Roosevelt loses the vice-presidential race

On Tuesday 2 November 1920 Americans chose a successor to President Woodrow Wilson. The election ended in one of the worst defeats in the history of the Democratic Party. The Republicans – Senator Warren Harding of Ohio, with the Governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, as his running mate – won more than 60 per cent of the vote. The Democrats – the Governor of Ohio, James M. Cox, and his running mate, the thirty-eight-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt – took just over 34 per cent. It was the only defeat in a general election in Roosevelt’s entire career. Twelve years later he became president, and during the Second World War he led the United States.

Who lost to whom

It is often said that on this day Roosevelt “lost the vice-presidential election to the Governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge”. This is a shorthand that needs explaining. In the United States the president and vice-president are not elected separately. The parties put forward a joint ticket, and voters in each state choose electors who, in the Electoral College, cast their votes for both candidates on the same ticket. Roosevelt therefore did not fight a duel with Coolidge. The whole Cox–Roosevelt ticket lost to the Harding–Coolidge ticket, and the outcome was decided by a judgement on the Wilson administration, not by the merits of the two vice-presidential candidates. Formally the electors voted in January 1921, but the result was settled on 2 November.

A country weary of war

For America, 1920 was a year of disillusionment. The wartime boom was over and the country was sliding into a sharp recession. In 1919 a wave of strikes in the steel and meat-packing industries had swept the United States, along with bloody race riots in Chicago and other cities. Fear of Communists was fuelled by Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer’s raids on radicals and by the Wall Street bombing of 16 September 1920. Irish and German Americans who had voted for Wilson in 1916 resented him – the Irish because he had not pressed for Irish independence at the peace conference, the Germans because they had been suspected of disloyalty throughout the war.

The most important dispute, however, concerned the world. Twice, in November 1919 and on 19 March 1920, the Senate had rejected the Treaty of Versailles together with the Covenant of the League of Nations. The League began work in January 1920, as the Paris Peace Conference was drawing to a close, but without the United States, whose president had conceived it. Wilson, paralysed since his stroke of October 1919, wanted the election to be a “solemn referendum” on the League. Privately he even hoped for a third term, although he was in no condition to govern normally.

Two newspaper publishers from Ohio

Both parties turned to little-known politicians from Ohio, a large swing state. The Republican convention in Chicago, deadlocked between General Leonard Wood and the Governor of Illinois, Frank Lowden, chose Harding on the tenth ballot. A newspaper publisher from the small town of Marion, he was a compromise candidate agreed, it was said, by the party bosses in a “smoke-filled room” in a hotel. The bosses wanted to give him Senator Irvine Lenroot as his running mate, but the delegates rebelled and chose Coolidge, who had become known across the country after firmly breaking the Boston police strike in the autumn of 1919. Among the candidates put forward at the convention was also Herbert Hoover, head of wartime food relief for Europe, who had only declared himself a Republican in March.

The Democrats met in San Francisco from 28 June to 6 July. The strongest candidate was Wilson’s son-in-law, the former Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo, but the president would not help him. Only on the 44th ballot did the nomination go to Cox, also a newspaper publisher and three times Governor of Ohio. For vice-president he chose Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy since 1913. The choice surprised many but made sense: Roosevelt came from New York, the most populous state, was regarded as a moderate, was young and energetic, and bore a name Americans knew. His distant cousin, and the uncle of his wife Eleanor, was the former president Theodore Roosevelt, who had died in January 1919 – though he had been a Republican, and his family pointedly kept its distance from their Democratic relative.

Curiously, as late as early 1920 Roosevelt had been urging Hoover to run as a Democrat, and would happily have become his vice-president himself. The plan collapsed when Hoover chose the Republicans. Their paths were to cross again in 1932.

The campaign

On 18 July Cox and Roosevelt visited the ailing Wilson at the White House and pledged to defend the League of Nations. In practice Cox soon softened his position and talked of joining the League with reservations, similar to those sought by the Republican Senate leader Henry Cabot Lodge. Roosevelt also supported membership of the League but, unlike Wilson, was prepared to compromise with the Senate. In August he resigned from the Navy Department and set off on a tour of the country. He gave hundreds of speeches from the rear platforms of trains, often several a day. He made some gaffes. The most notorious was his boast in Montana that he had personally written the constitution of Haiti, then occupied by the US Marines. The Republicans seized on it as proof of the Wilson administration’s arrogance.

Harding ran a “front porch” campaign from his home in Marion, to which thousands of voters travelled. He promised a “return to normalcy” and said nothing specific about the League, thereby alienating neither its supporters in his own party nor the “irreconcilable” senators such as William Borah. The Republicans had several times as much money and, for the first time on such a large scale, made use of newspaper advertising. Their slogan was “America First”.

The result

Some 26.8 million Americans voted on 2 November, eight million more than four years earlier. For the first time women in every state could vote in a presidential election, since the constitutional amendment on women’s suffrage had come into force in August 1920. Harding and Coolidge won more than 16.1 million votes (60.3 per cent) and 404 electoral votes. Cox and Roosevelt won 9.1 million votes (34.1 per cent) and 127 electoral votes. They carried only eleven states – ten in the old South, plus Kentucky – and lost even the home states of both candidates, Ohio and New York. The Republicans won every large city. Almost a million votes, 3.4 per cent, went to the Socialist Eugene Debs, who was then serving a sentence in Atlanta for opposing wartime conscription. Harding’s margin of more than 26 percentage points remains a record in the history of US presidential elections. Among those reading out the results as they came in that evening was the Westinghouse station in Pittsburgh, later known as KDKA, which began the tradition of election nights on the radio.

Roosevelt took the defeat calmly. He returned to New York, to work at a law firm and an insurance company. The campaign had nevertheless given him what he needed: he had got to know party activists across the country and become one of the most recognisable faces among the Democrats. It was also the first time Eleanor Roosevelt appeared in public at her husband’s side.

Significance

The 1920 election was read as a verdict on Wilson’s policies. Harding took office on 4 March 1921, and in his first message to Congress, on 12 April, he declared that the United States would “have no part” in the existing League of Nations. Instead of ratifying the Treaty of Versailles, in August 1921 Washington concluded separate peace treaties with Germany, Austria and Hungary. America did not withdraw from the world entirely: it pursued an ambitious financial and disarmament policy, convened the Washington Conference, and its bankers and diplomats helped to shape the Dawes and Young Plans. But it refused to take part in a system of collective security. Without the world’s greatest power, the League proved helpless in the face of Japan’s aggression in Manchuria in 1931 and Italy’s in Ethiopia in 1935, while France, deprived of the American guarantees promised in Paris, sought security on its own.

For Roosevelt himself, November 1920 was the start of a road that almost immediately came to an end. In August 1921, on Campobello Island, he fell ill, most probably with polio, and lost the use of his legs. He returned to politics in 1928 as Governor of New York, and in 1932 he defeated Hoover in the presidential election. As president he long had to reckon with the same reluctance to become involved in European affairs that had sunk the Cox–Roosevelt ticket in 1920. He designed the United Nations so as to avoid the fate of the League he had defended in his first, losing campaign.