Chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America" Will H. Hays Signed Page. This item is
certified authentic by PSA/DNA and
comes encapsulated.
ES-2599
William
Harrison Hays Sr. (/heɪz/; November 5, 1879 – March 7, 1954) was an
American Republican politician.
As chairman of the Republican National
Committee from 1918–21, Hays managed the successful 1920
presidential campaign of Warren G. Harding. Harding then appointed Hays to his cabinet
as his first Postmaster General.
He resigned from the cabinet in 1922 to become the first chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors of America. As MPPDA chair, Hays oversaw the
promulgation of the Motion Picture Production Code (informally known as the
Hays Code), which spelled out a set of moral guidelines for the self-censorship of content in American cinema.
William Harrison Hays Sr. was born November 5, 1879 in Sullivan, Indiana. He attended Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana.[
Oilman Harry Ford Sinclair devised
a scheme in which twenty-five cents was diverted from the sale of every barrel
of oil sold from the oil field leases that were the focus of the Teapot Dome scandal.
Sinclair testified that he "loaned" Will H. Hays, then-chairman of
the Republican National Committee, $185,000 worth of Liberty Bonds, later getting back $100,000. Sinclair also gave
Hays $75,000 as an outright gift to the Committee. At the time, Hays was
attempting to pay off the 1920 Republican campaign debt. Hays later approached
a number of wealthy men and told them that if they would contribute to pay down
the Committee's debt, he would reimburse them for their contributions with
Liberty Bonds.[ In 1924, after his resignation from the
Harding administration, and while he was serving as President of the Motion
Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Hays was called to testify
before the Senate Committee on Public Lands. When asked how much money Sinclair
had contributed to the Republican Party, Hays testified that his contribution
was $75,000. In 1928, after more details of Sinclair's scheme had emerged, Hays
was called to testify again. Hays then told the full story of Sinclair's
contribution, including the donation of $185,000 in Liberty Bonds and the
$75,000 cash contribution. He stated that he had not mentioned the bonds in his
earlier testimony because the Committee "had not asked about any
bonds." While there was some public perception that Hays was attempting to
conceal Sinclair's large contribution to the Republican National Committee, he
testified that he was "using the bonds to raise money for the deficit. Hays
resigned his cabinet position on January 14, 1922, to become Chairman of the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) shortly after the
organization's founding. He began his new job, at a $35,360 annual salary
(equivalent to $550,000 in 2020), on March 6 of that year. There was
speculation that he would be paid between $100,000 and $150,000 a year. The
goal of the organization was to improve the image of the movie industry in the
wake of the scandal surrounding the alleged rape and murder of model and
actress Virginia Rappe, of which
film star Roscoe "Fatty"
Arbuckle was accused, and amid growing calls by religious
groups for federal censorship of the movies. Hiring Hays to "clean up the
pictures" was, at least in part, a public relations ploy and much was made
of his conservative redentials,
including his roles as a Presbyterian deacon and past chairman of the
Republican Party. In his new position in
Hollywood, Hays' main roles were to persuade individual state censor boards not
to ban specific films outright and to reduce the financial impact of the
boards' cuts and edits. At that time, the studios were required by state laws
to pay the censor boards for each foot of film excised and for each title card
edited; in addition, studios also had the expense of duplicating and
distributing separate versions of each censored film for the state or states
that adhered to a particular board's decisions. Hays attempted to
reduce studio costs (and improve the industry's image in general) by advising
individual studios on how to produce movies to reduce the likelihood that the
film would be cut. Each board kept its "standards" secret (if,
indeed, they had any standardization at all), so Hays was forced to intuit what
would or would not be permitted by each board. At first he applied what he
called "The Formula" but it was not particularly successful; from that
he developed a set of guidelines he called "The Don'ts and Be
Carefuls". In general his efforts at pre-release self-censorship were
unsuccessful in quieting calls for federal censorship.[ Catholic bishops and lay
people tended to be wary of federal censorship and favored the Hays approach of
self-censorship; these included the outspoken Catholic layman Martin J. Quigley, publisher of Exhibitors
Herald-World (a trade magazine for independent exhibitors). For
several months in 1929, Martin Quigley, Joseph Breen, Father Daniel A. Lord S.J., Father FitzGeorge Dinneen S.J., and
Father Wilfred Parsons (editor of Catholic publication America)
discussed the desirability of a new and more stringent code of behavior for the
movies. With the blessing of Cardinal George W. Mundelein of Chicago, Father Lord
authored the code, which later became known as "The Production Code", "The Code", and "The
Hays Code". It was presented to Will Hays in 1930 who said, "My eyes
nearly popped out when I read it. This was the very thing I had been looking
for".[ The studio heads were less
enthusiastic but they agreed to make The Code the rule of the industry, albeit
with many loopholes that allowed studio producers to override the Hays Office's
application of it. From 1930 to 1934, the Production Code was only slightly
effective in fighting back calls for federal censorship. However, things came
to a head in 1934 with widespread threats of Catholic boycotts of
"immoral" movies, as well as reduced funding from Catholic financiers
such as A. P. Giannini of
the Bank of America. As a
result, the studios granted MPPDA full authority to enforce the Production Code
on all studios, creating a relatively strict regime of self-censorship which
endured for decades. (The Code was set aside in the 1960s when the MPAA adopted
the age-based rating system in force today.) Also in 1934, to deal with
"inappropriate" industry personnel, alongside the Code's concern with
the industry's output, Hays created a list of 117 names of performers whose
personal lives he thought made them unfit to appear in films. Hays'
philosophy might best be summed up by a statement he reportedly made to a movie
director: "When you make a woman cross her legs in the films, maybe you
don't need to see how she can cross them and stay within the law; but how low
she can cross them and still be interesting". Hays
faced much international pressure to block film scripts and scenes offensive to
foreign nations. Many European nations imposed quotas designed to boost
domestic productions over Hollywood imports. A key accomplishment of Hays was
his work with the U.S. government, particularly the State Department and
the Department
of Commerce, in maintaining Hollywood's domination of overseas movie
markets.
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