Political Conservatism: Warren G. Harding

Political Conservatism 

Warren G. Harding (1921 – 1923)  The 29th president of the United States  Died in office  Republican who endorsed conservative values in politics and economics  tended to favor big business in domestic policy and isolationism in foreign policy  President Warren G. Harding called “normalcy … a regular steady order of things.”

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Many Americans of the 1920s endorsed conservative values in politics and economics Under presidents Harding and Calvin Coolidge, tariffs reached new highs, income taxes fell for people who were most well off, and the Supreme Court upset progressive measures, such as the minimum wage and federal child labor laws Both Harding and Coolidge tended to favor business. “The business of America is business,” Coolidge declared. “This is a business country, and it wants a business government.” Calvin Coolidge (19231929)

Political Conservatism  

Republican presidents shared isolationist inclinations in foreign policy; the United States never joined the League of Nations. Harding and Coolidge also endorsed pacifist policies: 

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1921 Harding organized the Washington Conference, a pioneering effort to reduce arms and avoid an expensive naval arms race. Attended by the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Italy, and other countries the conference proposed destruction of ships and a moratorium on new construction. In 1928, under Coolidge, the United States and France cosponsored the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced aggression and called for the end of war. Useless in practice. However, it helped to establish the 20th-century concept of war as an outlaw act by an aggressor state on a victim state.

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1924 the U.S. Congress passed the National Origins Act, which limited immigration into the country Protests against unrestricted immigration came from organized labor, which feared the loss of jobs to newcomers, and from patriotic organizations, which feared foreign radicalism set an annual quota on immigration and limited the number of newcomers from each country to the proportion of people of that national origin in the 1890 population discriminated against the most recent newcomers, southern and eastern Europeans, and excluded Asian immigrants almost entirely. Latin American immigration, however, was unlimited.

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Radical political activism waned, dimmed by the Red Scare of 1919 Social criticism appeared in literary magazines such as The Masses; in newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun, where journalist H. L. Mencken published biting commentary; and in popular fiction such as Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt (1922), an assault on provincial values. Some intellectuals fled the United States and settled in Paris. Progressivism faded (most enduring vestige - the post-suffrage women’s movement).

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split between urban and rural, modern and traditional, radical and reactionary Nativist, anti-radical sentiments: the Sacco-Vanzetti Case [Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (arrested in 1920; executed in 1927; their names cleared in 1977)] revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s: targeted Catholics, Jews, and immigrants, as well as African Americans; thrived in the Midwest and Far West, as well as in the South

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religious fundamentalism: 1925 John T. Scopes (a Tennessee schoolteacher) tried for breaking a state law that prohibited the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools  courtroom battle between traditionalism and modernism. Scopes was convicted, although the verdict was later reversed on technical grounds battle over Prohibition:  “Drys” favored Prohibition and “wets” opposed it  The 18th Amendment enforced by The Volstead Act (1919)  organized crime entered the liquor business; rival gangs and networks of speakeasies induced a crime wave.  By the end of the 1920s, Prohibition was discredited, and it was repealed in 1933.

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the conflict between “wets” and “drys” played a role in the presidential election of 1928. the Democratic candidate, Al Smith, governor of New York - a “wet”; represented urban, immigrant constituencies Republican Herbert Hoover - engineer from Iowa, a “dry”; represented rural, traditional constituencies Hoover envisioned a rational economic order in which corporate leaders acted for the public good; promised voters “a chicken for every pot and a car in every garage”; won the elections before the Great Depression.

The Great Depression (1929 – 1930s)  

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Crash on the stock market shattered the economy: fortunes vanished in days; consumers stopped buying, businesses retrenched, banks cut off credit, and a downward spiral began; unemployment reached 25% in 1933 Credit / loans – impossible to pay (particularly the farmers + the Dust Bowl) Hoover: the Government should not interfere; relied on private measures to solve it  spoke out against the New Deal (Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan based on Government’s interference; won the 1932 presidential election)

The Great Depression (1929 – 1930s) 

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Vocabulary: “Hoover blankets” (newspapers), “Hoover flags” (empty pockets), Hoovervilles (shantytowns) Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-1945) 

The New Deal (see Lecture on Progressivism)

Post- WWI American Intellectuals  

Disillusion with the war, not with the whole of American thought and tradition. One year after the Armistice (1918) The New Republic, the unofficial voice of the liberal intellectuals in this period, published John Dewey’s “The Discrediting of Idealism”:  he acknowledges his being among the gullible “who swallowed the cant [hypocritical cliché] of idealism as a sugar coating for the bitter core of violence and greed.”  Naïve optimism and “fine phrases” led Americans to the assumption that ideals would be served by victory, while blinding them to such realities as the secret & cynical treaties among the other Allies (which rushed the war)  reviving idealism by associating it with nonmilitary forces like commerce, industry, science

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Targets of disillusion: absurdity of using a war to end all wars, of instituting freedom with force (quickly apparent after 1918). Dewey’s essay the following year: only the first in a long line of condemnations of America’s intervention in the European conflict 

E.G.: Revisionist histories: 

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Harry Elmer Barnes’ Genesis of the World War (1926): Germany was not the solely responsible. Sidney B. Fay’s Origins of the World War (1928): Allied propaganda had distorted the facts.

Internationalism: bitterness and pride. They vowed never again to commit their ideals and energies to foreign causes. E.g.: the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, including the League of Nations.

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concern for the future of the Western World; frame of mind encouraged by Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918) [American edition: 1926]  Western civilization was doomed by the rhythm of cultures to decline and perish just as had ancient Greece and Rome In the U.S. the end of 3 centuries of frontier provided an additional reason for uneasiness; the advent of an urban-industrial civilization and the loss of pioneer vitality meant decline rather than progress: Henry Adams (1838-1918) - The Education of Henry Adams (1907/1918):

Post- WWI American Intellectuals modern world might be accelerating toward destruction rather than perfection  evolution might bring retrogression ( “The Dynamo and the Virgin”).  the postwar mood made the Adams’s book a bestseller. Freudian theory: death instinct & assumption of the unhappiness of the civilized man [Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)] 

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Post- WWI American Intellectuals 

Expatriation or “exile” 

Malcolm Cowley in Exile’s Return (1934): the exiles were nostalgic, full of the wish to recapture some remembered America

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The Russian Revolution of 1917: some intellectuals envied a country that apparently had not gone wrong; many American intellectuals transferred their hopes for the common man to the red flag

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Relief and optimism  relief that the weaknesses of the old order were finally exposed. This offered some hope that reconstruction and a better America are possible. “The war had been a needed catharsis” (Nash 43).

Post- WWI American Intellectuals 

Harold Stearns edited Civilization in the United States (1922): 

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Wrongly perceived as a document of American intellectuals’ despair and alienation Preface - “constructive criticism”: 

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Hope lay in the rebelliousness of the young intellectuals. The war had opened their eyes: showed them the frail foundations of the older generation’s beliefs. One found value, however, in the past in writers like Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau The American intellectuals of the 1920s believed they were vital enough to produce cultural greatness.

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One could surpass the limitations of utilitarianism and gentility Experience was the solution; in Paris the American writers experienced otherness and in otherness they could contemplate and live more truly their Americanness Goal: an American intellectual renaissance.

Post- WWI American Intellectuals A New Perception of Human Nature The Leopold-Loeb Case •June 1, 1924: cold-blooded, unreasonable (no apparent motive), brutal murder (two highly intelligent, highly educated, millionaire family young men kill a 14-year boy) shocks the American public: alert them to the possibility that the traditional understanding of human nature (as controlled by some superior ethical instance) no guarantee of socially acceptable behavior •Europe: discussion of the mind as a physiological mechanism, depleted of religious sense or romantic aura, was well advanced •e.g. Jean Martin Charcot [1825-1893], French neurologist, considered the father of clinical neurology. He specialized in the study of hysteria

Post- WWI American Intellectuals A New Perception of Human Nature 

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Most famous of his students: Sigmund Freud

William James (1842-1910) published Principles of Psychology (1890): 

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Building on the insights of Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species-1859). A naturalistic [based on nature, anatomy] and functionalistic [practical, utilitarian] interpretation of mental processes. The mind: a physical organ. No innate ethical controlling guide to human behavior.

Post- WWI American Intellectuals A New Perception of Human Nature 

this entirely biological conception of human nature - serious blow to the old dualistic view of the mind as distinct from the body 

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E.g. functionalists: no basis for the Transcendentalist basic assumption that each man contained a “spark of divinity”.

Shortly before World War I psychology began to have considerable impact on the way American intellectuals conceived of human nature.

Post- WWI American Intellectuals A New Perception of Human Nature 

Determinants of human behavior:  Ancient, inherited instincts.  The endocrine glands.  Heredity  The Environment (Behaviorism): title coming from the book Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1914) and Behaviorism (1925) by John B. Watson.

Post- WWI American Intellectuals A New Perception of Human Nature 

Watson was inspired by Pavlov’s results and applied them to human beings 

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developed the idea of the hollow man / lacked the capacity for self-direction Man responds to external stimuli as a dog salivates at the sound of the bell announcing food mechanistic conception of the mind.

Post- WWI American Intellectuals A New Perception of Human Nature Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)  impact on American intellectual history of the 1920s comparable to Darwin’s in the late 19th century  Unlike behaviorism: minds not hollow  core of Freud’s theory: the libido strongly influenced thought and behavior  continuous conflict between the ego and the id over the direction of the individual  with the aid of ideals and ethics (the superego), reason attempted to control the destructive energy of the unconscious.

Superego

Ego

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The Leopold-Loeb case illustrated this theory; Clarence Darrow, the defense lawyer of the two murderers used the testimony of prominent psychiatrists focusing the trial on the mental condition of the murderers: the unconscious impulses that determined the actions (Darrow called them “emotions’). The vogue of Freudian psychology in the United States began in 1909 when Freud came to lecture at Clark University at the invitation of its president, the eminent educational psychologist G. Stanley Hall.

1909 pioneers of the growing psychoanalytic movement assembled at Clark University to hear lectures by Sigmund Freud. The group included, top row, left to right, A. A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, and bottom row, Freud, Clark University President C. Stanley Hall, and Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung. The visit, the only one Freud made to the United States, broadened the influence and popularity of psychoanalysis.