Thou Shalt Not

When I saw today’s news that Louisiana has become the first state to mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms, I thought it sounded a lot like the 1950s campaign to put the Ten Commandments in classrooms that I chronicled in One Nation Under God.

But I didn’t realize until I read this post that Louisiana is literally using that exact campaign as its model.

Which is hilarious because that model was developed as a promotional campaign for the Cecil B. DeMille blockbuster film, The Ten Commandments.

No, really. That’s Charlton Heston on the left there, at one of the many dedications.

Here’s the story:

Cecil B. DeMille believed he could best serve the conservative religious revival of the postwar era with his considerable talents as a filmmaker.  In August 1952, he announced that his next film would be an epic production of The Ten Commandments.  The director had already produced a film on the topic three decades earlier, but wanted to tackle it again.  “I feel that this subject is particularly timely today,” he announced to the press.  “There is a spiritual resurgence throughout the world.  I want to do my part in furthering this spiritual mobilization both in countries where the state has not tried to replace God and in countries where it apparently has.”  (Reporters did not ask into which category the director believed his own country lay.)  In later interviews, DeMille often described the story in tones strikingly similar to those in his speech for Fifield. “The great clash between two beliefs is dramatized,” the director explained to the Los Angeles Times.  “Rameses II represents the ruler governing only by his own whims and caprices, whereas Moses brought to the people a rule of life which was eternal and right because it came from the Supreme Being.”  “It is the story of human freedom,” he told the Washington Post, “whether men are to be ruled by law or by the whims of dictators, whether they are to be free souls under God or whether they belong to the state.”

In promoting the film, DeMille and his crew presented The Ten Commandments as a true story grounded in the hard facts of history and the holy truths of the Bible.  A year before its premiere, the film’s screenwriter Aeneas MacKenzie vouched for its accuracy in a lengthy piece for the New York Times.  He recalled how DeMille made his “team of scenarists” aware of the solemnity of their duty.  “There is no place for the usual fiction in a picture that deals with the interpretations and circumstances from which not one – but three! – of the world’s great religions have sprung,” the director had instructed.  “You may dramatize the scenes in any way you wish, but whatever episodes you employ must be justified to me in terms of recognized authorities.  You are to invent nothing out of your own talented imaginations. “ (At this, MacKenzie remembered, DeMille had added a flourish from the pharaoh: “So let it be written, gentlemen!  So let it be done!”)  The director, however, had issued an impossible demand, for there simply was no record for much of Moses’ life.  The biblical account introduced Moses as a baby along the Nile and then returned to him three decades later, with no mention of his life in between.  For a film that claimed simply to reveal God’s words, much of its script would have to be written by man.

To preserve the illusion of historical accuracy, DeMille instructed his head of research Henry Noerdlinger to find the documentation that would be needed to fend off religious and academic critics.  Noerdlinger cast his net broadly, drawing on ancient rabbinical texts, early Christian narratives and the Koran.  Most of these accounts had been composed centuries after the Book of Exodus, leading the researcher to refer to them cautiously as “traditions” rather than “histories.”  But he used them all the same, filling in the missing decades of Moses’ life with a story quite literally made for Hollywood.  In his telling, the Hebrew prophet who defiantly challenged the pharaoh had grown up with him as a fellow prince of Egypt.  This was a version of events that had eluded biblical scholars in three major faiths for millennia, but DeMille’s team insisted it was true, or true enough.  They pointed, as proof, not to the quality of Noerdlinger’s work, but the quantity, noting repeatedly that he had consulted some 1,644 sources in his research.  Such claims helped keep critics of the film at bay.  But more important, they gave DeMille the necessary cover to advance his own subjective narrative as objective fact.

DeMille went to great lengths to ensure that the audience saw the film as he did.  A ten-minute trailer for the blockbuster, for instance, showed the director in an elegantly furnished room that overflowed with original works and reproductions of classical art, leather-bound Bibles, reference books, and assorted historical documents. With the care of a curator, DeMille examined the evidence and instructed moviegoers on its meaning.  “All this happened 3,000 years ago,” he said, “but we’re still fighting the same battle that Moses fought.  Are men to be ruled by God’s laws?  Or are they to be ruled by the whims of a dictator, like Rameses II?  Are men property of the state?  Or are they free souls under God?”  Shortly before its premiere, the director filmed a special introduction to be shown before the film.  In it, DeMille parted a gold and white curtain, strode towards the audience and informed them they were about to witness “the story of the birth of freedom.”  He then repeated, virtually verbatim, his lines from the trailer about the film’s depiction of the timeless struggle between tyranny under the state and freedom “under God.”  If moviegoers still missed the connection to present-day politics, the official program distributed at screenings spelled it out plainly.  On its final page, the noted painter Arnold Friberg depicted Moses, his arms outstretched, with the Liberty Bell ringing behind him.  Across the top of the page ran the same passage from Leviticus used earlier by Spiritual Mobilization: “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, Unto All the Inhabitants Thereof.”  “These,” the program explained, “are the last words spoken by Moses in the motion picture as a mandate of liberty to the people.”

When the film premiered in November 1956, audiences were awestruck.  DeMille had spared no expense, with his budget ultimately ballooning to an astronomical $15 million.  The cast of 25,000 included everyone from Hollywood stars to Bedouin tribesmen, with all their actions captured in a stunning new widescreen format known as VistaVision.  Appropriately for a film of such scale, The Ten Commandments opened at the celebrated Criterion Theatre on Broadway.  As stars left their cars, they posed for photos as crowds of screaming New Yorkers pressed against police barricades on the sidewalks.  Only the Camel Cigarettes billboard seemed unimpressed by the spectacle, coolly blowing smoke rings a block away.  The film played to sellout crowds at the Criterion for the next year.  The three-hour-and-thirty-nine-minute running time meant that the theater could only show it twice a day, except on Saturdays and holidays when it ran three times.  And yet, the film was still seen at that single theater by more than 1,300,000 patrons for a box office gross of $2,500,000.  Across America, it sold nearly 22,000,000 tickets in its first year of release. Even today, it still ranks as the fifth highest-grossing film of all time, with receipts measured in constant dollars.

Yet The Ten Commandments’ most lasting legacy was its marketing campaign.  As he prepared for the debut, DeMille worked with the Fraternal Order of Eagles on an ambitious plan to “present plaques of the Ten Commandments on state capitol grounds, on courthouse lawns, public parks and other strategic places so that as many people as possible might view the laws of God.”  The organization had been distributing copies of the Ten Commandments for years, inspired by an incident in which Judge E.J. Ruegemer of St. Cloud, Minnesota, learned that a juvenile defendant in his courtroom had never heard of the laws and “sentenced” the boy to learn and obey them.  Ruegemer, the head of the Eagles’ Youth Guidance Commission, persuaded the fraternal order to take up the cause.  Members and their families volunteered to make reproductions of the Ten Commandments, initially manufacturing them as paper scrolls in St. Paul and framing them with hand-cut wood and glass.  The nearly 900,000 members of the organization popularized the venture, distributing scrolls far and wide.  Recipients included city halls in small towns from Washington state to Pennsylvania, judges in Idaho and Massachusetts, and a police detective in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

When he learned of the Eagles’ campaign, DeMille immediately wanted to join in.  A consummate showman, the director urged the Eagles to work on a grander scale. Instead of modest scrolls, he suggested the organization craft larger stone monuments that more closely resembled the tablets of Exodus.  In the interests of accuracy, DeMille even sent Ruegemer a sample of the granite he had carved from Mount Sinai during his personal pilgrimage to the holy site. Sharing the filmmaker’s eye for detail, the judge reported back that the Eagles had decided to build their monoliths “from Wisconsin red granite, believing it to more closely resemble the Mount Sinai granite than our Minnesota reds.”  In the spring and summer of 1955, the fraternal organization began dedicating these new stone monuments at sites like the lawn of the county courthouse in Evansville, Indiana.  Soon after, DeMille and the Eagles joined forces.  The Eagles wanted “to offer to Paramount Pictures our cooperation in publicizing and urging membership and families to see the forthcoming Ten Commandment film.”  In return, DeMille promised to use the full influence of his publicity department, including personal appearances by stars of the film, to promote the Eagles’ work.

Together, DeMille and the Eagles established Ten Commandments monuments across America.  In 1955, for instance, the organization dedicated one as the cornerstone for an addition to Milwaukee’s City Hall.  “It is unique,” Judge Ruegemer announced, for “this is the first time in the history of our country that the Ten Commandments in the form of a monolith will appear as part of a public building.”  He credited the idea to DeMille, who wanted “to see the Eagles present plaques of the Ten Commandments on state capitol grounds, on courthouse lawns, public parks and other strategic places so that as many people as possible might view the laws of God.”  To underscore the director’s importance in the process, both Donald Hayne, DeMille’s executive assistant, and Yul Brynner, who played Rameses II in the film, also addressed the Milwaukee crowd.  “The need for the Ten Commandments is even greater today that it was 3,000 years ago in Moses’ time,” Brynner insisted.  “They are the cornerstone on which our freedom rests.”

Charlton Heston, who starred as Moses, appeared at another monument’s dedication in June 1956.  Under a broiling sun, a crowd of five thousand gathered to witness the installation of a monolith at the International Peace Garden located on the American-Canadian border in North Dakota.  The stone symbolized, in the words of DeMille’s public relations men, “the principle of freedom under God on which the governments of the two countries are based.”  Following performances by the North Dakota Governor’s Band and a Scottish bagpipe group from Manitoba, Heston and Ruegemer unveiled the Eagles’ gift.  Carved from red granite, the monument bore not only the words of the Decalogue but also images of the American and Canadian flags. “The Commandments monolith,” a studio release claimed, “not only serves as a reminder to visitors of God’s law and their need to live by it, but of the concepts on which the laws of these nations are based – Freedom, democracy, justice, honor under God.”  (The concept of “freedom under God” was familiar to Heston.  As a “devoted member” of Fifield’s First Congregational Church, the actor had delivered some of Moses’ dialogue from the film to worshippers in its sanctuary.)  After the Peace Garden ceremonies, Heston signed autographs, took part in a family-style chicken dinner, and warmly accepted a lifetime membership in the local Eagles chapter.  The biggest news of the day nearly happened on the flight home, when technical problems on his small, chartered plane forced Heston to help the pilot make a dramatic emergency landing.

Although generally welcomed, the Eagles’ campaign was not without its critics.  Originally, the organization prided itself on the support its activities received from Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy alike.  But as the campaign began to focus on placing monuments in prominent public locations, cracks appeared in this coalition.  In July 1957, a Minneapolis rabbi who had long supported the Eagles’ efforts wrote Ruegemer to say that his support had its limits.  He praised the “highest motives” of the organization and said he still supported the placement of monuments on “private premises.”  But the rabbi believed “efforts to place these plaques in institutions and places, state sponsored, represents a serious threat to and departure from the classic American principle of separation of church and state.”  The American Jewish Congress felt the same way, he noted pointedly.  Individual chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, raised similar objections.  In June 1957, its Ohio branch sent a polite letter of protest to the mayor of Youngstown about a proposed monument there.  “The Eagles’ gesture is generous and public-spirited,” the letter read, but placement of such a religious icon on public land would “conflict with the healthy American tradition of separation of church and state.”  While such complaints would, decades later, place these Ten Commandments monuments at the center of landmark legal struggles, at the time they were easily dismissed.  The Eagles proceeded with their work, ultimately establishing nearly 4,000 monuments across America.

So when you hear the governor of Louisiana insisting that this effort is somehow reviving a tradition that was “a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” remember that’s a considerable stretch.

They’re reviving a tradition that was crafted in Hollywood.