Who Decides How Women Should Cross Their Legs: The Hays Code Pt 1
There are tropes and stereotypes and all-around gross patterns in a lot of Hollywood films. Studios tend to favor punishing “misbehaved” women, casting white people to play (or save) BIPOC characters, conceding to authoritative figures, and maintaining a very religious version of “good versus evil.” Sometimes I see posts or reviews bemoaning films, especially movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood, for falling into these traps and I wonder if the reviewers ever looked into why these tropes exist. Why do hardened gangsters and sexually free and forward women either reform or die? Why is there a long, gross history of whitewashing BIPOC stories? Why is burying/emotionally straining/outright ignoring your gays a thing? (This one is actually REALLLLLY multi-faceted, and don’t worry this Hollywood History series WILL dive into this topic at a much deeper level in a few months.) The answer is obviously complex; you can’t have conventions this problematic all go back to one simple thing, that would be fixable. However, there is one BIG thing that looms over three pivotal decades of American filmmaking: The Hays Code. When something this toxic and stifling runs an industry for so much of its formative years that industry is bound to have problems that are hard and lengthy to fix. Of course, Will H. Hays was not the only person responsible for this code by any stretch of the imagination, and we will touch on the other people who helped craft it, but in order to understand why The Code is so important, I think it’s necessary to understand the man for which it was named.
Like most terrible things, this story starts in Ohio. (Sorry Ohio.) Kind of, anyway. Ohio was the home of Warren G. Harding, one of the more forgettable presidents in modern US History. If you don’t know much about him you really aren’t alone, buuuuuuut maybe you should consider learning about him, especially if you’re American because his administration shines a really early and interesting light into a lot of contemporary issues within US politics…namely, corruption, and in this case within the Republican Party. Now, I’m not a historian by any stretch, and this series is born out of my own personal interest in learning rather than my already acquired knowledge. But the history classes I took in college did inform me that the Republican Party of the 1920s was in fact different than the one of today. So, yes, I know all about Southern Democrats and party swapping. However, the rise of this particular conservative Republican President has a lot in common with other contemporary conservative political leaders and it’s actually really fascinating to dive into. For the purposes of this post, though, I’ll summarize it this way:
Harding was a long-shot candidate who won his primary because he manipulated a crowded field that resulted in candidates with too many similarities splitting their votes amongst each other and deadlocking the nomination. (Sound familiar?)
He ran his General Election campaign by basically forcing the media, competition, and voters to engage with the process on his terms. (Sound familiar?)
He focused his platform on “Return to Normalcy” (in this case pre-WWI/Spanish Flu) pitching good moral values (despite having at least one mistress and a boatload of previous corruption himself) and a kind of…appeal to pseudo populism. (Sound familiar?)
Eventually, Harding won in a landslide over the Democratic candidate then made some interesting cabinet choices and left a historically-unmatched corrupt legacy behind...sound vaguely familiar?
So…how does this all add up or even apply at all to film as we know it today? There are a lot of important dates to remember around this particular section and they’re all crammed in pretty tightly so I’m going to use some cinematic knowledge to also clear up this political timeline. Now, I know a lot of my readers aren’t even Americans AND this is a movie blog not a political or history blog, so this back knowledge seems really out of place; however, as I think a lot of people are going to find out from this Hollywood History project, politics, film (art), history…there has always been a lot more overlap there than most realize. And, again, in order to understand a lot of the things that I am going to talk about in the months to come, it’s super important to understand that the root of this rotting, disgusting side of such a powerful industry was so heavily influenced by corruption, hypocrisy, and censorship a century ago. These things compound and build towards the reality we know today. So anyway, keep that in mind as we start with some niche history to introduce the series. To quote The Great Elle Woods, “I have a point, I promise.”
The basic timeline that you need to know is as follows:
Good little (like literally, he was 110 pounds) Christian boy Will Hays is the Chairman of the Republican Party between 1918 and June of 1921. So we’re talking early days of Chaplin shorts until about the time The Phantom Carriage was released. So cinematically during this time films had gone from this sort of experimental way to convey a narrative but still holding on to the conventions of stage performance to this new long-form storytelling with often shocking and artistic visuals. This era is basically when film found itself as a medium, in the sense that creators started to understand its power as an art form and how that can be effectively used to manipulate narratives. (Also the Soviets and Germans were way better at this than Americans early on, but that’s not what this is about. We’ll cover that too.)
However, during the 1920 campaign, Harding finds it a-okay to hire Chairman Hays as his campaign manager, even though he’s already the head of the Republican Party as an organization. Obviously, they win. This is the year that audiences saw The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Now, in MARCH of 1921, still in Phantom Carriage territory, Hays is appointed to be the 46th Post Master General even though he’s STILL the head of The Republican Party, as an organization, and in charge of paying back campaign debts and RNC debts, all the debts. I know this isn’t technically illegal but it’s really sketchy, and important, that there is an overlap lasting a third of a year with these two jobs.
A year, almost to the day, later Hays resigns from the Harding Administration to become the head of a new, fancy organization called the Motion Picture Association of America. That’s that MPAA we see in all the trailer ratings. They’re the ones who give movies an American Rating (our system is G for General, PG for Parental Guidance lightly suggested, PG-13 for Parental Guidance required under the age of 13, R for Restricted for unaccompanied viewers under 17, and NC-17 for No Children Under 17 accompanied or not, for any of my European and Asian readers who may not know.) There’s a lot that goes into making this rating structure and we aren’t quite there yet, but know this is the basis for that because it comes into censorship play later. 1922 is the year the German Expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu came out, by the way.
Okay, so, a little bit of time goes on without a lot of attention on Hays as a political figure. He’s not part of Harding’s complete embarrassment surrounding the Great Railroad Strike and he’s basically fully committed to making movies shitty so things get quiet on his end publically. Privately though, he’s still trying to pay off those big campaign debts I mentioned earlier. Like, BIG debts. And in the 1920s when you had biggggg debts there was only one sugar daddy that could keep on providing: oil tycoons. Of course, like any sugar daddy, oil tycoons are going to want something for that money. In this case, it was two years (1921 to 1923) of using Navy petroleum reserves for lower rates and no competition. This, essentially, means Big Oil gave prominent members of the Harding Administration a lot of money on a personal or organizational level to for-sure be able to use these fields on the cheap, rather than go through the proper bidding channels paying proper rates to the proper govenment departments. This is called The Teapot Dome scandal and it’s a WHOLE thing. For our purposes though, just know that while Hays wasn’t all-in spending the whole night with the oil industries…he was going on dates with them. He, both personally and on behalf of the RNC, was given literal 2021 millions in bonds and cash from a guy named Harry Ford Sinclair. He testified twice, once in 1924 (where he omitted evidence) and once in 1928 about this while heading the board of MPAA where he was making a cool half a million a year in 2021 money.
So if this guy was sooooo corrupt why was he the one chosen to help “clean-up” the film industry? (Which needed said cleaning-up because there was a major star who was accused of raping and murdering actress Virginia Rappe, perhaps the first cinema #MeToo victim. All these issues are so old and tired.) Because at this point public perception of Hays (or Harding, really) hadn’t been terribly tarnished and he had those strong conservative credentials detailed above; this satisfied certain loud religious groups that want(ed) a FEDERAL-level censorship of films. Studios did NOT want this, obviously, so they decided to get ahead of it. Now, before you start shouting FREE SPEECH at me, in 1915 the US Supreme Court had ruled 9-0 in the case Mutual Film Corp vs The Industrial Commission of…wait for it…Ohio (I told you all bad things start in Ohio.) that film did NOT count as free speech and governments could regulate and censor it, thus the censorship boards set up in 1913 by the State of Ohio were legal. This ruling would not be overturned for like four more decades, because the medium of cinema has had a hard life, man. Again, studios knew that censorship was inevitable, so as a PR move they chose to SELF-censor and create the MPAA. And, like, you can understand why appointing the notoriously conservative-Christian-former-member-of-the-government-but-not-anymore guy to “make sure filmmaking was on it’s best behavior” seemed like a good idea to these producers at the time. Hays was initially tasked with instructing filmmakers on how to make movies that complied with state censorship boards from the start, thus having a good image and also cutting the costs associated with re-editing their films. It turned out to be more like when Cersei allied with The Faith of Seven, though. Because instead of manipulating him into doing what was in the industry’s best interest while appearing to be totally virtuous and neutral…well, the corrupt politician is gonna corrupt politician and he backstabbed the industry and tossed them in the dungeons, too, with an even harsher industry standard that banned most creative, decent, or profitable idea. That’s for the next post, though, where I talk about the actual implementation of The Code in 1934. For now, we’re just talking about the Baddies who made it a thing. And, of course, it wasn’t just Hays who came up with this shitshow of a policy.
As the head of the MPAA at the time, Hays got to be the namesake of the censorship code. However, obviously, he wasn’t the only one who created this Catholic-influenced Code. There were several Catholic Priests and other rich white guys who participated in drafting on-screen rules that included but were not limited to, required reform/punishment of what they saw as impure behavior (especially as portrayed by female and BIPOC characters), the banning of depicting interracial or non-hetero relationships, the banning of questioning authority figures such as the Government or police or military, and a strict vision of the good/evil conflict. I cannot stress enough that this was, first and foremost, a form of RELIGIOUS censorship and, also, through a loophole, not even technically a violation of the First Amendment even when the 1915 case was eventually overturned. This wonky timeline and backstory is important because it outlines the corruption and hypocrisy of the man who was assigned to craft a way to tell one set of storytellers how they were allowed to tell stories, with a focus on keeping the morals of America strict, prudish, and fundamentalist Christian. I think one telling quote from Hays himself, more or less explains what his true goals were: “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." If only he had lived long enough to see Basic Instinct.
But that’s our main villain here. This is who he was: an ambitious politician who was steeped in corruption and fundamentalism from the start and until the very end. In the next few parts of the series, I’m going to detail the Code itself, how it affects marginalized voices in cinema (gender, race, sexual identities, and the counterculture), and its lasting impacts.