A Note on My Harding Research

The information I posted during 2020 mostly covered Warren Harding's front-porch campaign from his home on Mt. Vernon Avenue in Marion, Ohio. The campaign officially started on July 31, 1920, and ended on September 25. The plan was to post daily on events that occurred exactly 100 years ago that day, but I shared other information as well. You'll have to read bottom-to-top if you want to follow the campaign from Day 1.

I used the open web for some of my research but also information accessible by using my library card or my subscription to www.newspapers.com. The most useful resource was the Marion Star, which was owned by the Hardings at the time of the campaign. I also browsed online copies of other newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Star, and the Dayton Daily News, which, in 1920, was owned by Harding's Democratic opponent, Governor James M. Cox. I also posted information from other newspapers that covered Harding's trips away from Marion during the campaign.

Another great resource I used was Dale E. Cottrill's The Conciliator, a 1969 biography of the president that expanded an earlier bibliography of Harding's speeches. An online version is available at the Internet Archive, but I used a hard copy borrowed from the State Library of Ohio.

Readers should not construe anything posted here as a political statement on my part. I just like Harding as a historical topic.

9/14/2020

Tuesday, September 14, 1920 (DELEGATION FROM CALIFORNIA)

Telegrams in response to the Republican victory in Maine are received at Harding headquarters, including one from Governor Calvin Coolidge: "Nothing can prevent your election."

As reported in the New York Times, Senator Harding, in a speech to a delegation from California, calls "for the adoption of an 'American first' policy of immigration that would admin only aliens capable of easy assimilation and who would become imbued quickly with the American spirit":

Americans: I greet you who come from far places, with deep gratitude for the honor you have done the cause I represent, which I believe is the cause of all the people of America. 

There is no sectionalism in the United States, and if we all, by tolerance and justice and patriotism, stand together — the North and the South, the East and the West — we will perpetuate that spirit by which America has had her being and her glories, coming through stress and storm at times, but always coming through. 

"America First" — That spirit, my friends, is behind our individual citizenship which conceives government as being the expression of a community of interests and not a paternal or autocratic, or one-man source of pretended benevolence. It is an absurd idea that government may be the distributor of magic resources. The only resources of a government are the resources that its citizens put into it. 

Let us not allow those who would like to retain the autocratic power which the war put into their hands to deceive free Americans with the delusion that "democracy" painted as a sign over their works conceals the fact that they have robbed us of true democracy. They have set up a one-man dictatorship which they, of course, desire to perpetuate and which finds in their various spokesmen the expression, "We are in full accord."

The man on the right wears a ribbon that states "California Solid for Harding":

Californians in front of campaign headquarters

This editorial cartoon is published in today's Dayton Daily News, which, if you remember, is owned by James M. Cox.

The elephant has a point: Harding and his advisors have frequently changed their minds about the method of campaigning and the reasons for changing their minds.

Sources:

  • "Just a Little Jaunt." Dayton Daily News. 14 September 1920.
  • "Telegrams Over Maine Results." Marion Star. 15 September 1920.

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