What Price Warren Harding?
What Price Warren Harding? When considering the presidential election of 1920 most historians have tended to emphasize the losing Democratic party’s structure, strategy and electoral performance. Of course, Warren Harding’s nomination in the “smoke filled room,” his muddled calls for “normalcy” and an “association of nations,” and his landslide victory all feature in accounts of 1920, but often the story of Democratic collapse has been more alluring. Like the fascination of a train wreck, the spectacular unraveling of the Wilsonian coalition, of progressivism, and of postwar internationalism have captured historians’ imaginations. The election of 1920, it seems, was first and foremost lost by the Democrats rather than won by the Republicans.[1] John Morello’s Selling the President, 1920 is something of a corrective to this tendency, and represents a reversion towards the truism that electoral history usually favors winners over losers. Morello, from DeVry Institute of Technology, focus
