A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (110 page)

Government expenditures plummeted under the Republicans, falling almost to 1916 levels. Outlays remained low under both Harding and Coolidge (though they soared under Herbert Hoover), and even after defense expenditures were factored in, real per capita federal expenditures dropped from $170 per year in 1920 to a low of $70 in 1924, and remained well below $100 until 1930, when they reached $101.
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Coolidge’s reluctance to involve the government in labor disputes combined with general prosperity to drive down union membership. Unemployment reached the unheard-of low mark of less than 2 percent under Coolidge, and workers, overall, had little to complain about. The AFL’s membership dropped by 4 million during the decade, and overall union membership shrank slightly faster. Union leaders shook their heads and complained that affluence and luxury produced by the economy had made unions seem irrelevant. But business had contributed to the weakening of unions as well through a strategy called welfare capitalism, preemptively providing employees with a wide range of benefits without pressure from unions. Government refused to support strikers, and when the Railway Brotherhoods rejected the Railway Labor Board’s 12 percent reduction in wages for shop men, the subsequent labor stoppage was met with an injunction from Attorney General Harry Daugherty.

Government’s shifting attitude toward workers, which had been increasingly favorable prior to the 1920s, reflected the difficulty of having Washington involved at all in such matters as setting private sector wages. Many such episodes of the government’s refusing to act clearly illustrated the central belief during the Harding-Coolidge years that the government should butt out. The Supreme Court largely agreed, ruling on a number of issues related to government interference: whether to impose taxes on “undesirable” products (those manufactured by children),
Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company
(1922), or to require that companies pay minimum wages,
Adkins v. Children’s Hospital
(1923). In so doing, the Court reflected the culture of the day in which children often assumed adult roles in their early teens, and although adolescents were victimized in some instances, the workplace often remained the only path to upward mobility for those who lacked the opportunity to attend college. In addition, the refusal to allow government to set minimum wages for women, far from aiming at depriving women of better-paying jobs, was designed to strengthen the role of the husbands who were primary breadwinners in families.

An Economic (and Cultural) Goliath

Harding’s scandals and untimely death did nothing to impede the steadily expanding economy. Both Harding and Coolidge proved to be good friends to business if only because they moved the federal government out of the way of economic growth. The main fact was this: unleashed, and with government playing only a small role in people’s everyday affairs, American entrepreneurs produced the most vibrant eight-year burst of manufacturing and innovation in the nation’s history. It was a period that easily compared with any other eight-year period at any time, anywhere, including during the Industrial Revolution.

American businesses did more than simply turn out more goods, as is implied by critics of the Roaring Twenties. They fostered an environment that enabled the invention of breakthrough devices and products that fundamentally changed the structure of society, perhaps more than the Industrial Revolution itself. Consider the automobile. Prior to the widespread availability of cars—made possible in large part by Henry Ford’s moving assembly line and his keen understanding that what people needed was an affordable automobile—people either walked, took trains, or sailed on ships and riverboats. Auto registration rose from just over 9 million in 1921 to 23 million by 1929, whereas automobile production soared 225 percent during the decade. Ford, of course, had already seen demand for his own product peak prior to the war, when the price of a Ford Model T stood at $345, allowing Ford to sell 734,000 units.

Ford’s company already was being eclipsed by a new giant, General Motors (GM), a merger of Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac, Fisher Body, Delco, and other firms. Between 1918 and 1920, William Durant, GM’s founder, created a company that could satisfy all tastes (whereas with Ford’s Model T, “You could have any color you wanted as long as it was black”). Durant, however, was unable to manage the monster he had created, yielding control to Alfred P. Sloan Jr., who led GM’s surge past Ford during the decade. Whether a Ford or a Chevrolet, however, it was irrelevant
which
auto Americans drove. What was important was that they were driving more than ever before, generating an unprecedented demand for a wide variety of related materials—metal, lumber, steel, cotton, leather, paint, rubber, glass, and, of course, gasoline. Production of a vast legion of auxiliary items sparked expansion in those businesses as well as in all the firms needed to supply them. Cement plants, housing construction, gasoline, and spare parts firms grew at a dramatic rate. Moreover, the demand for autos led to a related clamoring on the part of drivers that cities and states build roads. State highway road construction soared tenfold between 1918 and 1930. As politicians moved to meet the public need for roads, often through bond financing, states and municipalities often turned to Wall Street either to supply the capital directly or to place the bond issues.

In ways less visible, though, the auto also encouraged opportunity and occupational freedom never before seen in American history. People were no longer tied to inner-city jobs or to sharecropper farms. Instead, they had hope that good jobs awaited just down the road or in California, which itself became a success story during the decade.

Another new technology, the radio, had also leaped onto the scene. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had been formed in 1919 to take over the assets of the American Marconi Company. The new radio medium utilized broadcasting in which the transmitter sent signals out over the airwaves for whoever wanted to pick them up, as opposed to the two-way wireless communication associated with a walkie-talkie. RCA expected that it could make money by providing the broadcasting free and selling the radio sets. In 1920, Westinghouse, one of the RCA partners, applied for the first radio station license, in Pittsburgh, and on November second of that year some five hundred listeners tuned in to coverage of Harding’s presidential victory. The following week the first World Series broadcast was heard. By 1922 more than two hundred stations were operating, and radio soon began to feature paid advertisements for products, giving birth to the modern practice of sponsor payment for programming on public airwaves.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that the best-known baseball player of all time, and perhaps the most dominant athlete in any sport at any time in American history, George Herman “Babe” Ruth (1895–1948), captured America’s imagination just as radio could broadcast his exploits, among which was setting the record, in 1927, of sixty home runs in a single season. A larger-than-life figure, Ruth not only led all of baseball in both home runs and strikeouts, but according to most contemporary newspaper accounts, he also surpassed any other player in his ability to party all night, carouse, smoke cigars, and then play a doubleheader.
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Motion pictures, another new technology, competed with radio as a main source of public entertainment. “Movies” originated with Thomas Edison in the late 1880s, and in 1903
The Great Train Robbery
became “the first movie with a recognizable plot.”
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Almost a decade later, D. W. Griffith produced
The Birth of a Nation
, about the Civil War, arguably creating the first true modern-era motion picture. But the greatest motion picture director of all, Cecil B. DeMille, captured the grand sweep of the 1920s with his epics
The Ten Commandments
(1923) and
King of Kings
(1927).
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Warner Bros., however, provided the decade’s key breakthrough when Al Jolson appeared in the first film with a sound track,
The Jazz Singer
(1927). Previously, movies had relied on written text to move the plot along, although posher theaters featured live organists or even orchestras playing along with the screen action. Jolson’s breakthrough opened the floodgates for the “talkies,” instantly ending the careers of many silent film artists who looked appealing, but sounded bad, and demanding more overall of the actor’s craft. With the industry producing up to five hundred movies a year, in a short time Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, and Clara Bow would epitomize the lavish lifestyles and celebrity culture that later was synonymous with Hollywood. Next to
The Jazz Singer
, though, was the other revolutionary motion picture of the decade—this one starring a mouse. Walter Elias “Walt” Disney, an illustrator and animator, had dreamed of producing a full-length motion picture cartoon. He took a giant step toward fulfilling that dream with
Steamboat Willie
in 1928, which introduced the world to a whistling Mickey Mouse. Motion pictures and radios were joined by another new consumer item—the telephone. In 1920, for every 1,000 city dwellers there were 61 telephones; by 1928 the number had risen to 92 per 1,000.
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Wets Versus Drys

As the idealism of Prohibition faded, and the reality of crime associated with bootlegging set in, the effort to ban alcohol began to unravel. One reason was that enforcement mechanisms were pitifully weak. The government had hired only fifteen hundred agents to support local police, compared to the thousand gunmen in Al Capone’s employ added to the dozens of other gangs of comparable size. Gunplay and violence, as law enforcement agents tried to shut down bootlegging operations, led to countless deaths. Intergang warfare killed hundreds in Chicago alone between 1920 and 1927. By some estimates, the number of bootleggers and illegal saloons went up after Prohibition. Washington, D.C., and Boston both saw the stratospheric increase in the number of liquor joints. Kansas, the origin of the dry movement, did not have a town where alcohol could not be obtained, at least according to an expert witness before the House Judiciary Committee.
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The leadership of the early Prohibition movement included many famous women, such as Carry Nation, who were concerned with protecting the nuclear family from the assault by liquor and prostitution. She was wrong in her assessment of the problem. Far from protecting women by improving the character of men, Prohibition perversely led women down to the saloon. Cocktails, especially, were in vogue among these “liberated” women, who, like their reformer sisters, came from the ranks of the well-to-do.

Liquor spread through organized crime into the hands (or bellies) of the lower classes only gradually in the 1920s, eventually entering into the political arena with the presidential campaign of Al Smith. By that time, much of the support for Prohibition had disappeared because several factors had coalesced to destroy the dry coalition. First, the drys lost some of their flexible and dynamic leaders, who in turn were replaced with more dogmatic and less imaginative types. Second, dry politicians, who were already in power, bore much of the blame for the economic fallout associated with the market crash in 1929. Third, public tastes had shifted (literally in some cases) to accommodate the new freedom of the age represented by the automobile and the radio. Restricting individual choices about anything did not fit well with those new icons. Finally, states chafed under federal laws. Above all, the liquor industry pumped massive resources into the repeal campaign, obtaining a “monopoly on…press coverage by providing reporters with reliable—and constant—information.”
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By the late 1920s and early 1930s, “it was unusual to find a story about prohibition in small local papers that did not have its origin with the [anti-Prohibition forces].”
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Not to be discounted, either, was the fact that the intelligentsia turned against Prohibition. Neo-Freudians—the rage in psychology circles—scorned the reformers, in sharp contrast to the pre–World War I sympathy they’d enjoyed in intellectual circles. Psychologists now saw Progressive reformers as sexually repressed meddlers.

All of these factors led toward the inexorable repeal of Prohibition with the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933. Still, for history written since the 1960s, where an open society was deemed the highest good and any restrictions on personal freedom were viewed as inherently autocratic, Prohibition left a more mixed legacy than is commonly portrayed. In the first place, it was not designed to stop private individuals from drinking, but only to eliminate the source of (as the reformers saw it) evil and misery, the saloon. Moreover, historians have displayed a nearly irresistible urge to saddle white rural Protestants with Prohibition, despite its female, upper-to upper-middle-class urban origins. A concurrent lack of attention was given to the measurable results of Prohibition. The U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, for example, prepared a report called “Alcohol and Health” in 1971, which showed that per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages fell by at least 40 percent in 1920, marking a permanent reduction in drinking.
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Economist Clark Warburton’s 1932 study analyzed a wide array of data, all of which were refined further by other economists in 1948. The conclusion of these studies was that alcohol consumption declined by 30 to 50 percent, or roughly what the 1971 HEW report had claimed.

Other benefits of Prohibition are overstated. Arrests for public drunkenness fell, leading to lower public expenses for dealing with drunks; the rates of alcoholic psychoses fell; and medical problems related to drinking in almost every category plummeted so much that medical journals scarcely mentioned it as a public health problem.
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Yet these statistics ignored a lag time of disease—especially illnesses such as psychoses and liver problems, which are cumulative and would not have shown up until the late 1920s, if then.