New Normal

I heard a commentator on the radio ask the question “How tired of you of hearing ‘We are moving to a new normal”. He then went on to say that the term he is hearing a great deal of now is “Normalcy”. This is a term that is being used a lot instead of “the new normal”.

The term normalcy was first used by United States presidential candidate Warren G. Harding's campaign slogan for the election of 1920. Although 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 were contemporaneous discussion and evidence that normalcy had been listed in dictionaries as far back as 1857. Harding's promise was to restore the United States' pre-war mentality, without the thought of war tainting the minds of the American people. To sum up his points, he stated:

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.

Harding wanted to end the move toward a more progressive society and to make people forget the war and the Spanish Flu that killed millions between 1918 and 1919. The Citizens of the US in 1920 had gone through rationing in World War, a Pandemic that killed millions, labour unrest causing massive strikes, a red scare which resulted in Federal raids in 30 cities with the arrest of 10,000 immigrants. Racial tensions were running high because Black soldiers returning from the war were demanding the end of segregation and to meet this perceived threat there was a rise of the right-wing extremist groups such as the Ku Klux Clan. Harding wanted to return to a simpler and better time and help the people move toward what he described as “normalcy”

 Return to normalcy” became the theme for Harding’s candidacy in the 1920 general election, promising an “America first” policy, Harding wanted to end internationalism. Harding opposed American participation in the League of Nations; his Democratic challenger, James M. Cox, supported it. Harding also struck a pro-business stance that was a marked departure from the progressivism of Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt before him. The electorate, apparently ready for an end to tension and upheaval, handed Harding a commanding victory as he captured more than 60 percent of the popular vote and tallied 404 electoral votes compared with 127 for Cox.

Promising a return to normalcy or a return to a new normal has worked in the past in the US, who knows it may work again.