Scope and Content Note
The papers of Elizabeth Allen Smart (1889-1959) span the years 1924-1961, with the bulk of the material dating from 1940 to 1955. The collection documents her work with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), first as secretary of its Motion Picture Legislative Committee and then as director of its national legislative program. The papers are in English and contain correspondence, reports, meeting minutes, mailing lists, petitions, questionnaires, newsletters, printed matter, legal documents, legislative proposals, and writings. The collection is arranged in two series: Motion Picture Legislation and WCTU Legislative Director files.
While fragmentary, the papers open a window on the concerted action of the WCTU and its allies to promote common legislative goals as part of their wider concern for shaping the nation’s moral climate. The WCTU’s legislative program was endorsed in national and state conventions in the period treated by this collection and focused on protecting family and home from the corrupting influences of alcoholic beverages, drugs, war, and indecent motion pictures. Smart also served as WCTU adviser to the United Nations.
Allies of the WCTU included the Motion Picture Research Council which published in 1929-1933 a multivolume series of studies finding a connection between juvenile delinquency and motion picture viewing. Educators, church men and women, and prominent citizens noted these studies in criticism of the motion picture industry and called for censorship and restrictions on access to movies by children. Congress proved unwilling to censor the movie industry, but in 1935 Senator Matthew M. Neely, Democrat of West Virginia, proposed the Anti-Block Booking and Blind Selling Bill initiating a five-year, ultimately unsuccessful, legislative effort to end the motion picture studio distribution practice that required exhibitors to buy movies in bulk (block booking) without knowing the content (blind selling). Neely argued that these practices forced exhibitors to show movies that did not meet local standards for the moral instruction of children. Samuel B. Pettengill, Democrat of Indiana, introduced similar legislation in the House of Representatives.
WCTU’s promotion of the Neely-Pettengill bill is documented in the Motion Picture Legislation series. Mary T. Bannerman of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers served as chair of a Joint Legislative Committee to Abolish Compulsory Block Booking and Blind Selling of Motion Pictures. Smart served as secretary to the committee and, concurrently, as secretary of the WCTU’s own Motion Picture Legislative Committee. Correspondence by Bannerman and minutes of the Joint Legislative Committee are included in the series, which also includes correspondence with Abram F. Myers, general counsel to the Allied States Association of Independent Exhibitors. As the legislation faltered, the committee shifted focus to an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Justice Department, known as United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. The Supreme Court’s 1948 ruling on the case ended the distribution practices, and eventually ended the studio system.
Initiatives documented in the WCTU Legislative Director series include a ban on advertisements of alcoholic beverages. In 1953-1954, legislation was sponsored in the House of Representatives by Joseph R. Bryson, Democrat of South Carolina, and introduced in the Senate by William Langer, Republican of North Dakota. Both bills were to ban interstate transmission of alcoholic beverage advertising in the press and over radio and television. The National WCTU, with membership in every state, played a leading role in a legislative strategy group of religious and lay organizations promoting the “dry” political agenda. Lobbying for the Bryson-Langer bills was the WCTU’s most concerted effort following the repeal in 1933 of the Eighteenth Amendment, which had banned the sale of alcoholic beverages.