Calvin Coolidge not an option--who for VP

If Calvin Coolidge wasn't a candidate for VP, who would be some good other choices? I'm working on my Tomorrow's Mountain ASB timeline, but this is a question that's valid for this thread. (He doesn't get credit for breaking up the Boston Police Strike.)
 
Going by Wikipedia, Harding personally preferred Irvine Lenroot and Hiram Johnson, both of whom were progressives, to balance the ticket, but the delegates revolted and nominated Coolidge.
 
I think we can rule out Hiram Johnson. For his reaction to the offer of the vice-presidential nomination, see David Pietrusza, 1920: The Year of Six Presidents, pp. 237-8:

"Hiram Johnson took it [defeat for the presidential nomination] less well [than Leonard Wood]; but then again, Hiram Johnson probably would have taken victory with ill grace. With his wife and son and secretary, he sat sulking in his Hotel Blackstone rooms. Popular poet James J. "Jimmy" Montague, a close Johnson friend, phoned Irvin Cobb and Ring Lardner: "Come along down to the Blackstone, we're going to sit shivah with the Johnsons. They need company."

"The gloom was intense, and someone opened a bottle of scotch. The phone rang. Johnson's secretary answered. It was Teddy Roosevelt Jr. Johnson knew he was calling to persuade Johnson about the vice-presidency. Everyone in Johnson's suite knew that that would be the only reason Roosevelt would call.

""Tell him I'm not swapping idle conversation with anybody this evening," Johnson fumed. "Tell him I've gone to bed-—tell him anything."

""Hiram," Johnson's wife urged, "for his father's sake if for no other reason, you must listen to him. And he's a fine boy and I'm fond of him. So are you." "This is no time for sentiment," Johnson spat out. "I'm more in a mood for murdering a few people."

"He took the call. “Hello, hello. . . . Johnson speaking. . . . No . . . no, not in a million years. . . . No, I tell you, no. . . . Oh, yes. . . . No, sirree. . . . For the last time, damn it to hell, NO!" Then, face reddened by rage more than Scotch, he hung up--hard.

"Montague had a question. “Senator, there wasn't any doubt as to what you meant by all those 'noes,'” he asked, “But that solitary 'yes' in the middle of 'em-—just here in the bosom of the family, would you mind telling us why you stuck in that lone 'yes'?”

"“Oh, that?” Johnson responded, his mood finally lightening. “That was when the young man asked me if I was sure I heard what he was saying.”"
 
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I had a three-part series on Lenroot in soc.history.what-if:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!s.../soc.history.what-if/FhJPJTj81yg/hjYoR-kL2UgJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!s.../soc.history.what-if/pGRe6GCwbb4/fs0fznJQnokJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!s.../soc.history.what-if/7tlISLaLCfg/LxIFNGrrViIJ

As I noted there, if Harding had made clear to the convention that Lenroot was his personal choice, not just that of an alleged "senatorial cabal," there is a good chance they would have accepted him.
 
I don't really know who.....Maybe the delegates nonimate Governor Frank Lowden of Illinois for Vice President?
 
So Lenroot seems the most plausible choice. After looking through some other notable people from the time period (which is to say I have no idea if they could be nominated, but they looked interesting), there's also William Borah, William Squire Kenyon, and George W. Norris as progressive westerner options. Herbert Hoover could also be on the table there. For a conservative New Englander like Coolidge, I always liked the idea of Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler as president, and I also stumbled upon archconservative Frank B. Brandegee, who helped Harding win the nomination, but he would be a bad choice for balancing the ticket. There were also two Southern Republicans who recieved vice presidential votes in 1920, but I get the impression that they were just favorite sons who didn't have support outside of the Southern delegations: former NC Senator Jeter Connelly Pritchard and former Red Cross Commissioner Henry W. Anderson of Virginia.
 
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Never ever ever would happen but someone on the RNC remembers 19th Amendment. Women voting nationwide for the first time. "What about Jeannette Rankin, gentlemen?"
 
Never ever ever would happen but someone on the RNC remembers 19th Amendment. Women voting nationwide for the first time. "What about Jeannette Rankin, gentlemen?"

Leaving aside all the many other reasons this would be out of the question, the Republicans were not going to nominate anyone who voted against the war in 1917. Why do anything that might seem to lend credence to Cox's attempt to accuse them of "treason," "pro-Germanism" etc.? (The people who hated the US getting into the war would vote Republican anyway.)
 
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