1920 The Year of the Six Presidents 1st Edition by David Pietrusza ISBN 0786716223 978-0786716227

The presidential election of 1920 was one of the most dramatic ever. For the only time in the nation’s history, six once-and-future presidents hoped to end up in the White House: Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt. It was an election that saw unprecedented levels of publicity — the Republicans outspent the Democrats by 4 to 1 — and it was the first to garner extensive newspaper and newsreel coverage. It was also the first election in which women could vote. Meanwhile, the 1920 census showed that America had become an urban nation — automobiles, mass production, chain stores, and easy credit were transforming the economy and America was limbering up for the most spectacular decade of its history, the roaring ’20s. Award-winning historian David Pietrusza’s riveting new work presents a dazzling panorama of presidential personalities, ambitions, plots, and counterplots — a picture of modern America at the crossroads.

Table of contents: 

The Players in Our Drama     1
“Discover a Common Hate”     9
“Something Queer Was Happening”     26
“I Seem to Have Gone to Pieces”     36
“He Is the Only Candidate”     55
“A Turtle on a Log”     72
“I Am Governor of Massachusetts”     90
“He Is Certainly a Wonder”     105
“A Twentieth-Century Apollo”     122
“Criminal Intrigues Everywhere”     140
“Superior Biologic Values”     155
“The Funeral Bake Meats”     167
“A ‘Safe’ Kind of Liberal”     187
“Red Feathers, Tin Bears, and Cardboard Oranges”     201
“Warren Harding Is the Best of the Second-Raters”     224
“The Greatest Living Champion of Water”     242
“Convict No. 9653”     262
“A Gathering of Asteroids”     282
“A Mother’s Advice Is Always Safest”     290
“Back to Normal”     311
“A Pretty Good Constitution”     331
“Wake up, Ethiopia!”     353
“Warren Gamaliel Harding Is Not a White Man”     369
“Perverts by Official Orders”     386
“It Was an Earthquake”     397
“Power Must Fail”     418
“Fear Itself”     435
Epilogue: “Malevolent Detachment”     439
Notes     455
Bibliography     527
Acknowledgments     543
Index     545