The Promise From the Home Market Club

On the evening of May 14, 1920, in the dining room of the Home Market Club in Boston, an Ohio senator who had not yet been nominated for the presidency by his own party delivered the campaign speech that would name an era. Warren Gamaliel Harding, fifty-four years old, the publisher of the Marion Star and a relatively undistinguished first-term senator, stood before a gathering of New England Republicans and read aloud a paragraph that his ghostwriter Judson Welliver had polished to a sheen but that Harding himself had insisted on saying. The country, he told the room, did not need heroics. It needed healing. It did not need surgery. It needed serenity. It did not need experiment. It needed equipoise. “America’s present need,” he said, in the sentence that would survive every other word he ever spoke, “is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy.”

The word landed strangely. Journalists wrote it down as “normality” because they assumed the Republican nominee had misspoken, and several papers printed the corrected form the next morning. But the new chief executive meant “normalcy” and continued to use it, and within months the word, awkward and slightly archaic and faintly ridiculous, had become the brand of a national mood. Eighteen months had passed since the Armistice at Compiègne. Eleven months had passed since the signing at Versailles. Six months had passed since the Senate’s first rejection of the Treaty in November 1919. Two months had passed since the Senate’s second rejection in March 1920. Woodrow Wilson lay incapacitated in the White House after his October 1919 stroke, his wife Edith filtering what reached him and what left him. U.S. troops were still scattered across northern Russia and Siberia under intervention orders nobody could quite explain. A red scare gripped the nation; Eugene Debs sat in a federal prison in Atlanta; the Senate had not yet formally ended the state of war with Germany.

Harding’s promise was that all of this would stop. The crusades would end. The executive overreach would be reversed. The country would step back from the global mission Wilson had pressed upon it and return, as the candidate would phrase it at his July 22 acceptance address, “to the homely virtues that made and preserved us.” Six months later, on November 2, 1920, Marion’s most famous son won the largest popular-vote landslide in the nation’s history to that point: 60.3 percent to James Cox’s 34.1 percent, with the imprisoned Debs collecting 3.4 percent from his cell. The mandate could not have been clearer if it had been written into the Constitution. The voters wanted out of Wilson’s world. The question this article reconstructs is whether the 29th president gave it to them, and what it cost when he did.

What Wilson’s World Had Become by the Spring of 1920

To understand what Harding was promising to retreat from, the picture of the Wilson administration’s final eighteen months has to be drawn fully. The occupant of the White House who had once written The State and Constitutional Government in the United States, who had taught at Princeton and run the institution as its first non-clerical leader, had broken his health on a September 1919 western speaking tour to rally public support for the Treaty. He collapsed in Pueblo, Colorado on September 25, was rushed back to Washington, and suffered the massive ischemic stroke that paralyzed his left side on October 2. From that morning forward, the executive branch of the United States was being managed, in the most literal sense, by Wilson’s second wife Edith Bolling Galt Wilson and his physician Cary Grayson. Visitors were screened, papers were filtered, cabinet members went weeks without seeing the president, and Secretary of State Robert Lansing was forced into resignation in February 1920 for the offense of having chaired cabinet meetings in Wilson’s absence. The episode would haunt every subsequent discussion of presidential succession and disability until the Twenty-Fifth Amendment finally addressed the question in 1967.

Beyond the disability itself, the Wilson program had assumed a posture that even sympathetic observers found increasingly difficult to defend. The Treaty of Versailles, which Wilson had signed on June 28, 1919 and which carried his beloved League of Nations Covenant inside it, had been rejected by the Senate twice. The first vote, on November 19, 1919, had failed both with reservations and without. The second vote, on March 19, 1920, had come closer; the version with Lodge’s reservations attached fell seven votes short of two-thirds. Wilson had ordered Democratic senators to vote against the reservation version, and twenty-three Democrats obeyed him, killing what could have passed. The decision was made from his sickbed, communicated through Edith, and produced the outcome that John Milton Cooper Jr. would later argue, in Breaking the Heart of the World, was the single most consequential failure of personal-versus-political judgment in twentieth-century American executive history. Wilson preferred no treaty to a compromised treaty, and he got the outcome he asked for. The reader who wants the full reconstruction of Wilson’s choice can read the companion article on Wilson at Versailles and the lost treaty; the present article picks up at the consequence.

The economic backdrop reinforced the case for retrenchment. The wartime economic mobilization had produced inflation that hit a peak of roughly 20 percent year-over-year in mid-1920. The Treasury had borrowed heavily through Liberty Bonds; debt service was crowding domestic priorities; demobilization had pushed unemployment upward as four million returning servicemen sought work that had often been filled by women, African American migrants from the South, and immigrants whose own positions were now contested. The summer of 1919 had brought race riots in Chicago, Washington D.C., Tulsa, and dozens of smaller cities. The fall had brought the steel strike, the coal strike, and the Boston police strike that propelled Calvin Coolidge to national attention. The winter had brought the Palmer Raids, A. Mitchell Palmer’s Justice Department roundup of suspected radicals, several thousand deportations on the Buford and other vessels, and the constitutional outrage of mass arrests without warrants that even progressives like Felix Frankfurter publicly condemned.

This was the world the voters wanted out of. The 1920 election was not, in any meaningful sense, an ideological contest between competing visions of governance. It was a referendum on whether the experiment of activist progressive government, prosecuted through a global war and a global peace conference, had been worth the price. The electorate, with the largest popular-vote majority any presidential candidate had ever assembled, said it had not. Cox, who had explicitly run on League membership and who had told audiences that the central issue of the campaign was the Treaty, lost every state outside the Solid South and several states inside it. Tennessee went Republican. The Republican popular-vote majority in New York exceeded one million. The party gained sixty-three House seats and ten Senate seats, building a Senate majority of fifty-nine to thirty-seven and a House majority of three hundred and three to one hundred and thirty-one. By any measure available to a working democracy, the people had spoken, and they had spoken with a clarity that the political class found alarming.

The Smoke-Filled Room and the Available Man

How the Republican Party arrived at the man from Blooming Grove as its nominee is the part of the 1920 story that has attracted the most historiographical attention and the most enduring legend. The Republican National Convention opened in the Chicago Coliseum on June 8, 1920, with no clear front-runner. General Leonard Wood, Theodore Roosevelt’s old friend and the heir to whatever the Bull Moose energy still represented, led on the first ballot with 287 votes. Governor Frank Lowden of Illinois ran second with 211. Senator Hiram Johnson of California, the 1912 Bull Moose vice-presidential candidate, ran third with 133. Harding, on the same first ballot, polled 65 votes. Through the second, third, and fourth ballots the figures barely moved, with Wood and Lowden essentially tied and Johnson holding firm. The convention adjourned for the night with the leading candidates deadlocked.

That night, in suite 408 and 409 of the Blackstone Hotel, the legend of the smoke-filled room was made. The phrase came from Harding’s campaign manager Harry Daugherty, who had told a reporter weeks earlier that the convention would deadlock and that the nomination would be settled “in a smoke-filled room at two or three in the morning by about a dozen tired men who would have to come together.” The actual gathering at the Blackstone was less coordinated than the legend remembered. George Harvey, the publisher and Republican operator, hosted a rotating group of senators and party figures throughout the late evening and early morning. Lodge appeared. Reed Smoot appeared. Brandegee of Connecticut, who would later say that the Ohio senator was nominated because “this is not a year for first-raters,” appeared. Penrose of Pennsylvania, dying in his Philadelphia home, was on the telephone. The room did not pick the new president so much as it eliminated the alternatives: Wood was too closely tied to the Theodore Roosevelt legacy and to questions about his fundraising; Lowden carried suspicion of having spent his way to delegates; Johnson was too progressive and had refused even to consider a Wood vice-presidential pairing. Harding was nobody’s first choice. He was acceptable to everyone in the room, which in a deadlocked convention was the most valuable currency available.

The next morning, on the ninth ballot, the new chief executive moved up. On the tenth, he was nominated. Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts, fresh from the Boston police strike fame, was nominated for vice president from the floor in a delegate revolt against the bosses’ preferred choice of Senator Irvine Lenroot of Wisconsin. The ticket was set. The campaign that followed was, by deliberate strategic choice, the quietest major-party effort in modern U.S. political history. Harding remained at his home in Marion, Ohio, on the front porch of the house his late father-in-law Amos Kling had built. Visitors came to him. Speakers came to him. Reporters came to him. The candidate himself spoke roughly four times a week from the porch, reading prepared remarks that had been vetted by Daugherty and by ghostwriters including Welliver and the young Richard Washburn Child. He gave no extemporaneous speeches of any consequence. He took no positions on the League that could be quoted out of context. When pressed, he equivocated in language calibrated to please both the Irreconcilables who had killed the Treaty and the moderate Republicans who had wanted Lodge’s reservations attached.

Cox, by contrast, ran an exhausting traditional campaign. He delivered three hundred and ninety-four speeches in the course of the autumn. He traveled twenty-two thousand miles. He gave detailed defenses of the League. His running mate, the assistant Secretary of the Navy named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, gave a thousand speeches in his own right, including extensive defenses of the Wilson administration’s role in occupying Haiti, which would haunt FDR through the 1932 nomination fight. None of it mattered. Cox was running against a referendum and on the wrong side of it. By October, the New York Times’ own polling showed Marion’s most famous son leading by twenty points. The actual result on November 2 exceeded even those expectations. the 29th president had carried the Pacific Coast, the Northeast, the Midwest, and significant parts of the upper South. The map of 1920 looked nothing like 1916 or 1912. It looked like a country that had decided.

The May 14 Speech, Read Closely

The Boston speech of May 14, 1920 deserves closer reading than it usually receives, because it is the document that named the Harding promise and the standard against which Harding’s two and a half years in office must be measured. Welliver wrote it; Harding signed off on it; the Home Market Club audience heard it; and within a week it was being quoted in editorials across the country. The full passage, which runs to roughly a single dense paragraph in the printed text, deserves to be parsed for what it actually committed the the man in the Oval Office to.

“America’s present need,” the central sentence begins, “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; not experiment but equipoise; not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality.” The construction is parallel to the point of becoming musical, and it makes the rhetorical case through the sheer accumulation of paired terms. What the candidate is promising is not a specific policy but an emotional and institutional posture: a retreat from the activist, expansionary, world-shaping presidency that Wilson had embodied. The most consequential of the eight pairings is the final one. “Not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality.” That phrase, more than any other, is the Treaty rejection encoded in advance. The Wilson program had asked Americans to subordinate their national sovereignty to a collective security commitment administered through the League. the Ohio senator is promising to lift that subordination off them.

But notice what the speech does not say. It does not say America will withdraw from the world. It does not say America will refuse to engage in arms control. It does not say America will abandon the Open Door in China or its existing commitments in Latin America. It does not say America will renounce its position as a great power. The promise is specifically about the European entanglement and specifically about the League. Elsewhere in the speech, the new the head of state praises American commercial expansion, defends a strong navy, and speaks approvingly of the country’s economic interests in the Pacific. The “isolationist” reading of normalcy, which became standard after the 1930s and persisted through much of the postwar period, is reading the speech through the lens of what would come later rather than what the candidate actually said in May of 1920. Robert Murray, in The the Republican nominee Era, makes this point with particular force: the speech promised retrenchment from Wilson’s specific project, not retreat from American great-power activity.

The second consequential passage, less quoted but in some ways more revealing, comes later in the same address. Harding speaks of the need for “the readjustment of relations between government and the governed,” and lays out what amounts to the executive-restraint thesis. The presidency, in this telling, had grown too large during the war emergency. The departments had multiplied; the regulatory apparatus had expanded; the wartime boards and commissions had asserted authorities that the peacetime Constitution did not contemplate. The candidate is promising to reverse this expansion. The promise is partial, ambiguous, and in some respects internally contradictory, but it is the second prong of normalcy: not just retreat from Wilson’s foreign program but retreat from Wilson’s domestic state. The reader who has followed the pattern of one-term presidents since 1900 will recognize the language; the pattern’s logic of coalition exhaustion runs through 1920 with particular force.

What gives the speech historical weight is the gap between its rhetorical confidence and the actual capacity of any new administration to deliver what it promised. Harding was not yet the nominee when he delivered it. He had no Cabinet. He had no detailed policy. He had a phrase, “normalcy,” and a posture, retreat, and a coalition, the antiwar Republicans plus the small-government conservatives plus the Irreconcilable senators plus the immigration restrictionists plus the business interests who wanted lower wartime tax rates. Whether that coalition could be welded into governance and whether the promise could be operationalized into law would be the work of the next thirty-four months. Some of it would be delivered cleanly. Some of it would be delivered through institutional channels different from the ones the speech implied. Some of it would not be delivered at all. The May 14 text remains the standard the reconstruction must measure against.

March 4, 1921: The Inaugural That Confirmed the Direction

When Harding took the oath of office on the East Portico of the Capitol on March 4, 1921, he became the first chief executive to be sworn in after riding to the ceremony in an automobile, a Packard Twin Six provided by the manufacturer. He also became the first president whose inaugural address was broadcast (through loudspeakers, not yet through radio, though commercial radio would arrive in November of that year with the KDKA broadcasts of the 1920 election results). The address itself is shorter than is usually remembered, roughly thirty-three hundred words, and runs through three movements: a vision of America’s place in the world, a commitment to fiscal restraint, and a closing peroration on the dignity of common life.

The foreign-policy passages confirmed what the May 14 speech had implied. “We seek no part in directing the destinies of the world,” Harding said, in a sentence that has been quoted out of context more often than almost any other line from any inaugural. Read in context, the sentence is bracketed by qualifications that significantly soften the isolationist reading. The full passage reads: “We will accept no responsibility except as our own conscience and judgment, in each instance, may determine. Our eyes never will be blind to a developing menace, our ears never deaf to the call of civilization. We recognize the new order in the world, with the closer contacts which progress has wrought. We sense the call of the human heart for fellowship, fraternity, and cooperation. We crave friendship and harbor no hate. But America, our America, the America builded on the foundation laid by the inspired fathers, can be a party to no permanent military alliance. It can enter into no political commitments, nor assume any economic obligations which will subject our decisions to any other than our own authority.”

That is not the speech of a country withdrawing from the world. It is the speech of a country renegotiating the terms on which it will engage with the world. The distinction matters. What Harding is rejecting is the Wilson formula of automatic collective security, the Article X obligation that would have committed the United States to enforce the territorial integrity of any League member against aggression. What he is leaving open, deliberately and explicitly, is engagement on terms the United States retains the right to set, instance by instance. The phrasing is closer to the position Lodge had articulated through the Senate reservations than to the position the Irreconcilables led by Borah and Johnson had taken. It rejects the League while preserving the room for substantive multilateralism conducted through different channels. The Washington Naval Conference, which Charles Evans Hughes would open eight months later, was foreshadowed in the inaugural’s careful language.

The domestic passages were less ambiguous. Harding called for reduced taxation, retrenchment in government spending, the establishment of a Bureau of the Budget (which would be created by the Budget and Accounting Act of June 10, 1921), the protection of agriculture through tariffs, and the restriction of immigration. The last point was significant. the president had voted as a senator for the literacy test that Wilson had vetoed and Congress had overridden in 1917. He had signaled during the campaign that he favored further restriction. The inaugural made the commitment explicit. Within ten weeks the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 would pass Congress and arrive on his desk, the first numerical-quota immigration law in U.S. history, capping annual admissions from each country at three percent of the foreign-born population from that country recorded in the 1910 census. The act would be replaced by the more restrictive 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, but the 1921 measure had been the first turn of the ratchet, and the Ohio senator had signed it on May 19, 1921.

April 12, 1921: The Senate, the President, and the Formal End of the War

The most consequential single moment of the early Harding administration’s foreign policy came on April 12, 1921, when the new president delivered his first annual message to a joint session of Congress. The message was unusual in its mechanics; it was the first joint-session address by a president since Wilson’s December 1920 message, and it returned to a tradition (in-person delivery of the annual message) that Wilson had revived and that Theodore Roosevelt and his predecessors had largely abandoned in favor of written messages. The decision to appear in person was itself a statement: the new president would speak directly to the legislature, but he would do so to lay out a program the legislature was expected to act on rather than to direct from the executive.

The address called for a series of measures that constituted, in aggregate, the most explicit retrenchment from Wilsonian executive posture that any post-1789 the man in the Oval Office had attempted. the Republican nominee asked Congress to pass a separate resolution declaring the state of war with Germany at an end, distinct from the Treaty of Versailles. He called for a substantial reduction in federal spending and the creation of the Bureau of the Budget. He asked for tariff revision through what would become the Emergency Tariff Act of May 27, 1921 and then the broader Fordney-McCumber Tariff of September 21, 1922. He called for immigration restriction. He called for tax reduction, particularly the elimination of the wartime excess-profits tax. He called for an end to the wartime regulatory boards that had not yet been wound down. He called for renewed federal support for the merchant marine. Each of these was, in different ways, a partial undoing of the Wilson program.

The most immediately significant of these calls was the war-termination resolution. The state of war with Germany, in formal international law, had not ended. The Treaty of Versailles, which would have ended it, had been twice rejected by the Senate. the nation’s troops remained on occupation duty along the Rhine. the country’s businesses operating in Germany were still subject to the legal disabilities that a state of belligerency imposed. Wilson had refused to negotiate a separate peace, arguing that any settlement short of the full Versailles framework would betray the Allies and the principles for which the war had been fought. Harding accepted the political reality that the Treaty was dead and proposed to substitute a different mechanism: a joint resolution of Congress declaring the war ended, paired with separate bilateral treaties to be negotiated with each former enemy power.

The mechanism worked. Senator Philander Knox of Pennsylvania, the former secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt, had introduced a version of such a resolution in the previous Congress; the Knox Resolution had passed both houses in May 1920 and been vetoed by Wilson on May 27 of that year. Knox had died in October 1921, but his successor Senator Porter McCumber of North Dakota took the lead in the new Congress, and the Knox-Porter Resolution passed the Senate by 38 to 19 on April 30, 1921 and the House by 263 to 59 on July 1. the candidate signed it on July 2, 1921, on the porch of Senator Joseph Frelinghuysen’s estate at Raritan, New Jersey, where he was guest for the weekend. The signing was without ceremony; Harding was reportedly playing a round of golf and was called inside to put pen to paper. The war with Germany, in Washington’s law, was over. A separate peace treaty with Germany was negotiated and signed at Berlin on August 25, 1921, with parallel agreements concluded with Austria on August 24 and with Hungary on August 29. All three were ratified by the Senate by mid-October and were significantly shorter and significantly less demanding than the Versailles document. They preserved the financial and territorial concessions the United States had obtained under Versailles while omitting the League Covenant entirely.

The Knox-Porter mechanism, viewed institutionally, represents one of the few clean cases of Senate reassertion against an over-extended executive in twentieth-century American history. Wilson had bet the foreign policy of his second term on a Treaty he could not bring his own party to support without reservations. The Senate, which had explicit constitutional authority over treaty ratification, had refused to be coerced. The new the head of state did not attempt to reverse that defeat but accepted it and engineered an alternative pathway. The pathway preserved the substantive the nation’s gains of the war while abandoning the institutional framework Wilson had insisted on. From the standpoint of executive-power theory, the moment is anomalous: the office gave up scope it had claimed, the Senate recovered authority it had asserted, and the institutional reset held for the duration of the interwar period. The reset would not survive the next world war, when FDR’s wartime executive would dwarf even Wilson’s claims, but for the eighteen years between 1921 and 1939 the boundary line was meaningfully different than it had been during the Wilson administration.

Hughes, the Battleships, and the November 12 Speech That Shocked the World

If the Knox-Porter Resolution had been the formal undoing of Wilson’s European program, the Washington Naval Conference of November 1921 through February 1922 was the affirmative substitute. The conference was the most ambitious arms-control project any government had attempted to that point. Its architecture was the work of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, the former Supreme Court justice, former 1916 Republican presidential candidate, and former governor of New York who Harding had named to the State Department in March 1921. Hughes was, by any reasonable accounting, the most institutionally consequential figure in the early Harding cabinet and arguably the most consequential American diplomat of the entire interwar period until Cordell Hull. Andrew Mellon at Treasury and Herbert Hoover at Commerce were each significant in their own domains, but Hughes shaped the foreign policy outcomes that defined the administration’s actual record.

The naval-arms problem in 1921 was concrete and dangerous. Three nations had emerged from the world war as serious naval powers: Britain, with its longstanding two-power standard now economically unsustainable; Japan, which had used the war to extend its position in the Pacific and to acquire former German possessions in Micronesia under League mandate; and the United States, whose 1916 naval program had authorized a fleet that would have made it the largest in the world by the late 1920s. A naval arms race was visibly underway. The 1916 program was budgeted but not yet completed; Japan was building eight battleships and eight battlecruisers under its “Eight-Eight” plan; Britain was attempting to maintain parity with both. The annual Washington’s naval appropriation for 1921 alone exceeded the entire prewar budget. The political pressure for relief was substantial. Senator William Borah of Idaho had introduced a Senate resolution in December 1920 calling for a naval-disarmament conference, and after various amendments it had passed the Senate sixty-three to twenty-seven on May 25, 1921, instructing the president to convene such a conference. Borah was an Irreconcilable; his pressure came from the isolationist right rather than the Wilsonian internationalist left. The administration accepted the mandate and turned it into an opportunity.

Hughes did the planning. He convened working groups in the State Department, Navy Department, and Treasury through the summer and early fall of 1921. He coordinated with congressional leadership. He arranged for invitations to Britain, Japan, France, Italy, and (for the related Far Eastern questions) China, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal. The conference opened on November 12, 1921 in Memorial Continental Hall in Washington, the day after the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington. The opening session was attended by President the man from Blooming Grove, Secretary Hughes, the assembled diplomatic corps, and a public gallery that included foreign correspondents from across the world.

What happened next has been described in the diplomatic histories so many times that it has acquired the quality of legend, but the legend in this case is accurate. Hughes, after a brief and conventional welcoming statement, set aside his prepared text and laid out a specific American proposal for the immediate scrapping of capital ships. He named individual American battleships and battlecruisers that would be destroyed. He named individual British and Japanese ships that should be destroyed. He proposed a tonnage ratio of 5 to 5 to 3 among the United States, Britain, and Japan in capital ships, with secondary ratios of 1.67 for France and Italy. He proposed a ten-year holiday in capital-ship construction. The total tonnage proposed for scrapping was approximately 1.87 million tons, including roughly 845,000 tons of the country’s battleships and battlecruisers that had been either authorized or were already under construction. Naval analysts in the audience calculated rapidly that Hughes was proposing to destroy, in a single afternoon, more naval tonnage than had been sunk in all the great fleet actions of the war just concluded.

The British First Sea Lord, Admiral David Beatty, who had commanded the British battlecruiser fleet at Jutland and was sitting in the audience, was later reported to have responded as if struck by a physical blow. He recovered enough to whisper to a neighboring delegate that Hughes had thrown more capital ships overboard than all the admirals of the world had sunk in centuries. The American press, predisposed by the Borah resolution’s popularity to receive the proposal favorably, reacted with near-universal enthusiasm. The Washington Post called the speech a moment of “imperishable grandeur.” Even papers that had been generally hostile to the Harding administration recognized that Hughes had executed a diplomatic coup of the first magnitude. The audience applauded for fully three minutes; observers later reported that several women fainted.

The substance of the proposal was the point, but the manner of its delivery shaped the conference’s eventual outcome. Hughes had committed the United States, in public, to substantive arms reductions before any of the other delegations had spoken. He had named the specific American ships to be scrapped, eliminating any possibility of the nation’s backsliding. He had set the negotiating frame as one of mutual reduction rather than mutual escalation. The British and Japanese delegations, faced with a public the country’s commitment they could not easily walk away from, had to engage on substance. The conference’s working sessions, conducted through December and January, produced exactly the framework Hughes had outlined, with relatively minor adjustments: the 5-5-3 capital-ship ratio held; the 5-5-3 carrier ratio was agreed at a slightly higher tonnage ceiling; the ten-year construction holiday was adopted; the maximum individual capital-ship size was capped at 35,000 tons.

The Five-Power Treaty was signed at the closing plenary on February 6, 1922. The signatories were the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy. The treaty’s principal terms scrapped seventy individual capital ships across the five navies and committed the signatories to a decade-long pause in new capital-ship construction. The agreement’s principal failures, which would become consequential in the late 1930s, were the omission of restrictions on cruisers, submarines, and aircraft carriers (which would be partially addressed by the 1930 London Naval Treaty) and the absence of any enforcement mechanism should any signatory choose to abrogate. Japan would formally abrogate in December 1934 and formally withdraw in December 1936, signaling the end of the interwar arms-control regime.

The Five-Power Treaty was the headline outcome, but the conference produced three additional agreements that were arguably more institutionally consequential in their immediate effects. The Four-Power Treaty, signed on December 13, 1921, was the diplomatic instrument that allowed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 (renewed in 1905 and 1911) to be terminated. The alliance had been a continuing irritant in American-Japanese-British relations, and the United States and Canada had both pressed the British government to allow it to lapse. The Four-Power Treaty, signed by the United States, Britain, Japan, and France, committed the four powers to respect each other’s Pacific possessions and to consult in case of dispute. It explicitly superseded the bilateral Anglo-Japanese arrangement. Britain accepted American leadership on the issue in part because the alliance had become diplomatically more costly than it was strategically valuable, and in part because Hughes had created enough negotiating goodwill through the broader conference that British acceptance was politically possible at home.

The Nine-Power Treaty, signed on February 6, 1922, addressed the Chinese question. China was nominally represented at the conference but had no leverage; the treaty was largely negotiated above its head among the powers with interests in the Chinese market. The treaty’s substantive commitment was the formal adoption of the Open Door policy that John Hay had articulated in his 1899 and 1900 notes as a binding multilateral obligation. The signatories committed to respect Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity, to refrain from seeking exclusive economic privileges in any region of China, and to consult before taking actions that might affect Chinese interests. The agreement was, on paper, a substantial American diplomatic achievement. In practice, it bound the United States to a Chinese stance whose enforcement mechanisms were nonexistent and whose principal violator over the subsequent two decades would be one of the signatories, Japan. The treaty’s collapse, in fits and starts from 1931 forward, would be among the proximate causes of American-Japanese tensions leading to Pearl Harbor.

A subsidiary agreement on Chinese tariff autonomy and a separate set of provisions on Shantung (where Japan had occupied former German concessions) rounded out the conference’s Far Eastern dimension. Japan agreed to withdraw from Shantung; the cession back to China was completed in May 1922. Russian objections to the treaty’s Pacific provisions, given that Soviet Russia was not a signatory and was at that point still being denied diplomatic recognition by the major powers, were noted and disregarded.

The conference closed on February 6, 1922. By any measure available to contemporary observers or to subsequent historians, it was a substantive multilateral diplomatic achievement of the first rank. It produced concrete arms reductions, the elimination of a strategically destabilizing alliance, the formalization of a major-power consensus on China, and the establishment of a precedent that naval arms control was a tractable diplomatic problem. It cost the United States nothing in terms of strategic position; the 5-5-3 ratio left American naval power equal to Britain’s and substantially greater than Japan’s. It saved the federal government an estimated $300 million in immediate construction costs and undetermined billions in deferred construction over the decade-long holiday. Andrew Mellon’s tax-reduction program at Treasury depended in part on the savings the conference made possible.

The reader who has come this far is entitled to a direct question: how does this body of diplomatic activity comport with the “isolationist” reading of normalcy that became standard in subsequent historical writing? The honest answer is that it does not. Harding’s foreign course, as actually executed through Hughes, was not isolationist in any analytic sense the term will bear. It was non-Wilsonian. It rejected the League and the automatic collective-security commitment Article X represented. It embraced specific, substantive, treaty-based multilateralism conducted through different institutional channels. The mistake of conflating those two positions is the central error the standard “normalcy” narrative has propagated, and John Dean’s 2004 biography Warren G. Harding is largely an attempt to correct it. Dean’s revisionism, which we will treat at length below, is in some respects an overcorrection, but the core analytic point is correct. The Washington Naval Conference is the proof.

The Comparison Table: Wilson 1919, the new occupant of the White House 1921 Through 1923, Coolidge 1923 Through 1929

To make the continuity and discontinuity visible across the three administrations spanning 1919 through 1929, the following comparison along five concrete dimensions clarifies what actually changed and what did not.

On League membership, the discontinuity is total. Wilson made League membership the central commitment of his second-term foreign policy and refused all compromise that would have allowed reservations. Harding’s first major foreign-approach act was the Knox-Porter Resolution declaring the war ended without League membership; he never sent the Versailles Treaty back to the Senate. Coolidge maintained the same position; he never proposed League membership and never associated his administration with internationalist sentiment beyond ad hoc cooperation on specific issues. The 1924 Republican platform reaffirmed opposition to League membership; the 1928 platform did so again. Three Democratic platforms in the same period gradually retreated from League advocacy. The institutional decision held.

On European engagement, the discontinuity is substantial but not absolute. Wilson had committed troops to the Rhineland occupation and to the disastrous interventions in north Russia and Siberia. The Rhineland force was reduced to roughly one thousand troops by mid-1921 and was withdrawn entirely in January 1923. The north Russia force had been withdrawn in mid-1919 before Wilson’s stroke; the Siberian force was withdrawn in April 1920. Harding inherited the Rhineland deployment and quietly closed it. The Dawes Plan of 1924, negotiated under Coolidge, did represent substantive American engagement with European financial questions (specifically German reparations), but it was conducted by Charles Dawes as a private banker rather than as a government official, even though Coolidge had recruited him and the plan operated with administration support. The institutional fiction allowed the United States to participate in the central interwar European financial question while maintaining the formal posture of non-entanglement. The continuity between the new chief executive and Coolidge on this technique is essentially perfect.

On Latin American interventions, the continuity from Wilson through Harding through Coolidge is the dimension that most undercuts the isolationist reading. Wilson had landed Marines in Haiti in 1915, in the Dominican Republic in 1916, and had pursued the Pancho Villa expedition into Mexico in 1916 to 1917. The Haitian occupation continued through Harding’s full term and through most of Coolidge’s; the country’s troops did not leave Haiti until 1934 under Franklin Roosevelt. The Dominican occupation, by contrast, began winding down in mid-1921 under Harding, with full withdrawal completed in September 1924 under Coolidge. Nicaragua, where Marines had been deployed since 1912, saw a brief withdrawal in August 1925 and a return in January 1927; Coolidge dispatched five thousand troops to support Adolfo Diaz against the Sandino insurgency, the largest American military intervention of the 1920s. The pattern is one of substantial continuity in the assertion of U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean basin, regardless of which party held the White House.

On naval arms control, the discontinuity is sharp and almost entirely a the 29th president-Coolidge achievement. Wilson had supported the 1916 naval program that authorized the largest peacetime fleet construction in the nation’s history to that point; his administration had treated naval supremacy as an objective in its own right. The Washington Naval Conference reversed that posture decisively. The Geneva Naval Conference of 1927, called by Coolidge to extend the Washington framework to cruisers and submarines, failed without producing an agreement (largely due to British-the country’s disagreement on cruiser categories), but the Coolidge administration maintained the Washington framework throughout the period. The London Naval Treaty of 1930 under Hoover would extend the framework before its eventual breakdown under Japanese pressure in 1934 and 1936.

On immigration program, the discontinuity is the most dramatic and the most quickly consolidated. Wilson’s two vetoes of the literacy test (in 1915 and 1917) had positioned the Democratic administration as comparatively pro-immigrant. The Wilson administration had also operated the wartime Bureau of Immigration in a manner that, while restrictive of suspected radicals, was administratively continuous with the pre-1914 open-immigration regime. The Emergency Quota Act of May 19, 1921 was the first numerical-quota law in American history, capping admissions from each country at three percent of the foreign-born population from that country recorded in the 1910 census. The Johnson-Reed Act of May 26, 1924 under Coolidge tightened the quotas to two percent of the 1890 foreign-born population (deliberately chosen to disfavor recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe), banned virtually all Asian immigration outright, and established the national-origins quota system that would govern U.S. immigration until 1965. The cumulative effect of the 1921 and 1924 measures was to reduce annual European immigration from approximately 805,000 in 1920 to approximately 165,000 by 1924. The discontinuity in immigration policy between the Wilson administration and the the senator from Marion-Coolidge era is the largest of any of the five dimensions and arguably the most consequential in its long-term effects on American demography and labor markets.

The honest reading of this comparison is that Harding’s course was neither pure continuity with Wilson nor pure retreat from American great-power activity. It was selective retrenchment: a sharp break on League membership and European entanglement, a sharp break on naval arms races and immigration openness, with continuity on Latin American hegemony and a substitution of treaty-based multilateralism conducted through ad hoc conferences for the institutional multilateralism Wilson had attempted to build through Geneva. Whether this counted as “normalcy” depends on what the word was taken to mean. If it meant withdrawal from the world, the policy was not normalcy. If it meant retreat from Wilson’s specific institutional architecture, the policy was normalcy delivered with substantial fidelity.

The Rapid Unwinding of the Wartime State

One element of normalcy that deserves its own attention is the speed at which the wartime regulatory apparatus was dismantled. Wilson had assembled, between April 1917 and November 1918, the largest peacetime expansion of federal authority in U.S. history to that point. The War Industries Board under Bernard Baruch had set production priorities across hundreds of industries. The Food Administration under Herbert Hoover had managed grain prices, hog production, and household consumption through voluntary pledge campaigns. The Fuel Administration under Harry Garfield had rationed coal and standardized “heatless Mondays.” The Railroad Administration under William McAdoo had nationalized roughly two hundred and fifty thousand miles of track. The Committee on Public Information under George Creel had managed wartime propaganda. The Espionage and Sedition Acts had criminalized speech that “willfully obstructed” the war effort. The Lever Act of 1917 had given the executive vast emergency authority over food and fuel. Each of these constituted, in different ways, a substantial expansion of executive scope into domains that the pre-1917 constitutional understanding had reserved either to private actors or to the states.

By Wilson’s last day in office on March 3, 1921, much of this apparatus had been technically wound down but had not been formally repealed or dismantled. The War Industries Board had ceased major activity in early 1919 but its legal framework remained on the books. The Railroad Administration had returned the rail network to private operation on March 1, 1920 under the Esch-Cummins Act, but the regulatory structure that act created had imposed significant new ICC authority over rates and consolidation. The Espionage Act of 1917 remained in force and would, in fact, never be repealed; Debs’s federal sentence under its provisions was being served at Atlanta when Harding took office.

The new administration moved quickly. Wartime emergency authorities were allowed to lapse without renewal; the Lever Act provisions on fuel and food expired in August 1921; the surviving boards and commissions either dissolved or had their funding zeroed in the fiscal 1922 appropriations. The Espionage Act remained, but Harding commuted Debs’s sentence on December 23, 1921, releasing the Socialist Party leader on Christmas Eve as a gesture of national reconciliation. The Bureau of the Budget, created under the Budget and Accounting Act of June 10, 1921, began operations on July 1 with Charles Dawes as its first director and immediately reduced fiscal 1922 spending estimates from $4.5 billion to $3.5 billion. The actual outlay that year came in at $3.37 billion, the largest single-year reduction in federal spending in peacetime U.S. history to that point. The wartime executive, on the regulatory and fiscal dimensions, was effectively dismantled within the first eighteen months.

The Teapot Dome Shadow

No account of the the man from Blooming Grove administration can be honest without addressing the scandal that has shaped the president’s posthumous reputation more than any other element of his record. Teapot Dome was the corruption that did not break publicly until after the president was dead, but the decisions that produced it were taken during his administration and with the involvement of officials he had appointed.

The relevant facts are these. The Teapot Dome oil reserve in Wyoming and the Elk Hills and Buena Vista Hills reserves in California had been set aside by Presidents Taft and Wilson as strategic naval petroleum reserves, to be available to fuel the Navy in event of war. In May 1921, the Ohio senator signed an executive order transferring administrative control of the reserves from the Department of the Navy to the Department of the Interior. The order was issued at the request of Interior Secretary Albert Fall, the former senator from New Mexico, and was supported by Navy Secretary Edwin Denby. The constitutional basis was thin (the reserves had been set aside by executive order in the first place, so executive order could in principle reassign them), and the political case rested on the argument that the Interior Department was better situated to manage extractive resources on federal land.

Within months of the transfer, Fall had negotiated lease arrangements with two private oil companies. The Elk Hills lease, dated December 11, 1921 and signed with the Pan U.S. Petroleum and Transport Company controlled by Edward Doheny, contained provisions for Doheny to develop the field, store reserve oil at a new facility in Pearl Harbor, and pay royalties in oil rather than cash. The Teapot Dome lease, dated April 7, 1922 and signed with the Mammoth Oil Company controlled by Harry Sinclair, contained parallel provisions. Both leases were executed without competitive bidding. Both were challenged almost immediately by congressional Democrats led by Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana, but the challenges did not produce a full investigation until 1923 and did not produce public revelation of the underlying corruption until late that year and into 1924.

What had not been visible to the public was that Doheny had loaned Fall $100,000 in cash in November 1921, delivered in a small black bag, and that Sinclair had subsequently provided Fall with approximately $304,000 in cash and Liberty Bonds along with the gift of a herd of cattle for Fall’s New Mexico ranch. The Walsh investigation, which interviewed Fall in October 1923 (two months after Harding’s death on August 2, 1923 in San Francisco), eventually unearthed the bag of cash and the bond transfers. Fall was indicted in 1924 for accepting bribes, convicted in October 1929, and served roughly nine months of a one-year prison sentence beginning in July 1931, becoming the first cabinet officer in the nation’s history to be imprisoned for crimes committed in office. Doheny was acquitted of bribery on the legal technicality that Fall’s “loan” was not legally distinguishable from a gift even if it was morally identical. Sinclair was convicted of contempt of Congress and of jury tampering and served a brief prison term in 1929.

The question that has divided Harding’s biographers for ninety years is what the president knew and when he knew it. The honest evidentiary answer is that we do not know with certainty. Harding made remarks to several confidants in the spring and summer of 1923 suggesting that he was aware of scandals brewing in his administration, though the specific scandal he had in mind appears to have been the Veterans Bureau corruption (Charles Forbes, the Veterans Bureau director, would be convicted of bribery in early 1925) rather than the oil-reserve leases. Russell, in The Shadow of Blooming Grove, argues that Harding was substantively aware of the Fall corruption by mid-1923; Murray, in The Harding Era, argues that the evidence does not support direct knowledge; Dean, in Warren G. the candidate, argues vigorously that Marion’s most famous son had no reason to suspect the leases were corrupt and that his administration’s record has been unfairly tarnished by Fall’s conduct.

The reconstruction that best fits the evidence is that the 29th president was aware of growing problems with his administration’s ethical standards (the Veterans Bureau corruption was substantial and was unraveling visibly through the spring of 1923) but did not specifically know that the Fall leases involved bribery rather than merely poor judgment or excessive favoritism. Whether this assessment exculpates the senator from Marion depends on the standard one applies. Under a strict standard of executive responsibility, the president was accountable for the actions of officers he appointed; under a more forgiving standard, presidents can only be held responsible for what they knew. The standard the reader applies will substantially determine how the the man from Blooming Grove record is graded. What is not in serious doubt is that the corruption happened, that it happened on Harding’s watch, that it was enabled by an executive order he signed, and that the reputational damage to the administration has been substantial and durable.

The Teapot Dome shadow does not change the analytic verdict on the foreign-policy substance of the the president administration. The Washington Naval Conference and its outputs stand on their own merits and were not touched by the scandal. The Knox-Porter Resolution and the separate peaces with Germany, Austria, and Hungary were similarly clean. The immigration restriction and the tax-reduction program were policies the public had voted for and that proceeded through ordinary congressional process. The scandal touched the Interior Department and the Veterans Bureau and, more peripherally, the Justice Department under Daugherty. It did not touch the parts of the record on which the “normalcy” promise of May 14, 1920 was redeemed.

The Historians Sort the Verdict

Among the five historians the standard reference list for the Ohio senator identifies, the disagreement on the foreign-policy substance is sharper than on the domestic record. Robert K. Murray’s The Harding Era, published in 1969, remains the scholarly standard, and Murray’s verdict is moderate-positive on the foreign-course record while critical of the personnel choices. Murray grants the Washington Naval Conference its weight and treats Hughes as a substantial the country’s secretary of state. He grants the Knox-Porter Resolution its institutional significance. He is harsh on the Forbes, Fall, and Daugherty appointments. The composite picture is of an administration whose foreign-policy substance was more impressive than its public reputation has allowed but whose domestic personnel was as badly chosen as the public reputation has suggested.

Andrew Sinclair’s The Available Man, published in 1965, is the more critical of the major academic biographies. Sinclair’s reading treats the Republican nominee as essentially a creation of Daugherty’s political machine, a figure of limited capacity who happened to be acceptable to the right combination of Senate barons at the right time. Sinclair grants Hughes the credit for the foreign-policy achievements but treats the new chief executive as having had little independent role in shaping them. The the candidate of Sinclair’s account is amiable, mediocre, and out of his depth. The available-man thesis (Harding was nominated not because he was best but because he was available to all factions) has been influential and has shaped much subsequent popular treatment.

Francis Russell’s The Shadow of Blooming Grove, published in 1968 and based partly on the controversial Carrie Phillips love letters (which Russell had access to but which were sealed by court order at the request of the the 29th president family), is the closest of the major biographies to outright hostility. Russell emphasizes the personal failings (the affairs, the gambling, the alcohol consumption in defiance of the Prohibition his administration was nominally enforcing), the personnel failures, and the scandals. Russell’s the senator from Marion is a sympathetic figure but a substantially failed president; the book’s account of the 1923 Alaska trip and the death in San Francisco is among the most vivid in the literature. Russell’s verdict has been challenged by subsequent biographers who have argued he made too much of the personal material and not enough of the substantive record.

David Pietrusza’s 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents, published in 2007, takes the narrower task of reconstructing the 1920 election and the political environment that produced Harding’s victory. Pietrusza’s account is heavily focused on the campaign mechanics, the Republican convention, the Cox campaign, the third-party challenge from Robert La Follette that did not materialize until 1924, and the political dynamics of the immediate postwar moment. Pietrusza is less invested in the verdict on the the man from Blooming Grove presidency than the biographers are; his contribution is to make the 1920 result legible as something other than a referendum on Wilson’s health.

The most aggressive rehabilitation has come from John Dean, the former Nixon White House counsel and Watergate figure, whose 2004 Warren G. the president is part of the American Presidents Series edited by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Dean’s verdict is sharply revisionist. He argues that Harding’s foreign-policy substance was significantly underrated, that the personal-scandal material has been overemphasized, that the Teapot Dome corruption was the work of Fall rather than the president, that the Harding economic record (the tax cuts under Mellon, the budget reform, the rapid demobilization of wartime regulations) deserves credit, and that the standard ranking of the new president near the bottom of every presidential survey reflects scholarly inertia rather than the underlying record. Dean’s argument is partly persuasive on the foreign-policy substance, where the Washington Naval Conference does carry the weight he attributes to it. The argument is more strained on the scandals; Dean’s claim that Harding was unaware of and uninvolved in Fall’s conduct is consistent with the evidence but does not address the executive-responsibility question that the standard verdict has rested on.

The disagreement among these five historians can be reduced to two analytic axes. The first is the personnel-versus-substance question: how much does an administration’s record depend on the personal capacity of the president versus the institutional decisions he makes about whom to appoint? Sinclair and Russell weight personnel heavily; Murray balances; Dean weights substance. The second is the comparison-base question: against what standard is the the new chief executive administration being judged? Compared to Wilson’s first term (1913 to 1917), the record looks weak. Compared to Wilson’s second term (1917 to 1921, including the stroke-immobilized last eighteen months), the record looks substantially stronger. Compared to the immediate predecessors Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft, the record falls into the middle range. The C-SPAN historian survey, which has ranked presidents in 2000, 2009, 2017, and 2021, has placed the candidate 38th, 38th, 40th, and 37th respectively, near the bottom but not the absolute floor.

The verdict the present article reaches is closer to Murray’s than to either Sinclair’s or Dean’s. The foreign-policy substance was real and was substantial. Hughes deserves most of the credit for that substance, but Harding’s choice of Hughes as secretary of state is itself a meaningful executive judgment. The Knox-Porter mechanism was an institutionally consequential restoration of the Senate’s treaty role. The Washington Naval Conference outputs were the most ambitious arms-control achievement of the interwar period and were directly attributable to the administration. The immigration and tariff measures were policies the public had voted for. The Teapot Dome scandal, the Forbes corruption, and the Daugherty unevenness were genuine failures of personnel selection and oversight that deserve the weight the standard accounts have assigned them. The composite picture is of an administration whose substantive achievements have been underrated and whose personnel scandals have been correctly noted. Whether this composite produces a ranking near the bottom or in the middle is a judgment call about how the two records balance.

The Complication

The strongest counter-argument to the verdict offered here runs as follows. Harding’s foreign-policy successes were Hughes’s foreign-policy successes; the president himself contributed little of substance. The administration’s domestic achievements were largely the work of Mellon at Treasury and Hoover at Commerce. The Knox-Porter Resolution was the work of Senate Republicans pursuing a strategy Knox had laid out before Marion’s most famous son took office. The Washington Naval Conference was politically enabled by the Borah resolution. The substantive credit, by this reading, belongs to specific cabinet officers and congressional figures rather than to the president, who functioned more as a permissive figurehead than as an active executive.

The argument has force and cannot be entirely dismissed. Harding’s role in the day-to-day shaping of policy was less direct than Wilson’s had been or than Theodore Roosevelt’s had been. Cabinet meetings under the 29th president were often informal; the president frequently deferred to the secretary with departmental jurisdiction; major stance speeches were prepared by ghostwriters with the candidate’s approval rather than from his original drafting. The available-man critique survives partly because there is real evidence that the senator from Marion was the available rather than the optimal choice for the work.

Two responses recover most of the credit for the president. First, the executive selection function is itself substantive; appointing Hughes rather than (for instance) Hiram Johnson to State, or Mellon rather than (for instance) Henry Cabot Lodge to Treasury, are choices with consequences that flowed from the president’s judgment. The available-man thesis is true about how the man from Blooming Grove became the Republican nominee but is too dismissive of how he constructed his administration. Second, the strategic frame within which Hughes, Mellon, and Hoover operated was set by Harding’s public commitments. The May 14, 1920 Boston speech, the March 4, 1921 inaugural, the April 12, 1921 annual message, and the steady reiteration of “normalcy” through the administration’s first year established the political environment in which the cabinet could execute. A different president, even one who appointed the same cabinet, might have produced different outcomes if the public framing had been different. The strategic frame is the executive contribution that survives the available-man critique.

The second strongest counter-argument is the one Dean does not fully answer: even granting the foreign-policy substance, the administration’s failure on personnel and oversight produced concrete corruption that compromised the public trust. The Teapot Dome leases were not merely poor judgment; they involved hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and the transfer of strategic petroleum reserves to private companies through procedures designed to evade competitive bidding. The Forbes corruption at the Veterans Bureau ran into the tens of millions of dollars in stolen or wasted appropriations. The Daugherty Justice Department, while not implicated in financial corruption of comparable magnitude, was the source of significant scandal in the prosecution of Prohibition violations and in the handling of the alien-property administration. The cumulative weight of these failures is substantial and cannot be erased by foreign-policy achievements on the other side of the ledger.

The composite balance the article reaches is that the foreign-policy substance was real and is underrated, that the personnel failures were real and are correctly weighted, and that the net ranking near the bottom of presidential surveys overstates the negative balance because the surveys have given inadequate weight to the substantive achievements. A fair ranking would place the president somewhere in the upper twenties to lower thirties rather than near the absolute floor where he has tended to land. The standard verdict that the administration was a moral and managerial disaster is correct on the personnel dimension and incorrect on the policy dimension.

The Verdict

Harding promised on May 14, 1920 to retreat from Wilson’s specific institutional program: from the League, from the automatic collective-security commitment of Article X, from the wartime regulatory state, from the open-immigration regime, from the high wartime taxes. He delivered each of these. The League was rejected and the war ended through a separate mechanism. The wartime boards were largely closed. The Emergency Quota Act installed the first numerical immigration restriction. The Mellon tax program reduced the top marginal rate from 73 percent to 56 percent under the 1921 Revenue Act and would continue downward in the subsequent acts.

What the new president did not promise on May 14, 1920, and what he did not retreat from, was the underlying American great-power posture. The Washington Naval Conference was substantive arms-control multilateralism, not retreat. The Open Door treaties were substantive Pacific engagement, not withdrawal. The Latin American interventions continued largely unchanged. The American economic presence in Europe through bank lending and bond markets expanded rather than contracted through the decade. The administration that named itself the return to normalcy was actively reshaping the institutional framework of American great-power activity rather than abandoning it.

The honest verdict is that the May 14 promise was kept on its own narrow terms and exceeded on the broader question of whether retreat from Wilson meant retreat from the world. Harding’s foreign policy substituted treaty-based, instance-by-instance multilateralism for Wilson’s institutionalized collective security. The substitution was, on the substantive dimension, more successful than the standard account has allowed. The institutional architecture Hughes constructed at Washington in 1921 and 1922 governed Pacific great-power relations for the better part of two decades until Japanese abrogation in 1934 and 1936 began the slow process of dismantling it. Whether the architecture’s eventual failure should be charged against its original construction is a separate question; the structures that survived the longest in twentieth-century international politics tended to be the ones with strong enforcement, and the Washington system lacked any enforcement beyond the political will of its signatories.

On the domestic side, the verdict is more divided. The economic restoration under Mellon was real; the inflation that had peaked at 20 percent in mid-1920 had been reversed to deflation by 1921 (with substantial costs to farmers, who would not recover from the early-1920s commodity-price collapse for the rest of the decade), and the postwar recession had given way to the beginning of the long expansion that would run through 1929. The immigration restriction reflected what the electorate had voted for. The personnel failures and the scandals were the genuine cost of the available-man approach to constructing an administration; they were not inevitable consequences of the course program but they were enabled by an executive who did not exercise close oversight of officers he had appointed.

The reconstruction of Harding’s decision in 1920 to promise normalcy and to deliver on the foreign-agenda components of that promise is, on balance, a story of partial executive success on the substantive dimension and partial executive failure on the managerial dimension. The two records have been weighted differently by different historians, and the appropriate composite verdict depends on how much weight one assigns to each. The verdict offered here is that the foreign-policy substance was the most consequential durable achievement of the administration and has been substantially underrated, while the personnel failures were real costs that have been correctly identified. The net verdict places Harding’s record meaningfully above the floor of presidential rankings, though not at the middle and certainly not at the top.

The Legacy and the House Thesis

The InsightCrunch series argues that the modern American executive was forged in four crises (the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War), that every emergency power created in those crises outlived its emergency, and that every subsequent chief executive inherits an office designed for conditions that no longer exist. The the Republican nominee administration is, on this telling, the one substantive interwar moment when the foreign-program ratchet appeared to reverse. The Wilson wartime expansion had been the largest peacetime claim of executive scope in American history to that point; the the new chief executive retrenchment, brief and partial as it was, demonstrated that the ratchet was not mechanical. Executive power expansion was a series of political choices made under specific conditions, and different political choices made under different conditions could reverse those expansions.

The reversal did not hold. The Roosevelt administration that took office in March 1933 would, within its first hundred days, reclaim authorities that no president had attempted since Wilson and would extend them further. The Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, the destroyers-for-bases arrangement of September 1940, the August 1941 declaration of an undeclared naval war in the North Atlantic, would each push the executive war-making authority beyond anything Wilson had claimed even at the height of 1918. The wartime federal government FDR built was approximately ten times the size of Harding’s. By the end of the Second World War the institutional retrenchment the candidate had effected was an antique. The Cold War would entrench the wartime executive permanently. The reader who wants the systematic version of this argument can read the pattern of wartime executive power expansion that never returned; the present article is the rare interwar exception that tests the rule.

What the Marion’s most famous son interlude proves, against the otherwise depressing institutional history, is that the imperial executive is contingent. It was built by political choice; it can be partially unbuilt by political choice; the people who voted in November 1920 for Harding’s normalcy did not get permanent retrenchment, but they got a meaningful eighteen-year reset on the European entanglement question. The reset was insufficient to prevent the next war but it shaped which kind of war America would be drawn into and on what terms. The Versailles framework Wilson had insisted on, with its punitive reparations and its territorial reorderings without American participation in the enforcement architecture, contributed to the conditions that produced the European catastrophe of 1933 to 1945. Whether American League membership would have changed those conditions is the great counterfactual of interwar history; the counterfactual reconstruction of what Wilson’s treaty would have produced if the Senate had ratified it is taken up elsewhere in this series.

Harding’s reversal was specifically of the Wilsonian architecture, not of the underlying American capacity. The country that emerged from the 1920s was richer, more industrially developed, more demographically restricted, more financially connected to Europe through bank lending and bond markets, more diplomatically engaged in the Pacific through the Washington framework, and more isolated from European institutional architecture than the country that had entered the decade. Each of these facets was a legacy of the normalcy program and of the specific stance choices the Harding administration made between March 1921 and August 1923. The Coolidge administration that followed extended most of them. The Hoover administration that followed Coolidge inherited their consequences and would be broken by the economic crisis their financial structure had not been designed to weather. The reader who wants the next stage of the institutional history can pick it up with the Coolidge decision not to restrain the 1927 credit boom, where the foreign-policy retrenchment of the the senator from Marion administration meets its economic counterpart.

The Harding promise of May 14, 1920 was kept on the dimensions that the president had named. It was kept on dimensions the the head of state had not explicitly named but that the Washington Naval Conference and the Knox-Porter Resolution operationalized. It was undercut on the personnel dimensions where the available-man approach produced the corruption and scandal that have shaped the posthumous reputation. The composite legacy is one of substantive foreign-policy achievement, substantive economic restoration, substantive demographic restriction, and substantive failures of administrative oversight. Whether this composite warrants the standard ranking near the bottom of presidential surveys is, in the view of this article, a question on which the conventional answer is wrong by a meaningful margin. The the president administration was not a great administration. It was, however, an administration that delivered most of what it promised on the foreign-policy dimension and that has been substantially underrated for doing so.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What did “return to normalcy” actually mean in 1920?

The phrase came from Warren Harding’s May 14, 1920 speech at the Home Market Club in Boston, where the Ohio senator told his audience that “America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy.” The word itself was archaic and was assumed by some reporters to be a misspeaking of “normality,” but the Ohio senator meant “normalcy” and continued to use it. What it named was a retreat from the activist Wilsonian state, both in foreign policy (rejection of the League of Nations and the collective-security commitments of Article X) and in domestic policy (reduction of wartime regulatory boards, tax cuts, immigration restriction). It was not a withdrawal from the world; it was a specific rejection of Wilson’s institutional architecture in favor of a more transactional, treaty-based approach to international affairs and a more limited federal regulatory posture at home.

Q: Did Harding deliver on his 1920 campaign promises?

Mostly, on the dimensions he had named. The League was rejected; the war with Germany was formally ended through the Knox-Porter Resolution of July 1921 and separate peace treaties signed at Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest in August 1921; the Emergency Quota Act of May 1921 installed the first numerical immigration restrictions in American history; the wartime regulatory boards were largely closed; the Revenue Act of 1921 began the Mellon tax-reduction program; the Bureau of the Budget was created. On foreign policy, the Washington Naval Conference of November 1921 through February 1922 produced substantive arms control. The major failures of the Harding administration on its stated promises were largely on the personnel and oversight dimensions, where the available-man approach to cabinet selection produced the Teapot Dome and Veterans Bureau scandals.

Q: Was Harding’s foreign agenda isolationist?

Not in any analytically useful sense of the term. The standard “isolationist” reading of normalcy conflates rejection of the League with retreat from American great-power activity, but the historical record does not support that conflation. The Washington Naval Conference produced substantive arms control with Britain, Japan, France, and Italy. The Four-Power Treaty replaced the Anglo-Japanese alliance. The Nine-Power Treaty formalized the Open Door in China as a binding multilateral obligation. American troops remained on station in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. U.S. banks dominated European reparations financing through the 1924 Dawes Plan. The honest description of Harding’s foreign policy is “non-Wilsonian,” meaning rejection of the League’s automatic collective-security architecture in favor of instance-by-instance treaty-based engagement, not “isolationist” in the sense of withdrawal.

Q: What was the Knox-Porter Resolution?

The Knox-Porter Resolution was a joint resolution of the United States Congress, signed by the new chief executive on July 2, 1921, that formally declared the state of war with Germany at an end. It was named for Senator Philander Knox of Pennsylvania, who had introduced an earlier version that Wilson had vetoed in May 1920, and Senator Porter McCumber of North Dakota, who took the lead in the Sixty-Seventh Congress after Knox’s death. The resolution allowed the United States to end the war without ratifying the Treaty of Versailles or accepting League of Nations membership. Separate bilateral peace treaties with Germany, Austria, and Hungary were negotiated in August 1921 and ratified by the Senate in October 1921. The mechanism preserved the substantive the nation’s gains from the war while abandoning Wilson’s institutional framework.

Q: Who was Charles Evans Hughes and why was he so important under Harding?

Charles Evans Hughes was Harding’s secretary of state from March 1921 through March 1925, when he resigned for health reasons and was succeeded by Frank Kellogg. Before joining the cabinet he had served as governor of New York from 1907 to 1910, associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1910 to 1916, the Republican presidential nominee in 1916 (when he lost narrowly to Wilson), and a private attorney during the war years. He would later return to the Supreme Court as chief justice from 1930 to 1941. Under Harding he was the architect of the Washington Naval Conference, the Knox-Porter Resolution’s diplomatic implementation, and the Four-Power and Nine-Power Treaties. He was, by most assessments, the most consequential the country’s secretary of state of the interwar period until Cordell Hull and arguably the most institutionally consequential figure in the the 29th president cabinet.

Q: What did the Five-Power Treaty accomplish?

The Five-Power Treaty, signed on February 6, 1922 by the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy, was the first major multilateral naval-arms-control agreement of the twentieth century. It established a 5-5-3 ratio of capital-ship tonnage among the United States, Britain, and Japan, with 1.67 ratios for France and Italy. It mandated the immediate scrapping of approximately seventy capital ships across the five navies, totaling roughly 1.87 million tons. It imposed a ten-year holiday on new capital-ship construction. It capped individual capital-ship displacement at 35,000 tons. The treaty’s principal limitations, which became consequential in the 1930s, were the absence of restrictions on cruisers, submarines, and aircraft carriers (partially addressed by the 1930 London Naval Treaty) and the lack of enforcement mechanisms. Japan abrogated in December 1934 and withdrew in December 1936, signaling the end of the interwar arms-control regime.

Q: How did the senator from Marion win by such a large margin in 1920?

Harding won 60.3 percent of the popular vote to James Cox’s 34.1 percent, with Eugene Debs (still imprisoned in Atlanta for sedition) collecting 3.4 percent. The margin was the largest in American history to that point. The result reflected a referendum on the Wilson administration’s record: the failure to ratify the Treaty, Wilson’s October 1919 stroke and the subsequent eighteen months of incapacitation, postwar inflation peaking at 20 percent in mid-1920, the recession that followed deflation, the 1919 race riots and labor strikes, the Palmer Raids, and the perception that the country had been pulled into commitments it had not signed up for. Cox ran an explicit defense of the Treaty and the Wilson program. He lost every state outside the Solid South and several states inside it. The election is properly read as a coalition repudiation rather than an endorsement of a Republican alternative, but the magnitude of the repudiation was difficult to deny.

Q: Was the Washington Naval Conference a success?

By the standards available to contemporary observers and to most subsequent historians, yes. It produced substantive arms reductions that contemporary diplomatic analysts had thought impossible. It eliminated the Anglo-Japanese alliance, which had been a continuing irritant in American-Japanese-British relations. It formalized the Open Door in China through binding multilateral commitment. It saved the federal government an estimated $300 million in immediate construction costs and substantial additional sums through the ten-year construction holiday. It established the precedent that naval arms control was a tractable diplomatic problem, a precedent that supported the 1930 London Naval Treaty and shaped postwar arms-control thinking. The framework’s eventual breakdown under Japanese pressure in the 1930s is sometimes invoked as evidence of failure, but enforcement was always going to depend on the political will of signatories, and the framework’s collapse reflected the failure of that will rather than a flaw in the original construction.

Q: Did Harding know about Teapot Dome?

The evidence does not support direct knowledge of bribery on Harding’s part. The Teapot Dome reserve leases to the Pan American and Mammoth oil companies, executed in December 1921 and April 1922 respectively, were not publicly questioned in any sustained way until late 1923, after Harding’s death on August 2 of that year. Albert Fall’s receipt of approximately $400,000 in cash and bonds from Edward Doheny and Harry Sinclair was not revealed until the Walsh Senate investigation interviews in October 1923 and the subsequent committee work through 1924. Harding made remarks to several confidants in the spring and summer of 1923 suggesting awareness of brewing scandals, though the specific scandal he had in mind appears to have been the Veterans Bureau corruption rather than the oil leases. The fair description is that the new president was substantively unaware of the bribery while being inadequately attentive to the personnel choices that enabled it.

Q: How do historians rank Warren the Republican nominee today?

The major presidential ranking surveys have placed the new chief executive consistently in the bottom ten, though not at the absolute floor. The C-SPAN historian surveys have ranked him 38th in 2000, 38th in 2009, 40th in 2017, and 37th in 2021. The Siena College surveys have produced similar results. The principal recent challenge to this consensus is John Dean’s 2004 biography Warren G. Harding, which argues for substantial rehabilitation on the grounds that the foreign-policy substance has been underrated and the personal-scandal material overemphasized. The Dean argument has not moved the rankings significantly, in part because the ranking surveys ask historians to weight the full record rather than the foreign-policy substance specifically, and the personnel failures of the Marion’s most famous son administration are real costs that the surveys have correctly identified.

Q: What was Andrew Mellon’s role under Harding?

Andrew Mellon, the Pittsburgh banker and industrialist, served as secretary of the treasury from March 1921 through February 1932, the longest tenure of any treasury secretary in American history. He continued in office under Coolidge and Hoover. Under the senator from Marion he designed and implemented the Revenue Act of 1921, which reduced the top marginal income tax rate from 73 percent to 56 percent and repealed the wartime excess-profits tax. The 1924 and 1926 revenue acts under Coolidge would continue the program of tax reduction, ultimately reducing the top marginal rate to 24 percent. Mellon also oversaw the Bureau of the Budget’s first years of operation under Charles Dawes and presided over the substantial reduction in federal expenditures (from $5.1 billion in fiscal 1921 to $3.3 billion in fiscal 1923) that accompanied the demobilization of the wartime regulatory apparatus.

Q: Why did the Senate reject the League of Nations a second time?

The Treaty of Versailles came before the Senate twice. The first vote, on November 19, 1919, failed both with reservations (53 to 38) and without reservations (38 to 53). The second vote, on March 19, 1920, came closer; the version with Lodge’s reservations attached received 49 votes in favor and 35 against, falling seven votes short of the two-thirds required for ratification. The decisive factor in the second defeat was Wilson’s instruction to Democratic senators to vote against the reservation version. Twenty-three Democrats obeyed the instruction; had they voted for ratification with reservations, the Treaty would have passed. The decision came from Wilson’s sickbed, communicated through his wife Edith, and produced the outcome John Milton Cooper Jr. argues was the most consequential failure of personal judgment in twentieth-century American foreign-policy history.

Q: Did the man from Blooming Grove restore the Republican Party?

In the sense of recovering the presidency after eight years of Democratic occupancy and building substantial congressional majorities (fifty-nine to thirty-seven in the Senate, three hundred and three to one hundred and thirty-one in the House after the 1920 elections), yes. The Republican Party would hold the presidency continuously from March 1921 through March 1933, the longest single-party run in twentieth-century executive history. In the sense of resolving the internal tensions between the conservative and progressive wings that the Bull Moose 1912 split had revealed, less clearly so. Robert La Follette’s 1924 progressive challenge would draw nearly five million votes; the conservative dominance of the party that became visible in the late 1920s under Coolidge and Hoover would be contested through the 1936 election before stabilizing.

Q: What happened to immigration policy under the the head of state?

The Emergency Quota Act of May 19, 1921 was the first numerical immigration restriction in American history. It capped admissions from each country at three percent of the foreign-born population from that country recorded in the 1910 census, producing an annual ceiling of approximately 357,000 immigrants. The act would be replaced by the more restrictive Johnson-Reed Act of May 26, 1924 under Coolidge, which tightened the quotas to two percent of the 1890 foreign-born population (deliberately chosen to disfavor recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe), banned virtually all Asian immigration outright, and established the national-origins quota system that would govern the nation’s immigration until 1965. The combined effect was to reduce annual European immigration from approximately 805,000 in 1920 to approximately 165,000 by 1924. The the Ohio senator contribution was the first turn of the ratchet.

Q: How did Coolidge differ from the new president in foreign policy?

The continuity between the two administrations was substantial, partly because Hughes remained as secretary of state under Coolidge through March 1925 and partly because Coolidge had little personal interest in foreign affairs and deferred to State on most questions. The principal differences were on Latin America, where Coolidge sent five thousand Marines to Nicaragua in January 1927 to support Adolfo Diaz against the Sandino insurgency (the largest American military intervention of the 1920s), and on the failed Geneva Naval Conference of 1927, which Coolidge had called to extend the Washington framework to cruisers and submarines and which broke down on British-American disagreements about cruiser categories. The Coolidge administration also negotiated the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy, which was named for Frank Kellogg, who had succeeded Hughes at State. The Pact was largely symbolic but represented a continuation of the treaty-based multilateralism Harding had initiated.

Q: Did the “normalcy” speech use a real word?

Yes, though the word was archaic. “Normalcy” had appeared in Webster’s dictionaries since at least the mid-nineteenth century, primarily as a technical term in mathematics (the property of being normal to a surface) and occasionally as a general synonym for “normality.” It had appeared in print in popular usage occasionally through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. the new chief executive did not invent the word, but he made it the brand of an era. Reporters who initially printed “normality” rather than “normalcy” on the assumption the candidate had misspoken were corrected by subsequent usage. The word’s archaic quality contributed to the impression that Marion’s most famous son was clumsy with language, an impression H. L. Mencken famously cultivated, but the word was real.

Q: Why is John Dean’s rehabilitation of the 29th president controversial?

Dean’s 2004 biography Warren G. the senator from Marion, part of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s American Presidents Series, argues for substantial revision of the standard verdict on Harding’s administration. The argument is most persuasive on the foreign-policy substance, where Dean correctly identifies the Washington Naval Conference and the Knox-Porter Resolution as significant achievements that the standard accounts have underweighted. The argument is more strained on the scandals, where Dean argues that the man from Blooming Grove was substantially unaware of and unimplicated in Fall’s conduct at Interior and Forbes’s conduct at the Veterans Bureau. The argument from absence of direct knowledge does not address the executive-responsibility question that the standard verdict has rested on; presidents are accountable for the officers they appoint. The Dean rehabilitation has been partly absorbed into more recent scholarship but has not moved the ranking surveys.

Q: What is the verdict on Harding’s normalcy decision?

The reconstruction this article reaches is that Harding’s promise of May 14, 1920 was kept on its narrow terms (rejection of the League, formal end of the war, immigration restriction, tax reduction, regulatory rollback) and exceeded on the broader question of substantive multilateralism (Washington Naval Conference, Open Door treaties, Four-Power Treaty replacing the Anglo-Japanese alliance). The foreign-policy substance has been substantially underrated in standard accounts; the personnel failures have been correctly identified and weighted. A fair composite ranking would place the president in the upper twenties to lower thirties of American presidents rather than near the absolute floor where most surveys have placed him. The “normalcy” administration was not a great administration but it was an administration that delivered most of what it promised on the foreign-policy dimension while failing substantially on the managerial dimension. The composite is more mixed and more interesting than the standard caricature has allowed.

Q: How did the Ohio senator die and what happened next?

the new president died on the evening of August 2, 1923 in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, during what was being called the “Voyage of Understanding” trip through the western United States and Alaska. The official medical verdict was a stroke or possibly a heart attack; he had been ill with what was diagnosed as ptomaine poisoning in Seattle the week before and had been showing signs of cardiovascular distress through the trip. He was the sixth president to die in office (the eighth if assassinations are counted with natural deaths). Calvin Coolidge took the oath of office at his father’s Vermont farmhouse at 2:47 a.m. on August 3, in a ceremony conducted by his father (a notary public) by kerosene lamp. The Coolidge administration would continue the policy direction the Republican nominee had set, with significant continuity in cabinet officers including Hughes at State, Mellon at Treasury, and Hoover at Commerce. The Teapot Dome and Veterans Bureau scandals would break publicly in late 1923 and early 1924, dominating the political environment of the Coolidge first term and shaping the historical reputation of his predecessor for the remainder of the twentieth century.

Q: What is the most underappreciated aspect of the the new chief executive administration?

The Washington Naval Conference. The conference produced the largest single multilateral arms reduction the world had seen to that point and arguably the largest until the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. It eliminated a destabilizing great-power alliance (the Anglo-Japanese accord) without requiring any the country’s or British concession of comparable magnitude. It formalized the Open Door in China through binding multilateral treaty. It saved the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars in immediate construction costs. It established the precedent that arms control was tractable. The conference’s eventual breakdown under Japanese pressure in the 1930s is sometimes invoked as evidence of failure, but enforcement was always going to depend on signatory political will, and the framework’s collapse reflected that failure rather than original-construction defects. The conference deserves to be ranked among the most consequential Washington’s diplomatic achievements of the twentieth century, and it is not commonly so ranked.