The Politics of the 1920s
 Big Ideas:
 President Harding’s administration was rife
with corruption.
▪ He appointed several people of
questionable character to his
administration.

Harding avoided
campaigning on progressive
issues. Instead, he
promised to go back to the
way life was before the war.
 His campaign slogan was “a
return to normalcy.”

Harding won a landslide
victory in the 1920 election.

During Harding’s administration, America began to
modernize. Unemployment dropped, and business
boomed.
Henry Ford
Pres. Harding
Thomas Edison
Harvey Firestone

Harding was charming and
outgoing –the exact opposite
of the stiff and dull Woodrow
Wilson.

However, Harding’s presidency
would be defined by both the
honest and dishonest people
with which he surrounded
himself.

Some trustworthy people
he relied on were:
 Herbert Hoover as
Secretary of Commerce
 Andrew Mellon as
Secretary of the
Treasury
 Charles Evans Hughes
as Secretary of State.
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After taking office Harding
awarded his campaign
supporters and contributors with
powerful government positions.
 These people were concerned
only with power and adding
money to their own pockets
through graft and bribery.
 This dishonest group of the
President’s friends was
nicknamed the “Ohio Gang.”


Some of the men were shameless
in their dishonesty.
 As the head of Veteran’s Affairs, Charles
Forbes diverted $250 million in medical
supplies meant for soldiers so that he
could sell them and keep the money.
 At the same time he was stealing form
veterans, he was also denying many of
them benefits.
▪ Of the 300,000 soldiers wounded in
WWI, Forbes only approved of the
claims of 47,000


President Harding died just as the
biggest scandal was about to
break.
 While traveling on the West
Coast, Harding became sick
and died.
The Teapot Dome Scandal began
in 1922 when Sec. of the Interior
Albert Fall took bribes in
exchange for allowing oil
companies to drill on Navy oil
reserves in Teapot Dome, WY and
Elk Hills, CA.

The investigation took nearly 8
years and Fall was the first
cabinet officer to go to prison.
 It was the biggest government
scandal until Watergate in the
1970s.


President Harding died of an
illness in 1923 and Vice President
Calvin Coolidge became the new
president.
Coolidge’s personality was the
opposite of Harding.
 He earned the nickname “Silent Cal”
because he spoke very little
exclaiming, “The things I never say
never get me into trouble.”
 He also had a different view on
promoting people to government
positions. “Nine-tenths of a
president’s callers at the White House
want something they ought not to

Big Ideas:
 President Coolidge believed that government should
interfere as little as possible with business and industry.
▪ Even though the government cut taxes in the 1920s, it
encouraged economic growth which led to an increase
in tax revenue for the government.


Pres. Coolidge dumped many of
his predecessor’s cabinet officials,
but kept the good ones such as
Andrew Mellon and Herbert
Hoover.
Melon had 3 main goals: balance
the budget, cut taxes, and reduce
the debt.
 He believed that this was the way to
improve the economy.

The idea that reduced taxes
increases revenue and encourages
growth is called supply-side
economics.

Secretary of Commerce Herbert
Hoover promoted a cooperation
between government and business
to promote economic efficiency he
called cooperative individualism.
 For example, Hoover wanted the
government to help businesses
find new markets for their goods,
created a new agency to help the
new airline industry expand, and
created the Federal Radio
Commission to assist
broadcasters by regulating radio
frequencies.
 Big Ideas:
 During the 1920s the US tried to use its
economic power to encourage peace
through disarmament treaties.

European economies were
heavily battered by WWI. The
US emerged as the economic
leader of the world.
 For the first time, Europe actually
owed the us money.

Americans generally favored
isolationism: the idea that
America is better off staying out
of world affairs.
 But it was hard to stay out of
world affairs when other
countries owe you $10 billion.


The US wanted the economies of
European countries to heal and
thrive so they could buy American
goods and pay back their loans.
Germany’s economy was in
serious trouble and defaulting on
payments.
 US Diplomat Charles Dawes
negotiated a deal with France,
Britain, and Germany that
promised Germany loans from the
US to pay their debts. In exchange,
Britain and France had to agree to
lower reparations.
Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary
of State, held a conference in
Washington DC to discuss limits to
militarism.
 The US was worried about Japan’s
growing influence in the Pacific
and the Europeans who could not
afford to maintain a military
presence in the region.

 Military limits worked for a while but
seriously undermined the British fleet,
gave Japan de-facto control of Asian
waters, and left the Philippines
indefensible. It also did little to limit
land forces.


Further measures to end war
were taken in 1928.
French Foreign Minister
Aristide Briand and US
Secretary of State Frank
Kellogg organized a treaty
conference to outlaw war as a
means of foreign policy: the
Kellogg-Briand Pact.

15 nations signed the
document pledging to use
diplomacy instead of guns to
solve disputes.
 The document served as a legal
basis for officially outlawing
military aggression, but it
lacked any means of
enforcement.
▪ Within 12 years, every country that
signed the document would be at
war.