There was once a man named Anthony Comstock who was the enemy of public lewdness. Of course he was never popular. No newspaper ever spoke of him without a jeer. He became the stock joke of his time—and it was not very long ago. He died in 1915. It is very noticeable that the men who mocked his life with banal jesting were non-Jews. It is also worth recording that the men who profited from the commercializing of much of the vice which he fought, were Jews. It was a very familiar triangle—the morally indignant non-Jew fighting against public lechery, and the Jewish instigators of it hiding behind ribald Gentiles and Gentile newspapers.
Well, the fight is still going on. If you will subscribe to a clipping bureau, or if you will look over the press of the country, you will see that the problem of the immoral show has been neither settled nor silenced. In every part of the country it is intensely alive just now. In almost every state there are movie censorship bills pending, with the old “wet” and gambling elements against them, and the awakened part of the decent population in favor of them; always, the Jewish producing firms constituting the silent pressure behind the opposition.
This is a grave fact. Standing alone it would seem to charge a certain Jewish element with intentional gross immorality. But that hardly states the condition. There are two standards in the United States, one ruling very largely in the production of plays, the other reigning, when it does reign, in the general public. One is an Oriental ideal—“If you can’t go as far as you like, go as far as you can.” It gravitates naturally to the flesh and its exposure, its natural psychic habitat is among the more sensual emotions.
This Oriental view is essentially different from the Anglo-Saxon, the American view. And it knows this. Thus is the opposition to censorship accounted for.
