March 4, 1921: Having spent the last year and a half of his Presidency physically and politically paralyzed, Woodrow Wilson leaves the White House -- his dreams, his spirit, and for all intents and purposes his body broken. He is 62 years old, but seems considerably older.
He moved America forward in many ways, but very much backward in one of the most important ways: Race. All of his accomplishments, including making America a true world power for the first time through saving the Allies' bacon in World War I, must forever include the attachment, "Yes, but... "
Warren Gamaliel Harding is inaugurated as the 29th President of the United States. He and Wilson are the 1st incoming and outgoing Presidents to ride to the Inauguration in a car, rather than in a horse-drawn carriage.
The 55-year-old former Senator from Ohio had told America what it wanted to hear, campaigning on a turn away from the activist and internationalist ways of Wilson. With radio still in the process of being made public, no television, and no sound films, he made a phonograph record of his big speech, which was short on specifics, but had plenty of platitudes, and availed of alliteration:
America's present need is not heroics, but healing.
Not nostrums, but normalcy.
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.
In other words, the occasional need to go back to a simpler time, before liberal Presidents made big demands of us. You know: "Morning in America." And "Make America great again."
The word "normalcy" had been in use before the 1920 campaign. It should have been "normality," but the Harding campaign used the theme of "Return to Normalcy," and America wanted that, and he won in a landslide.
Harding was sworn in by Chief Justice Edward D. White, on the East Portico of the Capitol. Outgoing Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts was sworn in as Vice President.
During the previous year's campaign, journalist H.L. Mencken wrote, "As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
Of Harding's Inaugural Address, Mencken wrote, "It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. But I grow lyrical." Harding began:
My Countrymen: When one surveys the world about him after the great storm, noting the marks of destruction, and yet rejoicing in the ruggedness of the things which withstood it, if he is an American, he breathes the clarified atmosphere with a strange mingling of regret and new hope.
We have seen a world passion spend its fury, but we contemplate our Republic unshaken, and hold our civilization secure. Liberty -- liberty within the law -- and civilization are inseparable, and though both were threatened, we find them now secure. And there comes to Americans the profound assurance that our representative government is the highest expression and surest guaranty of both.
And he rambled on -- to use the term often associated with Harding, "bloviated" -- in that vein for about half an hour.
Harding may have wanted a "return to normalcy," and the nation may have gotten that in terms of international relations. At home, though, the decade became known as the Roaring Twenties.
The general public knows that Harding is a friend of Thomas Edison. What it does not know is that he is not exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier. Also not generally known: He is terribly corrupt, with a Cabinet nearly as thieving as Ulysses S. Grant's; a compulsive womanizer, on a scale surpassing any President before him and competitive with some who came after him; and a man every bit as sick as Wilson. Within 2½ years of his Inauguration, he dies of a heart attack, just as the Teapot Dome scandal was beginning to be reported. His wife, Florence, known as "The Duchess," was a piece of work, too.
Richard Norton Smith is a conservative who has served as director of the Presidential Libraries of Abraham Lincoln, Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. He was honored by the Presidential Library of John F. Kennedy. He has written biographies of Hoover, Ford, George Washington, and unsuccessful Presidential candidates Thomas E. Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller. And, as a former aide to unsuccessful Presidential candidate Bob Dole, he ran the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas.
He knows as much about the Presidency as any person alive as of March 4, 2022. He knows plenty about his fellow Republican Harding. He has said that Harding had "the creepiest Administration in American history," and included Florence as part of the reason. (This, of course, was before Donald Trump took office.)
Still fairly popular for a few years, by the time the 1920s ended with a crash, his reputation crashed as well. The Hardings were buried together in their shared hometown of Marion, Ohio, first in a temporary vault, and then in a monumental tomb. By the time it opened in 1929, all the scandals had come out, and the oversized memorial became an embarrassment. He is still regarded as one of the worst Presidents, his accomplishments all but forgotten (and not a big deal anyway).
As sick as he was, Wilson managed to outlive Harding by 6 months, and attended his funeral, although he remained inside his car, to protect him from the August heat in Washington. He had become the only former President ever to stay in Washington to live. His house at 2340 S Street NW, on Embassy Row, is the only Presidential house in DC open as a museum.
Wilson is also the only President laid to rest in Washington, at the National Cathedral. William Howard Taft and John F. Kennedy are in Arlington National Cemetery, and George Washington on the grounds of his home in Mount Vernon, both right across the Potomac River.
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March 4, 1921 was a Friday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. And no games were scheduled for the NHL. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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