Bonjour and welcome back to the history
of the United States since 1877.
In the previous section we focused more on the International developments of US
history in the early 20th century. We
focused on two things:
US involvement in the Caribbean such as Panama
and Cuba as well as US involvement in Europe
during WWI. This period
marked a high-water mark that was
unprecedented for the US, a country that used to be quite
inward-looking previously. George
Washington in his farewell address had
famously warned Americans against
foreign entanglements, to become
entangled in European affairs. Well this
had changed completely under President
Woodrow Wilson who had happily jumped
into the fray. Initially Americans had
followed him happily but then by the end of
WWI there is a sense of fatigue,
with constant wars in the Caribbean and
Europe,
the sense that over 100,000 Americans
had died in WWI and then when the
Versailles Treaty was signed not much
had changed, the hope for a generous
peace was not fulfilled. Also a sense
that war in Europe had led to a
degradation of civil liberties at home:
we see this passage of the Espionage Act
and of the Sedition Act. The ability of
Americans to criticize the government,
to have the privacy of their mail, or to
publish what they want in the paper,
had been curtailed severely. And so there is
kind of a backlash against that outside interventionism
by 1919 1920. Famously the
Versailles Treaty which  Wilson had
negotiated while being in Paris had to
be ratified when he it brought back to the US.
Under the Constitution the
Senate is responsible for ratifying the
Versailles Treaty. And there was such a
backlash against WWI that the Senate
failed to muster the two-thirds majority
and the US never ratified that treaty.
One element of the treaty
was the creation of the League of
Nations, which is the ancestor of the
United Nations. As a result of not
ratifying the treaty the United States
did not join the League of Nations,
a good example of the isolationism that
came to characterize US politics in the 1920s and 30s.
That's a long introduction to explain that the next
section will not be about foreign policy
but about internal developments. Today we
will start with the 1920s period
dominated by conservative Republican
presidents. Wilson finished his
second term in 1921. By the end of that he was
quite incapacitated he had suffered a
stroke and was unable to do much.
In the 1920 election the person that won would
be a Republican, so we switched from
Democratic to Republican. His name was Warren Gamaliel Harding and
he was one of the many many presidents
who came from the state of Ohio. When he
campaigned for president in 1920 he said
that he wanted to achieve normalcy and
the journalists were a bit struck by it,
wondering "what is normalcy?" It was not in
the dictionary. They figured that he
meant normality, for things to go back to normal.
Well what is normal according to Harding?
It's whatever existed before WWI,
before the Progressive Era, so going back
to the Conservative small
government ethos of the Gilded Age, where
there should be no progressive reforms,
no telling people what to do,
small taxes as much as possible, and
overseas it also met going back to the
more isolationist view of US foreign
policy that had been known in the 19th c.
So no more interventions in the Caribbean
and definitely no
interventions in Europe, and that also
meant that the intrusion that the
federal government would have in
people's affairs during WWI with the
Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, the
curtailing of civil liberties, that would
have to come to an end. A very famous
case was that of Eugene V. Debs, we
encountered him before: he was a leading
member of the Socialist Party in the
early 20th c. and as such he had
criticized WWI: he wanted to remain at peace,
which was within his right of free
speech to say, but in WWI
there was such a limitation of civil liberties
that the government
punished him  and even sent him to federal
prison just because he had spoken up
against WWI.
When Harding became president he
pardoned Debs and got him out of prison,
not because of any kind of affinity
politically speaking (Harding was a
conservative Republican, Debs was
on the far left of the political spectrum) but
Harding was committed to the notion of
free speech which is enshrined in the
First Amendment to the Constitution and
you should let even you enemy say what
they want without punishing him through
the government. So the policies of
Harding overseas would be marked by
isolationism, which means simply to stay
out of people's affairs. The Versailles treaty
as I mentioned was not ratified by the
Senate and so the major foreign policy
development during the presidency of
Harding would be the passing of the
Washington disarmament conference
agreement. This was a conference that
gathered up in Washington DC in case you
haven't noticed and this was about naval
disarmament. Major naval powers in the
world (countries like the US Britain
France Italy Japan) gathered and agreed
to limit the number of capital
ships (big battleships and cruisers) that
they had. Germany was not invited:
remember that under the Versailles
Treaty Germany is not supposed to have a
high seas fleet at all. So this was
sponsored by Harding in the US
but notice that this is all about
disarmament, reducing the size of
international navies, the goal being to
avoid the kind of naval arms race that
had led to WWI. S even though the u.s.
is involved in foreign policy, it's really
to limit the risk of a foreign war and
limit the risk that the US would have to
enter that war. So it's really an isolationist  kind of an attempt. When
it comes to local politics you have a
return to small government and it would
be quite striking.
Harding mostly campaigned from the porch
of his house back in Marion Ohio and
when he became president he tried to do
as little as he could because 
that's what the Republican Party the
Conservatives were about: to have small
government. So just stay out of people's
affairs, don't pass major laws. Harding
has a poor reputation among historians.
Today, presidential historians every
year or so or gather up and have a poll on
who they think wasthe
president ever and the second person
ever and so forth, and usually Lincoln
or Washington or Kennedy or Franklin D
Roosevelt will top the list.Towards
the bottom of that list usually you will
have Warren Harding, which I think is a
bit unfair towards him. He's not a
terrible president, it's just that he does little.
There's also a sense that he was
intellectually a bit limited. On the plus
side he was aware of that himself,
he understood that he was not the brightest
bulb in the room, which to me is a sign
of intelligence, when you aware of your
own stupidity. Specifically there's a
time when he was looking at a tax issue
and he was talking with one of his
advisers and he just erupted saying, "oh I
can't make sense of that tax issue.
I listen to one expert who tells me one
thing and I'm convinced and then I
listen to another expert and he tells me
the opposite and I'm convinced as well,
and I can't make up my mind or
understand what the whole issue is about.
God, what a job!" So ultimately he is
mostly known for his less savory
aspects in office. For example he had a
mistress who lived a few blocks away
from the White House, and he fathered a
love child while in office. Also when he
came from Ohio to Washington, DC as president, his buddies from Ohio came along, thinking
"well that's a great opportunity to make
money!
My best friend is not President of the
United States!" So his administration
was surrounded by a cloud of scandal. You
have a lot of bribery schemes. The most
famous of them was the Teapot Dome
scandal, Teapot Dome being a place in
Wyoming where the US government would
own some federal land,
there was quite a bit of oil underneath that
land. I guess the idea had been to save
that oil aside as a strategic reserve
for the Navy if the US ever got involved in
another conflict, then you would have oil
that just had to be drilled and be ready
to power American ships. But the friends
of Warren Harding saw it otherwise and
thought, let's drill, let's get that oil
out and make a quick buck. To do so
they paid bribes to the right people and
eventually
a scandal erupted and tainted the administration. Notice that the presidency of Harding
is a bit short: elected in 1920, inaugurated in 1921, he did not do his full
four-year term because in 1923 he went
to the west coast and if I remember
the story right, when visiting Alaska he ate some tainted crab and by the time he got to
California he was very sick and died of
food poisoning. So he had a short
presidency. Amazingly a lot of the scandals
that I mentioned about the love child and
Teapot Dome were not fully understood
until after his death. When he died he was a very
very popular president. He brought
peace prosperity and stability to the
country, which is exactly what people
wanted right after WWI.
So his body was put on a train all
the way from the West coast to the East
Coast and throughout the country
millions of people were lined up the
tracks crying that they had lost what
they saw was the best president ever to
run the United States.The crowd tends to
be fickle and nowadays historians think
of him as maybe the worst ever. I guess
the truth is somewhere in between.
The rule when the President dies is obviously that
the Vice President becomes president and
that's how we got Calvin Coolidge
becoming president in 1923, then
reelected in his own right in 1924. He
decided not to run again in 1928. If you
think that Harding did little well
Coolidge did even less. He was kind of a
dour figure, came from the northeastern
corner of the United States next to
Canada [Vermont] and he was famously a man of few
words, which is kind of rare for
politicians. Usually they love
to make speeches.
For Coolidge it was always a
struggle. In fact there's a famous
anecdote where a woman came to see him
and told him, "I made a bet with my lady
friends that I could make you say three
words. I know you're a man of few words
Mr. president, but for sure I can make
you say three words." And he said
"you lost."
At least he had a sense of humor. Another
anecdote is that he had married a lady
who was a teacher for the deaf and his
pickup line (I don't know if you use
Tinder or whatever app but here's
a pick-up line) was "if you can make deaf
people here maybe you will make a mute
person speak." Apparently it worked. As
president Coolidge famously did little and
specifically slept a lot. His typical
day would look like that: sleep until
maybe 9:00 a.m. mosey on to the office
around 10:00 break for coffee for half
an hour then retire at noon for a three
hour lunch and then you take a nap,
stop by the office again at 5:00
p.m.
ask if there is any work to be done, "no
Mr. president,"
and so you retire for an early dinner
and then call it a day.
Coolidge slept more in office than any other
president something like 12 hours a day.
In part this might have reflected some
personal problems, apparently he lost a
child and usually when you sleep a lot
it's a sign of clinical depression.
So that might have been the
case: undiagnosed depression. But also
he was a conservative 
Republican who thought that the
government should do little and let private
enterprise do its magic, and that's it,
let's do little in office. If you think
the Republicans do little in the 20s
wait till you hear about the Democrats,
because they are out of office and very
very divided in that period. Traditionally the
Democratic party has been a big tent party
that is home to various competing
interest groups, and that's especially
true in the 1920s when the party was
divided between two groups that had very
little in common except for sharing the
same label of Democrats. The Democratic
Party back then was very very strong in
the South, and I know it's quite
different from today where the
Republican Party tends to be dominant,
but that was true from the time of the
civil war up until the 1960s. Maybe pause
the video for a second and ask yourself,
"how come the Democratic Party was
strong in the south after the Civil War?"
The answer would be that the person
who fought on the Union side, President
Lincoln, and the advocate of the
emancipation of the slaves, was a
Republican,
and so that meant for conservative white
segregationists in the South,
the Republican party was anathema.
So it would be solidly Democratic...
at least if you're white. Black people back
then used to be very Republican,
though in the South they were often prevented from
voting, and that remained the case up
until the 1960s where Lyndon Johnson, a
Democrat, passed the Civil Rights Act and
the Voting Rights Act which ended
segregation in the south. As a result
a lot of conservative Whites fled from
the Democratic party and that's why now
many of them will be conservative
Republicans. You have kind of the
opposite exodus among black voters where
they left the Republican Party to join
the Democratic Party in the south. But
getting back to the 20s, conservative
white Southerners are voting
Democratic, they'll never vote for the
party of Lincoln. So what are their
political views? Well they tended to be dry
because this is the era of Prohibition
alcohol is prohibited. In their religion
they tended to be Protestant (Baptist
Evangelical Pentecostal) and so forth,
often anti-catholic, the KKK was quite strong in the 1920s and was violently
anti-Catholic, and it tended to be
located in more rural areas of the South
and  back then there were few large
cities in the South. At the very same
time the other big stronghold of the
Democratic Party would be in the cities
of the north east, places like New
York or Cleveland or Pittsburgh.
The views of the Democrats in those areas
were quite different: many of them are
more ethnic in their background, they are
Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and
they wouldn't mind having a bit of
whiskey or beer or wine with dinner,
so they were typically
wet, they wanted to repeal prohibition.
Their views were more liberal, they were
descendants of the progressive branch of
the party, so they wanted to use the
government to do things to change society.
So on about every point they were at
opposite extremes of the political
spectrum, and yet somehow they had to
agree. That could create some issues when
you want to pick a national candidate. It
is a case for president, and you have to
somehow bridge all these differences.
That was especially notable in 1924 when
the Democrats
met for a convention, the time when they
picked their candidate, and they had to
figure out somebody who would be
amenable to the right and to the left
branch of the party. The more northern
wet liberal branch wanted to nominate a
man from New York
Al Smith, an Irish-American, wet, and that would make him anathema to people
from the south who would prefer another
guy, William McAdoo, who was
a white segregationist, conservative,
dry, anti-Catholic, and people in the North
did not like him. So it's kind of a
replay of the Civil War right there in the party.
So they voted and I think back then
you needed a two-thirds majority to be
elected, so it's difficult putting together
a majority. And they voted twice, three time
ten times and 20 times, and
that convention that was supposed to
last a couple days just dragged on and
on. All the journalists were reporting that
they were now at vote 50, 60, or 80 and
eventually it went into three digits.
By vote 103 the Democrats finally
picked a candidate who was quite bland,
John Davis was his name, he even had a
bland name, and his main claim to fame
was that he had no big idea about
anything, he was not on the record
as having supported this or that option
and that made him a good compromise
candidate for all the Democrats who on
top of that were probably eager to get
back home after 103 votes. So he was the
Democratic candidate that year and since
you know that Coolidge was reelected you
know that he went down in defeat and
then went back to obscurity. Now that
candidate John Davis is more of a
footnote in US history known for being an
unsuccessful candidate in the 1924 election
and that's about it.
So typically the Democrats are in a period
of a slump.
They lost the next election in 28.
So we'll have to wait until the thirties and the
presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt
before the Democrats are very active
again. Another movement that had been
quite important before would be the
progressive movement. When we talked
about Roosevelt and Wilson this was their heyday,
when they were dominant, either
as part of the Republican Party or the
Democratic Party or in the case of 1912
Teddy Roosevelt tried to run as a
third party candidate, as
the Bull Moose party . Well after WWI
the Progressives went into an eclipse, in the
sense that people were upset
with how extensive government
intervention had been in WWI, for
example banning the consumption of
alcohol, nationalizing the railroads, or
limiting what people could say.
WWI marked the high-water mark of
the progressive era, in that a lot of
their objectives are achieved, but also a
backlash among the more general, more
conservative population. So the
progressives by the 1920s were far less
powerful. The most famous progressive
of that period was a man called La Follette,
and I always love his name because in
French you would translate that roughly
as "crazy little girl," but that was his
last name so let's not point and mock. 
He was actually a very very important figure
in Wisconsin, there's a whole dynasty
there of governors and Senators, and he
would be the founding father of that
dynasty. He ran for president as a
member of the Progressive Party, as an
independent third-party candidate in 1924,
got something like 15-20 percent
of the vote, which was far from enough to
be elected president. Typically to be a
third party in American politics is not
successful, it's difficult to break
the logjam, and we'll see that time and
time again in 20th c. politics.
So the progressives went into an
eclipse, disappeared from the scene, at
least until the 1930s, when they came
back in a big way as part of the New
Deal. So that's kind of the story of
politics in 1920s: not too impressive
because people who are in power
are Republican presidents who want the
government to do little: Warren Harding first,
Calvin Coolidge next, and I have
not mentioned the third,
that would be Herbert Hoover elected in
1928, one-term president, we'll get back
to him when we get to the Great
Depression. Well I'm gonna stop here, we
still have to cover quite a bit more
about the 1920s, in that case what
happens outside of Washington DC and
that's where the true excitement is in the 1920s.
Au revoir and see you next time.
