THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 27
who had stuck with Taft in 1912 and
the progressives who’d bolted away
on Theodore Roosevelt’s bull moose.
When it came to the Party’s current
fissures, Harding appeared likely to
please the dwindling faction that re-
mained open to participation in Wil-
son’s League, as well as the Senate’s
Reservationists and Irreconcilables, who
opposed it with varying degrees of im-
placability.
As the campaign took shape, Har-
ding, whose success in politics had been
only intermittent before he was elected
to the Senate, in 1914, was aided by his
pacific, Rotarian temperament; by an
ambitious and mystical spouse; and by
his sensual handsomeness—Alice Roo-
sevelt Longworth, daughter of Teddy,
believed that he resembled “a decaying
Roman emperor.” During the Conven-
tion, Harding had found time to dally,
twice, with his mistress, Nan Britton,
who’d given birth to their child a year
earlier. In most respects besides the
extramarital, he was the opposite of
the man the Republicans have now, a
century later, nominated for a second
time. Far from bellowing that he alone
could fix things, Harding accepted his
nomination by saying, “No man is big
enough to run this great republic.” He
promised to be directed by his party,
not by any sense of personal gifts or
destiny. If Trump is the most cultish
figure ever to achieve his party’s nom-
ination for President, Harding may
have been the least.
His Democratic opponent was an-
other Ohioan, the state’s reformist
governor, James M. Cox. At the state-
house in Columbus, he had been both
progressive and pragmatic, appointing
skilled technicians where Harding
would have chosen pals. Cox, too,
was a fallback choice at his party’s
Convention, in San Francisco. It took
him forty-four ballots to beat the
ballyhooed front-runners, including
A. Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney Gen-
eral, who had made himself the scourge
of left-wing radicals after anarchists
bombed his home on Washington’s R
Street, in June of 1919. Cox appeared
to be, like Harding, a man who could
thread several important needles. Pro-
League of Nations but not ardently so,
he was also considered, when it came
to the enforcement of just-imposed
Prohibition, neither wet nor dry but,
like the Democrats’ deliberately flexi-
ble platform plank, “moist.” His bland
memoir, “Journey Through My Years”
(1946), brings to mind such non-show-
stopping oratory as this, from 1920:
“We stand at the forks of the road and
must choose which to follow.” If Har-
ding’s private life was secretly louche,
Cox’s divorce from his first wife was
eight years in the past and a matter of
public record. Now fifty, he was remar-
ried, to a much younger woman, and
the couple’s new baby, Anne, was about
to become a popular photographic sub-
ject for the Washington Star’s Sunday
rotogravure.
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 Washing-
ton 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 fu-
ture. The marvels of modernity were
regularly showcased in the paper: the
start of coast-to-coast airmail; Gover-
nor Cox’s use of an amplifier when ad-
dressing a crowd; Senator Harding’s
preservation, on a phonograph record,
of one of his speeches. A mid-July ad-
vertisement by Woodward & Lothrop,
a now vanished Washington depart-
ment store, enticed the homemaker to
buy “asbestos table mats.”A
nd yet the prevailing mood of the
country was troubled. The recent
past weighed heavily on voters, who
wanted to forget or suppress it. The in-
fluenza epidemic had finally subsided
in the spring of 1920, leaving six hun-
dred and seventy-five thousand Amer-
icans dead—more than ten times the
number of U.S. soldiers killed on Eu-
ropean battlefields. There might have
been a strong public desire to celebrate
the world war as a mission accom-
plished, but, nearly two years after the
Armistice, bodies were still being re-patriated from France for burial at Ar-
lington, 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 con-
victed, but Attorney General Palmer
was bent on pursuing the rest.
The country feared that this imme-
diate past was already turning into pro-
logue. Nothing abroad had been set-
tled. After the Versailles Treaty was
rejected by the U.S. Senate, the Euro-
pean Allies had to arrange its imple-
mentation by themselves, negotiating
disarmament and reparations with the
Weimar Republic at a conference in
Spa, Belgium, which the Star’s corre-
spondent 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 Eu-
ropean suitors. Many Americans cast
doubtful looks across the Atlantic, and
nativists were suspicious of the still as-
similating Europeans they nonetheless
pandered to as new voting constituen-
cies. The threats to America were com-
ing, 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 Mos-
cow, told British and European work-
ers to get ready for “heavy civil war”
and “revolutionary struggle.” As Poland
held off Trotsky’s Red Army, a dele-
gation of Polish-Americans pleaded
with Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Tu-
multy, for U.S. aid to Warsaw. Neither
candidate advocated such action, which
seemed symptomatic of what Harding
identified as the problem of “hyphen-
ated citizenship,” the dual loyalties that
made immigrants to the U.S. encour-
age American “meddling” in their coun-
tries 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