Birmingham & Tinseltown in the 1920's & 1930's

I recently finished a fascinating book by William J. Mann, Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood. Mann examines the 1922 murder of famed silent film director William Desmond Taylor and three actresses whose lives and careers intersected with his own: Mable Normand, Mary Miles Minter and Margaret Gibson. 

The book develops a new solution to Taylor's murder, which has never been officially solved. Along the way it details other scandals of the era involving illegal drugs and alcohol, wild parties, orgies, and other such behavior that so delighted gossip mongers and horrified self-appointed moral watchdogs, or "church ladies." Anyone unfamiliar with the American silent film era, from its earliest days in New York and New Jersey before the move to southern California, should read this book. It's a great introduction to the times, early film making, and the strong personalities on both sides of the camera.

Early in the book, in a discussion of pressures building to reform the film industry, I found it on page 68--the Alabama connection:

"On the various affiliated Committees for Better Films scattered throughout the country, such women as ...Mrs. Neil Wallace of Birmingham, Alabama..." As Mann notes, "These reform-minded women seemed to be everywhere." Those committees were affiliated with the National Board of Review, an organization "charged by the industry to ensure that all films released were suitable for the screen." 

The film industry hoped that by policing itself, regulation by federal and state governments would not develop. This battle between film makers and reformers continued until the early 1930's when Hollywood adopted the Hays Code of even stricter self-regulation. That Motion Picture Production Code, as it was formally known, governed film content until 1968.

Wondering about further details on Mrs. Neil Wallace, I remembered having a copy of Kristen Nicole Kitchen's, "Film Censorship in Birmingham, Alabama, 1921-1937: The Marginally Successful Reign of the Birmingham Better Films Committee." She completed this master's thesis at the University of South Alabama in 2000.

Early in her account, Kitchen writes, "Birmingham, Alabama, addressed the issue of motion picture regulation in 1921 by passing a city ordinance establishing the Office of Amusement Inspector (City Commission Minutes 191, City Ordinance 743-C). The Amusement Inspector was responsible for regulating all forms of public amusements and had complete control over which movies were shown within the Birmingham City limits (Appendix C). The Amusement Inspector was often called by concerned citizens, requesting that she view
certain films and consider banning them from public viewing. Using criteria outlined in the Birmingham City Code (Appendix C), the Amusement Inspector could force theater managers to cease exhibition of any film she deemed 'unsuitable.' Reasons for film closures ranged from onscreen nudity to inappropriate subject matter, such as birth control or unfaithful wives.

"Shortly after Birmingham's first Amusement Inspector was installed in office in 1921, it became clear that there were simply too many movies for one person to view. Needing immediate assistance, the Amusement Inspector formed the Birmingham Better Films Committee, an informal control group designed to provide her with movie reviews and recommendations." [page 2] 

As Mann discusses, this pattern developed in many cities across the country, bringing pressure from many different community groups on the film industry. As Kitchen notes, by 1930 around 100 were attempting to regulate film content. Mrs. Wallace served as Birmingham's Amusement Inspector in 1930. Film censorship ordinances remained on the books in the city until 1961.

I suspect that this Mrs. Wallace was the Neil Robinson Wallace listed in the 1940 U.S. Census as living on 14th Avenue South, aged about 70. She was also listed in the 1910 census as a widow, although her name given there is Neal R. Wallace. Her obituary appeared in the Birmingham News, page 6, on February 8, 1960. You can read more about her here and here. Her birth name was Cornelius Robinson; she was named after her father and called "Neil." She had married John Henderson Wallace in September 1887. One day I'll have to dig out that obituary and confirm the connection. 

A specific example of "Banned in Birmingham" is mentioned in Stephen Vaughn's article "Morality and Entertainment: The Origins of the Motion Picture Production Code" published in Journal of American History 77(1): 39-65, June 1990. On page 40 Vaughn notes, "In 1929 Birmingham, Alabama, banned The Road to Ruin (1928), which dealt with female drinking, abortion, and incest." The BBFC was not doubt involved. Further research in local newspapers should uncover some details of such events. 

I have examined silent films made in the Birmingham area in a series of blog posts beginning here. 

The Road to Ruin was remade in 1934 as a sound film.

Source: Wikipedia 

Skyline Farms: A 1930's Experiment in Alabama

By the mid-1930's the Great Depression had settled deep in America, and the Federal government had various programs underway to alleviate the social and economic devastation. One effort tried to help citizens with farming cooperatives in rural areas. Forty-three of these projects were established by the Federal Emergency Relief Agency, and Skyline Farms in Jackson County was one of them. In fact, as David Campbell's Encyclopedia of Alabama article notes, Skyline was among the largest.   

Skyline was developed on property of some 13,000 acres bought by the Federal government for that purpose. The project in Jackson County was available to whites only; a project at Gee's Bend in Wilcox County opened for African-Americans.

A common area included a school, commissary, warehouse and manager's office. Some 180 individual farms ranged from 40 to 60 acres; families were chosen from local relief rolls. The cost of housing and farm equipment had to be repaid from crop income; mostly potatoes and cotton were grown. Health and veterinary insurance were covered by the federal government

Arts, crafts, dances and music were also important at Skyline. The Skyline Farms Band played at the White House for Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, and were the first traditional music group to play for a president in that setting. Famed musicologist Alan Lomax recorded seven songs by the band in Washington, D.C., in May 1938. Those recordings are now part of the Archive of American Folk Song. 

By the early 1940's Skyline Farms suffered from crop failures; a hosiery mill constructed by the government also failed. Soon the farms were being sold to private owners; just two original families were able to buy their farms. 

A 2013 blog post by Deborah L. Helms discusses efforts to preserve the heritage of Skyline Farms. The article includes recent photographs of the surviving rock school and store and a house as well.

Children and teacher around a blackboard in the early makeshift school at Skyline Farms in February 1937. Photo by Arthur Rothstein, one of many photographers who documented life across American during the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration and other federal agencies. Rothstein took numerous photographs all over the state in the mid-1930's.  

Source: Alabama Dept. of Archives and History Digital Collections 

Skyline Farms Junior High School, probably late 1930's

Source: Alabama Dept. of Archives & History Digital Collections

Technical Sergeant William Davis of the 311th Infantry was a former resident of Skyline Farms. He was killed in action in Germany in February 1945.

Source: Alabama Dept of Archives & History Digital Collections

Below is a letter and its envelope written by Davis from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to his aunt Jodie Sharp at Skyline Farms in October 1942. Other letters to Jodie Sharp can be found at the ADAH Digital Collections.

The photographs below were all taken by Arthur Rothstein at Skyline Farms in September 1935.

Men working in a sand pit

Crops with shadows

Wife of a sharecropper to be resettled at Skyline

Clearing land 

Sawmill at Skyline


In 1937 Rothstein and another photographer, Ben Shahn, took many more pictures at Skyline. Below are two of them, the first by Rothstein and the second by Shahn.

Inside the project store

A square dance in progress

Old Alabama Stuff (10): Pine-Barren Bogs in 1922

The article below written by Roland Harper appeared in 1922. As L.J. Davenport, the author of the Encyclopedia of Alabama article about him notes, "He was one of the last botanists to visit and describe the native vegetation of the Southeast before it was altered drastically by human activity." Harper documented his field trips with extensive notes and more than 7000 photographs. 

He took a circuitous route to Alabama. Born in Maine, he lived with his family there and in Massachusetts while his father worked as a science teacher and school administrator. When Roland apparently came down with tuberculosis, the family moved to Georgia. He graduated from the University of Georgia in 1897 with a degree in engineering.

The family moved back to Massachusetts, and within a couple of years Harper had published his first botanical paper. He enrolled in Columbia University where he studied both botany and geology and received a PhD in 1905. In that same year he began working for the Geological Survey of Alabama and continued there until his 1966 death.

Over the course of his long career Harper published hundreds of items, including books and scientific papers. His major works include The Economic Botany of Alabama published in two parts in 1913 and 1928. Other works include Forests of Alabama [1943] and Preliminary Report on the Weeds of Alabama [1944].

Wikipedia has this to say about pine barrens: 

"Pine barrens, pine plains, sand plains, or pinelands occur throughout the northeastern U.S. from New Jersey to Maine (see Atlantic coastal pine barrens) as well as the Midwest, Canada and northern Eurasia. Pine barrens are plant communities that occur on dry, acidic, infertile soils dominated by grasses, forbs, low shrubs, and small to medium sized pines." 

Harper notes this botanical feature of pine forests in sand, gravel or clay stretching from Delaware into Alabama and Mississippi. These areas support bogs of typically unusual or rare plants. In Alabama Harper says the bogs are scarcer since the soil has more clay.

He describes his visits to a portion of these bogs in Autauga and Chilton counties in 1905 and 1921 respectively. Harper "examined quite a number of them" in Chilton County after noticing a pitcher plant from his train car. His article includes lists of woody plants and herbs including some not previously reported in the area.

The article by Davenport linked above gives more information about Harper's life and career. A book-length biography by Elizabeth Findley Shores is cited below. I am pleased to note that she is a relative!


Torreya was a journal published under that title from 1901 until 1945 by the Torrey Botanical Society named after a professor at Columbia College in the mid-19th century. Harper's article can be found at the Internet Archive here.



Further Reading

Davenport, L. J. and G. Ward Hubbs. "Roland Harper, Alabama Botanist and Social Critic: A Biographical Sketch and Bibliography." Alabama Museum of Natural History Bulletin 17 (May 1995): 25-45

Shores, Elizabeth Findley. On Harper's Trail: Roland McMillan Harper, Pioneering Botanist of the Southern Coastal Plain. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008

Roland Harper

Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama  

Film Actresses from Alabama Before 1960 (3): Dorothy Sebastian

Dorothy Sebastian's film career flamed briefly in the late 1920's and early 1930's and then just as quickly burned out. During that period she did appear in major roles in several high-profile films with other stars of the time.

She was born in Birmingham on April 26, 1903, one of five children of Robert and Stell Sabiston. Robert was a minister and the couple had served as foreign missionaries before settling in Birmingham. Stell was a painter, and Dorothy and her mother operated a small shop selling portraits and needlepoint creations. 

Dorothy eloped with her high school sweetheart, but the marriage ended in 1924. At this point she headed to New York and what she hoped would be a dance and acting career. She played a chorus girl that year on Broadway in George White's Scandals which opened in June and ran for 196 performances. She appeared in that show with her new last name.

Sebastian managed to get a screen test with United Artists and appeared in her first five films in 1925. In 1927 she was the female lead in a Tom Mix western, The Arizona Wildcat. The next year she played along with Joan Crawford and fellow Alabama native John Mack Brown in the drama Our Dancing Daughters. 

Her acting career continued into the early sound era. In 1929 she appeared in Spite Marriage with Buster Keaton, who was her lover at the time. She also had an affair with director Clarence Brown. Interestingly, Brown had operated an auto dealership in Birmingham before World War I.

In the early 1930's Sebastian asked for a raise in her MGM contract, but the studio refused and dropped her from its roster. She appeared in a few more films before she married William Boyd, better known as cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy. That marriage ended in 1936 in a bitter divorce. 

Sebastian continued to appear in a few small roles until her final film appearance in 1948. During World War II she worked in a defense factory where she met her future third husband, businessman Herman Shapiro. She died of cancer in April 1957.

A lengthy biography can be found at the Internet Movie Database along with a complete list of her films. A web site devoted to Sebastian can be found here. 

Unless otherwise noted, images are from the Lantern media history digital library.

Dorothy Sebastian

Source: Wikipedia 

Source: BhamWiki

Picture-Play Magazine 1926

Photoplay 1927

Screenland 1928

Motion Picture Classic 1928

The 1928 silent film Our Dancing Daughters starred two Alabama natives, Sebastian and Johnny Mack Brown, who was a football great at the University of Alabama before heading to Hollywood.

Dorothy Sebastian, Joan Crawford, and Anita Page in a publicity still for OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS (1928):

Source: The Hollywood Revue blog



Birmingham Photos of the Day (43): By Walker Evans in 1936

Walker Evans [1903-1975] was one of the great documentary photographers of the twentieth century. Evans made three brief trips to Alabama during his career, in March and the summer of 1936 and again in 1973. The images he recorded on the 1936 visits are among the most iconic Great Depression photographs taken in the United States. 

His most famous photos were taken in Hale County that summer. In the previous year Evans had been working for the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal program that was part of recovery efforts during the Great Depression. Evans traveled to various places, including the South, documenting agricultural and industrial life and work. 

In summer 1936 writer James Agee accepted an assignment from Fortune magazine to write about sharecroppers in the Deep South. Agee wanted Evans to accompany him, so the photographer took a leave from the federal agency. The two men spent eight weeks in the Alabama summer living primarily with three sharecropping families. The manuscript Agee delivered to Fortune was much longer than the magazine would publish; it eventually became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men published in 1941. Agee's singing prose about the daily lives of these desperately poor but proud people, and Evans' images make reading the book an unforgettable experience.    

Evans' third trip to Alabama came in 1973 when he and artist and photographer William Christenberry, an Alabama native, toured Hale County. Some of the color photographs Evans took on that trip appeared with Christenberry's in a museum exhibition "Of Time and Place" as well as the exhibit's catalog. 

Evans' first trip to the state may have been late in 1935. Some of the photographs below are dated in that year, others in March 1936 and some just 1936. Whatever the exact dates, these images capture indelible scenes from the city's past. 

The three photos below that feature a steel mill seem to capture the Ensley Works. Take a look at the photograph on the BhamWiki site here and see what you think.

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are from the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Birmingham steel workers

A similar shot of steel workers with Coca-Cola sign fully visible

Front entrance of a boarding house in Birmingham

Steel mill with workers' houses in the foreground

Roadside stand in the Birmingham vicinity

Source: ArtsMia 

Miners' houses near Birmingham

Another angle on those miners' houses

Company owned steel workers' houses

That Time America's First Female Detective Helped Solve a Montgomery Crime

Although born in Glasgow, Scotland, Allan Pinkerton came to the United States in 1842. By 1849 he had become the first police detective in Chicago. The following year he and a local attorney founded what became the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The company still exists today, although now as a division of a Swedish security firm. 

The Pinkerton's motto became "We Never Sleep." Pinkerton himself developed several investigative techniques still used around the world, such as shadowing a suspect and undercover work. During the Civil War he spent two years as chief of Union intelligence services; before he died, he had begun work to centralize America's criminal identification records. Today the FBI maintains just such a database. 

In 1856 Pinkerton personally hired Kate Warne as the first female detective in the United States. At first he thought the widow sought clerical work, but she had seen his newspaper ad for a detective. Warne convinced him that a woman could do investigative work in ways a man could not--something she would prove over and over. 

Before her death in 1868 Warne worked alongside Pinkerton and others on various important cases, including a plot to assassinate President-elect Lincoln in Baltimore in 1861 and many others during the Civil War. You can read the details of these activities on her Wikipedia entry and this essay. Some more about her is also available on this blog post. Warne has been the subject of a novel, a children's book published in 2015 and another book for children published early in 2016. She is also a character in The Pinkertons television series.

In 1858 Warne participated in a case with Alabama connections, which is detailed in Pinkerton's 1875 account, The Expressman and the Detective. Money totaling some forty thousand dollars had been disappearing from the Montgomery office of the Adams Express Company, which had a monopoly in the South on the delivery of letters, small packages and valuables. Suspicions naturally fell on Nathan Maroney, the man in charge of that office. 

Maroney seemed an exemplary employee, having come to the city in the early 1850's after service in the Mexican War with a company of Texas Rangers. A native of Rome, Georgia, Maroney was the son of a physician.

Packages of money began disappearing in April 1858. Unable to prove anything, the company requested Maroney's resignation in January 1859. Maroney was then arrested, but made bail and awaited trial in June. At this point Adams Express, fearing they would still be unable to find enough evidence that would convict Maroney, hired the Pinkerton Agency. Allan Pinkerton was happy to have the business from such a large company, and sent a man to Montgomery to begin investigating Maroney and other possible suspects.

Pinkerton himself soon arrived in Montgomery. "On the journey I amused myself reading Martin Chuzzlewit, which I took good care to throw away on the road, as its cuts at slavery made it unpopular in the South. At the various stations planters got aboard, sometimes conveying their slaves from point to point, sometimes travelling with their families to neighboring cities. I did not converse with them, as I was not sure of my ability to refrain from divulging my abolition sentiments." Pinkerton quickly concluded that Maroney was probably quilty and Mrs. Maroney might leave with the money and head north at any moment.

On March 12, Pinkerton's worries came true. Mrs. Maroney and her daughter made their way to Charleston and then by steamer to New York. On April 5 Maroney himself left town for Atlanta, followed by a Pinkerton agent. From there he traveled to Chattanooga and Nashville and on to Memphis. He then boarded the steamer "John Walsh" to New Orleans. After a stop in Natchez, the steamer continued down river where Maroney and the Pinkerton agent checked into a hotel. The next time he was sighted Maroney had changed his appearance significantly. Soon the suspect had boarded another steamer for Mobile and then back to Montgomery. He had apparently satisfied himself that he was not being followed.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Maroney had made her way to Jenkintown, then a small place a dozen miles north of Philadelphia. At this point Pinkerton brought Warne into the case. She was to become Madam Imbert, travelling with a companion, Miss Johnson. Pinkerton's instructions were explicit. "[Y]ou will arrange for a permanent stay in Jenkintown, get acquainted with Mrs. Maroney, and when you get thoroughly familiar with her, make her your confidante, and to show her how implicitly you rely on her friendship, disclose to her that you are the wife of a noted forger, who is serving a term in the penitentiary. As confidence begets confidence, Mrs. Maroney will, most certainly, in time unbosom herself to you." [page 101].

Madam Imbert was first pointed out to Mrs. Maroney by someone who noted "that the tall lady was from the South." In various ways Imbert insinuated herself into Mrs. Maroney's life until she indeed had the confidence of the suspect's wife. Warne was apparently made for this kind of work. "Mrs. Maroney was impatiently awaiting the arrival of Madam Imbert. She did not have to wait long, as the Madam came down immediately after breakfast. Her commanding figure and decided expression made her appear like a general giving orders. She was perfectly calm, while all the rest were so excited that they did not know what to do or say. She controlled the position."[p264]

From that point Warne "controlled the position." She managed to convince Mrs. Maroney to "exchange" the forty thousand dollars which were presumed to include bills marked by the banks before shipping. Warne came up with an elaborate scheme involving another Pinkerton agent posing as a book peddler who would supposedly take the money to be exchanged. The sum of $39,515 was returned to the Adams Express Company.

Maroney was soon arrested in New York and extradited to Montgomery for the trial. He was convicted and sentenced "to pass ten years in the Alabama Penitentiary, at hard labor." [p 278] Mrs. Maroney had gone to Chicago with "Madam Imbert". What happened to her, or Maroney after he completed his sentence, is unknown. 

Kate Warne died of pneumonia on January 28, 1868; Pinkerton was at the bedside. Many thought she had been Pinkerton's mistress; she often posed as his wife as they worked undercover. She is buried as "Kate Warn" in the Pinkerton family plot in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. Two newspaper items about her that appeared in March 1868 can be found below.

Do yourself a favor and read Pinkerton's The Expressman and the Detective. It's a rip-roaring story.

Also see W. Cassell Stewart's article "The Pinkerton-Maroney Investigation". Alabama Review 1982 July; 35(3): 163-172


UPDATE December 12, 2017: Greer Macallister's 2017 novel The Girl in Disguise is about Warne.

UPDATE March 30, 2022: A recent article on Warne by Kellie B. Gormly can be found here.

Allan Pinkerton [1819-1884]

Source: Wikipedia

Source: Wikipedia

Full text published in 1875 can be found at Project Gutenberg 

"As he stood outside of the counter, I was enabled to call off all the packages on the way-bill, but dropped the four containing the forty thousand dollars under the counter."—Page 237.

"The peddler lifted his satchel into the buggy; the Madam hurriedly emptied it of its contents, and holding it open, jammed the bundle of money into it, and handed it back to the peddler."—Page 268.

Kate Warne, as Madam Imbert, is depicted on the right, giving another Pinkerton agent posing as book peddler a satchel with the money.

This long obituary appeared in at least a few newspapers in March 1868. The article reviews several of Warne's exploits as a Pinkerton detective. You can read the entire item from an Ohio newspaper here. The piece was reprinted from the Chicago Republican. 

This editorial appeared in in a West Virginia newspaper on March 18, 1868. The item seems to evaluate Warne's work with some admiration and a good bit of horror. Warne's death is noted in passing near the end. 

Source: Amazon