The Educational screen (c1922-c1956])

November, 1944 Page 387 let us alone — we didn't care how many freedom-loving Spaniards, or Ethiopians, or Chinese, or Germans, Czechs, Austrians, Poles, and other oppressed peoples they robbed and killed. Just so long as we kept on getting ours. The first installment on that policy caught up with us, finally, at Pearl Harbor. We paid plenty there, and we keep on paying in blood and gold, each day the war lasts. We didn't really get away with anything by pulling down the shades and pretending there was nobody home when the bill collector came around the first time. This war should prove to us, once for all time, that if we want to live in peace and justice in our own home, we cannot tolerate robbery and torture out on the sidewalk, right in front of our door. And, to get down to business, if we want to do business — good business — with a lot of decent foreign customers, we cannot allow a gang of fascist racketeers to take all their money away from them, even to the shirt off their backs and often their very lives in the bargain. Sad to say, it took a Pearl Harbor to bring this home to most of us — but I am sure that all of us, again without any Party labels whatever, are determined that never again shall international banditry be tolerated in this world. We are confronted with a worldwide issue that is not between parties, or between candidates — it is an issue between viewpoints, an issue between the past and the future. Most of us here are convinced, I am sure, that the certain and complete defeat of our reactionary foes can be followed by one of the greatest periods of progress that mankind has ever seen, and that we should strike for a perspective of harmonious collaboration of free peoples in the reconstruction of a wracked and ravished world. What does this perspective offer to us in our own non-theatrical film business? It would give us, first of all, a busy world, with pretty nearly everybody ivorking full speed, and getting a fair return in money, and in leisure, to permit decent life. It would give us a thinking, talking, socially active world, where neighbors would meet often to discuss common interests, in churches, schools, block organizations like the present OCD, factory personnel groups — in all kinds of social units. A world in which accent will be laid on education — on culture for all — and where school will be taught with the full benefit of all the marvelous teaching experiences developed by the armed forces. The same decent, respect-motivated attitude is possible also between nations. One good thing the war is doing is to bring us much closer to two of the greatest peoples on earth, the Russians and the Chinese. If we can just act decent, they will constitute a market for our products that will keep our factories humming, and will send us in return commodities that will enrich our lives. Ambassador Davies is quoted recently to the effect that there is no point of conflict between the Russian people and our own. I know from my own personal experience the high regard that the common people of Russia have for everything American. I have traveled, literally, from Murmansk to Samarkand, and from the Crimea to Siberia, and I have never found anything but the friendliest feelings. I have worked in their factories and studios, slept in Another Shot from "Freedom Comes High" their best hotels and on earthen floors on peasant huts, always a foreigner yet always welcome as their friend. And now our two peoples are engaged in a great jomt struggle against a common enemy of both our respective ways of life. When that struggle is over, let us hope that we may maintain our attitude of friendly collaboration, each following that path of freedom that to himself seems best fitted to secure the greatest happiness to the greatest number. The ways of the two peoples are not nearly so different as political phraseology would seem to indicate. Their aim also is to live in a more comfortable house than the one in which they were born, to give tiieir children a better education than their own, and to build bigger and better factories, libraries, club-houses, airfields, farms, roads and other adjuncts of civilization than they had a year ago. Many social achievements, such as factory safety committees, incentive and suggestion plans, bonuses, bond drives, group insurance, and employee theatricals and good fellowship are duplicated exactly in the two lands. And, to make the parallel altogether complete, their interest in non-theatrical movies is every bit as great as our own. I had no trouble in working at my chosen profession in that country as readily as in this. I had a swell time doing it in both lands — and I have such respect for your intelligence and liiunanity as to feel that each and every one of you would do pretty well jourselves, in either country. The postwar world should see vastly more intercommunication of peoples by means of films and television, and this trend should prove one of the most potent agencies for peace that man has ever contrived. There may be more intense competition for the consumer's dollar, but if we all, as rational human beings, play our cards right, there will be plenty of consumer dollars for television as well as for movies. No society ever got poorer by making the lives of its people richer. Whatever else there may be about our business after the war, we know it will be bigger — and that it will play an even more vital role in the service of the American people, and of humanity at large, than ever before. It will be worthy of the best that any of us, and all of us, can give it.