6/8: 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 22 February 2024
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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 Republican Convention Chicago
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. I'm John B David Petruche. His book is 1920 the year of the six |
| 0:27.8 | presidents. Cox and Roosevelt are on the campaign trail. |
| 0:33.0 | Harding eventually initially thinks he's going to run a front porch campaign like McKinley, |
| 0:38.0 | but he's a good speaker. |
| 0:40.0 | He's an orator. |
| 0:41.0 | Although there was that remark about how his speeches, he calls them |
| 0:45.2 | bloviating or in search of an idea and when they find an idea they take it |
| 0:49.9 | prisoner and it can never escape. So I take it that his speeches weren't read from teleprompter. |
| 0:56.2 | He was, what, a spontaneous speaker? |
| 0:58.4 | Did he have a script? |
| 1:00.0 | Oh, I'm not sure if he spoke from notes or not, but he made, |
| 1:05.0 | I visited his home in Marion, Ohio, finally. |
| 1:10.0 | And I said, now how did he get such a nice sort of, |
| 1:12.8 | how did he manage to travel to Europe |
| 1:15.1 | and do all these things when he had this little teeny newspaper? |
| 1:18.9 | And the docent says because he went on the Chautauqua circuit and he earned quite a bit of money as a public speaker |
| 1:26.3 | which is really interesting considering the horrible reputation he has as a public speaker but he has a very nice voice which sounds sort of |
| 1:36.7 | modern you can listen to phonograph recordings of him and he knows not to say anything which is going to get him into trouble. |
| 1:44.7 | So he has a certain charm about him. |
| 1:49.0 | There's a scene, it's very sad, but it's vivid of Jimmy Cox and Frank Roosevelt going to meet with the President |
| 1:58.0 | of the United States Woodrow Wilson and Wilson's in a chair and I think he's so frail that frightens Cox in Roosevelt. |
| 2:06.0 | Roosevelt shows up not in a suit which he wears on other occasions. |
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