Sherry Chandler

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It’s the 63rd anniversary of the day we dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

In Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker quotes Alfred Nobel in August 1892:

“Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your congresses,” Alfred Nobel said. “On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.”

Mutually assured destruction. That worked out well.

I’m going to cherry-pick a little information from Chapter 13 of Freeberg’s Democracy’s Prisoner, just to ride my hobby horse that the more things change, the more they remain the same. This chapter is about the presidential race of 1920, in which Warren G. Harding won on a promise of a “return to normalcy:”

In public opinion polls, Harding ran at the back of the Republican pack that spring, and few pundits expected him to win the nomination. …No Republican stirred more passion among voters, however, than Hiram Johnson, the former governor of California. In 1912, Johnson had left his party to join the Bull Moose revolt, running as Roosevelt’s vice president. After Wilson’s victory, Johnson returned to the Republicans but remained determined to wrest control of the party from conservatives. While supporting the war, he often led the Senate’s opposition to what he called the presidents “autocratic leadership and inept following.”

…Running with little money and a skeletal organization, he made a surprisingly strong showing in many primaries, winning more votes than any of his rivals. Johnson was a charismatic speaker—some thought the best of his day—and across the country his rallies had all the emotional fervor of Billy Sunday revival meetings.

…As Republicans gathered in Chicago that summer for their nominating convention, Johnson’s progressive faction urged their party to make the defense of free speech a campaign issue, part of a broader assault on the president’s wartime record of “autocratic” rule. Such a move, they hoped, might even help win labor voters away from the Democrats… [pp. 237-238]

Alas, technicalities in the way the party counted delegates meant that progressive Johnson was not the Republican nominee. Instead, in “smoke-filled rooms,” the party compromised on Warren G. Harding, “a result shrewdly engineered by Harding’s campaign manager, Harry Daugherty.”

Warren G. Harding was a distinguished-looking man with an undistinguished record in the Senate. Though he had accomplished little, he had likewise alienated few. As one historian summarized his legislative career, “He carried his committee load, stayed out of trouble, and generally followed the lead of older, conservative Republicans.” Good looks, sociability, and rhetorical ambiguity had carried Harding far, and they would serve him well in the 1920 campaign. …a gregarious harmonizer who had good friends on both sides of the political aisle; none ever suspected him of intellectual superiorit, least of all himself. With disarming humility, he offered Americans “not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.” [p. 239]

Although the mix of candidates and traits is a little different this year, it is still the same mix that was driving the election nearly 90 years ago.

So I think we would all do well to heed the advice Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, gave Lucy Robins, Emma-Goldman appointed leader of the League for Amnesty of Political Prisoners: “take all you can get from politicians, but never assume that they are altruists.”