LOST:
1920 to Warren G.

He was nominated a candidate for the presidency by the Democratic party while serving as Governor. Cox supported the internationalist policies of Woodrow Wilson and favored U.S. entry into the League of Nations. However, he was defeated in the 1920 Presidential Election by fellow Ohioian Senator Warren G. Harding of Marion, Ohio. Cox's running mate was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Author Irving Stone wrote a book called They Also Ran about defeated Presidential candidates. Stone professed that Cox was superior in every way over Warren Harding and would have made a much better President. Stone argued there was never a case in the history of American presidential elections where the better man lost.

By 1920, World War I was over. The wartime boom had collapsed. Diplomats and politicians were arguing over peace treaties and the question of America's entry into the League of Nations. Overseas there were wars and revolutions; at home there were strikes, riots and a growing fear of radicals and terrorists. Disillusionment was in the air.

The giants who had dominated the political scene for a generation were gone -- Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919 and Woodrow Wilson was a broken invalid living in seclusion. Even so, the presidential election of 1920 continued the debate between the nationalistic activism of Roosevelt's presidency and the global idealism of Wilson's administration.

On June 8, 1920, the Republicans nominated Warren G. Harding, an Ohio newspaper editor and United States Senator, to run for president with Calvin Coolidge, governor of Massachusetts, as his running mate. The Democrats nominated another newspaper editor from Ohio, Governor James M. Cox, as their presidential candidate, and thirty-seven-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt for vice president.

The presidential election of 1920 was the last election campaign made accessible to the public solely through the use of record albums. By election night -- November 2, 1920 -- the "election campaign by phonograph" was a thing of the past, superseded by the first commercial radio broadcast coverage of election returns.


 Episcopalian. Suffered a stroke, and died three days later, in Dayton, Montgomery County, Ohio, July 15, 1957. Interment at Woodland Cemetery, Dayton, Ohio.