The right—by reason of patent, not constitutionality—even to make a film in the first place was in the hands of but a dozen men. And those dozen, by reason of commercial imperatives, made themselves subject to the veto of one man, Joseph Breen. We cannot claim to understand the life of free speech in America without understanding how that happened. * Despite such rhetoric, Breen’s biographer insists that by the 1940s Breen was a committed and vocal opponent of anti-Semitism. CHAPTER
