13: Roaring Twenties

Close your eyes and imagine what it was like to be a teenager in the 1920s.

Blower proceeds in two steps. She first offers a sweeping criticism of the notion of isolationism and its opposite term internationalism (and of related binaries, such as anti-interventionism vs. interventionism, or unilateralism vs. multilateralism) as a way of making sense of American foreign policy disputes in the 1920s and 1930s. Americans, she concludes, had strong and complex views on foreign affairs; the key question they were engaging, often in a highly emotional (if not “shrill” and “hyperbolic”) manner, was not “will the United States play a role but what role will it play

This is music for the fat men. In all the luxuriant cabarets of the “cultured” countries, fat men and women are lewdly wriggling their thighs to its rhythm, wallowing in obscenity, simulating the procreative act.

Somewhat related to the foregoing human problems is the race question. Congress ought to wipe the stain of barbaric lynching from the banners of a free and orderly, representative democracy.

One proposal is the creation of a commission embracing representatives of both races, to study and report on the entire subject. The proposal has real merit. I am convinced that in mutual tolerance, understanding, charity, recognition of the interdependence of the races, and the maintenance of the rights of citizenship lies the road to righteous adjustment.

This collection had been closed for fifty years as a result of court orders, settlement papers, and gift agreement. When the restriction expired on July 29, 2014, the Library digitized the originals and released the entire contents of the collection online

His affair with Carrie Phillips, wife of his longtime friend James Phillips, ran for more than fifteen years, beginning in Marion, Ohio in 1905. At one point, Phillips, a tall attractive woman ten years younger than Harding, had tried to blackmail him into voting against a declaration of war on Germany. As a German sympathizer who had lived in Berlin off and on, she had fallen under the surveillance of the U.S. Secret Service. In 1920, the Republican National Committee bribed Mr. and Mrs. Phillips with a free, slow trip to Japan, $20,000 in cash, and the promise of monthly payments to keep them quiet. She lived until 1960.