If the public taste is now so fixedly demoralized that the moving picture producers can confidently claim that “the public demands what we are giving it,” the case is more damning than otherwise. For it is recognized by all detached observers that such a public taste is a most urgent reason why immediate and heroic remedies should be adopted.
Cocaine peddlers can easily establish a “public demand” for their drugs, and they do. But that demand is never considered to be an extenuation for the peddling Of “coke.” So with the psychic poison and visual filth of the ordinary movie—the demand it has created is morally lawless, and the further satisfaction of the demand is morally lawless too.
Carl Laemmle, one of the leading producers in America and head of the Universal Film Company, testified before a congressional committee that he had sent a circular entitled “What Do You Want?” to the exhibitors who bought his pictures. At that time his company was in communication with about 22,000 exhibitors. Mr. Laemmle says that he expected about 95 per cent of the answers to favor clean, wholesome pictures, but “instead of finding 95 per cent favoring clean pictures, I discovered that at least one-half, or possibly 60 per cent, want pictures to be risque, the French for smutty.”
Laemmle himself is a German-born Jew, and did not state what percentage of the replies were from people of what is euphemistically termed his “faith.”
It is a very noticeable fact that whenever any attempt is made to control the tumultuous indecency and triviality which the movies ceaselessly pour out day and night upon the American public, the opposi¬ tion thereto is Jewish. Take, for example, the attempt to arouse the sober spirit of America to a proper appreciation of what is happening to Sunday, the Day of Rest. The opponents of the whole movement —a movement for the awakening of conscience, not for the passage of laws—are Jews, and they justify their opposition on Jewish grounds.