ABSTRACT
Warren G. Harding was a conservative, chain-smoking Republican who like his successor Calvin Coolidge let businessmen do their thing without much interference and he got elected president in 1920. Upon Harding's death, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, was sworn into office by his father, while on vacation in Maine, an understated ceremony for an understated president. Coolidge continued Harding's policies of noninterference with business, summing up his philosophy by saying that the chief business of the American people is business. The third president during the 1920s was Herbert Hoover, well liked for his almost-rags to glittering-riches origins and for his humanitarian relief work during the Great War, when he had organized food deliveries for the beleaguered masses in Belgium. The Great Depression was not his fault. By the time Hoover left office in early 1933, much of the economy had been gutted, and he had done little to alleviate the suffering or to improve the outlook for either capitalists or laborers.
