THE BOOMING 1920s
Wilson, distracted by the war, then laid low by his stroke, had mis- handled almost every postwar is- sue . The booming economy began to collapse in mid-1920 . The Repub- lican candidates for president and vice president, Warren G . Harding and Calvin Coolidge, easily defeated their Democratic opponents, James M . Cox and Franklin D . Roosevelt .
Following ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, women voted in a presidential elec- tion for the first time .
The first two years of Harding’s administration saw a continuance of the economic recession that had begun under Wilson . By 1923, how- ever, prosperity was back . For the next six years the country enjoyed the strongest economy in its history, at least in urban areas . Governmen- tal economic policy during the 1920s was eminently conservative . It was based upon the belief that if govern-
ment fostered private business, ben- efits would radiate out to most of the rest of the population .
Accordingly, the Republicans tried to create the most favorable conditions for U .S . industry . The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 and the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930 brought American trade barri- ers to new heights, guaranteeing U .S . manufacturers in one field after another a monopoly of the domes- tic market, but blocking a healthy trade with Europe that would have reinvigorated the international economy . Occurring at the begin- ning of the Great Depression, Haw- ley-Smoot triggered retaliation from other manufacturing nations and contributed greatly to a collapsing cycle of world trade that intensified world economic misery .
The federal government also start- ed a program of tax cuts, reflecting Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s belief that high taxes on individual incomes and corporations discour- aged investment in new industrial enterprises . Congress, in laws passed between 1921 and 1929, responded favorably to his proposals .
“The chief business of the Amer- ican people is business,” declared Calvin Coolidge, the Vermont-born vice president who succeeded to the presidency in 1923 after Harding’s death, and was elected in his own right in 1924 . Coolidge hewed to the conservative economic policies of the Republican Party, but he was a much abler administrator than the hapless Harding, whose administra-
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tion was mired in charges of corrup- tion in the months before his death .
Throughout the 1920s, private business received substantial en- couragement, including construc- tion loans, profitable mail-carrying contracts, and other indirect subsi- dies . The Transportation Act of 1920, for example, had already restored to private management the nation’s railways, which had been under gov- ernment control during the war . The Merchant Marine, which had been owned and largely operated by the government, was sold to private op- erators .
Republican policies in agri- culture, however, faced mounting criticism, for farmers shared least in the prosperity of the 1920s . The period since 1900 had been one of rising farm prices . The unprece- dented wartime demand for U .S . farm products had provided a strong stimulus to expansion . But by the close of 1920, with the abrupt end of wartime demand, the commercial agriculture of staple crops such as wheat and corn fell into sharp de- cline . Many factors accounted for the depression in American agri- culture, but foremost was the loss of foreign markets . This was partly in reaction to American tariff policy, but also because excess farm produc- tion was a worldwide phenomenon . When the Great Depression struck in the 1930s, it devastated an already fragile farm economy .
The distress of agriculture aside, the Twenties brought the best life ever to most Americans . It was the
decade in which the ordinary fam- ily purchased its first automobile, obtained refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, listened to the radio for en- tertainment, and went regularly to motion pictures . Prosperity was real and broadly distributed . The Repub- licans profited politically, as a result, by claiming credit for it .