Now, I am here to say, after talking it over with Court officers, who
have worked with me for years, that we have yet to find one case of
crime among youth that could fairly be traced just to the movies. I
do not recall more than two or three cases in my experience of over
a quarter of a century on the bench, where there was even reasonable
ground to believe that the cause of crime was due just to what the
offender had seen in the movies.
=But I do know of thousands of children who have been elevated,
inspired and made happier because of the movies; who have been kept
off the streets, out of the alleys, the vulgar story-telling of
the barnyards and a multitude of idle, evil associations, by the
wholesome appeals and opportunities of the movies.=
I also know that other agencies--against which no censorship, local or
national, has ever been proposed--have done far more toward producing
crime than the movies. If we did not have any motion pictures at all,
we would have far more crime than we have. Nothing in the last fifty
years of the most eventful history of all time, has done more to reduce
sin and crime and add to the happiness, education and progress of the
human race than motion pictures. And it is going to do more and more in
this regard in the years to come.
I am satisfied that most of the cases of crime which good people trace
to the movies are generally caused by misunderstanding or misuse of
perfectly proper stories as well as bad stories thrown on the screen.
This is shown by the fact that there is certainly no more and probably
less crime, especially among youth, in cities, where there is no local
or state censorship.