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.