1920
The Year of the Six Presidents
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The presidential election of 1920 was one of the most dramatic ever. For the only time in the nation's history, six once-and-future presidents hoped to end up in the White House: Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt. It was an election that saw unprecedented levels of publicity -- the Republicans outspent the Democrats by 4 to 1 -- and it was the first to garner extensive newspaper and newsreel coverage. It was also the first election in which women could vote. Meanwhile, the 1920 census showed that America had become an urban nation -- automobiles, mass production, chain stores, and easy credit were transforming the economy and America was limbering up for the most spectacular decade of its history, the roaring '20s. Award-winning historian David Pietrusza's riveting new work presents a dazzling panorama of presidential personalities, ambitions, plots, and counterplots -- a picture of modern America at the crossroads.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pietrusza's (Rothstein) chronicle\t\t of the presidential election of 1920 is absorbing, despite the subtitle's\t\t rather tangential claim that the election involved six men who had served or\t\t would serve as president: Harding, Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover and both Roosevelts\t\t (though Teddy had died in 1919). This book isn't really about them, nor is it\t\t merely the story of one electoral race. Rather, Pietrusza is telling a grander\t\t tale, of a country toppling into "modernity, or what passed for it." In 1920,\t\t the automobile had overtaken the horse, jazz and the fox-trot were replacing\t\t the camp meeting as popular entertainment, people were learning to buy on\t\t installment, and more and more of those fox-trotting shoppers lived in cities.\t\t Presidential candidates, for the first time, courted women voters. (Democrat\t\t Cox was divorced, which was expected to play badly with the fairer sex.) Both\t\t parties waffled on the so-called race question, seeking black votes while\t\t either tacitly or explicitly endorsing white supremacy. Given Harding's\t\t electoral victory and death during his term, Pietrusza could have devoted more\t\t space to the abiding importance of this election. All in all, Pietrusza has\t\t produced a broad, satisfying political and social history, in the style of\t\t Doris Kearns Goodwin. 16 pages of b&w illus.
