Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Jim Cox for Losing the 1920 Presidential Election

November 2, 1920, 100 years ago: KDKA begins broadcasting out of Pittsburgh, the 1st commercial radio station in America. The first broadcast is the results of the Presidential election. Senator Warren Harding becomes the only person elected President of the United States on his birthday, turning 55, and defeating Governor James M. Cox of Ohio in a landslide.

The Republican candidate wins 404 Electoral Votes to the the 127 won by his fellow Ohioan, Governor James M. Cox. Harding won 60 percent of the popular vote, to Cox's 34. Cox wins 11 States, all in the anti-Republican, anti-civil rights "Solid South": Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. But not every Southern State: Tennessee and Oklahoma are among the 37 States that Harding wins.

A year later, KDKA will become the 1st radio station to broadcast a baseball game, and the 1st to broadcast a football game. Eventually establishing itself at 1020 on the AM dial, it was long a Westinghouse Broadcasting station, but since 1996 has been part of CBS. It broadcast Pirates games from 1955 to 2006, including the 1960, '71 and '79 World Championships.

The Democrats had won the last 2 elections. How did Cox lose so badly?

Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Jim Cox for Losing the 1920 Presidential Election

Interestingly enough, Cox was the 1st divorced man to be a major-party nominee for President, and had also married another woman, but it wasn't considered an especially big issue. As with the next divorced man to be nominated, Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 (and he hadn't yet married someone else, and never would), it wouldn't have mattered if he had been happily married: He would have lost in a landslide anyway. In his case, for these reasons:

5. Demographics. The 2 largest ethnic groups in America were German and Irish. Both saw Britain as their enemy. And both saw the Democrats, led by incumbent President Woodrow Wilson, showing favoritism to Britain.

That hurt Cox in the Midwest, with its strong German concentration, but he probably would have lost it anyway. It was the Irish Catholics, either staying home or, for the 1st time, voting Republican that killed Cox in States like Ohio (home State of both candidates, and Cox got just 38 percent there), Maryland (42 percent), New Jersey (28), Massachusetts (28), Pennsylvania (27), New York (27) and Illinois (25).

4. The 19th Amendment. It gave women the right to vote (except in the 4 States that already recognized it), and this was the 1st election in which it had an effect. Harding was considered good-looking -- good-looking enough, apparently, to have at least 2 mistresses. Cox was not.

Harding and fellow early 1920s chick magnet Babe Ruth

3. The Postwar Depression. When the men who won World War I came home, their jobs had been filled. Unemployment rose sharply. Farmers, no longer needing to sell their crops to the U.S. Department of War (it was renamed the Department of Defense in 1947), saw their prices plummet. It might not have been a depression as long as the one that began 10 years later, but it was bad enough. As is so often the case, the economy was a huge factor in an election.

2. Wilson Fatigue. For the 1st 4 years of his Presidency, the Democratic incumbent, Woodrow Wilson, was rather popular. For the next 2 years, he was a beloved wartime leader. But his attempt to get America into the League of Nations scared people who didn't want America involved in another overseas war.

The stroke he suffered in 1919 made him look a bit

like Max Schreck, star of the 1922 vampire film Nosferatu.

No previous President had gone from enormously popular to enormously unpopular in just 1 year -- and only 2 have since, Herbert Hoover in 1930 and Richard Nixon in 1973. Voters took their frustrations out on the Democrats, including Cox, who, as a Governor, had absolutely nothing to do with the Wilson Administration.

It was unfair to Cox, but he stuck with Wilson's unpopular stances on things like the economy and getting America into the League of Nations. And he paid the price for it, every bit as much other Democratic candidates did that day: Already controlling both houses of Congress, the Republicans gained 63 seats in the House, and 10 seats in the Senate.

1. "Return to Normalcy." After 2 years of America being in World War I, and 2 years of postwar disruption, Harding, to use a more recent expression, had his finger on the pulse of the nation. He wasn't particularly bright, but he knew what Americans wanted. With radio still in the process of being made public, no television, and no sound films, he made a phonograph record of his big speech, which was short on specifics, but long on platitudes -- and long on alliteration:

America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.

And enough Americans agreed with him to give him an overwhelming victory. When he died in office on August 2, 1923, just as the Teapot Dome scandal was breaking, he was still very popular. And the Democratic Party was divided enough that, even with the scandal, a living Harding probably would have won in 1924, anyway.

By the end of the decade, with the full revelations of the scandal, and of his affairs, including an illegitimate daughter, his reputation was in tatters. He is still often considered one of the country's worst Presidents, along with predecessors like Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson; and successors like Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

VERDICT: Not Guilty. Regardless of who the Democrats ran, they would have lost. There was nothing Cox could have done that would have helped him. He was the better man, and may have had the better ideas, but he was the wrong man with the wrong ideas at the wrong time.

And what happened to Cox? He returned to his media empire, and ran it until his death in 1957. He is largely forgotten today, even by people who know the name Cox Communications, which his descendants have grown far beyond his imagination.

When he is remembered at all, it is for his connections to 2 Presidents: Harding, and his own Democratic nominee for Vice President, then the Assistant Secretary of the Navy: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.