by Jon Meacham
In the general election campaign of 1924, Coolidge’s running mate, Charles G. Dawes, denounced the Klan in a speech in Augusta, Maine. “Government cannot last if that way, the way of the Ku Klux Klan, is the way to enforce the law in this country,” Dawes said that August. “Lawlessness cannot be met with lawlessness if civilization is to be maintained.” Dawes tried to soften his attack, though, adding, as The New York Times put it, that “many join it in the interest of law and order.” The speech, the Times reported, had “confound[ed the] party in Maine” and left the “audience unresponsive.”
After conferring with Coolidge, Dawes dropped the subject. It was apparently the president’s judgment that the less said about the Klan the better. “He was probably fearful that a direct attack on the Klan by name would detract from addressing the pressing issues of postwar reconstruction then demanding the attention of the American people, as well as sow the seeds of discord among them at the very moment when national unity was essential for moving forward,” the Coolidge scholar Jerry L. Wallace wrote. “In addition, such an attack would provide the Klan with a goldmine of publicity and likely bring it renewed vigor”—which, as Simmons had pointed out, had happened when Congress had investigated the Klan in 1921.
“Moreover,” Wallace wrote, “the President undoubtedly realized from his study of history that hate groups like the Klan had historically come and gone, and that this Klan would be no different. Thus, it was best to let the Klan burn itself out, which, indeed, it did.” Still, Coolidge’s reticence had a price. “One political consequence was that black leaders, especially the younger ones, began to question their historic relationship with the Republican Party,” Wallace wrote, “and urban Democrat politicians like [Al] Smith moved to take advantage of this.”
On Saturday, August 9, 1924, Coolidge did make himself plain. A correspondent had written the president to express outrage at news that a black man was considering seeking the Republican nomination for a congressional seat from New York. “It is of some concern,” the man had written, “whether a Negro is allowed to run for Congress anywhere, at any time, in any party, in this, a white man’s country.” Coolidge replied that he was “amazed” at the letter. Citing the service of half a million black men in the U.S. armed forces during the Great War, the president wrote:
The suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color, I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race.
The African American Chicago Defender published Coolidge’s letter under the headline “Cal Coolidge Tells Kluxer When to Stop.”
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Words like these set a proper tone, but the causes of the Klan’s fall were complex. Americans did not wake up one morning and decide to be a better people. For one thing, restrictive immigration law in the 1920s, particularly the National Origins Act of 1924, which set limiting quotas, defused the passion around the issue; there were fewer targets as the years went by. (The 805,228 immigrants arriving in 1921, for instance, fell to 164,000 by the end of the decade.) Economic growth—the much-heralded prosperity of the decade, which put the “roar” in the Roaring Twenties—also reduced tensions. As more people came to have a stake in the nation’s success, and as that success became ever more linked to a widening opportunity, fewer of them were vulnerable to the Klan’s creed. Commerce was culture; relative security in wages and employment undercut the potency of the politics of fear.
The Klan sabotaged itself, too, as when one of its key leaders, David Curtis Stephenson of Indiana, was arrested for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a young woman on whom he had gnawed in a gruesome crime. (He was convicted of second-degree murder.) “I’m a nobody from nowhere, really—but I’ve got the biggest brains,” he had said during his rise to power. “I’m going to be the biggest man in the United States!” As historians of the KKK phenomenon have noted, the revelation of depravity and of hypocrisy at the pinnacle of the Klan undercut the organization’s self-righteous claims to be an irreproachable knighthood.
For his part, Coolidge urged the country to move beyond the forces that had fueled the rise of the second Klan. Addressing a convention of the American Legion in Omaha, Nebraska, on Tuesday, October 6, 1925, Coolidge was broad-gauged. “Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years of the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of to-day is real and genuine,” Coolidge said. “No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.”
He spoke of tolerance and of liberalism. “Granting first the essentials of loyalty to our country and to our fundamental institutions, we may not only overlook but we may encourage differences of opinion as to other things,” Coolidge said. “For differences of this kind will certainly be elements of strength rather than of weakness. They will give variety to our tastes and interests. They will broaden our vision, strengthen our understanding, encourage the true humanities, and enrich our whole mode and conception of life.” In an indirect but unmistakable allusion to the Klan and its “100 percent Americanism” platform, Coolidge told the veterans: “I recognize the full and complete necessity of 100 percent Americanism, but 100 percent Americanism may be made up of many various elements.” Coolidge added:
If we are to have…that union of spirit which is the foundation of real national genius and national progress, we must all realize that there are true Americans who did not happen to be born in our section of the country, who do not attend our place of religious worship, who are not of our racial stock, or who are not proficient in our language. If we are to create on this continent a free Republic and an enlightened civilization that will be capable of reflecting the true greatness and glory of mankind, it will be necessary to regard these differences as accidental and unessential. We shall have to look beyond the outward manifestations of race and creed. Divine Providence has not bestowed upon any race a monopoly of patriotism and character.
Afterward, Henry Hugh Proctor, a graduate of Nashville’s Fisk College and of the Yale Divinity School, a friend of W.E.B. Du Bois, and pastor of the First Congregational Church in Atlanta, and, later, the Nazarene Congregational Church in Brooklyn, reflected on Coolidge’s message. “Particularly do we want to thank you for that great word you spoke at Omaha, the bravest word spoken by any Executive in threescore years,” Proctor said. “It sounds like Lincoln.”
Navy Chief Petty Officer Graham Jackson, shedding tears of grief, plays as FDR’s body is taken from the Warm Springs Foundation in Warm Springs, Georgia, April 1945.
We must drive the Jewish international bankers out of Wall Street! We must destroy the Bolshevik labor unions! We must purge our country of all the alien elements and ideas that now infest her! America for Americans!
—The fictional former president SHAGPOKE WHIPPLE, in Nathanael West’s 1934 novel, A Cool Million
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, undelivered Jefferson Day Address, April 1945
ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1929, not quite two months after the disastrous stock market crash, dessert was being served to President Herbert Hoover and his holiday guests in the State Dining Room when word came that the West Wing was in flames. The Oval Office itself, installed by President Taft during a 1909 renovation, was burning. According to published reports, the president,
dressed in a dinner jacket and smoking a cigar, excused himself to inspect the fire. “At times it seemed as if the flames were subdued,” The New York Times wrote, “but there were occasional bursts of blaze through the roof, and the firemen had great difficulty in getting control of the situation.” In the main part of the mansion, the First Lady tried to distract the guests by asking the Marine Band to play on.
Metaphors don’t come much more apropos: The Hoover White House, at the onset of the Great Depression, subject to the destructive whims of an uncontrollable force. “Those parts which had not been actually destroyed,” the Times noted of the West Wing, “were gutted and water-soaked.” Something seemingly invincible, impervious to destruction, was proving vulnerable.
The same would soon be said of America itself. By 1932–33, the Great Depression was consuming the United States, creating public anxiety and eroding trust in the most basic of institutions. In his trilogy on Roosevelt and the New Deal, published between 1957 and 1960, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., referred to the 1920s and early ’30s as “The Crisis of the Old Order.” America seemed on the cusp of a violent break from the ancien régime of democratic capitalism. Would the nation save itself or, like Italy and, as the ’30s unfolded, Germany, seek comfort in totalitarianism? Or might it choose the path of the Soviet Union, casting its lot with Communism?
The questions were not academic. When the financier Bernard M. Baruch said the nation was facing a situation “worse than war,” there was, Time reported, “widespread agreement.” Nearly 20 percent of the workforce, or one out of five people, was jobless. “The country had never before known unemployment of these magnitudes or of this duration,” the historian David M. Kennedy wrote. “It had in place no mechanism with which to combat mass destitution on this scale.” Mobs of hungry youths were loose in the countryside. Armed standoffs roiled placid places such as Sioux City, Iowa. A Senate committee was told hard truths: “There are many signs that if the lawfully constituted leadership does not soon substitute action for words, a new leadership, perhaps unlawfully constituted, will arise and act.”
Hoover’s successor knew all this. In the summer of 1932, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York had told an adviser that the two most dangerous men in America were Huey Long of Louisiana and Douglas MacArthur, the army chief of staff. Long, the powerful Louisiana “Kingfish,” could conceivably orchestrate a coup from the populist left, and MacArthur might manage the same feat from the right. The general had already led a disastrous U.S. Army attack on veterans gathered in Washington seeking a promised pension bonus. (“MacArthur has decided to go into active command in the field,” said MacArthur, speaking, as was his wont, in the third person. “There is incipient revolution in the air.”)
The loudest cheers during Roosevelt’s inaugural address on Saturday, March 4, 1933, did not come from his assurance that the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself. No, as Eleanor Roosevelt noted, the greatest ovation greeted the new president’s assertion that the present emergency might require him to assume extended wartime executive powers.
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It was a mad, and maddening, time. In the middle of February 1933, Roosevelt, then the president-elect, was nearly killed in a park in Miami when an armed assailant, Giuseppe Zangara, opened fire from about ten yards away. FDR had stopped off in the city while on a fishing cruise aboard the Nourmahal, a yacht owned by his friend Vincent Astor. When Roosevelt disembarked, Astor, seeing the huge crowds, had a strange premonition. “It would be easy,” the millionaire remarked, “for an assassin to do his work and escape.”
Within half an hour, armed with an eight-dollar pearl-handled .32 revolver, Zangara got off five shots but missed Roosevelt, instead wounding the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, who was standing near the president-elect. The news was yet another blow to the country’s fragile sense of stability. “People seemed to feel that their faith in the future was also the assassin’s target,” Time wrote. Attending to the mayor, FDR, for his part, was preternaturally calm. “I’m all right,” he called out. “Roosevelt was simply himself—easy, confident, poised, to all appearances unmoved,” Roosevelt adviser Raymond Moley recalled. That night, safely back on the Nourmahal, Roosevelt drank a glass of whiskey and went to bed.
The assassination attempt exacerbated a fraught season. Asked whether history had ever seen anything like the Depression, John Maynard Keynes replied: “Yes. It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years.” In 1930, testifying before Congress, Father Charles Coughlin, the popular, often incendiary, radio priest, said: “I think by 1933, unless something is done, you will see a revolution in this country.” Describing the plight of the unemployed, the historian William Manchester wrote: “Although millions were trapped in a great tragedy for which there could plainly be no individual responsibility, social workers repeatedly observed that the jobless were suffering from feelings of guilt. ‘I haven’t had a steady job in more than two years,’ a man facing eviction told a New York Daily News reporter in February 1932. ‘Sometimes I feel like a murderer. What’s wrong with me, that I can’t protect my children?’ ”
A small group of rich Wall Streeters also tried their hand at conceiving and launching a plot to supplant FDR as president by attempting to convince the retired Marine major general Smedley Butler, a respected veteran, to raise an army, march on Washington, and take the capital. Fearful of Roosevelt and his reforms, the “Wall Street Putsch” conspirators were planning to impose a fascist state. (The episode was also known as the “Business Plot.”) Butler was an unwilling traitor. “If you get 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of Fascism,” Butler told one of the plotters who approached him, “I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home.” The retired general told FBI director J. Edgar Hoover about the conspiracy. Reports about the Wall Street cabal’s machinations soon leaked, and the threat fell apart.
In late 1934, secret congressional hearings, highlights of which were reported in the press, detailed what the plotters had been planning. Twice awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, Butler testified before a House panel led by Congressmen John McCormack of Massachusetts and Samuel Dickstein of New York. “May I preface my remarks by saying, sir,” Butler told McCormack, who co-chaired the committee, “that I have one interest in all of this, and that is to try to do my best to see that a democracy is maintained in this country?”
“Nobody who has either read about or known about General Butler would have anything but that understanding,” McCormack replied. The retired general then offered his side of the story of being approached by well-funded intermediaries to lead a military takeover of Roosevelt’s Washington. “Gen. Butler Bares ‘Fascist Plot’ To Seize Government By Force,” read the front-page headline in The New York Times on Wednesday, November 21, 1934.
“If General Butler had not been the patriot he was, and if they had been able to maintain secrecy, the plot certainly might very well have succeeded, having in mind the conditions existing at that time,” McCormack recalled to the author Jules Archer nearly four decades later. “No one can say for sure, of course, but when times are desperate and people are frustrated, anything like that could happen….If the plotters had got rid of Roosevelt, there’s no telling what might have taken place….A well-organized minority can always outmaneuver an unorganized majority, as Adolf Hitler did….The same thing could have happened here.”
McCormack had little patience for skepticism about the gravity of the possible coup. “The people were in a very confused state of mind, making the nation weak and ripe for some drastic kind of extremist reaction,” McCormack said. “Mass frustration could bring about anything.” General Butler, McCormack added, “regarded the plot very gravely indeed. He knew that this was a threat to our very way of government by a bunch of rich men who wanted fascism.”
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Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here told the story of the rise of an authoritarian state in an America riven by economic and cultural chaos. Lewis’s book painted a disturbing portrait of a United States that abandoned liberal democracy and sought stability in fascism. “Why, there’s no country in the world,” a fictional editor remarks in the novel, “that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious—than America.” The editor’s sad rhetorical query: “Where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!”
Across the Atlantic, Winston Churchill took note of Lewis’s book. “I was reading the other day a recent American novel by Sinclair Lewis—It Can’t Happen Here,” Churchill wrote in August 1936. “Such books render a public service to the English-speaking world. When we see what has happened in Germany, Italy and Russia we cannot neglect their warning.”
Less well known than Lewis’s work is a small novel by Nathanael West, A Cool Million, a Candide–Horatio Alger parody. Published a year before It Can’t Happen Here, A Cool Million includes the tale of the rise of a fascist politician. In it, a former American president, Shagpoke Whipple, takes advantage of the Depression to demagogue his way back to power. Here is West’s portrait of a Whipple rally:
“I’m a simple man,” he said with great simplicity, “and I want to talk to you about simple things. You’ll get no highfalutin’ talk from me.
“First of all, you people want jobs. Isn’t that so?…