Forgotten Man, The Read Online Free PDF Page A

his closest friends, Dwight Morrow of Wall Street, would eventually marry Lindbergh. Citizens had proven their willingness to test Coolidge’s propositions again by voting overwhelmingly for the refrainer in 1924, despite the fact that he had been vice president to Warren Harding, whose short time in office had been clouded by scandal.
    At first, the differences between Coolidge and Hoover were nearly indistinguishable to the public eye. Both men, after all, deeplyrespected the Constitution and the gold standard. Both respected the independence of the Supreme Court—like Woodrow Wilson before them. Wilson had said that while it was within the power of government to overwhelm the Court on an issue, by, say, “increasing the number of justices and refusing to confirm any appointments,” presidents recognized that this violated the spirit of the Constitution, and that the public would make “such outrages upon constitutional morality impossible by standing ready to curse them.” Both believed in enterprise. In 1925 Coolidge summed up his philosophy, telling the American Society of Newspaper Editors that “the chief ideal of the American people is idealism.” But he also offered a counterpart to that: “The chief business of the American people is business.” It was the latter line that was remembered, and proved too moderate for some. They shortly altered it to the now better-known phrase “the business of America is business.”
    Finally, both men were humble about the position of the federal government relative to business. Compared to the private sector, after all, the federal government was a pygmy. Its size was less than 2 percent of the national economy, smaller even than that of state and city governments. Lawmakers of their generation constantly feared that the fast-growing private sector might further diminish their already questionable relevance. Back in 1910, word of the rise of the skyscraper in New York had panicked congressmen, who promptly zoned height limits for buildings in the District of Columbia, so that no private building could ever overshadow the Capitol.
    Both men, too, shared an understanding of traditional economics, with its emphasis on the producer. “Supply creates its own demand,” the classical economist Jean-Baptiste Say had written in France a century earlier, and in the case of many new industries, that seemed to be proving true again. Why focus on Coolidge, or Hoover? had been the attitude of the mid-1920s. The business leaders were the ones who would pull the country forward, and were therefore the ones worth watching.
    Most dramatic was Henry Ford, who, the week after Harding’s death, reported he was selling automobiles under a new trade agreement to Russia. Twenty years before, Ford had started with just a few employees and $27,000. By constructing the modern assembly line, he was creating modern Detroit and conquering the rest of the country, buying up its own coal and iron mines. Part of his success was due to his religiously plowing back profit into the business, forgoing dividends. In fact, as Benjamin Anderson, the chief economist at Chase Bank, would write later, the first quarter century had offered “case after case of Fords,” all “showing the history of small businesses which, employing three or four laborers, had in relatively short periods of time (fifteen or twenty years) grown into very substantial businesses.” In 1923, Ford plants were already producing 6,000 cars a day, a record.
    During the war the government had begun work on a dam and power operation at Muscle Shoals, Alabama—the point being to make ammunition. The war ended before the plant was running, and recently Henry Ford, who had his own political ambitions, had put in a bid to take over Muscle Shoals. Only the private sector, some believed, had the wherewithal to develop America’s most important new industry, and the key to its growth: electric power. Muscle Shoals could be “the Detroit of