A Boy and the Law (1913)
When I wrote about Monroe, WI native William Wesley Young’s work for British Intelligence in the run-up to US entry into WW1, key evidence came from Young’s promotional advertising for his 1919 film company, “Films Incorporated”, which he founded with long-time newspaper buddy Davis Edward Marshall.
Section of “Films Incorporated” advertising in Hartford Courant, November 23rd, 1919. (Hartford, Connecticut)
Beyond Young’s remarkable claim of having edited so much British war film, it struck me that he listed himself as producer for “A Boy and the Law”. I had never heard of this film before, so I looked into it a little further.
“A Boy on the Law” was a film made around the personality of “Judge” Willis Brown. Starting around 1900 (and lasting for eight years) Brown had been a Chautauqua circuit speaker on juvenile delinquency and progressive-minded remedies for this problem. In 1905 he was appointed to the Juvenile Court in Salt Lake City, but was removed by the Utah Supreme Court in 1907 for what appears to be unethical conduct. In 1910 the Utah Juvenile Court exposed that Brown had misrepresented his credentials and was not even a lawyer. The effect of this removal, and then exposure, was fatal to Brown’s credibility as an expert on juvenile reform among professionals in that field:
Excerpt from “Work With Boys: General Alliance of Workers with Boys, Boys’ Clubs of America.” Volume 7, Number 1, January 1907. Edited by William Byron Forbush.
Not everyone interested in juvenile delinquency was responsible, however. In 1910, the same year of his exposure, William H. Selig, the Chicago-based film tycoon, signed Judge Willis Brown on to star in a feature about Brown’s refuge for wayward youth in Charlevoix, MI: “The City of Boys”. Two excerpts from promotional articles for this film follow, the first describing Selig’s interest, the second explaining Brown’s “Boy City” concept:
Title from The Film Index, November 5th 1910.
Portrait of Judge Willis Brown, as illustration to “Boy City” in The Film Index, November 5th 1910.
Excerpt from “Boy City” article in The Film Index, November 5th 1910. The animal action was probably added to please Selig, who kept his own zoo/ performing animal menagerie.
Motion Picture Story, February 1911. Press article title promoting Selig’s film. Excerpts from this article follow.
Images accompanying “The City of Boys” in Motion Picture Story, February 1911
By the time Selig sought out the disgraced reformer in 1910, Judge Brown had established some sort of connection with the Juvenile Court in Chicago. This period was one of increased public scrutiny of the juvenile justice system. In 1909 New York state had instituted laws preventing children being tried as adults. The NY Rockefeller family in particular were very interested in examining the connection between White Slavery, juvenile delinquency and other types of crime, to which end they financed the Bureau of Social Hygiene. According to the Rockefeller Foundation:
Bureau of Social Hygiene
From 1911 to 1934, the Bureau of Social Hygiene (BSH) funded research and sought to influence public policy on a number of issues related to sex, crime and delinquency. Although the BSH received contributions from a number of organizations, including the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), the Bureau was largely dependent upon the patronage of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (JDR Jr.), who created the organization to address many of his own personal concerns and interests.
Research and Reform
The idea for the BSH originated in 1910, following JDR Jr.’s participation in a grand jury investigation of white slavery in New York City. Motivated by frustration with temporary public commissions that could only recommend governmental action, JDR Jr. established a permanent and private body to deal directly with a variety of social ills, including prostitution, corruption, drug use and juvenile delinquency.
Outside of New York, the “boy reform movement” found support among the elite of Chicago and Milwaukee. In the wake of W. E. Stead’s expose of organized prostitution in his book If Christ Came To Chicago, Chicago in particular had earned a reputation as a bastion of the White Slave Trade and powerful politicians wanted to be seen doing something about it. Judge Willis Brown and William Selig cashed in on a social movement that had a considerable amount of money behind it.
Selig’s interest in Brown was nuanced, however. Besides his personal boy sanctuary, Brown involved himself in the American Anti-Cigarette League by organizing one million boys to pledge not to use cigarettes. This anti-cigarette agitation harmed cigarette producers like the Duke family, who in a few short years would throw themselves behind the British war effort. Selig’s background was dissimilar to the Dukes:
William Nicholas Selig was born on March 14, 1864, at 10 Kramer Street, Chicago, Illinois, to Joseph Franz and Antonia (Linsky) Selig, the fifth of eight children. Selig’s father, a shoemaker, hailed from Bohemia [Austro-Hungary], his mother from Prussia [German Empire]. Not much is known of “Willy” Selig’s early years except that his German-speaking family was poor and staunchly Roman Catholic. Selig attended public school until the age of thirteen and then began serving an apprenticeship as an upholsterer and decorator.
While still in his teens Selig rebelled against his parents’ wishes and became apprenticed to a master magician.
If “Kramer Street” is the same Chicago street that is now known as “Kramer Avenue”, then Selig grew up in Lombard/York township neighborhood of modern Chicago which was largely settled by German-speaking immigrants. In the late 1890s The Chicago Chronicle identified “Kramer Street” as a slum and Jewish neighborhood. [Prior to 1908 a synagogue named Kehilath Jacob met in a residence on the corner of Kramer and Jefferson.] When Selig was a boy, Kramer Street housed at least one sweatshop which drew the attention of the City Council.
Selig became a film magnate after meeting a metalworker who could reverse-engineer the Lumière brothers motion picture camera. In 1896 he employed this knowledge (and the metalworker) when he founded the Selig Polyscope Company— with whose money I have yet to find out.
Perhaps because he was raised by German-speaking parents, William Selig was able to establish business relationships with German film producers and exhibitors, who provided a steady outlet for his productions starting in 1902.¹ By the end of 1908, Selig was producing more than one film per week. (Source)
While I cannot say who funded Selig, I can say with confidence that the ability to speak German is not in itself sufficient to explain Selig’s success in German-speaking Europe. A more convincing answer may be indicated by the following points: 1) I have not yet located a “preparedness” war movie made by him in the run up to 1917; 2) Selig Polyscope had extensive holdings in Europe which did not survive WWI; and 3) Selig was ruined over the course of the war, Selig Polyscope went defunct, leaving its founder with only a zoo in Los Angeles to his name. These circumstances suggest Imperial German money was behind Selig, as it was the Roosevelts (who were NY politicians in Rockefeller’s orbit) prior to 1916.
Selig only produced one Judge Willis Brown movie, the next was overseen by William Wesley Young and, as mentioned, was titled “A Boy and the Law” (October, 1913). It appears Judge Brown had some sort of break with Selig, because Young was subtly derisive of Selig’s feature in his promotional material: “[Selig’s feature] was nothing more than a series of scenes depicting the life of hundreds of boys”.
“A Boy and the Law” was produced through Young’s “Youth Photoplay Compay” housed at 145 W 45th Street, New York City— a then newly-constructed, 13-floor building in the Theater District. Financing for the company was provided (in part at least) by a Charles A. Brady who used the same mailing address. One month after this initial address was published Youth Photoplay Co had already changed premises to the 7th floor of the Candler Building, 220 W 42nd Street, New York City— an even newer, ritzier office in a Theater District skyscraper. “A Boy and the Law” would be the firm’s first and only offering.
According to trade press, William Wesley Young had asked Judge Brown to contribute an article on “Soul vs Sensationalism” to the magazine Young edited at the time, The Publishers' Guide. Young was so impressed that he asked for a second article from Brown, “True Sensationalism in Motion Pictures” and printed it in The Exhibitors' Times. In this second piece, Brown argued for wholesome productions rather than vicious ones. Young “dared” Brown to write such a script— the result was “A Boy and the Law”.
Young’s search for wholesome film material was in keeping with the concerns of industry elites, like John R Freuler, who urged (and organized) his peers to self-censor in order to avoid regulation. In addition to this motivation, pro-war film leaders struggled to influence European audiences because of US films’ ‘porn problem’: mainstream European audiences shunned American films because they were filthy. According to President Wilson’s 1919 Film Tsar William A. Brady, the prevalence of pornography among American film exports had been Imperial Germany’s most effective propaganda talking-point. Brady’s mouthpiece, Photoplay Magazine (as in The National Salesgirl’s Beauty Contest) sponsored an industry coalition that vowed to produce clean films only in an attempt to remedy this situation:
Excerpt from “How The Motion Picture Saved the World” by William A. Brady in Photoplay Magazine, January 1919. Photoplay editors were behind Edith May’s National Salesgirl’s Beauty Contest; regularly featured the work of Alfred Cheney Johnston; and made celebrity stories about Flo Ziegfeld and his wife Billie Burke a recurring feature of their content. Note a well-established distribution system for American pornography in Europe.
Industry leaders had foreseen such image (and content!) problems by 1914; Judge Brown under William Young’s guidance was one answer. (It seems that the US independent film companies were particularly geared toward supplying pornography, as US perceptions of European films— which made up the Independents’ main source of content after the Edison trust curtailed non-trust production— was that they, too, were pornographic. The nurturing of the Western genre— in which John R Freuler’s ‘Western Exchange’ lead— was some independent producers’ response to their industry’s ‘porn problem’.)
Young’s “Judge Brown” movie had a special connection to the issues which concerned NY philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. “A Boy and the Law” was based on the life of Canadian pianist Willie Eckstein, who the film portrays as a Russian-Jewish immigrant. Here is the synopsis of “The Boy and the Law” from the AFI Catalog Database:
Around 1903, in czarist Russia, William (“Willie”) Eckstein is at boarding school when he receives a letter from his mother describing how their prosperous Jewish family has been forced by government edict to pack up their belongings and move to a poor village. Willie joins the Eneckva, a secret Nihilist society that meets on the outskirts of town, and quickly becomes a leader because of his speaking ability. In the meantime, Cossacks kill Willie’s father for defending a tavern waitress. At school, a teacher finds one of Willie's pamphlets and turns him in to local authorities, who ransack his room and throw Willie and two friends into jail. Other boys come to their rescue, however, and they escape down a cliff. Willie hurries home to his mother, to tell her he is fleeing Russia, and she gives him a peasant suit that will allow him to travel without being molested. He flees to America, where he claims he will “live free from the law.” After reaching the United States, Willie makes his way to Salt Lake City, Utah, where his uncle owns a clothing store. He starts his new life as a newspaper boy, but becomes a hoodlum and ends up in the hands of truant officers. Summoned to the Parental Court of Judge Willis Brown, Willie at first defies the judge, but later realizes that Brown sincerely wishes to help him. Supported by local progressive women who see the need of moral education for wayward children rather than punishment in a reform school, Judge Brown is given an 800-acre farm for the purpose of building a community for juveniles. He chooses eighteen young felons, including Willie, and drives them to the farm to start building “Boy Town,” and Willie is soon elected mayor. At Boy Town, the youths practice discipline and self-government, learning how to farm the land, deal with troublemakers, and earn a profitable living. Many of the boys grow into successful, law-abiding adults. Judge Brown sends Willie to an Eastern college, and then to a university in Missouri, where Willie studies agriculture. Finally, Judge Brown makes him the manager of a large private farm, and the young man becomes a U.S. citizen. He also sends his mother one of his regular letters with a money-order enclosed, along with a photograph of himself, and then dreams of her joy in receiving it. The judge comes in, presses Willie’s hands, and assures the sleeping youth that his belief in a square game will help him prosper and be an example for other boys.
I believe that “Eneckva” is supposed to translate to something like “Equality”, but the origin of this anglicized Russian (?) word is obscure to me. The only third-party review of the film, which is lost, comes from Variety:
Variety, April 1914.
This story has a number of sanitized references to the White Slave Trade— the available barmaid, Willie standing on a corner selling schlock— a trade which according to historian Edward J. Bristow was at this time most highly organized among Jewish crime-family networks which originated in lands on the border of Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire— particularly in Galicia. (French and Italian organized crime networks were also prominent, but never reached the efficiency of their Polish-Galician competitors.) Teenage boys from participating families often pursued careers as pimps and became involved in other forms of organized crime— the “juvenile delinquency” problem which so fascinated Rockefeller and the the Roosevelts. It wasn’t uncommon for these boys to have been sexually victimized themselves. Please note that part of Willie’s redemption comes from his developing a managerial interest in agriculture— this has important political connotations which I will explore in my upcoming post which deals with the founding of the US National Security Agency, (NSA).
It’s worth bearing in mind that William Wesley Young produced this film a few months after he penned a passive-aggressive article titled “What the Jews are Doing for America” for the McClure Syndicate. (He wrote articles in the same vein about the Germans and Irish, who were also hesitant about getting involved in Britain’s world war.) At the time of the above April 1914 article, Russia was on the side of the British and key battles were being prepared against Austria-Hungary in what is now Northeast Poland and Galicia— the heart of the mafioso network— and lands of conflicted loyalties to both great powers. “A Boy and the Law” could not have been released at a better time to 1) condition the American public’s reaction to immigration-related public order problems and 2) condition immigrant communities’ attitudes about who was worth their loyalty. Neither Russia nor Austro-Hungary were democracies.
In one sense, William Wesley Young was well prepared to produce this film: his director and star/inspiration both had backgrounds which made them more likely to understand the problems faced by the immigrant boys Judge Brown got involved with. John M. Stahl, the director, had never directed a film prior to “A Boy and the Law”, but according to Criterion.com, he had lead a lifestyle similar to Willie’s:
John Malcolm Stahl was a handsome, energetic-looking man whose face often appeared on advertisements for his movies in the 1920s. His name and crown of silver hair seem vaguely patrician; he always claimed to have been born in New York in 1886. In fact, it is almost certain that he was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, as Jacob Morris Strelitzsky, and that he emigrated to the United States as a child. When he died in 1950, a lawsuit filed by his only child, from the first of three marriages, challenged his will, claiming that Stahl’s third wife had coerced him into leaving his entire estate to her by threatening to expose his real background—as well as the fact that in his youth he had been jailed for unspecified crimes under various aliases. Beyond these tantalizing fragments, almost nothing is known about Stahl’s early life, his family, when he came to America, or how he wound up on the stage, and then in films, as an actor.
The inspiration for the film, apart from the righteous Judge, was Willie Eckstein, a child star on the Vaudeville circuit. How Eckstein’s past relates to Russian pogroms is not clear and I took a number of double-takes researching this post in fear that I’d located the wrong Willie. According to historian Debra Ann Pawlak in her book Bringing Up Oscar, Stahl’s Willie Eckstein is the Canadian piano sensation. It seems contemporary press had the same misgivings I had, as Moving Picture World (July 18th, 1914) reported: “The film is highly commended by those Jews who were acquainted with the boy’s parents and circumstances in Russia.”
More modern accounts of Willie Eckstein’s life make no mention of Russia or pogroms. For example, from RagtimePiano.com:
He [Willie Eckstein] was the youngest of what was reportedly fourteen children (only nine were confirmed) born to Swedish immigrant George Hugo Eckstein (shows as Eckstine in 1881) and his German wife Wilhelmina Hildebrandt in Pointe St. Charles, a mostly Irish district of Montréal, Quebec, where they were shown in the 1891 census. His musically trained parents had come original from Sweden to New York City, then Hamilton, Ontario, and had moved to Montréal just a year before Willie's birth.
Parts of Imperial Sweden (Estonia) were in Imperial Russia at this time, and this area had a substantial Swedish-speaking minority, so it’s possible that the confusion comes from the complicated history of Northern Europe, in which case Eckstein’s situation would have been atypical of Russian immigrants. More information comes from the Library and Archives of Canada:
William Eckstein was born in Montréal on December 6, 1888. He received classical training in piano as a very young child, including lessons from a teacher at McGill University from the age of six. As his talent manifested itself, the boy quickly became recognized as a child prodigy. A career as a concert pianist seemed to be in the works and Willie was, in fact, at age 12, awarded a piano scholarship to McGill. However, because his family was not well off, he gave up this opportunity in favour of becoming a paid performer on the vaudeville circuit.
As a vaudeville star, Willie played the piano on Broadway and on tour in Canada and the United States, for 6 years, billed as "The Boy Paderewski". His engagements were varied: the Canadian National Exhibition; Montréal's Karn Hall; and the White House, where he played for President Theodore Roosevelt. After 1905, while still in his teens, Eckstein made a successful European concert tour that included further piano study in Sweden and Germany.
Vaudeville venues, like coffeehouses and seedy restaurants, were often associated with organized prostitution and no doubt young Willie was exposed to some traumatizing events, especially given the nature of his act:
It is said he was performing in a storefront in New York when he was heard by yet another agent and quickly offered a $15,000 per year contract on the Keith/Albee, Proctor and Orpheum vaudeville circuits. Hoping to have obtained regular recitals for his living instead, Willie knew how much his family needed the funds, so reluctantly accepted with his father's prompting. Eckstein was billed as the "Boy Paderewski" and was routinely dressed in little boy's clothing, taking advantage of his diminutive height to make him appear much younger than his actual age…
Nature can't be stopped, and neither could the onset of puberty. Willie's voice deepened and his facial hair growth accelerated to the point where he reportedly needed to shave twice daily in order to maintain the illusion of being a pre-teen. Suspicions grew, and eventually bookings started to diminish as he seemed more adult and less child-like. At the end of one of the tours Eckstein was back in New York City struggling to make ends meet while playing in storefronts and restaurants.
It wasn’t long after the release of “A Boy and the Law” that William Wesley Young began working with Mischa Appelbaum, a religious refugee from Russia like “Willie” from the film, through The Humanitarian Cult. This cult was funded by the Seligman family and Jacob Schiff; it was politically supported by Teddy Roosevelt. The cult’s purpose was to contain and control the socialist movement in New York City— which attracted many people of Appelbaum’s background— and pervert that movement along hawkish lines.
On a positive note for Willie, the contacts he made through Young helped his career, if for a short while:
In 1919 Eckstein was teamed up for a one-shot song with American composer/artist Gene Buck. Goodbye Sunshine, Hello Moon was featured in the Ziegfeld Follies of that year as well as comedian Ed Wynn's Carnival, providing him with something of a hit. In the end, however, the demand for his tunes on Broadway never panned out. (Source)
Other people connected with Young fared worse. In 1920, Mischa Appelbaum tried to commit suicide after Jacob Schiff’s death and his pending obsolescence as a demagogue, while a “Mr. Young” wined and dined Edith May, who had just got her shot at the Ziegfeld Follies through the National Salesgirl’s Beauty Contest. Edith May continued some of the Humanitarian Cult’s message through her handler Zoe Beckley.
“Judge” Brown would go on to make many more “Boy City”-style films, and even an anti-German “preparedness” war drama with Mary Pickford’s brother Jack titled “The Spirit of '17”. Shortly thereafter, Brown set up a boys’-home-cum-movie-production-studio in Culver City, CA called “Boy City Film Company”. From CenturyFilmProject.org:
The Boy City Film Company produced a series of films to promote clean entertainment, of which this [Bud’s Recruit, 1918 pro-war movie] was the first. Most of them evidently did feature the Judge himself as a dispenser of wisdom and resolver of disputes, but this first movie only features him in a still photo as a prop. These movies are mostly lost, and would probably be entirely forgotten, except that the Judge was able to find a rather promising young man named King Vidor to direct them.
In 1918, after having made 10-12 short films and operating only a short while, Boy City Film Company closed due to financial problems. By 1920 Judge Brown had disappeared from the press; as did William Wesley Young’s Youth Photoplay Company.
***
In this post I’ve glossed over Judge Brown’s transition from Selig Polyscope to William Wesley Young’s Youth Photoplay Company, but the story of Selig’s fall from grace sheds light on Young’s intelligence employers and the founding of the US signals intelligence apparatus through Selig’s friend/business partner George Fabyan and Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories… stay tuned.
