Manifest Destiny, Progressivism, War, and the Roaring Twenties 205on the League. The Republicans, lacking an outstanding candidate,
eventually chose Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio to head their
ticket, after he first assured the leadership that he had not been in-
volved in any scandal or improper behavior. Handsome and intellectu-
ally vapid, he managed to hide his numerous extramarital affairs. His
genius, argued the historian John D. Hicks, “lay not so much in his
ability to conceal his thought as in the absence of any serious thought
to reveal.” The nominating convention also chose Calvin Coolidge of
Massachusetts for Vice President. His outstanding achievement as
governor, according to his supporters, was breaking a strike by Boston
policemen.
Democrats also floundered in naming their ticket. It took forty-four
ballots before the exhausted delegates chose James M. Cox, governor
of Ohio, and Franklin D. Roo sevelt of New York, assistant secretary of
the navy in the Wilson administration. Cox and Roo sevelt did attempt
to focus the campaign on the League, but Americans had had enough
of European involvement and were attracted by Harding’s “back to
normalcy” and “America First” appeals. Not surprisingly, the election
produced a landslide for the Republicans. They captured the presi-
dency, 404 electoral votes to 127 , and both houses of Congress.
In his inaugural address, Harding went out of his way to kill any
hope that the country would join the League of Nations, declaring that
the United States would “seek no part in directing the destinies of the
world.” The gravely ill Wilson pronounced Harding’s remark a retreat
into “sullen and selfish isolation which is deeply ignoble because mani-
festly cowardly and dishonorable.” When Congress passed a resolution
similar to the one vetoed by Wilson that ended the war with Germany,
Harding signed it on July 2 , 1921. It signified not only the country’s
disengagement from active participation in European conflicts but a
withdrawal into isolationism.
As t h e nat ion entered the 1920 s—known later as the Roaring
Twenties—it soon became obvious that profound changes had taken
place since the turn of the century. First, the census of 1920 revealed
that most Americans now lived in or near cities— not on farms as was
generally believed. More than 13 million people moved from rural to