THE MOVIE AND THE CENSOR
WE Americans are forever boasting of our sense of humor, but we have a
deplorable way of exhibiting a complete lack thereof at certain crises
when its saving grace alone could rescue us from ludicrous
inconsistency. When in the early life of the movie it most needed
supervision and restraint it was allowed to run wild at its own free
will, and at once became a naughty, mischievous boy, covered with mud.
As it grew in years and achievement, developing gradually new and higher
ideals, its need for parental discipline automatically decreased, and it
exhibited internally those guiding, corrective powers that have made it
constantly more worthy of the sympathy and support of the best element
in our civilization. And then came to pass a manifestation of belated
Pharisaism upon the part of certain narrow-minded influences in our
community that would have been laughable had it not been fraught with
serious consequences to a novel art-form struggling to find its
appointed place in the life of the world. Where was America’s boasted
sense of humor when the demand for movie censorship waxed loud—for
minorities always make a great noise—long after any reasonable excuse
for such a censorship, if such excuse there could be, had forever passed
away? What would be said of a father who had allowed his son to indulge
in every kind of youthful indiscretion until the latter had almost
reached his majority and then, when the boy had shown signs of
repentance, reform, regeneration, confined him forcibly to his room and
fed him physically upon bread and water and mentally upon the old Blue
Laws of Connecticut? Neither the heart nor the brain of such a father
would appear to us as sound.
In the eleventh chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke, Christ is
quoted in ringing, uncompromising denunciation of that reactionary,
tyrannical exercise of usurped authority which, through varied methods
and media, has checked the progress of the human spirit toward
enlightened freedom throughout all the centuries:
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as
graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not
aware of them.
And again he cries:
Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens
grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens
with one of your fingers.... Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have
taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves,
and them that were entering in ye hindered.
“Ye have taken away the key of knowledge!” The crime of crimes, the
unforgiveable sin! In this indictment that He brings against
professional hair-splitters and obstructionists, selfishly standing in
the way of human progress, the Christ gives divine sanction to Man’s
efforts to satisfy the irresistible craving in his soul for light, ever
more light, in the darkness through which he gropes. The fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge is not, as in the old Eden legend, accursed, but is
proclaimed by the Savior as food essential to that spiritual growth
without which there could be no hope for our race.
The late Andrew D. White, in his great book dealing with the obstacles
against which Science has had to struggle in its effort to enlarge the
diameter of Man’s knowledge, paints a vivid picture of the tragic
effects wrought by various forms of censorship upon the pathetic,
heroic, Christ-sanctioned efforts of the human race to employ freely the
key of knowledge to the end that we may always use “our dead selves as
stepping-stones to higher things.” Prison, the stake, massacre, war—what
weapon has not been used by the foes of enlightenment that they might
check mankind in its rise toward heights upon which the ancient,
unhallowed prerogatives of a few reactionaries could not survive? And
always, in some form or other, censorship has been the most serviceable
weapon, both in times of war and times of peace, by which relentless
unprogressives could break the spirit of those who strove to loosen the
shackles of ignorance from the human spirit. The marvel is not that Man
knows so much to-day as the fact that he has won what he knows against
almost insuperable odds.
There came to New York from somewhere in the West a year or so ago a
loquacious fanatic who loudly asserted that the earth is flat. The
metropolis refused to take this peripatetic crank seriously, gave him a
passing glance and laugh, and went on its busy way, momentarily
astonished, perhaps, at the amazing stubbornness displayed by outworn
errors in refusing to remain dead and buried. It is seldom, of course,
that the call of the past, the urge to ignorance and reaction, is so
blatantly and audaciously sounded, but Dowie of Zion City differed only
in degree and not in kind from those frequently well-intentioned but
always misguided busybodies who believe that the screen can be kept
decent not by public opinion and commercial common-sense, but only by
groups of three, or five, or seven individuals wielding the arbitrary
power of censorship.
The advocacy of official censorship of the movies is based upon a
fallacy. Where the misguided men and women urging censorship make their
chief error is in their attitude toward the rank and file of motion
picture patrons. They base their demand for censorship upon the sweeping
generalization that the majority of the millions of Americans who daily
attend the movies crave salacious pictures and must be forcibly
prevented from getting what they crave. This shows not merely ignorance
of the psychology of the American people, but is an exhibition of
indifference to the teachings of our national history that would be
ridiculous if it were not so pernicious in its practical results.
Furthermore, it is in essence the astounding proposition that there are
millions of our countrymen who flock daily to the support of an
institution that is openly undermining our most cherished ideals,
brazenly attacking the home and poisoning the minds of our youth by the
inculcation of ideas subversive of our existing civilization. Can not
the fanatics who are demanding censorship realize that if the motion
picture producers did not understand the American people, and our
inherent and inherited inclination for cleanliness and decency, better
than do the censor advocates the movie industry would have gone to
financial smash long ago? Furthermore, if the American public is not to
be trusted to choose its own amusements, and to automatically censor
them at the box-office or the park gate, is it competent to make its own
laws, elect its own executives, in short, to carry the American
experiment in government by the people to the splendid success that
awaits it? This query is searching and fundamental. Advocacy of
censorship in any form for the people of this country is a manifestation
of un-Americanism that is as surely foredoomed to failure as was George
III’s attempt to enforce a tax upon our ancestor’s tea. In truth,
censorship, both fundamentally and historically, springs from power
usurped and not from an altruistic regard for the moral welfare of a
community. Its beneficiaries centuries ago learned how to camouflage
their love of tyranny behind an assumed regard for the welfare of the
public. But the people of the United States, as becomes daily more
apparent, are too well informed, too sensitive to the unceasing efforts
of old tyrannies to gain new victories, too jealous of the heritage of
freedom that was won for them on hard-fought battlefields, to surrender
their priceless liberty of thought and speech and educational and
recreational choice to an outworn and discredited form of supervision.
The significance of a recent election held in one of our historic
cradles of liberty, the State that can boast of Concord, Lexington and
Bunker Hill, in connection with the subject under discussion can hardly
be over-estimated. In 1921 the legislature of Massachusetts was induced
to pass a censorship law. By petition it became a matter for referendum,
and on November 7, 1922, the electorate of the Bay State voted upon the
question whether or not they desired a censorship of the motion picture.
The people defeated the measure by a vote of 553,173 to 208,252, a
majority of 344,921 against censorship. Again had Massachusetts given an
outward and visible sign of her inward and spiritual detestation of
Toryism not essentially different in kind from that which she displayed
when “a snuffy old drone from a German hive” was endeavoring, by force
of arms, to hold her in leading-strings. What intrigues, if it does not
startle and perplex, a thoughtful historian in connection with the above
is that to-day in this country there is a clash, affecting the lives of
every one of us, between the ideals which a century and a half ago
placed George of England and George of Virginia in opposite and warring
camps upon certain basic propositions connected with the subject of
human liberty. But it is inconceivable, of course, that the spirit of
George the Thirdism can have anything but a temporary influence in the
United States in the twentieth century, despite the noise now made by
short-sighted, misguided or actually unprincipled champions of movie
censorship—a censorship that, were there nothing else to urge against
it, is an unnecessary and expensive luxury in light of the fact that the
States and cities of our nation are adequately provided with laws and
ordinances protecting the amusement-seeking public from indecent and
immoral exhibitions.
The Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N.Y.,
one of the ablest, most eloquent, scholarly and influential divines in
this country, referring in a recent sermon to matters touched upon in
this chapter, said:
The descendants of the Puritans and the Dutchmen, whose fathers
rebelled against the censors of the James I era, dictating to
them what creed and government they must accept, find it hard,
after three hundred years of freedom of press and speech, to go
back to the very thing from which their ancestors fled. Long ago
the historians said that the American Republic was the vision of
John Milton in his plea for the liberty of the printing-press,
set up in code and constitution. The genius of our Republic is
personal responsibility, individual excellence. A father and
mother must rise up early and sit up late to teach their boy and
girl to think for themselves, using their intellect; to weigh
for themselves, using their judgment; to decide for themselves,
using their own conscience and will.
“Hell is paved with good intentions.” The tragedy that we call human
history is made more understandable by these depressing, revelatory
words. The fussy, the futile, those whose hearts are kindly but whose
brains are weak, whose motives are praiseworthy but whose methods are
inept and inadequate, have, from the beginning of time, made life harder
than it need be for their fellow-men. When these well-intentioned but
badly-balanced busybodies combine with stronger characters whose motives
are reprehensibly selfish to mould men in the mass to their own narrow
pattern, denying to the individual that freedom of choice regarding his
own affairs that is one of the essential bulwarks of Anglo-Saxon
civilization, an internal menace has come to American institutions more
threatening than any external peril now within our purview.
But censorship of the movies will be, in all probability, only a passing
and more or less localized phase of our national tendency to indulge in
mischievous experimental legislation. If not, however, if censorship
should ever become both national and permanent, then would be sounded
the doom of those emancipatory institutions which have made of our
American experiment in self-government the one great hope, the one
burning beacon-light, for an over-governed, over-burdened, over-censored
world.
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