by Jill Lepore
Before then, women would gain the right to vote, the size of the electorate would double, and the problem would worsen. The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in August 1920, was the last constitutional act of the Progressive Era. It proved a checkered victory. Women achieved the right to vote only after the style of party politics had changed, from the public, popular politics of parades and marches (and high voter turnout) to the private, domesticated politics of mass advertising (and lower voter turnout). As one feminist pointed out as early as 1926, “It is a misfortune for the woman’s movement that it has succeeded in securing political rights for women at the very period when political rights are worth less than they have been at any time since the eighteenth century.”111
Attaining the right to vote also divided the women’s movement between those who wanted to pursue equal rights and those who, realizing that equal rights would render obsolete an entire body of protective labor legislation, did not. So-called equalizers formed the Women’s League for Equal Opportunity and the Equal Rights Association; sought passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced into Congress in 1923; and viewed protectionism with cynicism and suspicion: “Labor men wanted protective laws for women only so that they could steal women’s jobs under cover of chivalry,” one equalizer would write in 1929. Protectionists, meanwhile, formed the League of Women Voters.112 A half century later, as the Equal Rights Amendment at last neared ratification, this same divide, among women, would defeat it.
In the 1920 presidential election, the Republican Warren G. Harding easily triumphed over the Democrat, Ohio governor and Progressive reformer James Cox, and his relatively unknown running mate, the assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, chosen, in the main, for his famous last name. Wilsonian idealism and internationalism was over, and so was an era of reform. Harding rode to the White House on a rising tide of conservativism, a reaction against Progressive reforms that conservatives believed to be a betrayal of the nation’s founding principles, and especially of the Constitution. “I must utter my belief in the divine inspiration of the founding fathers,” Harding said in his inaugural address. He ordered the Librarian of Congress to take the original Constitution—the signed parchment—out of storage and erect for it a national shrine. He appointed as solicitor general James Montgomery Beck—Mr. Constitution—a former corporate lawyer who’d written a series of immensely popular books explaining the Constitution.113
“The Constitution is neither, on the one hand, a Gibraltar rock, which wholly resists the ceaseless washing of time or circumstance, nor is it, on the other hand, a sandy beach, which is slowly destroyed by the erosion of the waves,” Beck wrote. “It is rather to be likened to a floating dock, which, while firmly attached to its moorings, and not therefore at the caprice of the waves, yet rises and falls with the tide of time and circumstance.” Law professor Thomas Reed Powell, assessing Beck’s work in a contemptuous review in the New Republic, remarked that Beck’s Constitution moves neither forward nor backward: it “jiggles up and down,” like Jell-O. Powell proposed to write a volume of “Becksniffian Songs of Innocence,” to include this verse: “The Constitution is a dock, / That’s moored, yet tosses to and fro. / It’s not a beach; it’s not a rock. / And that is why we love it so.”114 The feud between Beck and Powell was no petty squabble but instead suggested a deep and widening chasm. The argument over the nature of the Constitution had much in common with the argument between Protestants who believed the Bible to be literally true and those who did not. Beck was a constitutional fundamentalist, Powell a believer in evolution.
Harding’s agenda of undoing Progressive reforms, outlined at his inauguration, brought together Solicitor General Beck’s understanding of the Constitution with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s gospel of efficiency. Taylorism had by now been applied to office work, to the very kind of work done by the government itself. Office workers sat at the new Modern Efficiency Desk, a metal slab topping file drawers, usually two on each side. They punched cards into time clocks and used typewriters and adding machines, manufactured by the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, founded in 1911 through a consolidation of companies that included Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company. A 1923 play called The Adding Machine lampooned the monotony of assembly-line office work and prefigured fears about machine automation. Its main character, “Mr. Zero,” writes down numbers all day long, “upon a square sheet of ruled paper.”115 When his boss tells him that he will be replaced by an adding machine, he murders him. What any office worker might know how to do got smaller and smaller, like the skills of factory workers, while the businesses people worked for got bigger and bigger, including, by 1924, IBM. “We must study, through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking,” said the company’s founder, Thomas Watson. Its motto was THINK, which was what employees were asked to do, but observers worried, and more as the years passed, that thinking was becoming the work of machines.116
Harding wanted to Taylorize the federal government. “I speak for administrative efficiency,” Harding said, in one of the worst inaugural addresses ever delivered, “for lightened tax burdens, for sound commercial practices, for adequate credit facilities, for sympathetic concern for all agricultural problems, for the omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business, for an end to Government’s experiment in business, and for more efficient business in Government administration.”117
With efficiency as his watchword, Harding assembled an extraordinary cohort of conservative businessmen in his cabinet who headed the federal government during some of the most prosperous years in American history. Between 1922 and 1928, industrial production rose by 70 percent, gross national product by almost 40 percent, per capita income by 30 percent, and real wages by 22 percent. The nation was electrified in the 1920s, too, as a new power grid reached business and residences alike: in 1916, only 16 percent of Americans lived in homes with electricity, but by 1927, that percentage had risen to 63.118
As secretary of Treasury, Harding appointed Andrew W. Mellon, an industrialist and philanthropist and the fourth wealthiest man in America after John D. Rockefeller Jr., Henry Ford, and Edsel Ford. Mellon, who would hold the office under three Republican presidents, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, aimed to bring efficiency to taxation. As Mellon argued in Taxation: The People’s Business (1924), high taxes kill “the spirit of business adventure.” Cutting taxes, Mellon insisted, would lower the cost of housing, reduce prices, raise the standard of living, create jobs, and “advance general prosperity.” Mellon’s bid for public support for his tax policy was greatly aided by the American Taxpayers’ League, formerly known as the American Bankers’ League—and bankrolled, in part, by members of the Mellon family—which sponsored, provided literature to, and paid the expenses of state tax clubs, whose members then testified before Congress, urging tax cuts. “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” Oliver Wendell Holmes said in 1927—words later engraved on the front of the IRS Building in Washington—but Americans by no means uniformly agreed. During Mellon’s tenure, Congress abolished the excess profits tax, cut the estate tax, exempted capital gains from income, and capped the top tax rate.119
As secretary of commerce, Harding appointed Herbert Hoover. Born into austere poverty in the Quaker town of West Branch, Iowa, and orphaned at the age of nine, Hoover had gone on to study geology at Stanford. As a mining engineer and organizational genius, he’d made a fortune in Australia and China and become a staggeringly successful international businessman, a millionaire ten times over by the time he retired from business at the age of thirty-seven to devote himself to public service and philanthropy. He’d lived most of his life outside the United States. Both during and after the war, he’d headed humanitarian relief efforts in Europe, helping to save tens of millions of lives. (When Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize, not a few Europeans thought Hoover more deserving.) When he returned to the United States, he’d become a dazzlingly popular guest at Lippmann’s
House of Truth. “Many felt, as I did,” Lippmann said, “that they had never met a more interesting man.” In 1920, both parties had urged him to run for president, but, though he dipped a toe in the waters of the Republican primaries, he’d quietly lost the nomination to Harding.120
Hoover was an efficiency expert, best known for an influential 400-page report called Waste in Industry. So great was his fame that nearly anything involving the elimination of waste, including vacuum cleaning, took his name. Although opposed to big government, Hoover understood his role as secretary of commerce as giving him control over the entire American economy. From his office on the top floor of a building on the corner of Nineteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, he brought the department’s many bureaus into rooms below him. With daunting efficiency, he expanded Commerce—making himself “Under-Secretary of all other departments”—to realize his plan of a “new era.” What Hoover designed was an associative state, bringing in business and labor leaders, farmers and fishermen, to cooperative meetings to order the government’s priorities. During Hoover’s tenure, the department’s budget grew to almost six times its previous size, from $860,000 to $5 million. “Never before, here or anywhere else, has a government been so completely fused with business,” the Wall Street Journal reported.121
During the 1920s, Americans’ faith in progress turned into a faith in prosperity, fueled by consumption. “A change has come over our democracy,” a journalist reported. “It is called consumptionism. The American citizen’s first importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.”122 By any measure, the American economy was getting bigger and bigger. The United States was the world’s biggest lender, and its economy was the largest in the world; by 1929, it produced 42 percent of the world’s output (Great Britain, France, and Germany together produced 28 percent).123 Steel production and railroad income broke all records, graphs of growth reaching higher and higher, like the skyscrapers towering over New York’s Fifth Avenue, Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, and San Francisco’s California Street.
And yet the nation turned inward. Before the war, most of the industrial world followed a policy of open borders for both goods and people. People left Europe for other parts of the world, especially the United States, while Europeans invested capital in building projects in their colonies. The devastation of the war and the brutal terms of the peace, especially for Germany, meant an end to these arrangements.124 After the war, the United States became the center of global trade, and yet soon began closing its borders to both people and goods. In 1921 and 1922, Harding and a Republican Congress raised taxes on imports; and in 1921 and 1924, they placed restrictions on immigration. European countries, devastated by the war, were unable to send excess workers across the Atlantic and, unable to sell their manufactured goods in the United States, were left unable to repay to American lenders the money they owed them. In retaliation, European countries raised tariffs, too, depriving American farmers and manufacturers of a market.125 And so began a vicious economic spiral. “It’s a marvel, looking back on it now,” Lippmann would later write ruefully, “that we could ever have so completely thought that a boom under such treacherous conditions was permanent.”126
Harding’s administration labeled its economic program a “return to normalcy.” Its political program was a campaign against immigration, its cultural program an aesthetic movement known as the Colonial Revival. Both looked inward, and backward, inventing and celebrating an American heritage, a fantasy world of a past that never happened. Philanthropic industrialists fortified their vision of the nation’s past, Henry Ford building an American history museum, John Rockefeller restoring Colonial Williamsburg, history as a life-sized dollhouse.127 R. T. H. Halsey, who had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, had led the effort to defend the banks against Theodore Roosevelt’s attack on the “money trust.” Relinquishing his seat on the exchange, he helped curate a new American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Unveiled in 1924, it displayed American fine and decorative arts from before 1825. “Much of the America of today has lost sight of its traditions,” Halsey warned. “Many of our people are not cognizant of our traditions and the principles for which our fathers struggled and died.” For Halsey, the contemplation of the past was meant to provide a warning about the present: “The tremendous changes in the character of our nation and the influx of foreign ideas utterly at variance with those held by the men who gave us the Republic threaten, and unless checked, may shake, the foundations of our Republic.”128
The year the American Wing opened, Congress passed the Immigration Act. It had two parts: an Asian Exclusion Act, extending the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, all but banned immigrants from anywhere in Asia, and a National Origins Act, which restricted the annual number of European immigrants to 150,000 and established a quota by which the number of new arrivals was made proportional to their representation in the existing population. The act instantiated the eugenicist logic of Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race. The purpose of the quota system was to end immigration from Asia and to curb the admission of southern and eastern Europeans, deemed less worthy than immigrants from other parts of Europe. Said Indiana Republican Fred S. Purnell, “There is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and this stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political diseases of the Old World.” New York Republican Nathan D. Perlman, a Jewish lawmaker and an opponent of immigration restriction, read into the Congressional Record the names of Americans, of all ethnicities, who’d been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross during the war. He argued in vain.129
A 1921 cartoon depicts Uncle Sam deploying a funnel to stanch the flow of immigrants from Europe. The immigration restriction regime begun in 1924 hardened racial lines, institutionalized new forms of race-based discrimination, codified the fiction of a “white race,” and introduced a new legal category into American life: the “illegal alien.” Europeans, deemed “white,” classified into their national origins, and ranked according to their desirability, could immigrate in limited numbers; entering the United States as legal aliens, they could become naturalized citizens. Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and other Asians, deemed nonwhite, could not immigrate into the United States legally, were deemed unassimilable, and were excluded from citizenship on racial grounds. More profoundly, the law categorized Europeans as belonging to nations—they were sorted by “national origin”—but categorized non-Europeans as belonging to “races”—they were sorted into five “colored races” (black, mulatto, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian).
Notably, the 1924 Immigration Act did not restrict immigration from Mexico, even though it, too, had been on the rise. Between 1890 and 1920, some 1.5 million Mexicans crossed into the United States, fleeing the dictator José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz, especially after the revolt against him in 1910. Mexican Americans who had lived in the American Southwest for decades tended to retain their language and culture, and to live in urban barrios; they often resented these newer arrivals, los recién llegados. Newer Mexican immigrants were most often employed picking produce on newly irrigated agricultural tracts. In 1890, irrigated land in California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona totaled about 1.5 million acres, but by 1902, there were 2 million irrigated acres in California alone. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, large growers had turned to Japanese laborers, but a so-called gentleman’s agreement between Japan and the United States ended their migration in 1908, after which growers began sending employment agents over the border and into Mexico to recruit workers. In an era when the regime of scientific management maligned Hungarians, Italians, and Jews as near-animals who needed to be ruled not by the lash but by the stopwatch, business owners and policymakers tended to describe Mexican immigrants—desperately poor political refugees—as ideal workers. In 1908, U.S. government economist Victor S. Clark claimed that Mexican immigrants were “docile, patient, usually
orderly in camp, fairly intelligent under competent supervision, obedient and cheap,” and, in 1911, a U.S. congressional panel reported that while Mexicans “are not easily assimilated, this is not of very great importance as long as most of them return to their native land after a short time.”130
But of course Mexicans who crossed the border in search of work did not always return to Mexico. During the debate over immigration restriction, Indiana congressman Albert H. Vestal asked, “What is the use of closing the front door to keep out undesirables from Europe when you permit Mexicans to come in here by the back door by the thousands and thousands?” Edward Taylor, a congressman from Colorado, answered that no one but Mexican immigrants would do the work they were hired to do: “The American laboring people will not get down on their hands and knees in the dirt and pull weeds and thin these beets, and break their backs doing that kind of work. In fact, there are very few people who can stand that kind of work. No matter how much they are paid, they cannot and will not do it.” This did not quiet nativists, the American Eugenics Society warning: “Our great Southwest is rapidly creating for itself a new racial problem, as our old South did when it imported slave labor from Africa. The Mexican birth rate is high, and every Mexican child born on American soil is an American citizen, who, on attaining his or her majority, will have a vote. This is not a question of pocketbook or of the ‘need of labor’ or of economics. It is a question of the character of future races. It is eugenics, not economics.” Congress, pressured by eugenicists and southern and western agriculturalists, in the end exempted Mexicans from the new immigration restriction regime, while also requiring not only passports but also visas for anyone entering the United States. Thus it erected hurdles that allowed Mexicans to cross the border to work temporarily but denied access to citizenship. Over time, Mexicans—assigned to a new category, “Mexican,” in the federal census—would become most closely tied to the new legal, racialized category of “illegal alien.” Before 1919, Mexicans who entered the United States at the border did not need to apply for entry. After the formation of the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924, soldiers armed points of entry, and deportation of “illegal aliens” became U.S. government policy.131