Coolidge, by Amity Shlaes. (Should she have titled it The Forgotten Man?) In the end, I found myself more interested in the times in which he lived than in the man himself. For example, immigration restriction really came to the fore during his Presidency. What were the forces that produced it? Was it part of the Progressive era (tied in with eugenics and Prohibition, perhaps), part of a general post-WWI xenophobia (Palmer raids, Ku Klux Klan), or the result of changes in political economy due to urbanization and industrialization? I found myself longing for more context on some of these issues. As it is, the book is long, but that is because she is trying to zero in on Coolidge–what he did and how he thought.
I’ve found Frederick Lewis Allen’s contemporary histories to be very good reads. But a search of his ‘Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s’ offered little in explanation on the immigration issue beyond:
” Immigration was restricted, being put upon a quota basis, to the satisfaction of labor and the relief of those who felt that the amount of melting being done in the melting-pot was disappointingly small.”
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/allen/cover.html
I visited the Immigration Museum at Ellis Island last year and one of the exhibits there had a very good history of immigration suggesting that racism against Chinese immigrants was one of the driving factors behind the United States’ first restrictions on immigration. I also found myself wanting to know more and have been looking for recommendations on what is the best book on immigration history.