Amidst the frantic events of our current election cycle, I thought it’d be interesting to wander back to my latest favorite historical home—the 1920s—and see what was going on politically. As always, I like to see where the past echoes in the present.

1920 was marked by the aftermath of World War I, which, in itself, had taken the art of war to horrible new heights of devastation, destruction, and depravity. The trenches, mustard gas, the financial instability after the wartime boom, all combined into a stark landscape.

The 20s was also the era to debate nationalistic activism—a response to labor unrest at home—and global idealism, our entry into the League of Nations. In short, the question posed was: as a nation were we to look inward as isolationists or outward as leaders in the post WWI world?

Additionally, two towering giants of a generation were gone: Theodore Roosevelt, that dashing figure larger than life, had died, and Woodrow Wilson, the former president, was an invalid.

In their places stepped the Republican candidate for 1920. Warren Harding was a newspaper editor of Ohio’s Marion Star, a moderately successful paper he and his buddies purchased for $300, in which Harding crafted measured, vague editorials and avoided stories that were critical of anything.

To some extent, this vagueness is what made the Star so popular. Harding delighted in his idyllic childhood on an Ohio farm doing chores amidst his close-knit siblings and smart parents. He took those sentiments and values into politics and won his first senate seat in 1899. The new senator prided himself on being “a good guy,” which in turn got him the nomination for president. As candidates go, his appeal sprung from his deeply held beliefs, easygoing nature, and earnest presentation. It was hard not to like him. (White House Historical Association)

His running mate was a stoic, taciturn New Englander, the Governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge was a Vermonter and definitely took some of Green Mountain grit into his successful political career. His family, with deep New England roots, were hardy farmers and businessmen. However he did not have the warm close childhood of Harding’s. His mother and sister both died prematurely and the mood in his childhood home was often somber.

A graduate of Amherst College, Coolidge trained as a lawyer and practiced in Northampton, Massachusetts. This is his personal philosophy:

T]here is a standard of righteousness that might does not make right, that the end does not justify the means, and that expediency as a working principle is bound to fail. The only hope of perfecting human relationships is in accordance with the law of service under which men are not so solicitous about what they shall get as they are about what they shall give. Yet people are entitled to the rewards of their industry. What they earn is theirs, no matter how small or how great. But the possession of property carries the obligation to use it in a larger service.

- 2010 JFK Symposium “A Standard of Righteousness”: The Worldview of Calvin Coolidge

by David Pietrusza

For their own candidate, Democrats proposed James M. Cox, also from Ohio and also a reporter, editor, and newspaper owner; The Dayton News and The Springfield News were his rags. Like others of his ilk, Cox came from a small-town farming background with the compensatory set of values and ideology that went along with that. He did not have an easy life but, in some measure, his hardships contributed to his progressive approach.

During his campaign, Cox visited 36 states and gave 394 speeches, mostly on domestic issues. He became known as a capable progressive guy, who backed women’s right to vote and Prohibition. Cox’s glory days were as Governor of Ohio, where he introduced minimum wage and workmen's compensation. He was keen on Americanization for immigrants and collective bargaining.

Cox’s running mate was none other than the young 29-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt, of whom so much is known and written that no elaboration is needed here.

Several facts of interest about elections in the 20s. First of all, the Republicans won hands down in an almost-overwhelming defeat of the Democrats. In his book They Also Ran ( 1943), Irving Stone remarks that Cox was far superior to Harding in every respect. Harding ran on a “Return to Normalcy” platform, and it played well in a tired war-worn country; Cox ran on a progressive future-oriented ticket and got much less traction.

Interestingly enough, every one of these men but Cox would become president. Harding died in office and was succeeded by Coolidge, and Roosevelt helmed the country through the Great Depression and the Second World War. The 1920 election was also the last to use phonographs to reach voters, and yet it was the first in which women could vote. The end of one era and the beginning of another.

As we contemplate the coming November election, what can we draw from 1920s politics? One of the take-aways is the idea of a “Return to Normalcy” versus forging ahead optimistically to the future. Perhaps it’s part of our human hardwiring or maybe because we are still such a young country, but frequently the past seems to rear up its nostalgic head as a time better than the present. We think the future is to be avoided as we scamper back to a place that, for the most part, didn’t exist. The idyllic past depends on whose past we’re talking about and where; as always, context is everything.

This yearning for the past is as old as human societies. Even Moses had his hands full leading his people out of slavery to the promised land. At one point in the book of Numbers, he rails at God in what is basically a huge temper tantrum. Paraphrasing, the conversation goes: “God, I have had it!” Moses railed. “I am responsible for all these people and they are whining about all the cucumbers and vegetables they used to eat in Egypt. They don’t want to follow me because I cannot give them meat. They forget that a return to Egypt is not about food, it is a return to slavery. Who in their right mind wants that?”

Clearly Moses was on his last nerve.

It’s no wonder that this constant conversation and love affair with the past is so endemic in our human nature and social order, especially if we think of the choice as cucumbers and slavery over an uncertain future in a promised land.

-Bird Jones