The 1920 presidential election set the political tone for the decade. Both major parties nominated middle-of-the-road politicians from Ohio: Republican Senator Warren G. Harding and Democratic Governor James Cox. Since the last election, many Americans had tired of Wilson and his moral righteousness, and they wanted relief from the rampant inflation and social turmoil that had come with the end of World I -the strikes, race riots, and Red scares of 1919. Harding, capitalizing on this weariness, declared that the country needed "not heroism but healing, not nostrums but normalcy, not revolution but restoration." The election results -a landslide for the Republicans - showed that he had captured the public mood.

Although Harding's vision of "normalcy" embraced generous acts, like pardoning the imprisoned socialist Eugene Debs, it translated more fundamentally into extraordinary corporate influence on national policy. During the 1920s, the political power of big business climbed to new heights. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, one of the wealthiest men in the nation, and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover dominated Harding's cabinet.

After Harding's sudden death in 192 3, his modest reputation was destroyed by the discovery of considerable corruption. Subsequent polls of historians have consistently ranked him one of the worst presidents in U.S. history. "Harding was not a bad man," Alice Roosevelt Longworth (Theodore Roosevelt's daughter) later observed. "He was just a slob." Although her own husband, Nick, an Ohio Republican congressman, was an associate member of what was known as Harding's "poker cabinet," she recalled with distaste Harding's drinking and carousing with political buddies in the "Ohio Gang." When she visited the White House study, she found the "air heavy with tobacco smoke . . . every imaginable brand of whisky . . . cards and poker chips ready at hand." Fortunately, she did not open the closet doors, or she might have discovered the president making love to his mistress, Nan Britton. While still a senator, Harding had fathered a child with Britton; as president, he sent Secret Service agents to deliver support payments for his child.

Whatever his personal failings, Harding himself was never accused of public wrong-doing, but he generally looked the other way when his friends put their hands in the government till. The head of the Veterans Bureau, aided by its general counsel, Charles F. Cramer, sold government medical supplies at ludicrously low prices to private contractors and extracted kickbacks in return. When the scam seemed about to unravel, Cramer committed suicide. So did Jess W. Smith, private secretarv to Harding's closest ally, an Ohio politician named Harry Daugherty, whom Harding had made attorney general. Smith had been lining his pockets by selling paroles and liquor licenses. Daugherty himself was later indicted for fraud, but a "lucky" fire that destroyed some key records prevented his conviction. The most notorious scandal of Harding's administration involved the secret leasing, at discount prices, of government- owned oil reserves in California and Wyoming -one of which was called "Teapot Dome." The grateful oil companies rewarded Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, who arranged the deal, with more than $400,000 in bribes.

These gradually unwinding scandals probably contributed to Harding's depression and high blood pressure, and finally his death, probably from a stroke. His successor, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, was a very different sort of man-upright, cautious, and introverted. (Coolidge's legendary taciturnity led to many jokes. One woman allegedly told him she had made a bet that she could get him to say more than two words. "You lose," he retorted.) Under Coolidge, Alice Longworth commented, the White House was "as different as a New England front parlor is from a backroom in a speakeasy." But if Coolidge's style was different, his conservative policies were very much the same. "Normalcy" remained the watchword of the day.