President Harding's "return to normalcy" meant getting the United States back to conservative principles after World War I.
Harding's 1920 presidential campaign said that America needed "not heroics, but healing ... not revolution, but restoration ... not the dramatic, but the dispassionate." Those are a few samples among several contrasts like that which he drew. Another was that we needed "not nostrums, but normalcy." A "nostrum" is a cure or medicine that someone promises will work but doesn't actually work. The term is used also for political schemes and promises for bringing about social reform or political progress -- and Harding didn't much believe in such schemes.
