Today Mary goes with sister Marguerite and "Miss Buck" (from whom she recently received a wedding invitation) to see D.W. Griffith's Hearts of the World at the Garrick Theatre.
Hearts of the World was a controversial movie and prior to Mary's attendance there were several advertisements in the local newspapers that the theaters would not be showing the movie as planned because of a pending legal battle with the censors.
In The Pennsylvania State Board of Censors: The Great War, the Movies, and D.W. Griffith [Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Vol. 75, No. 2, 2008, available as a PDF through the JSTOR.org web site], Harris Ross writes that in 1911 Pennsylvania was the first state to pass a law establishing motion picture censorship. The following is from Ross' article:
A very detailed history of the movie industry's relationship with the U.S. government and World War I propaganda can be found at the World Socialist web site.
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