What Really Explains Coolidge’s 1924 Landslide Victory
In the 1924 election, President Coolidge won 35 of the 48 states
By the Editors
From the distance of more than a century, a political scientist has taken a fresh look at the 1924 presidential election.
In an article published last year in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Christopher Devine questions the conventional wisdom about how and why the incumbent, Calvin Coolidge, won that election in a landslide. Coolidge had assumed the presidency little more than a year earlier, after the unexpected death of Warren Harding. In 1924’s three-way race, he received more votes than the other two candidates combined and carried thirty-five of the forty-eight states.
As Devine notes, most historians say that a robust economy was by far the biggest reason Coolidge won. Strong economic conditions did work in the president’s favor. But Devine argues that some historians adopt a form of economic “determinism.” In their view, Coolidge “does not deserve credit for winning the 1924 election.” Rather, “thanks mostly to the economy, it just happened to him.”
That argument is too simplistic, Devine suggests. He presents both qualitative and quantitative evidence to challenge the standard narrative of the 1924 campaign.
Let’s start with the quantitative analysis, because that is Devine’s most original contribution—but also his most problematic.
Questionable Data, Misguided Assumptions
For his empirical analysis, Devine examines “county-level political, economic, and demographic data” alongside county-by-county voting results. Using these data, he tests three common explanations for the election’s outcome:
Did Coolidge win primarily because of the economy? Devine’s short answer is largely yes. But he argues that it’s misleading to claim that—as one history textbook put it—Coolidge merely rode “the crest of a wave of economic prosperity for which he was given undeserved credit.”
Did third-party candidate Robert M. La Follette hurt Democratic nominee John W. Davis more than Coolidge? Devine concludes that this effect appeared only in the Great Plains and the Mountain West, and probably wasn’t large enough to change the election’s outcome.
Did Democrats lose votes because their party was in disarray, needing 103 ballots to choose a nominee at their 1924 convention? Devine acknowledges that this question cannot be tested well quantitatively because “scientific polling did not exist in the 1920s.” Seeking an alternative method, he lands on an approach that he admits “is far from ideal.”
The data limitations are significant, but the deeper problem lies in Devine’s assumptions. Beginning with a question about Democratic disunity, he somehow arrives at the conclusion that Coolidge “benefited from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.”
The justification for this line of inquiry is that one Democratic division involved “pro– versus anti–Ku Klux Klan sentiment.” True enough. As Timothy Egan writes in Fever in the Heartland, the Klan formed the “most powerful single bloc” at the Democratic convention, representing “nearly a third of all delegates.”
But the Democrats were also divided over Prohibition, immigration, and the League of Nations. The leading candidates going into the convention illustrated these divisions.
New York governor Al Smith opposed Prohibition, favored the League of Nations, and resisted immigration restrictions. He was also Catholic, making him anathema to the Klan. His rival, former treasury secretary William Gibbs McAdoo, enjoyed Klan backing and took opposite positions on those other issues. These differences help explain why the convention needed so many ballots to produce a compromise nominee.
How, then, does Devine move from Democrat divisions to an investigation into whether Coolidge benefited from Klan support? He explains, “Coolidge was the only presidential candidate who refused to denounce the Ku Klux Klan directly and explicitly during the campaign.”
That’s technically accurate, but here Devine omits important details.
First, the Democrats and La Follette’s Progressive Party ignored the Klan in their party platforms, just as the GOP did. As a historian observes, candidates “trod warily lest they alienate” either Klan supporters or Catholics, Jews, or African Americans. La Follette faced tensions among the various groups he was trying to attract, and one historian writes that the vague Progressive platform was the candidate’s attempt “to paper over differences between supporters.” The failure to condemn the Klan disappointed some progressives. After weeks of complaints from supporters, La Follette published a condemnation of the Klan in early August.
Davis’s decision to denounce the Klan was partly strategic. More than two weeks passed before the Democratic nominee joined La Follette in condemning the KKK. According to his biographer, Davis chose to speak out only after he learned that Coolidge’s running mate, Charles Dawes, planned to do so. Davis moved first. A day later, speaking in Maine, Dawes said he agreed with Davis that the Klan “has no proper part in this or any other campaign.”
Another factor: The Klan was associated more with the Democratic Party than with the Republican Party. Lynchings occurred mostly in Democrat-dominated states. A shrewd politician, Coolidge probably saw little value in explicitly addressing a topic that was roiling his opposition. Staying above the fray would have seemed the wiser path.
But that doesn’t mean Coolidge ignored African Americans and their rights. Quite the contrary. He had such a strong record on civil rights that former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke calls him “one of the country’s early civil rights pioneers.” In his first annual message to Congress in December 1923, Coolidge proposed—and later persuaded Congress to pass—a significant appropriation to fund Howard University’s medical school.
Coolidge also spoke forcefully for racial justice in that first message to Congress. He called for federal legislation “against the hideous crime of lynching,” reminding lawmakers that the constitutional rights of Black Americans were “just as sacred as those of any other citizen.”
Coolidge continued to speak out during the 1924 election year. In the spring he delivered the commencement address at Howard—a highly visible anti-racist message.
That summer, Coolidge replied to a voter who had written to complain that a Black candidate was running for Congress “in this, a white man’s country.” The president rebuked his correspondent, saying he was “amazed to receive such a letter.” Coolidge continued: “Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color. I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race.”
Coolidge released the letter publicly, ensuring that it appeared in newspapers nationwide.
On August 21—the same day Davis condemned the Klan—the White House released a letter from Coolidge to the president of the National Negro Business League. In it, Coolidge reaffirmed his pledge to defend the rights of Black Americans.
Had Coolidge been courting Klan support, it would have been strange for him to write these letters, let alone publish them widely.
A Dubious Klan Argument
Devine’s attempt to prove quantitatively that Coolidge benefited from the Klan remains unconvincing. By Devine’s logic, Davis’s condemnation of the KKK should have cost the Democrat votes in the South. But Devine finds no evidence that southern Klan supporters shifted toward Coolidge. Instead, the only measurable effect appears in the North, where Coolidge won roughly two percentage points more of the vote in counties where a local Klan chapter existed.
Yet this finding is uncertain, since Devine concedes that he is working with “imperfect data.”
Even if the data were reliable, they wouldn’t prove causation. Devine acknowledges that social scientists must make inferences in quantitative analyses. He gives an example: “If I were to find that counties with larger Black populations were significantly more likely to vote for Coolidge, would that prove that Black voters tended to support him? V. O. Key’s ‘racial threat’ hypothesis suggests the opposite possibility, that in such an environment, the white majority could be voting to counteract the considerable influence of Black residents with opposing political preferences.”
The Klan probably was not a decisive factor in the 1924 election. McAdoo supporters were not generally deterred from backing La Follette; Davis’s anti-Klan statement reassured eastern Democrats but did little to deter Klan sympathizers in the Democrats’ “solid South”; and Coolidge attracted conservatives on both sides of the issue.
Two other points worth mentioning: Lynchings declined significantly during Coolidge’s presidency, and by the end of the decade, the KKK had largely faded away. These were signs of progress for America.
Coolidge’s Hands-On Role
Devine stands on firmer ground in his qualitative analysis. He is right to challenge accounts that deny Coolidge credit for winning reelection.
Many historians have caricatured Coolidge as “Silent Cal”—a man who said little, thought little, and did little. This perception has colored accounts of his 1924 campaign. Yet his critics ignore two important facts.
First, the Coolidge family suffered a tragedy during the campaign. In July 1924, sixteen-year-old Calvin Coolidge Jr. died unexpectedly.
Second, presidents of that era were not expected to campaign vigorously for reelection. To do so was considered unpresidential. Woodrow Wilson had been something of an exception when he went on a Midwest speaking tour in 1916, but the idea of an incumbent barnstorming the country wouldn’t take hold until Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection campaigns and especially Harry Truman’s 1948 whistle-stop tour.
Despite his limited presence on the campaign trail, Coolidge played a central role in his reelection effort. The president, Devine says, contributed “directly via high-profile speeches and indirectly via coordination with campaign personnel and surrogates.” Coolidge shaped the party platform and guided messaging, including the speeches of surrogates like Dawes. The Republican VP candidate campaigned aggressively, traveling some fifteen thousand miles and delivering 108 speeches.
The core message of the Republican campaign was that Harding-Coolidge policies had restored American prosperity. Devine credits Coolidge with shaping that message. He does not, however, weigh in on whether the case was justified.
It was justified.
Coolidge did not claim “undeserved credit” for prosperity. The Harding-Coolidge administration helped pull the country out of the depression of 1921 by cutting tax rates and government spending. Coolidge continued those policies. In 1924 he cut the top tax rate from 58 percent to 46 percent—and he’d slash it to 25 percent in 1926. The federal government ran a surplus every year of his presidency, and the national debt shrank by about a third. The result was prosperity that dramatically improved the lives of everyday citizens.
By 1924, Americans could see tangible evidence of this prosperity. For most voters, the choice was simple. Coolidge policies had produced stability and growth after the upheavals of war and depression. He earned reelection.