The Coming of the American Behemoth. Michael Joseph Roberto
the great crash:
The great wealth created by our enterprise and industry, and saved by our economy, has had the widest distribution among our own people, and has gone out in a steady stream to serve the charity and the business of the world. The requirements of existence have passed beyond the standard of necessity into the region of luxury. Enlarging production is consumed by an increasing demand at home and an expanding commerce abroad. The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.68
For Coolidge, the New Capitalism had brought America to the point of universal abundance. He gladly embraced the ballyhoo that made him the most appropriate servant of big capital at the height of prosperity. “In short,” the historian Michael Parrish writes, “Coolidge was an ideal leader for many Americans who wished to explore the new land of materialism and self-indulgence, but who also feared the loss of traditional values.” He served monopoly-capitalist interests just as Harding had but with the greater proficiency required by continued economic expansion. Whatever Coolidge lacked in personality he made up for in the officious way he tended to business. He gave more formal speeches and met reporters more frequently than any president up to that point and proved highly conversant in many topics.69
But Republicans had no monopoly on the message. Prosperity was rewarding to corporate leaders who were also leading Democrats. Only months before the crash, Ladies’ Home Journal published an article by John Jacob Raskob, Democratic Party chairman and head of General Motors, titled “Everybody Ought to Be Rich.”70
Then again, it was the very aim of advertisers, who generally looked down upon consumers as nothing more than a mob to be manipulated, that familial happiness was not possible without milk from Carnation’s “contented cows,” that women who denied themselves Woodbury soap would lose out on romantic love, or a man was not a man if he was not willing “to walk a mile for a Camel.”71
4—Every Man a Capitalist? Fascist Ideology of Businessmen in 1920s America
HISTORIANS HAVE LONG RECOGNIZED how the development of advertising helped to sustain the booming economy in the United States during the mid- to late 1920s. Millions of Americans who lived in urban areas now routinely enjoyed the pleasures of a lifestyle that had only existed for a short time. But it took the genius of advertising to continuously rekindle their desire and acquisitiveness. To this end, advertising surely played an increasingly important role, its ballyhoo constantly rising to penetrate and sway the jaded consumer. To meet the challenge, the world of advertising became an intertwined network of businessmen and ad men whose ties to owners and managers aimed to make business the dominant force in American political and social life. As hundreds of prophets in academe and the media trumpeted the promise of uninterrupted prosperity to the masses, the owners of capital and their highly skilled attendants were surreptitiously shaping a political agenda that guaranteed nothing would change their hold on wealth and power—and their growing influence over society.
In the mix of all these proponents of the so-called capitalist revolution of the New Era, or what some called the New Capitalism, are the roots of a national form of fascist ideology. Within its genesis were two main currents that differed profoundly, to the point of being contradictory. One loudly promoted greater democratization of American capitalism; the other, a quiet but more powerful force, aimed to curtail democracy itself. The former represented the aspirations of the growing middle classes; the latter strengthened the political power of anti-democratic forces among business elites who made up America’s ruling class. If we concur with those in the 1930s who defined fascism as the power of finance capital, the merger of the two currents—the failed dreams of the aspiring middle classes from below and the cynicism of the ruling-class modernizers from above—generated a particular, national form of fascist ideology in the United States in the 1920s.
We see this clearly in a close reading of three key texts that help us to grasp the similarities and differences between the two currents, but both generating a capitalist ideology that is inherently fascist.
THE CAPITALIST REVOLUTION IN AMERICA AND THE PROMISE OF EVERLASTING PROSPERITY
In his campaign for the presidency, Warren Harding had promised to put America first. Five years later, Thomas Nixon Carver declared that the United States was already leading the rest of the world. Carver, a Harvard economics professor and author of The Present Economic Revolution in the United States, contended that America was unique in the world because a capitalist revolution was turning its laborers into capitalists:
The only economic revolution now under way is going on in the United States. It is a revolution that is to wipe out the distinction between laborers and capitalists by making laborers their own capitalists and by compelling most capitalists to become laborers of one kind or another, because not many of them will be able to live on the returns from capital alone. This is something new in the history of the world.1
Admonishing capitalists to avoid absentee ownership and European luxuries and even assume some tasks normally done by laborers, Carver gave most of the credit for the economic revolution to the power of the laborers—never calling them workers. He applauded the labor movement for abandoning the “antiquated methods” of its European counterparts, which were still guided “by a psychology … built up in a primitive and fighting stage of social development.” Instead, labor leaders in the United States were “beginning to think in constructive terms” by formulating a “higher strategy of labor.” Instead of fighting capital, they were now attuned to the “permanent economic forces” that could be used “as an implement for their own improvement.”2
Carver was certain the future looked even better. As more laborers earned higher wages, saved prudently, and acted responsibly in all their endeavors, they were putting themselves on the path to capitalist ownership. Of course, there would always be some conflict between employers and employees. But in his homespun approach to complex economic questions, Carver said the conflict was like that between husband and wife. In both cases, each needed the other and whatever differences existed between the two there were also “many elements of harmony” not to be forgotten. Carver reduced it all to a simple matter of choice:
Whether they live in peace and harmony or in a state of antagonisms depends upon which aspect of their relationship they permit themselves to think about most frequently. If they permit themselves to forget their need of one another and the many questions on which their interests harmonize, and to think only of the questions on which there is a conflict of interest, they are not likely to live a very harmonious life. But if, on the other hand, those questions on which there is a unity of interests occupy their minds, they may expect nothing but peace and harmony.3
For the first time in its long history, capitalism in its distinctively American form had proved why boom/bust cycles were a thing of the past. As more workers became capitalists, so would prosperity continue and the promise of progress under capitalism finally realized:
Wealth is not only increasing at a rapid rate, but the wages of those we formerly pitied are rising, laborers are becoming capitalists, and prosperity is being more and more widely diffused. We are approaching equality of prosperity more rapidly than most people realize. What is equally important, we are working out this diffusion of prosperity for all classes without surrendering the principle of liberty which is embodied in modern democratic institutions.4
Carver regarded the coming of universal wealth and uninterrupted progress as the fulfillment of capitalist utopia. And it would be utterly democratic! Regardless of where one stood on the class ladder, the economic revolution was leveling the pyramid of capitalist wealth. Labor leaders were playing a key role in this process by staying clear of an antiquated European radicalism based on class warfare. Fortunately, American labor leaders understood that the solution to the labor problem was higher wages, which would quell any discontent that might fuel class consciousness. Thanks to their efforts, America could look ahead to a future “when we shall no longer speak of the laboring ‘classes.’”5 With more laborers