Anything for a Vote

by Joseph Cummins

  On other fronts, Wilson was an active, liberal president. During his first term, he backed several bills that helped ease the plight of workers in America, including the Child Labor Bill, which forbade children under the age of fourteen from working in factories. He was also responsible for federal laws allotting funds for new highways and schools. The economy boomed, although this was due in part to the high price American companies could demand for their goods in war-ravaged Europe. With Wilson swearing to keep Americans out of the war, he was nominated by deafening applause on the first ballot at the Democratic Convention in St. Louis in June. His vice president continued to be Thomas Marshall.

  The Republicans sought their own “intellectual” in the White House and nominated Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, with Theodore Roosevelt’s former vice president Charles Fairbanks as his running mate. Roosevelt hemmed and hawed a bit before offering Hughes his backing—he called the former justice a “whiskered Wilson” and suggested that the only difference between the two was “a shave”—but in the end, he came around and supported Hughes.

  THE CAMPAIGN Wilson chose the now-somewhat-old-fashioned route of refusing to campaign, and at first it seemed like he didn’t need to. The Democratic slogan—one of the finest campaign slogans in all American presidential history—was “He kept us out of war.” This played exceedingly well, particularly in western states where more and more women had received the right to vote. (The Nineteenth Amendment would give voting rights to all women in 1920.) Wilson supporters claimed “a vote for Hughes is a vote for war!” Although, in fact, Hughes wanted to keep the country at peace. He was, however, undermined at every turn by Theodore Roosevelt, who, while ostensibly stumping for his party’s nominee, kept making bellicose anti-German statements.

  Nevertheless, the GOP managed to hurt Wilson on a number of issues. Although Americans wanted peace, they wanted their country to be prepared and respected by the world. Republicans, led by Roosevelt, successfully suggested that Wilson had not done enough to respond to the Lusitania attack or build up American armed forces. Wilson’s reputation was also sullied in the eyes of many religious Americans because of his personal life. His wife, Ellen, had died in 1914, and Wilson shocked the country by marrying again in December 1915—this time to a forty-something widow named Edith Bolling Galt. Republicans quickly spread rumors that the president had had an affair with Galt before Ellen’s death. Some even argued that Ellen had died of a broken heart.

  THE WINNER: WOODROW WILSON The race was surprisingly close. Election Day was November 7, and with much of the East reporting, by late in the evening Hughes had won almost all the electoral votes he was going to need—just one more state, California, would put him over the top. Democratic-leaning newspapers conceded defeat, while Republican ones carried huge headlines that read “THE PRESIDENT-ELECT—CHARLES EVANS HUGHES.” Wilson confessed to a friend a feeling of relief that he no longer had to shoulder the weighty responsibility of being president, yet, cautious as ever, he decided not to concede until the next morning, when returns from the West (notoriously slow in reporting) were in.

  It was a good thing. It turned out that Wilson had won California by 3,800 votes and swept the West. Nationwide, he beat Hughes 9,126,300 votes to 8,546,789, an amazing instance of snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat.

  WARREN G. HARDING

  VS.

  JAMES COX

  “[Harding] is a very respectable Ohio politician of the second class.”

  —New York Times

  Wilson may have promised to keep the country out of war, but by the time of his inauguration in 1917, new circumstances forced him to break his word. The Germans had opened up unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping, and several American vessels were sunk by U-boats. Even worse, Wilson discovered that Germany had proposed a secret alliance with Mexico. In return for joining the Axis powers, Mexico would be given most of the southwestern United States.

  Wilson declared war on Germany in April of 1917, sending thousands of “doughboys” to France to join in the hostilities. America’s role in the conflict lasted just eighteen months, but combat cost the lives of 53,000 American soldiers. When the armistice was signed in November of 1918, Wilson tried to get Senate ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, which included his cherished League of Nations, but the Republicans thwarted him at every turn. Worn out, Wilson suffered a stroke and spent the rest of his administration partially disabled.

  The end of the war brought higher costs for goods and widespread unemployment. Worse, the recent Russian Revolution had left many Americans on edge. This was just the opportunity the Republicans hungered for—a chance to reposition themselves as the party of the full dinner pail and the good old uncomplicated prewar days.

  THE CANDIDATES

  REPUBLICAN: WARREN G. HARDING Warren G. Harding was the most libidinous candidate to run for president until Bill Clinton waltzed in from Arkansas seventy years later; the good-looking Harding was particularly popular among women voters, who were now casting their ballots in large numbers. When Republican operatives decided to nominate the fifty-five-year-old Ohio senator, they asked if he had anything hidden in his personal life that would “disqualify” him from winning the presidency. Harding asked for some time to reflect on the question, and he may have pondered that he chewed tobacco, played poker, loved to drink (Prohibition had just been voted in), and was having affairs with not only the wife of one of his friends but also a young woman thirty years his junior, with whom he had an illegitimate daughter.

  Then he said, nope, nothing to hide, guys—it’s all good.

  Harding’s vice-presidential running mate was almost his polar opposite; Calvin Coolidge was the hard-nosed and taciturn governor of Massachusetts. When Coolidge received word that he had received the vice-presidential nod, he told his wife, “I’ve been nominated for vice president.” She said, “You aren’t going to take it, are you?” To which Coolidge replied, “I suppose I’ll have to.”

  DEMOCRAT: JAMES. M. COX The Democrats faced a serious disadvantage in 1920. They couldn’t part company with the recently crippled Woodrow Wilson—it would seem like they were abandoning their man when he was down. So their nominee was James Cox, the liberal governor of Ohio and former newspaper editor, who promised to campaign for Wilson’s pet project, the League of Nations. His running mate would be the young and charismatic assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, distant cousin and nephew-in-law of Theodore.

  THE CAMPAIGN

  With a candidate like Harding, the Republicans knew they had to act quickly. The first thing they did was get rid of the evidence. They sent his married lover, Carrie Fulton Phillips, on an extended, all-expenses-paid tour of Asia, along with her entire family. And just to be completely safe, Republicans also sent Harding’s brother-in-law to Europe because the guy had just married a Catholic (and Catholics didn’t play well in the conservative Midwest.)

  Now it was time for “a return to normalcy,” as Harding had explained in one of his campaign speeches. His speechwriter had actually written “a return to normality,” but Harding pronounced it “normalty.” Benevolent journalists translated it as “normalcy,” and the phrase became a popular Republican campaign slogan.

  Normalcy apparently meant small-town, turn-of-the-century American values—Harding was never terribly clear about this—but the phrase played well in a country that was becoming increasingly conservative. James Cox worked incredibly hard, campaigning 22,000 miles in thirty-six states, giving 400 speeches before two million people, but he was handicapped by association with Woodrow Wilson and his anti-Prohibition stance. (Harding, of course, loved his booze, but he expressed public support for Prohibition, echoing popular sentiments throughout the country.)

  Democrats furiously attacked Harding. They called him “weak, colorless, and mediocre.” They called him “a dummy, an animated automaton, a marionette.” They said he was part of a “Senatorial cabal” of “pygmies�
�� and “white-livered and incompetent politicians.” But nothing worked. Despite Harding’s excesses, he knew what he was doing. An admiring biographer wrote of him that he was a brilliant politician, shrewd when it came to “vacuity”—giving people satisfying emptiness.

  THE WINNER: WARREN G. HARDING

  In the fall of 1920, in the first-ever poll taken during a presidential campaign, Literary Digest magazine sent out millions of postcards to its readers, asking whom they would vote for. Harding won by a huge margin, especially among women. The same held true on Election Day. Harding and Coolidge won by a landslide, defeating the Democratic ticket 16,153,115 votes to 9,133,092, with a huge margin in the Electoral College of 404 to 127.

  The Roaring Twenties were about to begin, with just the man for the job at the helm—a president who knew how to have a good time.

  THE ADVENT OF THE AD MAN When Albert Lasker signed on as a Harding campaign consultant, the playbook for presidential elections was rewritten forever. Lasker was the head of a Chicago advertising and public relations firm and a true innovator; he coordinated a PR blitz for Harding that included movies, radio, photography, newspapers, and magazines. Some sample Lasker ad headlines:

  “America First!”

  “Independence means Independence, now as in 1776.”

  “Let’s be done with wiggle and wobble!”

  “This country will remain American. Its next President will remain in our own country.”

  These utterances may strike us as inane, but in 1920 they spoke to an American public that was becoming more insular in an uncertain world.

  Then, as now, people liked their movie stars, and Lasker helped Harding populate his front porch in Marion with Hollywood names. Long before Al Gore got chummy with Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, newsreel cameras captured Harding at home, hamming it up with the likes of Al Jolson, Lillian Russell, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford. The same cameras caught James Cox doggedly, grimly stumping away. People had no trouble deciding which candidate was more fun.

  JUMPING THE FENCE Harding had so many skeletons in his closet, it’s hard to imagine why any of his opponents would feel compelled to invent new ones. But that’s what happened when William Chancellor, a racist professor from Wooster, Ohio, claimed that he had thoroughly researched Harding’s past and discovered that the candidate had African American ancestors.

  In a paper entitled “Genealogy of Warren G. Harding of Marion, Ohio,” Chancellor claimed that Harding’s great-grandfather and great-grandmother were black and that his father was a mulatto who had married a white woman. As part of his “evidence,” Chancellor cited Amos Kling, Harding’s father-in-law—an unbalanced man who hated Harding—saying that Harding was “colored.”

  Woodrow Wilson and James Cox forbade the use of this material against Harding (although it was rumored that the latter whispered the story on more than one occasion). Most newspapers refused to touch it, although the slurs did appear in Democratic handbills. Harding himself was unruffled. When one newspaper reporter finally asked him directly, “Do you have any Negro blood?” Harding answered, to the horror of his party operatives, “How do I know, Jim? One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence.”

  A STRING OF WET SPONGES What’s in a word? Warren G. Harding’s long, meandering speeches, full of archaic nineteenth-century turns of phrase, satisfied his admirers but drove his opponents crazy. (A sample: “What is the greatest thing in life, my countrymen? Happiness. And there is more happiness in the American village today than in any other place on the face of the earth.”) After listening to one such speech, the great American humorist H. L. Mencken wrote that it “reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on a line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm.…”

  Warren G. Harding was the first candidate to hobnob with Hollywood stars on the campaign trail.

  CALVIN COOLIDGE

  VS. JOHN DAVIS

  Warren Harding worked and played hard—late-night poker games and his supposed trysts in White House closets with his young mistress, Nan Britton, were balanced by an attempt to keep the country moving into prosperity as the effects of the crisis after World War I wore off. But Harding was hit by a virulent flu in early 1923, and those symptoms may have hidden a heart attack. Doctors became concerned about the president, whose systolic blood pressure readings routinely topped 175.

  Pressures on Harding’s administration continued as scandals began to unfold, including one in which Charles Forbes, head of the new Veterans Bureau, was found to have stolen two million dollars from World War I veterans (a New York Times reporter came across Harding with his hands literally around Forbes’s neck, shouting, “You double-crossing bastard!”). Returning from an Alaska vacation prescribed by his doctors, Harding collapsed and died in a San Francisco hotel room on August 2, 1923.

  This left the country under the care of “Silent Cal” Coolidge. Coolidge inherited Harding’s scandals—including the infamous Teapot Dome Affair, in which government oil fields were leased to private business in return for bribes. Not much of this rubbed off on Coolidge, who was the epitome of rectitude. He was easily nominated for president when Republicans convened in Cleveland in June 1924. His vice-presidential running mate was Charles Dawes, budget director and former bright young political operative for William McKinley.

  The Democrats allowed their New York convention to be broadcast over the radio—the first time this had ever happened—and more than one million listeners were treated to endless days of squabbling from Ku Klux Klan members. The KKK had made major inroads into southern and western Democratic circles and wanted a platform amenable to their racist agenda. But after an astonishing 103 ballots (the most ever cast in a presidential party convention, before or since), anti-Klan forces prevailed and nominated John W. Davis, former solicitor general under Woodrow Wilson. His running mate was Charles Bryan, governor of Nebraska and brother of William Jennings Bryan.

  THE CAMPAIGN Say what you might about Calvin Coolidge, the man was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. “I don’t recall any candidate for president who ever injured himself very much by not talking,” he told reporters hungry for a quote. When it came to America, he was “for the economy. After that, I am for more economy.” The Republican campaign slogan “Keep Cool with Coolidge” seemed to sum it up.

  John Davis hit the campaign trail, but he was a lackluster speaker who didn’t think he would really win (“I went all around the country telling people I was going to be elected,” he later wrote, “and I knew I hadn’t any more chance than a snowball in hell.”) Democrats did discover that twenty-seven Republican ambassadors were AWOL from their duties in foreign countries while campaigning for Coolidge. And it was found that Silent Cal had quietly pocketed a $250 speaking fee when he was vice president. (But then so had Woodrow Wilson’s veep, Charles Marshall, who claimed he was so poorly paid as the nation’s second in command that “I had to do it, steal, or resign.”)

  Radio continued to play a growing role in the American electoral process. After Harding’s death, the newly formed National Broadcast Association went to Coolidge and told him that both Woodrow Wilson and Harding had basically worn themselves into sickness and death by traveling too much. Perhaps Cal might like to avail himself of the radio?

  Silent Cal got the message. On election night, he stayed home and broadcast over a national radio hookup, ending with a very folksy goodnight to the country: “… including my father, up on the Vermont farm, listening in.”

  THE WINNER: CALVIN COOLIDGE Americans ate it up. Calvin Coolidge became the country’s thirtieth president by beating John Davis 15,719,921 votes to 8,386,704, an almost two-to-one margin. Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes summed up everyone’s feelings quite nicely: “While I don’t expect anything very astonishing from [Coolidge], I don’t want anything ver
y astonishing.”

  HERBERT HOOVER

  VS.

  AL SMITH

  “ROME SUGGESTS THAT POPE MOVE HERE!”

  —Headline in Republican newspaper

  On August 2, 1927, while vacationing in his “Summer White House” in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Calvin Coolidge walked outside to waiting reporters and handed them a slip of paper that read: “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen-twenty-eight.” Taking no questions, Silent Cal walked back inside his house—and out of the presidency.

  No one could quite figure out why Coolidge had made this decision. The economy was booming, and the president, despite or because of his rock-bottom New England reticence and numerous eccentricities, was quite popular. Perhaps he still harbored grief from the death by blood poisoning of his sixteen-year-old son Calvin Jr. in 1924. Or perhaps it was because, as Mrs. Coolidge allegedly said, “Papa says there’s going to be a depression.”

  Whatever the reason, Coolidge’s choice not to run set the scene for an election that was, in the words of one historian, “one of the most revolting spectacles in the nation’s history.”

  THE CANDIDATES

  REPUBLICAN: HERBERT HOOVER Herbert Hoover would later gain a reputation as a man who twiddled his thumbs while America’s greatest economic crisis set in—but in 1928, he was a formidable candidate. He was the secretary of commerce and a self-made millionaire who had become known for overseeing humanitarian aid to thousands of starving Europeans during and after World War I. Unfortunately, he was also was one of the stiffest, most stilted, most machinelike candidates ever to run for president—so much so that Republicans were forced to plant articles with such headlines as “That Man Hoover—He’s Human.”