100 Years Against Our Imperial Presidency

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August 3, 2023

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Harding and Coolidge represented an important break in the emergence of an imperial Presidency embodied by Woodrow Wilson.  Wilson was raised as a child in the South during the Civil War and grew up with profound resentment toward the Republican Congress and its actions to reconstitute the South politically toward a political praxis of racial equality.  Wilson’s experiences led him to two important political ambitions as he matured through his collegiate and doctoral education:  1) advocate for a stronger presidency that could resist and perhaps reform the misguided actions of the Reconstruction Congress and 2) establish national norms for the segregation and exclusion of Black people.  In 1902, Wilson authored as a political science professor at Princeton an extensive history of the United States that explains the political nobility of the former South and the virtue of the terrorist organization known as the KKK. Wilson was unable to secure a popular vote in 1912 and 1916 despite winning consecutive terms as President.  His written sentiments were included in the film Birth of a Nation, shown by Wilson in the White House in 1915. The film was a profound catalyst for restarting the Klan in 1915. Wilson also placed anti-Black discrimination rules upon the federal workforce and told African American advocate William Trotter that he was doing Black people a favor by segregating them. 

These are important pretexts to the Presidential election of 1920.  Crippled by strokes and an ambitious physical trek across the United States to impose the League of Nations upon U.S. politics, Wilson was prevented from running again in 1920.  James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt ran for the Democrats in the 1920 election.  An important public argument against the election of Harding and Coolidge for the Republicans was authored by well-respected professor William Estabrook Chancellor of Ohio.  He argued that Harding had a Black matriarch in his family history and was therefore disqualified to be President of the United States.  The argument appeared in political ads and newspapers across the nation — including the New York Times.  Harding’s own father-in-law had told his daughter Florence not to marry Warren Harding because he was an “n-word.”  This common allegation against Harding was made in his state election races as well.  The Ohio Democratic Party argued publicly that if Harding won the election, Black people would rise up and take over the state.  Harding himself could not clarify whether he might have Black lineage and was happy to campaign for and alongside Black candidates in 1920.  At a time when anti-Black lynchings were at a peak and women were voting for the first time, the American public overwhelmingly rejected the racist slur against the Harding and Coolidge ticket.  Harding and Coolidge won more than 60% of the popular vote and more than 400 electoral votes.  It was a powerful repudiation of the anti-Black racism made by academic professors such as Woodrow Wilson and William Estabrook Chancellor.  Blacks who voted for Coolidge and Harding in places such as Florida were murdered in race riots over Blacks voting.  The South voted as a solid block for Cox and Roosevelt. 

Harding and Coolidge campaigned and gave speeches as President and Vice President in favor of racial equality.  Harding confronted the South at Birmingham by arguing in terms nearly identical to his Oklahoma City campaign speech of fall 1920 when he said:  “I wouldn’t be fit to be president of the United States if I didn’t tell you the same things here in the south that I tell in the north. I believe in race equality before the law. You can’t give one right to a white man and deny it to a black man.”  In 1924, Coolidge wrote an editorial to a New York newspaper correcting a Republican who said that Blacks should not be able to run for public office: