Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [51]
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“THE BUSINESS Of AMERICA IS BUSINESS”
DESPITE THE CORRUPTION OF MANY OF THE MEN WITH WHOM Harding had surrounded himself, Calvin Coolidge’s typically succinct 1924 campaign slogan, “Coolidge or Chaos,” still appeared to reflect the political reality. All through the 1920s the Democratic Party, torn apart by bitter internal divisions, seemed out of touch and unelectable, competing against a party that spoke for middle America’s hopes and aspirations. The Republican Party were seen to be making America prosper—and against that argument, the Democrats had no response.
Warren Harding (President from 1920-23), Calvin Coolidge (1923-28) and Herbert Hoover (1929-32) were all elected by vast majorities. All three believed in small, non-interventionist government; all three believed that the interests of big business were synonymous with the national interest—and therefore that business ought to be given what Coolidge called a “free hand.” It was the age, wrote Malcolm Cowley, “when directors’ meetings were more important than Cabinet meetings and when the national destiny was being decided by middle-aged bankers and corporation executives.”
“What we need in America is less government in business and more business in government,” declared Harding when appointing as his Treasury Secretary the austere banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon, the third-richest man in the United States after John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. Mellon, heir to those nineteenth-century capitalists who believed that the rich were uniquely suited to arrange the affairs of the rest of mankind, resigned from fifty-one directorships to take up his government post. He served at the Treasury until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1932, pursuing two objectives: to reduce public debt and to lower taxes. In both of these he was successful.
Immediately after the Great War, an economic downturn brought with it industrial action and striking workers, but business, supported by the government, stood firm. Supreme Court decisions in the late 1910s and early 1920s upheld the rights of industry over the rights of child workers and women, declaring it unconstitutional for the Government to regulate labor conditions, and illegal for unionization or picketing to be mandatory. Trade unions were systematically undermined. In 1920 the president of Bethlehem Steel (an industry which had gone on strike across the nation the previous year) announced that he would not recognize a union even if 95 percent of his workers belonged to one. He was backed up by Harry Daugherty, the Attorney-General, who said that he would do all he could “to prevent the labor unions of the country from destroying the Open Shop.”
Replacing unions, altruistic companies—it was thought—would look after their workers, providing them with health insurance, baseball teams and glee clubs. Successful businesses would share their profits with workers in the form of high wages. The worker could then encourage industry by spending and, if he were clever, could even buy his own share in it by investing in the stock market.
Each successive administration continued to develop this idea of “welfare capitalism.” Easy-going Harding simply wanted to see everyone prosper; Coolidge believed that government functioned best as a “businessman’s government”; Hoover, a former head of the Department of Commerce, campaigned on the message that the United States would thrive if business thrived. “Wealth creation,” the pursuit of money for its own sake, was lauded as natural, even noble. Coolidge said, “Brains are wealth and wealth is the chief aim of man.”
Businessmen were seen (and saw themselves) as creative, daring and public-spirited. Even Al Capone tried to promote an image of himself as an entrepreneurial benefactor rather than a hood. The American businessman had replaced “the statesman, the priest, the philosopher, as the creator of standards of ethics and behavior.” By 1928, one-time progressives like the journalist Walter Lippmann had been converted to the new dogma. Businessmen,