NAWSA GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE Copeland, Lillian

663 Beach St.
Revere Beach, Mass.
June 9, 1931.

My dear Miss Blackwell,

I am sending you a carbon copy of my motion picture article on file for publication in Sept. with "Bostonia." The manuscript was carefully looked over and recommended by Dr. Frank P. Morse of the State Board of Education.

I asked the Boston Transcript to which I was referred as one of the Educational papers, to publish it for me, so that I might put the matter before the Conservative people of Greater Boston before the end of the summer vacation.

The Editor replied, "There has been so much written on this subject and I myself have printed so much about it, that I cannot find it in my heart to print any more."

As I am a Boston University graduate, and chose that school of higher education because it stood for the opportunity that your family represented, I wish to ask you how the matter of protection of children from an education of crime in a commercialized theatre can be put before the women voters at this time. 

I am a retired high school teacher from the second largest boys' high school in the world, 


and believe in the obvious truth that the last battle wins the war. It is an incomprehensible thing that the university alumni may not obtain an expression of opinion from the city at this time.

Will you tell me how to get the attitude of the women voters of the state and city.

With appreciation,
Lillian Copeland

If the president's Child Welfare Broadcast is not a call to action and service then we as a people have lost our way.

About Motion Pictures

Lillian S Copeland
663 Beach St. Revere
Mass

Fitting the Nation's Youth "for a Complexity of Life for which there is no precedent".
A Study on "The Motion Picture and Education".

President Hoover recently called the mobilization of the nation's thought to prepare a program for this purpose. "The fundamental purpose of the conference", he said, was "to set forth an understanding of those safeguards which will assure to them health in mind and body." - - - "All of which are beyond the reach of the parent."

After the last word had been uttered in his broadcast for the defective child, there remain the normal and the talented child, of whom there are thirty-five million and a million and a half respectively. Upon these the world's achievement rests in each generation, "if", says the President, "we devote ourselves to their welfare and their guidance."

The complexity that has been brought about by "the new realm of the air", to quote the President, "has brought difficulties in education that call for careful adjustment." "The problem is not one of physical health," says the President, "but of mental, emotional, spiritual health."

There is a vital problem to solve in the Motion Picture.


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Prof. Erskine, in a recent address on authorship, says that the author's material for the movie is most limited of all. This is because the motion picture, being a photographic representation, makes a sense appeal, emphasizes reality. This is highly desirable in childhood to familiarize the child with the world about him, for it leaves the clear-cut, definite resources of visualization. American tradition, however, calls for a histrionic literature that is intellectual, psychological, ethical as the ideals of its achievement, to satisfy the inheritance of America. The motion picture of the present day does not meet the standards of American civilization.

Scenarios developed for every sort of audience present situations that awaken curiosity among the young over the most tawdry experience of life. Productions debasing girlhood and womanhood demoralize the young. Mental and moral defectives in scenes portraying the exploitation of young womanhood break down the morale of youth. Rough stuff of male characters with women actors may stimulate in adolescence the impulse of murder. 

War films giving battle scenes are undesirable below the high school age. To the children the slaughter is merely a game for the winner. "All's Quiet on the Western Front" is such; - a marvelous picture, however, for adults. Griffith's "Abraham Lincoln" is one of the finest of all for

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children. It suppresses battle scenes, makes clear the humanitarian cause of the national struggle, teaches the cost of our empire republic in the best manhood of the country, makes plain the personality and purpose of the Civil War president. The country has need of picturized presentations of concrete facts in the lives and work of our presidents.

In the case of pictures that exploit vice, since the nature of a scenario is not made public, young people from homes of culture and religious instruction may unwittingly spend the hours of a great religious holiday reviewing a dive, with its exploitation of the old, the simple, the unsuspecting. The exalted hours of the natal day of the Prince of Peace have nothing in harmony with a house of shame and the destruction of a life of simple and humble devotion. Indignant protest of young women in the foyer of a picture house of Greater Boston at the close of one Christmas showing demonstrated the worth of character of American homes and children. The protest of Christmas is still coming from young men who took their young ladies to see a great actor in a disgusting picture.

The situation demands a means of determining the sort of picture we are choosing, that we may be protected from such experience. Great actors alone do not determine the quality of a motion picture.

It seems that legal censorship of the movie is negligible. 

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The Federation of Women's Clubs throughout the country extend a gracious hand to assist the homes of the country, but their work has no government authority. They report that they inspect the films at Hollywood through their representative, Mrs. Thomas G. Winter, and appoint an adviser for each locality to list good pictures and condemn others. But as the motion picture is classified by law under "Amusement", it is censored like the theatre with the censorship of adults, and as such is subject to state regulation. It has consequently forty-eight different codes of restriction in the United States, from Sunday closing in Philadelphia to "wide open" in New York. Greater Boston deletes swear words and flagrant violations of morality on Sundays. It would seem that the general censorship is negligible. 

Reports from patrons are interesting. One mother of Greater Boston in her open letter to the Manager of the Interstate Theatres writes: - "I wish to enter a protest against any more pictures about gangsters and gang wars; dives showing men and women constantly drinking and fighting while under the influence of liquor; and mystery pictures full of shrieks and hysterical climaxes." To this she adds a list of pictures that she has approved, enough to provide full programs for four weeks of the season. When asked, 

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pictures after the pictures have been shown benefits the city as information?" She replied, "No".

The report of producers is interesting in this connection. The Christian Century of February 4 publishes an article on "Movie Exhibitors Ask for a Sponge"; - a protest of the Texas move managers against undesirable pictures. They ask the people of the state to give them legal power to clean up the theatre. They say they are victims of the book-blocking contracts to take the films in blocs from the Hollywood producers. They ask state authorization to make their own selection.

A Greater Boston manager told the writer that he was required to pay for blocs, from each of which he had to throw away not fewer than an average of five scenarios which were unfit for production. In this case the quality of the Hollywood production may be determined from the fact that the mother above mentioned had listed from her theatre only approximately a month's full program of pictures that were of high quality.

The Woman's Federation reports that the motion picture performances have a national weekly attendance of one hundred and fifteen million. We are like Mrs. Partington, sweeping back the Atlantic with a broom.

It would seem that the youth of today are entering life through the portals of a crass materialism, and an uncensored morality.

"There are safeguards and services to childhood 

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which can be provided by the community, state or nation, which are beyond the individual", says the President. The individual mother cannot determine the agencies by which the child shall be educated." As it is generally conceded that the theatre is the greatest educational power for motivation, does it not seem as if a national survey of the Motion Picture were needed? Would it not give a grasp of childhood welfare not otherwise to be obtained?

The protection and stimulation of which the President speaks, seems to ask a survey of the objective phase of education throughout minority. Present conditions would undoubtedly cause the removal of the Motion Picture from the State Department of Amusement to the State Boards of Education. A repertory theatre of the best pictures and plays of the past with the best new productions, under direction of the Boards of Education, fewer and better pictures, would eliminate an education in vice and crime, dissipate its murky atmosphere from the schools and give the direction of education to those trained to see in perspective the result of their work.

Calvin Coolidge says in his article on good government under date of February 13, "New forces are constantly being created for good or for evil. - - - - Unless the moral power of the world increases in proportion to its scientific power, there is real danger that new inventions will prove instruments of our own destruction."

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The mentality of a new life is a fresh plate in the camera of human existence. "Childhood is not of us," said the President, "but we make or mar it."

It was a little German boy of American birth whose home was below the pavement, who appeared one day on the sidewalk bending over his playthings. It was starting to see the little head covered with silver gold ringlets. So radiant he was! He and his older brother established themselves in our affections the day they played band. Brother went on ahead drumming his make-believe drum; - a sturdy leader was he. The hero followed playing the sliding trombone. He lifted his little knees high as he stepped; he lifted his face to the blue sky where clouds of white silver were stirring in the breeze; - summer skies above, summer below. Sargent could have smiled at such a personality for his canvas.

There were times when the little fellow visited grown-ups for serious sociability, or an hour of play, or to inspect things "for-r-r you".

He was constructive with material things, creative in his ideas and fascinatingly original. 

The lives of childhood and youth ask a highway through the jungle of commercialism and the confusion of new voices of the air, to the development of the highest 

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type of mentality civilization has yet known: - A clear, definite knowledge and inspiration born of certainty and integrity, a sense of power above our own, uncompassed and immaterial in our surrounding universe, and of goodness and blessing that life cannot exhaust.

Lillian S. Copeland

Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.