In the 1920s, many Americans thought that the Democratic party was destined to remain a minority party. Why

Politically, the 1920s was a conservative era. Americans elected three consecutive Republican presidents: Warren Harding (1920), Calvin Coolidge (1924), and Herbert Hoover (1928). Republicans were also a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate throughout this decade. All three Republican presidents were solidly in favor of promoting the interests of American business, and each reduced the taxes paid by large corporations. Coolidge summed up their policy best when he declared that "the business of America is business."

Harding campaigned promising a "return to normalcy," following years of progressive reform under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. However, his administration disintegrated amid scandal after Americans discovered that the president's Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, had been bribed into selling government oil reserves to private companies. Harding died in 1923 and was succeeded by his vice president, Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge was elected in 1924, but chose not to seek re-election four years later. Herbert Hoover, an experienced bureaucrat, won the presidency in 1928 by a wide margin over Democratic nominee Al Smith, Governor of New York. As an urbanite and a Catholic, Smith ran poorly with many rural and Protestant voters. As Hoover took office in early 1929, Americans could not have foreseen that a decade of Republican rule would soon come to a close owing to the Great Depression.