With President Wilson ailing in 1920, Democrats nominated Ohio governor James M. Cox for president, on a platform calling for U.S. participation in the League of Nations and continuation of Wilson’s progressivism. Republicans, led by their probusiness wing, tapped genial Ohio senator Warren G. Harding. In a dig at Wilson’s idealism, Harding promised “not nostrums but normalcy.” On election day, he won in a landslide, beginning an era of Republican dominance that lasted until 1932.

Harding’s most energetic appointee was Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, well known as head of the wartime Food Administration. Under Hoover’s direction, the Commerce Department helped create two thousand trade associations representing companies in almost every major industry. Government officials worked closely with the associations, providing statistical research, suggesting industry-wide standards, and promoting stable prices and wages. Hoover hoped that through voluntary business cooperation with government — an associated state — he could achieve what progressives had sought through governmental regulation. This meant, of course, giving corporate leaders greater policymaking power.

More sinister links between government and corporate interests were soon revealed. When President Harding died suddenly of a heart attack in August 1923, evidence was just emerging that parts of his administration were riddled with corruption. The worst scandal concerned secret leasing of government oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California, to private companies. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall was eventually convicted of taking $300,000 in bribes and became the first cabinet officer in U.S. history to serve a prison sentence.

Vice President Calvin Coolidge became president upon Harding’s death. He maintained Republican dominance while offering, with his austere Yankee morality, a contrast to his predecessor’s cronyism. Campaigning for election in his own right in 1924, Coolidge called for limited government and tax cuts for business. Rural and urban Democrats, deeply divided over such issues as prohibition and immigration restriction, deadlocked at their national convention; after 102 ballots, delegates finally nominated John W. Davis, a Wall Street lawyer. Coolidge easily defeated Davis and staved off a challenge from Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, who tried to resuscitate the Progressive Party. The 1924 Progressive platform called for stronger government regulation at home and international efforts to reduce weapons production and prevent war. “Free men of every generation,” it declared, “must combat the renewed efforts of organized force and greed.” In the end, Coolidge received 15.7 million votes to Davis’s 8.4 million and La Follette’s 4.9 million.

For the most part, Republicans dropped progressive initiatives of the prewar years. The Federal Trade Commission failed to enforce antitrust laws. The Supreme Court, now headed by former Republican president William Howard Taft, refused to break up the mammoth U.S. Steel Corporation, despite evidence of its near-monopoly status. With the agricultural sector facing hardship, Congress sought to aid farmers with the McNary-Haugen bills of 1927 and 1928, which proposed a system of federal price supports for major crops. But President Coolidge opposed the bills as “special-interest legislation” and vetoed them both. While some state and municipal leaders continued to pursue ambitious agendas, they were shut out of federal power.