Biden’s desire for ‘normalcy’ echoes Harding’s bid in 1920
A politically inexperienced and highly divisive president, a presidential campaign waged under the shadow of a deadly pandemic and an establishment candidate from the opposing party who promises to restore the country to a less turbulent time.
Those were the elements of the U.S. presidential election exactly 100 years ago that swept Warren Harding into office. The similarities to the 2020 race and Joe Biden’s quest to unseat Donald Trump in November are unmissable.
“I’ve been thinking about the parallels for a couple of months,” said Jim Robenalt, author of a book on Harding. “The coronavirus just added another layer.”
To the extent that he’s remembered today, Harding is best known for the Teapot Dome bribery scandal, lusty letters to his mistress and dying in office two years after his inauguration.
But his campaign slogan — “Return to Normalcy” — could just as well have been adopted by Biden, the former vice president, who often says he’ll return the U.S. to the way the White House operated before the “aberrant” Trump presidency.
Just as Biden is known for the occasional malapropism, Harding was mocked for the supposedly ungrammatical construction of his slogan. But the word “normalcy” conveyed what many voters were looking for after the exhaustion of World War I, the Spanish flu pandemic and the abrasive political style of President Woodrow Wilson.
A newspaper publisher from Ohio who went on to serve in the U.S. Senate — another parallel with Biden — Harding won at the Republican convention on the 10th ballot after none of the leading candidates could put together a majority. In his best-known campaign speech, he promised restoration, not revolution.
“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but a d j u st me n t ; n o t surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate,” he said.
That promise marked a contrast with Wilson, who was the real target of Harding’s rhetoric even though he wasn’t running for reelection in 1920.
A former academic who’d spent two years as New Jersey’s governor before winning the 1912 election, Wilson is remembered for his efforts to reshape American foreign policy. But at the time, many Americans disagreed with his goals as well as his approach.
Robenalt said Wilson “had to be the smartest guy in every room” and didn’t work well with Congress, leaving key senators behind as he negotiated the end to WWI in France. That gave an opening to Harding, who pledged to heal the country’s partisan divide.
“Wilson picked fights with people,” Robenalt said. “His arrogance would not let him compromise with anybody.”
The similarities between then and now extend to the modalities of the campaign, in practice if not preference. Harding ran a typicalfor-the-time “front-porch campaign,” where he mostly stayed at home, giving press interviews and meeting other politicians and high-profile guests.