1924 Presidential election

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La Follette>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Coolidge>>Davis

I'd still take Davis as a second choice, albeit a very distant second choice over Coolidge. He was better on immigration.

Davis gets a bad reputation as "one of those conservative Democrats" because of his various positions on issues relating to the South, but on matters of trusts/monopolies, immigration and a number of other issues he was certainly not conservative relative to Coolidge.

That's because he was a corporate tool. As H.L. Mencken wrote,

Dr. Davis is a lawyer whose life has been devoted to protecting the great enterprises of Big Business. He used to work for J. Pierpont Morgan, and he has himself said that he is proud of the fact. Mr. Morgan is an international banker, engaged in squeezing nations that are hard up and in trouble. His operations are safeguarded for him by the manpower of the United States. He was one of the principal beneficiaries of the late war, and made millions out of it. The Government hospitals are now full of one-legged soldiers who gallantly protected his investments then, and the public schools are full of boys who will protect his investments tomorrow.

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I don't really care what the Democratic party claimed to stand for as long as it was the party of the South - the party of Jim Crow, lynchings, and the resurgent Klan. For me, it's impossible to look at the 1924 electoral map and see anything but a Civil War redux. With that backdrop, Davis is clearly to the right of Coolidge. I hate to quote the vile Mencken twice in one thread, but he was one of the more important political commentators of the 1920s, and this is what he had to say about the Civil War:

I am not arguing here, of course, that the whole Confederate army was composed of gentlemen; on the contrary, it was chiefly made up, like the Federal army, of innocent and unwashed peasants, and not a few of them got into its corps of officers. But the impulse behind it, as everyone knows, was essentially aristocratic, and that aristocratic impulse would have fashioned the Confederacy if the fortunes of war had run the other way.

Looking at that electoral map again, I cannot and have no desire to support the candidate of the slaveholding aristocratic Confederate South. Of course it's impossible to know what the electoral map will look like before you vote, but based on the 1920 results I think one could make a pretty close guess. In any case I obviously would've been an enthusiastic La Follette supporter, but if forced to choose between Coolidge and Davis I would easily choose Coolidge.

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This isn't directly related to the subject of this thread, but since The Faith of a Liberal was published in 1924 I thought it would fit in this thread as well:

I've finished reading The Faith of a Liberal by Nicholas M. Butler. It is not really a book as such, but a collection of speeches made by Butler. Many if not most of the speeches are about the evils of socialism and various international affairs, while the last speech of the book is a most fascinating recollection of Butler's time spent as a student in Berlin and Paris in the 1880s. Still, I found a number of passages worth sharing here which pertain closely to this discussion:

The American spirit has been liberal from the outset. It was not tories but liberals who crowded the deck of the Mayflower and who made their home upon the stern and rockbound coast. It was not tories but liberals who pushed westward along the watercourses and over the mountain ranges to the rich lands and prairies of the Mississippi valley to make it one of the gardens and granaries of the world. It was not tories but liberals who met in the Continental Congress, in the Covention at Philadelphia, and on the floor of those earlier congresses when our nation's policies were in the making. It was not tories but liberals who rallied about Abraham Lincoln, and who at every sacrifice saved the Union and made all its people free. It was not tories but liberals who heard the call of anguished liberty from beyond the seas when the well-trained hosts of the most militaristic of empires had their swords at her throat.

Butler unequivocally proclaims the Pilgrims who boarded the Mayflower to be liberals. Apparently, he does not feel the need to add the prefix "proto-", as if 1620 were too early an age to have its own liberals and tories. Butler then proclaims the American revolutionaries and the supporters of Abraham Lincoln to be not tories, but liberals. Modern Republicans could learn a thing or two from this guy when they try to claim Lincoln as their own. Remember that this is not a Democrat talking, but a partisan Republican who served as a delegate at every convention from 1888 to 1936. This is exactly the sort of elite, upper crust WASP Republican that RINO Tom and NC Yankee love to describe as "conservative"; and here he is publishing a collection of his speeches in defense of liberalism. How interesting.

The liberal treasures the historic associations of his faith. He finds them in John Milton and John Hampden. He finds them in Benjamin Franklin and in Samuel Adams. He finds them in Thomas Jefferson and in Abraham Lincoln. He finds them in William Ewart Gladstone and in John Morley. He prefers those associations and their promise for the world to the glittering baubles of quickly passing place and power, when these gained by denying liberalism. He maintains his serenity and his confidence amid all discouragement, and feels able calmly to say to his opponents, as Gladstone said to the House of Commons when a hostile majority was about to throw out his first measure of Irish home rule: "The ebbing tide is with you and the flowing tide is with us."

Here, Butler lists John Milton and John Hampden, two Puritan radicals of the 17th century, as the first among a group of historic liberals. It seems Butler would agree with me that the Puritans were the founders of Anglo-American liberalism. He then once again describes Lincoln as a liberal, and ends by quoting Gladstone. Clearly, Butler does not view his beloved Republican party as the American counterpart to the British Conservatives.

The last fifteen or twenty years have seen the ending by the mere lapse of time and the nation's development of those controversies which were once fundamental. The paramount power of the nation has been effectively established and is now everywhere supported. Human slavery has been abolished. Authority to make internal public improvements and to administer in the interest of the whole people the public domain and its forest and mineral wealth, is conceded. The one remaining ground of party difference, the tariff, has completely changed its character with the growth in the Democrat Party of a large body of believers in a tariff for protection to home industries, and with the altered position of the United States as a creditor nation demanding for its own prosperity, for its wage-workers, and for its agriculture a steadily expanding international trade. One cannot maintain with a straight face a party division based upon the question whether a given rate of duty on imports shall be 20 per cent or 35 percent. If one will take pains to read formal party declarations recently made, say, in the States of New York, of Ohio, of Indiana, of Wisconsin, and of California, he will be speedily be cured of the notion that one and the same party name means one and the same thing in those different communities. In each of the two great historic parties there are millions of upright men and women who have no substantial differences with each other on grounds of principle, but who are continuing a mock battle with wooden guns after all cause for conflict has passed away and when a very different and bitter struggle is organizing on another part of the battlefield.

Here, Butler observes that since the abolition of slavery and the end of Reconstruction, the two parties no longer disagree on anything besides the tariff, and even on that issue are barely different. I hate to toot my own horn here, but I have observed basically the same thing:

After 1876, when the Republicans abandoned Reconstruction and the Democrats largely repudiated their Civil War era politics, both parties were less ideologically coherent and more identity-based, with only a couple signature policies like the tariff and free trade distinguishing them.

Butler's solution to this ideological incoherence, which I didn't include in the quoted passage, is a new party system in which "the overwhelming majority of Republicans and the overwhelming majority of Democrats [...] form a Democrat-Republican Party (to revive a name that was in use in this country a century ago) which would represent the predominant liberalism of our people. Over against such a progressive liberal party would be a distinctly radical party, to which should go al those who now call themselves Democrats or Republicans, but are in reality neither."

But to return to the quoted passage, I love Butler's line about how "one cannot maintain with a straight face a party division" based upon slight tariff differences - one can only wonder if NC Yankee is in fact unable to keep a straight face when he makes such arguments. Once again, I have expressed a similar sentiment before:

If I have been charged with minimizing the importance of trade and the other economic issues, would you not accuse Douglass of the same thing? I happen to agree with him, and if I lived back then I would like to think that I, too, would consider equal treatment under the law more important than the tariff rates or the price of imports.

The two-party system is what makes it possible for the American Constitution to work. That is why we always have two parties, although in the history of a hundred years the issues between them, the principles they profess, have often so sharply changed.

Very short quote, but nice to see Butler acknowledge, as many still refuse to, that the principles of the two major parties sharply changed over time.

No attempt can be made in this brief time to explain the present situation as regards our political parties: It is not to be wondered at that foreign observers find it difficult to follow our party divisions, but there is this key: All parties in Europe find their basic division between the conservatives and the liberals or radicals. There are those, decreasing in number, perhaps, but still powerful, who would have things as they were [and] there are those woho would change them in various directions called liberal or radical. What I should like to make clear is that in the European sense there is no conservative party in the United States; they are all divisions of liberal parties of one kind or another. There is no party, and never has been any party, in the United States that would have supported the programme, for example, of Disraeli in England a generation ago, because that programme, whether good or bad makes no difference, was the outgrowth of conditions with which American experience and American opinion were quite unfamiliar, and American parties begin where European traditional conservatism leaves off. Unless one understands that, he cannot use European terms understandingly in discussing American political developments and party conduct.

Butler makes it quite clear that the divisions between the two parties are anything but clear, least of all to foreigners more suited to ideologically coherent party politics. He then explains that both parties in the United States are varying shades of liberal and neither conservative in a European sense, but he stops after this paragraph. I would have liked to see how he contrasted Republican and Democratic liberalism, but based on what he said earlier I doubt he would have thought there was much of a difference at this point in time.

Beginning nearly three hundred years ago in England, a movement of opinion was started which, growing broader and deeper as it swept onward, found expression in the English, the American, and the French Revolutions, in the breaking down of absolutism in other lands, and in holding up the ideal of political democracy as the goal toward which liberal and progressive thought should move in order to advance civilization and to improve the condition and increase the satisfactions of individual men. As democracy grew in power and in influence, as as the teachings of its great exponents, particularly those who wrote and spoke the English tongue, gained a steadily widening hearing, men came to accept the notion, first, that democracy was inevitable, and, second, that it was beneficent.

Again, Butler recognizes the English Civil War as the birthplace of modern liberalism, not as some premodern "origins" point. I get the sense that this used to be understood intuitively, back when American men of letters knew the history of England quite well, but today it has to be argued about.

There is no progress in abandoning liberty. The only hope of progress is to make manking more worthy of liberty, more understanding of liberty, more competent for liberty. That way progress lies, and not in a great series of compulsions, limitations, prohibitions of one sort and another, that put the life of the individual and society in a strait-jacket at the behest of opinion. Liberty has its dangers. Liberty is not a path of roses; but tell me what path known to history so surely leads to human satisfaction and to human happiness as liberty with all its troubles, with all its temptations, and with all its dangers? There is none.

I included this passage because it is indicative of the tenor of many of Butler's speeches. Again and again he preaches on the subject of liberty and decries the intrusions of the federal government into state and local matters. This gives the lie to NC Yankee's foolish claim that the Republicans were a "big govt conservative party"; or else why would a "small govt liberal" like Butler have felt so at home there? Butler clearly viewed the Republicans as the party of his form of liberalism since their founding, as exemplified by Abraham Lincoln. If one is to call Grover Cleveland a "classical liberal" instead of a conservative, one must do the same for Calvin Coolidge.

There is a close parallel between slavery and prohibition. Slavery was not long ago proclaimed as the principal cause of civilization, indeed as the sole cause. It was defended and extolled as a divine institution by precisely the same type of clerical mind that defends and extols prohibition. It ate out the vitals of our nation for over a half-century, just as prohibition is doing now. It was incorporated in our constitutional system, and even as late as 1861 the attempt was made so to amend the Constitution that it could never be abolished. Even after Lincoln had been inaugurated and the Civil War had begun, this proposal was ratified by the States of Ohio, Maryland, and Illinois Men and women of the highest intelligence and noble character who hated slavery were called upon to accept it and to obey the laws based upon it because they were the alw. Precisely the same arguments are urged in support of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, and precisely the same attitude is taken toward them. My own feeling toward prohibition is exactly the felling which my parents and my grandparents had toward slavery. I look upon the Volstead Act precisely as they looked upon the Fugitive Slave Law. Like Abraham Lincoln, I shall obey these laws so long as they remain upon the statue book; but, like Abraham Lincoln, I shall not rest until they are repealed. The issue is one of plain simple, unadorned morality.

Butler compares slavery to prohibition, making the point that his liberal convictions which lead him to oppose the one institution also necessitate opposition to the other.

The American mind and temper were sternly, almost savagely, individualistic. The conditions of pioneer life both invited and rewarded this mentnal attitude and method. The Stuart monarchy, the Tory doctrine of government, and the activitie of George III and Lord North had combined to make Americans resentful of any government at a distance and antagonistic to it.

Again, starting with the Stuarts. The 17th century matters!

Those who would clearly understand the genesis of the Fifteenth Amendment and the way in which it fitted into the scheme of political thought following the Civil War, will find the facts set out succinctly and with accuracy by Mr. Blaine in his Twelve Years of Congress. The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, accomplished in 1870, was hailed as putting the capstone upon the National Government as rebuilt after the Civil War. Male suffrage was now to be universal. The full power of the nation declared that neither race, nor color, nor previous condition of servitude should be cause for the denial or abridgment, whether by the United States or by any State, of the right of any citizen to vote. No declaration could be more definite, none more specific, and none could deal with a matter more fundamental in democratic government.

In case there was any doubt, this passage should make absolutely clear that the Radical Republicans were the liberals and radicals of the Reconstruction era whilst their Democratic opponents were the conservatives and reactionaries.