Harding could hardly deliver the peace that he promised, but his message nevertheless resonated among a populace wracked by instability. Farmers’ bankruptcy rates, already egregious, now skyrocketed. After wartime controls fell, the economy tanked and national unemployment hit 20 percent. Anarchists and others sent more than thirty bombs through the mail on May 1, 1919. Waves of labor strikes, meanwhile, hit soon after the war. Then, between 19, nearly seven hundred thousand Americans died in a flu epidemic that hit nearly 20 percent of the American population. More than 115,000 American soldiers had lost their lives in barely a year of fighting in Europe. ![]() Two months later, he said, “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing not nostrums, but normalcy not revolution, but restoration.” The nation still reeled from the shock of World War I, the explosion of racial violence and political repression in 1919, and, a lingering “Red Scare” sparked by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He had won a landslide election by promising a “return to normalcy.” “Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way,” he declared in his inaugural address. Harding took the oath to become the twenty-ninth president of the United States. ![]() On a sunny day in early March 1921, Warren G.
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