This Day in 1912 in The Record: Dec. 18, 1912

Wednesday, Dec. 18, 1912. There's no rating system for movies in 1912, but for all intents and purposes all movies are rated "R." According to New York State law, no child under 16 can be admitted to a movie theater unless accompanied by a parent or legal guardian. But the head of the Mohawk & Hudson Humane Society tells The Record that the law needs to be even more restrictive.

Today's paper features an interview with Humane Society superintendent Nathaniel J. Walker, under the headline, "MOVING PICTURES BAD FOR CHILDREN." Speaking with our reporter yesterday, Walker said, "I believe that minds of children are affected by what they see at moving pictures, and that this is one of the chief causes of subsequent crimes."

Practically from the beginning of the movie business, people have warned that movies have a "demoralizing" or "desensitizing" effect on children, particularly when they portray violence and crime. The silent, black and white short subjects popular in 1912 were believed to have the same effect of colorfully violent computer-animated video games a century later.

"There is no doubt but that the moving pictures are injuring the morals of the youth, and that they are dangerous to a city," Walker says, "They have been the means of teaching crime to the boys, particularly the films that depict violence, such as robberies, assaults and hold-ups on the street. After seeing these pictures displayed once the youth is impressed with a desire to emulate the work of the principals, and the result is that he is quite often taken for a crime that might never have occurred had he not seen the 'reels.'

"Then again there are the morbid pictures and the suggestive ones, all having a tendency to demoralize the onlooker, if he is of an age that will not allow him to understand fully the meaning of right and wrong."

Girls go to movies also, but Walker is less worried about them turning criminal than with "the associations formed in a darkened room [where] a girl will make friends and meet acquaintances that are not for her good."

The danger is greater because of the ways children and theater owners circumvent state law. Children will wait with ticket money outside the theater for any adult to enter; the adult will then buy the child's ticket, while the theater management doesn't bother verifying the adult's relation to the child.

The easiest solution to this problem, Walker says, is to forbid children under 16 from seeing movies altogether. That way, his agents can arrest theater managers as soon as they see children going inside.

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