Once the world that people were born into was indistinguishable from the one they left after their three score and ten. Beginning with the Renaissance, accelerating change has become the new normal. The result has been a pervasive feeling that might be expressed as: “everything was better then.”
But no two people would agree on when “then” was or what would constitute “better”. Some would appear to wish the plantation and the slaves were back. And many of our discontents about the present are ill-informed. Would we really trade life today for the sweat shop, the outhouse and the early death of children because antibiotics had not yet been discovered?
Randall Jarrell, in a quote worth memorizing, said “The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.” Reading a little history, if it isn’t of the airbrushed sort, is a useful antidote to this mood of what might be called utopian nostalgia. It might allow us to quit yearning for what Jill Lepore calls “a fantasy world of the past that never happened.”
Political parties, preachers or moralists with a reactionary product to sell often contrast a terrible now with a wonderful then. Real history can remind us that the rose-tinted past we imagine was actually pretty vile, or at least as screwed up as the present we defame, or just downright weird.
“The Splendid Century by C.S Lewis’s brother Warren, concerns the court of Louis XIV. It often seems to be describing a world closer to fantasy or science-fiction than any earthly realm. For example, at the Sun King’s court, a highly sought-after job for a courtier was tending to the king’s chamber pot.
In the Paris of the pious Middle Ages, prostitutes energetically drummed up business in the cemetery of the Church of the Innocents as bodies were being buried and sermons preached. A Founding Father and ornament of Enlightenment thought was shot in a duel, and on the floor of the Senate, the self-styled greatest deliberative body in the world, gentlemen who disagreed often administered beatings to each other.
We may despair at the dystopian reign of Donald the First, but in fact he is channeling an earlier predecessor with whom is he vying for the title of worst president ever – Warren G. Harding. I am indebted to “These Truths” for many of the details in that follow.
To be fair, Harding was less obviously vulgar and corrupt than Trump, but equally unprepared for the job. He was notoriously incontinent personally, so much so that his own father said that if Warren had been a woman he’d have been constantly ”in the family way.” Nan Britton was his Stormy Daniels and, in a more straitlaced era the liaison damaged his reputation.
Like Trump, Harding was elected in a backlash against globalization and foreign entanglements in the disillusionment after World War I. He was a small-town newspaper owner, then a backbencher in the Ohio legislature and for a few years an inconsequential U.S Senator. He won the Republican nomination for president on the tenth ballot, largely because the backroom boys believed he’d be pliant and looked the part.
They weren’t wrong. He promised a return to normalcy, which won him the presidency in 1920. Normalcy turned out to mean serving the purposes of the plutocrats by undoing the reforms of the Progressive Era. For us, the bathtub gin and flappers of the 1920s may symbolize a carefree era of glamorous Gatsbyesque wealth, but for most of the country it was the era of Rotarian Babbitts.
In his inaugural, Harding promised lower taxes, concern for agriculture’s problems, an end to government experiments in business, and efficient government administration. What he delivered was otherwise. On the courts, Constitutional fundamentalists he appointed worked to undermine Progressive laws that aided working men.
He appointed a gaggle of cronies, at least one in-law, and a cabinetful of business tycoons led by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, a banker and one of the richest men in the country. Mellon promised cutting taxes would lower prices of housing, boost wages, raise the standard of living, create jobs and advance the general prosperity. His policies certainly advanced the prosperity of his business class. He cut taxes on business profits, estates, capital gains, and capped the tax on income so the rich paid less and the poor more.
Thus, he pioneered the trickle-down supply side economics later espoused by Reagan and now by Trump. As always, it produced a temporary boom, aided in the ‘20s by pent up demand after the abstemious war years, and the temporary advantage created by our European competitors having to deal with the wreckage and debt of the war. So, between 1922 and 1928, industrial production rose by 70% and real ages by 22%.
Innovation also flourished. In 1916 only 16% of American families lived in homes with electricity. Bu 1927 it was 63%, leading to a boom in purchases of radios, vacuum cleaners and other labor-saving devices. But the seeds of the boom’s destruction were also planted because Harding also led the country on a turn inward, even though it was at the center of global trade in the aftermath of the war.
The borders were closed to immigrants and to foreign goods. Immigrants deemed racial inferior were restricted or forbidden. These included all Asians and most swarthy southern Europeans. An exception was made for Mexicans because they provided needed stoop labor that it was claimed Americans would not perform, but they were given the title “illegal immigrants” making them ineligible for citizenship. Sound familiar?
Tariffs were imposed on overseas products. Our trading partners retaliated and soon farmers and manufacturers were suffering. Harding escaped much of the blame by dying suddenly of cardiac arrest in 1923. Harding did get the blame for the rampant corruption revealed after his death.
His Interior Secretary went to jail for taking a bribe to sell an oil man the right to drill on government land. Further maladministration, rather than the efficiency he’d promised was discovered in the Justice Department, Bureau of Prisons, and at Veterans. Zinke, Pruitt and Trump would have been right at home in 1922.
It was also the era during which advertising, mass media and public relations pioneered the business of misleading the public, not just about soap, but about politicians. Indeed, the word propaganda was coined during WWI and was thought to be a good thing.
In a death that seems right out of the Trump White House, Harding died as his wife was reading him a news story favorable to him. His last words were, “That’s good, read some more.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same.