Which of the following led voters to elect warren g. harding as president in 1920?

The candidates shared a background as newspapermen. Cox had been the publisher of the Dayton Daily News, whose presses rolled only eighty miles from those of Harding’s Marion Star. The nominees’ former profession was a point of pride with the nation’s press, which presented them as tribunes, not enemies, of the people. The Washington Star, buoyantly middlebrow and moderately conservative, seemed to endorse Harding on October 16th, though it’s difficult to tell. The paper remained almost Panglossian in its faith that, whoever won, the rapidly urbanizing country had a cheerful future. The marvels of modernity were regularly showcased in the paper: the start of coast-to-coast airmail; Governor Cox’s use of an amplifier when addressing a crowd; Senator Harding’s preservation, on a phonograph record, of one of his speeches. A mid-July advertisement by Woodward & Lothrop, a now vanished Washington department store, enticed the homemaker to buy “asbestos table mats.”

And yet the prevailing mood of the country was troubled. The recent past weighed heavily on voters, who wanted to forget or suppress it. The influenza epidemic had finally subsided in the spring of 1920, leaving six hundred and seventy-five thousand Americans dead—more than ten times the number of U.S. soldiers killed on European battlefields. There might have been a strong public desire to celebrate the world war as a mission accomplished, but, nearly two years after the Armistice, bodies were still being repatriated from France for burial at Arlington, and the White House was only just getting around to selling a flock of sheep that had grazed the South Lawn, providing wool for the war effort. Five thousand draft resisters had been convicted, but Attorney General Palmer was bent on pursuing the rest.

The country feared that this immediate past was already turning into prologue. Nothing abroad had been settled. After the Versailles Treaty was rejected by the U.S. Senate, the European Allies had to arrange its implementation by themselves, negotiating disarmament and reparations with the Weimar Republic at a conference in Spa, Belgium, which the Star’s correspondent compared to “a pack of wolves snarling over a carcass.” Americans had increasing reason to fear that the war would never really be “over over there,” and that their doughboys would soon be heading back.

The American voter of 2020 is aware of a Europe that wants to isolate itself from the United States, to raise a shield against Trump and his feckless gestures at disease control. The electorate of 1920 felt a compulsion to isolate itself from an array of needy, troubled European suitors. Many Americans cast doubtful looks across the Atlantic, and nativists were suspicious of the still assimilating Europeans they nonetheless pandered to as new voting constituencies. The threats to America were coming, after all, from the same places those people had recently left, and to which they might still feel attached.

In late July, the Comintern, in Moscow, told British and European workers to get ready for “heavy civil war” and “revolutionary struggle.” As Poland held off Trotsky’s Red Army, a delegation of Polish-Americans pleaded with Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty, for U.S. aid to Warsaw. Neither candidate advocated such action, which seemed symptomatic of what Harding identified as the problem of “hyphenated citizenship,” the dual loyalties that made immigrants to the U.S. encourage American “meddling” in their countries of origin. Such fears about those already here could amount to a kind of domestic xenophobia, and Cox saw Harding as the beneficiary of the split allegiances he publicly deplored. In his memoirs, Cox pointed out how blocs of ethnic voters were either aggrieved with Wilson for going to war (the Germans) or angry with him for abandoning their interests, such as Irish independence, in the Versailles negotiations. It was this “racial lineup,” Cox wrote, which guaranteed a G.O.P. victory.

American participation in a League of Nations would only cement those grievances, but Wilson remained determined to see the U.S. join. The effects of his stroke rendered him so inactive and so little visible that, for stretches of the 1920 campaign, Cox and Harding appeared to be running for a job that no longer existed. The President’s wife, Edith, along with his physician and his secretary, kept affairs of state operating at a minimal level, while Wilson navigated what his biographer A. Scott Berg calls “a twilight zone—a state of physical exhaustion, emotional turbulence and mental unrest.”

The League became, to Cox’s clear disadvantage, the central issue of the 1920 campaign after he was permitted to visit the White House on Sunday, July 18th. The sight of the disabled Wilson moved him to tears, changing the dynamic between the two men and ultimately the tenor of the whole campaign. Cox had been sufficiently lukewarm toward the League that Wilson was initially anything but enthusiastic about his candidacy. Now, however, the nominee impulsively pledged to Wilson his “million percent support” for the League. Cox’s ardor became emotive and personal, prompting him to tell one campaign audience that Wilson had been reduced to “the saddest picture in all history” by the ad-hominem hatred of his tormentors in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Harding tried to finesse the League issue. His willingness to consider a different “international association” or a souped-up version of the World Court left him open to charges of waffling. Moreover, the Democrats’ new commitment to the League gave Republican senators Henry Cabot Lodge, Hiram Johnson, and William Borah a reason to hold their candidate’s feet to the rejectionist fire. As Cox pronounced opposition to the League a betrayal of “the boys who died in France,” Lodge attacked the new organization as “a breeder of war.” By October 7th, Harding appeared ready to offer a straight answer. “I favor staying out,” he told the citizens of Des Moines.

The League issue came to the fore partly because it could be decided yes or no. Domestic anxieties never attained the same clarity but were ever present. In fact, the initials H.C.L., which turn up in headlines and stories, were shorthand not for Henry Cabot Lodge but for the high cost of living. Rising postwar prices for beef, coal, and sugar preoccupied householders and bureaucrats. The economic situation was not nearly as dire as the one strangling 2020, but then, as now, the federal response looked ham-fisted. The War Department sold off stockpiled canned meat, and the Justice Department’s H.C.L. task force recommended, as an affordable “common sense garment,” a dress made from sugar sacks. Until prices began coming down in September, Harding blamed the incumbent Democrats, in one speech intoning, with an ecstatic, Whitmanesque repetition, the phrase “more production,” as the essential cure for consumer woe. A protective tariff, he believed, was also in order.

Throughout the year, labor was restive. The Wobblies, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, were said to be planning a “reign of terror” in the Pacific Northwest. The White House jawboned striking coal miners back to work, and threatened D.C. sewer workers, who were contemplating a walkout, with replacement by U.S. troops. The biggest, blackest headline of the campaign appeared in mid-September, after an attack on New York’s financial district: “20 KILLED IN WALL STREET EXPLOSION.” (The final death toll was thirty-eight.) Inside J. P. Morgan’s bank, as Beverly Gage reconstructed the scene in her book, “The Day Wall Street Exploded” (2009), one man experienced “a shudder followed by a blizzard of white” as “papers burst from their files.” On the streets outside, “men on fire dropped to the ground: ‘Save me! Save me! Put me out!’ Customers fled barbershops, with cream on their faces, aprons streaming behind. . . .” No one was ever convicted of the attack, but evidence pointed to Italian anarchists, heightening the appeals to nativism and isolationism.

“Sorry, kid. The guy who comes up with names is on vacation, so we’re just gonna call you Peter Who Eats Sandwiches.”

Cartoon by Hartley Lin

The socialist Eugene V. Debs, already imprisoned for sedition in encouraging draft resistance during the war, continued a third-party Presidential campaign from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He told the press that he was glad to have an alibi for his whereabouts during the bombing.

Racial violence remained a phenomenon of such dailiness in 1920 that its occurrence, even when reported, was perceived as being more inevitable than eventful, something that required an occasional word from the candidates without anybody believing it would seriously affect the election. During the campaign, there were lynchings in Duluth, Minnesota; Paris, Texas; Graham, North Carolina; Corinth, Mississippi; Macclenny, Florida; and elsewhere. The Star had occasionally, over the previous year, published strong editorials against lynching, but the paper’s complacency more often prevailed. When it had reason to feature or consider the Civil War, only as distant from 1920 as the Kennedy Presidency is from our own day, it took satisfaction from lore and legend, and from North-South reconciliation—which (rather than emancipation) would be the dominant theme of the Lincoln Memorial, still under construction. The Star’s Sunday magazine made a serious revival of the Ku Klux Klan in Virginia and Georgia seem part of a colorful pageant being staged by reënactors: “The Old Klan, Its Mysterious Rites, the Blazing Cross and the Fantastic Costumes.”

Harding declared, in his speech accepting the nomination, “I believe the federal government should stamp out lynching,” but his party’s platform was more evasive: “We urge Congress to consider the most effective means to end lynching in this country.” The cravenness of the Convention document compelled the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs to withhold its endorsement from the G.O.P. ticket. The Democratic Party, the nation’s principal political guarantor of Jim Crow segregation for two more generations, offered even less. The word “lynching” doesn’t appear in the platform constructed in San Francisco, and when Cox, late in the campaign, wrote that his opponent was trying to “arouse racial hatred,” he meant that Harding was making too many pledges to Black citizens, which he had no “intention of carrying out.” During the last days of the campaign, a pamphlet claiming that Harding had Black ancestry received substantial press coverage, but too late to incite the full horror it intended.

Memory of the recent mass death from influenza underwent its own sort of quarantine, a mental feat akin to the general denial surrounding race. The pandemic had never received sustained attention from the federal government. Wilson didn’t address it in public, not even during its third wave, in 1919, when he remained preoccupied with peacemaking abroad. His detachment may have been enabled by something newly messianic in him, whereas Trump’s petulant self-pity over COVID-19 was inevitable from the start. But the Presidential vacuum feels shocking in either century. Harding, in 1919, had been one of two senators to propose a modest appropriation for research into the flu; in 1920, there was no serious campaign discussion of any public-health policies that might blunt future pandemics. Whooping cough, tuberculosis, and even anthrax (a possible danger from new shaving brushes) all found their way into the news, but the flu departed from political discussion as stealthily as it had once settled into people’s lungs.

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