Dark Tide (35 page)

Moreover, Harding’s coattails were long and their fabric sturdy. Republican congressmen and senators were elected across the country, and the GOP piled up a 150-vote majority in the House and a twenty-two-vote majority in the Senate. “The Republican wave, still rising, has invaded rock-ribbed Southern and border States …” the
Boston Globe
reported. “It’s an avalanche to Harding.” The
Boston Herald
said the election returns “accentuate the stupendous overturn in government.” Women, voting nationwide for the first time following the passage of the 19th amendment in August 1920, cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Harding, who was elected on his fifty-fifth birthday.

In Massachusetts, the Harding victory was even more striking, thanks in part to the influence of the popular Coolidge, who won the admiration of voters for his leadership during the Boston police strike. Cox, the Democrat, carried only two small towns in the Bay State. Nearly 90 percent of Massachusetts’ voters went to the polls, a full third of them women, and political experts estimated that about three-quarters of women voted for the Republican ticket. More than sixty thousand women cast ballots in the city of Boston alone, and Harding and Coolidge carried the capital city by a plurality of thirty thousand votes, the first time Boston had given a Republican a plurality since William McKinley in 1896.

The stunning GOP victory was seen nationwide as a repudiation of Woodrow Wilson’s policies and politics—his dogged attempts to draw the United States into a League of Nations and his unfriendliness toward Big Business. So devastating was Wilson’s defeat that fiery Democrat William Jennings Bryan only half-jokingly called for a constitutional maneuver that would allow Wilson to resign in December 1920 and Harding to assume the presidency three months before the scheduled inauguration.

Harding recognized the mandate the country had given him and used words and symbols on inauguration day to usher in the new era. Under a brilliant sky, a Marine Band, “gay in scarlet coats and bright blue trousers,” sat in front of the inaugural kiosk, while the steps of the Capitol were guarded with color guards of “regulars and sailors …” noted the
New York Times
. “Viewed from an upper window of the Capitol … (were) the reds, greens, and browns of women’s hats,” women whose participation in the inaugural, for the first time in American history, was more than ceremonial, and whom Harding rewarded for their support by providing hundreds with prime seating locations at the inaugural.

During his thirty-seven-minute inaugural address, Harding, the country’s twenty-ninth president, spoke first on the topic closest to the hearts of most Americans: the sovereignty of the United States. He justified the country’s decision not to participate in the League of Nations that had become so closely associated with his predecessor, and which finally came into being without U.S. support on January 20, 1920. “We recognize the new order in the world, with the closer contacts which progress has wrought. We crave friendship and harbor no hate,” Harding said. “But America, our America … can be a party to no permanent military alliance. It can enter into no political commitments, nor assume any economic obligations which will subject our decisions to any other than our own authority.”

But it was Harding’s secondary inaugural theme that was the subject of greater interest to America’s business leaders: the need to fuel the country’s economic progress by freeing Big Business from the regulatory shackles that Wilson and Congress had imposed during the war. The message played like sweet music in boardrooms and factories across America—to the emerging automobile, aviation, and rubber magnates; to the burgeoning steel, chemical, and construction industries; to the Wall Street financiers and investment bankers; and indeed, to industrial corporations like United States Industrial Alcohol. Though many of these companies, USIA included, had benefited enormously from war-related contracts, they were now hobbled by excessive regulations in a peacetime economy.

Harding outlined the remedy: “I speak for administrative efficiency, for lightened tax burdens, for sound commercial practices, for adequate credit facilities, for the omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business, for an end to Government’s experiment in business, and for more efficient business in Government administration.”

Harding had called for freeing America from international entanglements that could weaken her and freeing American business from regulations that he believed could weaken the economy. As if to symbolize this new freedom, his first executive order was to reopen the gates to the White House grounds to the general public for the first time since Wilson had ordered them shut when the United States had entered the war on April 6, 1917. The
New York Times
reported: “Crowds poured through all the entrances like water through a broken dam … The crowds streamed across the lawns from all four sides and some pressed their faces against the White House windows.” Noted the
Boston Herald
: “Immediately after the gates swung open, the crowd … thronged in … [then] news of the issuance of the order spread about the city and inaugural visitors and Washingtonians added a visit to the White House ground to the list of history-making events they had witnessed during the day.”

Harding’s hope for a richer, stronger America would be dampened briefly by a severe, though short, depression in the latter part of 1921 and early 1922. But the vision of his inaugural was realized shortly thereafter when the economy recovered and began an eight-year era of prosperity that would become known as the Roaring Twenties. Harding, his administration wracked by scandal, his life cut short while in office by high blood pressure and heart disease, received little credit for the boom; much of that went to Calvin Coolidge, who assumed the presidency in 1923 upon Harding’s death, and was elected in his own right in 1924.

Still, Harding’s 1921 inaugural marked the beginning of a new stage in America’s economic growth. Men like Henry Ford and Alfred F. Sloan of General Motors, and Harvey Firestone and Frank M. Seiberling of Goodyear Rubber, helped the country’s auto production jump from 1.5 million cars in 1919 to nearly 5 million in 1929, and spawned the first “auto sections” in American newspapers. America built roads, schools, and factories. Electrification of those factories and modern assembly-line methods created a boom in manufacturing production. Capital became plentiful as banks loosened the reins on credit to keep up with the growth. The stock market shot up.

New money in the marketplace, coupled with a white-hot economy, spurred innovation and consumer spending. Wages of working Americans grew, and the onset of installment buying allowed them to purchase more for their families. The 1920s marked a consumer goods revolution—electric toasters, irons, phonographs, radios, plumbing fixtures, and automobiles. While immigrants and black Americans still faced discrimination and tough economic prospects, most of the country prospered.

In November 1920, KDKA in Pittsburgh would begin service, marking the birth of regular American radio broadcasting. Two years later, there would be five hundred stations on the air. The movie business also grew during the 1920s, as the American public flocked to theaters to see Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin.

American business was at the pinnacle of its influence. About two hundred corporations controlled more than 20 percent of the nation’s wealth. The large corporations thrived, both financially and in the public’s eyes; companies like International Harvester, H. J. Heinz, Singer Sewing, Ford, General Motors, U.S. Steel, AT&T, and du Pont saw themselves not only as leaders in their industries, not only as job-creation machines, but as leading institutions in society. As wages grew and labor opportunities abounded in the 1920s, Big Business saw itself as a benefactor that bestowed both financial rewards and a sense of self-worth to those whom it employed. By developing new, often revolutionary products, by moving the country forward, Big Business believed it was doing more than making money; it was doing something
virtuous
. “The man who builds a factory builds a temple—the man who works there worships there,” Calvin Coolidge said.

It is hard to overestimate the symbolic impact of Warren Harding’s inauguration, the overwhelming sense of excitement and promise it created among America’s entrepreneurial and corporate elite. The power and influence of Big Business had been curtailed during Wilson’s eight-year tenure, profitable war years notwithstanding; corporate leaders believed that a Republican administration offered virtually limitless prospects, new hope at the start of a new decade.

USIA and its lead attorney, Charles Choate, must have felt some of that hope. Choate’s case had absorbed a series of body blows by Damon Hall’s relentless procession of witnesses; perhaps the country’s changing mood toward business, exemplified by Harding’s resounding victory, would induce Hugh Ogden to look more favorably on USIA’s version of events.

Many of Boston’s finest private men’s clubs, several of which Ogden belonged to, had celebrated the GOP victory in November, most holding receptions for former governor Calvin Coolidge for becoming vice president-elect. Choate believed that Coolidge and Harding, without doubt, were Ogden’s kind of men. If the new president, elected by an electoral and popular landslide, was calling for the “omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business,” then certainly Ogden would
have
to consider whether a decision against USIA fell into the category of “unnecessary interference.” Certainly, he would have to think long and hard about the
ramifications
of such a decision. Would it stifle the expansion of plants and factories if they were required to attain
unattainable
levels of safety? Would it introduce a whole new layer of government regulations and restrictions even while a popular new president had clearly called for the opposite?

For the first time in years, warm winds, favorable to Big Business, were now blowing steadily from Washington. Warren G. Harding’s inauguration, and all that it bespoke, must have buoyed Charles Choate’s spirits and instilled cautious optimism in the defense. How long that optimism would prevail would depend on how well Arthur P. Jell stood up to questioning three weeks hence in New York City.

Hugh Ogden’s feelings about President Harding’s nomination are not part of the historical record, but Ogden’s writings and speeches indicate strongly that he would have cast a wary eye toward America’s economic prosperity, lest it cloud her vision on bedrock issues of fairness and justice for all citizens.

In a Memorial Day speech in the near future, Ogden would observe: “We have prospered. We have sold goods at high prices. We have accumulated the largest stock of gold any nation ever possessed, but have we done anymore than that? Have we in our blindness gained the whole world and lost our own soul? It was not to ensure material prosperity that our soldiers fought and died … that the relations of capital and labor might be still further embittered … We must administer our government upon the broadest and most humanitarian lines so that each citizen shall receive his full inheritance in good roads, good schools, adequate opportunities for higher education, hospital facilities, libraries … and other institutions that are a public charge for the public good.”