A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (109 page)

Reform zeal during this time led to the formation of an antituberculosis league in 1897, the American Conference for the Prevention of Infant Mortality in 1909, the National Mental Hygiene Committee that same year, the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness in 1915, and a half dozen more.
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The founding of the American Eugenics Society in 1923 by biologist Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell, and Luther Burbank was more chilling.
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Indiana and California mandated sterilization of confirmed “criminals, idiots, rapists, and imbeciles” whose condition was viewed as “incurable” based on the recommendation of three physicians.
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All of these organizations and movements captured the Progressive view that disease and imperfection of any kind could be “reformed” through human action.

As with most other reform movements in America, Prohibition started among upper-class females, and, as was often the case, the targets ultimately were lower-class men. According to the pietistic conscience, the lower classes were naturally the morally weaker classes, but predictably it was pietist women who after 1870 rushed toward political and social protest to save the family.
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And who could be numbered among these “morally weaker classes”? None other than immigrants, Irish, Italians, and Poles. In the eyes of Progressive reformers, the drinking habits of the foreigners reinforced the political corruption where fat, cigar-smoking backroom pols mobilized armies of drunken immigrants to pad their machine’s vote.

Whether temperance itself was ever the sole objective of the women’s groups who participated in the Prohibition movement invites skepticism. Many feminist leaders latched on to Prohibition only as an organizational tool that would permit them to mobilize for the “real” effort, women’s suffrage.

Suffering for Suffrage

Voting rights for women, another Progressive plank, had a long history. Since the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, calls for the Declaration of Independence to be applied to all people, not just all men, had increased in frequency and intensity. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had organized the Seneca Women’s Rights Convention, labeled it the “duty of women…to secure…their sacred right to the elective franchise.”
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Shortly after the Civil War, Stanton had formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, which wanted a constitutional amendment for female suffrage. That association soon pressed for other objectives, including birth control and easier divorce laws, and alienated some women who merely wanted the vote, and who in turn formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. The two merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, largely made up of middle-and upper-class reform-minded people of both sexes.

The Wyoming Territory had granted voting rights to women in 1869, and when Wyoming petitioned to enter the Union twenty years later, Congress allowed the women’s vote clause to stand in the new state constitution. In 1916, Wyoming’s neighbor, Montana, elected Jeannette Pickering Rankin as the first woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Colorado voters changed their state’s law in 1893 to permit female suffrage, and were soon joined by their neighbors in Utah, which became a state in 1896 with women’s suffrage. The trend seemed inevitable, and in 1919, Congress introduced the Nineteenth Amendment to enfranchise adult women. The states ratified the amendment in 1920. Over the years, one of the most significant impacts of female voting rights has been a corollary increase in the size of government.
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Voting rights for women might have come sooner had the issue been restricted to the franchise alone. But activists such as Margaret Sanger from New York City had associated feminism with such controversial practices as birth control and eugenics. Sanger, one of eleven children, was deeply affected by the death of her tubercular mother. Instead of blaming the disease, Sanger blamed the rigors of childbirth for her mother’s death. The difficult delivery of her own baby convinced her of the dangers of the birth process and the problems of poverty she associated with large families.

Sanger quickly fell in with New York radicals and met all the important socialists, including Debs, “Big Bill” Haywood, John Reed, Clarence Darrow, Will Durant, and Upton Sinclair. She seemed “supremely unimpressed” by her fellow travelers: in addition to her disparaging remarks about Haywood and her “silk hat radical” reference to Debs, she called Alexander Beckman, a labor organizer, “a hack, armchair socialist—full of hot air but likely little else.”
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Sanger bitterly attacked any fellow travelers, characterizing members of the Socialist Party as “losers, complainers, and perpetual victims—unwilling or unable to do for themselves, much less society at large.”
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What kept her in the good graces of the radical community was her libertine attitude and, above all, her willingness to link socialism to sexual liberation.

After a failed attempt to open an abortion clinic, Sanger published a paper called
The Woman Rebel
that denounced marriage as a “degenerate institution,” openly advocated abortion, and endorsed political assassinations.
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Her writings clearly violated the Comstock Laws, enacted in 1873 to prohibit the transmission of pornography or other obscene materials through the mail, and she was indicted. Rather than submit to jail, Sanger fled to England, where she absorbed the already discredited overpopulation ideas of Malthus. Suddenly she found a way to package birth control in the less offensive wrapping of concern for population pressures. Although relabeling her program as family planning, in reality Sanger associated birth control with population control, particularly among the unfit. The most merciful thing a large family could do to a new baby, she suggested, was to kill it.
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She attacked charity as enabling the dregs of society to escape natural selection: “My criticism…is not directed at the failure of philanthropy, but rather at its success. The dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism…have today produced their full harvest of human waste.”
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Benevolence encouraged the “perpetuation of defectives, delinquents, and dependents.”
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Birth control and sterilization could be used to weed out the poor (and, she noted, blacks and Chinese, whom she likened to a “plague”). She viewed birth control as a means of “weeding out the unfit,” aiming at the “creation of a superman.”
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Founding the
Birth Control Review
in 1917, Sanger published a number of proeugenics articles: “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” (June 1920), “The Eugenic Conscience” (February 1921), “The Purpose of Eugenics” (December 1924), “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” (July 1925), and “Birth Control: The True Eugenics” (August 1928). One of her regular contributors, Norman Hines, repeatedly claimed that Catholic stock (that is, people from predominantly Catholic nations) was inferior to Protestant stock. Perhaps the most outrageous article published in
Birth Control Review
was a favorable book review of Lothrop Stoddard’s
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy
(1923)—a book that became a model for fascist eugenics in Europe. Claiming that black children were “destined to be a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation,” Sanger revealed herself as a full-fledged racist.
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Mainstream feminists recognized the dangers posed by any association with the eugenics movement, and distanced themselves from her views sufficiently enough to ensure passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Only later would they revive Sanger’s positions under the benign-sounding name Planned Parenthood.

The Dark Bargain

By 1920 the United States looked vastly different than it had at the turn of the century. Technology had changed life in dramatic ways; Progressive reforms had affected almost every aspect of daily life; and the large-scale economic reorganization that had started in the 1860s had reached maturity. Although the end of the war brought a large-scale depression in the agricultural sector, the nation nevertheless was perched to spread its wings. However, flight would require a drastic withdrawal from Progressive wartime assumptions and structures in every area of life. Candidate Warren G. Harding would call it a return to normalcy, but regardless of the term, exorbitant tax rates, large government debt, and price fixing would need to go.

Wilson’s exit marked the last gasp of Progressivism until, arguably, 1933. That would have surprised many, especially since the polestar of Progressive policy, Prohibition, had just been enacted. Yet the contradictions of Progressivism were precisely what had doomed it as a viable American political theory. Progressives had made a dark bargain with the voters. On the one hand, they sought women’s rights, which liberated women (often) to act as men; on the other hand, they sought to constrain liberties across a wide range of economic, social, and behavioral issues. Women could vote, but now they could not drink. They could start businesses, but could not expand those companies lest they fall prey to antitrust fervor. Likewise, men found that Progressive policies had freed them from the dominance of the state legislators when it came to electing their senators, but then they learned that the states lacked the power to insulate them from arbitrary action by the federal government. Voters could recall their judges, but at the cost of allowing them to make tough, unpopular decisions. They could initiate legislation, swamping ballots with scores of legal-sounding and unfathomable proposals. And the income tax, hailed as the measure to redistribute wealth, succeeded only in taking more wealth than ever from those least able to pay it. Small wonder that in 1920 Americans, for the most part, were ready to ditch Progressivism.

The Twenties Myth

M
any recent histories—including textbooks—have developed a mythology about the Roaring Twenties and the Great Crash of 1929. Although it is tempting to call this mythology the Liberal Legend, it would be inaccurate because elements of it have been echoed by conservative historians, most recently Paul Johnson, and to some extent, by libertarian economists like Murray Rothbard. By and large, however, the essentials of this story are the same.
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During the 1920s, the story goes, the wild speculation in the stock market led to a maladjustment of wealth on the one hand and too much investment on the other. Average Americans could not buy enough durable goods—autos, radios, and other big ticket items—and as a consequence, sales in automobiles and other manufactured items tailed off. The Federal Reserve Board, in thrall to the Republican probusiness clique, did not curtail bank lending to securities affiliates, as the banks’ securities arms were called, until it was too late. Instead, throughout much of the 1920s the Fed actually expanded the money supply, allowing stock prices to soar in a wild orgy of speculation.

At this point in the mythology, Herbert Hoover enters the picture, thoroughly bamboozled by the developments and too uninventive to correct the problems. Lacking the vision of Franklin Roosevelt, Hoover simply allowed things to deteriorate, and he deserved the embarrassment from appellations like “Hoovervilles” (given to tent cities) and “Hoover hankies” (given to empty pockets turned inside out). Unwilling to use the power of the federal government to “fix” the economy, the befuddled Hoover deservedly lost the 1932 election to Franklin Roosevelt, at which point everything improved. Roosevelt’s vision and courage, through the creation of the New Deal, led America out of the Depression.

Little of this mythology is true. Consider the notion that the stock market was one gigantic speculative bubble: there is virtually no evidence for that in numerous studies by economic historians. The most any economists come up with is a tiny layer of speculation at the top, one incapable of affecting either stock prices or attitudes toward buying securities.
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If anything, the market accurately reflected the fantastic growth in American industry. The most rapidly rising stocks in the 1920s had been electric utilities, radios, and autos. Since 1899 industrial use of electricity had zoomed upward by nearly 300 percent. Little else needs to be said about the impact of autos on America’s culture and economy. Certainly the auto industry was not indicative of speculation.

In fact, several elements would have had to be present to make a case for speculation. First, people would have had to invest with little or no information about the securities they were purchasing. That has not been demonstrated. Quite the opposite, studies have shown that most investors were well informed, especially about foreign bonds that supposedly had dragged down the large banks. As just one example, Charles E. Merrill, the securities genius who perceived that the markets of the future would lie with the vast middle class, constructed his firm’s reputation on accurate and honest appraisals of securities.
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Second, to make the case for speculation, as John Kenneth Galbraith attempted to do, it has to be shown that the maldistribution of wealth resulted in most of the trading’s being conducted by the wealthy. Yet analyses of bond issues of the day showed that a broad cross section of Americans snapped up the latest bonds, with the most prominent occupations of the purchasers being schoolteachers, cabbies, and maids.

But even the notion that the stock market crash caused the Depression itself is egregiously wrong. Although the market may have temporarily reflected a downturn in the economy, the Depression was a confluence of several dramatic shocks (especially the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act), which were made worse by foolish Federal Reserve Board policies and then rapidly accelerated into the abyss by government attempts to “solve” the problems. We begin to correct the host of thoroughly confused writings about the nation’s worst economic episode with an accurate appraisal of the 1920s.

Return to Normalcy

Anyone looking at the American economy from 1919 to 1921 might have been completely misled about the future. The end of World War I brought the return of millions of soldiers and sailors to farms and factories in the United States and Europe, and the destruction wreaked by several years of combat had disrupted normal economic activities, fattened the U.S. government, and glutted the job markets. Farmers were especially devastated, with farm prices plummeting after the European farmers—who had been holding rifles instead of hoes just months earlier—abruptly returned to the land. In the United States, the weakening of the agricultural sector, although not in itself debilitating, had severe but largely hidden repercussions.

After 1921, however, the nation made a sharp U-turn. First came a new administration when Warren G. Harding defeated Woodrow Wilson’s handpicked successor, James M. Cox. Cox, a Dayton, Ohio, newspaper publisher and governor of Ohio, saw economic activity in a static bureaucratic way. In his view, the high national debt needed for the war had to be paid off by high taxes. He could not have been more wrong. Andrew Mellon, Harding’s secretary of the treasury, commissioned a study of why the wealthier classes had paid less and less in taxes as the government raised the tax rate on them repeatedly. He found that high tax rates actually drove money underground. The rich tended to invest abroad rather than build new factories and mills in the United States and then suffer from the 73 percent tax on any income from those investments. At any rate, Cox’s misfortune to be with the incumbent party during a recession was not aided in any way by his view that a correction required more of the same. Wilson’s League of Nations had proven equally unpopular, and the infirm president could not campaign for his would-be successor.

Oddly enough, Warren Harding (1865–1923), the winner in the 1920 election, would die before the ailing Wilson, whose series of strokes had left him little more than a figurehead during his final months in office. (Wilson hung on until 1924.) Harding had defeated Cox by the largest plurality up to that time in history, 16.1 million to 9.1 million (the electoral college vote was 404 to 127). The election was also notable for the showing of socialist Eugene V. Debs, who, while in jail, had still pulled almost 1 million votes, as he had in 1912 and 1916.

Debs had “run” for office from the hoosegow while Senator Harding essentially campaigned from his home in Marion, Ohio. A self-made man, Harding, like Cox, created a successful newspaper (
The Marion Star
). After his nomination by the Republicans, Harding copied Harrison, campaigning from his Marion front porch and greeting the more than six hundred thousand people who had made the pilgrimage. He invited many reporters to join him in a chew of tobacco or a shot of whiskey. When Harding finally hit the campaign trail, he told a Boston crowd that America needed “not nostrums but normalcy,” thus coining the phrase that became his unintended theme. His association with Madison Avenue marketing whiz Albert Lasker led him to introduce state-of-the-art advertising.
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Without a doubt, Harding’s most astute appointment was Andrew Mellon at Treasury. Mellon, whose Pittsburgh family had generated a fortune from oil and banking, understood business better than any Treasury secretary since Hamilton. After his study of falling tax revenues revealed that the amont of money gleaned from the upper classes had declined with each new rate increase, Mellon concluded that
lowering
the rates on everyone, especially the wealthiest classes, would actually result in their paying more taxes. From 1921 to 1926, Congress reduced rates from 73 percent on the top income earners and 4 percent on the lowest taxpayers to 25 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively, then down even further in 1929. Unexpectedly, to everyone except Mellon, the tax take from the wealthy almost tripled, but the poorer classes saw their share of taxes fall substantially. The nation as a whole benefited as the national debt fell by one third (from $24 billion to $18 billion) in five years.

Mellon’s tax policies set the stage for the most amazing growth yet seen in America’s already impressive economy. Had Harding appointed a dozen Mellons, he would have been remembered as a great president, but he did not, of course, and many of his appointees were of less than stellar character.

A Scandal for Every Occasion

Self-discipline and trustworthiness proved to be lacking in Harry Daugherty, the attorney general; Charles Forbes of the Veterans Bureau; and Albert Fall, the interior secretary—all of whom either directly or indirectly fleeced the government. Forbes resigned after a scandal in which he sold U.S. veterans hospital supplies to his friends; Fall resigned after the infamous Teapot Dome scandal, during which he granted favorable leases for government oil fields in Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming, in return for kickbacks totaling $400,000. Teapot Dome would join Crédit Mobilier as among the worst scandals in American history. It had its origins in a fight over the environment between “developmentalists” and “conservationists.”
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Had the conservationist wing of the Republican Party not become aware of the leases, which it opposed, and thus made a public issue of them, it is unlikely that the newspapers would have picked up on the issue or that the public would have exhibited such outrage. It would not be the last time that environmental issues would color the political debate over economic development.

Any one of the three scandals alone might not have damaged Harding. Taken together, however, the impact tainted his entire administration. Worse, swirling amid those scandals were the suicides of Charles Cramer, the counsel for the Veterans Bureau, and Jess Smith, an associate of Daugherty’s. An odor of corruption started to cling to Harding, who, Grant-like, had a knack for appointing crooks and bunglers. Harding commented after the unwelcome publicity that followed one suicide, “I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damned friends…they’re the ones who keep me walking the floor nights.”

In 1923, before any image restoration could occur, Harding died of a heart attack. His successor, Calvin Coolidge, although eminently capable, had altogether the wrong personality for using the public relations machinery of the White House to rebuild his predecessor’s image. On the other hand, as historian Robert Maddox concludes, “‘Silent Cal’ was in fact the only public figure to come away from the mess with his reputation enhanced.”
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As part of the twenties myth, Coolidge has been ridiculed as lazy, with one text even claiming that he “spent only about four hours daily on his executive duties,” and another offering without qualification that “Coolidge hardly worked at all: he napped in the mornings before lunch, dozed a bit after eating, [and then he] lay down for a few minutes prior to dinner.”
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Yet his work habits reflected the view of government’s role in American life, and he also refused to play the public relations game that most politicians practiced. Coolidge had a remarkable ability to refrain from small talk. Known as Silent Cal, Coolidge was once the subject of a bet by two dinner guests: one woman bet another she could get Coolidge to say three words in succession. After several unsuccessful tries, she explained the bet to Coolidge, who said, “You lose.” Coolidge may not have been a friend of the elites, and he probably was not the quotable, boisterous type the public had become accustomed to with Roosevelt, but he was thoroughly American.

Literally born on the Fourth of July in 1872, Coolidge grew up on a Vermont farm. A redheaded youngster prone to allergies, Coolidge experienced a constant loneliness that stemmed first from punishments at the hands of his grandmother, then later, in 1890, from the death of his sister Abbie from appendicitis. These and other events contributed to Coolidge’s famous shyness and standoffish nature.

Young Coolidge moved off the farm, studied law, and advanced up the ranks in the Massachusetts Republican Party. He became governor of Massachusetts, where he demonstrated his approach to limited government. Explaining that public institutions could never take the place of the private sector and hard work, Coolidge saw self-government as meaning self-support. As Harding’s vice president, Coolidge avoided the scandals that had enveloped other members of the administration and remained clean. Appropriately enough, he was asleep at his father’s farmhouse the night that a postal messenger arrived with the telegram informing Coolidge that Harding had died, and he needed to take the oath of office immediately. The Coolidge home did not have a telephone, but it did have a notary public (Calvin’s father) to administer the oath of office by kerosene lamp. Silent Cal pulled off a silent coup within the GOP itself, effectively overthrowing the old guard in that party that had stood with Harding. In his inaugural address—an astoundingly brief 102 words—Coolidge warned Americans not to expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong, and not to be in a hurry to legislate. When a business or union endangered the public, however, Coolidge acted with decisiveness and skill. During the 1919 Boston Police strike, the then-governor Coolidge had given the strikers enough rope to hang themselves when public opinion ultimately turned against them. At that point he summoned the National Guard, stating that there was no right to strike “against the public safety at any time.”
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That perspective remained with President Coolidge, and it sent a message to business and consumers that he would protect private property from government confiscation.