Calvin Coolidge Frontpage

American President Frontpage

In the election of 1924, a new high was reached in the number of Americans voting. Nearly 29 million citizens cast ballots. Compare this number to the 18,466,821 people voting in 1918. The additional 10 million voters were principally women, enfranchised by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Yet, when observed carefully, these 29 million voters represented only 48.9 percent of the electorate a decline from the 61.6 percent of the electorate -- who had voted in 1916. Calvin Coolidge was the second President to have been elected in an election in which the majority of those eligible did not even vote. His predecessor, Warren G. Harding, had been the first -- with only 49.2 percent of the electorate voting in 1920. This means that Coolidge had been elected by winning the support of less than 30 percent of the eligible electorate.


Female Vote

To the astonishment of most political observers, the newly enfranchised women voted in the same small proportion of the electorate as men in 1924, and most of them voted for the antireform, pro-business candidates who had expressed little enthusiasm on suffrage for women. The general consensus seemed to suggest women voters differed little from male voters, and that most of them probably followed their husband's or father's lead in casting their ballots.

Politically active women tended to avoid party politics even after obtaining suffrage during the Coolidge years. The progressives among them favored voluntary organization and pressure groups to lobby legislatures on issues of birth control, peace, education, Indian Affairs, and opposition to lynching. The National Woman's Party continued to advocate female solidarity in support of equal rights, but the newly formed League of Women Voters, which grew out of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, rejected the tactic of a female voting bloc. Instead, the League believed in lobbying for women's issues -- and other issues -- in unison with men. The vast majority of voting women, however, voted along class and ethnic grounds rather than according to gender.


Women at Work

Not only could women finally vote, but also more of them held jobs in the 1920s than ever before. By 1930, nearly 11 million women worked in sex-segregated wage earning jobs, an increase of 2 million since the war. This meant that women were restricted to certain types of jobs, and, typically, they were paid far lower wages in comparison to men. Thus, one million women were teachers and nurses; another 2.2 million worked as typists, bookkeepers, and office clerks; 736,000 clerked in stores and worked as hairdressers and waitresses. Factory-working women, in sex-segregated jobs, numbered 2 million by 1928. Moreover, nearly 30 percent of the women in the work force were married. Although the vast majority of white married women (88 percent) worked exclusively in the home as housewives and mothers, twice as many African American wives and mothers worked outside the home -- a reflection of the far greater impoverishment of the black household.

Although the Coolidge years seemed to mark the end of reform and Wilsonian type progressivism, many progressive issues were sustained in the 1920s, especially at the state and local levels. Thirty-four states instituted or expanded laws for workers compensation. Many states established employee-funded old age pensions and welfare programs for the indigent. Most importantly, the nation's universities began graduating a new generation of social scientists, reformers committed to the idea that progress could be obtained by the wise use of government power.


Status of Native Americans

The plight of Native Americans received renewed attention in the 1920s in the face of the obvious failure of ill-conceived and poorly implemented policies of allotting land to individual Native Americans rather than to tribes. This policy failed to make Native Americans self-supporting or so-called "productive" citizens as defined by dominant white culture. Reform groups like the Indian Rights Association, the Indian Defense Association, and the General Federation of Women's Clubs struggled to obtain better education, citizenship, and social services for Indians, as well as their return to the tribal lands owned and operated by the Native Americans in tribal units. The Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 had granted citizenship only to Native Americans who had left the tribal reservations to live on their individual farms and homesteads. Also, the federal government denied basic civil liberties to Native Americans regardless of their citizenship status, such as prohibiting the sale of liquor (prior to the Eighteenth Amendment) to any Native Americans. Although Congress granted full citizenship to all Native Americans in 1924, the Bureau of Indian Affairs continued to exert a strict, overly protective power over the tribes much as had been the case in the late 1800s.


Status of African Americans

More than 6 million Americans moved from the country to urban places in the 1920s. Southerners -- especially southern blacks -- moved to the thriving industrial cities of the South or took the trains to cities all over the nation. The African American populations of New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Houston doubled. They congregated in the seedy, older neighborhoods that had served white immigrants who moved to better neighborhoods. For blacks, these urban ghettos became permanent slum residences as the surrounding white communities adopted restrictive covenants in which white homeowners pledged not to sell their property to blacks.

In response to the race riots of the early 1920s, discrimination, and racial threats, thousands of blacks in northern cities joined black pride (nationalist) movements. Marcus Garvey, a prophet-like Jamaican immigrant who lived in the black urban district of Harlem in New York City, headed the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey advocated black separatism and cultivated racial pride by organizing parades, mass meetings, newspapers, and a scheme to help blacks emigrate to Africa. Membership in the UNIA numbered several million at its peak. Other black leaders like W. E. B. DuBois (the Marxist leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and A. Philip Randolph (the socialist head of the Pullman Car Porter's Union) opposed the movement. Eventually, the UNIA collapsed when Garvey was convicted of mail fraud and deported.


Rise of Ethnic Enclaves

While the immigrant restriction laws passed during the Coolidge years limited emigrants from eastern and southern Europe, thousands of people from Mexico and Puerto Rico flocked to the cities in the Southwest (Denver, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and Tucson) and New York. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans created barrio communities that differed little from the black ghettos in their poverty, limited education, poor, health services, and discriminatory police surveillance practices. Even more than the earlier European ghettos, the barrios of New York and Los Angeles kept alive the customs and values of the homeland; maintaining these cultural heritages was facilitated by the communities' nearness to Mexico and Puerto Rico. Like earlier immigrants who arrived before them, the blacks and Puerto Ricans joined political machines that provided them with economic assistance and generated group political power, especially in New York.

As the blacks and Hispanics moved into the inner cities, the whites fled to the suburbs -- a pattern of growth made possible by the automobile, which rendered the urban fringe accessible to white businesses and white homeowners. Between 1920 and 1930, the middle and upper class bedroom suburbs of most major cities grew five to ten times as fast as the core neighborhoods. Many of these suburban tracts, boomed by quick-sale housing contractors, sought to separate themselves from the problems of the inner cities by political opposition to annexation. Here, the voter apathy in national elections was markedly strong, although local political organizations and volunteer associations thrived.


Concerns of the Elderly

Among the new voters in the 1920s, besides women and the voting blacks in the eastern cities, were those thousands of Americans who were living longer lives. Many white Americans lived into their early sixties by 1925. White women lived even longer. At the same time, the new industrial system valued youth and agility, pushing most Americans over age fifty into forced retirement. As a result, most of the inmates in state poorhouses were older people, and one-third of those Americans aged sixty-five and older depended financially on someone else. No pension plans existed for private or federal employees. The drive for pension plans, and a growing identification of many older Americans as a separate class of people with special political interests, began to pick up steam during the Coolidge years. By 1930, almost every state had responded to the political clout of this newly energized part of the electorate by providing at least minimal welfare assistance to elderly people.