The 1920 presidential election took place following World War I and a year of chaos and violence known as the Red Summer. President Woodrow Wilson had suffered a major stroke in the fall of 1919 and was left partially paralyzed. Despite this, he still held out hopes of running for a third term but it had become clear that Democrat leaders were done with him and wanted to move on.The Republicans were clearly in the ascendancy after retaking Congress in the last midterm elections; there had been talk of running Theodore Roosevelt again in 1920 but he died in early 1919. At their convention in Chicago that June, they nominated Ohio Senator Warren Harding. Harding, a former newspaper editor in his home town of Marion, was a likeable but intellectually dim party apparatchik. The Republican platform ran on a "return to normalcy" and rejection of US entry into the League of Nations. Harding's running mate was former Boston mayor Calvin Coolidge, who had gained national notoriety through his handling of a police strike in the city.The Democrat convention was in San Francisco in late June, the first time a major party had held a convention west of the Rockies. They ended up with Ohio governor James Cox and former Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin Roosevelt. The Cox-Roosevelt ticket lacked any substantiative message beyond supporting entry into the League of Nations, which the American public was largely against.
There was little doubt about the outcome of the election despite some weak Democrat attempts at race baiting by accusing Harding of being part-black (his campaign produced a family tree to disprove the charge) and he was elected on November 2 in an overwhelming landslide with 404 electoral votes to Cox's 127. The popular vote was 61% to 34%, the only time a non-incumbent president has topped 60% in an election. Cox won nothing outside the South but a bigger surprise was Tennessee's defection to the Republican camp, the first time since Reconstruction that one of the eleven former Confederate states had voted Republican in a presidential election. This was attributed to widespread opposition to the League of Nations in the state.This was also the first presidential election to be broadcast live on the radio (radio transmission being then limited to the New York City area) and the first after the 19th Amendment had mandated nationwide female suffrage although turnout of women voters was rather insignificantly low.
>>18379215Nevada didn't even crack 80,000 people in the 1920 US Census. It was flogged into statehood in 1864 solely to give Lincoln additional electoral votes although he didn't actually need them to win.
>>18379215>Iowa matching California in electoral votes>Massachusetts having more electoral votes than California
>>18379246Iowa has substantially lost population since the Depression. The state has only 10% more people now than it did in 1890.
>>18379246California exploded somewhat with the California Gold Rush, but that was only enough to get it to statehoodOnly after WWII did California really explode in population
Harding won the biggest electoral landslide since Franklin Pierce in 1852. The 19th Amendment also significantly expanded the pool of eligible voters. That Cox lost was because nobody wanted the League of Nations and everyone was tired of Wilsonian progressivism.
>>18379215>Harding's running mate was former Boston mayor Calvin Coolidge, who had gained national notoriety through his handling of a police strike in the city.I recently finished "Calvin Coolidge: An American Enigma" and it goes into detail about why he was chosen.Cal was actually the first VP to be picked by the delegates' choice and not by coronation of the party elders.Harding was always the fourth place option for the 1920 race so most delegates spent days advocating for Hiram Johnson, Leonard Wood, and the governor from Illinois who's name I've forgotten. As well as smaller candidates like future presidents Hoover and Calvin Coolidge.And they debated and campaigned in the hot summer, almost 100 degrees in the convention hall, for days until the party elders and senatorial class decided to coronate Warren Harding as a compromise black horse candidate. Which really pissed off everyone there.So, in retribution, the delegates chose Calvin Coolidge - known for being incorruptible and disliked by party leaders - with a greater applause and cheering than Harding was given when it was announced he'd be the nominee.Calvin Coolidge himself wasn't even there. He was still the governor of Boston.He kept in touch with the goings-on at the convention by phone. His wife, future first lady Grace Coolidge, asked him why one particular phone call was going on so long. "Nominated" was his one word reply.
>>18379215FDR knew this election was a lost cause for the Democrats and he used it mainly as a way of touring the country and getting his face out there for future presidential runs. He had originally thought of making a run in 1936 but events caused him to speed things up four years.
>The Wilson years had been too much for Main Street. Constant idealism, utopian goals, saving the world for democracy, and relentless self-sacrifice were exhausting. The American people, wanting nothing more than to be left alone for a while, turned their backs on it all and instead elected a third-rate mediocrity to the White House. Harding's inauguration on March 4, 1921 was followed by a stifling pall of reaction and neo-standpatterism descending over Washington D.C., perhaps epitomized by his selection of banker Andrew Mellon as Treasury Secretary.
The isolated blue patch in the West is Mineral County, Montana which only recorded 889 votes in this election and it went Democrat by a difference of just 15.
>>18379299There was a documentary about FDR from the 80s in which they interview the three living former presidents at the time (Nixon, Ford, and Carter) and ask their takes on him. Nixon, who had never been any fan of the guy, said "He was certainly an operator."
Everyone was sick of Wilson's shit by 1920 much like how everyone hated Carter in 1980 so even many loyal Democrats crossed party lines. Irish and German immigrants in particular wanted to kill Wilson, the second for understandable reasons, the first because of his Anglophilia, so they all boycotted the election or voted for Harding as a huge fuck you.
>>18379299it should also be stated that FDR in 1920 was a lot different guy than he was in 1933, this was among other things before he was crippled by polio
>>183793571919-20 had been as bad years for the nation as 1968, 1980, or 2008. The economy was in a major downturn and there were huge race riots and socialists/anarchists setting off bombs everywhere. Harding ran on a campaign of returning to normalcy.
>>18379215Harding's landslide in this election was nothing short of impressive; he got basically all voting blocs outside the South and carried both rural and city voters.
>>18379384Nixon and Reagan had bigger electoral college margins but didn't get as much popular vote because there were still some fairly significant Democrat blocs in welfare recipients, urban areas, and union workers. Harding though got basically everyone that could vote and didn't talk in a Southern drawl.
>>18379215>and former Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin Roosevelt. The Cox-Roosevelt ticketI didn't realize FDR ran as a VP. Fag had zero fucking experience too. he got his law degree, was a lawyer for like 2 years, actually wait, he didn't even get his JD. he went to columbia and then dropped out before graduating and passed the bar exam. was a lawyer for 2 years at some fancy law firm who hired him due to his last name, got elected as a state senator due to his last name, served 1 term and 2.5 months and then got hired as the assistant secretary of the navy, just like Teddy, because of his last name. literally his only experience in 1920 was >2 years, 2 months and 17 days as state senator>8 years as assistant secretary of the navy he hadn't even written his john paul jones book yet
>>18379395Back in those days vice presidential picks could come from more unusual sources, today they play it safe and usually just select a Congressman or governor so you would never see an assistant cabinet secretary getting selected today.
There was a Reddit thread about the 1920 election but it was half Pajeets repeating the parties switched meme over and over dozens of times.
>>18379357Wilson had also ran for reelection on an antiwar platform he of course had no intention of actually following.
As has been explained before, this election was specifically a repudiation of Wilson. In 1924 there was minimal ideological difference between Coolidge and Davis so no real reason to vote Democrat then either. In 1928 Hoover was extremely popular and Smith's religion cost him a lot of support.
There was a consensus at the time that the 1920 election was a "kangaroo election" meaning the bottom halves of each ticket (Coolidge and FDR) were by far the stronger candidates than either of the actual nominees
>>18379399I'm sure the Roosevelt name, didn't hurt. but before either FDR's presidency or Carter's or something that didn't happen until the mid 1900s the VP basically literally did nothing. The only actual job the VP has is presiding over the senate and voting to break ties but it's not like speaker of the house presiding. it's like bong speaker of the house presiding where all they could do was parliamentary shit. The president pro temp of the senate doesn't even do it now, they just make the jr senators do it. The only VP who has ever said he liked it was Jefferson since he was a parliament procedures autist and literally wrote a book on it
>>18379440as has been mentioned earlier, FDR was also a significantly different guy in 1920 than he later became, just as Wilson had once been a conservative Cleveland Democrat
The economy had recovered from the postwar recession by late in 1921 and Harding commuted Eugene Debs's prison sentence and invited him to the White House.
>>18379220>despite some weak Democrat attempts at race baiting by accusing Harding of being part-black (his campaign produced a family tree to disprove the charge)it was a better time
>>18379215>>18379220What was all of the seethe over? was it just WWI and the league of nations? Wilson won 2 elections
>>18379246>>18379275>>18379273When did they find oil in LA/Long branch?california is really mountainous and the only reason it's so populated is because there are a lot of jobs due to the major ports and oil industries and major ports bring other industries. idk how much trade was coming in via the pacific ports in 1920, where as now LA/Longbranch has more traffic than NY/NJ
>>18379280what other bullshit did wilson do other than the fed and the league of nations?
>The Red Scare no doubt abetted standpatters who used it as a vehicle to depict all labor unions as socialist front groups and declare that the open shop was the only American way. The nation was further inflamed by the trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts in 1921, two left wing Italian immigrants who had avoided military service during the war and were now on trial for murdering a factory paymaster and a security guard. The New England WASP judge and jury were undoubtedly not able to deliver a fair and impartial verdict to the two defendants.>Liberal activists in America and abroad rallied to the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti; they dragged out their appeals six years but were ultimately strapped into the Bay State's electric chair in 1927 and became martyred heroes to leftists everywhere. Although their guilt was not in doubt, it was also clear that they did not get a fair trial; in a less inflammatory atmosphere they might have at least avoided the death penalty.
>>18379481>>18379467>>18379357>>18379379The tail end of Wilson's administration was a complete shitfest. Nobody, just nobody still liked the guy by 1920.
>>18379298not that corruption isn't a massive issue now, since basically every politician is corrupt. but it's weird how many old time politicians like Coolidge, Teddy and Garfield were famous for being anti corruption
>>18379467>Wilson won 2 electionsSo did George W. Bush for that matter.
>>18379306who wrote this? seems like a lot of seethe. most of the federal departments were created in the 20th century so presidents from before Teddy were much more limited in what they could actually do and would usually let congress run the show. that's why no one really talks about presidential deeds outside of Jackson and Lincoln before 1900
>>18379325>1920 and it's still just the civil war lines>>18379335he was very much one of those didn't actually ever do anything in office until he got to the presidency and just used the lower offices as a stepping stone. Wilson was the same way and more modern comparisons would be like obama, romney in 2008/2012, rubio in 2016, the current governors of NJ and Virginia now and the immediate past governor of NJ. like their obvious goals are just to check off boxes so they could run for president
>>18379357was it just the league of nations/WWI and interventionalism?>>18379379ok, that clears that up
>>18379403the party switch thing doesn't happen until like goldwater/nixon due to EL BJ forcing integration. IDK why jeets keep pushing that except to try to claim Lincoln, FDR and teddy as lefties. like if you look at any presidential map from the precivil war era until lbj v gold water, unless it's a massive landlside like the FDR 1932 map it's literally just the fucking slave states v free state
>>18379417most of the 20th century elections outside of like the FDR ones and like LBJ v goldwater and Carter v reagan saw 2 very similar platforms
>>18379497the bush thing was mostly due to clinton era banking rollbacks and lending practices. bush fucking contributed to it. but it was mostly clinton's fault. Clinton got rid of a lot of the great depression era banking regulations and told banks to give no asset mortgages to blacks in order to ruin the suburbs. bush than contributed to this because some data the GOP had at the time showed that if you got an illegal to own a house instead of renting they would start voting republican so he pushed for those shitty mortgages to illegals
>The resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan epitomized the reactionary spirit of the decade. The new Klan had little to do with the hooded night riders of the Reconstruction era South; its base of support was concentrated in the Midwest and had a high number of middle class professionals in its ranks. The Klan condemned all that was not WASP; Catholics, Jews, communists, anarchists, immigration, blacks, alcohol, and the theory of evolution all met its ire. At one point it had 5 million members and significant political pull in some states, especially Indiana.>The Klan had Masonic rituals, chants such as "Kill the Kikes, Katholics, and Koons", and ranks like Wizard and Grand Wizard, and it staged large public rallies; some 40,000 robed Klansmen marched in Washington D.C. in 1925. In short, it can be described as an extreme xenophobic reaction from the heartland states. The revived Klan did not last long; a Congressional investigation in 1928 revealed it as a massive pyramid scheme and it quickly collapsed after tht.
I cannot fathom anything more boring than the history of usa.
>>18379542based>>18379543the US is the only country that matters, cry about it, thirdie
>European immigration, temporarily halted by the war, quickly resumed once peace returned; another 800,000 immigrants arrived in 1920-21. A temporary immigration quota was enacted by Congress in 1921, giving way to the more substantiative Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. The Immigration Act also banned all Japanese immigrants; infuriated Japanese staged mass anti-US rallies and one fanatic committed seppuku in front of the US embassy in Tokyo in a dramatic protest. Canada and Latin America meanwhile had no immigration restrictions placed on them.>With that, the flow of immigration became a trickle and the Great Depression even caused an uptick in emigration out of the US. Aside from the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act during World War II, the 1924 Immigration Act remained the law of the land until 1965.
>>18379578yeah that one jewish dem senator opened the borders
>The advances of science and medicine were making real results. Hookworm was eradicated from the South by the 1920s and by 1930 the average life expectancy of a white American had increased eight years since the start of the century. Yet it was a reactionary decade and there was a resurgence of Christian fundamentalists who charged that Darwinism led to atheism and was corrupting the morals of America's youth as the jazz age seemed to showcase. There were attempts to restrict schools from teaching the "bestial hypothesis" and three Southern states did succeed in passing such measures.
>One state was Tennessee and it was here that a major showdown was imminent when in 1925 a Dayton high school teacher named John Scopes was indicted for teaching the theory of evolution in his classroom. The case was a media circus that brought a flood of reporters to the small Southern town, many of them big city Northeasterners with a snob prejudice against Southern culture--some of the press were surprised to find that local girls in Dayton wore flapper bob haircuts and silk stockings, apparently expecting them to go barefoot and wear sackcloth.>Scopes was defended by celebrity attorney Clarence Darrow while the old progressive lion William Jennings Bryan, an ardent fundamentalist Christian, represented the prosecution. In the end, the state won its case, Scopes was found guilty, and fined $100. He appealed and the state supreme court tossed the fine on a technicality, although the anti-evolution law remained on the books until the 1960s. The aging Bryan, now in his 60s, died of exhaustion just five days after the trial ended. In the end it was a Pyrrhic victory that only seemed to make Christian fundamentalists look foolish, but fundamentalism nonetheless remained a strong part of American culture.
>>18379620>WJB's last act was to defend a $100 fine for teaching evolutionlmao. It's weird how many of those guys, clay, calhune, webster and WJB just ended up as cucks in the end
>>18379628Calhoun went to his grave proposing a totally unworkable solution to the sectional conflict by having two co-presidents, one a Northern, the other a Southern one.
>>18379620This didn't mention that the ACLU deliberately put Scopes up to it because they wanted a legal challenge against the anti-evolution law.
>>18379635it's also weird how calhoun, webster and clay all died at like exactly the same time. I think the one who lived the longest only lived 2 more years than the other two
>The rise of car culture, radio, recorded music, and Hollywood brought about new ways of life over the decade--Americans could be more mobile than ever before and receive news and media quicker than ever before. It also brought a substantial change in moral standards. Women could now all vote and many were dressing and engaging in lifestyles that outraged the older generation. The short-skirted, chain-smoking, carousing flapper became the "face" of the Roaring Twenties. Contraception activist Margaret Sanger made scandalous headlines over the decade. It had become acceptable for the first time for women to wear makeup; in earlier times only prostitutes did and it was avoided by respectable ladies. Speakeasies were gender-integrated unlike the male-only saloon of the old days, where women other than prostitutes didn't venture. When it came to employment, women did not make so much progress in the '20s and most continued to work traditional female jobs such as manufacturing lines, secretaries, nurses, and schoolteachers.>The Scopes Monkey Trial proved that the old-time religion had lost some of its teeth; established preachers like Billy Sunday found their audience diminishing as tales of Hell and damnation for sinners became less appealing. Churches also had to compete with movies and sporting events for people's attention.
>Literature was also putting the 19th century behind it as the old, genteel generation of novelists such as Henry Adams, Henry James, and William Howells had all died by 1920. The monopoly that New England WASPs had on intellectual culture in America was fading and the new generation came from more diverse backgrounds. The most famous or notorious man of letters of the era was the surly H.L. Mencken, a man who made it his mission to acidly denounce nearly all aspects of American mass culture. Christian fundamentalists, the middle class, democracy, family life, patriotism, and idealists of all stripes met Mencken's ire. He denounced the South as "the hookworm and pellagra Belt" and said of the Scopes Monkey Trial "Heave an egg out a Pullman window and you will hit a fundamentalist. They are everywhere where science and reason are not to be found."
>>18379665>Margaret Sangerisn't she the eugenics lady?
>Once peace returned to Europe, America's industrial lobbies began to fear cheap imported goods again so there was agitation for high tariff walls. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922 raised import duties to 38%, nearly the level of the infamous Payne-Aldrich Tariff. This bill was also a first in that it authorized the president to reduce or lower tariffs as much as 50%. Harding and Coolidge both backed the Republican Party's traditional protectionist stance and in their combined six years authorized 32 tariff hikes while cutting duties just five times, mostly on unimportant items.>The tariffs proved to be a major economic pinch on the European states who had hoped to sell goods in the United States to rebuild their economies from war and to pay back their war debts. In the end, Europe responded in kind with their own protectionist policies. Nobody came out the winner of the trade wars of the 1920s and it would end up contributing to the evils that were to come after 1929.
>>18379801a. basedb. who fucking wrote this? free trade is terrible
>Harding's administration would prove the most scandal-ridden since Ulysses Grant--Veterans' Bureau chief Charles Forbes, a one-time army deserter, was caught with friends of his embezzling $200 million in funds from the bureau, had to resign, was convicted of embezzlement, and served two years in the Federal pen in Atlanta.>Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Albert Fall convinced Navy Secretary Denby to transfer the Navy's strategic oil reserve in Teapot Dome, Wyoming to the Interior Department. The clueless Harding signed the executive order authorizing this and Fall leased the land to oil men Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny after they paid him a bribe of more than half a million dollars. The Teapot Dome Scandal leaked in 1923, two years after the crooked deal had taken place, and all three men were indicted for bribery and embezzlement but it took until 1929 to finally bring them to trial. A jury ultimately acquitted Sinclair and Doheny while finding Fall guilty. He received one year in prison. Sinclair was convicted on a lesser charge of "shadowing" the jurors and refusing to testify before the Senate.
>The Teapot Dome Scandal was an outrage to moral-minded Americans who wondered how something as essential as the strategic oil reserve could be pawned off so easily. The acquittal of Sinclair and Doheny also left many shaking their heads and grousing how money could get someone out of nearly any legal scrape.>A Senate investigation in 1924 also disclosed that Attorney General Harry Daugherty had illegally sold pardons and liquor permits. He was forced out of office. Daugherty was tried in 1927 on accusations of improperly receiving funds in the sale of American Metal Company assets seized during World War I. The first jury deadlocked, the second one voted for acquittal. During the trial, Daugherty hid behind the now-deceased Harding by implying that the rot went all the way to the White House.>Harding was not himself guilty of corruption, merely horrible judgement in his choice of friends and Cabinet appointments. The news of the scandals however left him deeply despondent. He embarked on a speech-making summer tour across the nation in 1923 that took him as far as Alaska. The president sailed down the West Coast and arrived in San Francisco, where he died in his hotel room on August 2 of an apparent heart attack. It was widely said that learning about the bad behavior of his friends was really what killed him. A nation not yet fully aware of the extent of the scandals mourned Harding's untimely passing.
>>18379822wiki says $2 milly which would be $36 million in todays money. if it was $200 million it would be $3.6 billion in today's money
