Harding was from Ohio, then the American heartland and certainly the Republican center of gravity, which had produced six out of ten presidents since 1865. He thought America was the most wonderful country in the world, in history indeed, and all he wished was to keep it like that.
In America, Surrealism is invisible because all is larger than life.’ (Salvador Dali).
By the 1920s, in countless different ways, America was pulling the world behind it.
‘A march must make a man with a wooden leg step out.’ (John Philip Sousa).
‘The blues come a lot from the church. The first time I heard a boogie-woogie piano was the first time I went to church.’ (‘T-Bone’ Walker).
‘The best songs come from the gutter.’ (Edwards Marks, A Broadway music publisher).
Harding inherited one the sharpest recessions in American history. By July 1921 it was all over and the economy was booming again. Harding and Mellon, at the Treasury, had done nothing except cut government expenditure by a huge 40 percent from Wilson’s peacetime level, the last time a major industrial power treated recession by classic laissez-faire methods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level. Benjamin Anderson of Chase Manhattan was later to call it ‘our last natural recovery to full employment.’ The cuts were not ill-considered but part of a careful plan to bring the spending of the monster state which had emerged under Wilson back under control.
