American History

As part of his policy of returning America to prewar conditions, Harding pardoned many individuals who had been convicted of antiwar activities or for being radicals. His main concern, however, was business. Reversing progressive and wartime trends, the Harding administration strove to establish pro business policies. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty obtained injunctions against striking workers. The Supreme Court sided with management in disputes over unions, minimum wage laws, child labour, and other issues. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover expanded the size of his department fourfold during the next eight years in attempts to foster business growth and efficiency and to encourage trade associations and business–labour cooperation. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon, one of the nation's richest men, drastically cut taxes, especially on the wealthy; he also cut federal spending to reduce the national debt.

In foreign affairs the Harding administration tried to ensure peace by urging disarmament, and at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921 Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes negotiated the first effective arms-reduction agreement in history. On the whole, however, the policies of the United States were narrow and nationalistic. It did not cooperate with the League of Nations. It insisted that Europeans pay their American debts but in 1922 passed the Fordney–McCumber Tariff, which raised duties so high that foreigners had great difficulty earning the necessary dollars. When immigration reached prewar levels, Congress gave in to the protests of organized labour, which believed immigrants were taking jobs away from American citizens, and to the objections of business leaders and patriotic organizations, who feared that some of the immigrants might be radicals.

Reversing traditional American policy, Congress passed first an emergency restriction bill and then in 1924 the National Origins Act. The quota did not pertain to North Americans, however. Harding's policies, his genial nature, and the return of prosperity made the president extremely popular. His sudden death, of a cerebral embolism, in the summer of 1923 resulted in a national outpouring of grief. Yet it soon became evident that his administration had been the most corrupt since Grant's. Harding had appointed venal mediocrities, many of them old cronies, to office, and they had betrayed his trust. The most publicized scandal was the illegal leasing of naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyo., which led to the conviction of Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall for accepting a bribe. Calvin Coolidge, Harding's vice president and successor, was a taciturn, parsimonious New Englander who restored honesty to government.

His administration suffered none of the stigma of the Harding scandals, and Coolidge, thanks to a buoyant economy and a divided Democratic Party, easily defeated the conservative Democrat John W. Davis in the election of 1924. Even though an independent campaign by Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin drew off insurgent Republicans, Coolidge received more popular, and electoral, votes than his opponents combined. For millions of Americans, the sober-minded Coolidge was a more appropriate symbol for the era than the journalistic terms Jazz Age or Roaring Twenties. These terms were exaggerations, but they did have some basis in fact. Many young men and women who had been disillusioned by their experiences in World War I rebelled against what they viewed as unsuccessful, outmoded prewar conventions and attitudes. Women who had been forced to work outside the home because of labour shortages during the war were unwilling to give up their social and economic independence after the war had ended. Having won the right to vote when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, the new "emancipated" woman, the flapper, demanded to be recognized as man's equal in all areas. She adopted a masculine look, bobbing her hair and abandoning corsets; she drank and smoked in public; and she was more open about sex.

Social changes were not limited to the young. Productivity gains brought most Americans up to at least a modest level of comfort. People were working fewer hours a week and earning more money than ever before. New consumer goods—radios, telephones, refrigerators, and above all the motor car - made life better, and they were easier to buy thanks to a vastly expanded consumer credit system. Leisure activities became more important, professional sports boomed, and the rapid growth of tabloid newspapers, magazines, movies, and radios enabled millions to share in the exciting world of speakeasies, flappers, and jazz music, even if only vicariously. On the darker side, anti foreign sentiment led to the revival of the racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan, especially in rural areas. During the early 1920s the Klan achieved a membership of some 5,000,000 and gained control of, or influence over, many city and state governments. Rural areas also provided the base for a Christian fundamentalist movement, as farmers and small-town dwellers who felt threatened and alienated by the rapidly expanding, socially changing cities fought to preserve American moral standards by stressing religious orthodoxy.

The movement grew steadily until 1925, when John T. Scopes, a biology teacher in Dayton, Tenn., was tried for violating a law common to many Southern states prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. Although Scopes was found guilty of breaking the law, both the law itself and fundamentalist beliefs were ridiculed during the course of the trial, which attracted national attention. One fundamentalist goal that was achieved was the passage in 1919 of the Prohibition (Eighteenth) Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors. Millions of mostly Protestant churchgoers hailed Prohibition as a moral advance, and the liquor consumption of working people, as well as the incidence of alcohol-related diseases and deaths, does seem to have dropped during the period. On the other hand, millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens drank the prohibited liquor, prompting the growth of organized crime. The illegal liquor business was so lucrative and federal prohibition enforcement machinery was so slight that gangsters were soon engaged in the large-scale smuggling, manufacture, and sale of alcoholic beverages.