It was 1920. Woodrow Wilson was on his way out, and the Republicans seemed certain to take over the White House. Their triumph would be achieved through the candidacy of Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding, the handsome Babbitt from Marion, Ohio. Republicans all over the nation were rooting for him, and in his own home town on the day that Harding, 54, opened his campaign, every storefront in the community was ablaze with bunting.
Every storefront but one, that is. It was the Uhler-Phillips department store, and, as William Allen White wrote years later, "when the reporters asked about it, they...