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Warren G. Harding Administration Begins
Warren G. Harding took the oath to become the twenty-ninth president of the United States. He had won a landslide election by promising a “return to normalcy.” “Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way,” he declared in his inaugural address. Two months later, he said, “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.”
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Cooliage takes Harding's place
Harding died suddenly of a heart attack and Vice President Calvin Coolidge ascended to the presidency. As president, Coolidge sought to remove the stain of scandal but otherwise continued Harding’s economic approach, refusing to take actions in defense of workers or consumers against American business. “The chief business of the American people,” the new president stated, “is business.” Coolidge supported lower taxes and maintained higher tariff rates.
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The Scopes Trial
John T. Scopes was tried for teaching his students evolutionary theory in violation of the Butler Act, a state law preventing evolutionary theory or any theory that denied “the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” from being taught in publicly funded Tennessee classrooms. Clarence Darrow, an agnostic attorney and a keen liberal mind from Chicago, aided the defense. William Jennings Bryan was on the prosecuting side.
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The Jazz Singer Premiers
It was the first movie with synchronized words and pictures. The Warners spent half a million to equip two theaters to show it. “Sound is a passing fancy,” one MGM producer told his wife, but Warner Bros.’ assets, which increased from just $5,000,000 in 1925 to $230,000,000 in 1930, tell a different story.
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The Smoot-Hawley Tariff
Hoover signed the highest tariff in American history, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, just as global markets began to crumble. Other countries responded in kind, tariff walls rose across the globe, and international trade ground to a halt. Between 1929 and 1932, international trade dropped from $36 billion to only $12 billion. American exports fell by 78 percent. Combined with overproduction and declining domestic consumption, the tariff exacerbated the world’s economic collapse.
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The Great Depression Starts
The start of the great depression took place over a series of events combined with the general downward trajectory of the stock market from the mid-1920s to 30s. However, the Hoover administration did not help. 1,352 banks failed. In 1932, another nearly 2,300 banks collapsed. 1930 is the year when many Americans could no longer deny the worsening state of their economy. -
Hoover Creates the RFC
With the economy long since stagnant and a reelection campaign looming, Hoover, hoping to stimulate American industry, created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to provide emergency loans to banks, building-and-loan societies, railroads, and other private industries. It was radical in its use of direct government aid and out of character for the normally laissez-faire Hoover, but it also bypassed needy Americans to bolster industrial and financial interests.
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The Fair Labor Standards Act and "End" of the New Deal
Historians debate when the New Deal ended. Some identify the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 as the last major New Deal measure. Others see wartime measures such as price and rent control and the G.I. Bill as species of New Deal legislation. Still others conceive of a “New Deal order,” a constellation of “ideas, public policies, and political alliances,” Indeed, the New Deal’s legacy still remains, and its battle lines still shape American politics.
-The American Yawp