![]() What did all that mean then, and what does it mean now? Let’s set aside the question of how heroics and healing play as opposites in Harding’s speechifying. “Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational.”Īnd then Harding offered the cure: “America's present need is not heroics but healing not nostrums but normalcy.” It might have been simpler to end it there, but normalcy was just the first in a series of antonyms that Harding suggested, expressing his goals in the negative: “Not revolution but restoration not agitation but adjustment not surgery but serenity not the dramatic but the dispassionate not experiment but equipoise not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality." “There isn’t anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war,” he began. Harding’s inept speeches saddled him with too many words-making “hope” and “inspiration” fight for breathing space.īut in a speech Harding gave in Boston in May 1920, he managed to convey a text that would be abnormally memorable.įirst, Harding defined the problem of perspective, created by war and diseases. But finding the language for this was a struggle. But he benefited from the appeal of both.Įlected president in 1920, Harding campaigned to put a keel beneath a nation buffeted by world war as well as the long and deadly 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. When American historians hear talk of “normalcy,” they think of Warren G. Retrieved September 15, 2020.What is normalcy? And what does it mean when we tell ourselves that we want to get back to it? "Joe Biden's promise: a return to normalcy". ^ "Election of 1920: Republican and the Return to Normalcy". ![]() Cut him and other public figures a break". Archived from the original on June 18, 2006. ![]()
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