When Prince Morrow died, groups such as the American Social Hygiene Association persuaded John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Grace Dodge to take over the leadership of the movement. Rockefeller, who had given thousands of dollars for studies and provided much of the annual budget, had served on special grand juries in New York investigating the white-slave trade. Although the juries found no evidence of a syndicate, the experience convinced Rockefeller that there were responsible concerns about the damage done to society by venereal disease. He thus joined the thousands of other moral crusaders of the day, further cementing the relationship between planning, professionalism, and social reform. As one press release aptly put it, “The name Rockefeller stands for a type of efficiency and thoroughness of work.”65
All of these streams of reform and the application of science and professional solutions came to a confluence over alcohol, particularly because the saloon was perceived as the hotbed of prostitution. Even the direct democracy movement played a significant role in eliminating booze. At the elementary school level, thanks to Massachusetts housewife Mary Hunt, a movement called Scientific Temperance Instruction swept the nation in the 1880s, providing a forerunner to Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” antidrug campaign a century later.66 Enlisting antialcohol crusaders from Connecticut to California, Scientific Temperance Instruction in classrooms introduced scientific experts to support its Prohibition position, leading a popular democratic movement to influence curricula. The Anti-Saloon League, founded in the 1890s, joined with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to use local laws to excise saloons within city boundaries, isolating them in wet areas. More than 40 percent of the population lived in dry communities by 1906, thanks to such local legislation, and within three years the dry movement had spread to a dozen states, again through grassroots activism.67
Prohibition puts modern liberal historians in a quandry: on the one hand, they have approved of its use of federal power for social engineering for a purpose they deem desirable; but on the other hand, it ran counter to their unwillingness to pursue any policies based on morals or values. Consequently, historians have mischaracterized Prohibition as “cultural and class legislation,” wherein Progressive upper classes and Anglo-Saxons “imposed their Puritanical will on benign but besotted immigrants to mold an America that reflected their values,” as one text described the Progressives’ efforts.68 Historian Richard Hofstadter called Prohibition a “parochial substitute for genuine reform, carried about America by the rural-evangelical virus.”69 Such a view erred by lumping together two substantially different groups, the Progressives and the rural Populists. A stronger correlation existed with women and Prohibition, leading dry counties to also permit universal suffrage. Only after Prohibition failed was there a deliberate effort to reinterpret the essentially Progressive flavor of Prohibition as the work of wild-eyed Christian evangelists and Populists or, as H. L. Mencken sneeringly put it, “ignorant bumpkins of the cow states.”70 The amendment gained broad supermajority support from a wide range of groups, as was obvious by the fact that it was an amendment and not a statutory law. As Prohibition historian Norman Clark wrote, “A majority of the people in a majority of the states wanted this truly national effort to influence national morality.”71 Doctors, teachers, upper-class reformers, rural preachers, labor leaders, and businessmen of all sorts supported Prohibition.
Under the amendment, the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors (consisting of any beverage with more than .5 percent alcohol) was prohibited. Unlike later laws against drug use, actually consuming alcohol was not a crime, and had enforcement been even remotely possible, Prohibition may not have passed. Although a large majority of Americans (for a variety of motivations) supported the concept, it was not clear how many wished to provide the government with the means and the license to ensure compliance.72
A revealing look at the Janus-faced nature of Progressive policy can be gleaned from the approach to enforcement of the antialcohol campaign. The Volstead Act, passed in 1919 over Wilson’s veto, provided an enforcement mechanism, but instead of placing the Prohibition Bureau inside the Justice Department, where it belonged, Volstead made it a part of the Treasury Department. “Revenooers” broke up illegal stills, and agents crashed into speakeasies; and when the government had no other evidence, it charged mobsters with income tax evasion, which was what finally put Al Capone behind bars.
Reform zeal during this time led to the formation of an antituberculosis league in 1897, the American Conference for the Prevention of Infant Mortality in 1909, the National Mental Hygiene Committee that same year, the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness in 1915, and a half dozen more.73 The founding of the American Eugenics Society in 1923 by biologist Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell, and Luther Burbank was more chilling.74 Indiana and California mandated sterilization of confirmed “criminals, idiots, rapists, and imbeciles” whose condition was viewed as “incurable” based on the recommendation of three physicians.75 All of these organizations and movements captured the Progressive view that disease and imperfection of any kind could be “reformed” through human action.
As with most other reform movements in America, Prohibition started among upper-class females, and, as was often the case, the targets ultimately were lower-class men. According to the pietistic conscience, the lower classes were naturally the morally weaker classes, but predictably it was pietist women who after 1870 rushed toward political and social protest to save the family.76 And who could be numbered among these “morally weaker classes”? None other than immigrants, Irish, Italians, and Poles. In the eyes of Progressive reformers, the drinking habits of the foreigners reinforced the political corruption where fat, cigar-smoking backroom pols mobilized armies of drunken immigrants to pad their machine’s vote.
Whether temperance itself was ever the sole objective of the women’s groups who participated in the Prohibition movement invites skepticism. Many feminist leaders latched on to Prohibition only as an organizational tool that would permit them to mobilize for the “real” effort, women’s suffrage.
Suffering for Suffrage
Voting rights for women, another Progressive plank, had a long history. Since the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, calls for the Declaration of Independence to be applied to all people, not just all men, had increased in frequency and intensity. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had organized the Seneca Women’s Rights Convention, labeled it the “duty of women…to secure…their sacred right to the elective franchise.”77 Shortly after the Civil War, Stanton had formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, which wanted a constitutional amendment for female suffrage. That association soon pressed for other objectives, including birth control and easier divorce laws, and alienated some women who merely wanted the vote, and who in turn formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. The two merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, largely made up of middle-and upper-class reform-minded people of both sexes.
The Wyoming Territory had granted voting rights to women in 1869, and when Wyoming petitioned to enter the Union twenty years later, Congress allowed the women’s vote clause to stand in the new state constitution. In 1916, Wyoming’s neighbor, Montana, elected Jeannette Pickering Rankin as the first woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Colorado voters changed their state’s law in 1893 to permit female suffrage, and were soon joined by their neighbors in Utah, which became a state in 1896 with women’s suffrage. The trend seemed inevitable, and in 1919, Congress introduced the Nineteenth Amendment to enfranchise adult women. The states ratified the amendment in 1920. Over the years, one of the most significant impacts of female voting rights has been a corollary increase in the size of government.78
Voting rights for women might have come sooner had the issue been restricted to the franchise alone. But activists such as Margaret Sanger from New York City had associated feminism with such controversial practices as birth control and eugenics. Sanger, one of
eleven children, was deeply affected by the death of her tubercular mother. Instead of blaming the disease, Sanger blamed the rigors of childbirth for her mother’s death. The difficult delivery of her own baby convinced her of the dangers of the birth process and the problems of poverty she associated with large families.
Sanger quickly fell in with New York radicals and met all the important socialists, including Debs, “Big Bill” Haywood, John Reed, Clarence Darrow, Will Durant, and Upton Sinclair. She seemed “supremely unimpressed” by her fellow travelers: in addition to her disparaging remarks about Haywood and her “silk hat radical” reference to Debs, she called Alexander Beckman, a labor organizer, “a hack, armchair socialist—full of hot air but likely little else.”79 Sanger bitterly attacked any fellow travelers, characterizing members of the Socialist Party as “losers, complainers, and perpetual victims—unwilling or unable to do for themselves, much less society at large.”80 What kept her in the good graces of the radical community was her libertine attitude and, above all, her willingness to link socialism to sexual liberation.
After a failed attempt to open an abortion clinic, Sanger published a paper called The Woman Rebel that denounced marriage as a “degenerate institution,” openly advocated abortion, and endorsed political assassinations.81 Her writings clearly violated the Comstock Laws, enacted in 1873 to prohibit the transmission of pornography or other obscene materials through the mail, and she was indicted. Rather than submit to jail, Sanger fled to England, where she absorbed the already discredited overpopulation ideas of Malthus. Suddenly she found a way to package birth control in the less offensive wrapping of concern for population pressures. Although relabeling her program as family planning, in reality Sanger associated birth control with population control, particularly among the unfit. The most merciful thing a large family could do to a new baby, she suggested, was to kill it.82 She attacked charity as enabling the dregs of society to escape natural selection: “My criticism…is not directed at the failure of philanthropy, but rather at its success. The dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism…have today produced their full harvest of human waste.”83 Benevolence encouraged the “perpetuation of defectives, delinquents, and dependents.”84 Birth control and sterilization could be used to weed out the poor (and, she noted, blacks and Chinese, whom she likened to a “plague”). She viewed birth control as a means of “weeding out the unfit,” aiming at the “creation of a superman.”85
Founding the Birth Control Review in 1917, Sanger published a number of proeugenics articles: “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” (June 1920), “The Eugenic Conscience” (February 1921), “The Purpose of Eugenics” (December 1924), “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” (July 1925), and “Birth Control: The True Eugenics” (August 1928). One of her regular contributors, Norman Hines, repeatedly claimed that Catholic stock (that is, people from predominantly Catholic nations) was inferior to Protestant stock. Perhaps the most outrageous article published in Birth Control Review was a favorable book review of Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1923)—a book that became a model for fascist eugenics in Europe. Claiming that black children were “destined to be a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation,” Sanger revealed herself as a full-fledged racist.86
Mainstream feminists recognized the dangers posed by any association with the eugenics movement, and distanced themselves from her views sufficiently enough to ensure passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Only later would they revive Sanger’s positions under the benign-sounding name Planned Parenthood.
The Dark Bargain
By 1920 the United States looked vastly different than it had at the turn of the century. Technology had changed life in dramatic ways; Progressive reforms had affected almost every aspect of daily life; and the large-scale economic reorganization that had started in the 1860s had reached maturity. Although the end of the war brought a large-scale depression in the agricultural sector, the nation nevertheless was perched to spread its wings. However, flight would require a drastic withdrawal from Progressive wartime assumptions and structures in every area of life. Candidate Warren G. Harding would call it a return to normalcy, but regardless of the term, exorbitant tax rates, large government debt, and price fixing would need to go.
Wilson’s exit marked the last gasp of Progressivism until, arguably, 1933. That would have surprised many, especially since the polestar of Progressive policy, Prohibition, had just been enacted. Yet the contradictions of Progressivism were precisely what had doomed it as a viable American political theory. Progressives had made a dark bargain with the voters. On the one hand, they sought women’s rights, which liberated women (often) to act as men; on the other hand, they sought to constrain liberties across a wide range of economic, social, and behavioral issues. Women could vote, but now they could not drink. They could start businesses, but could not expand those companies lest they fall prey to antitrust fervor. Likewise, men found that Progressive policies had freed them from the dominance of the state legislators when it came to electing their senators, but then they learned that the states lacked the power to insulate them from arbitrary action by the federal government. Voters could recall their judges, but at the cost of allowing them to make tough, unpopular decisions. They could initiate legislation, swamping ballots with scores of legal-sounding and unfathomable proposals. And the income tax, hailed as the measure to redistribute wealth, succeeded only in taking more wealth than ever from those least able to pay it. Small wonder that in 1920 Americans, for the most part, were ready to ditch Progressivism.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Roaring Twenties and the Great Crash, 1920–32
The Twenties Myth
Many recent histories—including textbooks—have developed a mythology about the Roaring Twenties and the Great Crash of 1929. Although it is tempting to call this mythology the Liberal Legend, it would be inaccurate because elements of it have been echoed by conservative historians, most recently Paul Johnson, and to some extent, by libertarian economists like Murray Rothbard. By and large, however, the essentials of this story are the same.1
During the 1920s, the story goes, the wild speculation in the stock market led to a maladjustment of wealth on the one hand and too much investment on the other. Average Americans could not buy enough durable goods—autos, radios, and other big ticket items—and as a consequence, sales in automobiles and other manufactured items tailed off. The Federal Reserve Board, in thrall to the Republican probusiness clique, did not curtail bank lending to securities affiliates, as the banks’ securities arms were called, until it was too late. Instead, throughout much of the 1920s the Fed actually expanded the money supply, allowing stock prices to soar in a wild orgy of speculation.
At this point in the mythology, Herbert Hoover enters the picture, thoroughly bamboozled by the developments and too uninventive to correct the problems. Lacking the vision of Franklin Roosevelt, Hoover simply allowed things to deteriorate, and he deserved the embarrassment from appellations like “Hoovervilles” (given to tent cities) and “Hoover hankies” (given to empty pockets turned inside out). Unwilling to use the power of the federal government to “fix” the economy, the befuddled Hoover deservedly lost the 1932 election to Franklin Roosevelt, at which point everything improved. Roosevelt’s vision and courage, through the creation of the New Deal, led America out of the Depression.
Little of this mythology is true. Consider the notion that the stock market was one gigantic speculative bubble: there is virtually no evidence for that in numerous studies by economic historians. The most any economists come up with is a tiny layer of speculation at the top, one incapable of affecting either stock prices or attitudes toward buying securities.2 If anything, the market accurately reflected the fantastic growth in American industry. The most rapidly rising stocks in the 1920s had been electric utilities, radios, and autos. Since 1899 industrial use of electricity had zoomed upward by nearly 300
percent. Little else needs to be said about the impact of autos on America’s culture and economy. Certainly the auto industry was not indicative of speculation.
In fact, several elements would have had to be present to make a case for speculation. First, people would have had to invest with little or no information about the securities they were purchasing. That has not been demonstrated. Quite the opposite, studies have shown that most investors were well informed, especially about foreign bonds that supposedly had dragged down the large banks. As just one example, Charles E. Merrill, the securities genius who perceived that the markets of the future would lie with the vast middle class, constructed his firm’s reputation on accurate and honest appraisals of securities.3 Second, to make the case for speculation, as John Kenneth Galbraith attempted to do, it has to be shown that the maldistribution of wealth resulted in most of the trading’s being conducted by the wealthy. Yet analyses of bond issues of the day showed that a broad cross section of Americans snapped up the latest bonds, with the most prominent occupations of the purchasers being schoolteachers, cabbies, and maids.
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