Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (42 page)

There came to my attention in the city of Detroit – and this took place last November – a wild party given at a roadhouse, and a very wild party, where the liquor was donated by one of the principal gamblers of Detroit – Denny Murphy if you want his name – and there were at that drunken revel… the Governor of Michigan, the chief of police of Detroit, the chief of the State Police, politicians, club men, gamblers, criminals, bootleggers, all there fraternizing in the spirit of the most perfect equality under the god Bacchus, and I will say that there were four judges of the circuit of Michigan at that drunken revel, at which naked hoochy-koochy dancers appeared later … you find that hypocrisy today over the length and breadth of this land.
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As Ligget pointed out, evasion of Prohibition generated enormous funds which were reinvested in other forms of crime such as
prostitution, but above all gambling, which for the first time were organized on a systematic and quasi-legitimate basis. More recent studies confirm his view that Prohibition brought about a qualitative and – as it has turned out – permanent change in the scale and sophistication of American organized crime. Running large-scale beer-convoys required powers of organization soon put to use elsewhere. In the early 1920s, for the first time, gambling syndicates used phone-banks to take bets from all over the country. Meyer Lansky and Benjamin Siegel adapted bootlegging patterns to organize huge nationwide gambling empires. Prohibition was the ‘takeoff point’ for big crime in America; and of course it continued after the twenty-first Amendment, which ended prohibition, was ratified in December 1933. Throughout the 1930s organized crime matured, and it was from 1944 onwards, for instance, that the small desert town of Las Vegas was transformed into the world’s gambling capital. Prohibition, far from ‘Americanizing’ minorities, tended to reinforce minority characteristics through specific patterns of crime: among Italians, Jews, Irish and, not least, among blacks, where from the early 1920s West Indians introduced the ‘numbers game’ and other gambling rings, forming powerful black ghetto crime-citadels in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit.
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Studies by the Justice Department’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in the 1970s indicate that the beginning of Prohibition in 1920 was the starting-point for most identifiable immigrant crime-families, which continue to flourish and perpetuate themselves in our age.
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The truth is, Prohibition was a clumsy and half-hearted piece of social engineering, designed to produce a homogenization of a mixed community by law. It did not of course involve the enormous cruelty of Lenin’s social engineering in Russia, or Mussolini’s feeble imitation of it in Italy, but in its own way it inflicted the same damage to social morals and the civilized cohesion of the community. The tragedy is that it was quite unnecessary. America’s entrepreneurial market system was itself an effective homogenizer, binding together and adjudicating between ethnic and racial groups without regard to colour or national origins. The way in which the enormous German and Polish immigrations, for instance, had been absorbed within an Anglo-Saxon framework, was astounding: the market had done it. Mitchell Palmer was mistaken in thinking that aliens in the mass brought radical politics. On the contrary: they were fleeing closed systems to embrace the free one. They were voting with their feet for the entrepreneurial economy.

Indeed, at the very time Palmer expected revolution to manifest itself, American radicalism, especially of a collectivist kind, was entering a period of steady decline. It had never been strong. Marx
had been unable to explain why America, which, by the end of his life, had become the most powerful and inventive of the capitalist economies, showed no sign whatever of producing the conditions for the proletarian revolution which he claimed mature capitalism made inevitable. Engels sought to meet the difficulty by arguing that socialism was weak there ‘just because America is so purely bourgeois, so entirely without a feudal past and therefore proud of its purely bourgeois organization’. Lenin (1908) thought that in the USA, ‘the model and ideal of our bourgeois civilization’, socialism had to deal with ‘the most firmly established democratic systems, which confront the proletariat with purely socialist tasks’. Antonio Gramsci blamed ‘Americanism’, which he defined as ‘pure rationalism without any of the class values derived from feudalism’. H.G. Wells in
The Future of America
(1906) attributed the absence of a powerful socialist party to the symmetrical absence of a conservative one: ‘All Americans are, from the English point of view, Liberals of one sort or another.’
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Until the 1920s there were some grounds for thinking, however, that an American Left might eventually come to occupy a significant role in politics. In the years before 1914 the Socialist Party had about 125,000 members, who included the leaders of the mineworkers, brewery workers, carpenters and ironworkers. It elected over 1,000 public officials, including the mayors of important towns and two congressmen; in 1912 its candidate Eugene Debs got 6 per cent of the popular vote. But thereafter the decline was continuous. The Workingmen’s Party had some successes in a few cities in the 1920s and early 1930s. But the mainstream socialist parties floundered. The failure of the Socialist Party itself was attributed to its inability to decide whether it was a mass political party, a pressure group, a revolutionary sect or just an educational force, attempting to be all four at the same time.
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Even in the desperate year 1932 Norman Thomas got only 2 per cent of the presidential vote. The Communist Party equally failed to become a new expression of American radicalism and became a mere US appendage of Soviet policy.
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Its highest score was the 1,150,000 it helped to collect for Henry Wallace, the Progressive candidate, in 1948. During the next thirty years the decline continued. In the 1976 election, for instance, the Socialists and five other radical parties fielded candidates; none polled as many as 100,000 out of a total of 80 million votes: added together they got less than a quarter of 1 per cent of votes cast. By the beginning of the 1980s the United States was the only democratic industrialized nation in which not a single independent socialist or labour party representative held elective office.

This pattern was adumbrated by the politics of the 1920s. Whereas in Britain, Austria, France, Germany, Spain and the Scandinavian countries, Social Democratic parties became the principal opposition
parties or even formed or participated in governments, in the USA the decade was a Republican one. The Republican Party was, of course, the party of Lincoln, which had emancipated the slaves and won the Civil War. Blacks, who poured into Northern cities during the First World War and after, still voted Republican in overwhelming numbers. It had also been the party of Theodore Roosevelt and progressive capital. But it was, at the same time, the party of social conservatism and free market economics. In the 1920s its mastery was overwhelming. Between 1920 and 1932, Republicans controlled the White House and the Senate for the whole time and the House except for the years 1930–2.
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Warren Harding in 1920 got 60.2 per cent, the largest popular majority yet recorded (16,152,000 to 9,147,000), carrying every state outside the South. The Republicans took the House by 303 to 131 and won ten Senate seats to give them a majority of twenty-two.
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In 1924 Calvin Coolidge won by 15,725,000 votes to a mere 8,386,000 for his Democrat rival, John W. Davis. In 1928 Herbert Hoover won by 21,391,000 votes to 15,016,000 for Al Smith, a landslide electoral college victory of 444 to 87; he carried all but two Northern states and five in the ‘Solid South’. The Socialists polled less than 300,000, the Communists under 50,000.
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These repeated successes indicated what Coolidge called ‘a state of contentment seldom before seen’, a marriage between a democratic people and its government, and the economic system the governing party upheld and epitomized, which is very rare in history and worth examining. In order to do so effectively it is necessary to probe beneath the conventional historiography of the period, especially as it revolves round its two key figures, Harding and Coolidge.

Harding won the election on his fifty-fifth birthday, which, characteristically, he celebrated by playing a round of golf. He did not believe that politics were very important or that people should get excited about them or allow them to penetrate too far into their everyday lives. In short he was the exact opposite of Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler, and the professional Social Democratic politicians of Europe. He came from Ohio, the Republican political heartland, which had produced six out of ten presidents since 1865. He had emerged from poverty to create a successful small-town paper, the
Marion Star
, and had then become director of a bank, a phone company, a lumber firm and a building society. He was decent, small-town America in person: a handsome man, always genial and friendly, but dignified. He was not above answering the White House front door in person, and he always took a horse-ride on Sunday. He told a cheering crowd in Boston in May 1920: ‘America’s present need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy; not
revolution but restoration … not surgery but serenity.’
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America as Arcadia was a reality to him; somehow, he wished to preserve it. To get elected, he stuck old President McKinley’s flagpole in front of his house and ran a ‘front porch’ campaign. Many famous people made the pilgrimage to Marion to listen to his campaign talk, Al Jolson, Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Pearl White among them, but 600,000 ordinary folk too, thousands of them black – hence the Democrat rumour that Harding had negro blood. Everybody liked Harding. The worst thing about him was his sharp-faced wife, Flossie, known as ‘the Duchess’, of whom Harding said (not in her hearing), ‘Mrs Harding wants to be the drum-major in every band that passes’.
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Harding believed that America’s matchless society was the creation of voluntarism and that only government could spoil it. If he could plant a Rotary Club in every city and hamlet, he said, he would ‘rest assured that our ideals of freedom would be safe and civilization would progress’. That was a general view. ‘There is only one first-class civilization in the world’, wrote the
Ladies’ Home Journal. ‘
It is right here in the United States.’ That was also the view of most American intellectuals, to judge not by their subsequent rationalizations in the Thirties but by what they actually wrote at the time. The same month Harding signed the 1921 Immigration Act, Scott Fitzgerald was writing to Edmund Wilson from London:

God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest. Rome is only a few years behind Tyre and Babylon. The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise the bar of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons and Celts to enter. France made me sick. Its silly pose as the thing the world has to save …. I believe at last in the white man’s burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro. Even in art! Italy has no one …. They’re thru and done. You may have spoken in jest about New York as the capital of culture but in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money …. We will be the Romans in the next generations as the English are now.
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Harding believed this cultural supremacy would arise inevitably provided government allowed the wheels of free enterprise to turn. Far from selecting cronies from ‘the buck-eye state’ (as later alleged), he formed a cabinet of strong men: Charles. Evans Hughes as Secretary of State, Andrew Mellon at the Treasury, Hoover at Commerce. He hurried with his cabinet list straight to the Senate, and his choice for the Department of the Interior, Albert Fall, Senator for New Mexico, sported a handle-bar moustache and wore a flowing black cape and broad-brimmed stetson – normalcy itself! – was so popular he was confirmed by immediate acclamation, the
only time in American history a cabinet member has been accorded such a vote of confidence.
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The cabinet list was a cross-section of successful America: a car manufacturer, two bankers, a hotel director, a farm-journal editor, an international lawyer, a rancher, an engineer and only two professional politicians.

Harding inherited an absentee presidency and one of the sharpest recessions in American history. By July 1921 it was all over and the economy was booming again. Harding had done nothing except cut government expenditure, the last time a major industrial power treated a recession by classic
laissez-faire
methods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level. Benjamin Anderson of Chase Manhattan was later to call it ‘our last natural recovery to full employment’.
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But the cuts were important. Indeed, Harding can be described as the only president in American history who actually brought about massive cuts in government spending, producing nearly a 40 per cent saving over Wilsonian peacetime expenditure.
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Nor was this a wild assault. It was part of a considered plan which included the creation of the Bureau of the Budget, under the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, to bring authorizations under systematic central scrutiny and control. Its first director, Charles Dawes, said in 1922 that, before Harding, ‘everyone did as they damn pleased’; cabinet members were ‘commanchees’, Congress ‘a nest of cowards’. Then Harding ‘waved the axe and said that anybody who didn’t co-operate his head would come off; the result was ‘velvet for the taxpayer’.
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