He wanted to make a patriotic movie. He was prosecuted for it — and then disappeared.

Boston Globe

2 days ago

At the defense table, looking so nervous he might shake apart, was the defendant, Robert Goldstein, 34, the American-born son of a Jewish immigrant from Germany. He was 5-foot-3⅜-inches tall and 140 pounds, with a high forehead, gray-blue eyes, and a clean-shaven, pleasant face, if not an especially handsome one. He spoke too softly in court and radiated fear, like an injured bird.
Goldstein had one production to his credit,
The Spirit of '76,
a lavishly-produced film about the American Revolution. He had finished the 12-reel extravaganza in the spring of 1917, around the time the United States entered World War I. Running over two hours, the film was a fictional love story entwined with historical events, many set in Massachusetts, such as the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and a galloping Paul Revere. The action of the silent movie, with violent battle and massacre scenes, was synchronized in the theater with a live orchestra.
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All I ever wanted to do was make a patriotic movie,
Goldstein pleaded to anyone who would listen.
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It seemed an incredible twist, Goldstein thought, that he stood accused of betraying his country by producing a film about its origin — a film hostile to Britain, the government insisted, America's ally in the Great War.
The prosecutor in Goldstein's case rose for closing remarks.
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'Gentlemen of the jury,' he began. 'When you go to the jury room the first thing you want to do is to put a label on this defendant. Which class does he come in? Is he a traitor or is he a patriot?'
Being called traitor was so uncanny to Goldstein that he experienced a sense of dissociation, as if he were merely part of the audience at this sensational trial, rather than the main character, facing up to 20 years in prison.
With the United States at war, the government said, there were only two classes in America. 'Traitors or patriots,' the prosecutor repeated, and then, indicating Goldstein, 'Which is he?'
I
have been chasing Robert Goldstein and the largely forgotten story of his prosecution for five years, after learning about him while writing a book about espionage and propaganda in World War I.
As a journalist, my professional life, my very identity, rests on the First Amendment and free expression. The Goldstein saga speaks to me as a warning shouted through time, a tragic harbinger from America's past about the damage done to individuals and to the nation when the White House perverts justice to silence its critics and punish those who don't fall into line. We'll never know what art was not made, what opinions not voiced, because of Goldstein's high-profile prosecution.
There is another reason I have chased Robert Goldstein.
He disappeared in the 1930s, vanishing from history as if plucked from the face of the earth.
For years, history sleuths thought he probably died in the Holocaust, an American Jew who, after his legal troubles ended, sought refuge in Berlin.
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I needed to know for certain what happened to Goldstein, this unwitting martyr for the cause of free speech, unjustly prosecuted for making art. Returning him to the historical record was the only bit of redress I could offer.
So I became, in a word, obsessed. I began to accumulate a file, which eventually grew to hundreds of pages in length, filled with court records, declassified FBI files, old newspapers, census records, and materials from microfilm archives. I followed others who had pulled these threads before me; compelling new evidence continued to emerge, as paperwork long lost in the files of bureaucracy was digitized and made searchable.
For years, the file grew. Then, in June, I received the clue that changed everything.
G
oldstein's early life emerges readily from records and his own writings. The Goldsteins of San Francisco were an immigrant success story.
Robert Goldstein's father, Simon, came from Germany as part of the wave of European Jews who resettled in the United States in the latter half of the 19th century. Goldstein's mother, Margaret, from Lowell, was the American-born daughter of Irish immigrants. She gave birth to Robert in San Francisco in 1883.
Simon was a serial entrepreneur best known for his theatrical costume shop. When producers of plays or films needed to dress a brood of pirates or some Roman centurions, they called Goldstein. The business allowed him to befriend many of the biggest stars of his time, including Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, brother of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, and director D.W. Griffith, whose 1915 film
The Birth of a Nation,
a glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, became the first ever blockbuster movie and inspired the terror group's rebirth.
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Being around famous actors, Goldstein developed an insatiable appetite for performance. From his earliest memories, according to a letter he wrote, he spent several nights a week in San Francisco theaters with his mother, seeing all the new plays. He would later spend a year in Europe as a theater apprentice, painting scenery and making costumes.
As a young man, Goldstein wrote plays nobody read and musical compositions nobody played. Those things did not satisfy his creative itch, nor his ambitions.
When he was 25, he discovered moving pictures. In these first primitive silent flicks Goldstein saw, actors performed the story while a mechanical organ played the
William Tell Overture.
Film moved him like no stage play ever had.
'There was dramatic suspense,' Goldstein wrote later in a letter, 'a charming mystery about this miracle which the stage or printed page lacked.'
He saw every new movie that came out. In 1911, a patriotic film,
The Battle Hymn of the Republic,
thrilled him 'to the roots of his hair,' he wrote. Throughout the audience, tears streamed down faces. Goldstein was astonished that fleeting images on a screen could raise so much emotion.
His life's wish was set: to make a movie.
T
he brief glimpses of a young Goldstein that appear in the public record paint him as an eccentric and vulnerable personality — soft-spoken, averse to confrontation, and easily steamrolled.
Goldstein married in 1908, when he was 24. His 20-year-old bride, Adele, went by Della. In the coming years of their tempestuous union, Della pursued divorce, only to change her mind. They never had children. She left Goldstein often, apparently for affairs with other men.
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Adultery was still scandalous enough in 1912 that the Goldsteins' marriage problems were splashed across the front page of
The San Francisco Call.
Under the headline 'MATES ARE MISSED,' the wife of a prominent architect publicly accused her husband of running off with Della Goldstein. In the story, Robert confirmed that his wife had vanished with a cart full of their household effects, leaving him with nothing 'but an aching heart.'
They reconciled, but that was not the end of it. Four years later, Goldstein took out a humiliating classified ad in
The Los Angeles Evening Express:
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: YOU will please take notice that my wife, Adele J. Goldstein, having abandoned me and having left my bed and board, I will not be responsible for any debts or obligations incurred by her or any articles or property furnished to her. ROBERT H. GOLDSTEIN.
A 1917 advertisement for The Spirit of '76.
wikimedia commons
Once again, the marriage survived. By then, they had moved to Los Angeles, where Goldstein ran a thriving branch of the family costume business. He had provided costumes for
Birth of a Nation,
and the stock shares Goldstein owned in the movie paid a substantial profit. Birth earned an estimated $10 million in its first run, an astonishing amount at the time. Its total earnings are far higher, though opinions differ on how high.
Birth'
s original title was
The Clansman,
like the 1905 novel by white supremacist Thomas Dixon Jr. on which the movie was based. In the film, robed Klansmen on horseback are portrayed as heroically defending the South from rampaging Black men after the Civil War.
Regarded today as perhaps Hollywood's most racist production ever, the film sparked nationwide protests in its time, including in Boston, where
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There is no evidence that Goldstein was morally conflicted by his connection to
Birth.
While his writing is not racially disparaging, there are also no passages expressing regret or concern. By all appearances, he considered his involvement with the film to be a smart investment.
A few months after
Birth
debuted, Goldstein struck a partnership in a movie venture with a former newspaper publisher, George Hutchin, and several others. Given the massive profit the director, D.W. Griffith, had made with Birth, a Civil War-era picture, Goldstein suggested they make a movie about the real birth of the nation, the American Revolution. It would be a flag-waving appeal to patriotism, with what was then an enormous budget of $250,000, the equivalent of nearly $7 million today.
Goldstein hired professional actors, including Howard Gaye, who played Robert E. Lee in
Birth,
and Jane Novak, whose movie career would extend into the 1950s.
Like roughly 90 percent of movies from its era,
The Spirit of '76
is considered a lost film — no known copies exist. Goldstein wrote the script, a synopsis of which survives. He also summarized the story in a letter written a decade later.
The film, shot mostly in and around Los Angeles, weaved events of the American Revolution with a convoluted love story. The short version of the plot — stay with me here — is that the secret, half-Native American wife of British King George III is exiled to the colonies with a plan to take over the Iroquois tribes, put down the Colonial rebellion, and become queen of America, while in the meantime she falls in love with a man who she doesn't realize is her own brother.
Goldstein learned much from
Birth of a Nation,
which pioneered new techniques of cinematography. He also concluded that the controversy around the film had been good for its bottom line.
Goldstein could not always make the film's payroll, despite backfilling cash shortfalls from his own pocket. Creditors sued. Goldstein's associates tried to fire him.
Still, the production was lavish: For one scene, Goldstein needed snow to film George Washington at Valley Forge — snow in California. Every morning during the winter of 1916-17, a film assistant called a lodge on Mount Lowe — a 5,606-foot peak in the San Gabriel Mountains — to ask if there was snow. A thousand extras who would play Washington's army stayed ready to rush to the mountains within hours. When snow finally fell, a convoy of trucks and train cars whisked the men to the mountain to film the scene before it melted.
For another scene, he researched a minor but brutal event of the revolution. In 1778, British loyalists and their Iroquois allies attacked the village of Cherry Valley in central New York, slaughtering about 30 civilians. Goldstein filmed scenes of fictionalized atrocities based on the raid.
Others involved in the film cautioned Goldstein that the violent scenes went too far.
Nonsense,
Goldstein thought. The atrocities, he said, would give the movie 'punch.'
W
orld War I had split the major powers in Europe: Britain, France, and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary. When the war began in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson had declared that the United States would remain neutral.
In early 1917, as Goldstein tackled his final edits, world-changing events cascaded one upon another.
Germany announced on January 31 that it would unleash 'unrestricted submarine warfare' on shipping to prevent supplies from landing in Britain. That put US ships and passengers in jeopardy. President Wilson severed diplomatic relations with Germany. Then on March 1, 1917, the infamous Zimmermann Telegram became public. The secret diplomatic cable, decoded by the British, revealed that Germany was trying to provoke hostilities between the United States and Mexico.
Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, bringing the United States into the conflict.
Goldstein's movie about the nation's founding was about to debut in a very different America.
G
oldstein chose Chicago's Orchestra Hall to debut
The Spirit of '76
in May 1917, with a 40-piece live orchestra. An advertising campaign hyped 'The Greatest Motion Picture Ever Produced,' and boasted of a $500,000 production budget, exaggerating the cost by double.
The planned premiere quickly snagged. Chicago police Major Metellus Funkhouser, the city's 'censor of public morals,' refused to issue a permit to show
Spirit.
In his judgment, some of the scenes would be offensive to the British, who were America's ally in WWI. Funkhouser considered it his duty to block anything that might undermine American support for the war.
The atrocity scenes from the Cherry Valley massacre were too much for Funkhouser. These included the bayoneting of a baby, the murder of an unarmed Quaker, and the suggestive carrying off of a young woman by a soldier. There's no evidence those exact things happened at Cherry Valley, though what did happen was no better: Women and children were hacked to death or had their skulls caved in.
A battle scene filmed by Goldstein for "The Spirit of '76."
rom Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
After a lawsuit and two weeks of wrangling, Goldstein relented. He made substantial cuts in the movie — almost certainly the most violent scenes — and received his permit.
When
Spirit
finally opened,
The Chicago Tribune
published a warm review. The audience responded with 'frantic applause' to Paul Revere's ride, the Battle of Lexington, and Valley Forge. Cuts made to the film, the Tribune reported, had rendered the production 'highly innocuous.'
By the fall, Goldstein was in California to relaunch the movie at a prestigious location, Clune's Auditorium in Los Angeles, where
Birth of a Nation
had been shown to huge crowds in 1915.
Officers of the US attorney's office demanded a preview showing, to check for violations of the Espionage Act. The federal law, which had passed months earlier in June, made it illegal to even 'attempt to cause' insubordination or disloyalty in the US military. The Wilson administration stretched the law to police criticism of its war efforts.
Goldstein reluctantly screened the film for the officials. Whether the version they previewed contained the atrocity scenes would soon be in dispute.
The feds, it turned out, had been interested in Goldstein for months: In May 1917, a British diplomat in Chicago had passed along some intelligence to the US Bureau of Investigation, what is now called the FBI. The intel included that Goldstein was 'a German Jew' who was 'rabidly pro-German.' Antisemitism in the United States was at a peak in the early 20th century; Jews in Goldstein's time were routinely caricatured as conniving and openly blackballed from many elite social clubs, company boards, and schools.
The diplomat also alleged, wrongly, that
The Spirit of '76
had been financed by German interests, and speculated that the whole film project may have been a propaganda vehicle of the German Empire. This information went to the highest levels of government, by secret memo to the chief of the Bureau of Investigation.
For
Spirit'
s public California premiere on November 27, a Tuesday, the theater was decked out with huge replicas of early American flags. Ushers were dressed in Colonial costumes. The movie was scheduled for two shows daily.
The audience for
Spirit'
s California debut was about 1,500. Clune's Auditorium could seat nearly twice that, but Goldstein was pleased with the interest. The reviews published the next day were generally good. Tickets sold well. On Thursday, which was Thanksgiving, Goldstein eavesdropped among the matinee crowd after the showing and heard nothing but praise for his film. The evening show that night, Goldstein learned from the box office, was a sellout.
Robert Goldstein on the set in King George's court during filming.
from Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Delighted, he walked to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner convinced that
Spirit
was a hit, and he was destined for a career making movies.
At last! At last! Success!
he thought, as he wrote in a letter 10 years later.
He returned to the theater 15 minutes before the evening showing was to start. The place was dark. The audience was still outside. Federal agents were in the theater with a warrant, impounding all 12 reels of
The Spirit of '76
under the Espionage Act.
A
federal grand jury indicted Goldstein five days later. He was charged with attempting 'to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty' in the military with his movie. How? By arousing antagonism between Americans and Brits.
The government's entire case came to this: Goldstein made the British look like bad guys in a movie about the American Revolution.
To win a conviction, prosecutors did not have to prove the movie actually caused insubordination or disloyalty, only that it was Goldstein's intention. It was not just a speech crime, but a thought crime.
Goldstein's case was unique because he was charged for making a film, but across the nation the Wilson administration wielded the Espionage Act like a club, smashing criticism and dissent. In the following months, the pacifist socialist and labor leader Eugene Debs would be charged for making an antiwar speech in an Ohio park. Ultimately, the US government prosecuted more than 2,000 people for speech during the war.
Fear radiated from these criminal cases, permeating the country. The government encouraged people to report their neighbors for making disloyal comments. The Department of Justice threatened to revoke the citizenship of naturalized Americans who engaged in 'seditious speech.' German language books were burned. Playing music by German composers was discouraged or prohibited. South Dakota banned the speaking of German in public.
The uncounted victims of the administration's crusade against its critics were those whose speech was chilled — those who got the message that it was safer to shut up than speak out.
In Goldstein's case, the government accused him of adding several scenes depicting British war atrocities after members of law enforcement had previewed the film. Goldstein was mystified. He would give conflicting accounts of whether the scenes were added before or after the screening, but, either way, Goldstein considered the scenes merely atmospheric. 'They gave only a fleeting impression, to increase the suspense and excitement of this part of the picture,' he later wrote. 'Every picture has hundreds of such scenes in battle sequences.'
A photo from The Los Angeles Times on June 21, 1918, showing Goldstein leaving county jail on his way to federal prison.
From the Los Angeles Times
He spent the night in county lockup, with his chest so tight from nerves he thought he might suffocate.
The government conducted its prosecution of Goldstein backward: First it indicted him, then it sent out investigators to find evidence to make the charges stick.
The FBI interviewed dozens of people in and around the film, according to declassified files. They found nothing criminal, but plenty that could hurt Goldstein in an emotional jury trial.
A former stock salesman for the movie revealed that Goldstein had remarked that the British barbarity scenes would be good for ticket sales. Investigators were told that Goldstein's company had placed an ad for stock in the film in a German-language magazine. And the FBI learned that Goldstein had opposed the US entry into the war and had written to his congressman urging him to vote against it.
Goldstein went to trial in Los Angeles in April 1918, before Judge Benjamin Franklin Bledsoe, a passionate supporter of the war.
Throughout the trial, the press hammered Goldstein with innuendo.
The Los Angeles Times
published on its front page a photo of a storage shed Goldstein had used in his production. A canvas sign on the shed had once read 'SPIRIT of 76,' but after damage from 'a curious freak of the wind,' the sign read 'SPI 76,' playing into the antisemitic trope of the disloyal Jew. Goldstein was so humiliated by the suggestion he was a German spy that he could barely face his fellow prisoners in lockup.
Blockbuster testimony came from Goldstein's old business partner Hutchin, who said Goldstein told him early in their efforts that Franz Bopp, a disgraced former German diplomat in San Francisco, would help finance the movie. There was no evidence Bopp actually invested in
Spirit.
Prosecutors called Goldstein's father to the stand, asking him biographical questions about his son. It appears they merely wanted the jury to hear Simon Goldstein's strong German accent.
Goldstein's lawyers entered passages from history books into the record, arguing that the basic thrust of the movie was true.
A courtroom was turned into a cinema so the jury could see the picture. Goldstein's defense bitterly argued that the session be moved to a real theater so the film could be seen as intended, with an orchestra. 'There is not the proper spirit or atmosphere,' one of the lawyers complained.
A clip from the front page of The Los Angeles Times on April 3, 1918, mocking Goldstein during his trial.
From the Los Angeles Times
Judge Bledsoe overruled the objection (he also brought his wife to court to see the movie).
Testifying in his own defense, in a hurried whisper, Goldstein said no customer in LA ever complained about the scenes the government considered unpatriotic.
The prosecutor was unsparing in his arguments. He called Goldstein a 'beast' and 'a vile thing.'
He reminded the jury that while Jesus Christ was a Jew like Goldstein, so was Judas.
G
oldstein waited 'in a fever' while jurors decided his fate. They deliberated for one hour in the afternoon, broke for dinner until 8 p.m., and then returned their verdict at 8:30.
Guilty.
Goldstein choked up as if he could not breathe. He sobbed uncontrollably.
Two weeks later the moviemaker stood again before Bledsoe, for his sentencing. Goldstein 'shook like an aspen,' one reporter noted.
'The defendant is lucky,' Bledsoe said, 'that he is not in some countries where such conduct as he has been guilty of would have met with the supreme penalty.'
He sentenced Goldstein to 10 years in prison.
Goldstein got his first view of McNeil Island from the motorboat transporting him to the federal penitentiary in Puget Sound, Washington, where he would serve his sentence. It was 'desolate and depressing,' he later wrote. He had to learn how to use a shovel on work details.
Lift with the legs,
not the arms. 'Some natures can stand the bleak monotony of prison life,' he wrote, 'others waste like the sparrow in a cage.' Goldstein was a sparrow.
While Goldstein was incarcerated, lawsuits from his creditors piled up. His wife finally divorced him. A Pasadena man named Jesse Goldstein made headlines when he filed in court to change his name, so people would stop asking if he was related to the seditious filmmaker.
Others convicted under the Espionage Act received similarly severe sentences.
S
even months into Goldstein's sentence, in November 1918, Americans poured into the streets to celebrate victory in the Great War.
The celebration was short-lived, though: The US economy was in a recession, and the public mood quickly soured.
In February 1919, a friendly newspaper editor suggested to President Wilson that the nation would be uplifted if the president offered amnesty 'for all those persons who have been convicted for expressions of opinion.' Wilson wouldn't go that far, but he shortened many of the long sentences imposed for speech.
Goldstein's term was commuted to three years. He earned seven days off his sentence each month for good behavior, and was discharged from custody in October 1920.
Prison seemed to have broken something in Goldstein. Not only had he lost 40 pounds, his writings of the time reveal deep paranoia. Everyone was secretly against him: his own lawyers, his family, even his dentist. He was convinced that strangers everywhere were laughing at him, plotting, and trying to drive him mad.
'He must escape them somehow,' Goldstein wrote about himself. 'But if they followed him everywhere he went, how was this possible?'
In the years after the war, a sort of national reckoning over the speech prosecutions played out, beginning at the Supreme Court. Boston-born Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, after voting in 1919 to uphold Debs's conviction, seemed to change his mind later that year. Writing in dissent in another case, Holmes laid out the concept of the public square as the marketplace of ideas, which shaped future speech rulings. The next year, free speech advocates formed the American Civil Liberties Union. And, the Supreme Court affirmatively extended First Amendment protections to films in 1952.
G
oldstein was just 37 when released, yet his film career was effectively over. He recut
The Spirit of '76
and showed it for three weeks in New York in 1921. The press savaged the picture with bad reviews.
He moved to Europe, chasing job opportunities in film that did not pan out, and eventually settled in Berlin with his aunt.
In 1927, he became engaged to a 25-year-old woman named Erna Prange. She had dark eyes and light, wavy hair, cut fashionably short. Goldstein, then 43, was tortured by fantasies that his neighbors were conspiring to corrupt Erna, trying to seduce her and get her addicted to cocaine.
'I began to watch her,' he was quoted as saying in a 1928 celebrity news story about the end of their relationship, 'But she always eluded me and those in the plot helped her.'
Goldstein believed the plotters were whisking his fiancée through underground tunnels for her to perform in secret strip clubs. His neighbors went to these lengths, according to Goldstein's tangled thinking, to punish him for being imprisoned over a movie.
Twice, Goldstein failed to show up on the date of his own wedding. On the third try, he made it to the ceremony, but when the minister asked, 'Will thou take this woman?' Goldstein shouted: 'No!'
The spurned bride nearly fainted in embarrassment. The relationship ended.
Erna came to believe that Goldstein suffered from 'persecution mania,' she was quoted as saying, 'possibly as a result of his prison experiences in America.'
The American movie star Mary Nolan, who made films in Germany in the 1920s, befriended Goldstein in Berlin. She told reporters that her friend Robert Goldstein had tragically begun to confuse movie plots with his real life.
A
nd then Goldstein disappeared.
He was soon forgotten, even by those closest to him; when Goldstein's only sibling, Louis, died in 1950, his obituary made no mention of Robert.
In 1991,
'I feel sorry for him because it's sad,' Slide, now 80, recently told me. 'It's something the American government caused, not only his professional downfall but his mental and emotional downfall.'
When Slide wrote his book, there was no known record of Goldstein after a letter he sent from Berlin in 1935, two years after Hitler rose to power. Slide surmised that Goldstein was killed by the Nazis.
Subsequent to the publication of Slide's book, another letter from Goldstein to the academy turned up, dated 1938, sent not from Berlin but New York City. The letter is in the academy's collections at the Margaret Herrick Library, in Beverly Hills.
Keith Negley for the Boston Globe
In this note, Goldstein suggests that Germany deported him in 1935. A ship manifest from that era confirmed that he had sailed from Hamburg to New York that August.
His letter begged the academy for a job.
'It may be merely superstition on my part but perhaps the whole [industry] might have more luck if they did something decent by me,' he wrote, 20 years after his conviction.
Goldstein applied for Social Security benefits in New York in 1940, digitized records show.
From there his path grew hazy.
The 1950 US Census, made public in 2022, lists someone named Robert Goldstein as a resident of Willard State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in New York. The name is not that unusual and the records were not conclusive — though they were interesting.
Online records of The Hebrew Free Burial Association, a New York charity that arranges respectful funerals for impoverished Jews, were equally interesting.
The organization recorded the burial of a Robert Goldstein in 1957. This man died at age 74 as a patient at Harlem Valley State Hospital, a former psychiatric facility on a campus of gloomy redbrick buildings in Dover, New York, where lobotomies were performed. The facility closed in 1994.
The Hebrew Free Burial Association is still around.
I wrote to them in June.
T
he document from the Burial Association appeared in my inbox less than two hours later. It was a one-page burial application, dated November 1957.
Name of deceased:
Robert Goldstein.
Occupation:
Theatrical costumes.
That was when I knew. After years of searching, this was the right man. I jumped screaming from my chair, and then had to explain myself to co-workers in the
Globe
newsroom.
The document also correctly named Goldstein's parents as Simon and Margaret.
The proof is irrefutable.
This dogged maker of a lavish movie spectacle about America, who profited from bigotry and was wrecked by antisemitism, died in ruin, madness, and quiet anonymity in a mental institution, after his government put him in prison for speech it did not like.
Robert Goldstein, filmmaker, is buried in Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island, beneath a donated stone.
Mark Arsenault is the author of
and an investigative reporter at The Boston Globe. Send comments to [e-mail].
Mark Arsenault can be reached at