Charles E. Sebastian, recent Mayor of Los Angeles.
From Photoplay, July 1917.
HOW THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF SCREENLAND’S CAPITAL BECAME A FILM ACTOR
A YEAR ago Charles E. Sebastian was the chief executive of Los Angeles, one of the ten biggest cities in the United States and the largest in area and population in the West.
Now in the same city he may be seen daily with make-up on his face and his hair reddened to give it the proper shade on the screen.
Whether he will remain in the movies will depend largely on the reception accorded his first actorial effort, which is described as a picturized history of his public career as policeman, chief of police and mayor.
The film is entitled “The Downfall of a Mayor” and it is qualified with such subcaptions as “Exposing Chemically Pure Los Angeles” and “The Invisible Government.” Sebastian was really ousted as mayor a few months ago, although his resignation was ascribed to ill health.
According to the advance notices, Hero Sebastian has plenty of opportunities to hero in the seven or eight reels comprising the film. He saves beautiful maidens from Chinese dens and white slave rings and other well-known birds of prey, who finally get together and put the intrepid cop out of business after he has matriculated to the mayor’s chair.
“IT IS STRANGE with what matter-of-factness the pictures take it for granted that our politicians are corrupt,” said the New York Dramatic Mirror in 1914.1
The ordinary neighborhood politician was the only hope for the poor. In exchange for their vote, he provided services which often amounted to favors—finding a job, releasing a relative from jail, chasing a landlord to carry out repairs.2 No one was too poor to be helped. “But as the politicians grew rich and powerful,” wrote Lincoln Steffens, “the kindness went from their charity. They sacrificed the children in the schools, let the Health Department neglect the tenements and planted vice in the neighborhood and homes of the poor.”3
THE LIFE OF BIG TIM SULLIVAN New York City’s election districts were divided into wards whose bosses had privileged access to Tammany Hall, the Democratic party’s headquarters.4 From 1892 to 1912, Tammany was identified with Big Tim Sullivan, even though Boss Croker or Charley Murphy held the top job. Sullivan had run an East Side saloon that was the hangout of the Whyo gang, the most vicious of the Irish street gangs. The ward went over to Tammany with a little help from the Whyos, and Sullivan became as powerful as any European monarch. While state senator and later United States congressman, he controlled gambling and prize fighting in Manhattan and raked in millions from saloons, brothels, hotels, and theatres5 on the East Side and eventually, the Tenderloin (the area around Times Square).
His mysterious death in 1913 was commemorated by a four-reeler, The Life of Big Tim Sullivan (1914). The film was divided into four parts, beginning with the arrival of Irish immigrants in New York, where Sullivan was born in 1863. He becomes a newsboy, ready with his fists, but ready, too, with help and sympathy for those who need them. “Pugnacity and heart feeling are the two things brought out in strong relief all through the picture.”6
The second part covers Big Tim’s youth and first political success, when the Whyo gang stampeded the nominating convention and made him assemblyman by every vote in the district bar four. (Sullivan remarked that the other side got one more vote than he expected, “But I’ll find the fellow.”)7
“The picture of an old-time voting booth will amuse,” wrote Moving Picture World. “It has the honesty of being absolutely outrageous. A vote bought is a vote gained; but ‘If it’s true’—so they said in those days—‘what of it’?”8 The role of Sullivan at this period of his life was taken by his distant relative, Joe Sullivan. Reviewers noted the actor’s physical similarity to the great politician.
“The third period shows Tim at the time of his greatest power, which is truthfully shown and will startle, even though it is well known … Tim had almost as much power to open prison doors, when a friend was in trouble, as Nero. The film closes with an accurate and impressive picture of a requiem mass for the repose of Tim’s soul. Last of all, it shows the Christmas dinner that he always gave to the Bowery derelicts, followed by the shoe party at which each poor hobo got a pair of shoes and a pair of socks.”
These scenes were apparently strikingly authentic; derelicts were “enticed into the studio by the promise of a good meal and a few cents. ‘We are told that the studio smelt strong at that time. We get a good view of the faces nearby, and then are shown an actual picture of the crowds coming from the Big Tim Sullivan Association’s headquarters, 259 Bowery, with the shoe boxes under arm.’ ”
The origin of the shoe ceremony went back to Sullivan’s childhood, when a teacher sent him to the brother of a Tammany leader for a new pair of shoes. “I needed them shoes then,” recalled Sullivan, “and I thought, if I ever got any money, I would give shoes to people who needed them and I’m going to buy shoes for people as long as I live.”9
The idea for the film came from Sullivan’s long-serving secretary Harry Apelbaum. It was probably directed by the ever-resourceful Leon J. Rubinstein, who made several of these documentary-style dramas for his Gotham Film Company, and produced by Benjamin R. Tolmas.10
Biography was new to the cinema, and Moving Picture World thought that notice should be taken of that very fact: “Sincerity is written all over the picture; it was plainly made for love of the man and there isn’t a touch of commercialism in it … Affection seems to be the sole cause and mainspring of it. There is no politics in it; no taint of scenario writer’s conceit or producer’s conceit. It is human.”11
“Marcus Loew grabbed this one quick and put it right into his best House, the Broadway Theatre, New York,” proclaimed Rubinstein’s ads, with surprise. “Does Marcus Loew know pictures? Would he run anything in that jim-dandy theatre of his if it were not the best he could get? Why—that theatre uses only the pick of Famous Players’ productions, yet right there squarely between Frohman and Belasco genius, Loew puts on our corking four-reeler. Have you seen how he advertises it all over Broadway? He’s spending a mint on it.”12
After its first showing at the Broadway, the picture went down to the Bowery, to the Delancey Street Theater and the Avenue B Theater. Many of the exteriors had been shot in the surrounding area, and hundreds of local people, including many who knew Sullivan and had worked with him, had appeared in the film.13
Tammany was the most colorful example, but city halls across the nation were run by men intent on improving their financial standing at public expense. The early movies spread the word. In 1913 the London Daily Mail commented: “There is no need for us to follow the language on the American screen and describe bribery as ‘graft.”14
Reliance made a film called The Grafters in 1913, directed by Frederick Sullivan, about a contractor, John Hascom (Henry Koser), whose business is in a bad way. His bookkeeper, Alva (Edna Cunningham), sees an advertisement for a large contract for street work. Only political friends of the administration will be considered, Hascom tells her, but Alva persuades him to file a bid anyway. The office boy who delivers the bid is told that the deadline has already passed and the contract has been awarded, but Alva knows otherwise. She braves the supervisors and demands a reading of her bid. They try to ignore her, but one old man, noted for his adherence to clean politics, supports her, and she is allowed to read her bid. The great discrepancy in the price starts a crusade for cleaner government, enabling men like Hascom to share in the city’s work and Alva to share his life.15
Edna Cunningham and Henry Koser in the 1913 Reliance production of The Grafters. From Moving Picture World, April 5, 1913.
Sullivan followed it with a remarkably similar film for Reliance, The Big Boss (1913), with a slight change of the contractor’s name. Bascom (Augustus Balfour) is in financial straits, and he applies to the political boss, Morgan (George Siegmann), for help. Morgan offers to throw the aqueduct contract his way if Bascom will persuade his young daughter, Nell (Muriel Ostriche), to marry Morgan. Nell’s fiancé, Dick (Irving Cummings), is a reporter investigating the graft scandals alarming the city. Dick uses a dictagraph to eavesdrop on the bosses, but the machine is discovered and Dick is nearly beaten to death. Bascom rescues him; Dick writes his article, then the boss has a change of heart and gives the contract to Bascom. Nell thanks him, and for her sake Dick flings his story on the fire.16
The “happy” ending is unintentionally realistic: the graft story killed by further graft, the boss untouched by the law, the system continuing unchecked.
Graft (1915) was the title of a Universal serial which had the distinction of being inspired by eighteen17 of the most famous American authors, Universal having purchased Crack O’ Doom, an anthology by such writers as Irvin Cobb, Nina Wilcox Putnam, James Oppenheim, Zane Grey, Rupert Hughes, and Louis Joseph Vance. The stories were turned into scenarios by Hugh Weir, Joe Brandt (Universal’s general manager, whose idea it was), and Walter Woods and directed by Richard Stanton and George A. Lessey in twenty episodes. The titles make one wish the serial had survived: The Tenement House Evil … The Traction Grab … The Railroad Monopoly … The Illegal Bucket Shops … The Milk Battle … The Patent Medicine Danger … The Photo Badger Game. In the cast were Hobart Henley, the future director, Jane Novak, Harry Carey, and Richard Stanton himself. The idea was to tell a lively, exciting story and to accomplish something for the public welfare, too.18 The stories were uncompromising: the first episode, Liquor and the Law, had a district attorney murdered by order of a graft syndicate known as “The Fifteen” and his son taking up the fight against them.19
The natural enemy of the grafter was the reform politician. In a two-reel Kalem film of 1914, The County Seat War, directed by J. P. McGowan, a reform district attorney is elected. The boss summons his gangsters, and together they attack the courthouse, seize the records, and burn the place down. A soldier is killed, and the militia sets out in pursuit. The men are cornered in a barn, and a full-scale gunfight takes place. The gangsters, outgunned, surrender. Some children, meanwhile, playing in the ruins of the courthouse, find a book. Scribbled on its pages are the soldier’s last words, accusing the boss of his murder. The film ends with the boss about to face his execution.20
Nowhere did the critics suggest that this was a wild exaggeration and an affront to political bosses; they merely praised its maelstrom of action. But this was undoubtedly the era’s harshest cinematic portrayal of the political boss.
A more human study of the phenomenon was Canavan, the Man Who Had His Way, written in 1918 by Rupert Hughes and made into a film in 1921 by E. Mason Hopper as Hold Your Horses. Irish-born Tom Moore played Canavan.
“Imagine a photoplay in which the hero begins as a street cleaner!” said Motion Picture Classic.21 Canavan is humiliated to find that the only job he seems suited for is as a whitewing in New York. His life is made all the more miserable by his battle-ax of a wife (Sylvia Ashton). One day, Canavan is knocked down by the high-stepping team of the aristocratic Miss Newness (Naomi Childers). He recovers from the accident with only the imprint of a horseshoe on his chest as a sign of good luck. He lands a job with an excavating gang, detailed to halt Fifth Avenue traffic with his red flag whenever blasting begins. The feeling of authority is a powerful tonic to his self-respect. After bullying coachmen and chauffeurs, he thrashes his employer. The ward boss sees this and hires him as a lieutenant. “Now that I’ve got a good start,” Canavan says to himself, “I think I’ll go home and lick the ‘ould woman.’ ”
He becomes boss of the city and uses his new power to free Beatrice Newness’s husband from the penitentiary out of gratitude for the horseshoe incident. And when both are free, he takes as his wife the woman whose horses once trampled him.22
Tom Moore as Canavan, the immigrant from Ireland, who rises to the top in machine politics in Hold Your Horses, 1921. (John E. Allen)
The picture reached the screen just in time, for the following year Hays took office, and such social criticism, even in a comedy, would have been firmly discouraged. As it was, Photoplay was startled by its boldness, for once he tastes authority, Canavan departs from the usual type of movie hero: “As a boss he is frankly something of a grafter, selling his favors where they will do most good and accepting whatever comes his way … Returning from a yachting trip abroad to find his political power waning, he re-establishes himself by walking into his club and knocking the first enemy he meets flat on his back … Canavan is not one of those snow-white reformers who combat wrong everywhere, but a dishonest and crooked leader who has the district attorney under his thumb, and who smiles upon dangerous tenements when a friend owns them. Indeed, Hold Your Horses violates all the moral canons of the photoplay—and gets away with it.”23
Lincoln Steffens, in his book The Shame of the Cities, saw behind the big businessman: “I found him buying boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago and beating good government in New York. He is a self-righteous fraud, this big business man. He is the chief source of corruption, and it were a boon if he would neglect politics.”24
Heir to the robber barons of the nineteenth century, the railroad magnates, and the coal-mine kings, the big businessman was pilloried in many early films. The Edison Company’s The Reform Candidate (1911) portrayed an electric-railway financier called Curtis Greer (Robert Brower) who makes a habit of using minor political machinery for business purposes because he knows every politician has his price. He attempts to fix Mayor McNamara (Charles Ogle), a saloonkeeper who runs the town. A reform candidate, Bryce (Harold Shaw), sets out to stop the valuable electric-railway franchise being given to men who don’t give a damn for the welfare of the public. A girl reporter (Miriam Nesbitt) haunts McNamara’s saloon posing as a prostitute in order to find proof of his collusion with Greer.25 The film showed how the businessman had replaced the gangster as the source of finance for the political machine.
Films on crooked politicians and callous corporations flowed from the studios. But none dared attack a real company, or expose a real politician, as the muckraking magazines were able to do. In 1913, however, a remarkable event took place. A politician, hounded by Tammany Hall, turned to the moving picture as a court of last appeal.
They called him “Plain Bill” Sulzer, this remarkable politician who seemed destined for the presidency of the United States. He was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1863, of a German father and a mother of Scots-Irish origin. His early life was spent on a farm, but while he was still a boy, his family moved to New York’s Lower East Side. Intending to become a Presbyterian minister, Sulzer attended night classes at Cooper Union, where his talents as a speaker were recognized. A Tammany leader, John Reilly, advised him to study law. He was admitted to the bar at twenty-one, but his fascination with politics caused him to become known on the East Side as “Reilly’s boy spellbinder.”26
Sulzer was only twenty-seven when he was elected by a large majority to the State Assembly. A wholehearted Tammany man, loyal to the then leader, Richard “Boss” Croker, he cultivated a theatrical style despite the scorn of the newspapers, who regarded him as “very much of an ass.”27 And he wrapped himself in the guise of a reformer, a statesman of the people. He won votes by espousing the Jewish cause, denouncing Russia for its outrages (the Sulzer campaign slogan was “Non-Jewish but pro-Jewish”); he also supported the Boers of South Africa against the British, which helped with the Irish vote. He took a firm stand for labor, introducing a bill in Congress to establish an eight-hour working day. But however many good causes he endorsed, he remained a Tammany man—which made it all the more surprising that when he was nominated for governor (by Tammany boss Charles F. Murphy), he announced, “William Sulzer never had a boss, and his only master is himself.”28
Former governor of the state of New York, William Sulzer, playing himself in The Governor’s Boss, 1915. (Museum of Modern Art)
A split in the Republican ranks gave Sulzer the governorship of New York. His inauguration was in contrast to the usual ceremony: “The People’s Governor” wore an ordinary business suit and fedora rather than the customary high hat and frock coat and he walked to the Capitol instead of traveling by carriage. The crowd loved it and cheered him when he declared, “The hour has struck and the task of administrative reform is mine … No influence controls me but the dictates of my conscience.”29
By asserting his independence from Tammany Hall, Sulzer laid dynamite beneath his own feet. By repeating it on every possible occasion, he lit the fuse. When he began dismissing people for incompetence or graft, relations with Murphy became volatile.
Sulzer had some strong supporters—penologist Thomas Mott Osborne, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Henry Morgenthau, head of the Finance Committee of the Democratic National Committee, and even former President Theodore Roosevelt. But he had some equally powerful opponents. He had angered the railroads by making secret pledges to the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, which were revealed in the press. To the end of his life, he was convinced that the railroads had spent vast sums to destroy his political career.
He further helped his own downfall by fighting to secure the enactment of a statewide primary law, which drew his battle with the Democratic organization into the open. The defeat of the bill made Sulzer more paranoid than ever and led to what Jacob Friedman called “the desperate war of extermination” between the governor and the Tammany leaders, which ended in his impeachment trial in 1913.
Accused of a startling range of offenses, from misappropriating funds to corrupt stock transactions, Sulzer refused to utter a single word during the legislative inquiry and would not even take the stand during the impeachment trial. This was construed as a confession of guilt, even though Sulzer issued all-embracing denials to the press. His behavior dismayed even his most ardent supporters, but, although he was found guilty, many ordinary voters thought his conviction was the result of his stand against Tammany corruption.
“It was a political lynching,” said Sulzer. “A horse thief, in frontier days, would have received a squarer deal.”30
With all these troubles on his shoulders, with all the problems he had to face, Sulzer apparently found time to play the lead in a motion picture which was released in November: The Shame of the Empire State. In the absence of the film it is hard to judge the veracity of its claims. Did Leon Rubinstein do his usual trick and catch a few shots of Sulzer at open-air meetings and splice them into a melodrama? Or did Sulzer, desperate to cling to popular support, see a moving picture role as manna from heaven? As far as the working people were concerned, he need not have worried. Even after his impeachment, his popularity was remarkable, his return to New York City a triumph. The New York election cost Tammany four years’ control of the government (John Purroy Mitchel swept into the mayoralty, carrying every borough), and Murphy had cause to regret his support for Sulzer’s impeachment.
Rubinstein scooped the industry with the announcement: “The Whole Country Wondered—Meanwhile, WE DID IT! The Shame of the Empire State, with Governor William Sulzer Himself, GENUINE, PERSONALLY!
“The biggest moving picture interests in the world offered fabulous sums for the services of this man who for another year will be the central figure in the Nation’s politics; his fate is the most absorbing topic in the country’s affairs; his series of one hundred lectures will keep his name on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and his exposures of political corruption, even as electrifying as they are now, are only a small part of the story he is yet to tell.”31
Even if so sensational a figure as an impeached governor of the first state in the country were not appearing in it, the story would still be a powerful feature, continued the Ruby Feature Film Company ad.
“BUT HE IS! Not a fake, not an impersonation, but the real living Mr. Sulzer himself. We know it sounds too big to be true, but we always have dealt in big ones. The film is four reels, with a number of fights and riots and scraps and enough wallop to make you sit up.”32
The very same month, the Fair Feature Sales Company offered Making a Mayor, in which Sulzer appeared (together with former district attorney Charles Whitman) in a documentary about the city’s elections.33
In November, Sulzer was returned in triumph to the New York Assembly as an Independent. But thereafter he attracted little attention in this subsidiary role, beyond his familiar rantings against Tammany. By now he had lost most of his prominent supporters, including Theodore Roosevelt. In 1914 he stood again for governor, on a Prohibition ticket, and was defeated.34
In 1915, he appeared in another film, and this time there was no doubt that he played the lead. The Governor’s Boss, originally a novel written by Sulzer’s friend James S. Barcus, a former U.S. senator from Indiana, spluttered briefly as a play on Broadway earlier that year. Charles E. Davenport, who also adapted the scenario, made a film of it for a company calling itself The Governor’s Boss Photoplay Company. This was backed by some of the most prominent citizens of Freeport, Long Island. The picture was largely shot in Freeport, with well-known local residents taking minor parts. The story was built around Sulzer’s experiences at Albany, his fight against Boss Murphy, and his impeachment. “The former executive declares that he does not seek gold or fame as a movie actor, but merely wishes to show the public how his fall was brought about by crooked politicians and to win vindication in public opinion.”35
Variety thought it melodramatic in the extreme, which is probably how Sulzer regarded the events in real life. “All of the modern expose devices are brought into play. There is the Dictophone, the dictagraph, the motion picture machine, etc.”36 As for Sulzer’s performance, Variety commented that if given the chance he might have made a better governor of the Empire State than he ever would a motion picture actor. The picture was cheaply produced; some scenes were out of focus. Rape, blackmail, forgery, the stuffing of ballot boxes, and the bribing of state politicians all played a part in the saga.37 It appears to have given free rein to Sulzer’s paranoia, despite the fact that it had a happy ending, with the defeat of Tammany Hall.
Although the film did not follow the story of the actual impeachment, said Moving Picture World, there was enough election material to lend it lasting value as a recorder of events: “It is the punches which Director Davenport has injected into the scenario, which give the audience an insight into affairs with which it never comes in contact … and has no means of knowing anything about. It depicts just how candidates are ‘nominated’ and made to obey the will of the ‘power behind the throne’ and how the ‘invisible government’ puts across the ‘work.’ ”38
Sulzer’s political career ended not with a bang but a whimper. He was asked to run in the 1916 presidential election by the American party, formed by his supporters and independent Democrats. (The party was dedicated to “God, the people, and the overthrow of the political bosses.”)39 He declined the honor and returned to what must, for him, have been a very unwelcome obscurity. (His career was the inspiration for the Preston Sturges film The Great McGinty [1940].)40
“In the disgrace of William Sulzer,” wrote Jacob Friedman, “future statesmen will find at least one useful lesson—that no man can afford to pit himself against a powerful political organization unless his own record is above reproach.”41