Was WWI widely viewed as a mistake in 1920? Based on the election results

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

Not sure if this belongs in history or not but one thing I’ve wondered for a while is if one of the reasons Cox lost by such a massive landslide in 1920 is because the war itself was viewed as a mistake. Or was it that the war was popular but the idea of being involved in global affairs via the League of Nations wasn’t?

[bagelman]

Americans may have believed so, although they were quiet about it due to fascist elements of American society really enjoying lots of leeway in the late 1910s. Wilson did win 1916 promising not to enter the war, a promise obviously flushed down the toilet.

[Agonized-Statism]

The Great War was an enormous, terrifying paradigm shift for the West best encapsulated by Robert Frost's "Design", which suggests that the white Christian world isn't the morally superior vehicle for progress once thought. Many believed the time to be right for a transformation to the next mode of production, and fascism emerged from decaying liberal societies to protect their elites and traditions. Spengler believed it to be the beginning of the end for Western civilization, with the fascists as their Caesers.

Americans had already experienced such a "modern war" in the Civil War, and reacted by refusing to get involved in European entanglements or the League of Nations. I don't know if they thought it was a mistake so much as a consequence of the nationalism, imperialism, and alliances inherent to Europe. It fed notions that the United States was an exceptional continental nation-state, a pure meritocratic capitalist experiment whose "business is business" according to President Coolidge. The more Europe slipped into chaos after WWI, the more the myth of US exceptionalism was fed and Republicans benefitted.

[junior chįmp]

There are 2 reasons the 1920 election was such a landslide:

1) There was a severe depression (the 1920 depression only lasted about a year but it was more severe than the first year of the great depression:

https://econreview.berkeley.edu/in-the-shadow-of-the-slump-the-depression-of-1920-1921/

2) There was no incumbent. Political scientist Alan Abramowitz has found that after backtesting all presidential elections in US History that incumbency adds on average 4.313% to the overall margin. Think about it, in 1920, Cox got about 34.1% of the vote yet he wasnt an incumbent but there was a depression. In 1932, Hoover got 39.6% of the vote in a depression but he was an incumbent. The incumbency boost helped Hoover but didnt help Cox.

[darklordoftech]

Yes. People in the countries that started it were mad at their monarchs for starting it and Americans were mad at Wilson for taking them into war. People felt they had no stake in who won and were confused about what was being fought over.

[The Mikado]

There are 2 reasons the 1920 election was such a landslide:

1) There was a severe depression (the 1920 depression only lasted about a year but it was more severe than the first year of the great depression:

https://econreview.berkeley.edu/in-the-shadow-of-the-slump-the-depression-of-1920-1921/

2) There was no incumbent. Political scientist Alan Abramowitz has found that after backtesting all presidential elections in US History that incumbency adds on average 4.313% to the overall margin. Think about it, in 1920, Cox got about 34.1% of the vote yet he wasnt an incumbent but there was a depression. In 1932, Hoover got 39.6% of the vote in a depression but he was an incumbent. The incumbency boost helped Hoover but didnt help Cox.

This user's reason #1 gets it. The biggest thing you need to keep in mind about 1920 is that the recession was STEEP. One of the biggest recessions in American history, a result of millions of men demobilizing at once and there not being work for any of them, and this was directly blamed on the Democratic Party.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

There are 2 reasons the 1920 election was such a landslide:

1) There was a severe depression (the 1920 depression only lasted about a year but it was more severe than the first year of the great depression:

https://econreview.berkeley.edu/in-the-shadow-of-the-slump-the-depression-of-1920-1921/

2) There was no incumbent. Political scientist Alan Abramowitz has found that after backtesting all presidential elections in US History that incumbency adds on average 4.313% to the overall margin. Think about it, in 1920, Cox got about 34.1% of the vote yet he wasnt an incumbent but there was a depression. In 1932, Hoover got 39.6% of the vote in a depression but he was an incumbent. The incumbency boost helped Hoover but didnt help Cox.

This user's reason #1 gets it. The biggest thing you need to keep in mind about 1920 is that the recession was STEEP. One of the biggest recessions in American history, a result of millions of men demobilizing at once and there not being work for any of them, and this was directly blamed on the Democratic Party.

On the macro sense yes, just like the Depression itself was the over arching cause of Hoover's landslide defeat in 1932 and there are similarities with 1894 as well (though less so with 1896 considering the Populist takeover of the Democratic Party, but that gets into complexities that are irrelevant here).

However, it needs to be remembered at the risk of invoking certain nuisances when such is stated overtly, the Democratic Party (especially as a national entity) was structured as and appealed to people on the basis of being a 19th to early 20th century "liberal" party. It is no accident that it suffered the same fate thus as its counterpart in Great Britain. The war, the draft, the censorship, the suppression of dissent and free speech, the imprisoning of the opponents of the war, and the seeming embrace of British foreign policy by the anglophile Woodrow Wilson would have necessarily dictated the crippling of the Democratic Party base.

With the exception for those areas in which the Republicans did not exist and where such period liberalism was not shall we say fundamental to the Democrats support, basically, the South. It is no accident that these actions were all similar to those taken by the Confederacy during or before the war depending on the circumstances and thus for a particular wing of the party, there was less comprehension of why these would be problematic, yet the same Irish who rioted against Lincoln and emancipation over the draft, now along with millions of Germans and ethnics jumped ship over the Democrats engaging in the same policies as both sides of Civil War had. Harding's numbers in NYC are something to behold.

[ModerateRadical]

James Cox was a decent candidate, but WWI and its aftermath did hurt the Democratic Party severely w/r/t several of their constituencies. German-Americans were severely discriminated against during the war, and turned away from the party in droves as a result. The Irish-American population also felt snubbed as a result of the Wilson administration embracing Britain so strongly, and defected from the party (Harding was the last Republican to win an outright majority of the vote in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, home of Boston). I'm not 100% sure on this, but I'd guess that a sizeable percentage of isolationists either stayed home or voted for Republicans (or Debs, if they were left-wing isolationists) as a result of the war and Wilson's push for a League of Nations after the war. The First Red Scare probably also hurt the Democratic Party's image among organized labor.