Most of the social films managed a happy ending. So should this book. The last thought, however, is not one of mine. Film historian Russell Merritt came up with it as a reaction to this book, and I shall give him the last word.
“Let me try out an idea that may infuriate you. The move away from the social consciousness of the teens to the twenties merry-go-round of comedy, crime, glamour, and sex may not have been altogether a bad thing. The shift of public attention from the antics of Lusk and Palmer to those of Valentino and Swanson may have done more to abate the madness of the Bolshevik witch hunts and Ku Klux Klan revivals than any reasoned arguments for freedom of speech. One of the contributions of twenties movies is that, like baseball, jazz, and national magazines, they brought Americans back together again after years of severe—and, by 1919, hysterical—divisiveness. Your text concentrates on the negative aspect of this—the avoidance of issues that badly required reform and investigation—but it is possible to see another side. Better the trivial than the hysterical. Movies helped deflate the hot-air rhetoric of people like Tom Dixon and Billy Sunday; movies—particularly the great comedies—showed that disillusionment need not be melancholy and that denunciation may be less effective socially and politically than satire and parody.
“The industry was drifting away from social controversy at least two years before the Hays Office was invented, and it is symptomatic that the last great social crusade was Bolshevism; mainstream directors and studios needed no encouragement to look for noncontroversial characters and stories. The challenge became to find topics that would bring audiences together.”
Twenty-five years ago I wrote a book in praise of the entertainment film of the 1920s. It was the first volume in this trilogy—The Parade’s Gone By.… I am delighted to find we have come full circle.