History of the United States in the Twentieth Century — Fall

Theodore Roosevelt 1858-1919

TR was a sickly child, an anxious youth and young man, and when his young wife died leaving him a twenty-five-year-old widower with a child, he went out to the Badlands of Dakota, to heal and find himself (1884). Calling it the Badlands was a typical 19th-century topographical moral judgment (though it is true that the French, who were there first, baptized them mauvaise terres à traverser). It was indeed a Deathscape, actually strewn with buffalo skulls and bones. Below the buttes were mazes of quicksands and connecting gullies and abysses, into which men and animals simply disappeared. There were mists of steam, and smoldering lignite and coal seams emitted subterranean fires. TR, characteristically, summed up: ‘The Badlands looked like Poe sounded.’ He noted that volcanic ash covered this part of South Dakota, east of the Black Hills in the southwest of the Territory (it did not become a state till 1889). The ash went to a depth of 300 feet and had in prehistoric times engulfed herds of mammoths, elephants, camels, and other creatures whose bones are still buried there.209 Natural forces were still scorching, eroding, sandblasting, and freezing, then rock-splitting the surface all the time and TR called it ‘As grim and desolate and forbidding as any place on earth could be.’ He seems to have seen himself, not quite consciously, as like John the Baptist in the desert, or Jesus Christ spending a time in the wilderness to prepare himself for his ministry. The Roosevelts were old money and TR was able to buy himself into a cattle-herding business, setting up his headquarters at the Maltese Cross Ranch near Medora, and building a remote lodge called Elkhorn. It was his object to overcome his physical debility by pushing himself to the limit of his resources: he wrote a letter home boasting, ‘I have just come in from spending thirteen hours in the saddle.’ There were still a few buffalo and Sioux Indians around and the frontier was not yet ‘closed.’

Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People (pp. 615-616). HarperCollins.

REQUIRED READING FOR THE WHOLE YEAR OF HISTORY OF THE USA

From the Publisher:
"For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society. The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. Too often they reflect a fragmented outlook that fails to convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own history. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding and its aspirations; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative effectively. Of course, it goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale of the past. It will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But as Land of Hope brilliantly shows, there is no contradiction between a truthful account of the American past and an inspiring one. Readers of Land of Hope will find both in its pages."

REVIEWS

“At a time of severe partisanship that has infected many accounts of our nation’s past, this brilliant new history, Land of Hope, written in lucid and often lyrical prose, is much needed. It is accurate, honest, and free of the unhistorical condescension so often paid to the people of America’s past. This generous but not uncritical story of our nation’s history ought to be read by every American. It explains and justifies the right kind of patriotism.”― Gordon S. Wood, author of Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

“We’ve long needed a readable text that truly tells the American story, neither hiding the serious injustices in our history nor soft-pedaling our nation’s extraordinary achievements. Such a text cannot be a mere compilation of facts, and it certainly could not be written by someone lacking a deep understanding and appreciation of America’s constitutional ideals and institutions. Bringing his impressive skills as a political theorist, historian, and writer to bear, Wilfred McClay has supplied the need.”― Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University

“No one has told the story of America with greater balance or better prose than Wilfred McClay. Land of Hope is a history book that you will not be able to put down. From the moment that ‘natives’ first crossed here over the Bering Strait, to the founding of America’s great experiment in republican government, to the horror and triumph of the Civil War...McClay’s account will capture your attention while offering an unforgettable education.”― James W. Ceaser, Professor of Politics, University of Virginia

RECOMMENDED READING

From Kirkus's Reviews:
Theodore Roosevelt emerges as considerably more than his toothy Rough Rider legend in this extensively researched, psychologically penetrating biography of our 26th president. Even as an asthmatic child, when he began to mold his mind with tales of heroes and his body with physical exercise, Roosevelt saw life as a series of struggles and achievements, according to Brands (History/Texas A&M Univ.; The Reckless Decade, 1995). In young adulthood, this quest for heroism redoubled with the death of his father, who set a near-impossible moral standard. T.R.'s Manichaean perception of the world gave him the moral confidence, energy, and charisma that endeared him to supporters, but it also led him to intemperate, even demagogic attacks on opponents (e.g., he accused Woodrow Wilson of ``criminal folly'' for not preparing the US more thoroughly for entry into WW I). Brands absolves him of what critics viewed as his hypocrisy, noting that Roosevelt's near-total incapacity for reflection and self-knowledge led him, for good and ill, to ignore legal and procedural obstacles (notably by fomenting revolution in Panama to get the canal built there). Brands also adeptly traces the effect of Roosevelt's romanticism on his private life, noting that T.R.'s grief over the death of his first wife was so intense that he almost never referred to her after she died and maintained a more distant relationship with their daughter, Alice, than he did with the children of his second marriage. Brands accords Roosevelt full credit for blazing a path for future presidents in assuming responsibility for the economy and international security, and for using his office's ``bully pulpit'' to goad the national conscience. Missing some of the brio of Edmund Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and of the colonel himself, but a life that pays its subject the ultimate tribute of taking him seriously as an adult. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

William Howard Taft 1857-1930

William Howard Taft served as the 27th president of the United States from 1909 to 1913 and the tenth chief justice of the United States from 1921 to 1930. He is the only person to have held both offices. Taft was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, Alphonso Taft, was a U.S. attorney general and secretary of war. Taft attended Yale and joined Skull and Bones, of which his father was a founding member. After becoming a lawyer, Taft was appointed a judge while still in his twenties. He continued a rapid rise, being named solicitor general and a judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1901, President William McKinley appointed Taft civilian governor of the Philippines. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt made him Secretary of War, and he became Roosevelt's hand-picked successor. Despite his personal ambition to become chief justice, Taft declined repeated offers of appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, believing his political work to be more important. With Roosevelt's help, Taft had little opposition for the Republican nomination for president in 1908 and easily defeated William Jennings Bryan for the presidency in that November's election. As president, he focused on East Asia more than European affairs and repeatedly intervened to prop up or remove Latin American governments. Taft sought reductions to trade tariffs, then a major source of governmental income, but the resulting bill was heavily influenced by special interests. His administration was filled with conflict between the Republican Party's conservative wing, with which Taft often sympathized, and its progressive wing, toward which Roosevelt moved more and more. Controversies over conservation and antitrust cases filed by the Taft administration served to further separate the two men. The 1912 presidential election was a three-way race, as Roosevelt challenged Taft for renomination. Taft used his control of the party machinery to gain a bare majority of delegates and Roosevelt bolted the party. The split left Taft with little chance of reelection, and he took only Utah and Vermont in his loss to Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson. After leaving office, Taft returned to Yale as a professor, continuing his political activity and working against war through the League to Enforce Peace. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft chief justice, an office he had long sought. Chief Justice Taft was a conservative on business issues, and under him there were advances in individual rights. In poor health, he resigned in February 1930, and died the following month. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the first president and first Supreme Court justice to be interred there. (Wikipedia)

REQUIRED READING FOR THE WHOLE YEAR OF HISTORY OF THE USA

 

RECOMMENDED READING

The only president to later serve as chief justice of the United States, William Howard Taft remarked in the 1920s that "I don't remember that I ever was President." Historians have agreed, and Taft is usually portrayed, when written about at all, as nothing more than a failed chief executive. In this provocative new study, the first treatment of the Taft presidency in four decades, Lewis L. Gould presents a compelling assessment of Taft's accomplishments and setbacks in office. Rich in human interest and fresh analysis of the events of Taft's four years in Washington, Gould's book shows why Taft's presidency is very much worth remembering on its own terms. Gould argues that Taft wanted to be president and had an ambitious agenda when he took power in March 1909. Approaching his duties more as a judge than as a charismatic executive in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt, Taft soon found himself out of step with public opinion. Gould shows how the Payne-Aldrich Tariff and the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy squandered Taft's political capital and prepared the ground for Democratic victories in the elections of 1910 and 1912. His seamless narrative provides innovative treatments of these crucial episodes to make Taft's presidency more understandable than in any previous account. On Canadian Reciprocity, Dollar Diplomacy, and international arbitration, Gould's well-researched work goes beyond earlier stale clichs about Taft's administration to link his tenure to the evolution of the modern presidency. Taft emerges as a hard-working but flawed executive who lacked the excitement of Theodore Roosevelt or the inspiration of Woodrow Wilson. The break with Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 doomed the Taft presidency, and Gould supplies an evenhanded analysis of the erosion of their once warm friendship. At bottom, the two men clashed about the nature of presidential power, and Gould traces with insight how this personal and ideological rupture influenced the future of the Republican party and the course of American politics. In Gould's skilled hands, this neglected presidency again comes alive. Leaving the White House in 1913, Taft wrote that "the people of the United States did not owe me another election." What his presidency deserved is the lively and wise appraisal of his record in office contained in this superb book.

 

Woodrow Wilson 1856-1924

President Woodrow Wilson dedicated to pursuing a program of progressive domestic reform ("the New Freedom") saw the outbreak of war in Europe as a threat to his plans. In December 1914, he declared that the United States should not let itself be "thrown off balance" by a war "with which we have nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us." "He kept us out of the war" was Wilson's campaign slogan in the presidential election of 1916, an election in which he narrowly defeated the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes. Ever since George Washington had warned Americans against "foreign entanglements," isolationism had been as American as apple pie. And the slaughter on the Western Front had certainly not whetted Americans' appetite for intervention in the war. "There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight," Wilson opined. "There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right." The bellicose former president, Theodore Roosevelt, mocked Wilson's "too proud to fight" rhetoric and accused the president of cowardice. Wilson, he thundered, was a "demagogue, adroit, tricky, false, without one spark of loftiness in him, without a touch of the heroic in his cold, selfish and timid soul." He likened the president to Pontius Pilate, then apologized to Pilate. "We are passing through a thick streak of yellow in our national life." Born in Virginia in 1856, Wilson was nine years old when the American Civil War ended. He did not experience it as Lincoln defined it: as an epic struggle to reaffirm the principle that "government by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth," and certainly not as a successful effort to free an enslaved people and to remove the taint of slavery from the American republic. "To Wilson, it was a war of unwarranted destruction, of occupation and degradation of his beloved South. When he was fourteen, the Wilson family moved to a devastated Columbia, South Carolina, which Yankee soldiers had all but burned to the ground five years later. The Civil War left him with a deep, abiding horror of war itself. Wilson worried that if America were dragged into war for the wrong reasons, it would ignite an enthusiasm for war and violence like the emotion that has swept the North during the Civil War. This was why it was important in the days following the Lusitania's sinking to keep America cool and levelheaded" (Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder). How then, did Wilson win an election by promising to keep American out of the Great War, and then almost immediately find himself leading the country into it? Wilson had made two key decisions early in his first term, which brought the United States into closer relation with Britain and France, in spite of his insistence on American neutrality. "By permitting extension of commercial credit he enabled the Allies to buy supplies in America from which the Central Powers, by virtue of Allied control of the seas, were largely cut off. It opened an explosive expansion in American manufacture, trade, and foreign investments and bent the national economy to the same side in the war as prevailing popular sentiment" [in favor of the Allies] (Barbara Tuchman, "How We Entered World War I," in Practicing History).

 

RECOMMENDED READING

“A brilliant biography that still resonates in Washington today.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin
From Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times–bestselling author A. Scott Berg comes the definitive—and revelatory—biography of one of the great American figures of modern times. One hundred years after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson still stands as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, and one of the most enigmatic. And now, after more than a decade of research and writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg has completed Wilson--the most personal and penetrating biography ever written about the 28th President. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of documents in the Wilson Archives, Berg was the first biographer to gain access to two recently-discovered caches of papers belonging to those close to Wilson. From this material, Berg was able to add countless details--even several unknown events--that fill in missing pieces of Wilson’s character and cast new light on his entire life. From the scholar-President who ushered the country through its first great world war to the man of intense passion and turbulence , from the idealist determined to make the world “safe for democracy” to the stroke-crippled leader whose incapacity and the subterfuges around it were among the century’s greatest secrets, the result is an intimate portrait written with a particularly contemporary point of view – a book at once magisterial and deeply emotional about the whole of Wilson’s life, accomplishments, and failings. This is not just Wilson the icon – but Wilson the man.

The Great War of 1914–18 was the primal tragedy of modern world civilization, the main reason why the 20th century turned into such a disastrous epoch for mankind. The United States became a great power in the decades after the Civil War, and even an imperial power in 1898. But it was not yet a world power in the sense that it regularly conferred with the major European states, known as ‘the powers,’and took part in their diplomatic arrangements. America was not an isolated power—was never at any time, it can be argued, isolationist—and had always had global dealings from its Republican inception. But it had prudently kept clear of the internal wrangles of Europe (as had Britain until 1903), and held itself well aloof from both the Entente Cordiale of Britain and France, with its links, through France, with Tsarist Russia, an anti-semitic autocracy held in abhorrence by most Americans, and with the militaristic, Teutonic, and to some extent racist alliance of the Central European powers, the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. Thus the United States was a mere spectator during the frantic events which followed the murder of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of Austria on June 18, 1914, the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, the Russian decision to support the Serbs, the French decision to support Russia, the German decision to support Austria and fight a two-front war against Russia and France, and Germany’s consequential decision to send its armies through Belgium to enforce quick defeat on the French, and so the involvement of Britain and its dominion allies in support of Belgium. No one in Europe took any notice of Wilson’s offer to mediate. The United States had no quarrel with Germany: quite the contrary. As early as 1785 it had negotiated a commercial treaty with Prussia, at which time immigrants of German origin already constituted 9 percent of the population. The Prussians backed the Union during the Civil War and the United States looked with approval on the emergence of a united Germany. But from the 1870s on, economic, commercial, colonial, and even naval rivalry endangered German-American relations, especially in the Pacific. There was a sharp dispute over Samoa, which did not end until the territory was partitioned in 1899, and which left a legacy of suspicion. America began to dislike Germany for exactly the same reasons as the British did: the arrogance and naive pushiness with which the Germans, latecomers to global naval power and colonialism, sought their own ‘place in the sun.’ In 1898, for instance, the Americans interpreted the presence of a strong German naval squadron near the Philippines as evidence of designs upon the islands. In the growing Anglo-German antagonism of 1900–14, the Special Relationship of Britain and America operated powerfully in Britain’s favor. It is significant that in 1902, when both Germany and Britain punished Venezuela for reneging on its debts, President Roosevelt’s administration criticized Germany but not Britain for violating the Monroe Doctrine. All the same, there was at first no question of America entering the war. On August 4, immediately after it began, Wilson issued a proclamation of neutrality. Two weeks later he urged Americans to be ‘impartial in thought as well as in action.’

 

RECOMMENDED READING

The Great War of 1914-1918 confronted the United States with one of the most wrenching crises in the nation's history. It also left a residue of disruption and disillusion that spawned an even more ruinous conflict scarcely a generation later. Over Here is the single-most comprehensive discussion of the impact of World War I on American society. This 25th anniversary edition includes a new afterword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author David M. Kennedy, that explains his reasons for writing the original edition as well as his opinions on the legacy of Wilsonian idealism, most recently reflected in President George W. Bush's national security strategy. More than a chronicle of the war years, Over Here uses the record of America's experience in the Great War as a prism through which to view early twentieth century American society. The ways in which America mobilized for the war, chose to fight it, and then went about the business of enshrining it in memory all indicate important aspects of enduring American character. An American history classic, Over Here reflects on a society's struggle with the pains of war, and offers trenchant insights into the birth of modern America.

 

Why did Wilson's liberal program of democratization and conflict resolution fail in Paris in 1919?  Wilson was immensely popular in Europe, but not so much in America.  Republicans captured both houses of Congress in the elections of 1918, so it appeared to European statesmen at the conference that he had sought and lost a vote of confidence at home.  Two of Wilson's most powerful political opponents, former President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, issued a statement that was duly noted in the capitals of Europe: "Our allies and our enemies should all understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority whatever to speak for the American people at this time.  His leadership has just been repudiated by them.  The newly elected Congress comes far nearer than Mr. Wilson to having a right to speak the purposes of the American people at this moment.  Mr. Wilson and his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points and all his utterances every which way have ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people." Attacked by partisan nationalists at home, confronted by an alliance of European nationalists at Paris, Wilson had to abandon, wholly or in part, many of his cherished principles. Although he believed in open covenants openly arrived at, the treaty was drafted behind closed doors. Although he espoused the self-determination of nations, he consented to turn over the Austrian Tyrol to Italy, to put Germans under Polish rule in Silesia and the Corridor, and to allow Japan to take over the German sphere of influence in Shantung. Although he advocated a peace among equals, he agreed that Germany must pay an immediate indemnity of $5 billion, sign a blank check for future reparations (including the full cost of pensions of Allied soldiers), surrender vast amounts of coal- and iron-rich territory, lose much of her merchant marine, and be stripped of her overseas empire" (Leuchtenberg). "Eighteenth-century peacemakers," Henry Kissinger has argued, would have regarded 'war guilt clauses' as absurd.  For them, wars were amoral inevitabilities caused by clashing interests.  In the treaties that concluded eighteenth-century wars, the losers paid a price without its being justified on moral grounds. But for Wilson and the peacemakers at Versailles, the cause of the war of 1914-18 had to be ascribed to some evil which had to be punished." The reaction began with Warren Harding's promise of a "return to normalcy" after the huge upheaval of the First World War and Woodrow Wilson's failed peace settlement. Harding was fond of alliteration: "not heroics, but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration." "To be sure, the Americans had not suffered on anything like the scale that the European combatant powers had suffered. But they had lost more men than in any previous American war aside from the Civil War, and had lived through a sudden and unprecedented disruption of their none-too-settled economy, all for a cause that now seemed dubious at best, a conflict that the nation could very easily have avoided. All the grand rhetoric from the presidential podium about the nation's noble war aims, making the world safe for democracy, self-determination, open agreements openly arrived at, freedom of the seas, and so on—all of it now rang pitiably hollow (McClay). The final years of the Wilson administration—a botched demobilization, rapid inflation, widespread labor unrest, 25 race riots in cities around the country, the influenza epidemic that killed 675,000 American and infected 28 percent of the population, a Red Scare featuring terrorist bombs and "Palmer Raids" (mass arrests of suspected sympathizers with the Bolshevik Revolution)—no wonder Harding won in a landslide. A basic feature of the Roaring Twenties: Presiding over this decade of effervescent social change and cultural dynamism were two of the most conservative presidents in modern American history, the Republicans Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

Bruce Thompson

REQUIRED READING

"The Great War of 1914–18 was the primal tragedy of modern world civilization, the main reason why the 20th century turned into such a disastrous epoch for mankind." Paul Johnson. For Americans the Great War was also a tragedy in that they were dragged into it against their wishes by a President who had promised to keep them out of it. And afterward there was a darkness that swept over both Europe and the United States about all of what of had just happened and this darkness spawned a generation of writers who attempted to tell their own stories and with these stories tell the bigger story world war. Of all the writers who appeared as war veterans in the 1920s, one American writer succeeded best of all in channeling his war experiences into one great novel: Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. The title alone announced the general state of mind that gripped him and his fellow war veterans as they sat down to write about what had happened. Hemingway was the perfect, handsome, American kid gone off to war in all innocence and romantic quest who gets shot, badly wounded, and ends up in a Milan hospital with the other soldiers in various states of pain. I want us all to read this novel. If you have read it before, maybe years ago, pick it up again and just sit down and read it all and be amazed at what a triumph it is. It has everything that led Gertrude Stein to announce: "You are all a lost generation." But Hemingway was not lost; he turned his pain and suffering into one of the great novels in American literature.

 

RECOMMENDED READING

As we proceed into Twentieth Century history you may discover that you would like a good general coverage of all the great intellectual and artistic movements of the century. If that is what you need then this is the book for you. It is the single best survey of 20th century intellectual and artistic history in print. It is a big book, but you can use it as you would use a reference volume and look up specific people and movements. The paperback copy is the one you want with its revised up to date edition.

Henry Ford 1863-1947

During the 1920s, the key industry was the auto industry. Henry Ford pioneered the moving assembly line, quadrupling productivity over a ten-year period, while keeping prices low (the Model T cost less than $300) and wages high. By 1925, Ford was manufacturing nine thousand cars per day. There were 26 million cars in the United States by 1929, one car on the road for every five Americans. Wilfred McCay: "Automobiles became to the economy of the 1920s, and much of the twentieth century, what textiles had been early in the previous century and what railroads had been after the Civil War: a centrally important industry that was not only a big business in its own right but also a powerful economic multiplier that gave rise to important by-products, including additional big businesses, subsidiary industries, and various other ripple effects through the economy. In the case of automobiles, the by-products were items like rubber, tires, spark plugs, glass paint, and, of course, the various petroleum products needed to operate an internal combustion engine—not to mention the extensive highway construction, some three hundred thousand miles of it between 1921 and 1919, to provide surfaces for those 26 million cars to travel on. And along with those new highways, there would be battalions of service stations.

RECOMMENDED READING

Reviews

“The implicit claim of Watts’s admirable book is almost inarguable – that it’s impossible to understand 20th-century America without knowing the story of Henry Ford.” –The New York Times

“Ford has had many biographers... None, however, comes close to Steven Watts... He brilliantly reveals the nature of Ford’s genius.” –Chicago Tribune

“Steven Watts attempts the most integrated understanding to date of Ford’s enormous influence and varied appeal... The fascinating result may change the way Henry Ford is remembered.” –San Francisco Chronicle

Warren G. Harding 1865-1923

Warren Gamaliel Harding was the 29th president of the United States, serving from 1921 until his death in 1923. A member of the Republican Party, he was one of the most popular sitting U.S. presidents while in office. After his death, a number of scandals were exposed, including Teapot Dome which damaged his reputation. Harding lived in rural Ohio all his life, except when political service took him elsewhere. As a young man, he bought The Marion Star and built it into a successful newspaper. Harding served in the Ohio State Senate from 1900 to 1904, and was lieutenant governor for two years. He was defeated for governor in 1910, but was elected to the United States Senate in 1914—the state's first direct election for that office. Harding ran for the Republican nomination for president in 1920, but was considered a long shot before the convention. When the leading candidates could not garner a majority, and the convention deadlocked, support for Harding increased, and he was nominated on the tenth ballot. He conducted a front porch campaign, remaining mostly in Marion and allowing people to come to him. He promised a return to normalcy of the pre–World War I period, and defeated Democratic nominee James M. Cox in a landslide to become the first sitting senator elected president.(Wikipedia)

Calvin Coolidge 1872-1933

Calvin Coolidge was the 30th president of the United States, serving from 1923 to 1929. A Republican lawyer from Massachusetts, he previously served as the 29th vice president from 1921 to 1923 under President Warren G. Harding, and as the 48th governor of Massachusetts from 1919 to 1921. Coolidge gained a reputation as a small-government conservative with a taciturn personality and dry sense of humor that earned him the nickname "Silent Cal". Coolidge began his career as a member of the Massachusetts State House. He rose up the ranks of Massachusetts politics and was elected governor in 1918. As governor, Coolidge ran on the record of fiscal conservatism, strong support for women's suffrage, and vague opposition to Prohibition. His prompt and effective response to the Boston police strike of 1919 thrust him into the national spotlight as a man of decisive action. The following year, the Republican Party nominated Coolidge as the running mate to Senator Warren G. Harding in the 1920 presidential election, which they won in a landslide. Coolidge served as vice president until Harding's death in 1923, after which he assumed the presidency. During his presidency, Coolidge restored public confidence in the White House after the Harding administration's many scandals. He signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which granted U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans, and oversaw a period of rapid and expansive economic growth known as the "Roaring Twenties", leaving office with considerable popularity.(Wikipedia)

 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING

This is the most important book that we can recommend dealing with 1930 to 1945 in the USA. It is an acknowledged masterpiece as you will see in the reviews below. We can all be proud that this brilliant historian has had a home for all these years in our own Stanford University.

REVIEWS
"This is modern America's story--modern America's most thrilling, most irresistible, and most significant story--and in this massive volume, David M. Kennedy makes it his story in a way that no one has before. Freedom From Fear, the fourth installment of the new Oxford History of the United States to appear, is as much a triumph as its predecessors, providing every indication that the series, once completed, will stand as the most comprehensive and most compelling narrative history of the nation."--Boston Globe
"Rarely does a work of historical synthesis combine such trenchant analysis and elegant writing as does Kennedy's spectacular contribution to the Oxford History of the United States. Kennedy uses a wide canvas to depict all aspects of the American political, social and economic experience from 1929 to 1945. He also provides a stunningly original reinterpretation of the competing forces and interests that combined to shape the New Deal under FDR's direction. The book's final 400 pages admirably demonstrate exactly how the U.S. emerged victorious in WWII....Because of its scope, its insight and its purring narrative engine, Kennedy's book will stand for years to come as the definitive history of the most important decades of the American Century."--Publishers Weekly
"An engrossing narrative of a momentous time. The best one-volume account of the Roosevelt era currently available....Good old-fashioned history."--The New York Times Book Review
"An indispensable account of the two great formative events of 20th century American history--the Great Depression and the second World War."--The Economist
"Kennedy's book is the most illuminating, riveting, comprehensive, and graceful one-volume history of this nation's experiences during the Great Depression, New Deal, and WWII published to date....This is social, political, dipolmatic, and military history written magisterially with broad but nuanced strokes across a 16-year span that utterly transformed the lives of Americans and the world....Librarians should order this book for their libraries, faculty members should assign it, and everyone should read it."--CHOICE

The Roaring Twenties: STAR POWER

Howard Zeitz: "By the mid-1920s movie theaters were selling 50 million tickets each week, a sum equal to roughly half the US population! And the generation that came of age in the twenties learned things at the movie palace that they couldn't learn in school. 'The only benefit I ever got from the movies was in learning to love and the knowledge of sex,' a young woman confided to an interviewer in the mid-20s. 'If we didn't see such examples in the movies,' explained another, 'where would we get the idea of being hot? We wouldn't.'" This was the first great decade in the history of the Hollywood movie industry. Most of the owners and production chiefs of the major studios were immigrants from central or eastern Europe who began their careers in the garment, glove or fur businesses, and applied their entrepreneurial skills to a new industry that had few barriers to the entry of newcomers: Louis B. Mayer (MGM); Adolph Zukor (Paramount); Jesse Lasky (Paramount); William Fox (Fox); Jack Warner (Warner Brothers); Carl Laemmle (Universal); B.P. Schulberg (Paramount); Irving Thalberg (Universal, MGM); Sam Goldwyn (independent); David O. Selznick (MGM, RKO, Selznick); Harry Cohn (Columbia). They had the classic Jewish combination of an aspiration toward cultural assimilation combined with an early experience of humble origins in small towns and urban ghettos—in a nation of immigrants, rapidly urbanizing, this was the perfect recipe for success in the new medium of cinema. Howard Sachar: "California was becoming a favored locale among these aspiring producers."

 

RECOMMENDED READING

 

RECOMMENDED READING

Who was the most famous American in the world during the Roaring Twenties? Not the presidents, Harding and Coolidge, who did not intend to emulate Wilson by solving Europe's, and the world's, problems. Not those two superstars in their respective fields, Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin—both world-famous, certainly, but neither had been born in America. Not even Babe Ruth, arguably the greatest baseball player of them all, who hit a record-setting 60 home runs that year. The most famous American, after his 1927 New York-to-Paris flight, was Charles Lindbergh, whose Spirit of St. Louis was the antidote not only to the Titanic, which had sunk on her maiden voyage fifteen years earlier, but also to the disillusionment that followed in the wake of the First World War and the failure of Woodrow Wilson to secure a durable peace settlement. In his classic book, Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen explains: "A disillusioned nation fed on cheap heroics and scandal and crime was revolting against the low estimate of human nature which it had allowed itself to entertain. For years the American people had been spiritually starved. They had seen their early ideals and illusions and hopes one by one worn away by the corrosive influence of events and ideas—by the disappointing aftermath of the war, by scientific doctrines and psychological theories which undermined their religion and ridiculed their sentimental notions, by the spectacle of graft in politics and crime on the city streets, and finally by their recent newspaper diet of smut and murder. Romance, chivalry, and self-dedication had been debunked; the heroes of history had been shown to have feet of clay, and the saints of history had been revealed as people with queer complexes. There was the god of business to worship—but a suspicion lingered that he was made of brass…. Something that people needed if they were to be at peace with themselves and with the world, was missing from their lives. And all at once Lindbergh provided it. Romance, chivalry, self-dedication—here they were, embodied in a modern Galahad for a generation which had foresworn Galahads. Lindbergh did not accept the moving-picture offers that came his way, he did not sell testimonials, did not boast, did not get himself involved in scandal, conducted himself with unerring taste—and was handsome and brave withal. The machinery of ballyhoo was ready and waiting to life him up where every eye could see him. Is it any wonder that the public's reception of him took on the aspects of a vast religious revival?"

 

RECOMMENDED READING

Herbert Clark Hoover (1874 – 1964)

was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. A wealthy mining engineer before his presidency, Hoover led the wartime Commission for Relief in Belgium and was the director of the U.S. Food Administration, followed by post-war relief of Europe. As a member of the Republican Party, he served as the third United States secretary of commerce from 1921 to 1928 before being elected president in 1928. His presidency was dominated by the Great Depression, and his policies and methods to combat it were seen as lackluster. Amid his unpopularity, he decisively lost reelection to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. Born to a Quaker family in West Branch, Iowa, Hoover grew up in Oregon. He was one of the first graduates of the new Stanford University in 1895. Hoover took a position with a London-based mining company working in Australia and China. He rapidly became a wealthy mining engineer. In 1914, the outbreak of World War I, he organized and headed the Commission for Relief in Belgium, an international relief organization that provided food to occupied Belgium. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover to lead the Food Administration. He became famous as his country's "food dictator". After the war, Hoover led the American Relief Administration, which provided food to the starving millions in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Russia. Hoover's wartime service made him a favorite of many progressives, and he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in the 1920 U.S. presidential election. Hoover served as Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Hoover was an unusually active and visible Cabinet member, becoming known as "Secretary of Commerce and Under-Secretary of all other departments." He was influential in the development of air travel and radio. Hoover led the federal response to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. He won the Republican nomination in the 1928 presidential election and defeated Democratic candidate Al Smith in a landslide. In 1929, Hoover assumed the presidency. However, during his first year in office, the stock market crashed, signaling the onset of the Great Depression, which dominated Hoover's presidency until its end. He supported the Mexican Repatriation and his response to the Great Depression was widely seen as lackluster. In the midst of the Great Depression, he was decisively defeated by Democratic nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. Hoover's retirement was over 31 years long, one of the longest presidential retirements. He authored numerous works and became increasingly conservative in retirement. He strongly criticized Roosevelt's foreign policy and the New Deal. In the 1940s and 1950s, public opinion of Hoover improved, largely due to his service in various assignments for presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, including chairing the influential Hoover Commission. Critical assessments of his presidency by historians and political scientists generally rank him as a significantly below-average president, although Hoover has received praise for his actions as a humanitarian and public official.

 

RECOMMENDED READING

Theodore Roosevelt 1858-1919

TR was a sickly child, an anxious youth and young man, and when his young wife died leaving him a twenty-five-year-old widower with a child, he went out to the Badlands of Dakota, to heal and find himself (1884). Calling it the Badlands was a typical 19th-century topographical moral judgment (though it is true that the French, who were there first, baptized them mauvaise terres à traverser). It was indeed a Deathscape, actually strewn with buffalo skulls and bones. Below the buttes were mazes of quicksands and connecting gullies and abysses, into which men and animals simply disappeared. There were mists of steam, and smoldering lignite and coal seams emitted subterranean fires. TR, characteristically, summed up: ‘The Badlands looked like Poe sounded.’ He noted that volcanic ash covered this part of South Dakota, east of the Black Hills in the southwest of the Territory (it did not become a state till 1889). The ash went to a depth of 300 feet and had in prehistoric times engulfed herds of mammoths, elephants, camels, and other creatures whose bones are still buried there.209 Natural forces were still scorching, eroding, sandblasting, and freezing, then rock-splitting the surface all the time and TR called it ‘As grim and desolate and forbidding as any place on earth could be.’ He seems to have seen himself, not quite consciously, as like John the Baptist in the desert, or Jesus Christ spending a time in the wilderness to prepare himself for his ministry. The Roosevelts were old money and TR was able to buy himself into a cattle-herding business, setting up his headquarters at the Maltese Cross Ranch near Medora, and building a remote lodge called Elkhorn. It was his object to overcome his physical debility by pushing himself to the limit of his resources: he wrote a letter home boasting, ‘I have just come in from spending thirteen hours in the saddle.’ There were still a few buffalo and Sioux Indians around and the frontier was not yet ‘closed.’

Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People (pp. 615-616). HarperCollins.

REQUIRED READING FOR THE WHOLE YEAR OF HISTORY OF THE USA

From the Publisher:
"For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society. The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. Too often they reflect a fragmented outlook that fails to convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own history. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding and its aspirations; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative effectively. Of course, it goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale of the past. It will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But as Land of Hope brilliantly shows, there is no contradiction between a truthful account of the American past and an inspiring one. Readers of Land of Hope will find both in its pages."

REVIEWS

“At a time of severe partisanship that has infected many accounts of our nation’s past, this brilliant new history, Land of Hope, written in lucid and often lyrical prose, is much needed. It is accurate, honest, and free of the unhistorical condescension so often paid to the people of America’s past. This generous but not uncritical story of our nation’s history ought to be read by every American. It explains and justifies the right kind of patriotism.”― Gordon S. Wood, author of Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

“We’ve long needed a readable text that truly tells the American story, neither hiding the serious injustices in our history nor soft-pedaling our nation’s extraordinary achievements. Such a text cannot be a mere compilation of facts, and it certainly could not be written by someone lacking a deep understanding and appreciation of America’s constitutional ideals and institutions. Bringing his impressive skills as a political theorist, historian, and writer to bear, Wilfred McClay has supplied the need.”― Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University

“No one has told the story of America with greater balance or better prose than Wilfred McClay. Land of Hope is a history book that you will not be able to put down. From the moment that ‘natives’ first crossed here over the Bering Strait, to the founding of America’s great experiment in republican government, to the horror and triumph of the Civil War...McClay’s account will capture your attention while offering an unforgettable education.”― James W. Ceaser, Professor of Politics, University of Virginia

RECOMMENDED READING

From Kirkus's Reviews:
Theodore Roosevelt emerges as considerably more than his toothy Rough Rider legend in this extensively researched, psychologically penetrating biography of our 26th president. Even as an asthmatic child, when he began to mold his mind with tales of heroes and his body with physical exercise, Roosevelt saw life as a series of struggles and achievements, according to Brands (History/Texas A&M Univ.; The Reckless Decade, 1995). In young adulthood, this quest for heroism redoubled with the death of his father, who set a near-impossible moral standard. T.R.'s Manichaean perception of the world gave him the moral confidence, energy, and charisma that endeared him to supporters, but it also led him to intemperate, even demagogic attacks on opponents (e.g., he accused Woodrow Wilson of ``criminal folly'' for not preparing the US more thoroughly for entry into WW I). Brands absolves him of what critics viewed as his hypocrisy, noting that Roosevelt's near-total incapacity for reflection and self-knowledge led him, for good and ill, to ignore legal and procedural obstacles (notably by fomenting revolution in Panama to get the canal built there). Brands also adeptly traces the effect of Roosevelt's romanticism on his private life, noting that T.R.'s grief over the death of his first wife was so intense that he almost never referred to her after she died and maintained a more distant relationship with their daughter, Alice, than he did with the children of his second marriage. Brands accords Roosevelt full credit for blazing a path for future presidents in assuming responsibility for the economy and international security, and for using his office's ``bully pulpit'' to goad the national conscience. Missing some of the brio of Edmund Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and of the colonel himself, but a life that pays its subject the ultimate tribute of taking him seriously as an adult. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

William Howard Taft 1857-1930

William Howard Taft served as the 27th president of the United States from 1909 to 1913 and the tenth chief justice of the United States from 1921 to 1930. He is the only person to have held both offices. Taft was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, Alphonso Taft, was a U.S. attorney general and secretary of war. Taft attended Yale and joined Skull and Bones, of which his father was a founding member. After becoming a lawyer, Taft was appointed a judge while still in his twenties. He continued a rapid rise, being named solicitor general and a judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1901, President William McKinley appointed Taft civilian governor of the Philippines. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt made him Secretary of War, and he became Roosevelt's hand-picked successor. Despite his personal ambition to become chief justice, Taft declined repeated offers of appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, believing his political work to be more important. With Roosevelt's help, Taft had little opposition for the Republican nomination for president in 1908 and easily defeated William Jennings Bryan for the presidency in that November's election. As president, he focused on East Asia more than European affairs and repeatedly intervened to prop up or remove Latin American governments. Taft sought reductions to trade tariffs, then a major source of governmental income, but the resulting bill was heavily influenced by special interests. His administration was filled with conflict between the Republican Party's conservative wing, with which Taft often sympathized, and its progressive wing, toward which Roosevelt moved more and more. Controversies over conservation and antitrust cases filed by the Taft administration served to further separate the two men. The 1912 presidential election was a three-way race, as Roosevelt challenged Taft for renomination. Taft used his control of the party machinery to gain a bare majority of delegates and Roosevelt bolted the party. The split left Taft with little chance of reelection, and he took only Utah and Vermont in his loss to Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson. After leaving office, Taft returned to Yale as a professor, continuing his political activity and working against war through the League to Enforce Peace. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft chief justice, an office he had long sought. Chief Justice Taft was a conservative on business issues, and under him there were advances in individual rights. In poor health, he resigned in February 1930, and died the following month. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the first president and first Supreme Court justice to be interred there. (Wikipedia)

REQUIRED READING FOR THE WHOLE YEAR OF HISTORY OF THE USA

 

RECOMMENDED READING

The only president to later serve as chief justice of the United States, William Howard Taft remarked in the 1920s that "I don't remember that I ever was President." Historians have agreed, and Taft is usually portrayed, when written about at all, as nothing more than a failed chief executive. In this provocative new study, the first treatment of the Taft presidency in four decades, Lewis L. Gould presents a compelling assessment of Taft's accomplishments and setbacks in office. Rich in human interest and fresh analysis of the events of Taft's four years in Washington, Gould's book shows why Taft's presidency is very much worth remembering on its own terms. Gould argues that Taft wanted to be president and had an ambitious agenda when he took power in March 1909. Approaching his duties more as a judge than as a charismatic executive in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt, Taft soon found himself out of step with public opinion. Gould shows how the Payne-Aldrich Tariff and the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy squandered Taft's political capital and prepared the ground for Democratic victories in the elections of 1910 and 1912. His seamless narrative provides innovative treatments of these crucial episodes to make Taft's presidency more understandable than in any previous account. On Canadian Reciprocity, Dollar Diplomacy, and international arbitration, Gould's well-researched work goes beyond earlier stale clichs about Taft's administration to link his tenure to the evolution of the modern presidency. Taft emerges as a hard-working but flawed executive who lacked the excitement of Theodore Roosevelt or the inspiration of Woodrow Wilson. The break with Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 doomed the Taft presidency, and Gould supplies an evenhanded analysis of the erosion of their once warm friendship. At bottom, the two men clashed about the nature of presidential power, and Gould traces with insight how this personal and ideological rupture influenced the future of the Republican party and the course of American politics. In Gould's skilled hands, this neglected presidency again comes alive. Leaving the White House in 1913, Taft wrote that "the people of the United States did not owe me another election." What his presidency deserved is the lively and wise appraisal of his record in office contained in this superb book.

 

Woodrow Wilson 1856-1924

President Woodrow Wilson dedicated to pursuing a program of progressive domestic reform ("the New Freedom") saw the outbreak of war in Europe as a threat to his plans. In December 1914, he declared that the United States should not let itself be "thrown off balance" by a war "with which we have nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us." "He kept us out of the war" was Wilson's campaign slogan in the presidential election of 1916, an election in which he narrowly defeated the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes. Ever since George Washington had warned Americans against "foreign entanglements," isolationism had been as American as apple pie. And the slaughter on the Western Front had certainly not whetted Americans' appetite for intervention in the war. "There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight," Wilson opined. "There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right." The bellicose former president, Theodore Roosevelt, mocked Wilson's "too proud to fight" rhetoric and accused the president of cowardice. Wilson, he thundered, was a "demagogue, adroit, tricky, false, without one spark of loftiness in him, without a touch of the heroic in his cold, selfish and timid soul." He likened the president to Pontius Pilate, then apologized to Pilate. "We are passing through a thick streak of yellow in our national life." Born in Virginia in 1856, Wilson was nine years old when the American Civil War ended. He did not experience it as Lincoln defined it: as an epic struggle to reaffirm the principle that "government by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth," and certainly not as a successful effort to free an enslaved people and to remove the taint of slavery from the American republic. "To Wilson, it was a war of unwarranted destruction, of occupation and degradation of his beloved South. When he was fourteen, the Wilson family moved to a devastated Columbia, South Carolina, which Yankee soldiers had all but burned to the ground five years later. The Civil War left him with a deep, abiding horror of war itself. Wilson worried that if America were dragged into war for the wrong reasons, it would ignite an enthusiasm for war and violence like the emotion that has swept the North during the Civil War. This was why it was important in the days following the Lusitania's sinking to keep America cool and levelheaded" (Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder). How then, did Wilson win an election by promising to keep American out of the Great War, and then almost immediately find himself leading the country into it? Wilson had made two key decisions early in his first term, which brought the United States into closer relation with Britain and France, in spite of his insistence on American neutrality. "By permitting extension of commercial credit he enabled the Allies to buy supplies in America from which the Central Powers, by virtue of Allied control of the seas, were largely cut off. It opened an explosive expansion in American manufacture, trade, and foreign investments and bent the national economy to the same side in the war as prevailing popular sentiment" [in favor of the Allies] (Barbara Tuchman, "How We Entered World War I," in Practicing History).

 

RECOMMENDED READING

“A brilliant biography that still resonates in Washington today.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin
From Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times–bestselling author A. Scott Berg comes the definitive—and revelatory—biography of one of the great American figures of modern times. One hundred years after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson still stands as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, and one of the most enigmatic. And now, after more than a decade of research and writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg has completed Wilson--the most personal and penetrating biography ever written about the 28th President. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of documents in the Wilson Archives, Berg was the first biographer to gain access to two recently-discovered caches of papers belonging to those close to Wilson. From this material, Berg was able to add countless details--even several unknown events--that fill in missing pieces of Wilson’s character and cast new light on his entire life. From the scholar-President who ushered the country through its first great world war to the man of intense passion and turbulence , from the idealist determined to make the world “safe for democracy” to the stroke-crippled leader whose incapacity and the subterfuges around it were among the century’s greatest secrets, the result is an intimate portrait written with a particularly contemporary point of view – a book at once magisterial and deeply emotional about the whole of Wilson’s life, accomplishments, and failings. This is not just Wilson the icon – but Wilson the man.

The Great War of 1914–18 was the primal tragedy of modern world civilization, the main reason why the 20th century turned into such a disastrous epoch for mankind. The United States became a great power in the decades after the Civil War, and even an imperial power in 1898. But it was not yet a world power in the sense that it regularly conferred with the major European states, known as ‘the powers,’and took part in their diplomatic arrangements. America was not an isolated power—was never at any time, it can be argued, isolationist—and had always had global dealings from its Republican inception. But it had prudently kept clear of the internal wrangles of Europe (as had Britain until 1903), and held itself well aloof from both the Entente Cordiale of Britain and France, with its links, through France, with Tsarist Russia, an anti-semitic autocracy held in abhorrence by most Americans, and with the militaristic, Teutonic, and to some extent racist alliance of the Central European powers, the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. Thus the United States was a mere spectator during the frantic events which followed the murder of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of Austria on June 18, 1914, the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, the Russian decision to support the Serbs, the French decision to support Russia, the German decision to support Austria and fight a two-front war against Russia and France, and Germany’s consequential decision to send its armies through Belgium to enforce quick defeat on the French, and so the involvement of Britain and its dominion allies in support of Belgium. No one in Europe took any notice of Wilson’s offer to mediate. The United States had no quarrel with Germany: quite the contrary. As early as 1785 it had negotiated a commercial treaty with Prussia, at which time immigrants of German origin already constituted 9 percent of the population. The Prussians backed the Union during the Civil War and the United States looked with approval on the emergence of a united Germany. But from the 1870s on, economic, commercial, colonial, and even naval rivalry endangered German-American relations, especially in the Pacific. There was a sharp dispute over Samoa, which did not end until the territory was partitioned in 1899, and which left a legacy of suspicion. America began to dislike Germany for exactly the same reasons as the British did: the arrogance and naive pushiness with which the Germans, latecomers to global naval power and colonialism, sought their own ‘place in the sun.’ In 1898, for instance, the Americans interpreted the presence of a strong German naval squadron near the Philippines as evidence of designs upon the islands. In the growing Anglo-German antagonism of 1900–14, the Special Relationship of Britain and America operated powerfully in Britain’s favor. It is significant that in 1902, when both Germany and Britain punished Venezuela for reneging on its debts, President Roosevelt’s administration criticized Germany but not Britain for violating the Monroe Doctrine. All the same, there was at first no question of America entering the war. On August 4, immediately after it began, Wilson issued a proclamation of neutrality. Two weeks later he urged Americans to be ‘impartial in thought as well as in action.’

 

RECOMMENDED READING

The Great War of 1914-1918 confronted the United States with one of the most wrenching crises in the nation's history. It also left a residue of disruption and disillusion that spawned an even more ruinous conflict scarcely a generation later. Over Here is the single-most comprehensive discussion of the impact of World War I on American society. This 25th anniversary edition includes a new afterword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author David M. Kennedy, that explains his reasons for writing the original edition as well as his opinions on the legacy of Wilsonian idealism, most recently reflected in President George W. Bush's national security strategy. More than a chronicle of the war years, Over Here uses the record of America's experience in the Great War as a prism through which to view early twentieth century American society. The ways in which America mobilized for the war, chose to fight it, and then went about the business of enshrining it in memory all indicate important aspects of enduring American character. An American history classic, Over Here reflects on a society's struggle with the pains of war, and offers trenchant insights into the birth of modern America.

 

Why did Wilson's liberal program of democratization and conflict resolution fail in Paris in 1919?  Wilson was immensely popular in Europe, but not so much in America.  Republicans captured both houses of Congress in the elections of 1918, so it appeared to European statesmen at the conference that he had sought and lost a vote of confidence at home.  Two of Wilson's most powerful political opponents, former President Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, issued a statement that was duly noted in the capitals of Europe: "Our allies and our enemies should all understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority whatever to speak for the American people at this time.  His leadership has just been repudiated by them.  The newly elected Congress comes far nearer than Mr. Wilson to having a right to speak the purposes of the American people at this moment.  Mr. Wilson and his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points and all his utterances every which way have ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people." Attacked by partisan nationalists at home, confronted by an alliance of European nationalists at Paris, Wilson had to abandon, wholly or in part, many of his cherished principles. Although he believed in open covenants openly arrived at, the treaty was drafted behind closed doors. Although he espoused the self-determination of nations, he consented to turn over the Austrian Tyrol to Italy, to put Germans under Polish rule in Silesia and the Corridor, and to allow Japan to take over the German sphere of influence in Shantung. Although he advocated a peace among equals, he agreed that Germany must pay an immediate indemnity of $5 billion, sign a blank check for future reparations (including the full cost of pensions of Allied soldiers), surrender vast amounts of coal- and iron-rich territory, lose much of her merchant marine, and be stripped of her overseas empire" (Leuchtenberg). "Eighteenth-century peacemakers," Henry Kissinger has argued, would have regarded 'war guilt clauses' as absurd.  For them, wars were amoral inevitabilities caused by clashing interests.  In the treaties that concluded eighteenth-century wars, the losers paid a price without its being justified on moral grounds. But for Wilson and the peacemakers at Versailles, the cause of the war of 1914-18 had to be ascribed to some evil which had to be punished." The reaction began with Warren Harding's promise of a "return to normalcy" after the huge upheaval of the First World War and Woodrow Wilson's failed peace settlement. Harding was fond of alliteration: "not heroics, but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration." "To be sure, the Americans had not suffered on anything like the scale that the European combatant powers had suffered. But they had lost more men than in any previous American war aside from the Civil War, and had lived through a sudden and unprecedented disruption of their none-too-settled economy, all for a cause that now seemed dubious at best, a conflict that the nation could very easily have avoided. All the grand rhetoric from the presidential podium about the nation's noble war aims, making the world safe for democracy, self-determination, open agreements openly arrived at, freedom of the seas, and so on—all of it now rang pitiably hollow (McClay). The final years of the Wilson administration—a botched demobilization, rapid inflation, widespread labor unrest, 25 race riots in cities around the country, the influenza epidemic that killed 675,000 American and infected 28 percent of the population, a Red Scare featuring terrorist bombs and "Palmer Raids" (mass arrests of suspected sympathizers with the Bolshevik Revolution)—no wonder Harding won in a landslide. A basic feature of the Roaring Twenties: Presiding over this decade of effervescent social change and cultural dynamism were two of the most conservative presidents in modern American history, the Republicans Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

Bruce Thompson

REQUIRED READING

"The Great War of 1914–18 was the primal tragedy of modern world civilization, the main reason why the 20th century turned into such a disastrous epoch for mankind." Paul Johnson. For Americans the Great War was also a tragedy in that they were dragged into it against their wishes by a President who had promised to keep them out of it. And afterward there was a darkness that swept over both Europe and the United States about all of what of had just happened and this darkness spawned a generation of writers who attempted to tell their own stories and with these stories tell the bigger story world war. Of all the writers who appeared as war veterans in the 1920s, one American writer succeeded best of all in channeling his war experiences into one great novel: Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. The title alone announced the general state of mind that gripped him and his fellow war veterans as they sat down to write about what had happened. Hemingway was the perfect, handsome, American kid gone off to war in all innocence and romantic quest who gets shot, badly wounded, and ends up in a Milan hospital with the other soldiers in various states of pain. I want us all to read this novel. If you have read it before, maybe years ago, pick it up again and just sit down and read it all and be amazed at what a triumph it is. It has everything that led Gertrude Stein to announce: "You are all a lost generation." But Hemingway was not lost; he turned his pain and suffering into one of the great novels in American literature.

 

RECOMMENDED READING

As we proceed into Twentieth Century history you may discover that you would like a good general coverage of all the great intellectual and artistic movements of the century. If that is what you need then this is the book for you. It is the single best survey of 20th century intellectual and artistic history in print. It is a big book, but you can use it as you would use a reference volume and look up specific people and movements. The paperback copy is the one you want with its revised up to date edition.

Henry Ford 1863-1947

During the 1920s, the key industry was the auto industry. Henry Ford pioneered the moving assembly line, quadrupling productivity over a ten-year period, while keeping prices low (the Model T cost less than $300) and wages high. By 1925, Ford was manufacturing nine thousand cars per day. There were 26 million cars in the United States by 1929, one car on the road for every five Americans. Wilfred McCay: "Automobiles became to the economy of the 1920s, and much of the twentieth century, what textiles had been early in the previous century and what railroads had been after the Civil War: a centrally important industry that was not only a big business in its own right but also a powerful economic multiplier that gave rise to important by-products, including additional big businesses, subsidiary industries, and various other ripple effects through the economy. In the case of automobiles, the by-products were items like rubber, tires, spark plugs, glass paint, and, of course, the various petroleum products needed to operate an internal combustion engine—not to mention the extensive highway construction, some three hundred thousand miles of it between 1921 and 1919, to provide surfaces for those 26 million cars to travel on. And along with those new highways, there would be battalions of service stations.

RECOMMENDED READING

Reviews

“The implicit claim of Watts’s admirable book is almost inarguable – that it’s impossible to understand 20th-century America without knowing the story of Henry Ford.” –The New York Times

“Ford has had many biographers... None, however, comes close to Steven Watts... He brilliantly reveals the nature of Ford’s genius.” –Chicago Tribune

“Steven Watts attempts the most integrated understanding to date of Ford’s enormous influence and varied appeal... The fascinating result may change the way Henry Ford is remembered.” –San Francisco Chronicle

Warren G. Harding 1865-1923

Warren Gamaliel Harding was the 29th president of the United States, serving from 1921 until his death in 1923. A member of the Republican Party, he was one of the most popular sitting U.S. presidents while in office. After his death, a number of scandals were exposed, including Teapot Dome which damaged his reputation. Harding lived in rural Ohio all his life, except when political service took him elsewhere. As a young man, he bought The Marion Star and built it into a successful newspaper. Harding served in the Ohio State Senate from 1900 to 1904, and was lieutenant governor for two years. He was defeated for governor in 1910, but was elected to the United States Senate in 1914—the state's first direct election for that office. Harding ran for the Republican nomination for president in 1920, but was considered a long shot before the convention. When the leading candidates could not garner a majority, and the convention deadlocked, support for Harding increased, and he was nominated on the tenth ballot. He conducted a front porch campaign, remaining mostly in Marion and allowing people to come to him. He promised a return to normalcy of the pre–World War I period, and defeated Democratic nominee James M. Cox in a landslide to become the first sitting senator elected president.(Wikipedia)

Calvin Coolidge 1872-1933

Calvin Coolidge was the 30th president of the United States, serving from 1923 to 1929. A Republican lawyer from Massachusetts, he previously served as the 29th vice president from 1921 to 1923 under President Warren G. Harding, and as the 48th governor of Massachusetts from 1919 to 1921. Coolidge gained a reputation as a small-government conservative with a taciturn personality and dry sense of humor that earned him the nickname "Silent Cal". Coolidge began his career as a member of the Massachusetts State House. He rose up the ranks of Massachusetts politics and was elected governor in 1918. As governor, Coolidge ran on the record of fiscal conservatism, strong support for women's suffrage, and vague opposition to Prohibition. His prompt and effective response to the Boston police strike of 1919 thrust him into the national spotlight as a man of decisive action. The following year, the Republican Party nominated Coolidge as the running mate to Senator Warren G. Harding in the 1920 presidential election, which they won in a landslide. Coolidge served as vice president until Harding's death in 1923, after which he assumed the presidency. During his presidency, Coolidge restored public confidence in the White House after the Harding administration's many scandals. He signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which granted U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans, and oversaw a period of rapid and expansive economic growth known as the "Roaring Twenties", leaving office with considerable popularity.(Wikipedia)

 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING

This is the most important book that we can recommend dealing with 1930 to 1945 in the USA. It is an acknowledged masterpiece as you will see in the reviews below. We can all be proud that this brilliant historian has had a home for all these years in our own Stanford University.

REVIEWS
"This is modern America's story--modern America's most thrilling, most irresistible, and most significant story--and in this massive volume, David M. Kennedy makes it his story in a way that no one has before. Freedom From Fear, the fourth installment of the new Oxford History of the United States to appear, is as much a triumph as its predecessors, providing every indication that the series, once completed, will stand as the most comprehensive and most compelling narrative history of the nation."--Boston Globe
"Rarely does a work of historical synthesis combine such trenchant analysis and elegant writing as does Kennedy's spectacular contribution to the Oxford History of the United States. Kennedy uses a wide canvas to depict all aspects of the American political, social and economic experience from 1929 to 1945. He also provides a stunningly original reinterpretation of the competing forces and interests that combined to shape the New Deal under FDR's direction. The book's final 400 pages admirably demonstrate exactly how the U.S. emerged victorious in WWII....Because of its scope, its insight and its purring narrative engine, Kennedy's book will stand for years to come as the definitive history of the most important decades of the American Century."--Publishers Weekly
"An engrossing narrative of a momentous time. The best one-volume account of the Roosevelt era currently available....Good old-fashioned history."--The New York Times Book Review
"An indispensable account of the two great formative events of 20th century American history--the Great Depression and the second World War."--The Economist
"Kennedy's book is the most illuminating, riveting, comprehensive, and graceful one-volume history of this nation's experiences during the Great Depression, New Deal, and WWII published to date....This is social, political, dipolmatic, and military history written magisterially with broad but nuanced strokes across a 16-year span that utterly transformed the lives of Americans and the world....Librarians should order this book for their libraries, faculty members should assign it, and everyone should read it."--CHOICE

The Roaring Twenties: STAR POWER

Howard Zeitz: "By the mid-1920s movie theaters were selling 50 million tickets each week, a sum equal to roughly half the US population! And the generation that came of age in the twenties learned things at the movie palace that they couldn't learn in school. 'The only benefit I ever got from the movies was in learning to love and the knowledge of sex,' a young woman confided to an interviewer in the mid-20s. 'If we didn't see such examples in the movies,' explained another, 'where would we get the idea of being hot? We wouldn't.'" This was the first great decade in the history of the Hollywood movie industry. Most of the owners and production chiefs of the major studios were immigrants from central or eastern Europe who began their careers in the garment, glove or fur businesses, and applied their entrepreneurial skills to a new industry that had few barriers to the entry of newcomers: Louis B. Mayer (MGM); Adolph Zukor (Paramount); Jesse Lasky (Paramount); William Fox (Fox); Jack Warner (Warner Brothers); Carl Laemmle (Universal); B.P. Schulberg (Paramount); Irving Thalberg (Universal, MGM); Sam Goldwyn (independent); David O. Selznick (MGM, RKO, Selznick); Harry Cohn (Columbia). They had the classic Jewish combination of an aspiration toward cultural assimilation combined with an early experience of humble origins in small towns and urban ghettos—in a nation of immigrants, rapidly urbanizing, this was the perfect recipe for success in the new medium of cinema. Howard Sachar: "California was becoming a favored locale among these aspiring producers."

 

RECOMMENDED READING

 

RECOMMENDED READING

Who was the most famous American in the world during the Roaring Twenties? Not the presidents, Harding and Coolidge, who did not intend to emulate Wilson by solving Europe's, and the world's, problems. Not those two superstars in their respective fields, Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin—both world-famous, certainly, but neither had been born in America. Not even Babe Ruth, arguably the greatest baseball player of them all, who hit a record-setting 60 home runs that year. The most famous American, after his 1927 New York-to-Paris flight, was Charles Lindbergh, whose Spirit of St. Louis was the antidote not only to the Titanic, which had sunk on her maiden voyage fifteen years earlier, but also to the disillusionment that followed in the wake of the First World War and the failure of Woodrow Wilson to secure a durable peace settlement. In his classic book, Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen explains: "A disillusioned nation fed on cheap heroics and scandal and crime was revolting against the low estimate of human nature which it had allowed itself to entertain. For years the American people had been spiritually starved. They had seen their early ideals and illusions and hopes one by one worn away by the corrosive influence of events and ideas—by the disappointing aftermath of the war, by scientific doctrines and psychological theories which undermined their religion and ridiculed their sentimental notions, by the spectacle of graft in politics and crime on the city streets, and finally by their recent newspaper diet of smut and murder. Romance, chivalry, and self-dedication had been debunked; the heroes of history had been shown to have feet of clay, and the saints of history had been revealed as people with queer complexes. There was the god of business to worship—but a suspicion lingered that he was made of brass…. Something that people needed if they were to be at peace with themselves and with the world, was missing from their lives. And all at once Lindbergh provided it. Romance, chivalry, self-dedication—here they were, embodied in a modern Galahad for a generation which had foresworn Galahads. Lindbergh did not accept the moving-picture offers that came his way, he did not sell testimonials, did not boast, did not get himself involved in scandal, conducted himself with unerring taste—and was handsome and brave withal. The machinery of ballyhoo was ready and waiting to life him up where every eye could see him. Is it any wonder that the public's reception of him took on the aspects of a vast religious revival?"

 

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Herbert Clark Hoover (1874 – 1964)

was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. A wealthy mining engineer before his presidency, Hoover led the wartime Commission for Relief in Belgium and was the director of the U.S. Food Administration, followed by post-war relief of Europe. As a member of the Republican Party, he served as the third United States secretary of commerce from 1921 to 1928 before being elected president in 1928. His presidency was dominated by the Great Depression, and his policies and methods to combat it were seen as lackluster. Amid his unpopularity, he decisively lost reelection to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. Born to a Quaker family in West Branch, Iowa, Hoover grew up in Oregon. He was one of the first graduates of the new Stanford University in 1895. Hoover took a position with a London-based mining company working in Australia and China. He rapidly became a wealthy mining engineer. In 1914, the outbreak of World War I, he organized and headed the Commission for Relief in Belgium, an international relief organization that provided food to occupied Belgium. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Hoover to lead the Food Administration. He became famous as his country's "food dictator". After the war, Hoover led the American Relief Administration, which provided food to the starving millions in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Russia. Hoover's wartime service made him a favorite of many progressives, and he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in the 1920 U.S. presidential election. Hoover served as Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Hoover was an unusually active and visible Cabinet member, becoming known as "Secretary of Commerce and Under-Secretary of all other departments." He was influential in the development of air travel and radio. Hoover led the federal response to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. He won the Republican nomination in the 1928 presidential election and defeated Democratic candidate Al Smith in a landslide. In 1929, Hoover assumed the presidency. However, during his first year in office, the stock market crashed, signaling the onset of the Great Depression, which dominated Hoover's presidency until its end. He supported the Mexican Repatriation and his response to the Great Depression was widely seen as lackluster. In the midst of the Great Depression, he was decisively defeated by Democratic nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. Hoover's retirement was over 31 years long, one of the longest presidential retirements. He authored numerous works and became increasingly conservative in retirement. He strongly criticized Roosevelt's foreign policy and the New Deal. In the 1940s and 1950s, public opinion of Hoover improved, largely due to his service in various assignments for presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, including chairing the influential Hoover Commission. Critical assessments of his presidency by historians and political scientists generally rank him as a significantly below-average president, although Hoover has received praise for his actions as a humanitarian and public official.

 

RECOMMENDED READING