Election of 1920: America’s Return to “Normalcy”

Candidates:
Republican Party: Warren Harding (Ohio) and Calvin Coolidge (Massachusetts)
Democratic Party: James Cox (Ohio) and Franklin Roosevelt (New York)
Socialist Party: Eugene Debs (Indiana) and Seymour Stedman (Illinois)

Election Results:
Harding/Coolidge: 404 electoral votes, 16.1 million popular votes
Cox/Roosevelt: 127 electoral votes, 9.1 million popular votes
Debs/Stedman: 0 electoral votes, 915,000 popular votes

Summary:
The tone of the 1920 presidential election was almost completely set within the period between President Woodrow Wilson’s January 1918 announcement of his Fourteen Points (the American aims in creating a lasting peace) and the fall 1919 stroke that Wilson suffered while advocating for passage in the Senate of the League of Nations. Having returned from Europe with the prospect of creating a united body to govern over international affairs, Wilson faced massive opposition from Senate Republicans and leading Republican Henry Cabot Lodge. Wilson’s idealism ran up against the lingering anger of Republicans with his 1916 pledge to keep the United States out of war and his brazen negotiations in Versailles. In order to promote passage of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, Wilson did a whistle stop tour through the Western United States, in the hopes of appealing directly to the American people. Instead, he suffered a severe stroke and was unable to stop the prevailing winds against passage of the treaty. In the end, the Senate voted down the treaty and the United States stayed out of the League of Nations.

These struggles as well as economic struggles in the postwar period and the overzealous actions of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in 1920 against supposed radicals led to problems for the Democratic Party in the 1920 presidential election. Woodrow Wilson, unlike presidents in the past, had no hand in dictating his successor and the party struggled to find an effective candidate. After many ballots passed, the Democratic delegates finally agreed on compromise candidate James Cox, the former governor of Ohio and a newspaper publisher. Though the pick was uninspired, the Democrats were attempting to match the Republican nominating process by picking someone average who would not push the lofty idealism of a Woodrow Wilson.

The Republicans, licking their chops after a legislative success, were careful in their nominating convention and had a strong cast of candidates. Potential nominees included progressive California Governor Hiram Johnson, former General Leonard Wood, and Governor Frank Lowden of Illinois. As delegates gathered and attempted to find compromise in Chicago in the summer of 1920, they found their compromise choice in former Ohio Senator and lieutenant governor Warren Harding. Harding, who had no known strikes against him and a simple manner, was the second pick of many delegates and won out simply by winning a nomination war of attrition.

The Republican campaign in 1920 focused on the theme “America First” and Harding, whose simple manner was not born of political necessity but a lack of intelligence, called for a return to “normalcy” (a common mangling of the language that should have been unexpected from a former newspaper editor). Harding, in the tradition of other Ohio presidential candidates, ran a front porch campaign and called for more conservative approaches to government. Cox, who had to avoid the issue of the League of Nations and the shadow of Wilson’s failures, went out of his way to make appearances throughout the country.

But these efforts were to no avail as Harding’s patriotic campaign managed to gather in the newly enfranchised women’s vote and the significant rural vote to hand the Democrats the largest electoral loss to that point in history. A minor candidate in this election was Socialist Eugene V. Debs, whose popular votes were more of a show of support to freedom of speech than any real desire to have a socialist government. Debs ran from prison in 1920 and was pardoned by Harding in the following year for the charges of sedition he was arrested for in 1917.