30 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
passage. Republicans pointed out that
twenty-nine of the ratifying states were
controlled by the G.O.P.; Cox argued
that women’s traditional civilizing in-
fluence should make them natural sup-
porters of the League. Will Hays, the
chairman of the Republican National
Committee, who later codified mo-
tion-picture purity, hoped that settle-
ment of the suffrage issue would add
to “national security” and clarify the
“political atmosphere.” Secretary of
State Bainbridge Colby, hoping to avoid
any display “of the friction or collu-
sions which may have developed in the
long struggle for ratification,” chose to
sign the new amendment, without any
ceremony, at his home. The sudden ab-
sence of the contentious issue became
one more ingredient of normalcy; the
women’s crusade contributed to it by
going away, like the war and the flu.
The long-term direction of the coun-
try turned out to depend not on who
was at the top of each party’s ticket but
on the Vice-Presidential nominees. The
Republican Convention delegates, al-
lowed a free hand in the matter, had
picked the Massachusetts governor,
Calvin Coolidge, newly famous for his
tough handling of a Boston police walk-
out, in which he had declared, “There
is no right to strike against the public
safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”
Coolidge ended up serving twice as
long as Harding in the White House,
sanitizing the place with his dignified,
even endearing probity. Throughout
the 1920 campaign, he remained cir-
cumspect, allowing the image of thrifty
Silent Cal to accrue: voters learned that
he had not bought a new pair of shoes
for the past two years. His biographer
Amity Shlaes points out in “Coolidge”
(2013) that his oratorical version of “nor-
malcy” was “old times.”
Governor Cox selected the beguil-
ing thirty-eight-year-old Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the
Navy, for his running mate. But, if Roo-
sevelt was his first choice, Cox wasn’t
F.D.R.’s. One preliminary phase of the
1920 campaign feels like an alternate-
history novel: Roosevelt was intrigued
by the notion of being on a ticket that
was headed by—wait for it—Herbert
Hoover, the engineer turned nonpar-
tisan public servant, hailed for saving
Europe’s war refugees from starvation.
(Hoover, alas, decided to become a
Republican.)
Two weeks after being nominated
with Cox, F.D.R. assured him that he
was getting lots of favorable mail from
progressive Republicans. Roosevelt did
not point out that a portion of his sup-
porters believed him to be Teddy’s son.
He was soon on the stump from North
Dakota to West Virginia, exhibiting a
rhetorical talent that Cox could only
envy. F.D.R. couldn’t get Coolidge to
debate the League face to face, but he
told Bostonians that the Republican
platform was “a hymn of hate,” and in-
sisted to Hoosiers that Harding’s pledge
of party government amounted to “a
syndicated presidency,” not leadership.
Geoffrey C. Ward’s biography of the
young Roosevelt, “A First-Class Tem-
perament” (1989), depicts a devious, ex-
haustingly ambitious future President
who, in 1920, explained to voters that
normalcy would actually be “a mere pe-
riod of coma in our national life.”W
arren Gamaliel Harding was
elected President of the United
States on his fifty-fifth birthday, No-
vember 2, 1920. Turnout was low, but
voters provided Harding with a land-
slide and the Republican Party with
nearly unassailable majorities in both
houses of Congress. Debs polled al-
most a million votes for the Socialist
Party, despite his imprisonment and
the flood tide toward normalcy. The
election results were quick, uncontested,
and received with civility.
The Star felt certain that Harding
would appoint “big men” to his Cabinet,
and he did—Charles Evans Hughes
as Secretary of State, Hoover as Sec-
retary of Commerce—along with some
speckishly small and corrupt ones: Al-
bert Fall, the eventual brewmaster of
the Teapot Dome scandal, went to
Interior, and Harry Daugherty, Har-
ding’s campaign manager, became At-
torney General. The cash-stuffed en-
velopes of “the Ohio Gang” soon began
to upholster Washington. In the sum-
mer of 1923, increasingly mired in the
scandals of subordinates, Harding em-
barked on a cross-country trip, a po-
litical reset that he dubbed the “Voy-
age of Understanding.” Before he could
complete it, he died on August 2nd,
probably of a heart attack, in a SanFrancisco hotel room, just twenty-nine
months into his term. Cox later re-
called him as “a warm-hearted man
with most gracious impulses” who had
been undone by a “preference for cro-
nies of a lower type.”
Woodrow Wilson managed to out-
live Harding and rode in his funeral
procession, but, six months later, in
February, 1924, those who still associ-
ated Wilson with freedom and self-
determination were keeping a death-
bed vigil, kneeling in prayer outside his
house on S Street. Cox had by then re-
turned to the newspaper business; a
decade later, with F.D.R. in the White
House, he declined his old running
mate’s request to serve as Ambassador
to Germany or as head of the Federal
Reserve. Cox’s daughter (the baby in
the rotogravure), Anne Cox Chambers,
died in January, at the age of a hun-
dred. In the past five years, ideological
descendants of Debs, whose sentence
Harding commuted in 1921 with a
Christmastime handshake at the White
House, have brought democratic so-
cialism back into the mainstream of
American political debate.
The Star expired early in the Pres-
idency of Ronald Reagan, who, with
admiration that had lingered since
youth, hung Coolidge’s portrait in the
White House Cabinet Room. The Star’s
creamy white Beaux-Arts building still
stands directly across from the city’s
Old Post Office, once the office of the
Postmaster General and now occupied
under a sixty-year lease by guests of
the Trump International Hotel. The
country’s current Postmaster, Louis
DeJoy, lives in Kalorama, at the corner
of Connecticut and Wyoming Avenues.
In August, demonstrators outside his
apartment building, spurred by con-
gressional accusations that DeJoy was
trying to sabotage the mail-in voting
that the President detests, shouted de-
mands for his resignation.
Warren Harding’s house and front
porch in Marion, Ohio, have under-
gone restoration in advance of the open-
ing, next door, of a museum and library.
Because of the greatest health emer-
gency to envelop the United States
since the Spanish-flu pandemic, the
dedication of these new facilities, once
scheduled for September 18th, has been
postponed indefinitely.