“1920: The Year of the Six Presidents”, by David Pietrusza

 

592 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-0786721023

Perhaps I read this book too soon after completing Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom by Conrad Black (reviewed on August 9^th, 2021), but I found 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza to be…blah. This is weird, because 1920 is not an unimportant year in American History; I mean, just look at all that was going on, from the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, both awful commentaries on American Justice and the Wilson Administration, to say nothing of all those Jim Crow laws, of which the racist Wilson cared nothing about. But for all that, 1920 while rather a chore to complete, it is not without value, as it sheds light on many (to me) unknown subjects, such as the process for selecting presidential candidates. Harding was a nonentity whose agenda was merely to return the nation to “normalcy”, a vague notion at best but one which resonated with millions of Americans; his opponent, Ohio governor James M. Cox, never developed a coherent stance concerning Wilson’s policies or on such controversial issues as Prohibition (unsurprisingly, Harding’s administration was essentially a disaster, with several officials being convicted of crimes of corruption).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is Pietrusza’s detailing of the strange, obsessive, and contradictory personality of Wilson: he trusted no one and was quick to take offence, cutting off friends at the merest hint of a slight or differences in policy or contradictory opinions. His inability to relate to others is seen in his tendency to lecture others in most any gathering, while his progressivism – or rather, “progressivism” – was at best a thin veneer scarcely concealing his prejudices over race, labor, women’s rights, etc. While his insistence on personally conducting treaty negotiations in France is a perfect example of his compulsiveness, maybe his most egregious act was to leave the nation essentially leaderless during the last year of his presidency as a result of his medical condition by creating a façade of being alert and in charge.

But it is Pietrusza’s failure to provide context for the issues he records that is his most egregious failure, nowhere more in his handling of the labor question. While he acknowledges Eugene Debs, the imprisoned socialist candidate for president and labor leader, as a champion of the working class, he in no way captures the decades-long discord between labor and ownership in American industries (interestingly, the Wilson administration’s mandate that employee work councils be established within workplaces – not mentioned by the author – to ensure labor peace was consistent with his call for “making the world safe for democracy”). However, after the War, employers and government turned on striking workers with a vengeance, capped by the excesses of the Attorney General Mitchell Palmer in his roundup of militants and the summary deportation of several hundred of others. Furthermore, Pietrusza’s focus on political personalities and considerations relegates the many important issues in the post WWI period to mostly cursory and fragmented treatment, such as the tough economic times with high inflation and unemployment, the flagrant suppression of the labor movement and dissent in general (that is, the Red Scare), and Wilson’s incessant, insistent pushing of the League of Nations, part of his plan for the settlement of the War. Also, both prohibition and women’s suffrage, with an emphasis on political maneuvering, receive some attention.

Both party nominating conventions and the election are subject to detail overkill by the author: all manner of meetings with every attendee noted, whose standing is now up or down, manipulative strategies and deals of the moment, statistics of trips taken and speeches made, etc. The winners at those conventions, Republican Warren Harding and Democrat James Cox, were both second-rate, second-tier candidates; it is only partially clear as to why Republican front-runners Leonard Wood and Frank Lowden and, to some extent, Democratic leaders William McAdoo and A. Mitchell Palmer faded so badly. Pietrusza’s supplying of the vote totals of each round of balloting, while unnecessary, does explicitly show the changes in fortunes. Again, the smoking backroom negotiations are, at times, enlightening and even interesting, but really now, the back-and-forth horseracing manner becomes tedious after a few pages.

All-in-all, 1920 is a rather shallow, miscellaneously detailed (to the point of tedium) book that looks at the many flawed, mediocre individuals who vied, or were otherwise involved, for the 1920 Presidency, Republicans and Democrats both. Some details of their backgrounds are provided, but most important to the author are their personality quirks and shortcomings, the various antagonisms that existed among them, and, how they did or did not cope with political forces, including the media. The title of the book well overstates the prominence of those involved in the election of 1920. The two actual presidents exerted minimal influence on the process: Theodore Roosevelt died well before the conventions and Woodrow Wilson, after suffering several strokes, was bed-ridden during the entire election cycle. The others, FDR, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Warren Harding were relatively unimportant politicians at the time and were more or less dragged along by the course of events. Not bad, I guess, but just dry as toast under the sun in the Sahara.