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.
Censorship <^<^>^><^^><^><^<^<^> 373
gaged in such inconsequential work". Others, with reference to the general conduct of the committee, referred to it as a "smoke screen, an obvious camouflage, an approval stamp for the salacious films and for the questionable, if not criminal, conduct of the industry and its employees".14
In January, 1925, the National Committee for Better Films, affiliated with the National Board of Review, adopted a resolution which presented its viewpoint as being opposed to legal censorship of motion pictures. Referring to legal censorship the resolution said in part :
(1) It is political in its nature and arises from the demand of the organized minority who are desirous of imposing their interpretation of motion picture values, in the matters of morals and of good and evil, on the opinion of the vast majority.
(2) It presupposes that the American public are willing to patronize an entertainment which is vicious in its tendencies and likely to corrupt their morals — a state of mind in the individual American picture-goer that this Conference does not believe exists, unless one is ready to admit that the whole nation is already corrupt and decadent.
(3) It seeks to shift personal responsibility and the responsibility of parent toward child to the shoulders of politically appointed public guardians, who are no more likely to have special qualifications for the exercise of such guardianship than the ordinarily intelligent man or woman ; and such shifting of moral responsibility, this Conference believes, makes for slovenly spiritual habits both in the individual and in the nation.
(4) It is a makeshift at best, in nowise securing the end sought (that of improving motion pictures), and tending psychologically to invent the alleged reason for its existence, as well as to perpetuate as an alleged necessity what is in reality a politically paying institution — legal censorship.
(5) It has never taken into consideration the fact that the motion picture is primarily not an entertainment for children, but that at its best it is directed at an adult audience and that it must be recognized and supported as a form of expression for mature minds if it is to fulfill its possibilities both as an art and as an educator ; at the same time, in its aim to make all pictures harmless for children, legal censorship has failed to provide alike for any recognition of those pictures suitable to young people and those pictures suitable to adults ; again,
14 A Survey of the Motion Picture Problem, published by the Federal Motion Picture Council of America, Inc., p. 5.