Is This 1920 All Over Again? Is Joe Biden the New Warren Harding?
A world system in tatters, with old alliances broken, treaties abandoned and economies ravaged. Millions dead from a global pandemic. Economic uncertainty, with modern highs in unemployment, stagnant wages, and soaring inequality. Riots and protests rooted in conflict over race and immigration. And a voluble but physically damaged president who believed himself anointed a great leader by God.
The year was 1920, but it’s also 2020. Perhaps the most important parallel — one that points to the dangers and opportunities of our fates come November 3 — is the desire, after years of upheaval, for normalcy.
A century ago, the United States was trying desperately to escape the chaos and churn of the previous four years. Under President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, the U.S. had just concluded its role in World War I and was battling the Spanish Flu. As bankers and manufacturers thrived, workers struggled with low wages and high unemployment.
American presidents, as Yale’s Stephen Skowronek notes, are reactions to their predecessors. Think of a few shorthand examples. We went from Nixon (corruption) to Carter (purity), from Carter (declinist) to Reagan (resurgent), from Reagan (ideologue) to Bush I (pragmatist), from Bush I (old-fashioned) to Clinton (new generation), from Clinton (a rogue) to Bush II (born again), from Bush II (reckless) to Obama (cool), from Obama (cerebral) to Trump (crude).
So let’s revisit 1920, a moment of historic churn.
After suffering a massive stroke in 1919, Wilson was an invalid for the last 17 months of his second term. He had already been laid low by the Spanish Flu at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and aides lied about his true condition. No one in his Cabinet had the courage to suggest that his vice president, the cipher that was Warren Harding, replace him.
As if the global crises were not enough, more conflict and chaos came via Wilson’s Cabinet members. His first attorney general, Thomas Gregory, who prosecuted and jailed war protesters and “hyphenated Americans,” as immigrants were known, and shut down newspapers considered suspect in their allegiances to the antiwar cause or their native lands. Gregory’s replacement, Mitchell Palmer, continued the Wilson administration’s unprecedented attacks on civil liberties.
And so in 1920 Americans had had enough — exhausted from the violence, uncertainty, and erratic leadership in Washington. To return to normalcy , Americans turned to a jovial man who was eager to be liked. Harding had built a network of political allies as the publisher of a successful newspaper in Ohio. Speaking in soaring but Babbitt-like language, he was the perfect vehicle for the Republican Party business and farm base.
In his campaign, Harding avoided spending too much time on the campaign trail. In his front-porch campaign, he invited reporters to come to him, issuing bromides about “the American way” and “a return to normalcy.” He normality, but the neologism stuck.
Harding had no real agenda beyond restoring the Republican Party’s sway over the federal government. He picked elites for his Cabinet: Andrew Carnegie for Treasury, former Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes for State, Herbert Hoover for Commerce. He also picked an outlier, the leftist Henry Wallace, for Agriculture.
Inevitably, he also tapped clunkers, like Harry Daugherty for Justice and Albert Fall for Interior — the two main reasons that historians consider Harding one of the worst presidents ever. Fall persuaded Harding to transfer purview of oil deposits from the War Department to the Interior Department. That was the beginning of the Teapot Dome bribery scandal. Luckily for Harding, the scandal broke after Harding had suffered a fatal heart attack.
The chaos of 2020 looks a lot like the chaos of 1920. Now, as then, the opposition party has selected a calm, friendly, detached man to restore the nation to normalcy. Just as Harding was the man for his moment, Joe Biden looks like the man for his.
Today’s chaos is worse in some ways, better in others. In both, the president’s ego and vindictive streak was largely responsible. The different is that today the whole American system is under attack as Donald Trump targets his political enemies, longtime American allies, the federal establishment (from Justice to the intelligence community to the Post Office), and media. Trump declared that “I alone can fix it,” and he believes it.
Like Wilson then, Trump is a shadow of his former self. A lifelong hedonist — a partier at Studio 54, a gaudy celebrant of greed and excess, a massive debtor with a series of bankruptcies — he is grossly obese and never exercises. Mocking the coronavirus, he got his comeuppance when he tested positive and got sent to Walter Reed.
Even though Trump has few if any convictions — his only true convictions are prejudices against minorities and women and resentment toward anyone who does not bow to him — he has presided over one of the most consequential presidencies in history. He has waged all-out assault on policies and arrangements considered cornerstones of American success since World War II: western alliances, the social welfare system, expansions of rights, environmental protection, civil liberties, and more. Where Wilson built, Trump has destroyed. Both rocked the system to its foundations.
And so along comes Biden, the antidote to Trump. He is modest, empathetic, pragmatic, collaborative, and middle class to his core. He believes he can salve the nation’s wounds by being authentic and caring. And he will have plenty of help. He has built his vast network of friends and allies over the last half-century. He’ll put some luminaries in his Cabinet.
Would it be wrong — or mean — to call Biden the Harding of his party and his time? Probably not.
Besides his blindness to Daugherty and Fell’s criminal schemes, Harding wasn’t all bad. He even displayed courage and conviction. In Birmingham, Harding told an audience of blacks and whites: “Whether you like it or not, unless our democracy is a lie you must stand for that equality.” No other president had every embraced blacks’ rights so strongly. This came after Wilson stripped blacks rights of their roles in the federal bureaucracy and staged a showing of “Birth of a Nation,” the film that celebrated the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House.
Harding also freed political activists who had languished in jail for opposing World War. Where there is injury, mercy.
On policy, Harding cut government spending in half. He modernized the bureaucracy by creating the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget) and the General Accounting Office. To care for servicemen, he created the Veterans Bureau. He oversaw the creation of cooperative for farmers. He convened the most significant arms –control conference in history. He sought U.S. entry into the World Court. He began the federal highway system. He built the cornerstone of the modern welfare state with the Sheppard Towner Act, which provided assistance to mothers with infants (later ruled unconstitutional).
Like all Republicans, he was friendly to big business. He increased the tariff to protect American products against foreign competition. However dubious tariffs may be, that was as fundamental to Republicans then as health care is to Democrats today. He also got Congress to regulate the futures trading (later ruled unconstitutional).
The specifics will differ, but this is the kind of agenda we can expect from a middle-of-the-roader like Joe Biden. It’s mostly about strengthening institutions, tending to basic needs, and building for the future. Sometimes his political base will push him further than he wants to go; sometimes he’ll chip away at problems. Hi might trust a follower too much and get in trouble, as Harding did in the Teapot Dome scandal. Biden won’t please everyone. He’ll probably be a one-term president.
History doesn’t repeat itself, to use an old trope, but it rhymes. The Biden presidency will be, to use an expression, a return to normalcy.
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Charles Euchner is writing a book about Woodrow Wilson’s failed campaign for the League of Nations. He is the author of books on civil rights (Nobody Turn Me Around), politics and policy (Urban Politics Reconsidered), sports (Playing the Field and The Last Nine Innings, and writing (The Elements of Writing). He teaches writing at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
