Commentary

If you don’t believe history repeats itself, then consider what the United States was going through in the 1920s.

Aviation was in its infancy, or better yet, toddlerhood. Piloting was hazardous and oftentimes deadly, yet airplane people pushed the envelope, setting speed and endurance records. The Orteig Prize, which was $25,000 to the first person to fly from North America to Europe, doomed many an airman, especially those attempting to fly westbound into the prevailing winds. Then solitary Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis from Long Island, N.Y. to Paris and instantly became the most revered and sought-after human being on the planet.

Today we have Elon Musk (SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) pushing the envelope with commercial space flights.

Republican Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, receiving the nomination as the compromise alternative. History shows he was not intellectually up to the task. Sounds like 2020.

Harding’s vice president was “Silent Cal” Calvin Coolidge. Compared to now, Harding didn’t know how good he had it: at least Coolidge never cackled when expected to say something intelligent and meaningful while on the world stage. A woman seated next to Coolidge at a White House dinner said: “My friends bet me I wouldn’t be able to get you to say three words.” Coolidge answered: “You lose.”

A plethora of Harding’s cabinet appointments were sketchy. Interior Secretary Albert Fall corruptly sold oil leases in Wyoming, an area known as Teapot Dome. Estimates of the cost to the U.S. in the Harding Administration hover around $2 billion with a “b,” and Harding was president for only 29 months.

Biden hasn’t been president for even 15 months and there are many billions of spending he’s scratched his signature to. It will be interesting to see if Biden exceeds Harding’s 29 months in office.

Harding had been vacationing in Alaska and was on a train in California when he died in August, 1923, elevating Coolidge to the presidency. “Whereas Warren G. Harding had charm but no brains, Coolidge had brains but little charm,” writes Bill Bryson in One Summer, America 1927.

Coolidge didn’t need to do much because prosperity in America was ever increasing in the 1920s. Almost everyone was investing in the booming stock market. Stocks were bought on margin, with as little as 10% down, which was borrowed from the broker, who borrowed it from a bank. But like the real estate bubble of 2007-2008, there was little connection between the value of the stock and the value of the company. And if you remember 2021’s Gamestop/Reddit/RobinHood market “adjustment,” where the “little guy” investor made the institutional investors look like chumps, that’s one of those full-circle events.

And yet to be seen is how Biden’s disastrous executive orders, which have made the U.S. dependent on foreign countries for energy, the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle and soaring inflation will pan out.

Anarchists were terrorizing the nation in the Roaring Twenties. Two were Sacco and Vanzetti, who were convicted of murder on the thinnest of evidence and executed in 1927. In the months before they were put to death, bombs in numerous locations ripped buildings apart and killed innocent civilians.

In the 2020s, anarchy has taken another form in the name of social justice and/or the absurdly named anti-facists (Antifa). Cities, neighborhoods and law-abiding Americans have been and may still be terrorized by left-leaning anarchists, conveniently wearing black masks so they don’t spread COVID-19. Exacerbating the problem is a complicit media; reporters often stood in front of burning vehicles or buildings, telling viewers about the “mostly peaceful protests” underway.

Henry Ford stopped production of the Model T with the 15,348,781st car on May 26, 1927, and idled Ford’s manufacturing for months while the Model A was developed. By the way, the Model T was available in colors other than black.

As Americans embraced the freedom that mobility provided, manufacturing, oil, rubber and interstate commerce all rose thanks to automobiles. Today, certain members of Congress and Biden endeavor to stop the fossil-fuel industry, cripple the U.S. economy and promote electric cars as the answer.

There were gangsters back them. By the latter part of the 1920s, gangster Al Capone enjoyed the protection of Chicago’s political and law-enforcement circles as he provided alcohol to the thirsty. But an enterprising attorney in the Justice Department figured that Capone’s lifestyle didn’t reflect his income, as stated on his income-tax return. By 1927, Capone was on his way out. His protection in Chicago abandoned him and a cell at Alcatraz awaited.

The economic exuberance–what those in the Roaring Twenties called Prosperity–of the four years of Trump’s presidency, was quickly dismantled by executive order and portends dire times ahead. Young people weaned on plenty…plenty of money, free time, diversions from cell phones and video games…seem to think that a guaranteed annual income, free college and health insurance are all within their grasp, if only we would embrace socialism.

The 1920s had its ugly moments. From Bryson’s book: “Remarkably, the Ku Klux Klan was not the most dangerous outpost of bigotry in American in the period. That distinction belonged, extraordinarily though it is to state, to a coalition of academics and scientists. Since early in the century, a large number of prominent and learned Americans had been preoccupied, often to the point of obsessiveness, with the belief that the country was filling up with dangerously inferior people and that something urgent must be done about it.

“Dr. William Robinson, a leading New York physician, spoke for a vociferous minority when he declared that people of an inferior nature ‘have no right in the first instance to be born, but having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind.’; W. Duncan McKim, also a physician and author of a book titled Heredity and Human Progress, proposed that ‘the surest, the simplest, the kindest, and most humane means for preventing production among those whom we deem unworthy of the high privilege, is a gentle, painless death.’”

Makes you think of the ultra-rich like Bill Gates of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Pichai Sundararajan of Google, and any of the other in that group who have control of what a majority of Americans see, hear and, God forbid, think.

In retrospect, both decades have a lot in common. Frighteningly so. Some nowadays are anticipating an economic meltdown, and it’s not hard to imagine, if one pays attention to what’s happening at the gas pump or grocery check-out line.

Question is: Will it be in 2029? Or sooner? Or not at all?