1/8: 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
1/8: 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/1920-Year-Presidents-David-Pietrusza/dp/0786721022
The presidential election of 1920 was one of the most dramatic ever. For the only time in the nation's history, six once-and-future presidents hoped to end up in the White House: Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt. It was an election that saw unprecedented levels of publicity -- the Republicans outspent the Democrats by 4 to 1 -- and it was the first to garner extensive newspaper and newsreel coverage. It was also the first election in which women could vote. Meanwhile, the 1920 census showed that America had become an urban nation -- automobiles, mass production, chain stores, and easy credit were transforming the economy and America was limbering up for the most spectacular decade of its history, the roaring '20s. Award-winning historian David Pietrusza's riveting new work presents a dazzling panorama of presidential personalities, ambitions, plots, and counterplots -- a picture of modern America at the crossroads.
1920
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. This is a B.S. I on the world with John Bachelor. Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:30.0 | 1920, the year of six presidents. I welcome David Patricia, historian of this and presidential |
| 0:38.3 | elections on either side of it, but this is the election of 1920, and it begins with a tragedy. |
| 0:44.7 | It is the night of 1st October, 1919 at the White House. |
| 0:50.4 | 1st October to 2nd October. |
| 0:53.0 | The first lady, Edith, hears a sound |
| 0:58.0 | and she rushes into the President's bedroom. |
| 1:01.0 | He's sitting at the edge of his bed, Woodrow Wilson. He's reaching for a glass of |
| 1:05.8 | water but can't quite manage it. Why? Several days before, a stroke comes to him and he's been raced back to the White House from his |
| 1:14.7 | speaking tour. He needs help to get into the bathroom. His wife helps him and |
| 1:20.4 | then she rushes to the phone to call Dr. Grayson because something's happened to the president, |
| 1:27.0 | something in addition. She hears a thump and she discovers Woodrow Wilson unconscious on the floor of his bathroom and helpless. |
| 1:36.0 | I welcome David Petruia to help us tell this story of from that moment, everything changes in American politics. |
| 1:45.0 | Woodrow Wilson is frail the rest of his life. |
| 1:48.8 | He dies in 1924, but his legacy at that moment becomes a dominant story in the election of 1920 and every election since then because it's about the League of Nations. |
| 2:02.0 | David, congratulations and a very good evening to you. |
| 2:06.0 | The League of Nations at that moment, |
| 2:08.0 | what was it to the electorate looking to the campaign of 1920? What was it to the Republicans? What was it to the Democrats? Good evening, David. |
| 2:17.8 | Well, it's a bunch of things to a bunch of people to the, to that fellow on the bathroom floor in the White House, |
| 2:26.0 | Woodrow Wilson, it's the Alpha and Omega. |
| 2:28.9 | It's the big issue. |
| 2:30.1 | It's his, it's his crusade in Europe as Dwight Eisenhower would title a book a few decades later. |
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