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FULL STEAM AHEAD 459
great length, and I explained that my personal convictions about the social responsibility of the movies had had much to do with my entering the field.
As Dr. Adler pointed out, the questions involved go deeper than the legal problems of censorship and prohibition. They led him to consider all types of criticism, the relation of art to the moralist, the relation of church, state, and family in achieving the welfare of the community and the integrity of the individual. Painstakingly he discussed the relation of moral and aesthetic standards in criticism. This work put a scholarly, philosophical foundation under the self-regulating structure which the Association had built up within the industry.
When he examined the findings of earlier studies on the influence of movies on conduct, he found many of them inconsistent and by no means proven. He kept on the lookout to distinguish between knowledge and opinion, statistics and interpretation. The latter he found uncertain, affected by personal bias, and often based on erroneous facts. He found no accurate way to measure the relative influence on children of movies as compared with home, school, church, friends, books. To quote him on only one important point, juvenile delinquency, "In the matter of moral influence, the relevance of the scientific data is questionable. To whatever extent they can be considered as reliable, the findings are inconsistent and tend to be negative. ... If all this has significance after unreliability of methods and data have been taken into account and inconsistencies nullify each other, it tends to cast some doubt wpon the p ovular concern about the moral influence of motion pictures upon the immature."
That's a pretty strong statement and goes farther than I ever cared to go. But it was a body blow to the theory that movies were primarily or even largely responsible for juvenile delinquency. Similarly, Moley concluded that children were not ' movie-made."
The discussion of movies and morals, pro and con, went on endlessly in the press, reflecting people's thinking. I was glad that it did, and I always felt that it was one of my jobs to see that editors were kept informed. They were quick to scent bias in pressure reports, and just as quick to pass on interesting facts to the public. They stood almost ioo per cent against censorship, which was the usual goal of the "moviemenace" decriers. They remained among my staunchest allies in the cultivation of a constructive attitude on the part of the rank and file. Here is one out of the hundreds of illuminating current newspaper comments of 1933 and 1934:
St. Paul, Minn., Dispatch: It is just a little amusing to see the investigators trotting up and dumping at the studio door all the ills of society from crime to vanity that have at other times been blamed upon co-education, the bunnyhug, jazz music, French novels, high heels, the split skirt, one-piece bathing