Episode 13: The 1920s
Show Notes
Overview:
Today’s episode is all about the roaring twenties. It’s a decade often recalled with wistful longing, and more than touch of trepidation. Longing, because that is what Americans largely felt in this era: a longing to move past the pain of the Great War and the great pandemic. Trepidation, for us if not for them, because we know the traumas that 1930s and ‘40s would bring. Sometimes it’s no fun to know what comes next, and if you don’t know what we are referring to…well, then you better stick around for future episodes!
The Presidents of the 1920s are largely not recalled well, if recalled at all. Indeed, we’ve chosen to discuss them en masse to leave a bit more time for more consequential presidents still to come. Our three today, in the order they served, were Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. If you needed a catchphrase to remember each as we go forward today, you could do worse than to say: one of the most scandal-ridden presidencies in American history; one of the intentionally least impactful; and one of the most callous.
Quick refreshers on each president. Warren Harding was a nice guy from Ohio who never offended anyone. Handsome, too. He looked the part of a United States senator, and then a president, and made few enemies throughout this long career. You make enemies by taking stands and that wasn’t Harding’s thing. He missed more Senate sessions than he attended, for example, lest he be forced to take public stands on controversial issues like prohibition and women’s suffrage. He didn’t really take a stand on the critical League of Nations question—if the United States should join or not—when running for President in 1920. He instead promised a return to normalcy, quiet, and calm. The first decades of the twentieth century had already offered enough excitement and worry for a lifetime.
Harding quietly wondered if he was up to the job once elected, and with good reason, but he did have the smarts to assemble an impressive and expert cabinet of advisers. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the good sense to reject old and new friends alike who viewed his time in the White House as a moment to enrich themselves. Scandals ensued. So too, historians later learned, did stress from a couple of extramarital affairs, including one who tried to blackmail him, and another who bore a baby, for whom Harding paid child support payments, though they never met. He escaped the consequences in the end the old fashioned way. He died from a heart attack in 1923, while still in office, leaving the president to none other than….
Calvin Coolidge, Silent Cal, as cool and calm a customer as has ever been in the White House. Told in the middle of the night of Harding’s death, he took the presidential oath of office and then went straight back to bed. Born and raised in Vermont, Coolidge steadily climbed the political ranks in neighboring Massachusetts, ultimately serving as Governor. It was Coolidge who greeted soldiers returning from the War, and Coolidge who became nationally famous for refusing to back down when Boston’s police union went on strike. “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime,” he said, and the incident propelled him to the Republican national ticket. Untarnished by Harding’s scandals, and propelled by a booming economy, Coolidge won his own election in 1924 with the slogan “keep cool with Coolidge.”
It wasn’t just a line. Coolidge believed in small government, and practiced what he preached. He cut taxes for the wealthy, and left the stock market largely unregulated, which of course led to the central story of his successor, Herbert Hoover.
Hoover is one of the most fascinating and perplexing men to ever sit in the Oval Office, because he SHOULD have been so good. Brilliant, hard-working, a self-made millionaire and engineer with vast international experience, he succeeded at everything he touched—except the presidency. The Great Depression happened on his watch. Nearly a quarter of Americans were unemployed by the time he left office. Many were hungry and homeless. Most all were scared of what the future might hold, and if nothing else, knew they didn’t want another four years of Hoover, booting him out of office after only a single term. Hoover epitomizes two interesting things about presidents: first, there is nothing on your resume that guarantees success, and second, that the president will ultimately be held responsible for anything that happens on their watch. Period. He did not cause the Depression, nor frankly could he have averted it. But the nation elected Franklin Roosevelt as his replacement in 1932 largely because Roosevelt promised to do more to help the impoverished and suffering beyond anything Hoover’s conservative ideology allowed. And an ideologue he was, spending the rest of his days—several decades in fact—writing thoughtful even brilliant essays and books extolling the virtues of small government and of conservative ideals.
As you can see, there is a lot of ground to cover here, especially if we are to understand how these three presidents engaged the nation’s questions over race, especially since none of them put racial justice at the top of their presidential to-do list.
To help us in this journey, we spoke to two brilliant historians. Neither are presidential historians per se, but to be fair there aren’t too many experts that focus on these specific presidents! Instead, we’ve selected scholars that can speak to the specific racial issues of the time, and how the president helped or made things worse. Together our scholars illuminated two points:
First, the important role of African American soldiers during this period, in terms of their vitally important but contested military service, and in the role veterans played in the black community once home
And second, the way that labor demands complicated questions surrounding Mexican immigration policies and race relations in the American southwest
Guest One: Dr. Le’Trice Donaldson
Professor Le’Trice D. Donaldson is an Assistant Professor of African American and U.S. history at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. Prior to this appointment, she taught at The University of Mississippi, The University of Memphis, Medgar Evers College, Marist College and City University of New York-York College.
Dr. Donaldson earned her Ph.D from the University of Memphis, and her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She specializes in African American military and gender history during the Post-Civil War era through World War I. The primary focus of her work centers on reshaping the narrative of the Black military experience on how African American men utilized military service for community uplift and community defense. Dr. Donaldson am also interested in race and religion in the Caribbean and Latin America, U.S. intelligence history, and the Black Atlantic World experience.
She is the author of, A Voyage Through the African American Experience which is a textbook for the introduction to African American Studies, and, Duty Beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight for Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870-1920, which was recently published in February 2020.
Dr. Donaldson’s website.
Follow Dr. Donaldson on Twitter.
Guest Two Dr. Deborah Kang
Dr. S. Deborah Kang is the Anne Stark and Chester Watson Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas and an Immigration Policy Fellow at the US Immigration Policy Center at the University of California at San Diego. Her research focuses on both the historical and contemporary aspects of US immigration and border policy.
Published by Oxford University Press in 2017, her first book, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954 offers a comprehensive legal history of the nation’s immigration agencies on the US-Mexico border during the first half of the twentieth century. It won six awards and accolades, including the Henry Adams Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government, the Theodore Saloutos Book Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, the W. Turrentine Jackson Award from the Western History Association, and the Americo Paredes Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book on Chicano/a, Mexican American and/or Latino/a Studies. It was also named a finalist for the Weber-Clements Book Prize by the Western History Association.
Her second book is a history of US immigration legalization policies from the early twentieth century to the present. Kang has also been preparing working papers and briefs on the recent immigration enforcement policies issued by the Trump administration for the US Immigration Policy Center. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies.
Kang has provided expert commentary for documentary filmmakers and major media outlets, and is available for interviews on topics related to immigration law and policy, immigration history, and the US-Mexico border.
Follow Professor Kang on Twitter.
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