26 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
Republican Warren G. Harding spoke to voters from his front porch in Ohio.
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
THE NORMALCY ELECTION
What can we learn from the fears and longings of the 1920 campaign?
BY THOMAS MALLON
H
ere in stately, spacious Kalorama,
a Washington, D.C., neighbor-
hood less familiar and storied than
nearby Georgetown, politics makes
strange neighbors. Over on Tracy Place,
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump oc-
cupy a large, charmless house whose
chief selling point, one suspects, was
its fuck-you proximity to the post-Pres-
idential residence of Barack and Mi-
chelle Obama, several houses away, on
Belmont Road.
A short walk from either takes you
to 2340 S Street, into which Mr. and
Mrs. Woodrow Wilson moved after
leaving the White House, in March,
- Wilson’s successor, Ohio’s Sena-
tor Warren G. Harding, and his wife,
Florence, were packing up their house
a few blocks away, at 2314 Wyoming.
Harding was a serious poker player, and
today his old house is occupied by the
Ambassador of gambling-friendly Mo-
naco. The Wilson House, a small mu-
seum that is Kalorama’s chief tourist
attraction, has been closed during the
Covid-19 pandemic. With awareness
of Wilson’s racism cancelling his once-
good name, someone has placed a Black
Lives Matter sign, looking hasty and
apologetic, against a small pane of glass
near the front door.
The last four of Wilson’s eight years
in the White House were an epic drama.
Reëlected in 1916 on an implied prom-
ise of nonintervention (“He kept us out
of war”), he soon became the Com-
mander-in-Chief of an American mil-
itary victory and, on the streets of
Europe, the rhapsodically received or-
acle of a permanent peace that would
be sustained by a League of Nations.
Crushed by his own country’s resis-
tance to this vision, he suffered a stroke
in 1919 after barnstorming the U.S. in
support of the League. The following
year, he was too infirm to fulfill his
hopes of bucking the two-term tradi-
tion and running for a third.
When considered against the elec-
toral circumstances that exchanged Wil-
son, a Democrat, for Harding, a Re-
publican, some of the tumults of 2020
appear to be a centennial reiteration,
or inversion, of the calamities and long-
ings of the 1920 campaign. Then the
country—recently riven by disease, in-
flamed with racial violence and anx-
ious about immigration, torn between
isolation and globalism—yearned for
what the winning candidate somewhat
malapropically promised would be a
return to “normalcy.” Early in 2020, the
term remained useful to supporters of
Joe Biden, with its suggestion of Pres-
idential behavior once more within the
pale. The word’s nostalgic tenor soon
enough made it anathema to left-wing
Democrats, and the cyclonic circum-
stances of the past six months may have
made it feel obsolete to Biden himself,
but it is still what he is talking about
when he calls for removing Donald
Trump: “Will we rid ourselves of this
toxin? Or will we make it a permanent
part of our national character?” In terms
of the Presidential decency on which
so much depends, there is nowhere to
go but backward.
Harding received the Republican
nomination on June 12th, in a hellishly
hot Chicago. His tenth-ballot victory
came after the famous deadlock-dis-
solving conversations in a “smoke-filled
room” at the Blackstone Hotel. His
image seemed to materialize as a kind
of anti-Wilson: a non-cerebral, non-
visionary backslapper, less interested in
remaking the world than in making
sure that Main Street looked spruce.
His instinctive centrism led the Re-
publican overlords to believe that Har-
ding might finally reunite the “regulars” A.P
.
