William H. Hays resigned as Postmaster General in order to become head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors. In that role he would end up associated with an effort to clean up, if you will, the movie industry, which would lead to him being somewhat misremembered today.
Hays would bring in the Hays Production Code, which was effectively a code of self-censorship for the movie industry. The draft code stunned critics of film, who were advocating state and Federal restrictions at the time. As the code basically gave them what they wanted, they were satiated by it and ceased their efforts for the most part.
The things that brought about the concern were real. While we have a conceptual draft of a related topic, what had basically occurred is that film, both still and moving pictures, brought in the ability to portray topics, and by that we can largely say the topic was young women, in an easy to do and lurid manner. Such things has always existed, of course, to a degree, but when illustrated magazines largely relied on illustrators, many of whom have been featured here, the effort and public reaction generally tended to preclude too much cross over from pornography and near pornography into popular media.
Film started to erode that significantly, and the real erosion really took off in the movie industry. There were not controls on the production of movies at all, and as a result, starting almost from the onset of film, moviemakers found that they could insert some degree of pornography and get away with it. Only partially obscured bathing scenes, or ones that weren't obscured at all, made their way into dramas. Even famous producers, like Cecil B. DeMille, made silent films that were wholesale lurid, with a DeMille example ironically supposedly being one about early saints, the same featuring scenses of chained writhing nude women.
This has promoted an effort to do something about it, but the cross-over of private scandal into the news, coming from the movie industry, really pushed it over the top. Divorces and scandalous deaths became headline news. When Fatty Arbuckle was arrested it provided the final push.
Arbuckle would, of course, later be acquitted, but the scandal did give an unseemly look into things that people would no longer tolerate. No matter what the truth of the tragedy was, it did feature a story of illicit sex (it seems) and scandalous behavior. People had enough.
Faced with this, the movie industry organized and Hays was brought over. The Production Code would stave off the disaster and for around forty years keep American film from sinking into the moral sewer. In the late 1960s the industry, looking at the time, calculated that they could break free from it, and they did, although not to their credit or to that of the arts.
On this day in 1922, the Anglo-Irish Treaty officially went into effect. In a really confusing technicality, the Irish had two governments during this period, one being a provisional government that was to rule for the remainder of the year until the full transition into a Free State was accomplished. However, as the Irish already had formed a Parliament, the existing Dail, and simply kept it in existence and perhaps can be regarded as the real government. The Dáil Éireann was the technical successor to the Dáil of the Irish Republic, which had ceased to exist in December 6, 1921. While De Valera claimed that it remained in existence after he lost what amounted to a vote of no confidence, nobody had challenged the transition up to that point. Technically the current Dáil dates to 1937, when Ireland adopted a constitution declaring itself to be a republic, and the Dáil Éireann became its lower house.
Members of the provisional government were, in fact, members of the Dáil Éireann, so in reality the latter rather than the former was the government. Michael Collins, the famous republican guerilla (terrorist) leader of the Anglo Irish War was made the chairman of the Provisional Government. He had been instrumental in negotiating the treaty with the United Kingdom.
The President of the League of Nations called for the evacuation of 120,000 Armenian Christians from Turkey.
Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post illustration featured a boy looking at stereographs. Not one of his better illustrations in my view.
Judge was looking for smiling faces, and featured an alluring young woman coming out of a makeup case.
On the same day, The Country Gentleman gave us a different portrayal of a young woman with an illustration by Katherine R. Wireman.
I like that illustration better.
Mary Plant and Leicester Faust, the latter part of the Busch brewing family, married in St. Louis.
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