Ohio senator Warren Harding ran against Ohio Governor James M. Cox in 1920. Both vice presidential candidates, Calvin Coolidge for the Republicans and Franklin Roosevelt, for the Democrats eventually became presidents themselves.
The election of 1920 saw the biggest popular vote landslide since records of the popular vote were recorded. Warren Harding's call for a "Return to Normalcy" played well with an American electorate weary of the disruption of the first World War. The election was seen as a sound rejection of outgoing president Woodrow Wilson's proposal for a new role for America on the world stage as a leader in the new League of Nations. 1920 was also the first election after the passage of the 19th Amendment that granted women the vote nationwide. Harding supported women's suffrage, which helped him win that demorgraphic.
Warren G. Harding (Ohio) J.Calvin Coolidge (Mass.) | Republican | 404 | 16,152,200 |
James M. Cox (Ohio) Franklin D. Roosevelt (N.Y.) | Democratic | 127 | 9,147,353 |
"A return to normalcy" was presidential candidate Warren Harding’s campaign promise in the election of 1920. After the extreme disruption of World War I and its aftermath, the American electorate was quite receptive to the concept.
Although detractors believed that the word was a neologism as well as a malapropism coined by Harding (as opposed to the more accepted term normality), research shows that the word normalcy was listed in dictionaries as far back as 1857.
The losing candidates . . .
A very young and vibrant Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the Vice Presidential candidate under the nominee, James M. Cox. Roosevelt had made a name for himself in the outgoing Woodrow Wilson administration as Secretary of the Navy. The Cox-Roosevelt ticket was soundly defeated.
Approximately a year later in August 1921, while vacationing at Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada, Roosevelt contracted an illness believed by his physicians to be polio, which resulted in his total and permanent paralysis from the waist down. He never walked again without assistance. Despite this, he went on to be elected president in 1932 and was re-elected three times.
No comments:
Post a Comment