United States into the European war … [and] are out for empire,” as Pettigrew put it in his 1923 book, Imperial Washington. Though the party powerbrokers and imperialists had preferred other candidates, they had finally settled on Harding because he was “the man least objectionable and most certain to stand right on their plans to exploit the rest of the world.” Citing a record of Harding’s accomplishments, Pettigrew wrote that “on every important test between capital and labor, he voted with capital.”27
Indeed, Harding did the bidding of capital as a skillful politician highly conscious of the need to represent the whole spectrum of capitalist society while serving party elites who were confident he would promote their interests. His administration quickly initiated legislation aimed at advancing the interests of monopoly and finance capital, among them: lowering taxes, especially on corporations and wealthy individuals; cutting the size of federal bureaucracy; and imposing stronger tariffs to protect U.S. corporations, whose rising exports now drove the world economy. He chose some of the most qualified, wealthy, and powerful capitalist elites to fill key cabinet positions: Andrew Mellon as Treasury secretary, Charles Hughes to lead the State Department, and Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce. All proved highly capable in making Washington subservient to the dictates of Wall Street.28 Mellon, one of the five richest men in the world, promptly drafted legislation that Congress made into law with passage of the Revenue Act of 1921. Taxes on the wealthy were reduced significantly as lawmakers shifted the burden of making up for shortfalls with several indirect taxes, doubling the stamp tax on documents and introducing a federal license tax on cars. According to Sean Dennis Cashman, the Revenue Act amounted to nothing more than a “specious justification for the relief of the rich” so they would be freed from burdensome taxation that would prohibit them from further creative and productive investment.29 Under Harding, trickle-down economics was born.
At the same time, Harding was also a petty-bourgeois reactionary and white supremacist whose leadership in restricting immigration was central to the doctrine of 100 percent Americanism. Defending segregation in his April 12 speech to Congress, he made a lame attempt to address the spike in racist violence and the number of African Americans lynched. He called on Congress “to wipe out the stain of barbaric lynching from the banners of a free and orderly representative democracy.” As a white supremacist, however, Harding called this a “condition which cannot be removed” but alluded to the possibility “that some of its difficulties might be ameliorated by a humane and enlightened consideration of it,” or as he also put it, “at least, a national attitude of mind calculated to bring about the most satisfactory possible adjustment of relations between the races, and of each race to the national life.”
Harding did not last a full term in the White House. A sickly man who drank and ate excessively while relying on a regimen of drugs served up by his quack physician, he died of a likely heart attack on August 2, 1923, in the presidential suite of a San Francisco hotel while on the last leg of a tour dubbed “The Voyage of Understanding.” But his relatively brief run is perhaps more significant than even his defenders have argued. His petty-bourgeois ways served as an effective cover for a political agenda that served the capitalist ruling class. As an ardent nationalist, Harding promoted the expansion of American business at home and greater imperial reach abroad with his mantra of “America First.” His politics amounted to a contradictio in terminis: rooted in a petty-capitalist faith in business, Harding quickly became his opposite once in the White House, a champion of monopoly-finance capital. His presidency indicated a new dynamic in ruling-class politics in the United States, a president posing as a true representative of democratic capitalism, which was considered peculiarly American, but whose policies fueled the centralization and concentration of Big Business itself.
ROARING INTO THE 1920s
Within a year of Harding’s entry into the White House, the Great Boom was on. From 1922 to 1929, technological innovation on a massive scale raised the productive capacity of American industry to historic levels which, in turn, made the United States the world’s first, true consumer society. Tectonic shifts altered the social and political landscape. Consumerism replaced citizenship. The desire for individual fulfillment pushed aside earlier Progressive Era concerns about collective needs. Wages for some workers rose while the middle class grew in numbers. Those with enough income and credit bought cars, appliances, radios, clothes, cosmetics, and more. The luckiest managed to buy homes, which sparked increased residential construction. A rising segment of the population, mostly white, urban, and employed in various commercial activities and professions, became obsessed with fashion, movies, cigarettes, speakeasies, and other newfound pleasures.
Cultural norms were being uprooted. Women smoked openly. Jazz clubs stretched leisure time into the wee hours. And like never before people talked openly about sex. The petting party, wrote magazine writer-editor Frederick Lewis Allen in 1931, had become “widely established as an indoor sport.”30 In ways generally foreign to other peoples, Americans had proved themselves the quickest learners in the ways of self-indulgence. Those who entered the ranks of the new middle class, among them professionals and mid-level managers, attained levels of social comfort unimaginable only a few years earlier. With the rising self-indulgence came the advocates, practitioners, and propagandists of the “new psychology.” There was much talk about Sigmund Freud, though few really understood what he had claimed to have discovered about people. Most important, however, the coming of material abundance—or at least the promise of it—had raised the bar for American individualism to a much greater height.
As for business leaders, politicians, academics, and others, the whirlwind of new ideas, attitudes, and behaviors was indicative of capitalism’s long-standing promise of endless prosperity and uninterrupted progress. Some called it a “New Era” or the “New Capitalism,” others the “New Economy.” Regardless of the terminology, all indicated that a capitalist revolution was underway. How startling! After all, wasn’t it Lenin and the Bolsheviks who were claiming that their revolutionary turn to socialism had changed the course of human history? No! shouted the creators and propagandists of the New Era. The real revolution was a capitalist one, and since it was only happening in America it seemed reasonable that the next best thing to do was to sell the idea to the public. By the middle of the decade, the marketing of the New Era, or whatever it was called, made up what people understood as the “ballyhoo” of the times, all that noisy, frenzied barking about what struck them in the moment. From the allure of shiny cars and short skirts, to a new Charlie Chaplin movie, or the stories of famous people being murdered, swindled, divorced, or lionized in the daily tabloids, the clamor of those engaged in selling anything or any idea through advertising, publicity and propaganda was constant.
For all its exuberant promise of an even brighter future, the Great Boom also challenged the capitalist class in equally unprecedented ways. New cracks were opening in the political landscape, adding to longtime spatial and cultural divides. None was more significant than the sudden, widening chasm between urban workers earning higher wages and small farmers in the countryside burdened by declining prices in agricultural products. Rapid industrialization and urbanization were breaking down the old order of agrarian and small-town America. Expenditures for public education rose dramatically. College enrollments soared though millions of Americans were left behind and consigned to ignorance and backwardness. New and often jarring perspectives became part of everyday life, which increasingly divided Americans along many lines. Science challenged religion. Protestants sneered at Catholics. Both despised Jews. Protestantism itself, the dominant form of American Christianity, became a battleground between modernists and fundamentalists. Women were challenging patriarchy at home and in the workplace. African Americans migrated to the North and Midwest to escape the legacy of slavery in the South.
The rapid pace of change also compelled the captains of industry and their partners in finance to create new methods in capitalist production aimed at keeping the American economy moving. To that end, the Great Boom they engineered and the effort to sell it as a capitalist revolution only reaffirmed what Marx and Engels had written seventy years earlier about the revolutionary powers of the bourgeoisie. The U.S. ruling class was
