Americans love to rank things…baseball homerun kings, party colleges, “Star Wars” films, and pretty much anything else you can think of. And that, of course, includes Presidents.
In particular, historians enjoy pretending that the largely subjective practice of ranking Presidents from ‘Best’ to ‘Worst’ is, in fact, an objective task. Naturally, it’s anything but. One historian may look at the accomplishments of, say, James K. Polk and consider them to be worthy of a high ranking, while another may look at the exact same criteria and place Polk low on the list.
When it comes to who is ‘Best’, though, it’s hard to argue with the usual results…it’s generally a toss-up between the Father of Our Country, George Washington, and the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln (although sometimes Franklin Delano Roosevelt slips into the top spot instead).
Likewise, few ever argue who lands at the very bottom of the list: Warren Gamaliel Harding.
Harding has had a virtual lock on last place since historians began getting serious about doing rankings in the mid-20th Century. He invariably beats out James Buchanan, who in recent years has had not one, but two best-selling biographies that (spoiler alert) declare him the very worst of all time…"The Worst President” by Garry Boulard, and “Worst. President. Ever.” by Robert Strauss. Harding beats out William Henry Harrison, who died just one month after taking office, and thus literally did nothing as President. He even beat out Richard Nixon in the immediate aftermath of his resignation amid the Watergate scandal.
So if Harding keeps getting pegged as the worst, he must have been pretty bad, right?
Well, not really.
Don’t get me wrong, Warren Harding was not a great President, not by any stretch of the imagination. But he was actually a pretty fair one, all things considered. He did some good things, and even at times showed tremendous political courage. He really ought to be given his due, so allow me.
Warren was born in 1865 in Ohio, to a family that traced its lineage to American colonial times. Called “Winnie” by his family, he had what would appear to be the typical boy’s life in small town 19th Century America; fishing, swimming, romping. He played cornet in the town band. Later, opponents would claim he was a poor student, but actually Warren did well at school. He particularly excelled at literature and composition. He had a lifelong love for poetry, and even as a young boy, he would delight adults by reciting poems from memory. In school he developed an enthusiasm for debating.
Although both of his parents were physicians, the Hardings were not wealthy, so to make ends meet they also farmed. Warren and his siblings had to be up before dawn for their chores, and then rush home after school to do more work on the farm.
All in all, it sounds a bit like idyllic Americana. But there was heartache as well. A couple of generations before Warren was born, one of his ancestors got into a feud with a neighbor, who retaliated by spreading the rumor that the Hardings were part negro; as time passed, in some tellings of the tale, they were actually light-skinned blacks who were passing for white. The rumor clung to them, and as Warren was growing up, he had to often face it. Some parents wouldn’t let their children play with those “colored” Harding kids. And although Warren was gregarious and had many friends, still other kids outside of his circle would openly taunt him with cries of “n*gger”. As an adult, he frequently and forcefully had to refute the claim when made by political opponents, but in private he was much less concerned about the possibility. “Who knows,” he would indifferently say, “maybe one of my ancestors did jump the fence.”
Personality-wise, most people liked Warren immensely. He was friendly and funny and eager to please…indeed, too eager. His father once admonished him with, “Warren, it’s a good thing you weren’t born a girl, because you’d be in the family way all of the time. You just can’t say no!” Harding had a deep-rooted need to make people like him, which can be both an asset and a liability in politics.
Graduating from college at age 17 (not uncommon at the time), he first became a school teacher, a vocation which…even taking into account the Presidency…he later called the hardest job he ever did. He then became an insurance agent, but soon found what he felt was his true calling: newspaper reporter. But at the age of only 19, he stepped up from reporter to publisher, when he became the owner of a struggling paper, the Marion, Ohio Daily Star. Legend had it that he won it in a poker game, but if so, more than likely his opponent intentionally lost the game, just to get the floundering and debt-ridden newspaper off of his hands.
Harding dove into the task of saving the paper. He improved the quality of the reporting, personally went out to drum up advertising, and earned the loyalty of his employees by implementing the radical concept of profit sharing, which in turn encouraged them to do all they could to sell more papers. One of his paper boys was Norman Thomas, much later the head of the Socialist Party in the United States, and while Thomas rarely had anything good to say about capitalists, he always spoke fondly of Mr. Harding.
Within a few short years, the Star was a rousing success, and Harding was a young man with a future, and he became involved in the Republican Party. Although his part of Ohio was a Democratic stronghold, Warren managed to get himself elected to the State Senate, and a couple of years after that became the Lt. Governor. And though he later lost his own bid to become Governor, he had well established himself as a popular public speaker, and traveled all across the state campaigning for Republicans candidates, addressing civic organizations, and meeting with other newspaper executives. When he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1914, he won roundly.
Harding was, at best, an indifferent Senator. He was present for less than one-third of the roll calls during his six years there, one of the worst records in the Senate, and offered no meaningful legislation. He didn’t even take a public stand on the two major domestic issues of the day, women’s suffrage and prohibition. Nevertheless, Harding loved being a Senator, being a part of the “club”, swapping saucy stories and dirty jokes with his fellow solons in the Cloak Room, or rounding up a few fellow Senators for all-night poker games. It was really everything he ever wanted.
What he didn’t want was to be President. And frankly, there was little chance of that. The three frontrunners for the 1920 Republican nomination were General Leonard Wood, Illinois Governor Frank Lowden, and California Senator Hiram Johnson, and without a doubt one of them would be the nominee. Still, Harding allowed himself to be named as Ohio’s ‘favorite son’ candidate at the convention; this was done largely for the prestige, which Harding felt would help him when he ran for reelection to the Senate that November.
But Harry Daugherty had other plans. He was an Ohio power broker and mentor to Harding since Warren’s early days in the state legislature. Indeed, the first time he laid eyes on Warren Harding, with his broad chest, piercing eyes and Roman nose, Daugherty remarked, “Gee, he sure looks like a President.” And as Harding’s political fortunes rose, that became exactly what Daugherty intended for him.
He was a savvy enough political operator to expect that Wood, Lowden and Johnson would battle one another to a standstill at the convention, thus leading the frustrated delegates to turn to a compromise candidate. In fact, some months before the convention, Daugherty made one of the most perfect predictions of political prophecy ever, when he told a reporter, “I don’t expect Senator Harding will be nominated on the first, second, or third ballot. But I think about 11 minutes after two o’clock on Friday morning of the convention, when 15 or 20 men, bleary-eyed and perspiring profusely from the heat, are sitting around a table, some one of them will say, ‘Who will we nominate?’ At that decisive time, the friends of Senator Harding can suggest him.” And that is precisely what happened.
The party leaders called Harding into a closed door meeting, and asked him bluntly if there was anything in his past that could derail his candidacy. He asked for a few minutes alone to think about it. Without a doubt he thought about how the accusations of having negro ancestry would be brought up again. He probably thought about how being President would inhibit much of the things he loved to do. He quite likely through about Carrie Phillips and Nan Britton, just two of a number of women he had been having affairs with, and how having those relationships exposed would not only almost certainly cost him the presidency and any other political office in the future, but also end his marriage and humiliate the women involved. After twenty minutes or so, he returned to the room, faced the men who could hand him the GOP nomination, and calmly said no, there were no skeletons in his closet.
1920 was the first election in which women were allowed to vote in all 48 states, and it certainly did Harding no harm that he had voted in favor of suffrage in the Senate…nor did it hurt that he was, by the standards of the day, an exceptionally handsome man. He won by one of the biggest landslides in history, with a whopping 61% of the popular vote, and beat his Democratic opponent, James Cox, in the Electoral College by well over than three-to-one.
As was the tradition, Harding himself did no campaigning, instead limiting himself to making the occasional remarks from his front porch back in Ohio. But he had plenty of surrogates crisscrossing the country making speeches and holding rallies for him, including Broadway star Al Jolson, who would croon a ditty written specifically for the campaign: “We need another Lincoln/To do the country’s thinkin’/Mr. Harding you’re the man for us!”
Okay, we’ve reached the part where Harding goes to the White House. This invariably is when writers focus on the scandals, as if that’s the only thing that constituted the Harding years. In fact, the scandals didn’t come to light until after his death, and at the time, people remembered the brief Harding era as quiet and tranquil. You should know about the scandals, so I encourage you to go elsewhere and look them up. Start with Teapot Dome. Right now, however, we’re going to talk about what Harding did right.
Harding was a sharp enough politician to know that he had to reward certain factions in the party for the work they did getting him elected, so he appointed some individuals to his Cabinet who might best be described as party hacks: Albert Fall at Interior and Edwin Denby at the Navy Department. But he balanced them with some truly outstanding choices for other posts: former Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes as the Secretary of State, Andrew Mellon as Treasury Secretary, and Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce (“…and Undersecretary of everything else!”).
And while he had promised to pursue a much less activist presidency than the nation had seen under his immediate predecessors (Harding called it “Normalcy”, an entirely made-up word that nevertheless has found its place in our vernacular to this day), Harding was still quite active in a number of areas.
Here are some of his most notable accomplishments:
* Like virtually every other American, he was horrified by the costs, in blood and treasure, of the Great War. Seeking a solution to prevent any such wars from ever erupting again, Harding was a strong proponent for what would become a global agreement on arms limitations, which the U.S. hosted, and brought the great powers together to pledge to reduce their navies and pledge to seek negotiated solutions to conflicts. Ultimately this pact failed to prevent World War II, but not for lack of good intentions and honest effort.
* Recognizing the need to better coordinate government expenditures, Harding established the Bureau of the Budget (today known as the OMB), and imposed more efficient controls on Federal buying and selling.
* During the war, President Woodrow Wilson had jailed a number of vocal critics of the conflict (and of his handling of it as the Commander in Chief). Harding ordered the process begun to pardon those prisoners, and he personally expedited the release of Socialist Leader Eugene V. Debs so that he could be home for Christmas…but only on the proviso that Debs first come to the White House to meet with Harding (where they allegedly drank some bootleg whisky in the Oval Office).
* When the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, it fell to Harding to negotiate a separate peace with Germany. When the new treaty was ready to sign, Germany’s diplomats steeled themselves for a display of pomp and spectacle, where the United States would celebrate its triumph by humbling the defeated Germans; after all, wasn’t that what the European Allies had done? But instead, looking to put the rancor of the past behind both nations, Harding refused to hold any elaborate signing ceremony. Instead, informed that the paperwork was ready, he had it brought out to the golf course where he was playing, asked to come into a house along the fairway, and sat down at the dining room table, where he quickly wrote his signature. “That’s all,” he said, and went back to his golf game.
* Proving there is life after the White House for ex-Presidents, he named William Howard Taft as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
* The postwar years had become a Renaissance of sorts for racism in the United States, with the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the expansion of segregation laws, and not merely in the South. It was not smart politics at the time for a politician to speak out against racism. But Harding had never been a proponent of white supremacy (perhaps those childhood years being taunted as a “n*gger” helped him develop an affinity with people of color?), and when he was invited to receive an honorary degree at the University of Alabama, he saw it as the perfect opportunity to speak his mind.
Before a crowd of some 30,000 (white and black…in segregated seating, of course), the President said, “I want to see the time come when black men will regard themselves as full participants in the benefits and duties of American citizenship. We cannot go on, as we have gone on for more than half a century, with one great section of our population, numbering as many people as the entire population of some significant countries of Europe, set off from real contribution to solving national issues, because of a division on race lines.”
They may seem somewhat tame now, but those were the most radical words spoken in favor of racial equality spoken by any President since Lincoln. And Harding said them on old Confederate soil.
Tragically, although the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress at the time, Southern Democrats managed to use parliamentarian tactics and the filibuster to thwart Republican civil rights measures, including abolition of the poll tax and branding lynching as a Federal crime. Just as sadly, it would be the last time when the GOP fully threw its full weight behind civil rights legislation and truly was the ‘Party of Lincoln’. But for one brief moment, it looked as if Warren Harding could achieve it.
***
Whatever fears Harding had about having to relinquish his favorite pastimes in the White House never came to pass. Although Prohibition was now the law of the land, illegal liquor flowed like…well, like liquor in the White House residence. Harding kept on having his all-night poker parties, he’d often leave the office in mid-day to go catch a Washington Senators game, or after dinner he’d go to the boxing matches.
And he kept having affairs. One long-standing rumor has it that he would slip into the closet off of the Oval Office with visiting young ladies (one can only assume it is somewhat spacious) and would emerge a few minutes later, as the lady in question adjusted her skirt and patted down her hair.
Most men who have served in the office don’t like being President very much. For some, it was agony. Very few…the Roosevelts, JFK, Reagan…loved it. Warren Harding loved it most of all. Being President was like every day is Christmas!
Well, not every day. He knew he was in over his head, that he didn’t have the knowledge and the expertise to truly do the job as it needed to be done. As he sighed in exasperation to his secretary one day, “Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don’t know where the book is, and maybe I couldn’t read it if I found it!”
And eventually he began to hear about illegal activities within his Administration. When he learned that the Director of the Veterans Bureau, an old friend of Harding’s named Charles Forbes, had been secretly selling off government property and under-providing for veterans’ hospitals, and was pocketing the profits, the President summoned him to the Oval Office, where he lunged at Forbes, wrapped his hands around his throat, and tried to strangle him! Harding had to be pulled off of Forbes before the first case of presidential homicide was committed.
As other scandals began to emerge…including a growing number of perpetrators committing suicide, rather than face prosecution…Harding would pace the White House late at night, grumbling, “My political enemies I can deal with…it’s my political friends who will be the death of me!”
But he could still find his sense of humor even in the midst of mounting gloom. Will Rogers wrote in his syndicated newspaper column how he had attended a function in Washington the night before and spent a few minutes talking with Harding: “I told him I wanted to share the latest political jokes, and he said, ‘I already know them…I appointed most of them to office.’ I saw I could not match wits with this man, so I went home.”
In the summer of 1923, Harding decided to get out of the sweltering heat in Washington…and escape from his political problems…by taking a train trip across the country, and visiting Alaska (then still a territory, not a state). People flocked to train stations and whistle-stops along the route, and Harding felt obligated to speak at each stop, quickly exhausting himself. Already suffering from a heart ailment and high blood pressure (which the public did not know about), he grew weaker and developed a fever. In San Francisco he took to his bed, and as his wife read to him, he suffered a stroke and died.
There were salacious rumors later that his wife, Florence, had poisoned him, either as revenge for his philandering, or else to spare him the grief of the emerging scandals. The very idea is preposterous.
At the time of his death, the nation was thrown into a state of grief not seen since the assassination of Lincoln. Harding’s popularity right up until the end had been tremendous; had the next election been held in the summer of ’23, Harding doubtless would have won by an even greater margin that in 1920.
But very quickly after that, Harding’s star began to dim. Partly it was because with the full public revelation of the various scandals, and with his untimely death, Harding was unable to address the issues, or even defend himself. Thus, it became easy for others to push blame onto him, even though there’s no evidence whatsoever that he benefited illegally in any way during his presidency. At the very least, people began holding him responsible for appointing the guilty parties to their positions to begin with, and for failing to more closely monitor their activities.
Perhaps his fall from grace is best illustrated by Harding’s tomb. Upon his death, the Congress appropriated a large sum of money for the building of a grand Greek-style memorial tomb in Ohio, and politicians in both parties fell over themselves speaking words of praise to the memory of the dead President. But when the tomb was finally finished and dedicated in 1931, President Herbert Hoover attended, but virtually no other political figure of note found it convenient to be there. And Harding’s reputation has been buried with his remains ever since.
Warren Harding probably should never have been President, but he was, and he made the best of it within his limitations. Who’s to say the Leonard Wood or Frank Lowden or James Cox would have been any better?
In closing, let me share the words of Alice Longworth, the irrepressible daughter of Theodore Roosevelt: “Warren Harding wasn’t a bad man, he was just a slob.”
And in its own weird way, I think that’s about the best compliment one could pay the man.
Just a boy at heart
