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in them. His recommendations, designed to safeguard “American” family values and the sanctity of marriage and the home, were approved in 1930 and enforced from 1934. The first dictate read, “No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it.” Heated love scenes—like those for which Pola Negri had been celebrated—and references to “impure love” were banned, in case they aroused improper passions; virtue and morality were to triumph by decree; the clergy were not to be ridiculed and gangsters were not to be portrayed as sympathetic. But, for Hollywood hotshots as for Washington politicians, the appearance of morality remained far more important than the practice of it.

President Warren Harding and his wife Florence, 1921.

5

“My God! HOW THE MONEY Rolls IN”

WILL HAYS’S CONNECTION WITH HOLLYWOOD DATED BACK to two years before he was appointed president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.

In August 1920, the “Harding-Coolidge Theatrical League” arrived in Warren Harding’s home town of Marion, Ohio, to give their support to Harding’s presidential campaign which Hays was masterminding. Newly married Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks led a group of actors and entertainers pledging their support for Harding in the upcoming election.

Hollywood loved Harding for his easy good nature, his sociability, his sincerity—and perhaps above all for his nobly presidential looks. Lillian Gish described him as “a Roman statue carved out of marble” and was charmed by the way he held his arms out to her and her sister, Dorothy, when they were invited to the White House for a screening of one of their movies, calling them both “Darling!”

Fellow politicians found him less impressive. Harding won the Republican nomination by default: delegates and fixers agreed that the times didn’t require a “First-Rater” but that Harding, politically conservative (as a senator he had always voted with the party) and with immense popular appeal, would be as malleable as he was electable. Harding was no less realistic about his attributes. After receiving his party’s nomination he said he felt “like a man who goes in with a pair of eights and comes out with aces full.”

His campaign confirmed expectations. “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality . . .” he declared, without running out of breath. Somehow Harding’s bungled language and overblown rhetoric convinced voters that he stood for a return to what he called “normalcy” after the turbulent war years.

Even the man who became Harding’s Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, commented on his preference for “three-dollar words.” William McAdoo, one of the failed Democratic contenders for candidate, said Harding’s speeches “leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.”

The journalist William Allen White, who liked Harding, agreed that he was “densely ignorant. At best he was a poor dub who had made his reputation running with the political machine in Ohio, making Memorial Day addresses for the Elks, addressing service clubs—the Rotarians, Kiwanians, or the Lions—uttering resounding platitudes and saying nothing because he knew nothing.” Harding may have looked like a president, but he wasn’t equal to the challenges of the job. Yet Harding’s simple, wellintentioned affability struck a chord with millions of American voters. His election win was less a landslide than an earthquake, the most sweeping presidential victory ever; he came to office in early 1921 on a national wave of buoyant optimism. “The populace is on a broad grin,” reported