Warren Harding Tried to Return America to 'Normalcy' After WWI and the 1918 Pandemic. It Failed.

[Initech]

What is normalcy? And what does it mean when we tell ourselves that we want to get back to it?

When American historians hear talk of “normalcy,” they think of Warren G. Harding. Harding did not invent normalcy. Not the word, nor the state of being. But he benefited from the appeal of both.

Elected president in 1920, Harding campaigned to put a keel beneath a nation buffeted by world war as well as the long and deadly 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. But finding the language for this was a struggle. Harding’s inept speeches saddled him with too many words—making “hope” and “inspiration” fight for breathing space.

But in a speech Harding gave in Boston in May 1920, he managed to convey a text that would be abnormally memorable.

First, Harding defined the problem of perspective, created by war and diseases. “There isn’t anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war,” he began. “Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational.”

And then Harding offered the cure: “America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy.” It might have been simpler to end it there, but normalcy was just the first in a series of antonyms that Harding suggested, expressing his goals in the negative: “Not revolution but restoration; not agitation but adjustment; not surgery but serenity; not the dramatic but the dispassionate; not experiment but equipoise; not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/warren-harding-back-to-normalcy-after-1918-pandemic-180974911/

Very interesting read. It makes me wonder how we will recover after COVID and after the unrest. I hope that Biden will have a more thought out plan than Harding did.

[Thomas Hurt]

1. Normalcy to the christofascist is a romantic ideological myth.

It never existed, but then again conservative/reactionary ideology would not be conservative or reactionary if they didn't deluded themselves. Cultures evolve they don't return to some previous state.