Chapter Seven
Return to Normalcy
Running for president in 1920, Warren G. Harding promised “a return to normalcy.” People mocked the slogan for the use of the odd turn of phrase instead of saying “a return to normality,” or even the simpler “a return to normal.” Harding’s defenders countered that “normalcy” was a perfectly good word, traceable back to usages almost fifty years earlier. In the first presidential election in which women could vote, the Republican with the matinee idol good looks (at least by the standards of 1920) beat the bookish and stern-looking Democrat, James Cox, by a landslide.
Whatever its lexical legitimacy, Harding’s slogan promised a return to normal life after World War I and the upheavals of the administration of Woodrow Wilson. And after the earthquake resul
