There’s certainly been some parallels noted of America in 1920 and 2020. Primarily, this has been focused on the pandemics. In 1920, the fourth wave of the flu pandemic hit the US, with cities such as NYC, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and St. Louis having higher death tolls than in the previous waves.
However, what’s less known focused on is the economic parallels. Just as 2020 America is experiencing double-digit unemployment as a result of the pandemic and end of the Obama boom, 1920 America was also experiencing a depression as a result of its own pandemic and the end of the wartime economic boom.
While the comparison of Presidents Wilson and Trump is not one that’s been made that often, as they of different parties and demeanors, they are actually quite similar in two key ways. First, both had radically reoriented American foreign policy by making America more subservient to foreign powers (in Wilson’s case, this was through an attempt to build a stronger international law structure with the League of Nations, as opposed to Trump’s deference to dictators). Second, both Wilson and Trump were racist even by the standards of their time, as Wilson had heavily segregated the federal government, and, like Trump, would insist that his racism was somehow beneficial to those he was discriminating against. They also both were uniquely enraged by any criticism by non-whites.
The Republican Party, the out party, nominated Warren G. Harding. Despite the backdrop, Harding did not run a fire-and-brimstone campaign. Instead, he pitched a “Return to Normalcy,” offering the following prescription for the country’s problems:
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….
Harding had correctly interpreted the mood of the country, and won an overwhelming victory, getting over 60% of the vote and carrying 37 of the 48 US states at the time.
I believe the mood of America, in 2020 as in 1920, is one of exhaustion. Exhaustion of illness and death. Exhaustion of brutality and burning. Exhaustion of joblessness and shuttered storefronts. Exhaustion of waking up every morning, seeing blaring headlines, and saying “oh no, what now?”
I don’t want Joe Biden to be Warren Harding (and my ellipses above leave off Harding’s last two points, which I find to be unacceptable). But it is clear that Trump’s only hope to retain the office is to invert the election, to present Joe Biden as a radical who threatens America when in fact Trump is the radical whose actions have brought us to this ugly place. This website was certainly not a hotbed of Biden support during the primaries. Biden was too much of a “normie Dem” for many of us, me included, too willing to view Trump as an dark aberration as opposed to an unveiling of the ugliness of the soul of the modern Republican Party. The reason Biden won is that, even among Democrats, is an end to the harvest of misery that has plagued us since Trump’s attainment of the Presidency, as opposed to a revolutionary alteration of America itself.
The American people are ready to see change, but they want it made within the context of reformation, not revolution. There is a deep desire for a return to normalcy. Joe Biden is the man to bring us back, and to build back better upon the basis that the Obama-Biden Administration had laid down prior to it being torn apart by Trump. This election is about change, but its also about a return to normalcy and letting America be America again. Let’s help make that happen.
