1920 Republican Convention

Who would you like to see win the nomination 1920?


  • Total voters
    87
I was thinking if Hoover was president from 1921 - 1929, he wouldn't be blamed for the depression.

I'm not so sure. Harding and Coolidge's policies were essentially what helped spur on the depression itself. If Hoover is in the same position as they were IOTL and he pursued the same laissez-faire policies (which is extremely likely), he's still going to shoulder a hefty bit of the blame as his conservative colleagues did IOTL.
 
Herbert Hoover. He was more of an interventionist when it came to the economy. Doesn't mean a lot of intervention, but unlike Harding and Coolidge he holds a leash upon it so that it won't get out of hand.
 
I think we should go on to a second ballot, to give this a more 'Convention'-y feel. The next poll should eliminate those with zero votes (Sproul, Butler, Pritchard, Poindexter, Sutherland) and those with under 10% of the vote (Lowden, Harding).

Actually, my thinking was if we did a second ballot, it would be more of a runoff style, where the minimum number of candidates who add up to 50% of the vote -- in this case Robert LaFollete, Calvin Coolidge, and Leonard Wood -- would be on the ballot.
 
I'm not so sure. Harding and Coolidge's policies were essentially what helped spur on the depression itself. If Hoover is in the same position as they were IOTL and he pursued the same laissez-faire policies (which is extremely likely), he's still going to shoulder a hefty bit of the blame as his conservative colleagues did IOTL.

I thought that the Hoover in the White House eight years earlier was deserving of its own thread. SO I posted it.
 
Would it be possible to specify VP candidates at the same time?

Frex, I'd be reasonably happy to switch from Johnson to Harding, provided I could specify Johnson as his running-mate. No prizes for guessing why. A LaFollette/Johnson ticket would be ok with me for similar reasons, but is imho too unlikely for serious discussion. LF's (or Johnson's) VP would have to be a conservative.

I don't see the need for anyone to be "eliminated". That's a runoff election, not a second ballot. Convention delegates could change their votes from ballot to ballot, but no candidates had to withdraw unless they chose to.
 
I feel the same way, at least on domestic policies. I feel like there is still strong potential for the US under Wood to join the LoN, even if it has to wait for HCL's death. HCL was a Wood fan, supporting him over Pershing.


Sorry to be a chronic naysayer on this, but for my money the LoN was stone dead from the moment the election returns were in.

It wasn't just the Republican win, but the totality of it. This is even clearer in the Congressional results than the Presidential. The overall composition of the House was 300/132 Republican, but that of course includes the solid South. Ignore the eleven Confederate states, and it becomes 293/35, and 13 even of those latter were from just three border states - Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland. If those are counted as "Southern", it becomes 298/22. An actual majority of the states - 25 out of 48 - did not return a single Democratic Congressman, and only one survived in the whole of New England.

In short, outside the South the Democratic Party was not just defeated. It was virtually annihilated. Wherever a two party system existed, there had been a total renunciation of the Woodrow and all his works - and anyone who suggested, no matter how sound his reasoning, that this rejection somehow did not include the "work" with which Wilson was most closely identified, would surely have been laughed out of court.

In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that even those Republicans who had shown a degree of sympathy with the League in 1919/20 were disinclined to pursue the matter post-election - and quite a few Democrats agreed. It is significant that both Hoover and FDR, who had supported the League pre-1920, considered the issue dead by the time they reached the White House a few years later. I can't see much reason for expecting President Wood to be any different.
 
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