How the feds broke 'The Spirit of '76'
Former President Woodrow Wilson on his 65th birthday, on Dec. 28, 1921. Credit: Newsday Archives / UPI
More than a century ago, a California businessman produced a fervently patriotic film called "The Spirit of '76" — set, as one might guess, during the American Revolution.
But the federal government quickly banned this flag-waving silent movie in 1917. During this period, amid the U.S. involvement in World War I, under President Woodrow Wilson, many peoples' liberties were abridged across the nation.
The authorities decided the film's scenes portraying horrid wartime atrocities by the British Redcoats, more than 140 years earlier, could subvert our support for Britain's efforts against Germany.
And Robert Goldstein, a costume supplier by trade who produced and co-wrote the film, was sentenced to a shocking 10 years in prison after his conviction under the Espionage Act of 1917.
Any July 4 would be a good time to remember this case as a warning of how criminalizing and chilling public speech and opinion can boomerang into a kind of dystopian self-satire for authorities.
Recently, on a much lighter note, the Federal Communications Commission ended up looking foolish by targeting ABC because President Donald Trump was mocked by comedian Jimmy Kimmel.
In the "Spirit of '76" case, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Franklin Bledsoe said the movie was crafted "to make us a little bit slack in our loyalty to Great Britain in this great catastrophe." At sentencing, Bledsoe said, "The defendant is lucky that he is not in some countries where such conduct as he has been guilty of would have met with the supreme penalty."
Decades later, essayist Walter Karp lamented that the 1776 revolution, "a story that had nourished love of liberty and hatred of tyranny in American schoolchildren, had become a crime to retell in Wilson's America."
Last year journalist Mark Arsenault, who extensively researched the case, recalled that the 1918 armistice was followed by a partial reckoning in which Wilson was persuaded to shorten many of the longer sentences punishing speech.
Goldstein's term was commuted to 3 years. He emerged from prison in October 1920 with a ruined reputation. And, a chilling effect on public expression had already become widespread. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson used the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act of 1918 to stop delivering publications deemed disloyal, such as polemics supporting independence for Ireland and India.
The courts then didn't give movies the same First Amendment status as printed press. So, according to a biographical work by film historian Anthony Slide, Goldstein's lawyers didn't defend him on that basis. Also, it turned out that the feds had been surveilling him based on rumors he was involved in pro-German intrigue. They seized the film's 12 reels from a Los Angeles theater.
By cruel contrast: Only two years before "Spirit" premiered in Chicago in 1917, D.W. Griffith unveiled "The Birth of a Nation." That movie romanticized the Confederacy, played a big role in reviving the racist Ku Klux Klan, and became the young industry's first blockbuster success.
Goldstein admired Griffith, but ended up shunned by peers, not as a villain, but a fool.
Last year, in The Boston Globe, Arsenault reported unknown facts about Goldstein's demise. He tried and failed to make movies in Europe, returning to the United States from Germany in the 1930s paranoid and alone. He died in 1957 in Dover, New York, in Harlem Valley State Hospital, which was a psychiatric facility.
The case, United States v. The Spirit of '76, broke Goldstein's own spirit. No copies of the film are believed to have survived.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
