My Amazon Review of David Pietrusza's "1920: The Year of Six Presidents"

 

A Rocky Road to Normalcy

 

1920 was quite a year. The 18^th Amendment (prohibition) was enforced, the 19^th Amendment was ratified (Women’s Suffrage), the Palmer raids against radicals continued, the Ku Klux Klan was revived, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for murder, and the North discovered there was a large African American population living in its major cities as a result of the wartime demand for labor. Into this hothouse comes the 1920 presidential election.

 

Author David Pietrusza highlights the role of six presidents who played key roles in that year’s election. First there is Theodore Roosevelt who in late 1918 after Republican congressional victories became the odds-on favorite for the nomination. Unfortunately, he dies in early 1919 and his chosen successor General Leonard Wood fails to win the Republican nomination. Then there is President Woodrow Wilson who was ready to run for an unprecedented third term but was incapacitated by a stroke that enabled his wife Edith to become the de facto president. We see young and charismatic Franklin Roosevelt advancing to become the Democratic nominee for Vice President. Before that he was talked about running for Vice President under Herbert Hoover on the Democratic ticket.

 

Of course, Hoover would ultimately acknowledge that he was a Republican. Hoover was extraordinarily popular in his role to feed famine struck Europe and even Keynes noted that Hoover was one of the few people who came out of the Versailles Conference with an enhanced reputation.

 

On the Republican side we see the very amiable and very flawed Warren Harding win the nomination under the aegis of his corrupt campaign manager Harry Dougherty. Harding’s affairs and illegitimate children would have made Bill Clinton blush. In a multi-ballot affair, the Republican leadership settles on Harding in the famous Room 404 of the Blackstone Hotel which forever after would be called the smoke-filled room. When a delegate from Oregon nominates Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge for Vice President a genuine stampede on the floor of the convention leads to his nomination. Coolidge is known for breaking the Boston police strike in 1919.

 

The Democratic Convention is also a multi-ballot affair that leads to the nomination of Ohio governor James Cox, a favorite of the big city bosses. Unlike the Republican Convention the Democratic bosses left no tracks. Ironically both Harding and Cox are newspaper publishers from the same state. Nevertheless, the decision of the voter in November was clear. Both Harding and the Republicans in congress won a blowout victory. One of Harding’s first acts is to pardon Socialist candidate Eugene Debs who was serving in prison, an act that Wilson refused to do.

 

Where Pietrusza is acute is his character sketches of the book’s major protagonists. Wilson is a stubborn old man, Harding is in way over his head, Hoover, though brilliant is cold and austere and Coolidge, though quiet is a dedicated public servant. This book is a great read for political junkies. I learned that the Republicans put a mild anti-lynching plank written by the NAACP and that the seeds for Roosevelt’s 1932 run were planted in 1920 where he collected the names of leading Democrats throughout the country during his vice-presidential campaign.

For the full Amazon URL see: A Rocky Road to Normalcy (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Richard White's "The Republic for Which it Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896"

History with a 21^st Century Liberal Bias

Stanford professor Richard White is a distinguished historian; I only have amateur status. While reading White’s encyclopedic history of post-civil war America you get the impression that he is looking to shock the sensibilities of 21^st Century liberals by highlighting racism, the plight of laborers and farmers, the corruption of government and the greed of the emerging capitalist class.

To be sure the post-civil war era was no bed of roses, but if Lincoln came back from the dead and looked upon the America of 1896 he would have been largely pleased. The Whig in Lincoln, after all he was an admirer of Henry Clay’s American  System,  would have been pleased to see the success of the Pacific Railway Act, the Homestead Act and the Morrill Act (land grant colleges). America truly became a country from sea to shining sea, surpassed Britain as an industrial power and was about to take its place on the world stage. Of course as White rightfully notes the Native Americans were far from being partners in this process. Nation building is messy.

The free labor Lincoln might have been a bit disappointed in that industrial workers instead of being free were in fact “slaves” to the industrialists. This last point White makes over and over. However industrial workers were far from being slaves and far from being a majority of the workforce and even with the urbanization that took place in the 30 years after the civil war, America was still an agricultural country with a small town economy. And as bad as factory conditions were, immigrants from Europe continued to pile in. Simply put higher real wages and freedom remained a big draw.  Moreover, White ignores the rise of the middle class who would read the muckraking journals that were just beginning to make their appearance in the 1890s.  

The idea that White doesn’t seem to get is that the America of the 1870s was an “emerging market.” Where he is shocked about the governmental corruption that took place, I view it as a stage in the growth of the economy. Industrialization is messy and that is why crony capitalism and emerging markets go hand in hand. He also makes a side comment that American growth was slow compared to some of the faster growing economies of the 20^th century. Of course it was because America was inventing the stuff that the 20^th century economies had the benefit of copying.

Although White cites the excellent work in Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” he doesn’t take it to heart. (See https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2016/02/my-amazon-review-of-robert-j-gordons.html )   Productivity growth was strong and real wages were rising. The U.S. was experiencing a “good” deflation, not a bad one as gains in productivity were translated into lower prices. Indeed the return to the gold standard, which White is critical of and it had a lot to do with the deflation, but it laid the basis of America becoming a global economic power at the dawn of the next century. The late 1800s truly were truly an age on invention and the locus of invention was largely in America.

All of the class issues that White discusses were fought out in the election of 1896. William McKinley’s defeat of William Jennings Bryan was a resounding vote for the gold standard and against the class-based reforms proposed by Bryan. Highlighting the rise of the new middle class is the fact that 750,000 people visited McKinley’s home to hear him give campaign speeches. These folks weren’t the tribunes of capitalism or White’s downtrodden workers and farmers, but rather they were of the rising middle class.

The one area where I know Lincoln would have been disappointed is the failure of reconstruction. Here the Republicans punted and turned the south over to the Ku Klux Klan, the armed wing of the Democratic Party. As White notes, the Republican traded the south for the west. I wish he would have spent more time on President James Garfield, whose was shot at the beginning of his term. If there was anyone who could have halted Jim Crow, it would have been him. We will never know.

I am sure White’s book will win its share of awards, but for me it was a disappointment. He should take off his liberal blinders and look at the world as it was.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1TWNN5VYQ0HO0/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv