Introduction
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1919
marked the height of so-called "progressive radicalism."
Progressives wanted to reorganize the nation along more socialistic
lines, calling for items such as federal old-age pensions, railroad
nationalization, government management of natural resources, and a
"genuine
redistribution" of the nation's wealth. Moreover, many wanted to
make government's wartime management of the economy permanent, and
wanted to give Congress "unlimited powers" over industry and commerce,
with a national minimum wage and guaranteed full employment.
Talk of revolution--constitutional and peaceful, of course--was
everywhere. At home, there was talk of a new social order, while
in Paris, there was hope for a New World Order. Writers like
John Dos Passos remembered the time in glittering terms, a time
when young men were climbing out of their uniforms and the whole nation
seemed to hold the promise of spring. Imperial America shone even
more brightly when compared to the exhausted nations of the Old
Order. The world only seemed to be waiting, Americans thought,
for us to show them the way.
Yet, at the time when hope and expectations seemed greatest, the whole
dream began to crumble. The war had inspired moral dedication;
peace brought a return of selfishness. The brilliant spring of
hope died overnight as if by a killing frost--killed by a wave of
postwar strikes, the Red Scare
, inflation, and disillusionment with the results of war.
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"Normalcy":
Warren
G. Harding (1921-1923)
Warren G. Harding
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Florence Harding
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That return to
"normalcy" was nowhere symbolized better than in the Republican nominee
for President in 1920, Warren G. Harding . If Wilson
had symbolized the high moral-intellectualism of the progressives, then
Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio best symbolized main street.
Americans found his easy-going manner and "hail fellow, well met"
manner reassuring and comfortable. Wilson, in contempt,
characterized his successor as having a "bungalow mind." Harding
exuded the atmosphere of a sleepy Ohio town--the shady streets, the
weekly lodge meeting, golf on a Saturday morning, followed by a
fried-chicken dinner and an afternoon nap. Teddy Roosevelt's
outspoken daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, visited the Harding
White House and remembered the scene: the President's study
filled with card-playing, cigar-smoking cronies, poker chips on the
table and cuspidors on the floor. She remarked later:
"Harding was not a bad man; he was just a
slob."
Truthfully, Harding
was amiable, devoted in friendship, and without malice. He was
not a leader, but a booster. He had no real
ambitions for the White House. But someone did, and that person
was Harding's wife, whom he called "the Duchess." She constantly
pushed him on, against his better judgment, until he found himself
occupying the house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. While there,
he drank and gambled, and played the stock market, while his Ohio
friends lined their pockets. Almost pathetically, Harding sensed
the dignity of the presidency and knew he could never achieve it.
His chief
weakness was his amiability and devotion to his friends, who
shamelessly took advantage of him. Harding's father had once
observed that it
was a good thing Warren had not been born a girl, or else "you'd be in
the family way all the time. You just can't say No."
Harding
himself said to Nicholas Murray Butler: "I am not fit for this
office and should never have been here."
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"The Great Barbecue"
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Be that at is it
may, Harding was there, and while Warren gambled, the business
of the presidency went on. There were some able men on Harding's
Cabinet: Charles Evans Hughes was Secretary of State, Andrew
Mellon Secretary of the Treasury, Henry C. Wallace Secretary of
Agriculture,
and Herbert Hoover Secretary of Commerce. Unfortunately, there
was also Harry Daugherty, Attorney General—a small-time fixer with
dissolute morals who had no qualms about calling his enemies
Bolsheviks, or using his power against strikers. Harding's
Secretary of the
Interior was a man of equally dissolute character, Albert B. Fall, whom
William Allen White observed likened to a "patent-medicine
vendor." Together, Daugherty and Fall presided over what
historian Vernon L.
Parrington called "the Great Barbecue"—a wholesale looting of office
for personal gain. In return for a "loan" of $100,000 cash, Fall
gave his old friend Edward L. Doheny, the oil millionaire, a lease on
naval reserves at Elk Hills in California.
This scandal
and
others were on the verge of being exposed when Harding took a trip to
Alaska in the summer of 1923, accompanied by Secretary of Commerce
Herbert Hoover. Hoover, who thought he'd been asked along to talk
over policy, found instead that he was more in demand as a bridge
player, as the brooding Harding played cards incessantly. (The
trip was so bad that Hoover never played cards again.)
Once back in the Northwest, Harding fell ill, which was attributed
to eating bad crabmeat (though none had been on the menu). On
August 3, while his wife read to him an article about himself from the
Saturday Evening Post, he suddenly died.
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"A Puritan in
Babylon": Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929)
Calvin Coolidge
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Harding's successor
could not have been more of a contrast. Famous for being
characterized as looking like he'd just swallowed a pickle, "Silent
Cal" Coolidge received a telegram in the dead of night at his father's
farm in Vermont, informing him of Harding's death. Coolidge
senior, a notary,
gave Coolidge the oath of office be lamplight. Then Coolidge went
back to bed.
The
succession of Calvin Coolidge couldn't have come
at a better time. For all his
apparent dourness, the image of the sober President was needed to
offset the damage from the emerging Harding-era scandals.
Coolidge
worshipped business, coining the phrase: "The chief business of the
American people is business." He endowed wealth with a divine
character. For Coolidge, business was a religion, and every factory a
temple. But as much as he worshipped business, he detested
government. Inasmuch as the government justified itself at all,
it was only to
serve business. "The law that builds up the people is the law
that builds up industry." And the chief way for government to
serve business was to diminish itself. Coolidge thought that only
by a rigid system of economy could government accomplish
anything.
Economy was his self-confessed obsession; it was "idealism in its most
practical form" and the "fullest test of our national character."
As
President, he dedicated himself to doing nothing. One White House
usher recalled
that no other President had ever slept so much. He said that
"four-fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if
we would only sit down and keep still." To his proponents,
Coolidge's
inactivity was termed "restraint"; to others, it was evidence of
a dull and lazy man. To some, his obsession with the purpose of
business represented "character"; to others, it seemed a bankruptcy of
mind and soul. To some he was the best of the American middle
class; to others, he was almost the worst. William Allen White
called him "a Puritan in Babylon." His frugality sanctioned an
age of waste, his simplicity an age of luxury, his taciturnity an age
of
ballyhoo. He was the moral symbol that the times seemed to demand.
And
Coolidge worked to make his strict image a reality. He fired
Daugherty, Harding's crooked Attorney General, and in general, tidied
up the administration. He also quietly moved to take control of
the Republican party--or rather, he let his friend, William Morgan
Butler, a Massachusetts businessman and mill owner, take control on his
behalf.
Butler's
takeover symbolizes the transformation of the Republican party in the
Twenties. Before, old patricians like Henry Cabot Lodge had run
the
party in concert with businessmen, even though the patricians like
Lodge privately held the businessmen as politicians in contempt.
Lodge said that watching a "businessman [deal] with a large political
question is really a painful sight." But the partnership between
patricians and businessmen shifted in the Twenties. By the 1924,
Lodge, who had led the Republican Party for a quarter of a century, was
relegated to the role of ordinary delegate. He was never once
even consulted by the party's new business leaders. Under
Butler's efficient guidance, a calm Republican majority nominated
Coolidge for another term. The Democrats nominated a
corporate lawyer, John W. Davis of New York. Progressives in both
parties would have to look elsewhere for a candidate. Some followed
young Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin, who
took the traditional progressive stance against business. This
was all the Republicans needed for an issue. The issue, they
said, "is whether you stand on the rock of common sense with Calvin
Coolidge, or upon the sinking sands with Robert M. LaFollette."
And that was that.
Taft,
now Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court, mused on the meaning of the Republicans'
victory in 1924. He said that whenever the American people
understood the issue to be between radicalism and conservatism, the
answer will invariably be conservatism. "This country is no
country for radicalism. I think it is really the most
conservative
country in the world."
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Proceed to Next
Lecture
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