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 PICTURE COMMISSIOX, 223 Again we say we believo an adequate censorship will not diniinisli the total business of motion-picture makers and exhibitors, but will rather bring as much increased business from substantial families, careful of the nerves and minds and morals of their children, as will offset the loss from these families that let children run like goats to feed on any ru.bbish that they may find upon the street. But whoever makes or loses money we propose to provide, so far as law may do so, that our children's hearts shall not be coned for anybod3^ When this law is passed, much will remain for parents, teachers, and pastors to do. The commission can not refuse a license to a film because it is bad art and a false vieAv of life, but only when in its judgment it would exercise a morally harmful eifect. But so far the law^ must " make it harder to do wrong and easier to do right.'* In a " government of the people " it is pertinent not only to state the argument for the bill, but also to show Avho are asking for its passage. The first strong demand for the bill, before it was intro- duced in Congress, came from a club of men teachers in Schenectady, N. Y., who had made a thorough investigation of all the local motion- picture theaters and found much which they believed would be harm- ful to their own pupils, whom tliey saw often and in large numbers in these places. (Their painstaking and conservative report is found in the record of the first House hearing.) All through central New York, from Albany to Rochester, the statement that a l)ill to provide Federal censorship of motion pictures would be introduced in Con- gress met with swift and strong approval as something that would meet a felt want. Subsequently, in tours of Texas, Louisiana, Arkan- sas, and Kansas, in State Sunday-school conventions, in churches, in mass meetings, I found the same response in swift, intense applause, and unanimous petitions to Congress. No cne counted present cen- sorship sufficient. It is not also Protestant church ]ieo})le that ask for the bill. Bishop Canevin, of Pittsburgh, a Catliolic leader in social uplift, is one of the most earnest champions of the bill, which he says he will ask the Catholic societies to support. These samples of public senti- ment from New York to Texas tell the same story as petitions in the committee files from Boston to San Francisco, all sa3ang emphatically of this bill. " We need it; we want it." If anyone is still in doubt whether we need a really " national " cen- sorship of motion pictures, such as the passage of the Smith-Hughes bill in Congress would provide, let him read the list following of films which the so-called National Board of Censorship did not sup- press but which were turned down by the Cleveland censor, as shown in his 1013 report to the city council, page 20: The followliij? scenes were cousiderod objection.-ihle ;nid were ordered elimi- nated : Scenes showiug— Passing of files, sawing of bars, and detailed escape from jail ^ .Mixing of i)owder and dynanuting building 1 Objectionable title 2 Showing women in scant costumes t» Stabbing, d-tailed 1 0|iiuni dream, involving criminal assault, nnirder, etc 1 Objectionable gambling 1 ."^lan taking lU)erties with girl 1