HENRY FORD’S ROUGE PLANT, a working day in the early 1920s. A massive ship loaded with iron ore steams into a turning basin off the River Rouge, swings ponderously to starboard, and slides into a slip next to Henry Ford’s concrete holding bins. Hulett unloaders rumble down the tracks alongside the slip, pause, plunge their huge arms down into the ship’s hold, scoop out ten-ton bites of ore, and swing around to dump their loads into the bins behind. Within the day, the ore is rolling on bottom-dumping railroad cars from bins to blast furnaces; within hours, molten metal moves from furnace to foundry, to be cast into engine blocks, and to the machining rooms, where the engines pass through thirty or more machine-tool operations.
In the vast assembly rooms, vehicles begin to take shape as castings, pistons, axles, springs, and thousands of other parts and pieces flow into the central assembly line. Coming in at right angles are the conveyors feeding in the parts via buckets, belts, rollers, monorails, and “scenic railways.” A seven-leafed car-spring has passed through its own assembly line—punch press, bending machine, nitrate bath, bolt insertion, painting, inspection—before joining the central procession. Roofs, wheels, windows, bumpers are clamped into place. A tall, black Model T triumphantly emerges at the end of the long line. Kindled into life by a gallon of gasoline, the car roars off in a cloud of exhaust to a railway siding and the awaiting freight train. The whole process, from ore to car, has taken perhaps a day….
The men standing at the moving assembly lines and toiling in the rolling mill, powerhouse, blast furnaces, and foundry were considered the elite of American industry, well paid, well housed, well treated by a benevolent employer. Life at the Rouge was not easy. They were part of an army—75,000 men worked at the sprawling facility by 1926—and they were treated much like soldiers. Amid an ear-splitting roar, they fought their daily battle of production standing often shoulder to shoulder, absolutely dominated by the flow of work, just as the flow of work had been carefully adjusted to them. Each man had enough space to do his work, no more. Men did not move; only materials. Each work unit, wrote an admiring observer, was “a carefully designed gear which meshes with other gears and operates in synchronism with them, the whole forming one huge, perfectly-timed, smoothly operating industrial machine of almost unbelievable efficiency.”
The whole plant seemed in motion as parts flowed from scores of tributaries into the mighty central stream. Men seemed in constant motion from the waist up as they drilled, inserted, bolted, clipped, plucked parts from small bins at their side, moved in a precise series of steps to an exact and demanding time sequence. Mass production, according to company doctrine, reduced the “necessity for thought on the part of the worker and … his movements to a minimum.” Thus workers were expected to act as efficiently and automatically as machines. Plant bosses, on the other hand, were not only allowed to move about but required to. They were given desks without chairs so that they had to work standing up, or preferably on the move. Casual conversations were frowned upon. An air of anxiety hung over the whole place as workers labored and bosses scrambled to meet the company injunction—produce, produce, produce.
The man most in motion at the Ford works was Henry Ford himself. Still lean and sinewy as he entered his sixties, almost handsome, with his black eyes and slightly curling hair, he was bored by executive meetings, hardly able to sit still for more than a few minutes. Restlessly he toured his plants and yards, his bins and his foundries, sharp to spot men engaged in idle chatter or executives stuck to their desks, praising or upbraiding with brief words and rapidly gesturing hands. Even on holidays he was restless, hurrying. Camping in the Smokies with his old friend Thomas Edison, he was surprised when the inventor felt his hip pocket. “What are you looking for?” Said Edison: “I figure you always carry a lighted bunch of firecrackers in your clothes somewhere. Slow to a walk for a while, will you? I get tired of motion pictures.”
By the early twenties, Henry Ford was already a legend, both in the popular press and in the automobile industry. The public drank in the stories—how as a young genius mechanic he had experimented with light-car Models A and B and K at a time when automobiles were big and their owners wealthy; how he had worked out audacious mass-production techniques for building hundreds of thousands of Model Ts; how he had fought off Wall Street bankers who were trying to dominate the automobile industry through patent control; how he had sent a Peace Ship to Europe in 1915 to end the war; how he had fought off his own associates and stockholders so that he could establish personal control of his company; how he had made several hundred million—or was it a billion?—dollars; and how, above all, he had suddenly announced in 1914 that every Ford worker would receive at least five dollars a day, to the delight of auto workers and the consternation of his rivals.
What impressed Americans most was Ford’s independence. In an age of monopoly and trusts, he steered clear of combination and stuck to his last—making cars and tractors. In an age that preached individualism more than it practiced it, he was the supreme individualist—a man who could tell bankers, suppliers, union bosses, rivals to go to hell. This perception was accurate. Thwarted by strikes against his glass and steel suppliers, and by miners and railroad workers, he resolved to control the source of his raw materials—of the timber that went into his car bodies, the iron mines that produced ore for wheels and axles, the glass that made car windows, the leather for interiors, the coal that fed his towering furnaces. By 1915, with his Highland plant a huge success, he had resolved on building a far bigger works at Rouge—an integrated works that would combine a multitude of auto-building processes, resting on a vertical organization of production. Raising colossal amounts of capital from his own profits, and some from bankers, Ford simply bought up enormous tracts of land, timber, iron fields, waterpower rights, limestone, and silica sand.
So that ore-bearing vessel easing into the slip belonged personally to Henry Ford, as did the cargo ship headed out to Europe and South America packed with his cars and tractors, as did canals and railroads and ports and harbors. He planned for the future, too, requiring that branch plants be set up next to waterways in case other men’s railroads should fail him. Ford wanted independence because that to him meant power—power to do as he wished. And he had few doubts about what he could do through his own talents if only rivals or incompetents did not stand in his way.
Ford would control not only raw materials but men’s lives as well—and not only their working lives but, to a degree, their home lives, too. To make sure that his five-dollars-a-day wage would not be wasted—or worse—Ford established the Sociological Department, whose main task was to encourage workers toward “thrift, honesty, sobriety, better housing, and better living generally.” At this time, the company was employing thousands of immigrants from Poland, Russia, Romania, Italy, and other less industrialized areas of Europe. Over a hundred staff members from the Sociological Department visited workers’ homes to inspect for uncleanliness, bad habits, congestion, undernourished children, drunkenness, gambling. “Employees should use plenty of soap and water in the home, and upon their children, bathing frequently,” a Ford pamphlet advised. “Notice that the most advanced people are the cleanest.”
The result was a clash of cultures—between the immigrants’ pre-industrial living and working habits and Ford’s Puritan ethic of hard work, clean living, and efficiency. Ford’s paternalism reflected a pervasive fear that the immigrants would not only waste their five dollars a day but flaunt it. A veiled warning came in a condescending verse from the Detroit poet Edgar Guest about “Giuseppe,” who goes out promenading with white collar, silk hat, cane, and Ford badge on his lapel:
He smok’ da cigar weath da beega da band,
Da “three-for-da-quart” ees da kind;
Da diamond dat flash from da back of hees hand,
Eez da beegest Giuseppe could find.…
For Giuseppe, he work at da Ford.
If the company’s “sociologists” had limited impact on the workers’ home lives, Ford had more control of their working time. Within his plants he established “Americanization” classes that taught English, table manners, cleanliness, proper attire, and even etiquette, as well as Ford shop practices. “Graduation” took the form of a pageant depicting immigrants descending from a boat down a gangway into a fifteen-foot-wide “melting pot” representing the Ford English School. But the clash of cultures could not be resolved; and, inevitably, Ford’s paternalism had its ugly side. Vexed above all by absenteeism, the company sacked almost a thousand Greek and Russian workers who as Orthodox Christians celebrated Christmas thirteen days after the regular holiday under their own Julian calendar. “If these men are to make their home in America,” a Ford official stated, “they should observe American holidays.”
Still, as historians noted, immigrants tended to cling to their ways—to the crowded tenements, the noisy sociability, the relaxed hours, even the “squalor.” After a few years, the sociological and Americanization programs were dropped. While these programs did have a certain impact on the wider social scene—the 16,000 workers who graduated from the Ford schools served as models for many local and national “Americanization” efforts directed at immigrants—Ford, in the end, found that he had less power over men than over machines.
All told, however, Henry Ford had emerged by the mid-1920s as one of the country’s supreme transforming leaders. He belonged, concluded a biographer, “to that small company of historical personalities who literally transformed the world of their time.” Not only did he make it possible for millions of Americans to own cars, not only did he develop the moving assembly line as a fundamental part of the total production process, help put the nation on wheels, and force a vast expansion of the highways his “flivvers” rode on; he also reshaped the home locations, recreation habits, social intercourse, even the language of tens of millions of working people. Thus he “altered the contours of society” as much as he “permanently changed the topography of cities and nations.”
It was not that Ford had a direct influence on politics or government. On the contrary, on almost every occasion where he moved outside his industrial orbit he failed, sometimes dramatically. Thus his Peace Ship—a 1915 cruise to Europe with Jane Addams and other pacifists—not only failed but made him something of a laughingstock. An ardent supporter of Woodrow Wilson, he moved with the President from pacifism to war mobilization, in which he had a prominent role, and then went down with Wilson and the League. He rashly accepted the Democratic nomination for United States senator from Michigan, only to be beaten by what he viewed as “Wall Street money” and by a free-spending Republican candidate who later was found guilty of violating the federal corrupt practices act. He published his own weekly, the Dearborn Independent, but this venture turned sour when Ford used it for anti-Semitic propaganda, in part because for a time he imagined a “Jewish control” of banking. His most bizarre and humiliating experience resulted from a libel suit he launched against Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune for calling him an unpatriotic “anarchist” during the war. After a long proceeding, during which Ford was put on the stand and exposed as ignorant of American history, a jury of farmers found the Tribune guilty but fined it six cents—a deliciously satisfying verdict for the Colonel.
Like many transforming leaders, Ford was a bundle of contradictions. He believed in “pragmatic,” ad hoc, day-to-day decision-making, and yet carefully and brilliantly planned one of the biggest and most complex production layouts in the world. He demanded absolute discipline from the work force, but made a special effort to employ not only unlettered immigrants but handicapped persons and ex-convicts. He led his company into historic advances but also setbacks, such as refusing to paint Model Ts anything save black, long delaying the shift from the Model T to the Model A, and holding an almost obsessive bias against hydraulic brakes. He practiced centralized and disciplined management, but preached old-fashioned smallness and, indeed, during the early twenties built a number of small factories—called Village Industries—to produce sub-assembly parts. He was almost impossible to work with or under, but he brought to industrial leadership a number of men who would become giants in the automotive industry—notably William S. Knudsen and Charles E. Sorensen. Ford, someone said, was able to assemble everything except himself.
‘‘Ford runs modern society and not the politicians who are only screens,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1924. The novelist was only partly right. Ford enormously influenced social and political attitudes through his Model Ts, his pervasive company propaganda, and his own example. His influence was worldwide; Europeans coined the term “Fordismus” for the idea of mass production, industrial efficiency, and cheap consumer goods, and even the Russians hailed him and his tractors as symbols of the kind of modern industry needed to build socialism. But the automaker found out the hard way that economic power was not directly convertible into political power. A financial loner, a political independent, an erratic innovator, Ford was far more a throwback to the days of the Carnegies and Rockefellers than a forerunner of the modern capitalist in politics. The future lay with the bankers and businessmen and brokers who would make up the transactional leadership of mid-twentieth-century America.
During the 1920s the Republican leaders and the business leaders of the nation—often the same men—conducted a crowning experiment in America’s capitalistic brand of conservatism. Assured and determined, for ten years they had the almost unfettered opportunity to convert their individualistic rhetoric, pro-business beliefs, and corporate power into public policy and governmental action. No opponent could obstruct them as they worked in their economic and political laboratory. The conservative leaders did not, of course, view their efforts as experimental; on the contrary, they assumed that they were bringing the nation back to “normalcy”—back to old moorings, established wisdoms, and the proper conduct of affairs after the radical Wilson years. Hence the period was not a mere interregnum between the New Freedom and the New Deal, but witnessed a major venture with its own powerful impact on American history and American democracy.
An extraordinary political continuity and consistency marked that decade. Throughout, Republicans remained firmly in control. Whether the Democrats nominated a moderate liberal and internationalist in 1920, or a conservative in 1924, or an Irish-Catholic city man in 1928, the Grand Old Party racked up its nearly two-to-one popular majorities and its three-or four-to-one electoral college majorities throughout the decade. The Republicans kept control of Congress, even during the “off-year” House and Senate elections of the 1920s.
The Republicans nominated and elected three Presidents, each with a distinctive image and style. Harding in the White House continued to be very much the same man as in the Senate—a poker-playing, golf-addictive, tobacco-chewing, mistress-keeping, whiskey-drinking politico who concealed a good deal of political sophistication and grasp of policy behind an affable, glad-handing front, and a quick intelligence and lazy, undisciplined mind behind his Hollywood-presidential appearance—silvery hair, square jaw, expressive mouth, big frame, high paunch. Calvin Coolidge seemed almost his opposite—a small, spare man, as austere and hard-looking as some of his native Vermont granite, taciturn in public though garrulous enough when he wanted to be. Herbert Hoover, who had won warm admiration from Republicans and Democrats alike, and from acute observers such as Brandeis and Lippmann, for his competent and compassionate handling of wartime relief, was a remarkable administrator, both well organized and imaginative, who could launch major new ventures and write a sophisticated tract, as he did on individualism, with equal skill. All three men had small-town origins, but they had been shaped by diverse subcultures—Harding by the boom town of Marion, Coolidge by the staid political and business world of Northampton, Hoover by years as an engineer and promoter overseas and at home.
In broad political outlook, on the other hand, the three Presidents were much alike. At his first Cabinet meeting after Harding’s death in August 1923, and later to press and Congress, Coolidge stated that he would continue all his predecessor’s policies. Hoover in turn carried on most of Coolidge’s initiatives, at least until new imperatives arose. All three chief executives were under the same institutional constraints. The presidency had its own direction and dynamics, as foreign demands and bureaucratic pressures played on the White House. Even the easygoing Harding was moving toward a more modern and coherent program in the last year of his brief presidency, and Coolidge, in Robert Murray’s words, was able to be the President that Harding would have liked to have been. Undergirding all three Administrations, moreover, was the power of the Republican party. No single “boss” could tell Presidents what to do, but the collective leadership, triumphant self-confidence, and policy and patronage demands of the Grand Old Party set the course of all three Administrations.
Presidential Republican rule showed the most continuity in its top executive leadership. Secretary of State Hughes served during both the Harding and early Coolidge years, as did a number of other Cabinet officers. Coolidge as Vice-President sat in Harding’s Cabinet, Hoover as Secretary of Commerce in both Harding’s and Coolidge’s. After the long patronage drought during the Wilson years, GOP leaders in Congress and the country put intense pressure on all three Presidents for Republican appointments. But of all the forces for continuity through the 1920s, nothing could compare, in intensity and effect, with that of Andrew William Mellon.
Andrew Mellon. The star of no leader was to shine so brightly in the 1920s, nor fade so quickly into darkness thereafter. Born in 1855, Mellon had grown up in a Pittsburgh banking family drenched in affluence, education, gentility, conservatism, and Republicanism. Everything Mellon touched, as he rose in banking and industry circles, turned to money. Taking over his father’s bank at the age of twenty-seven, Andrew helped establish the Aluminum Company of America, Gulf Oil, and Union Steel, then moved on into manufacturing, shipbuilding, public utilities. He helped Marshall-McClintick become world-famous as builder of the Panama Canal locks, the Hell Gate and George Washington bridges, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. But at heart he always remained a banker. By 1920, he was reputed to be one of America’s richest men—perhaps the richest—with a fortune of several hundred millions.
He was an austere figure amid the flamboyant politicos of the day— reticent, soft-voiced, with a long narrow head and chilly gray-blue eyes on top of a small, slight frame tightly buttoned into a dark suit. It was considered a master stroke on Harding’s part when the new President was able to persuade this diffident multimillionaire to come to Washington as Secretary of the Treasury. Coolidge, who admired wealth, was delighted to keep him on as Treasury Secretary, as was Hoover despite earlier disagreements with him in the Cabinet. He rivaled all three Presidents in his influence over economic policy.
Above all Mellon symbolized the unity between corporate power and the Grand Old Party. No chasm separated his Republicanism from his business conservatism. However much he disdained truck with ordinary politicos, touching their hands only with the tips of his fingers, organizational Republicanism was part of his life. Leaders of the Pennsylvania Cameron-Quay machine had often dropped in to see his father; later, Mellon consorted with Boies Penrose, Philander Knox, and other heads of one of the most conservative state parties in the country. Corporate control of the Republican party had long been a staple of muckraking journalists and progressive orators. They drew a picture of politicians as pawns of the corporations. But big business did not have to exert conservative influence on most Republican regulars; that influence was already in them, inculcated by heritage, family, education, occupation, class status, social environment, and party ideology.
So Harding really meant it when he said, “This is essentially a business country. We hear a vast deal about ‘big business,’ but the big business of America is nothing but the aggregate of the small businesses. That is why we need business sense in charge of American administration, and why the majority of America has for more than half a century been a Republican majority.” He denounced the “hampering restrictions and bullying methods” used against business. Coolidge not only issued his famous pronunciamento: “The business of America is business,” but, flinty Vermonter though he was, waxed euphoric: the man “who builds a factory,” he said, “builds a temple, the man who works there worships there, and to each is due not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise.” Herbert Hoover said in 1928: “Given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” Every “expansion of government in business,” he said, “poisons the very roots of liberalism—that is, political equality, free speech, free assembly, free press, and equality of opportunity.”
In the election of 1928 the voters granted Hoover’s wish to continue the essential program of the previous eight years—to proceed with the Republicans’ venture in a businesslike and business-loving regime. The Grand Old Party could claim all credit for the continuing success of the grand old experiment in rugged individualism, laissez-faire, materialism, social stability, corporate influence, and business power.
Thus for a solid decade conservative belief dominated the public affairs of the nation. Not since the triumphant Republicanism of the turn of the century had a party majority so firmly established its power and leadership in Congress and the presidency, but the stakes were much higher now because of the expanded role of the federal government. Refurbishing its electoral majorities throughout the decade, the leadership of the Grand Old Party carried through its policies and programs not only in Washington but in a host of state capitals outside the South. It was government by compact majority.
It was precisely this kind of majority that the Founding Fathers had feared in drafting the new constitution in 1787. As good republicans they believed in majority rule—rule by a majority of the fraction of the people who could vote at the time, that is—but as men wanting order and stability, they proposed to curb majorities, especially majorities composed of turbulent mobs and unruly populaces. Thus James Madison recognized the old and “fundamental principle of Republican government—that the majority who rule are the safest Guardians both of public good and private rights.” But—“If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.” By dividing up powers among different sets of leaders, by making these leaders elected by and responsible to diverse and conflicting constituencies, and by staggering elections over a period of time, the Framers sought to tame the unruly beast of majority power.
The Founders recognized, nonetheless, that popular majorities ultimately would take control of the new federal government if such majorities could remain large and united enough to win a series of presidential and legislative elections. Here was where they played their trump constitutional card. By establishing presidential selection and Senate confirmation of federal judges, they tied the judiciary into the republican system; but by giving judges lifetime tenure, along with some power of judicial review, they created a judicial leadership that institutionally would be “behind the times”—that is, responding to the presidential and legislative majorities of a decade or even a generation back. This meant a virtual guarantee of continuity and stability: the judiciary would represent a kind of consensus among shifting factions, parties, and ideologies.
Somehow this logical arrangement did not seem to be working in the early twentieth century. It might have been expected that when Harding came to the White House in March of 1921, the Supreme Court in particular would strike a balance between the conservative presidencies of McKinley and Taft and the progressive presidencies of Roosevelt and Wilson. But history played one of its tricks. Taft had the pleasure of making as many Supreme Court appointments in his four years in the White House as Wilson and TR did in their combined fifteen years. This was. not wholly by chance; retiring justices had long since learned the art of waiting out Presidents.
So the Republicans returning to power in 1921 happily found like-minded brethren on the bench. Their luck continued when, two months after he took office, Harding could bestow the highest gift in a President’s hands—the chief justiceship. It was not only luck: Chief Justice White had held out until the GOP returned, repeatedly telling Taft, as the former President said later, that “he was holding the office for me and that he would give it back to a Republican administration.” It was Taft’s crowning moment, too, for this was above all else the post he craved, while serving in practically every other. There was a slight problem, since Harding had promised a place on the Court to his campaign brain-truster George Sutherland, but this was straightened out—Sutherland was told to wait for the next vacancy—and by summer 1921, William Howard Taft, as spry and genial as ever and less plump, was seated at the center of the High Court.
That Court had for some years been a center of controversy. During the heyday of progressivism, liberals and radicals complained that the reactionary bench was upholding corporate property rights and thwarting state and federal regulation of the economy. In 1908, three years after Lochner v. New York, the court in Adair v. U.S. invalidated the Erdman Act, which had outlawed the notorious “yellow-dog” contract that made union non-membership a condition of employment. The Court held that the act impaired both the employer’s and the worker’s freedom of contract, and that the commerce power of Congress did not extend to the act, for labor relations had no “real or substantial relation” with commerce. A few years later, the Court struck down a state law against yellow-dog contracts. During the progressive era, the Court upheld a couple of Oregon laws limiting hours of work, as well as other regulatory legislation. But then came Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), invalidating a child labor act that had been the direct product of efforts by Florence Kelley and other progressive activists. Congress, the Court held in a five-to-four verdict, lacked power to exclude goods from interstate commerce unless they were themselves intrinsically harmful. No matter, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in dissent, that the goods were the “product of ruined lives.”
Would the new Chief Justice—genial, moderate, kind Will Taft—make a difference? An early answer came in the second child labor case in 1922. Thwarted by Hammer v. Dagenhart, Congress had passed a new act against child labor, this time using its taxing power. Taft not only voted with the Court to invalidate; he wrote the decision. Then came Adkins v. Children’s Hospital.
Congress had passed a minimum-wage law for women in the District of Columbia, partly on the ground of a relationship between wages and the health and morals of women. The High Court was expected to sustain the act, on precedent of the Oregon cases, but the Court was now packed with more conservative justices. Writing for the Court, Justice Sutherland, who had finally been elevated late in 1922, based his decision voiding the law on the liberty-of-contract doctrine. Taft produced a moving dissent but could not sway his colleagues. Using as precedent the Lockner and Adair decisions, Sutherland held that in principle “there can be no difference between the case of selling labor and the case of selling goods.” As Max Lerner later pointed out, “by treating the labor contract like any commodity purchase-and-sale,” Sutherland had borne out the contention of Karl Marx that “under capitalism labor has become a mere commodity.” From Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery in London might have come a thin peal of cynical laughter.
For a time under Taft’s leadership the Court followed a wavering centrist course, issuing a number of antiunion labor decisions while upholding various state regulatory laws and federal programs. Later in the 1920s, its conservatism seemed to harden. In vain left-liberals denounced the “reactionary” course of the Court. For most Americans, the High Court was still above politics and above ideology, handing down decisions from some rarefied summit, interpreting a sacred document, simply “finding” the law, not making it. In fact, the Court could hardly have been more partisan and ideological. Taft used his personal and political skills in “massing the court,” as he strove to make it appear more united than it was. Sometimes, justices would reluctantly go along with the majority in order to lessen internal conflict. Taft even held Sunday afternoon caucuses in his home, described by his friendly biographer as “extra-curricular conferences” at which “plans were made to block the liberal machinations.”
Taft and his Court occupied the best of political worlds. Benefiting from both the popular worship of the Constitution and the “cult of the robe,” the justices seemed above the battle at the same time that they in fact were deeply involved in politics. Ironically, in a system designed to thwart majorities, they held a majority that worked, that delivered. In a system that so often thwarted the wishes of masses of voters, they had the votes.
The compact majority produced. As President, Congress, and Court worked smoothly together, despite occasional sputterings, a conservative party and government churned out conservative legislation and administrative and judicial decisions. Following a rash of railroad and coal strikes in the summer of 1922, Harding allowed Harry Daugherty, now his Attorney General, to gain a sweeping restraining order from a federal judge against the rail strikers. The failed strikes left railroad labor furious with the Administration, and divided to boot, as tens of thousands of shopmen were required to sign agreements with vindictive managements, forcing them into company unions.
Toward farmers the Harding Administration took a more generous line. The Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 forbade discriminatory practices in livestock, poultry, and dairy transactions, especially the manipulation of prices, and next year the Capper-Volstead Act exempted farmers and their organizations from the reach of the antitrust laws. But what most farmers most keenly wanted was control of farm surpluses and stabilization of prices. When a 1923 credit act easing loans for crop financing proved inadequate, farm organizations rallied behind the McNary-Haugen bill, an elaborate scheme to buy the annual surplus of certain crops during times of high output and keep it off the domestic market. Defeated time and again in House or Senate, the bill finally passed Congress in 1927, only to be vetoed by Coolidge.
The Grand Old Party seemed powerful enough to resist the demands of poorer members of its grand old coalition of farmers and workers. It was equally casual toward a third and historic bastion of Republicanism—black Americans. Harding had been treading a wary course between those Republicans who wanted the GOP to recognize burgeoning black power in Northern cities, and others who sought to curb the Republican “black-and-tan” organizations in the South in order to create a “lily-white” party that could appeal to Southern whites. But Harding wanted the Negro to have the right to vote. “Let the black man vote when he is fit to vote,” he told a Birmingham audience; “prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote.” And he wanted the black man to have the right to life. He proposed a federal anti-lynching law, only to see it filibustered to death by Southern Democrats in the Senate. Under Lodge’s leadership the Republican caucus decided to give up efforts to overcome the filibuster, handing black leaders the excuse blacks would hear again and again—the anti-lynching bill had to yield to “more important” business in the Senate.
That important business was a ship subsidy bill, and the Republicans throughout the decade pushed through subsidies for a variety of business interests despite their vaunted belief in laissez-faire. But the most powerful Republican thrust came in the field of taxation. This was Treasury Secretary Mellon’s domain. The financier was quite direct and emphatic in his approach to taxation. The income tax and war demands had shifted the tax burden too heavily onto the upper-income classes, he believed, impairing their capacity to risk capital for the expansion of production. Soon after his appointment, Mellon appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee to urge repeal of the excess-profits tax and reduction of the maximum surtax rate from 65 percent to 32 percent.
Harding fully backed his Secretary, though he was hardly of much help intellectually. “I can’t make a damn thing out of this tax problem,” he exploded to an aide. “I listen to one side and they seem right, and then—God!—I talk to the other side, and they seem just as right.” But Mellon did not need Presidents; he had himself. With the help of Penrose and other Old Guard members of Congress, he pushed through the first of his revenue bills by the end of 1921. Unappeased, he pressed for further reductions in personal income taxes on the rich and in inheritance taxes, gaining these in the revenue acts of 1926 and 1928 under Coolidge. Mellon backed up both Harding and Coolidge in vetoing veterans’ bonus bills, and he worked closely with Harding’s budget director, Charles Dawes, on government economy. By the time Mellon left Hoover’s Cabinet for the Court of St. James’s in early 1932, the Mellon-Harding-Coolidge-Hoover fiscal program had long been firmly in place.
Only one thing seemed to threaten continued Republican ascendancy throughout the decade—scandal. Rumors of malfeasance on the part of an “Ohio gang,” climaxed by the suicide of an old friend of Harding and Daugherty, began circulating through Washington early in 1923. The President had been suffering from high blood pressure and other ills for some time, and his concern over the reports probably hastened his death, apparently from an embolism, during a long trip back from Alaska early in August that year. For months, indeed years, following Harding’s death, Washington was titillated by revelations of fraud and bribery in the Veterans Bureau, of secret leases of Teapot Dome oil reserves to oil men in exchange for their “loans” to Harding’s Interior Secretary, Albert B. Fall. Attorney General Daugherty, who was accused of conspiracy, refused to testify, charged that “Red labor” was plotting against him, and got off with a hung jury, some three years after Coolidge had sacked him.
For all the publicity, the scandals had little effect on Republican presidential victories. In large part, this was due to Coolidge’s probity and his distance from the “Ohio gang.” Coolidge also possessed a gift that Harding lacked—luck. He had luck in small ways: the news of Harding’s death came to him while he happened to be in his rustic home town in Vermont, resulting in marvelous newspaper stories of his swearing-in by his father, a notary public, in the little parlor of the Coolidge household. If Harding had died a day later, the news would have come to Coolidge while he was stopping at the baronial New Hampshire estate of a rich Boston friend. He had luck in big ways too: the “Coolidge boom” roared all through the five and a half years of his presidency.
Coolidge boom? This was just what Andrew Mellon had planned.
The Republican “compact majority” was far less united over foreign policy than domestic. Businessmen could agree on tax, labor, subsidy, and similar issues, but the business community fragmented in the face of world needs and demands. Ideologically they divided into isolationists, unilateralists, and internationalists; economically they divided into importers and exporters, competing regional producing interests, investment bankers like the House of Morgan favoring financial and commercial cooperation with London, and industrialists like the Rockefellers pressing for aggressive American investment abroad. Politically they divided into factions in the GOP, in Congress, and in the presidency. The conservatism that dominated the decade’s thought seemed to falter at the water’s edge.
The result was a foreign policy of zigzag, of “fits and starts, of hesitancy and of timid advance,” in L. Ethan Ellis’s words. At times, envoys to Washington could hardly find a foreign policy. Editors sardonically suggested that the American Secret Service or even Scotland Yard be dispatched to locate it.
Harding’s Cabinet epitomized the Republican disunity. On the President’s right sat Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, ardent spokesman for the dwindling band of GOP internationalists. Across from him was the imperious Andrew Mellon, who had bankrolled the unilateralists’ campaign against Wilson’s League. Between them was Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, whose main goal now was to promote American exports while limiting imports. Alongside these men sat the knavish party regulars and domestic policy brokers, Albert Fall and Harry Daugherty. These regulars linked with the conservative congressional party centered in the Senate, where Lodge continued to press for a foreign policy expressive of American power, and where Borah and his fellow isolationists now opposed Lodge as tenaciously as they had fought Wilson.
Washington seemed headed for a dull and squalid unilateralism as the Republicans dropped any pretense of fulfilling Harding’s vague promise of an “association of nations” in place of the spurned League. Then came a historic zigzag.
A deadly spiral of naval shipbuilding had begun as the British, once America had opted out of the League, wished to reassert their traditional command of the seas, as the Japanese undertook their own buildup, and as American watchdogs called for escalation. But there were calls too for an end to the arms race. Borah, moving to head up the disarmament movement, proposed a simple halving of naval construction by the three maritime superpowers. Lodge earlier had buried two such resolutions, but Borah proved his match in legislative maneuver. Moreover, the Borah Resolution captured the imagination of the public, which hailed it as the “Model ‘T’” of diplomatic proposals for its simplicity and practicality. A sizable portion of the business community, concerned that the cost of the naval arms race—in an era when an estimated 93 percent of all federal expenditures went to military or veterans’ programs—would interfere with Mellon’s planned tax cuts and business subsidies, quietly rallied behind the peace movement.
In this thrust toward peace, women leaders were now playing their part. Fresh from their success in helping secure female suffrage, members of the League of Women Voters made disarmament the first issue on which to demonstrate the power of the woman’s vote. Carrie Chapman Catt roused the LWV convention in April 1921 with a hard-hitting call to action: “Everybody at this time is extremely careful about being nonpartisan. I don’t care a rap about it. I am for disarmament. I believe in taking action…. We are the appointed ones to lead in this question.” The women coordinated an alliance of church groups, unions, business and academic spokespeople in favor of arms control.
Lodge and Harding succumbed to the mounting public pressure; on July 10, Secretary of State Hughes invited the Japanese, British, and six other powers to send representatives to Washington to discuss naval armaments and political problems in the Far East. Hughes saw in the negotiations an opportunity to revive the internationalist wing of the Republican party. Throughout the summer he consulted with a group of young naval officers and administrators, led by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and together they hammered out an audacious proposal to end the arms race.
Although Harding appointed him as one of the four American negotiators, Lodge at first put little stock in the conference. “I do not for a moment believe that either Japan or England will accept any disarmament proposals,” he confided to his diary just days before the talks opened, “but … we shall have made our position clear and will lay the responsibility where it will belong—with them.”
In mid-November 1921, the negotiators and their advisors assembled in Continental Memorial Hall for the first session of the naval talks. Only the handful of American experts who had been working with Hughes suspected that they were about to witness one of the most dramatic acts of individual leadership in the history of peace. The crowd of distinguished guests—senators and congressmen, Holmes and Brandeis from the Supreme Court, Vice-President Coolidge, British pacifist spokesman H. G. Wells—heard President Harding make a vapid introductory speech and then applauded politely as the Secretary of State took the floor.
It was the moment of a lifetime. Hughes, erect and gray-bearded at the podium, shocked the audience by calling for an immediate end to all naval construction, and went on to spell out in exquisite detail a plan for stopping the construction of capital ships for at least ten years. As the foreign negotiators sat bolt upright in disbelief, Hughes listed the ships that each power would have to cancel or scrap—seventy-eight battleships in all, totaling nearly 2 million tons. In the gallery, William Jennings Bryan, still the leader of American pacifists, sat with tears of joy in his eyes.
Hughes had instantly riveted world attention on the Washington Conference, making it difficult for any of the delegates to challenge the American proposal. Though weeks of hard negotiating still followed, the Secretary’s task was made considerably easier by the cryptologists of the Navy’s “Black Chamber,” who broke Japan’s diplomatic codes and so were able to learn the Japanese negotiating positions in advance. But it was Hughes’s benign persistence, coupled with his willingness to link the arms talks to the resolution of the political problems pending in the Far East, that finally turned the tide. The Americans’ flexibility in mixing diplomatic, territorial, and arms compromises, Hughes said later, “alone made possible the success of the Conference.”
A broad-ranging series of agreements grew out of the Washington talks. The British and Japanese accepted Hughes’s ten-year freeze and a ratio of 5:5:3 in battleships between their fleets and the U.S. Navy. Japan settled for the short end of the ratio, but in return Britain and America promised not to build or fortify any new bases in the Western Pacific. France and Italy also agreed to limit the number of their capital ships, as long as smaller vessels were exempted from the treaty. Limits were set on the tonnage and armament of all remaining warships. On the political front, Japan and Britain replaced their military alliance with a four-power nonaggression pact that included France and the United States, thus laying to rest American fears of a possible joint Anglo-Japanese attack. Lodge was able to secure Senate approval of all these agreements, although the isolationists balked at the Four-Power Treaty, which barely passed with help from Senate Democrats. The final fruit of the negotiations was a nine-power treaty in which all the nations with interests in the Far East bound themselves to uphold the independence and territorial sovereignty of China. After more than twenty years, John Hay’s Open Door proposal had finally been transformed into an international covenant.
A triumph for American ideals and interests, the Washington Conference also proved to be the swan song of the Republican internationalists. Over the rest of the decade, the leaders of the GOP proceeded to undermine or fritter away the gains that the talks had brought them. Relations between Japan and America began to improve after the conference, only to be poisoned by the xenophobic Immigration Act of 1924. Sponsored by Lodge and by California’s Hiram Johnson, the bill closed the United States to immigrants from the Orient—a mortal insult in the eyes of the Japanese. Partly as a result of rising anti-American and anti-Western sentiments in Japan, a second round of arms talks, convened in Geneva in 1927, ended in failure.
Another set of negotiations, held in London in 1930, did produce an agreement to limit all vessels, not just battleships, but only at the price of major new concessions to Japan. The London talks, moreover, foreboded a bleak future for arms control. The French and Italian delegates walked out of the conference, and the Japanese government suffered a wave of assassinations and mass protests when it ratified the new treaty.
On other fronts as well the Republicans failed to capitalize on the openings made by Hughes. After years of coaxing, the Senate in 1925 agreed to America’s joining the World Court, but only with a series of reservations that the court administrators in Geneva declined to accept. The United States also joined an international movement, led by Columbia professor James Shotwell, to “outlaw” war. The resulting Kellogg-Briand Pact, which twenty-six nations signed in 1928, had no enforcement mechanism—and just to be sure, the Senate appended a list of occasions when the United States would not be bound by it. One senator labeled it “an international kiss.”
If the Republicans stood divided in their response to internationalism, on the economics of foreign affairs they were somewhat more united. The economic thrust of American policy in the 1920s was set by Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover, who despite occasional disagreements over tactics basically concurred. The Treasury and Commerce secretaries promoted a business approach to international affairs. Drawing on their experiences in private enterprise, the two focused on “fostering the use of experts, on finding apolitical solutions, on encouraging private voluntary and cooperative action, and on enlarging but circumscribing the role of government.” They would rely on private trade, buttressed by federal data-gathering and voluntary international cooperation, to advance American interests abroad. Most of all, they would rely on Mellon’s old colleagues, the staid Republican investment bankers.
The help of the bankers was especially needed to untangle the international financial mess left by the World War and the peace settlement. The war had disrupted the old, London-based network of financial ties between Europe and the rest of the world. The Allies had been forced to borrow billions of dollars from the United States, and the various European states needed billions more to rebuild their economies when the fighting ended. When Harding entered the White House, the American government had loans out to seventeen European nations totaling more than $10 billion. The main debtors, Britain and France, made their repayment contingent on receiving reparations from Germany.
Here the Republicans reaped one of the unintended fruits of their failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. In Paris, Wilson and Lloyd George had agreed to leave unspecified the amount to be paid by Germany, as they expected that later the British and American representatives on the reparations committee would work out a fairly moderate sum. When America rejected the treaty, however, the French were left as the dominant power on the committee, and in 1921 they presented Germany with a bill for the astronomical sum of $32 billion. After the Germans refused to pay, the specter of international debts unsettled efforts to stabilize European currencies and economies.
Mellon’s banking instincts urged him toward a moderate solution to the growing debt/reparation crisis. “If we insist on too difficult terms,” we would “receive nothing,” he noted. But he was unwilling to have the American government simply write off $10 billion in supposed assets which would then have to be replaced out of the pockets of bondholders and taxpayers. His solution was to renegotiate the loans, granting the Europeans lower interest rates and longer terms of repayment. Using the leverage provided by Treasury Department oversight of private loans to foreign powers—the bankers seldom risked a loan not approved by Mellon and Hoover—the Republican banker-in-chief brought country after country to the bargaining table. Slowly the loan tangle was resolved, in the finance ministries and the banking houses. For the press and the public, however, the issue remained an acrimonious one; Coolidge’s bland and perhaps apocryphal “they hired the money, didn’t they,” rather than Mellon’s strategy of enlightened self-interest, seemed to define the American position on the debts.
Sound American business sense was also needed to help defuse the explosive question of German reparations. France’s attempt to bludgeon the Germans into paying by occupying the Ruhr in 1923 only helped wreck the German economy, unleash wild inflation that pauperized the country’s middle class, and encourage political extremists on both the left and the right. Two Americans, the Chicago banker Charles Dawes and General Electric chairman Owen Young, helped shape a solution under which Germany’s reparation payments were fixed at a reasonable yearly sum. Meanwhile private American capital flowed into Germany, helping restore prosperity to that country and indeed to much of Europe.
The cycle of private loans, reparation payments, and rescheduled war debts seemed to some a “financial merry-go-round,” as the United States collected in debt payments approximately the same amount the bankers lent to Germany. But in fact the cycle of payments seemed to be fulfilling the Republicans’ goals. With the structure of international credit restored, prosperity returned to both sides of the Atlantic. Urged on by the American banks, Britain and other European powers went back onto the gold standard. Stable prices, sound currencies, steadily growing trade—the Republican millennium appeared to be at hand as Hoover moved from the Commerce Department to the White House in 1929.
The real source of the international recovery, however, was the expansion of trade, and here the Republicans’ business sense would eventually play them false. But, for a time, Hoover’s efforts to promote American sales and investment abroad gleaned tremendous dividends. Yankee investment in Latin America tripled, and commerce with the region grew by 87 percent. Even while Congress—over Hoover’s objections—offended Japan with exclusionary immigration laws, trade with the island kingdom swelled. In revolution-torn China, where the United States government maintained a brigade of Marines from 1927 on, Model T Fords shared streets with rickshaws, and the Standard Oil refinery was one of the largest employers in Tientsin.
It was dollar diplomacy—but with a difference. Throughout the decade, the Republicans worked steadily to placate anti-American feelings triggered by previous heavy-handedness. In 1924 Coolidge withdrew the Marines from the Dominican Republic; in 1925 the occupation of Nicaragua ended, although a year later American troops returned to that country to battle the guerrilla forces of the legendary General Sandino.
The most dramatic improvement came in relations with Mexico. The Mexican government had aroused both American Catholics by its anticlerical policies and American oil companies—which controlled 70 percent of Mexico’s oil—by its nationalization of foreign oil holdings. Talk of war even bubbled up on both sides of the Rio Grande until Coolidge moved to head off the building crisis by appointing his old friend Dwight Morrow, of the House of Morgan, as envoy to Mexico City. Morrow’s tact and infectious good nature won him the friendship of Mexican officials, and he sponsored a visit to Mexico by the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh (soon to be his son-in-law) that helped turn public attitudes toward the United States around. Morrow helped negotiate a reconciliation between the government and the church in the Latin republic and he worked out a businesslike compromise on the question of oil. In the next year, Hoover put the presidential seal of approval on the tenuous new friendship with Latin America by undertaking a seven-week goodwill tour of the region just before his inauguration.
As the decade closed, the earlier rifts in the GOP seemed to have yielded to the party’s general pro-business consensus. With Hughes heading for the Supreme Court and Lodge dead, the League a political cipher, and the drama of disarmament drained by the very success of the Washington Conference, the way was at last clear for a moderate foreign economic policy. Then the GOP took another leap—backwards—as it turned in 1929 to write into law the last facet of Mellon’s economic program: a high, across-the-board protective tariff. President Hoover viewed with misgivings his party’s rally around upward tariff revision. Few men recognized better than Hoover the importance of international trade to America’s continuing prosperity, or more feared tariff retaliation by other nations.
“Break this chain” of trade, Hoover declared during the 1928 campaign, “and the whole machine is thrown out of order…. Cease exporting automobiles to South America or Europe, and automobile workers are thrown out of work in Michigan. The suffering does not stop there…. The steel mills slacken in Pennsylvania and Indiana. The mines employ fewer workers at Lake Superior. And every farmer in the United States suffers from diminished purchasing power.”
Thus Hoover had serious private doubts about the Smoot-Hawley bill that the Republicans in Congress enacted in early 1930. In public, however, the President emphasized the handful of concessions the legislative leaders had granted him. The fusillade of antitariff protests from academics and from Democrats—although many of the latter had joined in the orgy of log-rolling as Smoot-Hawley took final form—also apparently stiffened Hoover’s resolve to follow his party and accept the bill. In June 1930 the President signed the tariff into law, hailing it as the fulfillment of “the repeated demands of statesmen and industrial and agricultural leaders over the past twenty-five years.”
The ghosts of John Sherman, Mark Hanna, and Nelson Aldrich no doubt smiled down in approval.
Smoot-Hawley towered as a party achievement, the culmination of a century of Whig and Republican economic nationalism, the climactic act of the 1920s’ “compact majority.” At the end of that decade of conservative business rule, as at the start, the party had its way, despite the misgivings of Herbert Hoover and the fears of internationalists in both parties. James Madison’s old checks and balances, designed to delay and fragment “naked majority rule,” still seemed to be suspended. By 1931, the Republicans had achieved what no liberal or progressive leadership had brought about at least since Reconstruction—ten solid years of party government. The voices of protest were shrill and scattered, minority opposition weak and divided.
If the Framers’ anti-majoritarian Constitution could not protect minority interests, what could? The American people had supplied their own answer within a dozen years of adopting the 1787 charter, by establishing a Jeffersonian party opposition to challenge the Federalist incumbents. That opposition went on to take office in 1800. The flowering of the party system had nurtured a “loyal opposition” ready to critique, challenge, and balance the party in power. As parliamentary systems grew in Europe during the nineteenth century, the idea of the militant but loyal opposition grew with them. By 1930, the labor movement in Britain, for example, and German socialists, had long since been challenging the established parties.
Emboldened by their midterm gains of 1922 and the “Ohio gang” scandals the next year, the Democrats marched into 1924 with high hopes of ousting the GOP. With a host of promising leaders, including such veterans as Oscar Underwood and former Treasury Secretary McAdoo and rising young figures like Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, the Democracy’s prospects looked good, as they assembled in Manhattan for the quadrennial conclave. But everything fell apart in their convention hall, “Tex” Rickard’s old Madison Square Garden. Even the place was wrong—a red-brick edifice used to host circuses and six-day bike races and adorned by a ten-story tower (in which the architect Stanford White had been murdered), and located in the middle of Al Smith territory—urban, polyglot, and very “wet.” McAdoo arrived breathing fire against the city itself—“the city of privilege,” he called it, “reactionary, sinister, unscrupulous, mercenary, and sordid,” rooted in corruption and dominated by greed. At the convention, when the keynote speaker declaimed that what this country “needs is Paul Revere,” he was greeted with a round of boos because the delegates thought he said what the country needed was “real beer.” During a demonstration by the Georgia delegation, the convention band struck up with “Marching Through Georgia,” thinking it was a beloved Southern song, instead of Sherman’s victory march.
But the main trouble in the convention was the old Democratic party divisions between the congressional leadership and the presidential, between the South and the North, between the wets and the drys, between the country and the city—plus the two-thirds requirement for nomination. The convention was so divided that it failed even to censure the Ku Klux Klan. In the early-summer heat, roll call followed roll call as the Smith and McAdoo forces checked each other. Days dragged by. On the 99th ballot McAdoo led Smith by half a vote. The exhausted leadership finally worked a compromise on the 103rd ballot, by nominating for President John W. Davis, a conservative corporation lawyer in the Cleveland tradition, and for Vice-President Charles W. Bryan, brother of the Commoner, part populist and part socialist. This ticket was not balanced but, in David Burner’s term, “schizoid.”
The nation’s labor and progressive leaders had long before recognized the feebleness of the divided Democracy. Throughout the early twenties, AFL and rail labor leaders, farm-laborites, old and new Progressives, and socialists had been planning independent action for 1924. Out of these activities had grown the Conference for Progressive Political Action, which sponsored a Progressive party convention in 1924. Robert La Follette, older, wearier, was both the unifier and the hero of the CPPA. At its convention in Chicago, he won the united support of 1,200 delegates embracing labor, farmers, students, a few women, and virtually no blacks. La Follette gained the plaudits of both liberals and socialists with a demand that monopolies be “crushed.” Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, declaring that when “the Democratic party goes to Wall Street for a candidate” like Davis, he must refuse to go with it, accepted the nomination for Vice-President.
Once again La Follette found that launching a third party is one of the most difficult ventures in American politics. It was hard enough to foster unity among the fragmented elements of the left. The Socialist party fell in line, formally endorsing La Follette, while the Communists and other radical parties castigated the La Follette Progressives as even more reactionary than the two major parties. But the strategic problem lay deeper. The La Follette leadership hoped that the Progressive thrust in 1924 would break through existing party alignments and clear the way for a true split by 1928 between a right and a left party. In the meantime, though, La Follette did not want to jeopardize the reelection of Borah, Norris, and other Progressives. Many socialists, on the other hand, wanted a third party that would push for its own Senate and state candidates, even against liberal Democrats and Republicans, if need be, in order to build a labor-left party that could some day take over the whole sprawling governmental system. La Follette insisted on running solo. As it turned out, the Idaho Progressive party endorsed Borah, who later backed Coolidge; Norris ran as a Republican but renounced Coolidge.
The Republicans held probably the dullest convention in the nation’s history. Hiram Johnson, who opposed the Administration’s tax reduction program and many of its foreign policies, might have enlivened the proceedings, but he lost out early against Coolidge’s party organization and patronage. In any event, the GOP leadership wanted a bland convention and a quiet campaign. It publicized slogans such as “Keep Cool with Coolidge” and “Coolidge or Chaos.” The myth of cautious Cal, of silent Cal, was building. Middle-class Americans liked him for his nutshell philosophy, “Work and save.” They liked him for his honesty and simplicity, for his willingness to put on Indian headdresses out west, all the while looking as though he had been weaned on a pickle, as Alice Roosevelt Longworth would claim she had not said.
Americans liked him in 1924, giving him a huge vote of endorsement, 15.7 million votes to Davis’s 8.4 million and La Follette’s 4.8 million. La Follette carried only his own Wisconsin, though he ran second to Coolidge in half the mountain and all three Pacific states. The GOP carried the congressional elections, and Borah and Norris retained their seats and returned to Washington to carry on the fight within the party. Progressivism seemed to be stalled as a national movement. The 1912 progressives had split with the Taft party and met defeat at the hands of a united Democracy. The 1924 progressives had failed to unite with the Democrats, and both parties had been shellacked by a united GOP.
It was clear to the Democratic party leaders—including young Franklin Roosevelt, now slowly regaining some mobility after a crippling polio attack—that the Democracy must move more firmly to the still-burgeoning urban and immigrant masses and toward industrial labor. Their candidate for 1928 was at hand. Al Smith had emerged from the sidewalks of New York, educated at no college other than the Fulton Fish Market, politically savvy, able above all to learn from experience. Elected to the state legislature, he gained a seat on the Banking Committee after having entered a bank only once—to serve a jury notice—and on the Forest Committee, though he had never been in a forest. He learned much from Tammany and from rebelling against Tammany; he learned from the Triangle fire that women were cheap, property sacred. Democratic hopes for Al Smith and his party soared when Silent Cal, vacationing in the Black Hills in August 1927, summoned the press and handed each reporter a little slip: “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.”
Most Americans knew little about Al Smith except for one big fact: he was a Catholic. Survivors of the McAdoo-Smith convention duel of 1924 knew that a Smith nomination in 1928 would set off a religious war. Could a rational debate on the issue forestall irrational confrontation? In April 1927, the Atlantic Monthly published an “open letter” from Charles C. Marshall to Smith questioning whether a Catholic’s dual allegiance to his Church and Constitution should bar him from the presidency. The Atlantic printed Smith’s reply in the next issue:
“Taking your letter as a whole and reducing it to commonplace English, you imply that there is a conflict between religious loyalty to the Catholic faith and patriotic loyalty to the United States.” No such thing could be true. “I have taken an oath of office in this State nineteen times. Each time I swore to defend and maintain the Constitution of the United States.” He had never known any conflict between his official duties and his religious belief. And, rebutting Marshall, Smith contended that no such conflict could exist in education, religious tolerance, appointments, foreign policy.
“I summarize my creed as an American Catholic. I believe in the worship of God according to the faith and practice of the Roman Catholic Pope and I recognize no power in the institutions of my Church to interfere with the operations of the Constitution of the United States or the enforcement of the law of the land. I believe in absolute freedom of conscience for all men and in equality of all churches, all sects, and all beliefs before the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor. I believe in the absolute separation of Church and State….”
In vain. Americans were not yet ready for a rational debate over church and state. As the Democratic nominee, Smith ran into a hurricane of religious bigotry, misunderstanding, sectional chauvinism. It was a religious war and much more—a culmination of the cultural war between big city and small town, immigrants and nativists, wets and drys, North and South, East and West, Irish and English, on a battlefield of ignorance and intolerance. Smith, moreover, refused to pretend that he was not what he was, in Oscar Handlin’s words— “a Catholic, a grandson of Irish immigrants, a poor boy off the sidewalks of New York.” Against the advice of the media experts of the day he went right on wearing his brown derby and big cigar, saying “horspital” over the “raddio,” attacking Prohibition, refusing to restrict immigration: “I have lived among these people all my life” and “I can’t shut the door in their faces.”
Al Smith received the news of his defeat sitting in the Seventy-first Regimental Armory, an unlighted cigar clamped in his teeth. He had won 87 electoral votes against Hoover’s 444, 15 million popular votes against Hoover’s 21.4 million. “Well,” he later said, “I guess the time has not yet come when a man can say his beads in the White House.”
Once again the Democrats had failed to build an electoral coalition that could even come close to beating the GOP. Once again the loyal opposition had failed to come up with a credible alternative. Excuses there were aplenty, but perhaps even the Democrats did not comprehend the full power of the Republicans’ “compact majority.” Corporate business had more than an efficient party working for it; it had an ideology rooted in the modern American experience, grounded in fundamental American beliefs and attitudes, fortified by “scientific ideas” such as Social Darwinism, operationalized through an experienced political leadership, and above all expressive of the nation’s industrial and financial power. The only strategy for a party and electoral opposition was to shape an ideology, a party, and a leadership so sharply different from the “ins” as to pose a constant challenge and thereby offer some hope of winning in the future. The Democrats failed to do this; even Smith, with his ties to big business and his innate social conservatism, offered no clear-cut alternative. Election studies later revealed that the 1928 presidential contest was far more a reflection of the politics of the 1920s than a forerunner of the political alignments to come.
If Democrats, progressives, liberals, laborites, and their allies could not overcome the “compact majority” of corporate and Republican power and leadership, at least the minority had the right to exist, speak up, challenge the ins, and seek to oust them at the polls. What about opposition from more radical elements? The Founding Fathers had sought to protect the rights of small minorities as well as large, of tiny sects, rebellious movements, individual dissenters. They had bequeathed this protection in the checks and balances and in the Bill of Rights, and they and their successors had institutionalized that protection by allowing dissenters recourse to the judges, who were expected to be aloof, protected by lifetime tenure from the gusts of intolerance and passion that swept the populace.
Toward “seditionists,” draft obstructionists, and the like, a conservative Supreme Court took a hard line during wartime. In the Schenck case Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke for the entire Court in upholding Charles T. Schenck’s conviction for mailing impassioned anti-draft letters to draftees. “The most stringent protection of free speech,” Holmes wrote, “would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” But Holmes set a stern test for future restrictions on First Amendment liberties. “The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight….”
Eugene Debs fared no better than Schenck, however, under this wartime test. Holmes spoke for the Court in sustaining Debs’s conviction for obstructing the recruiting service in the socialist leader’s now famous Canton speech. Privately Holmes seemed defensive about his position. Referring to a “lot of jaw about free speech,” he wrote his friend Sir Frederick Pollock about “people who pitched into the Court for sending Debs to prison.” He hoped that Wilson would pardon him “and some other poor devils with whom I have more sympathy.” He went on: “The greatest bores in the world are the come-outers who are cocksure of a dozen nostrums. The dogmatism of a little education is hopeless.”
Jacob Abrams, a Russian emigrant, was sentenced under the Espionage Act to twenty years’ imprisonment for throwing down from a loft in the garment district some leaflets urging workers to produce no arms for American intervention in Russia at a time when Americans were not at war with Russians. The Court held that the necessary result of this incitement was to hamper the war with Germany. Holmes and Brandeis dissented. Abrams’s action was only indirect, Holmes argued; there was no clear and present danger in the publication of such a “silly leaflet.” Holmes concluded with words that would become etched in American constitutional history:
“But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market…. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment….” What about free speech when the.nation was not at war? The “red scare” of 1919, coming on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and a rash of communist uprisings elsewhere in Europe, left a scar on the popular mind that lasted well into the twenties and later. Extremism had fed on extremism; alarming labor actions like the Boston police strike, the furious factional quarrels among communists and between communists and socialists, and the bombings, had been matched by the reckless arrests and imprisonments, mass deportations, and demands by such as Billy Sunday that “wild-eyed Socialists and I.W.W.’s” be stood up before firing squads.
Amid the whipped-up fear and hysteria, each side stereotyped the other and lost any capacity to discriminate. Fanatics placed or mailed bombs that mainly hurt the poor and vulnerable—one mail bomb blew off the hands of a Southern senator’s maid—while missing their targets; Tennessee’s Senator Kenneth McKellar wanted to send American radicals to penal colonies in the middle of the Pacific, and South Carolina’s James F. Byrnes asked federal help to thwart an alleged plot of communists to foment a black uprising in the South. The New York State Assembly denied their seats to five socialists who obviously had chosen the democratic electoral process over “red rebellion.”
In the postwar hysteria Benjamin Gitlow, a left-wing socialist, had been arrested and convicted under New York’s Criminal Anarchy Act of 1902 for writing pamphlets that urged proletarian “struggle.” The Court upheld his conviction, Holmes and Brandeis dissenting. Holmes and Brandeis agreed with the majority on one crucial point—that the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment was part of the “liberty” of the Fourteenth Amendment and thus guaranteed against state infringement. The dissenters, moreover, saw no clear and present danger in Gitlow’s pamphlet. Incitement? Holmes asked in response to the Court’s depiction of the pamphlet. “Every idea is an incitement.” He added: “If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces in the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.” And in the Schwimmer case, upholding the right of a pacifist to become naturalized as a United States citizen, he reminded the Court that the most vital principle of the Constitution was that of free thought, including freedom for the thought “we hate.”
Still, this was only the loyal opposition speaking. The compact majority on the Court, under Taft’s unifying leadership, turned out decision after decision against dissent—or at least against dissenters. To some it seemed odd that a Court so clearly representing conservative thought in the country, so clearly committed to laissez-faire and against governmental regulation, should crumble so easily when government attacked individual liberty to dissent. The High Bench seemed far more devoted to property rights than to civil liberties. This view was bottomed on a major and very articular premise—that in America’s hierarchy of liberties, economic liberty stood at the top. Faith in Algerism was still running strong in the 1920s.
However thwarted by their minority status, the dissenters found other ways to influence political opinion and action. Holmes and Brandeis and their numerous political friends such as the La Follettes, former law clerks, intellectual correspondents, and faithful acolytes constituted a powerhouse of ideas, criticisms, ruminations, explorations, and proposals. Brandeis and Holmes struck sparks off each other; Brandeis wrote Felix Frankfurter of Harvard Law School almost every day, passing on political and judicial gossip, asking for legal and other information, and often suggesting ideas, proposals, and comments for Frankfurter in turn to pass on to the New Republic or—later—the New York World. Through Frankfurter also, Brandeis made his private political views known to a wider circle. The justice paid his young associate several thousand dollars a year to help him work for causes they both favored.
Holmes and Brandeis were tourist attractions on the High Court, in the little Capitol room in which the Court still met—the former with his swath of white hair, mustachios, and imperial presence; the latter with his “piercing blue eyes,” abundant gray hair, and creased cheeks, looking, according to one of his clerks, “like a combination of Hebrew prophet and Abraham Lincoln.” But even between the two of them there was a division in the intellectual powerhouse. Holmes did not share Brandeis’s almost undiscriminating opposition to “bigness.” Holmes’s approach to free speech was based on claims of utility rather than of morality, in Philippa Strum’s words, while “Brandeis saw free speech as an end as well as a means,” and believed in it as an absolute truth, along with his insistence upon experimentation. Agreed in practice on most legal questions, the two men differed on key issues of principle and philosophy.
Nor did left-liberal thinkers outside the Court achieve much intellectual unity. Philosophers, historians, and economists seemed more interested in perfecting their crafts than in trying to match the brilliant innovations of the progressive era or, in the European fashion, to frame comprehensive doctrines that could undergird political programs. Vernon Parrington worked on the third volume of his architectonic Main Currents in American Thought, which he would never complete. Thorstein Veblen, a founding member of the New School for Social Research in New York, had fled from the “higher learning in America” that he had derided in 1918 only to see some of his work popularized and cheapened. Neither man would outlive the decade. Charles and Mary Beard published a best-selling history of the United States. Walter Lippmann, writing first for the New Republic and then for the New York World, had moved by the late 1920s so far toward the lively political center that after the World was sold off to Scripps-Howard, he was offered jobs by William Randolph Hearst, Roy Howard, the New York Times, and the Republican New York Herald-Tribune; Lippmann chose the Trib.
Certainly no creed arose in the 1920s to challenge Sumner’s Social Darwinism or Herbert Hoover’s Individualism; no radical movement or party arose that could mobilize popular support in the fashion that the Republican party did. While the weakness of the left was partly political—the socialists, for example, were unable truly to engage with the “masses”—the failure was primarily intellectual. Few demanded of Hoover how far he would go if he really believed that everyone should be given the chance to develop “the best with which he has been endowed in heart and mind.” If life chances were to be equalized, if everyone, in Hoover’s words, was to be given an equal place at the starting line, where would that starting line be established? Who would provide the “life chances”; only one’s parents or employers, or also schools, literacy projects, vocational programs, health and welfare agencies—in short, government?
“Equality of opportunity” was becoming the catchword of corporate conservatism—its formula for combining liberty and equality. But how much genuine equality was implied in this slogan, and what kind, and when? How much liberty; not only of property but of speech, ideas, dissent?