Table Of Contentcalvin coolidge
and the Coolidge Era
c a lv i n
c o o l i d g e
and the Coolidge Era
1920
Essays on the History of the s
Edited by John Earl Haynes
Published by the Library of Congress
washington, d.c.
Distributed by University Press of New England
hanover and london
Published by the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Distributed by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755
© 1998by the Library of Congress
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
CIP data appear at the end of the book
Contents
Preface vii
james h. billington, Librarian of Congress
Introduction ix
john earl haynes
1. Calvin Coolidge and the Last Arcadia 1
paul johnson
2. The American Polity in the Age of Normalcy: A Reappraisal 14
john braeman
3. Re-Shifting Perspectives on the 1920s: Recent Trends
in Social and Cultural History 63
lynn dumenil
4. Coolidge, Hays, and 1920s Movies: Some Aspects
of Image and Reality 97
daniel j. leab
5. Calvin Coolidge, the Man and the President 132
robert h. ferrell
6. The “Great Enigma” and the “Great Engineer”: The Political
Relationship of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover 149
george h. nash
7. The American Economy of the Interwar Era: Growth and
Transformation from the Great War to the Great Depression 191
michael a. bernstein
8. New Estimates of Income Shares During the 1920s 215
gene smiley
v
vi Contents
9. America and the World in the 1920s 233
warren i. cohen
10. Made in the U.S.A.: Mass Culture and the Americanization
of Working-Class Ethnics in the Coolidge Era 244
ronald edsforth
11. “Now at Last We Can Begin!”: The Impact
of Woman Suffrage in New York 273
elisabeth i. perry
12. American Foreign Policy: The European Dimension,
1921–1929 289
stephen a. schuker
Contributors 309
Index 313
Preface
james h. billington, Librarian of Congress
The historian John Braeman begins his essay in this volume with the com-
ment that “the appearance in recent years of a large body of new scholar-
ship on the 1920s makes timely a reassessment of the current state of our
knowledge.” This statement catches the chief purpose of the Library of
Congress’s 1995symposium, “Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era,” and
of this volume, which publishes essays Wrst presented at that symposium. As
the essays in this book show, the 1920s were years rich in cultural, social,
and economic growth and change. Yet until recently, scholarship tended to
neglect the era. While an impressive body of research has permitted us bet-
ter to understand the complexities of that time, a simpler, shallow image of
that era has lingered in many texts.
The essayists in this volume are not of one mind; readers will notice
a number of well-argued disagreements; and many areas and issues are
notaddressed here. But the range of coverage is impressive—complex re-
considerations of income statistics, the rise and import of motion pictures,
the interaction of new immigrant populations with established American
society, the dilemmas women faced in the political arena once they gained
the vote, American policymakers dealing with world power in the wake of
World War I, and, of course, Calvin Coolidge himself, that unusual per-
sonality who held the presidency during most of that era and has too often
been a subject of caricature rather than serious study. Both scholars and
general readers stand to gain a fuller picture of America in this still too-
little-understood decade.
The Library of Congress is glad to have brought these scholars together
and expresses its gratitude to Mr. Laurance S. Rockefeller and his late wife,
Mary. Their generosity and infectious interest made both the conference
and this volume possible.
vii
Introduction
john earl haynes
When plans for a Library of Congress symposium on Calvin Coolidge and
the Coolidge era reached my desk, I could not but reXect on my views of
President Coolidge and the 1920s. I remember well as a graduate student in
history chuckling at the witty ridicule depicting Coolidge as a simple-
minded fool in books that were required reading in my graduate seminars.
Many were from writers who sketched Coolidge as a blind follower of an
intellectually bankrupt ideology of laissez-faire, portraying him as one who
led, or, rather, by his lack of leadership, allowed the nation to drift into a
false prosperity, a sort of decadent and greedy debauch that inevitably re-
sulted in the catastrophe of the Great Depression.
It took several decades, but my understanding of both Coolidge and the
1920s changed. The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress main-
tains Coolidge’s presidential papers, and some years ago I had occasion to
examine Wle #111in the collection.1This Wle dealt with thirty-one federal
prisoners who had been convicted under wartime statutes covering crimes
based on interference with the war-effort in 1917and 1918. By 1923, most
persons convicted for such crimes had served their sentences or been re-
leased early by amnesties proclaimed by President Harding. Most of those
who remained were members of the Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW), an anarcho-syndicalist labor union that advocated resistance to
military conscription, industrial sabotage, and the eventual overthrow of
the government through a general strike.
File #111contains letters from clergymen and civil liberties groups urg-
ing full pardons on free-speech grounds for those still imprisoned, arguing
that they had been convicted for their beliefs rather than for overt acts. The
Wle also contains a letter from Senator William Borah (Republican, Idaho)
urging that the prisoners be pardoned on the grounds that their trials had
been legally Xawed. A statement by U.S. Judge Frank Rudkin, who had
presided at some of the IWW trials, took a similar position. He felt that de-
cisions later reached by U.S. appeals courts rendered the convictions of
these prisoners on several counts inappropriate and that on those counts
where conviction could still be sustained, the prisoners had served sufW-
cient time.
Present as well were letters from those hostile to releasing the IWW
ix
x Introduction
militants. The presiding judge in Los Angeles’ Superior Court advised
Coolidge that releasing the prisoners would make enforcement of the pro-
hibition law difWcult because the crimes of the IWW prisoners made viola-
tions of the Volstead Act seem trivial. Letters and statements from the
American Legion, the Sons of the American Revolution, and a variety of in-
dividuals also opposed amnesty.
Coolidge appointed a committee to advise him on the matter: Newton
D. Baker (President Wilson’s secretary of war), Episcopal Bishop Charles
H. Brent (former chief of chaplains for the American Expeditionary Force),
and General James G. Harbord (former chief of staff of the AEF). The
committee recommended that the prisoners be released but not pardoned;
Coolidge then commuted the sentences of all thirty-one to the time already
served and released them.
What is striking about the Wle is that it provides ample information
about what various people thought and advised Coolidge to do, and it doc-
uments what Coolidge did, but there is nothing that tells one whyCoolidge
decided to commute the sentences. Did he think the prisoners improperly
convicted as did Senator Borah and various civil liberties groups? Did he
regard it as an act of charity for misguided and essentially harmless men
who had been punished enough as did Bishop Brent? Did he think it was
time to put the controversies of the war behind as did Newton Baker? In
the Wle, a copy of the White House announcement of Coolidge’s commu-
tation order only announces the decision and is devoid of explanation.
File #111is typical of many of those in the Coolidge papers and of much
of Coolidge’s correspondence. Edward Clark, Coolidge’s presidential sec-
retary, later wrote to a colleague about Coolidge’s correspondence Wles.
He noted that “Mr. Coolidge did not follow the practice of other Presi-
dents in trying to explain his administration through letters to friends.”
Clark contrasted this with President Hoover, for whom Clark also worked.
“Mr. Hoover, for instance, has tried to dictate a memorandum after every
important conference giving his recollection of the event and I have no
doubt that he also followed Wilson’s practice in embodying the same his-
tory information in letters. Mr. Coolidge, however, strictly avoided this
and the Wle, therefore consisted of the huge number of letters to him which
might be of interest but with replies which reveal little or nothing.”2
Coolidge, I came to realize, was not silent because he was inarticulate or
had nothing to say. Rather, Coolidge believed that a person, particularly
someone exercising governmental power, should be judged by their acts
and the consequences of their acts. He did not much care for those who
thought intentions more important than consequences; in his view, focus-
ing on motives was a sort of moral evasion of responsibility for one’s acts.
Few people, and particularly few politicians, ever own up to ill intentions
and most can come up with well-intentioned reasons for doing whatever
