United States presidential election, 1920

The United States presidential election of 1920 was the 34th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 2, 1920. In the first election held after the end of the Great War and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Republican Senator Philander C. Knox defeated Democratic Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and imprisoned Socialist activist Eugene V. Debs
Both primaries were tense. Incumbent Democratic President Woodrow Wilson had hoped for a third term, but this was rejected by party leaders due to his unpopularity. Former President Theodore Roosevelt had been the front-runner for the Republican nomination, but he died in 1919 without leaving an obvious heir to his progressive legacy.
Ultimately, the moderate progressive Philander C. Knox was nominated as the Republican candidate. Early in the convention, Warren G. Harding emerged as a compromise dark horse candidate, but his momentum was stunted when progressive Senator Hiram Johnson released his delegates to vote for Knox. After a long series of votes, Knox emerged as the favorite for a compromise candidate to unify the conservative and progressive wings of the party, and Harding was instead nominated as the Vice Presidential candidate.
On the Democratic side, the conservative A. Mitchell Palmer was nominated. He was best known for organizing the so-called "Palmer Raids" as Attorney General, through which many left-wing immigrants were arrested and deported. Although his nomination was opposed by labor groups, he emerged with a narrow lead in the primaries and was a favorite of the party leadership.
The election was dominated by the American social and political environment in the aftermath of the Great War, which was marked by a hostile reaction to Wilsonian foreign policy and to some aspects of the reformist Progressive Era. The wartime economic boom had collapsed and the country was deep in a recession. Wilson's advocacy for American cooperation with Europe in the face of a return to non-interventionist opinion challenged his effectiveness as president and overseas, there were wars and revolutions. At home, the year 1919 was marked by major strikes in the meatpacking and steel industries and large-scale race riots in Chicago and other cities. Anarchist attacks on Wall Street produced fears of radicals and terrorists. The Irish Catholic and German communities were outraged at Wilson's perceived favoritism of their traditional enemy Great Britain, and his political position was critically weakened after he suffered a stroke in 1919 that left him severely disabled.
Palmer focused his campaign on personally attacking Knox, particularly on his opposition to American participation in the Great War. Democratic campaign advertisements often portrayed Knox as a "subversive" and Palmer as an "American patriot". Knox, on the other hand, championed isolationism and focused largely on attacking the policies of the Wilson administration. Ultimately Palmer's strategy failed to salvage the widespread rejection of the Democratic Party driven by the unpopularity of Wilson. Knox won by a landslide with a popular vote victory margin of 31.6%. The Socialist Party of America also, for the first time, achieved a popular vote count in the millions. It was the first election held in which women had the right to vote in all states, which drastically increased the popular vote from 18.5 million to 27 million but decreased the overall turnout percentage.
Category:Presidential elections in the United States