The Spirit of '76 (1917)
released 28th May 1917
Cast:
Adda Gleason
Howard Gaye
George Chesebro
Doris Pawn
Jane Novak
Noah Beery
The Spirit of '76 (1917)
Drama
135m
Continental Producing Company
Director:
George Siegmann
Writer:
Robert Goldstein, George L. Hutchin
"A Historical Romance Dealing with the AMERICAN REVOLUTION and its CAUSES"
While filming The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith became so desperate for financial backing that he approached cast members and crew for money. Billy Bitzer, the veteran cameraman who had worked with the director since his earliest days at Biograph, contributed around $7,000. Still, it wasn't enough. Faced with a $6,200 bill from costumier Robert Goldstein, Griffith offered the softly spoken German-American shares in the film as payment. Goldstein not only accepted but also invested a further $1,000.
It proved to be a shrewd investment: although accurate figures are difficult to pin down, it’s estimated that the film saw a return of around $60m against a production cost no greater than $110,000. Goldstein was suddenly a very wealthy man. Inspired by the magnitude and success of The Birth of a Nation, he decided he would produce a film that would tell the story of the American Revolution on the same epic scale. So, in the spring of 1916, undeterred by his complete lack of filmmaking experience, he established the Continental Producing Company with capital of $250,000.
Not content to be merely a financial backer, Goldstein co-wrote the scenario with George L. Hutchin, the former promoter of the Portland Rose Festival, who had formed a company to make educational films about America’s history. The Spirit of ’76 tells the somewhat lurid tale of Catherine Montour, a mixed-race former lover of King George III, who journeys to America and becomes the queen of an indigenous people. On the eve of her wedding, she discovers her fiancé is also her long-lost brother. Woven around these soap opera developments are real historical events such as Paul Revere’s midnight ride, Valley Forge, the striking of the Liberty bell and the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
For the part of Catherine, Goldstein cast Adda Gleason; Howard Gaye played her unknowing brother and, we must assume, lover; Jack Cosgrove played the British King. Other notable figures among the cast included Jane Novak, George Chesebro, and Noah Beery as George Washington. To direct them, Goldstein hired George Siegmann, who, besides serving as an assistant to Griffith on both The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, had directed almost a dozen films of his own. Recalling her time working on the picture, Novak said, “Everyone in the company was constantly excited and thrilled by what we expected to be one of the greatest films. D. W. Griffith came several times to see our sets and watch a bit of our work. Mr. Goldstein was a small man, very gentle and soft-spoken—kind to everyone.” The film was shot at the former Rolin Studio in Los Angeles.
In April 1917, Goldstein placed full-page ads in trade magazines in which he ‘begged to announce’ the completion of his twelve-reel subject, ‘An historical romance dealing with the American Revolution and the causes that led up to it.’ The ad informed potential exhibitors that ‘This picture has been in production for over a year and is happily completed in time to help rouse the patriotic spirit of America.’ He booked a four-week run beginning on the 7th May 1917 at the Orchestra Hall in Chicago, the home of the city’s Symphony Orchestra, at a cost of $1,600 per week. From late April, ads appeared for the ‘Greatest Patriotic Photo Spectacle on Earth, a $500,000 production to be backed by a 50-piece symphony orchestra’. As late as 6th May, the Chicago Tribune printed a brief article promoting the following day’s premiere.
By then, however, Major Metallus Lucullus Cicero Funkhouser, Chicago’s second deputy superintendent of police and its movie censor, had already dropped a bombshell that shattered all of Goldstein’s plans. Funkhouser refused to issue a permit for the film to be shown because it was anti-British and would offend the government of the United Kingdom, whose ally America had become when it declared war on Germany the previous month. He also believed that friends of the German government had financed the film with the aim of disrupt recruitment in the States. It wasn’t Funkhouser’s first intervention in this manner; he had censored Mary Pickford’s The Little American on the grounds it was offensive to Chicago’s German population.
Funkhouser issued a list of scenes that Goldstein would have to remove from the film before he would grant a permit, including one depicting a British soldier bayoneting a baby. Goldstein immediately complied, and advertisements on the 7th confirmed the screening would take place. Funkhouser, however, still didn’t issue the permit, and that night a cordon of fifty policemen refused entry to an reported two thousand patrons.
Goldstein engaged the services of Trainer and Reeves, the law firm that had represented The Birth of a Nation during its own censorship battle. According to Variety, it was a move that may have backfired, speculating that city officials held a grudge following the lawyers’ successful representation of Griffith’s movie. On 23rd May, Judge Kavanagh, while upholding Funkhouser’s decision ‘flayed’ the censor for a ‘fatal use of discretion,’ and stated that ‘the public must not be without protection from a police superintendent who shall, by caprice or whim, refuse an exhibitor the lawful right to exhibit.’ Kavanagh upheld the ban because of a scene he considered immoral—but which Goldstein’s lawyers claimed he had cut in line with Funkhouser’s instructions.
The day after Judge Kavanagh’s decision, Funkhouser requested the censor board once again view the re-cut picture, and this time a permit was at last issued.
The movie finally premiered on 28th May 1917, three weeks after its original debut date, to mostly positive reviews. Motography, reported that “While the feeling is a patriotic one, no feelings of resentment is aroused against any of our present allies.” The Exhibitor’s Trade Review felt that the film “has some truly wonderful moments and should cause the red blood of any American to tingle...Everything is action, action, action…The picture is a succession of thrills.” The Chicago American said, “Chicago is honored by being the premier city for the showing of “The Spirit of ‘76”. Never before has there been screened a history, romance, adventure, story picture in such perfection. It is a stage classic. It is the very heart of what our patriotism is based on.”
On 27th November 1917, the film opened at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles with the scenes the Chicago censor had ordered removed reinstated. This was allegedly after a official police inspection which had ordered the offending scenes to be removed. At 7:30 p.m. the following night, shortly before the film was scheduled to be shown, the District Attorney’s office seized the film, and the screening was cancelled. The next day, Judge Benjamin Bledsoe ordered that the master film in Hollywood also be confiscated. After Goldstein admitted under questioning by Judge Bledsoe to reinserting the censored scenes to make the film more exciting, the judge ordered Goldstein to be placed under arrest on a charge of violating the 1917 Espionage Act. Goldstein spent a night in jail and was released only after his associates paid the $5,000 bail.
George Siegmann
Robert Goldstein bids farewell to his county jailer before departing for federal prison.
On the 1st December, officers raided the home of one of Continental’s cutters at Highland Avenue in Hollywood and confiscated a further 123,000 feet of film and the scenario for The Spirit of ’76. The Federal Court acted swiftly; three days later, Goldstein was formally charged on the grounds that he “wilfully attempted to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty on the part of the military and naval forces of the United States, in that he…intended to arouse antagonism, hatred and enmity between the American people and the people of Great Britain.” A second count charged that he attempted to influence those not yet called for military duty, and a third that he conspired with others to influence those who had not yet been called to selective service. Unable to secure funds to meet the increased bail of $10,000, Goldstein returned to jail, where he remained until his court hearing on 12th March.
Goldstein’s luck didn’t improve while he languished in jail awaiting trial. In February 1918, Howard Gaye, the actor cast in the role of Lionel Esmonde, successfully sued him for the sum of $480. The following month, his wife started divorce proceedings, claiming that he enjoyed clandestine trips to the beach with another woman. That same month, the Continental Producing Company, which had ousted Goldstein as president but in which he still owned shares, filed for bankruptcy, citing debts of $90,617.49 against assets of $46,550.
Goldstein’s trial got underway on 2nd April, and the damning testimony quickly mounted against the beleaguered producer. George L. Hutchins, whom Goldstein had engaged to write the film’s scenario, testified that he was informed that ex-German consul Franz Bopp, later imprisoned for conspiring to blow up munitions ships, was a potential backer of the production. Hutchins also insisted that Goldstein had added the film’s objectionable scenes after he had handed in his completed scenario. W.L. Brock, the film’s researcher, claimed Goldstein instructed him to gather as many pictures as possible that showed the British carrying out atrocities during the War of Independence. He also asserted that the producer said that the Germans in the present war were no more guilty than the British were in the War of the Revolution, and that he wanted ‘no damned Englishmen working on the picture.’ The next day, actress Adda Gleason testified Goldstein had told her he would become a German spy if the USA went to war with Germany.
Goldstein’s defence team argued that the film represented an accurate representation of historical events, producing many historical reference books to support their claim. Newspapers reported that Goldstein’s testimony was weak, that he was a poor defendant; the guilty verdict that followed seemed to bear them out. On the 29th April 1918, Judge Bledsoe sentenced him to ten years in the federal penitentiary at McNeil’s Island and a $5,000 fine. Reporting on the sentencing, the Los Angeles Times stated that Goldstein “shook like an aspen as Judge Bledsoe verbally excoriated him for his unpatriotic conduct. Judge Bledsoe told Goldstein that he had not only lied on the stand when he testified in his own behalf, but that his conduct on that occasion was most despicable.’
After a failed attempt at an appeal, an embittered Goldstein entered McNeil’s Island on 20th June 1918, insisting that “I shall serve my sentence like a man, but I wish everybody to know that I am just as good an American as anyone in the country.” He blamed his business partners for his downfall, saying, “I’ll tell you what was behind this trouble—personal rancor on the part of my former business associates who wished to secure control of the film. They have plunged the production into the bankruptcy court, and have filed twenty-six lawsuits against me, which are pending…these former associates of mine now intend to make a fortune with the production that landed me in jail for ten years and a $5,000 fine besides. I wish them better luck than I had. My trial gave them plenty of free advertising so I expect they will wax rich and forget me up there on McNeil’s Island.”
Six weeks later, a court awarded his wife, Adele J. Goldstein, a divorce on the grounds that he ‘paid attention’ to motion picture actress Grace Moore.
To pay off some $40,000 of debt owed by the bankrupt Continental Producing Company, trustee William H. Moore Jr. and attorney L. J. Binford engaged the services of industry professionals to excise the film’s anti-English propaganda content. After receiving the approval of Department of Justice officials, who deemed the re-cut picture ‘patriotic and educational,’ the film was re-titled The Eternal Spirit of ’76, but there is no record of it being released.
In March 1919, President Woodrow Wilson, feeling that Goldstein’s sentence had been unduly harsh, commuted it to three years and remitted the $5,000 fine. Goldstein only served one year of his sentence, and in July 1921 he re-released the film under its original title. This time, the reviews were not so kind. Moving Picture World reviewer Edward Wietzel complained that Goldstein had “ground out a crude concoction of fact and fiction, purporting to deal with some of the momentous episodes in American history, and filled it with astonishing and mirthful anachronisms.” The Exhibitor’s Herald refused to even view the film, stating that “In assuming this position we feel we are in accord with the probable attitude of millions of Americans who doubtless will be unwilling to swallow passively the slimy history of this picture.” Photoplay, which in 1918 had described Goldstein as “a bumptious ignoramus, more fool than villain,” joked that “it resembles nothing so much as a fourteen reel Ben Turpin comedy without the talented Ben. If this is a specimen of the real Spirit of ’76 how did we ever manage to win the revolution?” The Billboard decreed that “After viewing this lengthy film your reviewer could discover nothing but a mass of confusion, atrociously bad photography and at times farcical arrangements of scenes…” Sadly, as the film is now lost, we cannot judge for ourselves whether The Spirit of ’76 is “the very heart of what our patriotism is based on,” as opined in 1917, or is the “crude concoction of fact and fiction,” critics considered it to be just four years later.
Goldstein left the United States, defeated and demoralised, for a film job in the Netherlands that never materialised. From there, he moved to Berlin. Actress Jane Novak recalled meeting him while shooting a film there in 1924: “One day I had a phone call from Mr. Goldstein. My companion and I had dinner with him that night. He was the same gentle, soft-spoken man I had known so many years before. I never saw him again.”
A sense of injustice haunted Goldstein for the rest of his life. He bombarded the newly founded Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with letters of complaint. In 1927, he wrote: “I am merely a lone man suffering a great wrong for no reason whatever, can you refuse to help me obtain justice? I have never done the slightest thing to warrant this persecution and prejudice against me, which denies the very right to exist. What, in the name of common sense, can be the reason for such wanton injustice?”
In 1935, he wrote the Academy another letter from Berlin: “Because I can’t pay $9 to have my American passport renewed I have been fined 75 marks—and as I consequently can’t pay that either—two weeks in jail. I have received the order to deliver myself to jail next week or be punished. If you can’t do anything else, put it in the papers. It is a swell piece of ironical news.”
Later still, in 1938, Goldstein wrote to the Academy from New York: “You will probably remember that I wrote you several times from Berlin during the fifteen years I stayed there. Since my enforced return here, three years ago, things have been going just as badly as they did in L.A. twenty years ago, when this very deplorable affair started… nothing even remotely resembling my fate ever happened to any other producer in this game, you should agree with me that I should be given some consideration, another chance as a writer, director or producer—or at least something practical. I have been treated so terribly here in New York that I am at my wit’s end.”
Sources: Early American Cinema, Anthony Slide; The Billboard, 9th June 1917; Chicago Tribune, 7th May 1917; Variety, May 1917; Motography, 23rd June 1917; Los Angeles Times, 1917-1919; Moving Picture World, 6th August 1921; The Billboard, 30th July 1921; Photoplay, October 1921; Slate Magazine, The Unluckiest Man in Movie History, Pts I, II & III.