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August 2, 2023

Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Warren Gamaliel Harding, a man almost universally identified as one of the worst Presidents ever. In truth, Harding was not nearly as bad as history has treated him. Writers like Ryan S. Walters (in his recent book Harding: The Jazz Age President) have made well-researched efforts to demonstrate that Harding’s administration was actually a successful model of conservatism.

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The established narrative goes something like this: Harding, a likeable but dull and unimaginative newspaper publisher from Marion, Ohio, runs for the Ohio legislature at the behest of local Republicans and is elected to the state senate. There he meets a political Svengali named Harry Daugherty, who sees Harding as his ticket to bigger and better things. With Daugherty’s help, Harding wins election to the U.S. Senate in 1914 and serves an undistinguished and ineffective term.

 At the 1920 Republican National Convention, Daugherty employs Machiavellian tactics in a smoke-filled room to get Harding nominated as the Republican Presidential candidate. Harding runs a campaign full of platitudes like “normalcy” but devoid of vision, but nevertheless wins in a landslide. Once in office, Harding spends his time playing golf and poker and cavorting with his mistress, leaving Daugherty and others to run the government; they proceed to loot everything. When Harding finds out, he is so overwhelmed by guilt that he suffers a fatal stroke, leaving Calvin Coolidge (another conservative President despised by the Left) to clean up the mess.

As Walters points out, the facts about Harding are very different. Harding was no political neophyte or dilettante when he arrived in Washington: He had long been interested in politics, serving as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1888, when he was not yet twenty-three. He served two terms in the Ohio senate and ended his tenure there as Republican floor leader; he then served a term as Ohio’s lieutenant governor before being elected to the U. S. Senate[i].

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As a first-term Senator, he had no leadership role; however, he served on the Foreign Relations Committee and was an ally of committee chairman Henry Cabot Lodge. Therefore, Harding was in the vanguard of senators who fought the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the approval of the League of Nations.[ii] Although Harding at first was in favor of the treaty (he later changed his mind and voted against it), his opposition to the League earned him Woodrow Wilson’s enmity (it was Wilson who first accused Harding of having a “disturbingly dull mind”[iii]) and the wrath of progressives to the present day.[iv]

The facts surrounding the 1920 Republican convention also need to be reviewed. Harding was not an unknown factor when the Republicans met in Chicago for their 1920 convention; he had declared his candidacy for the nomination the previous December but had not secured many delegates during the primaries. When the convention became deadlocked, party leaders met in the now-famous smoke-filled room to discuss breaking the logjam. They agreed that the front-runners each had too much baggage and had offended too many delegates to secure the nomination, so the leaders agreed to promote Harding as a candidate who could be supported by all factions of the party. Once he had their backing, Harding secured the nomination.[v]

Upon assuming the Oval Office, Harding inherited a nation in turmoil. The economy was in shambles. The Federal income tax, which Wilson had established (through constitutional amendment) on the promise that it would only apply to the wealthy, was affecting people at all wage levels.[vi] Wartime Federal spending had continued unabated, and the country was deeply in debt. The inflation-fueled postwar boomlet had petered out, leaving the country mired in a depression.[vii] Harding’s first order of business was to get the economy moving again.

With the help of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and budget director Charles Dawes, Harding embarked on an economic program that Ronald Reagan would have envied. Harding pushed tax cuts through Congress, cut the size of the Federal budget, and vetoed spending bills that he deemed unnecessary – even if he was sympathetic to their aims.[viii] He also increased tariffs to protect American farmers and manufacturers.[ix] The economy staged one of the biggest turnarounds in history as a result – and the prosperity continued through the end of the decade, which is still referred to as “the roaring Twenties.”

While Harding took a first-things-first approach to the economy, he believed that his most important duty as President was to heal the nation’s psyche. The Spanish flu epidemic had killed millions and had weakened the country’s mood. More pressing were the effects of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and Vladimir Lenin’s pledge to take communism to the world. That resulted in the country’s first “Red scare” as leftist radicals began acts of terrorism throughout America. Wilson, a die-hard Southern racist, saw Black Americans (especially those returning from World War I) as especially vulnerable to communist propaganda and targeted them as scapegoats, which led to a resurgence of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings[x].

Harding favored the arrest of those who committed violence, but he was horrified at the terror unleashed on Black people. He had been sympathetic to Blacks even as a child, so much so that he was often accused of having Black blood (his father-in-law, who despised Harding, even called him the n-word).[xi] Harding pushed for equal educational and economic opportunities for Black people, and made it clear he was their ally. He was the first President to urge passage of a Federal anti-lynching law. He also reached out to Jews and Native Americans, and had sympathy for working people.[xii]