TEN

Normalcy

After a three-year self-imposed editorial exile because of his pro-German views, H. L. Mencken penned his first article for the Baltimore Evening Sun in February 1920. Ever the libertarian, he complained mightily about what the Great War had cost in terms of civil liberties and personal freedom. Mencken had much spleen to vent, especially against President Wilson. “Between Wilson and his brigades of informers, spies, volunteer detectives, perjurers and complaisant judges, and the Prohibitionists and their messianic delusion, the liberty of the citizen has pretty well vanished in America,” he wrote in an article called, “A Carnival of Buncombe.” But he also saw hope that Americans had grown tired of the wartime impositions and just wanted things to return to normal.¹

The country’s idealism had fallen hard, descending into partisan squabbling and finger-pointing. John Carter complained in the Atlantic Monthly in September 1920 that “the older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us.” It was now the younger generation’s turn—and they would run amok with a new moral code (or lack thereof, as older Americans viewed it), visiting speakeasies, kissing before marriage and openly discussing sex, smoking cigarettes, and going on late-night car trips. The young generation grew up quickly during the war and just as quickly shed the Victorian propriety of their parents.²

The generation that fought the Great War became known as the “Lost Generation.” They came home adrift, disillusioned, and disoriented from the experience after being told that their crusade would lead to world peace. The expression originated with the modernist writer Gertrude Stein, but was first used in print by Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises. The lost generation’s chief spokesman was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who published his first critically acclaimed novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. He also gave the era its name: the Jazz Age. That same year, Sinclair Lewis published his novel Main Street, which skewered small-town America. He would repeat the deed two years later with Babbitt, this time taking down Midwestern values of conformity and social uplift. Scott Fitzgerald went on to catalog the growing cynicism of the era in The Great Gatsby, his 1925 novel modeled on the life of Cincinnati bootlegger George Remus.

A generation of young men and women who had lived through the war wrote about it in fictionalized accounts. Ernest Hemingway published A Farewell to Arms; John Dos Passos wrote Three Soldiers; while E. E. Cummings published his first book, The Enormous Room. All three men had served as ambulance corps drivers. Willa Cather, who witnessed the war from the safety of New York City, won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1922 wartime novel One of Ours.

The high cost of living, or HCL, that had paralyzed the economy and resulted in countless strikes, came crashing down. Food prices plummeted, as farmers had overplanted wheat during the war. Four million sailors and soldiers were released from service and struggled to find work, while wartime industrial production was no longer necessary. Factories that had retooled during the war now faced the expensive task of converting back to consumer production. As a result, the American economy dove into recession in 1920, but began recovering the follow year. The decade after that became known as the Roaring Twenties for the booming economy.

Baseball’s reputation had been terribly tarnished after the revelations that the 1919 World Series had been fixed. The sport began to recover in 1920, when the Boston Red Sox traded away a promising player, George Herman “Babe” Ruth, to the second-rate New York Yankees. Ruth immediately began hitting home runs and electrifying fans with his dazzling fielding. He hit fifty-four home runs that first season. Ruth helped restore the public’s faith in the sport. A year later, the Baby Ruth candy bar was introduced, a clear takeoff on the baseball star’s name.

The year 1920 was Woodrow Wilson’s last full year in the White House. He was, as Wilson biographer Scott Berg called him, “the lamest duck ever to inhabit the White House.” He was still chronically ill after his stroke, and he could accomplish little in terms of legislation. The Republican Party was solidly in control of Congress. Wilson was depressed at the outcome of the Senate’s Treaty of Versailles vote in March, and he had no energy for political fights.³

The president’s health would never recover. He could walk short distances, but his left side was nearly paralyzed, and he spent much of his time in a wheelchair. Wilson took to sitting outdoors under the White House’s south portico, where he could look out on the south lawn and the Washington Monument. He thought delusionally that he might run for the presidency again in 1920, but Wilson was in no condition for a campaign.

Wilson called his cabinet to meet on April 14, his first cabinet meeting in more than seven months. Josephus Daniels recorded his impressions in his diary: “He [Wilson] was seated at his desk and did not rise when we entered as was his custom. He looked fuller in the face, lips seemed thicker and face longer, but he was bright and cheerful.” Secretary of the Treasury David Houston thought that Wilson “looked old, worn, and haggard.” The cabinet heatedly debated Mitchell Palmer’s roundup of anarchists and radicals, as well as labor unrest and the high cost of living. After a while, Edith Wilson and Dr. Grayson entered the room. Edith declared, “This is an experiment, you know,” and reminded her husband that the meeting should end soon, lest it tax his recovering health.⁴

Six days later, the cabinet met again. Wilson spoke about the bitter defeat of his dream, the League of Nations. “It is dead,” he said, “and lies over there. Every morning I put flowers on its grave.” Wilson was politically defeated and physically shattered.⁵

William Hawkins interviewed the president in September 1920, a confidential interview only granted on the promise that Hawkins would publish none if its details. The journalist noted how much the president’s health had affected his appearance. “The ravages of his long illness were visible in his face. His left arm lay helpless at his side, the fingers of the hand half clenched as if drawn permanently in that position,” Hawkins wrote. “Here was the shell of a man literally burned out by the fire of his own ideal. But the mind and the ideal were still there, even if the body had broken down at the time when they most needed it.”

Hawkins asked about foreign policy and current events, and Wilson discussed the men who served as secretary of state. William Jennings Bryan “has a very high forehead but he is not a high-brow,” Wilson deadpanned.

“What of Lansing?” Hawkins asked.

“Oh, Lansing, he wasn’t even true,” the president responded regretfully.⁶

Wilson made his first public appearance in more than a year on October 27. He met with fifteen pro-League Republicans. They were stunned at how he looked, and he spoke so low that they could hardly hear him. He read a statement rehashing the lost fight for the country to join the League of Nations.⁷

Likewise, Ray Baker visited the White House in November and was shocked to see the president’s decline, as he wrote in his diary: “It was dreadful. I cannot get over it yet. A broken, ruined old man, shuffling along, his left arm inert, the fingers drawn up like a claw, the left side of his face sagging frightfully. His voice is not human: it gurgles in his throat, sounds like that of an automaton. And yet his mind seems as alert as ever.” Though Edith and Dr. Grayson chatted amiably, in part to keep a positive environment for the president, their patient was sullen and depressed. “At luncheon, Mrs. W. cared for him as for a baby, pinned his napkin up to his chin,” Baker wrote. Yet Wilson displayed a note of humor. “You see,” he told Baker, “I have to wear a bib. It does not imply bibulousness.”⁸

Two hundred thousand maimed and wounded American men survived the war and had to rebuild their lives. Socialist Oscar Ameringer’s son was gassed and terribly wounded in the Argonne Forest. “For this and for the loss of a career as a brilliant musician, he draws a pension of one hundred dollars a month,” the columnist wrote.⁹ Congress consolidated federal veterans programs under the Veterans Bureau in 1921, and President Herbert Hoover later elevated it to the Veterans Administration in 1930.

Others who had experienced the war moved on with their lives. Captain Harry Truman returned to Kansas City. He was thirty-five years old and married his fiancée Bess in June 1919. He teamed up with a close friend from the army, Eddie Jacobson, to open a men’s haberdashery known as Truman & Jacobson. He borrowed heavily against his family farm to buy merchandise to sell at the store. The store fell victim to the postwar economic downturn. By 1922, the business had gone bankrupt. Truman would eventually go into politics.

Conscientious objector Ernest Meyer had evaded a court-martial and was released from the army in December 1918. He noted that some 171,000 men had evaded the draft, and of the millions of men who had reported for military service, 3,989 had declared themselves conscientious objectors. Nearly ninety percent of these were religious pacifists. Some 1,300 were assigned to noncombatant jobs, another 1,200 were given farm furloughs, while 99 were assigned to the American Friends Reconstruction Unit in France. Many of the others, including Meyer, fell through the legal cracks—but 450 were court-martialed and sent to Alcatraz or Fort Leavenworth. In November 1920, the last imprisoned conscientious objectors were released, two years after the war had ended.¹⁰

In fact, Secretary of Defense Newton Baker recorded that 350,000 men did not register for the draft, double the estimate that Meyer gave. There was a lingering question about what to do with so many scofflaws but given their sizable numbers and the fact that the war had ended, nothing was done.¹¹

After his release from the army, Meyer went to Washington, D.C. to work for the American Union Against Militarism. There were some who were calling for a permanent increase in the size of the standing army and for peacetime universal conscription. The AUAM fought against this and largely won, mailing thousands of pamphlets to influence public opinion and Congress. If they had written against the draft during wartime, they would have been declared seditious, but instead their ideas were warmly received. The plan for peacetime conscription was shelved.

Wilson considered offering amnesty and a general pardon to dissenters who were imprisoned for speaking or writing against the war. The day after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, he wrote Joe Tumulty: “It seems to me that this would not be only a generous act but a just act to accompany the signing of the peace.” Tumulty relayed the opinion of Attorney General Palmer, who believed such an amnesty should wait until Wilson returned to the states. “He says there have been no convictions of people for mere expression of opinion. Every case has been a conviction for obstructing the war under statute.” Palmer seems to have missed the broader point, that amnesty was about reconciliation—and that people had in fact been convicted for speaking out against the war.¹²

After the war, President Wilson pardoned numerous people, including conscientious objectors and people convicted under the Espionage Act, but there was one person he refused to forgive: Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party leader whom he had called a “traitor to his country.” This was despite the fact that the chorus for pardon was loud from both the left and the right, and even within his own cabinet.¹³ In the meantime Debs’s confinement in the Atlanta penitentiary made him a martyr to the cause of free speech. He ran for the presidency from prison in 1920 (he won 3.4 percent of the vote) and railed against Wilson for betraying his ideals. “It is he, not I, who needs a pardon,” Debs said. President Harding partially commuted Debs’s sentence on Christmas 1921.¹⁴ Wilson was unrepentant, telling journalist Ida Tarbell, “Debs never should have been released. Debs was one of the worst men in the country.”¹⁵

The League of Nations organized in Geneva, Switzerland, in January 1920 with forty-two founding members. The United States was not one of them. The league was not able to rectify the huge mistakes in the Treaty of Versailles, despite Wilson’s insistence that it would prevent future conflicts. Later that year, Wilson received the Nobel Peace Prize for creating the league. It came with a cash prize of $40,000. He was only the second president to be awarded the prize. Theodore Roosevelt received the prize for brokering peace after the Russo-Japanese War. Two other presidents have been awarded the Nobel since: Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

The 1920 Election

By 1920, the doughboys had largely come home from Europe and wartime mobilization was over as the economy struggled in recession. The United States looked forward to peace and the presidential elections that fall as the Wilson era ended. The Democrats chose Ohio Governor James Cox with Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his running mate. Party leaders hoped to rope in the fame of the Roosevelt brand.

Larz Anderson, a wealthy, longtime Taft supporter, attended the GOP convention in Chicago. He was still bitter about Theodore Roosevelt splitting the Republican vote in 1912 and putting Wilson in the White House. “Lest we forget—remember that Roosevelt is directly and inexcusably to blame for the past seven years,” he wrote in his diary.¹⁶ Theodore Roosevelt should have been the Republican presidential candidate in 1920. With his death in January 1919, however, the GOP had to search for a new man. It ultimately found its candidate on the backbench, a mediocre first term senator from Ohio named Warren Gamaliel Harding. Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts was his running mate, the man who had broken the Boston Police strike.

Harding was affable and likeable, an anti-intellectual, in many ways the opposite of Woodrow Wilson. He was exactly what the country wanted in 1920. Unfortunately, he was gullible and indecisive, and had no vision for what he wanted to accomplish. And his language skills were full of malapropisms. At a speech in Boston, Harding awkwardly stated, “America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration.” He was widely derided for saying normalcy when he likely meant normality, but in fact the word already existed. Harding stumbled into a brilliant word, one that has since been regularly and widely adopted into the English language.¹⁷ Herbert Hoover understood the appeal of normalcy: “It was just what the people wanted to do after all the emotional and other strains of the war. It was a sort of ‘leave-me-alone’ feeling after a fever.” Normalcy was the perfect word for the postwar era.¹⁸

H. L. Mencken wrote pointedly about Harding’s language, which he called “Gamalielese” after the president’s unusual middle name: “He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered.” It was frankly frustrating to a penman like Mencken, who prided himself on the appropriate use of words like boobery, Comstockery, intolerable, and Puritanism.¹⁹ Mencken held in low esteem the ability of his fellow Americans to choose a good president. “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron,” he wrote, not prophetically, but in response to the GOP picking Harding.²⁰

On June 13, the New York Times took the rare step of publishing a front-page editorial denouncing Harding, calling him “a very respectable Ohio politician of the second class.” It went on to call him “faint and colorless,” a blind follower of Senator Lodge’s campaign against the League of Nations. The editorial denounced the Republican Party leadership as having lost its moral compass that guided the party in the time of Lincoln. “And for principles, they have only hatred of Mr. WILSON and a ravening hunger for the offices.”²¹ The Times would not run another such front-page editorial until 2015 on the issue of gun control.²²

A year after the 1920 election, Joe Tumulty recalled that dubious Democrats had called on him to play the race card against Harding, claiming they had documents that proved Harding was partly black. He acted not only to discredit them, but he recommended to Wilson that they apprise the Harding campaign of this attempted smear. “If we can’t win this fight by fair means, we will not attempt to win it by unfair means,” Wilson responded.²³

Edith Wilson remembered the Harding race card quite differently in her 1938 memoir, and she blamed Tumulty. She recalled the secretary racing up to the president one day. “Governor, we’ve got ’em beat!” Tumulty exclaimed. “Here is a paper which has been searched out and is absolutely true, showing that Harding has negro blood in him. This country will never stand for that!” The president would have none of that. “Even if that is so, it will never be used with my consent. We cannot go into a man’s genealogy; we must base our campaign on principles, not on backstairs gossip. That is not only right but good politics. So I insist you kill any such proposal.”²⁴

Two versions of the same story by two eyewitnesses two decades apart leaves one questioning Edith’s bias against Tumulty—and Tumulty’s own willingness to play the race card. In any case, the rumor of Harding’s African ancestry was disproved, but one rumor hung around his neck like an albatross: he had in fact sired a child out of wedlock, though DNA evidence would not prove this for certain until a century later.²⁵

Despite Harding’s flawed English, the allegations about his lineage, and his clear lack of leadership, he won the election by a landslide. Harding won sixty percent of the popular vote. Republicans captured supermajorities in Congress, rendering Democrats politically moot. The next decade belonged to the Republican Party, ending only with the onset of the Great Depression. It put to bed the idea of the U.S. joining the League of Nations. The country in fact would never join.

Warren Harding was perhaps the most handsome president ever to grace the Oval Office. He looked like a movie star. Looks can be deceiving of course: he was also one of the most corrupt and ineffective, and his two years and five months in office would be marked by intrigue, scandal, and finally by his own death. He was a tool for his friends’ greed, who would use his presidency to loot the U.S. treasury with the Teapot Dome and numerous other scandals. H. L. Mencken called him a “tin-horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor.” Historians widely consider him one of the country’s worst presidents.²⁶

At the final cabinet meeting on March 1, 1921, President Wilson’s cabinet asked what he would do next. He rejected the idea of writing a history of his administration, as he had governed openly and believed the citizens knew everything (one might take exception to the period after his stroke). When pressed, however, he remarked, “I am going to try to teach ex-presidents how to behave,” which was to stay out of the limelight, unlike the path that Theodore Roosevelt had chosen. “There will be one very difficult thing for me, however, to stand, and that is Mr. Harding’s English.”²⁷

The cabinet members said farewell to Wilson and expressed their appreciation for working for the man. Wilson attempted to respond, but soon his lips trembled and tears welled up in his eyes. It was an unusual display of emotion for a man so self-controlled. “Gentlemen, it is one of the handicaps of my physical condition that I cannot control myself as I have been accustomed to do,” he finally said in a broken voice. “God bless you all.”²⁸

The Cost of American Isolation

Warren Harding was sworn in as president on March 4, 1921. His inauguration speech declared that the United States would retain its isolationism, or as he described it, “the wisdom of the inherited policy of non-involvement in Old World affairs.” It was a code word for the League of Nations, but also reinforced the tradition handed down from George Washington that the country should remain free of entangling alliances.²⁹

A general sense of disillusionment swept across America after the Great War. Instead of high-minded rhetoric and lofty success that Wilson seemed to promise, the country was jaded from the war experience. Author Willa Cather, who had expressed such hope for world peace at the time of the Armistice, changed her worldview considerably. She wrote a letter in 1922 declaring, “It seems to me that everything has gone wrong since the Armistice. Why they celebrate that day with anything but fasts and sack-cloth and ashes, I don’t know.”³⁰ Historian Frederick Lewis Allen noted that Americans “were less concerned with making the world safe for democracy than with making America safe for themselves.” The isolationists roared back, intent on keeping the U.S. from messy global politics. The country resumed its time-tested practice of go-it-alone nationalism. In the years after the war, many Americans concluded that getting involved in the Great War was a mistake.³¹

With the Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, the United States still had to make peace with Germany. The Harding administration negotiated a separate treaty that was not nearly as punitive as the treaty Wilson helped create. Peace between Germany and the U.S. was declared on November 11, 1921—the third anniversary of the Armistice. The German economy was in a tailspin, and by 1922 it was clear that the Germans would default on their reparations payments. The French occupied the industrial Ruhr district in January 1923 and held onto it through 1925. The Germans engaged in passive resistance to the French occupation, and ultimately the French yielded considerably on the reparations terms. The U.S. stepped in with a loan in 1924 so that the Germans could make their reduced reparations payment. Though the Germans had blunted the French, the Ruhr crisis was a blow to German national pride that further contributed to the rise of right-wing nationalists like the Nazis.

The Harding administration hosted the Washington Naval Conference in late 1921, which won an agreement to limit the number of battleships that the three great naval powers—Great Britain, Japan, and the United States—could build. It was designed to head off an arms race as seen between England and Germany in the decade before the Great War. It did not foresee that battleships would soon be obsolete in the face of naval aviation, a point that the acerbic and ambitious commander of the army air corps, General Billy Mitchell, sought to make. In 1921, he used airborne bombers to sink the captured German battleship SMS Ostfriesland. This was two decades before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that made Mitchell’s conclusion abundantly clear: naval air power was on the ascendancy. He was court-martialed for insubordination in 1925 and resigned from the army. Mitchell died in 1936, not living long enough to see his prophecy fulfilled, nor the creation of the U.S. Air Force as a separate branch in 1947.

Harding’s scandal-plagued presidency did not survive long. He died in August 1923 during a trip to the West. Historian Frederick Lewis Allen concluded, “The Harding Administration was responsible in its short two years and five months for more concentrated robbery and rascality than any other in the whole history of the Federal Government.” Vice President Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as president.³²

Racism and xenophobia saw a resurgence in America in the 1920s, marked by a rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The previous decades had witnessed immigration that had shifted the American population toward a more racially diverse culture. Conservatives saw this as a challenge to a white-dominated, Protestant society and slammed the gates shut on new entrants. The Immigration Act of 1924 put tight limits on “undesirables” like Eastern Europeans and Italians, while banning Asian immigrants entirely. A strict quota system was established that heavily favored white western European immigrants. The law was not reformed until 1965.

Many Americans who had served in the Great War expanded their horizons. Older politicians wanted to keep America free from global entanglements, but the generation that fought the war was forever changed. When they came of age to serve in Congress, theirs had a far more expansive worldview than Senator Lodge’s generation. Ernest Hemingway had gone to Europe as a naïve eighteen-year-old but returned with a kindled fire and viewed the world’s citizens with equality. “There isn’t going to be any such thing as ‘foreigners’ for me after the war now,” he wrote his mother. “Just because your pals speak another language shouldn’t make any difference.”³³

Meanwhile a new global threat was rising: fascism. It began in Italy, one of the sore winners at the Paris Peace Conference, where Benito Mussolini and his blackshirt Fascisti marched on Rome and seized power in October 1922, overthrowing the liberal government. In Germany, former army corporal Adolf Hitler decried the downward spiraling economy and above all the loss to Germany’s national prestige from the Treaty of Versailles. He teamed with former General Erich Ludendorff in November 1923 to overthrow the Bavarian government in the so-called Beer Hall Putsch, modeled on Mussolini’s takeover. Both Ludendorff and Hitler were arrested when the coup failed.

While in jail Hitler wrote his memoirs, Mein Kampf, a book that laid out exactly how he would restore Germany’s national honor, conquer Europe, and exterminate the Jews. The German and Italian fascists would find common cause with another sore winner at Paris: Japan. At the core of fascist ideology was victimhood, which demagogues spun into populist resentment. These three countries resented the peace treaty—and they would steer the world into a second global cataclysm even deadlier than the first. The United States would be pulled into that world war as well after two decades of denying its role in stopping global totalitarianism. And at the end, democracy would be restored in the enemy nations as the U.S. embraced Wilsonian diplomacy.