The Hays Code: How Hollywood Censored Itself for Three Decades

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Picture Betty Boop for a second. Yeah. If you've seen those really early black and white cartoons, she originally started out as this quintessential, carefree, 1920s flapper.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:11)
Right, she had the short skirt, the garter, a low-cut top.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:14)
Exactly, and she lived a pretty wild lifestyle. But then, a few years later, overnight, she is suddenly wearing this modest, high-collared, almost matronly dress.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
Yeah, and her entire personality completely changes too.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:28)
Right, and why this sudden, dramatic makeover? I mean, fashion didn't change, the law didn't change. Instead, the American movie industry voluntarily decided to put a moral straitjacket on itself.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:38)
Which is just wild to think about today.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:40)
It really is. So welcome to this deep dive into the Hays Code, officially known as the Motion Picture Production Code.
Our mission today is to explore exactly how and why Hollywood, you know, an industry literally built on pushing boundaries, decided to aggressively censor itself for over three decades. Yeah.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:59)
Dictating every single thing you could and couldn't see on a screen.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:02)
Okay, let's unpack this. Because to understand why Hollywood put handcuffs on itself, we really have to look at the absolute chaos of the 1920s.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:12)
Chaos is honestly the perfect word for it. I mean, the 1920s in Hollywood was a period of explosive, unprecedented financial growth. Right. But the industry was also stepping on a lot of cultural landmines.
Civic, religious, and political organizations across the country were getting increasingly outraged.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:30)
It wasn't just about what was on the screen, right?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:32)
No, exactly. It was the off-screen lifestyles of the stars themselves. The public was constantly bombarded with these lurid headlines. You had the manslaughter trial of the massive comedy star Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:46)
Oh, wow. Right. Involving the tragic death of the actress Virginia Rep.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:49)
Exactly. And then you had the sensational, completely unsolved murder of a prominent director, William Desmond Taylor. So to a lot of middle America, Hollywood looked like this den of sheer iniquity.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:01)
It just sounds like the Wild West. And it seems like the people in power were absolutely terrified of it. I mean, from the sources we're looking at, politicians basically started circling like sharks.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:09)
Oh, they definitely did. In 1921 alone, legislators across 37 different states introduced almost 100 distinct film censorship bills.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:19)
100? That's insane.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:21)
Yeah. And several states like New York and Virginia, they didn't just propose bills, they actually went ahead and created their own government-run censorship boards.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:30)
Which, if you think about it, sounds like a complete logistical nightmare for a business.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:34)
Oh, a total nightmare.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:36)
Like if you're trying to distribute a movie nationally, but New York has one set of decency laws, Kansas has a completely different set, and Virginia has another, how do you even operate? You'd have to cut and edit hundreds of different versions of a single film just to comply with all these local laws.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:53)
Which they absolutely didn't want to do.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:54)
Right. But I was looking through the notes, and there's something that genuinely confused me.
Today, we just take it for granted that movies are considered art, right? They're protected by the First Amendment. Why couldn't the studios just take these local censorship boards to court and claim free speech?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:09)
Well, because at the time, that legal shield simply did not exist for them. Quite really. Yeah. Back in 1915, there was a Supreme Court decision called Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio.
And the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that motion pictures did not have free speech protections.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:27)
Wow. So what were they legally considered then?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:30)
The justices essentially declared that movies were purely a business, like a novelty.
They compared them to a circus, a carnival, or a traveling amusement park. They weren't considered the press, and they definitely weren't considered art. So the First Amendment just did not apply.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:46)
So the government had total legal authority to chop up their movies however they wanted. That completely explains the sheer panic. If the government is threatening to tear your multi-million dollar business model apart state by state, you have to do something drastic.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:01)
Exactly.
Which brings us to the fixer. The studios decide they need to bring in an outsider to clean up their image, and so they hire Will H. Hays.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:09)
Right. The analogy that really jumped out to me of the sources is to Major League Baseball.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:13)
Oh yeah. That's a great comparison.