Hello friends, welcome. Welcome to the fourth episode in our series about prohibition from

hatchets to hoods. Today's episode is one I've been waiting to do since the beginning

of my podcasting career. And I have to start by telling you that the years leading up to

the 1920 presidential election were filled with war, poverty, unemployment, and pestilence

in the form of a global pandemic. The country was experiencing some very dark days, 100,000

American men died in World War I, and we lost 650,000 Americans to the influenza pandemic

in 1918. Americans had had enough. They were done. It was time for things to be normal

again, whether or not they actually were, which sounds kind of familiar, right? And along

came a candidate, a candidate who knew exactly how to tap into that yearning for normalcy.

In fact, his campaign slogan was a return to normalcy. He pitched himself as a man of

the people, and he charmed a nation that seemed hell bent on making prohibition the law

of the land. But behind closed doors, Warren Harding hid a plethora of dark secrets.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.

Okay, I have to give you just like a quick little note, Warren Harding was not a goody

tooshos, okay? You may want to listen to this episode with your headphones on or use

discretion around small children. As far as presidents go, Warren Harding can't

slid under the radar when it came to nominations. He certainly wasn't anybody's frontrunner. That

would have been the former president, Teddy Roosevelt, who already served two terms, and he

had run for a third term under a different party, and then everybody was like, who are we

going to get to be the Republican nominee? Maybe Teddy Roosevelt. Of course, remember,

this was before the constitutional amendment that made it so that presidents could only

serve two terms in office. All signs were pointing to Teddy Roosevelt, whom historians

...