U.S. History lesson and a most unusual photo

Today, class, before 2020 passes into history, let's take a glimpse back in time to the America of a hundred years ago, to the year 1920.

I can hear some of you saying "Let's not" but I am going to forge ahead anyhow. Stick with me. You may learn something.

World War I had ended with the armistice in November 1918. American women had just received the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and everyone was looking forward to the election in the fall of 1920. The deadly Spanish flu had lasted from February 1918 to April 1920, infecting 500 million people – about a third of the world's population at the time – in four successive waves. The death toll worldwide is estimated to have been somewhere between 17 million and 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million.

On the American political scene, President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, wanted to serve a third term but his failing health made that unlikely. In the Republican Party, former president Theodore Roosevelt had been the favorite for another run at the presidency, but that hope ended when he died in January 1919. Whom to pick, whom to pick? Both parties were in a quandary.

At the Democratic Party's National Convention in San Francisco, on the 44th ballot (repeat, 44th ballot -- Donald Trump would have been apoplectic), James M. Cox, the governor of Ohio, was chosen to head the ticket and he picked the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York, as his Vice-Presidential running mate. Here they are at a campaign stop in Washington D.C. in 1920:

Do you notice anything unusual or surprising about that photo? The answer is revealed before the end of this post.

The Republicans chose Senator Warren G. Harding, also of Ohio, to be their candidate. He became the 29th president of the United States. His Vice-Presidential running mate, Calvin Coolidge, then became the 30th president when Harding died in office in 1923.

Here is what the electoral map ended up looking like in 1920:

The "big three" states in electoral votes that year were New York (45), Pennsylvania (38), and Illinois(29). Not California, Not Texas. Not Florida. The North and West voted Republican and there was an almost solidly Democratic south except for the state of Tennessee. The nation's political map has changed a great desl in the last hundred years, mainly because the political stances of the Democrats and Republicans have changed as well.

About that photograph, it is the only one I have ever seen of Franklin D. Roosevelt standing tall and erect, unassisted by crutches or canes, or not sitting in a wheelchair. It made me wonder just when he contracted polio, and I have learned that it happened the very next year, in 1921. He became very ill while his family was on vacation at Campobello in Maine. He became permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Although he was diagnosed with poliomyelitis at the time, some now think his symptoms were more consistent with Guillain–Barré syndrome.

The Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, World War II were all yet to come.

Roosevelt probably thought his career was ended and that his life was ruined.

He could not have been more wrong.

He went on to become Governor of New York, and then the longest-serving president of the United States, from 1933 until 1945.