, 5.

111. These ads appeared in The Theatre and Woman’s Home Companion, among other magazines. See Blanchard, “How Gossard Reduced Selling Cost and Helped the Retailer,” 100, 106.

112. “A Novel Entertainment,” Wellsboro [PA] Gazette, November 1, 1916, 8.

113. “Regulating Motion Picture Shows,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 19, 1909, 6; “To Censor Film Shows,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, December 13, 1909, 3; “Censures Films Shown Here,” St. Louis Star and Times, February 21, 1910, 2. “Raiding Nickelodeons,” Variety 6, no. 7 (April 27, 1907): 8, reported on the arrest of a nickelodeon operator: “suggestive pictures confiscated include one of extreme licentiousness, showing a young woman in various states of retiring for the night. This is only one of over one hundred such places in St. Louis, and the police say they are going to raid all that have objectionable pictures. The maximum fine is $300.”

114. I consider this point in relation to independently owned small-town theaters in the 1930s in “Hillbilly Music and Will Rogers: Small-town Picture Shows in the 30s,” in American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 153–66; and “Imagining and Promoting the Small-Town Theater,” in Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing, ed. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 169–85.

115. “Dealers Hire ‘Movies’ for Corset Story,” Printers’ Ink 89, no. 13 (December 24, 1914): 62–63, calls the campaign a “new business-getting idea.” References in Moving Picture World, buried in the columns of information submitted from exhibitors across the country, offered little more than noting, for example, that “the Gossard corset-fitting moving pictures were shown at the Lyric theater in Birmingham, Ala.,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 12 (March 20, 1915): 1797.

116. “Utilizing Moving Pictures in Target Practice,” Scientific American 107 (October 26, 1912): 352.

117. Clayton Sedgwick Cooper, American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1915), 33.

118. Ad for E-Z-Bake Flour, Indianapolis News, February 12, 1916, 7; New Way Motor Company ad, Kansas Farmer and Mail and Breeze [Topeka KS], February 7, 1920, 40.

119. “The Industrial Coach: How the Efficiency Engineer Studies the Human Machine,” Scientific American 113 (November 6, 1915): 402.

120. “Innovative,” Moving Picture News 6, no. 18 (November 2, 1912): 25.

121. “Moving Picture Educator,” Moving Picture World 22, no. 4 (October 24, 1914): 481.

122. W. H. Jackson, “Encouraging Progress: The Moving Picture is the Social Leader, Entertainer and Educator of the Masses,” Moving Picture World 32, no. 8 (May 26, 1917): 1275.

3. MULTI-SITED CINEMA

1. “1915, as Seen from 1914,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 24 (December 19, 1914): 25–26.

2. See, for example, Jennifer Horne, “A History Overdue: The Public Library and Motion Pictures,” in Useful Cinema, ed. Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 149–77; Haidee Wasson, “Big, Fast Museums/Small, Slow Movies: Film, Scale, and the Art Museum,” in Useful Cinema, 205–29; Martin L. Johnson, “The Theater or the Schoolhouse? The Social Center, the Model Picture Show, and the Logic of Counterattractions,” Film History 29, no. 4 (2017): 1–31; Sue Collins, “Film, Cultural Policy, and World War I Training Camps: Send Your Soldiers to the Show with Smileage,” Film History 26, no. 1 (2014): 1–49; Alison Griffiths, “Film Education in the Natural History Museum: Cinema Lights Up the Gallery in the 1920s,” in Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, ed. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 124–44; Marina Dahlquist, “Health Instruction on Screen: The Department of Health in New York City-1917,” in Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema, ed. Marta Braun, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2012), 107–16; Caitlin McGrath, “ ‘This Splendid Temple’: Watching Movies in the Wanamaker Department Store,” in Beyond the Screen, 281–87; Terry Lindvall, Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Alison Griffiths, “A Portal to the Outside World: Motion Pictures in the Penitentiary,” Film History 25, no. 4 (2003): 1–35; Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Alison Griffiths, Carcereal Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

3. Mark-Anthony Falzon, “Introduction,” in Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis, and Locality in Contemporary Research, ed. Mark-Anthony Falzon (London: Ashgate, 2009), 1–2.

4. New Cinema History has been very much concerned with what Julia Hallam and Les Roberts describe as “spatial historiography” in their introduction to a collection of essays on this topic, many of which are concerned with “the historical geographies of film production and exhibition,” but always with an emphasis on the commercial film industry, the movie theater, and (theatrical) cinemagoing practices (“Film and Spatiality: Outline of a New Empiricism,” in Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place, ed. Julia Hallam and Les Roberts [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014], 8). A particular effective example of this approach is Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers’s study of Flanders, “Mapping Film Exhibition in Flanders (1920–1990): A Diachronic Analysis of Cinema Culture Combined with Demographic and Geographic Data,” in Locating the Moving Image, 80–105.

5. On traveling lecturers who relied on moving pictures as well as lantern slides, see Charles Musser, High-Class Motion Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Genoa Caldwell, ed., Burton Holmes, Travelogues: The Greatest Traveler of His Time, 1892–1952 (Hong Kong: Taschen, 2018); X. Theodore Barber, “The Roots of Travel Cinema: John L. Stoddard, E. Burton Holmes and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Travel Lecture,” Film History 5, no. 1 (1993): 68–84; Jennifer Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Richard Abel, “Charge and Countercharge: ‘Documentary’ War Pictures in the USA, 1914–1916,” Film History 22, no. 4 (2010): 366–88; and Gregory A. Waller, “The Multiple-Media Lecture: Racing with Death in Antarctic Blizzards (1915),” in Performing New Media, ed. Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, Joshua Yumibe (London: John Libbey, 2014), 150–59.

6. “Health Movies in Lee,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, May 9, 1917, 10. See the detailed account of the logistical aspects of this outreach service, written by the head of the North Carolina State Board of Health (“An Interesting Letter,” Moving Picture World 29, no. 12 [September 16, 1916]: 1830–31). Examples of other health campaigns include: efforts in Vermont from 1913 through 1915 that featured a “a complete moving picture apparatus” powered by “a motor-generator mounted on a truck” that visited ninety towns, reaching a total audience upward of twenty thousand (“Tuberculosis Commission Files Its Report,” Burlington [VT] Weekly Free Press, February 18, 1915, 4); and the Texas State Health exhibit car “with a stereopticon and moving picture display” used for meetings “held in the public square or near the car in any other convenient place” (Victoria [TX] Daily Advocate, February 1, 1915, 1, 4).

7. George E. Quisenberry, “Blazing the Film Trail in the Ozarks,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 11 (September 19, 1914): 36. On itinerant exhibitors in the US, see, for example, Calvin Pryluck, “The Itinerant Movie Show and the Development of the Film Industry,” Journal of the University Film and Video Association 25, no. 4 (1983): 11–22; Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); Gregory A. Waller, “Robert Southard and the History of Itinerant Film Exhibition,” Film Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2004): 2–14; Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, “The Archaeology of Itinerant Film Exhibition: Unpacking the Brinton Entertainment Company Collection,” in The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History, ed. Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers (New York: Routledge, 2019), 112–22.

8. “No Narrow Conceptions of Film Utility Will Do,” Reel and Slide 2, no. 5 (May 1919): 6.

9. “The Stag Party,” Moving Picture News 5, no. 4 (January 27, 1912): 6; “Police to Run Down All Illegal Films,” New York Times, January 17, 1912, 13; “Police Confiscate Bad Moving Picture,” Black Hills [SD] Weekly Journal, February 2, 1912, 6.

10. References to screenings at Madison Square Garden Poultry Show (New York Sun, February 7, 1915, 8); convention of the Southern Presbyterian Church’s Laymen’s Missionary Movement (“Moving Pictures at Laymen’s Meet to Show Missions,” Charlotte [NC] News, February 13, 1915, 3); the Ohio House of Representatives Hall (Butler County [OH] Democrat, February 11, 1915, 1); the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club (Baltimore [MD] Sun, February 3, 1915, 4); the high school auditorium in Neosha, Missouri (Neosha [MO] County Democrat, February 26, 1915, 1); the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater (“State Board of Control,” Little Falls [MN] Herald, February 12, 1915, 1); and the Raleigh Hotel (“Chief Justices and Senators at ‘Movie,’ ” Washington Herald, February 20, 1915, 5).

11. “Moving Picture Show at Western Kentucky Asylum Great Success,” Paducah [KY] Sun-Democrat, January 6, 1911, 2; “Moving Picture Shows to Be Given in All Kentucky Institutions,” Paducah [KY] Sun-Democrat February 9, 1911, 3; “Moving Pictures for State Wards,” Paducah [KY] Evening Sun, December 21, 1910, 2; “New Motion Picture Show Will Be Installed at the Western Kentucky Asylum,” Hopkinsville [KY] Kentuckian, December 24, 1910, 2; “Moving Pictures at Asylum Here,” Lexington [KY] Leader, February 8, 1911, 1; “Moving Pictures for Asylum Considered,” Lexington [KY] Herald, February 9, 1909, 10; “More Money for Asylum Patients,” Lexington [KY] Leader, March 26, 1911, 19; “Asylums Too Small to Care for Unfortunates,” Lexington [KY] Herald, November 19, 1911, 3; “Moving Picture Shows in all Insane Asylums,” Louisville [KY] Courier-Journal, February 8, 1911, 5; “Moving Pictures Delight Insane Patients at Western Asylum for Insane,” Louisville [KY] Courier-Journal, January 5, 1911, 6; and “Whims Forgotten by Patients of Kentucky Insane Asylum When Motion Pictures Are Shown,” Cincinnati [OH] Enquirer, January 5, 1911, 3. The motion picture trade press took note of this state initiative (“Asylum Patients See Films,” Nickelodeon 5, no. 11 [March 18, 1911]: 296; “Films Soothe Insane Patients,” Motography 6, no. 2 [August 1911]: 89), as did the Fourth Report of the Kentucky State Board of Control for Charitable Institutions for the Period of Two Years, July 1, 1909 to June 30, 1911 (Frankfort: Kentucky State Journal Publishing Company, 1911) 41, 116, 176.

Kentucky was hardly unique in deploying this new therapeutic/control strategy. See, for example, “Moving Pictures in State Institutions,” Nickelodeon 1, no. 1 (January 1909): 20; “Insane See Moving Pictures,” Nickelodeon 2, no. 1 (January 1, 1910): 25; Charles Gibson, “Moving Pictures Curing Insanity,” Nickelodeon 4, no. 9 (November 1, 1910): 253–54; “Insane Hospitals Buying Machines,” Nickelodeon 4, no. 12 (December 15, 1910): 332; “Christmas Treat for Insane,” Nickelodeon 5, no. 1 (January 14, 1911): 45; “Motion Pictures Good for Insane,” Motography 5, no. 4 (April 1911): 31; “Films Soothe Insane Patients,” Motography 6, no. 2 (August 1911): 89; “Pictures Greatest Aid to Insane,” Motography 7, no. 5 (May 1912): 224.

12. Wallace M. Morgan, History of Kern County, California (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1914), 134–47.

13. Bakersfield Morning Echo, February 14, 1915, 8.

14. “The Brotherhood League,” Bakersfield Morning Echo, February 12, 1914, 2.

15. “Moving Pictures for Brotherhood,” Bakersfield Morning Echo, November 14, 1914, 4; Bakersfield Morning Echo, January 19, 1915, 10. As early as 1911, a writer in Motography claimed that “the motion picture has actually become a part of the equipment of the up-to-date church,” with “a permanent machine as part of the regular equipment” of a church’s “lecture and entertainment halls and rooms” (K. S. Hover, “Motography as an Arm of the Church,” Motography 5, no. 5 [May 1911]: 84–86).

16. “Installing Movie Machine at Church,” Bakersfield Morning Echo, January 26, 1915, 10.

17. “ ‘Ben Hur’ Illustrated by Stereopticon Pictures,” Bakersfield Morning Echo, October 11, 1904, 14; “City Evils Pointed Out by Lecturer,” Bakersfield Morning Echo, March 9, 1912, 10; mention of Salvation Army lecture, Bakersfield Morning Echo, June 1, 1913, 10.

18. Bakersfield Californian, November 12, 1915, 3.

19. Bakersfield Californian, January 30, 1915, 4.

20. Bakersfield Californian, February 26, 1915, 6.

21. For example, The Pickwick Papers (Vitagraph 1913) was paired with Miniature Circus (likely a 1908 Pathé trick film) and an installment of the Pathé newsreel (Bakersfield Morning Echo, May 7, 1915, 10).

22. A 1911 editorial in Nickelodeon identifies five uses of motion pictures in the church: as an “entertainment device” comparable to the church social; as a tool for Sunday school religious instruction; as a way to promote foreign and home mission work; as a means of furthering “social education” and uplift campaigns; and as a part of the sermon, to make “the gospel vivid, pictorial, dramatic, and above all interesting” (“Another Kind of Minister,” Nickelodeon 5, no. 5 [February 4, 1911]: 125).

23. At this date films dealing with overtly Christian or Biblical subjects were relatively few and far between. Only thirteen such titles are listed in the Moving Picture World’s “Catalogue of Educational Releases” for 1914, which covers hundreds of films (Moving Picture World 23, no. 6 [February 6, 1915): 815.) One frustrated clergyman in Hartford, Connecticut, decided to open his own movie theater since the films made available from commercial distributors for “parish houses, churches and Y.M.C.A.’s” were “the stupidest, cheapest and most insipid films . . . held for a while by the big companies as junk for churches, after which they are sent to the wilds of South America” (Reverend H. E. Robbins, “Why I Opened a Moving Picture House,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 1 [January 2, 1915]: 64).

24. Rarely did calls for the use of moving pictures in different sites pay attention to the suitability of the space for film exhibition, but see the detailed instructions offered by Simon Henry Gage and Henry Phelps Gage about selecting a “suitable room” and preparing a room for film exhibition, including arranging lighting, placing the projector, and assuring the quality of the screen (Optic Projection [Ithaca, NY: Comstock Publishing, 1914], 439–73.)

25. Ad for Portoscope, Moving Picture World 26, no. 6 (October 30, 1915): 1036; price for Cameragraph listed in Power’s Cameragraph 1913 Catalog. Social reformer John Collier, then secretary of the People’s Institute, had no qualms about screening educational films at a YMCA, though he explained in 1912 that using this type of building required a considerable investment for the projector, projection booth, and machine operator, not to mention the difficulty in acquiring prints and the need to prepare advertising material and to arrange for music and a lecturer as “accessories” for the picture (“Motion Pictures for Y.M.C.A. Work,” Motography 8, no. 13 [December 21, 1912]: 493–94).

26. John B. Rathbun, Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting: A comprehensive volume treating the principles of motography; the making of motion pictures; the scenario; the motion picture theater; the projector; the conduct of film exhibiting; methods of coloring films; talking pictures, etc. (Chicago: Charles C. Thompson Company, 1914), 197–98.

27. Quoted in Federal Motion Picture Commission Hearings before the Committee on Education, House of Representatives, Sixty-Fourth Congress, First Session on H.R. 456, A Bill to Create a New Division of the Bureau of Education, To Be Known as the Federal Motion Picture Commission, and Defining Its Powers and Duties. January 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, and 19, 1916 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 296. Ordinances could also take sponsorship into account. New York City’s motion picture ordinance, printed in full in Municipal Engineering 47, no. 1 (July 1914): 35–40, granted exception for “motion picture exhibitions with or without charge for admission conducted under the direct management of educational or religious institutions” and to “motion picture exhibitions without charge for admission given or held not more than once a week in private residences or bona fide social, scientific, political or athletic clubs” (39).

28. “Appoints Board of Censorship,” Nashville [TN] Banner, May 7, 1914, 7; “Consider Aid to City Schools,” Nashville [TN] Banner, June 2, 1914, 1; “Nashville Has Film Censor Board,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 22 (June 6, 1914): 36.

29. W. Stephen Bush, “Motion Picture Laws,” Moving Picture World 22, no. 10 (December 5, 1914): 1372.

30. Moving Picture World 22, no. 5 (October 31, 1914): 672.

31. “An Ordinance to Amend Section 148 of the Code of the City of Miami, Adopted July 7th, 1910,” Miami [FL] News, January 10, 1914, 13.

32. W. Stephen Bush, “Motion Picture Laws,” Moving Picture World 22, no. 8 (November 21, 1914): 1062.

33. Moving Picture World 22, no. 12 (December 19, 1914): 1667. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1911 that the Salem Congregational church convinced the City Council to amend the ordinance prohibiting film exhibition in frame buildings to allow the operation of moving picture machines in buildings used “exclusively for religious purposes” (“Films Means of Grace,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1911, sec. II, 8).

34. “A Model Ordinance for Regulating Motion Picture Theatres,” Exhibitors’ Times 1, no. 4 (June 7, 1913): 22.

35. See “The Fireproof Projection Booth,” Motography 12, no. 7 (August 15, 1914): 250; “The Need of Fireproof Operating Booths,” Motion Picture News 11, no. 1 (January 9, 1915): 103–4; “Fireproof Booths,” Motion Picture News 19, no. 20 (May 17, 1919): 3253. In April 1913, the New York Clipper noted that the New York state senate passed a bill “providing that a portable booth for temporary exhibitions, may be used upon approval of the proper authorities. Concrete, hollow tile or other fireproof material may be used” (New York Clipper, April 19, 1913, 12). Alfred H. Saunders, “Motion Pictures as an Aid to Education,” in United States Bureau of Education Report of the Commissioner, 1913 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 1:593–94, argued that a chief “obstacle to the use of films in schools” was ordinances restricting the use of projectors in schools.

36. Sharlow Brothers Company ad, Motion Picture News 9, no. 24 (June 13, 1914): 129.

37. Ad for J-M Transite Asbestos Wood Booth, Moving Picture World 19, no. 2 (January 3, 1914): 111, and Variety 34, no. 9 (May 1, 1914): 27.

38. As early as 1908, the trade press was discussing the prospects of a type of motion picture film free of “dangerous combustability” (“Cellit Facts,” Film Index 3, no. 34 [September 5, 1908]: 6–7). In 1916 Motography reported that Chicago would likely soon have so-called free shows, since the city council had passed a “much debated” ordinance “permitting the use of portable projectors without booths and with ‘non-flame’ film in schools and churches” (“Free Shows in Chicago,” Motography 15, no. 6 [February 5, 1916]: 312). Austin C. Lescarboura, in The Cinema Handbook (New York: Scientific American Publishing, 1922), 416, went so far as to credit safety film for enabling the fulfillment of the utopian promise of moving pictures: “today the non-inflammable or slow-burning film and the projectors that handle it are approved for use anywhere, without fire-proof booth or licensed operator. This makes motion pictures available to everyone, anywhere, and at any time. At last motion pictures may be said to be a universal commodity.”

39. Moving Picture World 24, no. 6 (May 15, 1915): 1121.

40. Moving Picture World 24, no. 13 (June 26, 1915): 2140.

41. “A New Difficulty,” School Board Journal 33, no. 5 (November 1906): 8–9; School Board Journal 44, no. 5 (May 1912): 29.

42. Josephine Redding, “The Motion Picture in Education,” School Board Journal 45, no. 1 (December 1912): 11–12; School Board Journal 46, no. 1 (January 1913): 8, 50; Charles A. Kent, “Moving Pictures,” School Board Journal 48, no. 1 (January 1914): 17–18; School Board Journal 48, no. 2 (February 1914): 19–20; School Board Journal 48, no. 3 (March 1914): 15, 64. The quotation comes from 48, no. 3:15.

43. “New High School to Cost $175,000,” Logansport [IN] Pharos, January 15, 1913, 6; “The Logansport High School,” School Board Journal 51, no. 1 (July 1915): 25–26, 86. An advertisement for Simplex projectors in Moving Picture World 24, no. 8 (May 22, 1915): 1307, promises that “a moving picture projector of this type in a public meeting place such as a High School Auditorium may be made an agency for great good, in community welfare work” by providing a “definite educational and civic uplift service.” On the church as a community-minded social center, see Herbert Francis Evans, The Sunday-School Building and Its Equipment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1914), who argues that the modern church ought to have a “large social and gymnasium combined,” complete with a stage and a “fireproof motion-picture operating room” (32).

44. Ad for Blanchard lecture, Logansport [IN] Pharos-Reporter, February 4, 1915, 5.

45. “A Noteworthy Grade Building,” School Board Journal 49, no. 4 (October 1914): 23–24. A related strategy was to equip the “consolidated” rural school that doubles as a community social center with a projector. Joseph Kennedy argued that “in the consolidated schools, if there is a suitable hall, a moving-picture entertainment of the right kind is to be commended. . . . The community center—the school center—should avail itself of all such inventions” (Rural Life and the Rural School [New York: American Book Company, 1915], 120).

46. The opening of a new school in Ironton, Michigan, complete with all the “modern appliances and conveniences,” including a booth wired for a motion picture machine attached to a 275-seat “assembly room” warranted a front-page story in the Ironwood (MI) Times, January 2, 1915, 1. How to install projectors in schools remained a concern; see Alfred H. Saunders, “The School Projector and the Booth,” Reel and Slide 1, no. 9 (November 1918): 20–21, which recommended that when necessary the booth could be built as a ten-by-ten-foot extension to the auditorium.

47. “Specializing the Educationals,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 13 (September 26, 1914): 1784.

48. “Ordering M. Machines,” Billboard 27, no. 18 (May 1, 1915): 53.

49. War Department Annual Reports, 1913 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 1:148.

50. “Aid for Army Chaplains,” Army & Navy Register 55, no. 1748 (January 17, 1914): 72. See also Moving Picture World 23, no. 13 (March 27, 1915): 1963; “U.S. Buys 66 Simplex Machines,” Billboard, April 24, 1915, 47. Simplex advertisements made much of this sale; see Motion Picture News 12, no. 19 (November 13, 1915): 120; Billboard, April 24, 1915, 53; Moving Picture World 25, no. 3 (July 17, 1915): 545. Motion Picture News reported that the Army and Navy installed more than sixty of Power’s projectors for use at Annapolis and West Point, at “the principal army posts throughout the country, and on a number of battleships, where they are used not only for entertainment purposes, but for instruction in military and naval tactics” (“Government Installs 60 Powers Machines,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 17 [October 31, 1914]: 53).

51. References to Detroit YMCA (Moving Picture World 25, no. 11 [September 11, 1915]: 1865); Kansas State Manual Training Normal School (Moving Picture World 25, no. 10 [September 4, 1915]: 1677); ice cream parlor in Lincoln, Illinois (Moving Picture World 25, no. 12 [September 18, 1915]: 2023); West End Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee (Moving Picture World 24, no. 7 [May 15, 1915]: 1118).

52. There was no standardization at this date for how films were used in YMCAs, even though all were linked as part of a national organization. For example, in cities like Bristol, Rhode Island, and Trenton, New Jersey, YMCAs with permanently installed motion picture equipment were screening films on a regular weekly basis, potentially competing with commercial shows, although usually making some effort at providing “educational” fare (Moving Picture World 23, no. 11 [March 13, 1915]: 1642; Moving Picture World 24, no. 2 [April 10, 1915]: 254). The Central YMCA in Cleveland, Ohio, scheduled on Saturday afternoons and evenings, “Pathé weekly and Pathé animated cartoons, together with high class films of both an entertaining and educational nature” (Moving Picture World 26, no. 10 [November 27, 1915]: 1690). But individual YMCAs also deployed a number of other strategies less modeled on theatrical exhibition, like sending a representative deep into the forests of Maine to conduct religious services and show moving pictures to lumberjacks (Moving Picture World 23, no. 3 [January 16, 1915]: 397); screening “thrift films” from the American Institute of Banking to wage-earners at Cincinnati factories (Moving Picture World 26, no. 12 [December 11, 1915]: 2042); and sponsoring a lecture on the Ohio workers’ compensation law at the opera house in Piqua, Ohio (“Striking Evidence,” Piqua [OH] Leader-Dispatch, May 27, 1914, 8).

53. YMCA of the USA, Yearbook and Official Roster of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of Canada and the United States of America (New York: International Committee of YMCAs, 1915), 5.

54. Moving Picture World declared that “while certain factions of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the middlewest are unalterably opposed to the moving picture, the trend of sentiment among the clergy and laymen is in favor of adopting its use” (20, no. 6 [May 9, 1914]: 840). See also a syndicated newspaper item report that “at its first annual church efficiency meeting yesterday, the New York conference of the Methodist church indorsed moving picture performances in churches or church buildings, brass bands or orchestras to attract the public and gymnasiums in connection with the churches” (“Methodists Indorse Movies,” Fort Worth [TX] Star-Telegram, October 13, 1915, 10).

55. Religious Bodies 1916: Part 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 23. Columns with self-reported information in Moving Picture World during 1914–15 mention a number of Methodist Episcopal congregations using motion pictures, including churches in San Francisco (Moving Picture World 24, no. 2 [April 10, 1915]: 256); Muscatine, Iowa (Moving Picture World 19, no. 4 [January 24, 1914]: 428); Brynn, Minnesota (Moving Picture World 19, no. 4 [January 24, 1914]: 444); Elgin, Illinois (Moving Picture World 24, no. 10 [June 5, 1915]: 1637); Spokane, Washington (Moving Picture World 25, no. 4 [July 24, 1915]: 686); Ellsworth, Maine (Moving Picture World 26, no. 1 [October 2, 1915]: 108); Aurora, Illinois (Moving Picture World 26, no. 2 [October 9, 1915]: 299); Sandwich, Illinois (Moving Picture World 26, no. 8 [November 20, 1915]: 1523); and Norfolk, Virginia (Moving Picture World 21, no. 2 [July 11, 1914]: 245).

56. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Educational Institutions Equipped with Motion-Picture Projection Machines (Visual Instruction Leaflet No. 1), 2. I discuss this report in more detail in “Institutionalizing Educational Cinema in the United States during the Early 1920s,” in The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, ed. Marina Dahlquist and Joel Frykholm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 220–50. Census data doesn’t provide much help when it comes to calculating the number of projectors. “Moving pictures” as a separate industry in the census first occurs in 1910, in a listing of sixteen establishments, including manufacturers of machines “for taking and projecting moving pictures,” but also producers of “picture films, many of which are leased, and not sold” as well as “steel grips, film titles, and cleaned films” (Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, Volume VIII Manufactures [1909] [Washington, DC: General Printing Office, 1913], 492).

57. Advertisements for dealers in second-hand projectors appear regularly in the trade press; see, for instance, ads for Harbach and Company in Philadelphia offering “bargain” used projectors (Moving Picture News 4, no. 43 [October 28, 1911]: 18). Projectors and other motion picture equipment (as well as films) were also sold via classified ads. Billboard regularly ran classified ads like one in 1905 that offered “Edison Kinetoscope, 2 Rheostats, 3 sets song slides, lecture set on Japan, about 1,000 ft. film, sheet, trunk, wire, etc.” (Billboard 17, no. 18 [May 6, 1905]: 35). Classified ads offering projectors for sale also appeared in Moving Picture World, including, for instance, an ad from 1914 that offered a “traveling outfit” comprised of a “Powers 6 machine, rheostat, cable, Taylor trunk, portable galvanized booth, roll curtain”—all for “$175 cash” (Moving Picture World 22, no. 7 [November 14, 1914]: 997).

58. “Power’s Cameragraph and Its Principles,” Nickelodeon 4, no. 7 (October 1, 1910): 186.

59. George Blaisdell, “Nicholas Power Urges Standardization,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 1 (July 4, 1914): 222–23.

60. Advertising for the Simplex projector, one of Power’s major competitors, also referenced the non-theatrical market, highlighting, for example, purchases by Columbia University (Motion Picture News 8, no. 17 [November 1, 1913]: 2); Ohio State Penitentiary, National Cash Register, and the Ohio Board of Censors (Moving Picture World 21, no. 2 [July 18, 1914]: 299); and Sing Sing penitentiary (Moving Picture World 23, no. 11 [March 13, 1915]: 1585.

61. Thomas Bedding, “Nicholas Power,” Motion Picture News 8, no. 15 (October 11, 1913): 16. Power was also featured on the cover of Billboard 27, no. 19 (May 8, 1915). See also another highly laudatory piece on the company, “The Making of a Projector,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 13 (June 23, 1914): 63–64; and the detailed description of the Cameragraph 6, “Power’s Cameragraph and Its Principles,” Nickelodeon 4, no. 7 (October 1, 1910): 185–88.

62. See, for example, ad for Power’s Cameragraph No. 6A, Motion Picture News 8, no. 21 (November 29, 1913): 55.

63. “Nicholas Power as a Seer,” Motion Picture News 8, no. 23 (December 13, 1913): 30; also appearing in “Photoplays and Photoplayers,” Buffalo [NY] Sunday Morning News, December 14, 1913, 27.

64. William Barry, “The Versatility of the Motion Picture,” Motion Picture News 8, no. 25 (December 27, 1913): 44.

65. For example, ads announced that Motiographs had been installed in South Dakota’s state industrial school, penitentiary, and asylum (Motion Picture News 10, no. 15 [October 17, 1914]: 52); on Edison’s projectors, “Motion Pictures Invade Buffalo Schools,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 6 (August 15, 1914): 19; and on the Pathéscope, “Will Supply Schools with Projectors,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 11 (September 19, 1914): 42. Power had begun this promotional practice in 1912, when brief items appeared in Moving Picture World about the installation of Cameragraphs in churches, military bases, schools, and hospitals (“Power’s Cameragraph in Hospitals,” Moving Picture World 14, no. 13 [December 28, 1912]: 1277).

66. See “Photoplays and Photoplayers,” Ogden [Ogden UT] Standard, January 7, 1914, 2; and Jasper [IN] Weekly Courier, May 8, 1914, 3.

67. “The Powers That Be,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 14 (October 1, 1914): 36.

68. The Cameragraph in: Hearst home, Motion Picture News 9, no. 3 (January 24, 1914): 27; railroads, “Installation of Power’s Machines,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 19 (November 14, 1914): 76; Adirondack Electric Power, “The Powers That Be,” 36; United Odd Fellows Hall, “Live News of the Week,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 2 (July 18, 1914): 53.

69. On installations in churches, see, for example, mention of: St James Methodist (New York City) and Church of St. Rose of Lima (Brooklyn) (“Live News of the Week,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 11 [March 21, 1914]: 57); St. Mary’s Rectory (Kingston NY) (“Right off the Reel,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 17 [May 2, 1914]: 52); First Christian Church and the Presbyterian Church (Ashland KY) (“Live News of the Week,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 4 [August 1, 1914]: 53).

On installations in schools, see, for example, mention of: Shattuck Military School (Faribault, Minnesota) and the University of Minnesota (“Schools Buy Powers 6A Cameragraph,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 8 [February 28, 1914]: 38); New Rochelle (NY) High School (“Right off the Reel,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 15 [April 18, 1914]: 59); Central High School (Minneapolis) (“The ‘Powers’ That Be,” 74).

On installations in YMCAs see, for example, mention of: Nagasaki, Japan (“Pictures in Japan,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 13 [April 4, 1914]: 28); New York City (“The ‘Powers’ That Be,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 1 [July 11, 1914]: 74); Bristol, Rhode Island (“Installation of Power’s Machines,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 19 [November 14, 1914]: 76).

On installations in state institutions, see, for example, mention of: New York Eastern Reformatory (“The Powers That Be,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 14 [October 1, 1914]: 36); Auburn Prison (Auburn NY) and Clinton Prison (Dannemora NY) (“Power’s Machines in Prison,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 11 [March 21, 1914]: 25); State Epileptic Colony (Abilene TX), State Lunatic Asylum (Austin TX), and State Orphan Home (Corsicana TX) (“Right Off the Reel,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 14 [April 11, 1914]: 60).

On installations for the US military, see, for example, mention of: Battleship Michigan (“Battleship Equipped for Motion Pictures,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 6 [February 14, 1914]: 34); Battleship Vermont (“Live News of the Week,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 13 [April 4, 1914]: 36); USS Delaware (“The ‘Powers’ That Be,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 1 [July 11, 1914]: 74); USS Utah (“The Powers That Be,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 14 [October 1, 1914]: 36). See also Frederick A. Talbot’s chapter on “The Military Value of the Cinematograph” in Practical Cinematography and its Applications (London: William Heinemann, 1913); and Jacob Fasnacht, “ ‘Movies’ in the United States Navy,” Motion Picture Magazine 9, no. 4 (May 1915): 81–84.

70. For background on the company, see “Projecting Machines and Their Manufacturers: N. 3—Power’s Cameragraph,” Moving Picture World 1, no. 35 (November 2, 1907): 565–66; Blaisdell, “Nicholas Power Urges Standardization,” 222–23.

71. Cameragraph ads, New York Clipper 54, no. 1 (February 24, 1906): 35; Billboard 18, no. 11 (March 17, 1906): 76.

72. Ad for Cameragraph, C. Francis Jenkins and Oscar B. DePue, Handbook for Motion Picture and Stereopticon Operators (Washington, DC: Knega Company, 1908), 138–39.

73. Power ads in Nickelodeon 4, no. 1 (July 1, 1910): 8; Films Index 5, no. 18 (April 30, 1910): 12; Billboard 22, no. 12 (March 19, 1910): 129; Moving Picture World 7, no. 19 (November 5, 1910): 1025.

74. Power ad, Moving Picture World 8, no. 14 (April 8, 1911): 745.

75. “The Nicholas Power Company,” Motography 8, no. 8 (October 12, 1912): 297.

76. Power ad, School Board Journal 44, no. 4 (April 1912): 39.

77. Moving Picture World 12, no. 8 (May 24, 1912): 784.

78. Power ads that mention lecturers: Moving Picture World 11, no. 1 (January 6, 1912): 84; Moving Picture World 12, no. 8 (May 24, 1912): 784; Moving Picture World 13, no. 9 (August 31, 1912): 932.

79. Power ad highlighting Paul Rainey’s African Hunt and The Carnegie Alaska-Siberia Expedition, Moving Picture World 12, no. 9 (June 1, 1912): 884.

80. Power’s Cameragraph Catalog (1910) introduced the Cameragraph No. 6 as “designed especially to meet the most recent conditions which have arisen in the art of projecting motion pictures” (3) with “the needs of the theater owner, the operator and the patron of the moving picture theatre . . . constantly held in view” (7). Power continued to offer the “lighter and more compact” no. 5, which was purportedly well adapted for use by “traveling exhibitors and for the service in theatres which do not run continuously” (18). Both models were available with a stereopticon and an optional dissolving view attachment.

81. Power’s Cameragraph Catalog (1913), 52.

82. Power ad, Motion Picture News 9, no. 7 (February 21, 1914): 12.

83. Power ads, Moving Picture World 16, no. 8 (May 24, 1913): 764; Moving Picture World 15, no. 6 (February 8, 1913): 632.

84. Power ads, Moving Picture World 20, no. 8 (May 23, 1914): 1198; Moving Picture World 24, no. 11 (June 12, 1915): 1876.

85. See Power ads in American Exporter: A Monthly Journal of Foreign Trade 77, no. 2 (August 1915): 176; The Navy: An Illustrated Monthly Devoted to the Interests of the United States Navy 9, no. 11 (November 15, 1915): 252; The Churchman 112, no. 10 (September 4, 1915): 328; School Board Journal 48, no. 1 (January 1914): 43; Christian Work 98 (April 3, 1915): 445.

86. Thousands of theaters ad, Moving Picture World 24, no. 10 (June 5, 1915): 1712.

87. This particular ad appeared in Motion Picture News 9, no. 11 (March 21, 1914): 16; Motography 11, no. 6 (March 21, 1914): 19; Moving Picture World 19, no. 12 (March 21, 1914): 1616; Reel Life 3, no. 16 (March 14, 1914): 4. It was revised in 1915 to picture a wheel with a projector as the hub and twelve spokes, dropping “private homes” and “clubs,” Moving Picture World 25, no. 7 (August 14, 1915): 1252; New York Dramatic Mirror 73 (August 16, 1915): 31; New York Clipper 63, no. 27 (August 14, 1915): 15. Another variation had the projector as the sun, surrounded with eight types of building (churches, film studios, army, prisons, YMCAs, schools, Navy, theaters) (Moving Picture World 24, no. 1 [April 3, 1915]: 164); New York Clipper 63, no. 7 (March 27, 1915): 29.

88. See, for instance, the inside front cover of Motion Picture Magazine 9 (June 1915); Moving Picture World 24, no. 1 (April 3, 1915): 164; New York Clipper 63, no. 7 (March 27, 1915): 29; Ecclesiastical Review 15, no. 6 (December 1915): 575.

89. “Power’s Cameragraph No. 6A,” American Exporter 77, no. 6 (December 1915): 161.

90. Power ad, Our Navy 8, no. 2 (June 1915): back cover.

91. Visual Education 2, no. 1 (January 1921): back cover.

92. Haidee Wasson, “Protocols of Portability,” Film History 25, nos. 1–2 (2013): 236–37. In a series of essays, including “Experimental Viewing Protocols” (Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, 25–43), and most fully in Everyday Movies: Portability and the Transformation of American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021), Wasson offers an extraordinarily rich and well-argued revision of the history of cinema, with the portable projector as focal point. See, in particular, her discussion of the emergence of 16mm and the activities of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in the 1920s and 1930s (Everyday Movies, 49–70).

93. This item was reprinted in many newspapers in 1914, with no additional information about the invention. See, for example, Oxnard [CA] Daily Courier, December 7, 1914, 3.

94. “Animatograph to Open New Field,” Motography 11, no. 12 (June 13, 1914): 429.

95. See Ben Singer, “Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope,” Film History 2 (1988): 37–69; Alan Kattelle, Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897–1979 (Nashua, NH: Transition, 2000). Maxwell H. Hite, in Lessons in How to Become a Successful Moving Picture Machine Operator (Harrisburg, PA: Maxwell H. Hite, 1908), 15, praised an earlier Edison model, the Universal Projecting Kinetoscope, for its “extreme completeness, compactness, portability, simplicity, accuracy, ability to project steady and brilliant pictures”—with “operation as easy and satisfactory to the amateur as to the expert.” With “all parts . . . detachable for convenience in packing,” Hite noted, the “complete machine can be carried in an ordinary dress suit case” weighing ninety pounds.

96. The tabletop Kinora system that used flip-cards (akin to the Mutoscope) offered a quite different alternative for home use. “Endless pleasure can be obtained with this instrument in the home,” Frederick A. Talbot claimed, by screening films of “pretty little incidents of domestic life” and “great events, such as a horse race, a boxing contest, an express train at full speed—in short, anything in motion” (Moving Pictures, How They Are Made and Worked [Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1912], 305).

97. Singer, “Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope,” 49. The catalogue, Edison Motion Picture Films For Use in Home Kinetoscopes (n.d.), indicates its titles are intended “for education and entertainment at home, in schools, Sunday schools, clubs, lodges, etc.”

98. The Knickerbocker Film Company’s new projector was designed to “demonstrate commercial propositions” by a salesman who “can do this in any room which has electric lights and can prepare the demonstration in less than five minutes” (“A New Projector,” Moving Picture World 18, no. 9 [November 29, 1913]: 1005. “Practical Travelling Salesman’s Projector,” Moving Picture World 25, no. 8 [August 21, 1915]: 1313, describes Holloway’s new machine, which can be adapted “to run standard advertising film automatically and continuously for any length of time.”

99. Chester L. Lucas, “The Moving Picture in the Machine Tool Business,” Machinery 20 (January 1914): 345–48. See also information about the Motionscope in “Motion Pictures for Selling Machinery,” Iron Age 88, no. 9 (August 31, 1911): 464; Iron Trade Review 51, no. 12 (September 19, 1912): 542–43; “Buffalo Heartily Welcomes Allied Foundrymen,” Foundry: A Monthly Journal for All Departments of the Foundry Business 40, no. 10 (October 1912): 385–87. Ad for the Motionscope Machine, The Graphic Arts: For Printers and Users of Printing 2 (1911): 365.

100. Louisiana State University, University Bulletin 6, no. 7 (July 1915): 6, for example, describes its “extension service to rural schools” using an automobile “equipped with all the apparatus necessary for giving moving pictures and stereopticon views and cooking demonstrations in rural communities and schools where electricity for light is not available.” See also “Railway Motion-Picture Theater,” Scientific American 113 (September 4, 1915): 201; and the photograph of a YMCA truck equipped with a projector and screen in Reel and Slide 1, no. 5 (July 1918): 8.

101. “A New Type of Amateur Projector,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 23 (June 13, 1914): 100.

102. “New Portable Projector,” Billboard, April 17, 1915, 53.

103. Ad for Kineclair, Motion Picture News 9, no. 12 (March 28, 1914): 60.

104. “In the Educational Field,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 5 (August 8, 1914): 35.

105. Ads appeared in Moving Picture World 21, no. 2 (July 11, 1914) for the Phantoscope (313), Optigraph Six (333), Bing’s Home Entertainer (358), and Victor Animatograph (316). See also M. H. Schoenbaum, “Amateur Projectors,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 12 (March 28, 1914): 21; and “The Home Projector and Its Development: Several Forms Described,” Motography 9, no. 2 (January 18, 1913): 33. On the Optigraph, see “The Optigraph Home Projector,” Moving Picture World 20, no. 4 (April 25, 1914): 540; “Optigraph Home Projector,” Motography 12, no. 2 (July 11, 1914): 66; ad for Optigraph Six, Moving Picture World 21, no. 2 (July 18, 1914): 333; “Optigraph is Awarded Gold Medal at Frisco Fair,” Motion Picture News 12, no. 9 (September 4, 1915): 144. On Bing’s Home Entertainer, see ads in Motion Picture News 9, no. 5 (February 7, 1914): 52; Motion Picture News 9, no. 23 (June 13, 1914): 131; Motion Picture News 10, no. 6 (August 15, 1914): 69; Moving Picture World 19, no. 7 (February 14, 1914): 852; Moving Picture World 28, no. 9 (May 27, 1916): 1576.

Other portable machines available in the mid-1910s included the Portoscope (advertised in Moving Picture World 26, no. 3 [October 16, 1915]: 525, and Moving Picture World 26, no. 4 [October 23, 1915]: 705); the Kineclair (“The Kineclair,” Moving Picture World 19, no. 6 [February 7, 1914]: 665; F. H. Richardson, “A New Projector,” Moving Picture World 19, no. 6 [February 7, 1914]: 661; ad, Motion Picture News 9, no. 25 [June 27, 1914]: 86); the Cameoscope (“Cameoscope New Home Projection Machine,” Motion Picture News 11, no. 12 [March 27, 1915]: 108–9; “New Portable Projector,” Billboard, April 17, 1915, 53; H. Richardson, “New Home Projector,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 10 [March 6, 1915]: 1436); the Vanoscope (“Vanoscope Shows Latest Roosevelt Films,” Motion Picture News 10, no. 2 [July 18, 1914]: 47); the Cosmograph (“A New Home Projection Machine,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 11 [March 21, 1914]: 40); and the Projectoscope (“The Portable Projectoscope,” Judicious Advertising 12, no. 10 [October 1914]: 119).

106. “The Phantoscope: A Simplified Motion Picture Projector for the Home,” Moving Picture News 8, no. 13 (September 27, 1913): 20–21. Advertisements for the Phantoscope: Moving Picture World 18, no. 13 (December 27, 1913): 1610; Moving Picture World 19, no. 6 (February 7, 1914): 757; Moving Picture World 20, no. 7 (May 16, 1914): 1047.

107. Motion Picture News 9, no. 10 (March 14, 1914): 53. See also F. H. Richardson, “Jenkins Improves with Age,” Moving Picture World 20, no. 8 (May 23, 1914): 1094.

108. “The Phantoscope: A Simplified Motion Picture Projector,” 20–21.

109. See Phantoscope ads: Moving Picture World 19, no. 3 (January 17, 1914): 358; Moving Picture World 19, no. 10 (March 7, 1914): 1305; Moving Picture World 19, no. 12 (March 21, 1914): 1608; Moving Picture World 22, no. 2 (October 10, 1914): 263.

110. Phantoscope ad with list of purchasers Moving Picture World 21, no. 2 (July 18, 1914): 313.

111. “Phantoscope Company Adds to Its Capital,” Moving Picture World 26, no. 5 (October 30, 1915): 824. Advertisements for the Graphoscope began to appear in October 1914 (see Moving Picture World 22, no. 5 [October 31, 1914]: 717; Moving Picture World 22, no. 7 [November 14, 1914]: 1004).

112. “A New Type of Amateur Projector,” Motion Picture News 9, no. 23 (June 13, 1914): 100; “Animatograph to Open New Field,” Motography 11, no. 12 (June 13, 1914): 429; Animatograph ad Motion Picture News 9, no. 23 (June 13, 1914): 121; ad for Victor Animatograph, Moving Picture World 20, no. 13 (June 20, 1914): 1733; ad for Victor Animatograph as “the First Professional Portable Motion Picture Machine,” Moving Picture World 20, no. 13 (June 20, 1914): 1733. See also “The Victor Animatograph,” American Exporter 75, no. 6 (December 1914): advertising section.

113. “The Model 2 Animatograph,” Motography 16, no. 21 (November 24, 1917): 3685; ad for Victor Animatograph, Motion Picture News 16, no. 22 (December 1, 1917): 3879; “Victor Animatograph Projector,” Moving Picture World 34, no. 12 (December 15, 1917): 1633.

114. Ad in School Board Journal 56, no. 2 (February 1918): 82. Ad in Catholic Educational Review 12, no. 2 (September 1916): advertising section.

115. See “Gossip-Gathering on Film Boulevard,” Moving Picture Age 5, no. 4 (April 1923): 23; A. F. Victor, “The Motion Picture a Practical Feature of the Home,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 16 (1923): 264–65.

116. “Motion Pictures in Home Promised by Local Company,” Indianapolis Star June 20, 1913, 5; Pathéscope ad Talking Machine World 10, no. 6 (July 8, 1914): back cover. Some illustrations show one model of the Pathéscope available with a cabinet, styled much like a talking machine for the parlor, completed with storage area for film reels (see the first Pathéscope ad in Motion Picture News 9, no. 12 (March 28, 1914): 67).

117. Anke Mebold, “ ‘Just like a Public Library Maintained for Public Welfare’: 28mm as a Comprehensive Service Strategy for Non-theatrical Clientele, 1912–23,” in Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution, 1895–1915, ed. Frank Kessler and Nanna Verhoeff (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey, 2007), 260–74. On a different strategy concerning distributing films to the home, see Martina Roepke, “Bringing Movies into the Home: Distribution Strategies for 17.5 mm Film (1903–08),” in Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution, 275–82.

118. Descriptive Catalogue of Pathéscope Films Classified (New York: Pathéscope Company of America, 1918), 6.

119. See Anke Mebold and Charles Tepperman, “Resurrecting the Lost History of 28mm film in North America,” Film History 15 (2003): 137–51. On amateur filming, see also “A Motion Picture Camera in Every Home,” Exhibitors’ Times 1, no. 7 (July 5, 1913): 10–11.

120. See Pathéscope ads in Saturday Evening Post 187, no. 40 (April 3, 1915): 86; Literary Digest 53, no. 19 (November 4, 1916): 1189; Scribner’s Magazine 60, no. 4 (October 1916): 67; Collier’s 51, no. 5 (October 14, 1916): 24.

121. Philadelphia Inquirer, March 18, 1914, 5.

122. Pathéscope ad in Congregationalist and Christian World 99, no. 51 (December 17, 1914): 889. See also other ads in Congregationalist and Christian World 99, no. 46 (November 12, 1914): 651; 99, no. 49 (December 4, 1914): 789; 100, no. 30 (July 29, 1915): 155; and “Motion Pictures Church and Home,” Congregationalist and Christian World 100, no. 7 (February 18, 1915): 224; “Put Motion Pictures in Every Y.M.C.A.” Association Men 42, no. 7 (April 1917): 401.

123. F. H. Richardson, “The Pathéscope—A Remarkable Home Projector,” Moving Picture World 20, no. 11 (June 13, 1914): 1524.

124. Demonstration at Boys’ Club Building (Springfield [MA] Union, March 4, 1915, 13); “Motion picture performance” for Second Regiment at the Armory (Springfield [MA] Union, March 31, 1915, 6); demonstration at the YWCA (Springfield [MA] Republican, April 6, 1915, 4); Pathéscope entertainment at private home (Springfield [MA] Republican, April 6, 1915, 4); screening as part of benefit at Grand Army post (Springfield [MA] Republican, April 24, 1915, 18); ad for Free Moving Pictures at Meekins, Packard & Wheat store (Springfield [MA] Republican, May 12, 1915, 5); screening at the Convention of Christian Endeavors (Springfield [MA] Republican, June 6, 1915, 18); “Pathéscope entertainment” for members of the Current Events club at a private home (Springfield [MA] Republican, November 18, 1915, 12); exhibition at Methodist church (Springfield [MA] Republican, November 18, 1915, 12); open-air “show” at country club (Springfield [MA] Republican, June 28, 1916, 10); Pathéscope pictures shown during Christmas party at Second Congregational Church (Springfield [MA] Republican, December 23, 1916, 10).

125. Traveling agents for Pathéscopes gave demonstrations in Buffalo (Buffalo [NY] Courier, July 12, 1914, 8); Cincinnati (Cincinnati Enquirer, August 9, 1914, 34); St. Louis (St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 6, 1914, 6). Other Pathé screenings: Butte [MT] Miner, March 8, 1916, 9; “Screen Entertainment,” Weekly Republican [Cherryvale KS], June 17, 1915, 4; “The Pathéscope as an Advertising Medium,” Fort-Worth [TX] Record-Telegram, April 1, 1914, 6; ad for Dairy Show, Kalamazoo [MI] Gazette, February 8, 1916, 9; Creamery and Milk Plant Monthly 4, no. 5 (February 1915): 36.

126. See, for example, “Free Movies for the Kiddies Demonstration of the Pathéscope Animated Pictures at the May Co., Cleveland,” Norwalk [OH] Reflector-Herald, August 29, 1915, 7.

127. Public events at this department store included a Household and Pure Food Show (Oregon Daily Journal, February 28, 1916, 18); illustrated lecture on the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (Oregon Daily Journal, May 3, 1916, 18); dressmaking classes (Oregon Daily Journal, May 16, 1916, 18).

128. See, for example, Meier & Frank ads in Oregonian [Portland OR], December 4, 1915, 18; February 26, 1916, 18; March 25, 1916, 20.

129. Ad for Pathéscope Salon, New York Times, August 16, 1914, 28; Wanamaker’s ad, Daily Standard Union [Brooklyn NY], August 18, 1914, 5. See Wasson, Everyday Movies, 43–45.

130. See, for example, ads for Woodward & Lothrop, Washington Post, February 6, 1915, 9; February 7, 1915, 9.

131. Washington Post, January 24, 1915, 11; January 30, 1915, 5.

132. See, for example, Washington Post, February 2, 1915, 3; February 4, 1915, E15.

133. Washington Post, February 14, 1915, E15.

134. On contests in Louisville (Moving Picture World 23, no. 10 [March 6, 1915]: 1470); St. Louis (Moving Picture World 24, no. 12 [June 19, 1915]: 1961); Los Angeles (Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1916, part II, 13; “Visual Education Campaign,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1916, 25); Buffalo (“ ‘Ballot Squads’ Are Organizing to Gather Times Contest Votes,” Buffalo [NY] Times, September 10, 1914, 1); New York City (New York Tribune, September 27, 1914, 7); Tacoma (Moving Picture World 25, no. 7 [August 14, 1915]: 1188); Chillicothe (Chillicothe [MO] Constitution-Tribune, December 16, 1915, 4); Salt Lake City (Desert News [UT], May 1, 1917, 10).

135. Ad for Pathéscope contest, Farm, Stock & Home 31, no. 3 (February 1, 1916): 128.

136. “Company Is Granted Right to Sell Movie Machines to Schools,” Albuquerque [NM] Morning Journal, May 21, 1915, 3. See also “Movie Machines for Rural Schools Whose Films Won’t Burn,” Santa Fe New Mexican, May 17, 1915, 2. In October 1915, the Pathéscope Company of New Mexico was incorporated, based in Santa Fe but with rights to a territory that stretched from Kansas to Southern California (“Pathéscope Company to Incorporate with $100,000 Capital; Headquarters Here,” Santa Fe New Mexican, October 29, 1915, 5).

137. Albuquerque [NM] Journal, August 11, 1915, 3.

138. “New Premier Pathéscope Has Strong Points Which Have Appeal for New York Educators,” Moving Picture World 39, no. 9 (March 1, 1919): 1205.

139. The New Premier Pathéscope (Boston: Pathéscope Company of New England, 1919), 4. See also “The Premier Pathéscope,” Motion Picture News 18, no. 5 (August 3, 1918): 773–74; and ad for Premier Pathéscope, Motion Picture News 18, no. 15 (October 12, 1918): 2431.

140. New Premier Pathéscope, 30.

141. New Premier Pathéscope, 22–23.

142. See Pathéscope ads in House & Garden 38, no. 5 (November 1920): 86; Country Life 38, no. 4 (August 1920): 70; Vanity Fair 15, no. 2 (November 1920): 30; Art & Decoration 13, no. 4 (September 1920): 221.

143. Pathéscope ad, House & Garden 38, no. 2 (August 1920): 70. New Premier Pathéscope boasted that the projector had immediately been “eagerly welcomed in the most exclusive city and country homes . . . the most prominent families in the metropolitan district and throughout the country appear upon the list of our pleased patrons” (7).

144. Pathéscope ad, Industrial Management 60, no. 2 (August 1920): 105.

145. Pathéscope ads, System 37, no. 4 (April 1920): 859, and 37, no. 5 (May 1920): 1063. See also Pathéscope ads in Industrial Management 60, no. 2 (August 1920): 105, and 16, no. 24 (September 4, 1920): 23; Motion Picture News 20, no. 21 (November 15, 1919): 3633; and National Geographic 38, no. 2 (August 1920): advertising section.

146. Ad in Associated Advertising 11, no. 6 (June 1920): 93, claims that “any industrial film can be printed for the Pathéscope”; ad in Printers’ Ink Monthly 1, no. 8 (July 1920): 97; Pathé advertisement for “Industrial Film Production,” Reel and Slide 1, no. 8 (October 1918): 47.

147. Education by Visualization: The Royal Road to Learning Lies along the Film Highway (New York: Pathéscope Company of America, 1919; first published in 1914). This pamphlet is described as “our new school circular” in the ad for the Pathéscope in Talking Machine World 10, no. 9 (September 15, 1914): 29.

148. Pathéscope ad, Visual Education 1, no. 4 (June 1920): 63.

149. Pathéscope ad, Visual Education 1, no. 5 (September–October 1920): 65. See also “New Premier Pathéscope Has Strong Points,” 1205; ad for Pathéscope, Reel and Slide 1, no. 8 (October 1918): 1, claimed that the Pathéscope had been “adopted by every school board that investigates the merits of portable projectors.”

150. Pathéscope ad, System 37, no. 5 (May 1920): 1063.

151. Jonas Howard, “Uses for Portable Machine Show Wide Variety,” Reel and Slide 1, no. 5 (July 1918): 19.

152. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Visual Instruction Leaflet No. 1: Educational Institutions Equipped with Motion-Picture Machines (December 1919).

153. The scholarly literature on these topics is vast. Among the studies I have found particularly helpful are Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp, eds., Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Moya Luckett, Cinema and Community: Progressivism, Exhibition, and Film Culture in Chicago, 1907–1917 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014); Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen, eds., Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007); Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communication (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

154. Blaisdell, “Nicholas Power Urges Standardization,” 222–23.

4. TARGETED AUDIENCES

1. Thomas F. Logan, “What Railroads Are Doing to Reduce Death and Injury,” Scientific American 103, no. 7 (August 14, 1915): 144. The same image appeared in “Motion Pictures in Railway’s ‘Safety First’ Campaign,” Popular Science Monthly and World’s Advance 87, no. 5 (November 1915): 615. See also “ ‘Picture Car’ Feature of Road,” Motography 8, no. 13 (December 21, 1912): 476; Homer Croy, “Getting Rid of the Railroad Cripples,” Independent 76 (November 20, 1913): 338–40.

2. Paul H. Davis, “Investing in the Movies,” Photoplay 8, no. 6 (November 1915): 109.

3. “Musings of a Photoplay Philosopher,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 5, no. 4 (May 1912): 113. This class-conscious columnist also looked forward to the coming stratification of movie theaters via scaled ticket prices as a way to assure social stability because in the new system the “banker in evening dress” won’t have to sit next to “a negro or day laborer in overalls” (“Musings of Photoplay Philosopher,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 3, no. 3 [April 1912]: 130). Likely the same end would be achieved, declared the Philosopher, once individual theaters come to be identified by the single type of film they offer, “comedy, or Western pictures, or dramas, or classics, etc.” (“Musings of Photoplay Philosopher,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 5, no. 2 [March 1912]: 132).

4. The Union board purchased a Simplex projector that was installed in time for the first screening at this theater on December 2, 1914 (“Union Movie Show First of Its Kind,” Indiana Daily Student, December 1, 1914, 1).

5. “Union Movies” Indiana Daily Student, September 23, 1915, 4.

6. Ad for Free Picture Show at Princess, Bloomington [IN] Evening World, August 11, 1915, 1; “Corset Fittings in Moving Pictures,” Bloomington [IN] Evening World, August 12, 1915, 1.

7. The scholarly literature on film exhibition in particular US localities during the silent era includes George C. Pratt, “ ‘No Magic, No Mystery, No Sleight of Hand’: The First Ten Years of Motion Pictures in Rochester,” in Image 8, no. 4 (December 1959): 159–211; Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Junko Ogihara, “The Exhibition of Films for Japanese Americans in Los Angeles during the Silent Film Era,” Film History 4, no. 2 (1990): 81–87; Gregory A. Waller, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1895–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); James Labosier, “From the Kinetoscope to the Nickelodeon: Motion Picture Presentation and Production in Portland, Oregon from 1894 to 1906,” Film History 16, no. 3 (2004): 286–323; Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen, eds., Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007); Desirée J. Garcia, “Subversive Sounds: Ethnic Spectatorship and Boston’s Nickelodeon Theatres, 1907–1914,” Film History 19, no. 3 (2007): 213–27; Kathryn H. Fuller- Seeley, ed., Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Michael Aronson, Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905–1929 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); Moya Luckett, Cinema and Community: Progressivism, Exhibition, and Film Culture in Chicago, 1907–1917 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013); Richard Abel, Motor City Movie Culture, 1916–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020). One of the central debates among historians of early American cinema concerns the actual composition of urban theatrical audiences during and after the nickelodeon era, focusing on Manhattan. Judith Thissen provides a helpful overview of this debate in “Beyond the Nickelodeon: Cinemagoing, Everyday Life and Identity Politics,” in Audiences, ed. Ian Christie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 45–65.

8. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 258. See Luckett’s discussion of “Progressive Era spectatorship theories” concerning “collective spectatorship” that were deeply informed by contemporary claims concerning the behavior and susceptibility of crowds (Luckett, Cinema and Community, 26–42).

9. On theatrical and non-theatrical screenings for African American audiences in the silent period, see Waller, Main Street Amusements, 161–79, 240–47; Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Allyson Nadia Fields, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

10. Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Kathy Fuller-Seeley, At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1996); Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Diana Anselmo-Sequeira, “Screen-Struck: The Invention of the Movie Girl Fan,” Cinema Journal 55, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 1–28.

11. The Casino and Orpheum theaters in Louisville, Kentucky, were advertised as “Catering especially to Ladies and Children,” though this emphasis did not mean that men were prohibited from attending (ads for Casino and Orpheum, Kentucky Irish-American [Louisville KY], February 5, 1915, 4).

12. “A Model Ordinance for Regulating Motion Picture Theatres,” Exhibitors’ Times 1, no. 5 (June 14, 1913): 26. This ordinance was offered in a two-part article in Exhibitors’ Times 1, no. 4 (June 7, 1913): 22–23; 1, no. 5 (June 14, 1913): 7, 12–14, 26.

13. Nancy J. Rosenbloom, “From Regulation to Censorship: Film and Political Culture in New York in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3, no. 4 (2004): 385.

14. Federal Motion Picture Commission Hearings before the Committee on Education, House of Representatives, Sixty-Fourth Congress, First Session on H.R. 456, A Bill to Create a New Division of the Bureau of Education, To Be Known as the Federal Motion Picture Commission, and Defining Its Powers and Duties, January 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, and 19, 1916 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 282. Rosenbloom tracks the efforts of the National Board of Censorship in working toward regulation of theaters specifically within the context of the “urban cultural politics” of New York (“From Regulation to Censorship,” 369–406). The broader social and political context for the National Board of Censorship is provided by Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

15. Federal Motion Picture Commission Hearings, 76.

16. Other sections of the document reference differing sectional and class “prejudices” as another sign of the difficulty of censorship and the diversity of the movie audience (Federal Motion Picture Commission Hearings, 285).

17. For John Collier, the fact that “the same film goes everywhere, to all kinds of audiences, and to young people and old” seriously hampered the artistic possibilities of the medium: “the manufacturer is compelled to make films, and the censor is compelled to censor them for an imaginary genus homo who represents an average of the qualities of babes and octogenarians, immigrants and Americans, cultured and ignorant, black and white” (“The Final Word on Censorship,” Motion Picture Story Magazine 7, no. 4 [May 1914]: 102).

18. “Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio,” United States Reports: Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court 236 (1914): 230–58. Among the many discussions of the Mutual case, see, in particular, Grieveson, Policing Cinema, 198–205; John Wertheimer, “Mutual Film Reviewed: The Movies, Censorship, and Free Speech in Progressive America,” American Journal of Legal History 37, no. 2 (1993): 158–89; and Jennifer Petersen, “Can Moving Pictures Speak? Film, Speech, and Social Science in Early Twentieth-Century Law,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 3 (Spring 2014): 76–99.

19. Acts of the State of Ohio 103 (Chillicothe, OH: N. Willis, 1913), Ohio House Bill No. 322, 399–400.

20. Quoted in “Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio,” 257.

21. Pennsylvania Board of Censors (of Motion Pictures) Rules and Standards, Act No. 239, passed May 15, 1915, 6–8.

22. Federal Motion Picture Commission Hearings, 292.

23. Federal Motion Picture Commission Hearings, 65. Addressing the People’s Institute in 1911, the Rev. H. A. Jump questioned “why there should not be organized in our American cities motion picture civic centers where the films are definitely selected with a view to their educational uplift upon the masses of our population” (quoted in The Social Influence of the Moving Picture [New York: Playground and Recreation Association of America, 1911]). In certain ways, the YMCA was already attempting to fulfill the role that Crafts proposed. Moving Picture World was quick to note when an individual YMCA had permanently installed motion picture equipment in its auditorium and was screening films on a regular weekly basis, potentially competing with commercial shows, although usually making some effort at providing “educational” fare.

Examples of YMCA film exhibition noted by Moving Picture World in 1915 include: the YMCA in Bristol, Rhode Island, booking through United Film Service “all the educational and children’s features released through the United program” (Moving Picture World 23, no. 11 [March 13, 1915]: 1642); the Trenton, New Jersey, YMCA establishing Friday and Saturday evening screenings “throughout the winter season” (Moving Picture World 24, no. 2 [April 10, 1915]: 254); the Central YMCA in Cleveland, Ohio, announcing that in its auditorium on Saturday afternoons and evenings, “Pathe weekly and Pathe animated cartoons, together with high class films of both an entertaining and educational nature, will be shown” (Moving Picture World 26, no. 9 [November 27, 1915]: 1690). But individual YMCAs also deployed a number of other idiosyncratic, exhibition strategies less similar to theatrical models and aimed at more clearly demarcated audiences. These included sending a representative deep into the forests of Maine to conduct religious services and show moving pictures to lumberjacks (Moving Picture World 23, no. 3 [January 16, 1915]: 397); and screening “thrift films” from the American Institute of Banking to wage-earners at Cincinnati factories (Moving Picture World 26, no. 12 [December 11, 1915]: 2042).

24. Ad for lecture on “Fire and the Fight Against It,” Tribune [Scranton PA], February 11, 1916, 5.

25. The New Premier Pathéscope (Boston: Pathéscope Company of New England, 1919), 29, 4.

26. On the circulation and reception of The Birth of a Nation in the US, see Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Michael J. Martin, ed., The Birth of a Nation: The Cinematic Past in the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019).

27. See “Will Show Picture,” South Bend [IN] Tribune, November 11, 1915, 6.

28. Referring to the $2 tickets, the Indianapolis Freeman wondered: “What does this prohibitory price mean? Is it a war on the race begun in high places? Thinking of this is almost equal to the losing of race hope,” “ ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ ” Indianapolis Freeman April 17, 1915, 4.

29. Review of ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ ” South Bend [IN] Tribune, November 30, 1915, 6. For the reviewer in the Houston [TX] Post, the “three hours of film are cheered and applauded as no spoken drama has ever been in a Houston theater, and that for an audience of varied temperaments, sympathies, ideals and homes”—an audience that included invited Civil War veterans dressed in blue or gray (“ ‘Birth of a Nation’ Stirred Large Audience to Enthusiasm,” Houston [TX] Post, October 19, 1915, 10).

30. “Civil War Veteran Protests Against ‘Birth of a Nation,’ ” Indianapolis News, March 7, 1916, 3.

31. “Scholars May Attend,” Call-Leader [Elwood IN], April 10, 1916, 8.

32. “Still Showing Vicious Picture,” New York Age, March 11, 1915, 1.

33. “White House Will Have ‘Movie’ Show,” Washington Times, February 18, 1915, 1. Mark E. Benbow’s exhaustive study of this screening concludes that Thomas Dixon approached Wilson to arrange a screening of the film (“Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and ‘Like Writing History with Lightning,’ ” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9, no. 4 [October 2010]: 509–33). See also Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 111.

34. Benbow, “Birth of a Quotation,” 513.

35. “Intimate Picture of Presidency is Drawn by Wilson,” Times Dispatch [Richmond VA], March 21, 1914, 1.

36. Washington newspapers regularly reported on moving picture screenings for the Press Club, including a demonstration of “talking moving pictures” (“Willis is Last to Fall at Press Club’s Spelling Bee,” Indianapolis Star, June 6, 1913, 11); a “cinematograph lecture on the Graeco-Bulgarian War” (“ ‘Movies’ Celebrate Move,” Washington Herald, March 8, 1914, 2); the Williamson submarine pictures with lecture by F. N. Glover, a member of the Williamson expedition (“View Life Under Sea,” Washington Post, July 17, 1914, 2): the Chicago Tribune’s war films (“National Press Club to See War Moving Pictures,” Washington Times, November 19, 1914, 10; “War ‘Movies’ Shown to Press Club and Guests,” Washington Times, November 20, 1914, 4); a lecture on bird and animal life in the Philippines with moving pictures (“Worcester Will Lecture,” Evening Star, January 5, 1915, 11); war films from the Daily News Film Company (“National Clubmen See Real War Pictures,” Washington Times, January 23, 1915, 7); twilight sleep films with lecture by Schlossingk (“Twilight Sleep Illustrated by Films,” Evening Star, March 22, 1915, 16); With the Fighting Forces in Europe and other Kinemacolor films (“Kinemacolor Pictures,” Washington Herald, April 29, 1915, 5).

37. See, for example, the syndicated news item, “Films Show Our Weakness,” Portis [KS] Independent, August 19, 1915, 6.

38. “Press Club to Witness Noted Film,” Evening Star, February 19, 1915, 8; “ ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Shown,” Evening Star, February 20, 1915, 12; “Movies at Press Club,” Washington Post, February 20, 1915, 5; “Chief Justice and Senators at ‘Movie,’ ” Washington Herald, February 20, 1915, 4; “ ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ ” New York Sun, February 22, 1915, 7. See Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, 112.

39. Decades before the scene in BlacKkKlansman (2018) that featured a screening of The Birth of a Nation for a small group of enthusiastic KKK members, the film was utilized extensively by the Klan in the 1920s (predominately in theatrical screenings, sometimes in theaters operated by KKK members), as Tom Rice demonstrates in White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). John E. Abbott notes that The Birth of a Nation was one of the featured titles in the series that the Museum of Modern Art presented at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, entitled “The Motion Picture 1914–1934” (“The Motion Picture and the Museum,” National Board of Review Magazine 10, no. 7 [September–October 1935]: 6). The film was a centerpiece of MoMA’s circulating 16mm series, “The Work of D. W. Griffith, 1917–1924” (“Film Library Now Has Circuit of 325 Units,” Motion Picture Herald 141, no. 2 [October 12, 1940]: 54).

40. “ ‘The Birth of a Nation’ in Church,” New York Times, October 13, 1915, 15.

41. Reisner was widely known for his use of advertising, electric signage, and motion pictures to bring people into his church. See, for example, Reisner’s Church Publicity: The Modern Way to Compel Them to Come (New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1913); a newspaper profile of Reisner (“Wanted: Souls to Save,” New York Press, May 11, 1913, n.p.); and a report on a screening at Grace Methodist Episcopal (Moving Picture World 15, no. 13 [March 22, 1913]: 1126). Reisner was prominent enough that Simplex referenced him directly in an advertisement for its projector in Christian Workers Magazine, August 16, 1916, 909; and Moving Picture World 22, no. 3 (October 17, 1914): 354, reported on his arrangement with William Fox’s Box Office Attractions Company to book feature films for screenings at Grace Methodist Episcopal.

42. “ ‘Birth of Nation’ to Be Shown,” Boston Post, April 8, 1915, 1.

43. “To See Themselves in Moving Pictures,” Hartford [CN] Courant, February 6, 1916, 16.

44. “Dinner to Employees,” Fall River [MA] Daily Evening News, May 26, 1914, 1.

45. “Sons of America Have Meeting—Capt. Anderson Speaker of the Evening,” Charlotte [NC] News, February 12, 1915, 3.

46. “Educational Pictures Will Be Shown Throughout Parish,” Monroe [LA] News-Star, November 30, 1915, 3.

47. “Foundrymen to See Movies,” St Louis [MO] Star and Times, February 3, 1916, 8.

48. “Men of Millions Visit Thompsonville,” Hartford [CN] Courant, January 30, 1915, 17; “Bankers Makes Visit,” Springfield [MA] Union, January 30, 1915, 14; “Financial Men at Thompsonville Plant,” Springfield [MA] News, January 30, 1915, 3. “Inspect Carpet Plant,” Springfield [MA] Republican, January 30, 1915, 7. Randall L. Patton (Carpet Capital: The Rise of a New South Industry [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999], 43) mentions that this film was part of the company’s broader advertising strategies.

49. New York Sun, February 10, 1915, 3; “Urge Passage of Mothers’ Pensions,” New York Tribune, February 10, 1915, 5; “A Powerful Vitagraph Story,” Motography 13, no. 5 (January 23, 1915): 166; “Facts and Comments,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 9 (February 27, 1915): 1259. For background on this aspect of social welfare efforts in the Progressive Era, see S. J. Kleinberg, Widows and Orphans First: The Family Economy and Social Welfare Policy, 1880–1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 84–102. A different strategy for targeting elected officials was a “special exhibition” of Your Girl or Mine, arranged by Mrs. Winston Churchill, screened at White’s Opera House in Concord, New Hampshire, for two hundred members of the New Hampshire Legislature (“Table Gossip,” Boston Globe, February 14, 1915, 56).

50. Moving Picture World 22, no. 1 (October 3, 1914): 82.

51. “ ‘Movies at Safety Congress,” Brooklyn [NY] Citizen, September 24, 1913, 6; “Endeavoring to Reduce the Industrial Accidents,” Twin-City [Winston-Salem NC] Daily Sentinel, October 15, 1913, 7. Brownell’s presentation on “Education in Public Safety” is described in Proceedings of the National Council for Industrial Safety, Second Safety Congress (New York City, September 23–25, 1913), 25–27, 65.

52. “Presbyterians to Attend Missionary Conference Soon,” Montgomery [AL] Advertiser, February 14, 1915, 112; “Moving Pictures at Laymen’s Meet to Show Missions,” Charlotte [NC] News, February 14, 1915, 3; “Two Thousand Laymen Are to be Guests of Charlotte,” Charlotte [NC] News, February 14, 1915, 1, 13; “The Laymen’s Conventions,” The Times [Shreveport LA], February 17, 1915, 4; “The Movies and Missions,” News and Observer [Raleigh NC], February 16, 1915, 3. See also Ida Clyde Clarke, “Moving Pictures and Missionary Education,” Greensboro [NC] Daily News, July 5, 1914, 18.

For an account of the experiences shooting this footage in China, see J. C. Silliman, “The Rowland Party in China,” Presbyterian of the South 88, no. 31 (August 5, 1914): 1–2. The Laymen’s Missionary Film Company was formed in Athens, Georgia, to distribute these moving pictures, which were incorporated into a sixty-minute program with a lecturer and colored slides and screened for a “try-out” during four days at a “regular moving picture theater” in Athens, rented for the occasion. This program was designed to be interdenominational and so of greater utility (Cameron Johnson, “A Fine Success,” Presbyterian of the South 84, no. 18 [May 12, 1915]: 22–23; “Missions in Pictures,” Presbyterian of the South 84, no. 19 [May 19, 1915]: 19, 22). For earlier examples of moving pictures in the service of missionary work, see “Motion Pictures Show Mission Work,” Dayton [OH] Herald, January 4, 1909, 7; and a syndicated article by Frederic J. Haskins, “Motion Pictures—Educational Uses,” Buffalo [NY] Commercial, October 19, 1911, 7.

53. On different versions of the captive audience, see, for example, Eric Smoodin, Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930–1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Stephen Groening, “ ‘We Can See Ourselves as Others See Us’: Women Workers and Western Union’s Training Films in the 1920s,” in Useful Cinema, ed. Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 34–58; Stephen Groening, “ ‘No One Liked to be a Captive Audience’: Headphones and In-Flight Cinema,” Film History 28, no. 3 (2016): 114–38; and, particularly, Alison Griffiths’ research on film screenings in prisons: “ ‘For the Amusement of the Shutins’: The Vicissitudes of Film Viewing in Prisons,” Film History 28, no. 3 (2016): 1–23; Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

54. “Organizing Club Work and Instructing Club Members,” Cowley [LA] Post-Signal, June 1, 1915, 2; “Auto-Stereopticon Machine,” The Times [Shreveport LA], August 26, 1915, 2.

55. “Missions in the ‘Movies,’ ” Altoona [PA] Tribune, March 27, 1914, 13.

56. Proceedings of the National Council for Industrial Safety, Second Safety Congress (New York City, September 23–25, 1913), 65.

57. “Saw ‘Washington at Valley Forge,’ ” Decatur [IL] Review, May 14, 1916, 22; “Patriotic Meeting To Be Held at Y.M.C.A. Friday Night,” Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph, November 23, 1916, 5; “Kannapolis Y.M.C.A. Notes,” Concord [NC] Times, November 11, 1915, 5.

58. “Foundrymen’s Meet Opens Amid Roar of Machinery,” Buffalo [NY] Courier, September 24, 1912, 7, describes a screening of this film at the national gathering of foundrymen organizations in Buffalo, New York, where a temporary “brick” movie theater was constructed for the occasion inside the city’s new auditorium. On this screening, see also “Story of Iron on Motion Picture Films,” Buffalo [NY] Evening News, September 18, 1912, 13; “From Mines to Finished Product,” Buffalo [NY] Commercial, September 18, 1912, 11; “Eyes of a Great Industry Are on Us,” Buffalo [NY] Times, September 22, 1912, 1. For a sense of the longer exhibition history of this film, see “Lecture on Mining Iron,” Boston Globe, February 16, 1913, 14; “From Mine to Molder,” Indianapolis News, June 20, 1918, 20; “They’ll See Steel-Making,” Buffalo [NY] Commercial, March 24, 1920, 12; “Engineers to Discuss Iron,” Courier-News [Bridgewater NJ], December 6, 1924, 4. On how individual non-fiction films could serve “multiple purposes” depending on “the variety of institutional contexts in which they appear,” see, for example, Frank Kessler and Eef Masson, “Layers of Cheese: Generic Overlap in Early Non-fiction Films on Production Processes,” in Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 75–84.

59. Jennifer A. Delton, The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 1–2. See Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 57–59.

60. James J. Connolly, “The Public Good and the Problem of Pluralism in Lincoln Steffen’s Civic Imagination,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4, no. 2 (2005): 125. This point is developed by, for example, McGerr (The Decline of Popular Politics, 152), who describes the replacement of the “old parties” and strict political partisanship by the early twentieth century as “around the country, Americans had forged ties that gave them new ways of influencing politics and government. Farmers tested their strength through co-operatives; businessmen banded together in professional societies.” See also Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People’s Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997): “the late nineteenth century saw an expansion of the organizational repertoire of many Americans, who learned not simply to organize but to organize in many ways and to assess the strategic and symbolic consequences of their choice among organizational forms” (37, emphasis in original). In Robert H. Wiebe’s classic account, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 123, NAM figures as one of many professional and occupational “groupings” and specialized organizations that defined and represented the interests of the “new middle class.” For Wiebe, not only businessmen and doctors, but progressive advocates for social change likewise “always . . . marched in groups” (199).

61. Daniel W. Rogers, Making Capitalism Safe: Work Safety and Health Regulation in America, 1880–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 53–67, situates NAM’s campaign in the broader context of state health and safety agencies and legislation.

62. During the period it made the three NAM films, the Edison company released a number of other titles it identified as sponsored films, made in “co-operation” with a revealing mix of private and public, profit and non-profit organizations, including The Street Beautiful (August 1912) with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs; The Rescue, Care and Education of Blind Babies (September 1912) with the International Sunshine Society; The Usurer’s Grip (October 1915) and The Public and Private Care of Infants (December 1912) with the Russell Sage Foundation. See “Educational Films,” Kinetogram 7, no. 2 (August 15, 1912): 17, which lists the “societies and committees with which” Edison had “co-operated” in the name of “uplift and betterment of the community at large.”

63. Note that beyond the “industrial betterment” films it sponsored, NAM also strongly encouraged companies to invest in “industrial film[s], illustrating factory processes and modern manufacturing methods.” If “prepared with thought and careful attention to detail,” such films can become “a permanent asset that assures returns in a practical manner through the wide publicity gained by the presentation and consideration of the subject at close range. Audiences that have seen film stories of this nature always identify the product of the companies exploited with the pictures and the publicity thus secured is invaluable as compared with the outlay” (Ruthven Smith, “Industrial Motion Pictures,” American Industries 13, no. 1 [August 1912]: 26).

64. Delton, The Industrialists, 1–2; Industrial Betterment Activities of the National Association of Manufacturers of the United States of America (New York: National Association of Manufacturers, 1913), 6. Thanhouser’s initial promotional material for An American in the Making made no mention of US Steel or NAM; see the Thanhouser ad, Moving Picture World 6, no. 4 (April 26, 1913): 334.

65. Times-Democrat [New Orleans LA], July 7, 1912, 44. See “Review of The Workman’s Lesson,” Moving Picture World 12, no. 13 (June 29, 1912): 1212.

66. This claim appeared, for example, in “The Moving Picture as an Industrial Educator,” Current Opinion 55, no. 3 (September 1913): 206, 208. The Workman’s Lesson was paired with an Essanay comedy, a “Western drama,” and the performance of a local singer at the Bijou in Racine, Wisconsin (ad for Bijou, Racine [WI] Journal-News, July 22, 1912, 8); for later booking, see ad for the Eagle theater, Fairbanks [AL] Daily Times, November 4, 1913, 4, where The Workmen’s Lesson screened along with four other films, including a “clever comedy” and the Pathé “educational picture,” The Sedge Warbler and the Cuckoo.

67. “Railroad ‘Safety First’ Rally is Attended by 12,000 Men,” Wall Street Journal, October 24, 1912, 6.

68. “ ‘Safety First’-Tomorrow,” Kansas City [MO] Times, October 18, 1912, 16; “ ‘Safety First’ is Watchword of People of Thirteen Railways,” Tulsa [OK] Daily Democrat, October 8, 1912, 3.

69. “Safety First Slogan is Expounded Here Before Many Hundred,” New Castle [PA] Herald, April 23, 1913, 7; “Mill Men Attend ‘Safety’ Meeting,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 7, 1913, 2.

70. “Employees Hear How to Prevent Accidents,” Hartford [CN] Courant, November 27, 1912, 2.

71. A restored print of The Crime of Carelessness is available on the DVD collection Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film (National Film Preservation Foundation, 2007). Richard Abel’s commentary on this DVD release and Scott Simmons’s notes on the film both point out the relation of The Crime of Carelessness to the deadly March 1911 fire at the Triangle Waist Company, in which 146 mostly female workers died.

72. Industrial Betterment Activities, 11.

73. See, for example, ad for the Palace in Great Bend, Kansas, where the “great Edison drama,” The Man He Might Have Been, shares the bill with a one-reel John Bunny comedy and The Boomerang (1913), a melodrama about the dangers of patent medicine (ad for Palace, Great Bend [KS] Tribune, April 28, 1913, 1).

74. Ad for Bijou, Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, January 13, 1913, 3, and “Four Films at Bijou,” Wilmington [NC] Morning Star, January 13, 1913, 6; ad for Masonic Theatre, Hinton [WV] Daily News, March 4, 1913, 4.

75. See ad for Orpheum, Daily Gate City [Keokuk IA], February 23, 1915, 3.

76. “Era of Honesty Seen by Speaker,” Indianapolis Star, February 7, 1913, 16.

77. Frederic W. Keough, “Industrial Advancement through Motion Pictures,” American Industries 13, no. 6 (January 1913): 13–18.

78. F. C. Schwedtman, “Accident Prevention and Workmen’s Compensation Activities,” American Industries 13, no. 2 (September 1912): 17; Keough, “Industrial Advancement through Motion Pictures,” 17.

79. National Association of Manufacturers Board of Director Minutes, July 10, 1912, 9. Thanks to Angela Schad, Reference Archivist of the Hagley Museum and Library, for finding and sending me this information.

80. See, for example, “Train to Preach Industrial Progress,” Greenville [SC] Daily News, January 4, 1913, 7; “Industrial Gospel Train the Latest,” Marion [OH] Star, March 15, 1913, 33.

81. Industrial Betterment Activities, 5.

82. Ibid., 6.

83. “Industrial Motion Pictures Shown,” American Industries 13, no. 8 (March 1913): 41–42; Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Convention of the National Association of Manufacturers (Detroit, Michigan, May 19–21, 1913), 30. “Manufacturers to Meet in Detroit,” Judicious Advertising 11, no. 6 (May 1913): 136–37, notes that the screening of motion pictures and lantern slides related to accident prevention and workmen’s compensation would be followed by a discussion involving representatives of, for example, Eastman Kodak and the Ford Motor Company. The 1912 NAM conference had included screenings of films identified as having been “prepared especially” for NAM as part of a “practical demonstration, through the medium of motion pictures” of safety devices: Cause and Effect of Industrial Accidents and Safety Devices in a Representative Factory Plant; along with two other safety films: Factory Fire Drills and Safety at Sea: Lifeboat Drill on an Ocean Liner (Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the National Association of Manufacturers of the United States of America [New York, May 20–22, 1912], 50–56).

84. Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the National Association of Manufacturers of the United States of America (New York, May 19–20, 1914), 8.

85. Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the National Association of Manufacturers, 37.

86. Industrial Betterment Activities, 7; Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the National Association of Manufacturers, 37–38.

87. “Industrial Betterment Meetings,” American Industries 14, no. 8 (March 1914): 40; on the Inland Steel Company screening, see Duluth [MN] News-Tribune, July 7, 1915, 11. American Industries subsequently charted the further circulation of NAM’s films and stereopticon slides to “all of the large high schools of Connecticut” as well the plants of the B. F. Goodrich Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio; the Burroughs Adding Machine Company in Detroit; and the Ethical Culture Society and the Child Welfare League in New York City (“Industrial Betterment Activities,” American Industries 14, no. 10 [May 1914]: 39).

88. “Industrial Betterment at Bridgeport, Conn.” American Industries 14, no. 6 (January 1914): 40; “Factory Foremen Hear Stirring Talks On Industrial Betterment at Great Conference Held by Manufacturers,” Bridgeport [CN] Times and Evening Farmer, December 18, 1913, 2. A similar event was held in Binghamton, New York (“Manufacturers to Hear Talk,” Press and Sun-Bulletin [Binghamton NY], February 20, 1914, 8). See also “Teaching the Lessons of Safety,” American Industries 14, no. 5 (December 1913): 20, which describes the use of screenings as part of a meeting in Milwaukee under auspices of the Milwaukee Merchants and Manufacturers Association, with purportedly eight thousand “employers, workingmen and many women” attending.

89. “Motion Pictures to Illustrate Accident Prevention at ‘Safety First’ Congress,” Cincinnati Enquirer, January 3, 1915, 26. On the screening in Reno, see ad for Grand Theatre, Nevada State Journal, June 14, 1914, 4; “Safety First Seen in Films,” Reno [NV] Gazette-Journal, June 17, 1914, 5; “ ‘Safety First’ Films Attract,” Nevada State Journal, June 24, 1914, 8.

90. “International Exposition of Safety and Sanitation,” American Industries 14, no. 6 (January 1914): 24. See “Safety Exposition Sets New Standards,” Safety: Bulletin of the Museum of Safety 2 (January 1914): 3–21. “Exhibitors at the International Exposition of Safety and Sanitation,” Safety: Bulletin of the American Museum of Safety 2 (January 1914): 10; “Model Factories,” Morning Post [Camden NJ], December 11, 1913, 4; “Safety Exhibit Opens To-Night,” Standard Union [Brooklyn NY], December 11, 1913, 6. This exposition also prominently featured a theater operated by the National Cash Register Company, which offered “free motion pictures and stereopticon slides” demonstrating the range of “Corporation Welfare Work” shown in films sponsored by the likes of American Telephone & Telegraph, Metropolitan Life Insurance, and Lever Bros. Soap Works (“International Exposition of Safety and Sanitation,” 24). Both National Cash Register and NAM were awarded Grand Prizes at this exposition, as was the Nicolas Power Company for its motion picture projectors. The following year the motion picture presentations at this event included the New York Telephone Company’s The Telephone Way and The Telephone Girl (“Exhibitors at America’s Second Exposition of Sanitation and Safety,” Safety: Bulletin of the Museum of Safety 3 [January 1915]: 12).

91. “The Chemical Industries Exposition,” Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry 7, no. 9 (September 1915): 736; “Industrial Betterment Activities,” American Industries 14, no. 10 (May 1914): 39; “The Doctor’s Place in Modern Society,” Allentown [PA] Leader, February 1, 1917, 1.

92. For a list of films that were “securable” from the National Safety Council, see “ Safety Motion Picture Films,” Steel and Iron 62 (September 1, 1915): 856. “N.A.M. Motion Pictures,” American Industries 15, no. 5 (December 1914): 44; Rev. H. R. Miles, “How Can the Churches and Employers Co-operate in Industrial Betterment Work?” American Industries 14, no. 11 (June 1914): 22. On YMCA screenings, see: “Moving Picture Show by Y.M.C.A.” Quad City Times [Davenport IA], June 6, 1915, 10; “Films on Safety Shown at the Plaza,” Dispatch [Moline IL], March 12, 1917, 7. On university extension distribution, see, for example, “Educational Pictures in Great Demand,” Pittsburgh [PA] Daily Post, January 18, 1915, 12; “Dr. Sheridan Speaks at Grange Ave. Church Fellowship Meeting,” Racine [WI] Journal-News, February 5, 1916, 5; “Motion Pictures,” Lead [SD] Daily Call, March 28, 1916, 5; “K.U. Has a ‘Movie’ Exchange,” Dodge City [KS] Daily Globe, November 30, 1914, 3; “Sends Films Free,” Sharon Valley [KS] Times, December 3, 1914, 2.

93. George J. Zehrung, “Social Service with Industrial Pictures,” Moving Picture Age 4, no. 8 (August 1921): 7–8.

94. “N.A.M. Motion Pictures,” American Industries 15, no. 10 (May 1915): 45.

95. “ ‘Hazards of Trainmen’ and ‘The Workman’s Lesson,’ ” St. Joseph [MI] Daily Press, March 26, 1915, 5; “Program on Safety First,” St. Joseph [MI] Daily Press, March 30, 1915, 1; “ ‘Safety First’ at Congregational Church,” St. Joseph [MI] Saturday Herald, April 5, 1915, 6.

96. For a particularly dire assessment of market segmentation see Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). “The aim” of the post-1970s advertising industry, declares Turow, “is to package individuals, or groups of people in ways that make them useful targets for the advertisers of certain products through certain types of media.” This effort, he warns, involves nothing less than the attempt to “create the electronic equivalents of gated communities” (1–2).

97. Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996). See also, for example, Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post (New York: Routledge, 1995); Matthew Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America, 1893–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Matthew Schneirov, “Popular Magazines, New Liberal Discourse, and American Democracy, 1890s–1914,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 16 (2017): 121–42.

98. Farm, Field, and Fireside Collection: https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/?a=p&cltn= FFF&p=collections.

99. See the information gathered through the “General Population Schedule” for the 1910 census: www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/index_of_questions/1910 _1.html.

100. Susan L. Mizruchi, The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 144, 6–10.

101. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 4, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 16. Among the essays focusing on magazines in this collection, see especially Richard Ohmann, “Diverging Paths: Books and Magazines in the Transition to Corporate Capitalism,” 102–15; Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, “Crafting a Communications Infrastructure: Scientific and Technical Publishing in the United States,” 234–59; Charles A. Seavey with Caroline F. Sloat, “The Government as Publisher,” 260–75; Sally M. Miller, “Distinctive Media: The European Ethnic Press in the United States,” 299–311; and William Vance Trollinger Jr., “An Outpouring of ‘Faithful’ Words: Protestant Publishing in the United States,” 359–75. For a more conventional, encyclopedic history that also demonstrates the diversity of magazine publishing in the United States, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. 4, 1885–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957).

102. Print in Motion, 17. Another way of framing this relationship, specifically in terms of Progressivism, is offered by Morton Keller: “in issue after issue, the search for ways of enhancing social conformity ran head-on into the fact of American pluralism. An ever-greater variety of people, ideas, interests, and institutions emerged from the same economic and social developments that fed the Progressive taste for unity and efficiency” (Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1933 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994], 5).

103. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 183.

104. Altman, Film/Genre, 165.

105. Lea Jacobs and Andrea Comiskey, “Hollywood’s Conception of Its Audience in the 1920s,” The Classical Hollywood Reader, ed. Steve Neale (New York: Routledge, 2012), 107.

106. Julia Guarneri, Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 6.

107. Wendell R. Smith, “Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation as Alternative Marketing Strategies,” Journal of Marketing 21, no. 1 (July 1956): 3–8. Smith defines “market segmentation” as “viewing a heterogeneous market (one characterized by divergent demand) as a number of smaller homogeneous markets in response to different product preferences among important market segments. It is attributable to the desires of consumers or users for more precise satisfaction of their varying wants” (Smith, 6). Daniel Pope claims that “the advent and ascendency of market segmentation as a principle of national advertisers may well be the most far-reaching development in national advertising in recent decades” (The Making of Modern Advertising [New York: Basic Books, 1983], 265).

108. Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 287, 170. Focusing on the relationship between advertising and major circulation magazines in the early twentieth century, T. Jackson Lears finds only “the rise of corporate cultural hegemony” as “the broader pattern of publishers’ dependence on advertising revenues continued to spread, encouraging inoffensive blandness and a general climate of support for advertisers’ worldview” (Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America [New York: Basic Books, 1994]: 203).

109. John Lee Mahlin, Advertising, Selling the Consumer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1914), 42–43. See also, for example, John B. Opdycke, Advertising Selling and Practice (Chicago: A. W. Shaw Company, 1918).

110. William H. Ingersoll, “Advertising,” paper read at the meeting of the newly organized Efficiency Society in March 1912 (Transactions of the Efficiency Society 1 [1912]: 134–35).

111. Surveying the broad prospects for advertising film in 1916, Ernest D. Dench drew a basic distinction between attempts to reach the “general public” with theatrical screenings and those more focused on “quality” rather than “quantity” circulation, like the Columbia Paper Manufacturing Company, whose film was “exhibited by one of their traveling representatives before printers in various parts of the country,” and the Reliable Incubator and Brooder Company, which sent its film to a “poultry show” in Illinois (“Advertising-Film Circulation,” Judicious Advertising 14, no. 2 [August 1915]: 81–82).

112. References to screenings for schoolchildren in Joliet, Illinois, who were taken to the Illinois Steel Company where they watched safety films concerning “accidents common to children” offered by this company and the Chicago & Joliet Electric Railway Company (Moving Picture World 16, no. 11 [June 14, 1913]: 1149); adult Jewish immigrants at Educational Alliance (“Experiments in Educational Shows,” Motography 5, no. 5 [May 1911]: 63); professionals gathered at the Associated Advertising Club (Moving Picture World 23, no. 8 [February 20, 1915]: 1167) and at the Engineers and Architects Club in Louisville, Kentucky (Moving Picture World 21, no. 2 [July 11, 1914]: 293); members at conventions of the National Mouth Hygiene Association (“The Moving Picture Film,” Oral Hygiene 2 [1912]: 792–93) and the Illinois State Medical Society (Moving Picture World 16, no. 11 [June 14, 1913]: 1148); the “most untidy and demented patients,” inmates at the state hospital for the insane in Kankakee, Illinois (“Pictures a Godsend,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 6 [February 6, 1915]: 857), and patients at Battle Creek [MI] Sanitarium (“Motograph in Educational Work,” Motography 6, no. 2 [August 1911]: 94).

113. Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 6.

114. I have found no examples in the US comparable to the screenings organized between 1909 and 1914 by the German Colonial Society’s well-established network, studied in detail by Wolfgang Fuhrmann in “Locating Early Film Audiences: Voluntary associations and colonial film,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22, no. 3 (2002): 291–304.

5. EVENT CINEMA: LAND SHOWS AND THE PANAMA-PACIFIC INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION

1. “Motion Pictures as a World Power,” Motography 13, no. 17 (April 24, 1917): 651.

2. Bancroft Library, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, carton 111, folder 15. Hereafter abbreviated as BANC.

3. “Moving Pictures,” Laredo [TX] Weekly Times, April 16, 1911, 6.

4. “Railways Employ the Screen,” Star Tribune [Minneapolis MN], April 13, 1913, 52.

5. Rudolph Matas, “The Cinematograph as an Aid to Medical Education and Research,” Southern Medical Journal 5, no. 8 (September 1912): 512. This event was widely covered. See “Listen to Discussions,” Evening Star [Washington DC], December 13, 1911, 5; “Patients For Sale,” Washington Post, December 14, 1911, 1. “For the First Time,” Nashville [TN] Banner, December 14, 1911, 3, highlighted “the wonderful cinematograph demonstration last night for the first time in America . . . moving pictures taken by the aid of the X-ray.”

6. “Piez Denounces A.F.L. Stand on the Coal Strike,” St. Louis Star and Times, November 21, 1919, 8.

7. “City Beautiful on Color Slides,” St. Louis Star and Times, September 24, 1912, 5; “Lectures at Business Show,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 24, 1912, 55.

8. “Cement Wonders Attract Crowds,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 9, 1910, 7. Joseph Husband, “Putting a Big Crimp in ‘Overhead,’ ” System 30, no. 6 (December 1916): 660–65, discusses the “efficient” and “systematized” activities of the Portland Cement Association aimed at making “America think in terms of concrete.” Key to this effort was the association’s “Lecture Bureau [that] prepares and delivers lectures, technical and popular; prepares lecture outlines; trains speakers; arranges dates; cooperates with independently paid lecturers; and prepares the motion picture films, lantern slides, charts and models which are needed to show the uses of concrete” (665).

9. See, for example “Cement Show Will Spread to New York,” Inter Ocean [Chicago IL], February 20, 1910, 11; “Cement Show a Big Success,” New York Tribune, December 22, 1910, 3.

10. Universal Portland Cement Co. Monthly Bulletin, no. 80 (January 1911): back cover.

11. “Annual Convention and Cement Show Open,” Omaha [NE] World-Herald, March 3, 1915, 1. See also “Nebraska News Letter,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 13 (March 27, 1915): 1958; “What’s Doing in Concrete,” Farm Cement News 6, no. 3 (1916): 21. On A Concrete Romance, see Moving Picture World 22, no. 9 (November 28, 1914): 1258, and “ ‘A Concrete Romance,’ ” Motography 13, no. 13 (March 17, 1915): 490. A Concrete Romance was also screened at, for example, the Tri-State Farmers’ Institute in Evansville, Indiana (“Farmers Name 3,000 Delegates,” Indianapolis Star, February 11, 1915, 4); the Central YMCA in Camden, New Jersey, under the auspices of the Association of American Portland Cement Manufacturers and Bureau of Commercial Economics (“ ‘A Concrete Romance’ at Y.M.C.A. To-Night,” Morning Post [Camden NJ], April 6, 1915, 11); and the high school in Wausau, Wisconsin, as part of an “illustrated lecture” series using films from the University of Wisconsin Extension Service (“Lecture Course is Announced,” Wausau [WI] Daily Herald, November 2, 1916, 2).

12. Events booked at the Coliseum in 1909 included the Electrical Show (“Electric Show Ready to Open,” Chicago Tribune, January 16, 1909, A7); Auto Show (“First Day of the Chicago Auto Show Eclipses,” Chicago Tribune, February 7, 1909, G4); Cement Show (“Many View Cement Wonders,” Chicago Tribune, February 19, 1909, 5); Barnum and Bailey Circus (“Circus Opens at Coliseum,” Chicago Tribune, April 2, 1909, 7).

13. Ad for Land Show, Chicago Tribune, October 12, 1909, 8.

14. “The Hunger for Land,” Edgewood [IA] Journal, November 11, 1909, 4.

15. “Land Show Ready: Full of Wonders,” Chicago Tribune, November 20, 1909, 1–2. “Putting the Great West on Exhibition in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, October 31, 1909, 60–61.

16. Land Show advertisement, Chicago Tribune, October 22, 1909, 9.

17. “Land Show Gains Public Interest,” Chicago Tribune, November 22, 1909, 1, 5.

18. “Tribune’s Big Land Show Opens at the Coliseum Today,” Chicago Tribune, November 20, 1909, 17; “U.S. An Exhibitor at Tribune Show,” Chicago Tribune, October 10, 1909, 6.

19. “Big Room for Lectures,” Chicago Tribune, November 20, 1909, 17.

20. Land Show advertisement, Chicago Tribune, October 17, 1909, 43; “Tribune’s Great Land Exposition Opens in the Coliseum,” Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1909, section 2:1, 10, 11. The federal government’s contributions to this event were particularly well publicized; see, for instance, “National Aid to Chicago Land Show,” Fort Worth [TX] Star-Telegram, August 24, 1909, 2.

21. James C. Boykin, “The Cotton States and International Exposition,” in Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1894–95 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896), 2:1735–44; James C. Boykin, “The Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition,” in Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1896–97 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), 1:1081–104; “The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, in Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1897–98 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1899), 2:1733–40.

22. “Given the Post of Honor,” Evening Star [Washington DC], May 13, 1901, 2; “The Pan-American Exposition,” Conneautville [PA] Courier, August 1, 1901, 7; “The Pan-American,” Morning News [Savannah GA], May 16, 1901, 11; Charles Edward Lloyd, “Department of the Interior at the Pan-American,” Defiance [OH] Express, July 25, 1901, 2.

23. “Photographed the Fast Mail,” Kansas City [MO] Times, June 24, 1903, 2; “Arizona Exhibits,” Arizona Republic [Phoenix], July 20, 1903, 3.

24. H. B. Hardt, Official Catalogue of the Lewis & Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair, Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., June 1 to October 15, 1905 (Portland: A. Hess & Co., 1905), 34–35.

25. Jesse Everett Wilson, Participation in the Alaska-Pacific-Yukon Exposition (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), 17, 46–48, 70–72; “The Portland Fair,” Custer County Republican [Broken Bow NE], May 4, 1905, 4; “Country’s Scenic Grandeur,” Statesman Journal [Salem OR], May 21, 1905, 11.

26. Participation in the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 17, 48, 70–72.

27. The utility of moving pictures was a recurrent theme that year in this trade magazine. See, for example, “Moving Pictures as Court Evidence,” Nickelodeon 1, no. 2 (February 1909): 34; “Moving Pictures as Salesmen,” Nickelodeon 1, no. 3 (March 1909): 71–72; “Selling Machinery by Moving Pictures,” Nickelodeon 1, no. 4 (April 1909): 96; “Moving Pictures to Get Immigrants West,” Nickelodeon 1, no. 5 (May 1909): 130; “Advertising a City by Motography,” Nickelodeon 1, no. 6 (June 1909): 165–66; “Moving Pictures in Teaching Trades,” Nickelodeon 1, no. 6 (June 1909): 166.

28. Theodore T. Kling, “Motography in the Government Service,” Nickelodeon 2, no. 3 (September 1909): 73–76.

29. The Oregon Building at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition also included its own forty-by-sixty-foot “lecture room,” where “half hour lectures illustrated by moving pictures” were given daily (Wilfred Beaton, “Oregon’s Part in the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific,” Oregon Daily Journal, February 28, 1909, 29).

30. See Waldon Fawcett, “How Uncle Sam Gets Settlers,” Printers’ Ink 80, no. 7 (August 15, 1912): 42, 44, 46, 50.

31. See, for example, “Big Room for Lectures,” Chicago Tribune, November 20, 1909, 17; “Lectures at Land Show,” Chicago Tribune, November 29, 1909, 6. On the Reclamation Service and the broader historical contexts of this government initiative, see Donald J. Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); William D. Rowley, The Bureau of Reclamation: Origins and Growth to 1945 (Denver: Government Printing Office, 2006), 1:138–91. Interestingly, the 1919 monograph by the Institute for Government Research, The U.S. Reclamation Service: Its History, Activities and Organization (New York: D.C. Appleton, 1919) makes no mention of any promotional activities.

32. Pisani, Water and American Government, 101–2.

33. “Men Who Edit Uncle Sam’s Books and Periodicals,” Evening Star [Washington], December 13, 1908, 56; “Uncle Sam’s Editors,” Lincoln [NE] Daily Star, December 20, 1908, 19. One of Blanchard’s lecture tours in 1911, for example, covered sixty-one cities and towns in the Midwest, as he pitched the success of “swamp reclamation” in Louisiana (“Special Train,” Weekly Banner [Athens GA], June 16, 1911, 1). Other lecturers at the Chicago land show included Reclamation Service employee Louella Littlepage, who to my knowledge was one of the first women to serve in this capacity. In 1910, Littlepage would be a featured lecturer at the first Pittsburgh Land Show (see “Gifted and Beautiful Woman to Lecture at the Land Show,” Pittsburgh [PA] Post-Gazette, September 25, 1910, 1; “Illustrated Lectures at the Big Land Show,” Pittsburgh [PA] Post-Gazette, October 2, 1910, 32).

34. Sydney Wise, “The Moving Picture as a Factor in Land Development,” Moving Picture World 7, no. 18 (October 28, 1910): 1000. See also Watterson R. Rothacker, “How Moving Pictures Stimulate Sales,” Nickelodeon 5, no. 10 (March 11, 1911): 273; “Moving Pictures at Big Land Show,” Motography 5, no. 6 (June 1911): 124.

35. “Soil Hungry Seek the Simple Life at Land Show,” Chicago Tribune, November 23, 1910, 2. See also “Secretary McIsaac Writes of the Los Angeles Land Show,” Santa Cruz [CA] Evening News, March 19, 1912, 2: “the lecture room is kept in operation all day . . . a megaphone cleverly manipulated in the main auditorium advises land show visitors every half hour of the pictures and lectures in the lecture-room. An average attendance of 250 is thus secured for each lecture.”

36. On the government exhibits at the 1910 Chicago Land Show, see “U.S. Exhibit Full for Land Show,” Chicago Tribune, November 6, 1910, 98; “U.S. Exhibit Ready for Show,” Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1910, 13; “Second United States Land and Irrigation Exposition,” Irrigation Age 26, no. 2 (December 1910): 695–98. Interestingly, Chicago’s Land Show itself became the subject of a “descriptive lecture” lecture illustrated with slides and moving pictures (“The Chicago Land Show,” Herald-Bulletin [Burley ID], April 26, 1912, 4).

37. “Land Show Opens to Public Today,” Chicago Tribune, November 19, 1910, 1; “The Chicago Tribune and the Land Show,” Chicago Tribune, Land Section, November 20, 1910. For a more critical view, see “Second United States Land and Irrigation Exposition,” Irrigation Age 26, no. 2 (December 1910): 695–98, which complained that the Land Show was poorly managed and conducted by the Tribune as an “advertisement for itself and the return of some cash revenue.”

38. Ad for Southern Louisiana Association, Chicago Tribune, November 20, 1910, 99. See also “Pictures at Chicago Land Show,” Nickelodeon 4, no. 10 (November 15, 1910): 282.

39. “Moving Picture Lectures at Big Land Show,” Motography 5, no. 6 (June 1911): 124; “Chicagoan Wins Arkansas Farm,” Chicago Tribune, November 23, 1910, 4; “Moving Picture Lectures at the Land Show Today,” Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1910, 15; “Booming California,” Placer Herald [Rocklin CA], January 28, 1911, 1.

40. Harrison Menaul, “Millions in White Space to Colonize Empires,” Judicious Advertising 9, no. 4 (March 1911): 63–68.

41. Charles W. Hurd, “Getting the Value Out of a $1,360,000 Appropriation,” Printers’ Ink 80, no. 1 (July 4, 1912): 26. See also Charles Frederick Carter, “Advertising the Railroads,” Advertising & Selling 22, no. 4 (September 1912): 46–53.

42. “Spending a Fortune to Tell Others How to Gain Wealth,” Burwell [NE] Tribune, February 22, 1912, 2. Union Pacific-Southern Pacific ad, Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1911, 4; “Coliseum to be Huge Bird Cage,” Chicago Tribune, November 16, 1911, 20.

43. “Land Exposition Closes; 320,000 Persons Saw Show,” Chicago Tribune, December 10, 1911, 4; “File for Farms at Show Today,” Chicago Tribune, November 18, 1911, 7.

44. “ ‘The Times’ Day at Land Show,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1912, 18.

45. “List of Exhibitors in the Land Show,” Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1912, J3.

46. Ad for United States Land Show, Chicago Tribune, November 20, 1912, 13.

47. “The Oil Pull at the Chicago Land Show,” Gas Review 5, no. 2 (February 1912): 76; “The Oil Pull at the Chicago Land Show,” Thresherman’s Review 21, no. 1 (January 1912): 60, 65.

48. Thomas Elsaesser, “Archives and Archaeologies,” in Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 28. See also essays by Hediger and Vonderau (“Record, Rhetoric, Rationalization: Industrial Organization and Film,” 35–60); and Petr Szcepanik (“Modernism, Industry, Film,” 349–62) in this volume. I discuss International Harvester’s marketing campaigns in “Advertising with Moving Pictures: International Harvester’s The Romance of the Reaper (1910–1913),” in The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material, ed. Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, Tom Gunning, and Joshua Yumibe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 194–202.

49. A promotional article for the Great Northern Railway claimed that 1911 saw thirty-one land shows with a total attendance of 1.2 million (Hoke Smith, “Shows How Land Shows Benefit the New States,” Great Falls [MT] Tribune, December 29, 1911, 9). The number of land shows drop after 1915, though the California Land Show in San Francisco was still active in 1917 (San Francisco Examiner, October 6, 1917, 7).

50. Railway Age Gazette 51, no. 20 (November 17, 1911): 981.

51. For example, at the St. Paul Land Show, “special moving picture and illustrated lecture programs given in the lecture hall from 1:30 to 6 each afternoon and from 7:30–10:30” (“Elaborate Program of Entertainment Arranged for Land Show, Nov. 12–23,” Minneapolis Tribune, November 12, 1912, 8); at the Pittsburgh Land Show, “Lectures Varied and Instructive” were offered at the one-thousand-seat Lecture Hall (Pittsburgh [PA] Post-Gazette, October 19, 1910, 6).

52. Chicago Examiner, November 20, 1911, 9–10.

53. Other railroads adopted comparable strategies. See Watterson R. Rothacker, “Yellowstone Park on the Screen,” Motography 7, no. 4 (April 1912): 169–70, which claims that Northern Pacific and other “American railways are finding in moving pictures an advertising medium that convinces” the tourist and the “homeseeker.” “Advertise Road by Pictures,” Motography 8, no. 7 (1912): 248, notes that Sunset Pacific Railroad has a “moving picture film factory” in Houston, Texas, to produce moving pictures of industries and scenery along its line.

54. “Highways of Progress: From Minnesota to the Sea,” World’s Work 19, no. 2 (December 1909): 12338–61. This was one of a series of seven articles that subsequently appeared as his book Highways of Progress (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1910). On Hill as a preeminent “empire builder,” see “Railroads as Empire Builders,” Railway World 55, no. 35 (September 1, 1911): 721–24.

55. Claire Strom, Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 92, 8. Strom emphasizes the complex relation between Hill, the federal government’s reclamation and conservation efforts, party politics (at the state and national level), federal agencies, universities, and the growing influence of “scientific” agriculture. See also Albro Martin, James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Roy V. Scott, Railroad Development Programs in the Twentieth Century (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1985); Ralph W. Hidy, Muriel E. Hidy, and Roy V. Scott, The Great Northern Railway: A History (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1988).

56. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011), xxiv, 457.

57. “Who’s Who—and Why—J. J.’s Son,” Saturday Evening Post 185, no. 2 (July 13, 1912): 19. See also the entry on “Louis W. Hill, the Clerk Hill,” in John Walker Harrington’s newspaper series, “Romances of the Railroads,” Cincinnati Enquirer, October 29, 1916, 5.

58. “Learning through the Eye-Gate,” Moving Picture News 4, no. 48 (December 2, 1911): 10.

59. “Films at Land Show to Draw Settlers,” Chicago Examiner, November 12, 1911, 17; “Picture Man is in Helena,” Independent-Record [Helena MT], June 23, 1911, 8.

60. “Show Pictures of the Canyon,” Semi-Weekly Helena [MT] Independent, June 30, 1911, 13; “Picture Man is in Helena,” 8; “Show Autos in Moving Pictures,” Helena [MT] Independent, June 27, 1911, 5.

61. “Will Picture Fair Montana,” Dillon [MN] Tribune, April 28, 1911, 8; “See America First Car in the City,” Great Falls [MT] Tribune, June 11, 1911, 3; “Take Moving Pictures Here,” Spokesman-Review [Spokane WA], September 6, 1911, 5; “Pictures to Boom Astoria, Oregon,” Motography 5, no. 6 (June 1911): 140; For example, in Great Falls, Montana, with his “motion picture apparatus mounted” on an automobile, Seavolt shot footage of local parks and the business section (“Makes Motion Views of Great Falls,” Great Falls [MT] Tribune, July 20, 1911, 7).

A brief sketch of Seavolt’s subsequent career offers a glimpse at the business of non-theatrical film production as it developed in the Midwest: in 1914, he co-founded with Otto Raths, who ran a theater in St. Paul, the Raths-Seavolt Film Manufacturing Company, “industrial film manufacturers” based in St. Paul (“A De Luxe Brochure,” Motography 12, no. 8 [August 22, 1914]: 272; “Rath Wins New Honors,” Motography 13, no. 1 [January 2, 1915]: 23; “New Motion Picture Studio in St. Paul,” Moving Picture World [March 20, 1915]: 1793); and then in 1916 he became vice president in charge of “laboratory work” as well as continuing to be a camera operator for the Lochren Film Corporation in Minneapolis, which produced a local newsreel, animated cartoons, and advertising slides (“New Firm in Minneapolis,” Motography 16, no. 1 [July 1, 1916]: 2); “Able Business Men Behind Lochren Film,” Moving Picture World 32, no. 3 [April 21, 1917]: 481).

62. “Montana in the Moving Pictures,” Laurel [MT] Outlook, December 13, 1911, 1. Unfortunately, I have found no record of when and where The Homeseeker’s Claim might have been screened apart from the 1911 Chicago Land Show (“Films at Land Show to Draw Settlers,” Chicago Examiner, November 12, 1911, 17).

63. “Picture Films to Advertise,” Evening Tribune [Albert Lea MN], July 14, 1911, 4. As Tom Gunning observes, from the beginning of cinema, “travel images” produced by railroads were “part and parcel of a modern advertising campaign” (“ ‘The Whole World Within Reach’: Travel Images without Borders,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 31. See Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 241–44.

64. “ ‘Show Crop Wealth—Spare No Expense,’ ” Butte [MT] Daily Post, March 9, 1910, 7.

65. See “Corn Show on Wheels,” Quenemo [KS] News, January 10, 1907, 1; “Farmers Institute: Exhibit Car Coming,” Independent Review [Garnett KS], January 11, 1907, 5. The Missouri Pacific retooled the same cars for its traveling “dairy” exhibits (“Exhibit Cars Here,” Hutchinson [KS] News, March 25, 1907, 8). “Exhibit cars” like these often had an explicitly instructional intent, with state colleges of agriculture playing a key role. Utah’s State Agricultural College, for example, outfitted an “exhibit car” and a “lecture coach fitted with a stereopticon” (“Exhibit Train Will Reach Ogden Monday,” Ogden [UT] Standard, January 14, 1909, 1; “Spreading the Gospel of Scientific Farming,” Salt Lake City Herald, January 27, 1909, 12; “The Lecture Train,” Box Elder News [Brigham City UT], January 21, 1909, 1).

66. “An Unique Exhibition,” Garrett [IN] Clipper, April 13, 1911, 1; “Great Northern Display Car Visits Garrett,” Fort Wayne [IN] Journal-Gazette, April 9, 1911, 31. Screenings were also part of elaborate promotional effort in 1911 that involved sending the governors of five Western states on a special Great Northern exhibit train with stops at twenty-nine cities in the Midwest. See “Governors to Tour Country,” Butte [MT] Daily Post, August 28, 1911, 1; Smith, “Shows How Land Shows Benefit the New States,” 9; “Great Northern Railway Makes History in 1911,” Oregon Journal [Portland], April 3, 1912, 44.

67. “Free Exhibition Car,” Alexandria [IN] Times, March 23, 1910, 3. See also “Oregon-Montana Free Exhibit Car,” Rushville [IN] Daily Republican, December 28, 1910, 4: “Great Northwest,” Tipton [IN] Daily Tribune, February 16, 1912, 1. See Scott, Railroad Development Programs, 19.

68. “Moving Pictures of Montana Farm Scenes Shown,” Inland Empire [Moore MT], May 2, 1912, 1. See also “Growers See Prosperity,” Statesman Journal [Salem OR], February 26, 1911, 1, 8.

69. See ad for Delightful Trip to the Scenic Northwest, Journal and Tribune [Knoxville TN], January 11, 1914, 10; “With ‘Movie’ Shows, Railroads Will Boost,” Daily Missoulian [Missoula MT], March 16, 1914, 2; “Minnesota Advertising Car,” Mower County [Lancaster MN] Transcript, January 7, 1914, 1. Real estate companies and agents selling undeveloped or reclaimed land also began to use moving pictures for similar ends, as when the Central California Traction Company in 1912, for example, created what it called a “Moving Picture Land Show” that combined photographic slides of available lots with a newly shot film that followed prospective buyers from San Francisco across the bay to Oakland by ferry and then out to the company’s acreage near Sacramento. Seeking local investors, this film was presented to overflow crowds at free public screenings in opera houses and armories in central California towns (“Commercial Bodies To See Land Show Rehearsal,” Bakersfield Californian, April 11, 1912, 1; ad for Moving Picture Land Show, Morning Echo [Bakersfield CA], April 11, 1912, 2). One sign of the popularity of this mode of advertising was that a successful land scam in 1913 defrauded investors by using a railway exhibit car and a free moving picture show (“How Victims in 4 States Lost Million,” St. Louis Star and Times, August 3, 1913, 10).

70. “Moving Pictures of Montana Farm Scenes Shown,” Inland Empire [Moore MT], May 2, 1912, 1.

71. See Douglas V. Shaw, “The Great Northern Railroad and the Promotion of Tourism,” Journal of Cultural Economics 13, no. 1 (June 1989): 65–72; Hidy, Hidy, and, Scott, Great Northern Railway: A History, 124–25.

72. Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001), 59–92.

73. “Travel Show is of Much Interest,” Spokane [WA] Chronicle, April 2, 1913, 5; F. W. Graham, “Travel Show Booming,” Morning Oregonian [Portland OR], April 11, 1913, 14.

74. See, for example, “The Blackfeet at Land Show in New York,” Meriden [CT] Journal, October 3, 1911, 12. For background, see the chapters on Glacier National Park in Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

75. “Press Agents are Active,” Cut Bank [MT] Pioneer Press, June 20, 1913, 1.

76. Rufus Steele, “The Man Who Showed His Father,” Sunset Magazine 34, no. 3 (March 1915): 482; Steele also emphasized Hill’s success in making Glacier National Park an “immense” “motion picture attraction.”

77. “Pathe’s Weekly, No. 37,” Moving Picture World 13, no. 10 (September 7, 1912): 1179–80. One newspaper reported that Hill planned to install motion picture machines in “compartment observation cars” on Great Northern trains to screen “views of Glacier national park and the arrival” of President Taft’s son and daughter at the park (“Moving Pictures of Taft Party,” Helena [MT] Independent Record, August 9, 1912, 2).

78. “At the Sign of the Flaming Arcs,” Moving Picture World 14, no. 6 (November 9, 1912): 540, describes Glacier National Park: “cruise up St. Mary’s Lake in a launch, through water as smooth as the proverbial glass, reflecting the great snow-clad mountains in the distance; his camp beside Iceberg Lake; McDermott’s Falls, a cascade of rare beauty; ‘the ragged edge of the mountain tops make a jagged line in the sky’—a panoramic view; Harrison’s Glacier, so clear that it is possible to see objects frozen to a depth of 200 feet; the dramatic scene where the Indians, under Chief Big Top, arrayed in their best blankets and feathers, are grouped on a high crag, their arms extended to the sky—all these are but part of a most interesting film and one that merits preserving.” See Peterson’s detailed analysis of the Pathé film entitled Glacier National Park (identified as being from 1917) in the broader context of travelogues as advertising for railroads (Education in the School of Dreams, 251–59).

79. “Feature Montana Over Entire World,” Butte [MT] Miner, September 27, 1912, 8.

80. “Blazing Trail in Glacier National Park: Experiences with Pathe Cameraman,” Motography 10, no. 6 (September 20, 1913): 195–96; “Blazing Trails in Glacier National Park with a Pathe Camera Man,” Conrad [MT] Independent, December 4, 1913, 2.

81. “Feature Montana Over Entire World,” 8.

82. “Rose Festival to Travel Far in Motion Pictures Taken During Week,” Oregon Daily Journal [Portland], June 15, 1913, 13.

83. Shaffer, See America First, 91.

84. “Great Northern Wins Big Prize at Pan. Pac. Fair,” Buffalo [NY] Times, June 20, 1915, 65.

85. “Montana to Have Big Representation,” Glasgow [MT] Courier, February 5, 1915, 11; “Great Northern Puts on Show,” Willmar [MT] Tribune, February 10, 1915, 4. Arthur A. Willoughby, “Comprehensive Exhibits by Railroad Companies at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” Railway World 59, no. 4 (April 1915): 317. See the photographs of the Blackfeet Indians on Glacier National Park Day at the PPIE, in Donna Ewald and Peter Clute, San Francisco Invites the World (San Francisco: Chronicle Books 1991), 58–59.

86. Letter from L. D. Kitchell to the PPIE’s Chief of Transportation, August 20, 1915, BANC, carton 111, folder 15.

87. “Red Men’s Tribal Rites for Today,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 15, 1915, 5; “Blackfeet Indians Visit Exposition,” Helena [MT] Independent, June 15, 1915, 1; Laura A. Ackley, San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkeley: Heyday, 2015), 262–64.

88. Ben Macomber, The Jewel City: Its Planning and Achievement; Its Architecture, Sculpture, Symbolism, and Music; Its Gardens, Palaces, and Exhibits (San Francisco: John H. Williams, 1915), 82. See Ackley, San Francisco’s Jewel City, 166; Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1921), 68–69. The Wanamaker exhibit was awarded by the PPIE a “grand prize for uplift work on behalf of the Indians” and received national publicity (“Medal for Dr. Dixon,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 27, 1915, 16). On Dixon and the broader context for his representation of Native Americans, see Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 236–51; Caitlin McGrath, “ ‘A Vanishing Race’? The Native American Films of J. K. Dixon,” in Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, ed. Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 29–50.

89. “Metro Day at the Fair,” Moving Picture World 25, no. 6 (August 7, 1915): 974.

90. “Metro Day at the Fair,” 974; “Hearst-Selig Gets Medal at S. F. Fair,” San Francisco Examiner, July 16, 1915, 9.

91. Motography 14, no. 7 (August 14, 1915): 321.

92. See the survey of the Zone’s attractions in Billboard’s special PPIE issue, February 20, 1915; “In and Out of Los Angeles Studios,” Motion Picture News 11, no. 14 (April 10, 1915): 43.

93. Metro Moving Picture Day program, BANC, carton 10, folder 8.

94. “California Exposition Honors Francis X. Bushman,” Billboard July 3, 1915, 81; “Metro Day at World’s Fair,” Moving Picture World 25, no. 1 (July 3, 1915): 41; Motography 14, no. 2 (July 10,1915): 52.

95. “Metro’s Big Day,” New York Dramatic Mirror 73 (July 7, 1915): 24.

96. “Special Days—Twenty First Week,” BANC, carton 10, folder 4.

97. The souvenir booths are mentioned in “Exposition Pays Tribute to Motion Picture Art,” New York Dramatic Mirror 73 (July 7, 1915): 22.

98. “Half Interest in Filmland Sold,” Moving Picture World 24, no. 12 (June 19, 1915): 1969. See Akeley, San Francisco’s Jewel City, 246–47; ad for The Exposition’s First Romance, Billboard, May 29, 1915, 57. See, for instance, an ad for screening at the Majestic theater, Sioux City [IA] Journal, December 5, 1915, 27. Variety 39, no. 3 (June 18, 1915): 18, includes a review of Neola the Sioux, a three-reel film shot at the PPIE featuring 101 Ranch performers.

99. Oakland [CA] Tribune, May 29, 1915, 16; on the closing of 101 Ranch, see Billboard, June 19, 1915, 1; Todd, Story of the Exposition, 363.

100. Schedule for Edison Day (October 21, 1915), BANC, carton 10, folder 4.

101. William Lipsky, Images of America: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005), 8.

102. Moving pictures also proved to be important in the ongoing promotional efforts of the PPIE’s Department of Exploitation, which delivered more than 2,700 illustrated lectures across the US. See Akeley, San Francisco’s Jewel City, 76; “Advertising the West,” Pullman [WA] Herald, August 23, 1912, 5. Railroads used a similar strategy. In St. Louis, for example, free events that featured moving pictures and slides of the PPIE and the “great Western wonderland” were offered by the advertising agent for the Missouri Pacific Railway at churches across the city in the summer of 1915 (see “Beautiful Pictures of America’s Great Western Wonderland and the California Expositions to Be Shown in St. Louis This Week,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 18, 1915, 21; “Colorado, Yellowstone, California and Exposition Pictures to Be Shown in St. Louis This Week,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 25, 1915, 29). Horatio F. Stoll, “Advertising California and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” Advertising & Selling 21, no. 8 (January 1912): 37–43, indicates how much the railroad promotional activity at land shows also served to promote the PPIE. The Cardinell-Vincent Company, official photographer at the PPIE, offered a weekly series of new colored slides of the exposition for use in movie theaters: six dollars for twelve slides or ten dollars for twenty-four slides each week for twelve weeks (ad in Moving Picture World 41, no. 1 [April 3, 1915]: 135).

103. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 390.

104. Ibid., 385.

105. Daily records kept by this office indicate that during one week in October 1914, it either sent or received from sixty newspapers in the South an “article on Moving Pictures at the exposition” (BANC, carton 70, file 50).

106. “Exhibits Graphically Portray the Progress of Decades,” Oregonian, April 18, 1915, sec. 5:2.

107. See “World’s Progress in Review at Exposition,” Allentown [PA] Morning Call, April 20, 1915, 12; “Marvels Seen at San Francisco,” Commercial Appeal [Memphis TN], May 2, 1915, 45; “World’s Progress Mirrored at Fair,” Davis Count Clipper [Bountiful UT], May 14, 1915, 4–5.

108. “Coal Mining at the Panama-Pacific Exposition,” Coal Age 8, no. 12 (September 18, 1915): 455–56.

109. “Power Machines at Expo,” Billboard, July 10, 1915, 52.

110. “Simplex at the Exposition,” Moving Picture World 25, no. 2 (July 10, 1915): 315. See also, for example, W. L. Stern, “Motion Pictures at the Exposition,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 11 (March 13, 1915): 1595; “Power’s Cameragraph Wins Exposition Grand Prize,” Motography 14, no. 4 (July 24, 1915): 151; “Pictures at World’s Fair,” Billboard, April 10, 1915, 47; “Exposition Pays Tribute to Motion Picture Art,” 22–23.

111. “Exposition Pays Tribute to Motion Picture Art,” 22.

112. “Simplex at the Exposition,” 315.

113. Macomber, Jewel City, 146. The literature on the PPIE is extensive, including trade books that reprint a great many photographs and other images, like Ewald and Clute, San Francisco Invites the World, and Lee Bruno, Panorama: Tales from San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco: Cameron & Company, 2014). Scholarly studies include: Burton Benedict, ed., The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkeley: Scolar Press, 1983); Sarah J. Moore, Empire on Display: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2013); Abigail M. Markwyn, Empress San Francisco: The Pacific Rim, the Great West, and California at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); Kim K. Fahlstedt, Chinatown Film Culture: The Appearance of Cinema in San Francisco’s Chinese Neighborhood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 44–63. Ackley, San Francisco’s Jewel City is a particularly useful overview. Todd, Story of the Exposition is the most detailed source from the period.

114. BANC, carton 111, folder 12. See Greg Eamon, “Farmers, Phantoms and Princes: The Canadian Pacific Railway and Filmmaking from 1899–1919,” Cinémas 6, no. 1 (1995): 11–32.

115. See “Southern Pacific Building Feature of Big Exposition,” Atlanta Constitution, March 7, 1915, 9.

116. “S.P. Publicity Work at the Fair Valuable,” San Jose [CA] Mercury News, April 15, 1915, 9. See the ad for Clum lecturing at a YMCA in New Orleans, Times-Democrat [New Orleans], April 29, 1911, 11. George Wharton James, who also lectured at the Southern Pacific building noted that working in this type of venue meant that the lecturer had to cope with an audience at least in part composed of “the unheeding, unthinking hoi-polloi, the crowd, the mob, the hurrying sight-seer, curious, thoughtless, restless” (Exposition Memories [Pasadena, CA: Radiant Life Press, 1917], 27).

117. “Panama Fair Notes,” Railway World 59 (March 1915): 254. For a response from one small community on this railway line, see “Is Placerville Represented?,” Placerville [CA] Mountain Democrat, May 22, 1915, 6.

118. “This Railroad System’s Exhibit at the Panama-Pacific Exposition,” Information for Employes [sic] and the Public, pamphlet published December 29, 1914, BANC, carton 11, folder 20. See also Willoughby, “Comprehensive Exhibits by Railway Companies,” 236–37. For a syndicated newspaper article describing the Pennsylvania Railway’s award-winning exhibit, see New Brunswick [NJ] Times, June 18, 1915, 2. For a full list of films screened at the Pennsylvania Railway exhibit, see the August 20, 1915, letter to the PPIE’s Chief of Transportation, BANC, carton 111, folder 20.

119. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 661.

120. See the correspondence between H. T. Wilkins, special agent in charge of the exhibit, and the PPIE’s Department of Transportation Exhibits, BANC, carton 111, folders 19 and 20.

121. “The Railways and the California Expositions,” Railway Gazette Age 59 (September 17, 1915): 499–500; Todd estimates that over 137,000 people took this “journey by cinematograph” (Story of the Exposition, 237).

122. “Railway Cars Joined to Form Movie Theater,” Popular Mechanics 24, no. 5 (November 1915): 708; “Railway Motion-Picture Theater,” Scientific American 113, no. 10 (September 4, 1915): 201. See “The Great International Panama-Pacific Exposition,” Scientific American 112, no. 9 (February 27, 1915): 194–95; Hamilton M. Wright “The Panama-Pacific International Exposition at Night,” Scientific American 112, no. 17 (April 24, 1915): 378, 389; Scientific American 113, no. 8 (August 21, 1915): cover.

123. See B. S. Brown, “Hale’s Tours and Scenes of the World,” Moving Picture World 29, no. 3 (July 15, 1916): 372–73. In Jeffrey Ruoff, ed., Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), see essays by Tom Gunning, “ ‘The Whole World Within Reach’: Travel Images without Borders,” 42–60; and Lauren Rabinovitz, “From Hale’s Tours to Star Tours: Virtual Voyages, Travel Ride Films, and the Delirium of the Hyper-Real,” 25–41.

124. “Exposition Pays Tribute to Motion Picture Art,” New York Dramatic Mirror 73 (July 7, 1915): 22. See also Todd, Story of the Exposition, 302; Wine and Spirit Bulletin 29, no. 1 (January 1, 1915): 42; “San Joaquin and Calveras Formally Dedicate Exhibits,” Stockton [CA] Daily Record, March 24, 1915, 3; on the large virtual voyages in the Zone, see Akeley, San Francisco’s Jewel City, 244–46; Moore, Empire on Display, 181–89.

125. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 74; The Story of a Great Achievement: Telephone Communication from Coast to Coast (New York: Bartlett-Orr Press, 1915), 16. See “Remarkable Success of the Transcontinental Telephone Demonstrations at the Panama-Pacific Exposition,” Telephone Review 7, no. 3 (March 1916): 85.

126. “Transcontinental Demonstrations,” Telephone Review 7, no. 1 (January 1916): 14–15. See also “Roar of Atlantic Ocean Heard in San Francisco,” Bell Telephone News 5, no. 1 (August 1915): 2–4. AT&T presented dozens of demonstrations of transcontinental telephony through the fall of 1915 and into 1916 to elected officials, journalists, service organizations, chambers of commerce, and other potentially influential groups. Moving Picture World noted another demonstration: a telephone connection between Symphony Hall in Boston and the Lasky studio in Los Angeles, where Jesse Lasky, Cecil DeMille, and cast members listened to the sound of the audience and orchestra in Boston during a performance of Carmen while watching the film Carmen (“Thousand Dollar Long Distance Phone Call,” Moving Picture World 26, no. 4 [October 23, 1915]: 602–3).

127. “The United States Steel Corporation’s Exhibit at the Panama-Pacific Exposition,” Monthly Bulletin of the Iron and Steel Institute 3, no. 4 (April 1915): 95–117; Todd, Story of the Exposition, 205–8; W. L. Stern, “Motion Pictures at the Exposition,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 11 (March 13, 1915): 1595; “Organ Recital at U.S. Steel Exhibit,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 11 (March 13, 1915): 1635; “Beautiful Building Dedicated to W. Va. at the Panama Exposition,” Wheeling [WV] Intelligencer, March 17, 1915, 8.

128. Illinois at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), 35. Illinois also had exhibits in other palaces (Agriculture, Education, and Mining) that featured photographs but no moving pictures.

129. “Personal Impressions of Pacific Coast Trip and San Francisco and San Diego Fairs,” Belleville [IL] News Democrat, October 7, 1915, 4.

130. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 389.

131. “Announcement of Plans for the Illinois State Building,” BANC, carton 29, folder 22.

132. Billboard, February 20, 1915, 55; “The Great IHC Exhibit at San Francisco,” Farm Implements 29, no. 2 (February 27, 1915): 30.

133. Report of the Illinois Commission to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (Chicago, 1915), 70.

134. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 386; Moving Picture World 23, no. 8 (February 20, 1915): 1162; “Personality of Oregon is Imbued in Building at the Fair,” Oregonian [Portland OR], August 22, 1915, sec. 5:3.

135. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 387.

136. J. A. Filcher, Official Report, Sacramento Valley Expositions Commission (1916), 34–35, 53.

137. Massachusetts at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, California 1915 (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1916), 91–97. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 388; “Edison Films at Exposition,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 8 (February 20, 1915): 1119.

138. Massachusetts at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, 95.

139. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 387.

140. Laura Ingalls Wilder, West from Home (New York: Harper Collins, 1974), 122, 149–51; see Todd, Story of the Exposition, 287.

141. “Power Machines at Expo,” Billboard (July 10, 1915): 2.

142. See Todd, Story of the Exposition, 390; “Many Exposition Shows,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 10 (March 6, 1915): 1478; “Film Displays and Noted Features at the San Francisco Fair,” Chicago Examiner, October 19, 1915, 32; Wine and Spirit Bulletin 29, no. 1 (January 1, 1915): 42; “Exposition Pays Tribute to Motion Picture Art,” 22; Daily Official Program, September 11, 1915, 29.

143. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 32.

144. Ryan, Education Exhibits at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. See also Education and Social Economy Official Catalogue of Exhibitors (San Francisco: Wahlgreen Company, 1915).

145. See Noah W. Sobe, “Challenging the Gaze: The Subject of Attention and a 1915 Montessori Demonstration Classroom,” Educational Theory 54, no. 3 (2004): 281–97.

146. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 33.

147. “Panama-Pacific Exposition Closes in Blaze of Glory,” Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, December 5, 1915, 40. This article also appeared in, for example, the Salt Lake [UT] Tribune, the Syracuse [NY] Herald, and the Brownwood [TX] Daily Bulletin. See also Harold French, “Educational Exhibits at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” Journal of Education 80, no. 22 (December 17, 1914): 602–3. Even when the PPIE was still under construction, this journal predicted that “through the use of several moving picture equipments, presenting school activities in action, the Education Palace is likely to be the most attractive palace in all the grounds” (“Education at the Panama Pacific,” Journal of Education 79, no. 16 [April 16, 1914]: 434).

148. Ryan, Education Exhibits at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 9. Wisconsin’s exhibit was the exception in that it regularly offered Pathe Daily News, as well as promotional presentations like Hawaii and the Pineapple Industry. See, for example, the daily programs for September (BANC, carton 10, folder 4).

149. Massachusetts at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, 100–29.

150. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 50–52.

151. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 62–63. The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report, 1913–1914, 2nd ed. (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1915), 66–68. This report does not mention motion pictures at the PPIE exhibit, though the Foundation’s disbursements for the PPIE include $1260 for “Motion Pictures of Clinics and Field Work” (148). See Marina Dahlquist, “Health on Display: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition as Sanitary Venue,” in Performing New Media, 1890–1915, ed. Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, Joshua Yumibe (London: John Libbey, 2014), 174–85.

152. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 33.

153. One of these theaters offered visitors a chance to watch a projectionist at work through a window at the rear of the booth and also included a large showcase displaying a Simplex projector broken down into its component parts. Ads for the Precision Manufacturer Company made much of the fact that its Simplex projectors were in use at these two theaters (ad in Moving Picture World 25, no. 2 [July 10, 1915]: 363).

154. This was the schedule for Theater No. 1 on Friday, June 18, 1915, as reported in the Oakland Tribune, June 17, 1915, 5; and for September 11, as reported in “Exposition Program for Today,” The Recorder [San Francisco], September 11, 1915, 6. See BANC, carton 10, folder 4, which contains the Daily Program announcements circulated to the press. On the Philippines exhibit in the Palace of Education, see The Philippine Public Schools at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco: Marnell and Company, 1915).

155. “Lectures on Labor to Be Given To-Day,” San Francisco Examiner, September 6, 1915, 6.

156. “Palace of Education Shows Edison Films,” San Francisco Examiner, October 15, 1915, 13.

157. The reference to the American Library Association was noted in Moving Picture World 25, no. 1 (July 3, 1915): 106; the appearance by Holmes in Moving Picture World 25, no. 8 (August 21, 1913): 1345, and “Traveling with Holmes,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 11, 1915, 10.

158. The Remington films are noted in the Official Program, June 22, 1915, 15. A promotional notice for a one-night stand by the Hampton Singers on their way to what is described as a “two-month engagement” at the PPIE guarantees that the performance will be the same as will be given at the exposition, including “many of the original negro plantation melodies which were sung in the cabins on the big Southern plantations before the war. In addition to the singing, a series of most interesting moving pictures, showing life in the cotton fields of the South, will be shown with an interesting description by William S. Dodd, the well-known lecturer, who infuses into his talk many amusing incidents of life and customs beyond the Mason-Dixon line. You dream of Dixie and the land of cotton when you hear the slave-day melodies. You see old Virginia, the cabins and the corn fields, passing in motion before you. You see Hampton institute training leaders, tradesmen, farmers and teachers” (“Famed Hampton Singers are Coming to This City,” Anaconda [MT] Standard, June 6, 1915, 10). For background on the production and circulation of films about Hampton, see Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 121–50.

159. “First with Its School Exhibit,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1915, 18; “How Our Schools Won Grand Prize,” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1915, sec. 2:3. The Los Angeles footage was exhibited in Los Angeles as a seven-reel “educational film,” entitled Our Wonderful Schools (“School Films Are Free,” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1915, sec. 2:2). Filming across the state for the California exhibit in the Palace of Education was well covered by local newspapers. See, for example, “Motion Pictures Are Taken in Los Altos,” San Jose [CA] Mercury News, April 22, 1915.

160. Complimentary Souvenir Book, Fifty-Third Annual Convention, National Education Association and International Congress of Education (Oakland, CA: Arthur Henry Chamberlain, 1915), 78–79.

161. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 70.

162. State of New York at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, California, February Twentieth to December Fourth, 1915 (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon Company, 1916), 19, 76, 79.

163. Todd, The Story of the Exposition, 266, 270.

164. State of New York at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 324, 328, 340.

165. Ibid., 377.

166. Ibid., 348; “The Barge Canal Exhibit at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” Barge Canal Bulletin, series 7, no. 2 (February 1915): 43–48.

167. This information comes from “U.S. Government Program for Today” in the Official Program for June 22, 1915, 11; see Todd, Story of the Exposition, 110.

168. Letter to Hon. Martin B. Bailey, March 2, 1914, BANC, carton 76, folder 1.

169. Sabine Haenni, The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 240.

170. Universal Exposition 1915 Celebrating the Opening of the Panama Canal: Rules and Regulations, “Theatres and Moving Picture Concessions” (San Francisco: PPIE, 1915), 33–39, BANC, carton 65, folder 25.

171. Letter from Engineer of Fire Protection regarding Oregon theater, May 7, 1915, BANC, carton 59, folder 7; letter from Engineer of Fire Protection regarding motion picture operator in Pennsylvania building, April 15, 1915, BANC, carton 59, folder 10.

172. “Exposition Pays Tribute to Motion Picture Art,” New York Daily Mirror 73 (July 7, 1915): 22.

173. W. L. Stern, “Motion Pictures at the Exposition,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 11 (March 13, 1915): 1595.

174. “The American Republics at the San Francisco Exposition,” Bulletin of the Pan American Union 41, no. 2 (August 1915): 169–173, which includes photographs of the exterior and interior of this pavilion. See also Macomber, The Jewel City, 156; Todd, Story of the Exhibition, 388.

175. Massachusetts at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, 91–97.

176. “American Republics at the San Francisco Exposition,” 189.

177. On the Pan-American Exposition, see, in particular, Kristin Whissel, Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); on Chicago and New York World’s Fairs in the 1930s, see Haidee Wasson, Everyday Movies: Portability and the Transformation of American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021). Another point of comparison are the European trade shows in which cinema was utilized, as discussed by, for example, Yvonne Zimmermann, “ ‘What Hollywood Is to America, the Corporate Film Is to Switzerland,’ Remarks on Industrial Film as Utility Film,” in Films that Work, 101–17; Petr Szcepanik, “Modernism, Industry, Film,” in Films that Work, 349–62; and Andrea Haller, “Seen Through the Eyes of Simmel: The Cinema Programmer as a ‘Modern’ Experience,” in Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, ed. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier (London: John Libbey, 2009), 113–23.

178. Tuscaloosa [AL] News, February 2, 1915, 5; ad for Cement Show, Omaha [NE] Daily Bee, January 31, 1914, 2: “New Projection Record Made at Methodist Centenary,” Reel and Slide 2, no. 9 (September 1919): 29.

179. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 385.

AFTERWORD

1. “Plan Missionary Films,” Des Moines [IA] Register, January 25, 1915, 3; Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “The Value of Moving Pictures in Prison,” El Paso [TX] Herald, January 2, 1915, 11.

2. Ad for screening From the Manger to the Cross, Des Moines [IA] Tribune, February 22, 1912, 5; “Activities of Negro School to Be Shown,” Des Moines [IA] Register, April 10, 1915, 4.

3. “Missionary Spoke to Large Audience,” Atchison [KS] Daily Champion, February 3, 1915, 6; “Missionary Returns,” Fairmont West Virginian, August 24, 1914, 8; “First Christian Church,” Daily Ardmoreite [OK], February 26, 1915, 5; “Among Our Missionaries,” Missionary Intelligencer 27, no. 7 (July 1914): 288; “Notes from the Foreign Society,” Christian Century 32 (November 11, 1915): 15.

4. DeVry ad, Educational Screen 5, no. 1 (January 1926): 32.

5. “Uncle Sam as a Movie Producer,” Popular Mechanics 43, no. 4 (April 1925): 618–22.

6. See, for example, “Will Lecture on Journey, ‘To Lhasa in Disguise,’ ” Baltimore [MD] Sun, January 27, 1924, 34; “Movies, Lectures to Describe Work of Lutheran Body,” Journal and Courier [Lafayette IN], January 17, 1924, 14; “Sportsmen’s Club Sponsor for Motion Picture and Lecture,” Santa Cruz [CA] News, February 20, 1924, 2; “Zionist Movement Told in Lecture and Pictures,” News-Palladium [Benton Harbor MI], November 26, 1923, 2; “Free Movie-Lecture of Better Business Methods, Feb. 1,” Fayetteville [AK] Daily Democrat, January 20, 1921, 1.

7. Ford as well as the USDA figure prominently in Lee Grieveson’s argument in Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), about the deployment of non-theatrical cinema in the US during the 1920s by the state and corporate interests in the service of furthering the project of “liberal political economy.”

8. Ad for Apollo Film Company, Moving Picture Age 5, no. 1 (January 1922): 32.

9. Educational Screen 1, no. 2 (February 1922): 24. I discuss these efforts in “Institutionalizing Educational Cinema in the United States in the Early 1920s,” in The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, ed. Marina Dahlquist and Joel Frykholm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 220–50.

10. “Wants Aid of N. E. A.,” Film Daily 21, no. 6 (July 7, 1922): 1, 2.

11. MPPDA Digital Archive, record 354, October 5, 1927: Material on the Motion Picture Trade Conference. I discuss the activities of the MPPDA in relation to non-theatrical cinema in “16 Hollywood,” in Oxford Handbook of American Film History, ed. Jon Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).