Rev. Noble Earle McLaughlin, Universalist
Today I will delve a little deeper into local connections between Monroe, WI’s most famous movie man, Leon Goetz, and our only (known) contribution to NYC cabaret lines. The Reverend Noble Earle McLaughlin was Leon Goetz's 'religious supporter' for his film “A Romance of the Movies”, a biographical movie about local girl Edith May Leuenberger's experiences at the Ziegfeld Follies.
Contemporary newspaper coverage of Edith May’s experiences stressed her sexual vulnerability as a sheltered teen member of NYC’s most publicized cabaret. You can see Rev. McLaughlin's endorsement of “A Romance of the Movies” in the fine print of the advertisement below: “Rev. N. E. McLaughlin and Albert A. Tschudy are among the many local folk who have given the production their time and co-operation.”
Newspaper advertisement in the Green County Historical Society’s Edith May Leuenberger collection. Untitled and undated, probably from The Monroe Evening Times, in mid-1921.
None of Edith May’s press coverage quoted Rev. McLaughlin, he served no discernible role in her experiences over September-October 1920. Why would Leon involve Rev. McLaughlin— or any religious leader— in his movie publicity at all?
By the 1920s, American-made sex films, called “Enlightenment Films” at the time, had won infamy the world over. The US film industry had a pronounced “porn problem”. The political result of this was the emergence of local censorship boards, one of which was the Pennsylvania State Board of Censors where social commentator Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer served. In his 1922 book The Morals of the Movies, Oberholtzer documented the typical marketing techniques used by sex film producers to avoid public censure:
The absolute assurance of large profits from the exhibition of such material [an “enlightenment film”] led the distributors to put forth exceptional efforts to market it with the greatest possible amount of prestige and publicity. They ran off the reels privately before doctors and ministers with the purpose of securing endorsements from at least some of the number who might be drawn to witness the “shows”... The names of bishops and other men, well known in the community, were used by the audacious fellows who held the distribution rights. Because of the variety that there is in human nature, by flattery and sometimes by bribery, endorsements of this kind were obtained. These were printed in the theaters, thus creating an impression which lulled into insensibility many who were on the point of protesting against such a commercialization of sacred things, and enabled those who had set out to speculate upon the curious and prurient in public taste to gather in the money from the crowds which formed long queues at the doors of the theaters.
Rev. McLaughlin was remarkable to the extent that he was a both a reverend and a film exhibitor, under the auspices of the University of Wisconsin Bureau of Visual Instruction. From The Universalist Leader, September 10th 1921:
The Universalist Leader, Sept 10 1921. Part 1/2
The Universalist Leader, Sept 10 1921. Part 2/2
There are two fascinating aspects to the excerpt above: 1) Rev. McLaughlin’s involvement with the UW program and 2) the Reverend’s failure to mention Goetz’s film “A Romance of the Movies”, a local block-buster he’d just endorsed a few months earlier.
The University of Wisconsin’s Bureau of Visual Instruction was a national leader in the use of film to educate the public. The importance of the medium was first realized by the military during WWI, when the Navy spear-headed using films in their anti-venereal disease campaigns. This coincided with Navy leaders Josephus Daniels and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s closure of the bordellos which traditionally served servicemen, as well as their censoring films that portrayed servicemen as commercial sex consumers. (Navy members were stereotypically portrayed in a drunks and “johns” in pre-WWI US films.) In 1919 the Navy even went as far as to budget for the production of “educational” films about VDs. (The production was farmed out to poorly-supervised contractors.) Some historians and social commentators believe this money birthed the modern pornographic film industry.
Mistakes, intentional or otherwise, were bound to be made in the quest to harness film for propaganda purposes and WWI provided administrators and educators alike with valuable experience, which would be rolled out on the general public in the 1920s.
In 1921 the US Department of the Interior, through its Bureau of Education, advocated the University of Wisconsin’s Visual Instruction program as the model on which other states should base their film-education efforts. The Interior Department issued “Bulletin No. 7, Organization for Visual Instruction (1921)” which was written by UW employee William H. Dudley, who developed the UW Visual Instruction program.
This bulletin— and through it the UW program and Dudley— played an outsized role forming film-based government education programs. In 1923 the leading programs were superseded by “The Department for Visual Instruction” (DVI) of the “National Education Association” (NEA). The NEA is a union for people employed in education; many of its members are either directly or indirectly employed by the US government. From the DVI’s successor institution’s website:
DVI was formed at a time of rapidly increasing interest in the potential of visual media—particularly slides and motion pictures—in schools, colleges, and university extension divisions. During the period of 1916 to 1922 there were already two fledgling organizations outside the NEA struggling to give voice to this new movement, the National Academy of Visual Instruction (NAVI) and the Visual Instruction Association of America (VIAA). Meanwhile, inside the NEA there was considerable enthusiasm for harnessing the new emerging media but also a complex power struggle to decide how to position this new force within the larger organization. Various individuals and committees represented visual education at the semi-annual NEA conventions leading up to 1923. Many of the leading figures occupied leadership positions in all three organizations. Most prominent were Ernest L. Crandall, Director of Libraries and Visual Instruction, New York City Schools, and Dudley Grant Hays [sic], Chief of University of Wisconsin’s Bureau of Visual Instruction.
“Dudley Grant Hays” appears to be an error, William H. Dudley held the UW position.
We met Ernest L. Crandall before as one of the board members of Educational Film Magazine’s “Committee on Pedagogical Research in Visual Education”. Crandall served alongside William Wesley Young, fresh from the Humanitarian Cult and (likely) fresh from grooming Edith May Leuenberger for political work shepherding the pacifist movement. Also on the committee was Sigmund Freud’s US-based lieutenant A. A. Brill. Together this group formed quite a well-connected bunch. While William H. Dudley didn’t make the cut, W. W. Young maintained his connections at the University of Wisconsin. Young had graduated from UW decades prior, and was the driving force establishing its Journalism School, as well as the founder of the university newspaper, The Daily Cardinal.
Educational Film Magazine, January 1921
Rev. McLaughlin put himself, and his congregation, at the service of powerful forces when he plugged into the Bureau of Visual Instruction’s network. In truth, the Bureau had as much to gain as McLaughlin, as his flock included the most wealthy and influential residents of Green County, including the Treat, Ludlow, Churchill and Bingham families— also, the Young family. (All good English names!) The Ludlows, a family of railway and merchant magnates, were particularly generous patrons and good friends with Chicago notables Potter Palmer and Marshall Field. The wider Monroe community at this time was comprised of people of Central European descent, particularly from Switzerland.
Rich people can be difficult to shepherd: the early history of the Universalist flock is a case of “mo money, mo problems”. The excerpt below is from an 1884 history of our region, and details some of the remarkable financial difficulties (opportunities?) involved in building the Universalist church.
The History of Green County. 1884 1/3
The History of Green County. 1884 2/3
The History of Green County. 1884 3/3
Universalist Christianity is a liberal offshoot of radical Protestantism (and Islam!) that has its roots in New England, particularly states like Connecticut or Rhode Island (Pilgrims) and Boston (Puritans), though like the Moravian Brethren they view their roots as stretching far back to the earliest days of Christianity. Certainly modern scholars of Universalist history identify radical Moravian Brethren, Pietists and Quakers as influences on Universalist thinking. (Uneducated, extra-biblical, radical Protestantism.) All three faiths are remarkable for the political influence their adherents achieved: the Moravian Brethren in London’s merchant communities; Pietism became the Prussian military religion; and Quakers were leading lenders to the British Crown.
Universalism’s more recent history identifies it as a splinter group from the Methodist movement (which was also largely influenced by Count Zinzendorf's Moravian Brethren). Universalist beliefs teach a multicultural view of spiritual truth and reject the idea of hell as an eternal punishment. Much like Virginia Whittingham's Episcopal ancestor, and Count Zinzendorf's evangelical missionaries, some Universalists were noted for proselytizing to minority communities. Typically, however, this was an elite religious movement and this tendency was reflected in the demographics of Rev. McLaughlin's Monroe congregation.
In the 1960s the American Unitarian Association joined with the Universalist Church of America, to form the Unitarian Universalist Association-- “Unitarian Universalism” (UU) will be the designation most people are familiar with today. (Already in 1884 Monroe's congregation had a significant Unitarian element.) Unitarians were uncomfortable with the idea of the Trinity, a criticism long leveled at Christianity by Muslim and Jewish scholars. Today, Wikipedia states Unitarian Universalists comprise many faiths: including atheism, agnosticism, pantheism, panentheism, pandeism, deism, humanism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Taoism, syncretism, Omnism, Neopaganism and the teachings of the Baháʼí Faith. This claim seems to agree with a number of UU congregation websites.
Certainly, this religious open-mindedness stretched back to the builders of Monroe's Universalist church, which is now home to the Green County Historical Society. The Universalist church has no spire; it rests on a strict rectangular foundation; and its windows contain no representational images, but abstract, arts-and-crafts inspired designs.
An early image of the outside of the Universalist Church, which now houses the Green County Historical Society.
The restraint shown in the facade of the church shouldn’t lead readers to believe that Universalists shunned ornamentation, in fact Rev. McLaughlin was particularly proud of the costly improvements made to the building under his tenure:
The Universalist Leader, Sept 7 1922
All in all, when Rev. McLaughlin equipped his church with a “first-class moving picture outfit”, he was meeting the expectations of his congregation: a well-established group of wealthy locals, who enjoyed the best society had to offer but were not wedded to prevailing social customs, and who were in a better place than most to profit from new technologies and moral standards. That the reverend looked to the university in Madison to assist him in adopting these technologies was quite natural.
What is a bit harder to explain is why Rev. McLaughlin remained silent about his endorsement of Leon Goetz’s movie featuring Edith May. “A Romance of the Movies” is a lost film, but readers can get an indication of what the film would have been like by looking at Photoplay Magazine’s 1915 ‘photo-drama’ titled The Chorus Girl, which I reproduced as part of my post on The National Salesgirls Beauty Contest. “A Romance of the Movies” would almost certainly have been what Oberholtzer identified as an “enlightenment film”.
I can only speculate as to what Rev. McLaughlin’s motives were for first endorsing Edith May’s film, then clamming up about it. What we can say about McLaughlin is that he had social aspirations: a UW graduate, he kept in close contact with the university and was even cultivating contacts at Harvard University (just across the river from Boston!) at around the time he endorsed “A Romance of the Movies”.
The Universalist Leader, Sept 3 1921
If the reverend had made it to Harvard just a few months earlier, he could have finagled a seat at the Ziegfeld Cinema Corporations’ invite-only showing of “The Panther’s Cub”, another “enlightenment film” begging for investors in Boston and its surrounding environs.
In addition to his academic pretensions, Noble Earle had made an advantageous marriage to Hattie Townsend, a daughter of one of the leading families in Stoughton, a prosperous satellite to our capital city Madison in Dane County. (The Townsends were transplants to WI from New York state, as the reverend also seems to have been.) Perhaps when “A Romance of the Movies” actually came to be aired, Rev. McLaughlin felt too many boundaries had been pushed. Certainly the wider silence in our local Green County historical record about Leon’s Ziegfeld movie suggests such reservations were widely held.
For more on Unitarianism in Great Britain, please see my post on Lady Duff Gordon’s great aunt Lucie, who was connected at the very highest levels of the British East India Company’s intelligence apparatus. At least one Universalist church in Brooklyn was used as the some-time venue for Mischa Appelbaum’s Humanitarian Cult, which was ultimately funded and controlled by Jacob Schiff. William Wesley Young acted as a type of ‘handler’ for Appelbaum and oversaw the cult’s magazine.
