Chapter 24 The Reactionary Twenties

1920

Referendum on Wilson

Deeply divided parties

Warren G. Harding “Return to Normalcy”

Landslide Victory

“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing… not revolution, but restoration.” - Harding

Landslide Victory

Electorate: “Tired of issues, sick at heart of ideals, and weary of being noble”

Questions over Harding’s “Whiteness”

Warren G. Harding

Anti-Wilson: Not an intellectual

Newspaper editor in Marion, Ohio

Unspectacular Senator

Reluctant to run for presidency

“I cannot hope to be one of the best presidents, but perhaps I may be remembered as one of the best loved.”

Harding’s Cabinet: The good

Secretary of Commerce: Herbert Hoover

Secretary of Treasury: Andrew Mellon

Secretary of State: Charles Evan Hughes - Supreme Court of Justice

Secretary of Agriculture: Henry Wallace - served many decades

Economic Policy

Modernization - official US budget process

Professionalization: kept competent Democrats

Cut Billions from budget

Tariff: Emergency measures, led to reduced farm income and low wages

Tax relief: 1922 cut most taxes in half

Republican Economic Philosophy

Hoover: voluntary business efficiency

Mellon: tax reduction; only 2% paid income tax by 1929

Problem: Encouraged Speculation

Republicans also curtailed government regulation seeking a more collaborative relationship with business

International Economy

Washington Conference: true disarmament, but no enforcement

US - Great Britain Loan Agreement

Reparations and loans

French invasion of Germany

Harding and Civil Rights

Reserved Wilson’s policies on Black federal appointments

US needed to “wipe the stain of barbaric lynching from the banners of a free and orderly, representative democracy”

Accused the KKK of causing, “hatred, prejudice, and violence

Conservative Court

Chief Justice Taft

Struck down federal child labor law

Minimum wage for women

Power of regulatory agencies

Harding’s Cabinet: The Bad

Attorney General Daugherty

Secretary of the Interior: Albert Fall

Scandals

“Ohio Gang” - “But my friends… my Goddamn friends”

VA head resigned over stolen medical supplies

Legal advisor to the VA committed suicide

Justice department lawyer, part of selling favors racket, was murdered

AG was accused of selling German Assets for-profit and took the 5th

Teapot Dome

Fall: deeply in debt

$400,000 in bribes

Prison sentence

Harding’s End

Summer of 1923

Food poisoning, heart attack, and no autopsy

Last visit to Alaska

An outpouring of grief and then shock. (scandals release)

Lack of Morals

Whiskey, gambling, and women

Non-Britton

Love letters

Silent Cal

Calvin Coolidge - after Harding passed, then Hoover

“Gilded Age Stance”

“Above all be brief”

Veto

Election of 1924

“I am a member of no organized political party. I am a Democrat”

Progressives and LA Follette: 4.8 million votes

Landslide for Coolidge in the electoral college

Rejecting War

Popular reaction against World War I stimulated a strong peace movement'

Naval disarmament conferences

1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact: renounced war and was signed by 64 nations