100 years ago today in Spokane: Visiting evangelist calls out movies as bad influence

A visiting evangelist declared that movies were responsible for many of the day’s ills.

Movies were “breaking down the barriers of modesty, which are our real protection in modern civilization.”

But that wasn’t all. He asserted that psychologists “report that children who become devotees of movies suffer from a loss of memory.”

“The child goes only for the thrill and doesn’t try to remember anything but the next one to attend,” said Dr. George Wood Anderson.

He also said that librarians reported that “when the movies come, fewer books are taken out by children.”

Movies, he said, encouraged criminality in children, because it gave them “an unreal and abnormal” habit of thought.

More than 2,000 people attended his lecture, titled “Cringing Cowards” – referring to people who were afraid to speak out against “commercialized amusements.”

From the bird beat: An armed Spokane police officer was preparing for war against a downtown menace – pigeons.

The officer would be equipped with a small caliber shotgun and light shot.

“The birds have become a nuisance and their numbers must be reduced,” said Spokane’s commissioner of public safety.

Also on this date

(Associated Press)

44 B.C.: Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of nobles that included Brutus and Cassius.

1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson, addressing a joint session of Congress, called for new legislation to guarantee every American’s right to vote; the result was passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.