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Profs & Pints: Roaring Twenties, Republican Rule

Profs and Pints presents: Roaring Twenties, Republican Rule, a look at a period that has long inspired American conservatives, with Robert Chiles, senior lecturer in history at the University of Maryland at College Park.

The decade of the 1920s was marked by polarized politics and conservative Republicans' domination of the White House, offering lessons for anyone interested in presidential politics today. Come learn from Robert Chiles, a scholar of American politics and society during that period, about the quirky figures who sat in the Oval Office during that time and the distinct political approaches that helped them win elections by landslides.

It began with the rise of Warren G. Harding, who championed America First and promised a return to normalcy as a rejection of Woodrow Wilson's progressivism and internationalism. Then came Calvin Coolidge, who was so committed to federal smallness that he urged purposeful inactivity by the executive branch, an approach that would inspire laissez-faire conservatives into the age of Ronald Reagan. It all came to an end with the dramatic rise and fall of Herbert Hoover, whose advocacy of individualism and self-reliance proved no match for the Great Depression.

Such figures inspired political backlashes, including the 1924 radical revolt by Fighting Bob La Folette and, in 1928, the first modern liberal presidential campaign by New York's Happy Warrior, Al Smith. But it took the economic disaster ushered in by the 1929 stock market crash to truly reverse the conservative political tide.

Come learn about these quirky presidents, their rivalries and their significant scandals, and the Jazz Age social and economic trends that helped bring them into power. Theirs was a vibrant political era and a fascinating and surprisingly transformative period in our nations history.