What did a return to normalcy after world war 1 mean?

In the aftermath of World War I, the Palmer Raids, a failed effort to ratify the League of Nations, economic stagnation and the failing Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding ran for president on a promise to return the nation to a better sense of normalcy. 

Harding was an imperfect messenger. He drank bootlegged booze just as Prohibition was kicking in. He played around on his wife, just as women were given the right to vote for the first time. He was surrounded by Ohio cronies who were dedicated to using Harding’s presidency as a pathway to enriching themselves, just as the Progressive Era, a political movement focused almost exclusively on political reform, was winding down. 

{mosads}Harding has been harshly judged by history. His relatively short tenure (he died before his first term expired) was beset by scandal, and while he did have some notable accomplishments, including the establishment of a Budget Bureau and the creation of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Teapot Dome scandal has come to characterize the Harding administration for the ages. 

But Harding did succeed in restoring a greater sense of normalcy to America. In the aftermath of the Red Scare, which sent socialist leader Eugene Debs to prison, Harding released him in an effort to calm America’s collective waters. Harding was a leader on civil rights and actively promoted aspiring black politicians, a notable change from the virulently racist Wilson. Perhaps most importantly, Harding steered away from crisis politics and put government back into its proper role in society. And by limiting government expansion, Harding helped create the economic dynamic that led to the Roaring ’20s, a brisk period of economic growth. 

Warren Harding is a poor model for Mitt Romney to emulate, but his message of a return to normalcy strikes a chord. 

It has been slightly more than 10 years since the attacks of 9/11. We have fought two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, that have drained our military and a global war on terror that has chiefly occupied our intelligence agencies. Over the last 15 years, we have seen the tech bubble expand and burst, and we have seen a housing bubble expand and burst. 

We have endured a Great Recession. During the financial panic of 2008, one of America’s most prominent investment houses collapsed and two of America’s biggest banks veered uncomfortably close to failure. America’s auto companies also teetered on the edge of a bankruptcy, as did many small towns and big municipalities. 

Over the last three and a half years, America’s anxiety level hasn’t appreciably diminished. The economy has grown, but not at a rate that will give jobs to the jobless. The Obama administration focused on a divisive healthcare overhaul, jamming it through both chambers of the Congress, rather than focusing first on job creation. That healthcare law inspired outraged protesters and a political movement aimed at overthrowing the political elites. 

A president who was elected on the promise of “Change You Can Believe” now bases his whole reelection campaign on the false notion that he single-handedly killed the greatest terrorist in history. This same president employs class-war rhetoric that would make Henry Wallace —the former leftist vice president to Franklin Roosevelt — blush. 

What America needs today is a return to normalcy. The American people need greater confidence that the government will do what it is supposed to do and not what it is not constitutionally mandated to do. They need a greater sense of economic security that comes from a political leadership that has an abiding faith in the market system. They need a president who will focus first on getting our country’s financial house in order and not on whatever political whim comes to mind. 

We have been through a lot as a nation in the last decade. We need a chance to catch our breath so that we can move forward.

Feehery is president of Quinn Gillespie Communications and spent 15 years working in the House Republican leadership. He is a contributor to The Hill’s Pundits Blog and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com.

What does it mean when say we want to get back to “normalcy”?

When American historians hear talk of “normalcy,” we think of President Warren G. Harding.

Elected in 1920, Harding campaigned to put a keel beneath a nation buffeted by world war and the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. But finding the language for this was a struggle — until a Boston address in May 1920.

First, Harding defined the problem of perspective, created by war and diseases. “Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational.” And then Harding offered the cure:

“America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy.” It might have been simpler to end there, but normalcy was just the first in a series of antonyms that Harding suggested, expressing his goals in the negative: “Not revolution but restoration; not agitation but adjustment; not surgery but serenity; not the dramatic but the dispassionate; not experiment but equipoise; not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality."

What did normalcy mean then, and what does it mean now?

Calling for “sustainment in triumphant nationality,” was Harding’s convoluted way of saying let’s make America great again. Harding won the election, but neither he nor normalcy would succeed.  His failures hold lessons for those who seek restoration in our time of fear, disease, and death.

Harding-style restoration meant, for many, freewheeling consumption and giddy speculation. Lack of regulation was a virtue to Harding, a balm after he restrictions of war and disease. “The world needs to be reminded that all human ills are not curable by legislation,” Harding had said, in the same speech. But the Roaring Twenties left those who weren’t white or privileged more vulnerable to the tilt-a-whirl economy of the era. There was no net to catch them, and economic growth had no safety mechanism.

Harding led to Coolidge; Coolidge led to Hoover. It would take the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s anything-but-normal presidency to create the social protections of the New Deal.

Harding also promised a return to a normal and cleaner politics. “No government,” he said in Boston, “is worthy of the name which is directed by influence on the one hand, or moved by intimidation on the other.”

But Harding would be remembered best mostly for his administration’s criminality. The Teapot Dome scandal — which involved cabinet members and leases to pump oil at the Teapot Dome in Wyoming — was the highest level of government lawbreaking before Watergate.

In Harding’s time, radio and communications technologies arrived with great promises of easier connection, much as Zoom suggests new ways of being together now. But by the end of the 1920s — and from then on — radio enabled a wave of populist demagogues who saw the chance for audience and influence both, and took it. Where will the technologies that promise us community today lead us, if we’re not sufficiently wary of them?

It’s striking how well Harding recognized that war and disease had exposed America’s problems with equality. To his credit, he advanced plans for racial equity, but they foundered. For too many Americans, normalcy meant keeping the color line sharply drawn. Similarly, today COVID exposes inequalities we considered “normal” three months ago, and demonstrates how easily we labeled some workers essential and some not — and how those labels are resulting in higher death rates.

For Harding, normalcy also meant a retreat from the world, and from seeking to end war elsewhere, so that we could think of America first. “Let us stop to consider that tranquility at home is more precious than peace abroad,” he also said in Boston. But retreat did not spare us from being drawn into the second world war.

The lesson from Harding’s time is that “going back to normal,” is not safe; it’s dangerous.

As we look back and think ahead now, we can do better. Let’s put normalcy at least off to the side, as we try to find our way out of all this.

William Deverell is a professor of history at USC and the director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He wrote this for Zócalo Public Square.

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