Judge Ben B. Lindsey on The Child—The Movie—and Censorship

“I defy anyone to show that one city or state with censorship is any better than other cities or states like our own where there is no censorship.”

“The movie is a real League of Nations, binding the world together through seeing that they are all just the same as each other.”

“Pontius Pilate was the first great censor.”

“I believe in real religion and real education.”

Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America, Inc.

WILL H. HAYS, Pres.

469 Fifth Avenue New York City

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Judge Ben B. Lindsey

Judge of the Juvenile and Family Court of Denver, Colorado.

Judge Lindsey is one of the best known of Americans. He is an authority on child welfare and juvenile treatment—a writer of note on the subject, a lecturer, a man whose opinions are sought.

In January, 1899, he was appointed public guardian and administrator of the County Court of Denver, that under the first Colorado Juvenile law of April 12th, 1899, became the Juvenile Court. The following year he was appointed, and ten times since has been elected Judge of that Court, in which he is now serving his twenty-sixth year. In Who’s Who for 1925 he is listed as the “promoter of the juvenile court system and originator of some of its features and has international reputation as an authority upon juvenile delinquency.”

Judge Lindsey is author of the Colorado Juvenile Court laws and with his collaborator (Wainwright Evans) the recent much discussed book “The Revolt of Modern Youth.” In this book Judge Lindsey takes a firm stand against censorship.

The following address was delivered by Judge Lindsey at the Fourth National Motion Picture Conference in Chicago, Ill., in February, 1926.

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The Child—The Movie—and Censorship

By JUDGE BEN B. LINDSEY

Ladies and Gentlemen:

As stated in your program, “This is an open conference with a free platform—all are welcome.”

I trust that I may be of some service. Even though we differ in methods, our purposes are the same. We want clean, wholesome motion pictures and we want to protect the youth of this country against any evil in this popular form of entertainment, as well as to secure for them the best that is to be had in this new, marvelous method of human expression. And whatever may be our differences, I wish to express my own appreciation of the value of an association like this in bringing about a free and open discussion that may help to disclose to us real remedies against the evils that we all oppose.

I have friends here in this conference with whom I differ as to methods to that end, but I have the highest respect for the sincerity of their purposes, as I believe they will have for mine. For my views on the subject of governmental censorship are well known. They have been formulated after nearly twenty-seven years of experience in a Juvenile Court that came into existence under our Colorado law of 1899—the same year as that of the Juvenile Court of your own great city of Chicago, which, next to Denver, I count as home, because here reside some of my dearest friends.

VIEWS ARE WELL-KNOWN

When it was suggested that, having engagements in and about Chicago, under the auspices of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, having its main offices here, I might be of service in presenting my views on censorship at this meeting, I said I would prefer to do so under the auspices of some disinterested group. As a result of this preference, you have heard read the request of Mrs. Virginia Palmer, Chairman of the Motion Picture Division of our Colorado State Parent-Teacher Association, requesting that I be heard here.

However, I wish to assure you that this is not by way of any apology whatever in presenting these views under any auspices, interested or disinterested. There can be no crime in any event for a man to do that when his sincere views are as well known as mine are and as, in recent years, they have been expressed literally hundreds of times.

In nearly every public lecture I have given on childhood and crime during recent years, I have stated over and over again my opposition to governmental censorship of the movies as a remedy for evil.

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In our recent book, THE REVOLT OF MODERN YOUTH, we took a firm stand against Censorship, and within a few days, it will be exactly five years ago that, in the City of Detroit, I delivered an address dealing with censorship and crime in the movies. That address was very widely circulated. Part of it was printed and thousands of copies were distributed. And so, when I left Denver with the request of Mrs. Virginia Palmer, the State Chairman of Motion Pictures of our State Parent-Teacher Association, that I take part in this conference, I redictated an old address of five years ago and brought it with me. To this I have added some more extended observations in confirmation of the conclusions there expressed after much thought, much study and much experience.

SANER METHODS BY COOPERATION

This all compels me to favor what I consider the saner, more constructive censorship by cooperation between social agencies, the public, the producers and exhibitors as against what I believe to be the more questionable and dangerous power of governmental censorship.

Mrs. Palmer, the Chairman of the Motion Picture Department of our State Parent-Teacher Association, supplied me for this meeting with considerable literature of that organization in support of their stand for the former kind of censorship as against the latter. The Parent-Teacher Association of Colorado is a part of that great national organization of the best motherhood and womanhood of this country. In recent years, they conducted a series of discussions and debates on the entire subject of so-called “censorship” or state regulation of motion pictures. This involved an investigation of what is being done in this regard in all other cities and states. It resulted in the adoption at their State Convention at Colorado Springs in May 1921, of the following resolutions:

WHEREAS, The picture loving public should be given an opportunity to act as their own censors, and WHEREAS, Pictures cannot be adapted to the mentality of the lowest type of person and potential criminals are much in the minority, and therefore, may not be considered as representing the patronage of the Motion Picture Theatre, and WHEREAS, All lasting reforms are derived from within, BE IT RESOLVED: That it be the continued policy of the Mothers Congress and Parent-Teacher Associations to work for the Better Film movement through cooperation, selection and for public education.

EDUCATION AND SELECTION

This organization has never found any reason to change their opinion thus expressed. At their recent state convention, they again reaffirmed it. A most successful constructive work, formulated at their state conventions, has been carried on in behalf of better pictures. They oppose censorship with their motto: “Education and [Pg 5]Selection.” In addition to this definite plan, there is a constant propaganda carried on among its various units for the type of picture that they think deserves encouragement. Their efforts to create a public demand for better pictures and to support the producers and exhibitors in their efforts to furnish them, has been so superior to any city or state censorship boards that any demand for any such remedy in Colorado has become extinct. No one would think of giving it the slightest encouragement in face of the big, constructive work of the Parent-Teacher organization of our state.

I am glad to avail myself, not only of the privilege afforded through the request referred to, that I take part in this program, but also to give some of my own views, after more than a quarter of a century in the Juvenile Court, on the whole subject of the problem of good and evil as it relates to motion pictures.

THE MOVIES, CENSORSHIP AND CRIME

I do not agree with those who claim that crime among youth is so largely due to what is shown in motion pictures. Of course, some of the weak-minded and the vicious have doubtless been stimulated to crime by something good or bad that they have seen in the movies. This may also be said of what they have read in the Bible, the newspapers, magazines and all kinds of literature, or through the misuse of automobiles, dancing or music. But we must always keep in mind that far more good than evil has come out of all these things.

Good and evil is a matter of relativity. It is comparative. If motion pictures are to reflect from nature the face of virtue, they must also show the image of vice. To make virtue lovable and vice despisable, we must know what they are. We all admit there are decent and indecent, acceptable and unacceptable methods by which this ought to be done. Yet, it must be done or there can be no lessons from life; there can be no strengthening of character. By no system of wet-nursism, can you solve the problem of crime by hiding bad things or the truth about them, or by depriving children of the right, under proper conditions, to see, to hear and to know what they are.

They may be worse off if shielded from knowledge of evil or spared any contact with it. They will be better and stronger if wisely familiarized with evil in order to know how to avoid it—or, facing it, to conquer it. “Vice is a monster of such frightful mien, that to be hated needs but to be seen.” And I would rather take a chance for youth through their seeing vice too often than in not seeing it enough if they are to learn to hate it and so triumph over it.

We are losing sight in this country of some fundamental things about the whole problem of good and evil. As a result, when some of our reforms and crusades are won, we may be worse off than when we started. If our remedies do not fail altogether, they produce worse evils. The “kick” that some people get out of reforming often blinds them to the facts about good and evil and how to overcome evil. A man on a jag is always blind to the things about him.

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CHILDREN ELEVATED, INSPIRED

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.

CENSORSHIP DOES NOT IMPROVE

I defy anyone to show that one city or state with censorship is any better in this regard than other cities or states like our own, where there is no censorship, and where such organizations as our Parent-Teacher Associations are firmly against it.

They show us a messy lot of contradictions and silly absurdities in mussing up films, aggravating, useless annoyances, and frequently petty politics and tyranny as the result of their differences of opinion about what is good and what is bad, but they cannot show that they are any better or that they have accomplished anything provably worth while, that could not have been as well, or better done without these, to me, ridiculous hobbles.

Anything they have done has been far better done in cities like Denver, through cooperation of civic agencies with the producers and exhibitors themselves. Any good that has ever come out of city or state censorship is sure to be overbalanced by just as much evil and just as much nonsense as any that has been prevented—if any has been really prevented.

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MOVIES BATTLE AGAINST WAR

The movies are going to do more than any other agency to prevent the greatest of all crimes, horrid war. Through motion pictures, all nations, people, races and creeds, all speaking the same language, of the movies, are being brought into concord, acquaintanceship and understanding. And when they know and understand each other, they will love and cease to hate each other and war shall be no more. It is a real League of Nations in binding them together through seeing that they are all just the same as each other—that there are no bad people and no good people when properly understood, but there are bad things and good things as they reflect through the bodies or behavior and conduct of people, depending on causes, which as yet we know little about, and that the great lesson of Life is to learn how to wisely fight evil more and people less.

Mankind has conquered all the reptiles and the wild beasts that threatened his mastery of this planet. Why? Because, primarily, he could see them, because they were known to him. But he hasn’t conquered all disease—that remains to threaten his dominion. Why? Because it is mostly the unseen beasts—the bugs, parasites and germs just now beginning to be seen. As with evil and disease, the movies will do more than all else besides to make them real—to make them known.

IT IS THUS THE GREATEST EDUCATOR THE WORLD HAS EVER HAD—THE VISUAL EDUCATOR.

And when all things are seen and known to man, he becomes forever the undisputed sovereign of the world. Through visual education the average child of twelve is in the future to know more in academic education than the present college graduate. Largely through the movies, among the future great inventors of the world, we shall behold children from ten to twenty-one years of age.

OVERCOME EVIL WITH GOOD

How, O Master, shall we overcome evil—is still the eternal question of a war-ridden, hate-ridden, fearful world. Instead of any longer listening, it is growing listless to the eternal answer—“Overcome evil with good.” He never said to overcome it through governmental suppression and the hate-breeding violence of forcible censorships. That was the answer of Pontius Pilate. And Pontius Pilate was the first great censor and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship. On behalf of this nation’s childhood, whose destinies are to be injured by such false remedies, I appeal from the gospel of Pilate to the gospel of Christ.

But what shall we do, you may ask, to guard that destiny which we all equally have at heart? It is not an easy thing always to know just how to overcome evil with good. It is much easier for some parents, teachers, unwise, if not ungracious pastors, to leave the job to a board of censors or some new-fangled statute law with its abuses, blackmails, grafts, persecutions, stupidities and tyrannies. Are we to be a nation of dodgers, of weazened shirkers, putting responsibility on [Pg 8]laws, laws and more laws, bureaus, bureaucrats, censors and regulators until we are glutted, choked and suffocated with laws to let any George do it, but the right George?

Are we to become a nation of “squealers,” passing the buck from parents, homes, schools and churches for their responsibility for Youth, to some perfectly human-to-err censors who may be wise and good but likely to be mostly foolish, if, as in the case of some of our prohibition regulators, they are not crooks and grafters, to flounder in their own helplessness because they do not know what is good or what is evil or how to fight it.

Consider the fact that even now a picture that one governmental censor board says is good, another in some other state, condemns as bad. And consider the rank injustice of city or state censorship authorities passing a “bad” picture as “good” in one such city or state, and this same perfectly “good” picture as “bad” in another, as these different censorship boards often do.

FATHERS FOUGHT FOR FREEDOM

Only gradually and painfully, through science mostly, now more and more handmaiden of real education and real religion, shall we know how to overcome evil. It is always with good. It is too big a problem for me to give all my views on here. In our “Revolt of Modern Youth” I took an entire book to tell more about it as I see it. But I do not believe Christ was wrong nor that the people of this Republic are wrong, who since its foundation in the wisdom of our Fathers, have fought for just such liberties as governmental censorship will deny us.

Now, I think a great deal of good could be done in the fight against evil if our parents and Sunday-school teachers would question youth more as to their motives for righteous conduct, and with more time and patience set them right as to their real meaning. You ask them why they do right and they will generally tell you that it is “to keep out of jail,” or “the cop’ll get me,” or “I’d get a licking” or “I’ll go to hell.”

Thus, from perfectly well-intentioned teaching, what we are putting mostly in their lives is misunderstanding. That is, we are trying to get virtue mostly by artificial restraints—the same kind of restraints that are now being proposed through forcible censorship and regulation. These fears no longer serve as restraints and we are very much at fault in doing so little to substitute natural restraints as these artificial ones are passing.

Fundamentally, it is our overstrain in the demand for these artificial restraints upon human conduct—restraints that come from without—that is making most of the crime in this country. And their over-emphasis to the neglect of natural restraints is due far more to ignorance in churches and schools than the motion pictures. There is such a thing as going too far in our insatiate demand for these artificial restraints. It is a greater crime against youth, fostered mostly by well-meaning church people who are ignorant about youth. They are causing us to forget all about the more important restraints, or to [Pg 9]indulge in a lazy indifference regarding them because of our mistaken faith in restraints so largely artificial.

As against these, what we need most in the lives of youth are the natural restraints. They come from within. They enable children and people, in the face of every evil and temptation, without being afraid to know about it, to see it or to hear about it, to be so fortified from within against it that they will stand up to meet it and conquer it. In other words, to have the strength of character to do right because it is right—not through the fear of punishment or the hope of rewards—but through true education and religion.