page_title: James M. Cox
section_title: Bid for presidency
hierarchical_section_title: James M. Cox / Bid for presidency
caption_attribution_description: Poster for U.S. Democratic Party nominees for President and Vice President of the United States in 1920 -- James M. Cox for President and Franklin D. Roosevelt for Vice-President.
context_page_description: James Middleton Cox was the 46th and 48th Governor of Ohio, a U.S. Representative from Ohio, and the Democratic nominee for President of the United States at the 1920 presidential election. His running mate during his presidential campaign was future president Franklin D. Roosevelt. He founded the chain of newspapers that continues today as Cox Enterprises, a media conglomerate.
  Born and raised in Ohio, Cox began his career as a newspaper copy reader before becoming an assistant to Congressman Paul J. Sorg. As owner of the Dayton Daily News, Cox introduced several innovations and crusaded against the local Republican Party boss. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1909 to 1913 before being elected as Governor of Ohio. As governor, Cox introduced a series of progressive reforms and supported Woodrow Wilson's handling of World War I and its aftermath. He was chosen as the Democratic nominee for president on the forty-fourth ballot of the 1920 Democratic National Convention. Running on a ticket with future President Franklin D.
context_section_description: A capable and well-liked progressive reformer, Cox was nominated for the presidency by the Democratic party at the 1920 Democratic convention in San Francisco defeating A. Mitchell Palmer and William Gibbs McAdoo on the forty-fourth ballot.
  Cox conducted an activist campaign visiting 36 states and delivering 394 speeches mainly focusing on domestic issues, to the displeasure of the Wilsonians, who pictured the election "as a referendum on the League of Nations." To fight unemployment and inflation, he suggested simultaneously lower income and business profits taxes. He promised to introduce national collective bargaining legislation and pledged his support to the Volstead Act. Cox spoke in support of  Americanization to increase loyalty to the United States among the immigrant population.
  Despite all efforts, Cox was defeated in the 1920 presidential election by a fellow Ohioan and newspaperman, U.S. Senator Warren G. Harding of Marion. The public had grown weary of the turmoil of the Wilson years, and eagerly accepted Harding's call for a "return to normalcy."  Cox's running mate was future president, then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. One of the better known analyses of the 1920 election is in Irving Stone's book about defeated presidential candidates, They Also Ran. Stone rated Cox as superior in every way over Warren Harding, claiming the former would have made a much better president; the author argued that there was never a stronger case in the history of American presidential elections for the proposition that the better man lost. Of the four men on both tickets, all but Cox would ultimately become president: Harding won, and was succeeded by his running mate Calvin Coolidge after dying in office, while Roosevelt would be elected president in 1932. However, Cox would outlive all three men by several years.
  During the campaign, Cox several times recorded for The Nation's Forum, a record label that made voice recordings of American political and civic leaders in 1918-1920. Among them was the campaign speech now preserved at the Library of Congress which accused the Republicans of failing to acknowledge that President Wilson's successful prosecution of the Great War had, according to Cox, "saved civilization."
caption: Cox/Roosevelt electoral poster
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