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Controversial first leader of the American film industry

William Harrison Hays Sr. (/h//eɪ//z/; November 5, 1879 – March 7, 1954) was an American politician, and member of the Republican Party. As chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1918 to 1921, 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 chairman, 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. He attended Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

He was the manager of Warren G. Harding's successful campaign for the Presidency of the United States in the 1920 election and was subsequently appointed Postmaster General.

Hays resigned his cabinet position on January 14, 1922, to become Chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America shortly after the organization's founding. He began his new job, at a $35,360 annual salary (35360.0 in 1922 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years), 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 credentials, including his roles as a Presbyterian deacon and past chairman of the Republican Party. 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. As an example of Hays' philosophy, he reportedly said 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 worked with the U. S. government, particularly the State Department and the Department of Commerce, to maintain Hollywood's domination of overseas movie markets.

When the entertainment industry started to take off in the early 1920s, thousands of people flocked to Hollywood with hopes of becoming the next big star. These hopefuls were called "extras" because they were the extra people who filled out scenes. The main way to find work at this time was to wait outside the gates of studios, hoping to be hired on the spot. With little regulation on hiring film extras, many people were exploited while looking for work. In an effort to fix the employment issues and exploitation that plagued the industry, Hays commissioned several studies of the employment conditions in Hollywood, including one from Mary van Kleeck, a prominent sociologist with the Russell Sage Foundation. After reviewing the results of the studies, Hays adopted a suggestion of van Kleeck's and created the Central Casting Corporation in 1925 as a way to regulate the hiring of extras in Hollywood.

After his retirement, Will H. Hays returned to Sullivan, Indiana, where he died on March 7, 1954. His widow died in 1960.

In their 1940 short No Census, No Feelings, The Three Stooges refer to Will Hays and his position as censor czar in a joke, when Moe tells Curly, "We have a job now, we're working for the Census"; Curly replies "You mean Will Hays?" in a word association of "census" and "censors". In 1942 Looney Tunes Abbott and Costello parody cartoon “A Tale of Two Kitties,” two cats Babbit and Catstello try to eat a naked “tweety” bird. During the ladder scene, Babbit yells "Give me the bird!" To which Catstello replies, "If the Hayes Office would only let me, I'd give him the boid alright!"