Behind the scenes: 1924, the fascinating, forgotten election.

Yesterday (January 30, 2024) was release day! My first video of 2024 for my YouTube channel went up yesterday afternoon. It's titled "1924: The Fascinating, Forgotten Election," and if you haven't seen it yet it's embedded below. As is customary, I thought I'd do a brief article giving you a look at the subject and my process of creating it. I waited to finish this one in the calendar year 2024, as it's an even 100 years since the curious contest, mostly forgotten in American history, in which Calvin Coolidge won election to the White House for a full term in his own right. This is an election that slides casually by in the pages of history books, but is actually pretty unusual and very fascinating--and thus a sitting duck for my now well-known deep dive historical treatment.

The story of the 1924 election begins the previous August, in San Francisco, with the sudden death of Warren G. Harding, the 29th President. An affable but somewhat insubstantial man who was largely a creature of the party bosses--I call them the "cigar-chompers"--who brokered the Republican convention in Chicago in 1920, Harding was elected overwhelmingly by a country that was weary of 30 years of Progressive reform and especially of foreign entanglements. World War I had just ended and Americans were eager to get back to their businesses. Coolidge, a temporary hero in the press for his principled stand in the Boston police strike of 1919, wound up on the ticket as Harding's Vice-President. When Harding croaked in a San Francisco hotel room on August 2, Coolidge was thrust on to the stage of history. In some ways he seemed unprepared. A quintessential 19th century man living almost out of time, Coolidge was sworn in, by his father no less, in the front parlor of their house in rural Vermont that had no electricity. This is just the beginning of the 1924 story.