normalcy

noun

The quality or condition of being usual: customariness, habitualness, normality, ordinariness, prevalence, regularity, routineness, usualness. See usual/unusual.

It won the presidential election for Warren G. Harding in 1920: normalcy, a word that he rescued from obscurity. After the disruption of the World War, Harding said on the campaign trail, it was time to get back to normal: "America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration." He repeated the word in his inaugural address the next year: "Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way.... We must strive to normalcy to reach stability."

Normalcy was popular with the voters. But since it was a newly prominent word uttered by a politician, reactions to normalcy were mixed. Language purists sneered that Harding's word was a mistake for normality. They explained that -ity is the usual suffix for words like normal, while -cy is only attached to words that end in t, as in democracy from democrat. However, there were language purists among Harding's supporters too, and they found normalcy lurking in dictionaries and articles as far back as 1857, attracting no criticism (or attention of any sort) before Harding used it.

The normalcy debate of the 1920s is now long gone, and normalcy is now more normal than normality to describe the way things usually are or the way we think they ought to be. After Harding, however, politicians have been less eager to use the word in their slogans, perhaps because Harding's normalcy led to the Teapot Dome scandal, perhaps because normalcy is hard to determine in our Multicultural (1941) world.

In a Boston address on the eve of the 1920 presidential campaign, Senator Warren G. Harding said, in part, "America's present need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy.…"The word "normalcy" came quickly to symbolize to many Americans a respite from the activist policies of President Woodrow Wilson. Specifically, it signified a return to a high protective tariff, a drastic reduction in income and inheritance taxes, a government crackdown on organized labor, a restoration of subsidies and bounties to favored corporate groups, an absence of government interference in private enterprise, and a nationalistic foreign policy. Harding's "back to normal" slogan propelled him to victory in the 1920 presidential election.

Bibliography

Ferrell, Robert H. The Strange Deaths of President Harding. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

Russell, Francis. The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

A word used by President Warren Harding to describe the calm political and social order to which he wished to return the United States after the idealism and commotion of the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.