THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 29
venness 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 prin-
cipal political guarantor of Jim Crow
segregation for two more generations,
offered even less. The word “lynching”
doesn’t appear in the platform con-
structed in San Francisco, and when
Cox, late in the campaign, wrote that
his opponent was trying to “arouse ra-
cial 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 sus-
tained attention from the federal gov-
ernment. Wilson didn’t address it in
public, not even during its third wave,
in 1919, when he remained preoccu-
pied 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 pos-
sible danger from new shaving brushes)
all found their way into the news, but
the flu departed from political discus-
sion as stealthily as it had once settled
into people’s lungs.
The speed with which the disease’s
ravaging was airbrushed from history
remains a matter of mystery and spec-
ulation. In “America’s Forgotten Pan-
demic” (1989), Alfred W. Crosby sug-
gests that the flu became in people’s
minds “simply a subdivision of the war,”
the other alien calamity that they were
intent on forgetting. Few contagious
diseases in that era were ever cured, and
a practiced fatalism probably contrib-
uted to the willful adoption of what
today we would call closure. Whereas
the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to de-
termine what happens on November
3rd, the flu played no discernible part
in Harding’s election.
It may, however, have contributed
subconsciously to the longing for nor-
malcy. The fulfillment of that longing
depended on erasure more than on scru-
tiny, nostalgia instead of vision. As Ir-
ving Stone, in his chapter on Cox in
“They Also Ran” (1943), summed it up:The people were tired: tired from the war,
tired from the suffering and bloodshed, tired
from hysteria, tired from being geared to the
breaking point, tired from the vast expendi-
tures of money and morale and man power,
tired from eight years of idealism, tired from
personal government. ... For just a little while
they wanted to be let alone, to sleep in the sun,
to recoup their energies and their enthusiasm.Cox promised a campaign of “gin-
ger and jazz,” but Harding won by con-
ducting a sort of non-campaign from
his “front porch.” He occasionally trav-elled into competitive states, but Mar-
ion, Ohio, had a small-town camera-
readiness that proved more effective
than stumping. Harding made news
greeting barefoot children or taking a
vacation from what already appeared to
be one: “Harding Lets Up in Campaign
Work—Declares Holiday and Motors
Forty Miles for Game of Golf.” Cox
insisted that no one was going to keep
him “muzzled” on any veranda, and he
taunted Harding as if his opponent were
Joe Biden “hiding in his basement.” But
when Cox toured Western states, where
voters were more sympathetic to the
League, he risked becoming ensnared
by local political squabbles that Har-
ding was able to avoid.
There was one sea change that year:
the triumph of women’s suffrage, on
August 18th, when Tennessee ratified
the Nineteenth Amendment. After de-
cades of bitter conflict in which its pro-
ponents were mocked, imprisoned, and
despised, both candidates were eager
to be seen giving it a final push toward“Sorry, kid. The guy who comes up with names is on vacation,
so we’re just gonna call you Peter Who Eats Sandwiches.”