·: Barak Y. Orbach :·

Prizefighting and the Birth of Movie Censorship

For many decades, censorship scholars unanimously, but mistakenly, treated a 1907 ordinance of the City of Chicago as the first act of censorship in the United States. The Chicago Ordinance prohibited public exhibition of motion pictures without a permit from the Chief of Police and required the Chief of Police to deny permits for “immoral or obscene” films. The conventional wisdom had been that sexual innuendos and crime themes triggered the first wave of movie censorship in the United States.

My study of the early motion-picture industry, however, finds that in 1897 many states and municipalities considered prohibitions against a now-extinct genre: prizefight films that depicted real and staged boxing fights. On March 20, 1897, the State of Maine passed a law that prohibited public exhibition of "photographic or other reproduction of prize fight." Illinois, Minnesota, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania considered bills that pohibited exhibition of prizefight films but ultimately these bills did not become laws. In July 1897, Los Angeles adopted an ordinance that outlawed the "exhibition of photographic or kinetoscopic pictures or other representation of any prize fight or any fight of similar nature." In October 1897, Iowa passed a prohibition against prizefight films, which provided that "[i]t shall be unlawful for any person, persons or corporation to exhibit in this state by means of the photograph, kinetograph, or any kindred device or machine, any picture of any prize fight, glove contest, or other match between men or animals, that is prohibited by the laws of this state."

Movie censorship in the United States was therefore born with attempts to ban a very peculiar genre, ten years before Chicago passed its Ordinance to censor “immoral or obscene” films.

The event that led to the 1897 bans on prizefight films was the 'fight of the century,' the world heavyweight championship between James J. Corbett and Robert Fitzsimmons that was held in Carson City, Nevada, on March 17, 1897.


	New York Herald, November 18, 1897

Although prizefighting was a very popular sport in the nineteenth century, it also had many opponents. In the first half of the nineteenth century, states prosecuted prizefighters using common law doctrines, such as breach of the peace, affray, rout, riot, assault, and battery. In the 1830s, some states started enacting specific laws against prizefighting. In 1894, when Edison commercialized his kinetoscope, a peep-show machine that could show 20-second clips, approximately 30 states had anti-prizefight statutes. The anticipation for the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight led the remaning states to enact anti-prizefight statutes or to clarify what general statutes banned prizefighting.

Desperate for cash, in January 1897, Nevada legalized prizefighting. The Nevada statute allowed only licensed glove contests and instructed the Sheriff of any country in which such contest was held to charge $1,000 for a license. Nevada was also hoping to generate income from sports tourism.

The filming of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight in Carson City found states and municipalities with laws against prizefighting but with no laws against exhibition of prizefight films. Many states and municipalities therefore considered censorship bills that banned the genre. Some ultimately passed such prohibitions.


	A frame from the Corbett-Fitzsimmons film

By 1907, when Chicago adopted its censorship ordinance, movie censorship was not a new concept in the United States. More importantly, states, municipalities, and the motion-picture industry had some experience with censorship that shaped the events in Chicago.