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Title: Judge Ben B. Lindsey on the child—the movie—and censorship
Author: Ben B. Lindsey
Release date: July 30, 2026 [eBook #79231]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Motion Picture Producers & Distributers of America, Inc., 1926
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79231
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JUDGE BEN B. LINDSEY ON THE CHILD—THE MOVIE—AND CENSORSHIP ***
Judge Ben B. Lindsey
ON
The Child--The Movie--and
Censorship
“I defy anyone to show that one city or state with
censorship is any better than other cities or states
like our own where there is no censorship.”
* * * * *
“The movie is a real League of Nations, binding the
world together through seeing that they are all just
the same as each other.”
* * * * *
“Pontius Pilate was the first great censor.”
* * * * *
“I believe in real religion and real education.”
[Illustration]
Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America, Inc.
WILL H. HAYS, Pres. 469 Fifth Avenue
New York City
Judge Ben B. Lindsey
_Judge of the Juvenile and Family Court of Denver, Colorado._
Judge Lindsey is one of the best known of Americans. He is an authority
on child welfare and juvenile treatment--a writer of note on the
subject, a lecturer, a man whose opinions are sought.
In January, 1899, he was appointed public guardian and administrator
of the County Court of Denver, that under the first Colorado Juvenile
law of April 12th, 1899, became the Juvenile Court. The following year
he was appointed, and ten times since has been elected Judge of that
Court, in which he is now serving his twenty-sixth year. In Who’s Who
for 1925 he is listed as the “promoter of the juvenile court system and
originator of some of its features and has international reputation as
an authority upon juvenile delinquency.”
Judge Lindsey is author of the Colorado Juvenile Court laws and with
his collaborator (Wainwright Evans) the recent much discussed book “The
Revolt of Modern Youth.” In this book Judge Lindsey takes a firm stand
against censorship.
The following address was delivered by Judge Lindsey at the Fourth
National Motion Picture Conference in Chicago, Ill., in February, 1926.
The Child--The Movie--and Censorship
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.
VIEWS ARE WELL-KNOWN
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.
SANER METHODS BY COOPERATION
=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.=
EDUCATION AND SELECTION
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.
THE MOVIES, CENSORSHIP AND CRIME
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.
CHILDREN ELEVATED, INSPIRED
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.
CENSORSHIP DOES NOT IMPROVE
=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.
MOVIES BATTLE AGAINST WAR
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.
OVERCOME EVIL WITH GOOD
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.
FATHERS FOUGHT FOR FREEDOM
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.
GOOD AND EVIL ARE RELATIVE
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.
NATIONAL HOBBY TO ATTACK
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.
BUILD SELF RELIANT YOUTH
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.
IMPROVEMENT RAPID
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.)
PUBLIC OPINION RULES
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.
COOPERATION AND ENCOURAGEMENT
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.
REAL EDUCATION AND RELIGION
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.
RESPONSIBLE PEOPLE NEEDED
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.
PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY
=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.
TRUST TO ALL THE PEOPLE
=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.
ALREADY REGULATED
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.
LAWS ARE SUFFICIENT
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.=
HUMAN THOUGHT NOT TO BE TAMPERED WITH
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.
USING ONE’S OWN STRENGTH
=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.=
PREPARE YOUTH FOR THE PATH
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.=
Transcriber’s Note:
- Text that was in bold is enclosed by equals signs (=bold=).
- Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
- Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
- Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice.
- New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.
- Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following
changes:
Page 5: “some of the week-minded” to “some of the weak-minded”
Page 5: “to be done. yet” to “to be done. Yet”
Page 7: “forever the undisputed soverign” to “forever the undisputed
sovereign”
Page 8: “mostly by artificial restaints” to “mostly by artificial
restraints”
Page 9: “of the natural restrains” to “of the natural restraints”
Page 11: “an industry or artistery” to “an industry or artistry”
Page 11: “what is really abscenity” to “what is really obscenity”
Page 13: “are backed, as it” to “are backed, as is”
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