31: 4. The Republican Convention: Harding Emerges from the Smoke-Filled Room David Pietrusza 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents The Republican National Convention in Chicago in June 1920 was hot and chaotic. Leading candidates included Hiram Johnson, Leonar
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John Batchelor
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🗓️ 27 October 2025
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Summary
David Pietrusza
1920: The Year of the Six Presidents
The Republican National Convention in Chicago in June 1920 was hot and chaotic. Leading candidates included Hiram Johnson, Leonard Wood, and Frank Lowden, while Warren Harding was a distant long shot, seeking the presidency partly to boost his reelection campaign for his Senate seat. The balloting quickly established the limits of the frontrunners. Because Republicans required only a majority for nomination, unlike the Democratic two-thirds rule, they were able to pivot to Harding, who was seen as an acceptable compromise. The Republican platform on the League of Nations was deliberately ambiguous, reflecting the deep division between internationalists like Hoover and isolationists like Lodge.
1913 WILSON OPENING DAY
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchew with David Petrucia. His new book is 1920, the year of the six presidents. |
| 0:06.0 | The Republicans gather in Chicago, as they have many times before. |
| 0:11.0 | A circus has just left town, so you can imagine the flavor on the floor. |
| 0:15.0 | It's very hot, even though it's June, very hot. |
| 0:20.0 | And it's roasting, even Alice Roosevelt, who is a woman who's used to being in the kitchen with the heat, given her tongue. Even she acknowledges that it's so hot. The candidates are given odds, and David reproduces the odds. It's quite fun. You can live through it. |
| 0:43.2 | Hiram Johnson, the progressive from California, who's cranky, has even money. Leonard Wood, |
| 0:50.1 | the man who's been Army Chief of Staff, TR's friends, the only physician ever to become head of the Army. A political actor certainly is given 7 to five. Frank Loden of Illinois is given eight to |
| 0:57.0 | five. Then Herbert Hoover has four to one odds, four to one odds to be the Republican nominee. |
| 1:03.1 | And you have to search and search and search. And all the way down here, you find Warren Harding. |
| 1:07.9 | So as they gather, Harding is successful in not acting as if he wants to be the |
| 1:15.5 | nominee. Actually, David, there was a remark that he made. I shouldn't be spending all this money |
| 1:20.1 | on my headquarters if I don't really want it. He really didn't want, didn't think he was going to be |
| 1:27.2 | president. So why was he running? |
| 1:29.5 | What was the, what was the secret he had inside of him? Well, I think one can always, you know, |
| 1:35.6 | flatter a candidate into a candidacy. If somebody just on the street says, oh, you'd be a great |
| 1:41.6 | person in his office, it goes to your head. But also, |
| 1:45.3 | there's a, there's a calculation. And because Ohio is that battleground state, he's afraid |
| 1:53.8 | of losing his Senate seat in 1920. He's only been in for one term. And you never know. And so he thinks that if he has obtained the cachet, |
| 2:04.6 | the glamour of being a presidential wannabe, that this might boost his campaign for the Senate |
| 2:11.5 | in Ohio. So that's part of it as well. But also I think he calculates that once TR is out of the race, you know, there's a lane open that maybe, maybe somebody can break through because, you know, |
| 2:30.1 | Leonard Wood is not an experienced politician in electoral politics. |
| 2:34.6 | Frank Loden is just a governor from Illinois. |
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