Harding and coolidge
- Nothing seemed more clearly to illustrate the unadventurous character of 1920's politics than the characters of the two men who served as president during most of the decade: Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge
- Harding was elected to the presidency in 1920 having spent many years in public life doing little of not
- An undistinguished senator form Ohio, he had received the Republican presidential nomination as a result of an agreement among leader of his party, how considered him as one noted a "good second-rater"
- Harding appointed capable men to the most important cabinet offices and he attempted to stabilize the nation's troubled foreign policy
- But even as he attempted to rise to his office he seemed baffled by his responsibilities as if he recognized his own unfitness
- Harding lacked the strength to abandon the party hacks who had helped create his political success
- One of them, Harry Daughtry, the Ohio party boss principally responsible for his meteoric political ascent, he appointed attorney general
- At the urging of Fall, Harding transferred control of the reserves from the navy Department to the Interior Deportment
- Fall then secretly leased them to two wealth y businessmen and received in return nearly a half a million dollars in "loans" to ease his private financial troubles
- Fall was ultimately convicted for bribery and sentenced to a year in prison
- In the summer of 1923, only months before Senate investigations and press revelations brought the scandals to light, a tired and depressed Harding left Washington for speaking tour in the West
- In many ways, Calvin Coolidge, who succeed Harding in the presidency, was utterly different from his predecessor
- Where Harding was genial, garrulous, and debauched, Coolidge was dour, silent, even puritanical
- And while Harding was corrupt and at least tolerant of corruption in others, Coolidge seemed honest beyond reproach
- In other ways, however, Harding and Coolidge were similar figures
- Both took an essentially passive approach to their office
- Like Harding, Coolidge had risen to the presidency on the basis of new substantive accomplishment
- If anything, Coolidge was even less active as president than Harding, partly as a result of his conviction that government should interfere as little as possible in the life of a nation
- In 1924, he received his party's presidential nomination virtually unopposed
- Running against John W. Davis, he own a comfortable victory