In the election of 1920 the country rejected Woodrow Wilson, the outgoing president of the United States and elected Warren Gamaliel Harding. In the inaugural ceremony that was about to take place, the country was changing not only it's chief executive, but its mood, its outlook and its aspirations.

No two leaders could have been less alike. Wilson, prim and scholarly-looking, was a man whose era had passed. In the name of idealism, he had led America through a devistating war in Europe. In peacetime he had crusaded for reform at home and had admonished the nation to take up new responsibilities of world leadership. But America had grown tired of responsibility and crusades.

The abandonment of Wilson reflected a change in the nations basic attitudes. The promised millennium of world peace and democracy still had not arrived. Mnay Americans reacted to the unsettling new elements of the era by affecting a kind of romantic cynicism. Like the youthful F. Scott Fitzgerald, they professed "to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." Others simply refused to worry themselves about anything but their own business; almost everybody agreed that the problems of the world were too confusing and had to be ignored.