Today -100: May 15, 1920: Not nostrums but normalcy

Eugene Debs issues a statement from prison accepting the Socialist Party nomination. “The Socialist Party will appeal this year to men who think.” As Adlai Stevenson would say, that’s not enough, we need a majority. The D’s and R’s are “both wings of the same bird of prey,” Debs says. Admitting to the divisions within the Socialist Party, he says the radicals keep the conservatives from giving away too much in order to popularize the movement. “To begin to placate your enemies is to invite decay.” He says campaigning from prison “will be much less tiresome and my managers and opponents can always locate me.”

The Socialist Party’s national convention decides to adhere to the Third International as long as the party is not required to adopt one particular means of attaining socialism, such as the dictatorship of the proletariat. The party will hire 3 negroes to do propaganda work among negroes; one will be black and work among black women.

Headline of the Day -100: 

Speaking of normal, Warren G. Harding delivers his famous “Return to Normalcy”  speech (incomplete transcript) to the Home Market Club of Boston, setting out the theme of his presidential campaign and making the previously very-little-used word “normalcy” into a thing:

there isn’t anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war. Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational. ... 

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; 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. ... 

Let us stop to consider that tranquility at home is more precious than peace abroad, and that both our good fortune and our eminence are dependent on the normal forward stride of all the American people.

I’m a little startled to see words a later president kind of lifted:

If we can prove a representative popular government under which a citizenship seeks what it may do for the government rather than what the government may do for individuals, we shall do more to make democracy safe for the world than all armed conflict ever recorded.

The NYT reports the speech on page 20 and misses out on the word normalcy. The Library of Congress website has a studio recording Harding made of this speech in June for Columbia Graphophone.

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