Censoring the Past

I was watching the 1934 movie GENTLEMEN ARE BORN on TCM the other day, and came to a scene where one of the young women, who had been working in a library, was called on the carpet by her stern old boss. It seems she had heard a report that the young lady was no longer living with her female roommate; and so WHERE might she be living now? The library must not have scandal attached to it, after all.

The young woman pleaded that she needed this job, because…she had just gotten married the other day.

Why didn’t you tell me this? demanded the boss lady. Then of course you cannot continue to work for us. You know the policy.

Terrible, right? A young woman, one of our main sympathetic characters, thrown out of her job because she had gotten married! And then the boss lady said this:

“You have been depriving some other girl with no outside means of support from obtaining a position here.”

Huh.

There was a reason for this policy…and the reason, whatever we may think of its effect on our heroine, was…to take care of society’s less fortunate, according to the economic and social circumstances of the time.

It was an interesting moment. That’s why I went back and played it again, and noted the exact words that I reproduce here. It’s not terribly deep, but it stopped me for a moment, and made me think a bit. It made me sympathize with the cross old termagant with her hair in a bun: she knew what was right, and it was right in her eyes because it was one of the few measures they could take to spread scarce jobs around in a world where people were going hungry for lacking them. The past is a different country, as someone famous has said.

Another allegedly famous person (at least he has a blue checkmark in Twitter) is John Levenstein, and he also said something just Wednesday, as the nation is in a frenzy of statue destruction:

“Now that we’re talking, there are casually racist +sexist +homophobic moments in classic movies that don’t need to be classics anymore.”

I suppose the moment I just described is one of the ones Mr. Levenstein would like to get rid of.

Of course, making people think is the last thing the modern SJW wants to do.