Headline of the Day -100:
The Republican National Convention nominates Sen. Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio for president on the 10th ballot. By the 8th ballot, Gen. Leonard Wood and Illinois Gov. Frank Lowden were still in the lead, and then there was a little recess, and...
Some time back, Harry Daugherty, Harding’s campaign manager predicted what would happen. (The NYT puts this in quotes, but it’s really a paraphrase): “At the proper time after Republican National Convention meets some fifteen men, bleary eyed with loss of sleep and perspiring profusely with the excessive heat, will sit down in seclusion around a big table. I will be with them and will present the name of Senator Harding to them, and before we get through they will put him over.” This indeed happens in the proverbial smoke-filled room in the Blackstone Hotel (in fact, this is the origin of the phrase “smoke-filled room,” coined by UP reporter Raymond Clapper), where senators decide on Harding as a compromise candidate, despite his poor performance in primaries. They might have gone for Philander Knox if they’d been able to get Hiram Johnson to drop out in his favor, but they couldn’t.
The NYT describes Harding as “a very respectable Ohio politician of the second class. He has never been a leader of men or a director of policies.” The editorial says his nomination is “the fine and perfect flower of the cowardice and imbecility of the Senatorial cabal that charged itself with the management of the Republican Convention”. The Times is much happier with the choice of Gov. Calvin Coolidge as his running mate, saying his actions against the Boston police strike showed him to be “a man.”
That choice was evidently a much easier one for the boys in the Blackstone (Harding had no input in the decision, as far as I know).
A Japanese newspaper reports that Trotsky is dead and Lenin has fled.
France and Belgium agree a military alliance. I guess the idea of Belgian neutrality is done.
Headline of the Day -100:
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