“We Want to Be Neutral”: The Right-Wing Extremist Politics of 1930s Detroit Police Movie Censorship .

This article examines the relationship between policing, film censorship, and right-wing extremist politics through a case study of the Detroit Police Department Censor Bureau’s censorship of leftist cinema during the 1930s. This period saw the police Censor Bureau repeatedly target films suspected of harboring sympathy for communist ideology as well as films openly critical of Hitler and fascism. I place this history within the context of the rise of nativist and fascist movements in southeast Michigan as a whole, and within the Detroit Police Department in particular, during the years leading up to the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]