McDonald Room, Menzies Library, ANU

From Khaki to Beige: The strange case of the 1920 Presidential election and the American way of forgetting World War I

Dr Douglas Craig, School of History, ANU

My paper begins by setting the context of the 1920 presidential election, which for a time promised to be a “khaki election” in keeping with those in Australia, Britain and Canada between 1918 and 1920. Two candidates for the Republican presidential nomination – Generals John J. Pershing and Leonard M. Wood – hoped to ride a wave of military triumphalism into the White House in the first presidential nomination and election cycle after the end of the war. Pershing, as the Commander of the American European Forces, tried to forge a constituency from the millions of men he had led, while Wood hoped to win the presidency on the back of his prominence as a military hero whose contribution to the Great War had been limited by Woodrow Wilson’s hostility and John Pershing’s jealousy.

As it turned out, neither Pershing nor Wood succeeded in translating their military prominence into presidential nomination or election. Instead, both major parties nominated distinctly non-military candidates. James M. Cox, the Democratic nominee, had been Governor of Ohio during the war and was well outside President Woodrow Wilson’s wartime administration. The Republicans nominated Warren G. Harding, who had led a quiet and undistinguished life in the US Senate during the war. Thus both major parties nominated candidates who had had as little to do with the Great War as was possible in American public life. And all this was within eighteen months of the end of the war to end all wars.

My paper examines how this came about, and concludes by connecting this episode to broader questions concerning the ways in which Americans remembered – or tried to forget – the Great War.

Dr Douglas Craig is a Reader in History and Head of School. His dual biography of Newton Baker and William G. McAdoo, Secretary of War and Secretary of Treasury during World War I, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press early in 2013. He is currently working on two projects concerning the ramifications of the Great War on United States’ politics between 1918 and 1929.

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