Motion Picture Commission : hearings before the Committee on Education, House of Representatives, Sixty-third Congress, second session, on bills to establish a Federal Motion Picture Commission (1978)

MOTION PICTUEE COMMISSION. 15 The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that the Post Office is not compelled to wait until a court has declared a book to be immoral before it can exclude a doubtful book from the mails. If the office condemns the morality of a paper which the publisher wants to send through the mails, the public welfare requires that he shall prove its good character in the courts by an appeal from the decision of the Post Office authorities. The censorship of the stage, which has existed in England since 1727, does not forbid the printing of plays nor their performance, except for pay in licensed places of amusement. Four times in the last 60 years, in 1853, 1866, 1892, and 1909, the English Parliament has investigated the censorship of stage plays. Each time the re- port has advocated its retention. The report of 1909 showed that the thea- trical managers and actors are in favor of retaining the censorship of plays, though the investigation was made at the request of 40 leading persons, many of whom were writers of plays, who wished it abolished or modified. The agitation did not weaken the censorship, but strengthened it. It ex- tended it to sketches in vaudeville performances, which had previously been allowed without censoring. Then certain motion-picture interests, being igno- rant of how much real official censorship would benefit their business, announced that they had united in engaging Mr. A. G. Bedford, who has been the official censor of stage plays for 14 years, to censor all their films. But because he is not an official censor no satisfactory result has come from a pretended,censor- ship. Liverpool, Middleboro, and Carlisle have instituted local forms of censor- ship of motion pictures, because the British board of film censors can no more control the character of the pictures than can our own so-called National Board of Censorship, which has no official power, and is, therefore, neither national nor has any opportunity to censor. There is much more reason for censoring motion pictures than there is for censoring either plays or vaudeville performances. A play or dramatic sketch varies with each actor or performance, but a motion picture which is right morally at the beginning continues always the same. The daily newspapers print criticisms concerning the character of plays which consume a whole evening and run for a week or more in the larger cities. But four or five picture plays are given in one evening. No parent, however wise or careful, can decide which motion picture shows are safe for his children. He can not judge by the character of the exhibitor, for no exhibitor can select the pictures he is to show. He has to take from the exchange what comes to him in the circuit or deprive his patrons of seeing as many pictures as his rivals show. I must reserve for my next article a statement of the reasons for official censorship, and my reply to the objections urged against it by my opponent. FIRST AKTICLE FOR THE NEGATIVE, BY PRESIDENT DYER. In discussing the question of censorship, I wish to say, in the first place, that no one has a higher or more sincere regard for the ability and sense of fairness of Canon Chase that I have. Although I am opposed unalterably to censorship as repugnant to American ideals, yet I believe that many of its opponents would be willing to forego their objections if it were certain that the censorship would be permanently in the hands of Canon Chase or men of his type. It must be remembered that we have to determine our course of action in all matters by the experiences of the past, and those experiences have taught us that in dealing with any rule or regulation it never must be accepted under the belief that it is always to be administered fairly and that its evil possibili- ties will not be disclosed. The only safe course to adopt is to assume the worst. If any rule or regu- lation is capable of degenerating into an instrument of oppression, or of some other evil consequence, it may be said safely that in time that degeneration almost surely will take place. I start with the proposition, therefore, that any censorship of motion pictures, if adopted as a principle, might pass into the hands of unscrupulous politicians and come, in consequence, to be ad- ministered unfairly, dishonestly, and oppressively. For the past five years most of the motion pictures in the United States have been censored by the so-called National Board of Censorship. That censorship has done much good.