The memoirs of Will H. Hays (1955)

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.

MOTION PICTURES AND THE WAR 543 memorialized in an interfaith chapel at Temple University, of which Dr. Poling was made honorary chaplain. The writer of The Christian Herald article was Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church, New York, who through pulpit and page is constantly communicating to others the inspiring uplift in Christian faith. In this article Dr. Peale called motion pictures, along with the church and radio, the three greatest "personality-molding agencies," and pleaded for an understanding and sympathetic relationship between the three. He knew whereof he spoke in saying that the church should welcome the opportunity to influence the movies, for he had served effectively as technical adviser on pictures in which the church was prominently portrayed. He knew that the motion picture could give the church "another powerful ally in emphasizing the decent, upright ideals of American living/' and he believed that this helpful relationship was being achieved: It has been my observation that within recent years there has been an increasing number of truly notable pictures built around the lives of great and inspiring characters. Moreover, the production of historical films is making a profound contribution to the development of a fine patriotism. In all these pictures honor, idealism and religion are elements of outstanding emphasis. In the autumn of 1944, fifty years after the first public exhibition of motion pictures, we had a great "roundup" of the people who had helped us most to create higher standards. This Public Relations Conference gave our friendly critics opportunity to tell us what they would most like to see films do if they were better to discharge their responsibility to a growing public. It was one of the friendliest and frankest discussions I have ever heard. The horizon was broad, for its war record already proved what the industry could do, and the approaching end of the war suggested some of the problems shared. As I said in opening the conference, we asked for no resolutions but we wanted all the advice we could get. I promised the seventy delegates, meeting in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, an account of our stewardship. Joe Breen carefully explained the exact way in which the Production Code Administration operated; Governor Milliken discussed the wide network of activities carried on by the Community Service Department, with its thousands of volunteer "branches"; and Francis Harmon told about the work of the War Activities Committee. The late Dr. James Rowland Angell, president emeritus of Yale University and educational director of RCA, one of our wisest advisers, emphasized that the entertainment picture can quite fairly be held to consistency with the prevailing mores of the day, with the ethical