Controversies
In the 1920s Americans warred over a series of issues in which basic values were at stake, from Prohibition and immigration to the teaching of evolution and tolerance of the Ku Klux Klan. Indirectly, these fights occurred because liberalism was on the rise. For the first time city dwellers outnumbered rural residents, and secular cosmopolitan beliefs were spreading outward. Newly assertive African-Americans, many self-consciously calling themselves “New Negroes,” established a vibrant presence in national life, demanding their overdue rights. The “New Woman” similarly challenged long-held gender boundaries in her dress, social, and sexual habits, and in her self-conception, even as the political intensity that had marked the suffrage movement subsided. The young in general flouted dominant mores on matters of personal freedom such as birth control and drinking—even as they too supported Coolidge and, tacitly, his management of the nation’s economy.
Partly in response to this revolution in manners and morals, guardians of the old order mobilized politically in the 1920s. Some of these reactionary movements had reared their head in previous years with the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915, Prohibition’s passage in 1919, and the Red Scare of 1919-20. But in the 1920s, these forms of political fundamentalism gained strength.1
Sympathetic to neither the liberals nor the reactionaries and clinging to his belief in minimal presidential governance, Coolidge
tried to avoid the culture wars. When he weighed in, he tried to minimize any backlash. He criticized, in passing, the prosecution of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a Tennessee high school class, but he kept his comments brief, making it clear that he didn’t want the issue to provoke “even greater differences than the Prohibition amendment.” He pardoned the remaining prisoners who sat convicted of sedition during the mad rush to punish dissenters during the war. He nominally supported Prohibition and served no liquor in the White House, but he tolerated a level of enforcement lax enough to leave most Americans, at least in “wet” states, free to drink. Although Coolidge’s restraint in these areas had the virtue of keeping social strife from worsening, it also deprived him of the chance to cast himself squarely on the side of social progress.2
The first of the social issues to confront Coolidge was immigration. Since the 1880s, eastern and southern Europeans, including Catholics and a record number of Jews, had been flooding into American cities. Many Americans of northern European and Protestant descent, who had come to view “American” as synonymous with their own ethnic heritage, watched the changing complexion of the populace with alarm. In the late nineteenth century a nativist movement had arisen, and in 1917 Congress imposed, over Woodrow Wilson’s veto, a literacy test on foreign settlers.
After the war, several factors heightened the nativists’ distress. Labor radicalism fueled anxiety about the menace allegedly posed by the foreign-born, and the fight over the League of Nations laid bare ethnic divisions in the United States, exposing hostility toward foreigners as well. When in 1921 Ellis Island proved unable to handle the new boatloads of arriving Europeans—authorities diverted ships to Boston—Congress temporarily capped the number of immigrants who could enter the country.
By 1924, support was gathering across the political spectrum for stronger federal action. Voices of dissent were passionate but relatively few in number, coming mainly from immigrants, minorities, and city dwellers like New York City congressman Fiorello La Guardia. Never one to occupy the fringes of political opinion,
Coolidge endorsed new immigration caps in his 1923 State of the Union message, declaring, “America must be kept American.” (Three years earlier, Coolidge had stated crudely that the Nordic race would decline if its people combined with those of other races—but on the whole his racial attitudes were neither especially enlightened nor especially benighted for his age.)3
Congress, however, needed no prodding from Coolidge to act. In the House, Republican Albert Johnson of Washington, a staunch nativist, led the charge. His bill proposed to limit each country’s immigrants according to a formula based on the 1890 census, which meant severely curtailing the numbers of Jews, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs. Another provision barred the Japanese from immigrating altogether (as an 1882 law had barred most Chinese). Despite some fervent resistance—at one point two congressmen all but came to blows on the House floor—a lightly modified version of Johnson’s bill passed the lower chamber. Moving less rashly, the Senate stalled in the face of the bill’s barely disguised racism. Yet the Senate sponsor, Republican David Reed of Pennsylvania, essentially shared Johnson’s goal of maintaining the ethnic status quo, and the general discriminatory thrust of preferring northwestern Europeans remained in the final version.
Though it would affect comparatively fewer immigrants, it was the Japanese-exclusion provision that proved the biggest sticking point, since Coolidge and his administration opposed the measure. Leading the fight was Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, a political heavyweight who had been governor of New York, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, and the Republican nominee for president in 1916. A middle-of-the-road internationalist, Hughes bristled at the isolationism he saw pervading Congress and argued against the Japanese-exclusion clause, insisting it would violate a 1907 “Gentleman’s Agreement” between the United States and Japan. Under that pact, Japan had promised to limit emigration to the United States in return for guarantees that Japanese students already here would be integrated into the California schools. (Most Japanese-Americans lived in California.) If the immigration bill
passed, Hughes warned, it would fly in the face of that delicately negotiated entente and harm relations with Japan. With Coolidge’s backing, he pressed the Senate to make room for a quota of Japanese.
Unfortunately, Hughes hurt his cause with a tactical blunder. Having been cautioned by the Japanese ambassador, Masanao Hanihara, of “grave consequences” should the ban become law, Hughes relayed the ambassador’s warning to the Senate. A huge flap resulted. Lawmakers took umbrage at what Senator Hiram Johnson of California called an “impertinent” threat and an infringement on American “sovereignty.” An anti-Japanese backlash followed, and the Senate upheld the exclusion with scant dissent.4
The reconciliation of the House and Senate drafts offered one last chance to obtain a more moderate bill. But Coolidge was ineffectual, and a meager amendment that he had gotten inserted in the Senate bill was dropped altogether. Coolidge let his unhappiness with the Japanese exclusion be known and, as with the tax bill, made noises about vetoing the immigration bill. But he never considered that option seriously.
In fact, the dustup over the Japanese exclusion obscured the broad support enjoyed by the bill’s core provisions. Once the bill gathered steam, its limits on southern and eastern European immigration never came under serious challenge. Coolidge personally rebuffed a group led by Rabbi Stephen Wise and New York congressman Samuel Dickstein who sought to plead their case against the new quotas. Eventually Coolidge capitulated altogether. Sensing defeat, he signed the bill, Japanese exclusion and all, on May 26. As a result, only a tiny number of immigrants would enter the United States over the next four decades, profoundly affecting the demographic and political character of the nation. After the Holocaust of the 1930s and ’40s, the bill would come to be seen as a betrayal of the nation’s promise of an open door—one that, along with its other unfortunate effects, helped consign millions of European Jews to death. Not until a major new immigration law was passed in 1965 would America’s doors open again.
Although restricting immigration enjoyed widespread support, its most enthusiastic backers included the members of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. In the 1920s the Klan itself became another hot-button issue. Again, Coolidge would try to avoid the fray.
Originally founded after the Civil War by Confederate veterans, the white-robed, hooded vigilante group had died out after vigorous prosecution by the Grant administration in the 1870s. But in 1915, a Methodist preacher in Stone Mountain, Georgia, reconstituted the infamous brotherhood. Preaching not only white supremacy but also the inferiority of Catholics and Jews, he won few adherents until the early 1920s, when membership mushroomed to five million—not only in the South but also in other rural regions where old-stock Protestants feared the swelling urban masses. States as diverse as Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Ohio, and Oregon all claimed influential Klan populations, and numerous senators, governors, and state legislators around the country owed their election to the body’s support. While most of the Klan’s middle-class members eschewed violence, viewing the association as little different from a Rotary Club, others carried out lynchings, beatings, brandings, and arson, frequently gaining acquittals from juries of their white peers.
In 1925 the “Grand Dragon” of the Klan’s Indiana chapter, David Stephenson, would go to prison for complicity in the death of a woman he had raped, hastening the organization’s demise. But during the 1924 election season the Klan remained a contentious subject. At the Democratic National Convention in July, no issue divided the party more deeply. Delegates battled over whether to repudiate the group and risk alienating key supporters, especially in the South. Their refusal to do so, except obliquely, demoralized the party’s liberal members and created a public relations fiasco, since public opinion on the whole reviled the Klan.
Coolidge and the Republicans showed ample hesitation of their own. In the 1920s, most black voters were Republicans, while the Democrats still commanded solid support across the South. But the GOP’s conservative stands on issues like immigration and alcohol
recommended it to Klansmen in states such as Colorado and New Jersey, and many Republicans feared the costs of denouncing the Klan outright. When, despite his party’s equivocations, the Democratic presidential nominee, John W. Davis, finally did speak out against the vigilante group in the summer of 1924, he shrewdly called on the president to do likewise. Black leaders, Jewish leaders, and the New York Republican Party, among others, all joined in the pressure on Coolidge to do so.
But the president spoke only in generalities. The few statements about the Klan emanating from any White House spokesman were elliptical and somewhat cryptic reassurances from Bascom Slemp that Coolidge was “not a member of the order and is not in sympathy with the aims and purposes.” That Coolidge gave the job of delivering this anodyne message to Slemp—a racist southerner whose appointment as the president’s secretary the NAACP had earlier called “a slap in the face” to twelve million black Americans—only made it more suspect. To be sure, Coolidge had no affection for the Klan; his silence was strategic, and it may have helped him win the electoral votes of Colorado, Indiana, and Kansas. But Coolidge’s lack of comment couldn’t be written off solely as election-year caution. In August 1925 the president again refused a chance to speak out. With 40,000 robed Klan members descending on Washington and marching past the White House, the president made good on his Silent Cal moniker by vacationing in Swampscott, Massachusetts, and issuing no denunciation. Later, in October 1925, he gave a high-minded address to the American Legion in Omaha, praising men of all races and religions as equally American and having fought with equal valor in the army. But he did not mention the Klan by name.5
Like most Americans, Coolidge considered himself an egalitarian, and his record on racial issues compares favorably to that of Woodrow Wilson and many other contemporaries. But the mildness of his opposition to the Klan typified his lack of leadership on racial issues. Though the 1920s witnessed the Harlem Renaissance, Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist movement, social science research
that decimated pseudoscientific racist claims, and activism by the NAACP and the Urban League, the will to reform in Washington—including in the White House—was still lacking. In his 1923 State of the Union address, Coolidge deemed racial difficulties “to a large extent local problems which must be worked out by the mutual forbearance and human kindness of each community” rather than by “outside interference.” While calling for antilynching legislation, he lent the bill emerging from the House only tepid support when it stood a fair chance of congressional passage in 1925, spending his political capital instead on another round of tax cuts. The bill died.6
On other racial matters, Coolidge’s record was marked by halfhearted efforts and qualifications. In 1924, he supported replacing black Republican delegates from southern states with white ones in order to attract more voters there. He never made a priority of enforcing black voting rights, and his efforts to reverse Wilson’s policy of segregating the federal workforce were halting and partial. If he deserves credit for commuting the jail sentence of Marcus Garvey, who was imprisoned for mail fraud—Attorney General John Sargent, reviewing the case, could find no one claiming to have been defrauded—Coolidge had the freed activist deported to his native Jamaica. Other actions—proposing a biracial commission to foster “mutual understanding,” which came to naught, and the appointment of a few blacks to government posts, such as ambassador to Liberia—smacked of tokenism.
Even Coolidge’s superficially liberal attitudes and fine words on race masked blind spots. As Bruce Barton reported in 1923, Coolidge lectured a black audience that while he admired “their progress,” they should recall that “the Anglo-Saxon race has been centuries in reaching its present position and that the Negro could not and must not expect to bridge the chasm in a century.” Civil rights leaders lamented what they saw as lip service to their cause. The civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph recalled joining William Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian and a Massachusetts acquaintance of Coolidge’s, on a visit to see the president. After Trotter “made a very fiery talk,” Randolph recalled, Coolidge said
simply, “All right, thank you very much,” and sat down. Then, said Randolph, “Trotter turns right around with his group and we walked out.” The behavior, typical of Coolidge, was no less disappointing because other visitors received similar treatment. And while the president’s indifference didn’t stop most politically active blacks from backing him in 1924, any hopes that the Party of Lincoln would deliver more justice than Wilson’s Democrats were already dashed. “May God write us down as asses if ever again we are found putting our trust in either the Republican or Democratic parties,” said the great civil rights leader W. E. B. DuBois.7
Classically conservative on economic policy and averse to progressive leadership on social policy, Coolidge was in foreign affairs a cautious moderate: cognizant that America needed to play a leading role in world affairs yet wary of grand Wilsonian projects and eager not to run afoul of public sentiment. Neither isolationist nor imperialist, he hoped to encourage peace and stability without becoming unduly entangled in Europe’s affairs.
On the international front, Coolidge had to confront several important issues in his first year in office, including the question of whether to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and calls for various treaties and institutions to protect the peace. But the most urgent and knottiest issues were those surrounding foreign debt to the United States. During World War I, American banks had lent the European allies more than $10 billion, and after the war these nations, their economies ailing, were struggling to meet their payments. Then crisis struck. In early 1923, Germany, groaning under the reparations imposed by the Versailles Treaty, defaulted on its payments to France. French and Belgian troops moved into the Ruhr Valley, home to the German coal and steel industries, raising the prospect of another war. Germany printed money to pay its debts, resulting in a legendary period of hyperinflation. By October 1923, one dollar bought 4.2 trillion marks.
Inheriting this crisis, Coolidge hewed to his old-fashioned notions
of fiscal responsibility. Some experts were proposing that Europe’s debts be wiped clean in the interest of economic stability, with the forgiveness tallied as an American gift to the war effort. But Coolidge, like Harding before him, resisted. Along with much of the American public, he believed that debts should be repaid, plain and simple. “Well, they hired the money, didn’t they?” he is alleged to have said. Nor did he deign to consider lowering the high tariffs on imports that he and Harding both supported—a move that would have helped the European economies by encouraging exports to the United States.8
The Franco-German crisis forced Coolidge to take action, however, and Secretary of State Hughes secured the president’s blessing to organize a commission of delegates from Belgium, France, Britain, Italy, and the United States to craft a solution. To lead it, Coolidge named the dynamic Charles Dawes, a wealthy financier who had been Harding’s economy-minded budget director. Though the president stayed out of the negotiations, he threw his weight behind the Dawes Committee and joined its fortunes to his own. Negotiations commenced in earnest in Paris in January 1924, and by early April a compromise emerged: in return for a withdrawal from the Ruhr, the Allies would restructure the German debt and reorganize the German central bank. Providing the critical ingredient, the United States would furnish Germany with the capital to help repay its loans. Despite criticism from isolationists like Hiram Johnson, who decried the meddling in European affairs, Coolidge stuck with the plan.
Overall, Americans were relieved to see continental tensions defused. Although Germany balked at the terms, it signed the agreement in late August, to much celebration. The Dawes Plan helped the European economies in the short term, spurring a boom in Germany that lasted through much of the 1920s. They also paved the way for the 1925 Locarno agreements, which resolved some outstanding territorial disputes and promised to establish a spirit of cooperation among the European powers, winning praise from Coolidge as likely to have “a great and permanent effect upon
humanity.” In 1925, Dawes shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Austen Chamberlain, the British statesman who had spearheaded the Locarno talks.9
Alas, the German boom and the “spirit of Locarno” would prove short-lived—especially after the 1929 Wall Street crash put an end to America’s ability to prop up the European economies. In retrospect, there was something absurd all along about the shell game—American funds going to Germany, through the Allies, and back to the United States—which was contrived partly to satisfy each country’s sense of amour propre. Still, when the Dawes Plan was signed, few people foresaw dire consequences. In the summer of 1924 the resolution of the European crisis, however temporary, enhanced Coolidge’s popularity. Without making official pledges on behalf of the government, he had, through the work of a private citizen, gotten private banks to solve a crisis. The move reassured Americans that peace was at hand.
As it turned out, Coolidge’s troubles with Congress in 1924 didn’t hurt him much either. His legislative losses may actually have helped him as much as his victories. They spared him any wrath from veterans and any possible fallout from skewed tax cuts, while he received credit for what the newspapers presented (in the mocking words of newspaperman Frank Kent) as “the forceful and vigorous talk of a red-blooded, resolute, two-fisted, fighting executive.” He had spoken directly to the public and felt confident they backed his leadership. “Coolidge personifies to our people calmness, common sense, and splendid courage,” Dawes later wrote. Buoyed by the economy, emphasizing his modest aims and his rectitude, and drawing attention to his own virtue, Coolidge pinned his success or failure on concerns greater than mere acts of legislation. Like the best politicians, he made such judgment hinge on who he was.10
The fall campaign was looming.