On Apr 20, 2:17*am, " wrote:
NORMALCY

* * Warren Harding's presidency represented a return
to normalcy from World War I. *He did a pretty good
job of it. *Harding believed in a commercial republic
with limited government and little to do with the rest
of the world except to make it safe for commerce.

* * Harding's bodies were in the closet or in bed.
They were not lying by the millions in muddy fields of
Flanders, face up, rotting in the sun.

A valid point if you're comparing Harding to, say, Kaiser Wilhelm.
If you're comparing him to Woodrow Wilson, talk of "millions" is way
off base. The official total of American military dead in WW I was
116,516 -- a far cry from millions.

* * * The little that Harding had to do with foreign
affairs involved disarmament and attempts to outlaw
war -- the latter being admittedly an impractical, if
highminded appeal to reason.

* * * Harding offered us no grand visions, no promises
of sunny upland pastures of egalitarianism, no great
national missions or wars on drugs, poverty or Islam.
Instead, he suggested, as did Coolidge, who was
seconded so warmly by Mencken, that the business of
America is business.

* * * The court historians and their acolytes on this
forum may prefer vast numbers of corpses that died
violently in some idealistic national project

Well, they may also have preferred that Europe not be subjugated to
German militarism, that civilians in neutral countries such as Belgium
not be subject to atrocities, that American ships not be sunk by
German submarines, and that Mexico not be urged to make war on us.
Little things like that.

rather
than the simple, homely virtue of attempting to make
America ever richer.

Then again, it seems reasonable to prefer that our President know
more than just which end of an ace is up, and that he spend less time
chasing skirts, and more time making sure his subordinates are
actually working to make America ever richer, rather than just
themselves.