The presidential election of 1920 might be the last in which neither major party, going into its national convention, had a clear image of who would emerge as its nominee, and thus it was the last of the truly wide-open seasons of presidential conventions. In all subsequent campaigns, even those in which there was no incumbent in the running, at least one of the major parties came to its nominating convention with an established front-runner; and with the final triumph of the primary system in the 1970s, no convention would again open with uncertainty about the inevitable nominee (the 1976 GOP convention being a possible exception). Thus 1920 was indeed the last convention of its kind.
By 1920, the euphoria that followed the end of World War I had been replaced with growing anxiety over the direction of the country and uncertainty as to how to conduct foreign affairs in an increasingly more dangerous world. The Great War (as World War I was then called) had amplified warfare to an entirely unprecedented level of mass slaughter, and many Americans, while on the whole having supported the war effort, were now even more reticent to become involved in foreign alliances. Even though Woodrow Wilson conducted a nationwide tour, giving some forty speeches promoting the League of Nations treaty during the late summer and throughout the fall of 1919, the Senate refused to ratify the treaty. Prior to the vote, Wilson suffered a stroke, which seriously weakened his health for the remainder of his second term. Meanwhile, labor unrest in the United States had sparked numerous strikes and concern over discontent among the working class. Recession had replaced the wartime boom. More than anything, the war had dramatically altered life in the United States. As historian Donald McCoy once wrote, “The First World War and its aftermath had struck the nation’s political, social, and economic scene with earthquake force. Old ties and ways of life had been broken, the position of whole layers of society had been altered, and new fears and expectations had been unleashed, new leaders had arisen, and the role and status of the old ones had been changed.”
American society was in the process of metamorphosis, and American political institutions were reacting. The energy of progressivism was, at least for the moment, spent. Isolationism, as evinced by the failure of Wilson’s mission to commit the United States to the League of Nations, was emergent. Suspicion of foreign attitudes and ideologies was pervasive. Racism and religious animosity waxed with the reinvigoration of a once-moribund Ku Klux Klan. The American economy was becoming increasingly more industrial, commercial, and urban, and gradually less agricultural (although American agriculture still remained a major component of the economy), and the image of American life less rural.
Those large issues that had commanded attention during the last four campaigns—the policies of progressivism and, especially in 1916, the war—had exhausted both parties and the public mood in general. For the most part, progressivism had won the day, and it was only a matter of adjusting to the new shape the republic was now assuming. No candidate could effectively run against the legacy of both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The progressive movement had irrevocably transformed the American polity. The Great War had left the American public wary of what George Washington had referred to as “foreign entanglements,” Wilson’s grand vision for an international League of Nations now soundly rejected. Added to this was confusion and apprehension over events in Russia, where a communist revolution was under way, provoking a Red Scare throughout the United States against Bolshevism and, in effect, any type of “foreign-born” ideology. Internal divisions over the war and the Russian Revolution undermined the Socialist Party, which had become a thriving third party in the early decades of the century. Furthermore, a new amendment to the Constitution prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol; thus while the Prohibition Party could never gain more than a quarter of a million votes in any given presidential election, its agenda had triumphed, and with the enactment of the Volstead Act to enforce this amendment, an entire nation was legally declared “dry.” Additionally, in the midst of these many changes, many of them driven by disenchantment or uncertainty, the Nineteenth Amendment protecting the right of women to vote at the federal level was ratified, a positive stroke for democracy and electoral politics that was ratified in time for the 1920 election. Full women’s suffrage had been gradually gaining strength since Wyoming (1869) and Utah (1870), as territories, guaranteed the franchise for women (a guarantee that was preempted at the federal level), with Wyoming becoming the first state to protect women’s right to vote upon admission to the Union in 1890, Colorado following in 1893 as the second state to do so. Eastward, progress was also made on a smaller scale in Michigan and Minnesota in the 1870s and Kansas in the 1880s, through laws permitting women to vote at the local level in those states, and again on the West Coast in the Washington Territory in the mid-1880s (although this would not become established by the state of Washington until 1910). Before the turn of the century, the states of Wyoming and Colorado were soon joined by the states of Idaho and Utah in upholding the voting rights of women. What began in the Rocky Mountain West soon gained momentum in both directions, and within a generation, women had finally won the hard struggle to guarantee their voting rights at the federal level.
As a response to the turmoil of the past few years, “Back to Normalcy” was coined as the defining phrase of the Campaign of 1920; large men and even larger ideas were now a thing of the recent past. Wilson, Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, and Charles Evans Hughes were, for various reasons, no longer available as candidates to the American public. Hughes’s prominence in GOP politics quickly faded in spite of his nearly defeating the incumbent Wilson four years earlier in a very tight, narrowly decided election. Bryan had been stigmatized by three embarrassing losses and had become, on a personal level, too eccentric for mainstream politics. Wilson was actually interested in a third term, but his broken health and recent inability to accomplish his foreign policy goals prevented him from mustering the energy and support. Finally, the age’s defining figure, Theodore Roosevelt, who in running in 1912 had already through his actions established his position on the “no third term” tradition, had unexpectedly passed away in 1919. Had Roosevelt lived, he would probably have again been the Republican candidate, as there was simply no one else in either party who could exceed him; and had Wilson not suffered his stroke, he would have been in a good position to run for reelection as well—a lost scenario wherein the two great progressives would have met in battle again, this time without a third alternative (as in 1912 with President Taft), an alternate possibility that can only give students of politics and history pause. But with Roosevelt’s death and the flagging of Wilson’s health, along with the inexplicable political decline of Hughes and the dwindling of Bryan’s base, the two parties were left without any major personality to drive their efforts forward. After two decades wherein the American electorate enjoyed a surplus of political giants, the Campaign of 1920 moved toward the acceptable, the safe, the ordinary.
As the campaign season approached, new leadership emerged in both parties. For the Republicans, the field was populated by any number of potential candidates, the more familiar names being Robert La Follette, Roosevelt’s friend Hiram Johnson (governor of California and Roosevelt’s Bull Moose running mate in 1912), and Nicholas Butler, who in 1912 had replaced Vice President James Sherman as President Taft’s running mate upon Sherman’s sudden passing. Among the many newer faces were Governor Frank Lowden of Illinois; Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts; Iowa’s talented Herbert Hoover, who had risen to prominence due to his humanitarian efforts in Europe during and after the war; General Leonard Wood, a distinguished military figure, physician, and another close friend of Roosevelt’s who had served as governor general of the Philippines as well as military governor of Cuba; Pennsylvania governor William C. Sproul; and Warren G. Harding, who had first received notice in the convention of 1916, and who was favorably regarded by Roosevelt.
As the convention opened, three candidates emerged as the principal competitors: Wood, who won 287 delegates on the first ballot; Lowden, who took 211 delegates on that round; and Johnson, who trailed in third with 133. Sproul led the rest of the field with 84 delegates, with Butler taking 69 and Harding a distant sixth place with 65 first-ballot delegates. The second ballot tightened the race at the top between Wood and Lowden, the former improving his position to 289, the latter following close with 259. Johnson gained 13 votes to remain a distant third, with every other candidate losing votes; thus it now appeared that a two-man race between General Wood and Governor Lowden was under way. Indeed, this trend persisted, with both candidates slowly gaining votes on each ballot while other challengers faded; Wood peaked with 314 on the fourth ballot, only to be surpassed by Lowden on the fifth, who led 303 to 299, Wood having lost 15 votes. But Lowden could not take advantage of this momentum; on the sixth ballot, the candidates each won 311 votes, and they exchanged leads on the following two ballots. Johnson remained a distant third through seven ballots, and on the fifth ballot, Harding suddenly moved into fourth place after having lost ground on the second through the fourth ballots, then jumping past Johnson to move into third on the seventh ballot and gaining further ground on the eighth. With no candidate able to make a significant move upward, it became evident that the convention was moving toward a deadlock.
With the convention in recess, the four leading candidates, Lowden, Wood, Harding, and Johnson, worked hard off the floor to win new delegates. Johnson, now in fourth, was approached as a possible vice presidential candidate, but he expressed no interest in again running for that position. Between the fifth and sixth ballots, the real work of nominating a candidate had quietly shifted behind the scenes. Gathering in a “smoke-filled room” that had been rented by the party chairman, Will Hays, the backroom bargaining began, with the influential senator from Massachusetts and devoted friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, now supporting Harding as the only reasonable solution to the deadlock. While Lodge was a preeminent figure at the time, it was Harry M. Daugherty, Ohio political boss and Harding’s campaign manager, who did the most to propel Harding’s ascent. Coming from Ohio, Harding might help the Republicans retake the Buckeye State, the one state in the Midwest that had eluded them over the past two elections against Wilson, thereby having enabled the Democrats to crack into the Republicans’ vital northern and midwestern bloc. Harding was also perceived as a “cleaner” candidate, in the sense that he was not as closely associated with big money. This gave Harding the boost he needed, so that by the ninth ballot, he jumped from a distant third to a significant first-place lead, winning 347 delegates to 249 for Wood, while Lowden faded to 121. On the tenth ballot, Harding pulled away, winning 644 delegates and the nomination.
The convention then selected Governor Coolidge, a refreshing new face in the party who never received more than thirty-two votes for the presidential nomination, on the first round to run as Harding’s vice presidential candidate. Lodge was also approached by some delegates to run as second on the ticket, a proposal that he dismissed without hesitation. Coolidge’s appeal actually stemmed from his lack of insider credentials. It was clear that he was not connected to the convention’s principal kingmakers, and he seemed to be a refreshing antidote to the Old Guard who had dominated the backroom negotiations. In a sense, Harding was like Coolidge in this regard, and he fell into the nomination largely due to the fact that the initial front-runners, Wood, Lowden, and Johnson, could not bridge their differences and unify behind a single standard-bearer. Thus the Harding-Coolidge ticket represented a new kind of presidential candidacy—not as connected as the old leadership, and not as monumental as the candidates that had dominated the political landscape since the 1890s. The “Back to Normalcy” slogan was Harding’s, and it typifies not only the desire of the times but also attitudes within both parties: The invigorating days of progressivism were coming to a close, and in the aftermath of a terrible war, the nation was prepared to stop and take a long break from those tumultuous times, to withdraw from ambitious domestic programs as well as the trending movement toward the expansion of America’s role abroad. Reflecting these attitudes, the GOP platform was decidedly more conservative than it had been in years, another signal that the momentum of progressivism had played out.
Recognizing the key role California played in Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 presidential election victory, the Democratic Party held its convention in San Francisco in the latter part of June and early July. Lacking a true front-runner, the Democrats were in the same situation as their Republican rivals. There was one possible front-runner for the Democrats—President Wilson’s son in-law, William G. McAdoo of California, a former senator who had also served for five years as Wilson’s secretary of the treasury. McAdoo, however, hesitated to formerly announce his candidacy, as there was still doubt about his father-in-law’s campaign intentions. Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, was in the early going an active candidate, but his fixation on the “Red Menace” of Bolshevism was the only issue that he seemed passionate about, and it did not take him very far in the party. Other candidates whose names received some mention were, along with Wilson himself, William Jennings Bryan (who still commanded a small but committed following); incumbent vice president Thomas R. Marshall, who enjoyed some initial support but withdrew his name from consideration early in the process; New York’s impressive governor Alfred E. Smith; Speaker of the House Champ Clark of Missouri, who had actually at one point been the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 1912 before the ascent of Wilson; John W. Davis, the current ambassador to the Court of St. James; New Jersey governor Edward I. Edwards; Senator Robert Latham Owen of Oklahoma; Senator Carter Glass of Virginia (who had succeeded McAdoo as Wilson’s treasury secretary, leaving that office for the Senate in early 1920); and a popular two-term former governor from Ohio, James M. Cox. When counting the numerous also-rans and favorite sons, all told, twenty-three candidates would receive some delegate votes at the Democratic convention.
After one ballot, McAdoo won the support of 266 delegates, making him the slim front-runner, followed by Palmer with 256 votes, Cox with 134, and Smith holding 109 delegates. After just one ballot, President Wilson made it known through back channels that he would be available to step forward and break what already appeared to be a deadlocked convention; but not every delegate was convinced, many thinking that the nomination would eventually go to McAdoo or one of the other leaders—possibly Cox, who was showing more appeal among the delegates than initially expected. Wilson’s name remained officially out of the running, but unofficially, the delegates were fully aware of the possibility of a last-minute draft for the president. As the balloting continued, the candidates pulled away from the pack: McAdoo, who held and increased his lead through six ballots; Palmer; and Cox, who remained a distant third to McAdoo but remained viable. McAdoo led through eleven ballots, but on the twelfth, Cox managed to pull ahead, winning the support of 404 delegates to McAdoo’s 375, with Palmer receding far behind. There was little movement until the thirty-eighth ballot, when Palmer, realizing that his position was no longer tenable, withdrew from the contest; and with his delegates now in play, both Cox and McAdoo drew into a tighter race. By the forty-first ballot, Cox held 497 delegates, McAdoo 440, leading the latter’s supporters to propose a recess to negotiate off the convention floor. But Cox’s supporters, realizing the stratagem and aware of the power of the “smoke-filled room” and the advantage it would give to McAdoo, refused to accede to adjournment and, slugging out for two more ballots, managed to gain the majority needed to nominate their candidate. Having done so, McAdoo withdrew his name, and his delegates were released to Cox as a sign of party unity. Thus the campaign for the White House would entail a battle between two Ohioans, the third time that major party candidates from the same state would square off for the White House—the first being Lincoln against Douglas, both from Illinois, in 1860; and the second being Theodore Roosevelt against Alton Parker, both of New York, in 1904.
Notably, for the vice presidency, the delegates nominated Cox’s preferred choice, a young, luminous, and rapidly emerging star within the party, President Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York, who was also a cousin of the late Republican former president Theodore Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt had also served as assistant secretary of the navy under President McKinley). Franklin Roosevelt—who, in spite of disparate party affiliations, deliberately emulated his famous cousin, whom he once referred to as the greatest man he ever met—was supported by, among others, both Cox and Al Smith, the latter having become something of a mentor for young Franklin. Young Roosevelt had already made his own mark, for he was well known and highly regarded within the Wilson administration and among most of the delegates at the convention.
The Socialist Party was still the strongest minor party in spite of the anxieties of the times, nominating for a fifth run its most prominent figure, Eugene V. Debs, even though he had been imprisoned for violating the Espionage Act. With Debs in prison and unable to campaign, the job of stumping for the Socialist cause fell to his lawyer, Seymour Stedman. Other minor parties nominating candidates include the newly formed Farmer-Labor Party, which nominated Parley P. Christensen of Utah, and the Prohibition Party, still active and nominating Aaron S. Watkins from Ohio.
Among the issues under discussion during the campaign were the enforcement of Prohibition under the Volstead Act, continuation of progressive reforms on behalf of labor, government regulation of industry and transportation, the rising cost of living, conservation and reclamation of natural resources, the state of American farming, immigration, campaign funding, and the League of Nations. The debate over joining the League of Nations stood out as the principal single issue of 1920. Led by Cox and Franklin Roosevelt and motivated to fulfill the promise of Wilson’s foreign policy efforts, the Democrats regarded the League as the paramount issue and placed it as the central plank of their platform. For the most part, Democrats were united behind the League, but Republicans remained divided. Harding felt pressure from both supporters and opponents of the League, and awkwardly he tried to steer a middle course. Cox attempted to make it his defining principle, and he attacked Harding for equivocating on the issue. Pro-League Republicans backed Harding in spite of his confused stance, but the party reiterated within the platform its position against the controversial Treaty of Versailles, praising the Senate for its opposition. Harding made clear his support for some type of international organization, but the League itself was implicitly rejected in the Republican platform.
The Harding campaign defined “Back to Normalcy” in terms that proposed significantly reducing government regulation of business. Throughout the campaign, Harding made use of the slogan “Less Government in business and more business in Government” to describe how his administration would reduce government regulation of the private sector and improve the efficiency of the federal government by adopting successful business practices. Significantly, Harding largely conducted a front-porch campaign, along with making several phonograph recordings of his speeches for distribution to a much wider audience than otherwise possible. In one speech, Harding expressed a refrain that would typify the Republican’s new approach, one that in all its elements poses a direct contrast to the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt: “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”
Even though the majority of Americans supported the progressive reforms of Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, the Harding campaign made effective use of the growing distrust of government and the great reluctance of the American public to become involved in new “foreign entanglements.” Equally important, the Republican Party attempted to blame the Red Scare on the failed foreign policies of the Wilson administration.
Significantly, the Harding campaign raised approximately $8 million, the largest amount in the history of presidential campaigns up to that point in time. To help Daugherty manage his campaign, Harding hired ad man Albert Lasker, who made use of modern advertising techniques to create a new image of Harding as a down-to-earth, ordinary American. Lasker distributed thousands of pictures of Harding and his wife to newspapers from coast to coast, and he hired Al Jolson, who was at that time the best-known entertainer in the United States, to compose a song, “Harding You’re the Man for Us,” to further publicize his candidate’s image. Like Harding, Cox made a number of phonograph recordings as well, arguing on record, as it were, that Wilson’s successful prosecution of World War I had in the end saved “civilization.” In sharp contrast to the Republican campaign strategy, Cox and Roosevelt both campaigned extensively across the United States. On behalf of the Democrats’ cause, Franklin Roosevelt delivered over a thousand speeches in thirty-two states, a feat reminiscent of his famous cousin.
In spite of their strenuous efforts on the stump, it was difficult for Cox and Roosevelt to counteract the kind of money that was backing Harding-Coolidge. In the successful tradition of Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and William McKinley in 1896 and 1900, Harding was also an effective campaigner from the front porch (leaving his home on only a few occasions to deliver a handful of speeches in major cities); through his speeches, he was able to persuade voters that the promise of normalcy was real, and that stability would be the consequence of a Republican victory. “Let’s be done with wiggle and wobble,” Harding wrote, indicating that with a GOP victory, the country would be stabilized in the coming administration. The press liked him, and he cut a dignified figure, attracting large numbers to his front-porch events. In addressing the issues, Harding preferred restraint, letting the enthusiastic Democrats assert large and unrealistic claims while he and Coolidge exhibited sober forbearance. Coolidge, who would become famous for his laconic demeanor, was particularly effective in this regard, and he criticized the Democrats Cox and Roosevelt for conducting a campaign that became “coarser and coarser” and “wilder and wilder.” The alternative that the Republicans offered was one of calm and fixity, and they succeeded in depicting the Democrats as offering more turmoil and instability. Roosevelt was, by contrast, a vigorous campaigner, proudly pointing out during his extensive travels that Cox was not prone to hiding behind the comforts of the front porch, away from the people and the political debates. For his part, Cox reaffirmed the principles of progressivism and claimed that the Republicans were promising not stability or normalcy, but instead reactionary retreat from the positive reforms that the Democrats had delivered to all Americans.
But as the election approached, it became clear to many observers that the Republican team, in spite of the many talents of the Democrats, was better positioned, more abundantly funded, and tactically sharper. The situation for the Democrats was not helped by the breaking of a scandal involving allegations about Franklin Roosevelt. By and large, Roosevelt’s record as assistant secretary of the navy was solid, winning him widespread respect; however, to weaken the Democratic ticket, members of the Republican National Committee released a letter from a Providence, Rhode Island, publisher, John Rathon, alleging that Roosevelt had lied before a congressional investigating committee when he denied removing the files of a man convicted of a morals charge during his service in the navy. The dispute involved what was then called the Newport Scandal, a sting conducted by the navy that was aimed at identifying homosexual sailors. Roosevelt vigorously denied the allegations and quickly filed libel suits against Rathon and his Providence Journal along with officials in the Republican National Committee. However, the controversy embarrassed the campaign and, at the time, was seen as a potential impediment to Roosevelt’s continued political fortunes. In the end, this imbroglio proved to be of almost no significance to young Roosevelt, given the grave crisis that he, quite unknowingly at the time, was about to face in his personal life shortly after the end of the campaign.
On Election Day, the Harding-Coolidge campaign enjoyed what was then the biggest popular-vote landslide in American history, winning over 16,000,000 votes (an astonishing 60.3%, at that time far and away the highest percentage ever accumulated by a presidential ticket), 5,000,000 more than the total that President Wilson had gained for victory in the previous election. Cox-Roosevelt managed slightly over 9,100,000 votes (about 34%), which was actually slightly higher than Wilson’s popular total won in 1916. Looking at the popular vote alone, Harding’s margin of victory amounted to a stunning 26 percent, which still remains the highest margin of victory in the history of presidential elections. On the whole, in spite of the inclusion of women voters nationwide within the electorate, the Democrats made, in effect, absolutely no gains from their close but successful election four years earlier, while the Republicans had nearly doubled their support. From his prison cell, Debs won 913,000 votes, the best showing yet for the Socialists, a remarkable feat given Debs’s situation and the onset of the Red Scare. The Farmer-Labor Party managed just over 260,000 votes. For the first time in six consecutive elections, the Prohibition Party dipped below 200,000 votes, winning just under 190,000, its worst showing since 1896. But party members could take some solace in the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment.
In the Electoral College, Harding-Coolidge won 404 electoral votes to 127 for Cox-Roosevelt, sweeping the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West, and even cracking into the Democrats’ southern bloc by taking Tennessee for the first time since 1868, during the early years of Reconstruction. Harding clobbered Cox in their common home state of Ohio and demolished the Democrats in Roosevelt’s home state of New York. Aside from Tennessee, the Democrats held their southern bloc (including Texas here); but it was a decisive retreat from Wilson’s electoral victory four years earlier, made possible by a solid southern-western combination.
Thus Warren G. Harding decisively became the twenty-ninth president of the United States. But in two years, Harding would die suddenly, and his vice president, the taciturn Calvin Coolidge, would be inaugurated as the thirtieth president, only to find that in the pursuit of “normalcy,” he would lead the nation through an era of rapid economic and cultural change in American history that would come to be known as the Roaring Twenties.
Bagby, Wesley. The Road to Normalcy: The Presidential Campaign and Election of 1920. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962.
Cebula, James E. James M. Cox: Journalist and Politician. New York: Garland, 1985.
McCoy, Donald. “1920.” In Arthur M. Schlesinger, Fred L. Israel, and David J. Frent, eds. Running for President: The Candidates and Their Images. Vol. 2. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
McCoy, Donald R. “Election of 1920.” In Arthur M. Schlesinger, Fred Israel, and William P. Hansen, eds. History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968. Vol. 2. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.
Morello, John A. Selling the President, 1920: Albert D. Lasker, Advertising, and the Election of Warren G. Harding. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.