68Th Congress

Sixty-Eight Congress March 4, 1923 – March 4, 1925 Administration of Warren G. Harding/First Administration of Calvin Coolidge* *Calvin Coolidge succeeds Warren Harding as the 30th President following Harding’s death on Aug. 2, 1923 in San Francisco Historical Background ............................................................................................................. 1 War or Peace? ............................................................................................................................. 3 Economic Trends and Conditions ....................................................................................... 5 Landmark U.S. Supreme Court Decisions ........................................................................ 6 1923 Events ................................................................................................................................. 6 President Warren G. 1924 Events ................................................................................................................................. 7 Harding Major Acts ..................................................................................................................................... 9 Historical Background The continued economic troubles afflicting the nation had significant consequences for President Warren G. Harding’s Republican Party in the midterm elections of 1922. Though they managed to maintain their majorities in both houses of Congress, it was by the thinnest of margins. In the House, the Republican majority declined from 302 of 435 seats in the 67th Congress to 225 of 435 seats in the 68th, and in the Senate, the Republicans’ majority declined from 59 of 96 seats in the 67th Congress to 53 of 96 seats in the 68th. During the summer of 1923, Harding embarked on a cross-country journey he called the “Voyage of Understanding,” hoping to see as much of the country as he could, including the territory of Alaska, and to work on material for his reelection campaign in 1924. By the end of July, President Calvin however, the President’s grueling schedule began to exacerbate health issues Coolidge, Jr. that had been plaguing him in recent years. On July 27th, the President gave a speech before a crowd of 25,000 at the stadium at University of Washington in Seattle, but his exhaustion was such that he rushed through the speech and called for his physician, ultimately receiving a diagnosis of heart problems compounded by pneumonia. The President resumed his grueling schedule, however, and on the evening of August 2, as First Lady Florence Harding read aloud from the Saturday Evening Post, President Warren G. Harding died of a probable heart attack in their hotel room in San Francisco. Hours later, at 2:47 a.m., on August 3, 1923, Vice President Calvin Coolidge assumed the Presidency and became the only Chief Executive to have the oath of office administered by his father, a notary public. In his first annual message before the Congress that December, Coolidge outlined a modest agenda, calling for the reorganization and consolidation of the U.S. Foreign Service, revisions to the statutes establishing the Veterans Bureau, and House Senate amendments to the Immigration Act of 1921 to place greater strictures on immigration of people from certain countries. Within a year, each of these Majority Majority proposals was enacted into law: respectively, the Rogers Act of 1924, Party: Party: Republican Republican enacted May of that year, the World War Veterans’ Act, 1924, enacted that (225 seats) (53 seats) June, and the Immigration Act of 1924, approved that May. The last of these continued the growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the country, amending Minority Minority Party: Party: the Immigration Act of 1917 to prohibit the immigration of any persons from Democrat Democrat any country on the continent of Asia, or any island adjacent thereto that was (207 seats) (42 seats) not under U.S. dominion. Other Other Parties: Parties: Sensitive to the postwar economic contraction and the new vibrancy of the Farmer- Farmer- labor movement in the U.S., Congress approved the World War Adjusted Labor Labor Compensation Act. Veterans’ organizations advocated for this bill, which (2 seats); (1 seat); Socialist provided for the payment of a “bonus” to ex-servicemen to compensate them (1 seat) for wages unrealized due to their service. Coolidge opposed the bill and Speaker of vetoed it when he received it from the Congress, but his veto was overridden Majority the House: and the Act became law. Other legislation influenced by the organizing of Leader: Frederick H. Charles soldiers who served during the World War included the Indian Citizenship Gillett Curtis Act of 1924. This law granted citizenship to any Native Americans born within the territory of the United States and who had previously been denied citizenship. The Act was conceived, in part, in recognition of the thousands of Native Americans who served during the war and did not impinge upon a Native American citizen’s rights associated with their tribal membership. With the Indian Citizenship Act of June 1924, Congress granted citizenship to non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States. Another major initiative influenced by the growing labor movement in the United States was the proposed Child Labor Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment would have granted the Federal government authority to regulate labor of persons younger than 18-years of age. The extraordinary step of amending the Constitution was necessitated when the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, enacted in 1916, was held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918), and a provision of the Revenue Act of 1918 that authorized the Federal government to levy taxes on companies that employed children was similarly struck down in Bailey v. Senate Majority Leader Drexel Furniture Co., 259 U.S. 20 (1922). Though approved by both houses of Charles Curtis Congress in 1924 and ratified by a majority of the states, the amendment has yet to reach the ¾ of states threshold required by Article V of the Constitution. The Congress also enacted a substantial amendment to the nation’s first campaign finance law, the Federal Corrupt Practices Act. This law, originally enacted in 1910 and amended in 1911, established spending limits for Federal election campaigns. The Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1925 amended the earlier law, extending the law’s authority to multi-state parties and election committees, and mandated a regime of quarterly financial disclosures. Approval of the Clarke-McNary Act of June 1924 expanded Federal assistance in protecting both public and private forest producing lands from 2 fire and in producing seedlings for future forests. Also in June, Congress submitted the proposed Child Labor Amendment to the States for ratification, but was never able to gain the required two-thirds approval needed for it to become part of the Constitution. Source: Dell, Christopher and Stephen W. Stathis. Major Acts of Congress and Treaties Approved by the Senate, 1789-1980, Government Division (CRS), Sept. 1, 1982. 97th Congress, 2nd Session, 82- 156 GOV. ProQuest Congressional, CRS-1982-GOV-0005 War or Peace? Speaker of the House Latin America Frederick H. Gillett The United States remained intensely interested in developments in Latin America during the 68th Congress. There was considerable bitterness in the region over what was viewed as a paternalistic and interventionist U.S. foreign policy, including in Mexico, where the new, post-revolutionary government of President Álvaro Obregón was not recognized by the Harding administration, and in Nicaragua, which had experienced a series of U.S. interventions and occupations over the preceding decades. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes worked to improve relations between the U.S. and the various Latin American states. At his encouragement, the new administration of Calvin Coolidge formally recognized the post-revolutionary government in Mexico and normalized relations between the two neighbors. Potentially of even greater significance was the fifth Pan-American Conference, held in Santiago de Chile, from March 25-May 3, 1923. The Pan- American Union, the predecessor organization of today’s Organization of American States (OAS), is an intergovernmental organization comprised of the governments of the various states of the American continents, the goal of which was to facilitate dialogue and cooperation in economic and security matters, and to prevent or defuse situations that might otherwise lead to armed conflict. The conference culminated in the drafting and signing of the Pan-American Treaty to avoid or prevent conflicts between the American States, which mandated the establishment of a Pan-American Commission, as a body empowered to investigate grievances among the signatory states, and prohibited the signatory states from mobilizing their armed forces against one another. The treaty was signed by the governments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the United States. It wasn’t long before this new environment of cooperation would be put to the test. In Honduras, the instability of the major political parties led to the failure of any candidate to receive the required majority of votes in the Presidential election of October 1923. According to the terms of the Honduran Constitution,

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