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The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. (MPPDA) was the trade association for the major companies in the motion picture industry during the 1920s and 1930s. According to its by-laws, the MPPDA was created 'to foster the common interests of those engaged in the motion picture industry in the United States.' In practice, its restricted membership was dominated by the major companies - Paramount, Loew's, Inc. (parent company for MGM), Fox, Warner Bros., RKO, Universal, Columbia and United Artists - and it operated as the means by which these companies could co-operate in all areas of the movie business in which they were not competing with each other. It had a large role in managing the industry's public relations, particularly in maintaining the industry's respectability in the eyes of church and civic groups suspicious of the movies' influence on the young and unsophisticated. The MPPDA also conducted negotiations on behalf of the industry with local, state, federal and foreign governments. In cinema history, it is best known for its role in regulating the content of motion pictures, particularly through the Motion Picture Production Code (often called the Hays Code), introduced in 1930.

The MPPDA was not the industry's first trade association. In many respects, the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), which came into being in 1908, can be seen as the American film industry's first attempt at business self-regulation, while the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures (NBC), created in 1909, represented the industry's first attempt to regulate movie content through mechanisms internal to the industry as an alternative to official censorship by various levels of government. The NBC changed its name to the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (NBR) in 1915. In 1916, the short-lived Motion Picture Board of Trade was replaced as the industry's trade association by the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI), which included members of all three branches of the industry.

From 1907, state and municipal governments had sought to regulate and tax the industry through a variety of measures, including the establishment of censor boards. Between 1911 and 1916, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Ohio, and Maryland established state censor boards, and in 1915 the US Supreme Court ruled state censorship to be constitutional, denying movies the right to protection under the First Amendment. In the early 1920s almost every state legislature considered a censorship bill. The increased vigor of this pro-censorship campaign had less to do with the more explicit sexuality of movies such as Cecil B. deMille's Why Change Your Wife? than it did with larger social factors: the establishment of prohibition, and the postwar depression, which intensified middle class anxieties about the potentially disruptive condition of the working class. In 1921, as part of its campaign against state censorship, NAMPI published the "Thirteen Points," a series of resolutions designed to operate as a system of content self-regulation. It failed to prevent the passage of censorship legislation in New York, however, and the organisation's subsequent collapse led to discussions about replacing it with a more effective body. The industry's rapid vertical integration had revived the rhetoric of the evils of the "Movie Trust," heightened by an element of anti-Semitism. In August 1921, the Federal Trade Commission charged Famous Players-Lasky with monopolizing first-run exhibition, and there were calls for the Senate Judiciary Committee to conduct an investigation into the political activities of the motion picture industry. It was these events, far more than the hullabaloo in the Hearst press over the Fatty Arbuckle and William Desmond Taylor scandals that led to the creation of the MPPDA.

Will H. Hays had been Chairman of the Republican Party National Committee in 1920, and had organized Warren Harding's successful Presidential campaign. In 1921 he was Postmaster General in Harding's Cabinet, and industry leaders chose him for the job partly because he was the most respectable Protestant politician industry leaders could buy, but also because of his political connections and organizational skills. He presented the MPPDA as an innovative trade association at the forefront of corporate development, largely responsible for the industry's maturation into respectability, standardizing trade practices and stabilizing relationships between distributors and exhibitors through Film Boards of Trade, arbitration and the Standard Exhibition Contract. The Association's stated object, to establish "the highest possible moral and artistic standards of motion picture production" was in one sense simply an extension of this practice, but it also implicitly accepted that "pure" entertainment and amusement that was not harmful to its consumer was a commodity comparable to the pure meat guaranteed by the Food and Drug Administration. Resisting the spread of state censorship and regulating movie content was only one aspect of the MPPDA's overall task of internally reorganizing the industry's affairs. The disputes between distributors and exhibitors during the process of vertical integration had been exploited by reform groups and had also undermined the confidence of Wall Street in the competence of industry management. Much of what the MPPDA did in the 1920s in negotiating a standard form of contract to govern the 500,000 contractual agreements signed between distributors and exhibitors every year, and in establishing a system of arbitration for settling trade disputes arising from these contracts, for example, was aimed at securing the confidence of finance capital for the industry's continued expansion.

Hays also persuaded industry leaders that they needed a much more effective public relations operation to reorient the industry's public image. He argued that the industry could not "ignore the classes that write, talk, and legislate." The movies had not merely to provide a satisfactory level of entertainment for their diverse audiences, but also to offend as small a proportion of the country's cultural and legislative leadership as possible. His public relations policy, implemented in large part by his assistant Col. Jason Joy, affiliated the MPPDA with nationally federated civic and religious organizations, women's clubs and parent-teacher associations, aiming to make "this important portion of public opinion a friendly rather than a hostile critic of pictures," and contain the legislative threat posed by their political lobbying power. The MPPDA's activities in the production and promotion of educational and medical films, its contributions to Americanization campaigns and its provision of movies for schools, charities and other institutions were all part of this public relations campaign to demonstrate the industry's respectability and social utility. They were not, in practical terms, as important as the MPPDA's role in maintaining internal industrial harmony, or its constant work on legal and legislative issues. The association's central concern was that legislation or court action might impose a strict application of the anti-trust laws on the industry, and force the major companies to divorce production, distribution and exhibition from each other. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the industry was also subject to a constant barrage of hostile local and state legislation, proposed by politicians who saw Hollywood's fabled riches as a potential source of local revenue. Through its General Counsel, Charles C. Pettijohn, the MPPDA maintained an extensive network of political alliances at a municipal and state level to prevent the passage of such legislation, as well as conducting the industry's dealings with the federal government and its foreign policy in negotiations over treaties and quotas with other countries.

The late 1920s represented the pinnacle of the MPPDA's achievement. Although the MPPDA succeeded in preventing the spread of state censorship after its establishment, more than 60% of domestic exhibition was affected by what Hays always referred to as "political censorship" by either state or municipal authorities, together with virtually the entire foreign market, and the association failed to abolish any of the existing boards or to have sound films recognised as 'speech' protected by the First Amendment. The MPPDA's mechanisms for self-regulation therefore comprised an additional, rather than a replacement, structure for the control of content. To establish self-regulation as a form of industrial self-determination, the industry had to demonstrate that, as Hays put it, "the quality of our pictures is such that no reasonable person can claim any need of censorship." In part he achieved this by conceding that there was no dispute over the need to regulate entertainment or over the standards by which it should be regulated, only over who possessed the appropriate authority to police the ideological apparatus of representation.

In 1924, the MPPDA established a mechanism for vetting source material, known as "the Formula," in order "to exercise every possible care that only books or plays which are of the right type are used for screen presentation." In 1927, the Association published a code to govern production, administered by Col. Joy as Director of its Studio Relations Committee (SRC) in Hollywood. The "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," as this code was familiarly known, was compiled by a committee chaired by Irving Thalberg, and synthesized the restrictions and eliminations applied by state and foreign censors. Films were modified after production but before release in order to assuage the concerns of civic, religious, or manufacturing interests, but until 1930, the SRC's function was only advisory.

The technological complexities of sound production necessitated a more exact arrangement. Unlike silent film, talkies could not be altered by local censors, regional distributors or individual exhibitors without destroying synchronization. Producers began to demand something firmer than advice from the SRC, but at the same time they wanted to establish a more permissive code for sound, since with dialogue characters could, they argued, "delicately" discuss subjects the silent picture was forced to shun. The studios' heads of production sought to evade authorial responsibility for the moral standards of their output. Arguing that the civic groups demanding reform exaggerated the effect movies had on their audiences, Thalberg insisted that "the motion picture is literally bound to the mental and moral level of its vast audience." But in claiming that they reflected rather than created public taste, the producers surrendered the terms in which the cultural function of movies was being debated by the press, religious and civic groups, and legislators. Their desire to "bring Broadway to Main Street" provoked the hostility of an increasingly insecure Protestant provincial middle-class seeking to defend its cultural hegemony from the incursions of a modernist, metropolitan culture that the provincials regarded as "alien." Combining opposition to monopoly with a barely concealed anti-Semitism, provincial Protestantism regarded movies as a threat to the ability of small communities to exercise control over the cultural influences they tolerated.

In the second half of 1929 the MPPDA was the subject of heavy criticism for reasons only tangentially connected to movie content. Its relationship with the federal government had been strained by a wave of mergers and theatre-buying among the major companies and by their "steady policy of aggrandizement, discrimination and exclusion" in dealing with independent exhibitors. At the same time, the stability of the public relations edifice Hays had constructed during the previous seven years disintegrated in the wake of the association's failure to establish a cooperative relationship with the Protestant churches similar to that they enjoyed with organized Catholicism. In the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash, the movie industry provided a highly conspicuous target for critics of the business culture of the 1920s, and the campaign against Hays and the "meretricious" business practices of the "shrewd Hebrews" who ran the major companies by the Protestant religious press gave independent exhibitors the chance to combine their attack on the majors' trade practices with a complaint about their morals. Confronted with local criticism about the moral standards of the movies they showed, small exhibitors often defended themselves by arguing that the majors' insistence on block booking forced exhibitors to show "sex-smut" regardless of their own or their community's preferences. They insisted that the only way to secure decency on Main Street was through extensive Federal regulation of the industry.

Under attack from several directions, Hays recognized that the regulation of film content represented the one area of industry activity where the Association might be able to demonstrate its usefulness to both the public and its members, and initiated the revision of the 1927 code in September 1929. A committee of producers chaired by Irving Thalberg produced a draft code in November. A quite separate document emanated from Chicago, where C.C. Pettijohn was working to repeal the city's censorship ordinance. His campaign led to the involvement of Martin Quigley, a prominent Chicago Catholic and trade paper publisher, in the Code's rewriting. Quigley proposed a much more elaborated Code enunciating the moral principles underlying screen entertainment, and recruited a prominent Jesuit, Father Daniel Lord, to draft it.

Joy spent January 1930 attempting to compromise the two drafts and their differing ambitions, and a meeting of the producers' association discussed the texts at length in February. After that meeting, a producers committee wrote a "condensed" version, and Lord and Hays rewrote Lord's draft as a separate document entitled "Reasons Underlying the Code." The text of the Code itself provided a list of prohibitions rather than the moral arguments of Lord's draft. Its "Particular Applications" elaborated the "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," and added clauses on liquor, adultery, vulgarity and obscenity. With the consent of both parties, Catholic involvement in the Code remained secret. So did its implementation procedure, the Resolution for Uniform Interpretation, which did not make submission of scripts to the SRC compulsory, and placed responsibility for making changes in finished films with the companies concerned. It also appointed a "Jury" composed of the heads of production of each of the member companies as final arbiters of whether a film conformed "to the spirit and the letter of the Code." Hays's caution in publicly committing the Association to the Code's enforcement had as much to do with his recognition of the practical problems to be solved in the Code's application as it did with a scepticism about producers' intentions.

Although a growing chorus of voices denounced the moral evils of the movies, it would be wrong to conclude that movies became more salacious or vicious between 1930 and 1934. With occasional exceptions, the reverse is the case. Certainly the commonly-made assertion that the Code was not applied during this period, or was applied only ineffectually, is quite without foundation, and to describe the movies of these years as a "pre-Code" cinema is completely inaccurate. The early 1930s was, however, a period of moral conservatism in American culture and elsewhere, and both the SRC and state censors applied increasingly strict standards. The industry's most vociferous critics judged the movies on their advertising far more frequently than on their content, and a small number of visible infringements were sufficient to fuel the flames of their righteousness. The Association's Advertising Code, passed in June 1930, relied entirely on the voluntary cooperation of publicity departments, and was much less effectively applied than the Production Code.

Joy's approach to the improvement of content was gradualist. He thought the "small, narrow, picauyunish fault-finding" of censor boards inhibited his attempts to negotiate strategies of representation that permitted producers "to paint the unconventional, the unlawful, the immoral side of life in order to bring out in immediate contrast the happiness and benefits derived from wholesome, clean and law-abiding conduct." He recognized that if the Code was to remain effective, it had to allow the studios to develop a system of representational conventions "from which conclusions might be drawn by the sophisticated mind, but which would mean nothing to the unsophisticated and inexperienced." Particularly in the early years of its operation, much of the work of the Production Code lay in the creation and maintenance of this system of conventions. Like other Hollywood conventions, the Code was one of several substitutes for detailed audience research. Having chosen not to differentiate its product through a ratings system, the industry had to construct movies for an undifferentiated audience. Once the limits of explicit "sophistication" had been established, the production industry had to find ways of appealing to both "innocent" and "sophisticated" sensibilities in the same object without transgressing the boundaries of public acceptability. This involved devising systems and codes of representation in which "innocence" was inscribed into the text while "sophisticated" viewers were able "read into" movies whatever meanings they pleased to find, so long as producers could use the Production Code to deny that they had put them there.

Censors, however, continued to identify some disturbing developments in movie content: a cycle of "kept woman" films, including Illicit, The Easiest Way and Back Street, for instance. In early 1931, the SRC completely misjudged reactions to Universal's Dracula, which was widely condemned. Its commercial success exemplified the Association's and the industry's dilemma as the effects of the Depression began to be felt at the box office. Some of the material most likely to produce immediate high returns in first-run theatres, and thus maintain company liquidity, also provoked reform groups to claim the Code was being ignored. In 1931, the brief cycle of gangster films inspired by press coverage of Al Capone beginning with The Doorway to Hell and Little Caesar revived charges that the movies were encouraging young audiences to view the gangster protagonist as a "hero-villain" and proved a public relations calamity for the Association. In September 1931, Code procedures were considerably tightened, submission of scripts was made compulsory, and further production of gangster films was prohibited. The movie most immediately affected was Howard Hughes' Scarface, which was reconstructed on four occasions before it passed both the MPPDA and New York's censorship in May 1932.

The prohibition of gang films raised a problem elsewhere. Forced by their financial position to seek immediate returns on their investment in production studios chose material that remained only just within the letter of the Code. Joy hoped that a "new drive on sex films would partially, if not entirely, eliminate" kept woman stories and discourage the further production of chain-gang and horror films. But the problem was more elusive, since it seemed that every time the Association responded to one kind of complaint, it was replaced by another. As soon as Joy was provided with the means to ensure the overall morality of a movie's narrative, reformers argued that the stories Hollywood told were not the primary source of its influence. The cinema's power to corrupt was now assumed to lie in the seductive pleasure of its spectacle, exemplified in the screen careers of Jean Harlow and the actress Father Lord described as "the unspeakable Constance Bennett." Faced with Red-Headed Woman, a comedy which depicted Harlow's progression up the social ladder by a series of affairs, Joy feared that other studios would try "to figure out ways of topping this particular picture" in competition for the sensational element of the urban trade. The most drastic change of studio policy came when Emanuel Cohen replaced B.P. Schulberg as Paramount's head of production. Cohen's decision to abandon the studio's previously conservative production policy resulted in its producing A Farewell To Arms, purchasing William Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, and signing a contract with Mae West. The success of She Done Him Wrong with all audiences only increased alarm among reform elements that West, notorious after her arrests for indecency in New York in 1928, was now considered fit material for the screen.

In January 1932, Joseph Breen had arrived in Hollywood to oversee its publicity for the Association. His abrasive style constituted a significant shift away from Joy's attempts at consensus. In September Joy left to become a producer at Fox, and was replaced by the former New York censor James Wingate, who proved unable to establish a rapport with any of the studio heads, and paid too much attention to details of elimination rather than wider thematic concerns. Joy's resignation coincided with the first publication of extracts from the Payne Fund Studies, a research program investigating children's attendance and emotional responses to motion pictures undertaken by the Motion Picture Research Council (MPRC), which had become the focal point of Protestant and educational concerns about the cultural effects of the movies. A widely circulated sensationalized digest of the Studies, Henry James Forman's Our Movie Made Children, made the MPRC's demands for Federal regulation a profound threat to the industry. By the end of 1932 nearly forty religious and educational organizations had passed resolutions calling for federal regulation of the industry.

The early months of 1933 comprised the low point of the industry's fortunes. It was rumored that Hays would be replaced with a Democrat after Roosevelt's election, and there was widespread fear that the entire industry was virtually bankrupt. Hays insisted that more than economic action was required to deal with the crisis, and that only a more rigid enforcement of the Code could maintain public sympathy and defeat the pressure for federal intervention. He persuaded the Board to sign a Reaffirmation of Objectives acknowledging that "disintegrating influences" threatened "standards of production, standards of quality, standards of business practice," and pledging them to the maintenance of "higher business standards." The Reaffirmation became the implement with which Hays began to reorganize the SRC. The tone of its correspondence changed: as one studio official explained to his producers, "prior to this time, we were told 'it is recommended, etc.,' but recently letters definitely state, 'it is inadmissible, etc.' or something equally definite." A number of productions then nearing completion, among them Paramount's adaptation of Sanctuary, The Story of Temple Drake and Warners' Baby Face were held up for extensive revisions in addition to those agreed prior to the Reaffirmation. Breen relinquished his other work to concentrate full-time on self-regulation, and established his usefulness to the companies by doing what Wingate apparently could not: providing practical solutions to a studio's problem in applying the Code, and thus protecting its investment. From August 1933 he was in effect running the SRC.

Breen was also in almost constant conspiratorial correspondence with Quigley and other prominent Catholics, attempting to involve the Church hierarchy in a demonstration of Catholic cultural assertiveness. By November 1933 they had persuaded the Catholic Bishops to establish an Episcopal Committee on Motion Pictures, and in April 1934 the Committee announced it would recruit a Legion of Decency, whose members would sign a pledge promising "to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality." The Legion was not a spontaneous expression of public feeling. Its campaign was delicately orchestrated to achieve a precise objective: the effective enforcement of the Production Code by the existing machinery. Although its principal weapon appeared to be the economic one of a threatened boycott of films or theatres, its real power lay in its capacity to generate publicity. It was designed to intimidate producers, not to inflict major economic damage. It was, indeed, vital to its success that it separate the question of Code enforcement from issues of industry trade practice like block booking, in order to differentiate the Legion from the MPRC and make it clear that the Bishops had "no purpose or desire to tell the picture people how to run their business." It was a very effectively stage-managed crisis, and a complete success in producing its intended results. In June the MPPDA Board revised the Resolution for Uniform Interpretation. The SRC was renamed the Production Code Administration (PCA), with Breen as its Director and an augmented staff. The producer's jury was eliminated, leaving appeal to the MPPDA Board as the only mechanism for questioning Breen's judgment. Each film passed by the PCA would be given a Seal, displayed on every print. All member companies agreed not to distribute or release a film without a certificate. A penalty clause imposed a $25,000 fine for violation of the new Resolution.

Given the public attention being paid to the campaign, it was in the industry's best interests to make a show of atonement. Industry publicity emphasized the scale of the 1934 crisis in order to create a dividing line between "before," when the SRC had been unable to control production, and "now," when PCA "self-regulation" had really become effective. As a result of this need for a public act of contrition, the history of the SRC's gradual implementation of the Production Code was concealed behind a more apocalyptic account. The immediate purpose behind this exaggeration was less to flatter the Catholics (although the Legion of Decency, which operated its own ratings system, remained a powerful influence at the PCA until the 1950s) than to outmanoeuvre those still demanding federal regulation of the industry. But in fact, Breen had largely won the internal battle by March, when Fox, RKO, Universal and Columbia were showing "a definite willingness to do the right thing," and there was "some progress" at Paramount and 20th Century. Only Warners, always the most recalcitrant of the major companies in their attitude to the Code and the MPPDA, had to be brought into line. With the implementation of the agreement in mid-July, conditions tightened further. As in March 1933, a number of films were withheld from release, and drastic reconstruction undertaken: the conversion of Mae West's It Ain't No Sin into Belle of the Nineties being the most prominent. A number of films then in circulation were withdrawn before the end of their release cycle: many more were refused certification over the next few years when companies attempted to re-release them. Other films in production, including The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Bordertown and Imitation of Life underwent substantial modifications; proposed projects, including MGM's plan to adapt James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, were rejected. In another important respect production policy had changed dramatically in early, not mid-1934. The wave of Hollywood's adaptation of high-budget literary classics and historical biographies resulted directly from the requirements of the industry's public relations. As well as Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Thalberg's Romeo and Juliet, movies like Charge of the Light Brigade and The Buccaneer were also aimed at convincing middle class America of the bourgeois respectability of the cinema.

By late 1934, there was clear evidence of a box-office recovery led by the neighborhood theatres and apparently responsive to the new production trends that elevated Shirley Temple to the pinnacle of box-office championship from 1934 to 1938. The complex ideological phenomenon that Temple represented indicated a change in public sensibility as well as industry strategy, but the films in which she appeared were, as Graham Greene pointed out in 1937, hardly devoid of sexual sophistication, any more than were Astaire-Rogers musicals or screwball comedies. Rather, these genres contained the culmination of Joy's policy of encoding the representation of sexuality in such a way that a pre-existent knowledge was required to gain access to it. Having conceded the limitations of its boundaries, in the second half of the decade producers and audiences alike could explore the possibilities as well as the constraints of the Code as a convention of representation - much as they had done before, but with much less public hindrance.

The establishment of the PCA did not abate the process of negotiation over what constituted satisfactory material for films. Writers and producers commonly left material that they knew would be cut in scripts sent to the PCA, often in hopes of negotiating something else through, and frequently shots or sequences that the PCA initially objected to survived into in the final film. In 1935, disputes over the representation of crime resurfaced with the attempt by several studios to circumvent the prohibition on gangster films in the G-Men cycle, until British censors objected to the trend. The Code's provisions on crime were modified on a number of occasions during the later 1930s. On the whole, however, these questions of Code enforcement were relatively minor: the studios had acquiesced in the PCA machinery and, with occasional displays of resistance, acquiesced in its decisions. More importantly, public opinion had, with few and inconsequential exceptions, recovered from its moral panic and accepted the Association's or the Legion's account of the industry's rescue from the abyss in 1934.

Despite the tone with which Breen did business, his insistence that the PCA was "regarded by producers, directors, and their staffs, as participants in the processes of production" was perfectly accurate. Beyond the shared assumption that the PCA functioned as an aid, not a hindrance, to production, there were two underlying considerations that governed its working operation. "Compensating moral values," as understood by Breen, ensured not only that "No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it," but also that a calculus of retribution or coincidence would invariably be deployed to punish the guilty or declare sympathetic characters innocent. But if plots had to be morally unambiguous in their development, dialogue and conclusion, the site of textual ambiguity shifted from narrative to the representation of incident, in a manner that required the audience to construct an event that may or may not have taken place. In matters of sex in particular, Joy's policy of encoding the representation of sexuality in such a way that a pre-existent knowledge was required to gain access to it came to preside over Hollywood's representation. The public, argued Harold J. Salemson, "learned to supply from its own imagination the specific acts of so-called misconduct which the Production Code has made unmentionable." As screenwriter Elliott Paul pithily observed, "A scene should give full play to the vices of the audience, and still have a technical out" (Paul and Quintanilla, 1942, pp. 63-4).

The difficulties the Association faced over film content in the late 1930s were largely the results of its success. As his dealings with the studios became more assertive after 1934, Breen's correspondence made fewer distinctions between a decision under the Code, advice regarding the likely actions of state or foreign censors, and the implementation of "industry policy" in response to pressure groups, foreign governments and corporate interests. Industry policy was, like self-regulation, designed to prevent the movies becoming a subject of controversy or giving offense to powerful interests, but events such as MGM's decision in 1936 to not to produce a film version of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, and Catholic protest over Blockade, set in the Spanish Civil War, led to accusations from liberals within the industry and outside that "self-regulation ... has degenerated into political censorship." Throughout the 1930s, German and Italian censorship had been particularly concerned with controlling imports, and for much of the decade Hollywood's studios appeased the restrictive demands of foreign governments to preserve access to their markets. But the escalating European crisis eventually provoked a change in Hollywood's behavior, as the spread of Nazism progressively closed markets to American movies. Political censorship was also practiced in the United States in the 1930s, most often when a number of state or local boards banned Soviet films. Newsreels were generally exempted from state censorship, but they practiced a firm degree of self-regulation, avoiding the coverage of crime as well as political controversy. In 1941, isolationists complained that Hollywood was actively promoting American entry into the war.

The PCA case that received most public attention in the late 1930s, however, was as trivial as most publicized instances of moral censorship: the inclusion of the usually prohibited word "damn" in Clark Gable's last line in Gone with the Wind, whose producer, David O. Selznick, was one of those arguing that the industry should abandon the "insane and inane and outmoded" Code. Hays, on the other hand, maintained in 1938 that the industry could afford "the soft impeachment" that it provided nothing more than "escapist" entertainment, since that was "the commodity for which the public pays at the box-office. Propaganda disguised as entertainment would be neither honest salesmanship nor honest showmanship." At the same time, however, he had initiated an investigation into the jurisdiction of the PCA, largely as a result of the anti-trust suit filed against the major companies by the Department of Justice in July 1938. Implicating the PCA in the majors' restrictive practices, the suit alleged that they used the Code to exercise a practical censorship over the entire industry, restricting the production of pictures treating controversial subjects and hindering the development of innovative approaches to drama or narrative by companies that might use innovation as a way of challenging the majors' monopoly power. For the first time, the censorship of the movies – as opposed to movie content – was in danger of becoming the issue. In 1939 the PCA's jurisdiction was restricted so that there was a clear distinction between its administration of the Code and its other advisory functions. One effect of this was to acquiesce in the use of politically more controversial content as a way of demonstrating that the "freedom of the screen" was not hampered by the operations of the PCA. Although PCA officials continued to voice concern over whether such subjects as Confessions of a Nazi Spy constituted appropriate screen entertainment, they were much more circumspect in expressing their opinions.

Under Breen, the PCA was one of the most powerful influences on Hollywood production for more than twenty years, and although his personal control over the PCA's standards has often been exaggerated, the Classical Hollywood of the studio system would have been unrecognizable without the determining market censorship the PCA exercised.  Hays, a Presbyterian Church elder who neither smoked nor drank, was often caricatured as "a Babbitt in Babylon," but in his organization of industry self-regulation, and his protection of the industry from the application of the anti-trust laws, he did more than any other individual to preserve Hollywood for oligopoly capital.