Moral Reform

It is a truism that Americans periodically go on moral binges in which some citizens try to act as moral arbiters for all citizens. It is less obvious, however, that these sprees commonly reflect bitter resistance to extensive social change. Yet that has certainly been the case with the rapid urbanization of the nation. Secularization, loosening family ties, an increasingly multilingual populace, and new modes of pursuing pleasure undermined the village culture of an earlier era, and traditionalists responded in the first half of the twentieth century with various strategies intended to restore the moral guidelines of a village past in the urban nation.

Some of these reforms were meant to provide an institutional framework in which to teach proper morals and behavior to the urban poor. The playground movement early in the century, for instance, aimed to steer the children of immigrants away from the crude life of the streets and onto playgrounds where supervised team play would train them in both the cooperative and the competitive values needed to make them into good citizens. This “positive environmentalism” not only focused on what was wrong but also offered a constructive moral alternative.

A very different approach to moral reform was expressed in various repressive movements that sought not to teach the proper but to outlaw what was objectionable. Prostitution was one obvious target of social control, the sleazy urban dance hall another. But by far the most significant of these efforts was the war on the saloon.

Spearheaded by the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), the Prohibition movement reached its goal when the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1919. In its effort to dry up the nation the ASL drove people with clashing cultural styles into hostile camps and exposed the severe social strains of the era. The patrons of the saloon were largely urban workers—Catholics, Jews, and Eastern Orthodox recently arrived from the cultures of Southern and Eastern Europe where alcohol was a normal part of communal life. The middle-class ASL, on the other hand, was rooted in traditional Protestant views of family, social order, work, and the deferment of pleasure, and it perceived its foes as threats to this moral order. There were thus bitter ethnic, religious, and class feelings at work on both sides of the dry divide.

Although Prohibition did curtail drinking to a significant degree, it did not stem the tide of social change that had triggered the movement for moral reform in the first place. Thus, when Prohibition ended in 1933, other expressions of moral reformism flourished. Among these were pressures to influence the content of movies. Although censorship laws were already on the books in several states and dozens of towns and cities by the 1920s, movies grew more and more lurid, especially after the Depression cut into revenues in the early 1930s. Many believed that the new films posed a fundamental challenge to family, religion, patriotism, and general decency. Finally, in the face of a growing public outcry, congressional rumblings about “regulating” the industry, and threats by the newly organized Catholic Legion of Decency to boycott “condemned” films, the producers of movies agreed in 1934 to abide by the Motion Picture Production Code they had ignored since they approved it in 1930.

In general, the code had an extremely low tolerance for sex, profanity, gratuitous violence, and incitement to criminal behavior. The boundaries were so narrowly defined that the censors even tried to change Clark Gable’s famous line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” in Gone with the Wind to, “My dear, I don’t care.” Fortunately, they relented. Family values were promoted by banning any reference to prostitution, abortion, adultery, “perversion,” and birth control. The code had a positive side to it as well. It insisted that “correct standards of life …be presented” in motion pictures. Flag, country, and religion, for instance, had to be treated respectfully. Proper films, it claimed, would lead to proper character and proper ideals. Thus, the code expressed both the positive and the repressive aspects of earlier moral reform movements. Not until the 1950s was it effectively challenged.

Moral reformism touches upon some of the most sensitive issues of a relatively open society. Should personal morality be regulated by law? What is the proper balance between the will of the majority and the rights of a minority, or between the rights of the community and the rights of an individual? These have been vexing questions since the founding of the Republic, and there is no sign of easy answers in the near future.

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