United States

In foreign affairs the Harding administration tried to ensure peace by urging disarmament, and at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921 Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes negotiated the first effective arms-reduction agreement in history. On the whole, however, the policies of the United States were narrow and nationalistic. It did not cooperate with the League of Nations. It insisted that Europeans pay their American debts but in 1922 passed the Fordney–McCumber Tariff, which raised duties so high that foreigners had great difficulty earning the necessary dollars. When immigration reached prewar levels (some 800,000 people entered the country between June 1920 and June 1921), Congress gave in to the protests of organized labour, which believed immigrants were taking jobs away from American citizens, and to the objections of business leaders and patriotic organizations, who feared that some of the immigrants might be radicals. Reversing traditional American policy, Congress passed first an emergency restriction bill and then in 1924 the National Origins Act. The act set a quota limiting the number of immigrants to 164,000 annually (150,000 after July 1, 1927); it discriminated against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and barred Asians completely. The quota did not pertain to North Americans, however.

Hughes, Charles EvansCharles Evans Hughes, 1916.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Harding’s policies, his genial nature, and the return of prosperity made the president extremely popular. His sudden death, of a cerebral embolism, in the summer of 1923 resulted in a national outpouring of grief. Yet it soon became evident that his administration had been the most corrupt since Ulysses S. Grant’s. Harding had appointed venal mediocrities, many of them old cronies, to office, and they had betrayed his trust. The most publicized scandal was the illegal leasing of naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, which led to the conviction of Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall for accepting a bribe.

Calvin Coolidge, Harding’s vice president and successor, was a taciturn, parsimonious New Englander who restored honesty to government. His administration suffered none of the stigma of the Harding scandals, and Coolidge, thanks to a buoyant economy and a divided Democratic Party, easily defeated the conservative Democrat John W. Davis in the election of 1924. Even though an independent campaign by Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin drew off insurgent Republicans, Coolidge received more popular, and electoral, votes than his opponents combined.

Coolidge, CalvinCalvin Coolidge taking the oath of office as U.S. president, 1925.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Coolidge followed Harding’s policies, and prosperity continued for most of the decade. From 1922 to 1929, stock dividends rose by 108 percent, corporate profits by 76 percent, and wages by 33 percent. In 1929, 4,455,100 passenger cars were sold by American factories, one for every 27 members of the population, a record that was not broken until 1950. Productivity was the key to America’s economic growth. Because of improvements in technology, overall labour costs declined by nearly 10 percent, even though the wages of individual workers rose.

The prosperity was not solidly based, however. The wealthy benefited most, and agriculture and several industries, such as textiles and bituminous coal mining, were seriously depressed; after 1926 construction declined.

New social trends

For millions of Americans, the sober-minded Coolidge was a more appropriate symbol for the era than the journalistic terms Jazz Age or Roaring Twenties. These terms were exaggerations, but they did have some basis in fact. Many young men and women who had been disillusioned by their experiences in World War I rebelled against what they viewed as unsuccessful, outmoded prewar conventions and attitudes. Women who had been forced to work outside the home because of labour shortages during the war were unwilling to give up their social and economic independence after the war had ended. Having won the right to vote when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, the new “emancipated” woman, the flapper, demanded to be recognized as man’s equal in all areas. She adopted a masculine look, bobbing her hair and abandoning corsets; she drank and smoked in public; and she was more open about sex.