Category: Politics
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Party Allegiance as Good Citizenship
In 1920, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Robert von Moschzisker argued that America had become too big to govern effectively without political parties. To my mind, the maintenance of the present system and the development of party fealty are matters of prime importance at this time in America. How, with our vast electorate, scattered over a […]
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The First Woman President
Weeks after women gained the right to vote, a satirical column predicted a future female president since “Millions of us men will be compelled to vote for her with the threat of losing our home-brewed meals if we don’t.” In 1920, the country was still 12 years away from its first elected female senator, Hattie Wyatt Caraway of […]
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Harding, Baseball Fan
Future President Warren Harding’s “front porch campaign” of 1920 rendered him unable to attend a Major League Baseball game, as he usually did each summer. So on September 2, they brought a game to him. The Chicago Cubs came to Harding’s hometown of Marion, Ohio to play an exhibition game against a semi-pro local team, […]
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Campaigning from Porch and Stump
1920 Republican presidential candidate Warren Harding was accused of holding few true political beliefs: When one speaks of Harding, of course, one means the unincorporated syndicate that goes by that name, headed by Senator Lodge and consisting of perhaps a dozen members of the Senate, including the one from Ohio, Mr. Harding… When Harding speaks […]
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The Party of Discontent
Would a third party candidate spoil the 1920 presidential election? At least three presidential elections in the past three decades alone were very likely altered by third-party candidates: 1992: Independent candidate Ross Perot earned 19.7 million votes, mostly from Republican George H.W. Bush, likely tipping the election to Democrat Bill Clinton. 2000: Green Party candidate […]
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Harding and the Front Porch Plot
In 1920, Warren Harding ran the last true “front porch campaign,” a major party presidential candidate campaigning primarily from home… until Joe Biden for several months in 2020. This 1920 New York Times article explains the rationale for Harding, the Republican nominee, in trying to replicate the successful 1896 front porch campaign of fellow Ohio Republican […]
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The Vice Presidency Comes to the Fore
“The two parties in 1920… have both nominated men of Presidential stature for Vice President,” a New York Times article that summer read. Those two men were FDR and Calvin Coolidge, who would both become president. In fact, 1920 is the only year in American history when both major-party vice presidential nominees later became president. […]
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That Ideal Campaign Front Porch
On the 1920 campaign trail, future President Warren G. Harding revealed his perfect formula for eating waffles: You eat the first fourteen waffles without syrup, but with lots of butter. Then you put syrup on the next nine, and the last half-dozen you eat just simply swimming in syrup. Eaten that way, waffles never hurt […]
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Penrose as Potential President Maker in Chicago
A week before the 1920 Republican convention, an article suggested Pennsylvania Sen. Boies Penrose could decide the party’s presidential nominee. As it turns out, he kind of did. Heretofore the Old Guard has had more than one man capable of playing this part behind the scenes, with the loyalty of the ingrained partisan who in […]
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Gov. Frazier’s Own Story of the Non Partisan League
The first U.S. state governor ever to lose their seat in a recall election? 1921: Lynn Frazier, a socialist who led North Dakota. Frazier was affiliated with the Non-Partisan League (NPL) faction of the Republican Party, a socialist faction which only emerged in 1915 but won Frazier the 1916 election. At the time, North Dakota […]
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