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The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
The Great American Story: The Great War and Its Aftermath
00:51:26
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Foreign. Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
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And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with the Great American Story, A Land of Hope lectures 16 and 17 today, the Great War and its Aftermath.
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Yeah, another two parter covering a really big topic. And I think Dr. Maclay does an excellent job in explaining why, how the war came about, how America's involvement in the war came about and what its repercussions were.
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Yeah, it's an interesting change in American foreign policy that is a direct result of the progressive view of foreign policy, which we covered a little bit two episodes ago.
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Right. We talked about the change. The founder's view on foreign policy was it was the purpose of the American government to protect the lives, liberty and property of American citizens. So when those things are actually being harmed or at risk of being harmed, the government could use force, the military to protect Americans. And the progressives shifted that view away from the focus on the government protecting its own citizens to the government making the world safe for democracy. So tyranny anywhere became a problem for everyone everywhere. And World War I is an example of that philosophy playing out on a global scale.
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And it's a philosophy that since the early 1900s has dominated American foreign policy since then. Until very recently, Wilson had sworn that
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he would keep America out of the war. But of course, we entered the war in 1917 and the Americans and their allies won the war. And that gave us our first real experiment in global government. It wasn't absolute. It was a beginning and attempt. But with the League of Nations, we saw the idea of a formal international government body that would govern the affairs of nations across the globe, at least in some respects.
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And if you're enjoying listening to the course, I encourage you to go to Hillsdale Edu course and watch it. The courses are beautiful. There's a lot of learning resources that you can utilize to increase your learning. And you can take some short quizzes that will help you track your learning progress. You can go to enroll in the course by going to Hillsdale. Edu course. That's Hills
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especially Juan. For a course this thorough and in depth, it's really helpful to go onto the website and gain access to the study guides and the additional resources we put up that help you as a student, keep track of this great narrative that Professor Maclay is unfolding for us. So with that, let's turn to professor maclay for lectures 16 and 17 of the great American story, A Land of Hope, the Great War and its Aftermath. Parts one and two.
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Hello, welcome back for our next lecture, which is on the Great War and its aftermath. The First World War descended on Europe like a thunderstorm in the night, completely unexpected, shattering the stillness of a summer evening. Or so it seemed to Americans who were not really following events in Europe that closely or in far flung parts of the world, of which they knew nothing and cared less. But Americans were not the only ones to be surprised and confused by this war, by its tangled and somewhat incomprehensible origins. They were not the only ones to find its nightmarish violence and ferocity to be inexplicable, using weapons of unparalleled destructiveness and cruelty. It all seemed out of proportion to whatever goals, whatever motives were lying behind the war effort. So did many of their European contemporaries. What did it all mean, this breathtaking eruption of civilizational self destruction? Surely, if the Great War was a pivotal event in history, as it was, there had to be some self evident explanation for where it was coming from and where it was going. But in fact, some of the greatest events in human history are and remain mysterious today, more than a century after the Great War, the war that was to be, the war to end all wars. There's no clear consensus among historians about its causes, but we can venture a few generalizations. It certainly does arise out of the instability in the balance of power in Europe that arose after 1871, after the unification of Germany and Germany's rise to being a contending power among the powers of Europe. This in an era of imperialism and imperial aspiration, as I mentioned last time, and the constant jostling that came with that, gave rise to elaborate systems of alliances, shifting alliances. Some were secret, some were concluded principally for the purposes of national security or mutual assistance in the event of an attack. This whole lineup by 1914 consisted of the great states of Europe sorting themselves out into two alliance blocks. The Triple Entente, which was Great Britain, France and Russia, and the Triple Alliance, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy. No one had planned this to work out this way, and it was an intrinsically unstable and dangerous situation. When war broke out, it broke out over an event on the periphery of the Austro Hungarian Empire. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, by a Bosnian revolutionary associated with a Serbian nationalist organization. To explain all of that would take the rest of my lecture, and I'm not going to do that, since we're of course in American history. But suffice it to say that when war broke out, it was a royal mess, like a game of toppling and exploding dominoes and the United States. The President of the United States was determined on one thing. He was not going to play that game. Following the tradition, in a very conscious way, of Jefferson, Washington and John Quincy Adams, he issued a solemn declaration of neutrality on August 4, just three days after the beginning of the war, and instructed the nation to remain impartial in thought as well as action with respect to this unfolding conflict. Well, Wilson was asking a lot, since he understood that many of the inhabitants of his own country would have affiliations and loyalties to the countries that they had come from and where relatives were still living. So it's a lot to ask to remain neutral in thought as well as action. But the point was that America needed to stay out of this European conflagration. The war quickly descended to levels of hellish mayhem and mass slaughter unprecedented in human history. Almost surreal in their enormity. Even more than the American Civil War, this fit the definition of total war. A war in which the battle was fought not just between armies in the fields or navies at sea, but between whole populations. And fought with weapons of horrific destructive power. Poison gas, machine guns, armored tanks, aerial bombing, flamethrowers, landmines, powerful long range artillery capable of reaching targets many miles away. The Germans had a Paris gun that had a range of up to 81 miles. Wow, this is quite an array of new weapons, largely new weapons. On the western front of the war, the action stalemated very quickly and devolved into trench warfare. Attempts to break through resulted in horrific casualties. At the battle near the small French city of Verdun, an unsuccessful attack led to upwards of a million casualties among the two sides combined. And I could go on with other examples. The worst day in the history of the British Army. In the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, 20,000 British soldiers died and 40,000 were wounded on the first day of battle. So the casualties, already early in the war effort, were mounting up to unprecedented levels. And these were battles that in the end, made very little difference in the disposition of forces in the war. The these numbers are almost too much to comprehend. So are the stories of woundings, maimings and shattered lives. Small wonder that Americans did not want any part of it, especially since the war aims were so nebulous, so hard to articulate, so hard to understand. They're hard to articulate and understand even today. So the policy of neutrality seemed the only sensible thing. Of course, the policy of neutrality had never entirely worked for America in the past. In the time of the Napoleonic wars, it foundered and it would founder again at this time for much the same reason. The United States, a trading commercial nation, wanted to trade with all parties. It wanted freedom of the seas. Freedom of the seas favored those nations that lacked the navies to protect their commerce. So it had the effect of denying the British, who had the far superior navy to anybody else in the world, the advantages of their superiority in naval things. So it became clear that America was going to have to at some point take sides. The Germans understood this and they unleashed against the Allies, and by extension it would affect America, their submarine force, the one area of naval warfare in which they had superiority. And this had great effect on shipping, which was very important, of course, to British British interests as an island nation. And it blunted somewhat the power of their navy. The sinking of the liner Lusitania in May of 1915, which resulted in 128American deaths, was a potential crisis. But Wilson was able to finesse it effectively. And by fall of 1916, when he was running for reelection, he ran effectively on the slogan he kept us out of war. Even an incident like the Lusitania was not enough to rile American public opinion in the direction of war. Wilson didn't win that election very commandingly. In California, for example. In California, 3800 votes Alamillion cast had gone a different way. His opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, would have been elected president. So the election was that close. It was not an impressive victory. Wilson didn't have the same kind of wind in his sails that he felt that he'd had in the early part of his first term. But he didn't know it. Wilson, with his characteristic self confidence, immediately launched into another effort to mediate the struggle. Gave a speech in 1917 to the Senate, but directed consciously to the people of the world, saying that he proposed acting as a kind of middleman, appealing to the populace of the countries at war themselves and not to leaders. He said, the United States is going to play a role in the great enterprise of peace. But the peace would have to be a peace without victory, a peace that sought not just a new balance of power, but a just and secure peace. I'm quoting Wilson's language here. A community of power built on democratic governance and the consent of the governed and so on. He was giving a glimpse of the visionary themes that he would sound later, once the United States actually entered the war effort. And he would interject himself. It's interesting. This kind of language, this way of thinking, reflects not only American democratic ideals, but it also reflects that progressive Era notion of disinterestedness that all along Wilson presented American involvement in the affairs of Europe not as taking sides, although in the end, of course, the United States had to take sides, but as in some way being above the struggle and coming in like a schoolmaster coming into a schoolyard and breaking up the fights among the students. This would be a problem later on, this attitude, this American attitude. Finally, the sinking of merchant vessels in the first weeks of March of 1917 did what sinking Lusitania and other crises had not done. It changed public opinion. It led Wilson to ask for a declaration of war. And he did so on April 2nd. But he did it in this disinterested tone. He had to oppose Germany's submarine policy because it was warfare against mankind and the world. He said famous words must be made safe for democracy. We act, he said, without animus, not in enmity towards a people or the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but only in response to an armed opposition to irresponsible government which has thrown aside considerations of humanity and right and is running amok. Remember his strategy of giving speeches not to the Senate assembled before him, not to the American government, not to the governments of foreign countries, but to the people of those countries. America was at war. Now began the task of mobilization for war. And the United States did a very good job of mobilizing quickly for war. And it did so through the creation of government agencies designed for that purpose. Preeminently, the War Industries Board. WIB brought all of the war related industries into coordination with one another, had awesome power, set production quotas and allocated raw materials, and intervened in the production goals and techniques of industries, all in ways designed to increase efficiency, decrease waste, improve the war effort. It entered into labor management negotiations, set wages and prices, tremendously powerful agency. And for progressives, who were not particularly great fans of war in the first place, but for progressives, this was exhibit A in how a powerful directive government could break down some of the problems of the modern economy and make it run with greater efficiency. So the progressives warmed to the war effort. They began to see this as a way of implementing progressive ideals by a different path, a different pattern. Part of the war effort also was an effort to influence public opinion, really the first organized government propaganda effort on a large scale in the nation's history. Wilson thought it was acutely important to have the nation with him. And so he set up something called the Committee on Public Information, headed by the journalist George Creel, sometimes called the Creel Committee, that would organize what was essentially a propagandistic machine to sell the public on the war effort. They brought in movie stars, artists, writers, celebrities to promote the sale of bonds, Liberty bonds as they were called, conservation and other wartime efforts. It was surprisingly effective, although it also transgressed some boundaries. So some of the speakers and art and films presented the Germans in such a negative way that it was really beyond the bounds of what was reasonable. There's a 1918 film called the Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin, which sets the tone, suggests the tone, as did the American Protective League's campaign slogan, hate the hunter. So it was a time of intense anti German feeling in the American population, much of it drummed up by the American government. Worse even than that, though, was Wilson's intolerance of dissent. Of those who opposed the war effort, Wilson, not unlike John Adams at an earlier time, passed legislation, the espionage act of 1917 and the Sedition act of 1918 that were designed to suppress dissent. The latter of these made it an offense to utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the government, the Constitution or the armed forces. More than 1,000 people were convicted, including Eugene Debs, who as you may remember, had just run for president, who was sentenced for 10 years in prison for advocating resistance to conscription. These convictions were upheld by the Supreme Court. Did Wilson overreact? I think quite probably so. The balance between maintaining robust civil liberties and national security is always a difficult one. But in retrospect, I think most historians would say he went too far. But of course, progressive intellectuals were less likely to complain because they liked what the war was doing. By way of providing an example of how top down organization of the economy through government agencies could work, The problem goes back to something that we've talked about before. A fundamental conflict between the centralizing, consolidating, harmonizing spirit of progressivism, progressive thought and the competitive idea at the heart of the Constitution, which involved channeling conflict itself through checks and balances, separation of powers and other structures that protect against the danger of consolidated power. The Germans program of unrestricted submarine warfare started having an effect almost immediately. And they got a lucky break when the Bolshevik revolution in Russia led to Russia dropping out of the war effort and leaving the Germans all of a sudden with the prospect that they only had to fight on one front. The Germans had been held down by the need to fight on both an eastern front against Russia and a western front against the other allies. But good things were happening on the Allied side. The building of warships was beginning to have a notable effect of American warships, particularly for convoy escorts. And losses of Allied merchant shipping were way down. The American entry into the war was a huge boost to morale on the European side and to the materiel and resources, men and material and resources on the military side. The injection of American energy and optimism had an incalculable positive effect. But time was short, and as the French premier, Georges Clemenceau, pleaded to a journalist, tell your Americans to come quickly. They did come reasonably quickly. The American expeditionary force under General John Pershing, arrived in Paris on July 4, 1917. Interestingly, Pershing did not yield authority to his Allied counterparts. This was with Wilson's insistence that the relationship between the United States and the Allies was not that of allies, but of associates. You see, he was trying to take the higher ground, which was not an immediately appealing position to everyone allied with him. But he said, we desire, and this is truthful, we desire no conquest, no dominion. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. America was not trying to get in on this and get any of the. The booty and spoils of war. And this claim was, in fact, entirely credible. In a way, I think Wilson was trying to echo some part of the John Quincy Adams view that America doesn't go abroad in search of augmenting her own fortunes. As it turned out, by the spring of 1918, the American soldiers, American doughboys, as they were called, became engaged in battle. And I won't go through the history of all of their engagements except to say that by November 11, an armistice was signed. The war was concluded, the Germans were defeated. We now celebrate that day as Veterans Day. The toll, the death toll from the war is just staggering. Americans only lost about 117,000 dead, but compared to over a million for almost all the other combatants, the British, The Germans lost 1.8 million, the Russians 1.7 million, and others. Incomparable levels of death. The number of military and civilian casualties coming out of the First World War War has been estimated at 40 million people. That was about 10% of Europe's population as of the year 1900. So this was a pivotal moment now for the European world, for the whole world, but particularly for Europe, a decisive victory had been won. But its consequences were immense. Confusion, instability, destruction, displacement, widespread starvation, deprivation, and fear that radical regimes, taking their cue from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, might come to power in Europe.
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Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being. And we can help with the Hillsdale dialogues each week Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio. This show is a part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to your favorite. You'll get brand new episodes of all your favorite shows sent right to your device, and you'll help us know that you're out there listening. Never miss another episode by going to podcast hillsdale.edu subscribe that's podcast hillsdale.edu subscribe or click the Follow or Subscribe button on Apple podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.
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The war had brought about the collapse of four empires Imperial Germany, Austria, Hungary, Tsarist Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, and it would necessitate a complete redrawing of the map of Europe. It would also leave behind a sense of disillusionment, a desire for vengeance, and a revulsion at the regimes that had survived. It left Europe open to the possibility of a genuinely radical alternative. Wilson understood all of this. He understood the gravity of the situation, the gravity of the historical moment, and he saw an opportunity for himself to come in and interject, as part of the peace settlement, a perspective that he alone could offer that would begin to build a whole new international order, a world, as he said, fit and safe to live in. This would be embodied in what were called his 14 points, which he delivered in a speech to Congress on January 8, 1918. The 14 points are worth going into in some detail, and I do that in the book. I won't do that here. Except to say that they were a collection of desirable goals, some of which conflicted with one another, but capped with number 14 of the points being the creation of an international body designed to adjudicate issues of conflict between and among nations. So this General association of nations, as he called it, called it, that would provide mutual guarantees to one another of political independence and territorial integrity. They would look out for one another. This was what came to be called the League of nations. So the 14 points, to make a long story short, were entered into the discussion at the peace conference in Paris, which Wilson attended, a really rather spectacular, or at least dramatic move on his part to actually go across the ocean and attend the conference Himself personally. So he went to Paris, and in a high minded and hubristic way, he was greeted by cheering and adoring crowds. He thought he had the world with him. But when he got into conferences with the other powers, the other leaders from Britain, France and Italy, he discovered that his 14 points got nowhere. One by one they were picked off, and eventually what remained, the sole thing that remained, was the League of Nations. But Wilson convinced himself that that was would be enough. That would be enough to make the effort worthwhile. So the treaty as it emerged, would contain a provision for the League of Nations. And Wilson brought this home with him, expecting that given his popularity, it would not be difficult. It would not be difficult for him to carry the day. Unfortunately for him, he had not kept in touch with the people in the Senate and on the home front that whose support he would need to ratify the treaty. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, a crusty, skillful old hand at politics, ended up thwarting him, thwarting his efforts. But Lodge was concerned that particularly Article 10 of the league covenant would erode the actual national sovereignty of the United States, would leave the United States unable to have sufficient autonomy to govern its own affairs. He took the position that that would have to be changed in order for the treaty to be acceptable. Others had other reservations. Some had small reservations. Some had large reservations. Some were irreconcilable. That is, they would not accept the treaty on any terms. Finally, Wilson, who was so stubborn, so convinced of his own rectitude, was unwilling to accept any alterations, any revisions, saw the treaty failed to be ratified and he, he. By the election of 1920, he was out of the picture, having been felled by a stroke. A bitter man, he appealed to the public to make the election of 1920 into a referendum on the question of the League. What happened was the Republican candidate, a rather unimpressive candidate in a lot of ways, Warren G. Harding won a smashing victory. He won over 60% of the popular vote. For the first time in American history that any presidential candidate had reached the 60% mark. What a repudiation of Wilson. Harding had been a strong reservationist on the League too. So voting for him was in effect, if one follows the calculus that Wilson set down, a vote for Harding was a vote against the League. Harding promised that his campaign and his campaign that he would return things to the way they were before the status quo. Not nostrums, but normalcy, not heroics, but healing, not revolution, but restoration. This was the contrast he was drawing to the turbulent Wilson, who had spent eight years stirring things up on the domestic front and then in the international scene. So after eight years of that, America was ready for something different. It wasn't just the treaty. Many Americans were disillusioned by the war. It seemed to them to have settled little or nothing. The grand oratory of Wilson. The notion about freedom of the seas and self determination, open agreements openly arrived at all of that sounded pitiably hollow. And many Americans were suspicious, in fact that the war effort had been put up by industrialists, by munitions manufacturers who stood to profit from a war. And the NYE Commission was established to investigate precisely those kinds of worries. The economy was on a roller coaster ride of Americans were impatient with the government regulation that the war had brought. They saw massive displacements as the returning veterans found housing, autos, consumer goods to be in short supply with huge spikes in prices and availability. In cities around the country there were urban riots because of the returning vets being unable to find work and housing. These often had an ugly racial overtone. And something that's often forgotten is that the international Spanish influenza epidemic killed 675,000Americans in the year 1918. Some 22 million people around the world, about 28% of the American population was infected by the disease which was almost certainly spread by the interaction of individuals involved in the war effort. Above all there was, as I've mentioned before, the specter of the Bolshevik revolution which affected Americans view about the stability of their own institutions and the intentions of radicals, often foreign born radicals in their midst. Something that happened with the transition from Wilson to Harding that may well have been a good thing, an overdue thing in American politics is that the emphasis upon the presidency. Wilson had been at the center of everything. He had been the focus of everything in the 20s. The 1920s presidential politics would not be the be all and end all of American life. Harding just wasn't a figure that had that kind of stature. In many ways, the stars of the Show in the 1920s, the Post Progressive era, would be those who were driving the American economy and the American culture, not the political leadership of the country. This is a little reminiscent of the experience of the last third of the 19th century when because of Johnson's humiliation, the presidency had been taken down a few notches and not to come back until Theodore Roosevelt appeared on the scene. This was an era in which Calvin Coolidge's adage held sway. The chief business of the American people is business. Rather than seeking to make the world safe for democracy. Instead the Republican leaders of the 1920s made a more modest goal, making America safe for enterprise. In that they succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. Things got off to a rough start for Harding. He had to inherit a very troubled economy. The economy turned down in 1920, July of 1920, and lasting through 1921, a very sharp recession, which caused unemployment to soar and agricultural products commodity prices fell. Harding dealt with these changes by turning to the advice of his secretary of the Treasury, Andrew W. Mellon, A highly successful banker financier. Mellon had a view of the economy that called for a dramatic restructuring of the tax burden on individuals. In business, he sought to cut taxes for individuals. Remember, the income tax was a relatively new thing at this time that Wilson had instituted. He didn't eliminate income taxes, but cut taxes sharply. Yes, for the people with the highest incomes the most, from 77%. That's a very high rate to 24%. But an even greater percentage wise cut for the low incomes, dropping from 4% to 0.5%. Mellon wanted to reduce the huge federal debt that had come from the war effort, as always does in times of war. But he didn't want to do it at the expense of economic growth. He propounded the principle that taxes that were set too high could be damaging not only to the economy, but to revenues. The history of taxation, he said, shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid, but instead put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business. This is the origins of the notion that became called supply side economics. Reducing taxes could actually increase government revenues. The Mellon tax cuts and other parts of his economic program worked splendidly. By the end of 1922, real GMP was already inching up. By 1923, it was up sharply and would continue to rise through most of the decade. The economy grew 42% over the decade of the twenties. The average rate of GNP, the forerunner of GDP for the decade, was 4.7%. The annual rate of GNP. The national debt was halved from 33 billion to 16 billion by 1929. The size of the American economy was astounding. It was the economic colossus of of the world. The United States was producing nearly half the world's output and possessed wealth equivalent to all of post war Europe. Wealth adding up to perhaps 40% of the world's total wealth. These are just staggering numbers. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. This helped to lubricate credit markets and provide a stimulus to growth. Along with these advances came advances in manufacturing and industrial production. The moving assembly line which Henry Ford honed to Perfection in the manufacture of automobiles. By the 1920s, these methods had by breaking down all the complex process involved in assembling a complicated automotive vehicle into simple repetitive operations, using standardized parts and employing a conveyor belt. This was widely used now in the automobile industry. Ford's plants quadrupled in productivity over the 10 year period of the 1920s. This was a main reason why Ford was able to sell his famous Model T for less than $300. By 1929, there were 26 million cars in the United States. Automobiles were to the 1920s for what textiles had been early in the 19th century and what railroads had been at the time of the Civil war and thereafter. The centrally important industry that was not only a big business in itself, but was the promoter through economic multiplier effect of other big businesses and small business and ripple effects in the economy that cause all economic votes to rise. Henry Ford was an interesting figure in the growth of the industry. In some ways he was more important than any politician of the time. He did two absolutely vital things, things to the automobile industry. He understood that if he could bring the price of a car low enough, he could create a virtually unlimited mass market for automobiles. And second, he realized that the nature of the work involved in running an assembly line was boring and repetitive and dehumanizing in the worst case. And so it would be necessary to pay workers extremely well to compensate them for the tedious nature of the work. One change in the face of post war American life that's only hinted at by the widespread ownership of automobiles is a burgeoning new national culture bursting at the seams with nervous energy and going full tilt in several different directions at once. The recovery of prosperity, the expansion of prosperity, the scale of mass production of goods aimed at individual consumers soon transformed the everyday life of most Americans in ways that the rapid expansion of auto ownership was only one harbinger. And it only began, as I said, to hint at. Many historians will say that the 1920s are the first decade of our times. What they mean by this is that a great many of the standard features of American life as we know it today came into being during that time. And I'm talking about pervasive mass communications, personal automobiles, already mentioned, motion pictures and the analogs to them. A distinctive form of American popular music that drew upon native traditions and immigrant traditions and African American native traditions, A consumer oriented economy, professional sports that captured the nation's imagination, Celebrity culture of all kinds, readily available consumer credit, the wide availability of electrical power, and so on. These are aspects of American life that for us over the last hundred years we find inconceivable to think of American life without them. But they began to become the norm of American life. I've said a lot more about this in the book and I encourage you to read in the chapters where I talk about just things as commonplace as the advent of refrigerators and what a difference that made in the life of American families. Back to the political scene for a moment. And mainly what I want to do is make the point that there was one individual who rose above the crowd of mediocre or less than high performing politicians during this time. Harding, unfortunately was not one of them. Harding's presidency was successful in generating economic liftoff for the country in the post war era, but in other respects it was a failure. Harding himself had very poor judgment about the appointees he made to office. The administration was honeycombed with incompetence and frauds, people whose dishonesty knew no bounds. There were scandals involving thefts and colossal mismanagement in his administration, including the attempted theft of a significant part of the nation's oil reserves and three oil fields set aside for strategic use. All of this came to light after Harding unfortunately died in office August 2, 1923 on a visit to San Francisco. But his reputation, which to that point had been not too bad. He was an amiable figure and was loved by the American people, mostly by way of contrast with Wilson. But when the news about the various levels of corruption in his administration became known, his reputation sank and has never recovered. But fortunately for the country, he was succeeded by a man of extraordinarily high probity, a Vice President who was much more suited to the job of the presidency than he was. I'm talking about Calvin Coolidge of Vermont, who was a man of few words. He's known for being silent Cal, and is underestimated. Perhaps in part because of that, he was popular. He was re elected, or elected in his own right, I should say in 1924, easily. And he kept the prosperity of the early 20s going to the degree that the prosperity became known as Coolidge Prosperity. It was associated with his name. The economy continued to thrive and rise under his leadership. But there's a lot more to Coolidge than than that. And when the occasion demanded, he could be eloquent and profound. He's gotten something of a raw deal from historians for various reasons, but I'd like to correct that here and now as best I can by sharing with you a speech he gave in Philadelphia commemorating the 150th anniversary of the American Revolution, July of 1926. This was a speech for the ages, a speech that rivaled any of Lincoln's great speeches or John Quincy Adams or George Washington's or Jefferson's or others that we've talked about. It was a defense of the American founding, of the American Founding principles, against those like Wilson and the Progressives, who believed that the massive social changes and economic changes of the late 19th century had rendered the Constitution no longer valid. Let me just read you a portion of the speech, and it's obvious to whom and to what this speech is directed. He's talking about the Declaration of Independence. About the Declaration, there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which had given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter, the Declaration of Independence. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward, towards a time when there was no equality, no no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient than those of the revolutionary fathers. What a wonderful repast to Wilson. Coolidge was also a modest man and chose not to run for reelection in 1928. He'd be succeeded by Herbert Hoover, under whose regime prosperity continued to grow. Hoover, by the way. I'll talk more about him in the next lecture. Was a man who was extraordinarily well equipped, on paper, at any rate, to be President of the United States. He presided over a bullish stock market. During the year 1929, the stock market boomed. The country was in the grip of a speculative mania which helped to feed the bull market. Many small investors were jumping on the market and buying stocks on margin, that is, on credit, betting that rise in price that followed would generate a quick sale and a quick profit. They were caught up in an economic bubble, and the bubble was bound to burst. It did in October of that year, 1929. Beginning October 24th, on Black Thursday, prices began to fall. The following Monday, October 29th, they again fell in October, excuse me, October 28th. And then Black Tuesday, October 29th, the bottom fell out of the market and some prices fell to subterranean levels. General motors fell from $73 a share to $8. The Dow Jones Industrial Index dropped from a September high of 381 to 198 and later that would drop to 41, so 1/9 of its previous peak value. It's important to understand that the crash of the stock market in 1929 was not the cause of the Great Depression, although it may have marked its beginning, but certainly was not the cause. Stocks fluctuate. Stocks rise, Stocks fall. They would in fact rise later in that year. But it was clear by Spring of 1930 that the country was in the grip of a serious recession or depression. And as it turned out, that depression was not loose in its grip until the nation was at war more than a decade later. We'll deal with those things in our next lecture. Thank you.
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