Will Hays Becomes Postmaster General; Ends Some, But Not All, Post Office Censorship
Appointed Postmaster General by President Warren G. Harding, Will Hays ended most of the political censorship of the mails that had occurred in the administration of President Woodrow Wilson during World War I. Most important, see the pivotal case in which the U.S. Post Office banned the radical, anti-war magazine The Masses from the mails on July 24, 1917.
Hays did not, however, end the censorship of sexually related materials, which continued for another 50 years. Additionally, the Post Office gradually resumed censorship of political publications after Hays resigned his position.
Hays left the Post Office in 1922 to become head of Hollywood Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association. In that position, he led a voluntary self-censorship of the movies, which continued long after he left that job. (See his call for the movie industry to “purify itself” on June 4, 1922.) His name has since been immortalized in the term “Hays Code,” which refers to the film censorship code.
Financially, Hays did very well in his work for Hollywood. By the late 1930s and early 1940s he was reported to be the highest paid lobbyist in Washington, DC.
Learn more about Post Office censorship: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/pill/peopleevents/e_comstock.html
See a timeline on movie censorship: https://www.aclu.org/files/multimedia/censorshiptimeline.html