Elected Vice-president
The Harding/Coolidge ticket wins in 1920. Warren G. Harding of Marion, Ohio was a U.S. Senator. He had been a newspaper printer and managed The Star, a local paper. He had served as Lieutenant-Governor. Their opponents are James M. Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Cox worked in the newspaper field until he became city editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer and bought The Daily Dayton News and The Springfield Press-Republic. Mr. Cox was elected to Congress in 1908 and became governor of Ohio in 1912. Franklin D. Roosevelt had a career as a lawyer and was a member of the New York State Legislature. In 1910 he was elected to the New York Senate. In 1913 he is appointed to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The election: “For the nation as a whole, Harding-Coolidge received 16.1 million votes and Cox-Roosevelt, 9.1 million. Harding’s margin of victory in the popular vote was the largest since reliable records were kept. He received 404 electoral votes to Cox’s 127. Eugene Debs received close to a million votes.” “Some saw this (election) as a repudiation of Wilson and global idealism, and in part it was. But the country was traditionally Republican.” Coolidge, in his Autobiography, looked back at this victory and commented: “When the inauguration was over I realized that the same thing for which I had worked in Massachusetts had been accomplished in the nation. The radicalism which had tinged our whole political and economic life from soon after 1900 to the World War period was passed. There were still echoes of it, and some of its votaries remained, but its power was gone. The country had little interest in mere destructive criticism. It wanted the progress that along comes from constructive policies.”
Sobel, Coolidge, An American Enigma.