Roaring Twenties

Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover: The Republican Decade

Between 1921 and 1933, the White House was occupied, with only a brief interruption, by two men from Vermont and Ohio. The first, Warren G. Harding, was elected in 1920 on the slogan “a return to normalcy.” He died in office in 1923. The second, Calvin Coolidge, succeeded him, won his own election in 1924, and served until 1929. The third, Herbert Hoover, won in a landslide in 1928 and watched his presidency collapse with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. The three men — one handsome, one taciturn, one brilliant — together defined the politics of the Roaring Twenties.

This cluster examines each in detail. For a deep dive into specific events, see the long-tail pages on the Harding scandals, Coolidge’s achievements, and Hoover’s response to the Depression.

Warren G. Harding (1921–1923)

Warren Gamaliel Harding was born on November 2, 1865, in Blooming Grove, Ohio. He was the first sitting U.S. senator to be elected president since James Buchanan. He had been a small-town newspaper editor, a state legislator, a U.S. senator, and a famously genial public figure — “the best looking man in politics,” one admirer wrote, “and the worst judge of men.” He won the 1920 Republican nomination on the eighth ballot, in a smoke-filled room at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, when party bosses decided he was more electable than the front-runner, Leonard Wood, and the progressive favorite, Hiram Johnson.

Harding’s cabinet was a mixture of greatness and disaster. The great included Charles Evans Hughes (State), Andrew Mellon (Treasury), Herbert Hoover (Commerce), and Henry C. Wallace (Agriculture). The disaster included Albert Fall (Interior), Harry Daugherty (Attorney General), and Edwin Denby (Navy), along with a circle of cronies from Ohio who came to be known as the Ohio Gang. The most prominent of these was Jess Smith, a political fixer who committed suicide in May 1923 in circumstances that embarrassed the administration.

Harding’s domestic achievements were substantial. He signed the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which created the Bureau of the Budget (later the Office of Management and Budget) and the General Accounting Office — the foundations of the modern federal budget process. He pushed through the Federal Highway Act of 1921, which funded the construction of a national highway system. He appointed four justices to the Supreme Court, including William Howard Taft, the former president, as Chief Justice. He signed the Federal Intermediate Credit Act and the Packers and Stockyards Act, both of which expanded federal regulation of agriculture.

In foreign policy, Harding’s most enduring legacy was the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22, which limited the tonnage of capital ships and set the diplomatic tone for the rest of the decade. He also signed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, the first major immigration-restriction law since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

But Harding’s presidency is now defined by scandal — most damagingly the Teapot Dome affair, in which the Secretary of the Interior accepted bribes for leasing federal oil reserves. The full details of his administration’s scandals are laid out in the Harding administration scandals.

In late July 1923, Harding embarked on a cross-country speaking tour, nicknamed the Voyage of Understanding. By the time he reached San Francisco, he was ill. On August 2, 1923, he died of what his doctors called “ptomaine poisoning” but what most historians believe was a heart attack or stroke. He was 57. The full details of his administration’s scandals are laid out in the Harding administration scandals.

Calvin Coolidge (1923–1929)

John Calvin Coolidge was born on July 4, 1872, in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, the only U.S. president born on Independence Day. He was a graduate of Amherst College, a lawyer, a city councilman, a state legislator, a mayor, a state senator, the lieutenant governor and then the governor of Massachusetts, and finally the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1920.

Coolidge became nationally famous on September 14, 1919, when he was governor of Massachusetts and the Boston Police Strike began. Samuel Gompers, the head of the AFL, called the strikers “my friends.” Coolidge, who had called out the state guard, issued a statement that would define him for the rest of his career: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” He won re-election by a huge margin.

When Harding died, Coolidge was visiting his family home in Plymouth Notch. His father, a notary public, administered the oath of office by lamplight in the front parlor. Coolidge went on to win the 1924 election in a landslide over the conservative Democrat John W. Davis of West Virginia and the progressive Republican Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin. The election was the first in which most Southern women voted in a presidential race; the Nineteenth Amendment had extended the franchise to them only four years earlier.

Coolidge’s domestic policies favored business. The Revenue Acts of 1924 and 1926, the most sweeping tax cuts in American history to that point, lowered the top marginal income tax rate from 73 percent to 25 percent. The Federal Radio Commission was created in 1927, the first federal agency to regulate broadcasting. The Flood Control Act of 1928 authorized the Mississippi River flood-control system. Coolidge vetoed the McNary-Haugen Farm Bill twice, in 1927 and 1928, despite the deepening agricultural depression, on the grounds that the federal government should not buy agricultural surpluses to keep farm prices up.

In foreign policy, Coolidge signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which “renounced war as an instrument of national policy.” The pact, drafted by Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, was eventually signed by 62 nations. It had no enforcement mechanism, but it represented the high-water mark of interwar idealism.

On August 2, 1927, Coolidge held a press conference at which he handed out a typewritten statement: “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.” He was the first president to rule out a third term by choice, and his decision not to seek re-election cleared the way for Herbert Hoover. A full look at Coolidge’s achievements is available in the long-tail page.

Coolidge’s reputation has been revised many times. He was considered competent but colorless in the 1930s. He was held up as a model of limited-government conservatism in the 1950s and again in the 1980s. In the 2010s, a wave of economic histories credited him with presiding over a period of extraordinary growth. He died on January 5, 1933, in Northampton, Massachusetts, just before the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt. His reputation for honesty and personal integrity remains intact, and he is the only 1920s president to leave office untainted by scandal.

Herbert Hoover (1929–1933)

Herbert Clark Hoover was born on August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa. Orphaned by the age of 10, he was raised by relatives in Oregon. He graduated from Stanford University in 1895, then made a fortune as a mining engineer, working in Australia, China, and elsewhere. He was a global figure before he entered American politics: he ran the Commission for Relief in Belgium during World War I, the U.S. Food Administration in 1917–18, and the American Relief Administration in 1919–21, which fed millions of Europeans after the armistice.

Hoover served as Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge from 1921 to 1928. He expanded the department’s mandate to include radio, aviation, and the regulation of new industries. He chaired the President’s Conference on Unemployment in 1921 and the Colorado River Compact of 1922. He was the most prominent progressive Republican of the decade, the founder of what would later be called Reaganism or compassionate conservatism — a belief in the efficiency of markets, the value of voluntary cooperation, and the role of government in setting standards rather than commanding outcomes.

Hoover won the 1928 election in a landslide over New York Governor Alfred E. Smith. He spent the 119 days between his election on November 6 and his inauguration on March 4, 1929, working on his transition — and was among the last presidents to have so long a lame-duck period before the Twentieth Amendment moved inauguration day to January 20, beginning with FDR’s second inauguration in 1937.

By the time Hoover took office, the agricultural depression was already in its eighth year. By October 1929, it was about to be overwhelmed by the Wall Street Crash. The crash began on Black Thursday, October 24, accelerated on Black Monday, October 28, and culminated on Black Tuesday, October 29. By mid-November, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had lost about half its value from its September peak. The full timeline of the stock market crash of 1929 and the end of the Roaring Twenties is covered in detail in those clusters.

Hoover’s response to the Depression was shaped by his belief in “rugged individualism” and voluntarism. He convened the President’s Conference on Unemployment in 1929 and encouraged business leaders to maintain wages and employment. He supported the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 and the Federal Farm Board. He signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, which raised duties on more than 20,000 imported goods and triggered retaliatory tariffs abroad. He signed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation Act of 1932, which lent money to banks, railroads, and other businesses. He signed the Emergency Banking Act in March 1933 in the closing days of his administration, which helped stabilize the collapsing banking system. He authorized the construction of what would be named the Hoover Dam. (The famous Glass-Steagall Act — which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and separated commercial from investment banking — was signed by Franklin Roosevelt in June 1933, after Hoover had left office.)

None of it was enough. By 1932, unemployment was over 20 percent. The Bonus Army of unemployed World War I veterans marched on Washington that summer. Hoover’s decision to use the U.S. Army — under Douglas MacArthur, with cavalry under George S. Patton — to disperse the marchers from their camp in Anacostia was the symbolic end of his presidency. He lost the 1932 election to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide, taking only six states. The full story of Hoover’s response to the Depression is told in the third long-tail page.

After leaving office, Hoover lived another 31 years. He criticized the New Deal as socialist, opposed American entry into World War II, served as an adviser to Harry Truman on the reorganization of the executive branch, and was appointed chairman of the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of Government (the Hoover Commission) by Truman in 1947 and by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. He died on October 20, 1964, in New York City, at the age of 90. He had outlived both his successor and the man who defeated him.

What Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover Had in Common

The three Republican presidents of the 1920s were personally very different. Harding was affable and lazy. Coolidge was austere and principled. Hoover was brilliant and brittle. But they shared a common political philosophy: a belief in laissez-faire, the gold standard, fiscal conservatism, the protection of American industry, and a strong but limited role for the federal government.

The political vehicle for this philosophy was Andrew Mellon, the Pittsburgh banker and aluminum magnate who served as Treasury Secretary under all three. Mellon’s tax cuts, his anti-inflationary policies, and his willingness to let businesses fail if they could not survive on their own shaped the decade. The prosperity of the 1920s is, in the popular imagination, often attributed to this philosophy — though historians point out that the prosperity masked enormous inequalities and that the policies that worked in the 1920s were ill-suited to the crisis of the 1930s.

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