The last four of Wilson’s eight years in the White House were an epic drama. Reëlected in 1916 on an implied promise of nonintervention (“He kept us out of war”), he soon became the Commander-in-Chief of an American military victory and, on the streets of Europe, the rhapsodically received oracle of a permanent peace that would be sustained by a League of Nations. Crushed by his own country’s resistance to this vision, he suffered a stroke in 1919 after barnstorming the U.S. in support of the League. The following year, he was too infirm to fulfill his hopes of bucking the two-term tradition and running for a third.
When considered against the electoral circumstances that exchanged Wilson, a Democrat, for Harding, a Republican, some of the tumults of 2020 appear to be a centennial reiteration, or inversion, of the calamities and longings of the 1920 campaign. Then the country—recently riven by disease, inflamed with racial violence and anxious about immigration, torn between isolation and globalism—yearned for what the winning candidate somewhat malapropically promised would be a return to “normalcy.” Early in 2020, the term remained useful to supporters of Joe Biden, with its suggestion of Presidential behavior once more within the pale. The word’s nostalgic tenor soon enough made it anathema to left-wing Democrats, and the cyclonic circumstances of the past six months may have made it feel obsolete to Biden himself, but it is still what he is talking about when he calls for removing Donald Trump: “Will we rid ourselves of this toxin? Or will we make it a permanent part of our national character?” In terms of the Presidential decency on which so much depends, there is nowhere to go but backward.
Harding received the Republican nomination on June 12th, in a hellishly hot Chicago. His tenth-ballot victory came after the famous deadlock-dissolving conversations in a “smoke-filled room” at the Blackstone Hotel. His image seemed to materialize as a kind of anti-Wilson: a non-cerebral, non-visionary backslapper, less interested in remaking the world than in making sure that Main Street looked spruce. His instinctive centrism led the Republican overlords to believe that Harding might finally reunite the “regulars” who had stuck with Taft in 1912 and the progressives who’d bolted away on Theodore Roosevelt’s bull moose. When it came to the Party’s current fissures, Harding appeared likely to please the dwindling faction that remained open to participation in Wilson’s League, as well as the Senate’s Reservationists and Irreconcilables, who opposed it with varying degrees of implacability.