Memorandum for His Excellency, the Governor of New York, in opposition to an act entitled "To regulate the exhibition of motion pictures, creating a commission therefor, and making an appropriation therefor." (1921)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

ft inhuman or sacrilegious," but also must they so do if they think that the film or any part thereof would "tend to corrupt morals or to incite to crime." Whether a film or a part of a film is "obscene," "indecent," "im- moral" or "sacrilegious" might be left to the judgment of such censors as the Governor and the Senate might select. Words are things and these words are plain enough. Trial jurors ex necessitate determine obscenity and the like, and may well do so; but there is this dif- ference indicated by the striking comment of Montes- quieu in his "Spirit of the Laws ' "In the exercise of the Police Power it is rather the magistrate that punishes than the law; in the judgment of crimes it is rather the law that pun- ishes than the magistrate." But what of the word "inhuman," that means "want- ing in human kindness;" and what of powers- conferred by the words "or is of such character that its exhibi- tion would tend to corrupt morals or incite to crime"? Can the "personal equation" (to adopt the phrase of McKenna, J.) go further than this? It is a far cry from pornography to purity. But what of the duty cast on the censors to refuse license not in that the film— the whole picture—may "tend to corrupt morals or incite to crime," but to refuse license if any part of a film may do so? The censor of a film must be a psychologist, a thought- reader for the multitude. Yet these censors must decline license or permit for the film if a part, in their judgment, offends this act. The censor does not, of course, con- sider spectators ignorant of the existence of immorality or of crime until apprised by the picture. Any portrayal of the human comedy of life (not a phase of it) may incidentally involve immorality or even crime. "To err is human." The most famous, indeed the most elevating,