WARREN G. HARDING: A SIMPLETON AND CAPITALIST MODERNIZER DECLARES “AMERICA FIRST”
Such was the state of the nation in June 1920 when the Republican Party chose Warren Harding as their candidate for president. Harding was destined for a “troubled presidency” when he entered the White House in 1921 amid crises at home and abroad: a general economic nosedive, the great collapse of agricultural prices, widespread labor unrest, an increase of lynchings in the South, and, of course, the Red Scare.20 Harding’s clear intent as a candidate and incoming president was to lead the country in a return to “normalcy.” “By ‘normalcy’ I don’t mean the old order,” he declared, “but a regular steady order of things.”21 Normalcy for Harding did not mean “a retreat into the past but an orderly system for progress.”22 As an experienced politician, Harding knew what he was doing. When he told Americans that what they wanted was “not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration,” Harding was expressing the desire of the mainstream to move on from the political maelstrom of 1919. To do that required a new vibrancy in American life conducive to business success and the road toward progress. His personal charm and gregariousness enabled him to slap the back of anyone who mattered at the moment. For historian Sean Dennis Cashman, Harding was nothing more than an “amiable simpleton manipulated by sinister forces.”23 But he was more than that. Harding was the first of three Republican presidents during the prosperous 1920s, whose idea of normalcy served as an ideological cover for the titans of American capitalism to expand their powers at home and abroad. Although not the first president to swear that he would make “America First,” the slogan carried new weight as the Republican Party made it central to Harding’s campaign. This made Harding the perfect front man for capitalist modernization on the grandest scale ever because he actually understood his role in facilitating it.
We see this clearly in Harding’s speech to Congress when he aspired to be what the Saturday Evening Post wanted most in a president when it declared that America needed “a businessman” in the White House.24 On April 12, 1921, the new president reminded lawmakers that he had said as much during his campaign:
I have said to the people we meant to have less of Government in business as well as more business in Government. It is well to have it understood that business has a right to pursue its normal, legitimate, and righteous way unimpeded, and it ought have no call to meet Government competition where all risk is borne by the Public Treasury. There is no challenge to honest and lawful business success.25
Harding explained that the federal government would take the lead by becoming more like a business, which meant its own bottom line was to cut government spending to fall “within the limits of national income.” To achieve this, he heartily endorsed a “national budget system” on the basis of “business methods so essential to the minimum of expenditure.” This would also be crucial to holding down the public debt, which was already “staggering” from the wartime economy. Dire consequences were in store if such steps were not taken. “The unrestrained tendency to heedless expenditure and the attending growth of public indebtedness, extending from federal authority to that of state and municipality and including the smallest political subdivision, constitute the dangerous phase of government today,” Harding told Congress. Admitting in his typical jumbled English that government had been “illy prepared” for the transition to a peacetime economy, he was confident that the American people “had appraised the situation, and with that tolerance and patience which go with understanding, they will give us the influence of deliberate public opinion which ultimately becomes the edict of any popular government.” What?
To that end, he called upon Congress to work urgently to achieve two critical objectives. First, it should consider a “readjustment of internal taxes,” especially the removal of those deemed “unproductive.” This is how government could help to revive business activity. At the same time, he sought to allay fears of any shift in the tax burden by emphasizing that cutting government costs would eliminate any necessity for creating new taxes that would impede the free movement of business. The other urgent matter was to protect American business from foreign competition with “an instant tariff enactment.” As Harding professed:
I believe in the protection of American industry, and it is our purpose to prosper America first. The privileges of the American market to the foreign producer are offered so cheaply today, and the effect on much of our own productivity is the destruction of our self-reliance, which is the foundation of the independence and good fortune of our people.
As a proponent of capitalist modernization, Harding emphasized the need to build up communications networks, especially radio and cable and stressed the importance of new investments in commercial aviation beyond government funding.
Some historians have captured the modernizing bent in Harding’s presidency. “His background as a businessman from a small town not only shaped his political views but also gave him the important political advantage of seeming to represent both big business and the rural past.” As a longtime businessman in Marion, Ohio, and the publisher of its daily newspaper, Harding had learned how vital it was to channel the aspirations of merchants and family farmers in small-town and rural America to the imperial visions of corporate owners and big bankers, and to do so by justifying it on moral and religious grounds. Private enterprise was the “regular order of things” and would save America from decay, he said. “American business was not a monster but the expression of a God-given power to create.”26
For one of Harding’s contemporaries, Richard Franklin Pettigrew, American business was a beast and Harding was chosen by Republican elites to ride it. Pettigrew, one of the strongest and most respected anti-imperialist voices in the country and a longtime leader of middle-class, progressive radicalism in the mid-western states, and the first elected senator from South Dakota in 1899, easily recognized who wanted Harding to be the Republican nominee for president and why. They were all “men who put the United States into the European war … [and] are out for empire,” as Pettigrew put it in his 1923 book, Imperial Washington. Though the party powerbrokers and imperialists had preferred other candidates, they had finally settled on Harding because he was “the man least objectionable and most certain to stand right on their plans to exploit the rest of the world.” Citing a record of Harding’s accomplishments, Pettigrew wrote that “on every important test between capital and labor, he voted with capital.”27
Indeed, Harding did the bidding of capital as a skillful politician highly conscious of the need to represent the whole spectrum of capitalist society while serving party elites who were confident he would promote their interests. His administration quickly initiated legislation aimed at advancing the interests of monopoly and finance capital, among them: lowering taxes, especially on corporations and wealthy individuals; cutting the size of federal bureaucracy; and imposing stronger tariffs to protect U.S. corporations, whose rising exports now drove the world economy. He chose some of the most qualified, wealthy, and powerful capitalist elites to fill key cabinet positions: Andrew Mellon as Treasury secretary, Charles Hughes to lead the State Department, and Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce. All proved highly capable in making Washington subservient to the dictates of Wall Street.28 Mellon, one of the five richest men in the world, promptly drafted legislation that Congress made into law with passage of the Revenue Act of 1921. Taxes on the wealthy were reduced significantly as lawmakers shifted the burden of making up for shortfalls with several indirect taxes, doubling the stamp tax on documents and introducing a federal license tax on cars. According to Sean Dennis Cashman, the Revenue Act amounted to nothing more than a “specious justification for the relief of the rich” so they would be freed from burdensome taxation that would prohibit them from further creative and productive investment.29 Under Harding, trickle-down economics was born.
At the same time, Harding was also a petty-bourgeois reactionary and white supremacist whose leadership in restricting immigration was central to the doctrine of 100 percent Americanism. Defending segregation in his April 12 speech to Congress, he made a lame attempt to address the spike in racist violence and the number of African Americans lynched. He called on Congress “to wipe out the stain of barbaric lynching from the banners of a free and orderly