Garland S. Tucker III: The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge, and the 1924 Election, Austin, Tex.: Emerald Book Co., 2010, 336 pages, $29.95 hardcover.
For generations who’ve grown up with the notion that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal saved the United States from the Great Depression, the following story might be hard to believe.
It’s March 1933. Republican Herbert Hoover has presided over several years of dismal economic conditions, and his Democratic successor — an overwhelming winner over Hoover in the 1932 presidential race — is about to embark on a new course.
As FDR prepares to take aim at the Depression, a “major article” in the Sunday New York Times delivers a warning. “The chief aim of all government is to preserve the freedom of the citizen,” the Times author contends. “His control over his person, his property, his movements, his business, his desires should be restrained only so far as the public welfare imperatively demands. The world is in more danger of being governed too much than too little.”
“It is the teaching of all history that liberty can only be preserved in small areas,” the writer continues. “Local self-government is, therefore, indispensable to liberty. A centralized and distant bureaucracy is the worst of all tyranny.”
And there’s more to be feared than centralization. “Taxation can justly be levied for no purpose other than to provide revenue for the support of the government,” the author concludes. “To tax one person, class, or section to provide revenue for the benefit of another is none the less robbery because done under the form of law and called taxation.”
Given the standard textbook view of American history, the author of those words must have been a reactionary shaking his fist at the experts descending upon Washington to help Roosevelt turn the country around — through increased government planning, unprecedented centralization, and taxation not seen since the days of World War I.
Surely the author of those words was a Republican, perhaps the sore loser Hoover himself.
Find that copy of The New York Times, though, and you’ll discover that those Jeffersonian notions of limited government actually emanated from the pen of John W. Davis. Lifelong Democrat John W. Davis. One-time Democratic presidential nominee John W. Davis.
It’s a major accomplishment of Garland S. Tucker III’s new book that today’s students of political history have a chance to learn more about Davis, an unsung hero of American conservatism.
Tucker contends that Davis’ unsuccessful challenge of Republican Calvin Coolidge in the 1924 presidential race marked — as the title tells us — the “high tide” for American conservatives. The 1924 contest marked the last time both major parties nominated a conservative candidate for the White House.
Search for the most important presidential races of the past century, and you’re likely to consider the aforementioned 1932 contest that ushered in Roosevelt’s New Deal and the landslide 1980 election, which enabled Ronald Reagan to help steer the nation away from big government programs first launched under Roosevelt’s watch.
You might point to Johnson’s win over Goldwater in 1964, with its profound implications both for federal government expansion and for conservative retrenchment, or the most recent election, which produced the first president of color.
But chances are pretty good that you haven’t considered 1924 among those major elections. After all, Coolidge won big. The two major candidates were indistinguishable in many areas of public policy. The nation was enjoying a respite of prosperity between the major crises of the first “war to end all wars” and the first large-scale government attempt to steer the economy out of a ditch.
Tucker’s well-paced narrative might make you reconsider your assessment of 1924. In addition to his profile of the nearly universally neglected Davis, the author explains how a taciturn conservative such as Coolidge won fans within an American electorate that was still recovering from war and from the scandals of Coolidge’s predecessor, Warren Harding.
“He warned against the ‘thousands upon thousands of organizations ceaselessly clamoring and agitating for Government action that would increase the burden upon the taxpayer by increasing the cost of Government’; and he solemnly pledged himself to ‘the practice of public economy and insistence upon its rigid and drastic enforcement,’” Tucker writes of Coolidge. “He decried the growth in the American tax burden over the twenty years preceding Harding’s election, stating, ‘It is no wonder that under these almost despotic exactions the morale of the country began to break down. Its vitals were eaten out.’”
If Coolidge and Davis saw eye to eye on the dangers of too much government, a significant minority of voters shared the opposite view. The prospect of two conservative presidential nominees prompted Wisconsin Republican Sen. Robert La Follette to bolt the GOP for the Progressive banner.
“While his 1924 run for the presidency fell short, it was a transformational event in American political party history,” Tucker writes. “Progressive Republicans were shaken loose from their historical party moorings of more than a generation and ultimately found a home in the Democratic Party, which turned away from its Jeffersonian roots in the years following 1924.”
The man who would become the next Democratic president certainly learned political lessons from 1924. “Franklin Roosevelt commented shortly after Election Day, 1924, that is was useless for Democrats to ‘wear the livery of the conservative’ — a lesson the Democrats have not yet forgotten.”
Thanks to Tucker’s research and exposition of the often-neglected 1924 campaign, readers catch a glimpse of the early signs of major change that paved the way for today’s ideological partisan battles.