Dr. James Empringham was recently quoted in the New York World as saying: “I attended a meeting of motion picture owners in New York, and I was the only Christian present. The remainder of the company consisted of 500 un-Christian Jews.”
Now, there is little wisdom in discoursing against evil in the movies and deliberately closing our eyes to the forces behind the evil.
The method of reform must change. In earlier years, when the United States presented a more general Aryan complexion of mind and conscience, it was only necessary to expose the evil to cure it. The evils we suffered from were lapses, they were the fruits of moral inertia or drifting; the sharp word of recall stiffened the moral fiber of the guilty parties and cleared up the untoward condition. That is, evil doers of our own general racial type could be shamed into decency, or at least respectability.
That method is no longer possible. The basic conscience is no longer present to touch. The men now mostly concerned with the production of scenic and dramatic filth are not to be reached that way. They do not believe, in the first place, that it is filth. They cannot understand, in the second place, that they are really pandering to and increasing human depravity. When there does reach their mentalities the force of protest, it strikes them as being very funny; they cannot understand it; they explain it as due to morbidity, jealousy or—as we hear now—anti-Semitism.
Reader, beware! if you so much as resent the filth of the mass of the movies, you will fall under the judgement of anti-Semitism. The movies are of Jewish production. If you fight filth, the fight carries you straight into the Jewish camp because the majority of the producers are there. And then you are “attacking the Jews.”
If the Jews would throw out of their camp the men and methods that so continuously bring shame upon the Jewish name, this fight for decency could be conducted without so much racial reference.
An analysis of the motion picture industry in the United States will show:
