The Child—The Movie—and Censorship — VIEWS ARE WELL-KNOWN — SANER METHODS BY COOPERATION — EDUCATION AND SELECTION — THE MOVIES, CENSORSHIP AND CRIME — CHILDREN ELEVATED, INSPIRED — CENSORSHIP DOES NOT IMPROVE — MOVIES BATTLE AGAINST WAR — OVERCOME EVIL WITH GOOD — FATHERS FOUGHT FOR FREEDOM — GOOD AND EVIL ARE RELATIVE — NATIONAL HOBBY TO ATTACK — BUILD SELF RELIANT YOUTH — IMPROVEMENT RAPID — PUBLIC OPINION RULES — COOPERATION AND ENCOURAGEMENT — REAL EDUCATION AND RELIGION — RESPONSIBLE PEOPLE NEEDED — PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY — TRUST TO ALL THE PEOPLE — ALREADY REGULATED — LAWS ARE SUFFICIENT — HUMAN THOUGHT NOT TO BE TAMPERED WITH — USING ONE’S OWN STRENGTH — PREPARE YOUTH FOR THE PATH
By JUDGE BEN B. LINDSEY
Ladies and Gentlemen:
As stated in your program, “This is an open conference with
a free platform—all are welcome.”
I trust that I may be of some service. Even though we differ
in methods, our purposes are the same. We want clean, wholesome
motion pictures and we want to protect the youth of this country
against any evil in this popular form of entertainment, as well as to
secure for them the best that is to be had in this new, marvelous
method of human expression. And whatever may be our differences,
I wish to express my own appreciation of the value of an association
like this in bringing about a free and open discussion that may help
to disclose to us real remedies against the evils that we all oppose.
I have friends here in this conference with whom I differ as to
methods to that end, but I have the highest respect for the sincerity
of their purposes, as I believe they will have for mine. For my views
on the subject of governmental censorship are well known. They
have been formulated after nearly twenty-seven years of experience
in a Juvenile Court that came into existence under our Colorado law
of 1899—the same year as that of the Juvenile Court of your own
great city of Chicago, which, next to Denver, I count as home, because
here reside some of my dearest friends.
When it was suggested that, having engagements in and about
Chicago, under the auspices of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, having
its main offices here, I might be of service in presenting my views on
censorship at this meeting, I said I would prefer to do so under the
auspices of some disinterested group. As a result of this preference,
you have heard read the request of Mrs. Virginia Palmer, Chairman
of the Motion Picture Division of our Colorado State Parent-Teacher
Association, requesting that I be heard here.
However, I wish to assure you that this is not by way of any
apology whatever in presenting these views under any auspices, interested
or disinterested. There can be no crime in any event for
a man to do that when his sincere views are as well known as mine
are and as, in recent years, they have been expressed literally hundreds
of times.
In nearly every public lecture I have given on childhood
and crime during recent years, I have stated over and over
again my opposition to governmental censorship of the
movies as a remedy for evil.
In our recent book, THE REVOLT OF MODERN YOUTH, we
took a firm stand against Censorship, and within a few days, it will
be exactly five years ago that, in the City of Detroit, I delivered an
address dealing with censorship and crime in the movies. That address
was very widely circulated. Part of it was printed and thousands
of copies were distributed. And so, when I left Denver with
the request of Mrs. Virginia Palmer, the State Chairman of Motion
Pictures of our State Parent-Teacher Association, that I take part in
this conference, I redictated an old address of five years ago and
brought it with me. To this I have added some more extended observations
in confirmation of the conclusions there expressed after
much thought, much study and much experience.
This all compels me to favor what I consider the saner,
more constructive censorship by cooperation between social
agencies, the public, the producers and exhibitors as against
what I believe to be the more questionable and dangerous
power of governmental censorship.
Mrs. Palmer, the Chairman of the Motion Picture Department
of our State Parent-Teacher Association, supplied me for this meeting
with considerable literature of that organization in support of
their stand for the former kind of censorship as against the latter.
The Parent-Teacher Association of Colorado is a part of that great
national organization of the best motherhood and womanhood of this
country. In recent years, they conducted a series of discussions and
debates on the entire subject of so-called “censorship” or state regulation
of motion pictures. This involved an investigation of what
is being done in this regard in all other cities and states. It resulted
in the adoption at their State Convention at Colorado Springs in May
1921, of the following resolutions:
WHEREAS, The picture loving public should be given an
opportunity to act as their own censors, and
WHEREAS, Pictures cannot be adapted to the mentality
of the lowest type of person and potential criminals are much
in the minority, and therefore, may not be considered as representing
the patronage of the Motion Picture Theatre, and
WHEREAS, All lasting reforms are derived from within,
BE IT RESOLVED: That it be the continued policy of
the Mothers Congress and Parent-Teacher Associations to
work for the Better Film movement through cooperation,
selection and for public education.
This organization has never found any reason to change their
opinion thus expressed. At their recent state convention, they again
reaffirmed it. A most successful constructive work, formulated at
their state conventions, has been carried on in behalf of better pictures.
They oppose censorship with their motto: “Education and
Selection.” In addition to this definite plan, there is a constant propaganda
carried on among its various units for the type of picture that
they think deserves encouragement. Their efforts to create a public
demand for better pictures and to support the producers and exhibitors
in their efforts to furnish them, has been so superior to any
city or state censorship boards that any demand for any such remedy
in Colorado has become extinct. No one would think of giving it the
slightest encouragement in face of the big, constructive work of the
Parent-Teacher organization of our state.
I am glad to avail myself, not only of the privilege afforded
through the request referred to, that I take part in this program, but
also to give some of my own views, after more than a quarter of a
century in the Juvenile Court, on the whole subject of the problem
of good and evil as it relates to motion pictures.
I do not agree with those who claim that crime among youth is
so largely due to what is shown in motion pictures. Of course, some
of the weak-minded and the vicious have doubtless been stimulated
to crime by something good or bad that they have seen in the movies.
This may also be said of what they have read in the Bible, the newspapers,
magazines and all kinds of literature, or through the misuse
of automobiles, dancing or music. But we must always keep in mind
that far more good than evil has come out of all these things.
Good and evil is a matter of relativity. It is comparative.
If motion pictures are to reflect from nature the face of
virtue, they must also show the image of vice. To make
virtue lovable and vice despisable, we must know what they
are. We all admit there are decent and indecent, acceptable
and unacceptable methods by which this ought to be done.
Yet, it must be done or there can be no lessons from life; there
can be no strengthening of character. By no system of wet-nursism,
can you solve the problem of crime by hiding bad
things or the truth about them, or by depriving children of
the right, under proper conditions, to see, to hear and to know
what they are.
They may be worse off if shielded from knowledge of evil or
spared any contact with it. They will be better and stronger if wisely
familiarized with evil in order to know how to avoid it—or, facing
it, to conquer it. “Vice is a monster of such frightful mien, that to
be hated needs but to be seen.” And I would rather take a chance for
youth through their seeing vice too often than in not seeing it enough
if they are to learn to hate it and so triumph over it.
We are losing sight in this country of some fundamental things
about the whole problem of good and evil. As a result, when some
of our reforms and crusades are won, we may be worse off than when
we started. If our remedies do not fail altogether, they produce
worse evils. The “kick” that some people get out of reforming often
blinds them to the facts about good and evil and how to overcome
evil. A man on a jag is always blind to the things about him.
Now, I am here to say, after talking it over with Court officers,
who have worked with me for years, that we have yet to find one
case of crime among youth that could fairly be traced just to the
movies. I do not recall more than two or three cases in my experience
of over a quarter of a century on the bench, where there was even
reasonable ground to believe that the cause of crime was due just to
what the offender had seen in the movies.
But I do know of thousands of children who have been elevated,
inspired and made happier because of the movies;
who have been kept off the streets, out of the alleys, the
vulgar story-telling of the barnyards and a multitude of idle,
evil associations, by the wholesome appeals and opportunities
of the movies.
I also know that other agencies—against which no censorship,
local or national, has ever been proposed—have done far more toward
producing crime than the movies. If we did not have any motion
pictures at all, we would have far more crime than we have. Nothing
in the last fifty years of the most eventful history of all time,
has done more to reduce sin and crime and add to the happiness,
education and progress of the human race than motion pictures. And
it is going to do more and more in this regard in the years to come.
I am satisfied that most of the cases of crime which good people
trace to the movies are generally caused by misunderstanding or
misuse of perfectly proper stories as well as bad stories thrown on
the screen. This is shown by the fact that there is certainly no more
and probably less crime, especially among youth, in cities, where
there is no local or state censorship.
I defy anyone to show that one city or state with censorship is
any better in this regard than other cities or states like our own,
where there is no censorship, and where such organizations as our
Parent-Teacher Associations are firmly against it.
They show us a messy lot of contradictions and silly absurdities
in mussing up films, aggravating, useless annoyances, and frequently
petty politics and tyranny as the result of their differences of opinion
about what is good and what is bad, but they cannot show that they
are any better or that they have accomplished anything provably
worth while, that could not have been as well, or better done without
these, to me, ridiculous hobbles.
Anything they have done has been far better done in cities like
Denver, through cooperation of civic agencies with the producers and
exhibitors themselves. Any good that has ever come out of city or
state censorship is sure to be overbalanced by just as much evil and
just as much nonsense as any that has been prevented—if any has
been really prevented.
The movies are going to do more than any other agency to prevent
the greatest of all crimes, horrid war. Through motion pictures,
all nations, people, races and creeds, all speaking the same language,
of the movies, are being brought into concord, acquaintanceship and
understanding. And when they know and understand each other,
they will love and cease to hate each other and war shall be no more.
It is a real League of Nations in binding them together through seeing
that they are all just the same as each other—that there are no
bad people and no good people when properly understood, but there are
bad things and good things as they reflect through the bodies or behavior
and conduct of people, depending on causes, which as yet we
know little about, and that the great lesson of Life is to learn how to
wisely fight evil more and people less.
Mankind has conquered all the reptiles and the wild beasts that
threatened his mastery of this planet. Why? Because, primarily,
he could see them, because they were known to him. But he hasn’t
conquered all disease—that remains to threaten his dominion. Why?
Because it is mostly the unseen beasts—the bugs, parasites and
germs just now beginning to be seen. As with evil and disease, the
movies will do more than all else besides to make them real—to make
them known.
IT IS THUS THE GREATEST EDUCATOR THE WORLD HAS
EVER HAD—THE VISUAL EDUCATOR.
And when all things are seen and known to man, he becomes
forever the undisputed sovereign of the world. Through visual education
the average child of twelve is in the future to know more in
academic education than the present college graduate. Largely
through the movies, among the future great inventors of the world,
we shall behold children from ten to twenty-one years of age.
How, O Master, shall we overcome evil—is still the eternal question
of a war-ridden, hate-ridden, fearful world. Instead of any
longer listening, it is growing listless to the eternal answer—“Overcome
evil with good.” He never said to overcome it through governmental
suppression and the hate-breeding violence of forcible censorships.
That was the answer of Pontius Pilate. And Pontius Pilate
was the first great censor and Jesus Christ the first great victim of
censorship. On behalf of this nation’s childhood, whose destinies are
to be injured by such false remedies, I appeal from the gospel of
Pilate to the gospel of Christ.
But what shall we do, you may ask, to guard that destiny which
we all equally have at heart? It is not an easy thing always to know
just how to overcome evil with good. It is much easier for some
parents, teachers, unwise, if not ungracious pastors, to leave the job
to a board of censors or some new-fangled statute law with its abuses,
blackmails, grafts, persecutions, stupidities and tyrannies. Are we to
be a nation of dodgers, of weazened shirkers, putting responsibility on
laws, laws and more laws, bureaus, bureaucrats, censors and regulators
until we are glutted, choked and suffocated with laws to let any
George do it, but the right George?
Are we to become a nation of “squealers,” passing the buck from
parents, homes, schools and churches for their responsibility for
Youth, to some perfectly human-to-err censors who may be wise and
good but likely to be mostly foolish, if, as in the case of some of our
prohibition regulators, they are not crooks and grafters, to flounder
in their own helplessness because they do not know what is good or
what is evil or how to fight it.
Consider the fact that even now a picture that one governmental
censor board says is good, another in some other state, condemns as
bad. And consider the rank injustice of city or state censorship
authorities passing a “bad” picture as “good” in one such city or state,
and this same perfectly “good” picture as “bad” in another, as these
different censorship boards often do.
Only gradually and painfully, through science mostly, now more
and more handmaiden of real education and real religion, shall we
know how to overcome evil. It is always with good. It is too big a
problem for me to give all my views on here. In our “Revolt of Modern
Youth” I took an entire book to tell more about it as I see it. But
I do not believe Christ was wrong nor that the people of this Republic
are wrong, who since its foundation in the wisdom of our Fathers, have
fought for just such liberties as governmental censorship will deny us.
Now, I think a great deal of good could be done in the fight
against evil if our parents and Sunday-school teachers would question
youth more as to their motives for righteous conduct, and with more
time and patience set them right as to their real meaning. You ask
them why they do right and they will generally tell you that it is
“to keep out of jail,” or “the cop’ll get me,” or “I’d get a licking” or
“I’ll go to hell.”
Thus, from perfectly well-intentioned teaching, what we are putting
mostly in their lives is misunderstanding. That is, we are trying
to get virtue mostly by artificial restraints—the same kind of restraints
that are now being proposed through forcible censorship and regulation.
These fears no longer serve as restraints and we are very much
at fault in doing so little to substitute natural restraints as these
artificial ones are passing.
Fundamentally, it is our overstrain in the demand for these artificial
restraints upon human conduct—restraints that come from
without—that is making most of the crime in this country. And their
over-emphasis to the neglect of natural restraints is due far more to
ignorance in churches and schools than the motion pictures. There is
such a thing as going too far in our insatiate demand for these artificial
restraints. It is a greater crime against youth, fostered mostly
by well-meaning church people who are ignorant about youth. They
are causing us to forget all about the more important restraints, or to
indulge in a lazy indifference regarding them because of our mistaken
faith in restraints so largely artificial.
As against these, what we need most in the lives of youth
are the natural restraints. They come from within. They
enable children and people, in the face of every evil and temptation,
without being afraid to know about it, to see it or to
hear about it, to be so fortified from within against it that
they will stand up to meet it and conquer it. In other words,
to have the strength of character to do right because it is
right—not through the fear of punishment or the hope of
rewards—but through true education and religion.
These artificial restraints, so long thus over-emphasized in schools
and churches, and beheld on every hand in demands for more suppressions,
regulations, prohibitions, punishments, coercions and censorships,
are failing. And it is our insistent refusal to substitute more
of the natural restraints in homes, schools and churches, that is the
great cause of crime in this country. You do not cure evil by more
censorships and prohibitions, don’ts, verbotens and taboos. You are
just adding fuel to the flame you are setting up in this country. The
restraints of hell-fire and damnation are gone. They do not frighten
any more. Those of policemen, prisons and fears of punishments are
going just as fast. The thing that makes most people good in this
country is not any of these things. The thing that will make the bad
ones good is more of the thing that has made the good ones good—the
natural restraints.
I said good and evil are relative. You cannot helpfully know one
without the other. They should, of course, appear in proper perspective.
Their relationship for moral uplift should be clear. I insist that
the great majority of the movies do thus emphasize them in their true
light. Vice is ever shown as the enemy and destroyer of human happiness;
virtue as the only true course to secure the real joys of life;
that achieves the only victories worth while.
In the movies, righteousness wins; sin loses. The hero triumphs.
The villain bites the dust.
Not only decency but the pocketbook guarantees these general
averages, and that general average is the best we can hope for in anything.
Nothing is perfect and censorship will not make it so. You
cannot legislate right understanding into the human mind. By the
more and more decent methods of showing life, as I believe to be more
and more the rule in the movies, they furnish a great outlet, not only
to the natural, wholesome craving for excitement and adventure, but
for a necessary and legitimate amount of sex expression which otherwise,
from sheer suppression, is far more harmful and more likely to
result in sin and crime.
Some of the gossamer fabric of unreality, as in fantasies, dreams
and fairy tales, is just as necessary in the movies as are the realities
of life, to minister to the complexes and, as governors, to release the
strange suppressions of nature. There is always to be expected the
decent licenses of poetry and the exaggerations of fiction.
It has become a national hobby of ours, in the absence of much
good sense, to indulge in these thrilling and adventurous battles
against evil until we are becoming so ridiculous that only a modern
Cervantes, with another Don Quixote, can bring us to our senses.
Each time, in each onslaught, we have some one thing for the “goat.”
Then we all assemble for the chase. For many of us, it is great fun.
For others, it is a grievous concern. At one time it is the legalized
liquor traffic; at another, it is the cigarette or the automobile, the
racy literature, the dance or jazz music. Each time it is this or that
one thing that is causing all the sin. I do not know what it is going
to be when the kids begin spooning in the clouds in the aerial autos
of tomorrow. Neither the censors, nor the parents, nor the laws can
follow them there. At the present time the “goat” is the movies.
We have the admission of the advocates of censorship that evil
among youth may come from other agencies besides movies. Some
of these agencies are automobiles, music (jazz or grand opera), department
store windows, newspapers, books, magazines, ordinary pictures,
etc. Now their logic must be that the youth of this nation are lost
beyond redemption unless we apply their censorship for evil in the
movies, to evil in all these other agencies. Unless this is their purpose,
of what shall it avail us to get evil out of the movies by censorship—unless,
by the same methods, we extract it from all other agencies
of usefulness or happiness?
On the other hand, if our youth are not to be lost because of our
failure to apply censorship to automobiles and other agencies, then
why apply it to the movies? In the case of the movies, as in the
case of all these other agencies for both good and evil, why should
we not depend on existing laws against crime, and in addition, what
is far more important, why should we not trust to the good old institutions
of parents, homes, real education, real religion and the development
of scientific truth to fortify youth against evil, by equipping
them with strength in their own souls to conquer it. I tell you that
it cannot be done in any other way.
Our vision in this matter of censorship must not be limited to
the mere entertainment of motion pictures furnished by the present
motion picture industry. It must go far beyond that. For, in addition
to censoring all forms and agencies of pleasure now contemplated,
the amazing power demanded by the censorship advocates includes the
power to also censor every teaching of science (evolution and otherwise),
economics, patriotism, religion and government. As one after
the other shall fall to the fetters of censorship, we shall get further
and further away from real remedies for evil, only to become more
and more enslaved to the forces of reaction of fanaticism, ignorance,
superstition, despotism and tyranny. All this crusading for such false
remedies is making us more and more the laughing stock of the world.
If we yield to the demands of its well-meaning, but mistaken zealots,
we shall nurse up a generation of human jelly fish, of weaklings,
dependents, morons and criminals instead of a nation of sturdy, self-reliant
boys and girls.
No one deplores more than I do the commercialization of certain
phases of what we call the sex appeal or improper crime stories in the
movies. No one deplores more than I do some of the stupid, inartistic,
vulgar, uncultural, silly things in the movies. They are there as in
books and newspapers. If censorship were a practical remedy for
anything, we might better have it against bad taste, bad manners and
some of the stupid, boresome movies that can do no harm to anyone
except waste their time, and because of their very insipid stupidity,
would meet with approval of any board of censors. It is all to be
naturally expected in an industry or artistry so new. More patience,
time and education are needed to correct them. No one is more anxious
than I am to see them corrected. But it would be highly unjust
not to, at the same time, keep in mind all that is right with the movies.
In their short life of scarcely a quarter of a century, they
have done more to correct these follies and mistakes than literature
and newspapers have done in a century.
When I deal with naughty children, I always find more good than
evil in them, though their accusers seldom admit it. I get more out of
them by praising them for the good they do than by condemning them
for the evil they do. In this way do I succeed best. By working with
them and not against them. (Let us then, with this equally human
thing, see all the wonderful improvement that has been made in recent
years, not only artistically, from the standpoint of the producer, but
also from that of the growing demand of the public for clean shows,
and the splendid work of the producers in furnishing them.)
And even when crime and vice are presented, when it must be
done, more and more is it being done within the bounds of decency
and with due regard to well-established rules that most every one
knows and accepts. Few minds differ upon what is really obscenity
and indecency. Nothing is being more frowned upon today than the
stories written for a mere pornographic, sensual appeal, without any
good purpose intended or accomplished. For all of such cases, we have
the laws against obscenity and indecency which are not near as much
used or enforced as they might be and could be.
And we ever have the appeal to public opinion. I believe it is in
the end safe and sane in this country. And then there is being held
out to us by the producers themselves the open door invitation to join
hands with them to give the public the thing that it wants most and
that is, clean, decent, wholesome pictures. The children are being provided
with special films and opportunities to see them.
Cooperation between public and producer and exhibitor is
being successfully accepted as one of the best methods of carrying
on propaganda in this country for better, bigger and
cleaner pictures.
And, as a result, we are getting more and more of them all the
time. From every standpoint in theme, story, purpose, photography,
artistry, amazing progress has been made in the last few years. We
have never had so many marvelous, unobjectionable pictures as now
before the public. One of the very latest of these, “The Big Parade,”
is here. You have seen “The Ten Commandments.” “Ben Hur” is
being shown. Hundreds of others could be mentioned. I hold here a
list of several hundred such, selected by Mrs. Virginia Palmer, State
Chairman of the Motion Picture Department of our Colorado Parent-Teacher
Association.
The work of Mr. Hays and his associates in courting cooperation
and in receiving it from so many worthy sources deserves encouragement
instead of criticism. It has been a great success. Any fair
investigation of what the producers are doing under his able management
will disclose an amazing improvement in the short time for its
accomplishment. Let’s work with them and not against them as the
very best way to bigger and better things in the movies.
Especially is this course important when the best minds of this
country—like Professor Ross, who has just addressed you—have
warned us against the dangers of abuses sure and certain to come
under governmental censorship, and who, for many reasons, almost
without exception, firmly oppose it. We have overwhelming proof
that the people of this country do not want any more of such governmental
regulation and that they are opposed to such dangerous
powers being vested in any set of bureaucrats. This is confirmed by
the recent vote in Massachusetts that in their referendum to the people
buried the demand for motion picture censorship with a tidal
wave of “noes.” It was certainly loud enough to be heard all over
this country. The vote was 553,173 against censorship to 208,252 for
it—a majority of 344,991 against.
I am not questioning the sincerity or good motives of anyone. I
simply question their understanding. How people can make the statements
that are being made in some quarters, that the movies are
getting worse instead of better, I cannot understand. I do not believe
it. If they are, then it is a terrible indictment of our schools and
churches, far more than of the movies. It is proof that they are failing.
For if this thing be true, that, without the kind of governmental
censorship and regulation that is being proposed in some quarters, the
movies are to get worse and worse, then the churches and schools
had better close their doors, for the claim is equivalent to a confession
that they are failures. I do not believe they are failures. I believe in
real religion and in real education. I think their power and influence
are on the up-grade in this country. It is from their wise application
that we must look most for our remedies in the fight against evil.
The great duty to childhood today is that of parenthood and its handmaidens,
the school and the church—real education and real religion.
We must have in this country people responsible for these agencies,
who will acquaint themselves with what evil is and equip themselves
with the wisdom to teach children how to fight it, how to overcome
it; that they shall come to know that the child’s greatest safeguard
against evil is not censorship—the policeman with the club to
direct what he shall say, hear or do—the city, state or national wet-nursism
from the day he is born until he becomes an adult man or
woman.
Rather do I appeal for the simpler and saner expedient of
parental responsibility in companionship, spiritual training,
education, ideals and confidences that will educate that child
as to what evil is, to know where it lurks, and what he must
do to avoid it; that will teach him to hate it and despise it.
In this work, we need the cooperation of this great, new institution,
the movies. It can be done best by thus seeking the cooperation
of those who have the economic control of this new power, this new
means of education, the greatest that has ever appeared in any civilization.
I believe it can be done, and in a very large measure, it is being
done, with glowing opportunities and prospects for greater accomplishment
in the future than in the recent past. It is this sort of
remedy that I heartily advocate rather than any censorship or regulation
through city, state or national boards composed of people who
are to be given arbitrary, tyrannical and dangerous powers over the
development of the human mind. Such a remedy, I believe, will never
be accepted by the American people. If it ever is, it will be the saddest
day in the history of human progress since the bigotries and
tyrannies of the Middle Ages. It would mean that the issues of the
Scopes case in Tennessee would be as nothing compared to this new
power of a few people to tell the balance of America what they shall
see, hear or know, or what they shall be taught, to direct the human
mind which alone can retard or advance the progress of the world.
For let it be remembered that moving pictures, as a medium of
expression in influencing the human mind, as yet, are in their infancy.
They will be greater than the printing press, and whoever controls
this power will do most to control the future of the human race.
I would rather trust it to all the people than to a few people,
especially when that few are backed, as is proposed, in
their censorship regulations, by the powers of force and violence
to impose their will upon all the others.
Once having put in the hands of a few individuals, whether puritans
or politicians, of good or evil purpose, the power to say what
books shall be screened, what stories shall be pictured, what scientific
knowledge or achievement shall be presented, what reform espoused
by capital or labor, class or church, group or party, and, what shall
not, it will demand the same right as to the newspapers, books and
other forms of human expression, possibly the platform itself, until
all liberty and all freedom shall be lost unless such madness, as I
believe it to be, should, if ever successful, be met by revolt and revolution.
The progress of art, science and literature in this country depends
upon an unfettered, original creative imagination. There can be no
progress or creative work anywhere with the hobble of censorship on
these things at the helm. Freedom of thinkers, scientists, and artists
does not mean degeneracy. It means justice, truth, progress, happiness,
health and beauty. The chains of censorship mean irritation,
reaction, bigotry, vice, immorality, gloom, degeneracy and death. Of
course there are dangers in everything—good and evil in everything—all
dependent on its use and understanding. But I would a thousand
times rather take my chances on too much freedom than too much
of these artificial restraints.
There is, of course, some regulation of certain phases of the
moving picture industry that is defensible. But it seems to me very
unjust to compare the demand for censorship power to the same kind
of governmental regulations of industrial affairs which have to do
with business competition between individuals or corporations, or
with the distribution of foodstuffs as to deleterious substances, on
which no two minds can well differ after science has given its verdict.
Reasonable regulations as to business competition, labor, shipment
of films, protection from fire, ventilation, seating, spacing and
lighting of halls may well apply to the movies. But as a more justly
analogous case, who would say even as to foodstuffs or drugs, about
which we hear so much, that a board of bodily appetite censors should
have a right to say whether a city’s diet should not include pork chops,
if a person preferred them to mutton chops, simply because of the
views or tastes of the censors, or because great religious teachers have
censored the hog and approved the lamb; or that tea and coffee
should be censored because other teachers say the taste of too much
of it is worse than a moderate use of booze. The so-called badness
of most pictures may be due far more to that which is bad in the
taste of the censors than that which is really bad in the pictures.
And while I am not here discussing prohibition, yet as one of
its original champions, I would be false to the truth if I did not, at
least in discussing this new kind of prohibition of the thoughts of the
human mind, refer to all the evils that have followed our efforts thus
to curb by law the appetite of bodies. But even the case of the movies
is different. Booze was believed to be poison for the body and the
remedy was supposed to be complete outlawry. Well, at least we are
not prepared to say what the final result is going to be, even though
there may be justification there where none is here. What is poison
for the body is much easier of ascertainment than what is poison for
the mind. Acknowledged poisons of the mind are all met by laws
against obscenity with their penalties and punishments. They are
accepted as fair and just to everybody.
But human thought, which is back of all human progress
and of all change in the customs, morals, habits, traditions
and affairs of mankind, is an entirely different matter. It is
in no way justly comparable to any other form of arbitrary,
forcible censorship regulations that any state has ever undertaken.
It seems to me that this is so true that unprejudiced
minds cannot justly question it.
In the regulation of human thought, as presented through instruction
or entertainment in the motion pictures, books or newspapers,
we have an entirely different problem. It is too dangerous to
tamper with in any governmental, regulative, arbitrary way. To
attempt it is to court the greater evils of bigotry and fanaticism, of
racial, religious and class prejudices, of hatreds and tyrannies.
I would a thousand times rather see civilization subjected to all
the dangers which may lurk in an entirely, unregulated and uncensored
press, or of books, plays or motion pictures, than to risk the far
greater evils of arbitrary, forcible, governmental censorship regulation.
There are no committees of people on earth who have any
such super wisdom or right to exercise any such power, no
matter how commendable its purpose may be.
No, my friends, those who propose such remedies are honest but
mistaken. I wish they could all be convinced. I know their purposes
are good. I wish they would join the multitude of constructive
fathers, mothers, preachers, teachers, business men and citizens,
through the work of the home, school, church and press, enlisting, as
I believe we can, the cooperation and help of those who produce and
distribute the movies themselves, to get bigger, better and cleaner
pictures.
Decorating the walls of this room, we have held up to us a picture
of the crusader, St. George, in pursuit of the Dragon. It is an interesting
poster. I have seen it held up to children and parents in
Sunday-schools and churches. It has for us a great lesson. But I
sometimes wonder if it is understood. In this picture, St. George is
clad in armor.
It is the symbol of HIS OWN STRENGTH and power to meet and
slay the dragon—the evil he encounters.
Thus, down the path of life you have him started. He goes alone.
He is protected by no governmental wet-nursism. No censors have
preceded him to chase the dragons from his path. Now, just imagine
the censors doing that, be they a certain type of dear, old ladies who
never will be satisfied that anything is good if it pictures vice or crime,
or well-meaning Puritans with worse complexes, or crafty politicians
with itching palms, snooping into every crack and cranny for the
smell of dragons (evil) to shoo them off the path before young
George may proceed upon his way.
I hear them saying, “Come on, Georgie, dear boy; the path is
clear; we censors have done your work; we have seen to it that not
even a suspicious tabby cat can cross your path. You have no fight
to make; we will spare you even the sight of a dragon (evil) on the
road.”
Is that what you are going to do to Young America? Change the
noble knighthood of conflict and struggle to the milksophood of apron
strings? Yet such is governmental censorship. Against it, I protest.
Against it, modern youth revolts. I beseech you in their name, that
you avoid a step so fatal and so false.
I know you do not want to make mollycoddles of this younger
generation because a few morons or even alert, but vicious-minded,
persons, have become criminals from something good or bad they
have seen in the movies. I do not want to see methods adopted in
mistaken purpose of fighting evil whose effect is only to make insipid,
dependent, hot-house plants of modern youth.
I want to see a self-reliant Young America. I want to see
it grow to sturdy manhood, like the oak that faces and fights
the storm and fights best where the foe is known best and encountered
most.
This is the only right way to successfully equip the youth of
America with moral, physical and mental efficiency. Then, and only
then, as modern St. Georges, thus armored, they can be trusted
THEMSELVES to meet the dragons of evil that cross the path of life.
For down that path they have to go. You cannot prepare the path
for them. You cannot clear it of the dragons. Forcible governmental
censorship can’t do it and ought not to do it.
It’s our job to prepare youth for the path, the big job
parents, teachers and preachers are neglecting in their mistaken
effort too much to prepare the path for them. I do
beseech you to direct your efforts more to preparing youth for
the path and less to preparing the path for youth. Then,
with perfect faith, you can trust him to go down that path,
and though it be strewn with dragon’s teeth, he will emerge
triumphant, the glorious youth that he is—Young America,
the noblest, bravest, wisest, most loyal, generous and just
that the world has ever seen—his own best censor.
