August 2, 1923, 100 years ago: President Warren G. Harding dies. When the 1920s began, he was elected President as a good-looking, charismatic man who would lead the nation into a new era of "normalcy," while, at the same time, letting us have as much fun as he was having behind the scenes.
By the time the 1920s were over, he had been posthumously exposed as an idiot, a womanizer, and the head of a really corrupt Administration. His reputation crashed every bit as hard as the stock market did.
His image was well-crafted, especially since he was seen as nice and healthy, unlike the physically and politically paralyzed outgoing President, Woodrow Wilson. Little did anyone know that Harding was, like Wilson before his 1919 stroke, already a lot sicker than he let on by the time his candidacy began.
So let's look at some myths about the uproarious decade, and see how close they were to the truth:
Top 10 Myths About the Roaring Twenties
1. Babe Ruth saved baseball. That is, his home runs in 1920 and onward made the nation forget about the Black Sox Scandal, which would have destroyed baseball otherwise.
Warren Gamaliel Harding and George Herman Ruth Jr.
Baseball had survived scandals and down periods before. Certainly, Ruth helped. But the scandal didn't break until the end of the 1920 season, nearly a year after the fixed World Series, and Ruth was already destroying previous home run records. Without it, baseball might have taken longer to bounce back, but it would have happened.
And if you had asked the Babe himself, he would admit that he hadn't "saved baseball," that baseball didn't need "saving." It didn't after the Black Sox Scandal, it didn't after the Strike of '81, it didn't after the Strike of '94, and it doesn't now.
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1. Before embarking on a political career as an ambitious Republican, he built a successful newspaper, The Marion Star. He did this, but that's hardly a major accomplishment, and it wasn't something he did as President. So we can't count it.
2. Warren Harding was the first sitting U.S. Senator to win the Presidency. This is true. Is it a major accomplishment? Certainly: Winning the Presidency is one, regardless of how you did it, unless you cheated -- and, as far as we can tell, he didn't. But it's not an accomplishment as President.
3. One of his earliest successes was the Washington Naval Conference in 1921–22. He managed to bring the major nations with significant naval might to agree on what was called the naval limitations program. The program was in place for a decade.
This could be considered a major accomplishment. Or, it could be attributable to his Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, much as the Louisiana Purchase was less Thomas Jefferson than his negotiator, James Monroe; the Monroe Doctrine was less Monroe than Secretary of State (and successor as President) John Quincy Adams; and the Alaska Purchase was less Andrew Johnson than Secretary of State William Seward. But we can count it in Harding's favor.
4. Warren Harding passed the federal child welfare program, the first of its kind. He managed to lower taxes, increased the tax base, raised tariffs to create employment and he also managed to successfully negotiate with striking workers in mining and railroad companies, particularly the crisis in Blair Mountain and the Great Railroad Strike in 1922.
This is actually 4 separate actions. The child welfare program was, unquestionably, a good thing. But lowering taxes doesn't increase the tax base: By definition, it lowers it. Raising tariffs doesn't create employment, it reduces it. These things helped to set up the Great Depression of the 1930s.
And he had little to do with the Blair Mountain Crisis -- which wrecked the United Mine Workers for a decade. So that's 1 plus, 2 major minuses, and 1 flat-out lie that would have been a minus had it been true.
5. Warren Harding was vocal against lynching and the violence meted out to African Americans. He did bring in the anti-lynching bill only to see it fail at the hands of the Congress. Harding's Republican Party had control both houses of Congress, so, while his heart was in the right place, he failed as a leader on this issue.
6. President Harding signed a peace treaty with Austria and Germany post World War I. Big deal. Whoever was President was going to do that. It was a formality, since the war had ended 3 years earlier, and the Congress of Versailles had already happened. No one counts the proclamation officially ending World War II that he signed on December 31, 1946 -- 16 months after V-J Day -- as one of the accomplishments of Harry Truman. Ending the war in victory for the Allies, yes; the New Year's Eve '46 treaty, no.
So, to tally up: 9 actions, resulting in 2 major accomplishments, 1 piece of window dressing, 1 embarrassing failure, 2 harmful actions, and 3 actions that were not accomplishments of his Presidency at all.
And, yes, his economic policies, guided by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, helped to set up the Great Depression. And, yes, the Teapot Dome scandal was the biggest piece of executive branch malfeasance ever, and would remain so for another half a century.
In other words: In 2 1/2 years in office, 2 big pluses, 1 very little plus, 3 minor minuses, 1 big minus, and 1 humongous minus.
Was America better off on August 2, 1923, when Harding left the Presidency through death, than it was on March 4, 1921, when he entered the Presidency? Yes. How responsible was he for that? Not much. And, by March 4, 1931, the 10th Anniversary of his Inauguration, it was obvious that he was one of the worst Presidents the country had ever had. That we have since had Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, each of whom was even worse, by no means elevates Harding in history.
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Let's move on:
3. The Great Gatsby symbolizes the good times of "The Jazz Age." This one is pure baloney. Both the 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the films based on it, including the Robert Redford version in 1974 and the Leonardo DiCaprio one in 2013, show that all the parties and other good times were hollow -- or, to use the expression I used for Harding's treaty "ending the war," window dressing -- and did nothing but take people's minds off the difficulties of life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A director with guts could easily do a version of Gatsby and set it over half a century later, in the Disco Period.
4. Charles Lindbergh was the 1st man to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. He was the 1st to do it solo, and the 1st to do it from the North American continent to the European continent. Certainly, that was worth celebrating. Perhaps not as much as it was celebrated in what a documentary about the 1920s called "The Age of Ballyhoo." But worth some celebration.
Lindbergh and his plane, Spirit of St. Louis
But Lindbergh wasn't the 1st to fly across the Atlantic, or even the 2nd. On June 15, 1919, British pilots John Alcock and Arthur Brown made the 1st air crossing of the Atlantic. To be fair to Lindbergh and his achievement, Alcock and Brown did not go full continent-to-continent. They chose the closest possible route: From St. John's, Newfoundland, the easternmost city in the Western Hemisphere, to the west coast of Ireland, the westernmost point in Europe.
Arthur Brown (left) and John Alcock
5. The Jazz Singer was the 1st "Talking Picture." It wasn't: Its star, Jolson, already a Broadway and recording legend, had sung in a much shorter film the year before. But it was the 1st feature-length motion picture with a synchronized recorded music score, and the 1st feature-length motion picture with lip-synchronous speech and singing.
6. "Coolidge Prosperity." Yes, there was an economic boom that began under Harding, ending the postwar drop under Wilson, which was definitely a recession and has been termed a "depression" by some. And it continued under Coolidge.
Calvin Coolidge
But looks can be deceiving. Using the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a guide: It was 64 on August 22, 1921. Not 6,400: Sixty-four. It reached 100 in October 1922, was at 87 when Harding died in August 1923, and was at 120 at the end of 1924, Coolidge's 1st full year in office. Proportionally speaking, that's significant improvement.
At the end of 1925, it was at 156. In September 1926, it reached 164, before dropping a little by the end of the year. It broke 200 at the end of 1927. The real surge began in July 1928, just as Hoover was running on "Republican prosperity." It hit 292 on November 26, 1928. After a drop in early December, it reached 300 on New Year's Eve. On June 10, 1929, it was 303. On September 3, it had surged to 381.17.
Then it started going down. The "Crash of '29" seems to have happened in a hurry, but, on October 23, the Dow was already down to 305.85. On the 24th, "Black Thursday," it fell to 299.47, and would have been worse if not for a late stock buy made by the famous "walk across the floor" of the New York Stock Exchange by J.P. Morgan banker Thomas W. Lamont. On Friday, the 25th, there was a slight rise, to 301.22.
But the weekend, as it frequently has in tough times since, bred worry. On Monday the 28th, the Dow fell to 260.64. The 29th was "Black Tuesday," and the Dow fell to 230.07. The chickens hatched by Harding, Coolidge and Mellon had come home to roost. As a poem of the time went:
Hoover blew the whistle
Mellon rang the bell
Wall Street gave the signal
and the country went to hell!
What about the other major gauge of how well the economy is doing, the unemployment rate? Here it is, at the end of each calendar year in the 1920s:
* 1920: 4.0 percent
* 1921: 11.9
* 1922: 7.6
* 1923: 3.2
Looks like the Harding-Mellon policy of cutting taxes is working. Let's see what the Coolidge of policy of "do nothing, because the business of America is business" does:
* 1924: 5.5
* 1925: 4.0
* 1926: 1.9
Is that for real? Or was somebody cooking the books? Let's continue:
* 1927: 4.1
* 1928: 4.4
* 1929: 3.2
In other words, while the Crash happened late in 1929, the Depression wasn't yet getting noticed around the country. But then:
* 1930: 8.9
That's bad, but not as bad as the hangover from the Wilson years. But it got much, much worse thanks to the Harding-Mellon-Coolidge-Hoover policies:
* 1931: 15.9
* 1932: 23.6
* 1933: 24.9
Yeah. America needed a new deal, capitalized or otherwise. Harding died, and Coolidge did "not choose to run for President in 1928." So they escaped the blame of "early drafts of history," and Hoover was "left holding the bag." It just seemed too convenient, just as it was to blame CBS for the collapse of the Yankees in 1965, without considering what harm selling owners Dan Topping and Del Webb had already done.
Calvin Coolidge was, at least domestically, the most conservative President America has ever had. Not a radical right-winger like Reagan, George W. Bush or Trump, but conservative in the old sense of the word. America paid the price for this, but he didn't.
7. Prohibition turned America into a giant gangland shooting gallery. The homicide rate did rise in the 1920s, but context is needed. A lot of potential murderers, and murder victims, were in the service in 1917 and 1918.
But there's no sign that Prohibition or organized crime accounted for most, or even much, of it. Hijackings of cars and trucks smuggling liquor was common, but the robbers usually didn't find it necessary to kill the drivers. Why cause more trouble than you need?
8. "Flappers" were women of loose morals. Smoking. Drinking. Showing skin, with the age of the corset being over.
There was no study done at the time to prove that flappers had more sex than their predecessors. They did have more opportunity for pre-marital sex, as well as an increasing knowledge of contraceptive practices. The easier access to cars carried young adults away from parental eyes to socials, parties, sporting events, and theaters, while Hollywood productions portrayed, and simultaneously manufactured, this modern courting culture.
But there seems to have been no major rise in pregnancies, births, abortions, or sexually-transmitted diseases. If there was, it's been kept quiet. And if you wonder how something can be kept quiet for 100 years, let the record show that I didn't find out about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 until around 2000 or so, and didn't find out about the Ocoee Massacre in Florida in 1920 until its 100th Anniversary. And we still don't know what caused Babe Ruth's "Bellyache Heard 'Round the World" in 1925.
9. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 led to mass suicides. Since then, whenever there's a dip in the stock market, demonstrators go to the New York Stock Exchange at Broad and Wall Streets, and yell, "Jump! Jump! Jump!" Because they think that's what happened during and after the Crash of '29.
There is no record of a single stockbroker suicide, let alone one via jumping out of a window, in the wake of the Crash. In what remains the definitive book about the Crash, The Great Crash 1929, Pulitzer Prize-winning economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, "In the United States the suicide wave that followed the stock market is also part of the legend of 1929. In fact, there was none."
One of the more famous photos connected with the Crash is this one, showing Walter Thornton. He was one of the most successful male models of the early 20th Century. Today, though, he is best known for this photo, trying to sell his very nice car, a 1929 Chrysler Imperial 75 Roadster, for $100 -- about $1,784 in today's money.
Did Thornton get $100 for his car? I can find no reference to an answer. But he did return to his previous career, modeling, and soon started a modeling agency, and gained a new fortune from that. He lived until 1990.
10. The Crash of 1929 caused the Great Depression. That was part of it, but by no means all of it. The end of World War I meant that farmers, having lost a big chunk of their market, had already been in a depression since the Armistice, 11 years earlier.
The famous headline in
the film industry's "trade paper"
In his nationally-syndicated newspaper column, Will Rogers spent much of the "Roaring Twenties" saying how, for farmers, the decade didn't roar so much as mumble. He pointed out that the economic boom wasn't universal for the cities, either: In 1928, about a year before the Crash, he wrote, "Wall Street has never been better off, but Eighth Avenue has never been worse off."
When he was President, John F. Kennedy quoted an old saying: "A rising tide lifts all boats." Not a boat with a hole in it. And, of course, in the 1920s as now, some people didn't have boats, and some people couldn't even swim.
Even with the Crash, the Depression might have been sharp, but relatively short, if not for the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which President Herbert Hoover signed into law on June 17, 1930. Named for its sponsors, Senator Reed Smoot of Utah and Representative Willis Hawley of Oregon, both Republicans, the law raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods.
Willis Hawley (left) and Reed Smoot
This prompted retaliatory tariffs by other countries against America. As a result, between 1929 and 1933, American exports dropped 61 percent, and American imports dropped by 66 percent. Between 1929 and 1932, real Gross Domestic Product fell 17 percent worldwide, and 26 percent in the United States.
Unemployment was 8 percent when the Act was passed. It doubled to 16 percent in 1931 -- already higher than any of the "recessions" since the Depression -- and 25 percent in 1932. It is suspected that, when FDR took office on March 4, 1933, it may have been as high as 31 percent. If the Crash was the biggest cause, Smoot-Hawley was a strong second.
The Roaring Twenties did roar. But not quite the way history tends to remember it.
