This year has forced my wife and I to find pastimes other
than travel until COVID-19 is under control. One alternative has been to enter
a virtual time machine and to look in on what America was up to at other times
in our past. On this vein the history
concerning the national election of 1920, exactly 100 years ago, has captured
my attention because of the many similarities with today.
Like this year, 1920 was billed as a “return to normalcy” national
election. However, Republicans, not Democrats, were the party touting this
slogan after eight years of the aloof President Woodrow Wilson with an
internationalist prospective. Many thought that Wilson would run for a third
term. Instead, he suffered from a debilitating stroke while campaigning for the
League of Nations. On the forty-fourth
ballot, the Democrats chose to nominate a compromise candidate, Ohio native,
James M. Cox. (Franklin D. Roosevelt was his running mate.)
The Republican candidate, Warren G. Harding was considered a
moderate. It was thought that Harding would represent a kind of anti-Wilson,
non-cerebral back-slapper who would return the country to peaceful
isolation. He was nominated on the tenth
convention ballot as someone who could reunite Republican “regulars” who
followed William Howard Taft, along with the Theodore Roosevelt “progressives”,
to win the national election.
Both candidates came to the 1920 campaign with baggage. Harding had a mistress who had given birth to
a child the year before. Cox was
divorced and remarried to a much younger woman.
During the final weeks of the campaign, a “fake-news” pamphlet claiming
that Harding had black ancestry failed to gain any traction.
Campaigning was a much different affair in 1920. Harding did
most of his outreach to voters from his front porch in Ohio. One of his slogans
was the humble phrase: “No man is big enough to run this great republic.” Cox was the first national candidate to use
an amplifier while addressing the crowd.
Ironically, many of the issues facing voters in 1920 were
similar to those in 2020. The “Spanish Flu” pandemic had killed six hundred and
seventy-five thousand Americans through the spring of 1920. Everyone was fearful of a fourth wave as
voters went to the polls. Both candidates ignored the pandemic on the campaign
trail because public health did not carry the political implications it does in
today’s society. Harding, as the
outsider, did propose a modest appropriation to study the flu and how it could
be prevented.
Immigration was an issue, and nativist voters were
suspicious of the new arrivals and the still assimilating Southern and Eastern
Europeans. Nevertheless, the overall
effect was muted by the fact that many voters had recently arrived from the
same distant lands and were now welcoming their families. The Democratic vote
was hampered by German citizens annoyed with President Wilson for going to war
against their homeland and by Irish voters upset with the lack of enthusiasm
for Irish independence.
Socialism was a major topic of the campaign. The International Workers of the World were
rumored to be planning a “reign of terror” in the Pacific Northwest. In mid-September, an act of domestic
terrorism killed thirty-eight when a bomb exploded on Wall Street. Evidence pointed to Italian anarchists as the
cause. The socialist, Eugene V. Debs,
imprisoned for sedition after working to assist draft evaders during the Great
War, ran a third party candidacy from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. As a prisoner,
he garnered a million votes.
Racial equality was not an issue in 1920. Racial violence
against blacks was discussed with minimal enthusiasim. The Republicans could only offer a weak
declaration in its party platform: “We urge Congress to consider the most
effective means to end lynching in this country.” The Democratic Party, the
bastion of Jim Crow segregation, offered even less. There was no outrage
against the Ku Klux Klan, which was mustering its forces to terrorize the
nation’s immigrants and black population after the election.
On the economy, the roaring twenties had not yet begun, and
the country entered a sharp eighteen month recession at the beginning of
1920. This no doubt was responsible for
some of the socialist agitation. In
January 1920, three thousand immigrants accused of being alien radicals were
arrested or deported during raids conducted by President Wilson’s Attorney,
General A. Mitchell Palmer.
Congress passed both the Eighteenth (Prohibition) and
Nineteenth (Women’s Suffrage) Amendments. They came into law in 1920 and would
exemplify the contradictory nature of the American electorate for the next 100
years. On the one hand, Prohibition was an anti-immigration, authoritarian
measure. It was designed to get the new
heavy drinking, rabble-rousing immigrants from Ireland, Italy and Germany under
control and in line with conservative Protestantism. On the other, women’s suffrage was a move
toward liberal pluralism through universal voting.
Culturally, 1920 was the beginning of the reign of Scott
Fitzgerald and the “jazzing” of America.
The age of manifest destiny was over. The country was not yet ready to
assume a broad international role. Jazz provided just enough wildness and
permissiveness to keep the young happy without “going to the dogs.”
Warren G. Harding was elected President on his fifty-fifth
birthday. While turnout was low, Harding
won by a landslide and provided Republicans with majorities in both houses of
Congress.
The election results were uncontested and received with
civility.
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