DV Journal

The 2024 presidential race is unlike anything that’s happened in our lifetime. It’s a grudge match for the ages, a replay of 2020 that will likely end with either Donald Trump pulling a Grover Cleveland (by serving two non-consecutive terms), or with Joe Biden being the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to beat the same opponent twice in a row.

The last time a former president appeared on the November ballot for a shot at returning to the White House was in 1912, the year the Titanic sank. Perhaps that’s because, like the Titanic, most ex-president comeback attempts have been disasters.

Take Ulysses S. Grant. Winning the Civil War helped him sail into the White House in 1868. Though personally honest, Grant made the mistake of surrounding himself with men who weren’t. His administration was plagued by scandal, and he often bemoaned the burdens of the office.

In his farewell address at the end of 1876, Grant wrote, “With the present term of Congress my official life terminates. It is not probable that public affairs will ever again receive attention from me further than as a citizen of the Republic.”

But after a round-the-world tour with his wife, where Grant was loudly cheered and frequently feted, he changed his mind and entered the 1880 presidential race.

Unlike Trump, Grant was far from a lock when the GOP convention convened.

Popular Sen. James G. Blaine, R-Maine, had lined up solid support from the delegates and was neck-and-neck with Grant on the first ballot. But after a grueling 36 ballots (the longest-ever Republican National Convention), Grant lost to dark horse candidate Rep. James Garfield of Ohio, who went on the win the presidency. (And was assassinated soon thereafter.)

Another Republican president who desperately wanted redemption but got the boot instead was Herbert Hoover. In perhaps the worst timing in American politics, Hoover was elected in 1928, making him America’s president for the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. Not surprisingly, unhappy voters showed Hoover the White House door in 1932, replacing him with Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Who, incidentally, went on to shatter George Washington’s two-term tradition by seeking — and winning — the office four times.)

Like Grant before him, Hoover was itching for another bite of the chief executive apple. Unfortunately for him, Republican voters didn’t feel the same way. After flirting with seeking the nomination in 1936, Hoover actually entered the race in 1940. For his trouble, he got nothing more than a mere 17 delegates and a warm round of applause at the convention.

In the pre-Civil War era, ex-presidents Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore both ran for the office again. And both failed miserably. But the Mother of all Presidential Comeback Attempts was in 1912. And it was a doozie.

The assassination of William McKinley in 1901 made 42-year-old Theodore Roosevelt the youngest person to serve as president. In 1904, Roosevelt was elected in his own right. Then, in a move that still baffles historians, he did something incredibly stupid. Caught up in a moment of euphoria on Election Night, Roosevelt blurted out that he wouldn’t seek re-election in 1908.

Roosevelt regretted making the pledge but, as a man of his word, he was determined to keep it. And so in 1912, the man who perhaps loved being president more than any other handed over the reins to someone else.

His handpicked successor, William H. Taft, was easily elected. But there was a problem. Roosevelt was a progressive, and Taft was a conservative. The two quickly split, ending their close personal friendship and hurting Taft deeply in the process.

Teddy challenged his former BFF for the Republican nomination in 1912. Taft controlled the party machinery and had no trouble securing the nomination. And Teddy being Teddy, he bolted the GOP and ran on a third-party progressive ticket (nicknamed the Bull Moose Party).

That fractured Republican support, enabling Democratic progressive Woodrow Wilson to win the White House with just 42 percent of the vote.

And still, Teddy was ready to ride again. After considerable fence-mending within the GOP, including patching things up personally with Taft, Roosevelt was planning to run in 1920. Instead, he suffered a heart attack and died in his sleep in early 1919.

Fast forward to 2024:  An incumbent president is preparing to face off against his immediate predecessor. The GOP is hampered by a significant number of Never Trump voters, while the Democrats’ progressive wing is increasingly angry with their party’s soon-to-be 82-year-old standard bearer. Add to that a host of independents (most notably Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) circling around both camps.

How will it turn out? Nobody knows. But this much is certain: You’ll want to have your history book handy once the result is known. Because it will need to be updated.

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The fallibility of expertise is obvious when one considers that for nearly a century historians have considered Woodrow Wilson among the near-great presidents and Warren Harding among the worst. (Harding died 99 years ago this month, and Wilson six months later.)

In 1921, Harding gave the most courageous presidential civil rights speech ever. Speaking in Birmingham, Ala., Harding called for racial equality. White spectators stood in stunned silence while Black spectators cheered. Civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Dubois called the speech “a sudden thunder in blue skies” driving discussion “into the clear light of truth.”

In contrast, Wilson, Harding’s predecessor, helped poison race relations for a century. Even by 1910’s standards, Wilson’s racism was appalling. As president, he strived to undo whatever modest gains African-Americans had made since the Civil War.

Harding openly supported anti-lynching legislation — which Wilson opposed. Wilson’s acolytes whispered (falsely) that Harding had an African-American ancestor; Harding’s response amounted to “maybe so, and I don’t care.”

Wilson invited Hollywood pioneer D.W. Griffith to screen his technically pathbreaking but thematically toxic “Birth of a Nation” at the White House — the first film to be shown there. The film featured Wilson’s words: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation … until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” (Wilson later developed misgivings about the film, but his screening had already helped revive the Klan.)

Historians often favor leaders with expansive agendas during dramatic times over those with modest goals in calmer times.

Wilson led America into World War I, sired the Federal Reserve, and exerted an imperious (“Wilsonian”) foreign policy. Harding wasn’t a great president, but his America craved “normalcy” after the nightmare of World War I. Wilson expanded the federal government, while Harding focused on the less sexy goal of tidying it up. Today’s Office of Management and Budget and Government Accountability Office trace their origins to Harding. Harding’s appointees were often outstanding— Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Chief Justice William Howard Taft.

Wilson’s venality and Harding’s generous nature were not limited to race.

Wilson’s 1912 Socialist opponent, Eugene V. Debs, was imprisoned for urging resistance to World War I conscription. Wilson wrote, “This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration.” From prison in 1920, Debs ran against Harding, who then commuted his sentence and invited him to the White House, saying, “I’ve heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now glad to meet you personally.”

Wilson ignored warnings that draconian punishment of Germany would elicit disaster. Fury over his Versailles Treaty was a catalyst for Germany’s monsters — anarchists, communists, proto-Nazis. Wilson excluded senators from negotiations over the League of Nations, and they rejected his brainchild. Harding involved senators deeply in negotiations over a postwar disarmament treaty and won unanimous Senate approval.

Harding signed the unfortunate 1921 Emergency Quota Act closing America’s doors to immigration. But the act passed nearly unanimously in both houses — more a product of Wilson-era xenophobia than of the newly inaugurated Harding.

Immensely popular while in office, Harding’s posthumous reputation suffered from his naïve trust of unworthy cronies. Interior Secretary Albert Fall was imprisoned for corruption. Harding’s corrupt attorney general, Harry Daugherty, was forced from office by Calvin Coolidge, Harding’s successor. But were Fall and Dougherty worse than Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, who whipped up the first big Red Scare, deported immigrants and launched raids of dubious constitutionality against Americans? Harding’s posthumous reputation also suffered from the (correct) rumor that he fathered an illegitimate child with a much-younger woman.

Harding was what Winston Churchill called Clement Attlee: “a modest man with much to be modest about.” Compare that to a story told by Sigmund Freud: an associate remarked to Wilson how proud he was to have contributed to the president’s election victory. Wilson’s icy response, Freud said, was: “Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented this.”

Rest well, Mr. Harding.

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