A Companion to Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover

Katherine A.S. Sibley, Katherine A.S. Sibley

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118834473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

With the analysis of the best scholars on this era, 29 essays demonstrate how academics then and now have addressed the political, economic, diplomatic, cultural, ethnic, and social history of the presidents of the Republican Era of 1921-1933 - Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

• This is the first historiographical treatment of a long-neglected period, ranging from early treatments to the most recent scholarship
• Features review essays on the era, including the legacy of progressivism in an age of "normalcy", the history of American foreign relations after World War I, and race relations in the 1920s, as well as coverage of the three presidential elections and a thorough treatment of the causes and consequences of the Great Depression
• An introduction by the editor provides an overview of the issues, background and historical problems of the time, and the personalities at play

Part I
The Background of Progressivism

Chapter One
The Wilson Legacy, Domestic and International

Christopher McKnight Nichols

In the one hundred years since Woodrow Wilson took office, his ideas and actions have cast a long shadow over American domestic and international politics. His successes and failures as governor of New Jersey and as a two-term President of the United States (as well as president of Princeton University) were vigorously debated in his day and have been almost continually thereafter. Throughout the presidencies of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover and the Republican-dominated Congresses that followed Wilson’s time in the White House, Wilson’s achievements, failures, and grand visions hovered over the politics of this so-called “New Era.”

Discussions over the meanings and outcomes of Wilson’s ideas and actions have led to him becoming a standard bearer for several hotly contested – and often vaguely defined – sets of political positions. The one point of consensus amongst scholars, politicians, and citizens from the 1920s through the present has been that Wilsonian progressivism and internationalism decisively shaped American domestic and international politics and history. In domestic affairs, Wilson helped to bring about significant new economic reforms, such as the establishment of a federal income tax and the Federal Reserve. In international affairs, Wilson brought the US into World War I, idealistically campaigned for a global effort to “make the world safe for democracy,” and championed the League of Nations.

So wide-ranging was Wilson’s influence that his name has become both an adjective and a noun (an “ian” and an “ism”), with each word refining two distinct schools of thought. “Wilsonianism” may be the more influential, if slightly less used noun form of his name; it usually refers to an idealistic liberal internationalist foreign relations stance premised on such notions as self-determination, economic globalization, and collective security. Lloyd Ambrosius has defined Wilsonianism as “epitomiz[ing] the liberal tradition in American foreign relations” (Ambrosius 2002: 1). Wilson’s efforts to achieve a “peace without victory,” to proclaim terms to resolve the war and to establish a new global order in his Fourteen Points in January 1918, and to promote the League of Nations are fundamental to the meaning and ramifications of Wilsonianism and thus to its legacy. Indeed, Wilsonianism has had such national and international traction that Frank Ninkovich (1999) has deployed the adjective form “Wilsonian” to make the bold case that the dominant paradigm for the US role in the world after 1921 generated a “Wilsonian century.” As Ninkovich astutely notes, “a study of the Wilsonian century points beyond Wilsonianism to a concern for understanding a process in which a world full of strangers has become a global society” (Ninkovich 1999: 291). Such views have not been the province of admirers alone. Wilson’s influence was so profound that even arch-critic Henry Kissinger ruefully noted in 1994 that, “Wilsonianism has survived while history has bypassed the reservations of his contemporaries” (Kissinger 1994: 30).

Despite the use of “Wilsonian” in terms of foreign relations as Ninkovich and others have applied it, in adjective form “Wilsonian” is exceedingly common in historical scholarship and has been used just as often, or more so, to refer to Wilson’s style and school of politics in the domestic arena. In such usage the term “Wilsonian” operates as a label for a constellation of particular views about reform politics and progressivism intertwined with the successes and failures of the Wilson years in government. Nevertheless, domestic Wilsonian views were knotted together with Wilsonianism as an international vision, as this chapter will explore.

The chapter will examine these and related themes as part of the broader process of studying, evaluating, and invoking Wilson and the long shadow he cast over the presidencies and era profiled in this volume. We start with Wilson’s actions and efforts during his lifetime, briefly exploring the election of 1912 and his time as president, while also delving into the resulting reactions and responses of his day. Next we turn to the major strands of interpretation after Wilson left the White House as they developed in the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover years. A focus here will be on the dramatic battles over the “lessons” of the Wilson years as prismed through the lens of revisionist and counter-revisionist historical scholarship during the period from 1921 through 1933, and after. Throughout this chapter the central emphasis lies with changing interpretations of the legacy of Wilson in sections organized around the main historiographical themes of both Wilsonianism and Liberal Internationalism and the “New Freedom” program and Wilsonian Progressivism of that era that endure to the present.

This chapter illustrates but cannot exhaust the comprehensive body of scholarship on the subject of Wilson’s legacy. Ultimately, it is important to note that Wilson’s ideas and actions, along with the domestic and international historical developments during his presidency from 1913 through 1921, set the political parameters for liberal progressivism at home and abroad. In turn, his views and actions served as rhetorical and conceptual touch points – generally negative and easily attacked for political purposes – for the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. The major shift in American domestic and foreign relations enacted by Wilson was something that the Republican administrations of the 1920s into the 1930s rejected, at least rhetorically. In this way Wilson became a foil. Nevertheless, he had established the main operating features for federal government regulation and revenue generation and the US role in the world even for those staunchly opposed to all things “Wilsonian.”

Wilson, who had to deal with the rejection of his beloved League of Nations and the ensuing health problems he experienced from that time until his death, would no doubt be gratified by this legacy. As a historically oriented intellectual who published widely on Anglo-American political and legal history, he had sought to make a lasting mark on the world. From his childhood he was fascinated with oratory and debate. By college he was “absorbed in the study of politics” and often made out cards reading “Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Senator from Virginia” (Link 1947–65: 1:5–6). Wilson attended Law School at the University of Virginia and earned a PhD in political science at Johns Hopkins University, working as a professor at Cornell, Bryn Mawr, and Wesleyan before going to Princeton and eventually serving as its president. Yet a close look at his writing from his school years reveals an aim for more than a place in law or academia. Wilson noted in several private letters while he was in graduate school, for example, that the law was not for him, and thus he shifted to doctoral work; he wanted to “make myself an outside force in politics” and struggled with his own “terrible ambition, a longing to do immortal work” (Link 1966–94: 3:405; Blum 1956: 15). Thus his early biographers and admiring friends tended to describe him as “always headed for politics” and perhaps for the presidency, but of course this path was far from certain (Blum 1956; Link 1947–65: vol. 1). Indeed, more recent scholarship has called this teleology into question (Heckscher 1991; Thompson 2002; Cooper 2009).

Research on the Wilsonian legacy and Wilson’s own views of his impact have depended in part on the availability of his private papers. Early scholars did not have access to his collections and later scholars had to travel to Princeton to view these voluminous files. The best early work was done by Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson’s official biographer, who produced the first multi-volume account of Wilson’s life and times during the 1920s and 1930s based on interviews and close contact with Wilson, his family, and friends, as well as unfettered access to his papers (during Wilson’s lifetime he only made the papers available en masse to Baker). Scholarship on Wilson significantly advanced after Arthur Link completed a magisterial multi-volume and extensively annotated compendium of Wilson’s writings and reciprocal correspondence entitled The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (1966–94). The volumes dealing with the World War I years did not appear until the 1980s and 1990s, and have made possible more fine-grained understandings of the most contested issues about Wilson’s vision of a “new world order” and more holistic understandings of Wilson’s developing thought. The archival richness accessible in these volumes helped to fuel post-Cold War work on Wilsonianism and has been central to a renewed interest in a wide array of topics – on missionaries, on pacifism, on economic theories and political philosophy, on human rights, and on nationalist movements around the world, among other topics – that can now more easily incorporate a deeper understanding of Wilson’s views and actions (Ambrosius 1991, 2003; Berg 2013; Cooper 2003, 2009; Heckscher 1991; Thompson 2002; Manela 2007; Throntveit 2011, forthcoming).

Wilsonian Historiography

The historical profile of Woodrow Wilson and the Wilsonian legacy cannot be characterized as sequential so much as it has been richly sedimented. At least three main layers of analysis have been most prominent in the development of accounts of Wilson’s legacy since he left the White House in the spring of 1921. As with many historical cases, the highly charged present-day implications of the life, ideas, and actions of Wilson have continued to add urgency to archival research and interpretations, revitalizing Wilson’s ideas and making them relevant to contemporary concerns while at the same time often unmooring them from their own place and time in order to find Wilson, Wilsonian, or Wilsonianism applicable in the present.

The first main layer of Wilson historiography revolves around a deceptively simple related dual question: how “progressive” was Wilson and how “progressive” were his reform efforts? Critics in his own era and those thereafter – including scholars, thinkers, and politicians from both the political left and right – have noted the reforms enacted particularly between 1913 and 1916, hearkening to their essential “progressiveness” or, conversely, seeing them as a half-measure far from “authentic” progressivism. Much of this scholarship has explored the concept of a Wilsonian approach to politics and reform and has emphasized the limits of the progressive reforms and the president’s own reform impulses. Evidence here abounds and is premised either on a positive assessment of even the most modest changes made under the Wilson Administration (Berg 2013; Blum 1956; Cooper 2009; Heckscher 1991; Link 1957; Thompson 2002), as of historical significance despite the grander expectations for reform of many of the era’s progressives, or underscores several more critical lines of reproach. With respect to the latter, one argument highlights the corporatist and capitalist effects of Wilson’s mixed record on regulating the economy (Sklar 1988; Kolko 1977); another, complementary and widely shared criticism lies with Wilson’s relative lack of effort on social justice issues and retrograde perspectives on women’s suffrage and on race, as well as his willingness to severely curtail free speech during wartime (virtually all of Wilson’s best biographers suggest this to some degree: Link, Blum, Thompson, Heckscher, Cooper, Berg); another line of criticism, often building on those already laid out, places emphasis on Wilson’s lack of progressive bona fides until at least 1909, suggesting an exceedingly gradual process of coming to the progressive cause (Eisenach 1994).

A range of scholars rightly point out that much of the ea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO HISTORY
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Background of Progressivism
• Part II: Warren G. Harding and the Early 1920s
• Part III: Calvin Coolidge and His Era
• Part IV: Herbert Hoover and His Era
• Part V: In Retrospect
• Index
• End User License Agreement