Wallace, the vocal editor of Wallace’s Farmer and a well-known proponent of scientific farming, was made secretary of agriculture.
Many of Harding’s cabinet appointees, however, were individuals of true stature that answered to various American constituencies. Harding’s presidency would go down in history as among the most corrupt.
Workers lost not only bargaining power but also the support of courts, politicians, and, in large measure, the American public. During the 1920s, the labor movement suffered a sharp decline in memberships. A sour postwar economy led elites to raise the specter of the Russian Revolution and sideline not just the various American socialist and anarchist organizations but nearly all union activism. Meanwhile, the vestiges of America’s involvement in World War I and its propaganda and suspicions of anything less than “100 percent American” pushed Congress to address fears of immigration and foreign populations. To deliver on his promises of stability and prosperity, Harding signed legislation to restore a high protective tariff and dismantled the last wartime controls over industry. But whatever it was, it was not “normalcy.” The 1920s were a decade of conflict and tension. On the other hand, many Americans fought harder than ever for equal rights and cultural observers noted the appearance of “the New Woman” and “the New Negro.” Old immigrant communities that had predated new immigration quotas, meanwhile, clung to their cultures and their native faiths. But at the same time, many Americans turned their back on political and economic reform, denounced America’s shifting demographics, stifled immigration, retreated toward “old-time religion,” and revived the Ku Klux Klan with millions of new members. New mass entertainment introduced talking films and jazz while sexual and social restraints loosened. The mass production and consumption of automobiles, household appliances, film, and radio fueled a new economy and new standards of living. The 1920s, of course, would be anything but “normal.” The decade so reshaped American life that it came to be called by many names: the New Era, the Jazz Age, the Age of the Flapper, the Prosperity Decade, and, most commonly, the Roaring Twenties. Harding could hardly deliver the peace that he promised, but his message nevertheless resonated among a populace wracked by instability.
Farmers’ bankruptcy rates, already egregious, now skyrocketed.
After wartime controls fell, the economy tanked and national unemployment hit 20 percent. Anarchists and others sent more than thirty bombs through the mail on May 1, 1919. Waves of labor strikes, meanwhile, hit soon after the war. Then, between 19, nearly seven hundred thousand Americans died in a flu epidemic that hit nearly 20 percent of the American population. More than 115,000 American soldiers had lost their lives in barely a year of fighting in Europe. Two months later, he said, “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing not nostrums, but normalcy not revolution, but restoration.” The nation still reeled from the shock of World War I, the explosion of racial violence and political repression in 1919, and, a lingering “Red Scare” sparked by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. 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. Harding took the oath to become the twenty-ninth president of the United States. On a sunny day in early March 1921, Warren G.
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