Penguin History of the United States of America (92 page)

What followed his return in June 1919 was one of the great American tragedies; but it was of more significance in the story of Woodrow Wilson, perhaps, than in the history of the United States. Worn out by his labours; appalled at what might flow from the repudiation of his handiwork; filled with a prophet’s vision and also, unfortunately, with the vanity of Jonah, he refused all compromise. The Senate must take its medicine, he said; when House (now fallen quite out of favour) advised him to be as conciliatory in Washington as he had been in Paris, he replied, ‘One can never get anything in this life that is worth while without fighting for it.’ When the Senate baulked, he set out on a great speaking tour through the West, to rally the people to him: together they would overcome Senator Lodge. His case, we have seen, was by no means watertight; yet his eloquence was never greater. He defended the treaty with a passion worthy of a better cause – a passion that made it impossible to present its humble virtues, such as they were, in the coolly convincing light they deserved – and foretold, all too accurately, what would happen if Americans were to drop the burden of international responsibility which they had so recently assumed. The choice, he assured them again and again, trying to press home the lessons of his own education, lay between peace with the treaty, faults and all, or war without it. But it was all to no purpose. He suffered complete nervous prostration at Pueblo, Colorado; was hurried home to Washington;
and there suffered a massive stroke. It did not kill him, to his misfortune; but it incapacitated him for government, and turned his native obstinacy and assurance to granite. The forces mounting against him were insuperable, but he would not bend, though the German-Americans (seven million of them) thought the treaty was unjust to Germany, and the Irish-Americans resented its failure to secure self-determination for Ireland, and the haters of the British Empire, who were noisy if not especially numerous, damned the League because Britain, her colonies and the dominions would between them have six votes in it. Compromise of some kind was essential to save the treaty, but from his sick-bed Wilson refused it implacably; his will hurled the Democrats into unsuccessful battle against the Republicans; and when the Lodge amendments were passed, he forced his supporters to vote against the entire document. Lodge and his irreconcilables voted against it too, and thus it was Wilson himself, in collaboration, as it were, with his bitterest enemies, who made America take the first steps back down the isolationist path. The point is worth rubbing in: in spite of the fervour of the opponents, there was almost certainly a majority in the United States in 1919–20 for some sort of treaty, some sort of League; neither the people nor the politicians were, for the most part, yet ready to abandon their responsibilities; but after the final defeat of the treaty in the Senate, in March 1920, that was rapidly to change.

The rest of the Wilson administration was a complete failure. The summer of 1919 had been marked by more race-riots, including an appalling outbreak at Chicago in which thirty-eight people were killed and 537 injured. The country was in a wild mood of fear and reaction: after some bomb outrages, culminating in an attack on the House of Morgan on Wall Street – attacks which were presumably the work of the sort of crazed, conceited fanatics who have done so much harm since – the fear of Bolsheviks swept the country as the fear of German spies had done two years previously. It was urged on by the Attorney-General, Mitchell Palmer, himself the victim of an attempted assassination: but he was moved less by vengefulness than by his hope that the Red Scare would launch a successful Palmer-for-President boom. He arrested a thousand anarchists and socialists, and deported many of them to Russia. Five members were expelled from the New York state legislature because they were socialists. Strikes were ruthlessly broken by industrialists determined to regain control of the economic process which the war had compelled them partly to yield. Wartime boom was followed by post-war slump as orders for munitions, uniforms and rations ceased. The inflation which the war had brought did not cease: prices, which had risen by 62 per cent between 1914 and 1918, rose by 40 per cent between 1918 and 1920. The loans to the Allies ceased in 1920, which meant that the Europeans could no longer buy American exports: consequently US overseas trade was halved. In the South a new Ku Klux Klan began to arise, as vicious as the old and intent on attacking Jews and Catholics as well as blacks. The Chicago White Sox threw the World Series, the baseball
championships, in return for a bribe (they were promptly nicknamed the Black Sox). The police went on strike in Boston, and there was a general strike in Seattle. Meanwhile Wilson lay inert in the White House, doing nothing, saying nothing. The American people prepared his last repudiation.

The year 1920 was to be one of Republican victory, one in which the successful candidate must reflect the people’s desire for humdrum normality. So the Grand Old Party nominated Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio, an amiable nonentity whose chief contribution to the Presidential campaign was the revolting neologism ‘normalcy’, which well signified the synthetic tranquillity in which his countrymen hoped to smother their anxieties. His running mate was the Governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge. Against this pair the Democrats sent James Cox, the Governor of Ohio, who, out of respect for Wilson, made the question of the League the centre of his campaign. He and his fellow-candidate, the former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York, a distant cousin of Theodore, made as good a fight as they could; but it was useless. Harding swept to one of the biggest electoral victories in American history.

In March 1921, Woodrow Wilson wearily retired. He was to outlive his successor, and his countrymen did not quite forget him. From time to time he croaked out a warning. But America was dancing to a different tune. The gayest years of the Age of Gold were beginning.

Keep away from bootleg hootch
When you’re on a spree
Take good care of yourself, you belong to me’
Steer clear of frozen ponds (ooh! ooh!)
Peroxide blondes (ooh! ooh!)
Stocks and bonds (ooh! ooh!)
You’ll get a pain, ruin your bank-roll…

Popular song, ‘Button Up Your Overcoat’

Free association yields one image as the key to the twenties: the canyons of New York city in a storm of paper – whether ticker tape filling the air as it was chucked in countless uncoiling reels from office windows to greet the return of Lindbergh from his solo flight to Paris in 1927, or the deep litter thrown to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in the disastrous days of the Great Crash two years later. The image is apt. For not only were the great parades up Broadway and Fifth Avenue the typical carnival of the decade (Lindbergh was not the only celebrity to be welcomed to Manhattan, though he was the most fervently worshipped); not only was the Crash the event which has dominated our view of the twenties ever since it happened. The great walls of the canyons themselves tell us something. This was the decade of the triumphant skyscrapers, the decade which launched the Empire State Building (1,248 feet) and Rockefeller Center – for which the unlucky thirties had to pay. New York had conquered: the symbol of American life was no longer to be a log cabin or a family farm, it was to be a gigantic cigar. In 1925 Harold Ross from Colorado launched the greatest of all American magazines, inevitably named the
New Yorker
, with the express mission of startling the staid, such as ‘the old lady from Dubuque’. Harlem, not yet called a ghetto, exploded in jazz and poetry, and white folk flocked uptown to enjoy what the newly citified black folk were creating. As the golden years of Tin Pan Alley opened (they would last until
the coming of rock) Rodgers and Hart gave the world their first big hit,
Manhattan
. Urban America had triumphed: ‘the twenties’ were to be celebrated on the sidewalks of New York (the song of that name was Al Smith’s anthem). Just as American football is pre-eminently the television game, best watched from a deep chair in front of the box, a can of iced beer in your hand, so baseball was the game of the city in the days when you actually had to go to the stadium to see it played. The greatest sports hero of the decade was ‘Babe’ Ruth, the star of the New York Yankees, the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat, who hit sixty home runs in one year, 1928 – a record that stood until 1961; George Herman Ruth, who was bigger than Dempsey the boxer, than Tilden the tennis player, than Jones the golfer. Ruth, who once killed a fan by hitting a homer (the fan, in his excitement, had a heart-attack), was an entirely urban figure. The mimic battles of sport were the fitting preoccupation of the twenties, a time in which the quest for ‘normalcy’, the belief in the possibility of happiness and a good time, led great numbers of people, perhaps especially the young, who now had money to spend in large amounts for the first time (and so the world of pop was born), to turn their backs on the struggle of work and politics as much as possible and to seek salvation in the ephemeral. It was foolish – it was fun. ‘What Lincoln said in ’62’ suddenly seemed boring. So everybody Charlestoned. At the Republican convention in 1920 the bands played a song called
Mr Zip, Zip, Zip
instead
oijohn Brown’s Body
. The last veterans of the Civil War shuffled offstage; their successors, the veterans of the First World War, wanted to forget their own experiences in a hurry.

Beneath all the froth life went on much as usual; but the legend of the twenties did not arise out of nothing: it is still the best route to the truth about the times.

It is impossible to pinpoint the moment at which ‘the twenties’ began: legendary epochs elude the tidy historian. Certainly, the new day was at hand when President Harding took office. The amazing disparity between the job and the man has the right twenties flavour: it was an era of contradictions. Harding was not intelligent or firm or hard-working enough to be a successful President. His other personal weaknesses hardly mattered. True, he committed adultery in a coat-cupboard at the White House because he was too afraid of his wife to take his mistress to more comfortable quarters; but then several Presidents since have had their sexual difficulties and improprieties. True, he was rather too fond of giving government posts to poker-playing cronies whose honesty turned out to be inadequate; but Harry Truman was to do somewhat the same. True, his oratory stunned the mind:

Progress is not proclamation nor palaver. It is not pretence nor play on prejudice. It is not the perturbation of a people passion-wrought, nor a promise proposed…
¹
but real eloquence has seldom distinguished the modern Presidency. And Harding had his good points. His admirers thought he looked like George Washington. He was magnanimous, for example letting Eugene Debs out of the jail into which Woodrow Wilson had thrust him. He was determined to do his best to live up to the Presidency, hoping to be, not the greatest President (he knew himself too well for that), but the best-loved. Partly by good luck, partly because of his anxious respect for men who were abler than he, he put together an administration which, if it contained too many rogues and too many millionaires (the New York
World
, a liberal newspaper, guessed that the Cabinet altogether was worth $600,000,000), also contained three really able men, who were to give the period much of its character: Andrew Mellon, Charles Evans Hughes and Herbert Hoover.

Andrew Mellon, the second richest man in America, was Secretary of the Treasury. His fortune had initially been built upon the exploitation of the new metal, aluminium, but his family also controlled the Gulf Oil corporation. No appointment could have been more reassuring to Old Guard Republicans. Mellon came from Pennsylvania and his outlook was entirely predictable. He believed in a high tariff, low taxation, the greatest freedom to get and spend wealth, and in having a friendly government at Washington to back up big business leadership when necessary. He had no time for labour unions, no interest in farmers, no concern for consumers. As to the business cycle, he was a fatalist, regarding booms and slumps as natural phenomena which it was a waste of effort to try to control. He was personally honest, by the standards of the business class, but unhappily those standards were rather lax. He presided at the Treasury throughout the twenties – indeed until 1932. So he became an obvious target for the wrath of all those who blamed the Republican administrations of the twenties for the Great Depression.

Something can be said for Mellon, all the same. He was not the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Hamilton that his admirers loved to call him; indeed, his failure to mitigate the Depression must always count as a crime. He was callous and complacent. But his failure to foresee the Depression is scarcely surprising or even very culpable: nobody else foresaw it either, and today’s historians, who still cannot agree on exactly what caused it, are hardly in a position to blame Mellon and the other statesmen. If hindsight fails, how could foresight have succeeded? According to his lights, Mellon did very well by the American economy.

He was deeply conservative, but then so were the President and Senate that appointed him. The chief measure of the Harding Congress was the replacement of the Underwood tariff by the Fordney-McCumber tariff of 1922, which imposed the highest rates known until then in American history. It was an act of almost conscious atavism – back to the days of McKinley and Aldrich! (Harding had got the Presidential nomination largely because he seemed to be a new McKinley.) Mellon, even had he been a liberal,
would have had to accept the tariff as a constraint on his actions. Another constraint was the revulsion against the active government of the Wilson era: it would have been impossible to get many new programmes through Congress, even had Mellon been disposed to try; nobody yet dreamed of setting up a welfare state. In the circumstances, Mellon’s policies were probably the best that could have been implemented. The high tariff soon produced a vast budgetary surplus; Mellon therefore felt able to reduce taxation sharply every year. The rich, naturally, were the chief beneficiaries, but then, as events were soon to make all too plain, American prosperity was heavily dependent on their willingness and ability to spend, and tax cuts encouraged them to do so. Mellon’s remissions, which went on right through the decade, seemed like so many votes of confidence in the business civilization and were appreciated accordingly. They regularly released new spending-power into the market. This was a far better use for the money than allowing it to pile up in the Treasury.