WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman

Italian and German immigrants, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and islanders in American territories often endured appalling abuse.

      Historically, Catholics and Jews were also among those often shunned, stigmatized and oppressed. Sometimes the stigma stemmed from political activity such as that of militant union organizers and strikers, anarchists and other radicals. Both sides might engage in lawless behavior only to wind up in court where company owners, captains of industry and government officials could usually count on the prosecutors and judges they put in office to ignore their own misconduct while meting out harsh sentences to opponents labeled subversive.

      In many instances, publishing giant William Randolph Hearst played a pivotal role – creating or feeding a public appetite for scandalous headlines with little or no regard for the truth or for the lives at stake. One telling example was how Hearst helped ruin the career of silent movie megastar Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, of “Keystone Kops” fame. By the 1920s, the Hearst newspapers boasted a circulation of twenty million people in eighteen cities – almost a fifth of the country’s total population. In the first year of Prohibition the obese comedian signed an unprecedented million-dollar contract which he celebrated over Labor Day 1921 with friends at a three-day drinking party in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. A young actress named Virginia Rappe attended the party, fell violently ill and died a few days later. An ambitious prosecutor pursued false but headline-grabbing charges that Arbuckle had raped Virginia Rappe and ruptured her bladder.

      Hearst papers made Arbuckle the face of Hollywood’s loose morals that appalled so many conservative church-goers. (At the time, rumors were rampant that Hearst himself, a married father of five, was keeping Hollywood leading lady Marion Davies as his own mistress.) Arbuckle endured three sensationalized trials before being acquitted. The truth was that Virginia Rappe was already feeling poorly when she arrived at the party and never accused Arbuckle of any untoward conduct, and the doctors who examined her concluded she died of natural causes.⁴ The third jury met just long enough to pen a rare written apology for the great injustice done in besmirching Arbuckle’s name without “the slightest proof . . . to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime.”⁵

      Source: File: Roscoe Arbuckle Trial - 1921.jpg from Wikimedia Commons

      On Sept. 17, 1921, Hearst-owned papers trumpeted the Hollywood star’s likely execution.

      Starkly different headlines before the first criminal trial of Hollywood megastar Fatty Arbuckle in September 1921 and after the third trial in March 1922. Arbuckle never actually faced the death penalty. The charge was manslaughter, for which he was ultimately exonerated.

      Source: http://www.chcemywiedziec.pl/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Roscoe-Arbuckle-Exonerated-Creative-Commons-CC-SA1.jpg

      April 18, 1922, news bulletin after a third trial ended in acquittal and an apology from the jury. Six days later, new movie czar Will Hays banned Arbuckle from appearing in any films. Publisher William Randolph Hearst boasted that he sold more papers by his lurid coverage of the Arbuckle trials than the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania in 1915 that helped prompt the United States to join World War I.

      Source: Wikipedia Keystone Kops file

       The Keystone Kops

      Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle stands furthest right as a star member of the Keystone Kops – a silent slapstick comedy series popular in movie theaters from 1912 into the 1920s. Arbuckle joined the cast in 1913.

      Source: Wikipedia Brewster’s Millions file

      Arbuckle starred in “Brewster’s Millions” in 1921, a year after he signed his record-setting million-dollar contract with Paramount Pictures (roughly $17 million today).

      Source: Wikipedia Roscoe Arbuckle file

      what Arbuckle’s San Francisco hotel suite looked like after a 3-day binge over Labor Day weekend 1921 (shortly after Prohibition took effect). Among the party’s attendees was an out-of-work actress in poor health named Virginia Rappe, who died just days later, triggering the headline trial that ruined Arbuckle’s career.

      While the trials against Arbuckle remained pending, Hearst’s sensationalized coverage of the rape and manslaughter prosecutions fanned the church-going public’s animosity toward Hollywood’s corrupt morals. Local boards of censors across the country had already created headaches for Hollywood moguls; their distributors sometimes had to edit films heavily for showing in culturally conservative venues or see them banned outright. The studio heads responded to the mounting pressure by opting for self-censorship. They formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and paid President Harding’s former campaign manager, Postmaster General Will Hays, a hefty salary to leave the administration to head the new organization.

      Within a week of Arbuckle’s acquittal, Hays barred the Hollywood star permanently from the movies. The dramatic action mirrored that of baseball’s new czar the summer before – banning eight White Sox players for life for fixing the 1919 World Series (see Chapter 6). Just as Shoeless Joe Jackson became the scapegoat for vice-ridden professional baseball, Arbuckle stood in for the sins of Hollywood. Perhaps not coincidentally Hays took that bold action just days after The Wall Street Journal broke the Teapot Dome bribery scandal in which Hays later turned out to be a key figure, secretly taking oil company contributions to pay off campaign debts when chair of the Republican Party.

      After making an example of the industry’s biggest star, Hays later blacklisted nearly two hundred other actors and imposed a new morality code by which Hollywood endeavored to censor its public image for decades. Among the “Working Principles” of The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, it specified that “no picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it.”⁶ The voluntary code expressly prohibited a film from ridiculing or belittling natural or divine law in any way or creating sympathy for violators. Instead, filmmakers were urged to “stress proper behavior, respect for government and ‘Christian values’.”⁷ (Today, its successor organization is in charge of film ratings).

      Unrepentant at his role in ruining Arbuckle’s livelihood, Hearst boasted that his coverage of the three unwarranted trials “sold more newspapers than any event since the sinking of the Lusitania”⁸ – the British ocean liner torpedoed by Germans off the Irish coast in May 1915. (The nearly 1200 casualties of that act of war included 198 Americans. The sinking of the Lusitania helped convince the United States to join World War I on the side of the British and French.)

      Once in a while, over-reaching tactics backfired by prompting heroic responses that helped precipitate major reforms. As explored in the chapters that follow, a few courageous policemen, prosecutors, judges and other elected officials in these early decades of the 20th century stood out for their adherence to constitutional ideals despite strong pressure to do otherwise. Some paid a high price. Alabama Sheriff Matt Wann was murdered in May 1932, reportedly while attempting to make a late-night house arrest of a husband for failure to pay support. The sheriff had been accompanied by three deputies, but, somehow, the shooter fled and was never prosecuted. Rumors began spreading shortly after the sheriff’s death that it was a KKK hit job in collusion with his deputies in retaliation for Wann’s successful efforts the preceding year to prevent a lynch mob from stringing up prisoners in his custody – the Scottsboro Boys. At the time of Sheriff Wann’s death, eight of the defendants remained on death