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Culture Clash and Politics in the 1920's · Saberian History Lectures

• 0:00
  So, we were talking about reactions to the abrupt and decisive changes that occurred
• 0:06
  in American society in the period from 1910 to 1920.
• 0:11
  Now, I kind of want to get ahead of myself here, is America goes through a whole bunch
• 0:19
  of changes.
• 0:20
  You go through commercial changes with the rise of the consumer economy, where you are
• 0:29
  buying things for them to eventually lose value and be disposed of.
• 0:33
  By the way, what is the major consumable good that people were making payments on and lost
• 0:37
  value over time?
• 0:39
  Automobiles.
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  Automobiles.
• 0:43
  That was the article I gave you where you want to leave the customer just a little bit
• 0:47
  unsatisfied so that they will buy the next model.
• 0:51
  Sound familiar?
• 0:52
  Actually, the debt cycle of automotive, how many of you are drive?
• 1:00
  How many of you are making a car payment of a type?
• 1:03
  Many of you, and don't worry when you're in the big bad world, you will.
• 1:07
  We even see this peppering our culture so much that, okay, how many of you saw the film
• 1:13
  Frozen?
• 1:14
  Do you remember the scene where the sled goes into the ravine?
• 1:22
  I just paid it off, where Christoph's sled goes into the ravine because they're being
• 1:27
  chased by wolves.
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  He said, but I just paid it off with a whimper.
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  You get the idea.
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  That idea of credit economy has so peppered our culture that it even made its way into
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  a child's fairy tale.
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  Now I submit to you in a post-medieval fantasy world like that, you don't make payments on
• 1:47
  a sled.
• 1:48
  Actually, that would be, well, yes.
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  Anyway, so you have a consumer economy.
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  You also have changes to the demography of the United States as immigration resumes.
• 2:01
  So you have the cultural conflict between immigrants from southern and eastern Europe
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  and what we would call nativist Americans.
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  This would be your white Anglo-Sax and Protestant people from the hinterland who had been here
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  for multiple generations.
• 2:20
  One of the places where that plays out, and then you also have the shift in the intellectual
• 2:25
  culture where you have biblical fundamentalists in conflict with interpretationists and secular
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  humanists.
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  So we'll just say fundamentalists versus the academy or versus academics, although there
• 2:48
  are plenty of academics that have sprung up around biblical fundamentalism now.
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  And so each of these becomes sort of a battleground.
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  And so we think of this in terms of prohibition and immigration acts in the demographics as
• 3:05
  an abrupt and decisive change that an immigration law, in the intellectual history, all of a
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  sudden the schools become a battleground.
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  And even you see the rise of the new Klan as a response to immigration.
• 3:33
  And of course the Klan was anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-Darwin.
• 3:40
  So here's a photo from the Scopes Monkey Trial.
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  John T. Scopes had the revolutionary audacity to teach evolution in a biology class in Dayton,
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  Tennessee.
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  Now why was it against the law for John T. Scopes to teach evolution in biology in the
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  state of Tennessee?
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  Now just Christianity.
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  There was another implied idea that the book doesn't fully flesh out.
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  This was not an issue of free speech.
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  This was an issue of free intellectual thought except who was John T. Scopes working for?
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  The school, which was being funded by what?
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  The state.
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  The state previously had a state any compunction to interfere in an instructor's purview.
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  But now it's the state's money and now it's the state that is imposing the obligation
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  upon the children to be educated.
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  Would such a criminal prosecution have occurred even a hundred years earlier?
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  No, because who funded education back then?
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  Nope.
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  No one.
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  You had private tutors or you went to private school or you were being educated through
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  the church apparatus.
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  You were under no obligation in the 18th or even into the early 19th century to attend
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  school beyond fourth grade.
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  And so you have the progressive idea of compulsory education running into the fundamentalist
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  idea of teaching the biblical truth.
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  And so John T. Scopes broke the law.
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  He was put on trial.
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  He did of course lose his teaching position.
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  It was a test case for the ACLU.
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  The ACLU puts up Clarence Darrow, a New York attorney, and the state of Tennessee got William
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  Jennings Bryan to prosecute the case.
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  Now of course William Jennings Bryan had at that time run for president at least twice,
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  was a darling of the Democratic Party, was a darling of the populist movement, was an
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  orator of no ill repute.
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  But it was branded the trial of the century broadcast over radio and over newspapers.
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  It was a spectacle.
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  Scopes was found guilty, was made to pay a fine, and the fine was waived.
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  Fine was waived by the judge because the question for the jury was did Scopes teach evolution?
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  Yes.
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  What was being argued?
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  Was that actually a crime?
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  And so really what the defense was asking for was jury nullification.
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  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, jury nullification is where a jury
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  finds a person not guilty of a crime even though they had broken the law because the
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  law is somehow considered inappropriate or immoral.
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  That's jury nullification.
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  In this case the Tennessee jury did not wish to nullify the law but the judge set aside
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  the consequences.
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  Now just as if you thought your world wasn't ending already, you had in 1918 you had the
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  world at war, you had the flu pandemic, and then you have the passage of prohibition.
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  Prohibition comes into effect.
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  Now I don't know about you but maybe after the war and the flu pandemic and maybe when
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  the guys found out that the women were voting maybe some people could have used a good stiff
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  drink but that wasn't going to happen.
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  No?
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  Too soon?
• 7:15
  Alright.
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  So you have, now think about this for a moment, prohibition was prohibiting the consumption
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  and sale but primarily the sale not the consumption of alcohol.
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  Prohibiting the sale of alcohol not prohibiting the consumption.
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  What could possibly go wrong?
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  Is it actually against the law to consume?
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  Only to what?
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  To sell under the auspices of the government's power of interstate commerce.
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  Now here's the thing that's kind of fun.
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  Where do people drink?
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  Where else?
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  Everywhere yes.
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  At home and in saloons.
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  In cars not so much.
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  I mean automobiles are not so prolific.
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  But if you think about it as a law if you're going to get people to stop drinking all of
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  a sudden you are interfering with what aspect of their life?
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  Everything.
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  Both private and social.
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  Now I say this in a community that actually has deep German roots would it be taboo in
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  a German family for your child to have a beer with dinner?
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  Or wine with dinner?
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  That actually is quite frequent in the old country.
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  So you're not just closing down the bars you're getting into people's homes.
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  Now who else drinks alcohol as a matter of religious practice?
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  The Roman Catholic Church.
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  Now they had to make special dispensation so that the body and blood of Christ according
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  to their religious tradition could be maintained.
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  Not that the government was about to have the ATF bust into the chapel and put the bishop
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  in a choke hold although some of you are visualizing that and that's one of the virtues of visual
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  language and some of you think it's funny.
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  That tells me that some of you have an appetite for human cruelty.
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  But anyway.
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  In response you have the rise of organized crime syndicate that were running booze into
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  the country because it was not illegal to drink in Canada.
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  It was not illegal to drink in Mexico.
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  It was not illegal to drink in other parts of the world.
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  And so you have and also how else can you have alcohol just because maybe Anheuser-Busch
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  took a break and some of your other major alcoholic producers took a break because of
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  the prohibition.
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  What else can you do?
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  Sneak it but also how many of you know people who brew at home?
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  Well, there's moonshine and there's a homebrewment for beer in this area.
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  It's a rather sort of a hipster thing to do now.
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  I know people who were doing it before it was cool.
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  I just realized I just became the hipster meme.
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  All I needed were the glasses.
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  But anyway.
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  But yeah you have people making their own.
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  Actually nowadays moonshine has become a regulated trade in the United States which there are
• 10:26
  now hipster connoisseurs for moonshine.
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  But anyway.
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  So organized crime is often a response to it.
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  Now here's a thing that you need to keep in mind.
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  So if I'm looking at the Wilson administration from 1916 to 1920.
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  What are the hallmarks of the Wilson regime?
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  What was Wilson politically?
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  Wilson was a Democrat.
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  He was a progressive Democrat.
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  Now what's interesting about Wilson's progressivism, he was progressive.
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  He was a Democrat.
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  And he was a Southern Democrat.
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  From Virginia originally.
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  Taught at Princeton.
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  He was a professor of political science.
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  Which at the time was a relatively speaking new discipline.
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  What happened, what were the aspects of the progressive agenda?
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  Well you have women's suffrage.
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  What else?
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  You have regulation of business both before the war and after.
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  And what else do you have?
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  The war itself.
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  What did the war require?
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  You have an increase in taxes.
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  And you have the government of the United States getting into industry production, running
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  a propaganda arm, turning itself on the communists.
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  You have a massive expansion of the government apparatus both in terms of the domestic apparatus
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  in the form of the war industries board, in the form of other rationing programs, and
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  also in the security apparatus as you are funding the army and navy of the United States
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  to be a world power.
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  But here is the thing.
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  What did the United States get out of the war?
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  For all the blood, for all the treasure, for all the people who had died, what did they
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  have to show for it?
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  Did they have an additional state?
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  Did they have an additional territory?
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  Did they have tribute coming in from France or from England as a show of admiration or
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  gratitude?
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  What did the United States get out of their intervention into the world?
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  Nothing.
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  Instead, out of the war comes Wilson's 14 points.
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  Now I'm going to recap the 14 points just for a moment.
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  And with just enough snarks that you would actually feel the disdain because in many
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  ways you are living in the legacy of that man and your world burns for it.
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  You have the creation of weak states in Europe.
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  Weak states become the kindling for fascism.
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  Wilson didn't know.
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  You have the demilitarization of Germany, which seemed like a good idea at the time.
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  Unfortunately that made Germany a weak state for the kindling of fascism.
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  You have the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.
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  Let me give you some country names that were divvied up among the imperial powers of France
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  and Britain, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia.
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  All but one of those is a war zone right now because when they drew the maps, they drew
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  the maps for the imperial powers of Europe.
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  They didn't draw the maps according to the ethnic lines of the people.
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  The subject peoples were deliberately left out.
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  But that wasn't why the American people were upset.
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  The American people were dissatisfied because there was one last point in the philosopher
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  king's panoply of brilliant ideas.
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  What was the last point?
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  The League of Nations.
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  So the United States spent blood and treasure to fight a war over there, suffered the taxation,
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  suffered the bureaucracy, suffered the expansion of the government, all to create a one world
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  government that would tell the American people how they should govern their own country.
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  That's what many would say in the 1920s.
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  Now the thing that's actually funny is after this adventure with this philosopher king,
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  the Republican argument was fairly simple.
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  Make America normal again.
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  So here's Harding.
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  Harding was a pro-business Republican.
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  I'm going to put that over here.
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  He was an Ohio senator.
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  He was the son of a farmer.
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  And he basically said his fundamental argument was America needs a return to normalcy.
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  No nostrums, no great adventures, no great brilliant philosophical points.
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  It was very much to have some type of return to normalcy after a tumultuous decade that
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  had preceded it.
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  So let's get to, oh by the way, what happened to Wilson?
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  Did he run for re-election?
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  No, he had his two terms.
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  Who ran?
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  Cox, a person of very little repute, I mean very little name recognition, and FDR.
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  I wasn't laughing, I'm talking about, but FDR was, I know, and that's more to cut out
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  of the tape.
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  Cox and FDR.
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  So FDR ran for the VP slot, and then Harding ran with Coolidge.
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  Coolidge in many ways was unremarkable.
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  Harding prevails.
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  Like I say, people were tired.
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  Andrew Mellon is tapped to run either Treasury or Commerce.
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  It's off the top of my head right now.
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  So now let's talk about the legacy.
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  Because really, this contrast between progressives and conservatives is laid bare in the 1920s.
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  So let's talk about this for a moment.
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  So under Wilson, and I put Wilson up there not as he advocated a position, but as the
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  government was left off when he left off.
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  So you have taxes.
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  So both to fund the war and to fund the expansion of the government apparatus, the highest tax
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  break in the United States was 73%.
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  I mean, 73% of your income you gave to the government of the United States.
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  So that's your top bracket.
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  Under Harding, by the end of the Harding-Coolidge administration, I put this as a single period,
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  the end of Harding-Coolidge, by 1929, the lowest tax rate was down to 24%.
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  What does that do?
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  If you are Harding, why?
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  Why do you lower taxes?
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  There is an ethical reason and there is a political reason.
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  And there is a commercial reason.
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  Politically, it's not going to be so hard to vote for you again?
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  Economically.
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  Economically, if the government is not taxing it, that money goes back into circulation,
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  right?
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  If people aren't taxed, what do they presumably do with the money that they do not have to
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  pay in taxes?
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  They either buy consumer goods or they invest it in stock or they somehow otherwise put
• 19:26
  it back into the economy.
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  So actually the tax cuts in the 1920s are a source of capital that funds the economic
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  boom.
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  The other source of capital is credit.
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  Credit, what am I talking about?
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  Talked about it on Friday.
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  Layaway.
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  You don't have to pay for it all up front.
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  That means you can actually extend your loans and buy more things.
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  So you have the tax cuts, which means you're not paying as much in taxes.
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  You have the credit economy that allows you to put things on layaway.
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  This is part of the reason why you had such robust economic growth in the 1920s.
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  Does that make sense?
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  So it's not just layaway, it's also the tax cuts.
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  Now, what's the moral reason for cutting taxes?
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  What is taxation if you really think about it?
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  You work, you get paid, and the government takes it.
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  One sociologist once said, taxation is merely pro-social theft.
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  You get the idea.
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  Now, I'm going to keep going real quick.
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  Yeah?
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  How much does the government take out of our paychecks?
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  Have you looked at your last paycheck?
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  I would say they usually take about one fourth and then you get it back in the form of a
• 20:52
  tax return.
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  By the way, don't forget to file your tax returns.
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  All right.
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  Now another aspect of the Wilsonian Progressive Agenda was regulating corporations.
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  Now, so you have the creation of a number of government entities for regulating corporations
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  under the Wilson regime.
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  Those corporations, or those regulatory agencies are authorized by Congress.
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  As a president, can you dismantle a regulatory agency?
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  No.
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  Congress has to do that if you're going to can a regulatory agency.
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  As Ronald Reagan once said, a regulatory agency is the closest thing that one will have to
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  eternal life in this world.
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  But what can you do as president?
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  You can appoint pro-business regulators to head up those agencies.
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  Business is the business of the government of these United States.
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  Okay.
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  Actually kind of interesting, Harding begins a desegregation process in the Civil Service.
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  Who had segregated the Civil Service?
• 22:19
  Wilson, son of the South.
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  Used the domestic law enforcement apparatus to attack the Klan, whereas previously the
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  Klan had been part of Woodrow Wilson's political coalition.
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  And The Birth of a Nation was one of Wilson's favorite movies.
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  Okay, a couple of things.
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  In the Harding administration, you actually have the lowest unemployment rate in American
• 23:03
  history.
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  Unemployment was 2.4.
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  That's full employment.
• 23:09
  You go south of 5, you're considered at full employment.
• 23:14
  Okay.
• 23:17
  One other thing that you need to keep in mind.
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  What's one thing that the Wilson administration had to pay a very large sum of money on?
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  Military spending.
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  You had to fund the troops in the field, also there were designs to expand the United States
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  as a naval power.
• 23:43
  If you are Warren G. Harding and you're trying to cut taxes, you also know that you have
• 23:49
  to cut spending.
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  And so one of the things that Harding actually does is he changes the foreign policy from
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  an interventionist one to an isolationist one.
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  And he is actually one of the, his State Department actually engages in arms control.
• 24:09
  Now remember when I'm talking arms control in the 1920s, I'm talking about naval tonnage
• 24:13
  ships.
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  Battle ships, dreadnoughts, that sort of thing.
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  So you have what's called the Five Power Treaty between the US, the UK, France, Italy, and
• 24:30
  Japan.
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  But the primary driver behind that is battle ships cost money to build, to deploy, and
• 24:41
  you have to pay for the crews.
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  By the way, what are some world powers that are not on the list of the Five Power Talks?
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  Why isn't Germany on the list for the Five Power Talk?
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  It was demilitarized under the Treaty of Versailles.
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  Why is it Russia on the list of the Five Power Talks?
• 25:05
  Because of Bolshevik Revolution.
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  Because of Bolshevik Revolution.
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  Also, was Russia a major naval power after the Russo-Japanese War?
• 25:11
  No.
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  So it's, we don't want to talk to you because you're communist and you're not a great naval
• 25:16
  power anymore.
• 25:19
  Russia won't be a great naval power until middle of the Cold War and even then.
• 25:25
  Okay, so those are the three major points of the Harding Agenda.
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  Do we still hear the echo in some of the policies we have now?
• 25:40
  I mean in the last presidential election both of the major candidates thought that the Iraq
• 25:45
  intervention was a bad idea.
• 25:49
  Kind of interesting.
• 25:52
  Okay, setbacks for the unions.
• 25:56
  I'm going to go back to, so one of the things that was part of the Wilson Progressivist
• 26:06
  Coalition was the unions.
• 26:16
  Now when I'm talking about unions you actually have two employment situations.
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  You have what's called a closed shop and an open shop.
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  An open shop means you can work there at will.
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  Closed shop means you must be a union member to work.
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  How many of you currently work a wage job?
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  And you have somewhere where you sign the papers that you work for the company at will
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  that you have to provide two weeks notice.
• 26:53
  You are not subject to collective bargaining, yes?
• 26:57
  Did you know that actually in parts of the northeast even the grocery store sackers are
• 27:02
  unionized?
• 27:06
  Now unions in addition to being part of the Democratic coalition are, what do they do?
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  They advocate for the workers.
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  What is their principle means of advocation?
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  The most painful.
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  Strikes.
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  What do strikes do?
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  Stops work, yes?
• 27:33
  So if I look at the party labels for a moment, in the Democratic coalition I have immigrants,
• 27:40
  I have unions, and then down south I have southern agrarians.
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  We'll just call them southern conservatives and I'm going to put the Klan in parentheses
• 27:52
  because if you were a southern conservative Democrat by day you might have been wearing
• 27:57
  a white hood and riding around at night.
• 27:59
  In the Republican coalition you have western farmers
• 28:09
  and business interests.
• 28:10
  If I am a businessman do I like unions?
• 28:16
  Because they slow down the work, they demand more money, they're agitators, they may have
• 28:19
  socialist sympathies, yes?
• 28:22
  So if I'm Harding or Coolidge I like open shop because if you don't have to join a union
• 28:29
  in order to work what happens to the union?
• 28:31
  It falls apart, it loses its power.
• 28:35
  So that's what I call the tactical reason behind Republican opposition to unions.
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  There's also a moral reason behind it.
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  What do you pay in order to be in a union?
• 28:50
  What do you pay?
• 28:53
  Union dues.
• 28:54
  What does union dues then become if you think about it?
• 29:00
  Tax on working and the Republicans have already demonstrated an antipathy towards taxation
• 29:06
  and also if I continue it as a line of intellectual thought, abolition was about the freedom to
• 29:15
  work and the freedom to be compensated for the fruits of your labor.
• 29:20
  If you're paying union dues that union all of a sudden just became a parasite leeching
• 29:25
  off of the sustenance of the working man.
• 29:29
  So it fits their ethos tactically, it fits their ethos politically, morally and so they
• 29:36
  pushed for open shop work in the United States.
• 29:39
  There was a push to make closed shop work a federal thing and then they pushed against
• 29:43
  it.
• 29:48
  Isolation and foreign affairs attempted disarmament I talked about already.
• 29:52
  So here's the thing, number of Harding's people were kind of on the take.
• 29:56
  There was a scandal at the VA where the VA secretary was filching and reselling medical
• 30:01
  supplies.
• 30:02
  There was a scandal about who was getting a pardon and who wasn't.
• 30:05
  Then you have the Teapot Dome scandal.
• 30:07
  Basically the secretary of the Navy had leased federal oil contracts in Wyoming to a personal
• 30:14
  friend in exchange for kickbacks.
• 30:16
  So the Teapot Dome scandal was the first major scandal that actually implicated the White
• 30:20
  House.
• 30:21
  There were pressures.
• 30:22
  It became sort of the epitome of a White House gone wrong.
• 30:29
  Also kind of interesting, Warren Harding was actually a very charismatic person and he
• 30:34
  was very good with people, especially women.
• 30:38
  Men had quite a few extramarital affairs and loved children and was blackmailed on more
• 30:42
  than one occasion.
• 30:43
  Now kind of interesting, Warren Harding shortly at the tail end of his presidential term is
• 30:50
  staying in a hotel in San Francisco where he dies of a heart attack.
• 30:55
  No foul play.
• 30:58
  His vice president, Silent Cal Coolidge, succeeds him and actually wins in the election of 1924.
• 31:06
  Now the election of 1924 was kind of a lackluster election.
• 31:12
  You have the economy popping and so nobody wanted to change horses in the middle of the
• 31:17
  game.
• 31:18
  That was the idea.
• 31:20
  And actually I believe it's during this election that FDR posits that the only way the Republicans
• 31:27
  would actually lose their control on power would be an abrupt and decisive economic depression.
• 31:38
  Actually FDR said some very interesting things.
• 31:41
  Okay.
• 31:42
  Coolidge himself was not implicated in any of the scandals.
• 31:46
  One of the things that we don't really appreciate in modern times is just how detached the vice
• 31:51
  president is from the president.
• 31:53
  Now we have presidents choosing them as running mates and having them at the White House key
• 31:59
  in policy decision making at the time.
• 32:01
  Not really.
• 32:04
  It was just sort of oh show up to the Senate when we need you.
• 32:07
  Oh there it is.
• 32:09
  Moving on.
• 32:10
  So 1924 to 1928 you have the Coolidge administration mainly continuing Harding's tradition of
• 32:20
  cutting taxes and reducing spending.
• 32:23
  Then you have the next big election, 1928.
• 32:26
  This one is interesting in two ways.
• 32:29
  So Hoover is the, is a progressive Republican.
• 32:37
  He admired Woodrow Wilson.
• 32:39
  Hoover was himself an intellectual.
• 32:42
  He was a oil, or sorry, he was a mining engineer and an oil tycoon.
• 32:51
  He spoke to the virtues of American individualism.
• 32:56
  He did think that there was good to be done in the government to help the people.
• 33:02
  Now but if you're a Herbert Hoover who is in your electoral coalition?
• 33:09
  If you're a Republican who's in your electoral coalition?
• 33:13
  Western farmers, who else?
• 33:18
  Businessmen which includes progressives.
• 33:27
  So if you're Hoover do you upset your electoral coalition?
• 33:31
  Democrats put up Al Smith.
• 33:32
  Now Al Smith deserves a lot more credit than simply losing the 1928 election to Herbert
• 33:38
  Hoover.
• 33:39
  Al Smith is a Catholic.
• 33:42
  He is the first Catholic candidate for president and in many ways his nomination breaks the
• 33:51
  Democratic party coalition.
• 33:53
  And so you have Smith who is representing the interests of Northern immigrants as the
• 34:03
  Democratic nominee.
• 34:06
  But this breaks the two-fold block of the Democratic party.
• 34:11
  Northern immigrants are part of the voting block but the other part of the voting block
• 34:14
  is the Southern conservatives.
• 34:16
  Now the Southern conservatives are the ones that I've linked to the Klan.
• 34:21
  If you're part of the Klan you are anti-Catholic.
• 34:25
  And so Smith's nomination as the Democratic nominee causes the Southern Democrats to either
• 34:34
  stay at home or to vote against him and so in 1928 Hoover wins in a landslide.
• 34:41
  Now one of the things that's kind of interesting is later on in 1932 the Democratic party and
• 34:50
  the presidency fall to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Al Smith walks away from the Democratic
• 34:58
  party becoming dissatisfied with the direction the party had taken in the face of Roosevelt's
• 35:07
  New Deal.
• 35:08
  It is Al Smith who Reagan quoted as saying that I have seen the Democratic transformed
• 35:15
  from the party of Jackson and Jefferson to the party of Marx and Lenin.
• 35:21
  And so Reagan looked to Al Smith as an example of one who had walked away from the Democratic
• 35:27
  party.
• 35:28
  Reagan himself was originally a Democrat who became a Republican.
• 35:31
  And actually sort of a little tidbit from history for those of you who were following
• 35:34
  the presidential campaign.
• 35:36
  The last campaign and it wasn't really a campaign event but the last major event before election
• 35:42
  day was the Al Smith dinner in New York which was sponsored by the Catholic Archdiocese
• 35:48
  of New York City.
• 35:49
  That was the last time that the two major presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary
• 35:54
  Clinton were in the same space.
• 35:57
  It was after the debates and it was kind of a celebrity roast.
• 36:00
  But what most people didn't tell you what most media types left out was Al Smith spoke
• 36:08
  out against the socialist tendencies that had come out of the Democratic party in the
• 36:13
  New Deal.
• 36:14
  Questions, problems, concerns or revelations.