794 ★ CHAPTER 20 From Business Culture to Great Depressionseemed to exemplify Yankee honesty.
The scandals subsided, but otherwise
Coolidge continued his predecessor’s
policies. He twice vetoed the McNary-
Haugen bill, the top legislative priority
of congressmen from farm states. This
bill sought to have the government
purchase agricultural products for sale
overseas in order to raise farm prices.
Coolidge denounced it as an unwar-
ranted interference with the free mar-
ket. In 1924, Coolidge was reelected in
a landslide, defeating John W. Davis, a
Wall Street lawyer nominated on the
103rd ballot by a badly divided Demo-
cratic convention. (This was when the
comedian Will Rogers made the quip,
often repeated in future years, “I am a
member of no organized political party;
I am a Democrat.”)
One- sixth of the electorate in 1924
voted for Robert La Follette, running
as the candidate of a new Progressive Party, which called for greater taxation
of wealth, the conservation of natural resources, public ownership of the rail-
roads, farm relief, and the end of child labor. Although such ideas had been
proposed many times before World War I, Coolidge described the platform as a
blueprint for a “communistic and socialistic” America. Despite endorsements
from veteran Progressives like Jane Addams and John Dewey and the American
Federation of Labor, La Follette could raise no more than $250,000 for his cam-
paign. He carried only his native Wisconsin. But his candidacy demonstrated
the survival of some currents of dissent in a highly conservative decade.Economic Diplomacy
Foreign affairs also reflected the close working relationship between business
and government. “Any student of modern diplomacy,” declared Huntington Wil-
son, a State Department official, “knows that in these days of competition, capital,
trade, agriculture, labor and statecraft all go hand in hand if a country is to profit.”
The 1920s marked a retreat from Wilson’s goal of internationalism in favor of
unilateral American actions mainly designed to increase exports and investment
opportunities overseas. Indeed, what is sometimes called the “isolationism” ofProgressive Optimism, a satirical comment on
Robert La Follette’s campaign for president in
1924 as the candidate of the Progressive Party,
has a disheveled westerner (labeled Wisconsin,
La Follette’s state) tied to a stake in the desert
while a goat dressed as a cowboy and labeled
“Third Party” heads off to bring the party’s mes-
sage to the “uneducated East.”