Coolidge and Hoover

 Even those in the city or the suburbs who did not make a fortune benefited from rising standards of living. They read the sophisticated advertisements, visited the expanding chain stores, admired a cornucopia of goods (many wrapped in the glistening new substance of cellophane), succumbed to salesmanship as slickly synthetic as rayon or plastic, and bought exciting "durables" like vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, coffee percolators, phonographs, telephones and radios. Auto-mobiles, naturally, were the prime icons in this consumer revolution. And by 1925 Henry Ford's assembly line was turning out a Model T every ten seconds. Buying on the instalment plan, factory workers themselves could acquire a Tin Lizzie, which sold for as little as 30o dollars. But few of those who built the cars relished the dictatorial brand of welfare capitalism which caused Ford to be described as "an industrial Fascist—the Mussolini of Detroit." Automobiles were vehicles of emancipation. They took city folks with leisure to the baseball game, the speakeasy or the cinema (a secular shrine now more patronised than the church). Holiday-makers drove to the sea-side where they wore skin-tight swimsuits and acquired a tan; before the war genteel people had protected their pallor from the glare—but this was the era of the "solar revolution" and heliotherapy was all the rage. Cars fostered a more mobile frame of mind (as well as ribbon developments of gas stations and hot dog stands). Flappers in flivvers set new fashions. They abandoned their chaperones, discarded their corsets, bobbed their hair, rouged their cheeks, painted their fingernails, wore flesh-coloured stockings, drank cocktails and smoked in public—the sale of cigarettes increased from 47 billion in 192o to 125 billion in 1930. Mat they did in private was a subject of much prurient speculation. The practice of vamping seemed suggestive. So did the vogue for "It," defined by Elinor Glyn as "that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes." There were grounds for regarding dances like the Charleston and the Black Bottom as syncopated sensuality, and cheek-to-cheek foxtrots were thought to be vertical indications of horizontal inclinations. Freud was almost as popular as Ford. It was commonly supposed that as hemlines went up morals went down. And moralists denounced automobiles as mobile houses of prostitution. Probably there was an increase in promiscuity. It was stimulated by the new tabloid press ( The Graphic was known as "The Pornographic") and by Prohibition, introduced in 1919, which led to a widespread flouting of traditional standards. In the view of Colonel Robert McCormick, boss of the Chicago Tribune, even the Teapot Dome oil affair (a notorious government corruption scandal) was the fault of Prohibition, which had turned the United States into a nation of lawbreakers. There was certainly a grow-ing acceptance of divorce. But sex was by no means the only American preoccupation in an age which witnessed crazes for mah-jongg, Cou6ism (an early form of psychotherapy), marathon dances, crossword puzzles and miniature golf; or which hero-worshipped Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey, Rudy Vallee and Charles Lindbergh, to say nothing of a host of movie stars. The car itself could be as much of a distraction from sex as an encouragement to it. John Steinbeck was doubtless exaggerating in Cannery Row when he said that most babies were conceived in Model Ts; but he may well have been right to say that two generations of Ameri-cans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris. Meanwhile, down on farms lit by kerosene lamps and approached over dirt roads, rural America endured dearth amid plenty thanks to chronic over-production together with low prices, and revolted against the spree of the cities. Old Puritanism condemned new hedonism, especially where the illegal liquor business was concerned. But Prohibitionists were also protesting against an urban culture, a culture spawned by immigrants and deemed to be radical, degenerate and vicious. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which at its peak during the mid-192os attracted five million members, was also a form of rustic rebellion. True, the white-hooded Hydras, Kleagles, Terrors, Furies and Exalted Cyclopses of the "Invisible Empire" had legions of enemies, not just their traditional black targets in the countryside but a burgeoning city population of Catholics, Jews, aliens and assorted moral "deviants." Still here was bucolic bigotry combined with small-town fascism. Equally obscurantist were legislators who banned the teaching of evolution in several southern states, which led to the celebrated "Monkey Trial" in 1925. When John Thomas Scopes, a biology instructor, was fined TOO dollars for disseminating Darwinism at the Central High School in Day-ton, Tennessee, that flail of the "booboisie," H. L. Mencken, characteristically concluded that "the mob has made its superstitions official."69 In fact it was a reassertion of that old-time fundamentalism so deeply rooted in the soil of the countryside. Of course, the divide between metropolitan and rural life was never hard and fast. Progressive ideas, for example, flourished in the forests of Wisconsin and the cornfields of Nebraska. And even the most hardened urbanites cherished a nostalgia for a pastoral past. In his celebrated model village filled with antiques (including fiddlers playing square dances), Henry Ford tried to recreate it, as John Dos Passos said, so that everything might be the way it used to be, in the days of horses and buggies. Bound up with God, motherhood and apple pie, such Arcadian simplicities were so much a part of ideal America that even silent Calvin
Coolidge waxed lyrical about them. In his Autobiography, a deadly reflection of a desiccated personality; Coolidge eulogised the pristine, natural quality of New England life as he had experienced it in boyhood. Despite the drudgery and inconvenience, the rough overalls and cowhide boots, he enthused about picnics, parties, fairs and husking bees. "Even when I try to divest it of the halo which I know always surrounds the past," he wrote, "I am unable to create any other impression than that it was fresh and clean."  Honest, frugal, backward-looking and (in public at least) `.`as expansive as a letter-box," Coolidge seemed to embody immemorial American verities and values. Though not without sly and sometimes cruel wit, he spoke (when he spoke) in strings of cliches agreeable both to Main Street and to Park Row—when given their theme, a journalist such as James Thurber could report his speeches without the inconvenience of having to listen to them. After Harding's death in 1923, Coolidge was sworn in as President by his father, who was a notary public, at a simple ceremony in the lamp-lit living-room-cum-office of his white Plymouth house. Undemonstrative though he was, Coolidge permitted himself to be photographed hay-making during the 1924 election—his spotless smock was much mocked. Yet the small-town President was indulgent towards capitalists of great wealth. As that spokesman for Middle America William Allen White said, President Coolidge pitchforked the muck of oil and petty graft from the Augean stables of the White House, but he let in, all smartly frock-coated, plug-hatted, high-collared, bespatted and smugly proud, another crew which was to devastate his country more terribly than Harding's greasy playfellows. All the day the friends and emissaries of Kreuger, the match king, Insull, the utilities king, Wiggin, the wizard, Mitchell, the manipulator, Doherty, the monarch of gas, the Morgans, the Rockefellers, and Mellon in per-son, the bad and the good, unchecked and unidentified, sat at his council table.
Coolidge believed that government was the handmaiden of commerce. He also believed, more fervently than Jefferson himself, that less government was better government. So while big business grabbed "the country by the throat," as the Progressive senator George Norris remarked, Coolidge displayed a "genius" for "alert inactivity."This carrot-topped, blue-eyed, sharp-featured, freckle-faced, twangy-voiced chief executive was a political minimalist. When, in 1928, Treasury Department officials showed him how vital it was to control the runaway investment market, the President froze them off with a blast of silence. Then, like the good husbandman he was, Coolidge spent the afternoon in the basement of the White House counting the apples in a barrel sent to him by a friend from Vermont. Coolidge's successor, Herbert Hoover, was also a countryman, the first president to be born west of the Mississippi. Hoover made much of his idyllic youth amid the Iowan corn, where his father had been a Quaker blacksmith. He extolled the delights of Aunt Millie's cooking, the joys of the swimming hole, the thrill of Indian taught hunting, the happiness of fishing with a willow pole and "butcher-string line, fixed with hooks, ten for a dime, whose compelling lure is one segment of an angleworm and whose incantation is spitting on the bait."76 Of course, Hoover was no hick. Orphaned at a tender age, he had become a successful mining engi-neer, travelled all over the world and amassed at least a million dollars by the time he was 4o—he reckoned that anyone who could not make a for-tune by that age was "not worth much."77 Turning to public service, he had fulfilled his ambition to be a "food dictator"78 at home and abroad during and after the war. Hoover paid lip-service to cooperation, which meant that everyone should get together and do exactly as he told them. According to a member of his staff, he expressed himself in few words: "One was 'yes' and the other was 'no.'  But his "herculean efforts" saved "perhaps one-third of the population of postwar Europe" from starva-tion."' Moreover, tough and curt, pragmatic and idealistic, he refused to allow Western hostility towards Bolshevism to stop him from feeding mil-lions of Russians during the disastrous famine of 1921-2. As Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge, Hoover proved equally abrupt and adept. Laissez-faire was all very well but Hoover took action where necessary. Thus, for example, he controlled the distribution of radio frequencies. (This infuriated the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who told him to keep his "minions of Satan" away from her stations because when she offered prayers to the Almighty "I must fit into His wave reception."" Then she eloped on a motorcycle with Hoover's inspector.) Hoover was an early believer that radio was "the most important new instrument for intellectual communication since Gutenberg began to cast in movable type."82 And he was the first American president to appear on television. He was also, in the words of Walter Lippmann, "the first American President whose whole public career has been presented through the machinery of modern publicity . . . [which portrays] him as the master organizer, the irresistible engineer, the supreme economist."83 As Secretary of Commerce Hoover issued a plethora of publicity material and as Republican candidate for the presidency he employed the most sophisticated propaganda techniques. One of his advisers was the New York advertising man Bruce Barton, who had done such a remarkable job of promoting Jesus Christ in The Man Nobody Knows (1925)—the Son of God was famously billed as a dynamic entrepreneur who had taken twelve men from the lowest rungs of business life and created an organisation which changed the world. Barton's talents were deployed to point out that Hoover was not, as H. L. Mencken charged, "a fat Coolidge." Rather he was a progressive conservative, a forward-looking political engineer who was at the same time wedded to the homespun val-ues of American individualism. Hoover had seen American farmers, whom he had encouraged to over-produce during the war, reduced almost to the status of peasants during the 192os. Mencken went so far as to say that farmers were not members of the human race. But Hoover lost no opportunity to praise them. They were a breed set apart from "the insidi-ous forces of moral degeneration which are such corroding influences in the life of our great cities."
from: The Dark Valley