In 1921, the same New York legislator who had launched the state’s Legislative Committee to investigate “seditious activities” and “Revolutionary Radicalism” during the post-war “Red Scare”, sponsored a law to have movies censored for “objectionable material” by government commissioners. Movie industry lobbyists who had failed to convince the legislature to allow “self-censorship” by film producers, took heart in November 1922 when Massachusetts voters rejected similar provisions for censorship in their state. The election that same year of liberal Democratic New York Governor Al Smith prompted an effort to repeal the New York law.

         This letter from a church-based group opposing repeal was signed by the former advertising manager of a Kansas City Flour Mill Company who had moved to New York to open a public relations firm and to produce silent films with a “religious” (i.e. Christian) storyline. He later went on to organize the Outdoor Advertising Company that littered the American countryside with commercial billboards. His long letter explains in detail why necessary government “regulation” was not censorship but merely an effort to protect the public from “evil” and “indecent” movies that were profitable to “big business.”