34 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
it became clear that this was a euphe-
mism for abortions.) On April 12th, the
third jury went into deliberation at
5:10 P.M. and returned five minutes later
with a verdict: not guilty. More than
that, the jurors released a statement that
would have been difficult to compose
so quickly—they might have had help
from Arbuckle’s lawyers—beginning,
“Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Ar-
buckle. We feel that a great injustice
has been done him.”
Arbuckle crowed, “I believe I am due
for a comeback.” Paramount tested the
waters by allowing his shelved films to
be screened. Nevertheless, six days after
his acquittal Arbuckle was cancelled all
over again. The reason was that Holly-
wood had decided to police itself be-
fore Washington could.
W
ith the public’s taste whetted for
gossip about the private lives of
celebrities, tales of Hollywood deprav-
ity were coming down in a torrent. While
Arbuckle’s second jury was deliberat-
ing, the director William Desmond Tay-
lor was found murdered, and investiga-
tors turned up a sordid backstory that
included a deserted wife, secret love let-
ters, and an embezzling valet. Months
later, the Paramount heartthrob Wal-
lace Reid was admitted to a sanatorium
for morphine addiction and died soon
afterward. All the drugs, sex, and mur-
der confirmed Hollywood’s image as a
modern Gomorrah, and the threat of
government intervention turned exis-
tential. But the studio chiefs had found
a solution: hire their own referee.
As Warren G. Harding’s campaign
manager, Will H. Hays had helped Re-
publicans take the White House in 1920
and was rewarded with the job of Post-
master General. A Presbyterian elder
from Indiana, Hays had a clean-cut
image that, as Merritt writes, “contrasted
with the major film studio heads, all of
whom were Jewish and most of whom
were immigrants—facts not lost on
Hollywood’s critics, many of whom es-
poused anti-Semitism and nativism.” In
December, 1921, as the Arbuckle saga
dominated the headlines, a dozen stu-
dio chiefs signed a letter to Hays, offer-
ing him a hundred-thousand-dollar sal-
ary to head a new organization called
the Motion Picture Producers and Dis-
tributors of America. The idea was mod-
elled on major-league baseball, which
had brought on its first commissioner
after the fixed World Series of 1919.
Hays’s first major act as “czar of the mov-
ies”: banning Arbuckle from the screen.
In his autobiography, Hays said that
the decision came on request from Par-
amount’s president, Adolph Zukor, who
wanted to “sacrifice” Arbuckle without
the ban’s being traced back to the stu-
dio. Although the “Hays Office” became
synonymous with censorship, Hays’s real
job was to put a wholesome face on the
industry in order to forestall censor-
ship from the outside. But the long-
term effects of his installment were
seismic. In 1927, he issued a list of what
became known as “Don’ts and Be Care-
fuls,” which barred movies from show-
ing sex, profanity, “ridicule of the clergy,”
and other vices. Still, the rules were la-
zily enforced. It wasn’t until 1934, after
talkies presented new avenues for ob-
scenity, that the Hays Office formed the
Production Code Administration, which
kept the movies buttoned-up and pu-
ritanical—homosexuality, miscegena-
tion, and moral ambiguity were all but
absent from the screen—all the way into
the late sixties.
If there’s a modern analogue to the
creation of the Hays Office, it may not
be in Hollywood but in Silicon Valley.
Social media is roughly as old as the
film industry was then, and is also on
the receiving end of a public backlash.
Facebook and Twitter are our Paramount
and M-G-M, Mark Zuckerberg and
Jack Dorsey our Adolph Zukor andLouis B. Mayer. As with Hollywood in
the twenties, the honeymoon between
tech and Washington has soured, and
the sins of Big Tech—spreading dan-
gerous disinformation, collecting and
exploiting personal data—have placed
its moguls under scrutiny. The image of
a blank-eyed Zuckerberg testifying be-
fore Congress has eclipsed that of the
boy genius in a hoodie. You could seeFacebook’s “supreme court,” which was
formed last year to rule on ethical quan-
daries, as tech’s answer to the Hays Of-
fice: a semi-autonomous, self-regulat-
ing body meant to project integrity and
stanch a bleeding P.R. wound.
Donald Trump gave the tech indus-
try an unavoidable stress test, and, when
Twitter and Facebook suspended him,
earlier this year, they had a high-profile
scalp to hold up, as if to say, “Trust us!
We’re the good guys!” Hays, acting as
the studios’ lackey, took the same tack
by cutting off Arbuckle following the
trials. But it was impossible to curb the
opprobrium. Not long after the Ar-
buckle ban, Senator Henry Lee Myers,
of Montana, took to the Senate floor to
blast all of Hollywood as “a colony of
these people, where debauchery, riotous
living, drunkenness, ribaldry, dissipa-
tion, free love, seem to be conspicuous.”
Others felt that Arbuckle was being
scapegoated. Days before Christmas,
1922, Hays, in the spirit of “American
fair play” and “Christian charity,” lifted
the ban after only eight months. Then
as now, cancellation has a half life.
Arbuckle was elated, but not for long.
Outraged telegrams poured into Hays’s
office. The San Francisco Federation of
Women’s Clubs implored him to make
an example “of those who brazenly vi-
olate the moral code of a Christian na-
tion.” Local movie boards maintained
the ban on Arbuckle films of their own
accord, in Minnesota, in Detroit, in
Walla Walla, Washington, and then
most everywhere. Even the warden at
Sing Sing instituted an Arbuckle ban.
The court of public opinion was ren-
dering its own verdict. Hays refused to
reverse course again, but he’d made a
tactical error: by banning Arbuckle after
his acquittal, Hays had pronounced him
guilty of something. So why was he now
being absolved?“
H
e was very bitter over what he
believed was injustice, which fi-
nancially and professionally ruined him,”
one reporter recalled of the exiled Ar-
buckle. “I had never seen a more hope-
less man.” He drank. Legal fees had left
him in debt. He went back on the vaude-
ville circuit, though his appearances
sometimes drew protests. In 1924, Buster
Keaton brought him on as a co-director
for the film “Sherlock Jr.,” but he was