III.

Early Political Career

In the 1890s Harding increased his social and business connections in Marion. He joined the Masons, the Elks, and other fraternal orders. He served as a director of the Marion County Bank, the Marion County Telephone Company, and Marion Lumber Company, and he was a trustee of the Trinity Baptist Church.

The influence of his newspaper, his public speaking ability, his friendly personality, and his interest in public affairs brought Harding to the attention of local and state politicians. He joined the state Republican Party, and in 1898 and 1900, Harding was elected to the Ohio State Senate. By this time he had become friendly with Harry M. Daugherty, an influential lawyer and politician. In 1903 Daugherty helped get Harding elected lieutenant governor of Ohio. After serving a two-year term, Harding retired from politics until 1910, when he lost a campaign for governor.

In spite of this defeat, Harding remained well liked by Republican politicians. In 1912 President William Howard Taft, a fellow Ohioan, asked Harding to nominate Taft at the Republican National Convention for a second term as president. In the subsequent campaign, Harding vigorously attacked former President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), who had left the party to run as the candidate of the Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party. The issue of party loyalty seemed to have been more important to Harding than the defeat of the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, who won the election.

In 1914, with Daugherty's help, Harding gained the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate. In November he won the election by a large margin.

A.

United States Senator

In the Senate, Harding's warm nature, his conservative principles, and the fact that he represented a politically important state strengthened his political position, but Harding's record was undistinguished. He routinely supported the conservative policies of the Republican leadership. He favored a high protective tariff, or import tax, and although he voted for U.S. entry into World War I, in April 1917, he opposed high taxes on war profits as he opposed all measures that might harm business interests. For political reasons, not personal conviction, he supported the Anti-Saloon League's pressure on the Congress of the United States to submit the 18th, or Prohibition, Amendment to the states and the Volstead Act, which prohibited the sale of almost all beverages with an alcoholic content of more than 0.5 percent. After the war he joined other Republicans in opposing the Versailles Treaty, which included United States membership in the League of Nations, an association of the world's nations meant to be the first international peacekeeping body. Critics of the treaty argued that it might require the United States to send troops into another European war against the will of Congress or the president.

B.

Election of 1920

Late in 1919, Daugherty, then the Republican leader in Ohio, started a well-planned Harding-for-president movement. Harding's name was entered in presidential primaries, and the senator from Ohio made speeches around the country. On May 14, 1920, Harding announced that the nation needed “not nostrums but normalcy.” The slogan “return to normalcy” expressed the yearning of some Americans for the unrestrained free enterprise, the untaxed incomes, and the high import tariffs of the past. It also meant a nation isolated from troublesome world affairs or, as Harding put it, “not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality.” The Democrats naturally disagreed with Harding's views. William Gibbs McAdoo, secretary of the treasury from 1913 to 1918, summed up their reaction by calling Harding's speeches “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.”

Harding did poorly in the Republican primaries. He did not even win all the votes of the Ohio delegation. As a result, Harding felt no confidence about being named the Republican candidate. He would have pulled out of the race to assure himself reelection to the Senate, where he found life very pleasant, had not his wife and Daugherty persuaded him that he would win the nomination.

At the Republican National Convention in Chicago in June 1920, the Republicans went through four votes without deciding upon a candidate and adjourned until the next morning. A series of predawn meetings took place in suite number 404 in the Blackstone Hotel. The phrase “smoke-filled room,” used to describe the suite is still used to refer to a meeting where political deals are made. The meeting in the original smoke-filled room was controlled by Republican senators, including Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Charles Curtis of Kansas, and James E. Watson of Indiana. After consulting with state leaders, the group agreed that Harding should be nominated. The next day the convention proceeded as planned, and on the tenth ballot, Harding received 692.5 votes and was nominated for president.

With Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts as his vice-presidential running mate, Harding faced the Democratic slate of Governor James M. Cox of Ohio for president and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt for vice president. Heeding the advice of his managers, Harding conducted a front-porch campaign from his home in Marion, a technique that had been successfully employed by his fellow Ohioans and Republican U.S. presidents Benjamin Harrison, in the presidential election of 1888, and William McKinley, in 1896.

In his few campaign speeches, Harding relied mainly on the political effectiveness of bland generalities. Sometimes his statements were deliberately confusing. For example, he promised internationally minded voters that he would support an “association of nations,” while at the same time he promised “America first!” to isolationists. In this way he won the support of influential Republicans who believed in the League of Nations as well as those who opposed it. Harding's inoffensive stand on the league and other issues attracted many voters to the Republican Party. Many other voters, who blamed Wilson for entering the war and for high postwar prices, probably voted against the Democrats, rather than for Harding (see Isolationism).

Harding won the election by a record-breaking margin of 7 million votes over Cox, an amazing total of more than 60 percent of all votes cast. He received 404 electoral votes to Cox's 127 and carried every state except those in the solidly Democratic South.