Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration

HOLLYWOOD'S CENSOR

HOLLYWOOD’S CENSOR

JOSEPH I. BREEN

& the Production Code Administration

COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY

PRESS 

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York     Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51284-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doherty, Thomas Patrick,

Hollywood’s censor : Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code

Administration / Thomas Doherty.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-14358-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Motion pictures—Censorship—United States—History. 2. Breen, Joseph Ignatius, 1890–1965.  I. Title.

PN1995.62.D64    2007

791.430973—dc22 2007026146

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

FOR SANDRA, AGAIN  

CONTENTS

Opening Credits

Prologue: Hollywood, 1954

1   The Victorian Irishman

Catholicity in Philadelphia

The XXVIII International Eucharistic Congress (Fox–Catholic Church)

2   Bluenoses Against the Screen

Banned in Chicago

Holy Writ: The Production Code, 1930

3   Hollywood Shot to Pieces

Pre-Breen Hollywood

Legions at the Barricades

Signed and Sealed: The Production Code Administration, 1934

Will Hays the Second, the Hitler of Hollywood, the Mussolini of American Films, the Dictator of Movie Morals, etc.

4   The Breen Office

Office Work

God’s Work

5   Decoding Classical Hollywood Cinema

The Breen Office Shuffle

The Advisory Function

6   Confessional

7   Intermission at RKO

The PCA in Limbo

The Censor as Mogul

8   At War with the Breen Office

Shattering the Myth of Mere Entertainment

Señor Presidente

9   In His Sacerdotalism

The Catholic Prohibition Movement

Two-Fisted Priests and Beatific Nuns

10   Our Semitic Brethren

Irreligious Animosity

Hollywood’s Restricted Covenants

11   Social Problems, Existential Dilemmas, and Outsize Anatomies

The Genre with All the Answers

The Genre without a Name

Shoot-out over The Outlaw (1941–1949)

12   Invasion of the Art Films

The Swank Appeal of the Art House

The Rebuke from Italian Neorealism

Ingrid Bergman: From St. Joan to Jezebel

13   Amending the Ten Commandments

The Revolt of the Elites

The Revolt of the Independents

14   Not the Breen Office

Cracking the Code

Pious Platitudes Take It on Chin

15   Final Cut: Joseph I. Breen and the Auteur Theory

Appendix: The Production Code

Notes

Film Index

Index

OPENING CREDITS

What follows is not a biography of Joseph I. Breen but a cultural history of Hollywood and America with the life and character of Breen as the spine of the story. Along the way, Catholic priests, Jewish moguls, visionary auteurs, studio hacks, hardnosed journalists, and bluenose agitators will be clashing over the great art of the twentieth century, classic Hollywood cinema, during its high renaissance between the arrival of sound and the rise of television.

Though not certified by a Code Seal, the following production has an extensive credit list. Two players warrant top billing: Mary Pat Dorr, Joseph Breen’s granddaughter, who graciously shared her memories of a doting grandfather and generously granted permission, with no strings attached, to quote from his private correspondence; and Barbara Hall, head of Special Collections at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a fellow Breeniac who shared her unmatched expertise in matters Production Code. Martin S. Quigley, Pat Breen, Albert Van Schmus, and Monsignor Francis Weber patiently answered questions about the man they knew. Leonard Leff offered advice and research materials. Charles Maland lent his keen eye to the manuscript.

A number of kind scholars, researchers, and archivists provided invaluable guidance: Gregory Beal, Bob Dickson, Shawn Guthrie, Kristine Kreuger, and Linda Mehr at the Margaret Herrick Library and AMPAS; Nicholas B. Scheetz and Scott S. Taylor at Special Collections at Georgetown University; Rev. William Mugan, S.J., Nancy Merz, and Mary Struckel at the Midwest Jesuit Archives; Don H. Buske at the Historical Archives of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati; Julie Satzik at the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Archives and Records Center; W. John Shepherd at the Catholic History Research Center and University Archives at the Catholic University of America; Sean Delaney at the British Film Institute; Pat McAvinue at the Drexel Library at St Joseph’s University; Patrice M. Kane at Fordham University Library; Benjamin Singleton at the News-film Library at the University of South Carolina; Matthew J. Olsen at the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland; Patrick McNamara at the Archdiocese of Brooklyn Archives; Neil Bethke, at Archives and Special Collections at Loyola Marymount University; David Pavelich at the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago; Wayne Dowdy at the Memphis Public Library; Colin Varga and Shawn Weldon at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia Archives; Rev. Joseph Bongard at Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia; Ron Simon at the Paley Center for Media; and Madeline Matz, Rosemary Hanes, and Joe Belian at the Motion Picture Division of the Library of Congress. At Columbia University Press, Jennifer Crewe and Roy Thomas guided the manuscript and encouraged the author.

I also deeply appreciate all the friends who kibitzed, criticized, listened with good grace, and allowed themselves to be exploited for off-the-cuff research assistance: Matthew Bernstein, Sheri Chinen Biesen, Devin Carney, Julia Crantz, Lisa Debin, Andrew Hudgins, Rick Jewell, Ross Melnick, John Raeburn, Luke Salisbury, Maayan Zack, and all my colleagues at Brandeis University, especially Jacob Cohen for his thoughtful comments. Again, and above all, I owe my wife Sandra more than I can express.

Finally, I’d like to thank the members of the Academy for an Academy Film Scholars Grant and the opportunity to say the first part of this sentence.

PROLOGUE

Hollywood, 1954

On March 25, 1954, from the stages of the RKO Pantages Theater in Hollywood and the Center Theater in New York, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented its annual award ceremonies—the Oscars, live, on television. For only the second time in the Academy’s twenty-six-year history, video was crashing the party, and NBC had sent out open invitations courtesy of another dream factory (Oldsmobile brings you the famous Academy Awards Presentation!). The come-on blurb in a new weekly publication called TV Guide had already realigned its screen priorities: "Jack Webb of Dragnet will be among those presenting the Oscars."

Viewed via the washed-out kinescope that has preserved the evening, and measured against twenty-first-century standards of global saturation and glitzy excess, the festivities in 1954 look dressed-down and low-tech, the production numbers mechanical and martial, short on sizzle and skimpy on skin. The musical highlight was a modest vignette in a faux dinner club, featuring Dean Martin crooning a bourbon-smooth version of That’s Amore from The Caddy (1953), the latest box office hit from the golden comedy duo of Martin and Lewis. (Dino’s jukebox evergreen lost out to the treacly Three Coins in a Fountain.) In terms of sheer tonnage, the most elaborate choreography was reserved for a chorus line of behemoth Oldsmobiles parked on stage for the live commercials.

No matter. Still entranced by the novelty of bicoastal telecasts transmitted direct into the living room, Americans were thrilled to peek through the keyhole of the camera and spy on the glamour of a legendary Hollywood ritual. Of course, within the executive suites at NBC, the motives were less starstruck: advertising revenues might not recoup the costs of mounting the extravaganza, but the medium was selling more than any individual show. It was selling itself, betting on dividends down the line from a longterm investment in a blue-chip futures market. For the television industry, the Oscar ceremonies were a prize catch. For the motion picture industry, the incursion of video was a portent of things to come.

A dollop of controversy shadowed the telecast—not over the nominated films, or a scandalous gown, or an incendiary acceptance speech, but over the very fact that the hottest ticket in Hollywood was being squandered on the archrival. I rushed home last night to watch this great show on television, confessed a depressed motion picture exhibitor the next morning. I’m sure that millions of people (this morning’s papers say about 43,000,000) did the same thing. Certainly the empty seats in the theaters across the country prove that these figures are correct. Not so long ago, the moving-image competition had been derided and disdained. "Television is nothing but rehearsals," the effete theater critic Addison DeWitt scoffed in Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), summing up Broadway’s, and Hollywood’s, high-hat attitude to the small screen. But with Milton Berle’s madcap variety hour and the Friday Night Fights (also known as Texaco Star Theater and The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports) beaming topnotch, no-cost entertainment into private homes and public bars, the lofty superiority and smug complacency soon gave way to frayed nerves and furrowed brows. To the theater operators who manned the front lines and endured personal rejection at the box office window, ushering television into the Oscar ceremonies was the moral equivalent of trading with the enemy. Ornate motion picture palaces and 600-seat theaters alike—venues once filled to the rafters with sniffling matrons, snuggling couples, and popcorn-munching moppets sitting rapt before a women’s weepie, a screwball comedy, or a matinee shoot-’em-up—were left sparse and vacant, shells of their former selves. Why give lapsed moviegoers another reason to stay home and watch movie stars on television—for free!—instead of making them pay for the privilege down at the local Bijou?

Worse, Hollywood’s most exclusive soiree was not just shown on television, it was staged for television. The second Oscar telecast marked the first time the Academy Awards was fashioned to be run off with the TV cameras always in mind, revealed the Hollywood Reporter. The RKO Pantages audience, star-studded and glittering in evening dress, was passed up for the millions of more simply dressed home viewers. The Los Angeles Times rubbed salt in the wound: Unlike last year’s stuffy affair where the TV cameras were treated as intruders, this year the cameramen, decked out in white ties and tails, will have places of honor right on the stage. During rehearsals a symbolic turf war erupted between the old Hollywood pro Mitchell Leisen, director of the Pantages stage show, and NBC’s William Bennington, director of the television show. Let me rehearse, then you can try out your damn cameras! an exasperated Leisen bellowed at the upstart. Think of it: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences taking direction from the National Broadcasting Company.

Singer, dancer, funnyman, and shameless ham Donald O’Connor hosted the ceremonies, riffing off his persona as the goofy second banana in the splashy Technicolor musical Singin’ in the Rain (1952), the big hit, though Oscar underachiever, from the previous year. A masterpiece of industrial craftwork from MGM’s famed Freed unit, the tightly knit team of artists supervised by unit producer Arthur Freed, Singin’ in the Rain was a nostalgic homage to the early talkie era, when the quiet realm of silent cinema was shattered overnight by the thunderclap of sound, the last time Hollywood had faced a technological revolution upending the old order. The good-humored glance back at the glitches and scratches of the late 1920s offered reassurance that Hollywood would surmount an even greater threat in the early 1950s.

This night, the charmed entry in the list of Oscar-nominated films was From Here to Eternity (1953), directed by Fred Zinnemann from the James Jones novel (the boldest book of our time . . . honestly, fearlessly, on the screen!). Set on a hardtack, hot-blooded Army post in Hawaii in the days before Pearl Harbor, the khaki-colored melodrama devoted less screen time to close-order drill on the parade ground than to close-quarter tensions behind bedroom doors. Already iconic, emblazoned on one-sheet posters and spread across huge billboards, was an image of luxuriant sexuality: the glistening bodies of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, clad only in bathing suits, entwined on a beach as the surf rolls in and licks their lithe limbs, the couple a single organism horizontal in the sand. The film won eight Oscars, including Best Picture.

If the suave Dean Martin stole the musical portion of the show, a singer with a more intimate vocal style provided the note of highest drama. The award for Best Supporting Actor went to Frank Sinatra, the heartthrob of the wartime bobby-soxers, whose downward career spiral in the postwar era was reversed by his fierce performance as Maggio, the doomed rebel in From Here to Eternity. When actress Mercedes McCambridge read his name, the auditorium erupted in rapturous applause: Hollywood loves a comeback. The ovation and enthusiasm, sighed the normally reserved Variety, itself reduced to a bobby-soxer swoon, was of the gloss of which showbiz stardust is made. An overjoyed Sinatra sprinted up the aisle and graciously accepted his statuette, joking that he had not been asked to sing one of the nominated songs that year.

Taking over from Donald O’Connor to preside over a spate of more mundane award presentations was producer and screenwriter Charles Brackett, president of the Academy. Brackett owned a shelfful of Oscars himself, the most recent received just that evening for Titanic (1953), and the most notable earned in collaboration with his longtime partner Billy Wilder for Sunset Blvd. (1950), coincidentally, or not, another resonant meditation on the lost glory of Hollywood’s silent era. In his introductory remarks at the top of the show, Brackett put forward a brave face for the battered industry. Tonight we celebrate a single year—1953. We celebrate it exultantly, as a year of rebirth, revitalization, new techniques, new dimensions, Brackett insisted. As to the audience, it hasn’t drifted, it has surged back—but with a new look, a more knowing eye, an insistence on showmanship, a demand for balanced perfection in every department of picture making.

To Brackett fell the task of bestowing the honorary Oscars, a category devised to give due, often overdue, recognition to motion picture insiders, technical wizards, and neglected old-timers, the heavy lifters around town who were eminently regarded if woefully bereft of star voltage. Though good public relations and obligatory business, the honorary awards segment of the Oscars presaged a slump in the proceedings, the chance for the ladies to scurry to the powder room or the men to wander into the lobby for a smoke.

The roll call of honorary recipients began with Pete Smith, a former press agent who since 1935 had produced and narrated a popular series of short films for MGM called the Pete Smith Specialties, a monthly issue of whimsical vignettes with titles like Romance of Radium (1937), Lions on the Loose (1941), and Movie Pests (1944). Clocking in at ten to twenty minutes, the short or featurette had long been a staple entry on the program of newsreels, cartoons, singalongs, and sundry appetizers that unspooled before the main course of the featured attraction. Smith’s shorts often played better than the films they preceded, but in 1954, with no captive audience and no sure profit margin, even the brand name extras weren’t paying their rent. Smith had already announced his retirement, and the next year his unit closed up shop.

Also honored was producer Darryl F. Zanuck, president of Twentieth Century-Fox and the dauntless visionary behind CinemaScope, the new widescreen process designed to lure audiences away from the very medium they were watching. You can see it without glasses! exclaimed taglines, to prevent CinemaScope from being confused with the headache-inducing, and already fading, gimmick of 3-D cinema. After rolling the dice on CinemaScope, Zanuck was enjoying a huge payday with The Robe (1953), a biblical spectacle that earned three Oscars that night and accrued the highest grosses of any film that year. To cap his introduction of Zanuck, Brackett wittily turned his note card lengthwise to mimic the elongated shape of the CinemaScope screen.

Hollywood, 1934: Breen, on the town with comedian Joe E. Brown.

(URBAN ARCHIVES / TEMPLE UNIVERSITY)

Sandwiched between the awards to Pete Smith and Darryl F. Zanuck—whose names the well-informed, or at least older, moviegoer would surely have recognized—was someone whose name, at best, rang only a dim and distant bell.

Brackett read the commendation. The motion picture Production Code is a strong protection against self-appointed, wildcat censorship groups, he declared by way of preamble. For his conscientious, open-minded, and dignified management of a difficult office, the Academy’s board has voted an honorary award to the administrator of the Code—Mr. Joseph Breen.

On cue, a man walks forward from the wings: white-haired, well-fed, stiff-necked, barrel-chested, the very picture of a venerable Irish-American patriarch, a gentleman accustomed to the comforts of life and the respect of his peers, of his needs being met and his words being heeded—perhaps a police captain looking forward to a cushy pension, or a ward politician with a lifetime of favors in his pocket, or a monsignor from a prosperous parish with a case of twelve-year-old whiskey stashed back at the rectory.

After twenty years at the helm of the Production Code Administration, Joseph I. Breen was stepping down from the post he had forged, commanded, and cherished.

In retrospect, and set in relief against the rest of the program that evening, the curtain bow from Joseph I. Breen may be why so much about the twenty-sixth Academy Awards ceremony plays more like a grim wake than a joyous celebration. The controlling gaze of television, the extinction of the short film, the risky gamble on CinemaScope, and the retirement of the long-serving chief of the censorious Production Code Administration—all seemed to punctuate the end of a Golden Age, a shimmering epoch when Hollywood held a monopoly over the moving image, when throwaway shorts garnished a bountiful motion picture menu, when the square-shaped motion picture screen was plenty big enough, and when the moral universe projected by the medium was patrolled by a watchful sentinel.

As Breen walked across the stage to accept his trophy, the orchestra struck up an apt tune: Don’t Fence Me In. At the podium, a brief exchange occurs between Brackett and Breen, but the words, muttered away from the microphone, are barely audible.

Joe— begins Brackett.

Thank you very, very much, Breen interrupts, speaking over the greeting.

Say a word, urges Brackett.

But Joe Breen has already grabbed his trophy and is turning away, without saying a single word to either the home or the Hollywood audience. Taken aback, Brackett shrugs, the audience heeds the applause sign, and the orchestra, caught off guard, misses its cue to reprise the strains of Don’t Fence Me In. The camera cuts to a quick shot of Breen striding off stage, cradling his Oscar—the last glimpse of a man who, more than any actor, director, or producer in the room, had stamped his vision on Hollywood cinema.

1

THE VICTORIAN IRISHMAN

The signature at the bottom of the stationery read Joseph I. Breen, the firm hand a fair index to the man holding the pen. Face to face, however, the name was always Joe Breen, the consummate insider, backstage operator, and go-to guy. For twenty years, from 1934 until 1954, he reigned over the Production Code Administration, the agency charged with censoring the Hollywood screen, an in-house surgical procedure officially deemed self-regulation. Though little known outside the ranks of studio system players, this bureaucratic functionary was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. His job—really, his vocation—was to monitor the moral temperature of American cinema.

Unless you are in the motion picture industry, you never have heard of Joe Breen, Liberty magazine proclaimed in 1936, dragging the publicity-shy player on stage. Breen probably has more influence in standardizing world thinking than Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin. And, if we should accept the valuation of this man’s own business, possibly more than the Pope. The subject of the profile would have conceded his obscurity, resented the comparisons, and grimaced at the glib line about the Holy Father. Yet Liberty was right to hype its scoop and pump its angle: Joe Breen was big Hollywood news that never made the fan magazines.

A former journalist, consular officer, and public relations man, Breen was first brought to Hollywood in 1931 by Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). Hays needed a well-connected and media-savvy Roman Catholic layman to mollify the most formidable constituency assailing Hollywood for purveying sin and profiting from its wages. By February 1934 Breen had wrangled control of the Studio Relations Committee (SRC), a weak-kneed advisory body tasked with enforcing screen morality. On July 15, 1934, he formally took charge of the Production Code Administration (PCA), the implacable new regime that replaced its toothless predecessor. Where the Studio Relations Committee made suggestions, the Production Code Administration gave orders.

Though popularly known as the Hays Office, the PCA was Breen’s domain. It was he who vetted story lines, blue-penciled dialogue, and exercised final cut over hundreds of motion pictures per year—expensive A-caliber feature films, low-budget B-unit ephemera, short subjects, previews of coming attractions, even cartoons. More than any single individual, he shaped the moral stature of the American motion picture, Variety reflected upon his death in 1965. He was the most powerful censor of modern times, but he never looked upon himself as a censor, and, in truth, he wasn’t really a censor.

In truth, he was—perhaps not in a strict legal sense, but for all practical purposes. Empowered by the MPPDA, fortified by a support system of millions of like-minded Catholics, Breen wielded a two-sided gavel forged of executive power and moral intimidation. Under the law school definition of censorship (a restriction on freedom of expression enforced by a state power), Breen was not a censor: he was an employee paid to maintain quality control by a consortium of private corporations. According to Will Hays and the studio chieftains, the review process overseen by Breen was an altruistic act of self-discipline, a solemn agreement among public-spirited businessmen that showed how seriously they took their great public trust, how they endeavored, always, to improve and uplift the American moviegoing public, upwards of 90 million customers per week, who sat spellbound and impressionable before the motion picture screen. It is a mistake to think of the Production Code Administration as a form of censorship, a sort of policeman patrolling a beat, insisted Arthur Hornblow, Jr., producer of Gaslight (1944), who likened the filmmaker’s fealty to the Production Code to the doctor’s to the Hippocratic Oath or the lawyer’s to the Canon of Ethics. We are responsible members of a responsible profession, and the Code is the articulate enunciation of the ethical standards we have set up for ourselves.

To modern ears, the hiss of pure gas leaks from such pronouncements, the prattle of coerced businessmen spouting the cant of the times, the cynicism laced with a generous dose of self-deception. Yet the insistence on terminology is more than a matter of semantics. The word censor conjures the image of a narrow-minded prude, a purse-lipped matron or stone-faced minister squeezing the life and pleasure out of art. The best-known cutters have lived up to the mirthless portrait: Thomas Bowdler, the British physician who sanitized Shakespeare and lent his name to the prissy editing that denudes literature of eros and spice, or Anthony Comstock, the anti-vice crusader of the Progressive Era who sniffed through the U.S. mail to confiscate, eliminate, and prosecute senders and receivers of birth control pamphlets or underwear catalogues.

Breen’s imprint on the Hollywood films he censored—or regulated—went deeper. No mere splicer of the negative, he was an activist editor with a positive goal for the motion picture medium. Bringing a missionary zeal to his custodial trust, he felt a sacred duty to protect the spiritual well-being of the innocent souls who fluttered too close to the unholy attractions of the motion picture screen. Yet mere inoculation was never his sole mission—always he sought to instruct, to shape, to nurture. Breen’s legacy rests not in what he tore out of but in what he wove into the fabric of Hollywood cinema.

Like Thomas Bowdler, who became a dictionary verb, the head of the Production Code Administration also lent his surname to the language. Though never part of the civilian vernacular, the word was lingua franca around the company town in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Breening was the process whereby a film was cut to fit the moral framework of Joseph I. Breen.

CATHOLICITY IN PHILADELPHIA

For all his prominence in the annals of Hollywood, relatively little is known of Breen: he left behind no authorized biography, no unpublished memoir, and no central repository of papers. Though a seasoned journalist, a devoted correspondent, and a tireless memo writer, he maintained a low public profile during his tenure and kept his mouth shut in retirement. For Breen, a scandalous tell-all book (and he would have had much to tell) was unthinkable. In a city lit by flashbulbs and swept by searchlights, he shunned the glare, seldom making the scene or being mentioned in the seen-around-town columns. More unusual for an A-list Hollywood power broker, he slid under the radar of official government surveillance: at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the keeper of thick files on countless second-tier screenwriters and bit players, Breen was barely a blip on the screen.

Out of camera range, Breen was impossible to miss. Even in a business of puffed-up egos and outsized personalities, he dominated the rooms he walked into, the full force of his charisma needing to be felt up-close, nose to nose. Breen was the kind of person who, if you had dinner with him, you would know it, understates his friend Martin S. Quigley, editor of the trade weekly Motion Picture Herald from 1949 to 1972.¹ Sociable and loquacious, Breen was a lively raconteur who delighted in telling colorful anecdotes—some of them true—of his salad days as a newshound or his epic fights—some of them physical—with uppity directors. Yet he avoided the limelight the rest of the town craved. Incredible as it may seem, and despite the fact that I come from Hollywood, I have no picture of myself to send you, he informed an admiring Catholic journalist in 1944. I am probably the only person connected directly or indirectly with the motion picture industry in Hollywood who has not, at some time or other, sat for a photograph. His life must be pieced together from official records, trade press accounts, private letters, oral histories, Hollywood memoirs, and the occasional interview or written statement of principle. Above all, a sense of the man is best gleaned from the correspondence, memos, and documents contained in what is his chief legacy in print, the files of the Production Code Administration, a treasure trove of backstage infighting and evidence aplenty of Breen’s extraordinary impact on the main currents of American cinema.

Given the territory, the temptation to filter Breen’s life story through the lens of a vintage Hollywood biopic is well nigh irresistible. Streetwise and tough, unabashedly ethnic and intermittently corny, the first treatment bows to formula and traffics in clichés: the two-fisted Irishman going Hollywood to take center stage in a gruff Warner Bros. melodrama. Certainly he would be wrong for the starring role in the classy Great Man paeans from MGM or the spicy scenarios favored by the European refugees over on the Paramount lot. Cast the genial Pat O’Brien in the lead, not James Cagney (too edgy) or John Barrymore (too wasted) or Edward G. Robinson (too Jewish), and watch for shades of gray and moody undertones beneath the surface.

Joseph Ignatius Breen was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 14, 1888, six years before the official birth date of the movies and nine before radio.² His was the last generation of Americans whose childhood was not flooded with a torrent of projected images and broadcast sounds, the last generation to reach adulthood before the Great War shattered the hubris of Western civilization, the last generation whose public morals and formal manners were literally Victorian. It was never an age of innocence, but it was an age of fixed boundaries and firm lines, straight-laced and stiff-necked, of women encased in corsets and bound in stockings, of gentlemen adorned in greatcoats and top hats, of watchful chaperones supervising chaste courtship rituals before the automobile propelled young lovers down a bumpier road. Well into the 1950s, decades behind the fashion curve, Breen cradled his keys on a chain suspended from his vest pocket.

Breen traced his roots to the West of Ireland, his father, Hugh A. Breen, immigrating to America in his manhood, after a stretch of curious activity which found no favor with the British Constabulary, as his son wryly put it. Bypassing Boston and New York, the elder Breen found his wife, Mary Cunningham, in West Hoboken, New Jersey, and continued inland to settle in Philadelphia.

Though not as polyglot as New York or as Irish as Boston, Philadelphia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was an urban melting pot where the Irish mingled with an exotic mix of Italians, Poles, Jews, and more traditional stocks. A skeptical native son, Breen despised the corrupt Republican machine that ran Pennsylvania and lamented the bovine complacency of the electorate that tolerated it. Nearly everybody in Philadelphia votes the Gang ticket, he observed in adulthood, and cares nothing whatever for the character of its municipal government. Still, in a moment of W. C. Fields–like reverie, Breen admitted that Philadelphia is not quite so bad as it is represented to be.

Know-Nothing nativism: a contemporary illustration of the anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia in 1844.

Industrious and ambitious, Hugh Breen made the transition from shanty to lace curtain Irish in one generation, accumulating a modest fortune, said his son, by way of the barter and sale of real estate in the up-and-coming community which goes by the name of West Philadelphia. Settling in the respectable Fairmount Park district of the city, the Breens were prominent enough to welcome as dinner guests such local luminaries as Kid Gleason, the second baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies (and later heartbroken manager of the infamous Black Sox in the 1919 World Series) and the sports journalist and humorist Arthur Bugs Baer.

By Irish immigrant standards, Hugh and Mary Breen raised a medium-sized family. Joe was the youngest of three sons—his eldest brother, Francis A. Breen, entered the priesthood and for forty years devoted himself to the Society of Jesus, including service as treasurer both at St. Joseph’s College and on the Jesuit weekly, America. James J. Breen entered another text-intensive profession and became a prominent Philadelphia attorney and local politician. Two sisters—Marie, who never married, and Catherine, who wed a prosperous Philadelphia businessman named Thomas Quirk—completed the Breen family. With equitable symbolism, the career paths of the Breen boys traced the three main-traveled roads for upwardly mobile Irish-Americans in the twentieth century: religion and education (Francis), law and politics (James), and media and culture (Joseph).

The progress of the Breens up the ladder of success was smoothed by earlier arrivals forced to claw their way on to the first rung. Though the Irish had been flocking to America since the famines of the 1840s, led by their stomachs to build the railroads, run the saloons, and swell the enlisted ranks of the U.S. Cavalry, the settled population resisted the influx of emaciated refugees. Pamphlets denounced the Irish as vile bog trotters and editorial cartoons portrayed bewhiskered hooligans tumbling into paddy wagons after drunken donnybrooks. In the 1850s, the Native American Party, the so-called Know-Nothings, thrived on an anti-immigrant platform synthesized in a popular acronym for both the preferred employee and citizenship pool: NINA—No Irish Need Apply. The Irish, the Know-Nothings knew, were not bred for the moderation and self control of American republicanism.

More than the land of origin, however, the resilient Catholicism of the Irish was the true stain of un-American-ness. Popery is opposed in its very nature to Democratic Republicanism, wrote Samuel F. B. Morse, sending out a common message. Adherents of a creed cloaked in black robes and reeking of papist intrigue, Catholics pledged a treacherous allegiance to the foreign flag of the Vatican. Convents, seminaries, the parochial school system, and Catholic fraternal societies were under constant attack as incubators of Jesuitical subversion and nests of perverse sexuality.

Repudiating its Quaker roots, the City of Brotherly Love spawned one of the most spectacular outbreaks of anti-Catholic violence. In 1844, nativist mobs (inflamed by the spectacle of many flourishing Catholic congregations in the city and its environs) ran riot in the streets, burning to the ground two Catholic churches and a convent. The Irish Catholics were the foreigners against whom the opposition was directed, wrote Father Joseph L. J. Kirlin, the official historian of the archdiocese, in Catholicity in Philadelphia in 1909, himself still inflamed by the abuse hurled at his people (Irish papists, the miscreant Irish, the degraded slaves of the Pope). Breen grew up hearing tales of anti-Catholic mobs torching convents and seeing Thomas Nast cartoons depicting Catholic prelates as ravenous crocodiles invading the shorelines of Anglo-Protestant America.

The Civil War tempered some of the nativist bile. Mustered out of the Grand Army of the Republic, returning East or going West, Irish veterans claimed payment on the investment made in blood. Across New England and the Midwest, they waved the bloody shirt at election time and seized power from the older Northern European stocks. Exploiting a fluency in English and a familiarity with Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence often gained from the wrong end of the law, the Irish prospered in politics, business, and journalism.

The ascent of the Irish met periodic waves of backlash from inheritors of the Know-Nothing tradition, who might overlook the home country but never the faith. The 1890s witnessed a spike in nativist sentiment against Irish Catholics, in no small part because avid hustlers like the Breens were making it in America, scrambling up the economic ladder and nudging aside—leaping over—the underachieving sons of the genteel Protestant establishment. One Irish name equaled a Catholic and that equaled mud, recalled a man who was both in 1890s America. From everyday social slights to official sanctions, Irish Catholics had reason to feel themselves a subaltern people in a rigged caste system.

Ambitious Irish-Catholic families like the Breens channeled their energies into religion, education, and politics, which were often the same thing. Insular by necessity, and perhaps instinct, they closed ranks in parochial schools and Jesuit universities, at the Knights of Columbus and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, in Ladies Sodalities and Catholic Women’s Clubs—the institutions and associations that served as boot camps and officer’s candidate schools for Breen’s generation of Irish Catholics, a cohort who shaped more than their share of American culture in the next century.

As a full-blooded member of the tribe, young Joe grew up according to a strict ethno-religious catechism—literally so, the Baltimore Catechism, the basic training manual for American Catholics, having just been published in 1891. In Philadelphia, he attended Gesu Parish School through the eighth grade and then made the natural transition to the Roman Catholic High School for Boys, the archdiocesan free school. Popular, athletic, and a quick study, Breen was early pegged as a most-likely-to-succeed at Catholic High. He played basketball for Billy Markward, the beloved dean of Philadelphia basketball coaches, and was elected class president his senior year. The Fairmount parish produced a bumper crop of great basketball players, stars in their days, as Breen later reminisced to a friend from the neighborhood, winking that my well known modesty forbids me mentioning any names in this connection. By his own account, however, his most influential coaches were off the court. Whatever formal training I have had, I got entirely from Catholic schools, he recalled, aided, I am happy to say, by a fine old Irish Mother and an Irish Grandmother.

Whether at school, at home, or from the pulpit, the training sessions inculcated the same lessons: the primacy of the faith, the deference to priestly authority, and the absolute need for self-control in thought, word, and deed. The teachings of the one, holy, and apostolic Church being universal, the orthodoxies were drilled into Catholic schoolchildren everywhere, but the indigenous variation was uniquely unyielding. The Irish developed a militant and vigorous catechistic religious style that matched anything stiff-necked Protestantism could produce, wrote Dennis Clark, the historian of the Irish in Philadelphia, speaking specifically of Breen’s generation and archdiocese. Peculiarly Victorian in its characteristics, American Irish-Catholicism cultivated a personal code of conduct that was both strenuous and stoic, in a tight middle class image, with stifling standards of propriety. Breen was a pure product of the domestic vintage.

Upon graduation from Catholic High in 1906, Breen followed the path of his brothers into the all-male classrooms of St. Joseph’s College, Philadelphia’s flagship Jesuit university and the house college for the Breen boys, all of whom maintained lifelong links with their alma mater. Founded in 1851, St. Joseph’s was an ardent proponent of a rigorous Jesuit curriculum and a fierce propagator of the faith. According to its official historian, a militant Catholicism, often typical of the Jesuits, was evident during the college’s earlier decades, when Catholics found themselves a somewhat spurned minority in an overwhelmingly Protestant nation.

The militancy came with a chip on its shoulder. Though the worst of the anti-Catholic fevers from the 1890s had abated, nothing is a distant memory for the Irish, a people known not just to harbor but to treasure a grievance. Breen never lost his bitterness for the stupid and ill-informed people who considered Catholicism an alien infestation plotting to subvert American democracy and establish a sort of tenth-century unholy alliance between Church and State, with the Church, in the person of the Pope, riding in the saddle and holding controlling reins. As much as anyone in his generation, he worked to erase the slander and bridge the divide between the Church of Rome and the United States of America, to make piety and patriotism one doctrine, indivisible.

In 1908, more restless than his brothers, Breen left St. Joseph’s without graduating, a detail glossed over in later biographical entries. For the next six years, he worked as a beat reporter and feature writer for the Philadelphia Record, the North American, and other local newspapers. It was a storied age for big city journalism, a fast-talking, corner-cutting period immortalized by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur in their hit 1928 play The Front Page, where gruff editors yelled Stop the presses! between gulps of whiskey, and unscrupulous newshounds snatched pictures from the homes of grieving relatives to scoop the competition. According to tales told by old Philadelphia newspapermen, Breen was a local Charley MacArthur, Ben Hecht, and Gene Fowler all rolled into one, recalled the journalist John J. McCarthy, himself a veteran of the glory days. The most oft-told tale of Breen’s reportorial exploits—doubtless embroidered by former colleagues jealous that he had left the ranks of ink-stained wretches for the sweet life in Hollywood—concerned a breaking news story that was news to him. Bored by the drab city beat at the Philadelphia Record, Breen bunked off to see a musical comedy on tickets cuffed from the paper’s drama critic. While he enjoyed the show, an oil refinery caught fire downtown, engulfing a block of businesses and illuminating the entire north end of the city. The conflagration was clearly visible from the editorial offices of the Philadelphia Record. The city editor and the rewrite men were in a frenzy, chortled a veteran Philly journalist. Some two hours later when the fire was out, and the show was over, Breen called the office and reported, ‘Breen, downtown, talking. As usual—nothing doing.’

If true, it was one of the few times Breen was caught flat-footed. Certainly the practical Mary Dervin, a lace curtain girl from the neighborhood (the eldest daughter of the Fairmount Avenue Dervins), would not have encouraged a suitor who was not dependable and diligent. Sweethearts from childhood, the couple married in February 1914. A daughter, Helene, followed the next Christmas Eve, the first of six children—three boys, three girls.

From the rough and tumble of big city journalism, Breen moved into the more secure ranks of government service, joining the U.S. Consular Service in 1914. An index card in the State Department archives describes the applicant as a writer of ‘special’ articles. Engaged in general newspaper work 6 yrs and notes a facility in French and Spanish (Breen could also claim a working knowledge of an older diplomatic tongue, Latin). Postings at U.S. consulates in Panama, the ports at Brest and Le Havre, France, and Queens-town, Ireland, followed.

On April 16, 1917, just as America was entering the Great War, Breen was appointed vice consul in Kingston, Jamaica, a tour of duty he would recall ever after as a bucolic interlude in a frazzling work life. There is no spot in all the world half so beautiful as the British Isle of Jamaica, he remembered, waxing poetic over this gem of the Caribbean where life is easy and love is a thing of long summer twilights. Transported by his own reverie, he sighed: For those of us who care little for the flight of time and less for the machinations of trade and the mart, there are to be found in Jamaica vast stores of the stuff out of which dreams are made and fashioned.

That last bit was sheer blarney: Breen was not the stuff of which dreamy beachcombers are made. Driven and determined, what today would be diagnosed as a type A personality and manic workaholic, he craved action, thrived on competition, and kept a keen eye out for the main chance. He was a hard-nosed Irishman who kept his nose to the grindstone, often multiple grindstones.

A growing family to support on a meager government salary compelled another career shift. With the 1920s about to roar, a vista of possibility beckoned for a man of the world with a gift for fraternal camaraderie, a talent for prose on demand, and the capacity for dawn-to-dusk toil. When his next posting in Toronto, Canada, proved less congenial than balmy Jamaica, he abruptly resigned from government service.

In 1918, settling in New York, Breen was back behind a typewriter. By the fall of 1919, he was employed as a ‘feature writer,’ so called, for the big daily newspapers in New York. Keeping up the Catholic connection, he also served as secretary to Father Edward Tivnan, president of Fordham University, like St. Joseph’s a Jesuit institution. He described himself in those days as an overworked newspaperman with a houseful of babies to feed, clothe, and keep warm.

In 1920, Breen joined the International News Service and was dispatched overseas to cover the roiling political turmoil of postwar Europe.³ The sojourn as a foreign correspondent would later give rise to colorful tales—that Bolsheviks in Hungary had sentenced him to death, that the British had kicked him out of Ireland—which have eluded verification in the historical record. One epochal historical event he did witness was the shedding of first blood in the long struggle between Soviet communism and Western democracy. I was there, on the ground, in the midst of it all, when the Poles saved all of Europe from the menace of Bolshevism, he wrote proudly years later, of his beat in Warsaw covering the Russo-Polish War in 1920. It was the Poles who stood at the outposts of European civilization and fought back the hordes of wild men out of Russia. While a foreign correspondent, he forged friendships with luminaries of the European church, including a papal attaché in Warsaw named Achille Ratti, the future Pope Pius XI. When I knew the Holy Father, he was simply Monsignor Ratti, he could not resist bragging to a Jesuit friend upon hearing of the promotion.

The frustrations of working unbylined for a corporate news provider drained his creative juices and wounded his ego. By the time your story is rewritten, cut, or padded, or thrown out in toto, you wouldn’t recognize it anyway, he complained, echoing the grievances of Hollywood screenwriters to whom he would do likewise. Still, like most newspapermen, he took a wry pride in his status as a lowly scrivener toiling in the most forlorn business on earth. Ever after, he would relish a good scoop, seek out the company of newspapermen, and affect the swagger of the hard-bitten beat reporter. There has always been a sort of glamour about newspapermen—the adventurous—the courageous—‘the devil may care, but I get the dope style’ style—and believe me he is it! gushed an admirer in 1934, more than a decade after Breen had filed his last breaking news story.

In May 1921, trading on his proficiency in domestic Catholicism and foreign affairs, Breen secured a position as European Representative at the Bureau of Immigration at the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), a private relief agency and protean political action committee. Mr. Breen has had extensive Consular work in Europe, has a good personality and judgment, and seems to appreciate the needs for Catholic welfare work, wrote the bureau’s director, after Breen nailed the interview. Though dedicated to all things Catholic, the NCWC focused on immigration and overseas charity work. Breen’s job was to survey the plight of European Catholics, suggest the best means of relief, and facilitate the emigration of worthy Catholics to America.

Sailing immediately for the free city of Danzig, Breen spent the next year observing the rural poverty and blighted cityscapes of a continent still shell-shocked by the Great War. He was deeply disturbed by the despair and poverty he witnessed. I am one of those who, one year ago, frantically denounced our government for its European loans, he confessed in 1922. Now I take it all back. The truth is, I am ashamed of myself.

Catholic envoy to Europe: Breen, joking around with Rev. Richard H. Tierney, S.J., editor of the Jesuit magazine America, near Innsbruck, Austria, in June 1922.

(SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES)

For over a year, Breen crisscrossed the capitals of Europe, drawing on his background in the consular service to help Catholic immigrants from Belfast to Budapest fill out immigration forms with the answers that would satisfy the gatekeepers at Ellis Island. According to Breen, European Catholics were threatened by more than hunger and indigence. U.S. Protestant organizations, he warned the home office, were disseminating strong anti-Catholic propaganda . . . under the guise of charitable work and otherwise.

The Bureau of Immigration had two agendas: first, to help destitute European Catholics keep body and soul together; and second, to transform fresh-off-the-boat Catholic immigrants into red-blooded Americans. We seek to promote all these things among our people as a pledge of our Catholicity and our Americanism, Breen told a delegation of Catholic women in 1922. We stand for the preservation of the faith among our Catholic foreign born who come here among us. We stand for loyalty and devotion to America, its government, its institutions, its ideals. The two allegiances affirmed a single faith—to America and to the Catholic Church. In his work, as in his life, Breen yoked together a love for America and a devotion to our Catholic ideals of staunch citizenship and sturdy faith.

In 1922, Breen returned stateside to work at the NCWC’s home office in Washington, D.C., where he directed the Publications Office and advocated the Church line in the National Catholic Welfare Council Bulletin, the official monthly magazine of the NCWC, which he edited from May 1923 to March 1924. Two themes dominate his unsigned editorials in the Bulletin: derision of the Ku Klux Klansman and any other anti-Catholic bigot who has the misfortune to be at the same time brainless, and condemnations of the emergent menace of Soviet communism. This philosophy is not socialism, but the rankest kind of perversion, he wrote in 1923. It is Godlessness run to chaos. Only his last editorial offers a hint of the destiny on the horizon. In all our work we have sought to help, in a practical fashion, the films that are worthy and to shun those which are offensive or ill conceived, he declared. Good films, and even great films, may be produced without recourse to the offensive, the vulgarly suggestive, or the inane.

Manning the desk at NCWC headquarters, Breen watched the clock and cooled his heels, hanging about here and doing little besides drawing my pay and collecting expenses. Always scrupulous in money matters, he was troubled when less punctilious staffers treated the collection plate as a slush fund. This outfit, organized and functioning as it now is, is not only doomed to failure, but is guilty of a grave injustice, he confided to a Jesuit friend, disgusted that funds earmarked for charity had been squandered on comforts for the clergy. No more impressed with the civic polity of Washington than with Philadelphia, he described the capital as the world’s greatest rendezvous for get-rich-quick schemers, quack reformers, bunko-men, press agents, pious profiteers, claims-against-the-government beggars, and common thieves.

In April 1924, disillusioned with the backroom wheeling and dealing of Potomac politics, Breen resigned to take a job custom-made for his singular skills: overseeing the sales campaign of a book project entitled Catholic Builders of the Nation: A Symposium on the Catholic Contribution to the Civilization of the United States. Published by the Boston-based imprint Continental Press, Inc., and edited by C. E. McGuire, the massive five-volume compendium was a celebration of Breen’s twin faiths. In these remarkable volumes there is told for the first time the wonderful story of the part played by American Catholics, in various walks of life, in the upbuilding of this nation, read the ad copy. The story they tell is a striking one which will fill you with justifiable pride in the superb achievements of Catholic Americans in the face of bitter opposition, misunderstandings, doubts, and no little irreligious animosity.

As Breen stepped from public service to private business and back, he acquired a set of strong opinions he was not shy about sharing in conversation or published commentary. On the evidence of his chatty letters and erudite essays printed in top-line Catholic periodicals, a fusion of religious conservatism and progressive