Memorandum for His Excellency, the Governor of New York, in opposition to an act entitled "To regulate the exhibition of motion pictures, creating a commission therefor, and making an appropriation therefor." (1921)

Record Details:

Title:
Memorandum for His Excellency, the Governor of New York, in opposition to an act entitled "To regulate the exhibition of motion pictures, creating a commission therefor, and making an appropriation therefor."
Date:
1921
Publisher:
New York
Volume:
Memorandum for His Excellency, the Governor of New York, in opposition to an act entitled "To regulate the exhibition of motion pictures, creating a commission therefor, and making an appropriation therefor."
Leaf #:
00010
Language:
English
Collection:
Books and Government & Law
Format:
Books
Contributor:
University of California Libraries
Sponsor:
MSN
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
Date Added:
July 19, 2022
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5 biographies of human beings, even in sacred history itself, involve acts of immorality or acts forbidden by law. The lesson of life is not that immoral acts meet with instant punishment, or that crimes are^yhipped of justice. If so, there would be no merit in virtue. It is the story as a ivhole that may picture the ulti- mate regeneration of man or woman—the ultimate retri- bution for wrongdoing that teaches the lesson. The "personal equation" might move a censor authorized or required to judge the whole film by any part thereof, to hold that the theft of the silver candlesticks by Jean Valjean "incites to crime;" and yet what lesson more beautiful than that of "Les Miserables," which really develops from that theft? Or the censor might say: "This part of the film depicts Hester Prynne with the "A"'upon her breast, and so it tends to corrupt morals," and yet what story beyond "The Scarlet Letter" makes for the purity of man and woman, and promises them ultimate regeneration! The part of a film of "Ivanhoe" that showed Front de Boeuf's treatment of Isaac of York could be said to be "inhuman;" as so the part of a film that showed cannibalism on Robinson Cnlsoe's Isle, or Squeers' treatment of Smike in "Nich- olas Nickleby." It cannot be said that these illustrations are far- fetched when we remember that a school board in Brook- lyn debated the morality of reading Longfellow's "Build- ing of the Ship," in that the ship "leapSinto the ocean's arms"; that Swinburne by excision indicted with forceful power Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" as im- moral, or that the picture of that sweet and innocent book, "Bootle's Baby/' was censored in Pennsylvania so as to cut the incident of a husband burning his wife's letter after he had read it.