In a speech delivered on May 14, 1920, Harding proclaimed that America needed "not nostrums, but normalcy".[1] Two months later, during a homecoming speech, Harding reaffirmed his endorsement of "normal times and a return to normalcy."[2]
World War I and the Spanish flu had upended life, and Harding said that it altered the perspective of humanity. He argued that the solution was to seek normalcy by restoring life to how it was before the war.[3] Harding's conception of normalcy for the 1920s included deregulation, civic engagement, and isolationism.[3] He rejected the idealism of Woodrow Wilson and the activism of Roosevelt, favoring the earlier isolationist policy of the United States.[4]
Detractors of the time tried to belittle the word "normalcy" as a neologism as well as a malapropism, saying that it was poorly coined by Harding, as opposed to the more accepted term normality. There was contemporaneous discussion and evidence that normalcy had been listed in dictionaries as far back as 1857.[5] According to some historians, normalcy was an "obscure math term" before its use by Harding[6] during the campaign. Harding, a newspaper editor, addressed the issue of the word's origin, claiming that normalcy but not normality appeared in his dictionary.[7]
Harding prominently featured his dog Laddie Boy to the press to instill the domestic image associated with his vision of normalcy.[8]
Harding's position attracted support during the 1920 presidential election, winning 60.3% of the popular vote.[9]
^Curzan, Anne (2014). Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History. University of Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 107. ISBN9781139952286.
