2020 Essays

Anita Maris Boggs

Serna, Laura Isabel

Anita Maris Boggs was the co-founder of the Bureau of Commercial Economics, a Washington D.C.-based distributor of industrial and educational films that was founded in 1913 and dissolved sometime in the 1930s. Despite its official sounding name, the Bureau was not a government agency. Rather, it was a charitable institution supported by sponsors, donors, and the modest fees it charged for the shipping of film prints. International in scope, the organization described itself as “an association of the governments, institutions, manufacturers, producers and transportation lines of America and other countries,” whose goal was “to engage in disseminating geographical, commercial, industrial, and vocational information by the graphic method of motography” (Bureau of Commercial Economics 2). Its films, distributed via a network of university extension services and other partners, were screened free of charge to audiences in universities, high schools, convention halls, community centers, prisons, and even on screens set up outdoors. In 1920, the Bureau claimed to be reaching two million viewers a month.