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326 MOTION PICTURES I922-1945
I realized on that Christmas morning that motion pictures had become as strong an influence on our children and on countless adults, too, as the daily press. The juvenile argument which I had overheard confirmed my feeling and my fears that the great motion picture industry might as easily become a corrupting as a beneficial influence on our future generations.
At any rate, this was the thing that crystallized my decision. And when some months later I related the incident to Bill Hart, he was deeply affected and the following Christmas sent my boy the bridle he had used in many pictures.
Now that I had made up my mind, it was up to me to think out my philosophy of the job I had been called upon to do. The Christmas respite came to an end all too quickly, and on January 2, 1922, I was in New York on my way back to Washington. Interviewed by the papers, I stated that I would meet the motion picture producers on January 14, which I subsequently did.
Meanwhile I had already become the target for the fusillade of criticism I had anticipated. My friend Senator Pat Harrison of Mississippi felt that a Cabinet officer had no business resigning his high office for an amusement-industry post. Henry Ford, who I am sure meant well, gave vent to his distress in his Dearborn Independent. Dr. Wilbur Crafts, an eminent divine, charged that I had been "bought/'
The tenor of most of the criticism seemed to be that I was hiring myself out to the motion picture interests as a sort of "fixer," to shield them from public and possibly legislative wrath. This notion on the part of the champions of decency became especially articulate when they discovered that I was opposed, in principle, to censorship. That seemed to prove conclusively that my function would be that of a "mouthpiece" defending guilty clients.
For all I know, the idea of retaining a "mouthpiece," who would be something of a lobbyist, may have entered the minds of some of the motion picture men. They were sincere, but they were bewildered. Some producers genuinely desired to clean house but did not know how. Trade practices of the period were chaotic and savagely competitive. There were charges and countercharges of stealing and of cutthroat methods.
Ironically, many exhibitors also attacked me and the offer that the producers and distributors had made— on diametrically opposite grounds. In me they seemed to see a threat of blue-nosed regulation and political pressure.
Of course I had no intention of being a lobbyist, mouthpiece, or fixer. The cry of the children who idolized the movie stars was now the "Macedonian Call" as far as I was concerned, and I was not going to