Back to Normalcy
HANNAFORD, PETER
Back to Normalcy Smoke-fi lled rooms, the League of Nations, and the second Mrs. Wilson. BY PETER HANNAFORD At the moment we have several senators vying for the presidency. In 1920, it was...
...the irascible Senator Hiram Johnson of California...
...After 44 ballots the Democrats chose Ohio governor James M. Cox— like Harding, a newspaper publisher/ editor...
...After TR, the front-runners (now largely forgotten) were Illinois governor Frank Lowden and General Leonard Wood, of Rough Rider fame...
...enough issues to infl ame this or that constituency, so both parties cast up bland platforms...
...The Democratic nomination seemed less valuable as time went on, but this did not stop the ambitious Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore’s fi fth cousin, from making the effort (he ended up as his party’s vice presidential nominee...
...President Wilson, for his part, never recovered to fully govern again...
...Pietrusza brings to life Harding’s front porch campaign in Marion, Ohio, with bands playing, fl ags fl ying, and an astonishing 600,000 visitors tramping to the doorstep...
...Former President William Howard Taft harbored hopes of a political resurrection, but they were not to go far...
...David Pietrusza, a seasoned crime-andmystery writer, builds the suspense of the 1920 campaign so effectively that the reader easily suspends, for the moment, knowledge of the outcome, as if it were still about to happen...
...The Republicans] were able at Chicago to say nothing in just about one-tenth the number of words that the Democrats needed to say the same thing,” wrote the New York Tribune...
...The book begins with a section called “The Players in Our Drama,” featuring brief sketches of 52 of them...
...While the author gives us little new material (save some specifi cs of Wilson’s bad temper and the fact that Harding’s extramarital affairs were more numerous than you might think), he organizes the story in a way that produces high drama...
...The campaign played out against a background of post-World War I infl ation and unemployment, the fi nal drive for women’s suffrage, third-party impulses (Eugene Debs’s Socialists and others), Prohibition, and the beginnings of pent-up industrial growth...
...On the way to that Election Day, there was much early support for former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had returned to the Republicans after bolting in 1912 to head the Progressive movement’s ruinous Bull Moose ticket...
...Harry Daugherty, the Ohio tactician whose strategy it was to make the amiable Harding acceptable to all Republicans...
...Disabled and ill, he was sunk in reverie and the hope that, somehow, the Democratic convention would deadlock and turn to him for a third term, breathing new life into his lost cause, the League of Nations...
...Woodrow Wilson had little personal loyalty for those who gave their all for him, and his inability to compromise in any way over the League with his nemesis, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, had led to the League’s defeat...
...Others in the running were William Gibbs McAdoo, Wilson’s son-in-law and Treasury secretary, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who had run the controversial campaign to root out Communist sedition, and New York’s governor Alfred Smith...
...But his penchant for detail lets us see the Republican nominating process up close, so that we learn that Harding was chosen not by a handful of men in a “smoke-fi lled room” (as is often asserted) but as the result of many meetings over many hours in many rooms, with people scurrying from one to another with the frequency of the door openings and closings in a Feydeau farce...
...He could not speak...
...We meet, among others, the fading William Jennings Bryan...
...He begins with the moment of President Woodrow Wilson’s stroke on October 2, 1919: “The President of the United States lay bleeding on the bathroom fl oor...
...In 1920, it was presidents—past, present, and future—in a campaign like no other before or since...
...Roosevelt’s death in 1919 rearranged the equation...
...There was Herbert Hoover, the engineering whiz who had fed a starving Europe...
...Calvin Coolidge, governor of Massachusetts, had his supporters...
...There were more than Peter Hannaford is the author of The Quotable Calvin Coolidge: Sensible Words for a New Century...
...William Estabrook Chancellor, a racist professor who tries to bring down Harding by accusing him of being part black (such were the times...
...He was so uncertain about his political moorings, however, that he ran in the 1920 primaries in both parties...
...and Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, the president’s second wife who controlled access to him for the fi nal year-and-a-half of his presidency...
...This triggered a fl urry of jockeying, guessing, conniving, wishing, and horse-trading that would end 13 months later in the election of Warren Harding as the 29th president...
...He could not move...
...The same is true of his account of the Committee of Forty-eight, a progressive third-party movement that went nowhere...
...David Pietrusza draws a clear portrait of a man of high ideals and low tolerance for anyone who disagreed with him...
...He also gives more detail than most readers will need or want about the climactic vote in the Tennessee legislature over the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote...
Vol. 13 • November 2007 • No. 10
